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:

finger-13.jpg (76 Kb, 482 downloads) Finger-final

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

finger-1.jpg (76 Kb, 381 downloads) finger-1

Step II--Creating the finger nail.
Using the extrude button again ...

finger-2.jpg (78 Kb, 363 downloads) finger-2

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

finger-3.jpg (77 Kb, 344 downloads) finger-3

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

finger-4.jpg (77 Kb, 321 downloads) finger-4

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

finger-5.jpg (78 Kb, 389 downloads) finger-5

Shifting and moving it down to form the nail ...

finger-6.jpg (76 Kb, 308 downloads) finger-6

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

finger-7.jpg (75 Kb, 317 downloads) finger-7

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.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Georgie,

finger-8.jpg (75 Kb, 294 downloads) finger-8

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 ...

finger-9.jpg (69 Kb, 312 downloads) finger-9

Using the "Tip Operation" button ....
Please note the result.

finger-10.jpg (68 Kb, 288 downloads) finger-10

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

finger-11.jpg (68 Kb, 276 downloads) finger-12

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

finger-12.jpg (53 Kb, 250 downloads) finger-12

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

f-1.jpg (44 Kb, 277 downloads) fingers

I hope you've found this material helpful. What I really thought it was special enough to be shared with you all was the way the nail was created. Of course, the nails doesn't look so real enough. You might want to subdivided it once and fine-tune the object and subdivided it again in order to make it look very real.

And again, sorry for my delay in posting this material.

Good grief - no wonder you won, you put more detail into the finger than I have in my whole models ! Thanks for the tip about tip - it is one of the tools that I hardly use but I will have to have a play with it and see what I come up with.
Thanks for the tutorial - I know how much time they take to put together.

Nice tutorial Georgie.
Likewise...I hardly ever use the tip operation, but I will now.
Thanks.

Bazza

Thanks, Alan and bazza.