Modeling the Details - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 61

well as assigning material slots to them. This feature
will greatly speed up texturing and assigning materi-
als to your ivy later. (See Chapters 8 and 12 for more
on UV unwrapping and materials.)

Ground/Soil
To make the ground a bit more interesting, I sub-
divided it a couple of times and roughened it up
a bit with the Sculpt tools, which I'll discuss in
detail in Chapter 6. Next, I added a new plane
(this time keeping it unsubdivided and perfectly
flat) and placed it just below the average height
of the ground so that some of the deeper areas
poked down through it. This produces the effect
of puddles on the ground (see Figure 5-20).
Additionally, I created piles of dirt in the cor-
ners of the scene simply by creating a plane, sub-
dividing it several times, and using proportional
editing to add lumps. By combining this with a bit of
sculpting to build up dirt in the cracks and corners
between the blocks and other elements, I was able
to give the surroundings more of an aged look. The
final scene is shown in Figure 5-21.

Figure 5-22: The leg joints. Both joints were created using a
mix of cylinders for the simple parts and curves (converted
into meshes) for the longer pieces. Adding support loops
around the edges of the cylindrical parts allows them to sub-
divide much better. * While the following flows from the modeling tech-

niques already discussed, the parts we are creating fit
in alongside the sculpted and retopologized meshes
we will be working on in Chapters 6 and 7. You can
follow along with this part first or skip forward to
Chapters 6 and 7 on sculpting and retopology and
then return to this later.

basic shape a 2D curve, used the Extrude setting
to give it some thickness, and then converted it to
a mesh. Blender's default curve-filling topology is
full of skinny triangles, which do not subdivide at all
well, so I deleted these faces and filled in the front
and back by hand to produce nicer topology (see
Figure 5-23).

Modeling the Details of the
Spider Bot
For the Spider Bot, I needed to create the other
mechanical parts of the body that will complete
the model when combined with the main body and
leg pieces I will be sculpting and retopologizing
in Chapters 6 and 7. The aim was to create some
feasible mechanical-looking parts, such as joints,
wires, and so forth, that complete the look of the
Spider Bot.

Wires
The wires are all created from 3D Bézier curves
modeled around the legs and other areas to add
interest and connect the parts (see Figure 5-24).
To add further detail, I converted some wires to
meshes to allow me to add some loop cuts and
extrusions (see Figure 5-25).
For some of the more elaborate wires, I com-
bined the Array and Curve modifiers to duplicate a
single mesh along a curve (see Figure 5-26). First,
I modeled a single unit (the ring-shaped object in
Figure 5-26), and then I added an Array modifier
and a Curve modifier to duplicate that unit and
deform it to the shape of the curve.

Joints
The joints were all designed from the same basic
template: a cylinder for the central part, which
allows them to move freely, with struts coming out
that attach to the legs (see Figure 5-22). To produce
the struts, I began with a curve object to make the