Digital art touches every part of our lives, even when you don’t realise it. For example, the film you’re watching likely involves polygons, whether in a creature or character or in less obvious elements such as scenery, all created using state-of-the-art 3D modelling software and rendered with the best rendering software available today.
Video games utilise 3D to generate their characters and environments. Even those that appear 2D-based, such as Angry Birds or the Hollow Knight series, use flat polygonal planes to render the artwork rather than direct hand-drawn images.
Then there’s the more passive influence 3D has on our lives. The phone in your pocket or the car you drive were designed using 3D software, just like pretty much everything else around you, from consumer tech to furniture and architecture.
We would be in a very different world if polygons had never been created, so in this short tutorial, I’ll show how you can take the base elements of a polygon and build upon them to create a 3D skull. Any polygon model can be broken down into components: the points are the vertices, the lines connecting them are the edges, and the flat areas between them are the faces.
Quickly build up a low-polygon skull
1. Start simple
To build our skull, we begin with just a few simple shapes, forming the area where the eyes would sit. We can then continue to build out from this foundation. In most 3D apps, you can begin by creating a polygon plane: a flat square that can be divided into sections. You then move the vertices to start forming your shape.
2. Extrude and shape
Build on your starting point using the Extrude tool, which lets you select a component and extrude it from the model. With a single or multiple edges selected, you can extrude them to create a new ring of geometry that’s connected to the original selection. Repeating this step will give you more vertices to help shape the eye socket.
3. Weld and refine
Where extruding doesn’t work is when there’s a hole or a gap to fill between edges. Here, you’d use the Weld tool to combine, or weld, vertices together: pulling them to the same spot and making two vertices become one to close the gap. This process quickly builds the skull shape and serves as the basis for most 3D models.
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