10 Ways to Make Walls in Blender

[Music] let's take a look at 10 ways to make rooms in blender now this is a list of different approaches and they're all interchangeable there's no right way or wrong way they all have pros and cons and you can just watch these and just do the one that makes the most sense to you and there's a lot of things that you'll do for one method that you'll need to do for other methods as well but we'll just jump right in here but before we take a look at the actual 10 ways let's take a look at our camera i'm going to select my camera back out of my scene see that i have it selected and if you come down here to the properties tab there and find the little green camera and click on the green movie camera there you'll notice that by default the focal length of cameras in blender is set to 50 millimeter and that's great for a character or a close-up of an object but we really want to come in here and set this to something like 30. you can just type in 3-0 and hit enter or return you don't need to hit type yeah the mm and then that's just going to widen our view a little bit so it won't feel quite so claustrophobic when we're inside of rooms option number one just use the default cube we basically need a box to be our room and look we've got a box so we can do that but we do need to be aware of a couple of things if we use the default cube for our room first of all i'm going to tab into the object here and select all these sides and i'm going to hit the s key and just scale it up 2. just hit sn2 and enter and scale it up twice as big because remember our default cube is 2 meters tall which is six and a half feet that's a little small for a room and you don't unless you try to copy some architectural drawings or something you don't need to be too aware of scale but you want to keep things kind of roughly in scale because things like lighting and materials and physics if you get into any of that those things will be affected by the size of your object so if your model is teeny tiny or really enormous that could cause weird things to happen later on so just you know be kind of roughly aware of what you're doing with the scale i'm going to come over here and grab this top face and just push it down a little bit that looks fine that'll work and now i've got a box that will fit the scene i'm actually going to hit the a key and hold the snapping down i've just got the regular increment snapping down and i'm going to hold down my control or command button here grab the blue arrow on my move gizmo and i'm just gonna pull this up two snaps there snap snap and that should pull it right up onto the floor plane you don't have to do that but it's a tidy thing to do now what i need to do i'm gonna hit the zero key to look through my camera and see it's not quite inside the box i'm going to hit the 7 to go to the top view here remember you can use the gizmo here or you can touch the tilde key and move things around here as well so i'm just going to stay in top view and i'm going to find my camera over here exit out of the object mode there i'm just going to pull my camera and make sure that it is inside the box yeah that looks pretty good there so now i can come over here and click on the little camera button there or i can use the tilde key or i can hit the zero key on my full size keyboard and now i'm looking through the camera i'm going to hit my q key right now and look for lock camera to view because now i can sort of move my camera around in the scene anywhere that i want that looks pretty good now if you don't have that option that lock camera to view remember to turn it off let me show you where it lives so i'm gonna hit the n key it's over here in this little side panel you want to click on this view tab over here and you'll see that camera view camera to view is on there so every time you click click on that that'll allow you to move the camera around with pan and zoom and all that kind of thing and then remember to turn this off when you're all done so i'm going to deselect that and hit the n key to close that so how do you get that to be in your quick favorites well you just right click on the name of something and say add to quick favorites you can also assign a shortcut to it but you know there's a lot of shortcuts and you'll have to probably take it off something else so it's i think it's better just to add it to your quick favorites and then you can hit the q key and then it's right there when you need it and that saves you having to go into the end side panel all the time so just make sure that it's turned off it is i'm going to leave that turned off and i'm going to talk about the other thing that can be tricky about this this is true for a lot of the different techniques that i'm going to show you here i'm going to come over here to the viewport overlays and just be aware that face orientation is an option we can do and right now everything is red red that doesn't sound good so i'm going to exit out and say oh look it's all blue on the outside well what does that mean so remember that faces have a front and a back side and the cube is meant to be seen from the outside right you're going to take this cube and turn it into an alien or a race car or something right and we're going to be modeling from the outside but we've just put the camera inside the box which means that the camera is now looking at all the inside faces so we can fix that quite easily i'm just going to select the cube and hit tab hit the a key to select all and because they're all backwards i can just come up here to mesh and come down to normals and find flip so alt n or option n then i can say flip you can also recalculate outside or inside that's good if you have a mix of them but right now all we need to do is just select flip everything turns red on this side i'm going to jump into the camera view and looks good everything's now blue on the inside and once you have that you can turn off the face orientation overlay you don't actually have to have that on i'm just using that uh so you can see exactly what that's doing so now all i need to do is hit the 2 key to jump in and i'm going to use my control and r to add some ring cuts over here and i'll just set those there and i'll come over to the other side and control or command r and put a few more on this side and click again and