Blender Beginner Modelling Tutorial - Part 1

if you've ever tried to model something in blender only to become frustrated at how sloppy and uncooperative the mesh becomes then you could probably do with learning some modeling fundamentals fundamentals like the importance of good topology how to make some surfaces hard and flat whilst others curved and round how to make edges flow in the direction that you want them to how to fix shading problems and more all of which will be taught in this free course that i'm uploading to youtube in its entirety by the time you finish not only will you have learned some very valuable skills that will give you the confidence to go out and model something by yourself but you will have finished your very own practical chair that you can use in future scenes because everybody needs a chair but don't let its deceptively simple looks fool you because it actually has a very unique combination of hard flat surfaces that need to remain flat and other round surfaces that need to remain round making this a very perfect subject to learn some fundamental modeling skills and although this is labeled as a modeling tutorial of course at the end we will also be learning uv unwrapping and texturing this bad boy now this course is for beginners of blender but not complete beginners if you've never touched blender before then i recommend my donut tutorial series which you can watch by clicking a little i up there and finishing at least up until level one and once you've done that i would say you are then qualified to watch this course now i know you are very eager to get started in blender and start modeling but at this stage when you're starting a project it helps to get all your docs lined in a row so you don't make mistakes later on and what i mean by that is getting clear references and if you can find them blueprints so when i started like years ago when i was like just a beginner of blender i used to just go to google image search and just type in chair and then find an image i like click it that was my reference the problem with that is as i realized is that once you start modeling it eventually you need like another angle of the chair like the back of the chair like what does it look like there and then you go back to the image that you found and realized the chair doesn't have a name it was just a generic chair that a generic photographer photographed and now i can't find any more reference photos of it so it's for that reason that today doesn't matter what i'm making it could be a speaker it could be a water bottle i'm always going to choose a branded whatever it is not only because the designs tend to be nicer but once i know the name of it i can then find more reference photos later if i need them and that is highly highly important um so in our case we're going to be using the danish branded fredericia that's the company name uh and the type of chair is called the soborg chair which i'm sure is not how you pronounce it but hey i'm an australian i don't know how to pronounce danish words like that with the little o that goes like that no idea it's the soborg chair so not only is it good to have this name because we can go back and look for photos if we need them but uh in the case of furniture the manufacturers typically want you to replicate their furniture believe it or not because when you put it in arc viz then maybe a client will want to buy that chair right so um they not only give you like high resolution reference photos in their download section um but i learned this on twitter um that uh you can actually find the blueprints just by going to like the 2d like there's like a drawing file dwg file you can open that in illustrator and that gives you like a vectorized blueprint of the chair um so i converted those into png and i've made all this available um with a zip file in the description so you click that download it that has uh the blueprints as well as uh the reference photos all in like a png jpeg so it's easy to use so once we have that now we can go into blender and we can start setting it up so i'm gonna go and delete everything here not just the cube but everything indiscriminately and we're going to start by loading in those blueprint images okay so we're going to go shift a image reference okay which is by the way this is i guess it's a relatively new thing with 2.8 but it's so much easier to load in images this way than what it was uh previously i had to put it in the background it was pretty janky but anyways so we're going to start we've got three of them we'll have to do this three times but uh the first one top load reference image now um you might notice that it's come in at a sort of arbitrary angle and that's because it's it's like a line to the view that we were looking at so if it's at this view we could clear this just by going to the item preferences n properties and then just clearing the rotation here to zero and now it's where it should be which is top down it should be flat on the floor but what this means is for the next ones like side and front view we should go to that view before we add in the reference photo so side view is number pad three then if we hit shift a image reference then hit side you can see it's come in at the correct rotation which is good um so then we just position this where we want the images so these are kind of like free floating images just like a normal image in blender it's really handy i much prefer this reference image than the old one of having it in the background um but yeah i'm just moving this up so that it sits nicely on the grid floor there and then the last one front view number pad one image reference and front and there we go move it up and now we should have three blueprints blueprints ready aligned for our model now one thing i like to do is just change the opacity slightly because you can see if you're looking from like behind it you can't see through it um so i like to change the use alpha turn that on and then just set the opacity to 50 and i do that for all of