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volume 1, issue 14

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Thinking Outside the Box:
A Peek Inside My Brain (part 2)

By Paul "Villam" Steed

Anything I say comes from me and represents my personal opinions, views and subtle plans for influencing society. Read, ruminate over and remember at your own risk. If I teach you something and it helps, teach someone else.

eems like you guys dig this tutorial approach. Cool! Maybe I can convince some friends and fellow modeler/animators to do the same sometime and we can see the differences in technique. I don't really like the multi-part aspect of this beast so I'm going to try and convince His loonyness to post the remainder of this beast in one big chunk. If not…well I guess you'll get the last third next week. [Editor's note: he convinced me...what can I say? It's hard saying no to Paul Steed...he's quite intimidating when he needs to be.]

I'd like to give Neil Marshal credit for pointing out that edit\invert selected works on sub-objects. So my bass-ackwards way to invert faces just got right-sided-up! Also the numbering got a little whacked in my diary entries because I tried to merge entries where I could and had to expound a little more on others. So if there's a gap in the numbering, don't worry about it. I had to keep them so I could reference the right screenshot image.

And again, don't hesitate to ask me for help or a few pointers. I enjoy helping you tykes out and sometimes I learn a thing or two as well!

So last time we saw Sleeg-o (last issue) we had just welded his torso together. Now we need to cap the ends of the mesh since they're gaping holes.

Speaking of holes, a nice modifier to take care of a situation like this is a modifier called 'cap holes'.

So after adding 'cap holes to the stack, faces magically appear at the open ends of Sleeg's torso. I turn the edges in front to conform to my idea of what it should look like and voila. This a quick way to close off open spaces that aren't too complex.

To give the torso that shell-like appearance we need to select the capped faces at the neck and type in a value of -5 over in the face\extrude\amount box.

Now do the same for the back capped end but after the extrusion scale the selected faces by 60%. This way the faces won't intersect with the body. We didn't worry about the neck because the body gets noticeably bigger where the extruded faces end up.

Time to do some abs. I hide everything but the abdomen and hip lines. Then I build another cylinder with 7 sides and 3 segments this time (I can always optimize later if necessary). I use the attributes of the cylinder to effectively scale it again instead of applying a non-uniform scale to it and move the cylinder into position.

(Continued on next page)

Credits: Thinking Outside the Box logo illustrated and is © 1998 Dan Zalkus. Thinking Outside the Box is © 1998 Paul Steed. All other content is © 1998 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't even try it. We've got really big guns, and we're ripped, baby.