Welcome to Extruding
in Blender! In this video we'll go over what extruding
is, how you can go about planning your
model, and how it applies differently to faces,
edges, and vertices. So let's hop over
into a new Blender file! So whenever
we're extruding, we're going to want to be in Edit Mode,
and extruding is taking either an edge,
a face, or a vertex and creating
new geometry from it. So let's start with
a face! Go on to Face Select and select one of the
faces. Now we've already experienced what happens when you
scale it, so we could grab this whole cube and scale it
up or scale it so it's tall in the Z axis. But in this case,
what we can do is go down to Mesh
and go to Extrude, and we've got Region and we can see
it's go the shortcut key E. And when you do that it
creates a new face, joined with some other faces.
I haven't made that exactly a cube, although it's probably not far from it.
And then, if we click this face here, we can press
E or go to Mesh and Extrude, and we can extrude out this
way. See you can very quickly build up a model
of whatever you like, by just extruding.
And there we go, we've got some funky block work going on, perhaps
a 3D Tetris piece.
So how does it effect with edges? So we've seen verts when you extrude
a face, it creates a 3D
object of sorts. Now if we go and select an Edge,
and let's say we want to extrude this edge, you will notice it just generates
a single face. And we can lock it using a
modifier key, like the Y key in this case,
in order to lock it into a certain place.
Then there we go, we've got something that can't exist in real life, because it's
just a single face, it's got no thickness,
but it's great for building up our model, because then we can then
click on this face. So we go to Face Select and click on that
face and then extrude upwards.
You see that it's exactly the same
height as that but in a new position. And we can see by the
strange coloring thats going on that, that has in fact got
its normals around the wrong way, so it definitely can't exist in real life.
So in that case, I can select all of the faces, but in this case, I'm going to select the
entire model. So I'm going to go to Select, Deselect Everything
first, and then, Select, and Select everything, and then just go to Mesh,
Normals, and Recalculate to the Outside or
press Control and N. And that sorted out the normals on that.
How about the vertex? Right, with
vertices and when you're extruding using
the vertices, it's locked to the angle of which you're
currently viewing. Now to make that abundantly
clear, we're currently looking down at this kind of 45 degree angle onto our
model. If I select this vertex here and
press the E key or go to Extrude, Vertices
Only, you see that we've got this
vertex that we can place anywhere we like and it's
going to create an edge. And we can carry on doing that to our
hearts content, here, here, here, and you can make
anything you'd like. And of course, at some point, you'll want to close your
geometry. At the moment, this is all loose even though all
of these are connected to one another, it doesn't make anything other than
a series of edges. So we can create one more
and place it roughly next to our vertex that
we've had before, select the other vertex, and then,
Remove our Doubles. And has that
removed? We can see it's removed no vertices. I'm just going to increase the merge distance,
and that's closed that now. So that's one
vertex there, so it's linked back in. Now, if I
move the model around, you'll see that that whole series of
edges that we've created and vertices exist where I was
looking down on it. So if you wanted more control over that, you'd probably
lock your model in Orthographic Projection
to the side, and then, you could take an edge here,
make a pointy shape, if you wanted to, and I'm going to
join it back down here. I'm going to select the other vertex,
Remove Doubles, and that's brought the two together.
And as you can see, that's actually on
this plane here, the Z, Y plane,
so you can see it's straight down that edge. This
one is a bit ambiguous, it's just being created
in a random
place in space.
So you can see, by using this method, you can
very quickly block out a model shape
that you want. Now I haven't been particularly clear with what I'm doing here.
Oh, how about that! So because the
normals were the wrong way around, when we created... I'm just going to switch back into
Perspective Mode. Because the normals were the wrong way around on the
face that we created here, when we extruded an edge,
you can see it's kind of created a box. Now we'll want to
fill that face in, unless we want the box shape. In this
case we don't, so we'll need to go to Edge Select, select
these edges here, and
finally, we need to fill that in. So we can go to Mesh,
Faces, Make an Edge or Face, and click F.
So there we go, that's now a solid object again!
It's challenge time! OK, I'd like you to create a
block plane, as in an airplane! Now I
would like you, if you're unfamiliar with an airplane, to go look at some planes.
Wooden toys do make a great reference material for this
type of modeling, and, of course, once you've made it share the creation
in the discussions.
