Thursday 30th January 2014

Creating a Simple Polygon Model

Today I created a simple polygon model with a blinn texture by following the tutorial that I was shown. Creating the model was not at all very difficult but I did make a few mistakes to learn from. The first mistake I had made was that I hadn't turned off the function 'Interactive Creation'. Interactive creation allows you to freely created a polygon on the grid, but negates the option to create a polygon by typing in specific dimensions. The tutorial was using specific dimensions and did often state that the interactive creation needed to be turned off, but I failed to notice until someone pointed it out to me.

The second mistake I had made was I had failed to group things correctly. Grouping polygons together allows you to select all the objects at once rather than one at a time. When I first grouped my objects together, I thought I had done something wrong so I undone the action, or so I thought. This happened a couple of times and when I eventually grouped the polygons together I hadn't realized that I was doing it correctly each time. One of the steps of the tutorial was to template the groups, which I followed correctly, but when it came to the point I needed to untemplate the groups I was unable to do this. No matter how many times I tried to untemplate the groups they remained templated. Eventually I learned that because I had grouped the objects together 3 or 4 times that the group ended up within 2 more groups in the hierarchy. So I wasn't able to simply select untemplate, instead I had to go to each individual group, select each individual object and then manually untemplate everything by unchecking the box next to template (Attribute Editor -> Object Display).

This is a screen-shot of the finished model after following the tutorial.