Modeling a Treasure Chest in Blender: Blocking Out Basic Shapes

welcome to this blender two-point-eight training course my name is Kent Trammell and I will be your instructor but before we get started in blender I want to briefly discuss the goals of this course first off the intended audience is both beginners and experienced blender artists the release of blender version 2.8 has ushered in a new era of open source 3d creation and there's a lot of new people wanting to learn it for the first time as well as a lot of people looking to make a smooth transition from previous versions therefore this curriculum is designed to be simple enough for beginners with enough challenge for the experienced and to that end a treasure chest is a great project well it's certainly a lot of fun to create the best part is it will teach you all the essential techniques and workflow for creating with blender 2.8 in general meaning you can apply what you learn here to any number of things you want to build and that's the most important thing to get out of this so please keep that in mind as we go and with that said let's start modeling we're going to be starting this project from a fresh default blender 2.8 scene the only things I've changed in this setup if I go to my preferences is in the key map settings I've changed the spacebar action to be searched instead of the default play or tools this is from 2.7 behavior meaning I can hit the spacebar and type in any command to find tools easier and then I've also enabled a screencast keys add-on so that you can see what keys I'm pressing in the bottom right that doesn't really apply to you it's just for me as a teacher everything else should be completely default now with default blender you get a camera and a lamp for free these are objects we don't really need at least not now and so to get rid of them I can select them with left click select and then hold shift to add to my selection by clicking another object and then go to the object menu and choose delete or I can use the hotkey X to delete that as well I'm more of a hotkey person so you'll see me tend that way but I'll do my best to show you also in the menu where these items are found but at this point we're left with just the default cube which works out perfectly it will become the bottom half of our your chest now I want to set this on the grid as if the grid is a floor because right now the grid is cutting through the middle of our cube so I'm going to select that cube and then hit g4 grab or move the object around I want to lock it to the z-axis so I hit the Z key next now it's just moving up and down and then I can hit one on my number pad and then enter now this essentially served if we do that one more time G Z and one just moves the cube up one grid unit and that essentially puts the cube directly on the floor which is just preferentially how I like to contextualize the 3d space and now our cube is sitting on the floor we can start to edit this into a more rectangular shape as is appropriate for a treasure chest so with that selected I'm going to tab into edit mode so you can hit the tab key to go in and out of edit mode where we now have access to mesh vertices or edges or spaces and I can change through those one being vertices to being edges three being faces and those numbers are above the letter keys not the number pad alright so I'll just start with vertices and then hit a to select everything and hit sx/4 scale in the x-axis and I'm going to type in one period eight alright that's scaling it horizontally one point eight units and I've done this several times from rehearsal and I know that I want my Y dimensions to scale in Y one point two and now we're looking at the final dimensions of our treasure chest at least the lower half of the treasure chest and I'm gonna delete this top face because I want it to appear like an empty box so hit the three hotkey and then just select the top face and hit X just like an object mode to bring up our delete menu and we have several options here I just want to delete faces specifically and now we're looking at an empty basic treasure chest half now for the top we're going to use another primitive a cylinder I can tab back to object mode and go to the add menu to choose mesh cylinder or you can hit the hotkey shift a brings up the exact same menu I'm looking for the mesh category and cylinder specifically now before I do anything else including move or scale or rotate I have some creation specific options or operator specific options because creating a cylinder is a blender operation and anytime you do a blender operation you get specific settings in this bottom left menu right here you'll see it pop up and then disappear whenever you do another operation and so I want to have access to these settings to establish a better primitive creation and you'll see what I mean I'm going to hit three on the number pad which takes me to side orthographic view and then I'm also going to go to wireframe and to do that I hit the Z hotkey and move my mouse over to wireframe all right so now we can see the cylinder it has a several segments it has 32 segments in fact but I want to change the alignment for now which means rotating in the y-axis 90 degrees all right so that puts our cylinder like this and then I want to move it up in the z axis and then now that I'm positioning it that's why I need the side orthographic view I want the center of our cylinder to match the top edge of the treasure chest bottom so let's move that up and as you slide or move anything in blender or change a setting like a a number slider like we're doing if it's too sensitive you can always hold shift