/3/ - 3DCG

>>727742
if you really want to model the welding, then you probably are going to need to sculpt it and then either keep the mesh at that resolution, or bake it as a normal map. painting the normal map by hand might be possible, but i have no idea how shitty that is going to look or not look.

you don't need cylinders if you take the box modelling approach. simply extrude the face of cubes and then apply subdivision and find areas to smooth it out and make it more round. pic related is a quick little mesh i threw together in like maybe a minute. it's very much possible to get sharper edges with the edge crease tool. since making the screenshot, i turned that on, and it looks great, but keep in mind most of the edges are going to be hidden by other objects like the seat.

fwiw, i modeled a bicycle awhile back and unless you intend to do some kind of turntable animation with studio lighting, you really don't need the welding details.

another thing to keep in mind: depending on the bicycle you are modelling, some may have (what i believe is called) a t-junction. that way if you want to model with cylinders, you can just hide their ends inside the t-junction. the whole model can be floating geometry. and, in fact, this kind of model is probably best pieced-out as parts. it's not like a human where you want everything to be one surface.