ZTRUCK Cloud and Zack Truck Excape - My first blend :P

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Ah excellent! I will work through this tutorial tomorrow, looking forward to it.

Update: Checked out that tutorial, thanks for the tip Kaldashara!
 
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OK so I spent today playing with the edges and stuff, but I still get the weird shading thing when I link a new object onto the flat surface.

I have a flat surface normally shaded, I used scaling to make sure the vertices are completely flat. I create a low poly sphere and rotate it so that the rings are parallel to the surface. I put the sphere close to the surface and knife the surface so that there are vertices almost identical to where the sphere vertices are. I delete the faces inside these vertices. I delete the parts of the sphere I do not want.

Now I highlight both the surface and the sphere and join them together using ctrl+j, the shading is so far still normal. I then merge the vertices on the sphere and the surface making sure that the surface vertices stay static. As I am doing this I notice that the shading on the surface changes and lines up with the original faces on the surface (as in before I knifed them). When they are all merged I try to reduce this effect by using the crease function and it does not help.

Can anyone see a mistake in my steps or give me any pointers or link a tutorial which explains how to avoid this?

It is most noticeable on the door in the last picture I uploaded (the wing mirror handle), however if you would like to see a close up I can provide one

Edit: grammar
 
I'm not sure I understood everything of what you were trying to do, but here are some recommendations that might help:
- when you use the knife tool, Blender has the annoying tendency to create double-vertices which won't disappear after the "Select All+Remove doubles" combo (instead, you often have to merge the vertices in question).
- from what I see of your shading problem, and if I understand correctly (assuming you have no double-vertices problem), you can mostly address that sort of issue with additional levels of subsurf
- If your aim was to model the mirror holder, in my opinion and experience it is much more advisable to model the truck body and the mirror holder as separate objects, and not try to merge them. Merging objects is more advisable when you need some kind of unity, be it a geometrical unity (meaning: a seamless junction between to objects, like a weld) or a texture unity. Otherwise, in situations like "Object A resting on Object B", merging the objects is not advisable. I agree the surfaces where they're linked should meet properly, but merging the contact surfaces is not recommended in most cases (and not only because it makes the job unnecessarily harder).
 
So would it be advisable to keep the telemetry the same but without merging them to use ctrl+j to put them together, but then not mere them? or even forget ctrl+j altogether and leave them as seperate objects but relate them together anoter way? for example as a group (this would also make sense as it would make the UV wrapping easier as well).

You seem to have got te crux of my issue ^^
 
Honestly, for stuff like that, I suggest you keep the objects separate. Merging them is unnecessary (unless you really want to move them around and do all sort of geometric transformations). In your situation, I think there's no use in Crtl+J these objects at all. Personally, I tend to model a lot of objects as many individual pieces. For example, on this model, the Playstation is made of many separate objects (the buttons, the top lid, the cable inputs in the back, the memory card ports are separate), it's just the geometry of these separate objects which matches perfectly. If you really do want to link two objects without merging them, you can do a parenting, which is explained in one of the early tutorials of the Noob to Pro wikibook. As you mentioned, it will also make UV-unwrapping much easier.
 
Coming Along nicely now, I'll finish off the wheels and then start texturing and stuff. Is it worth using blender to texture or the other programs out there?



 
For me is blender fine. It has gotten recently many changes to it's texture system which makes it for beginners hard to understand at the first place. But if you understand the way how it works, is it very handy.
It's a bit old but it was the first tuto I had seen to understand the texture management system of blender:

Maybe someone knew a better tutorial.
 
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Good job, Scrat, it's really coming along nicely.

I think Blender is fine for texturing - to be sincere I am not sure anyone using Blender is using something else to texture. Everything you've seen on this forum from me and anaho was textured in Blender.
Before you start on texturing, if you wish to learn about it, there are 2 things I must stress:
- Learn about texturing using Cycles render (it's still within Blender). The method is different from the "Blender Internal" rendering engine. A convenient windows setup (in my opinion is to split into 3 windows a/3d viewport  b/UV-image editor  c/Node Editor. a/ shows your model, b/displays the unwraps and can show how your textures overlay on the unwrapped mesh c/the node system in creating materials is very handy. Blenderguru's introduction tutorials on Cycles and Creating materials with Cycles are highly recommended.
- Practice UV-unwrapping for basic stuff first (cube and cylinder unwrap), I think UV-unwrapping gets easier with practice (and then more practice).

If you need image sources, most of what we have comes from cgtextures.com (one of the few places that offers a large bank of textures for free). A good place to get supplied.
 
Do an Ambient occlusion bake into your model!!! It's a little tricky but you with thank me later!!!!!

 
Do an Ambient occlusion bake into your model!!! It's a little tricky but you with thank me later!!!!!
Click to expand...
If you wish to use Ambient Occlusion bakes for creating dirt maps, I have explained the process in this post, too.
My personal recommendation (but you can have other work flows): first, try to texture the truck as if it were brand new and shiny. That will give you the basic shaders to work with. Then later you'll gradually add in all sorts of modifications for rust, scratches, dirt and all "weathering" processes (that's where the Ambient Occlusion bake will come into play). Pretty much in the "first start simple, then progressively add in complexity" logic.
 
I personally go for the "bake" first and then shade under it using multiply in gimp. I get a better real time look of what I'm doing. That's just me
 
Looking good, here is my first WIP blend.

9zNG9SO.png
 
Well... I'm happy you got started on this scene! It seems it was ages ago when you asked me to help you out with it. It's a very promising beginning - If I remember correctly it's probably the most complicated scene I initially suggested to you. If you feel like you can work on it on a regular basis, why don't you open your own forum thread?
 
Wow we've got a lot of people adding their resources lately!

Just remember to take your time, everyone else :P
 
Most of the new people haven't been here for a while... I hope they're still around!
 
Still around, just got a job lol, dont have so much time as I did when I was at uni, but I am hoping to get going on it again soon.

the texturing is quite intimidating
 
Glad to hear you'll have a bit of time to resume your scene :)
Texturing will be quite a big chunk to learn - I'll be happy to help along the way.
 
I have stopped texturing for a bit to remodel some aspects of the truck that the lighting highlighted to my atention.

As a side I am also looking at options to use solidworks models in blender. Probably not the best way forward, but with blender I am doing a certain amount of fudging; I know I could knock up the exterior of a truck like this in a few hours on solidworks and it would be about a thousand times more realistic :P

Just want to give it a go and see how it turns out
 
I guess it just depends on what kind of software you're used to! It's often about knowing the tools you need to use in order to get to your result. Often you can model something with 4 different ways, but one way will take you 4 hours and another 5 mins.
If you can import solidworks models into Blender without a problem, go for it. However they might be a bit difficult to UV unwrap (if you end up with fine triangulated mesh, it might be a pain to select the UV seams one by one).
What aspects of meshing you're not too comfortable with in Blender? I might know a couple of tricks which could make your life easier.
 
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