Dimensionally Accurate Modeling in Blender

hey what's up guys trip here hey I got this file from a Sketchup user and as you may have heard Sketchup is now switching over to a full subscription model and because of that a lot of people are looking at moving away and of course blender is the obvious option for many so he asked if I could show him how to build something simple like this inside a blender so I thought I'd take a shot at it so here we go so here we are we're in actually blender 2.90 which is the alpha version so it's a it's not one of the stable releases but I do want to try and use it because it does have the push pull feature that the blender people are used to and this is the default setting so I'm going to first just go right into preferences and do some things that I like to do navigation I want to orbit around the selection and I want to invert or I wanted to zoom to the mouse position those are kind of critical for me because of the fact that it works pretty much like Sketchup does and then I'm gonna go into my system and I'm gonna set it up I'm gonna use my CUDA rendering and I'm not gonna really mess with a whole lot you could just add ons and other things that we're gonna mess with a little bit later but for the most part we're gonna just use it really straightforward just like this and then once we have this we're in this autosave Preferences mode so that'll save us I'm gonna turn that off so I can actually manually save I'm kind of used to that okay so let's close that and here we are at this cube and the first thing we do is I'm gonna add another window now notice that when I move my cursor over here and it turns to a crosshair I can then take and drag out a window and if I want to collapse it I can right click on here and say join areas and just say if I want to move this one to this one or this one or this one so that's how that works so I'm gonna drag out another window in this particular window we can set this viewport to be any kind of viewport I'm gonna use an image editor okay let's go ahead and open up an image and in my case the image is gonna be in Dropbox which is right here and I can select Dropbox and I can go in here and say add bookmark and that's the e if I double click here I can add the Dropbox bookmark and that'll be here move this one out in here I have this folder that I like to use which is blender stuff and I'm going to add that as a bookmark and in their blender files that is a bookmark and of course I can scroll all the way down to schedule files and here's the image so I'll use my mouse wheel to scroll around here and and then I'll press in the middle it's just pretty much exactly the same as Sketchup so if you want to control the scroll a little better you can hold the control key the left control key and you can move in and out and that works well so I want to try and use as many menus as I can so I don't use keys but what I'm doing here is I'm just again just like Sketchup using the middle mouse button to rotate shift mouse button to pan and then the scroll key is zoom in and out and that's really it it's pretty straightforward so up here we have a wireframe rendering we have solid which is what we're going to work in we have kind of this is a rendered image rendering they call a material preview our viewport shading material preview and then this is the actual rendering that uses the the lighting that you've set up in your collection so I'm going to go ahead and start here and this is I'm going to pull this little thing out this is the call the end penalty and toggles it back and forth or you can just drag it out there and if we look at this we're gonna see that it's about 48 inches tall and so if I look at my my coordinate system here you'll see that Z goes up right so Z is the tall so I'm going to go into dimensions and now I'm set to meters so I need to fix that I'm gonna go over here to the fifth one down here so one two three four five this one's called the scene properties in units I'm going to set the units to be imperial and the length to be inches okay so now well if I've done that I go in here and say okay 48 inches tall I'll type in here 48 and now we're 48 inches tall and then the total width we don't really have so let's say we have 15 and 3 on each side so let's say it's 21 on this Y dimension so actually let's just go ahead and and if I go to the front view here's the right orthographic let's go to the back front there we go so here's the front view so let's make sure that we're working in the right view so there the front view we're going to make this 15 plus 3 plus 3 which will be 21 and so that's in the x-direction this I'll go 21 inches and then in the side view which we can just hit this right here we know that this is probably I'm going to say it's about an inch and a half so that'll be Y 1.5 and this is now are kind of the basic shape of the whole object and with that set one thing that I'm going to show you really quick if I tab into here and I select an edge this is the vertex mode edge mode and the face mode if I select an edge and I go over to the bevel command and start beveling it you see it doesn't actually bevel at a 45 like you would think it would I'm gonna undo that come back over here and what I'm gonna do is show you why that is so I'll tab back out of this and I'm gonna talk about tabbing in and out for a second but I need to reset the scale to 1 the scale is off and that's that scale is gonna affect everything we do so I go to object and say apply scale now we're at 1 nothing really moved but now we're pretty good now think about this as a group in Sketchup so and in order to get inside the group and look at it you use the tab key now you can actually edit it and then when you're out of it then you've got this object and it shows up over here so I'm gonna call this mate okay so now that's been done I'll tab and I'll get into this and I'll hit a the a selects everything and I'll hit double a and it D selects everything so that's something to be aware of so let's look at some of the first things that we've got let's look at this this