Make A Space Station with Blender In 30 Minutes - No Add-ons Required!

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're going to be making a space station from scratch let's get started okay so what we're going to do today is build a space station i want to model out some basic shapes and use some of the tricks that we've been using in some of these modeling tutorials to create some really cool detail and use some procedural materials to flesh this thing out so i hope you're excited and ready to learn some cool things about modeling what we're going to do is uh first we're going to kind of flesh out the shape of this thing and we're going to have several different components to it so you've got like the solar panel cells we've got the the main modules so i'm going to start off i'm just going to delete everything from my scene and i'm going to go shift a mesh and we're going to create a cylinder now i'm going to rotate the cylinder on the x 90 degrees so r then x then 90 and that will do it for you and i'm going gonna scale this thing up on the y and we're gonna just kind of create the basic shape so let's go into edit mode and i'm gonna switch to face mode and i'm gonna select this front face in this back face and just hit x and delete faces um i don't like the faces that you get in the cylinder because they're n-gons which means they've got more than just four sides and um they don't render very well if you try to start messing with stuff so i like to delete those and just start fresh so um i'm gonna take this in here and maybe think about one side of this thing being like a propulsion type thing like maybe this is a moving space station uh so i'm gonna hit e to extrude i'm gonna hit s to scale and grab on the y and bring it forward and then i'm gonna you see probably not that much do it again e to extrude grab y and bring it forward a bit like this and then e to extrude scale with s bring it down grab on the y push it out a little bit and then e to extrude scale just give it a little bit of a lip here and then e grab y bring it in maybe scale it in so it's a bit like you know conical like that um and then e grab y bring that in scale it a bit and then what do i want to do uh maybe should i go all the way down like this might do that for now then e grab grab y bring it in scale it in and then i'm gonna grid fill so f3 type in grid fill and that will fill that in i'm also going to open up grip film and i'm going to use simple blending um you can see the difference here if you look at this section here just kind of like it's a bit distorted i don't like how tight these little corner polygons get um when i use simple blending i like this a bit better because they're spread out it's a bit more even and i might straighten up the span as well so you see how it's like kind of rotated if i rotate this uh there we go to 10 that will straighten it up basically this kind of just rotates those cuts so that's how that works all right let's go to the other side now i'm going to hold down alt and click this edge and i might hit e to extrude let's create like a narrow section grab y i might continue with this sort of like pattern with the shaping um and then e to extrude grab y bring this out right here e to extrude scale it back up now i want this to be the same size as this right instead of trying to eyeball it it'll never be never be quite accurate so where you can't really use snapping to pull that off a really cool way of doing it is actually to i'll delete this ring here so uh delete vertices and i can alt click this ring right here go to edge mode so you can see what i'm doing a bit clearer so selected that edge loop and i can actually in edit mode hit shift d to duplicate and then grab on the y oops switch back to global and back to medium point grab out on the y and bring it right out now this circle is now exactly the same size as this one right which is what i wanted to achieve so now what i can do is i can hold down alt and shift and click this loop so now both of these loops are connected or collect are selected then i can type f3 and then i can type in bridge edge loops and it will connect everything up for me now bridgex loops only works if you've got the same number of edges right which we do in this case so this this loop and this loop have the same number of edges so blender knows what to do and it can join that up so if this was missing one edge and it would be confused and it would give me an error so you just count your edges if you're getting errors um and that should fix it up so i'll hold down alt and click there and i'll hit e to extrude and grab on the y and pull this one out grab y this section right here so box select these guys so all of this shifty grab y bring it right out and then i'll turn snapping on make sure it's set to vertex and then i can grab y and just bring it right there now i need to connect this up so i'm gonna hit a to select all and then m to merge and i'm gonna select by distance and that will merge up all these guys so now there all right so we got sort of a dual module set up um we've got this long area here which is sort of like a fuselage type area and then i might go in here and select this edge loop right here i might hit e to extrude bring that in grab it on the y do this one a bit longer and then e grab y maybe bring this out e scale this up and then e and grab y and scale it down like this maybe e grab y bring that in scale that down kind of making like a front area you know like um maybe this is where the command bridge is or something so then let's grid fill this and again i'm going to straighten up my span and look at it dead on there we