Modeling a Chess Set That Works in 2D and 3D

in this video we're going to create a chest set that is very unique it is 3d and it's made in blender but when you view it from above it looks 2d so to do this we're going to have to do some clever boolean modifier operations for intersecting mesh so we'll start out by creating a pawn so we'll use a curve i will go to edit mode and view it from the front and i will delete all the segments and click draw and then you can just draw your pawn like this boop let's go modify properties add modifier screw and we've got ourselves a pawn let's make it a little bit slimmer let's just adjust some settings is this a pawn yet um yeah that's a pawn so the thing about bishops is that they're really just tall pawns so let's just make it tall and let's make it a little bit pointy oh it's too oh no that's weird we need a little dot on top and zoom in there we go okay so there's our bishop so let's make a queen and a queen it's just a tall bishop so let's make this even taller you know i always struggle to remember whoa that's a queen that's the queen i was about to say i struggle to remember how queen looks like but it just feels like a queen um let's make the king um yeah we need to just wait what no this guy should be oh that's the long neck what does a king look like is this a king oh wait no this is a king right and then the like this yeah um yeah we'll deal with the cross later yeah that's oh no that's way too wide you know what this is weird i want to do uh yes yes so the rook is also a palm it's just a little bit you know it's been in some tougher battles so we're gonna have to just see if we can do is this a rook i thought i remembered what chess pieces looked like until i started is this a rook this has to be a rook right yeah and then we'll do the yeah perfect now i was almost hoping we wouldn't get this far but now we're going to make the knight and that's going to be really difficult so let's just try it let's get rid of this oh i have no idea can we just draw the horse like this this is a horse right and then the poop and the ears and the neck hair i'm not that good of horse uh oh is this a loop nice it this is a really good horse we're going to make this into a mesh and we're going to extrude it and fill it yep perfect where's remash there's remash we can just and let's go ahead and sculpt and i'm not a sculptor oh we need to apply this let's set it to smooth smooth this no isn't oh the symmetry perfect is it just me or is this horse going beyond all expectations ears ears oh this one is the best one boop it looks like a hippo ah it has to be a horse um yeah that's good isn't it no it's still a hippo is it more a hippo now i think this um is going to be a bit removed anyways you know what that's good i know what you're thinking this is the worst horse ever but there's a trick uh do like this so we want this to be the bottom of the horse because we're going to like cut it open under here so delete the faces and we are going to look at the scene statistics edges 84. so if we take this one now this base thing if we set this to 84 now oh we have to make it to mesh first so now we can delete some of this select the base and then the horse ctrl j to join and you have both these selected f3 bridge yep and this looks super super weird ctrl v smooth just smooth so let's go back into sculpt mode let's just oh recalculate so let's move this i know what you're thinking this is not the chess piece but it is we're going to cut it from above so i've tried this a little bit and it's going to i think it's going to be just fine so that's all the chess pieces now we're going to convert these to mesh and we are going to have to do some minor housekeeping to just prepare this so convert to mesh and we're going to have to so let's just close these holes and the bishop oh what's really cool about the bishop is you know the bishop usually has this the shape of the silhouette of the bishop is often like this right that was a really good drawing okay never mind you know it usually has this thing right here and you might be thinking well we're going to add that and the thing is with this workflow we don't have to add it it's going to just appear by itself and the exact same thing is with the rook we won't have to do the this thing or whatever it's just going to be automatically cut like this and it's a really cool workflow okay so now our chess pieces are made complete you know what can we like yeah so now we're going to find some 2d chest designs and if you go on wikipedia for example and search for svg chess pieces oh no this is wiki media i think that's the same you will get all this design that is made by the user c burnett and this is the design that is mostly used online i think it's the default uh leeches design but i'm not super happy about the way the king is designed and the way the the queen the strokes of the i'm not like super happy about this so i did some research and i found this article on wikipedia chess symbols in unicode which means you can just type the character signs for chess and they will show up in any software if you have the right font installed so here is an overview of different fonts and how they interpret chess design so this font called free serif looks really great it's in this number two one and what's also great is that this is a gnu free font which is gpl 3.0 you know i'm not a legal expert but this sounds pretty good so let's scroll all the way down let's find the references gnu project archives and under free font this one 2010 dot zip you can download it let's place it on the desktop right click extract here so here are the fonts and if you sort them by size you can see that the free serif.otf is by far the biggest one two megabytes and fun fact about windows if you right click and drag on your desktop you can get this menu you can copy it instead so now we have this font saved to our desktop perfect so back in blender let's create a new text object we can write something and you can set the font to be the one on your desktop now if you go back to the chess symbols in unicode article you can scroll down and you can see here here's a chessboard using unicode so now you can copy all these characters which are chess piece characters you can just control v and you have chess pieces in blender perfect so now let's do the pawns you know let's just do one pawn like that so that's the black pieces now let's do the white pieces and then the palm so what i really like here is that these are sort of inverted so they are going to work without colors compared to this design that is really cool