Technical Notes: Week 10

Soft Selection and Sculpting Tools

    These tools are both good for selecting and moving an area of the of the model. This is good for making big, smooth adjustments - pushing and pulling

    press b to toggle soft selection

    b + middle-drag left or right to increase or decrease the size of the falloff area starting from 0.

    b + drag left or right to resize the falloff area starting from the last radius value.

I modelled the head this week and didn't really come across many issues. I got more practice on different tools, working from polygons, and pulling things with the soft selection tool. 

With all the different parts of the head, I'm working with many more objects in one scene than I had before (head, eyeballs, teeth, eyebrows, moustache, and teeth). Because they've all been symmetrical parts, I've been really getting the hang of using the duplicate special tool to create matching sides that are linked ("Instance" box ticked). I also found it necessary to group the teeth (ctrl g) in order to move them around as one part, and to keep the Outliner a little cleaner. I've been using Layers much more to make sure I'm not selecting anything that I'm not working on (creating layers with each part of the model and setting them as Reference layers when not in use). I'm also realising the importance of a clear naming system since nothing can have the same name, e.g. layers should have "lyr" in the name.

My groupmate has started working on the clothes on our model and had to figure this out:

    To duplicate faces separated from the main mesh, Edit Mesh > Duplicate > Options, check the "Separate Duplicated Faces" box.