I had completed a Blender model of my own design, and it was painful. I think it was a bit too complex for my current skills, as there were a few liberties taken that probably weren’t “best practice”, which is always a concern of mine when I’m learning something new.

Instead, I opted to work on something that I figured would be fairly easy: the TARDIS. After all, this is a perfectly symmetrical tall square. It’s nothing but insets, extrusions, and loop cuts. With symmetry comes the mirror modifier, which allows me to work on 1/4 of the model and have the data instantly replicated on the other 3/4 so I’m not working on the same thing X number of times and possibly getting it horribly, horribly wrong.

The above screen shot is where I am at the time of this posting. I have the light at the top to deal with, but in order to do so, I have to commit the mirror modifier so I can access the complete, flat face at the top of the structure; I think I’ve done about as much as I can with only 1/4 of the model, although I’ll try a few things and see how it works out.

After that comes the texturing, which is not something I’m looking forward to. I understand Blender’s tool-chain well enough to “do stuff”, but that’s mechanical learning. The TARDIS is a perfect exercise to put that tool-chain to use. As stated in the previous post, that “best practice” — how to cut a circle into a face, or a square into a circle, for example — is knowledge above and beyond just knowing what a loop cut or a bevel is. Texturing, though, is an art, literally and figuratively. Unwrapping UVs, getting them correct and proportional, and all of that pain has traditionally been what’s cause me to scuttle the whole 3D modeling thing a few times in the past, so I am not enthusiastic about what comes next in this process.