set them and then a few more going up vertically and again where you put these is kind of up to you and what your idea is for your room so i'm going to jump into the face select mode here now and i'm just going to grab a couple of these with shift and control and grab a whole bunch of those and just hit delete and then if i delete faces i've just made a doorway well another way you might want to do that though is to extrude into that direction and now you can make a hallway or you could just make a little bit of an inset or a little alcove or whatever whatever you think and then you could come in now at this point and hit the i key and inset there a little bit and turn that into a window or a door or whatever so you can start kind of grabbing things i do recommend however if you want to add like a column let's come over here and we'll add a column to this wall so i'm going to select this face and i'm going to hold down shift and control or shift and command and just jump and click all the things between those i'm going to use this little version of the extrude this extrude manifold it's a new version that's come out and then it allows doing this kind of thing just a little bit tidier so i'm going to pull this into the room here just to make a sort of a column or maybe it's a chimney or something like that and by using this extrude manifold if i jump out to the outside of it we can see that it has cleaned up all these faces that hasn't left in a whole bunch of extra faces when you start kind of pushing and pulling things sometimes like that you can leave a lot of extra faces that can cause problems but this extrude manifold is a really great way to sort of just grab something and yank on it and have it kind of clean itself up as it goes i could do the same thing over here and now as i pull this into the scene here i can make an extra wall or i can push it in the other direction there's a lot of really fun things that you can do with this option so there we go we've got a room pretty quickly just by using the inside of the default cube [Music] option number two building blocks this is the digital equivalent of going to your pantry and grabbing some mac and cheese boxes and some soup cans and just sort of stacking them up on your table and making a model that way so i just took a cube and i just made a few copies of it and i went and resized it to make it this sort of slab shape or you can just say select and say shift d and then you can hit enter and then just push out another copy of it and now you've got another face that you can rotate around and make a few sideways and again you don't have to stick with this shape here it's not like actual blocks i could say shift d and make a copy of this one i'll just pull it down over here i've also moved into vertex snapping mode over here this is useful for this as well because i can do things like hit the g key and then hold down control or command while i grab that corner and it'll snap right to it so i've got it stacked perfectly on top and if i just tab into that i can just sort of pull these faces out and just say i want to make this one a little bit bigger that one a little bit bigger and you know now look i've got steps pretty easily this is also a great place to introduce the idea of using boolean operations to make doors and windows so i'm going to tap out of that one and grab this one over here we'll just move it a little closer to our model and then i'm going to use this little block to create a window or a door so i'm going to pull it up into the shape here and make sure that it's poking all the way through here i'll make it a little bit more center there and remember we're taking this shape out of the brown one here so i'm going to select that one come over here to the add modifier that's the little blue wrench i'm going to click on this add modifier and add a boolean operation so when i do that i need to tell it well which one of these do am i using to cut out of the hole here this is a great place for the eye dropper because i have a whole bunch of cubes up here right now i'm not sure which is which so if i click on the eyedropper then i can come over here and say oh okay that's cube double o seven all right this this cube is double o seven it's got a license to bool here so i'm gonna make sure that actually as soon as i do that it's already done all i need to do is find double o seven and hide it and they can see yeah there's a window there and it is all set and ready to go the nice thing about this is it's non-destructive i can always come back to double 07 here and move it around and i could just move the wall around in this case or what i meant to do there is move the block around and you can always just keep on hiding it and say yeah that looks great you can also resize the block and turn that back on and just select it and just say scale i'll make it a little bit bigger there if i wanted to turn into a door or i could scale it down even farther you can keep on changing this around and non-destructively move walls and doors and things you can use any shape here it could be a circle it could be anything you want when you're all done and happy though so maybe you wanted to make a duplicate array or something where you want to apply this modifier remember you can come over here and apply it by just finding the apply selection and this little drop down arrow here or just hover over the modifier and put control or command a in and that will apply it so now i still have 007 here and i can move it around and use it somewhere else in my scene and even if i wanted to decide i wanted to change the shape now i could hit tab and i could select one of these faces and i can still push it around i can make this window wider or skinnier or whatever i just don't have the the cookie cutter of the block but it still allows me to very easily push these faces around and change the shape of these openings so those are very good ways for you to create really simple shapes and this is particularly good too when you're not going to worry too much about finishing it in blender and then just export that image take it into photoshop paint over it and you're good to go is there something special about number three option number three plain edges this is the first of a couple of versions that are kind of similar but they all have different pros