Week 5 - Apples, bowls and bananas

This week I found the tutorial on how to model apples using the proportional editing tool. I started off with an IcoSphere and began with moving the mesh to get an overall shape of an apple. This didn't really take too long, they didn't need to be perfect. All I did was moved the points around randomly until it resembled an apple. Then I applied a simple red texture to it. I then tried to model another apple but this time using a UVSphere. This one I found a bit more fiddly as there were a lot of points in exactly the same place and I ended up with an extremely jagged apple. I soon realised that I could actually select all the points at the same time. This made it a lot easier and I actually produced a better apple than I did with the IcoSphere. I coloured the UVSpheres green.

The bowl I found extremely simple to make. Just by creating and deleting a cube, I could still add vertices to the cube from scratch, even though the cube wasn't there. I created a line with three points and spun it 360°. This made a plane in the shape of a bowl. I then extruded it down slightly and added a brown woody colour to it.

The next part of the modelling fruit tutorial entailed 'box modelling' a banana using a background image (View>Background Image...). This meant starting by finding a side-on image of a banana, placing it into the background of the window and extruding and subdividing a cube along the length of it. To do this I had to put the cube into wireframe mode (Z) and then subdividing it in edit mode. I then moved the points around the banana and then extruded a new set. When this was done I was left with a very square banana. I smoothed it until it was a bit more rounded. However it still did not look right. I needed to scale the ends so that they tapered to a bananary point. The way I did this was just by scaling the vertices around the circumference of the end (Alt+Right click to select the edge loop). I continued to do this to every point individually until it looked just right. I later realised that I had done it the extra long way as I'm sure I could have used proportional editing to get a better result. I had already done it though, and I didn't really want to remodel the whole banana. I'll just bear it in mind for the next time I model a banana or similar shaped object. With that done, I added a texture to the model (F6>Add new>Texture Type: Image>Load) that I had found on the internet (FilterForge.com).

I had saved the bowl of apples in a separate blender file though, so I had to import the banana into it if I wanted it to be together with them. This was not as simple as I thought it would be. First I had to go to 'Append or Link' in the File menu (or Shift+F1). I then had to find the blender file with the banana and select the object in the file and import that. Eventually I found it named 'Cube' (I guess I should name my objects from now on) and clicked 'Load Library'. I then thought I at last was done and went to save the rendered image. I then discovered that I had a very grey looking banana. The texture I had applied earlier had not been imported into the fruitbowl file. So I retextured it the same way I did before (I guess it was good practice) and saved the final render. Here it is!