Phase 5. Extruding the foot/support of the monitor

The foot of a monitor is one of the elements that allow you to give the monitor a unique design. We will be creating a rather simple one, but as you will probably notice, it is easy to create something original. Before we are going to start with the foot, we are going to rotate the monitor so it will lean back a little.

If you are still at the Vertex sublevel, click Editable Mesh on the Modify tab of the Command Panel to select the entire model. Next, switch to the Left or view in any of the view ports and rotate (Select and Rotate toolbar button) the monitor so it leans back a little, as depicted in Picture-5a below.


Picture 5a

Switch back to the Perspective or Back view (or the one you prefer modeling in) and select the polygon we created for the foot in Phase 4. Click the Extrude button and extrude the polygon as depicted in Picture-5b below.


Picture 5b

Now extrude it again but this time only a little, to get something similar as depicted in Picture-5c below.


Picture 5c

Now we need to set some things straight. You will notice some light blue lines in some of the following pictures to indicate which line should be straight.

Switch to Vertex sublevel. On the Left view select all the vertexes of the part we extruded in the previous step. Instead of holding the CTRL button to select the vertexes (which would require you to rotate the view to select all the vertexes), select the vertexes by dragging a selection rectangle around the vertexes you want to select, as depicted in Picture-5d below.

 
Picture 5d

When you successfully selected all those vertexes, move them to the right as depicted in Picture-5e below.


Picture 5e

Now Zoom in on the Left view to get a close-up of the vertexes you just moved by using the Zoom button on the bottom right of the screen:

Zoom in until your Left view looks similar to Picture-5f below:


Picture 5f

Now click the Select and Move button on the toolbar again and select only the 4 vertexes of the bottom polygon (again with dragging that selection rectangle to select also the 2 vertexes you can't see on the left view) and move those to the right as depicted in Picture-5g below.


Picture 5g

Now select only the 4 vertexes on the left (with the selection rectangle again) and move them down until the bottom line becomes flat as depicted in Picture-5h below.


Picture 5h

You probably noticed that the bottom part of the 'leg' we are working on became a bit thinner when we moved those vertexes down so we need to move them a little to the left. You may need to zoom out and switch to maximum view to make sure you end up with similar results as depicted in Picture-5i below.

Picture 5i

Now switch to Polygon sublevel again, select the lowest polygon on the front of the foot, and extrude it so you get something similar as depicted in Picture-5j below.

Picture 5j

Now zoom in on the Left view again, to get a close-up of the area around the polygon we just extruded, switch to Vertex sublevel and select the 4 vertexes on the right as depicted in Picture-5k below.

Picture 5k

Now move up the vertexes so the bottom line becomes straight/flat as depicted in Picture-5l below.

Picture 5l

Next, select the 2 vertexes on the top-front of the foot and move them to the left, and if necessary a bit down to end up with something similar as depicted in Picture-5m below.

Picture 5m

Switch the Polygon sublevel again and the select the polygons on both the left and the right side of the bottom block. You can do this by selecting the polygons on one side, rotate the view, and hold the CTRL key when you click the polygons on the other side. Extrude them as depicted in Picture-5n below. You can do this in the Perspective view and look at the Front view to see how far you want to extrude (which just depends on how wide 'you' want the foot to be).

Picture 5n

You can leave the foot as it is, but if you learned anything from this tutorial it should be easy to improve the design of the foot. For example, you could scale down the side polygons using uniform scale on the Y-as to get something as depicted in Picture-5o below.

Picture 5o

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