By Paul "Villam" Steed

For this portion of the program I’ve decided to simply extrude the spike guidelines and see what it gets us.

Whoah, Nellie. Old Mr’ Extrude modifier has the previous settings I used on the torso hard coded into his brain so let’s knock down the height and make the four segments into one. I find it always better to adjust an extrusion this way by tweaking it’s values as opposed to NU scaling it or deleting excess faces due to too high a segment setting.

Next up a little optimization as I delete the faces that will intersect the top of the torso and scale in the top verts. After I scale and scale the verts some more along the x axis I hit the ‘selected’ button under the ‘weld’ part of the vertex sub-object menu. This welds any verts close enough to another one, saving you a one-on-one ministration, menstruation, mistletoe-ation, Croation?

Let’s do a little review. Unhiding the rest of the guidelines and shapes I decide I just don’t like the torso half. At more than 107 faces it’s digging into a fourth of my total face count. It just doesn’t do anything for me so guess what? You’re outta dere, Baybee! A Big, Fat Duh-leet to you Kaiser Sossay! Feels goood. Never be afraid to kill or maim your creation. It is yours to do with as you please. You are after all a modeling GOD.

That whole, starting-with-a-cylinder-primitive approach seemed to work out cool and fast for the head so let’s go ahead and do just that.

Using scale and move I edit the verts to fit my torso guidelines running out of segments unfortunately torwards the tail end. I don’t worry about the neck area and chest spikes for now since I just want to get the rough mass of the thing in first.

I rotate around to get a better look at the back of the torso, select the end faces of the tweaked cylinder and hit the extrude button under the face sub-object menu and draw the end faces out, effectively adding another segment to the cylinder. I do it this way instead of going back down the stack since I applied an ‘edit mesh’ modifier in the way of moving and scaling the vertices earlier.

So now we have another row of verts to tweak into place conforming to the guide outline who has a serious case of EI (extrusion inadequacy).

Hide the back faces of the torso and we’re left with shaping up the front of the carapace.

(Continued on next page)