3D Nuts! Tutorial - Modeling a chess pawn - Part 2

<<< Previous Page

	Step 11

Now zoom in on the Front viewport to get a closer view of the top half of the pawn. Go to Edges sublevel and select the 6th and 7th row from above (select one edge on both rows while holding the CTRL key, and click the Loop button). Scale down the two rows as shown in the screenshot.

	Step 12

Select the top row of edges and the row of edges 4 rows below it. Use Uniform Scale to scale the rows down.

	Step 13

Select the 2th row of edges from above and the row of edges 2 rows below it. Use Uniform Scale to scale the rows down, but less than what you did in Step 12.

	Step 14

Now select the row of edges between the previously selected rows and scale it down, again a little less than in the previous step.

	Step 15

Now select the loop of edges on top of the pawn, on the Top viewport, and move them up on the Front viewport. (To select those edges, selecting one edge, and use the Loop button again to select that entire loop of edges).

	Step 16

Go to Vertex sublevel and select the center vertex on top of the pawn and move it up. It may be a bit hard to select (or even see) the vertex, one way is to zoom in on the Top viewport and draw a selection rectangle, as small as possible, around the center vertex, and then de-select the vertex at the bottom of the pawn.

	Step 17

As you can see in the screenshots in step 16, our 'ball' is a bit flat, so we need to adjust that. On the Front viewport, select all the vertexes that enclose the top 6 rows of polygons. Scale up on the Y-axis, and move the selected vertexes up until the ball becomes round. It doesn't need to be perfect yet, you can tweak it a little after the next step if needed.

	Step 18

Now let's make it a bit smoother, hence more realistic. Go to Polygon sublevel and press CTRL-A to select all polygons of the model. Scroll down on lower part of the Modify tab until you see Smoothing Groups: (far below the Loop and Extrude buttons). While all the polygons are still selected, assign them all to smoothing group 1 by clicking on the 1 button (or the blank square button where 1 would be). Again, click the image on the right for more details.

	Step 19

Now for our final step before rendering. Leave the Polygon sublevel so the entire Editable Poly is selected. Scroll down on lower part of the Modify tab again until you see Subdivision Surface. Enable Use NURMS Subdivision, and set the Iterations to 1. A subdivision of 1 is usually enough, but if you are going to render a large close-up of the pawn, a Iterations value of 2 would be more appropriate (but requires more computer resources as well).

	Step 20

Press F9 for a quick render to see the finished result. After adding some ivory like material (i.e. a Phong material with Specular Level 125, Glossiness 50, and a Fall-off/Fresnel map in the Reflection slot) your render should look something like the image on the right. (Click the thumb for a larger version.) Check out my Creating a realistic glass object tutorial to turn this pawn into a glass pawn.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it contributed something to your skills and knowledge! Please use our Contact form to send me comments, or discuss this tutorial here.

Check out my other tutorials here >>>.

<<< Previous Page