Make modular sci-fi interiors in Blender.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so I recently made an interior of the Death Star for a cosplay composite that I was making of myself and it came out really well so the things that I learned from making that scene that hallway I use for a bunch of other scenes I did one for Captain Marvel based on the interior of the spaceship from the movie I did one on the prison ship from the Mandalorian and I made a few others just for fun to try to see how well I can hone this technique and get better at modeling and material and things like that to make realistic interiors which are great for the kind of photos that I make with them so I'm gonna share in this video not necessarily how to model the pieces or to material them that's gonna be a separate video later but I want to focus on the basics of how I set up my scenes how I'm setting up rules for all my meshes and using the grid to make things easy and actually pretty fun to design various interiors and once you make enough wall pieces or doors with ceilings and floors things like that you can actually redesign your room in infinite ways I'm sure you someone out there is smart enough to make some kind of particle system that could generate random rooms based on the parts that you make and that stuff really excites me because I love random I love procedural but we're almost there in that we're making individual pieces that we can rearrange at will for whatever we may need maybe we need a large open room we can do that maybe we need a long extensive hallway maybe we didn't intersection with four hallways or two or something like that or a big window scene you know you could make infinite numbers of pieces and match them together exactly how you need for your scenes so let's get started here is a scene that I made for the cosplay photo myself using the Death Star interior and it's basically a straight hallway I did make a turn or a fork in the in the hallway later out there but all these pieces are individual meshes as you see as I click on them they're just individual pieces that fit perfectly next to each other I call them neighboring meshes because there's mush right up to each other and using the grid and Pacific scaling of all the messages they literally fit together perfectly if you really want to get exact you can even put piping or connectors or panels in the same place vertically on all your wall pieces and that all everything des visibly really connect and mashed together really well so I just disappeared the or hid the ceiling so we can look down on all the pieces and I even made a door frame here that because I'm a nerd closing hatch doors which I'm sure you could animate or put a driver on that would be pretty fun now for this project I got lazy and I just made this one single floor mesh with a really long rectangle and I scaled the texture to match perfectly normally though what I'm doing now since I've improved my technique is I'm actually making maybe one square for a floor panel and I'm using the array to duplicate it down the hallway and same similar with this ceiling that I just got rid of let me bring that back so the ceiling similarly is one single mesh using a mirror modifier I'm making the other half and then I'm using array on top of that to make it go down the length of the hallway and yeah a little bit of work a lot of payoff so let's get started with a brand new project and I'm going to show you from start to finish how I do some of the basic modeling set up stuff so in this empty scene which has no cube because I don't like the cube although this time you are going to want your cube so shift a in case you don't have a cube make make a cube so here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna hit the period on my number pad to Center my vo around my cube let's go into edit mode by hitting tab s for scale X for the x axis and let's hit the number two so all we did there is we scaled it to X on the x axis and hit enter when you're done scaling next we're going to scale it vertically on the z-axis by four okay so it's two units wide four units tall and next we need to move it up because we want the origin point which is the the origin point of the mesh which is in the middle see if I move this cube over here see that yellow dot in the middle that is the origin of it which generally is at the center of a mesh but for this architectural type modular interior design we want it to be at the very floor base bottom of the mesh so go back into edit mode if you're not already in there and we're gonna hit g4 move Z for vertical or the z-axis and let's move it up for units there we go so now in the origin point is at the very bottom base of the all peace this is going to be a piece of the wall and that's good now let's turn on snapping by going up here hitting the magnet or you can use shift tab to turn it on and off and within the options we're gonna make sure it's increment is selected that means increment of the grid is what it's going to snap to and make sure absolute grid Snap is on all right now let's get our moving tool and just drag this over here out of the way let's make another one that's going to be twice as wide so make sure your 3d cursor is still in the center if you accidentally click somewhere left clicked anywhere in the scene it's moved so hit shift C to recenter your 3d cursor because the