Hi Matthew Frazier,
I guess if you dive deeply into modeling, you might want to have it even faster in the not so far future. For now, I can see that the steps in the first parts and the last part of this series, (during sped up) feel kind of disconnected. I’m sorry that you have to experience this.
The shown techniques lead to a beautiful result, but in the end, they are quite standard procedurals, you will get there in no time.
I assume that was the idea of the sped was, to not bore you to sobs. I have replied in the past to artists who liked to have it faster with other materials. No excuse, but it is not easy to find a good sweet-spot.
My wish for this series would have been to categorize the techniques and indicate clearly each with a different background color of the editor’s view, for example. Then in the speed up phase, those colors would give better feedback. This would have also communicated the author’s good rhythm of his modeling approach. Which is clear, quite straight forward and on the point. I wish that repetition would have been communicated as a voice-over during the fast time. I hope you have a better impression already about the author and feel motivated to check again.
What I can do is to point out the three techniques that I spotted, and have them in three little clips for you.
Please memorize the following, Extrude M~T, Extrude Inner M~W (Which means for M~T, you press the m key and directly, with no other action, the t key). Extrude or Extrude inner, will give you with mouse down and drag new geometry for the polygons that are selected.
With M~K (Knife), you can in Polygon mode cut new edges into the mesh. Which allows for a more detailed selection. Then Extrude and Extrude and extrude inner again, as you like.
Besides, if you use the Scale mode, selected polygons can be scaled, whereby the scaled polygons need more space, and so they move.
Last but not least, the Loop selection (U~L) is certainly an important tool here.
The third clip will use just the Atom Array object, here a MoGraph Cloner might provide more options, but that is another story, for a different series. The critical point here is how quickly a scaffold-like construction can be generated. It was the right place here, for sure, to have this demonstrated. All in all, you will hopefully gain a lot, and with my little extra clips, this will allow seeing more in the sped-up part.
Please let me know if there are any other questions, or if I have missed something. I’m happy to look into it.
Project-files, screen-captures:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/b29R9siSGASDjsrGjekBL0lYknbdzasn276p7QLn7RO
Enjoy, stay safe, stay healthy.
