Creatures Caves

Let's make our norns a toy in Blender! Part ﾆ.
Welcome back!

Let's jump right in, shall we?

Go ahead and open Blender, then load up toy_tutorial.blend.

On the panel below our windows, look for a square button with three arrows on it.This is the Editing button. Click on it, then look for the Objects and Links pane.

Click in the text box the reads OB:Cube and type in Guitar. It's always a good idea to name our objects so that we don't get confused. Select the camera.

Name the camera "Camera 1". Now reselect the Guitar object.

Right now we are in Object mode. In this mode we can move and edit objects, but we cannot affect the object's meshes. To change to Mesh editing mode, press the Tab key.

You'll notice that the object's edges turn yellow and that it's faces turn pink. This is Blender letting us know that we are now in Mesh Editing mode. The hotkeys to select and move edges, vertices and faces are the same here as in Object mode. There are, however, some new hotkeys that we'll be learning, but we'll cover those when we get to them.

Now, hold your mouse pointer over the right window and press the "G" key. Pressing "G" has the same effect as left clicking the mover widget, and right clicking still cancels the move. Go ahead and cancel the move.

Scroll your mouse wheel over the right hand window to zoom out until the entire background image is visible, then hold shift and the middle mouse button to pan the view down. Zoom back in so that you can see both our mesh and the bottom of the image like so:

Now shift click the mover widget and drag the mesh down so that is about in the center of the belly of the guitar.

Press the "S" key. This enables the Scale tool. Notice that the window header has changed to read: "Scale X:1 Y:1 Z:1". This lets us know the factor that we're scaling our mesh to. For extra precision, you can use the number pad to directly edit the scale factor; if you make a mistake, you can reset the scale factor with the Backspace key. You can also press the "X", "Y", or "Z" keys to only scale along the associated axis. Go ahead and pres the "X" key, the "5" key on the number pad, then press enter.

Now, let's change the right hand window to the top view and deselect all. Press Ctrl+Tab, and in the pop-up menu select Faces. We are now in Face Select mode. Select the topmost face of the mesh and return to the left window. Press the "E" key to active the Extrude tool. Simply put, the Extrude tool allows us to add a new section to our mesh. Extrude the topmost face until it is about even with the narrowest point of the guitar's belly, then left click to confirm the extrusion.

You'll notice that we now have a slight problem: We can't see our background image because the mesh is in the way. To fix this, press the "Z" key to switch the mesh to Wireframe mode.

Tada! We can now see through the mesh.

Now, select the bottommost face of the mesh in the right hand window. Unfortunately, there's not a 'Bottom' view preset, so we'll have to change the view by pressing the "2" key on the number pad until we can see the bottom of the mesh. Once you have the face selected, extrude it to the bottom of the guitar.

Now, we'll need to make some cuts in the mesh so that we can shape it to conform to the shape of the guitar. To do this, we need to change to Edge select mode, so press Crtl+Tab to open the Select Mode menu and choose Edges. Select the four topmost edges of the mesh.

If you need to, you can hold down the middle mouse button to rotate the view so that you can get a better view of the edges.

With the edges selected, press the "K" hey to open up the Knife menu. Select the Multicut option to enable the Knife tool in Multicut mode, and in the next menu that pops up, select 2. Your cursor will also change into the shape of a knife to let you know that the Knife tool is ready.

Left click on the right side of the selected edges, then move the knife tool to the left side of the edges. Notice that there is a gray line connected to the knife tool; this lets us know the line of our cut. Left click to set the end point of the line. If you need more precision, you can click the middle mouse button to constrain the line to the "X" axis. Once you have set the end point of the line, the line will turn pink to let us know that the knife tool is ready to cut our edges. Now press enter to confirm the cut.

Now there's some extra faces! Repeat this process with the bottom faces of the mesh, only make three cuts instead of two.

Great job! Let's start shaping the mesh.

Ctrl+Tab and enter Vertices select mode. If there are any vertices selected, deselect them. Press the "B" key to enter Box select mode. In this mode we can select multiple items at the same time. Left click to set the start point of the selection, then drag the cursor across to select the topmost vertices. release the left mouse button to confirm the selection. You'll notice the the edges that are connected to the selected vertices are also highlighted to let us know that we have selected two vertices that belong to and edge. Enable the Scale tool, constrain it to the "X" axis, and scale the selection until it's about the same width as the guitar. There are some vertices we'll have to move by hand, and we can do that by selecting them and moving them with the mover widget.

Repeat this process with the rest of the vertices.

Our cube is starting to look more like a guitar already!

Repeat the process of extruding, cutting, and scaling the mesh to shape the top of the guitar body. Here's a hint to help you along, extrude once and make four cuts with the Multicut tool.

Uh-oh, you might notice a slight problem with the left shoulder (one the right) of the guitar. It was designed by a rocker, you you know it's just gotta be difficult. But we're going to show this guitar that we're up to the challenge.

Select the topmost thee edges on the front and back of the mesh. Make a single cut at the deepest part of the 'V' with the Knife (Exact) tool.

Now, select the center-most vertices along the vertical edge that's aligned with the 'V' and move them down. Also move the center-most vertices on the leftmost edge down.

Now, we'll need to select each vertex in the part of the mesh that is still sticking up and merge it with the vertex below it. Start by selecting a vertex, and the vertex directly below it. Press the "W" key to open the Specials menu and select merge. In the pop up menu, select At Last. Blender will merge the two vertices and tell us that it removed one 'vertices'.

Repeat this process with the other three vertices.

Well OK, now the left shoulder looks good, but we messed up the right shoulder. Or not. We need to make a pair of cuts in the top face of the mesh, along the neck of the guitar, so that we can extrude the neck upward. Go ahead and make the cuts, then finish shaping the guitar body.

I also made another cut in the left shoulder of the mesh just to give it a bit more of a rounded shape.

Congratulations! The hard part is done, now you just have to extrude the neck, (As a hint, you can click the middle mouse button while extruding to change from extruding by normals to extruding by the "Z" axis), rotate the top face horizontal, and extrude, cut and shape the headstock.

And that's it for today's tutorial.

Edit:

Oops, I made a error! I never showed you how to use the Rotate toll, did I? Sorry about that.

To use the rotate tool, select the item or items youu want to rotate and press the "R" key. Just as with the other tools, you can press the "X". "Y". and "Z" keys to constrain the rotation to the associated axis, and hold down the Ctrl key to for extra precision.

See you next time!

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