I found this exercise difficult. I’ve always thought of myself as being bad at spatial tasks, and I was unfortunately not able to overcome that self-assessment. I will say that I hadn’t (for whatever reason) realized the original due date of this assignment, so I was a little behind on figuring out the program. When we had begun our dice in class, I was really cheered by how simple I found it — I was able to follow the steps that Austin walked us through, and I thought that the rest of it would be easy. But anything more intense than circles and squares turned out to be a challenge. I tried to model a book that I’ve been carrying around for months, and it was horrible — I spent ages trying to figure out how to change the appearance of the individual faces of the book (so that I could get three faces to look like paper), and I genuinely couldn’t get it to work. But when I went to make each pip of the die black, it was fine??? I also never figured out how to make the cover of the book stick out over the fore edge. I thought that I had figured out how to put a picture of the cover on one of the faces, but it just wouldn’t let me upload a photo 🙁 The wretched thing looks like this. I hate it; it haunts my dreams:
I’d say the only useful thing that I managed to figure out from this one was the “Appearance” button, and the cloth texture that it offered. I ended up returning to my die because I was so ashamed, so I finished it and it looks like this:
I found this much, much easier. I grant that it does not look nearly as good as the example that’s on the assignment page, but I think most of the components are there. I curved (filleted??) the edges of one of the pips in class, and couldn’t figure out how to make the other pips look like it later, so that’s still unresolved for me. But, you know, it has the right numbers of pips, and it’s black and white and (although it doesn’t come across in the pictures) glossy! I also found that when I had a bunch of the same feature — the pips — I could “Repeat appearance” by right-clicking one of them, and then super quickly click all of the pips on a face to apply the appearance to all of them. That was nice.
Anyway — I meant to say this right away, but I’m sure it came through — this was my first time using any 3D modeling tools, so I’m glad that I took away a little bit of knowledge. Obviously, there is still a lot more to learn.
