Blender for Packaging Design - Creating a Box with Flaps & Dielines

hi I'm Jeremy and welcome back to blender for designers today we'll be building a box but instead of unwrapping a cube I want to build like a real box with dye lines so you can probably see the flaps and the kind of way it's intricately put together and that you can unfold it into dye lines I'm not this is the Box I built way back in the first episode of the physical manifestation of it but I'm not actually going to build that literal box I'm gonna be kind of designing my own box just sort of arbitrarily and using a couple others as examples so quick refresher on how boxes work made this animation a while back to show you how a box folds and lets take a look at it so you can see that folds into a box now I'm gonna go ahead and reverse it again so you can see that it folds out to of lay flat or a flat object and that is basically the dye lines the dye lines describe how this is carved out so you want to see how we can create a dye line for our boxes now there's a couple different ways to approach this this one which you just saw has four flaps on the bottom and then it's got a slightly different top this top actually tucks right into it you know has a top top that covers the whole thing and tucks right in like this you can kind of see that now this one actually has the flaps on the side I believe it's called a side loader and it'll let you know you basically tuck these in on the side and then this winds up not doing this great but this kind of winds up on the top and as you can see there's a there's a little nifty thing here with this little shape here allows it to tuck in I'm sure you've seen these on snack packages and will hold that for you so I kind of actually want to I don't want to do the slide loading but I do want to reproduce that bit so as we open blender here you'll see we have no cube up there because we're not going to start with a cube or a box we're actually going to start with the flat bit the dye lines so what we're actually going to want to start with is a plane now let me get my little face out of the way and we'll get started so let's zoom in a little bit and see what we got gonna hit numpad 7 to go on the top you can hit end to bring up the dimensions and you see you have a one by one this is not his blender one-on-one guys so actually I'm gonna go ahead and start calling this plane I will call this box okay so first thing we want to do this is going to be the front so first thing we want to do is make the sides and I think I'm going to make a two-to-one box so what we're going to do is we're going to extract in X and go to basically one over so that's gonna be yeah so we're gonna - and then same thing here and why you why oops sorry X your G X now that I've extracted already and then we're gonna go to negative two so this here is going to be the front this is the left side that's the right side and we'll create the notch in the right side so now let's go to the bottom the bottom is going to be more of a flap so we're gonna extract in Y and we're gonna go down it's gonna have to go cover the whole thing but we don't want to quite cover it because it's gonna be a regular flap and then we're gonna well actual will do scaling in a minute and then we want these side flaps here on the bottom so we're gonna go oops actually you have to do this one at a time otherwise you can extract the whole thing so we might be able to get away with this so we're gonna extract in Y again we have two other flaps that only going to come down partway and so yeah you can see I moved to edge select incentive because if I had done vertex select it would have extracted three things so we're gonna do the same thing here e Y get these little flaps here and then let's uh let's actually start creating the back so I want to have the notch here on the right side like I did in the illustration I did or in the animation I did so this is after you mean these are gonna be the same dimensions and you know this is the same this is the bat the Front's this back should be the same dimensions and some of you were gonna say hey wait a minute they're not gonna be exactly the same dimensions because the box itself is gonna have a thickness we'll get to that we will get to that I promise but let's do the same dimensions at first so we're gonna tract an X and we're gonna go to over so this should take us to minus four so we have two one two that mean we can change the math or whatever we're going to keep it simple for now and then what we want to do is we're going to first of all it's let's finish up the bottom here we're gonna extract in Y again and we're going to go down we might as well make these the same size so scale Y zero and then we're going to do the front flap and so the first one we're actually gonna do the back before e to the front e in what in Y again and so we want to go at least a bit more than halfway and again we just do this by eye and then on this one we're going to also go a bit more than halfway but we're gonna do that notch thing I was talking about so let's go back into vertex mode and then we're gonna do a subdivide w subdivides and we're gonna do let's do one two three four subdivisions you know be enough but we'll get started there and then just looking at the the notch here yeah actually we're gonna probably need more than four I mean probably six okay cool so to scale these out scale in X scale these in scale in X and again I'm just doing this visually and it will carve out the notch like that and then it'll scale the notch in an X again I'm just doing this visually just what looks right I'm sure there's ways of doing this