We’ve all probably made some furniture that
looks like this, or this, or maybe this. But today, I’ll show you how to take your
furniture modelling to the next level. I’ll be showing you how to make THIS chair,
but these methods can be applied t o any other piece of furniture. These steps are: Research Modelling Materials Lighting/Rendering Every piece of furniture, or really anything
you model, should follow these 4 basic steps, you can always add in extra steps to further
refine things but these are the 4 fundamental steps for every model that you’ll make. Here are some examples of furniture that I’ve
modelled using all of these same techniques (and if you want you can find them all on
my Gumroad page for only $3 if you want to support the channel) Ahem Anyway, as I just mentioned, the first step
is… Research! Yes, I know, it sounds boring, but this is
probably the most important step. The easiest and most reliable place to get
both reference images and measurements is IKEA. Every product has multiple pictures from different
angles, in different lighting conditions, and most importantly it also gives us the
measurements for everything. Alternatively, you can even use Amazon, a
lot of stuff on Amazon now has a 360 view, which makes modelling so much easier. Whatever site you choose, make sure that you
find the measurements, because if you want to model realistic furniture, you NEED to
use real world scale, and it will also make the modelling process a little bit easier. Now that we have our reference images and
measurements we can jump into Blender and start blocking out our shape. The first thing I ALWAYS do is add a cube,
or cylinder with the dimensions of whatever I want to model. This will act as a guideline so that when
we start adding all of the different pieces, they will all have to fit inside this shape. By default, Blender displays measurements
in meters but we can actually type in the inch amount that we want and it will convert
it for us. In this case the chair is 32 inches wide,
36 inches deep and 30 inches tall. Now, looking from the right by pressing Numpad
3, we can just drag one of our reference images straight into Blender and it will create an
image plane for us. This plane is a regular Blender object so
you can move it , rotate it, scale it the same as any other object. So, now let’s just move it and scale it
until it sits on the Axis and fits inside the box. If you go the properties of the image, you
can also change the opacity, so that you can see through it while modelling. The side of this chair is a fraction of a
circle, so just add in a circle and scale and manipulate it until it matches the image. Then fill the circle with F and press I to
inset it until we have the thickness of the piece. For anything round, like this, Insetting is
a great way to get uniform thickness. Now all we have to do is delete the extra
faces and do a bit more fine tuning to match the shape. Just make sure that 2 of the vertices line
up with the second part of the leg that branches off because we’ll be using that to model
the other leg. Now just select those 2 vertices and extrude
them all the way down to the feet and line them up. Now add in some Loop Cuts to the second leg
and match it with the reference image. At this stage keep everything as low poly
as possible because it’ll make our lives easier and we can deal with the smoothness
later. Now, move the leg of the chair to one side
to fit within our guideline box and add in a Mirror Modifier to give us the second leg. If your mirror doesn’t look correct, press
Ctrl + A and apply ALL Transforms. In most cases, if you’re having any troubles
with modifiers in Blender, it’s likely because of bad transforms, so just Apply them and
everything should be fine. So now, just extrude the back 2 vertices across
on the X axis and make sure to enable clipping in the Mirror modifier. Now we want to add some thickness to this
piece, and because we’re using real world scale it makes it so much easier. Add a solidify modifier and type in how thick
you want the arm to be. As I mentioned before, you can type in the
unit, so in this case, the arm is gonna be 2 inches thick. Now let’s move onto the bottom portion of
the chair. This is much easier than the arms, add in
a plane, scale it up and move it until it fits the bottom part of the chair, then extrude
it up so that it creates the back. Now add a solidify modifier, make it 1 inch
thick, and you’re done. Those two pieces look good but we need to
make them a bit smoother. So, add a Subdivision modifier by pressing
Ctrl+1 and in Edit mode, select all of the edges that we want to stay sharp. With all of these selected, press Shift+E
and press 1 or drag your mouse until the line turns pink. Blender now knows that these edges are sharp
and some of the modifiers will treat them differently. You can still see some faces along the curve