them and this is all the fun stuff to do before you start the modeling stuff now finally the reference images right if you wanted to you could load your reference images you know into a separate view this set to image editor and you could load in an image like that right however it's then always there and it's always occupying part of the screen and you don't always need it open what i prefer instead is to use a free piece of software called pure ref this guy looks like this it's free the link is in the description it's awesome everybody should use this what you can do is add in any images anywhere just like an open free canvas so you right click go load load images and then i gave you three reference images go ahead and hit open and it'll just load them all in and it looks like this so you zoom in and out with your mouse a middle mouse to pan around which is basically blenders hotkeys as well uh moving the window is right click just so you know but uh but it's really good like you can zoom right in get the full resolution um you don't have to just like select one image and then load in another image et cetera it's really good you can move it uh everything around you can add in like control c and control v images online and just build out this wonderful canvas of all your reference images great tool anyway i hope i've sold it to you it is free after all so now that we've done that now let's finally finally start to model this bad boy now we need to start with a mesh some sort of mesh so shift a mesh and then i'd like to pick a object which most resembles what it is we are modeling now this is a chair nothing really resembles a chair however a chair leg looks similar to a cube so that's what i'm going to start with then i want to be able to see my reference behind it so i'm switching to wireframe mode you can switch between these views just by holding down z that's a fast way to sort of switch between them it's a little pie menu and then i'm going to move this to be the front chair leg right and just scale it down down down to like so now this blueprint is a little hard to understand right because it's it's not like just a flat chair leg right with with a line at the front line at the back there's also an inner line and that's all the way around and this is where it helps to look at your reference and corroborate what you think the mesh should look like with what it actually is with the reference so we can see that this is a front face there like it's a very flat edge um and then all the way around it you've got like a rounded bevel all the way around it and a front flat facing edge so this line here like it's not really clear what the blueprint is um telling us with that i don't think that's the bevel because that would be a very very thick bevel um but basically what i'm saying is we're just going to work off of this front face and this back face the inner phase we won't really bother with but anyways okay so now in edit mode with our cube here i'm going to click and drag over it making sure you are in uh the x-ray mode that little button there or alt z to tab between them because otherwise if you don't have that you might accidentally just be selecting this half of the mesh which is not good so x-ray mode select that and i'm just going to move this all the way up to the top middle clicking so that it locks it to the z axes um or you can change it with whatever anyway z axes and i'm just going to create this this front front leg there so it's running all the way up the side and then i'm going to take just this part this back part of it and then i'm going to move this out to about there and you can see that that's now lining up with our reference which is nice and i'll just move that down ever so slightly and if i'm a real knock i could just move this over slightly till it lines up but you know we got bigger problems ahead of us this is this is getting a little too detailed too early um okay so now the leg goes back right it's this front bit and then it goes back so we need to add in a loop cut ctrl r which is uh it'll give you this little yellow line so you just go near it click once and then the the second step is where you want to place this line so i want to place it basically where that uh horizontal part of the leg is like ignore the curve and pretend it's like a hard edge right there so i'm just going to place it about there if you get it wrong by the way you can double tap g and that'll edge slide and that'll enable you to choose the spot again but anyways then i'm going to just drag over this this part of the mesh and now hit e to extrude extrude it backwards to about there and the rest of it well this other stuff at the back here we'll get to uh in part two um brief interjection by the way uh if we go into front view we should probably position it uh where where that leg should be so i'm just gonna move this across to there and it's thinner than what the cube defaulted in at so i'm just going to scale it s and then x to scale it along the x axis and i just want it to you know this imaginary line will continue down to there and this imaginary line continue down to there you know something like that now you could rotate this uh if you really hated life and you wanted to make things harder the problem with like rotating this now at this step is that we've got a whole bunch of modeling to do over here and when we rotate it you can see that we've now it's less easy to grab like you know one point or whatever or to understand it because you've got like a doubling right a doubling and it's uh it's a little annoying so there's not really any disadvantages to um to doing this later so essentially i'm going to keep it straight and flat until i've finished this entire flat board here and then once that's done we're just going to go here rotate it over and uh it should be fine it'll be a lot easier to work with okay so we now have our first problem this this rounded corner there which again corroborating corroborating corroborating we'll go with corroborate um with our