Blender Tutorial 12 - Box Modeling a Robot

although students this is going to be a tutorial about box modeling and where this is in conjunction with our robot character assignment that we have going in des 3600 right now so I'll try to walk you through the process of doing some box modeling there so first all first of all I'm just starting off with a blank well a default scene here with my default cube default camera placement default point light and of course it's I'm going to be doing some modeling here it's best for me to start off in an orthographic viewport so I tapped five on the number pad I'm going to go to my front view and try to get kind of setup here so one of our students has generously provided her model sheet for this assignment so I'm going to load up some reference images before I get too far with anything so tap in on the keyboard to open up my properties panel over here and then I'm going to put a checkbox down here where it says background images twirl that down and add an image click on open and to go to the location where my images are saved which is my 3d classes folder here and then I've got this JPEG that I'm going to be using we load it up and since this is the front view as you can see up here I'm going to line this view up with the front view of the model sheet so I tapped Z on the keyboard to get a wireframe view and I'm going to come down here where my background images position is controlled and I'm going to move it in X that's moving a little bit fast just kind of get this whole thing lined up here I'm going to move it in X and then I'm going to hold down shift to move in smaller increments them and I start getting close to the right spot that looks almost evenly divided I'd say that's probably a little too small so you can see the increments I'm moving in here 3.94 looks almost right a little too far to the left next increment is three point nine two so let's try three point nine three right between those mm-hmm maybe three point nine three five and to me that still looks like it's got a little too much of the drawing on the left side so maybe I'll go back to three point nine four maybe that was that was about right mm three point nine four five let's try that okay and I think I'm happy with that now I've got to remember I've I've moved this in Y you might notice that my y-value for the position of this image is minus two point six that's going to be important in a minute because I can see that the student who provided this artwork has already lined the front and side views of this image up vertically and I just moved this image vertically so I want to make sure that when I bring this same image into my side orthographic view port right now I'm in front when I bring it into the side view I want to make sure that it is still lined up in Y so I'm going to use that exact same y-value because I'm going to bring the same image in and it's already lined up the two views on this image so I don't need I shouldn't need to use a different value for this y-value here anyway the last thing I need to do for this front view here is to change it from an all views background image to just a front view background image that ought to do the trick okay so let's line up our side view right now we're in front orthographic I'm going to tap three on my number pad and go to my side view I'm going to collapse this first image here and add another image this one's just going to be for my right side since that's where I'm at right orthographic and I don't need to browse for my image again it's already loaded into blenders database so I can just click this little icon here and select in the image that I already have now you might notice that the artwork is well above my default cube here and remember that's because I already dialed in a y-value for this image in the previous in the previous view minus 2.6 is going to put that where I want it so I'm going to start off by typing minus 2.6 for this image again just to get things about where I want them now looking at this side view of this the drawing of this robot here this is well this robot is symmetrical from side to side it is not symmetrical from front to back so my placement here the placement of the robot is going to be a little bit arbitrary it's going to be just kind of where I think it ought to be so I'm going to kind of roughly Center it and that's about all I need to do so if I look at my front view now my side view those are lining up vertically correctly now we've also got a top view provided for us here so let's let's look at our top view and in our top view this area is the front and this area is the back I can tell that because from our front view that green axis which is the y-axis disappears I'm looking straight down it okay so front or from our top view here I need to know which side is the front and which side is the back so that I can point the image the correct way so let's collapse this latest image we added add another one again we don't need a browse we can just select from our database and I can see that this top view here is facing the wrong direction and it's probably it looks to me like in turn from side to side left to right like it's lined up with this front view so we can probably we might be able to reuse some values there well no we won't because we're flipping the image around so let's let's rotate this image let's change it from all views to just being a top view image and let's rotate that 180 degrees this is the part that we're shooting for to get lined up over here and I'm going to just start centering that using the same technique now this one's going to be a little bit more difficult to Center at least we have this nice tail point to kind of guide us in here I think I made this JPEG a little too high in terms of resolution have you exported it at 1200 dpi and so my system