Lab Assignment Week I

3D Dice modeling and rendering

When I picked out my modeling objective for the 3D modeling lab for week one of DGAH 110, I figured I would pick an object that seemed straightforward enough to model: A six-sided die. It turns out that it wasn’t as simple as slapping some circles on a cube and calling it a day; a die, it turns out, is not such a simple cube:

While sharp-edge dice exist, I didn’t like how a cube looked when rendered in autodesk; the sharp edges took away the glossy quality seen in the image above. Additionally, the rounding gave the insets on the die the lighting effect that really makes it pop.

With respect to the design process, the tool that saved me the most time was the Create Sketch function as well as the Browser function, which was hidden for some reason when I first opened the app. The ability to precisely orient (and reorient) elements of the sketch made evenly spacing out the insets on each die face MUCH easier and straightforward. An issue I did run into with the sketch tool was creating axes to make the insets. The technique for taking hemispherical chunks out of the die was to first sketch circles onto a face in the orientation I wanted, then sketching a line in each circle that bisected them, using the trim tool to make the divided circle into a hemisphere and then finishing the sketch. Using the sketch through the browser, I used the rotate tool to make the insets appear on each side in 3d.

Lastly, I used the fillet tool to round the edges of the die as well as the edges of the insets. I found that a rounding of .5 mm took the sharpness off the edges of different elements in the model without making it look too blunt.

The main issues I had while picking this assignment up were with the spacial navigation system (namely the pan and orbit cameras) and the version of the app that I downloaded not having the default views stored correctly: the Browser function was missing. The issue with the Browser being missing is that it’s the prime tool to use for navigating sketches, which I needed repeated access in order to cut the die insets into its various faces. I fixed this issue by clicking View > Restore Default View. Aside from that, the process was mainly adapting to the sketch manipulation tools.