Installing And Using Construction Lines For Blender

hi everyone in this video we're going to be looking at how to use the construction lines add-on for blender and we're going to be working on a real project which i think is a great way to look at the tools in action and give some context as to how they work in conjunction with blender's native tools now if you don't have construction lines already i'll put links in the description below to blender market and gum road there's a small fee to support development but once you've paid once that's it you get all the upgrades for free now i'm not going to assume anything but a basic working knowledge of blender there are chapter marks in the video so if you do know blender well and you know how to install add-ons etc you can skip through those so the first thing i'm going to do is show you how to install the construction lines add-on so we fire up blender and we go to edit preferences and in the left hand section here we select add-ons and click the install button then if you navigate to where you've downloaded construction lines to you should find your construction line zip file now the only things that might be an issue here is if the zip file is named something other than what you're seeing here so we have construction lines underscore and then the version number if it's anything other than this if it's just construction lines or some other name then it may be that blender market or gun road have wrapped it in their own zip file so that will need to be extracted this has happened in the past not seen it for a while but it's worth keeping an eye out for that now blender add-ons are installed from the zip file so there's absolutely no reason to extract the files within just install the zip file select that and we press install add-on you'll notice that i've got two construction lines here this is a development sheet machine so don't worry about that and then if we just select enable the add-on here you'll notice that the construction lines icon is now in the tool menu if i drag this window out you can see that these are also where you find the preferences for construction lines as well and you have things like the default tool that will start up as you start in construction lines you've got keyboard shortcuts interface colors and various sizes and snapping options that you can go through and set those as a final check just to make sure that construction lines is working you click on the construction lines icon and this toolbar should display down here along with the tips section so before we start modeling anything let's get familiar with the construction lines tool set we'll go through each of these tools briefly below and most of them will be used extensively when we build our model so they become a lot more clear how they work and when to use them our first tool is the select tool and it's similar to blender select with a few extra features clicking to select will simply select an object and you can shift select for multiple selections you can box select as well so anything within the box will be selected and if you draw from right to left anything the box touches will be selected so left to right to select it has to be completely within the box and right to left just has to be touching the box now if you're new to blender there are two main modes when you're modeling there's the object mode which is for laying out so you can move objects around you can scale them you can rotate but you can't affect the geometry inside as such you press tab you'll enter edit mode and in construction lines we have this gray bounding box around whatever whatever it is that you're editing and the show that you are in edit mode and this is where you can actually affect each individual part of the geometry so the faces the vertices and the edges the construction lines can select any of these with the box select tool the other way we'll select all of these the box touched and we can start moving these around and playing and doing various bits of modeling with them so as the main select functions if we tab back in to object mode and we select our measure guide tool this was the first tool that i created and it's what started the whole construction lines project off blender is a fantastic and powerful tool but it doesn't have tools for easy accurate modeling which we need for cad work so my first tool was this measure tool and it simply allows you to measure various dimensions of an object or any of the space but more importantly it allows you to set guides so if i drag this guide out and i press x for instance to lock to the x axis we can lock to any axis x y or z or any direction with a shift and control and i'm going to type in 2000 and i'm working in millimeters so that is two meters and now i have a guide that i can use for any of the other work that i'm going to do any of the other modeling and this is really powerful because it means if i select my move tool i can take this object from any point i can start dragging it around in space but i can snap now to these guide points and this allows me to set out my models for accurate work so i can continue my guides and set more of these out maybe on the y-axis i might want to set another guide or i can drag a guide a horizontal guide from that guide edge as well and set things out that way and that will work off of other geometry as well so the next tool is the line tool and again this works very much like setting out guides i can click any point in space i can lock to an axis whether that's x y zed and i can simply start drawing lines and this is something that blender does not have natively so it gives us that more cad style way of working so i start drawing out my lines i can create basic shapes connect them up and it will automatically create a face where it finds a loop for me which is really handy because we don't need to go into using blender's tools to then select geometry and start creating faces so i can also use the line tool to split geometry as well so if i choose a vertex here simply draw to another edge center see that that that face now is split and we can tell that because we we have our edge center showing which of these dots in the middle of the faces and that shows me that that face has now been split and it doesn't just work on geometry that we've created with construction lines