seems to be slowing down a little bit here it's spinning up some hard drives for whatever it wants to do with them there we go okay so I'm in just a little and I'm going to try yeah and see so - 3.96 it's too far to the left so let's go - 3.95 and see what that looks like yeah it looks spot-on to me okay now the other complication that we've got here is from a top view like we lined up our side view here fairly arbitrarily right but we need to have the front of the robot in side view line up with the front of the robot in top view because those need to be that's something that actually does need to line up so I'm going to actually take my cube here and I'm just going to move it right to just exactly the front of the head and that should give me a frame of reference for getting the route top view into position I should be able to place the front of the robots head right on [Music] that front of that cube there and then that should be in position now okay and I think we're good so we're ready to start modeling here now with box modeling it's it's kind of exactly what it sounds like we're just going to start with a box and we're going to manipulate that box until it becomes our model one advantage of modeling a robot is we don't necessarily need all these parts to flow into each other like they're all covered with one contiguous layer of skin or something like that robots are made out of separate pieces that makes them a little easier to model so I'm going to tab into edit mode on my cube here and I'm going to do a loop cut and slide to cut this cube in half we're going to do a mirror modifier so that we only have to model one side of this image control R of course is a shortcut for that I'm mouse over an axis or an edge sorry that is perpendicular to the cut that I want I click to perform the loop cut portion of the command and then it it transitions me into the slide portion which I don't want to do I want I want this cut to be exactly in the middle so I hit escape to opt out of that portion of the command and then I tap Z to go into a wireframe view tap B to do a box selection of one side of this cube and I delete those vertices there and then from here I can just add my mirror modifier over in this modifier stack over here you can see that it is mirroring along the x-axis so I once again have what looks like a whole cube thanks to my modifier so I'm gonna click clipping make sure just grab these edges and move them try to move them across that middle line in in X and I can see that they won't move which that's a good sign that means that they are joining together they're welded together with the other half they're not close they are exactly contiguous in joining so that's important ok so I've got my box in place and from here basically I can kind of start moving this initial box into position this is going to become the body of the robot I can tab into edit mode here and basically just kind of start scaling and moving and extruding rotating scaling and this is basically box modeling tap seed and do a little circle select there and I'm just kind of going to approximate this shape you know we're really not building anything terribly precise yet we just kind of want to get it looking about like it should move scale rotate extrude grab rotate scale just kind of keep going that way until you have about the shape that you should I can see that right here that that little arch of the back and the and the roundness of the belly isn't really happening so I'm going to do a loop cut there opt out of the slide portion and just scale that up to kind of fit a little more what I want that shape to look like and you might notice I'm doing this whole thing in wireframe whoops and keep moving like shift s cursor to Center keep moving my cursor by right-clicking on accident you might notice I'm doing this whole thing in wireframe mode that's to make sure that I'm selecting all the way through this shape I don't want to just be moving the this these outer vertices I want to move the vertex in the center as well so when those are lined up perfectly in a center or in a named viewport then I can as long as I'm in a wireframe view I can select all the way through them you know what this this is getting really slow here with this image it's just too it's too high resolution I'm really taking a performance hit so I'm going to actually open that image in Photoshop and I am going to oops wrong one I am going to shrink it down and replace it in blender so that I can get rid of that performance hit I'm taking how big is this thing anyway image size and it's 13,000 pixels by 10,000 you know that's way too big so let's I'm gonna take that down like 25% of its original size we really don't need it that big it's save quality doesn't even need to be all the way up to 12 okay let's quit Photoshop now if I come back in here and blender you'll see that hasn't really made a difference that's because I need to reload my images so let's hit that little reload button right there reload reload okay let's see if that made any difference that does seem to be performing better for us and just and it's still a little laggy actually just to be weird I'm going to open this image in the uv/image editor let's see and okay it is reading it smaller now so that's good just kind of want to make sure I'm looking at the resolution right here so that's a little better that should help so now I'll close my window continue on with my box modeling okay so I'll do a selection all the way through box select or a circle select either one of those will work for that let's just kind of keep on going with our little operation here the neck I think will go up inside of the head a little bit I'm not a hundred percent sure how that's going to work yet so I'm just kind of going to put this in here as a placeholder for now okay and you