Phase 6. Adding some details

During this phase we are going to make it just a bit more realistic by adding some buttons. If you want to use a model for a game or just want to keep it as small as possible, you could add such details by textures and bumps maps. There are endless possibilities to model such details but in this tutorial, we are going to create them mostly in the same way we created the monitor: by extruding and scaling polygons. For this reason, we are going to speed things up a little. Additionally, we are going to use the Chamfer option in the Edge sublevel.

On the Front view, select the polygon below the display, extrude it, move it back to its original position, and scale it down, as depicted in Picture-6a below.

Picture 6a

Switch to Vertex sublevel and select the 2 lower vertexes of the polygon we just created and use uniform scale on the X-as to make the polygon a straight rectangle again as depicted in Picture-6b below. You may need to toggle to maximum view to make sure you get the lines straight.

Picture 6b

Now switch the Edge sublevel mode and select the edges as depicted in Picture-6c below. (Again, hold the CTRL key to select more than one edge or polygon, vertex, mesh, etc, etc.)

Picture 6c

Click the Chamfer button, you can find it below the Extrude button if you are in Edge sublevel.  Chamfering works similar as extruding, when you clicked the Chamfer button and you move the mouse pointer over one of the selected edges, the pointer will change. Click on one of the selected edges and drag to the right to chamfer the edges to end up with something similar as depicted in Picture-6d below.

Picture 6d

Switch to Polygon sublevel again and select only the polygons as depicted in Picture-6e below.

Picture 6e

Now to create the button (and to see if you learned anything from this tutorial ;) ) follow the steps below.

- Extrude outwards so the button comes slightly out of the monitor. (Note that if you extrude one button while the other is also selected, they will both be extruded.)

- Extrude one more time just a very little, and scale down the polygons just a little.

You should now have something similar as depicted in Picture-6f below:


Picture 6f

Texturing the monitor is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but let's use some basic materials to give the monitor some color. First, select the polygon that represents the actual display as depicted in Picture-6g below.


Picture 6g

Open the Material Editor by choosing it from the Rendering menu, or by pressing M. Click an available spot (i.e. the top-left ball). Set the Specular Level value to 30 and set the Diffuse color to nearly black as depicted in Picture-6h below.

Picture 6h

Drag the material we just created to the polygon to assign it. Now press CTRL+I (or choose Select Invert from the Edit menu) to select all the polygons except the one we had selected. In the Material Editor, create a new material with the color you want to use for the remaining part of the monitor and drag it to the selected polygons.

Instead of using simple colors, you can also make a screenshot of your own display (with your favorite program, website, or background for example) by pressing the PrintScreen button on your keyboard. Paste this screenshot in Paint, PhotoShop, MS Office Photo Editor, are any other software that allows you to save the screenshot to a .BMP file. Click the empty square button next to the Diffuse color, and select Bitmap, click OK, browse to the location where you stored the screenshot, select the .BMP file, and click OK. You will need to add a UVW Map and to fit the screenshot on the display.

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