iRiver iHP-120

[FrankFirsching]

Having some free time over easter and being inspired by stu's F/A 18C thread, I thought I do some 3d modeling, too. Having nothing done in Houdini for almost 2 years now (is it really that long ago?), I first had to get used to the new UI. The idea what to model was found pretty quick: my mp3 player, an iRiver iHP-120. Photos of the player can be found here: http://vorbis.audiohq.de/content/reviews/i...ver-ihp-120.php

I found some blueprints of it on another website and used stu's method with the trace-SOP to import them into Houdini.

I started with a simple box, where I moved some verts to get the basic shape of the raised display. Then I used the polyBevel-Sop to get the large roundings. Afterwards a lot of poly splitting was going on to get the small slots between the metallic caps and the main body as well as the boundary of the cover of the display. When this was done, the joystick in the middle was added.

Wires:

Shaded:

The next step will be to engrave the writing on the front and to add the 2 leds besides the mini-joystick.

[stu]

Great work!

[stevenong]

Hey Frank,

Welcome back! Nice work so far!

Cheers!

steven

[LEO-oo-]

Cool - nice job!

P.S. Sch

[FrankFirsching]

Thanks for the nice comments :-)

Today I did 4 things:

- Added the leds

- postponed the writing on the front (First wanted to finish all symmetrical parts)

- Fixed the front plate in the display region. Now there are nice rectangular regions after subdivision.

- Added drillings for the screws at the top of the model

For the leds I extended the circular region around the mini-joystick with some elliptic shapes based on the outer circle of the existing geometry. This additional geometry was then ray-SOPed down to the actual front-panel-geometry. Afterwards some simple poly extrudes in the led-region were needed to accomplish this task.

The display region was also reshaped, because of unwanted distortion due to subdivision. The reason was, that these polygons weren't quadrilaterals. Some polysplits helped. Now it looks like this:

Instead of working on the iRiver writing on the front I added the holes for the screws at the top of the unit. Therefor I used to cookie-SOP to drill the circular holes.

Afterward I used a polySplit-SOP with "Path Type" set to "Quad Strip" to get the same rounding between the circles as on the outside of the panel.

This split was then poly-beveled to get a small region, that could then be sunken in. A second bevel was used to round the edges.

At the end the usual splitting of non-quadrilaterals to get some nice subdivision.

[Jason]

Nice and clean modeling, and good detail in there - I like it.

[cellchuk]

good stuff man....

by the way It's great to see more modelling stuff in the forum..

cool :thumbsup:

[FrankFirsching]

Another update!

To finish my last step, I created a small screw, that I've put into the holes I already prepared.

It's basically a bunch circles, that are skinned together with some points moved towards the center to achieve the star form for the screwdriver.

Then I launched into modeling the start-,stop- and AB-buttons on the side. Here is a photo of how they look like:

The housing is basically a flat circular shape, that blends into the main-unit. So I created the shapes based on 4 circles and deformed the outer 2 elliptically to better fit the shape. The outer most circle was projected onto the main unit using the cookie-COP set to "Crease" mode. The second outer most circle was projected using the ray-SOP.

Now I had 2 curves on the main unit, one that intersected good with main unit itself, and one that had the same point number of the 2 inner circles. I used the skin-SOP on the 3 inner circles to form the housing...

... and a polyLoft-SOP to create geometry between the 2 outer circles.

On that geometry I dissolved the unnecessary edges and merged it with the rest.

I created a cutout volume based on the outer circle, duplicated it three times and used the cookie-SOP with custom settings to only keep the outside of the main unit.

Then I polyBeveled some edges on the housing, duplicated it also 3 times, merged and fused all together.

Now I needed to fill the holes with buttons. Therefore I created a base-button using some circles and polyBeveled the edges.

I created the shapes for the button-labels and used a cookie-SOP to subtract them from the base button. Again nothing without the mandatory polyBeveling of sharp edges

After placing the buttons in the holes, this is where I am now. I know, that there is a minor problem with the blending of the housings into the main unit on the side not facing the camera in the image below. The real unit doesn't show any crease in this area.

[Guest Swann]

i hope it's all made fully procedural

A little tip, last time I'm doing Hard modeling quite intesively.

It's not a good idea to make bevel before shape is ready and you know that you will not modify it in the future. This is why you have problem with housings. It is easer to add bevel after merging them with main body than clean beveled dense Geo to achieve smooth look.

