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Tutorial : Subsurf Modelling

 

Here i take as an example a simple character to show you the subsurf modelling technique.
It's a great modelling technique for organic modelling (such as heads, humans etc...). Here the "rule" is to start from a simple box that you extrude and sculpt, subsurf allows the smoothing of this "cage".

First you should use a sketch, it's really helpful to keep good proportions.
In order to place a sketch in the background, press this buttons on the left corner of your window (switch to one another),
and load your picture, then come back to your 3D view.

Then you can start, let's add a box : space/add mesh/cube. Place the box in front of one of your character's feet. Press subsurf in edit mode (F9).
Subdiv represents the amount of smoothing.

You can start your sculpting ! Select 4 points(a face) and extrude (E). Here the point is to extrude and move(G), resize (S), rotate (R) the points and faces.
Try to get the smallest amount of points, it helps you get more control on your mesh.
If you do a mistake you can "undo" with U (only in edit mode).


Once your first leg finished, you have to mirror it then you don't have to model the other one.
Quit the edit mode with tab and press shift D (copy), then press S and X (or Y)(mirror).
Now you have to join the 2 legs, press ctrl J (with the 2 legs selected).

In order to make the 2 legs part of the same mesh you have to connect them, bring the points you want to connect as close as possible to each other, select all the points you want to join and press Remove doubles (give it a higher limit first).You can also do W/remove doubles.
You can check how many points are selected on the top right corner of your screen (here 2 points out of 58), it's quite useful to see if Blender joined 2 points together (before 2, after 1).

Then keep on extruding your faces following your sketch.
It happens sometimes when you extrude your faces (or copy, or mirror) that your mesh looks black, that's because your "normals" are upside down, press draw normals to see which ones are upside down.
To put them back in order, select the wrong faces and press W/flip normals.( you can also press double sided if it doesn't work).

That's it, now you can model in subsurf, finally the point here is to extrude and play with polygonnes.
For the arms, i extruded the shoulders and the i subdived(W/subdivide) in order to have a few faces to extrude the fingers.

Tutorial : metaballs