Blender Modelling Introduction

In today's session, Josh walked us through the process of modelling in Blender. For the purposes of the learning process, we practiced creating a simple room diorama.

The first part of the process was creating the room shape, which we started by creating a simple cube and cutting out of some of the faces to leave the two back walls and the floor.

In order to separate the walls from the floor, we pressed Ctrl + P, and clicked 'selection', which disconnected it from the rest and allowed it to be moved independently. From there we created a rug, sofas and pillows using various techniques, many of which I had not used before.

This was the result at the end of the session:

Without textures

With addition of checker board texture

One feature that was used very consistently throughout the process was modifiers, which I had briefly looked at during my personal experimentation, but didn't really understand how it worked until now. The main modifiers we used for the project were Bevel and Subdivision, and occasionally the mirror modifier for the sofas' legs.

I learned a lot more about how some of the tools worked in edit mode such as the loop cut, as well as many more keyboard shortcuts.

Some of the other interesting things I learned were:

• Using the G key to drag around selected objects.
  
  
• Using shift + D to copy particular elements of the scene.
  
  
• Clicking and dragging the mouse upon placing a loop cut to adjust its position on the axis.
  
  
• Adding a secondary viewport by clicking and dragging out from the edge between the viewport and the side menus.
  
  
• Changing between different selection modes using the 1, 2 and 3 keys on numpad.
  
  
• Using control + B to split a loop cut into two and move them in opposite directions.

Overall I really enjoyed the session, as the process was fun and easy to follow, with me only needing Josh's help a couple of times for very minor issues. The skills I learned today will come in very useful once I start to further develop my gallery environment for the Independent project.