Forum: 3D Modeling


Subject: WIP: Simple Morphing Chess Piece - Advice On The Knight?

3dcheapskate opened this issue on Sep 08, 2010 ยท 24 posts


3dcheapskate posted Wed, 08 September 2010 at 8:52 AM

Starting with a fairly simple pawn, I've already got acceptable morphs for the bishop, rook, queen and king (bottom right of the attached image - they all still need a bit of tweaking). But the knight is proving to be more of a challenge, partly because it's the first 'organic' shape I've tried to model. I think I have the profile about right (tweaking necessary of course!)

Because this is a morph from my basic chess piece (the pawn) I can't add/delete any vertices - I've got to model it from the faces I've got - basically a sphere on top of a sphere on top of a sphere on top of a cylinder (with spurious faces/edges/vertices deleted and appropriate vertices merged to get a single closed surface). So obviously there are no nice edge loops associated with the mouth, nose, eyes or ears. I don't think this is an issue as I don't plan for the knight to animate - it's just an end-point for a morph.

There obviously need to be sufficient faces in the appropriate areas to model the detail of the horses head. I've played around a bit with the nostrils, mouth, and ears, and I think I have the general approach for these, although more work is obviously needed. But I don't think I've left enough faces to model the eyes (which I plan to do in a similar way to the nostrils).

Any advice, ideas or suggestions would be most appreciated, as always!

P.S. I know models of chess pieces are ten-a-penny, but this is mainly another learning exercise for me, a bit of modelling and morph creation practice. And as long as it ends up half-way reasonable it'll be released as a freebie.

P.P.S I'm posting this on both DAZ and Renderosity forums.


The 3Dcheapskate* occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.

*also available in ShareCG, DAZ, and HiveWire3D flavours (the DeviantArt and CGBytes flavour have been discontinued).