and cons so i've just got a regular plane instead of using the default cube i've just started with a plane i'm going to tab into it and and then just hit the s key and scale it up say four times that's pretty good that'll work and now what i can do is just subdivide this or i can extrude the edges as they are or i can put in loop cuts so if i were to come in here and say control or command r and just add a couple of cuts maybe i'll add two in this direction and maybe i'll ctrl or command r and add three or four in this direction so something like that so now i've got some faces that i can work with i'm in edge mode now so i could come over here and grab like these two edges and just hit extrude and push it off in the x direction if i put e to extrude and then tap the x key then i know i'm going in the red x axis over here i can do that maybe i can grab one of these and i could hit e to extrude and tap the y key to lock it into the y direction here maybe i've got a little hallway kind of coming into my room then maybe i'll make a little alcove over here e to extrude y and i'll push it off in that direction so now i have a kind of an interesting floor plan for my scene and i can come in with these edges here we'll see i'll start over here and i'll hold shift and control or shift and command down i'll see how far i can get so i'm just going to come over here and keep on adding to this selection maybe i'll leave these sides open and now i'm going to type e to extrude and z and i'm just going to pull upward and now i can just take a look at my scene there that looks great i've got a whole room basically instantly in a couple of steps now what i can do is start chopping up the walls horizontally so i can come in and say control r on here and i'll add maybe a couple of loop cuts going this way and then now i can make let's see let's do a door over here so i'll do control r and i'll make a space for a door and i can grab the face mode now and i can grab these here and hit delete and i'll delete those faces so there's a couple of things you can do here of course we could just extrude these faces but we can also use a modifier that's great for these like paper thin walls but before we do that we're going to have a better time if we take the floor out of this so i'm in the face select mode i'm going to select any one of the faces on my floor i'm going to show you a keyboard shortcut that i use all the time that i think is really handy i'm going to hold shift and g down and i'm going to select similar and i'm going to select in this case coplanar there's a lot of really great ways that you can select things that makes selecting really fast so there we go i've selected all the four faces just like that and i'm going to hit the p key and separate by selection since i have them all selected now you can see the color change the floors i've got a new floor in here and if i hit the tab key and exit out of that i can make a copy of this even too if i wanted to shift d and hit enter and now i've got a ceiling as well so i could just make a whole room here that easily but and really you could be done at this point and just say like that's good enough for what i need but in in many cases if you're going to light the scene especially if you're going to have light on the outside of the walls like a sunlight or an hdr world light in here these really paper thin walls can cause weird light bleed problems and there's a couple of ways to fix that but one of the things that you can do is add a modifier right now to the wall so i'm going to make sure i have the wall selected and we've got the blue wrench down over here i'm going to click add modifier and i'm going to add a solidify modifier so a solidify modifier just makes things that are one plane thick thicker so if we come over to the edge here we can see it hasn't done much because it by default it makes it very skinny but i'm just going to push this number up here until we can see that that thickness has gotten pretty good now if i take a look at the top view here we can see there's a few of these kind of like weird places where it sort of bowed out and that's because we've got uh where some of the loop cuts are it's caused this weird problem that's fixable both one click here just by coming over here to even thickness i'm just going to click one click on even thickness and that's going to take care of that problem here now i'm just going to delete my ceiling so i'm going to take a look at the scene here now and see that that spot there that did not have a reveal suddenly does the neat thing about it is is that if i select my walls again and i hide from the viewport the modifier here it still is paper thin so i can come back in hit the tab key and say maybe i'll add a couple of loop cuts over here and i'll add another little doorway or a window or something like that and if i just hit delete now delete faces i've still got this sort of like you know folded paper model but as soon as i turn back the modifier i get that reveal again and when you're all happy with that you could leave this on you know until you're done i mean you don't ever need to apply this but if you did want to apply it you could very easily then grab all the faces it will turn these kind of like not real faces into actual geometry i'm going to hit the tab key and i'm going to come in here and say apply and now you see all these faces here that weren't really here before are now things that we can actually work with here so i can come out here and extrude another you know sort of part of our scene really quickly just by using faces that really weren't even there until we applied the solidify modifier number four playing and delete this is a variation of the one that we were just looking at here i've got a new plane in here i've already scaled it up in size and i'm going to go ahead and tab into edit it and this time i'm going to right click and select subdivide in here and that's going to chop it up a little bit well i can come in down here and say let me type in 12. i'll type in 12 subdivisions and now i've got almost like kind of a little grid map now the nice thing about this is i can hit things like use the circle select i can hit the c key to grab circle select and then kind of kind of paint on areas here where i want to select remember when if you're going to do that you need