Since we only had two hours in this 3D session, lesson 5 on our VR environment group project was a much shorter one. For this post, I’ll be evidencing the focus of my work for the lesson, which was the final detail of the castle door.
This was the detailing that I wanted to replicate. I already had the two stretched-out poly spheres in place from the last lesson so the base was pretty much complete. All that I had left to do was the curves.
My first attempt involved using the EP curve tool, but I didn’t like the way it was turning out. So, I used a tablet pen to draw it free-hand and make the curve more precise. Even with this method though, it was extruding really strangely – I had to try again. I added more subdivisions in the hope that it would help the above situation.
It didn’t help, however. I zoomed in to see this weird double-extrusion happening and I really couldn’t understand why. Thankfully, the next suggestion worked – I was advised by a team member to use a NURB circle instead of a cylinder to extrude, and this actually followed the path correctly, without joining up like that. The result was all-black, but I was just happy to see a solution in tact.
The tutor showed me how to fix the mesh issues as well. I had to convert the extrusions to polygons, with ‘quads’ selected in the options panel. I then added SMP and reversed the duplicates, creating the result that you see above. Once I ‘deleted all by history’ and got rid of the originals, I had both of my curves ready to be added to the door!
I selected all of the faces and extruded them outwards slightly to make the curves thicker. I then worked on the ends a little, since they were a mess, deleting the faces, filling the holes and then extruding outwards so the inner, original curve didn’t peek out.
Finally, I assembled everything and combined. The half-door was done! I ran out of time at this point so I just sent the OBJ over to Jacob to finish up.
Ta-da! The finished result, pre-texturing of course. I’m happy with how my door turned out and how it fits into the scene. Thank you to our team leader who mirrored it for me and slotted it in (he also had to deal with the SMP disappearing and having to re-combine). I’ll remember to use the ‘Smoothing’ function next time to prevent this issue when importing.