and that will make it more precise and so I'm holding shift now and matching the center of our cylinder to the top edge and you can probably see where I'm going with this in that we will delete the bottom half of the cylinder leaving us a nice rounded top to the treasure chest but I've still got these options and I want to change the radius to match the dimensions of the rectangle that we've already created so about there and then if I look from the front I want to make sure that the depth is aligned as well just like that which actually three point six meters makes sense because we scaled one point eight so let me just type that in precisely three point six excellent and now the last thing we need to change is the number of vertices so here we have a choice to make you can see that the faceting in the cylinder will be great for creating the planks of our treasure chests right the treasure chest is not just solid wood it's created from planks of wood that's built together to create our shape and so if I lower this vertex count from 32 you'll see that the faceting gets broader and this would essentially make our boards more broad and so I actually want the value to be 16 okay so this will establish a good size for the boards that will make up our treasure chest and at this point I'm finally done with the creation of the cylinder so we can minimize that menu and then I can tab into edit mode and get rid of the end faces I guess I could have done that from the add menu as well but I did not and then I want to delete the bottom half switching over to vertices and then go to wireframe mode the reason I go to wireframe mode is I want to select the front and back vertex so you can see I selected but in the orthographic view it looks like it's not selected so by going to wireframe I can be box select that is the B hotkey as in well you saw it in the bottom right corner B as in boy and now I've got all those elements selected I can hit X and delete those vertices all right now we're left with just the top half and I can fill the sides now just being a half circle shape by selecting two vertices and hitting the F key all right this is our fill option now blender has a default fill operator that you just saw but there's a default add-on that's disabled out of the box but is included with blender and if we enable that it's called f2 and it is a much better fill operator so I am going to enable that right now in the add-ons section I can search for f2 we will enable that I will also save my current state of the preferences so that's always enabled when I start blender and now when I hit F you'll see that it fills the next available face in the direction that my mouse is ok so if I hold my mouse down it will fill the other direction but if I hold it up it will fill along my half circle and then for the last one I'm going to select these up three verts and fill that as well and this represents three new board planks I'll do the same thing on the other side fill with FF and then select these final three and hit that the reason I have to select those final three is by hitting F again it will leave me with a tiny triangle which I don't want I instead just will fill the whole thing there we go now it's the right kind of width to represent our board plank alright so we've got the basic shape of our cylinder I'm sorry not a cylinder our treasure chest using a cylindrical primitive and a cube primitive but now we're ready to expand and add more detail and actually create the shapes that make up the box okay like I've already said it's not solid wood it's made out of planks we've kind of established that already on the upper half but we now we need to do it for the bottom half and so I will select the bottom cube tab into edit mode again and we need to cut what are called edge loops and in your tool panel you have the option called loop cut right here I again being a hotkey person I like the control our hotkey so I'm going to hit ctrl R and then when you hover over faces you see this yellow line indicating where a new edge would be cut now if I scroll my mouse wheel that will increase the number of cuts and you can start to see where the number of cuts can create our plank pattern alright so if I use 3 for example and cut it there and then right-click let me do that one more time because ctrl R cut 3 loops and now I can actually move these loops up and down but I don't want to make that transformation I will right click to cancel that part of the operation so now I've got 3 actually 4 evenly spaced faces that represent wooden planks that will make up our treasure chest alright so for the bottom I need to approach this a little differently because I don't want to cut edge loops along these other faces that's just unnecessary geometry I only want to cut it on the bottom so I need to split apart this face from the rest of the mesh which I can do with the Y hotkey ok press Y and then G move it and you can see that it's no longer attached to the rest of the mesh and now that it's not attached I can hit ctrl R and cut three edge loops on the bottom face okay so now we've got boards running this way as well alright so we've got the the edge loops cut now we need to separate them out into their own individual faces we'll do that like we just did with the Y hotkey I need to select one by one and hit why-why-why and then the last one we don't need to because it's already its own face do the same thing for everything else why-why-why and now we've got our planks individually separated but they're paper thin let me hide this object up here for a second it's called cylinder we can either turn it off with the eye icon over here or