This is a general observation I have, but I wish to learn the reason why, all tutorials seem to design everything starting from one ploygon, ex: cube.
Take for example the Gus (ginger bread man) or sword tutorial on GameDev.
I am new to 3D but I would have preferred amalgamating vertices from a cylinder, triangle, and a number of cubes. Sort of like taking a building block approach, with different primitives. Please enlighten me.
There isn’t a need to start with a cube it just works very well in many situations. A lot of the sub-surfaces wouldn’t look nearly as good you extrude other shape an then subsurf them. Cubes are just relatively easier to handle than something with many more vertices. Finally in some cases you would have to go far far out of your way to make it work with any other shape.
If there is a particular starting point you want for any project, you can set Blender up the way you like it then select “Save Default Settings” from the file menu.
For instance, I have my default setting as an empty 3D window with one camera and one light on an inactive layer and a buttons window and another 3D window with a camera view.
I’ve set up a bunch of other layout presets in “Screens” and the whole shebang saved as defaults.
In short, take some time to play with screen layouts, set things up the way you want them and save them as default.
This question is really the “what’s the best modelling style?” question.
The answer is, do what works for you. I think a lot of people tend to work directly with a cube and extrude stuff off of it because it’s what they’re used to and they don’t have to think about combining multiple objects together (which requires about the same amount of hand editing).
Sometimes one way is more useful than another. If the shape you want is initially best approximated by a curve, use curves and convert to polygons for tweaking at the appropriate step. If the shape you want is very geometric, start with the basic geometric shapes and blend them together.
Etc.
There really isn’t any “how-to” rule other than “do what works.”
Hope this helps.
well thanks to all of you, I appreciate your feedback.
re: references to interface customisation; is there a way to set the default path when loading blend files in Windows? Blender allows you to customise paths, but I coould not identify the path for blend files.
It tries to open them within the blender program folder, whereas I tend to keep all my files within subdirectories in MyDocuments. Makes it easier to backup everything at one go.