board that doesn't really give us any dimensions but let's just say we're gonna go down maybe maybe an inch inch here so how do we do that well in Sketchup we would draw a maybe a some kind of tape measure line or something like that but in in blender we use loop cuts and loop cuts are important and one thing to think about is you're not trying to conserve polygons in blender unlike Sketchup your your you know we can come back later and we can manage all that so don't worry about creating too many loop cuts if you need them so the first thing I'm going to do actually I think the first thing I'll do is I'll cut a loop cut that's going to give me this three inches on the side here so I'll go over here to my loop cut and I'll click on it and as you can see as I roll over an edge it's going to tell me where my loop cut is now once I've done it I can click and drag I'm gonna drag it all the way to the end and we're there now I'm gonna go back to the Select box I'd like to move it but I don't see any widgets the reason for that is that we don't have widgets being displayed so with a select box up here let's go in here and let's say I want to move and I want this scale widget rotate sometimes gets in a way so we'll leave that alone now as I want to drag this over this loop cut over I want to go three inches and once I've let go I could type in three right here and I'm gonna be good now I do know that this is vertically symmetrical so I'm not going to do the other one I'll just do one half and then we'll just mirror it over there using the symmetrize feature that tell you in just a second so let's assume that there's another loop cut that we want to create and that that one will be here and I'll move it all the way up here and then I'll come back and I want to move it down and let's say it's going to be down maybe an inch and a half so it's minus 1.5 and there we have that okay now then on the other side let's just take another loop cut on the bottom here we have it move it all the way down and come back and we'll move it up and we'll say that's 1.5 also okay so that's pretty good now now I'm going to actually push pull these all the way down to that spot the way I'll do that is I'll use the extrude region if I come down here this one is says extrude dissolvent intersects with the one I want to use right and actually let's first select our face so we'll go over here and we'll choose the three button and I'll select this face right here and then I'm gonna go into my snapping mode and look up here I'll make sure on the snap and go vertex and then I'll go down here and I can say extrude dissolve and just pull this down and just blow it out about here and then we said that's minus 1.5 hey yeah that's right there now it turns out I really didn't need to draw that loop cut in there as you can tell but it's probably good good experience I'll come back in here and I will select this face and I'll do the same I'll go up like this and I'll come in here and say minus 1.5 so that's pretty cool now what I want to do is I'm going to want to draw another loop cut here and I'm not sure how long that is either so let's go ahead and I'm gonna use my shortcut key for loop cuts which is ctrl R and I'll drag that up all the way to here and then I will move it down let's move it down maybe something like this which might be about minus 4 there we go something like that so that looks pretty good this one looks like it's going to be about two it's just supposed to control R again let's drag it down here and then once we get it down here a left click to set it then we'll move it up again and let's make this maybe two inches I'll just make it two okay so we're doing pretty good still now I'm gonna go back into my face mode I'm going to select this face I'll go into my extrude and I'm going to push it all the way through oops I'll push it to here and then I will just say X which is delete and I'll delete the faces and so now we're very good to go now notice that when we started our cube was centered around the X Y axis and the z axis is so if I select everything and I look up here at my coordinate system I'll notice that I want to mirror this stuff on the x axis so I'm gonna go under mesh and say symmetrize and butt and symmetrize will do it from minus X to positive x which is that this arrow is always going to be pointing in the positive direction so that's exactly the way we want it so now we're done so that's how easy that was to create this particular shape so the next thing we want to do is we want to create this next shape and this is the arch shape and to do that what I'll do is I'll go to the front view which I'll use a numpad one to giving my front view and then I'll hit the 9 key which takes me to the back you so 9 if you're at the top view 7 is your top and 9 is the bottom 3 is the right notice over here is the right this is the numpad and 9 is the left or so so I'm going to go to the front and then I'll go to the back and you can see that's the back so what I want to do now is I'm going to select edges and I must like this and this and this and this and this and this and so we have all these edges selected and then with them selected I'm gonna say separate by selection so now we're going to look over here we have a new object called main but tab out of this I'm gonna call this new object I'm going to call this the arch okay and with that art selected we noticed that we know that this is going to be 40 3.5 high so with it selected I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna change the Z number to 43.5 and hit returned and now that I have that done I'm gonna want to rest it right on the bottom here so I'm going to move this up you know snap in place right there actually looks like I don't have is probably not the right height since I don't have those dimensions I'm gonna make this maybe 40 inches yeah let's do that again drag it down hold the control key down and we'll snap to the nearest vertex on that point so now we have that done let's go back to the front view if I want to I can go in this and show the x-ray mode the x-ray mode allowed