So let's hop on over into Blender! Here
we have the basic startup file in front of us, and the
first thing I'm going to do is hop on over into Edit Mode.
Now I'm going to select the front face,
and I'm going to use these arrows as reference.
So I want the front of the plane,
where this green arrow is here, and the rear on
the other side. So I've pressed E to extrude
and that's going to be the nose of my plane.
Now, each time I extrude, I'm going to want to
think about what is going in that area. So those are roughly
the middle of the fuselage and wings, then we're going to have a bit of body,
and then, we're going to have the tail plane and
the fin things at the back. OK, so let's start
shaping our model! We'll worry about the wings and things like that
in a moment. We want this to be a pointy cone, so I'm going to select the front
end.
I want to scale that down to
nothing. So I pressed S and I could keep going until I'm roughly there, or I could just
hit the 0 key, which will scale it to a point.
OK these two here, I want to
raise up to make the cockpit. So I'm going to click on that one
and this one here, and I'm going to extrude
up, I don't know by how much. That should do!
Finally, these last two we'll make the tail plane
from, or rather this one here. So we'll extrude that
up as well to roughly there, so it's eye level,
and then, we're going to have a wing here and
a wing on the other side. Now there is a way of
mirroring, but we're not going to do that, at the moment, we're just going to extrude
that out. So we're going to hit the E key to extrude
and I've started moving it in that direction, and looking down in the
lower corner, I think 5 and 1/2 to 6 is going to be what we want.
I'm going to go for 5, so I'm just going to press the number 5, and I'm going to go
around to the other side, select that face, press E, move this way,
and again by 5.
And there we go! This one here is going to be much less, so let's extrude that
out, probably about there, which is about 2.
And the same here, extrude this way by 2.
Now you can use the numbers across the top of the keyboard. I'm
just using my number pad, since it's easier to reach.
So now we need to tidy this lot up. So we're
going to bring some of these together. So I'm going to bring this
edge along with this edge, straight away.
So I'm just going to move it back, until they're almost
on top of one another, and then, I'm going to select the other edge,
go down, and Remove Doubles. And I'm
going to increase the Merge Distance enough, so that they snap together.
And I see at the top here, we've removed 2 vertices.
And I'm going to do the same now for this edge and this edge.
So I'm going to move that in till it's almost over the top,
select the other one, and remove doubles.
Now, I'm going to want to do a similar thing
to this wing, so I'm going to do that now.
Oh, there's another way you could do that! So we could merge these two together, or
once again, you could select the face here
and then scale it, but this time constrain it so it's
only on the Z axis. So I'm going to hit the Z key
and you can see it's getting smaller and bigger that way, and I'm going to
constrain it down to 0.
But bear in mind that these two edges, that have now been
scaled together, still exist on top of one another. So if you were
to do any work on it, let's select that edge now,
we can still see that we can lift it up or indeed through one another, so they're not
merged yet. So let's just undo that!
So to merge those two again, because they were on top of one another, we'll need to hop into
Wireframe Mode, select the other edge as well, scroll down
here, Remove Doubles. And we can see we've removed 2 vertices
which make up the edge there, so we've only got 2 left. I'd
recommend, when you've finished your model, just selecting
everything, and then, anything that's right next to one another,
if we click Remove Doubles, the Merge Distance is low. We can already see we've
created a duplicate 8 vertices there.
So it's always a good tip, as you're going through, if you think you've put one thing on top
of another, and you do want them to merge into one, then
remember to Remove Doubles, either as you go or towards the end.
So I'm just going to
rotate around the model now, to the other side of the plane,
and I'm going to do the same on this one. So I'm going to scale,
which you can select up here of course,
on the Z axis down to 0.
Now I can do the same thing for here and here.
We can select them all at once, if we were astute enough to remember
what we were doing. Again, scale in the
Z axis, down to 0.
Here we're going to scale in the Y axis, by the looks of things,
or maybe the X, X axis down to 0. So scale
in the X axis, all the way down to 0.
I'm not sure whether
we can select this edge and scale it down to 0 as well, that would be very
quick and simple if we could. Perfect!
So there we have our rudimentary plane! Now you can go around and
tidy some of this up, but that's pretty much the work
flow for doing block modeling.
How did you guys get on? What did you come up with? You can
spend a lot more time adding a lot of detail to this model! I'd love to see
what you came up with! See you in the next lecture!