know you can see we've kind of got this shape it's a decent little shape but it's very very flat on the sides compared to let's look at our front view you can see that our student has provided a fairly round shape looking at this from the side we don't have loop here nessa that is necessary to describe this roundness anything kind of sticking out on the edges so I'm going to do a loop cut down the middle here escape out so I don't slide it around we're just gonna leave it in the middle and that is going to allow us to now select up select these outer edges here yeah yeah I know there's a faster way to do that but I was committed I guess okay and then I'm just going to G X move those things in the x-axis what and you know what I might I don't want that selected I might get rid of the selections on the edge of the tail there G X because you can see with the clipping modifier those are getting a little too close together back there so let's maybe leave the back end of the tail out of this G X okay and that's starting to look a little better if I look at that from the side basically I just kind of brought the edges in there and you know I can come in and I can deal with these tail pieces separately just sort of bring them in and you want the tail to come to sort of a nice point back here GX g x g x DX g x that's looking a little better I think it's still a little flat on top G X that's kind of well let's look at it from a top view actually we have one here and can see from a top view that's way too flat right I mean that's it's too thick on the outer edges we've just got to be really careful not to smash these ends together in such a way that they start clipping together you don't want that yeah this is what this is performing so much better now that I shrunk that image down okay now we're getting there this top view is pretty handy it's not really technically required in the model sheet but if you want to if you want to kind of calculate where the top you should be you can might be doing yourself a big favor okay so that is proportioned pretty close at least through the body and of things to the way it should be there we go okay so that's pretty good reasonably happy with that for a start you know of course the heads going to end up being a sphere let's tackle these legs first so I have a choice here I can either make the legs as a separate object I can I can tab into edit mode on the body and and start adding the legs on as part of the same object using a by adding a new primitive into the into the mesh there or you know I could I could actually make them as a separate object like I mentioned before and then add them to the same mesh later and I might take that approach actually let's let's do that so I mean object mode right now so if I add a new primitive it's going to be its own object before we go there let's name our object here that's always a good practice so instead of cube we're gonna call this robot body and now I'm going to click create and I'm going to create another cube because this is cube modeling right and I'm going to shrink this thing down this is not mirrored to remember because it's a new object here and I'm gonna bring this over and just gonna place it roughly where I want the leg then I'm going to go over to my modifier stack here and I'm going to add a mirror modifier and you can see that it is set to we're the x-axis but it's not really doing anything so let's undo that movement that I did first of all undo undo so this is centered along the x-axis here if I now if I add my modifier now the the reason that modifier didn't work before is that the origin of my object is the point of mirroring so if I move this object over here you can see the origin is still in the middle of the object and basically a cube that is mirroring either side of itself around its center just looks like two cubes occupying the exact same point in space so mirroring doesn't actually do anything useful there so I'm going to add a mirror modifier now and then I tab into edit mode because if I move this geometry in edit mode I'm not actually moving the origin of the object so if I move this out here now you can see that I've kind of split that out and I've got a cube on either side now that's because the mirror modifier is in fact working for me so I can I'm gonna move this in object mode just to kind of keep the origin in the center of the y-axis of the geometry here roughly and then tab back into edit mode and I'm just going to start doing the exact same thing I'm going to kind of roughly block in this shape whoops kind of deselect the other side first time kind of blocking the shape here extrude scale grab scale and I think I'll extrude it one more time scale I'm gonna hit shift X so that I don't I'm gonna scale this way down and I don't really want it to get super skinny in the x axis which is the axis I'm looking down right now and let's just describe the top of this thing extrude scale shift X again okay from a front view you can kind of see that's how the legs are looking they're a little on the thick side so let's I have part of it selected so let's hit control L to just select all that geometry scale that in X and it looks to me like I can probably scale these in X so just just to kind of accomplish that sort of rounded shape that our student has going into the leg shape back there so SX and X just kind of keep that scaling going back and forth and actually I'm not going to scale that this X and get this feeling that I'm really messing up my geometry here and yep I sure AM yes X kind of want the these ends to end up roughly the same size okay yes X I'm just gonna let the whole thing taper in I'll grab it in X now line it up there a little bit this right here doesn't look right to me let's see where that sits okay so that is hmm okay so this is an interesting design