Extruding face "groups"?

[wsimike]

Originally Posted by Andy

I'm sure it's Extrude that you want.
I'd start with a cylinder and extrude the bottom a few times to break up the surfaces into a 'grid' of squares.

Select surfaces in your pattern and select extrude. Make sure the settings for extrude are on,off,on and just click the bounding box to perform the extrude in place. Hold down the control key and drag a corner handle to scale the new surfaces outwards. Scale top to botton (middle handle +control) to reduce the height of the new extrusions.

I suspect a lot of the shape on the pics is really the texture and the model is probably not actually very detailed.

Yeah, one thing SE's brilliant at is texture detail. FFXI has a relatively limited game engine, since it had to work within the static limitations of a PS2. Regardless, they've created some amazing looking things for that game. And it gets better as they learn the t ech. more.

I'll give those approaches a go and see what works best.

Thanks for the tips!