exactly and it doesn't honestly matter did we we're just doing this was it end gone cuz we're gonna fix that outfit and I think this comes back this is not quite all the way to the front and maybe scaling this in a little bit there we go got a nice little notch alright so now we want to actually fold this thing see this is this is well oh no we're not we're not quite done yet we want a tab so we're gonna go back to edge mode tag can be over here tab could be over there it doesn't really match you put the tab over here so we're gonna go extract an X again and here's when we start making it look more tabby so we're gonna scale an X scale and why excuse me sy and there we go so this this will fold under here this will fold over here this will fold other here and these little tabs will go under so let's do that let's get uh make these tabby now so scale on X let's make these tabby scale an X let's make these tabby you know what scale that much an X we want to scale a little bit do something goofy happened turn-turn I had two of them there yeah not that much actually this is you don't want to scale too much on this and I could probably do this exact but it's fine it is just visually apparently there is doubles there too so again just a little bit and then probably this one too we will actually have to do the vertex the vertex is so there we have basically a full set of dye lines you can actually probably print these out and create in our an actual box for them but we won't be printing anything out we will just be folding now before we fold we should realize that this is not in fact this is this is not in fact a flat object but actually has some thickness to it so we should create some thickness so I'm gonna go back out for a second I'm actually gonna go into my node editor here I'm gonna delete the timeline we don't actually need that but gonna bring up a node editor and I'm gonna create a material for this box which we will call box you don't need that we don't need these either right now but what we do need is a modifier we need specifically a solidify modifier and now solidify modifier will work on a plane it not it is not just for for things inside I mean we this will be a box later but you can see now it's it's created kind of an edge probably a little thick right now let's go to 0.05 because we don't need this to be terribly thick but yeah it's kind of created a you know kind of an engine if we don't want the inside to be exactly at the outside which we do not we have to put this material index on and then we need a second material so this is the box and we'll call this second material inside and just to make it differentiate a little bit I'm gonna make the color a bit different I'm actually gonna do this by adding shift a a input RGB because I may change the color later but we're gonna make this kind of a brownish yellow like let's pretend it's just like a tan on the inside and then got a no coated or something on the outside and that way we can see we can kind of see the difference now you could sort of compensate for the thickness by maybe increasing some of these but what don't worry about that after we folded it so let's fold it so what we need to do is we're going to tab back we're gonna go back into edit mode we're already in a mode but and then we're gonna put the cursor snap cursor to active and then we're gonna start rotating the flaps so we're gonna go want to get all the flaps here vertex select so we're going to rotate around this cursor so we're gonna rotate in X 90 degrees oops we actually want rotate and X minus 90 there we go those are all folded over let's do the same thing with the bottom ones it doesn't matter which one but cursor to select cursor to active love that feature that goes back to your last command cuz do you select everything then box select those bottom ones are X these are gonna be 90 and then let's fold this other tab here so snap cursor to active okay our why I'm gonna guess 90 nope ry minus 90 alright so now we have our basic thing that needs to fold in then this whole section needs to kind of rotate around this way so let's do that and right now we're going to intersect we're gonna start intersecting with everything we'll fix that in a minute so actually let's get the cursor here first and then it's kind of a weird angle isn't it our y 90 yep there we go OOP no we have a weird sudden intersections that no these have to be selected to our Y 90 there we go so now we have an intersection we'll fix that in a minute so should I say it was the front so let's just go back to the 7 and then right so we need to get this whole selection here rotated I also get the cursor I can over here get this whole section here including these two and I've probably missed one back here yes I did and then we're gonna go our Y minus 90 missed a section or Y minus 90 keep missing things that we don't need to do our Y minus 90 and then we're gonna go here just these bits are y- ID and there we have a folded box I actually kind of want the box to be oriented front ways so we're going to select everything again and our X 90 I believe no not along with her so this time along the median point or X 90 woo I'm not sure what happened there Oh doing everything let's do it go for the front view that's I hit number one are x90 sure that's correct I believe that is yeah that should be the front okay cool and then I'm just gonna get this oriented to kind of Center bottom here I like too many things on the bottom easier to manage that way okay so now we have our little box and this perspective that's or that's orthographic but yeah all the lines are intersecting and everything looks awful so first off