alright I'm gonna go with it for now I'll just we'll kind of see how this whole thing works out okay so it's time to make the lower leg now as I mentioned in class what seems to be drawn here would be what's called a clevis in machining terms so let's do a loop cut here and I want this clevis to be straight and you can see it's kind of got a taper to it so I'm going to hit escape I don't want to slide these things I want them to be perfectly centered and then I'm going to select one loop at a time here sx0 to flatten them out all right scaling X by 0 because scaling is a multiplicative operation so then I look around and just kind of make sure that whole thing worked with the with the layout here and it did so now I can delete these faces right here delete those faces okay and then I can now get my edge select mode going and I can fill these faces in here that I have now left empty into an infinitely thin walled open space leg part that doesn't really work in real life so let's fill that there we go okay and seems like everybody in class really wanted to see how you would punch a hole in this whole apparatus here so I'm going to tap I to do an inset kind of shrink these things down here and then go to my side view and I'm going to start moving all this stuff around here I see looks like this needs to be a little bit larger in this particular axis here okay and I've got the bottom of this shape shaped all wrong now and for now I'm just going to leave that alone I can also see that these vertices aren't quite lining up I want them to line up perfectly so basically what I don't want to do i if I do a scale operation by zero I don't want them scaling in the x-axis and all smashing together and acting like one vertex that's what that would look like so basically from this perspective I can scale these shift X zero and then from the side perspective I can see they didn't move in X but they moved in X or in y&z in everywhere the way they needed to be to be perfectly lined up so s up come on s shift X 0 s shift X 0 ok and now I can kind of move these around and you know that's probably a detail that might not be noticed later on that's also one of those things that I might be really glad I did it later on so it it's easiest to get things right while I'm working with a low polygon model because every time I add a detail or a feature to this robot it becomes a higher polygon mesh and that makes it more difficult to manipulate and work with and change and so it really like I you know it pays not to get in too much of a hurry to see your creation finished you know it pays to take your time and just kind of get every part of it put together well put together well and as correctly as you can I'm just kind of going to surround this circle here and I don't really need to worry about the fact that I'm cutting a cubic hole into this into this robot because I'm going to be using a subdivision surface modifier later phases and that hole will become round and I'll have to have to revisit it at that time so I'm gonna select an entire loop here by holding down option and clicking option shift click selects the next loop and then ctrl e brings up my edge menu I can just say hey let's bridge those edge loops do the same thing on the other side option click option shift click control e Bridge edge loops okay now I've got contiguous holes all the way through I also have pretty much the shape that I need to describe the top of the lower leg the part that fits into this clevis so you know as long as we're here option shift click weapon sorry option shift click we're gonna select all the faces that we need to actually become part of the upper leg that's pretty simple to do so I'm just going to duplicate these shift D that loads my cursor with them I'm going to hit escape so right now I actually have two sets of these faces occupying the exact same spot and that's a bit of a nightmare so I'm going to GZ minus one move the whole thing down by minus one blender units um that's actually a little farther than I intended so let's go G well let's undo that GZ minus 0.1 now GZ minus 0.25 there we go so a quarter of a blender unit down and because I typed in an increment that I know I can move it back perfectly with ease after I finish kind of modeling this thing so you can see the shape that this came out as let's close off some of our ends here option-click and then F just to put a face there option-click and tap F to put a face in and we can do the same thing here what not F ctrl e bring up your edge menu and bridge those edge loops okay so you might notice how this is looking kind of dark and and negative II it's not really shading properly that's because basically I took the inside of the mash up here and made it the outside of the mesh down here so the normals are all pointing in the wrong direction let's select this whole thing control L fix that while we're thinking about it let's go over to shading /u v's and recalculate our normals that's this guy right here okay and you can see that fixed it and that'll save us from the rendering problems that would have been introduced with that later okay so from here I can now actually just take this in G Z 0.25 put it right back into place and I can select one of my faces here go to a side view and just kind of I can start extruding out the rest of the lower leg here so let's scale Z by 0 let's flatten that whole thing out and just kind of try to get the right shape coming out of here so scale shift X I don't want this getting wider because it's as wide as it can possibly be coming out of this clevis go and that's probably a good start for our leg extrude s shift X I'm going to avoid scaling and exit all right now because I'm going to deal with the X dimensions of this leg when I get to the front view I'm just not even gonna deal with it right now e to extrude