Welcome to empties in blender.
In this video we'll be introducing the concept of an NPC essentially an embassy is a null object that
has no geometry.
They can be used as a hand or to control other objects used as a parent object.
For a group of objects who are we dealing with that very shortly they also have many other uses that
we won't dive into right at this moment but will when we need them in the course.
So let's hop over into blender.
So let's open up a new file in blender and we get the default cube in the scene now.
I'm just going to get rid of that because I'm not confused that's so.
And let's create our first empty.
So you add an empty Much like you would do a mesh object so you could use the add menu on the 3d edita
head or just go shift and a and well that's fortunate.
My mouse was direct there it's an empty and you can see there are eight different types of empty.
Now essentially they all do a very similar thing but depending on the application that you're doing
you may want a different shape or a different type of empty.
So it's more descriptive of the type of control you're going to have.
So for instance if you wanted a single arrow if it was a directional control you were using.
You can see here that this single arrow is great and we can scale it up rotate it round and we could
say the object is pointing that way and then when we move the arrow around we can control an object
based upon its direction.
Very very powerful.
So there are lots of different options for your empty but essentially you go into the ADD menu and go
ahead and add an empty.
Now you cannot create any geometry from that.
They there's no editing them in that sense.
But you can use them later on to control lots of different things.
And we'll be doing that very soon with our chess set.
Right.
So in the spirit of keeping it lean we need to do some things now we need to append the bishop into
our chess scene to see what it looks like as a whole check everything is in the right proportion and
then start filling up our board.
We're going to create the white porn's link duplicates our bishops and pause that's important rather
than just duplicating because we want it to apply across any changes we make we wanted them to apply
across the bishops that we made and the porn.
So we don't have to repeat ourselves and then we'll get on to managing our models.
In this scene let's hop over a blender.
Right.
So we're done with this for the moment let's go and open up our chess scene so it should be in my recent.
Chess scene.
And this is where we left it before so go ahead and open up your chest scene.
Now where we brought our primary whites pawn in.
Right let's go and upend our bishop.
So we're going to go file a pend and go find your low poly bishop in an object we want to select the
low poly Bishop.
There we go.
That's in our scene.
Let's just move that's about I'm going to constrain it to the x y axis so it doesn't disappear through
the floor by holding down a shift and said it's going to pop it next to our pawn.
Zoom in a little Have a look at it in context.
Excellent.
That looks really good.
Okay.
So now we've got four in there we need to start where we need a duplicate of this and we need another
seven duplicates of our porn.
Now before we go ahead and start messing around with our porn's and duplicating them lots on show you
a really neat trick was not really trick.
It's an operation that'll save you a shitload of time later on when you're doing very repetitive tasks
where an array modifier might not be of use to you.
So for instance if we wanted to duplicate this porn and it was a linked duplicate of course we'd do
Oulton Dee and we have our porn here.
Now if I just lock that to the x y axis and just place it down there for instance if I was more accurate
it would be better so I can look down here on the vector where it is and probably six and minus 6 there
go smack bang in the middle of that square now.
If I simply hold down Shift at the same time as are it repeats the last operation to shift Anar will
lay down another linked porn and again will do another link to porn and you can do that as many times
as you like.
It's a very powerful operation.
Okay guys it's Challenge time.
I'd like you to fill out the board.
So remember to link duplicate the porn's and to bishops only making the white pieces at the moment will
do something later on to create all of the black ones.
Now place them in the right starting position on the board.
Now you may have to refer to reference material in order to make sure the boards at the right orientation
for us and then finally create an empty called white pieces.
Pause video now and give that a go.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
Let's hop straight back over into blender.
Right so I've duplicated down here and I don't want to do that in this case so fortunately I've got
some undo buffer I can exploit.
Now I know that this pawn was placed exactly in the right place.
Were mucking about with.
I think this just go up here.
No not quite it's but I can set it back to zero and zero here and then it's right bang in the middle
of the board.
Then I can turn on snappin because we are using whole units and I can move it to the right position
here and down a little around here before I go any further though.
I know that's from reference material that a the whites white side of the board has the black square
in the left corner and the right and a white square in the right corner.
So that would be this way round or that way round.
So at the moment I'm about set up playing across the wrong way on the board.
I'm going to move that down to there and across to here.
And that should be smack bang in the middle.
Whole numbers here.
Exactly what I want to see over in the transform.
Right so the next thing I want to do is duplicate linked this pawn here.
So that's Oulton deep.
And there we go is linked and I can see that the Z is changing down in the lower left so I do want to
lock the z axis that's not moving and I just want to place it there.
Brilliant.
Now to do the next step I'm simply going to repeat that operation by holding down shift an hour ago
one two three four five six perfect.
Of course what we're looking at here is a couple of in the outline here.
There's lots of Corrections to do so perhaps before I do the repeating I should have renamed it so fortunate
they with the UNDO thing we can do that relatively quickly.
I'm just going to name that white pawn for the moment.
Got to rename it then I'm going to duplicate it lock it to the z axis and move it across.
Then I'm going to hold down Shift and after repeat that process that's much better all the way down
to them.
Brilliant.
And then finally we can do the bishop again.
Now I'm not quite sure where the bishop is so again I'm going to scan the locket to whole numbers and
type in 0 0 0 there.
There's that appeared above the border of maoist type nine.
That's not very clever of me it's next to zero of course.
And there we go.
This 007.
Now with snapping turned on in increments we can move that down and all where does it go it goes there
doesn't hit nights rook night Bishop.
That's fine and goes back one.
And then again a linked duplicate locked to the z axis move it across there and perfet so that chessboards
really coming on now with the pieces on it.
And we've got all of our stuff set up now this hierarchy at long here starting to get a bit messy I
wonder if there's something we can do about that.
And speaking about the hierarchy I have noticed that I don't have an empty yet.
I almost forgot that bit of the challenge so of course I need to go and empty.
Now I've got the choice of empties here and I'm not quite sure which one I'm going to pick.
I think for the purpose of this I am simply going to pick a plain axis.
It doesn't really matter.
It's not going to be much in the way of any use to us and where it's positioned we cancel that out later.
How we do need to name it though some going to rename that and I'm going to name it white pieces.
There we go.
So that's all ready for us later on.
Now we will deal with this hierarchy and organize a in the next couple of lectures so don't worry about
that for the moment.
But what I would like to see is how you guys are getting on.
So please share your results so far in the discussions and I will see you in the next lecture.
Take care.