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Old 26-12-07, 21:32   #2
tweetygwee
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PART 2: Making a Candlestick Base

We will now create a Candlestick, and later a table to put it on. Now I am still bad at texturing objects, and by no means are my methods suited to texturing. This is a purely mesh-making tutorial. The first step is to find a good reference image, or even better, a good reference object from your house! This is from a simple google image search:



Just look at the image and think about how you will recreate it in meta. More experience means faster and better methods, many people here will have better methods than me. This is more to familiarize you with the tools of meta than to show you shortcuts. Post away with your tips/suggestions, I want this to become a reference thread for people learning meta. We will start at the base and work upwards. Proportions and positioning can be dealt with later.

Remember:
Right click and drag to rotate the view
Use mouse wheel or zoom tool to zoom

1. Primitive – Cylinder:

U 8
V 1
Radius 6
Height 1

(TIP: Notice the “create as new” checkbox. This is useful, but not now as we want it as ‘obj1’)

2. Click clone, OK, then lock obj1. Click Ctrl+A, thus selecting all the vertices in obj2.

3. Drag the Y under the movement arrow until your clone comes to about the position shown below. Notice the 1.16 in the edit panel, showing how much I have dragged it.



4. Now scale it down in all three directions using on the edit panel to about 0.923 of the original. Scale it to about 0.5 in the Y direction (drag the letter Y under the scale button)


5. Unlock obj1 (click the key) and delete all of the top faces of this cylinder (see below).

6. Lock obj1, select all and bring the top cylinder down a bit (but not so the bottom of obj2 goes below the top of obj1, if you see what I mean).

7. Start connecting the bits with the ‘create’ tool. Click in the pattern shown below, holding Ctrl so that it snaps to the nearest vertex, although I find this doesn’t really do much, clicking near enough does the trick. There’s always the Undo button!



Now we have a little stepped base. This is how I usually go about creating “stepped” objects. You could have made a taller cylinder (2 in height), either segmented or cut with the knife into 4 vertically (use F1 for side view and hold Shift for straight cutting). Then you would use Rect or Rope to get the top two segments, scale them down and move it downwards. This way is shown below:



(TIP: in the next step, just use rect, or you can go to the “Edit Option” panel on the left hand side and find and click “Rc” this makes the select tool behave like Rect and the normal select tool simultaneously! Rp does the same for Rope. If you can’t see this panel, click on either side of the left pane and drag it up and down.)



Above, the blue dot shows where to drag the side pane up and down, and the Rc button pressed. With the coloured letters below you can change what axes are visible (ZX, like the floor, by default).

8. Press F1 for side view and use Rect or select with the tip above and select just the top of the base. Go to selected > copy, selected > paste and scale this new object down to about 0.6.

9. Delete the original top of the base and select obj2 on the object panel. Recreate these faces using the Create tool, like we did with the base. Now delete obj3, since we just created the faces on obj2, obj3 just allowed us to create them.

10. Look at the image below. You may have too many lines inside which we don’t need, like I have. Just select vertex ‘A’ and delete it. Now select B, C and the other 6 similar vertices by selecting while holding shift. Move these up (Y) about 0.4, creating the slight incline to the actual “stick”.



11. Press F1 and select the top two rows. Copy & paste (which makes a new obj3), using the edit panel, move it up 5 and scale it down to 0.25. Now scale it up in Y about 6. Using create, patch up the holes. It should now look like the image below.



We will continue the stick and make the candle in Part 3.
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