Modeling a Torch

  Some of us have experienced before doing something and trying to perfect it to the best of our liking. At some point in our lives we've all tried being a perfectionist through some kind of motive such as setting a short term goal of passing a class with 100% or finding every single pokemon in a pokemon game. For some artist's their motives for perfecting things become much higher when it comes to drawing things or even modeling polygon meshes. Now I'm not saying i'm a artist but when I was younger I actually use to draw a lot and I would find myself trying to perfect every single aspect of my artwork. As I got older my artistic side begin to fade away until I was taught 3ds Max. When I began 3D modeling it brought back my creativeness and somewhat brought back my perfectionist side. A good example of this happen recently when I was modeling a torch for my midterm course project. Before I began modeling the torch I had to take into account, what kind of torch needs to be designed for my project? How realistic do I want it? Taking into account questions like these actually helps in determining what kind of model your going to be modeling. One of the things I like to do when I model things on 3ds Max is getting a reference picture and placing that picture onto a planar. Since my group projects game has a somewhat "ruin" setting I decided to google torch images to get an idea of what kind of shape of a torch i'm looking for. After finding the image I was looking for I placed the image onto a planar on 3ds Max and began modeling through splines.

  One of the great things when you model objects using splines is being able to create curves in a much faster manner vs box modeling. Usually I model with splines in the beginning in order to get my model the shape I need and then I extrude the shape to actually make it a polygon mesh. After extruding the closed spline I begin sub dividing. When I was modeling the torch I actually went this route where I made a shape based off the picture through splines and extruded it out. Now the downfall that occurred when i extruded the closed spline or shape was my torch being somewhat boxy still. It had the shape that I mimic based off the picture reference however, the sides of the torch were not round due to the extrusion. Looking back at what I said on how I use to be a perfectionist with my drawings I knew right away I was not going to call this model "done". There was no way I could call my torch model done with polygons being very noticeable. One of the things I wanted from the model was to do my best in implementing it to being somewhat realistic and there's no way you could look at a torch in real life and see polygons. After noticing the sides of my torch giving that boxy look where you can see the polygons, I began to examine the picture and model more. The question I had to ask myself was, how do I go about making this model more round? Well one of the things I like to do when I model is sub divide. Usually before I sub divide I make sure to get the model to the shape I need in the least amount of polygons before I actually go about sub dividing. After asking myself how I should go about making this model more round than square I began sub dividing by grabbing an edge, hitting ring, and then hitting connect.

  

  Through doing this your actually connecting all edges that are in a ring (red edges seen from picture above) with another edge which creates more polygons. After sub dividing quite a few times I began starting at the head of the torch and making it more round by grabbing vertices and translating them. The more polygons you create through sub dividing, the more vertices your polygon mesh has. Taking this into advantage I grab certain vertices on the head of the torch pulled it out a little bit, grabbed another set of vertices, pulled it out a little bit more. By actually doing this I began to have the head of the torch be more of a round shape to where you don't see as much polygons as before.

  One of the problems I ran into when modeling the torch was trying to not have it look like a box or have the polygons be seen. In the picture above, the side of the torch's head you can see a somewhat difference between it and the top head of the torch. For the side head of the torch, you can almost still see the square that came from the extrusion of the shape I created. Seeing this I tried my best to prevent that look from occurring through sub dividing. Eventually on after I finish the head of the torch, the easy part came up...Making the bottom torch round. When it came to modeling the bottom part of the torch, I knew right away there weren't going to be as many sub divisions that needed to be made because you can think of the bottom part of a torch as a wooden stick. That means the wood was going to be somewhat deformed. Just like how I did the head of the torch, I did with the bottom of the torch. I begin sub dividing and pulling out vertices to give some bevel and deformation to the actual wood.

  When it comes to 3D modeling a model isn't done till you really feel like it meets your standards. As you can see through my experience with modeling a torch, I continued to model it until I felt the polygons weren't as much noticeable as well as the torch not having the "box" feeling from the extrusion.