Reply To: [ENDED] BC1-1801 – January Class Homepage – Getting Started with 3D Modeling & Blender

BC1-1801 Week 3 Homework Submission (pt 2)

For whatever reason, I don’t think I’ve ever done this exercise, but it was still fun to do.  I could probably spend another couple of hours working on him, but he’s starting to take shape (though I just realized I forgot the hands 😀 )

As I was working on this, I noticed something that you may have run into and wondered what to do about it.  There were times when I was rotating around a part and it seemed to “disappear”, but when I would pull back a little, it was there again.  This is actually not a bug, but rather what you’re experiencing is called “clipping”.  Blender clips very close and very far because if we were to truly have an “infinite” world, render times would be WAY longer than they are. So to keep things manageable, it “clips” the extremes.  However, if you happen to be finding that a given extreme is happening to “quickly” for you, you can adjust this. It’s in the “n” properties panel (the one that comes up on the right when you press the N key) under View. By default, blender clips anything closer than 1/10th of a blender unit or further than 1000. This is fine for most projects, but changing either of these will adjust at what point blender starts clipping. So if you need more when you’re close in, just change it to 0.01 for example, and you can then zoom in that much closer before it starts clipping.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that while you can use the skin modifier to create a basemesh, you can also use the techniques from the last couple of weeks and sometimes get even closer. Or better yet, combine the skin modifier with the basic primitives and/or mesh modeling we did last week.  There’s an add-on called “Bool Tool” that will add another tool set to the Tools tab that will allow you to “Boolean” your objects together. It works just like the Boolean modifier, but instead of having to do it on one object at a time, it can work on multiple objects at once.  

Before using it, I’d recommend applying at least your scale and make sure your normals are facing the right way, but I find it helpful to create a basemesh just as fast and/or slightly closer than just the skin modifier can get you.  (And if you ever watch any ZBrush sculpting, this is pretty close to how they can join shapes as well.) Once you have joined your objects, a little inflate and smoothing can help the transitions between pieces.

(This is also a function that is in another tool I like called Sculpt Tools UI, which Kent talks about in some of his other course.  Some of the other functions of that particular tool aren’t in Blender that I’m aware of, though.)

My point in sharing this, though, is that there are several ways to come up with a basemesh, whether it be from the skin modifier, mesh modeling the base, or mesh modeling/primitive/basemesh joining.  Find the workflow that works for you!