Welcome to Duplication and Merging!
So in this video we are going to learn about duplication,
because there are two types of it, and create one mesh
from multiple objects. So let's hop straight
over into Blender!
So here we have our wedge pointing upwards, that we were using before.
So we want to make a duplicate
of that wedge. So if we go down to Object
and about midway up there are two Duplicate
Options, there's Duplicate Objects and Duplicate Linked.
They are almost the same but they
have some radical differences. So we're going to, first of all,
Duplicate Linked. Now nothing happens immediately
but if we move the mouse we can see there's another wedge
right next to it. Now these two are linked and we can
see, in the Outliner, it's produced another wedge with Wedge
001. I'm just going to name that
something more appropriate, straight away, and call that the copy
just so I know which one's what. So because they're linked,
they should do similar things to one another.
However, when you're in Object Mode, if you just say change
the scale of something it doesn't effect the other object. And
you may be wondering well they're linked, well why isn't this one
resizing this one, because they are linked and that's the whole point
of linking them in the first place. Well if we go to Edit
Mode and we start playing about with our model, let's say moving that edge
down, you can see then it does effect the other side!
And similarly, if we hop over to this wedge,
our original one, and go into Edit Mode, we can
see that that also effects it. So that's really cool! See
you can alter the actual structure of a mesh,
however you can scale things completely independently of one another.
So in Object Mode these two are actually an identical mesh, however,
this one has a different Z scale to it, so it's
slightly taller. In fact, in this case, oh in this case because
there it's twice as wide along the bottom. So it's a great
way of using a base mesh and actually
using it to create more things, down the line, but also vary them
so they're not all the same. Now if we switch
over to Duplicate Objects and I
place this one over here, it is completely independent.
It's essentially a complete copy of the wedge.
In fact, it is a copy of this one, because that's what we've copied
in every form and face. So if we went into
Edit Mode on that and moved it about, it is completely independent
of these two. Right, so I
want to get rid of that redundant wedge, and I can actually delete it straight
here. You see I see it's Wedge Copy 001. I can right-click
there and just Delete. Alternatively, I could go down to
switch it to Object Mode and go to Object and
Delete is there, or press the X key and confirm, but I'm just going to do it in the
Outliner. So we have these two wedges
here and it's produced two meshes, as we can see, but
we may want that, eventually, to become one object.
So how do we do that? Well let's open up our Tool
Shelf again. Now you can leave these things open, by the way. I
just put them away when I'm not using them, because I'm running a lower
resolution than you might be. And we see an option here
to Join. If we click Join, well it
doesn't do anything because we've not got two or more meshes selected.
So if we hold down Shift and select the other mesh, we see
that one is active, which is orange, and this one has gone a kind of red to
mean it's included in the selection. If we now go to Join,
it's actually put them under one mesh. Now
incidentally, that's also broken the link that they had before.
So we've got both things selected there, however, if I just select
this one it now moves independently. So they're no longer
a duplicate linked object, the moment you join them back
together, so it's worth bearing that in mind. OK,
I feel a challenge coming on! Are you guys ready?!
We're going to create a
periscope! So I would like you to create a periscope,
existing of 2 wedges with a cube
in the middle. And just to make it a bit more challenging, I would like
the periscope's base to be at (0, 0, 0).
And just for reference, this is the type of shape
we are looking for, a very basic periscope,
or I suppose, looking at it, a 3D parallelogram.
So pause the video now, go off, and give that a
go! OK
welcome back! Let's hop into Blender and see if we can solve
our periscope issue! So I've been playing lots
with these wedges. I've been moving them up and down, moving them left and right,
and so I've got myself in a bit of a pickle. And if you ever
do this, you may want to consider remaking
your wedge, because it can sometimes be quicker
to just start from scratch, rather than trying to repair these wedges
so they look like the periscope.
They're a bit hard to work with at the moment. So I'm just going to
Delete my wedge completely. I'm then going to
create a cube, I'm going to zoom
in, and let's see what we can do here. I'm going to go into Edit Mode,
and with Vertex Select, I'm going to
remove that vertex there and this one here. You may remember this from the creation
of our wedge. And I'm just going to Delete the
Vertices, and then, I'm just going to Join these up, as we've
done before, and that will
create our first wedge for our periscope.
So the next thing we need to do is...
Well a periscope is that plus another one, so I
am going to go to Mesh, I'm going to... Ooh, let's switch to
Object Mode first. I'm going to go to Object and then go to Duplicate.
In this case, I am going to just duplicate it, I don't need them to be
linked. And we've got our other one here, so I'm just going to click that,
and I'm going to place that still at 0, 0 on the X,
Y. But I'm going to basically
lift it up, let's say, by 4 for the moment so it's just above
the other one. OK,
it looks like our wedge here isn't at 0, 0, because that
was the position of the 3D cursor, when we started. So now these two
should be in line with one another. Now this bottom one,
I want it to be the other way around, so I'm going to rotate it. Let's see,
skewer through the X axis there. I'm going to rotate that
by 180, so it becomes upside down. That's great!
In fact, that's looking good already, however that's not on the
base, at the moment, however, I'll deal with that, in a moment, once I've joined all
of these together. The final thing is to put a cube into the middle of
this mesh, and again, it's produced the cube at the
3D cursor, rather than anywhere else. So I
want the X and Y to both be 0, and
here this just needs to be 1. Nope! Let's try 2!
Perfect! So there we have our base periscope shape.
Now what we want to do here is just lift it up, so it's
base is where the Z basically equals 0.
So the first thing I'm going to do is highlight all of my
objects, and I'm going
to go to Tools, on the side here, and go to
Join. So there we go, we've got one shape now, one mesh,
that makes up our periscope and I just need to lift it up.
And as we can see, the Origin of this shape has been set
to the bottom. So, in this case, I think we just need to
lift it up by 1. So if we lift it up by 1, bang! That's
bang on the surface complete! So there we go,
there's our periscope! How did you guys get on?! Please
remember to post your
periscope in the discussions so we can see how you got on!