your 3d cursor is basically your origin point when you make a mesh so shift a add mesh right there it's it's going to be wherever your 3d cursor is so she have to see will make put your cursor back in the center okay let's slice this in correctly let's hit tab for edit mode scale X for this time so it's twice as why does the other piece and scale Z for as well okay I'm going to zoom out we need to move it up so GZ 4 sounds like a rapper name all right there we go we've got two pieces once then one's wide now one of the things that I've learned about making modular interiors is you need to make sure everything is scaled with some kind of number system where I'm using the factors of 2 so any wall piece I have my interiors is either 2 4 6 8 or 10 pieces I may make a few single unit pieces just to fill in any gaps if I have any but if you stick to the rule of factors of 2 or factors of 3 for some weird reason if you really like 3 you will you should have any gaps everything will line up perfectly with 2 4 6 & 8 and you know tins are 16 for wall pieces or ceilings if you have something really long so here we go let's start some basic modeling and again this video is not really to highlight how to model these things that's going to be definitely that deserves its own video later but I just want to show you know kind of the basics of this so I'm probably gonna speed up this editing process in post and you can just sit back and watch me model something really quick [Music] okay so I made two pieces and I'm gonna make a doorway and I do want to share this modeling tip because this is a huge time-saver right here is we're gonna use the mirror modifier to model one half of this mesh and the mirror will take care of the other half so I just made a cube what I'm gonna do is erase half of it and let the mirror fill in that gap so go into edit mode control R to make a loop cut which is gonna add edges all the way around and we only want one so hit enter enter again so because we don't want to slide it around to right in the middle now go to faces select this face and ctrl + to grab half of the entire cube now we're just gonna delete it so delete delete faces there we go now it's open so you know it's hollow that's okay the mirror is gonna duplicate this half and a half so go to your wrench which is modifiers add modifier mirror make sure it has it says X if you've modeled everything the opposite direction you may need to do Y or Z but no right now X is filling in on the x-axis its duplicated so now watch this if I model over here I'm gonna add some loop cuts to make a doorway select this face I'm gonna inset it oh here's another thing turn off your snapping when you're modeling because when you're modeling things you don't want it to snap on the grade you want to have more flexibility so with snap off I'm gonna undo and no it's still on turn it off okay so when you do this with the mirror function it's actually making a separate wall here so we don't want a middle wall delete it delete face there we go now we got a nice open doorway and grab this upper upper edge and bevel it make a cool little corner there looks like a doorway already and it'll make some random useless panels because you know I'll just do this one move it forwards on the y-axis cool okay so let's start building with three parts a little little little wall here so it turns nap on and with the move tool if you don't see that go over here hit T for tools and turn your move tool on do nice look at that just like Legos snaps right together awesome now if you want to make multiple copies of these you can hit shift D and move it but that makes an unlinked copy which means if I edit that the other piece is not changed now what if I I'm going to make like a nice addition that you know like oh I should have added you know a little more detail now I have seven other copies that are already in place but I need to edit those too you don't want to do multiple work so delete that and set it in shift D to duplicate which makes an unlinked copy let's do alt D there now look at this if I want to you know excuse a little farther if it looks weird you get the point so they're linked which means any change into the mess you do here will be here and if you make a material make it black oh we're not a material view there we go so any anything you do will be copied over here except for the location the scaling and the rotation which is good because you want these little clones will call them clones we want them to be in different locations right so I'm gonna put this back on the floor there we go I'm using the grid as my floor right so if I hit seven I have the above you I can move this over here I tell her these two I'll make them a little bit different shades of gray it's a little easier to see what's what there and make a material here I'll make this like a red doorway for some weird reason there we go so from above you we've got all these shapes remember all 2d to make a copy place that there now we can hold and shift we can right-click on all these little guys shift D again and make another wall now it's facing the wrong direction right so we're gonna hit our 180 now that that rotated each individual piece by 180 because I have individual origins select it let me go back and do it a different way they're facing the wrong direction if I hit median point are Z 180 look at that to flip the whole wall