Lighting :
I have used the same lighting in every tutorial to keep a nice pattern and a clean simple look. It was simply 1 plane set off to the front right hand corner of the scene and a plane in a cloner object using a 3 by 3 layout placed above to the scene. Then a compositing tag was added to the floor and self shadowing turned on followed by enabling ambient occlusion and global illumination in the render settings.
Tutorial 1 :
Cascading Bevel Text
This was created by using a spline mask with both a custom drawn bezier spline and a simple text object. By using the spline mask, it cuts out the shape drawn with the bezier spline from the text. I then duplicated this method 4 more times, each time moving the spline mask up by 10cm. Fianlly i made each masked text object a child of an extrude nurbs object and positioned them 10cm back each time so they would line up. I found this to be quite easy and think it is simple yet effective.
Tutorial 2 :
Portal Companion Cube
This was Modelled from a cube with simple extrudes and inner extrudes and cylinders used as tools. The phong was set to 0 to keep a chiseled look and a slight fillet added to the edges. To start with i had to make 1 corner of the cube and then duplicate it to make the whole thing. Next was making the smaller cubes. That was simply just a cube put into a cloning object, then deleting the unwanted cubes. To make the circle cutouts in the center i used a cylinder, made it go just into the cube and then used a Boole to make the cutout. Finally the inner circles were more cylinders with bevel and the heart was a path imported from Photoshop with extrude nurbs added to it. Overall this was relatively straight forward to make, the only small problem i had was lining up the boole but i think that was my fault for starting with the cube in a different place than he did in the tutorial. It definitely taught me more efficient ways of doing things by using things such as boole.
Tutorial 3 :
Poké Ball
This was made by simply cutting a sphere in half which had a small extrude, using the knife tool to make a precise cut for the gap in the middle and then duplicating it for the bottom. Next i had to use boole to cutout the circle in the front of the two halves. Once that was done just i had to add a sphere inside for the "core" and finally make the button out of two cylinders. This was a simple yet effective tutorial but it taught me more about using the knife tool.
Tutorial 4 :
Ipod Nano
This was made simply from 3 things. First of all was a cube to make the main shape, this was done simply by using the scale tall to make it long and thin and then adding a fillet to the edges to make the curve. Next was a simple plane for the screen and then a tube for the button, i just had to re-size them and position them accordingly. Finally all i needed to do was add the textures. The button texture was from Google images and the screen texture was an edit screen that i made myself in Photoshop Overall this was a very simple tutorial but i think the end product came out very well, and look almost real.
Tutorial 5 :
House
This was relatively straight forward to make because of the easy angle and symmetry of the whole thing. It was started by making a custom polygon for the shape of the building and then extruding it upwards. Then i made the roof by using the weld tool to weld the points in the middle. Finally the space for the windows was made by using the knife tool on the front face of the house and then the windows were made with a simple extrude and inner extrude. The extra parts that jut out of the house were not in the tutorial but i added then by extruding to make it look more interesting. The textures were also not covered in the tutorial so i took it upon myself to find them on the interent and apply them using cubic projection. I found this tutorial quite helpful in enhancing my ability to use the knife tool, the weld tool and making my own polygons.
