Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Practical Example: Modeling an Eye

If you're modeling characters, chances are good that those characters are going to need eyes. Granted, there's a chance that all your characters may be robots, moles, and worms, but I'll assume that's not the case. Eyes carry the life of a character, so you want to get them right. This example walks you through producing a nice eye model that you can make quickly and even reuse in future projects. It also gives you a good opportunity to practice mesh modeling techniques covered in this chapter. As a bonus, this book's companion DVD and Web site feature a video version of this example.

Starting with a primitive

You're starting your eye model. First things first: Delete the default cube in the 3D View (X); it's not the ideal primitive to start this model. Of course, you have to start with something. Exactly what that something is depends on what you're modeling. People who do box modeling typically start with a cube. Point-for-point modelers often start with a plane and extrude faces and vertices from that mesh.

In the case of this specific eye model that you're creating, it's most prudent to take a box modeler's approach, though, with a primitive that more closely matches the base shape you need. That means you're going to use a sphere. If you go to add a new mesh object in the 3D View (Shift+AMesh), you might notice that Blender ships with two different ...