Category Archives: Modellers

Creators – Week 4

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This week we continued with adding more props to our diorama. Of these the gaming chair was the most complex.

To make the five-footed design of chair base we started with a cylinder with twice as many sides and then, after placing an edge loop near the bottom, extruded every second face to form the feet. We then extruded these feet ends a second time and extruded a few more times to form a roughly spherical shape to represent coasters.

The chair seat was just a cube, scaled to the appropriate proportions and then the front and back faces extruded and scaled slightly to round out the shape. We duplicated the seat and moved and rotated it to form the chair back as well.

The arms were created by first duplicating the faces on the left and right of the chair seat, scaling them vertically and moving them up into position. The reason for doing this with copied faces was because it ensured they were perfectly aligned to the rest of the chair. These faces where then extruded with the “Extrude along face normals” command [Keystroke: Alt-E] to give them width. Finally we extruded the back faces of these two arms, down to the bottom of the chair back, by selecting them, going to a side view and using the Ctrl-Right Click command.

We also added a few more simple props. These were all based on cubes, scaled to size and shaped using inset, extrude and edge loops.

This is the final room, from a geometry perspective. We still need to give materials to the objects, light the scene and render a final image.

Files for this weeks work-in-progress model can be found on our Sharepoint site.

Creators – Week 3

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After mostly doing a review of the basic functions of Blender in Weeks 1 and 2, we started our first real project this week; a diorama of a room populated with low-poly props, rended by an orthographic camera from an isometric perspective.

A screenshot of Blender showing the diorama as a work-in-progress.

Most of the time we use perspective cameras. With perspective cameras, like in the real world, things appear smaller the further away they are. An orthographic camera does not have that effect; things stay the same size no matter how far away they are. In the image above the right-hand pane shows the view from the orthographic camera while the left-land shows a standard perspective view. You can see how the cube shape is emphasised using the orthographic camera; it’s a stylistic choice.

We are also using an isometric view point. This is one where the camera is positioned approximately the same distance along each axis and looking back towards the origin. It’s a style of presentation that has been made popular in many games down the ages and again is a stylistic choice. Search Google Images for “game isometric” to see examples.

We learned how to split the Blender view by dragging from the bottom left corner with the mouse. This split view allows us to maintain the camera view on one screen while we actively edit on the other.

Blender Viewport Shading Options

We set some options for Viewport Shading to help understand the model as we build it. These are shown above. Shadow and cavity help emphasise edges and geometry. Switching “Color” to “Random” helps us quickly visually distinguish distinct object while we still don’t have separate materials assigned to them.

All the objects were built with the following techniques:

  1. Loop-cuts
  2. Edge and face loop selection, movement and scaling
  3. Inset
  4. Face duplication and separation (to create new objects)
  5. Bridge edge-loops

The first three of these are very familiar, but we can talk about the other two. A few places, such as around the hole in the wall cut for the window, we had a set of existing faces that could be repurposed to form the basis of another object, in that case the window itself. Duplication of faces is accomplished with the keystroke shift-d, followed by enter to confirm. The duplicates, already selected, can then be separated by pressing p and choosing “Selection”.

Bridging edge loops we used in two ways. In the first, we had faces on opposite sides of a box. Selecting them both and choosing “Bridge Edge Loops” from the “Edge” menu causes a hole to be punched out between these faces,. The original faces are removed and the internal edges of the new hole are filled in.

The second way we used it was to join two faces opposing each other across a gap. In this case the faces are again themselves removed and a solid connection between the faces original locations is created across the gap.

Next we are going to continue to model props within the room and, time permitting, assign materials and render a final image.

Files for this weeks work-in-progress model can be found on our Sharepoint site.

Modelers – Build and Rig a Basic Humanoid Character – Week 15

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This week we continued with our super-simple rigged humanoid character. We texture painted the character, animated them, added a rigged camera and finally rendered everything to video.

Here are the video instructions:

Here’s a link to the folder where we store all our files . You’ll find a new file in there called humanoid_wip2.blend, containing everything we did this week.

Modelers – Build and Rig a Basic Humanoid Character – Week 14

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This week we build a super-simple humanoid character mesh using metaballs, a new modelling technique. We then rigged the character for animation with a simple armature.

Here are the video instructions:

Here’s a link to the folder where we store all our files . You’ll find a new file in there called humanoid_wip.blend, containing everything we did this week.

As an aside, my wife and I were playing with this character. Here’s what we did:

  1. Exported the mesh as an FBX (Select the mesh, File|Export|FBX and choose “export selected”)
  2. Loaded that FBX file into Mixamo.com
  3. In Mixamo, identified the key parts of the body and allowed it to process
  4. Attached a breakdancer mo-cap to the model
  5. Exported it again from Mixamo
  6. Imported it back into Blender (File|Import|FBX)
  7. Added some props (a hat and glasses) and made sure to add them to the head vertex group
  8. Texture painted the character
  9. Added some basic props, a ground, some cardboard and graffiti walls
  10. Animated the camera a little
  11. Imagined the music in our heads… 🙂

Hopefully you might be encouraged to try something like this yourself!

Modelers – Free-for-All Modelling – Week 12

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This week we did things differently and had a free-for-all session where we all built items to put into a collectively sitting room. We shared some 3D scanned humans to allow for proper scaling of items in our world. The screenshot below shows “Bettina” sitting on an ottoman in my pretty empty room waiting for everyone else’s creations to arrive. We’ll continue this next week.

Here’s a link to the folder where we store all our files . You’ll find a new file in there called Sitting Room.blend, containing everything I made this week.

Modelers – Coin Pile Part 3 – Week 8

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This week we finished our animation by texturing the plane to look like a tabletop and adding a background image of a desert island.

We also saw how to add an add-on to Blender, namely Lily Surface Scraper.

Here are the video instructions:

Here’s a link to the finished animation:

Here’s a link to the folder where we store all our files . You’ll find a new file in there called dubloon_wip3.blend, containing everything we did this week.