Jan 15 work

The goal of the class was to end with a basic robot like the following.

To get this result we start by adding a reference image to the front orthogonal view with these steps:

-Click the plus "+" sign at the top right side of the screen, next to the right panel

-A new panel will show up, scroll down that panel until you find "Background Images" and expand it with the small triangle next to it.

-Click on "add image" them "open", choose the image chibifront.jpg (the second image in the prev post)

- Where it says "axis" choose "front"

- Now to get a front view from the modeling space press 1 in the numpad, if you don't see the image, probably means you are in prespective mode, press 5 in the numpad to toggle to orthogonal mode and you should see this.

- Some useful short-cuts for cameras are 1 = front 3=right 7=top and 5=toggle perspective/orthogonal 

-The idea now is to start adding cylinders and spheres (from the create tab at the left side) and using scale/rotate/move to model them into shapes that we can use for the reference, for example adding the robot's hat:

- There are some items that cannot be done by using scale/rotate/move, for example the angled sides of the face, for this we need to edit the cylinder we will use for its face.

- To edit an object's geometry we go into what is called "edit mode", currently we are in "object mode", look at the bottom left-middle area there is a drop list that says "object mode".

- First create a cylinder for the face and scale it to fit the reference.

- With the new face cylinder selected change "object mode" to "edit mode"

- Now you can change the elements of the cylinder, these include vertices, segments and faces.

-We will reduce the size of the bottom face of the cylinder to create the angled cylinder, first select the "edit face" button.

- Move the camera until you get a bottom view (holding down the wheel button) and the select the lower face (right button click).

- Go back to front view (1) then press "scale" from the tools panel (left side), move the mouse to scale the bottom face until it matches the reference.

- Now change from "edit mode" to "object mode" so you can keep adding/creating/modifiying other objects.

- Using this basic techniques we can en up with a robot with no feet and no claws.

- Next class we will:

1. Use "boolean modifiers" to create the feet and claws.
2. Use face extrude to add details and create the the robot's plug (refer to previous post)
3. User hierarchy to create parent child relations so we can easily pose our model

Here is the file to continue from.