Thaxted windmill...

I began by starting to model the windmill that is located in Thaxted. It's of brick construction with wooden panels. I took this into consideration when modeling. Here is a step by step guide of how I created it...

I started with a cylinder and selected the top poly. I could then use the scale tool to make this poly smaller, creating a cone shape. This gives me the base of the windmill.


To create the indents, I connected the top edge with the bottom edge which creates a new poly in the middle. This can then be extruded inwards to give the effect of indents in the brick work.


I copied this around the edge of the cylinder and played around with the shape some more.


I added turrets and a domed roof, using editable poly cylinders and a sphere which i put into place and then attached to make it one.


Now i had the rough shape of the body. I could begin to model the 'fan blades' i started with a flat box and long thin box, I then attached them together and deleted some polygons in the flat box to make it look realistic.



I positioned it correctly and copied the part 4 times and adjusted the rotation. This finalised the 'fan blades'. I attached these 4 shapes together so that when I came to assigning materials It would make it much easier.


A nice touch which I saw on a few windmills was rope hanging from the fan blades. This Would also give me a chance to experiment with new methods and try out newly acquired skills. I started by selecting the line tool (under splines). I changed the intial type to smooth to give the effect of rope hanging and drag type to bezier. I could now Drag the vertexs to where I wanted them to make it look as if the rope was falling off of the blades. I could now adjust thickness to give the splines a 3D element. Under the rendering heading, I changed the radial thickness to 3.


The windmill model is now complete.