because this uses sort of three colors it's transparency black and white but this uses only transparency and then one color and i think that's really cool and i also think this design is just really good i look at this horse it's much better than what we just made in 3d what's really cool about this now you can just select all these right click extrude and you have these 3d models in your scene if you go ahead and watch the svg tutorial you're going to find a lot of information which just explains importing svg because these by now are basically svgs if you convert these to curves they are identical so i recommend checking out that tutorial it's going to help a lot because i'm going to do things a little bit faster in this video so we are going to give this a material that is very important because it's going to be impossible to do after we've done the boolean stuff let's call it inside let's just make it a very distinct color there we go and let's give it this one as well you know what i want to be super safe okay so we're going to color code this and i don't know why it just feels better so now we're going to convert this so right click convert to mesh so we're going to start separating all of these so select one of them and then press p just go through them and separate all these objects except for the pawns you can do uh by loose parts so now all of these if you for example set the origin to geometry and do like this yeah perfect wait a minute there are duplicates here i should be thinking a bit more before i do stuff yeah um okay there okay so let's move the palms over here you know i'm thinking if we should name this yeah let's you know what let's name it oh these are in the wrong order we're going to have to okay so the pawn rook am i playing chess right now in 2d let's take this pawn and line it up that's the king right so now it's all about just lining these up well oh it's very important that they cover all of them uh let's take the queen by the way when i'm scaling i'm not just scaling i'm scaling with s and then shift z so then we're not messing up our height and that's very important because in chess it's this super strict hierarchy where you can't really mess with the height of the pieces so there is a chance that this just won't work some of the times remember that the horse the knight needs to be facing forward we're going to actually apply that rotation it doesn't actually matter that these overlap because it will only be these that will survive once we have made the cut okay so this probably looks a bit weird oh we have to select all of these right click merge by distance this is incredibly important you see remembered 10 000 vertices that would have messed up our entire workflow because the boolean modifier is just mysterious oh and by the way you can see these have this different sort of placement nothing to worry about it's going to be completely fine ah it's this we should have named and we're going to oh wait no this is really important oh this is so important i'm so glad i remember this for the material setup to work these pieces for some reason needs to have both materials we're going to give this material a white 3d piece and we're going to just make all of them have the same material okay perfect let's duplicate these and let's be super precise here oh by the way this other knight has to be turned because it's the only piece without rotational symmetry these have the wrong materials it has to be inside black and then it has to be black 3d piece doing all this material stuff beforehand it's such a time saver and i'm just really excited if this is going to work and let's start chopping away so let's select all of these just to make things easier i'm going to set the viewport display display as bounds now we know that this is correct and we know that they're inside and we know and hope that this is going to work let's start with the rook let's give it the boolean modifier i just want to have a little taste white rook very interesting oh we see that it's already working oh and the materials are set up as well this is proof that it works so now we can set the object data properties normals auto smooth so now this is a rook and when you view it from above it's a 2d rook how amazing is that you can set this to flat you can see that this is actually a 2d rook and a 3d piece amazing so let's do it on the rest let's disable it on this one and then copy it to all of these so now all of these have their empty boolean modifier and let's just start linking oh the horse works as well amazing bishop ah the bishop doesn't work but we'll come back to it and try and fix it queen oh queen works and by doesn't work i mean that you can see it's transparent and the color helps us to tell that it's it's not really working let's have a look at the king oh the king works oh my god the king looks the king looks a little bit like a queen we might have to address that interesting so the palm the pawn always works yep now for the black pieces oh oh this is going to be so cool ah i'm very excited oh look at that how elegant is this design it's sort of that's amazing now let's do the black queen this is the black queen yeah and oh this is amazing oh my god look at this design this is this is like majestic it looks like a king and queen like so cool it looks like it's what is this drapes like a dress oh my god this is beyond expectations i had no idea the colors would be so cool black bishop oh bugged as well we might have to look at the 3d model there oh the knight is going to work yes oh that's really cool and then the rook blackrook wait ah perfect so there we have it some of them are a little bit bugged let's take a look at the bishops first um what might help it's actually just to set this too fast yes it actually works oh my god look at this this is amazing and here's the thing i told you about you know the bishops usually need this thing this one it's it's sort of built in right you get you get it for free how cool is that and the same is with the rook as well both of these have these okay so this isn't that dramatic this is just a little but yeah but this one look at this one i'm not super happy about the rooks to be honest but we'll get them some details there that's interesting let's actually do a proper check with each model to just see that nothing is broken so yeah we're going to delete these floating parts yeah so i'm looking for holes basically and i can't seem to find any so now let's look at the queens this looks good these look amazing and it's like super sharp hair as well i'm not really sure if that's super cool but yeah but