my kitchen is finally finished and I am now working on other projects. They’re stored on my Hard-drive D/Area 51 for now, but once I get something post-able I will let you know. Since this was so much fun and the only thing I left out was how I got those nice final pictures with all them light in them, I will start on my first video tutorial. I just hope it all works out with the picture, sound, format … The problem is that if I use pictures I would have to use hundreds, due to many different preferences but let’s see how it goes.

This is the final object.

Lighting

Now the object is quite nice but easy and fast to model and the light is the interesting part of the picture. I had to do it several times and then just picked the best. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about video cutting so there is the next thing to learn..Watch & enjoy

Well okey, I just figured out that you have to upgrade to video-press to upload flash vidz so sorry about that. But since I did the tutorial I will try and register with youtube and post the link. Maybe I can figure out how to increase quality since it’s recorded HD for the future.

I have to say that my project has now been declared of being finished. I have actually ordered a work board and it will come in one piece. This implies that the measurements where accurate and everything is in scale. But summarizing the steps up the ladder, I have to say that this is one unique blog. But don’t be afraid, I will keep up with new methodical acquisitions.

Now as I never stopped learning I rethought my original thinking about the room. I wanted to model it exactly how it was which was unfortunately too complicated. I couldn’t see a thing through those thick walls. So I simply reduced it to the basics in order to keep an oversight and the scale. This is how it looks. Whaddeye think of it?

The basic fit.

By the way, I don’t want to let you out on the simple tool I just discovered. Look at this picture, do you see all the lines that boole function did to my walls? Actually this happens with a lot of transformations. But How do I get rid of them?

Strange lines

Now it’s a little difficult to get the boole in the right order. I’ve set The Room as A and the Door as B. [A-B] We want to subtract the windows as well and therefore we use another boole. Look at the screen-shots.

Make the Boole or any converted object editable. You can now select the polygons and by clicking on fusion you can easily put them together. It finally looks something like this…

I hope you enjoyed your holidays as much as I did and didn’t stop practicing. Noe we are slowly getting to an end with my kitchen and there are actually only the cupboards and the dishwasher to come. Then well put it together brick by brick. I guess I will dedicate some posts to coloring/texture and render with some different projects I have started working on.

Honestly, it’s like working on many giant gig-saw puzzles & because it takes so long you just pic and work on the one you want from time to time

So here’s my fastest way of making a simple, plain cupboard…just like the ugly ones we’ve got…[butnot4long^^]

That's where i pit that pot...

Now this is actually really easy once you now the BOOLE function that I have discussed earlier. BOOLE = Object A – Object B. The overlapping areas are then a hole. If you then make it editable you have a new object. This is a good YouTube Vid on how to use the BOOLE function. Let’s go straight forward…

I create 2 cubes and make them editable. Then I go to the Koordinate Manager and size one to 150:250:150 cm & the other one to  160: 260:160 cm. All I did was just resizing them…I didn’t move them or anything…

Resize 2 Cubes

This is when I move them, but only a the smaller one inside the other one. I move it in z-axis direction so it overlaps just a tiny little bit. When I then insert them into the Boole per drag&drop [in the order displayed] it will look like in  quadrant IV [that's that upper left one^^]

Simply press 'C' and you have a new object

Now how could we do those shelves? Why don’t we recap that spline-loftNURB-modeling…

So I just created a rectangular spline, pressed ‘C’ and re-sized it to 155:155:0 cm. Now it perfectly fits into the empty cupboard and with Copy&Paste I multiplied them moving them down the y-axis from the top. Notice I already regrouped them in the Object Manager…it just stops me getting confused and makes me navigate faster…

spline --> re-size -->relocate --> copy&paste --> relocate

Now all I did was clicking on that loftNURB tag…drag&droppin’…finito. Hit that ‘c’ button and now all that’s missing is the door. Notice I exchanged my first grouping by exchanging the Shelf groups with loftNURBS…

loftNURB

Last but not least I want to create the door. At first I rearranged my object structure. [new tick of mine^^] I make the Boole editable by clicking on it and then pressing ‘C’…then I simply select all [ALL!] object and right click –> group together. This allows me to select the group [named Cupboard] and for example drag it around without leaving parts unconnected & behind…

