Okay this time we are going to model a character with metaballs and a few other techniques. For now this tutorial only covers modeling. Maybe after a while I will cover textures and lighting.

Let’s start out with a with a bunch of spheres. I organized them to make the arms, hands and torso of the snowman. I have also used spheres for the head and eyes. For the eyes I converted them to bezier objects and distorted them a bit so they don't look like perfect spheres (I will cover how to do that later in this tutorial). For the nose I just used the cone primitive.

Now we need to join all the spheres into one mesh. That is done with the metaball tool. Select all the spheres at once and the click on the metaball tool.

Once it's all metaballed together you will need to set the tolerance for the the spheres and the complexity of the mesh. I set the tolerance to 1.600 and cranked the complexity all the way up. If I was to animate this character I would try to keep the complexity down so my machine wasn't brought to it's knees with polygons.

Now let’s make his top hat. I made a simple profile of his hat with the pen tool and then tweaked to get the shape I liked.

Once I got the profile the way I liked it then I lathed the profile into the hat shape.

Now it looks like a good top hat.

Let's make the scarf now. With the pen tool make a profile of the scarf close the where you want it to appear.

Once you have a spline the shape you like it's time to lathe it. With the spline selected click on you lathe tool (lathing works the best in perspective view) and start the sweep. Make the sweep about 1/4 turn and then drag the center point of the lathe sweep. When you drag the point out it will expand the diameter of the lathe sweep.

When you are all done it should look something like this. It should look kind of like a turtle neck.

With the scarf selected let's convert it to bezier shape. Click on the icon with a sphere inside of a cube. When you click on it a convert dialogue box will open. Choose the "Bezier Surface" option.

With the scarf selected click on the icon with the bezier handles to edit the shape. Now tweak the points in the scarf to make it look like the shape of a scarf. it took me a while of pushing and pulling to get the scarf to look like it was draped over his neck.

Now we will do the boots. Basically, the boots are skinned ovals. Set up a stack of ovals that were wider at the bottom that at the top to approximate the shape of a foot and ankle. Select the "tools" tab on the "extensions" window and then the "skin" tool. With the "skin" tool select one oval and drag your curser to the next oval until you get a red bounding box telling you that the objects are skinned. Do this for each oval of the boot.

Now let's put the hat and boots onto the torso and head. It should look something like this. I have added a poster that the snowman is holding.

After texturing him, setting up a scene for him and lighting the scene with a glow dome this is what my snowman looks like.

I will get to another tutorial texturing this guy after I get a few more tutorials up on the site.