look at this it's like a dress oh my god i can't believe how cool this is you know i was thinking that this might be like okay but it's i think it's really cool and i have so many ideas for this uh the kings looks great all right okay so if i were to find some holes let me show oh i can't really replicate any mistakes because it's too perfect pawn's looking good okay so let's convert these to mesh uh right click convert to mesh this basically applies all the boolean modifiers so now i'm going to just clean up i'm using l to just select the floating pieces and you can't really see that these are sort of being ruined so you can delete all this no problem then you can just test to see yeah no moving parts there let's test this one yeah no loose parts i think this one has a lot of them yep and oh his entire nose is floating so well oh it still looks like a horse even though the nose is gone that that's really cool i mean it's a really weird horse that's really cute though a little snout i don't know why this looks so weird perhaps we can fix it with an edge split modifier yes we can that looks really good fantastic so apparently all of these are going to need an edge split modifier yep any floating parts here okay so we have this one this is a floating part but it's not that much floating it's more like standing there so i guess it's okay did which way did we go yeah let's do the queens oh we can just that's much better way to do it just like this yeah perfect this queen is so cool these ones they're these are amazing this one is interesting the king but it has so many loose pieces should we remove this piece i mean we're sort of supposed to if we're following the rule okay so we have to keep this this and this doesn't this look a little bit weird yeah i think i'm keeping the head it wraps around like this so it's really difficult to see that it's actually levitating so i think we're good now we are getting ready you want to take a look let's let's take it in orthographic view let's set it to flat and let's actually look at our 2d chess set how cool is this we can even have about this as the same color this is so cool okay so let's actually set up a chessboard and you might be thinking oh it's going to use a shader but we're going to use i've been waiting my whole life to use this feature checker deselect oh [ __ ] okay then finally we get to do the checkered what okay there we go a sign perfect i don't know what's real here uh yeah so this is wrong how big are chess pieces like this now it's a little bit smaller oh they're standing on the board already almost like they're ready to be played now let's do the pawn king oh where's the king yeah that's how we know i'm not a good chess player because i always mess up where the king and queen are going to stand bishops beer ships this is actually one of those things that takes less time in real life i feel oh that's so cool that's amazing i can't wait to click this button rendered view if you know what i mean i mean you do know what i mean because i just said what i meant white pawns no this is the black pawn like this yes it says rook knight queen is that right yes king poop that's much faster than the previous one why didn't i oh yes yes yes yes so we're going to create another plane let's give it a little bit of a of a frame here and then we can move it down a little bit and then we can take this edge there we go perfect 2d board perfect 3d board i think the king is a bit weird is it just me or does the king have this expression like it's like this yes by the way we are in blender 3.0 beta so we have cycles x oh yeah it just says cycles trust me it's cycles x let's add a light oh and by the way i'm using area lights now i've always been like oh you should use mesh lights but area lights are great so retract everything bad i've said about this light so dramatic perhaps the board is too bright yeah a little bit oh by the way if anyone tells you to never use the ad shader for stuff like this don't listen to them so the pawns aren't completely round it looks weird what if the pieces are glass but not entirely glass like just this part i want to see it oh it's a bit underwhelming perhaps with a different color ah it looks a little bit interesting let's have a look at the white pieces no what is this oh wait a minute you can't really see the material when you're viewing them from above we can actually make these quite dark and we can make the white pieces dark as well so this is actually really interesting you can make the white pieces white because they're white like this but when you're viewing them from the top they have to be sort of negative so they have to be dark air but that's no problem because these colors aren't visible when you view them from the top this is a really cool concept this is a bit more classy if they're not like super screaming color this is a really cool chess set in my opinion i mean it's a lot it's it's probably too much how cool is this the bishop is like one-fifth of a queen that's just such a cool design thing that like okay so you might want to take the bishop which has like one value but the queen you know five you should go for the queen and then the pawns are like not even one now we have this design that when you view it from above like perfectly from above you get this hey it looks a little bit like a 2d design right and that's like it's almost like a fun fact it's not like super visible it's like okay cool yeah i see it now you say it but a really cool way to just make this super visual let's change the light to a sunlight let's take all the pieces let's move them right up look at this how cool is this the shadows are perfect of course if you have direct sunlight these shadows are perfect so here we have basically made a piece of cloth and there is bright sunlight coming from above you put a camera underneath you could sort of record the movement of these pieces so if someone were to 3d print this design you could probably do like a chess match where it's possible to film from below so let's say you move the pawn and it goes out of focus because it's away and then when you place it on the square it's going to be like sharp again you won't have to use these really expensive chessboards so that is a chess set that works in 2d and 3d and now i'm going to try and render it out and just showing off this design [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh by the way feel free to add me on leeches

Channel: Polyfjord

Views: 4,218,574

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Id: fxe9KbWtCQ0

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021