we want to do is get these tabs to move in a little bit cuz they're gonna be the ones that are the lowest so right now it's actually really good to be on like oh we don't need to be an x-ray selection but we can go out x-ray selection here so we can kind of see and now we moved everything so it's reoriented so we're gonna scale this in Z and then again we're using median scale so we're gonna move the tabs just up like this and then we want to move this flap is gonna be up a little bit and that flap is gonna be down a little bit so let's move this top flap you can actually do a plane select and then just get rid of that line and then just move this whole thing up slightly get rid of those give her these lines as well side ones will get rid of the vertexes and then we can just move this up a little bit and then we can move this up just ever so slightly and then same thing on the bottom well that's a little bit less complicated we can move we want to get the front bit down slightly and then this bit up slightly not as much of the tabs alright so now we can see we actually have probably went a little far but we can fix that we actually have some flaps you can kind of see all the flaps one thing that's super bothering me that you may have noticed is that everything is super sharp edges here so we have to compensate for that so we're gonna have to go back and add yet another modifier which is of course the devil modifier so I should just put the bevel up before the solidify that'll definitely help yes it that absolutely helps and let's add three sections here and actually yes now you see the overlap is not is doing just just fine thank you and now it's doing doing great and one thing I forgot to mention bevel limit set to angle that means it only hits angles greater than 30 degrees which means it doesn't bevel absolutely everything just what we want so now I'm going to go ahead and tweak the flaps and make sure that the edges all work out okay I'm also going to go ahead and add environment map so I can kind of see what I'm doing in a rendered mode and I just did a tutorial on environment maps so I'm not going to go over that again I'm just gonna speed right through honestly a little bit boring but yeah basically it revolves quite a bit of tweaking just to make sure the flaps aren't intersecting in some sort of weird way but yeah so let's see what that looks like yeah there we go and actually kind of it's actually had a nice to see this in render mode so yeah you can see how that tucks in you can see how that tucks in and you won't have the inside be quite so Brown and the final render I bet so this is just to kind of see how these interact so another thing we want to do is unwrap the UVs so we can start actually start putting some graphics on here so to do that I'm going to tap back into edit mode let's hit a to select everything or unselect everything first then I'm going to get rid of the sidebar give us some space and go into a UV image editor and a square box is fine so then it's actually really simple you sit you unwrap and there you have it the dye lines now they're a little distorted because we were screwing around with with the various things to get the tabs to all cut and the rights you know to help hitting the right spot so everything it's a little bit more to story than I would like usually that's actually probably not as big a problem as you might think one thing we're gonna do is I'm just gonna go ahead and scale everything scale everything and Y to 0 just to get everything at least aligned but you probably don't even have to do that on the tabs because frankly who cares you're not gonna put any important art there we are missing this notch and that's kind of bugging me so we may just do you can probably just do a projection on the box so we can just go into this tab and then we can just you project from view now I'm gonna go ahead and resize it exactly to the box it takes a mile so I'm speeding it up probably honestly the best way to approach the UVs would have been to do a projection right at the beginning after before we fall to the dye lines but a little late now and this is honestly fine it worked out great alright nothing we can do here is merge these or actually I think it's a weld sorry you v's weld or nothing yeah here's weld them so it actually it'll actually merge these correctly so you can just hit W actually and weld them so test that out let's put a here we could do a new image and then we can do you know you do a UV grid maybe UV grid 1024 once we put that into our material node editor you want to be on outside box right great so just so we can add an image texture and then we've just created that UV grid so we can put that in here and then we're getting go into either texture or material mode and see what it looks like and looks pretty good looks like it's going pretty evenly you know these are not continuous on top they should not be so that's that's a good sign so that means we can put start putting some actual and you don't actually have to connect these you only have to be highlighting the image the texture to see it in texture mode and then one last thing we're noticing is that there's this little lot of little facets here still and so we want to get rid of that but let's go back into you know gray mode solid gray mode so I want to I want to see how we can get rid of that and the obvious way to do it is smooth shading but I'll show you what happens when that hat when we do that so we're gonna hit we're gonna bring up the the sidebar here and we're gonna go into smooth shading and it totally screws this thing up and actually shows a little bit of an error that we have