Welcome to Planning our Project! So in this video
we're going to check out the design specs of a chess board, make sure we get
some descent reference material in there. We're going to design our chess board using
that information, and from that, we're going to design
our working scale so we've got our scale right,
across all of the pieces and the board, etc. Now finally, we're going to play
about in Blender, to get it feeling right.
OK guys, straight away a challenge for you!
I'd like you to go and plan the project yourself, see how you get on with it!
So go off and research chess sets, see if you can get a feeling,
there's some good information out there! Look for, particularly,
the piece dimension and size, that's going to be important, then,
think about the set as a whole.
It took me about
10 to 15 minutes to go through all the research materials and just
play about and think about the actual set as a whole.
So pause the video now, go off and spend a couple of minutes doing
the research and looking at dimensions and sizes, and come up with
your own strategy for this project. What size are the pieces
going to be in Blender? What scale are you modeling to? OK, pause the video
now, and I will see you in a few moments!
Hello and welcome back! How did you get on?
So first of all, let's look at the king's dimensions!
So through the research, I've seen that the height of the king
is about 9.5 centimeters.
The king's base is somewhere
between 40 and 50% of the height, and the diameter
of the base will therefore, calculated, will be somewhere between
3.8 and 4.75 centimeters. The
chess board square dimension. Now, there's a few
sources out there, but I found out that the king's base is going to be approximately
75% of the square. The square is about two
times the diameter of the pawn's base, and a square is typically
somewhere between 5 and 6 1/2 centimeters across.
So we can then calculate the a pawn's base is going to
be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.25 centimeters.
So taking all of that into account, what I've done
is I've come up with these chosen dimensions, nice numbers there, and
just to show you how they visually fit in my mind as well. So the chosen
dimensions, we can see that the King's position
and size is about 4.5
centimeters across,
which is 75%
of 6 centimeters which is our chosen square size. Nice large numbers
there! And going on the other side, I've decided that the
Pawn will be 3 centimeters, which also fits into our 6 centimeters
and also has that nice whole number there. And finally, the other's position
and size, well it's not going to be as large as the King or as small as the Pawn, so I've thought
4 centimeters would be perfect for that. So there
we go! We just need to hop into Blender now and just do a scale test,
to make sure that we're going to be working in the right scale in Blender itself.
So in our wonderful default Blender file,
I'm just going to Delete our cube there. Alright, we've got
a 6 centimeter square and there's going to be
8 of them. So I'm just looking at the scale of the board itself, at the moment.
So I'm just going to quickly create us a Plane. It just
has to be a flat plane there. Brilliant! And 6 times
8 is 48, so it's going to have a Radius of
half of that, which is 24.
Let's see how that looks! Alright, that's pretty big!
I'm going to keep it like that, for the moment, because I do like the whole numbers.
I don't really want to start dealing with decimals, just at this moment.
We can always scale later on. Let's just save that!
Save and I'm going to save
it as Chessboard. Excellent! And
I'm just going to add a tiny bit of detail to this, so please excuse me
while I hop into Edit Mode, Subdivide this a couple
of times. So we've just got our grid there, hop
out of Edit Mode, and Save it. Brilliant! I'm now going to
create another new Blender file. I could make it in here. I should,
let's just make it in here! So in Edit Mode, I'm just going to
find myself... There will do, roughly,
and that'll be on there. Yes it is! Perfect! And just create a
Cylinder, which is going to represent our
king. Let's do the largest piece on there. So it's going
to have a Radius. Since we're stuck to a centimeter being a Blender unit, that's
nice and straight forward. It's 4.5, so
2.25 on the Radius, so there we go there! And
the height is going to be, so Depth here will be 9.5,
which represents 9.5, and we can see it's gone around
the axis there. So in the Transform, just up here,
I'm going to set the Z height
to be 4.75,
I think. There we go! So we've got
our... That's what it will look like, roughly, here! Now, I do
like the fact that this is going to be a bit big. I'm not
happy with it being massively larger than the stage there. It's still within our 100
Blender unit limit, that we should stick to, but they are
whole numbers and that is quite important, especially when teaching you guys
because I tend to get numbers wrong, occasionally, as the previous
section showed. So we're going to stick to whole numbers here.
I mean, I'd like it half the size of this, you see we're already in the 10th but there's lots of 0.0's,
0.25's, and all that going on, so I'm going to avoid that for the moment
and build it at this scale. I'm happy that it's not going to be too big, and it'll also
be representative of what we're working with. So there we go, we've hopped into
Blender and basically mocked up a chess board, really quickly,
just to see how things would sit on it.
So there we go, and I will see you in the next lecture!