Blender 2.8 Basics Tutorial pt. 5 | Rocket Modeling Exercise

now that you've got the basics of mesh modeling down we can go ahead and try and create our very first actual 3d model using blender 3d the model that we're going to be creating in this lesson is the fuselage or the main body of a low poly rocket in this low poly rocket that we're modeling is actually part of our next course in our introduction to blender learning flow which means that once you complete this lesson you'll already be a step ahead in your blender curriculum here on CG cookie comm so let's go ahead and get started by modeling our rocket fuselage so just to clarify things a little bit here the next course in our introduction to blender learning flow is this build and animate a low poly rocket course and the video that we'll be covering in this lesson is the modeling the rocket video from Chapter two so basically when you do this course you can just skip over this video because we will have done absolutely everything in it in particular what I mean by everything in it is modeling the fuselage of our rocket here now let me pull up reference image here the part of the rocket that we're going to be focusing on in this lesson is going to be the main fuselage the big white part here we'll also be making this window and the nose cone but we'll save the fins and the thrusters and well the rest of the scene for the actual course once we get there so let's go ahead and get started with modeling this rocket I'm gonna go ahead and close out of chrome here and I already have a nice fresh blender file loaded up here and I strongly encourage you guys start with a fresh one as well and turns out that off the bat we really don't need anything in our default scene here so I can just get rid of it all by pressing a well first let me make sure I'm clicked into blender I'll press a to select everything followed by X and then I'll confirm that deletion to get rid of everything because we don't need anything additionally it's probably a good idea to save our blender file before we get started here so I'm gonna click a file select save as and to my desktop I'm going to save a file called low poly rocket and you'll notice that I already have one saved here that's just because it's from an earlier attempt but it's fine I'll just save over it because I don't need to but obviously you won't have that same issue that I just had there anyway let's go ahead and get started with modeling our rocket now as I mentioned earlier our primitive shapes are kind of the baseline for modeling absolutely everything in blender no matter what you do you almost always start with a primitive shape or multiple primitive shapes so what primitive shape can we use to start modeling our rocket here well looking at it there isn't much that we can really decipher but there is one basic shape up top of our rocket here that we can see that we can use as a base reference we see this Pentagon now in our primitives you probably don't remember the primitives that well but there is no Pentagon primitive but there is something similar that we can adapt to become a Pentagon so let's go ahead and get started by adding in a circle to our scene now to add a circle all we need to do is press shift a come to the mesh category and select circle and this circle is what we're going to be modifying into our Pentagon that we'll be using for the rest of the rocket now here's the thing if you look really close at this circle when you zoom in here you'll notice that it's kind of made up of these line segments and these are actually the edges of the circle that you're seeing here and these edges well there are actually 32 of them by default so there are 32 edges that make up our entire circle but something really awesome happens if we drop the amount of edges down to 5 we get a Pentagon right because if it has 5 edges it has 5 vertices has 5 sides it's a Pentagon so all we need to do is drop the vertex count or the edge count to 5 and we can do this very simply by opening up this little menu down here that popped up when we added our circle you might not have noticed it but it did pop up when you when we added it and if we click this little arrow right here we can get a full list of settings that we can tweak about this circle that we just added to our scene here of those one of them is vertices and if we change the amount of vertices we have we can make a plethora of shapes whether it looks almost like a perfect circle or a triangle but if we set the number of vertices to 5 just so that we can create a pentagon to start with which is exactly like the Pentagon that we have in our scene here so with that I'm gonna go ahead and shrink down this ad circle menu and we can go ahead and start actually modeling our rockets so I like to imagine that this Pentagon is kind of the bottom layer of our rocket here we're going to need to extrude up from it a few times and once we complete that by the way to add some additional specificity here we're gonna focus on this white part first we're not gonna worry about the window or the nose cone we're just gonna focus on this white part and in order for us to model that starting with this as the base all we need to do is extrude upward to whatever this point is and extrude upward again while scaling inward to get to well some sort of cap on this rocket here so let's go ahead and do that now now there is an interesting way to do this it's actually not that interesting it's pretty common but so far we've been using blender in perspective mode and perspective mode is well it's basically how you and I see things when we look in the 3d viewport we're seeing this as though we have perspective things that are further away appear smaller and things that are closer up here bigger we can see this up in the upper left here we can see that we're in user perspective mode and we can also tell because of this grid right here it looks as though