This week we continued working on more 3D modelling, this time moving onto creating a skateboard and a pull kart.
Firstly I worked on the skateboard – this week we were introduced to editing in Blender, so to start off I took a cube and flattened it, and began extruding the edges and slowly but surely bending them into the right shape using the move and scale tools and bevelling, insetting the faces and bevelling some more, and lastly I shaded it smooth and auto smooth. Bevelling edges helps with not making 3D models look so much like 3D models, and makes them look a little more realistic, as not many things in life are as sharp as they are in 3D programs. The texture turned out a teeny bit off, but I’m not sure what caused that, and thankfully it wasn’t too noticeable or bothersome.
Admittedly I could have taken more screenshots of my process along the way, but got too into it and forgot to, so instead I’ll describe my process here. I took a cylinder, flipped it around and inset the faces on either side, and extruded the smaller faces inwards. I bevelled the edges with the width type on percent, and shaded smooth and auto smooth.
Then I inset the faces on the side where the bolt is mean to be, extruded them, inset the faces again, dissolved the inset face, and filled the space. This created some odd zigzaggy lines, but following the video I was able to remove the diagonal ones so that it was only made up of parallel lines. Then, on the other side, I inset the faces and merged the face at centre.
Next for the second part of the bolt, I made another cylinder, but set it to have 6 sides so it looked like an actual bolt. I rotated and adjusted it into place – what helped with aligning it was copying the values for locations for the wheel and pasting them for the bolt so it all lined up! I bevelled the edges and shaded it smooth and auto smooth, then got rid of the front face and filled it, and got rid of extra edges so that there was just one edge in the middle. Finally, I joined the bolt with the wheel using CTRL+J, and then duplicated it three times, using ALT+D so that it would be a linked object (which helped later when applying materials), and again used the values for location to adjust the wheels into place.
Next, I started working on the axle for the skateboard. First I set up a simple cylinder in between the two wheels, and to help with making the axle I put it into local view. I shaded it smooth, went into edit mode and added a loop cut in the middle, allowing me to get rid of half of the cylinder, and then applied a mirror modifier. Now if I’d edit one half of the cylinder, it would automatically also edit the other half.
I then added another loop cut, extruded from the top of the cylinder, deleted the top faces and the faces that had extruded in the middle, and flattened the outer edges by selecting them all and scaling them down. From those edges I extruded up, and scaled those extruded edges. Then I selected the edges in the middle and scaled them down. I then carefully bevelled the edges, including the loop cut on the cylinder, so that everything had a smoother look.
I added a loop cut near the top of the axle and extruded the region, adjusted it a bit and bevelled the edges again. Then, on the inside I got rid of some unnecessary faces and duplicated the axle over to the other pair of wheels, and finally, I parented the axles to the board, and the wheels to their axles. And with that, the form of the skateboard was done!
All that was left was to add some textures, so I decided to go for this minty green design. I made the axles and the bolts nice and shiny by turning down the roughness, and applied a metal texture as well. I actually really like how it turned out.
In order to render this skateboard, I decided to do the same thing with the camera that I did with my snowman and created an empty to lock my camera to. This made things a lot easier in terms of positioning the camera and getting things to look how I wanted them to.
Finally, after adding some planes and positioning the skateboard where I wanted it to be, I decided to render the final image in Cycles, and although it took a while, the result looked really nice and I’m very happy with how it turned out!
Now, for the pull kart.
I once again forgot to take as many screenshots along the way as I maybe would have wanted, however like with the skateboard, this was a relatively simple shape to make and helped me get familiar with the concept of creating models with wheels attached to them! I created a cube, shaped it how I wanted it to be, inset the faces and extruded those faces down, creating a box. Then I bevelled the edges to round everything out. I adjusted things around to get the shape I wanted by selecting the edges either side of the box and moving or scaling them. Then I added smooth and auto smooth, added a loop cut near the top of the box and extruded the faces along the normals to give the box the edge on the top, and finally bevelled those edges.
In terms of the wheels, my process was very similar to what I did with the skateboard, except that the wheels are flatter in this instance. I selected the wheel faces on either side, inset the faces, extruded them in, inset them again and extruded them out, and bevelled the edges, using the percent width type again, and shaded smooth and auto smooth. I inset the faces either side and merged at centre. Then I did the same thing as the skateboard with the bolt, this time creating a smaller one to match my reference, and once again adjusted the location with the location values to help everything line up properly. I got rid of the faces that weren’t showing on the outside, bevelled the edges and inset and merged the faces on the cylinders. Then I joined everything together so that the wheel was all one object, duplicated the wheels with Alt+D so they were linked and set them into place.
Next, for the part that connects the wheels, I created a plane, extruded the edges either side, and bevelled the inner edges to create a rounder appearance. I shaded smooth and added a solidify modifier to the plane to make it thicker, shaded auto smooth and duplicated it over to the other pair of wheels.
As for the handle, I created a cube and through rotating the faces and extruding, I created the longer part of the handle. As for the part you actually hold, I extruded a rectangular sort of shape, and inset the edges. Then I got rid of the face in the middle and filled the spaces between the edges on the handle by bridging the edge loops. Then, to make the shape rounder like shown above, I applied a subdivision surface modifier, and made the handle a more square shape at the bottom (as opposed to a rounder one) by adding loop cuts and moving them over. I decided to keep the top part slightly rounder to give it a more unique shape. I also added loop cuts to the longer part to give it more defined edges, so it looked more like a metal object.
Then I added another cube and moved one of the edges up, and then bevelled the edges, and this was for the part connecting the handle to the part connecting the wheels. Lastly, I applied my modifiers and went onto applying materials to the object.
Parenting the objects to each other also made things a little easier when it came to setting the scene up for rendering. This time I coloured pretty accurately to the reference as I liked the original red colour, and I turned down the roughness and applied the metallic effect where necessary.
I also decided to add some extra axles in between the wheels to fit the reference better, and after setting up some planes, setting the camera to look at an empty, posing the pull kart how I wanted it and rendering the image using Cycles, the pull kart was done!
I learned a lot from these two exercises, including using editing mode, extruding, bevelling and adding modifiers such as mirror, solidify and subdivision surface.