CGAN Dec25 -Gingerbread House - WIPs

Well, I certainly haven't finished until today so I guess I'll ahve to hope to make a new year's card out of my tower...  
But here's where I am now. I still have some things I don't even know how to do (as in, not at all, nit just technically but more like, what "candy" to use etc)

 

I too thought I could improve my tree with icing.
Great minds think alike but yours works way better than mine.

 

And I've no idea what to do with a background.

Thanks. Though I was a bit lazy when I resized the trees and the icing along with them. Thinner cookies and thinner lines of icing... And your icing looks nice with all the drips and stuff. I have drips too but I have a strong feeling there's an easier way to do it (than mine)...

My icing is just edges of single vertices extruded and then filled out with the skin modifier and a subdivision thingy.
That's my favourite way of making irregular meshes and I usually do it for making base meshes for sculpting.

Your neater icing looks like food made by a competent person that would be nice to eat.

How can single vertices have edges?
(And I'm not even going to pretend I understood the rest of that sentence...)

Is your icing a separate mesh that's not connected to the tree? With no modifiers?

If so you should be able to fatten it up (or make it thinner) in edit mode by selecting those vertices and then pressing Alt-S.

Charlotte wrote:

How can single vertices have edges?
(And I'm not even going to pretend I understood the rest of that sentence...)

You start with a single vertex and extrude it to make the edge. You then keep on extruding to draw a wiggly line. The skin modifier takes that edge and expands it into a mesh.

How did you do your icing?

I think I actually joined it to the trees except for the first tree in case I wanted to do something that required it to be separate...

But originally it was a separate mesh and without modifiers. And I should be able to fatten it up anyway, only I'd need to go through each "ring" of vertices throughout the whole thing and enlarge each one separately. I think. I'm not sure what alt+S does. I do remember there being something that made you able to edit the cross section after the fact, but not sure what or when it can be done.

I guess I'll be focusing on those shading nodes this month and I'll learn other things some other time. Otherwise I'll never finish before New Year's

Oh you posted more. And I *think* I understand. Will have to try that.

I keep starting with a cylinder, and subdivide that and change the size and rotation and position of cross sections and then when I need more than that relatively short straight bit, I use the extrude tool but on the cross section instead of just one vertex. So I guess my thing is skinned from the beginning

As long as the vertices are not linked to the tree vertices you should be able to select the icing by clicking one vertex and hitting L for linked. Or you could select it via the material tab.
Whatever. And yes, Alt-A in edit mode does scale the cross section without making the other dimensions bigger.

But the skin modifier thing works like this:

Extrude a single vertex...

 

Add the modifiers. First skin (and click smooth shading at the side) and then a subdivision....

 

Then you can select the individual vertices and scale the mesh at that point using CTRL-A...

 

The resulting mesh can get a little funky if the transitions in size and direction are too great so be careful. But it's an easy way to "draw" something out to start with and if necessary you can remesh it later for sculpting or editing, after you apply the modifers.


EDIT: And I remember doing it for that  Dragon Challenge back in the day.