me to see through it and alt Z also gives the x-ray mode so I'm gonna use the alt Z but you can do it up there as well now this is done what I'll do is I'm going to select over here my arch and I'm gonna move it so that goes through just a little bit so it's on the other side I think that's kind of what's going on I can't really tell but I'm going to assume it's going to go through and let's move it exactly two inches okay and with that done then I'm going to tab into it and select everything and I can radius it I can create my radiuses now or I can create them after I extrude it it doesn't really matter let's do it after I extrude it I'll show you how that works so first I'll just go into my extrude tool and I will say extrude region and I pull this through something like this again I don't know how long it is so let's make it a minus six oh I know we did nice thing about plenty as we can back up a lot so let's go back what I did is when I hit this extrude button let's select all these II and when I extrude it I usually use my mouse right and if I look at this inside of you I'm sorry if I hold the Alt key down I can very quickly switch from top view to side view as I drag I can just it'll snap the place but you can see we're gonna we're extruding it at the wrong direction now oops do so let's select them all let's go to our extrude again and this time because we don't have a surface we don't know where we want to scream so I know I want to extrude along the Y so I can say E and let's make sure that we're this would go along the Y there we go okay here and then we'll just say this is more than six so I'm used to actually using the keyboard command is to identify that so once we have that done we'll go back into our tab out we need to reset the scale and I do that with control a also you can do it with control a as well and then tie back in and now we'll bevel them in and with this we know that we want to go seven and a half so offset seven point five and then let's see we have one two three four five six so I have six segments one two three four five six seven so I need to make this something like this two three four five six okay that works pretty good let's just leave it like that so six so now that we know that we want multiples of three so we could make this let's make it 15 here we go go back here and with these still selected I'm going to move them up a little bit so there let's do actually I can't select them all like that right now because when we beveled it we have vertices in the same place here so I'm a tab into this hit the one key select all these vertices select everything and go back into my mesh and say cleanup merge by distance and notice down here we root for vertices from this mesh sum of a tab so now I'm going to go into Z which is my wireframe mode and I'm going to select only these and I want to move them up a little bit something like that some of them up maybe two inches there we go so it looks a little bit more like what we have here and then that's the wireframe will go back into this view here and we'll cut that out here and not too distant future not to worry so once we have this done the next thing you do is we need to make it inset a little bit so I'll hit free which is going to be plain mode select one of these or just select all of them and then we go back to extrude and we're going to extrude along the normals this time and now I'll pull this in and you'll see that we've got something kind of weird going on and because it's because the normal faces are doing something different so let's undo that and undo it twice because the first extrude might have might have actually created duplicate polygons so now I know that we don't have any but let's take a look at what's going on here so if I go up into here and I say I think it's in this one I want to show my face orientation now notice when I do that you'll see that it doesn't really match this is the face of some of our inside somewhere out so what I can do is I can select them all and just go to the mesh and go to normals and say recalculate outside shift in and now we're all good and now I can come back over here and turn face orientation off now if it seems like a lot of work you can always right-click on here and just say add to quick favorites so now if I have cute I just hit face hair rotation turn it on and off I can do the same for symmetrize and all these other things so we'll talk about that as we move forward okay so let's select all and then I'm going to basically pull them in and notice that we have this little hump in here and that's because we don't have offset even and let's make it point two-five like a quarter of an inch and I think that looks pretty good so next we're going to add this other piece in here I'm gonna tab into here and I will go in and again I'm going to use my loop cut and I will drag it all the way to the edge and come back here and then I'll move it let's move it in maybe what two inches something like that's where I'll start something like that so with that loop cut I am going to do the same thing we did earlier it's a mesh separate selection so now I have this new selection and this is I'm gonna call this stain glassed and while I'm here I'm gonna go ahead and say file save as and I go blend files versus ketchup five I'm gonna call this part two okay so now we have stained glass and I tab out of this mode I'm into the stained glass mode now i select my stained glass object i'll tab to be in the stained glass mode and i'll hit a and what I want to do is I want to inset this so before I do anything let's hit F and F creates a face so it created a face there and with that face selected if I go into the inset faces I can now pull it in as much as I want so I'm gonna pull it in let's say we go in two inches to something like that okay and then with it still select I was at X delete faces so that deletes that face now I want to work just on this so I'm with this in edit mode I will go under view and I'm gonna say local view which is taco local views numpad forward slashes so now I'm just working with this and