rotate grab scale shift X let's just get this right in one axis first e to extrude rotate grab s shift X scale and not the x axis e to extrude grab it rotate it now I'm going to flatten it perfectly by sz0 scale shift X don't want this scaling in X okay grab it in Y there we go alright so now from a front view you can see that this whole thing is quite off and I think I'm gonna have to take a little bit of artistic license here and I'm just going to have to say okay let's you know let's grab this whole side here and I'm going to grab it in X see what that's doing that is mmm it's probably messing up our clevis a little so let's deselect this top got it in X there we go okay so from I'm gonna grab my edges here and just sort of grab them in the x-axis and I'm going to keep working up with these edges to kind of describe the outer shape of this thing this leg grabbing X I'll grab the exact same edges on the inside and do the exact same thing with them GX GX okay so that's roughly the shape of our feet you can see that mechanically those would work okay that clevis is not going to start like rubbing or clipping through the thigh basically the lower leg we don't want it to don't want it to touch there so I'm feeling pretty good about that that's probably fine and let's build ahead for this robot here so from this point I'm going to create a UV sphere just use kind of the default oops I'm gonna undo that I'm still in edit mode on the legs let's tap out let's name this object cube will call this robot legs and now that we're in object mode we'll create a new object out of a UV sphere and get it into the right position and scale it it's probably getting you pretty close okay that's looking reasonably good now we've got this mouth is going to be a fun little thing to deal with but let's let's start with the eyes so you can see that between the front view the eyes look perfectly round and on the side view they're they're kind of ellipses that are flattened in one direction and they're you know across the x axis of the ellipse which you know of course in this view is our y-axis but anyway to me that's that shows perspective that says basically that this thing is facing forward but not completely forward so again a little bit of artistic license here we're probably going to have to take as far as like how do we place this these eyes look like they're going to best be described by a cylinder so I'm going to create a cylinder shape I don't need this many vertices probably because this cylinder is going to be fairly small so I'm gonna cut that in half let's go to 16 vertices I never use in guns so I'm gonna change the fill type to a triangle fan and the depth doesn't need to be nearly that deep let's take that down quite a bit and of course the radius can also be much smaller and let's tell this to align to view so that we can actually kind of compare it to what it should end up looking like it's inside so I can't really see it you know hold down shift while I adjust this value so that I get a little bit of a smaller eyeball there okay now before I move this off of the off of Center from the x axis I'm going to add a mirror modifier and tab into edit mode and then I'll start to move it and that allows me to of course mirror my mash across the x-axis and kind of start to describe this thing a little better so let's see what that looks like from a side view not very well placed so let's grab that in the y-axis and kind of start to move it forward a little let's see how that comes out you know so what we've got here is a bit of an impossible shape the eyes cannot be in this position from a front view and also in this position on a side view which is interesting so we've got to make an artistic decision here and this is this is the kind of thing that you can typically run into very easily when you draw a shape first you know you're not necessarily solving all of your problems in 3d although you are solving a number of them so I'm gonna say let's let's see what this looks like if we just move the eyes forward let's grab these in the y-axis until they start to poke out a little bit yeah a little more Gy let's get them all the way out just kind of see how that looks from a side view and that might be okay yeah let's roll with it for now if we decide we don't like it later we can always come back and try something else so I'm gonna give these eyes just a little bit of detail since this is a robot I'm going to do a loop cut and slide and I'm actually going to smash this all the way into the next loop there and I have confidence that that's not going to negatively affect me because I can always select this whole thing here all of the faces on top and I can scale that down and now the loop cut that I just did is now forming this outermost edge and it's right where the old edge of the of the cylinder used to be but that gives me the freedom to kind of scale things inward here and then extrude back a little bit I can't go very far can i because i ran to start running into that sphere but that gives us a little bit more of a mechanical kind of robot ii this is a lens look to this robot okay so that's good let's name this object robot dot eyes and now let's start getting into some of the details of kind of how to refine this we're really starting to push this in terms of time so I'm gonna select the body and I'm gonna add a subdivision surface modifier right here there we go and I'm going to go to tools and smooth shade it tab into edit mode and the thing I'm also going to do is over here this little button on the subsurf modifier I'm going to apply the edit cage to my model just edit cage to modify result so now you can see that it's actually showing my vertices and everything where they're falling according to what the subsurf modifier is doing and that allows me to come in here and start much