here as well which we can fix so let's go ahead and fix that error actually now go into vertex mode and then just knock this down so we bit I think that may screw up our no actually looks pretty good I was gonna say let's could screw that up slightly but not to worry but so yeah we're so now the edges look great but these look crappy so what we have to do is we have to actually go ahead and apply the bevel so you can see them already on force so I saved this a couple of times already so you want to save before you do the app apply and you by the way you want to do the UV unwrapping before you apply the bevel as well because it will screw up believe me I just did it so let's say let's save a box tutorial number 5 so we have the old and then what we're gonna do is we're going to apply the bevel and then we're gonna go into edit mode and we're gonna go select these faces and make them flat so we're gonna select that face I'll just show you how to do it on one and then you go into shading UV and you want to make just that face flat doesn't that look better looks better so we're gonna go to the rest of these outside faces and flatten them and you do get an edge as you go from the face of the bevel but that's actually kind of natural so I wouldn't I actually have no complaints about that and looking at an under render view it looks fantastic no little face facets and stuff at all all right so let's get some graphics on this thing and render this bad boy so right now we're going to go back to the uv/image editor and i'm going to go ahead go into edit mode and you can see that the UVs have incorporated the bevels so we're gonna go export the UVs a export UV layout PNG image one thing I don't want to do is any fill opacity so it's gonna step down to zero then I'm gonna open it illustrator this is Adobe Illustrator but you can use literally anything that creates images and since we have a square UV we'll have to create a square image let's do fifty centimeters by 50 centimeters trying to be more metric and then we're gonna place you can't see my menu but I'm going to file place we're gonna get the UVs here they're they're right here and we're gonna get them the right proportion but I hit in command you and you can see we basically have a die line here and so we're going to want to create a separate layer for that was it close to die we don't want to export it in fact we'll lock it off so I'm gonna go grab the blender for designers logo copy it paste it bring it in there bring some other words in there and just kind of create a nice little artwork and I'm actually not going to even bother with the colors because I'll show you why in a minute so I'm going to go ahead and export this remember to use artboards alright so let's go back to blender and go into render mode and what we're gonna do is we're going to go ahead and use principled shader here let's do a mix color mix RGB so we're just going to use the alpha as the factor and it will mix this in so we'll do dark except for there so you see blender box and then we're going to make the alpha be metallic so I'm gonna use another mix shader' to make the metallic bit glossy and the dark bit not glossy get the black yet do you know the kind of dark gray is gonna be not very rough and then this metallic bit I want to be super super smooth and then let's so let's get the camera in this spot so a line line camera to view let's do a square camera here way to wide angle so let's select the camera again and we're gonna go to instead of 35 let's do a 60 and then that means we're gonna have to back the camera off gzz like a lot let's go back to 3d view we'll add a plane at the bottom this will be our link where we get our shadows and stuff and then let's make that a shadow catcher that's first of all out of material to it make that solid white make that a shadow catcher alright and finally I'm going to go ahead and tweak the lighting just with the environment map so I'm gonna go back into D world nodes and just tweak that around I did a whole tutorial on that last week so show you how to kind of move the environment around to get those reflections to really to really look metallic so you're not just reflecting nothing and so we're basically done we'll just let that render of course we're never really done there's always something you can add so I just did another render and I'm gonna go put it up right here and you can actually see the flaps a little bit better and I actually was gonna put this in my app mock-up 3d and still will but it needs a little bit more work on the shading before it goes there but I think it's good for the render and I do want to advocate for only doing enough work you need for the shot or for the render that you need so I think for this render this is fine but I think when you see it from all the angles and changing yourself you're gonna have to update the shading a little but it does need some work there but but I hope what I have is useful at least for this and will show you kind of how to fold boxes how to get dye lines how to design in that way so hopefully that's useful and this also gives me enough enough of a peg to plug my app again mock-up 3d comm so take a look at it if you haven't already you can go into mock-up 3d comm or if you want to see the live demo go to mock up 3d comm slash demo and enjoy so I hope you guys found this useful hope you guys enjoy it leave a comment like subscribe and happy blendering thank you

Channel: Blender For Designers

Views: 135,057

Keywords: Box, Dieline, Die line, Fold, Packaging, Packaging Design, Design, Blender, 3D, Render

Id: Qkj1okN4ZqQ

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017