around so you may want to just flip flop the individuals or the whole thing that's up to you now let's make sure they're still on the grid they seem a little bit offset there you go I'm not sure how that happened I guess because the rotation the middle point was in the middle but I'm just going to each individual on heating G making sure it snaps right on the grid oh one more thing is we need to get everything kind of lined up with the center point of the grid right now the center is right here which is in the middle of this wall so let's be box select and move these all like this I like to use the grid and not not ignore it cuz it just helped me visually there we go lined everything back on the grid I don't know why it's getting offset on the grid so shift a/c to make sure your 3d cursor is right in the middle shift a to add a plane which is just a normal square so it's a 2-dimensional plane in a three-dimensional world and we need to scale it up so go to edit mode scale to do it again scale to maybe scale to again there we go good done 4 or 8 or whatever it is but there we go that works and let's again use our little mirror trick so edit mode ctrl R to make a loop cut now this is gonna go along the path along the direction of the hallway hit enter enter again and now you can't tell but is this plane is cut into two pieces or two it does not cut into two pieces it has two faces on it I'm gonna delete one face delete face get at it edit mode go to your modifiers wrench add a mirror and look at this X is not working because what is X X is this way down the hallway so we want Y and uncheck X there we go so now whatever we do to this side will be copied over here so we can do some little floor paneling I don't know you want to make floor paneling really subtle because when you think about it you don't want a floor in real life to have a bunch of bumps and grooves and stuff because you get tripped and drunk will get caught in there little bit get dirty lots of problems with floor panels so don't go crazy with floor paneling me you may want to just stick to applying an image texture to give it some look not so much modeling but yeah so little member turned off snap when we're modeling I'm gonna extrude this down a little bit do an inset a little bit and extra it back up very little changes very very small you can barely see that edge but with the right lighting and texturing it'll look cool alright and I'm gonna do it another inset with the letter I I love I inset and so nice scale on the x-axis to make more of a square shape and let's drop it down a little bit there and you just want to leave it like that just a little drop even though that's going against what I just said it's okay turn back turn our snap back on and move this over here and here's this awesome trick array Oh wrong direction now the array - let's collapse our mirror we don't need mirror this is our array modifier right here we've got two two copies account number two you can increase this to make more but it's moving X positive 1 positive 1 is this way to the left so if we go negative it's gonna go to the right so negative 1 there we go I've got two copies duplicated now it's just one copy so the original and the copy so we're whatever we do over here it's gonna be copied over here so I'm gonna do something cool I'm gonna apply our dark material but then also I'm going to apply the light material plus grab the other lighter material into a sign because I had these spaces selected that means when you do a sign whatever material you have select is going to assign to those faces or vertices so there we go it's not really pretty looking let me make a little bit a little darker there we go that's a little better let's have a nice or cool and our original wall is not far back enough oops so let's grab these pieces 2 3 4 and make sure our snap is on yes it is moving back right there so with hallways you want to make sure that everything is perfectly symmetrical you've got to be OCD when you're making stuff like this so it looks like these things are about 4 units back on either side left and right and when you design you want to keep that in mind you want to make sure things are spaced out now let's make a ceiling piece and then I think that it will sum up this video all right so again make sure your cursor is in the middle by shift C shift a to add let's add a cube and we want to move it up so GZ to move it up on the z axis right let's say if you hit number 3 it'll look oh look at this this whole wall is not on the floor it's hovering above the floor which is why that thing is there so let's select these guys moving down one unit shift click click click click pick number three to get this down the hallway view and we need to move these down oh there you go snapped right onto the grid I love that grid alright back to our ceiling piece if you select a mesh in hit period or decimal point it centers your view on that object very helpful for modeling because we do we don't care about anything right now except for just the cube so let's do there are a little by sex trick edit control are to add a loop cut inter enter now we're gonna grab this face make sure you got your faces selected in the top left we right click on this face ctrl + to increase your selection it just kind of grows see that we don't want to grow that much so select our side face control + to grow now I've got 50% of