The same problem can be seen here to, I supouse those corners shouldn't look like this ? And I have strange filling that bumping up subdivision will not help.

Edited March 29, 2008 by SWANN

[MatrixNAN]

I agree your modeling is looking very clean good work. Looking forward to seeing more.

Cheers,

Nate Nesler

[FrankFirsching]

After a long time finally an update again, although a very small one...

@SWANN: Yes you're right: increasing the subdivision depth doesn't help in that case. Unfortunately when I was modeling this part, I intentionally decided to use that look by using the "Corner"-bevel type instead of "High density round". I thought it was fine when it looked a bit worn. Now looking at it again, I think I'm going to redo that part.

@MatrixNAN: Thanks ;-)

I've reworked the button-housings and now they are better. Still not perfect, but so good that I'm satisfied. Additionally I created an OTL for the blending region to procedurally dissolve the unnecessary edges. This involved a custom VOP-SOP and some python scripting to compute the group-parameter for the dissolve-SOP. Here is a small example hip file:

transitionRegionExample.hipnc

The polysplitting that has to happen afterwards still is a lot of handcraft. Unfortunately I can't think of a procedural way for this :-(

The new thing is the hold button, that I added to the side. I started by modeling the shape of the button by joining 2 half circles.

I decided, that the edges I already had running down the side were enough to represent the shape after subdivision, so a simple cookie-SOP was not an option, cause the points of the cutout wouldn't lie on the original edges. So I fed the button shape into a bounding-SOP and cut out a rectangular region.

I piped the 2 half circles in each case into a bounding-SOP. The bounding-SOPs were set to a high minimum size in x to get a volume. The merged bounding-boxes were first inflated a bit with the peak-SOP and then used to group the points that were needed to build the roundings.

A point SOP was used to generate normals that are pointing along the y-axis to the center of the hole. Now a ray-SOP was used to move the points onto the original button shape.

At last a polyCap and polyExtrude-SOP were used to build the inset.

Adding a slider and the hold-button was ready.

[FrankFirsching]

It's already been over one month since my last update, so it's time for some progress...

Today I added the product labeling on the front of the unit. Basically it was tracing the characters with curve SOPs, extruding them and drilling a hole into the front plate. I wanted a clean topology, so using the cookie-SOP wasn't an option. After the writing was built, extruded and beveled on the back side, I merged it with the front panel of the player.

The front row of points of the writing was placed on the body using a ray-SOP. The beveling to the body was simply done using edge extrusion and projecting these points again to the body with a second ray-SOP. Now I had to do lots of poly-knitting to fill the holes.

Although it's doesn't look perfect in wireframe, it subdivides quite ok. So I'm fine with how it turned out.

[LEO-oo-]

Nice - thanks for the background informations!

[FrankFirsching]

So here is another update. I'll leave out the step by step explanations this time, cause there were too much of them and everything is just using techniques already used before. I finished all basic parts on the left, top and bottom side. I also redid the crease on the top side that now doesn't show the bad subdivision SWANN noticed.

Here's a view from the top side in wires and a quick render using a simple light with ambient occlusion:

And the bottom side:

What's missing are the small labels besides the buttons and connectors. I've not yet decided how to realize them, cause now the whole unit is a subdividable object. Adding all the writing with the constraint to be able to subdivide them would be a lot of work. So I'm considering to add them using displacement maps. The other way would be to commit to some geometric resolution and then add the writing with some simple boolean unions. I have to think about the pros and cons of each method.

[LEO-oo-]

Cool - I like the details!

[pagefan]

Nice Frank, when it's textured it's going to be indiscernible from the real thing (well i never actually saw one, or can't remember i saw one, but you know what i mean).

[Mario Marengo]

Hey Frank,

That's looking very nice indeed!

When you're done, it would be great if you also include a few reference stills of your unit. This little device would make a great test bed for hi-tech metallic/plastic shaders.

Cheers!

[FrankFirsching]

Thanks again for the nice comments. Mario, I think I'm going to post the hip file when I'm done, so it can surely serve as a shader testbed. Then I can also add some photos of my unit. The problem might be that it's already 4 years old and not looking anything like new anymore.

I still shirk modeling these small labels. Hence I modeled the earplugs I'm using with the player. They're not the originals and I decided to model these instead of the originals cause I didn't want to start modeling the remote control of the player (I'm just too lazy).

[kumpa]

good job Frank, did u use wire dop for headphone cord ?

[abvfx]

awesome work.

Well done mate.

-andy