it's vanishing into the distance but in order to actually model this rocket we're going to switch into something called orthographic view and orthographic view allows us to have a better perception of scale because it eliminates all of the depth from our scene basically we're looking at our model from infinitely far away but also infinitely zoomed in it seems kind of interesting but it makes more sense when you actually see it with your own eyes so in order to do this we first need to switch in to front view now in order to switch in to front view all we need to do if you have a number pad on your computer which is the little set of nine number keys and some math operations over on the right hand side is press the 1 key if you're on a laptop or some computer that doesn't have a number pad what you can do is click Edit come-to preferences from the input category right here check the emulate numberpad option click these three dots and select save preferences and then you can use the number row instead to press one or any of many number keys but basically what we've done by pressing one on a number pad or pressing one on our number row is switch into front orthographic view front orthographic view means that we're looking at well let me show you again here we're looking at our model from the front as you can see that just kind of snapped very quickly there but we're looking at our Pentagon from the front and we're looking at it as though there is no depth to it and again you can also see that right here so now we can actually start modeling our rocket now when we are an orthographic view you'll notice that there are a lot of these big tick marks and then there are also a lot of these smaller tick marks and we're going to be using these as reference for how we want to model our rocket here so we already have this rocket started basically with this first layer this is going to be as I mentioned earlier the kind of bottom wrap around the bottom loop at the bottom of our rocket here so we need to extrude upwards and outwards so we can get this part of this rocket this extruded part right here so in order to do that I'll go ahead and switch into edit mode by pressing tab and then what I'll do is I'll extrude upwards by pressing e followed by Z to lock things to the z axis now I'll move this up one unit here so you can see there are these major and minor tics like I mentioned earlier we're going to move it all the way up until the next major tick here and then we'll go ahead and click just like that and we have successfully extruded upwards now I'm going to switch back into front orthographic view and now I'm going to scale this I'm going to scale this out about maybe three of these minor tick marks so right now you can see I'm kind of halfway in between two tick marks here so all I'm going to do here is press s and I'm going to move it one - three of these tick marks out just like that and now we kind of have that bowing out feel that we have at the bottom of our rocket here we're kind of bulging out just a little bit like that now we need to bring things back up and in so I think what I'm going to do here is extrude upwards once again so I'll press E and then I'll press Z to lock it to the z-axis and I'm going to go to the knot the next major tick which is this one right here but the one after it right here and I'm going to count back 3 minor ticks from it so I'll do 1 2 3 just like that and I'll click to go ahead and place it now with that placed I'm going to go ahead and scale this in a little bit because our rocket has to come up and in so I'll scale this down maybe about that far where you can see that I'm currently on both sides I'm about 1 2 3 4 5 of these minor tick marks out from the center so we have 5 going this way and 5 going this way a radius of 5 if you will so now what I need to do is extrude up once again so I'll press E followed by Z to extrude upwards and I'll go all the way to the next major tick so you can see that it aligns with this major tick and I'll scale inwards a little bit more so it's about half of what we had before so this was about five minor ticks out from the center so this one's going to be about two point five minor ticks out from the center there's no reason for it to be super accurate but just like that we already have the base our fuselage done it's pretty simple and it's actually really fun to model like this now let's go ahead and have a look around our model I'm just going to change my perspective here by orbiting around a little bit and you'll notice that because of the way that we modeled this we don't have anything in our top this isn't like filled it's like it's a tube we can see straight through this and we kind of want it to be more of a solid object so we need to go ahead and fill in these faces but how do we add a face it's actually pretty simple what we can use is the hotkey which will just fill whatever we have selected so currently we have these 5 vertices selected so that means if we press f it will fill the area in between these 5 vertices with a face so I'll press F and just like that you can see we have a face added at the top of our rocket here and we can do the same thing with the bottom I'll select these 5 vertices and then I'll press F and it will fill that area with another face and just like that we have our rocket fuselage created so I'm going to go ahead and switch out of edit mode this is pretty important and I'm going to go ahead and rename my fuselage here up in our outliner because it's a really good habit to get into naming your objects as you're working on them so I'm gonna go ahead and just name this maybe rocket fuselage that seems like a good name for us to work with there so now we have our Rocket fuselage and with this completed I'm going to go ahead and save my blender file by clicking file and then selecting save to make sure that we don't lose any of our progress so the next thing that we have