Hard Surface modelling

After working modelling a vehicle and also working on another digital painting (I'll post it up soon) I thought I would try and model something quite technical and on a smaller scale. I have had this piston sitting on my shelf now for years and I keep looking at it wanting to model it but up to now have never gotten around to it. Modelling into cylinders is always complicated as it is easy to lose the circular shape with too many edge loops or even ones placed badly, bevelling can also easily take the shape out of anything circular. Obviously anything that is to be estruded, bevelled etc that flows with the cylinder isn't a problem, its when you start working into the shape against its flow. Adding a hole against the flow of the topology is also quite tricky as once the hole has been cut you will find yourself spending time tidying up the remaining vertices to make sure the object is still round and smooth. You can always use a boolean but I always try and stay away from them due to the amount of mess they leave behind.

I did think this model would be relatively simple but some little niggles did catch me out and required some thinking, mainly just the positioning of vertices around the hole of the piston and the flat indent either side of it. The little flat spot on the crown of the piston was also quite interesting to make as again the bevelled line you can see is against the flow of the topoloy. The little circlip was simple to make, it was just a quick extrude of a poly face onto a curve.

My aim with this is to possibly worki it into an animation of an engine and add various other parts to the model and maybe even make a photoreal render of all the pieces placed on a workshop bench. Its just an idea.

I threw a quick chrome mia_matrial preset on the model enclosed in a white sphere just to see what it would look like. As you can see its too shiney and will need tweaking/toning down.