I select the big cube and switch to polygon selection. Now I can select just that small bit I want to pull out or ‘extrude’. I noticed that when pulling it out the z-axis changed from 80 cm onwards…now my cupboard is 160 cm wide, so I simply add up to 240 cm…and that’s when I stop extruding.

follow those arrows

If you want to make it look like it’s up on hinges, selects the red x-axis & pull the door open…

I hope this helped, This is a simple way how I will create the cupboards and similar objects in my kitchen. Here’s a unrendered final pic of the cupboard. See you soon

Not many parts to it as one can now see

Hi there,

so I actually finished my work board last time but the room is still missing several things. But since we now know the basics of working with splines it will be less difficult. The next object is up to now my favorite! My glass table I donated to our kitchen and it actually looks just like it. The only difficult thing was making it look like glass. This makes it necessary to introduce some basic texture knowledge to you.

Now when you look at the glass table, please don’t pay attention at the couch. ^^ I know it literally sucks but I haven’t really figured out how to model it so it looks like I want it to look…in my head…with this special shape…hmm…

Anyways…

Glass Table

Now making a surface look like glass is not easy but if you follow these next steps it should work. When thinking of glass some things appeared to me that have to be considered: specularity, transparency, reflection and refraction. [<-- just some]

But let me first just shortly describe how I modeled the table. At first I created a circle spline and rotated it 90° so its level with the ground. I then made it editable and suddenly 4 points appeared opposite to each other. I simply selected each and dragged two inside and the other two a little less outside… [don't worry about the size, you can adjust that later]

The next steps are just fast forward. Place the loft nurbe onto your spline and copy paste it three times. Select the mid loft nurb [see how I named them] and the size tool and make it smaller.

The I just added two cylinder objects and resized them so I could then fit them where they belong.

-The Material Setup-

Step one is to make our glass white. Select a new material and set the color to white. I just added a texture to the ground so it’s easy to see…

Now go to the basis of your material and add a tag named diffusion. The tag has now appeared and when you click on it you can adjust the brightness to 19%.

The next step is to add transparency because I would like to look through my glass. But by 100% it will become invisible so we add some refraction [set it to 1.52] and put a shader on it named fresnel. Play around with the blur-offset and mix-strenght or just set it to my settings.

And this is all you need to know. I have to say that these are the basic glass settings you find almost on every simple glass object in any tutorial. A friend showed my the settings and said it’s just something you got to know by hard. I looked for other tutorials and this guy has the same basic settings but goes on…

Just see how my objects in the room look when Ilay that glass material on them

Room in Glass

Mary Christmas to you all and a happy new year.

the last few days where really exiting for me. I was stuck to the screen because I discovered the basics of spline modeling. This expanded my range of action exponentially!  This is the basic idea:

You basically create a spline object which is actually not an object but a line. This line you can form however you want and then just duplicate it. You now have many objects and by rearranging them on one axis in the coordinate manager you “create a 3D object from a 2D object”…see how it worked with my work board.

Worktop

This was really easy. All I did was I created a rectangular spline and sized it to the measurements [300 by 80 cm] of my work board. Then I moved it up 40 cm on the Y axis so it’s level with the ground…

I then copy and pasted the spline twice and moved them back by 2.5 and 5 cm on the blue z-axis.

And this is for the ones who pay attention to small details like me I changed the size of the spline in the middle to 302 by 82 cm. this gives it a nice curve…

And now the magical trick. Create a Loft-Nurbe and drag the splines into it… –> tada… the work board.

Today I’m going to go a little into details and model a pillow this is going to look something like this…

Pillow

It is actually quite easy, a friend of mine [who will hopefully become guest-author on this blog] showed me how to do it. You start by creating two plains and a ball. Rearrange them so the plains just touch the ball. Now imagine sowing the sides together…could be a pillow.

3 objects

Now select all objects in the object manager and make them editable. I hold Ctrl, select them in the object manager and then simply press C. The next step is to select both plains in order to combine them to one object. [Isn't that great? We now know how to put to different objects together! Yaay] Just go to combine and drag the mouse symbol from one upper corner to the one beneath it. I did it this way…

combine

It should then look like this…

Sewing the edges together

Now the interesting part begins! Select the plain object in the object manager and right click on it. Go to Clothilde Tag and select Cloth! Do the same for the ball but choose Collider in the end.