go turn off simple actually in this case simple looks better it's a bit cleaner all right this section's a little long so i'm going to switch to transparent view go to vertex mode box select this group grab it on the y bring it in all right sweet now i'm going to take this and i'm going to right click and shade smooth then i'm going to come over to the green triangle here and i'm going to go to normals and auto smooth and turn auto smooth on and i'll leave it at 30 degrees for now you can see what that does is it makes these edges sharp whereas everything else is nice and smooth that just saves me from having to use subdivision surface to uh to kind of you know flesh it all out um i could bring this down a little more maybe like 13 that'll give me sharp edges there too yeah i might leave that for now all right cool now um next thing i want to do is think about the uh solar panels right so we'll call this the main station um main module let's call it something like that all right i'm going to center my origin up so go object set origin origin to geometry and then i come here and put 0 for the y just to center it up and now i want to think about where i want to put these solar panels i'm going to have them kind of sticking out to the side here so i'm going to create a single plane rotate on the x 90 degrees grab it on the x and pull it out a little bit so i can have a look at this i'm going to scale it on the x bring it in and i might scale this down grab it up something like this i'll give it a little bit of depth so i'll go into edit mode and i'm gonna hit e to extrude grab on the y bring it in like this it's got a little bit of thickness to it and then i think i'm gonna select these corners sorry these corners and then we're going to bevel so control b to bevel and i'll round them out like this i'm going to come over to the green triangle turn on auto smooth and see it doesn't do anything you have to right click also and go shade smooth um so i'm going to create a plane another one grab it on the x rotate x90 this time i'm going to go into edit mode and i'm going to go to vertex mode and double tap a to deselect all then box select would be these bottom vertices and hit x to delete actually we'll go over here we'll subdivide so type uh subdivide and that will just subdivide it once so now it's got a vertex in the middle and then i'm going to hit e to extrude grabs it bring it down bit like that i think grab this one up i'm just kind of building a lattice frame so i'll hit e to extrude grab x turn on snapping with shift tab and select that and then i'm gonna go right here e to extrude grab x and bring that out to there and then maybe e to extrude and then bring that up here so snapping you can see is really handy i can just kind of move these guys around and here e bring that there bring that there now um i can't use the wireframe modifier on this right because there's no actual geometry it's just edges so you have to have faces to be able to use the wireframe modifier to kind of solidify that up so what i can do instead is i can hit f3 and type convert and i can convert to a curve now this is a curve object you can see now it's changed its icon right i'll call this frame and now with the curve options i can add geometry to this thing so i can extrude it a little bit like this to have it go out and then let's just convert it back to mesh now could have just extruded out the edges didn't have to do all that but that's okay there's a to select all e i mean just do this grab it on the x and z a little bit all right anyway so there's some that took way too long uh anyways i'm gonna go object set origin origin to geometry and then i'm gonna go here and select an array modifier and i will go negative one on the factor and i will expand it out grab zed actually i'll just put it right on zero zero zero go to the modifier expand these out a bit and i can go another array and just let that one be set to 2 which we'll just duplicate it across by having this positive number here and now i'm going to take my solar panel and let's see i'm going to grab it on the z and just kind of line it up let's write dead center on the zit so i'll just hit 0 on z and i'll grab this x bring it in to like here maybe and we add an array as well negative one actually probably a little bit more than that so there's a tiny gap between these and then we're gonna pull those out like so um and then i'm gonna actually then shift d to duplicate this grab z bring these guys up grab x bring these guys out i'll take this one and add in another array on y there we go take this lattice and let's uh let's shift d to duplicate the lattice i'll get rid of the second array or even get rid of this array as well grab this in the x and then i'm going to rotate y 90 degrees grab x and i'll just line this up and then i can use the array modifier again zero negative one space it out expand it up we might want to make this group continue through here maybe um let's see i'll parent all these guys to the mainframe so select them all and the last one i pick is the mainframe and then in my window over here hold down control p and parent it object take it right click on it select hierarchy shift d scale x negative one and that will just flip the whole system around then what we can do is we can take both of these and rotate them on the x a bit i also want to make sure i get some materials aside before i run away with myself a little bit here so i'm going to take these guys these guys these guys these guys these guys these guys these guys those guys material new click little bottom triangle copy material to selected solar panels is that panels i feel