Starting my Model and Studies Advice for 3D Literacy

During my studies advice on Wednesday with Mike, he went through how he would go about making the basics of my staff in very low detail, like the actual staff part and a basic skull, to show the techniques, like the curve tool and the extrude tool. This was helpful for building up the base part of the staff.

I used the EP curve tool to get a basic shape of my staff and then used a sweep mesh and used the taper graph to help add some more diversity and a little bit more of a warped look. To get the shape more detailed and exact, I used my reference art as an image plane and moved the edges and vertices around to get the exact shape I wanted. I also used the extrude tool on a face to get more edges, like the little ridges coming out of the basic staff shape.

For the branch coming off of the main question mark, scythe-like shape, I used the EP curve tool again, but selected a face and the curve and extruded it along the curve, then repeating this process with the extra small branches coming off the design.

General Studies Advice

I had made some progress on my staff model when I was doing the general studies advice with Henry, so I ended up showing him the parts I had done, although very little. He recommended removing some edges from certain areas, as they weren’t really needed, which you can see in these two screenshots. I can see why, I think I was going a little overboard with the edges at the beginning because I was still lacking in experience with topology, which I had never really thought about up until this point.

The Bottom Of the staff

I then started modelling the bottom part of the staff, which I did by filling the hole left by the sweep mesh there and then using the multi-cut tool to divide it into sections, ensuring they stayed polygons as well. Then I extruded the faces individually, moving them and continuing to extrude them to form the sort of shapes I was looking for in the branches coming off of the main body. 4

The bit underneath this was made from an EP curve as well, then joining the faces from the extruded branches to the multi-cut faces of the bottom part.

The target merge tools proved to be very useful here, for merging vertices and edges to ensure there were no random floating parts.