Thinking Outside the Box:
Exercise

By Paul "Villam" Steed

Shoot. Why not get rid of the vertices bisecting the leading edge of the lower arm, too? We can still imply a slight curve to the arm with the inner vertices. Doing this we also realize that the edges look better turned because it, well…just 'looks' better.

Cool. Now we're down to 123 faces. Good enough to move on. All in all that took maybe 25 or 30 minutes to complete. Of course verbalizing and rendering images to accompany this lecture is another matter entirely…

Part Two: The Rest

The next most easily do-able part of this monster is the tentacles. Let's look at the sketch again:

There's 3 of them and they look like they wave around like an elephant's trunk so they need to be articulate. Of course they need enough segments to accommodate their animations so we opt for lofting a pentagon with say 11 segments.

Looks good, but it weighs in at 116 faces (which after adding the other 2 is too many faces for comfort). So after deleting the faces at the base, merging the five vertices at the tip (a point is fine here), taking the last segment and making it into a square cross-section, the tentacle is starting to shape up.

(Continued on the next page)