Chess Piece

Today I used the lathe tool and splines to create a pawn. I created the outline by drawing with splines along a picture of a pawn, the grouping them to create a full outline. I did this to create an accurate outline for the shape. I then used the lathe to create the full 3d shape and rotate to get it facing the right way.

All in all I think it went well, and the shape holds well to a real chess piece, especially some of the harder edges.

Storyboard

This is my preliminary storyboard for my final assignment. I decided to base it on the classic blowing up the first Deathstar scene, as it contains a few different ships (3 X-wings, 2 TIE fighters and a TIE advanced X1) and a mounted gun as well. This seemed like it could show off some good modelling and animation techniques, as well as some interesting camera angles, so I settled on this slight change on the original scene, missing out the millennium falcon and the cockpit scenes of the various ships.

First week of 3d Modelling continued.

For my second assignment of the week, I was tasked with creating a castle. In general, I found this much easier than the house, due to the lack of difficult connections to make, like the roof I needed to make on the house.

I started with one of the corners, starting with a tube and manipulating it from there. It was simple to pull parts up and create windows due to them being created from lots of boxes. It ended up being fairly simple to create a corner with two arrow slits to face the outside of the castle with just simple connections and extrusions.

 I then cloned and rotated the corner 3 times, to create all four corners, placing them precisely using the transform co-ordinates, as dragging them could lead to the corners being slightly out of position, which could prove problematic at a later stage.

With the four corners in place, I placed a block between two corners, and did more connections to make the edges to extrude up and down to make the edge and walkways, then pulling the edges to the tubes to create more a joint to them, so there would be less of a gap between the square and curved faces.

I once again cloned, rotated and re-positioned the boxes, again using the co-ordinates, to create the full castle walls.

To finish off my castle I added a large box in the centre, making sure it was right in the middle with the co-ordinates, and created a smaller cylinder on top, with a cone on top of that, so to create a centre castle with a tower, leaving an end result I was pleased with

Just for a final touch I decided to try to create a window on the roof of the tower, to finish off the trapped princess look it had started to gain. I did this with connections and pulling edges to protrude out. This is the main part of this project that would need real improvement, but for an experiment I think the idea comes across well.

I think the whole building comes across well, and I believe for my first week of 3d modelling I have created a convincing castle. I found the project easier than the house due to the lack of a roof, which is another thing that needs implementing on the centre building to complete the look of this castle.

First week of modelling

This is my first real experience of modelling, therefore this modelling of a house proved difficult at first. The main difficulty I faced was making the correct connections on the roof. I solved this through connecting vertices instead of edges, as only at the end of this model did I realise how to delete wrongly created edges without removing faces. This my work at the end of the tutorial, before what adding in the extra doors and windows, which I will add in soon.

This is the roof before pulling it up to create a point. As you can see, my connections aren't totally perfect, but for a first try I think my work is acceptable.

Here is the finished model, ready for expansion of extra windows and doors.
As I said previously, for my first real attempt of modelling I am happy with this, and I will carry on with this model this week.