Week 4 - 21st October to 27th October 2013

Tron Lightcycle development

I've added a footrest, and the thingy above the rider,

extruded more wheel housing,

and added some handlebars and an engine (of sorts!)

Now I've reflected a duplicate - scale and drag the x pivot line to squash it flat and then out the other side. Typing in -1 to the attribute

Shark!

Is it possible that this modified cube can become a shark? Lewis assures me it can. The usual trick of selecting edges and extruding will get the job done.

Ahh... getting a bit more like it. Still a ways to go though.

Fins

Adding separate branches to the geometry can be problematic. Some things I've tried to bear in mind include the smallest true circle is six sided. so geometry with less than six faces is probably inadvisable. I used the following technique to add the fins. Imagine the cylinder below is a beautifully modelled (fin-less) shark.

Deleting the faces from two adjacent quads makes a six sided hole:

Select the two central verts and scale (in this case the y direction):

Double-click in edge mode and extrude.

'W' to move

Presto: fin begins!

Scale all...

And repeat...

Let's take a closer look for my classic error when finishing off:

NOT like that! the highlighted verts are 'hanging'

Learnt that the hard way. Do it like this and move the outer edges down if necessary.

Week 3 - 14th October to 20th October 2013

Tron's lightcycle

As taught by Lewis, I started with this curve which I lofted (surfaces, loft) into the wheel shape below:

making sure to select polygons and control points.

Some more lofting, this time to start making the body. I hid the wheels (ctrl-h) so I could better see what I was doing:

The pink lines show the mesh that I created from the curves. I found that by selecting all three of the curves in order from left to right and then doing the loft, it could be done in one step.

Selecting edges and extruding to develop the mesh. I used 'bridge' to close the gap from top to bottom. However this sometimes added extra faces, and I have found that the 'append to polygon tool' is more reliable.

To round up this week I extruded the engine hole inwards and rounded my wheel holes. Someone gave me the tip that in order to see the image planes while having 'x-ray' on the geometry, simply adjust the transparency on the material, in this case the default, 'lambert1':

I snapped the vertices of the wheel holes to a cylinder by hold ing 'v' whilst dragging each vertex. By selecting only the x or y arrow on the pivot I was able to stop them from sticking out from the rest of the model. This means that the holes should stay circular when smoothed.

Week 2 - 7th October to 13th October 2013

Trying to catch up. So we've got to produce a table with some props on...

Two possible images that I thought were striking:


 http://tanushrifurnitures.com/tablechair.php#prettyPhoto/7/

and

 http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LFltnqBCNXQ/UWRzkMGpkqI/AAAAAAAAA_c/T2PRRs82Cpg/s1600/rising+side+table.jpg

Visiting the blog of the designer, Robert van Embricqs of this second table revealed the not-so-obvious flat-pack construction:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZKfEKoA8nVY/UWRzkP_q5MI/AAAAAAAAA_Y/TLxUrzmeRjw/s1600/rising+side+table+transformation.jpg

I love this elegant and surprising solution to space-saving furniture, so I started to model it:

I started out by creating a simple cube and resizing in the x direction, duplicating so I had 3 of similar proportions and then duplicating them in the z direction before resizing again to map around a circle curve I had added to the scene.

About halfway round the curving process I realised that although the final table is a beautiful and interesting product, the modelling of it was not going to be sufficiently challenging to stretch my learning or show my current capability. So to the other model:

I'm not going for an exact replica of the table (let's learn to walk before sprinting!). I started with a CV curve which I duplicated and then lofted

Week 1 - 30th September to 6th October 2013

Struck down with genuine 'man-cold' (bronchitis), so no progress this week