you can hit the H key in object mode select it hit H that will hide it and now looking at just our the bottom half of the treasure chest you can see that our planks are paper-thin and we need to start adding thickness so I can select everything in edit mode with the a hotkey and hit the e hotkey to extrude our faces out extrude just like a pasta maker is adding thickness into a certain direction now by default you know it kind of moves all the faces in a single axis which is not what we want so having hit the e key I will then right-click to cancel any kind of movement that is there by default and I still extrude it if I hit the G key and move it around you can see that but while this certain selection is still available I want to hit alt and s ok that will move our selected mesh components along the face normal as I you know move my mouse wheel you can see that the thickness is increasing or decreasing or going in the opposite direction in this case I want to move it the thickness inward to about something like that you know it's not something needs to be perfect but just needs to make a little bit of sense and I think that makes sense for wood planks all right so to go over that again because the extrusion part can be a little weird I'm gonna select everything e to extrude and then immediately right click to cancel that extra movement then alt s and I can create my thickness as desired all right so this is great we are one step closer to having a true dimensional version of our box as it would be constructed in real life now we do have a problem because the extrusion is intersecting right now and I need to make either the front boards or the side boards it within the other okay so I'm gonna choose the side in this situation and I want to select all of the mesh components that are connected or or a mesh island as it's called and to select an entire island in one hotkey hover over a part of the mesh and hit L alright that will select the linked island and that's perfect for our individual boards so I'll just hover over each piece and hit L on the other side as well and I want to scale in the y-axis and line it up exactly with the front boards the back side of the front boards now if you're a true 3d modeler you will want that to be perfect not just close but perfect and 3d modeling is heaven for your perfectionism or hell depending on how you look at it and if we want it to be perfect we can instead use these snapping options so I hit control Z to undo that and these snapping options can be found near the magnet icon we can either enable them globally by turning that toggle on I prefer to keep it off and you can enable snapping in a transformative operation if I hit G and I'm moving and then hold control and it will start snapping to various parts of the mesh now the default is using incremental snapping based on the grid floor I want to use vertex snapping and also I want to affect rotate and scale well it's definitely scale let's turn off rotate I guess till we need it but at this operation I'm going to use scale with the S hotkey in the y axis again and then holding ctrl I can snap directly to that point ok so that's great I need to do the same thing on the bottom select just these mesh components also to deselect I don't know if I said that yet but that is hitting the a key twice pretty quickly alright so a once everything a twice d selects everything and then L to select mesh islands same thing s Y and then hold ctrl and snap it for a perfect scaling value and then we've got another issue between the bottom and the side so I'm going to decide to shrink these side panels upward just a little bit so once again deselect everything ll ll L ll L okay now I'm going to scale in the z-axis but we get a problem we're scaling on the bottom which is what I want but we're also scaling on the top now I can actually scale according to the top edge as long as my active component is one of those top edges which in this case it is it's that white element anything that's selected in white is your active component and if we choose edges specifically or vertices specifically I can shift click on that vertex at the top and then change our snapping or rather our pivot point to be active element okay now when we scale we're scaling towards that top edge and I can hit s Z and ctrl to snap to the bottom right there okay so now we've got perfect precise modeling you can feel good about the precision of that I know as a modeler that is a is important so next thing I want to do little tiny detail is move these faces inward so these these planks rather so go to my face selection which is also available up here I like to use the one two and three hotkeys but they're also selectable with the mouse up here so let's select these side panels by themselves first and move in X let's see how far if I look in the upper left corner up here I'm gonna follow my icon not the the mesh elements I'm moving you can see that the distance is changing dynamically so you know keep an eye on that let me let me cancel that operation in real quick keep an eye on that and I can type in a very specific value if I want so I'm pretty close to point negative point zero five let's just type it in negative 0.05 all right and remember that value because I'm going to do the opposite on the other side G X instead of negative let's go point zero five all right so now that gives me a nice little decorative edge so to speak it's probably functional too I've never built a wood chest but I would imagine that's functional and it also breaks up the surface a little bit you know it's not entirely even and perfect so on the note of being perfectionist that