reference you can see that it's uh yeah it's it's a very it's a round edge there and then there is a flat face that you could imagine that you could run your finger along you could write on it for example that that is a very flat face there and then a very flat face going this way so how could we make this with this well one way would be to just bevel this right here and don't do this i'm going to show you this method and why we're not going to use it so bevel control b with uh an edge selected we'll do this and then if you increase that with your mouse wheel up you would have this okay which looks good right wrong it's terrible no it's it looks okay so far however in the future we are going to be using uh smooth shading and when you use smooth shading you introduce artifacts that uh that you weren't aware of were causing problems right so the reason we've got this horrible looking shading problem here is that this is more than four vertices right it is it is over four which means it is an n-gon which is anything over four vertices it's not good typically you want to have what you can see here which is four four vertices that makes a face and it's very easy for the uh rendered the shader whatever the wizards that work in the background of blender it's easy for them to understand what they should look like um when you have three it's a try which is also not good and if you just have more than that you can create some some problems now you could fix this by like you know breaking this down adding in loop cuts etc and i've done that i've actually made this chair probably this would be like my 11th time making the chair for this tutorial because i had to like you know understand the the the subject well enough and explore all the different methods of doing it so that i could teach the right method to you so that's anyways but i've done it this way and it's it's a lot of work right so instead what we're going to do is we're not going to use the how many undo's we're not no one more come on there we go we're not going to do the bevel way instead we're going to be using the subdivision sub subsurf modifier it's got a longer name and a shorter name but anyways if you go to your add modifier stack here this is the modifier stack nothing in it yet we're going to add in the subdivision surface modifier also known as the subdiv modifier and it looks like this which young and old beginners and experts alike can all agree that this looks terrible right um so far right now what this is doing is uh it is essentially averaging out your mesh and it's adding in another cut where there isn't one uh before like another that's adding in extra geometry extra detail right so we we have a very low poly like mesh this this cage looking thing here right that's very low poly and so what it's doing is it's averaging out from there to there to there right so that is three three vertices and they're very far apart and they're at a 90 degree angle and it's a lot to average out so it's essentially going all the way up and around right because that's where the vertices are however you could imagine that if if instead of it you know all the way out to there if instead that vertices or another vertices was right about here for example then it wouldn't go all the way out to there it would go up up up up up up up and then go sort of like that right and then likewise if you had another vertice that was here instead then it would just be like that so that is what we want we want that nice rounded corner there so we want to control this ugly looking mesh right now with enough detail okay let me just turn off the annotations okay so i'm going to loop cut so ctrl r another loop cut add this in right here and i'm going to drag it out to be something tighter let's go side view mode yeah right where that line is right there that's where i want to do it so i just double tap g just to slide that along and then i'll add another loop cut here ctrl r click once to uh start the operation and then again it's just going to slide it up until it's about there double tap g again and there we go so you can see we've now controlled that um we've controlled where it is right so it's no longer a crazy long shape it's now just averaging out from there to there to there which is lovely and if we turn up the viewport uh you can see that it's every one of these steps it's adding in like another duplicate of of detail between it right so from there to that there it's now got one two three four five six six faces whereas if we turned it down it was like one face two anyway you get the idea it's just it's smoothing it out the more the higher you go um okay so that looks pretty good right and it matches almost like we could uh take this and just drag this out a little bit further and it will pretty pretty closely match that that curve there we'll add in more detail on things later but as a teaser as a cliffhanger for the next part of this video big cliffhanger are you ready how are we supposed to solve this problem which is that it's not just averaged out uh from there to there right and doing that but it's now also averaging out from there to there right so we've now got this what should be a flat face here and a flat face here it's now rounding it round right like it it tends to look a little bit like play-doh if you don't know what you're doing with it so that's what we're gonna fix in part two so go ahead click here on your screen and uh let's get into the next fun bit of this modeling see you there

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,969,807

Keywords: blender, tutorial, modelling, hard surface, series, course

Id: Hf2esGA7vCc

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020

Reddit Comments

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r/BlenderChairs

[u/MrThird312]

SS: Andrew Price, the Blender Guru, has just released his newest tutorial series, and this subject matter actually relates a lot towards Product Viz! We've had lots of chairs submitted in our short history, so this feels proper! Enjoy!