like i'm missing an inner and l there but uh and then the lattice i will select all the lattice pieces come here click new click down copy material to selected all right cool now um let's go ahead and switch over real quick into shaded mode i'm going to create a lamp and rotate it a little bit i'm going to go ahead and make some space so make my environment black i'm going to turn off that i'm going to go to my render settings i'm going to turn on ambient occlusion bloom and screen space reflections i'm going to split my view i'm going to go to the shader editor and i'm going to take the solar panels first and i'm going to make the solar panels really um shiny and super specky and then i want to put like a like a grid on them so i'm going to go for a uh let's see uh brick texture um and i will plug this into i'll just plug it into the emission real quick so we can see it into the emission there all right um that's kind of nice with the variation of the gray i think i might even keep that i'm going to turn the offset down so that they're squares like that and i might increase the scale a bit and then i want to take the mortar so in between it should be black so i'm going to take this let me think how do i want to do this um i'll stick this in the base color and what i might do is what happens if we stick this into the roughness let's unplug it from the base coat let's just do roughness of it see what that looks like so we need to invert it for this to work for rough so i'm going to go invert because black is very reflectant and uh i don't want i don't want that so let's see can we take a curves here and pump it up a little bit so that actually what i need to do i need to darken it to make it more looks pretty good we give it that kind of gold color that's our metallica yeah that looks right that's what we needed all right it's pretty cool now let's uh take the frame material and let's see i'm going to turn the specular up on those let me bring the roughness down a little bit and metallic yeah i'm not really seeing them very much so make them dark it may just not be thick enough for me to do to thicken them up a little bit so maybe i do want to use the wireframe modifier or maybe you want to use solidify let's see if we can solidify put this first and then i'll pull that up and see what it looks like it's pretty gross it's a bit weird but i kind of don't mind it now the thing with the array is we need to do is turn this off of relative offset into constant that way it won't move when the shape changes so if i make this that so negative 2.128 back this off a little bit all right now let's take this guy uh let's take our sun lamp as well actually real quick and let's drop the angle all the way off and let's pop the strength way up to like 10. make it really shiny so we're like really catching those solar panels so let's go ahead and create a few grables i'll just i'll start with one i'm gonna create a cube just bring it out over here and focus in on it and i'm gonna grab the top face bring it down and let's see i will take this face i'll control b to bevel bring it down like this maybe select this face e scale e grab it down like so i'm going to create a loop cut just like that with ctrl r down the middle take this hit e grab it up scale it in e scale it on the x and on the y i touch grab it up and then i'm going to inset with i and then e and then grab it down i'm just kind of making random random shapes i to inset e grab z i'd inset uh let's see e grab z up like this scale x but i want to do it in the individual origins so i'll switch this to individual origins now they don't move towards each other but they just stay still and kind of shrink just where they're at i'm going to bring it down a little bit just y how does that look it's not bad i might grab one of these edges like this edge loop here ctrl b to bevel roll my mouse so that's just one cut and then e to extrude that bring it out up like this looks pretty good i might make one more uh so shift s cursor to selected i'll shift a uh cube grab x skip zed go into edit mode this time i'll just do a couple of loot cuts like this a couple of cuts like that come here grab this face let's face this face the space and this face because why not all right inset grab z e uh i said i to inset bring them in e and down and see how it's just random just random stuff inset all this e grab said bring it down i to inset e to extrude grab z bring that down same thing here i inset e grab z i'm going to bring that one up and then i to inset e grabs it bring it down grab this one and this one and set both of those grab z bring it right up and then what i might do is let's see let's select this vertex right here shift s cursor to selected shift a up sphere that'll add a uv sphere directly in the mesh actually before i do that i'll shift a uv sphere i'm going to decrease the number of segments to maybe 10 and 10 because i don't need it to be that big maybe shift d scale this down grab x grab y scale it down i might go ahead and assign a material to these guys all right so what we're going to do here is i'm going to grab these guys move them over here and just so they're a bit closer so we can easily work and i'm going to turn on snapping i'm going to switch to face i'm going to turn center on snap with the center and i'm going to select a line rotation to target then i can select one of these guys i can hit shift d and then i can bring it right onto my object i will actually before i do this i will scale both of these guys down so they need to be a little bit smaller so grab this shift d there we go now what i can do is go in here and just align these guys out