if i hover over this default cube press tab to enter edit mode i can use this line split through and we see those faces have split so the next three tools are the rectangle circle and arc and they all work in a very similar way so if i take the rectangle tool i start dragging the rectangle out and i can either set that by i or i can type in a value all of the tools in construction lines you can use values that you type in rectangles it's going to be two values for the length and the width so you simply put a comma in the middle there so i'm going to make a two meter by three meter rectangle so i'm going to type two thousand two thousand millimeters and you'll notice at the top of the screen you're seeing the values that we're entering i'm doing two thousand by three thousand i'm gonna hit return and there we go we have a two two meter by three meter rectangle there and if i take my measure tool double check that we've got a two meter by three meter rectangle and with all of these tools you can also use them in edit mode on any other object and they will split the face or add to the geometry if you draw outside of that face so if i take this rectangle and i draw onto this surface there we go we've split the face we've now got two for two faces that we've split in fact we have three faces now because of the way it's split and you'll notice that sometimes extra edges are created and this is because of the way blender works we need these extra edges to tell blender that the face can be split and to allow it to split that face circles work exactly the same way i'm going to tab out now of edit mode back to object mode draw a circle with any radius that i like and if i hold ctrl and use the mouse wheel i can increase and decrease the segments and also use the arrow keys to do this and set those a segment count i can go all the way down to a triangle as well just three and set and build my circle there arcs exactly the same or an arc set the bulge and then of course if i use the line tool i could join that into full semicircle and as i say all of these tools can be used in object mode or edit mode they can be used to split other geometry add to other geometry it doesn't matter if the the um geometry is created in with blender's normal native tools everything works together let's take a look at the move and rotate tools and these are tools that sort of extend lenders own tools and i do that with the snapping that you will have noticed which again although blender has snapping it's not as straightforward as the snapping and as automatic as the snapping and construction lines so you'll notice we have light blue snap for faces green for vertices purple for edge centers and blue for the edges and we'll also be snapping to the global axes as well and to any guidelines with the move tool in construction lines unlike blender's move tool is you can pick a start point where you actually want to start your move from with a snap so i'm going to pick this corner of the rectangle here start moving around and it means that i can then snap this exact point to any other piece of geometry whether that's just on a face or a vertex or an edge or one of our guides but up here in the guide a really really powerful feature that's been added recently is if i press s to select this object this cube select my move tool start moving this cube i'm going to press control and that's going to duplicate that object i press x and lock to that x axis i'm going to set that down somewhere now if i type divide and divide divide by 3 that is going to give me three a distribution of three objects within that space that we've copied so this is a great way to easily duplicate objects and space them out nicely with exact distances and again if i drag one of these cubes again in this case unlock to the y axis press control to duplicate set this a little bit closer just to keep it on the screen and then instead of using divide i'm just going to use a number on its own i'll go for four and there we go that extends that duplication out by four we're going to be using this quite a lot in the modeling that we're going to do a little bit later so the rotate tool works with snapping as well so i can pick a start point this is going to be my sort of axis of rotation i then choose the plane of rotation that i want to work on whether it's the z x or y i'll stick with z in this case i pick another point along that plane we go i can rotate around i can type a value and maybe i go for 90 degrees hit return and there we go and i find that a far easier way to rotate than blender's tools which either rotate around the origin of the geometry or you have to set the position of the 3d cursor or set the origin on its own this does everything automatically i also recently added this extrude tool and it extends blend zone extrude because it allows you to cut through geometry which blenders extrude doesn't really allow you to do so i'm going to select this cube here press tab and in this case i'm going to choose off a rectangle i'm going to draw a rectangle on this face to split this face because i want to cut this rectangle out select extrude and select this face i'm going to drag that all the way through through the back doesn't matter how far you go this way once you get through the back it's just cut a hole through it there we go we can look through and we've cut that through which is really handy for modelling things like windows and doors or architectural work and i'm going to use that in the model that we're going to build a little bit later we can also simply extrude as we would in blender's own tool just dragging out different faces okay so we've gone through an overview of the main tools there's a lot more to them and in the manual which again i will link in the description below there's a lot more detail about how to use each tool and the various options on them final thing i quickly want to go through is the n panel this tool panel if you press the n key it shows and hides this panel and if we go down to cl that's construction lines for anyone that had construction lines before this version 0.9.63 all of these preferences would have been in the tool tab but they are now in their own tab cl and this just gives you options for different snaps that you want to use some of them you might not want to you don't always want to snap to the