the cube selected delete face now I got half of an empty cube here that's good go to your gear aren't your wrench add modifier mirror and we needed and we need to mirror this on the y-axis there we go so uncheck X check Y now whatever we do over here will be copied over here this is good so we're just gonna make kind of like a support beam and I want to move this up a little bit because I don't know why I maybe I need to get out of this this Rhett but I like making ceiling pieces with that like Kenna diagonal up and down you'll see you'll see what I mean alright so select a side face I'm going to turn off extra ever hear that with this option on you can see through meshes I don't want that I don't care about the back end the back side there we go so I'm gonna turn off our snaps because I'm editing I'm going to X true with E extra width again and then move it down GZ let's make sure things are lining up we'll be down a little bit further I could use snap for this but I'm not and then II extrude all the way out like that cool so we got a little support being there let's make some other pieces to kind of fill it in so we have more of a whole wider piece so I'm gonna make another loop cut ctrl R and it's gonna go horizontal now enter we're gonna grab all these top faces and extrude it so click on the first face hold ctrl and right click on the last face kinda gets like a selection range we go now extrude that out we actually want to do this with the snap on now so let's extrude to two units now let's undo extrude to four units there we go cool so this is going to tile this piece is going to be repeated by an array and they're all gonna line up nice and tight so let's move it back to the beginning of our hallway now I'm gonna add a array we wanted to go negative X because we're going the wrong direction there we go cool and now here's the fun part go go gadget ceiling awesome now we got some gaps here you know you can add some fans or some pipes at the good place for pipes actually had I had pipes pipes are super easy there's a lot going on in the scene and it's hard to model with everything turned on so let's hit the backslash button or a forward slash actually which solos out an object to get out of it you forward slash again so forward slash and I'm gonna turn off this screen visibility of array that means it's still there if I hit render it's all there but I'm just invisible it's like hiding a layer in Photoshop now let's add some pipes here right-click on this face space bar and type in snap cursor to active there we go that means our 3d cursor is right there which means when we add the cylinder shift a and cylinder look at that it's right there perfect so our for rotate let's write it on the y-axis so now it's going down the length of the hallway good let's us X or sorry s for scale X and - okay so now we've got a two unit long cylinder everything's exact numbers I know it's kind of weird if you're such if you're a beginner but just trust me it's gonna make things so much cleaner and easier instead of moving your mouse and trying to line things up just do it by numbers with the grid it's awesome so we need to move this down the hallway a little bit so G X maybe - nope negative remember G X negative - oh look at that perfect there's no way I could have lined it up with me by using in my eyeball nice and it's actually a little thick so let's scale by 0.5 and then scale X now when you do scale number scale is everything unless you press X Y or Z so I just killed everything by 0.5 which is what half the size that's actually should another li ER now we're going to stretch this out again so s x2 nice that's where we were before but now it's the right size and we can move it in a little bit by G Y or move it to the Y there we go okay so let's press our forward slash to get out of this view let's see what this looks like when we put all the pieces back in so remember we turned off the array let's turn it back on by hitting the screen oh nice look at that and let's give it a dark material ceilings are good when they're dark you don't want to be too bright unless it's a very white and clean backdrop like like that prisoner ship that I made cool so that's the basis of my little daniel grove module system is make your pieces in factors of 2 with the width make sure everything else lines up as best as you can you know these are all the same depth or thickness the default cube thickness which is actually 2 2 grid units technically and yeah using array all 2d to make clones of things there we go so if I edit this it's gonna be the same on both meshes which saves me a lot of time things like that I may do another video on the material in for sci-fi surfaces and maybe even one more deal to one on modeling like how to make cool greebles kind of make cool panels and some very simple tricks from modeling that gets you some really great results in a short amount of time because I just didn't have time to to quite do that on this one but I will soon so thank you so much for watching I hope you learned something if you have any questions be sure to ask me in the comments or in a message and I'll do my best to answer your questions thanks for watching and have a great day

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 64,707

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Id: H7Ck3w-F0aI

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020