Week 4 - Weekly Blog Entry

This week Steven Harris has posted a discussion on the VLE for everyone to post links to their blogs. I have chosen the blog: arusstarwarsmodellingproject.blogspot.co.uk by Connor Gamble. 

Good points about their blog in which I can get ideas from:

• They have updated their blog every week.
• Plenty of information discussing points about what they have done every week.
• Included images to actually show their creations.
• Each post is labelled accordingly.

Looking at the mark scheme; I have found some points that could be improved:

• By adding more blog entries actually demonstrating the development process of the models. As they have only added the final form of their models.
• Maybe more practical class exercises, even if they are improved versions of the first few weeks exercises.
• They have a lot of information but maybe they should include more detailed information of their chosen techniques that they have used and any issues that they faced.
• Include more images of their models, all from different angles.

By looking at some of the images that they have included on their blog; their models look quite detailed and also look like they have a decent polygon efficiency. By comparing their models to the actual thing, they look quite similar which is good.

New techniques that I have discovered include skills that have been mentioned on the document that Steven Harris has put up on the VLE. The techniques that would be very useful to me and my models include the ring and loop selection, this helps to choose many polygons at once rather than clicking each one individually on a shape like a cylinder, this also saves a lot of time. I am looking forward to using this technique as all three of my models include cylinders.

Week 3 - House Exercise

The exercise this week was to create a house in 3DS Max. I followed the tutorial that they gave me; creating the main structure of the building was quite easy. All I had to do was create the main cube and add two vertical edges to the front wall. This is to extrude these two walls to make two seperate rooms. I then had to make one of these rooms slightly smaller than the other. I found all of this quite easy so far.

The trickiest part of building this house were the windows and the roof.
The windows were the hardest part, especially the georgian bard across the windows. This is because the first time I did this extruding the georgian bars extruded the whole window.
I thought I would redo the whole house, in which I did, and create the windows again. This time I used a different tutorial from somewhere else. Even though it took me a while to do it, I still managed to create them in the end.

Making the vertices and lines on the top of the house to extrude the roof was also difficult. This is because I wasn't show how to get it exact to the tutorial and how to delete lines I didn't need. But I didn't give up and I pulled through it even though it took me a while. I still learnt techniques that would be useful for the models for my Star Wars assignment.

Overall I was very pleased with the model house that I created, I hope to use some of these techniques or my models.