directions or the grid for instance so they can be turned on and off and in this latest version we now have grid snapping and grid subdivision snapping so if i press 5 7 for plan view orthographic we'll see that we are now snapping to the grid and if i turn on subdivisions we snap to these grid subdivisions as well which is a really really handy way of modeling it makes life a lot easier and quicker for modeling things if you know exactly what your grid spacing is for some things it is a fantastic way to model without having to set guides or anything like that i put a quick access to the units which you can set in the scene settings here i work in metric you work in imperial you set that here and then you can set your length i work in millimeters because i need that kind of accuracy but you can easily switch between those in this quick access then we've got the guide dimensions if i go over to this section you see these persistent displays for dimensions which can be really handy when you've set out a lot of dimensions and you're trying to remember what dimension is what but also we can turn these on and off as we need them sometimes if you're getting really close they can get in the way for a little bit so you can turn those off and then we have the tip box down here which gives you a guide on each of the tools as you're using it how to show you how you would use that tool but that can also be turned off if you're a bit more familiar with those tools so now that we've gone through all of the tools i think it's time to start building our own model to show how these tools really work i'm going to quit instruction lines just for a second and clear the scene i'm going to draw around everything here apart from the camera and hit x delete okay so we've got a nice clean scene here i'm going to work in plan view so i'm going to hit 5 for orthographic mode and then 7 for plan top view and you can do exactly the same using this widget up here and changing the camera orthographic and perspective up here so let's fire up construction lines i'm going to use the alt and the accent grave key you can also use the button here but i find that quicker and we're going to set out this room so the project we're going to build is a recent project that i did it's simple it's a bookcase in a room and it's a single shot that i need so i don't need to build all the detail in all of the room but just one corner but it's a great way to show off how these tools and construction lines work so let's set the room out first and i'm going to do that by choosing the measure guide tool i'm going to start at the origin i'm going to start dragging out the direction that i need now i've got a 5 meter wall to work with press x to lock on this axis and know that i'm absolutely working on this x-axis and i'm going to type 5000 5000 millimeters there we go there's our 5 meter wall and the [Music] width of the room is four meters drag out four thousand there we go now i also i'm gonna drag horizontal guide across here to the end of the room and i'm going to drag in dragging another horizontal guide by 2 000 millimeters but this should give me three meter space here which is exactly what we want this is where the bookcase is going to go and then this wall sort of kicks out here by 700 millimeters 700 okay so let's draw this section of wall and i'm going to leave these walls off for now because it's far easier i can just work in this corner without having to constantly turn the walls on and off and have them get in the way let's choose the line tool and i'm going to start at the origin i'm going to drag all the way across to this guide point that we've set so i know we're on five meters i'm going to drag up type 200 so that's the thickness of our walls on the outside drag across press x to lock on the x-axis and i know we're going to go to 5 meters but i also want to come past for the thickness of the wall and i can use the grid snapping for this to 5 200 do exactly the same drag down using this grid snapping which is so handy to use now drag that in or up to this origin again and there we go there's our wall and that's nicely filled in by construction lines and we have our wall set up now just remembered we need to fill this section of wall where it kicks out a bit and i'm going to use a rectangle for this rectangle tool snap to this three meter point here and track that rectangle out and construction lines will now have added and connected those bits of geometry together now all i need to do is select all of those walls and a new feature in the latest version of construction lines is that you can now select multiple faces and extrude them at the same time whereas you had to do it one by one before so now we can multi extrude so i select my extrude tool click on the faces and i'm going to drag those up and i know that my room is 2.6 meters so to 600 and there we go there is our corner of room that we're mainly going to be working with here and we'll add the rest in afterwards that's a quick case of extruding these walls out and finishing that room off final thing i want to do on the room is to add our window in so i'm going to drag a horizontal guide from this wall here i'm going to drag this across by one meter and drag another horizontal guide across by 11 53.8 which is what the um window width was measured at i'm going to drag up 900 and the height of the window looking at my notes is 1095.5 and because we've set these guides now i can take a rectangle i'm going to make sure that i'm in edit mode if you're in object mode and you draw a rectangle on top all you're doing is creating a new rectangle object you're not affecting this geometry so i need to be in edit mode to affect that geometry and actually cut into it i'll snap to these guide points see we've got these extra edges which is normal i'll take my extrude tool i'm just going to cut that straight through and there we go we have a window opening there which will drag in a window later and we put that in okay so that's our section of wall done here i'm going to tab back into object mode i'm going to select that object scroll down to live find it give us this object here i'm going to drag that into my building folder just make sure that turns on and off there we go i like to organize my outliner like this i can add new collections and i find this for me is a