Subdivision Modelling Tutorial–Modelling Human Finger

Thanks, Alan and bazza.

This ‘tutorial’ is meant to show how the fingers of ‘The Swimmer’–Summer 2004 Pro/LP/Plus Modelling Competition Winner–was created. My sincere apology for being terribly late for posting this material. (I’ve had a major data loss while upgrading my harddisk, which kept me occupied for about a week.)

First of all, the final screen shot:

Step I.
Drop a cube and shape it like this using the extrude button (in the red circle):

Step II–Creating the finger nail.
Using the extrude button again …

Please note how it is being shaped, by scaling (in the red circle) and shifting (in the blue circle).

Make a room for the nail to come out from. And also note the change at the tip of the finger.

Now, it’s time to make the finger nail itself. Extruding …

Shifting and moving it down to form the nail …

III. Auto-smoothing (Subdivision).
Before using the subdivision operation, the finger needs some more touchup, using the ‘Tip Operation’ button (in the red circle) …

It’s time to see the effects of the subdivision.

Call up the Property Window by selecting the cube object and then Left-clicking on it.
Once the Property Window opens up, move the slider (in the red circle) to the right a little bit, and you’ll get a preview of the operation. If satisfied, click ‘OK.’

There are 2 ways to use the subdivision operation: one is the method described above, the other is using the subdivision button (in the blue circle) in the Object Operations Pannel.

Unlike the first method, once you have subdivided the object using the subdivision button, you can single out and control any vertex or face that have resulted from the subdivision operation. This allows you to fine-tune an object. ‘The Swimmer’ was created using the subdivison button.

There you go …, but the joints seem to missing. Let’s add some joints to the finger. Let’s select the faces where the finger joints are located …

Using the ‘Tip Operation’ button ….
Please note the result.

The ‘Tip Operation’ is very useful in adding extra volumes to an organic object:

Let’s stop playing with the ‘Tip Operation’ and lets move the new tips to where it should belong.

Once you know how to make a finger, then it would become easy to make four fingers like this: