Today's assignment consists of recreating the microscope shown to the right in Cheetah 3D. While this assignment might look complicated, I will walk you through the process step by step. When recreating anything in a 3D program, always keep the following steps in mind:

• Study the schematic and try to recognize the simple shapes that make up the object. For example, can you see shapes that are already prefabricated in Cheetah, like cubes, cylinders and polygons?
• Begin with the larger pieces first and add details at the end. Also, try to avoid rotations that are other than 90 or 45 degrees.
• Keep the same proportions as the original and move your camera often to make sure everything is lining up just right.
• If you need to create a more complex shape, make your object editable and use the polygon mode to subdivide and cover extend.
• Things that are meant to be lined up together like the eyepiece should be created together along a single axis and then grouped and moved as one unit. Otherwise aligning things becomes more difficult.
• Do the details at the very end.