to hit the enter or return key to tell it you're happy i'm going to hold the shift key down maybe i'll just come over here and grab a few others by using the shift and control or shift and command option to uh to grab some faces that's more faces than i wanted here i'll just come in here and manually delete a few of these and you can just basically kind of paint in areas that are either the areas that you're going to cut out of your scene or areas that you're going to add into your scene so you can work in either direction i'm going to then hit the delete key on these faces and get rid of those and so now i've got the plan of my room i can come back in with my edges here grab all those edges and then i hit the e key to extrude hold down the z key to make sure i'm going up in the z direction and i have basically another version of that same approach so this this way instead of extruding and kind of pushing and pulling i made this kind of like tile floor here and the great thing about that is like if i go back into the face mode here i could do something like this and i could make some columns quite easily i could just extrude these faces and this is a great way to create all kinds of sort of rooms very quickly just by using almost like a grid graph paper way of adding walls to your scene and then you can separate all this and you can grab the paper thin walls and you can apply the solidify modifier just like we did in the previous version hello five number five extrude vertices this is another variation but it's also really good if you're tracing over an image that you've brought and you've run a reference image or maybe a plan view of something and you want to trace over it this is a particularly good one for that now there is a add-on that you can add that gives you more options ctrl a and add in a single vertice just adding a single vertice will do this but if you haven't turned on that add-on you can just do this little trick here i'm going to grab the plane i'm going to hit the tab key and i'm going to in vertice mode here vertex mode i'm going to delete all of these vertices all but one and i'm going to have just this one vertices to work with and now this actually works you can do this in any view you want but i think it works a little bit better if you're in top view so i'm going to hit the e key to extrude this and then i'm just going to come off to an angle here this is actually a really good one for turning on your increment snapping if you just turn that on and leave that on then you don't have to worry about making sure that the lines are straight and i'm going to extrude this way and just hold down the snapping on there and i'll extrude again and i'm just going to keep on doing this until i've got the floor plan that i'm looking for or like i say if you're tracing over an existing plan that is there as an image this is a great way to do that and the nice thing about this version is that when you're all done you've got all these lines i can just set select a and now if i move back into a perspective view i can just extrude hit the e key and z to lock it in the z direction and then i've just got my walls there and i don't have to do that trick about selecting the floor or selecting the ceiling and making sure that you have it separated before you add the solidify modifier you can just drop the solidify modifier right on here and there are your walls and the nice thing about this again is that those walls are just one line thick so if i want to go back in here i want to check on even thickness there i can even turn this off to make it really easy to see it i'm going to go in here and make sure i'm in x-ray view though so i can grab all four because now this isn't just you know this is a wall now it's not just dots on the floor here but i can very easily move these around maybe they can make this wall angled you can do all that sort of thing and then you can come back in here and just turn your solidified modifier back on and there you go option number six extrude from a vertical edge so i've already jumped in here and taken a default cube and deleted everything except for the two vertices that make up one side of the cube i'm going to jump over here into wireframe to make this a little bit easier for us to see let me hide the title and i've got the little wireframe edge of this wall again probably easier to do in top view so i'm going to jump over into top view and i'm just going to hit extrude and now i'm i'm extruding off both sides of the wall so in the previous version basically this is very similar to the previous version except unlike the previous version we needed to extrude height of the wall right now we're doing it all at the same time so if i just keep on hitting e to extrude and i can come over here and keep on snapping onto vertices on the floor there and i can create the solid walls very quickly so this is another way to do that that it's very similar to the previous version but it creates both the height of the wall and the footprint of the wall at the same time how would you feel about seven number seven extrude faces again kind of a variant of the things we've been looking at this one may make the most sense of all of them so i just took a cube and made it a lot skinnier and taller and now what i can do is select that cube jump into the edit mode by hitting the tab key and select a face now again i've got the increment still selected on there so i can hit extrude and just kind of snap over to another's place where i want a wall and then i can just extrude again and extrude the thickness of the next wall now i can go on in a different direction and hit extrude and i can just keep on doing this remembering to extrude another little bit for the next piece of the wall there and keep on going until i've got the space that i want then you can come in here and do the boolean operations you can add a floor you can do all the other things that you've seen in the other versions but this is a a version of creating a room that could be very you know make makes kind of a lot of sense because you can just you're basically just sort of pushing the walls around where you want them to go the number of the day is eight number eight images as planes now of course in order for us to see the image on our images planes we need to be in one of the rendered modes so i'm