>>>Modelling Techniques and Strategies<<<

[Modron]

<edit> when you get done making the lizard try a turtle http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtop...ghlight=turtle <end edit>

This is an attempt at a general repository for Blender modelling knowledge. The idea is to collect a series of mini tuts on how various people model with Blender, or specific techniques that they would care to share. If you have a mini tut, or a technique to share, please create some kind of illustration, or diagram to go along with your explanation. I think I am going to make a tut on modelling an animal of some sort. Please contribute! [!]

[Harnak]

Great idea Modron!!

I know somethign I'd be interested in is how you did that Avatar that is shown whenever you post a message on Elysiun.

I'm looking forward to seeing how people approach problems, and I'm expecting to LEARN a ton!

Harnak

[Arathorn]

I'm a newbie to Blender as well, but when I start modeling, I first rtry to find a lot of pictures of what I'm trying to model (Im now busy with trains), then I make a square and start extruding from it.

[Gabio]

Yes modron! i wanted to do this for a long time.
Here is one technique I use:

The precise subsurf modelisation.
Category: high details organic model (high poly count).

Let say you have to medel an organic object.

-Start with a plan or a cube and extrude from it to form the shape of you object, something very rustic, like veryveryvery low poly.

-Start subsurf on it with 1 subdivision. Move some vertice to add some details, don't subdivide.

-Alt-C the convert to mesh. Move your old model to an other layer for undo purpose.

-On the fresh new mesh restart subsurf with 1 subdivision and model some more details but not too much, just what you can do without dividing some vertice.

-When you cannot add more details just by moving vertice. DO another Alt-C and move the old model to another layer and restart sudivision to level 1.

-redo this as long as you want precision.

The polycount can increase dramaticaly atfter like 5 conversion. but i never used moe than 4.

That's it for now. Maybe i'll add some correction as time goes on

[Modron]

Ok here's part 1 of my mini tut. I am going to model a lizard. I'll start by making the basic shape of the head.
>>Illustrations below<<<
1) Here I took a simple cube, extruded the bottom to give me my lower half, and then off of those halves, extruded the upper and lower jaw. I moved the snout vertices around a bit to give me my basic lizard head shape.
2) subsurfaced it
3) subdivided just so I have a few vertices to work with. Of course once I do this, the whole thing becomes slightly more square. we'll tweak it later.
4) now I want his lips to have a finer edge, so I make 2 loop cuts, ( loops cut is accessed by 'ctrl R' ) one just above his mouth, and one just below. This has the same effect as we got when subdividing, but the edge is closer.
5) now I want his head to be wider, so i go into front view, and do some constrained scaling.
6) now I'm going to pull the back of his head back a little, but I dont want to stretch the edges of his mouth, so I make another loop cut, just behind his mouth. You'll notice as I go along, I will be gradually spreading out these vertices, in the places where they don't need to be close together.
7) time to extrude out his eyebrow. I select the faces of the eyebrow region, extrude, and scale them down a bit, and in front view, pull the new vertices to the outside to give him an eyebrow ridge. I will be tweaking these too.
8) Now I do the same thing for his cheekbone,...extrude and scale,....and tweak
9) extrude, scale, and tweak, a second time, to get some finer control.
10) I round the snout a bit on the half I intend to keep
11) Now delete the vertices to one side of the center, select the remaining half, 'shift D' to duplicate, and 'M' to mirror along global axis X.
Once you have positioned the new left half as close as you can get it to where it should be, select all of the vertices along the rows you want to join, and click 'remove doubles' in edit buttons. If they don't all weld together, you can up the influence of the remove doubles, and try it again, or you can select the individual pairs that didn't join, and weld them wit 'alt M'.
12) Now that I have the whole head, I'd like to make him rounder, using the 'to sphere' button. I select all his vertices in edit mode, and put the 3D cursor in the middle of his head, a little toward the rear, and click 'to sphere'. I choose oh, 25% maybe for the ammount. so now he is a little rounder, but as you can see,...
13) ...he is still a bit squarish in some areas, especially on the back of his head, so i do more tweaking, using the to sphere command selectively on regions,...using Alt S on some vertices for 'scale along normal',...and when I have thouroughly tweaked one side, I delete/mirror duplicate/join, once again.
14) now he is ready for details, and a body, so that's what I will do in chapter 2. Hope you enjoy!

[roofoo]

Hey Modron,

Cool tutorial! But I've got a question, on the steps 4 & 6 when you say to make the loop cuts, what needs to be selected before you do that? I'm not exactly a newbie to Blender but I'm not too familiar with using that tool yet.
(Correct me if I'm wrong, but do I need to do a Shift+R to select a whole row of verts before making the loop cut?)