of the arm and you might be tempted to turn up the amount of subdivisions, but there is
a much easier way to do this. In Object Mode, all you need to do is Right
Click and Shade Smooth. Now the shading looks terrible, but again
another easy fix, go to the Object Data Properties, and enable Auto Smooth. Alternatively, you can just right click and
choose Shade Auto Smooth and it does both of these steps. I would also recommend right clicking on the
Auto Smooth checkbox and making it a Quick Favourite. This is a somewhat hidden feature in Blender,
but you can hover over pretty much anything, right click and add it your favourites, and
you access these by pressing Q. They’re also context sensitive so the menu will change
depending on where you open it. Now for probably the hardest part, the cushions. We can clearly see the seams of the cushions
so we’re going to use those as our guidelines. We’re going to create 2 cubes, and all you
need to do is match them up with the seams of the cushions, we can deal with how fluffy
they are in a minute. Select all of the edges of the Cube and press
Ctrl + E and increase the Bevel Weight to 1. This will allow us to create those seams later
on. Next add in a Subdivision modifier. This will turn our cube into a bean but that’s
fine, we can fix it by adding what are called holding edge loops. We could crease these seams like we did with
the chair but we don’t want these to be very sharp; it’s a cushion, it’s supposed
to look soft and round, so that’s why we add holding edge loops instead. Add 1 edge loop to the center of the cushion,
and now we can turn this edge into 2 by Bevelling it with Ctrl + B. Bevelling is a great way of
making sure that the edges are spread evenly. So do this on all sides of the cushion until
we have edge loops supporting all of the corners. Now we want to add a few more edge loops along
the top of the cushion, maybe around 5 in each direction until we have a nice grid on
the top and we can start shaping it. There isn’t really a science to this part,
just view the model from every angle and using proportional editing select the top vertices
and move them upwards to create a curve along the top of the model. You can also press Alt + S to inflate certain
parts and this will push them out naturally. Now you can apply the Subdivison by hovering
over it and pressing Ctrl+A, because we’re going to fine tune the shape some more with
sculpting. If you were making a sofa of a cushioned chair
you might need to spend some more time sculpting in details, but for this one, we’re keeping
it fairly simple. So now, In Sculpt Mode, scroll down to the
bottom of the list and choose Mesh Filter. The Mesh Filter tool allows you do certain
actions to the entire model, so in this case, go to the top and choose Smooth. Now click and drag until the edges of the
cushion have softened a little bit more. Don’t go too far with this or you’ll lose
all of the definition. Now we’re gonna use the Cloth brush to add
a few subtle wrinkles and folds. Simply click and drag on any part of the model
and you’ll see that the surface starts to naturally fold and wrinkle like cloth. Be subtle with this because this cushion is
fairly rigid so it wouldn’t have a lot of wrinkles. Your cushion should look fairly good now,
but we want to add a bit more definition to the seams. Remember how we set the Bevel weight of the
seams earlier? Now we can use a Bevel modifier, set it to
Weight instead of Angle and add a slight bevel to these edges. Turn on wireframe view just so we can clearly
see what we’re doing. Now, give the Bevel 2 segments and play with
the size, I went for about 3mm. Now, go to the Profile section of the modifier
and turn the shape all the way down. With the shape set to 0.5 it will try to smoothly
blend from one edge to the next, but by turning it up or down we can decide if the Bevel should
go further in or out. Apply all of the modifiers now and one more
time in Edit mode, select the center of all of these seams and press Alt + S to push them
a little further in to give them a bit more depth. Now we have the cushions in place, the wooden
parts of the chair are modelled, but it’s still missing something. We need bevels. If you look at all of the reference images,
they all have a nice highlight along the edges, and the way to achieve that in Blender is
by adding Bevels. Add the Bevel modifier to all of the wooden
portions, set the segments to 2 and again use your eye and judge how big you think the
bevel needs to be, they should only be a few millimetres at most. The reason we set the segments to 2 for all
of the bevels, is that this will then give us one edge in the middle of the bevel which
makes selections easier, which in turn will make it much easier to work with in the future. Now apply all of the modifiers and we’ll