The Clothilde Tag

I know switched to ‘select polygon mode’ and selected all the area I wanted to be sewed together.I then clicked on the Cloth Tag to open the attribute manager. There I select the Dresser and Set Seam Polys. Now lots of yellow lines pop on the selected area.

All you have to do know is press the magic button Dress-O-Matic [Above seam polys] and the sides will connect forming a nice pillow. Imagine you suck out the air trapped between ball and the plains. This is how it looks…

Then add some light and a plane for the floor…finished!

That was quick!

I started off with a cube and selected these polygons…I then pulled them down, so it looks somewhat like a bench. All I did then was clicking on a hyper nurb to smooth those edges off…Select some lines and rearrange them, you can do almost everything with it ^^

Now the easy part begins. I thought about using the ring selection to move 2 rows back at the same time by 15cm.

I move the other rows back to [30 & 50 cm] and the sofa looks almost like mine @ home. I just have to pull those ones out by the side…finished. Yeajjj

Integration

Now a few may think, easy as copy&paste is just a saying but this is literally selecting an object –> holding Ctrl+C –> opening an other project –> pressing Ctrl+V. Finished! You can easily switch between projects by selecting the window in the upper right corner. One tip: shrink or enlarge your object before copying so you see what your doing.

You now open the room you modeled before and just hold down Ctrl+V and the object will pop up in your 3D environment. Since we put the origin of both coordinate systems, the room & the world together it is easy rearranging them inside by working with the coordinates and angles. Again, for exact measurements calculate the coordinates and enter them in the objects position. [with respect to the world-system] Play around with other object and try to fit them in…like the crappy draft of my table

I am almost finished and have one more thing to say. Since I don’t quite know how my page about light should look like I will briefly show you the ones I used and why I used them. I used a normal light and placed it inside the room so there is this warm effect. Then I placed an area light to enlighten the left wall and a spot light in the background. You have to play around with light and colors because the light is what actually makes those effects work.

Hi guys,

this time I will continue with my room model, since I still want to add the door and some windows! For this purpose I will introduce  the “Boole” function which lets you cut out anything you want…like my door&windows

Door and Windows modeled by using the Bool Function

But first I have to explain the main principle. A Boole is nothing else but a function, saying: final object = 1^st – 2^nd object! You can group other objects and depending on their order in the object manager, they will be recognized as so. Difficult? I will explain grouping later on.

You basically model an object A [let's say a window] and place it in object B [let's say a wall] and they will overlap. Then you say A-B and the overlapping areas are reversed and gone. How convenient! Besides, the following screen-shots are still on my original room model. I just adjusted the materials/colors of the walls and placed it on a ground by adding a plane. On the firs pic I added some lights before pre-render. I will create a page about colors and light when I find the time but now see below. I created a cube and simply placed it somewhere on the wall so it sticks out at two sides. Then I went th Object → Modeling → Boole and the Boole appeard in the object manager. Next I dragged “The Room” on to the Boole and it was grouped underneath. [Tip: Rename your objects, or you'll get lost]

Select Boole and sort your objects

Now when look above in the object manager, you see I grouped  The Room beneath the Boole. As I said, the Boole will calculate C [Boole] = A-B. So when you group something beneath a Boole the first object is always A! Below I then dragged the cube from the object manager in to the Boole but beneath the Room. I then selected “A with out B” in the Attribute manager. [follow red line] Now the formula is complete and you read it: C [Boole or Window] = A [The Room] – B [The Cube] and it looks like this…

Click "A without B" and drag the cube in to the Boole

You may think, good but how did he get both windows and the door in to the Boole? You simply copy and paste the cube and re-size it to the way you want. [see below]

Copy, Paste, resize...finito

For my purpose I wanted the windows to be exactly where they should be and now I come back to setting the coordinate-system to one corner of The Room. You can simply set the coordinate-system from your cube/window to one corner of it and use it as a reference point to the coordinate-system of  The Room.  If you the have the measurements you can subtract or add them to the world coordinate-system. It’s a little bit trial&error in the beginning but necessarily for exact reproductions! Below are the main buttons you have to use… bye for now

main button and brief explanations

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