Reply To: [ENDED] BC1-1801 – January Class Homepage – Getting Started with 3D Modeling & Blender

BC1-1801 Week 2 Homework Submission Pt 3

I put this table separate from the other because this one I felt I wanted to give a little more explanation on.  I didn’t want to do a basic table, so part of the challenge was finding something worthy of what I know I can do, but at the same time wasn’t one I’d already modeled before.

One thing I often hear Kent talk about (and am surprised he hasn’t said anything about this time around) is the importance of references.  For this one, I searched a number of varieties of tables until I found one I liked.  Then, I used one of my handiest 3D modeling tools — a tape measure (which measures both imperial and metric).  Since I didn’t have the dimensions on the one I wanted to model, I took measurements from one I have (and have actually used as reference on a previous project) to get an idea of how big I should make it. 

Here’s where another great tip comes from, particularly if you’re doing a room.  Whenever possible, model to scale!  In the Properties Panel on the Scene tab (The third one that looks like it has 3 objects on it, between the one that looks like two sheets of paper and the world one), you can set the units to Blender units, Metric Units, or Imperial.  What’s handy is if you have it set to either Metric or Imperial, you can enter in the measurement in ANY metric or imperial unit, and if it’s not in the base unit you are using, it will convert it for you!  I typically like to model in metric (for conversion reasons), but the important thing is that you have some kind of units set.

That’s where the wireframe box comes in. That is what gave me the size for the table, so I knew how big to make it.  For the rest, I took educated guesses on sizes, but I would have measured something similar. For example, The top part of the table looked like a reasonably similar thickness of my desk, so used a measurement of the thickness of my desk and figured the main pieces of the rest were based off of a 4in x 4in, a 1in x 2in, and a 1in x 4 in piece of wood, and made the lengths of them fit the spaces I needed filled.

The leg placements were easy with a mirror modifier in X and Y using the table top as the mirror object. Same with the side pieces and braces, but just on one of those two axis. To get the detail on the long panel, I used an array and a mirror. (And beveling and insets to get the details).

As for the leg shape, that was the most interesting to figure out (other than the detailing of the array), and probably the least easy to see what I did.  For the legs, I started with a 12 vert, 2″ radius cylinder. (I knew I was going to want 4 corners with 2 holding edges, so three at each corner x 4 corners = 12, and for a 4×4, 2xRadius = 4, so I needed a 2 in radius to get a 4″ diameter).  Next, I marked off a 4″ section from the bottom (because it looked to be about the same length for that part as the width of the leg) and a 6″ section from the top (because it looked a little longer).  Then, I just added loop cuts and scaling at various points to get the shape of the middle part with an occasional bevel to make some of the edges have a bit more room to work with at that point (and a little scaling on the Z here and there).  

Once the design on the middle, round part was set, it was just a matter of taking an edge from the top and bottom part and sliding them over to the corner piece to form a more square shape, but keep the round of the middle part.  Only after doing all of that did I add in the holding edges for the square parts, but just on the tops and bottoms, not along the sides, since I’d already done that with the edge slide.

All of this was done in pieces, rather than a single object, because sometimes (such as in this case), it’s easier to figure out just what you need to do to model something taking cues from the real world because it would be made in pieces, and it can be easier to figure out the shapes of those pieces individually and combine them into the whole.

And if you get nothing else from this, remember, Use references (both images and physical). Model to scale when possible. And play around.  Sometimes it take a bit to come up with the solution that works.