Requirements
In this class exercise, we are asked to model a musical instrument using primitives only. I chose to model urheen in the exercise because I played it when I was a child and therefore very familiar with every details of this traditional Chinese musical instrument. Please click here to take a look at some pictures of urheen.
Readme
I was very restricted by the requirement that only primitives are allowed to be used. Although all polygon primitives are used as required, mostly I used polygon cylinders and torus at connecting points to hide seams. The drum resonator of the urheen is modelled by a polygon pipe with subdivision set to 6 to mimic the hexagonal shape. Helixes are twined around pegs to fix strings. A soccer ball primitive is installed at the end of each peg and some platonic primitives with different number of facets are sprinkled on the ground for decorative purpose. Finally, pyramid and prism polygons are created serving as legs of the urheen. A skill here I would like to stress is grouping which plays an important role in modeling the bow. We should build the bow as a whole and then move it to the appropriate position. If we built parts of it separately and move, it is almost impossible to have the bow-stick lie in the same plane. Since only primitive and basic transforms like translation, rotation and scaling are allowed, the instrument looks like a robot. I hope in the subsequent exercises I could use more advanced techniques like soft select, Poly Editing Tools and/or NURBS surfacing techniques to build better-looking models.