Welcome to Spin in Blender or Rotational
Extrusion! So in this video we're going to
convert the curve that we've made into a mesh object. We're going
to learn that a curve is still infinitely editable, and
using the Spin Tool we will make our pin. So let's
hop over into Blender!
Welcome back into Blender! So we have our curve
all there and sorted. Now I'm quite happy to get rid of our
cube that we made earlier, as our reference cube, as we're not going to
need it anymore, in this case. So I'm going to select that and just get rid of it
completely. OK, we've got our Bezier Curve
here, which is great, and I'm going to go over to the Outliner here
and just name our Bezier Curve something more descriptive, like
Pin Outline. It's very important you keep this naming
throughout your production, because when you're
models get more complicated, you're not going to be able to find anything. Right!
So we need to convert this into a mesh object,
and you can do that by going down to Object,
and, in my case, I'm going to have to scroll up a little.
There we go! Convert to...
And we can see the shortcut key there is Alt and C, and we want to
make a Mesh from a Curve, so we're going to
select that. And we can see, over in the Outliner, that it's created
a mesh object, that icon there has changed. Now in
case you wanted to keep the original data, the curve, you can
opt down here in the operator panel to
keep the original, and then, we can see we get Pin Outline
and Pin Outline 001 and one is a mesh object.
Now I'm going to go straight into that, because I know that this mesh object is about
to just become our pin. So there we go,
we've converted that curve straight into
a mesh. Now we've left the curve there, the curve is infinitely
editable, it's a mathematical calculation, which is great!
Once we've created a mesh
out of it, it essentially becomes solidified, as we mentioned, and if
I hide the pin outline, by clicking on the little
eye icon there, we can see
that our pin itself is now made up of, if we hop in to
select it first hop into Edit Mode, it's made up of a
series of vertices. If we highlight the entire lot,
because we're going to need that in a moment, we can then perform some
operations on it. So for instance, if that was just something we want
to extrude out, we could do that straight away, which is great! But we want to
rotationally extrude, how do we do that? Well
once we're in Edit Mode and we've selected all of the geometry
we want to manipulate, in this case it's everything, we can go
Tools on the Tool Shelf, scroll down a little if you can't see it already,
and click straight on Spin, and we can see the shortcut there is
Alt and R. So by pressing Alt and R, we
perform a Spin. Now, that doesn't look anything
like our pin! So
why? Well we're going to have to look down in the Operator Panel, so I'm just going to
make this a bit bigger, because there are a few more options here, and let's
go down them one by one. Steps is the number of
steps there are. It increases, the more steps you have the more detailed
it becomes. Now, it's quite a cool shape but it's not a pin!
Angle, well that is the angle at which it goes around. In fact,
it looks like some sort of funky wheel or break disc or plate, at the moment, which is
great, and obviously, you rotate all the way around until you meet 360. That's fine!
The center, well the center moves
each individual part of the rotation, and we actually
just want everything here at 0. So if it's not at 0, do set it
at 0 now.
Alright, now everything's at
0! It's still not quite right, we need to play with these axes down
here, and we're not rotating it in any way on the X and Y,
so we can definitely delete that and we have a pin
shape. Excellent! It's only
42 degrees of a pin but none the less that's always good!
Right, 160 degrees! Sorry, I was reading the wrong thing there!
Steps 42, Angle 160! That's great!
OK, it's challenge time! I'd like you guys to finish the pin!
So go ahead and finish off the pin and consider the
following please. I'd like you to remove any doubles that are created
during the process. Get the normals the right way around, because
there's a chance that they will be the wrong way around. So there's a little hint
there for you! And finally, set the base of the pin on the XY Plane,
just to finish it off, and that's where Z=0. So go ahead,
pause the video now, and give that a go!
OK welcome back! Let's hop back over into Blender!
So over in Blender... Well straight away I know I want
360 degrees, so I'm just going to wack that in straight away,
and I'm just going to have a look at my pin and just adjust this Z value
to... You see, that's normals that are the wrong way around, and that's
normals that are the right way around! So it's quite a distinctive color change, and
eye will tune into that very quickly. So now we've got that the right way
around. I do want to change our Steps, I think that's a few too many steps, actually.
I think that's over the top, so I'm just going to lower that down.
Now 16's a bit too low, 32
a bit high. I want to go for, in the middle of that, 24!
Yeah, there we go! I'm happy with that! Now, one thing to bear in
mind is, because we've gone around at a whole 360 degrees
there will be a series of duplicate vertices actually, along
this seem that we can see, where we started from, because it also put a
layer down when we finished. So we need to just select our
entire model, ensuring there's no further doubles,
and on the Tool Shelf I'm just going to Remove Doubles, as we've done before. And we can see I've actually
removed 120 vertices, at that point, so there was a
bit of mess in our model there but now it's all gone! Excellent!
So the one thing left to do then, in our model,
is just lift it up so it's actually on the X Y plane. So I'm simply going
to grab it, I'm going to lock it to the Z axis so it's still in the middle,
and, if I believe, it's 1.9, and that should make us
all the way up there. I'm just going to change the view to the Front
and there we go! Yeah, I'm happy, that looks like it's bang on the bottom and it is! And
there we go! There's our pin!
Remember to share this in the discussions, so I can
see what you guys have been up to, and I shall see you in the next lecture!