Hi everybody, I am Volkan KACAR. I am glad to share the development process of my last work, ‘Compass and Paperclip’ – I hope you like it!

Concept

First of all, I had seen too many compass types in my life, thanks to my grandfather :) and I was always thinking about to model a compass but because of my works I always forgot or didn’t have time to do it. And one day one of my good friends Cem Tezcan told me about Modo, especially its advanced modeling tools. So  I have started to study Modo on modeling. Either its interface that never bores user while modeling and its shortcut keys are all in fit. I have been a 3ds Max user for 9 years and I decided  to make my scene with Modo rather than 3ds Max. And my “Compass & Paperclip” work became the first serious work that I made with Modo. But on the other hand, I didn’t abandon the very powerful 3ds max :)) I want to use both 3ds Max and Modo on my future works.

Now you may understand why I didn’t use a reference image because as I mention before I have seen too many compasses so I didn’t need to search for a reference photo and I believe that is more improvising for me.

We can get on to work now.

Modelling the Compass

I didn’t use any reference images in my work; I simply started by adding a cylinder with a low number of segments into scene - I'll smooth the mesh later. This is the reason for using a cylinder with a low number of segments, as cylinders with a high number of segments can slow down the software unnecessarily.

I then switched to Poly mode and modelled easily using the Bevel function (the keyboard shortcut for Bevel is "B"). The shortcuts in modo are what make it a much stronger programme.

Afterwards, I made my model smoother by using the Smooth tool (the shortcut for this is the Tab key). Some edges however should be sharper than others - there are a few ways to achieve this. I sharpened the edges that I wanted to sharpen with the Edge Weight tool.