move on to the materials So, there’s 2 different ways you could do
materials. If you’re using this model purely for architectural
rendering, or ArchVis, then you can apply two separate materials to the model, one for
the wood and one for the cushion. And if you have an Asset Library set up, then you can drag and drop different materials and preview them. but if you were to ever move or delete some
textures, then your model would end up looking When making materials for games, however, you're generally trying to compress everything as much as possible to save space. So, you would only have one material, and the wood and cushions would just be separate parts of the texture. But then, it is a little bit more difficult to change the materials later because they're baked into the textures. Regardless of what method you pick, you will
need to do UVs for both of them. So let’s start on the UVs. Starting with the cushions. Open up the UV Editor window by dragging from
the top left corner. In Edit Mode, select the interior seams of
the model; you want to select a U along the top, as well as the two front edges, mark
the back two edges and then press Ctrl + E and mark these as seams. The seam selection might seem random but that
is just a pretty standard way of unwrapping a cube, which is what our cushion basically
is. Select your model and press U to unwrap it. Do the same for the other cushion, it’s
the exact same process. If your UVs are still messing up, make sure
to Apply the Transforms, CTRL + A, as I said before. If you’re having any problems in Blender,
most of the time, that’s the fix. Now to UV the legs. If you’ve already applied the Mirror modifier,
that’s fine, just go to Edit mode, delete half of the model and add the Mirror modifier
again. We don’t want to have to UV both of the
legs when we can save ourselves some time. Mark the seams along the edges, making sure
to pay attention to the seam across the top of the leg and the seam at the back. The wood goes in a different direction at
these seams so mark the seams along these points and mark some more seams until you
have some nice flat UV islands. Up until this point, everything has been separate
objects, but now in Object Mode select everything and join them all together with Ctrl + J.
Your shading might break so just double check that Auto Smooth is enabled. Now select everything and unwrap it again.
This time it will place all of the islands evenly within the UV grid. In the UV window, add a new texture and make
it a 4K Colour Grid texture. We want to make sure that the UVs of the model
look okay so we use this texture to test it and make sure that everything looks good. Add a new material to your object, add your
UV texture to the base colour and now you’ll see how your UVs look. If you’ve done everything correctly you
should have nice even squares all around the model and the letters should be the same size. If there is any distortion, go into Edit Mode,
and with Face selection turned on, just hover over the problem area and press L. This will only select up to the seams, so
you can diagnose any problems. Now if you press Shift + H, this will hide
everything except for the area that you’ve selected, so that you can easily see what
you need to fix. Then press Alt+H to show everything again
when you’re finished. We want to make sure that all of our letters
are facing the correct direction. The direction of the letters will determine
the way that the textures are mapped so we want the wood grain to flow in certain directions
and the fabric to go in one direction. Lastly, we just want to ensure that the UVs
aren’t overlapping, so select all of the UVs, and then we’re going to Average the
Island Scale, and secondly Pack the Islands. Turn both of these into a Quick Favourite
as well, because it’s much easier and quicker than going to the UV menu each time. With Pack Islands, just make sure that you
disable rotation, otherwise it will undo all of the rotation work we just did. So, now our UVs are finished. Separate the wooden parts of the model and
the cushion by pressing P, and now create separate materials for the cushion and the
wood. Name them just to be sure that you don’t
get confused at any point. It can be very easy to add 20 materials to
your object and then you’re not sure if your wood was Material.006 or Material.009,
so naming them is a good habit to get into. Now we need materials. You can try and create these procedurally
using Blender's built in textures, but that is a huge waste of time, so just go and download
some. The two main ones that I use are Poliigon
and Textures.com. Poliigon is primarily for industry professionals,
the materials are great but you do have to sign up and pay for credits, however they
do have a bunch of useful free textures, so download those ones and see if they work for
you. I would only sign up for Poliigon if you needed
