MINI: The Great Cube Challenge

This is a great challenge and covers a lot of very important skills that are needed for advanced modeling techniques.  It might look simple, but it is harder than you think. 

• Combine Polygons
• Extrude Edge Attributes
• Append Polygon Tool vs Bridge Tool
• One sided Light vs. Two Sided Light
• Normals
• Soft Edges vs Hard Edges
• Activate Poly Count Heads up Display
• Show Face Centers
• Unlimited Undos (and the consequences)
• Duplicate Face
• Merge Vertices
• Paint Select (b + MMB)
• Move Pivot Point (Insert Key)
• Snap (Vertex, Edge, & Grid) (V, C, X plus MMB)
• Bevel (Fractional vs Absolute)

 

Create a cube with 10 X 10 X 10 divisions

 

Create a cylinder Scale it  0.5  X  0.5  X  0.5

Change radius to 0.5

Subdivisions Axis to 24

Subdivisions Height to 10

 

Show Face Centers

Delete the centers faces leaving along the perimeter

 

Delete Caps on the Cylinder

Turn off Two Sided Lighting

Reverse Normals on cylinder

Extrude Cylinder’s edge at the Local Translate Z  to –0.025 units on both the top and bottom. **Or in the positive direction if have not reversed your Normals yet. 

 

Combine both objects

 

Using the Append Polygon Tool, Append 1 edge from the cylinder to the aligned edge of the cube.

 

Double click on one of the inner edges, the whole inner loop will be selected, de-select the two edges on the appended face and then Bridge the two edges with zero divisions.   Repeat on the other side.

 

Select the center faces and extrude them out using a global extrude.

 

 

Scale all the outer faces flat

Snap the faces to the edge of the cube

Delete faces of both the extrusion and the cube

 

Using the snap features, vertex and edge, snap the edges to the extruded hole.

Merge Vertices

Create a cylinder, same as the last except change the Height to 0.5 and the Height Divisions to 5.

Create a cylinder Scale it  0.5  X  0.5  X  0.5

Change radius to 0.5

Change Height to 0.5

Change Subdivisions Axis to 24

Change Subdivisions Height to 5

Duplicate Faces

Merge vertices

 

Bevel all “true” edges, not face edges using a consistent bevel

 

Here is the final project.