This week instead of lectures, we had a one on one support session with our tutors where we were given advice on how to improve our assessment 1 models. I showed Mike my most recent skull and petal models. He showed me how to smooth my skull a different way than simply using the smooth tool, as using the smooth option created polygons with more than 4 sides, which can make animating a model difficult and must be avoided. He told me that selecting the object in object mode and pressing 3 on my keyboard with show a smoothed preview of the object. Then by going to modify, then convert and finally smooth mesh preview to polygons, this smooths the mesh, ensuring only 4 sided polygons are present on the object.
I am happy that I saved my smoothed and unsmoothed model on two different files, as I was able to go back and edit the unsmoothed version, fixing the errors I made previously when smoothing they eyes of my skull.
He also taught me how to create teeth using this method, and how to duplicate them so what was done to one tooth is done to all. This will save much time when I am ready to add texture to my model. To do this I go to Edit, then duplicate special settings and change the geometry type from copy to instance. Once this is changed, when I press CTRL + shift + D, the selected object will be duplicated.