some very specific textures that you couldn’t find anywhere else. Textures.com also uses a credits system, but
you get 15 free credits every day which would allow you to download maybe 3 or 4 materials,
so do that everyday for a month and you’d have a library of over 100 materials to use
in your projects. So, we need a wood texture and a fabric texture. I’m gonna use these ones which are both
from Poliigon. Depending on which site you go with, you’ll
end up with a bunch of different textures. They’ll have names telling you what they
are but these textures are used to create realistic materials using the PBR workflow. For our materials you will need a Colour texture,
a Roughness or Specular or Gloss texture, and a Normal map. All you need to do is drag each of those textures
into the Shader Editor in Blender, and connect them up to the corresponding nodes. The most important thing to know, is that
underneath the texture, make sure that you change the Roughness and Normal to Non Color
Data. We don’t want Blender to treat these like
normal colour textures, so make sure to change them to Non Color Data. The only texture that should be colour is
the colour texture. Lastly, the normal map is a special type
of texture. You’ll see that the node on the Principled
shader is purple. So, we can’t plug a yellow texture directly
into a purple node. We need to convert it first, and we do this by adding in a Normal Map node. We now have a nicely modelled chair with nice
materials but now we need to present it well, as if it was in a catalogue, or on the IKEA
website. Most of the time, these models are presented
on a plain white background with nice even lighting to showcase the product, so to match
that, we need to add in a plane. Scale it up and extrude the edge behind the
model upwards, then select the bottom edge and bevel it and turn up the scroll wheel
until you have a bunch of cuts. I would never bevel like this in any other
circumstance, but this is just the background, it’s never going to be used for anything
else so it’s fine. Up until now, we’ve been using Eevee, so
let’s switch over to Cycles. Next, we need to work on the lighting. You could add in a Sun lamp and some spotlights
to try and light it nicely yourself, but there is a much easier way and that is by using a HDRi. A HDRi is a special type of image that contains
lighting information, so when we add it to our scene it will emit light and cast shadows. You’re probably wondering where to get HDRis,
and the main place that everyone goes to is PolyHaven. Everything on here is free, so go crazy, but
we’re looking for some studio lighting. You generally want to avoid anything too colourful
as that will then cast colour on to our white background and the chair. We want it to be as neutral as possible, so
pick something pretty plain as it will produce the best results. Now in the World properties tab, add an Environment
texture and choose your HDRi. You should already see some nice lighting,
but it would be nice to be able to rotate it. So, under the Vector properties, change it
to Mapping, and then change the Vector to Generated. Now we can use the Z rotation to rotate our
HDR to get some nice lighting. Now it’s all about presentation. Add a camera and choose the aspect ratio to
suit your model, in this case, I want it to be square. Now we can render our model by pressing F12. You might be waiting a while for this to finish
depending on your PC because by default the Render samples are set to 4096 which is way
too high for our purposes. So, cancel the render and change this to 128
or 256, and then just enable the Denoising Data render pass, and in the Compositor add
the Denoise Node and attach everything. The denoising works perfectly fine for something
like this, you only need a lot of samples if you’re doing something with a lot of
reflections or fog or subsurface scattering. Now, we wait… And that’s it! Now your chair is fully finished, so play
around with some different looks, maybe change the background colour, or change the fabric
on the chairs and see how it affects the final look. Modelling something like this can be seemingly
simple but when you get into the specifics of Sculpting, UVs, Lighting, it can get a
bit more complicated, but if there’s one thing that I want you to take away from this
video, it’s USE REFERENCE and GET MEASUREMENTS, those are probably the two easiest things
to do, but a lot of people would try and model something from their imagination and it never
looks real. So, hopefully you can take some of the things
you learned from this video to make any other piece of furniture. These are some examples that I’ve made myself, and no matter how complicated it may look, it
will pretty much always follow the same steps. So remember, USE REFERENCE, get MEASUREMENTS,
and also Apply the Transforms.
