Modeling

There are numerous tutorials on how to model characters, clothes, and armor. ZoyncTV made one on modeling T-shirts and pants that demonstrates several handy ideas. It is a 10 minute long video. I cover the key points after the video. So, watching this video is optional, but it will give you ideas.

Character Modelling Part 1 – This video is about making a T-shirt on a model.

C-Select

Selecting points is something we do all the time while modeling. Basic select is via right-click. But right-click selecting numerous vertices is far too tedious. So, most of us learn to use ‘B’ and drag to make a box to select groups of vertices.

An even more handy selection process is via ‘C’. Press C and left-click-hold and drag. Everything within the circle cursor is selected. Middle-click to deselect. Right-click to exit selection mode.

In C-select menus and other control do not work. You have to right-click to exit C-select before they will work. You are going to forget at some point and left-click in a menu while C-select is active. That WILL mess up you selection. Blender 2.63 will select everything when you do that. To recover move back into the 3D window and right-click then press Ctrl-Z to restore your selection.

You can press ‘Z’ to shift between wire frame and solid view. The change limits what will be selected. In solid view only the front facing vertices, edges, and faces will be selected. Anything behind the solid faces is not SUPPOSED to be selected. There are some glitches, so rotate your model after selecting to be sure there is no selection bleed through.

Retopology Trick

I have an article on how to get SNAP working to allow you to easily move topology around without changing the shape. See: Blender Retopology – Clothing Update. You can see how this is used in the following video, which I think is an excellent video and worth watching.

[youtube BPyM0HSKMt4]

You can see the body Sutrabla uses is very similar to the SL Avatar. When you use the body of the SL Avatar to start a shirt or pants you will need to reorganize the topology much the same why she has.

I love Sutrabla’s videos. They are good and fast paced.

Snap

Snap works very well. Learning how to use it and control it is a basic skill. So, a few words about that.

#4 – Blender 2.6 Snap Control

The image shows the SNAP menu and controls. I think the control is a bit flaky in the way it works. The horseshoe magnet icon turns snapping on and off. If snapping is off, pressing Ctrl will turn it on for the current action. Or off if snap is on.

Several actions require you press Ctrl and left-click to do things. This kills the snap-on/off-by-Ctrl feature. So, if you are doing tasks that require Ctrl-LMB, you need to click the horseshoe icon on or off.

#5 – Plane over the iconosphere

Moving left from the horseshoe is the snap type; Volume, Face, Edge, Vertex, and Increment. I’m not sure what Volume Snap is. I just don’t understand it. Face and Edge are obvious. Increment means snap to grid… sort of. It can seem a bit strange if you are in perspective view. It works pretty well in ortho view.

If you select Face Snap, you get two more controls. The first going right is: Snap onto Self. I suppose this is supposed to be self explanatory. In general it is ON by default. I consider it to mean snap to whatever snap mode item is there regardless which object it is in. With it off, it only snaps to OTHER objects rather than the currently selected mesh. You’ll notice the little orange circle that comes on when the cursor is snapping to something.

#6 – Plane snapped to iconosphere

The last button is Project Individual… This means that if you are moving an Edge or Face the vertices will individually snap into place. So, if you were snapping a quad face onto a pyramid. A line from your eye, the screen plane, through the vertex to the pyramid is where the vertex will snap to. See images #5 and #6. In image #6 all four vertices have snapped to the closest face. This can be handy when redoing topology.