more precisely matching the artwork with my subsurf smooth results now I can do this in wireframe mode just to kind of make selection a little more obvious and maybe a little easier there we go okay so from a front view you can see this whole thing actually needs to be scaled out I have to be really careful about scaling in X because this is mirrored and you can see that everything on the x axis on the inside there starts kind of going into the going into the clipping zone and that's not what I want at all so I've got to be a little bit careful there so let's just kind of grab the rib cage here and move it out in the x-axis and then it's starting to look promising like maybe we're getting close to the shape that we should have there okay so I'm gonna say that looks pretty good let's look at it from a top view mm-hmm could probably widen the tail out just a little bit but it doesn't look too bad I mean we really are getting pretty close to the model or to the original drawing here okay so that looks pretty good now I'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier to the legs do the same thing subdivision surface will smooth shade it and we're going to apply our justice dog adjust our edit cage to the modifier result this one we're going to have to we're gonna have to look at things in wireframe mode so that we can actually even still see the drawing the model sheet you can see that this subdivision surface modifier it has a tendency to kind of shrink things back a little bit which makes sense you know once you understand what it's doing make sense that everything would kind of shrink okay so this could be a little tricky here let's see we need to do some subdivisions or some loop cuts here to sharpen these edges so control our control are you just kind of slide those things as far as they can go to one side or the other to really sharpen the edges oh whoops I missed ctrl Z ctrl R there we go let's get this thing shaped right we need to do the same thing inside the clevis on both sides of both holes that's not always easy to visualize in your head but it's not too bad once you just kind of realize what the loop cuts are doing for you so let's cuts up here cuts up here okay so that's a lot sharper looking a little more robotic looking kind of a futuristic plasticky robot I guess I'm gonna select just the well everything except the shins here now so ctrl I inverts my selection if I select the shins or the the lower leg and then hit control I is selects the upper thigh and I'm gonna tap H to hide that temporarily and get it out of my way so I can now perform the same operations on these lower leg parts a little more easily just a couple of loop cuts for each part here so that each end becomes a lot more solid looking okay you can see that that's actually fitting together pretty well and sharpen to the edges of the shins but actually I think I kind of like it that way it definitely definitely increases the robotic feel of this to me you know the thighs here are penetrating the body which is another area that we've kind of got a deal with so let's see see what we can figure out let's do a loop cut here and you can see that this kind of needs some distance to sort of soften that arch on the back we don't want this thing to look like it has a goose egg on its back or something like that okay and I'm what I'm wondering is if I can't take these faces right here and kind of extrude them in a way that will that will make sense to sort of just have them kind of dodge around the thighs there you know the way it was sort of a cutout like you would do in a toy or something like that since this is supposed to be a robot I think that might work this vertex out of our way a little bit okay so now if I were to select these faces here these four faces and then extrude them inward just a little sx0 let's just scale that in X by a factor of zero g x grab it an X and just kind of see if we can't move that out of our own way just a little bit I guess a we've got to take some artistic license here because once you take you know I mean you can draw things on two-dimensional paper that just simply won't work in 3d once you start actually modeling them in 3d some of the some of the problems start to become a little more apparent let's see if we can't get this closer to our leg I want it to look like this things just missing a big chunk of itself like it's a shark bite victim or something like that so I'm basically just kind of adjusting our mesh here - really just barely kind of go around that leg and I I'll probably have to come back later because now that I'm thinking about this if this leg starts turning it's going to run into you know the portions of the body that it's that it's near but for now let's say that looks okay and oh I've still got to if I tap into edit mode on the legs I've still got the upper thighs hidden so that's option H unhides them and I can now kind of take the insides of this by portion I can bring them back in here again I'm taking some artistic license with this you mean or with this robot but I think it kind of has to be done here okay so I'm going to sharpen up the edges of this cavity here a little bit as well with just another loop cut I can see I've introduced a problem of some sort back here okay that's actually looking okay all right and we have been going for almost an hour so I'm going to stop this tutorial now and we'll continue this on in a later session but hopefully hopefully this gives you a good idea of sort of how to get started with this kind of a project so I'm going to save my work and then we'll start a new tutorial later thank you good luck [Applause]

Channel: Alex Chamberlain

Views: 708

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Id: 6Vg01yGwjEs

Length: 59min 0sec (3540 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018