Modeling an oar

We'll do a little more precise modeling with the oar. We'll be flipping groups of vertices around to make rich details while keeping the polygon count as low as possible. First, you need to know more about what you are making.

Getting a scale from an image

It's good to be able to make an object of the size you want it to be. As I used a real boat as the basis on which to build the boat model, a picture of an oar will help make a realistic oar, and as you'll discover, you can get quite a bit of information from it.

For a reference image, I went to a website and grabbed an image of an oar similar to the one shown in the following screenshot:

Now, I had to figure out the size of the oar. The specs on the website had the length of the oar and the width of the blade, which was enough information for me to scale things in the image and get the following basic measurements:

• I trimmed down the image until it was just the oar and got an image that was 1954 x 178 pixels...