great way to lay things out you can do it however you would like um anything you create you can put into folders and rename in this case i'm going to name these the walls and it just means i can turn any of these on and off and clean up the scene so i can work on this in a much easier way much clearer cleaner way okay so let's clear out these guides we don't need these anymore i'm going to right click and i'm going to hit remove all a nice clean scene now and we can start building the bookcase the bookcase is split into two sections we've got the lower section which is deeper and then an upper section which is a taller narrower section with shelves in the lower section has got some doors on there so let's start building that lower section first i've chosen my rectangle tool you can press r to do that i'm going to start dragging out a rectangle here and i'm going to type 50 by 600 the dimensions i want for that side and i'm going to press e to extrude i'm going to start dragging up this direction now the height to the top of the base is 800 we've got a 50 millimeter top so i'm going to go for 750 on these sides and this is where the move and duplicate comes in really handy because i can drag this side now press control hit x to lock to the x-axis duplicated that side really nice and easily i'm just going to double check i like to constantly check that my dimensions are correct yes we're in that three meters that we need to be within and then i'm going to press r again stop on e to extrude drag this up and type 50 that's about 50 millimeters and i might quickly just put a plinth section as well okay and extrude up again that plinth is going to be 50 millimeters and apart from the doors that is the main lower section done i'm going to choose the rectangle tool again drag from the corner and in this case i'm going to do 50 by 300 go extrude drag this one up not quite to the top because we're going to put a bulk head in and i'll show you why that is later so i'm going to need to leave a bit of space and i'm going to go for what do we got here 1800 so i'm going to go for 16 50. so we've got a a 150 space above the top so the carpentry company that i work for wants to put a bulkhead in the top and then run a coving or cornice around the front of the unit so they felt the bulkhead would be the best way to go on that so that's what we're going to do let's select this side i'm going to press g for grab the move tool control again top section in rectangle tool or a top 50 tap into edit mode and then i'm going to move this down base here there we go now i need to put it back on the unit so the easiest way to do that is to clear the walls out for a minute and i'm just gonna uncheck that so i can work on the back of the unit and i'm gonna put a rectangle again drag that over a little bit closer snapping okay i'm going to extrude that by 12 millimeters let's just put that back into place there y-axis there we go perfect let's fill the shelves in and dividers in a bit let's work on these doors so i'm going to use the rectangle tool to build the doors and i like on the doors to keep a three millimeter space all the way around so i'm gonna measure this space here which is two nine hundred i'm going to take away all of the three millimeter spaces around so we're gonna have six doors so we'll have seven of those three millimeters so if i type in to 900 minus 21 for those spaces and i'm going to divide that by six doors and that gives us 479.8 roughly it's good enough to work with choose rectangle tool and we're going to type 700 for the height here and it was 479 and there we go there's outdoor i'm just going to extrude that out and go for a 25 millimeter door there move that door along the x-axis by three millimeters and i'm going to push that back in on the y now to space these doors out correctly because we're gonna use that duplicate tool again i'm gonna use the tape guide tool i'm gonna drag out three millimeter guide here i'll select the door move drag that over to the three millimeter mark press control for a duplicate i'm going to click to set that and then i'm going to type in five we now have our six doors now really really handy feature in blender is the ability to link objects after you've created them and in this case it can be really useful because it didn't leave the three millimeters gap at the top and bottom so i'm going to exit construction lines for a second select all of these doors and i can either go up to the object and link section or i can press ctrl and l and i'm going to link object data yeah and that's going to link all of these objects together so that they're gonna whatever you do to one will happen to the others let's go back into construction lines and i'm editing one of these box select select all of the top geometry and i'm going to grab along the z axis i'm going to go down six for that three millimeter spacing then if i press s to select select all these doors again grab along the z and move up three and there we go we've got our perfect three millimeter spacing around everything so if you come from a sketchup background like i do the linking tool is like a component so anything you do and one affects all the others but what's really handy here is you can turn that on and off you i could now go back and unlink these doors and then later on if i needed to do something else i could then link them again or just link a couple of them depending on what it is that i wanted to do it's a really really handy feature there so finally on this unit we're going to need to build the dividers between the shelves and then build the shelves themselves so i'm going to get close to this corner i'm going to snap to this point sometimes you're gonna be touched tricky just to get that exact point i'm gonna go 50 by two eight eight because we've got that 12 millimeter back on and i'm going to extrude that divider up and then if i tape across we've got two 900 again and i need to have four sections in this so that's going to be two 900 minus the 350 so minus 150 and we're going to divide that by 4 which gives us 687.5 select this and we'll move on the x 687 687.5 and then to duplicate these we'll do exactly the same as we did with the doors take the measure tool press x to lock that 687.5 select this again g to grab control to duplicate it's going to times two on that so we now