in material preview right now but all i've done is basically taken this image which i made in photoshop and then imported it as an images plane and then just put a bunch of knife cuts over here and push things in and out so that i could create this object and it looks pretty good so the nice thing about that is you can throw that into an array and look you have like instant building in almost no time here using the image as plane and that works of course for interiors as well i have a link right up in here that i will talk about i've covered images as planes and a couple of other places so rather than go through that all right now you can watch these links if you want to know how to import this kind of imagery but you can take these images and you can do whole elevations in scenes and then bring them in and make those the walls of your scene very quickly these last two we're going to look at archie pack and archie mesh are add-ons so i can go over here to edit and preferences and click on the add-ons tab and just search for them we're going to take a look at archie pack first now this does involve opening up the end panel over here there is an archie pack tab when you create a new object you'll get a new tab over here and you can control it from that end panel this is not something i would use if you're just if you just want to do a quick perspective study that you're going to export out to a painting program and do a little paint over or whatever it is a little tricky to get your head wrapped around but if you're going to do a lot of architectural visualization or you want to work off of blueprints or things these two plugins do things that pretty much nothing else in blender does and it is kind of neat and that is working parametrically so what i'm going to do is say shift a to add a new object and i'm going to come down here to mesh and find arcgipak here and notice that there's windows and doors and stairs and other things as well but we're just going to add in a wall here since we're talking about walls and now we've got one chunk of a wall segment here so wall number one the neat thing about this is all of these numbers here if you click on any one of these numbers you can type in things here so i can type in four meters here and just make that wall longer and i can click off and deselect it and do other things and i can come back and select the wall again and then if i want to click on this little manipulate button i can get all that back again almost nothing in blender works that way to where you can go in and grab something and change it parametrically by changing the parameters of something now if i want to add more walls here i can just keep on adding parts so i'll add another wall over there and maybe i'll make this wall i don't know five meters long over there and then i'll come over and add another wall over here and oh another way that you can work too is to come over here and grab these and just like physically manipulate them grab these little squares and then you can just kind of yank on them you can even change the angle of them at the same time so you say i change the angle of that wall just by grabbing it so you can work very parametrically or you can even just kind of grab on things as well i can come down over here with the object selected and say what if i want to make this wall a curved wall well that's wall too so i can go from straight to curved and just add that kind of curved shape there to the the object and if i want to just close the check the close button there i just close the shape and now i've got an enclosed room now we can bring in those doors and windows and start adding objects to this room that's kind of neat and that that really the idea of being able to come back later on and say you know what actually i've decided i've changed my mind i want to actually change the height of this i want to add in an extra chunk of wall or whatever that's almost impossible to do in any other part of blender so let's take a look at the other one next into number 10 and straight to business last but not least number 10 archimesh which is another one of these ones that takes a little bit of getting used to but if you're going to do a lot of architectural visualization where you're going to be copying off of drawings and things it's one worth knowing about i'm just going to click into the scene and say shift a and i'm going to add way down at the bottom here r key mesh and i'm going to add a room and we add rooms in here very similarly to the way that you add them in archipack here just by increasing the number of walls so i'll just come over here and go ahead and add a couple but instead of closing those walls it's just allowing us to find wall one two and three so i can click on the length of wall one and i'll just type in four meters in there to change the length of that wall it's also automatically adding a baseboard it's doing all kinds of things if you check the little advanced tab you can change make it a curved wall that's very easy to do and you can change the angle of walls there's a lot of things that you can do it also has the ability to use this little auto hole function in here if you give your wall a little bit of thickness then you can bring in things like doors and when i bring in a door here you'll see it's added in a door group and this door group includes boolean operations that automatically cut things out of the wall it takes a little bit of poking around in here but there's a lot of really fun stuff there's venetian blinds there's all kinds of things that you can do to add to your scene and if we go ahead and look at the whole list of them in here we've got a whole lot of different ways that we can add walls and create rooms very quickly in blender so give a couple of those a try don't feel afraid to mix and match different techniques and see which ones work best for you

Channel: Sean O'Skea

Views: 31,147

Keywords: Blender, tutorial, beginner, basic, intro, how to, learn, 3D, model, modeling, materials, move around, navigation, move camera, render, Edit, Blender 2.8, Blender 2.9, graphics, add objects, start, first, Blender Guru, Blender binge, DECODED, CGMatter, Default Cube, Grant Abbitt, Wall, images as planes, how to make, room, interior, enviroment

Id: J97bL25GAo8

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020