Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)

It’s apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it’s curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I’ve ever created.

I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.

Everything I’ve read on the internet suggests that Blender is a better program, but the interface for Blender is non-standard. That is, the interface doesn’t work the same way every other Windows program works. After spending just a little time with Blender, I can certainly understand why Blender’s interface works the way it does, but I’m conscious that I’ll be teaching students who aren’t computer experts. Do I want to force them to learn a completely new way of thinking about GUI, just to get them to understand some basic 3D design concepts? Probably not.

I’m still not sure whether I’ll be able to import Anim8or objects into Hammer (Valve’s tool for creating Half-Life 2 worls).

Anyway, learning how to create an object like this was interesting. Rather than assemble a comlex object by choosing primitive shapes and plunking them next to each other, you have to start with a simple shape (in my case, a hexagon), and extrude geometrical shapes from the polygons that make up the object.