Character Design and Creation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 73

Figure 5.36 The fi nished Beast model with Mirror turned on Figure 5.37 Mirror has been applied, and the model has been

altered asymmetrically

your model that cross the mirror line stick to it. This guar-
antees that your model won't end up with any open spaces
along the middle when you Apply the modifi er. While work-
ing with the Mirror modifi er, you will fi nd that you can only
select and work with the vertices on the “original” side of the
model. If you want to be able to work directly on either side,
you need to enable the “Live in Edit Mode” icon on the mod-
ifi er, highlighted in red on Figure 5.38.

Figure 5.38 The modifi ers panel, with a Mirror

modifi er added

If you plan to also use a Subsurf modifi er, it should
appear below the Mirror modifi er in the Modifi ers
panel. Placing it above the mirror modifi er or failing
to enable Do Clipping can cause Blender to treat
the two halves as separate entities as opposed to a
single, joined model, leading to the results in Figure
5.39. Note the shading seam down the center line of
the model.

Polygon Count

In the level of detail section of this chapter, we talked
about keeping the polygon count to a minimum and
using both the subsurf modifi er and normal mapping
to produce high quality renders while allowing fl ex-
ibility in the work fl ow.

Figure 5.39 Blender subsurfacing a mirrored model without
joining the halves