Creating the body with Subdivision Surfacing

For the body, we're going to use a modifier that we haven't talked about yet—Subdivision Surfacing.

More experienced users may find it odd that we're waiting until this part of the book before using Subdivision Surfacing (or Subsurf, as its commonly referred to). After all, it's a tool that many people use frequently.

So, let's talk about that.

Subsurf works by dividing and smoothing a mesh. For instance, let's add a basic Cube shape for the body of our robot:

Next, let's add a Subsurf modifier to it:

Subsurf has divided and smoothed our cube. The more layers of Subdivision Surfacing you add, the smoother it gets:

A very important note, however, is that with each layer of subsurfing, the polygon count goes up quite a bit:

This can be quickly illustrated with a graph:

In practice, it would be rare to add more than two or three levels of Subdivision Surfacing. Still, the polygon count is one of the main drawbacks to it. Subsurf is a quick way...