3DS Exercise 3.1: Chess pieces

Chess piecesTo further explore the use of the splines, I completed an exercise in creating chess pieces from a reference image. The results and brief process for future reference are shown below. I created a pawn, bishop and rook. Each 2D objects was turned into 3D using the lathe tool that extended the shape 360 degrees around its centre.

Pawn

To begin, I used the spline tool to draw over the rough shape of a pawn. This resulted in quite sharp corners over the curved parts. To smooth them out, I used the 'fillet tool' which rounds the edge out by adding extra vertices around the selected one.

On this particularly large edge, I used the 'refine' tool which allowed me to add in extra vertices to make it smoother.

Bishop


The process for creating the bishop was identical to the pawn. To create the slit at the top, I created a square that I lined up with the reference image after hiding the bishop object. The square shape was then subtracted using the 'proboolean' tool.

 Rook

As before, the rook was created by extending the 2d shape of half of the object with the 'lathe' tool on the 'y' axis. Similarly to the bishop, the battlements were creating using boolean subtraction. The align tool was used for this model to centre the cross shape and have it accurately postioned on the top surface of the rook.

The final result is shown below in 'realistic' shading for all three model

Good parts:

•  A detailed and realistic appearance for each piece was created from a simple and rough 2D outline of the shape
• The process of turning the 2D shape into 3D using the 'lathe tool is fast and means any symmetrical shape with a reference image can use the same method
• Using the 'fillet' tool resulted in smooth edges that translated well to 3D. This would take longer and be harder to achieve when doing conventional polygon modelling

Issues:

• When using the '2D Pan View Mode' to align the objects with the background image, the result of the 'lathe' modifier' was a strange shape that did not extend the object correctly. This was solved by moving the reference image over to a plane, rotating that to sit flat on the grid and work on the models top down. This solution is evident from the second screenshot.

Improvements:

• Both the rook and bishop have a pointy top. This could be improved by assuring the top of the outline is smoothed out more
• The top of the rook would look more accurate if the battlements were thin rather than having a cheese wedge appearance from the cut out cross shape 
• The process is quite polygon intensive as edges are created for each vertex used to define the detail in the 2d shape