Blocking In - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 36

later to create the final model, but working with very
simple geometry now will leave more freedom for
experimentation while sculpting.
A base mesh can have any level of complex-
ity, but try to create topology that will support the
forms that you know you want to create, without
introducing too many details that you might not be
sure about. Depending on how sure you are of what
you want your model to look like, you can include
topology for features like eyes, mouths, and muscle
groups, or you can leave it as simple as a basic
sphere or cube if you're just modeling a face.
For the Bat Creature, I aimed for a base mesh
that gave topology for the overall body plan but
left out fine details, such as the head. I developed
the base mesh by setting my concept art as a back-
ground image and using it as a guide.

Snapping
Blender has tools for snapping objects, vertices,
faces, or edges to all sorts of things. To turn on
Snapping, click the Snapping icon (the horseshoe
magnet) in the header of the 3D Viewport (see
Figure 4-10). Then, from the drop-down menu
beside the Snapping icon, select how Blender will
snap your selection when it's moved, scaled, or
rotated from among the following options:

Increment Your selection will snap to the nearest
increment so that you can construct objects
with precisely aligned points. This is useful for
modeling things like buildings or mechanical
objects where you want perfectly aligned walls
and floors with no lumps or bumps. (You can
also snap your selection to Blender's grid by
pressing shift -S 4 Selection to Grid .)

Vertex/Edge/Face/Volume Your selection will be
snapped to the vertices, edges, faces, or interior
of any objects. You can change what Blender
chooses to snap to from the drop-down menu
that appears. Click the icon to the right of the
drop-down menu to rotate the selection so that
it aligns with the normal vertices that it snaps to.

Building the Bat Creature Base Mesh
I started with the torso of the creature to provide
a guide for the scale of the rest of the parts, as
well as something to attach them to. To begin, I
took the default . blend file (the scene you are pre-
sented with when Blender starts up) and deleted
any objects already present. Then I loaded in the
concept drawing for the Bat Creature (as shown
in Figure 4-11). (For help with this, see “Using
Concepts and Reference Images in Blender” on
page 26.) While I didn't plan to use this concept
to model from exactly, it made a useful guide for
judging the proportions as I worked. At this point, I
left the wings out of the base mesh for the body, as I
planned to model them separately later.

One very important snapping option is found
in Face Snapping mode. Enabling Face Snapping
causes the Project onto Surface icon to appear.
Project onto Surface will cause geometry you cre-
ate to snap onto the surface of existing objects as
you move, scale, or rotate them around. This option
allows you to create new topology over the surface of
an existing object. In Chapter 7, we will be creating
new topology over the surface of existing objects to
better capture their shapes after we have sculpted
the originals.

Figure 4-11: Concept
art loaded in as a
background image

Base Meshes
To create the Bat Creature, I needed a simple base
mesh that could be sculpted on. A base mesh is a
simple model that captures the basic shapes of the
model you want to sculpt. Once you've created a
base mesh, you can add a Multiresolution modi-
fier and begin subdividing and sculpting details in
Sculpt mode (see Chapter 6).
Your base mesh should capture the overall pro-
portions of the mesh and be designed to subdivide
easily in order to provide a nice even mesh to sculpt
on. We can retopologize the sculpted base mesh