definitely has its time and place but perfection is often unbelievable so now I'm transitioning into some artistic advice which segues into adding detail to our shapes but I want to keep in mind that eliminating perfection is going to be good for the artistic quality and the believability so just store that away in the back of your mind because once we start detailing it's going to be much more important but for now everything perfect is fine we're close to a stopping point I just need to do the same thing for the top half of our chests so let's bring that back using the in the outliner up here we can see that cylinder is grayed out and hidden so I can enable that again and select it and tab into edit mode and the same sort of thing I'm going to select each face and hit Y to separate it I'm gonna start with these side pieces and then I'm actually going to create these thickness before I separate these faces going around the the rounded shape I'm gonna select everything right now go to wireframe and I'll show you why I'm going to do this I'm going to e to extrude again right click to cancel any transformation alt s to scale all right so I'm going to line up that thickness according to the thickness of our the bottom part of our chest I think that looks pretty good if it's a little imperfect which I feel like maybe it is slightly different you know I can open up that last operator properties panel and then shift and move that ever so slightly something like that and the reason I decided to do that before separating my planks is now all of my planks will have this angle to it right here that angle is pretty important because if I separated the planks there would be intersection like this and so I wanted to avoid that intersection and I decided to extrude it while it was still connected however this adds one more step if I just select this part of the mesh and then hit shift H that will hide everything that's not selected I need to separate these planks and then fill a face or two faces so I need to select to do this as quickly as possible I can hold the Alt key and then click on well that's in edge mode and so well alt will click an edge loop you know how we cut edge loops for the bottom you can select edge loops holding alt and clicking also in various mesh component selection types so go to face and doing the same thing alt clicking now it selects that row of edge loops all right this is great for our planks I can do that and then hit Y to separate it do that all the way down the line until I get to the last one because that has an additional face on it so the last one if I hit L to select the island that's actually fine and on the front that's actually fine too but I need to fill one extra face if I move this out of the way since they were connected it doesn't automatically fill that face whenever we separate so I need to do this manually and the way I will do it it's not terribly quick but that's okay we'll just a select the island and then Shift H to hide everything else go to edge selection and then I can fill all right so select two faces or really just one face I guess using f2 and you can fill all right that's what I need to do for the rest of these pieces so select hide everything else fill the faces alt H brings everything back and let's try by the way shift L will deselect an entire island and I will just quickly fill the rest of these faces okay now everything has thickness and everything's separated into their own boards now that was a little bit more tedious than the bottom half of the chest and really I only did it because I wanted these angles to match up perfectly and so to me that was worth it but it is a little bit of that perfectionistic stuff that I was talking about not wanting them to intersect because that's not what things do in reality anyway the only thing left to do is to speaking of intersection is to fix the intersections on these side boards so let me go to face mode and then select these islands and then inside orthographic I can scale maybe just scale the whole thing down towards the active element like we did earlier so let's go to edge selection make that edge right there make that the active element make sure that our pivot is still set to active element then we should be able to scale down which we are yeah okay great we're going to be able to align these boards with the internal edge of the other faces that make sense the other boards however as I scale it's bringing the other boards across our chest in an undesired way so we just need to tell it to scale in every axis except X specifically right we do not want it to go in this direction in order to do that we can hit s and then shift X that means scale in every axis other than X and then we can align that as such okay so we've got the essential structure of our chest completed aside from perhaps moving this these blocks right here move it in X what is it negative point zero five yeah that's what it was do the same thing on the other side the opposite G X point zero five okay excellent now we've got the essential wooden shapes of our treasure chest and this essential shape is called a block out it's best to block out all of your shapes before you move on to the detailing phase so we've got our wooden block out we need to then block out the metal portions before we add final details so we will add those metal block out pieces in the next video

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 56,564

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender 2.8, modeling, blocking out, primitives, model, blender model, 3d model, video

Id: qH0Ak4cqqlo

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019