Thanks,
Roofoo

[Modron]

No, shift R is loop select, which selects a row of faces. What you want is ctrl R for loop cut, which cuts an edge loop. You'll see a select line, so place and click, then, you'll see a blue line that you can move around to select where your loop cut goes in that row, then you just click when it's in the right position. Sorry about the lack of definition of the mouth pics, but I noticed you can see approximately where I placed the cuts on the lower pic with the rear view.

[roofoo]

ok, sorry for the dumb question. :-| I tried it like you said and got it to work. I didn't know you could do that with Ctrl-R, I only knew about the pop-up menu with the K command....anyway, thanks for the help!

[Modron]

Hey, no need to feel dumb,...we were all noobs at one time, and I like to think of myself as an eternal noob in a way. Glad you got it to work, and feel free to ask more questions if you have them.

[Modron]

Ok, the body,....:
1) Before I got to what you see in the pic, I wanted a nice open edge where the back of the head was enclosed previously, so I selected the vertices in the middle of the back of the head, and deleted them, leaving myself with a nice open edge loop. Then, with the vertices of the edge loop selected, I extruded, and pulled the new vertices backwards to about where the base of the tail would be as you can see from the diagram.
2) I then made a loop cut right in the middle, and because I wanted it to be slightly larger and wider than the surrounding loops, I scaled it up slightly, and then did a constrained scaling from front view to make it wider.
3) Now I cut two more loops, and scaled them up slightly, so he has a nice curved shape.
4) Around each of those new loops, I cut two more loops, to give me a few faces from which to extrude the legs.
5) I deleted the middle vertice of the group from which I intended to extrude from, again giving me a nice open edge loop. Then i extruded it outwards to start the leg, and hit smooth a few times. ...A note about when you start modelling with open edge loops like this, and especially when your mesh is subsurfaced, and 'set smooth',...your normals will get screwed up, and it can make dark lines and patches on the surface of your mesh. To fix this, select all vertices, and press 'ctrl N', for 'recalculate normals outside'.
6) I rounded the adjoining vertices on the body somewhat, to blend in the leg a bit better,...at various times here, I may have made little tweaks without mentioning it,...a little bit here and there as i go,...
7) From front view, I continued extruding the leg out, rotating the loop as I went, right down to where I wanted the bottom of the foot to be. I then enclosed the bottom of the foot, by extruding, scaling the extruded vertices inward, extruding again, and the hitting 'alt M' to weld the selected vertices together at the center.
8) Now I selected a face on the outward facing side of the leg, and from top view extruded it out into a toe. I repeated this with neighboring faces, until I had three toes.
9) I gave him a thumb the same way, and did some scaling and tweaking to get his toes to look right. I also cut an extra loop at his ankle, and scaled it inward slightly.
10) I gave him a back leg, the same way as I made his front leg.
11) Now, just as i did while making his head, I deleted the half of him that I hadn't made legs for, duplicated the remaining half, did M for mirror along X axis, and after positioning the new half, welding them together into a whole. ( see part 1 )

Ok,...so, next, I'll do the tail, and some details,...until then blend on, garth!

[Modron]

It's alive!
1) Select the open edge loop at the base of what will be the tail
2) Extrude out, and scale the new vertices down
3) Extrude out again, and hit 'alt M' to weld them together into one vertice.
4) Use ctrl R to cut several new edge loops along the length of the tail
5) Hit the 'O' key to toggle into proportional editing mode, and select the vertice at the end of the tail. hit G key for 'grab', and you will see a dotted circle surrounding the selected vertice. Now hit the + key on your number pad keys several times, to scale up the influence of the proportional editing tool, until the circle encompasses the entire tail region. Then, from side view, pull the vertice upwards, to give the tail a nice bend,....but wait, it's not bending right. click it in place anyway, and hit thr 'R' key for 'rotate'. give the vertice some counter clockwise rotation. Ahh that's better,....on to step 6....
6) Hit O again, to toggle off the proportional editing tool. I decided the head was too big, so now i select all the head vertices, and scale them down. Also, I did some more tweaking to the jaw, and snout.
7) I will add nostrils, the same way we added the cheekbones, basically. First I select the face on which I want the nostril to be on, hit E for 'extrude' , and before I even mess with it, I click it in place. So, now when I scale it down, it will be on the same plane as the original face that i extruded from. So, scale it down,....
8) Now make another extrusion, but don't move it, or scale it down just yet,...just click it in place, and go to front view. Now pull it inwards a bit, and there you have your nostril. Reapeat the procedure on the other side. Try to get it roughly the same size as the first one.
9) A couple of icospheres for eyeballs...
10) Hello Mr. Lizard!

[TorQ]

I like what you are up to Modron. One thing that I am concerned over is the thought that people will be presenting information that might not be so much wrong as liable to lead newbies down the wrong path. In a long thread, which this promises to become, people might miss some of best information... I'm not entirely sure on how to avoid these issues but they are still a concern. As for my part I would like to suggest a revision for your lizard.



