This is my first attempt at anything.
I’ve tried learning other 3D apps, but after learning the basics Blender seems the most easiest and most efficient (in terms of getting things done) one…
This is the top part of a maglite flashlight. (I’m not worrying at the quality of the flashlight at all right now. I’m first trying to figure out how to best make each part of it.)
Here’s what I did:
Create cylinder for the body
Extrude the vertices on top in order to make the ‘rounded’ end
Subtract a cylinder to make space for the ‘ridges’ at the top
Create one ridge and use ‘Spin Dup’ to create the entire ridge circle
Here’s my problems. The result of step two doesn’t produce as much of a ‘rounded’ bevel as I wanted to. What 's the best way to produce such a corner?
For step 4, it’s hard to place the center marker right in the center in order to make sure the resulting circle falls correctly onto the flashlight. Would I be better off using a texture to get this effect instead of shaping?
Another thing is that the top of the actual flashlight changes from the round bevel to a flat circle as can be seen in the picture. I wonder how I can accomplish that.
Here’s the picture of my model (I know it’s very ugly. Don’t laugh.)
Here’s actual flashlight for reference [/img]
Hmm, for the rounding, you could try to turn on subsurfing. The only thing to watch out for if you did is that you’d have to crease the edges (blender 2.34) of the ridges in order to keep them sharp (if they’re part of the same mesh).
Much better…
Simple question: Is there any way I can join two adjacent vertices together? I want to get rid of the edge that connects them such that the two vertices become one.
Another question: What’s a good way to add vertices to a cylinder (or any other object altogether.) If I use subdivide, sometimes the way the object is subdivided is not the way I wanted it to be. For example for a cylinder I want to add a ring that basically splits every vertical edge into two. If I select all the vertices on the top end circle and on the bottom end circle and use subdivide, ther result is not what I want…
Select the two vertices and hit Alt-M. You’ll have the choice between merging the vertices in the center or at a point under the cursor. You can set the cursor on a particular vertex before hand if you want them to merge in a specific place.
If you’ve got a bunch of vertices doubled up in the same place (say, after a copy-and-mirror operation) you can hit Rem. Duplicate.
AFAIK, there’s no “bridge” feature in Blender that will arbitrarily create faces between two separate sets of verticies, like there is in Wings3D. This’d be a great feature to have in the future, though.
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