to take care of in our model is this nose cone so that means that we're going to have to add another circle to our scene to start modeling from or another I guess it's a Pentagon tourist scene because we made it into a Pentagon but I have to add another circle object and start working with that so let's go ahead and take care of that now I'm going to go ahead and just add a new circle object by pressing shift a and from the mesh category selecting circle and you'll notice it might be a little bit hard to see but by default our circles are now Pentagon's if we come to this menu you can see that it has five vertices by default and it will stay like this until we restart our blender file so now I can actually position this nose cone at the top of our rocket here so first thing we want to be doing is pressing one to switch into front orthographic view once again and I'm going to move this circle up to the top of our rocket I'm gonna do this with my move gizmos just because I feel like using them instead and I'm going to position this it's really not much higher you'll notice that as these we get a we get some additional ticks here I think what I'm going to do is position this about four of these very tiny little ticks they're not minor ticks but they're sub minor ticks higher than the actual top of our rocket here and we're just gonna make it a little bit wider we're gonna go somewhere around there maybe so we're about 0.04 of these units taller and about 0.1 unit are actually now undermined sorry we'll go somewhere like there that looks much better so we're just gonna be up about four of these and out about one and this is going to be the very top of our nose cone here this Pentagon that we saw earlier so we're gonna need to extrude down and then inwards so let's go ahead and take care of that now I'm going to press tab to switch into edit mode with our nose cone here and I'm going to extrude downwards so I'm going to click II to extrude followed by Z and you'll notice that right now I can't even see what I'm doing because it's hidden inside of our rocket so what I'm going to do is just really quick place this down right below where it was extruded from and I'm going to switch into a new version or a new way to view our model called wireframe mode all we need to do to switch into wireframe mode is to press the Z key which will open up this special menu called a pie menu it gives us a bunch of different options for how we want to look at our model and we're gonna select wireframe View mode wireframe mode will only show the outlines of our 3d models so we won't be able to see any faces which makes things useful for actually exploring and modeling inside of other things so now that I've done this I can press GZ to move the face down to be perfectly in line with this band right here then I can scale it outwards so that the line this edge right here is just about parallel with this edge right here and it looks like it might be a little bit big you'll have to eyeball this and determine for yourself whether or not it looks good but it should look something like this where these two lines are nearly parallel they don't have to be though so with that all we need to do now is extrude back inwards and it's a little bit hard to see here but you can see that at this corner we come out like this and then we cut back in so all I'll do in order to do this is extrude downwards about point one of these blender units one minor tick so you can see how it is on this tick right here and I extrude it down to here and then I'll just scale in a little bit you know I might not even go that far I might go even less something like that it all comes down to artistic preference whatever you think looks better usually will look better now let's switch back into solid View mode to do this I'll press Z once again to open up our pie menu and select solid view and just like that you can see that our nose cone is in place once again though we do have this opening at the top of our nose cone and we also have one at the bottom of our nose cone but we can't really see it so it doesn't matter too much so let's go ahead and close up this top opening I'll just select these five vertices and then I'll press the F key to fill it in then once we're done with that I'll switch out of edit mode and we've completed our nose cone just like that so with that I'm gonna go ahead and also rename my nose cone to rocket nose cone just like that and then just like I did last time I'm going to save my blender file to make sure that we don't lose anything in the process with the nose cone finished that means that the only thing we have left to model in our Rockettes main fuselage is this window now this window is a little bit tricky because it well let's take a close look at it here it kind of has this indent where pokes out comes in and then it pokes back in again and that's a little bit weird we've never modeled something like that and it's kind of strange to have to model something like that so let's go ahead and get started with modeling this window here I kind of want a nice clean open workspace to do this because now we have a bunch of stuff sitting in our scene here and I don't really think that I want to have to see this stuff so I'm gonna go ahead and hide it by coming up to our outliner and just clicking on this little eyeball this just means that it's not going to be shown in our 3d viewport it will still be shown when we render things and it hasn't been deleted we can bring it back at any time simply by clicking the little eyeball there but let's go ahead and get started on this window now that we have a nice clean workspace here in order to do that all I'm going to do is press shift a and add another circle which will be turned into a Pentagon now I'm actually going to imagine that this circle is or this Pentagon I guess is this blue part of our window here which means that in order to make a window well