if I hit a numpad forward slash again I come back out come back in so this is me this will make things easy and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use something that's very much like the tool right so it's called the knife tool and and it's very easy to use you just hit the K I think it might be up here I don't know exactly where it is I never use it because I always use the K tool but I'm not sure if a knife tools up here or not anyway I just tip type typing K and I'll snap to this vertex and then as I draw I can start clicking and drawing but what I really want to do is I want to constrain it so I hit the seed and I go here now I'm here I can hit efore end and all of these all these are down here by the way just so you see all those little the see is on ZZZ cut through everything so if I have a bunch of layers I can just cut through the first layer I see I can cut through everything I'm everything behind it as well so I'm gonna go back in and draw here see again and hit return and now you'll see that we have those done and then once I've got that done I'm gonna go back into my I'm gonna select this edge and remember the X key deletes things but it does a lot of different things you can delete the edges if I delete the edge that's gonna give it's not going to work very well but what I can do is I say tags X does dissolve the edge so I dissolve the edge but that doesn't work either X looted it's off that'll get it so that's what I want now what I'm gonna do next is I want to actually subdivide this area in closest squares as possible so I'm gonna use my loupe tool again and once I get it set I'm going to start rolling my mouse and as I roll my mouse I'm seeing more and more on the bottom left the number of cuts so let's do something like actually just lets go in there front view let's do it this way so we can see a little better control our and roll so we can see something like that looks about right and I can we look that just right click on to make sure it stays in the middle so that's that's good good and with this set like this what I want to do is mirror this to the other side so I'll select all and I'm gonna go to mesh and I'm unavailable to symmetrize but this time I'm going to add two quick favorites so now I could always just hit Q symmetrize and this time I want to go from positive x to negative x because we're in the positive sides were going there so now you see we've got that nicely done and I'm gonna take this and X and want to dissolve that and ctrl R and I can do the same thing maybe about like that that looks pretty good and then I'll fix these here in a second but before I do that what I'll do is let's go ahead and create some materials so I'll come over here to my material and I'm going to rename this one just the regular white because that's what it is I'll go to the rendered view right here I'll go to the polygons view take this and ctrl shift and as I do that I'm just going to keep selecting all those polygons and once I have them selected I'll go over here and say check or select and so this is going to select every other one and so those are going to be we're gonna make those red so I'll go here and say new and I would call this one red now come to the base color and I'll choose that red color and with that being said I will just assign the selected to that red and there we have it okay and then I'm gonna select the inverts of those and I make a blue new blue color here and assign the blue so now we have that now I just need to go in here and I'm going to go one two three two I'm holding the shift key down while you select skip three one two three okay and I think yeah it's just leave it like that so with those selected I want those to be red and assign them and we'll just leave it like that so tap out of it and that's what we'll have for this and then we'll go to the numpad ford slash able to get to everything now the last thing that we need to do is we're going to need to extrude this so once we have it selected I could tap into it select everything go over to my house hit E for extrude if I just hit E it's going to extrude around the normal so I'm hitting the extruder on the normal let's go ahead and just type in - point 1 2 5 minus 0.25 let's do that ok so now we have that pretty much set up so next what we're going to want to do is cut through this object here I want to cut I want to cut that board so that it will show this line across here when we do our rendering I can leave it like this if I want to but if I really want to cut through it and I need to get rid of this anyway so let's talk about how we're going to do that so first I'm going to take this object which is an arch and I'm going to go under object and I'm gonna say duplicate object and now moves it around if I right click it's going to leave it in place and so this is I'm gonna call this arch cutter and then I'm going to go ahead and use the local mode and go in here and now I'll tap into this and I will select all of these faces inside on the inside and the way I'll do that is in face mode I'll hold the alt and the shift key now get all of them so you see I have all of them selected and now I'm going to select more or less more so now I got those faces on the edges also selected and then I'm going to set X and I'm gonna leave the faces so now I have only this okay so next what I want to do is I'm gonna go into the vert vertice mode and I'm going to look at this from the front let's go back here look at it from the front let's see what we need to keep so we want to pretty much get rid of these and these shift key dragging a box X vertices okay and then we'll go back into this mode and UPS didn't get them all so thanks first he's okay so now now what I want to do is gonna make this a solid that's easy just hit a one two and hit f4 face it will go the other side one two it hit f4 face and then select all and then hit f4 face and now we have this completely solid so we'll come back in here and we'll see that goes through there actually what I'll do is I'll just use a modifier modifiers make this much easier so I'll select