Blender "Cage" Technique Tutorial

Heres a little tutorial for an interesting technique I discovered. It yields this kind of result...

(The cup was done using the technique. Note that much more complicated objects can be acheived using this technique.) Ok, now to start,

Fire up blender. (What else??)

Decide the general shape for the cage. For sake of this demonstration im just going to use a cube i've subdivided and turned into a sphere. :

Then select the faces that will become the "Cage". I usually use loop select for this. (Go into face select mode and then Alt Right click the edge of a face in the loop. What I mean is the ends of the edge have to be pointing either side of the loop. If you want to slect more than one loop just press shift alt insteasd of just alt.)

Heres what mine looks like so far:

Now press W and select "Select swap". Then pres H to hide the faces. What you see now is a bit of a preview of what your end result be.

If youre not happy with this cage, then unhide the hidden faces (press Alt H). Then swap selected faces (W again and Select swap). Then make the changes you want and preview it again.

If you are happy with what you have, make sure you have your cage selected the way you want it (Youll need to unhide the faces you hid for this to work). Then swap selected faces (W and select swap remember?) so that the cage is the only thing NOT selectected. Delete the faces (IMPORTANT: Make sure you deleted the faces and not the verticies). It should now look like your preview.

Ok, for this next part you need to select the cage (Just select all does the trick). Then extrude and select "Region". Then press escape (So that the faces have been extruded but haven't moved). Then pres Alt S and move your mouse untill youre happy with the thicknes (Alt S moves the faces along their normals, effectively shrinking or fattening the mesh. Or in this case, Cage.). Then press tab and admire your new object.

Something else you can do is Cage something smugly. Like this:

All you have to do is duplicate the object and then "Cage" the duplicate. (And apply a subsurf modifier if you want it looking like my example).

I hope this tutorial helped. If you have any ideas or some critisisms then just email me at draknoid@gmail.com

Happy Blendering!!