Week 3

At the start of this week I started to work on a village. For the house I wanted it to look like actual logs even when close up so I used a lot of cylinders to make the walls. To cut out the roof shape from these I used a large rectangular box and shaped the bottom to match the shape of the roof I wanted, used the Boolean tool to cut the logs and then shaped the top half of the roof.

For the floor and river, I used a plane and then the paint deformation to drag out the river. I then used the tube to make the bridge and Boolean to cut out the part of the bridge that isn't seen as its below the ground.

I then decided to practise using the 3 view modelling using a tie plane. The way I was shown during the lectures was to model half of it and then copy that half and flip it around using the mirror tool to get the whole model. I had a look at the mirror option though and saw that it had a copy feature included in it, with one of the copy options being an instance.

Because of this, I decided to create a mirror instance copy of the model as soon as I started (when it was just a semi-sphere) so that as I model one half, the other half gets modelled in real time letting me see how the whole model will look and not just half of it.

The large "wings" on the side of the tie plane I modelled by extruding the side of the semi-sphere out and then using outline to make them large, extruded them again to get the width, finally I extruded them once more and used outline to make the last surface a lot smaller again to create the bevelled look you can see in the front view of the wing below.

I have kept the poly count low (around 200) on purpose for a few reasons. The first reason is that with a low poly count the final animation will render a lot faster and also if the model was to be used in a game then a high poly count could cause the game to require to have a very low fps or not even be playable as high poly models require high processing power. The other reason is that when it comes to texturing the models I am going to be using pictures as my drawing skills are not that good and with a high poly model getting the pictures to line up properly could be very hard.