Blocking In - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 44

to affect only connected vertices ( alt -O), which will
drag only nearby vertices in the same mesh as those
selected, allowing you to do things like move an arm
without affecting your model's waist.
Different falloff settings can significantly impact
the effect of transforming part of your mesh. For
example, the Sharp Falloff option will create sharp
peaks if you grab and move a single vertex, whereas
the Sphere Falloff option will create bulbous, spheri-
cal shapes. The Random Falloff option is useful for
roughening up the surface of a mesh; by grabbing
a single vertex and moving it a little, with a wide
radius for the falloff, you can add a slight random
variation to the surface of a mesh.
Proportional editing is useful for many things
besides tweaking proportions. For example, you can
use it to create interesting curved or twisted defor-
mations by grabbing or rotating parts of the mesh
(Figure 4-24) or for posing characters without hav-
ing to rig them.

as a rough guide, beginning with a small plane
and working along the length of the bones (see
Figure 4-25). To make it easier to get the topology
I wanted, I kept the mesh 2D at this point.
With the basic skeleton blocked in, I began
filling in the wings between the bones. To make
sure the gap could be filled in neatly, I spaced out
the vertices along the bones so that they roughly
matched up with one another, adding more as
needed or shifting existing ones. Next, I extruded
and scaled the edges to create a clean division
between the wing and the bones, and I began filling
in the gaps. (The extrusion/scaling won't produce
perfect results, but you can tweak the position of the
vertices manually to get a nicer layout.)
With the gaps filled in, I selected the whole
model and extruded it back to give it some thickness,
as shown in Figure 4-26 ❶ . Next, I selected just the
wing membrane areas and used the Shrink/Fatten
tool ( alt -S) to make these areas slightly thinner
again ❷ . At this point, the wing had some thickness
but was still very flat looking. To rectify this, I first
selected its more central parts and shifted them back
slightly to give the wing a bit of a concave shape ❸ .

* Sometimes Blender will calculate the normals of

a mesh incorrectly, which can cause operators like
Shrink/Fatten and modifiers like Subdivision Surface
or Bevel to behave strangely. You can often see this if
you set your mesh to draw smooth, as black boundaries
will appear between areas with conflicting normals.
To fix this, simply select your whole mesh in Edit mode
and use the Recalculate Normals operator ( ctrl -N) to
force Blender to recalculate the object's normals.

Next I used the Warp operator ( shift -W) to
give the wing a curve ❹ . This operator uses the 3D
cursor position as the center of the operation and
arranges the selected vertices in a circle around
that center. You can define how far the vertices are
warped with your cursor; setting the 3D cursor fur-
ther from the mesh before using the operator will
give the curve a wider radius.
As a result of these treatments, I was able to add
a nice curve to the wing by switching to the top view
and using Warp. Also, by rotating the mesh and
using Warp again, I could add a similar curve to
the wing's profile ❺ .
The Warp operator will often move the mesh
about a bit, so I dropped back into Object mode ( tab )
and moved the wing back to where I wanted it before
applying the transforms ( ctrl -A 4 Apply Location and
then repeat for Rotation and Scale, too).

Figure 4-24: Proportional editing has many uses. Here it's
used to deform a subdivided column using (left to right)
Translate, Rotate, and Scale operations and the standard
“smooth” falloff.

I used proportional editing to make a few tweaks
to finalize the mesh, such as pulling back the arms
and shoulders slightly and narrowing the back where
it's level with the waist.

Creating the Wings
To make it easier to sculpt on the body and wings,
I created them as separate meshes that I could join
later when retopologizing. To create the wings, I
first blocked in the skeleton using the reference