my object I want to cut from and I'm gonna go over here to modifiers and just add a boolean modifier and it's gonna be different and it says what do I want to use and I'll use this one this object that we're up so what I want to use only use the arch cutter here it is okay and then with the arch cutter now we can just say that's modifier is done I can hide the arch cutter and we'll see that we did cut through nicely but what I want to do here is I'm going to apply this and now the modifier has been done has been created for us we'll apply it and now that it's applied we can go into here local mode and we'll see that indeed this is all set up exactly as we would like it now I'm gonna go back into arch cutter turn it on out of local mode out of local mode there and it's it's there and I'm gonna set X and delete it I don't need it anymore okay so now we're in pretty good shape all we need to do now is fix the lighting on this notice how how stepped it is so I'm going to take my object and or right-click on say shade smooth now this creates all kinds of weird artifacts and I always need to go over here and save normals Auto smooth and 30 is gonna be good same thing with this right Clint shade smooth Auto smooth and same with this right shade smooth Auto smooth okay so now we're actually pretty good shape and all we need to do from here on out is just do a final rendering so let's go ahead and save as and so here's where we're going to use one of our plugins and I'm gonna preferences if you install on an add-on hit install and wherever you stored the zip file for the sketch style plug-in or whatever plug-in that's where you install you don't ever have to unzip a plug-in you just find it and then install it so I go to bugger stuff and I go to sketch style in my case I have this right here i would just install this but you know what it turns out an add-on so I know that I already have sketch style setup I just need to turn it on here it is just turned on okay now we're in good shape so now with this set I will go to my sketch style and I'm gonna hit the sketch button and I am gonna scroll down and use Eevee I want to use Eevee for this and I want to use the rendering mode let's go back to something like this let's first set up our camera so if our camera set what we'll do is I always kind of get where I want and I'll hit ctrl alt & num pad zero and there's my camera region and I'll scroll up to where it is needs to be the right size and then I'll come over here and let's make this 1080 so let's make it square and then interview I'll say camera camera to view that's new so you know it will click on camera to view and I always actually right click on this and say add to quick favorites so okay so we'll get it kind of a nice view here that we like let's see what we have here okay or something like that and once we have this set up I can lock it down and we'll go back to sketch style and I'm gonna go in here and go to Eevee mode and you'll see that this is really loud so let's go into my let's go in here and let's turn on ambient occlusion there we go so if we turn in avid inclusion in the eating mode we're gonna see this and now that we have that done I might want to jump the brightness up a little bit but let's just leave it alone for now and we'll hit the render button and there we have it okay now I'm back in my original scene and I want to do another sketch table rendering but this time I want to keep the colors and so I've got a separate object for the stained glass and this object these two objects are set up the way that we want them with the exception that we need to go back into here and just mark those edges and I'll show you a really quick cool tool trick is it you can just come in here and select all of these which are the inside elements and with them selected what we want to do is notice that we have all these these horizontal lines I'll go under select and I'll say select loops select boundary loop so now I just got the outside of that and once I have that done I can say edge mark freestyle edge and so that works really well back out we'll go into our sketch view and again I'm gonna go back over here and I'm doing this again because I'm opening it up from an older file and tab will go into my view and camera to view and I'll just get a position that I think it's going to work for us lock that down go back to sketch style and since we're gonna be an Eevee let's turn it on turn on our ambient occlusion and what I'm going to do is select this inside one just the inside one and I'm gonna hit the materials button and so it's going to show the materials for that I'll leave the rest of them all white and then I'm gonna hit f12 you see that it renders quite nicely that way I can actually get the colors that I want inside here if I want to actually draw the lines for those materials I can do that too by going in there and marking the edges for those as well let's do that real quick let's go into local mode here and notice if I held the Z key down I've got rendered solid material preview and wireframe so I'm gonna go into solid mode here or I'm sorry material view mode here and then I'll tab into this and now I just want to select only the lines with the blue so I'll go over into my materials and I'll select blue and I'll say select and now that I have those I'll do the same trick we did before select loops slip boundary loop and now those are selected and we just go to edge and we say mark freestyle edge and then if you tab out of that you can add a local mode let's go ahead and punch the Alpha up on all these so that there and then we'll and then we'll actually turn the extend lines down a little bit specular only to here and hit f12 to render and there you have it so I hope this was helpful and I hope that it gives some people hope in the Sketchup community in terms of what can be done in blender thanks for watching I'll see you online

Channel: Chipp Walters

Views: 36,977

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Id: QJ4onJ-IhlU

Length: 37min 52sec (2272 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020