let's select uh just this bottom point here shift s cursor to selected go to edit mode go here to object set origin origin to 3d cursor that'll put the origin but this thing right down there now we can use shifty and grab this and it will work [Music] [Music] oh [Music] all right so i'm going to right click selected lisa actually first i'll come to here this arrayed one and i'll apply this so now these are that's all one object so now i can right click select objects shift d to duplicate and then ctrl j to join now it's all one thing i can navigate to where this one object is and i can move it out of this collection i pop it up here i can just turn this collection off now i can take this one object and i can set the origin to the center of this cylindrical object so i can come here and say loop select that and sorry that and that right so now you can see my the median point of all the vertexes i have selected is the center of the cylinder i can shift s cursor to selected and now i can grab this and go object origin origin to 3d cursor now the origin is there so now if i shift d this object turn off snapping i can rotate on the y and just slide this thing around to save myself some time now i've got this super cool thing i'm on with it um grab it grab it on the y actually bring it down like this i can scale it up as well just to get it to fit that whole thing now what i can do is i'm going to make a new collection i'll grab all these guys and put it in there [Music] large gravel and then i can select these shifty grab y scale okay forgot about those now i can select all that again shift d duplicate let's grab this on the y slide these guys over here shift d y now we could also do uh some fancy stuff if i go here to the front view turn on transparent mode box select all these front vertices just like so right and then i can turn on proportional editing and scale and roll my mouse wheel and that will scale all these guys down um let's switch to rendered view you can see it's really looking nice all these griebles they just create so much detail really lovely detail i'm gonna grab these guys because we've already got this kind of curve thing going on with them i'm gonna shift d grab y scale y scale it up shift d duplicate grab this back on the y scale that on the y graph y shift d scale y negative one flip that grab y place that right here now we need to have some random lights on the surface of this guy i'm going to be able to just go for an eye colorant distance into the factor make this like a bright red give it a constant uh give it a really big scale so like um and then just think it like i could randomly position some stuff on these guys turn my randomness all the way off it might be a bit too regular it's actually pretty good i could take this so i could go get a mapping node and a textured coordinate node plug the generated into the vector and then i could take this boronia texture and i could duplicate it so now this is exactly the same but what i could do here is i could bring this in and then i could go for a mix rgb drop this right here plug this one into the bottom one turn the factor all the way up go for add change this to a green and then i can offset the location a little bit like that maybe instead of up and down let's go side to side that'll keep the pattern the same right now all these lights are kind of side by side which looks pretty cool let's bring this up here see i'm just kind of like cheating basically i'm just filling this shape out there's not a hole but i'm using the power of power of gravels to keep myself from overworking it you know and what happens if we like create one point of interest like right here now select these two faces e to extrude grab on the zed bring them in and let's create another material and we'll just make this an emission shader [Music] and then turn the strings up that's pretty cool now the other thing you could do here is like if you could put in a planet in the background like that'd be really cool with some rings or like uh do like uh a sun or something so like you know i could import like the most of our planet from most of our series that we did like stick that in here that could look really cool uh i'd be tempted to do that i hope you enjoyed that today uh i learned a few things it was a good long stream that was an hour and 30 minutes so finally got in to do a nice long stream i've been wanting to do that for a while hope you enjoyed it hope you learned a few things now this tutorial this this live stream video i'm going to take it down after this goes live and i'll just put it up for everybody on the patreon and everyone that's a channel member on youtube at the all access pass level and higher so if you'd like to watch this uncut full stream that's where to catch it to that and of course if you're on patreon at the 10 level well depending on what your currency is uh the second level and up i think it's also called all access pass but anyways the second level and up you get the project files for this month and the previous month so this will be available for everybody on patreon this project file here so you can use this in your own projects and take it apart and do whatever you want to with it so feel free to check that out if you're interested thanks so much for watching everybody it was really fun to have you with me today and i hope you have a fantastic rest of your day i will catch you later see ya bye

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 30,207

Rating: 4.9707723 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: aB8jC0v4b9I

Length: 31min 24sec (1884 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021