have our four even space finally let's pop our shelves in and we're going to go for 25 millimeter shelves here and if we just work out the divide at the divisions on these shelves so we are 1600 and we're gonna go for four shells so five divisions so 1600 minus 100 of the four shelves divided by five spaces we have three hundred let's grab this up on the z 300 perfect do exactly the same so the guide point 300 select this shelf grab select the lowest point snap to that guide and i'm going to type in three for three extra shots there we go we've got these perfectly laid out shelves now and if i select all of them press the grab tool control x to lock on this axis i'm going to three there we go let's turn our building on and we have our bookcase in the corner we can start building out the rest of the room let's quickly pop that bulkhead in with the rectangle tool that's done extrude that up take that top and then i want to put a floor in across here and then we can extrude these walls out so if i just hover over the wall here press tab e to extrude extrude this one out by 200 extrude this corner extrude again by 200 for the wall thickness i can just extrude this finish off the room now obviously if we were doing more renderings in the room i put a doorway in if there were windows over here i'd put those in but in this case i'm going to be shooting our camera from around this direction lower down so we're never going to see the door so i'm not going to worry about what's over here for now what i like to do at this stage is start to set the camera up and get the lighting ready for rendering so i'm going to get roughly in to the position i'm going to shoot from and making sure you you do actually have a camera in the scene if you don't with construction lines for a second shift a and you can add a camera in and then to align the camera with this view that we're currently in we do control out and zero and that gives us this direction that we're in so i select this camera and i'm going to just change from 50 millimeters to go for 35 in this case i'm going to start zooming this out a little bit and you'll find that we come directly into this wall which this took me a while to work out that we could do this but a really handy feature in blender is you can set the clipping on the camera so if i drag this clip start up it means that i can shoot through the wall but it's not going to affect the final render at all the light won't be affected it's not creating a hole it's just allowing us to look through that wall and then i'm going to move the camera to the sort of position that i want to get the whole unit in i have in my quick favorites lock to camera view you can also do that up in the view sections and you can lock that camera to the view and that will allow you to rotate the camera as you're working so i'll turn that off now and i'm just going to go into my item and make sure that the camera is nice square down just a little bit in fact we've done 1600 there we go perfect so there we have it we have built a room we've built our construction our joinery carpentry work here and this is all ready for lighting and rendering and we'll dress the room up here and hopefully you can see just how easy it is to build this kind of thing with construction lines very short period of time but we built an accurate model that when we show a customer we know that this is built correctly to scale with the exact dimensions that we have been given and if you come from software like sketchup fusion or any of those pieces you'll be used to this way of working and you can now use those ways of working alongside the incredible power of blender which if you've not used blender much before you'll be able to see a small part of that just through the rendering that we're going to do so i've set my camera up and i'm going to add some lighting in now let's control a light an area lighting drag this out i'm going to go through this quickly as this isn't a rendering tutorial i'll show you quickly how i would render this scene i might skip through a few bits or speed them up in the video and in the comments if you want to know a bit more then just let me know and i can i can go through those i'll increase the power to 5000 is going to be our sun one for throat front view rotate and grab this i'm going to rotate our bookcase 0 to go back to the case grab that sun up just a little bit so it hits the bookcase so we haven't got a seating on but i know that that light now is coming through pretty much where i want it to hit the bookcase and i can start working with that now let's quickly put in ceiling rectangle tool there we go there's our ceiling yeah there we go so perfectly the light we've got hitting that bookcase exactly how we want it now when we add in the sky and we add in our down lights into the room this is going to work nicely so i'm going to speed this section up now and i'm going to put i'm going to dress the room i'm going to put some textures on but as i say if this is the kind of thing you're interested in you want to see a bit more about you've maybe not done it before in blender let me know in the comments and i can release another video showing exactly how how i've done this but i don't want to spend too much time on it in this video as this is mainly to show how we model with construction lines rather than how we use blender [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so this is by no means a perfect rendering but i hope that it's demonstrated how you can use construction lines to very quickly create models that are accurate that can then be sent for rendering now in the next video i'm going to be looking at how i created the coving and the skirting baseboard in this video it's a great technique being able to draw the profiles with construction lines and then using blender's own curve tools to copy that profile along a fixed path if you're familiar with sketchup it's just like the follow me tool but a lot more powerful and i'll go through all that in the next video so thanks very much for watching and i'll see you in the next video please don't forget to press like on this video and subscribe you

Channel: DN Drawings

Views: 20,500

Keywords: CAD, Construction Lines, SketchUp, Blender, 3D

Id: sobI6KDtR6E

Length: 47min 54sec (2874 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022