imagine this is laying flat by the way we're going to have to extrude out or up we're going to have to extrude outwards and then we'll have to extrude back downwards actually you know what I have a whole new way of doing this so in the actual video I did that I extrude up out and then back down but I just figured why not use the inset faces tool that we learned from the last video so let's go ahead and actually do this now this main face here is going to be the outline of our window and we're going to inset a face extrude it inwards and then we'll do the same thing on the outside there so let's go ahead and get started with that first things first we need a face to work with here right now we just have a bunch of edges because we are in solid view and we can't see any faces so let's add some faces to our scene here I'll press tab to switch into edit mode and I'll press F to fill in our Pentagon here now like I said what we want to do is extrude inwards and then kind of drop things down a little bit so let's go ahead and take care of that now I'll grab the inset faces tool and I'll simply click and drag from the edge to extrude or to inset our face about that far just like that then I'll grab the extrude tool and I'll extrude in the negative direction just like that and then the last thing we need to do is grab our edge select soar go switch into edge selection mode select all of our edges around the edge of our window here and simply extrude them downwards and I'm going to go a little bit further then I went with the base of the window so switch into front view just so I can see this and I'll switch into wireframe mode as well by pressing Z and selecting wireframe I just want to make sure that this bottom line is below our window here and as long as it is we have successfully created our window and we can switch out of edit mode and that was a lot easier than I expected especially with that in set faces tool so you discover new things every single day so with this window created I'm going to go ahead and name it Rockettes window oops didn't mean to put a space in there and then I'm going to show my rocket nose cone and fuselage and we'll try and position this window on one of these faces of our rocket here so I'll switch into side view by pressing number pad 3 or if you're working with the number row you'll press number row 3 and all I'm going to do is position this window I'll move it up a little bit here and I'll rotate it so it's it's parallel with the edge of our rocket here just like that then I'll scale it down a little bit actually good amount I'll even switch into front view here to see how big it is and I want it to be built that big then I'll switch back into side view here and I'll just position it up against our rocket just like this and it looks like it's still just a little bit off but if we tweak it a little bit and make sure it's in the perfect position we want to make sure too that we have this interior face being shown as you can see here right now the fuselage of the rocket is kind of clipping over our actual window pane the part that's going to be blue so we want to make sure that it kind of pokes out like this and it's hard to tell but there is a little bit of a change right there that you can see when we start clipping into our rocket we just want to make sure that we don't have any of that going on and just like that we have successfully modeled the entire fuselage of our rocket which means that the only things we have left to take care of are the fins and the thruster which we'll take care of in the actual course but congratulations you've just effectively created your first real 3d model in blender let's save our blender file one last time to make sure our most recent changes have been logged and do remember that now when you move along to the low poly rocket course which is the next course in this learning flow that you can go ahead and just skip that first modeling the rocket video and move straight on to the adding thrusters and fins video right off the bat other than that there's not much left to do in the blender basics so let's wrap things up congratulations you've completed the blender basics course here on CG cookie comm this means that you've taken your first steps into the world of 3d computer graphics and blender 3d and you're ready to continue either becoming an animator a 3d modeler a surfacer or whatever you want if you're not sure what the next step to take in your blender education should be I strongly recommend continuing our introduction to blender learning flow here on CG cookie calm the next course in this progression is the building and animating a low poly rocket course which is also made by me and covers everything from 3d modeling to surfacing to animating and even some simulations at the end so really no matter where you want to go in blender this course should be pretty awesome for you the low poly rocket course isn't free like this course but you can get access to it and every other course here on CG cookie comm with a free trial of our citizens subscription this subscription gives you an easy way to practice your newfound skills and can help you get some real projects under your belt in whatever 3d field you want to explore so grab a citizen subscription today and we'll be looking forward to seeing you around in the community either way congratulations on completing the blender basics course here on CG cookie calm and hopefully we'll see you around here more in the future thanks for watching and stay creative

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 24,207

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender 2.8, blender 2.8 beginner, blender beginner, blender beginner tutorial, blender 2.8 beginner tutorial, blender 3d, blender objects, blender how to, blender basics, blender cgcookie, cg cookie, 3d modeling, rocket

Id: AnFFDVigoco

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019