As you can see, the one thing that I am doing is introducing "proper" poly loops right from the beginning. I think that this is something that needs to be drilled into everyone's heads. The sooner you get you polys flowing the right way the better!

Step 1) Make a box and create a mirrored instance. Delete the faces that touch between the two boxes.

Step 2) Extrude the backside of the box out five times into a "U" shape. )At this point we are already creating what will become the mouth loop.)

Step 3) Shape the profile a bit.

Step 4) Use the Loop Cut Tool (CNTL+R) to cut in the boarder of the mouth loop. Be sure to try out the new smooth function when doing this. I used a smooth percentage of over 100.

How-to Use the Loop Cut Smooth option: The smooth option in the Loop Cut tool is really cool. I don't think its widely known how to use it but its easy. Press CTRL+R to start Loop Cut. Next select the loop that you want to cut like normal. Before you make your final click as to where you want the cut press the S KEY to turn on Smooth. Now click where you want the cut and it will ask the percentage of smooth you want. Test this out on a mesh that has some curves to it to get an idea of what it does. Try different amounts of smooth.


Step 5) Select the back of the head and extrude it back.

Step 6) Extrude the poly and scale it down to begin the creation of the main eye loops.

Step 7) Use the Loop Cut Tool to devide the eye loop in two.

Step 8 ) Shape the eye loop.

Step 9) Cut the Eye loop in half again but vertically this time. Shape.

Step 10) Add another loop to the eye loop using the Loop Cut with smooth.

Step 11) Cut the face to add more detail.

Step 12) Shape.

Step 13) Cut in another loop in the mouth area.

Step 14) Delete the polys from the center of the eye.

Step 15) Add a sphere for the eye.

Step 16) Shape the eye socket to fit the eye and extrude and loop cut to get the socket to look the way you want.

Step 17) Extrude the interior of the mouth. Add loops as needed, shape, and finish.




Let me know what you think.

TorQ

[Modron]

Hey Torq, that is awsome. Thanks for that, man. Your methods are certainly more sound than my own, but check it out, I just couldn't leave the lizard be,...lol...

[roofoo]

Modron, & TOrq, I just want to say both those tuts are awesome, they taught me a lot!! So the idea is basically to create loops around the detail areas, such as the eye, or mouth, from the start?

[Timah]

wow, that's weird, I've been modelling a lizard recently too and I stumbled upon this thread. I'll post a quick picture of what mine's coming out like. I went with quite a high polygon count mostly because I didn't know any better, but I think it's coming out fine. It's very rough so far, I'm working from reference images and trying to get it pretty accurate, eventually.

[Modron]

Roofoo, well, really, you can add details at any time,... In most cases, it's probably best not to do them straight off the bat,..I suppose I could have roughed out the whole thing first and then started on the eyebrows,...I guess I like to do them early because I am impatient, and I like to see things starting to take shape early on,......Also, you can get more vertices to make details with by making extrusions as well as loop cuts, and also knife cuts. And, I'm glad you found this thread useful.
Hey Timah, that is a cool lizard. Maybe some more lizards will show up, and we can make a reptile house hehe.

[TorQ]

roofoo,

The pupose of creating the poly loops is not about detail its about when the model is animated it moves the way that real skin and muscle move together. Creating the loops properly also affects the way the subdivision surface looks when its rendered. Finally, modeling with good loops alow you to better utilize great tools like Loop Cut. Creating the poly loops in the right place from the beginnning is much easier than going back and trying to redirect the flow of polys later on.

This link explains the idea in more detail:

http://coldfusion.art.msstate.edu/ca...ingtheory.html

Hope this helps.

TorQ

[Modron]

I made this diagram to show a way of increasing the number of vertices in an edge loop, without resorting to triangles. ( which should be avoided )

[roofoo]

Originally Posted by TorQ roofoo, The pupose of creating the poly loops is not about detail its about when the model is animated it moves the way that real skin and muscle move together. Creating the loops properly also affects the way the subdivision surface looks when its rendered. Finally, modeling with good loops alow you to better utilize great tools like Loop Cut. Creating the poly loops in the right place from the beginnning is much easier than going back and trying to redirect the flow of polys later on. This link explains the idea in more detail: http://coldfusion.art.msstate.edu/ca...ingtheory.html Hope this helps. TorQ

Yeah, I understand now, thanks for the link! I never really thought much about the direction of edges before, just the placement of the verts..but now I know what to do!

Originally Posted by Modron I made this diagram to show a way of increasing the number of vertices in an edge loop, without resorting to triangles. ( which should be avoided )

So is it ok then to have a triangle with 4 vertices? because I notice that is what you have in your diagram..(another dumb question... :-? )

-Roofoo

[Gabio]

Originally Posted by Modron I made this diagram to show a way of increasing the number of vertices in an edge loop, without resorting to triangles. ( which should be avoided )

I'm scatching my head on this one modron. It's juste not self explicative. Even more with the 4 triangles in...