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by Chris Tyler: Fundamentals | Modeling
Texturing | 7.5 Rendering
UV Mapping | Misc
8.0 Specific

Modeling an architectural lighting element

Christopher Tyler Jul, 11th 2012 3 Comments

This modeling tutorial shows how to model an architectural lighting element. It’s a deceptively simple looking object. This tutorials shows various ways of dealing with angled geometry in addition to focusing on various geometry problems that can arise

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Comments

  2. m4admin
    m4admin

    For some strange reason Flatten to Grid didn’t work for me at any point during this tutorial. I was able to click the command (as it wasn’t greyed out) but there was no just effect. I had to change over to vertices mode and manually move the vertices to eye so that I could continue the tutorial. Is there any setting that you can think of that may have caused this?

    Just as a point of interest is there any reason why, in the first video, you suggested not to scale the initial rectangle using scale tool. What was the reason for this and should we avoid using scale tool for scaling in future?

  3. Chris Tyler
    Chris Tyler

    I’m not sure why the flatten functions wouldn’t work. You have to have some elements selected, and also your grid active. One thing that could prevent the apparent operation of the function is if a guide is enabled. For instance, if you are trying to flatten along the Y axis, to the Y grid, using the Flatten to Grid function , but you have a Z axis guide enabled, that guide will ‘constrain’ the movement of those vertices in a way that prevents them from moving.

    So just press the semicolon key before you do a flatten function to ensure you don’t have a guide on.

    The scale tool applies a scaling factor to an object. It’s a relative scale function which means you can undo that by setting the scale value back to a previous value. Whereas using the scale functions inside the polygon modeler are absolute functions. Why this can be important is because subdivision is applied to a pre-scaled object. If an object has a very very large scaling factor it can cause problems with the resulting subdivision surface object.

    So the group-first then convert process I show helps to avoid possible down-stream problem that *can* show up (but certainly not always because the scaling factor generally has to be fairly large).

    Chris

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