I had gotten through all the details except adding the boolean modifiers to get the indented letters when I decided to try rendering with cycles. The result was...awful. There were large sections missing from the big n-gons and the cross-button was missing as well. Obviously the proper fix is not to use n-gons like that. But I'm curious to know how come the result is so different? And whether it's possible to fix or if I should try starting again and hope that I get something renderable on a second try?
Before adding the small details, the rendered result was OK, though it was never great. I tried rendering a few times during each section and the result was never great, but nothing like the result after adding the small details.
Here are the renders before and after adding the small details. It had been worse. There was a section missing from the bottom left of the front face as well. I managed to fix that to some extent by adding some quads. But that also seemed to warp the face.
That looks as if you added a SubD modifier. That model is not made for subdivisions though, so it can go super crazy if you add one. But it also looks as if you rendered in orthographic instead of perspective? Anyways, there is a lot going on there, for sure you are in do-over territory. Good news is, when we're starting to learn Blender, we all have to do and redo models 2 and even 3 times, it's the repetition that helps so much, each iteration gets better and better and you start to see where you made mistakes and you gain speed. We always recommend people to start over, you wont regret it.
I spoke too soon. It turns out I'd turned the bevel modifier off in the view. When I turned it on the huge additional offshoot of the console body reappeared. That bevel modifier has been a constant source of problems. I imagine it works fine for models made of quads, but it's just too much work too try to tame it with n-gons. Simply leaving the beveling until later and then applying it where needed looks like a far better option for a model like the one presented in these videos.
Thanks for the offer. For now I'm just going to move on. I'm going to give the first part of the project another try once I've finished (I just have the rendering video to go through). I got very different results when I went through the button details the second time. I might get very different results from modeling the body a second time, too. If I get similar behaviour from that I'll take you up on the offer.
I also have two sets of modeling videos to go through that I got through a Humble bundle a couple of months ago that go into modeling in a lot more detail. But I'm guessing that in those a surface like this would be subdivided initially and handled in such a way that big n-gons like don't appear. It'd probably be good experience to come back to this and look at creating the console model using better modeling approaches.
