House Design 001- Front Steps

Agenda- Intro, Meshes, Front Yard and Steps, Doors and Scale

Hello everybody! I am Domswolf, alongside Roblox Architects member and expert builder Electiz! Welcome to our House Design course. Before we begin learning! Allow me to explain a few things about this course.

This will probably be the longest building course you will take at Imagination Tech. (and the longest lessons too which is why I have an agenda) House Design takes lots of practice and knowledge. During the first part of this course we will help you build your first (if not your first professional) house. I know you all will love learning from this class because most of you had built houses for your test to get into the Honor’s Class. (House by student Clalexander)

Anyways, without further adieu, I take you first to Electiz with his personal tips on starting the house with a little tool called meshes. I have explained these before, but not in too much depth. If you are comfortable with meshes then skip ahead to my next section.

Welcome to Roblox Studio, the easiest way to build realistic stuff!

What are meshes? Meshes are bricks with a “script” in it that allow to make a special shape. (For those who are confused it isn’t a script as in scripting, just an instruction) Here’s a nice model that I use, with a variety of meshes.

http://www.roblox.com/Every-Mesh-On-ROBLOX-item?id=50716939

Made by Gaialis

I’ll make an example with a block mesh…

You can change basic settings by “Part”, in the brick itself. You can resize it, color it, anchor it, well basic stuff we can do with normal bricks.

-What do we do with the “‘Mesh”? Why is it here?

Well the mesh is what gives the brick special forms. Like a sphere or grass.

Let me show you what you can do with it.

In “Mesh” (inside the part), you have different settings than a brick. You can change color by VertexColor, You can change the “Position” by Offset.

The most important property is scale. It will allow you to make uniques sizes. You can make it even smaller than resize tool allow you to do! Let me show you another example.

With the scale, I changed one of the side from 1 to 0.01, if you look closer, you can see my scale is 1,0.01,1

It was originally 1,1,1

Why “,” instead of “.”?

The “,” is what separate from each sides. There’s 3 sides you can change. Large, Long, High.

A “.” is in the number, if you want to make a special number, small number by example 0.01 … 0.1 … 2.5 … 3.47 … There’s a variety of numbers.

Yes it looks slim! That’s what we do to make little details!

I showed you an example with a block. But there’s a variety of forms meshes allow you to! You can look at this by using the model I showed you…

Now you know basically what it is, I’ll show you a couple of examples in one of my game.

You can make slim/small details. Like I did with the glass and the Tablet.

You can make “roundy” Shapes, curves. To make a place less blocky.

You can make a mix of shapes

You can simply add some shapes, to give a good look to your stuffs!

Now it’s your turn to explore what meshes have to offer! I suggest you the model I sent you because there’s a variety of them.

House Used- The Canadian by Electiz- http://www.roblox.com/games/265381581/The-Canadian-WIP

You can visit to see examples, but if you don’t want to pay the paid access, you can visit on my profile another “recent” game called Aguavista that I used A LOT of meshes.

Meshes can be an easy thing to learn but there are many possibilities. I’m sure you all want to get to building the house now. Meshes are going to be something used a lot in this house building experience so we thought we would give an explaination. Now let’s use them.

One way we can use meshes is for plants in the front yard. If you are a part of my Advanced Unions class maybe this is something you don’t want to do but feel free to do whatever, it’s your house and we don’t make up the rules.

FYI, Sadly, we will not get to the designing part of the class for a while, but we will teach you skills about each and every section of a house so you can decide how to lay out your house from there.

Anyways back on topic, also shown in showcases by Electiz and I are rounded stairs. Many stairs in real life are like this, and you can easily do it by taking your main stair brick, duplicating it, putting a cylinder mesh inside of it (this cylinder part should be only 0.2 studs thick) Since there is no 1/10th stud snap (read the Building Skills’ snaps lesson for more info) we will simply use the properties to move the cylinder over by 0.1 studs so we have a nice round stair edge. Be sure to union cylinder and brick together so no glitches occur.

We can also use cylinder meshes to make nice stepping stones leading up to the house. This would mean you would have the stepping stones above a grass brick that passes through or under it. What would be the point of putting stepping stones if it were on concrete. I like to put my stepping stones 0.05 studs above the brick it rests on. That way it doesn’t feel like you are walking off a cliff.

Let’s say for this demonstration we use stepping stones. They would lead to a staircase (hypothetically let’s say slate on the bottom and concrete on the top like in the picture)

The different materials (or colors) can make the stairs stick out more so they don’t look like just some bland brick. Also make sure they are tall enough. It is worth mentioning that many outdoor stairs do not have the round edge but it all depends on the style of the house. We will get to that in another part of the class. Also if you want, add a nice brick pattern on your stair (Tile Patterns Lesson is here- http://bit.do/73Fk ) Tip- Brick Stairs are great for modern houses, not so much the style we are using here. If you do stair patterns, try making the bricks 0.01 studs higher.

Now lets work on making a nice traditional basic style of fence to start with. There are many different kinds of fences that can be used. On your house, you can have a sidewalk and then have a space in between two fences that sends you walking on the stepping stones. A fence design could be a little something like this.

It’s quite simple, you just take a brick 0.3 or 0.4 (I like 0.3 better) studs thick and make it about ½ or a little less than ½ the height of a player (drop in an npc to be sure). Then take two wedges (mesh or shape are both fine since they are small and people won’t walk on them) and place them on top of the fence. Make a brick 0.2 studs thick and run is across a whole line of these fence posts.

Now we have a healthy start on the front yard, we will work more with the front yard in a later lesson, but for now, we close the lesson with what I like to call “The Scale of the House”. The door (Electiz will explain why I call it this when he shows us how to make an amazingly detailed door).

Back with Electiz

Before we close the lesson, I will teach you how to make a nice detailed door.

-A door? “You kiddin’ me m8?”

-Yes a door! It can changes a lot to the way a place look like.

Let me show you some examples of doors…

Lets start with size!

To make a realistic size, you should use an NPC to compare the door. The NPC should be somewhere 2/3 or 5/7 the height of the door.

By using an NPC, you can compare to how the door will look like next to a Roblox Player.

I’ve heard my doors look complicated to do. (Other people say)

-Yes… and no.

Building a “quality” door require precision. You need to know what you want and how you want it to be.

But basicly, the only stuff you can have is the utilisation of Meshes, Unions (Domswolf told me you already have a class about unions) and using Studio’s properties.

You should, while building on Studio, take a look at real doors to see how they are made, how big they are. Like by example for the sizes I look at my doors in real life, to make something similar to life-like.

-This door is cheap. We want you to teach nice doors duuh!!

I practically start that way. I decide how tall, how big, how large...

So I have a start of size I need, afterwards you only need details!

When you build a door, don’t forget to disable CanCollide (Electiz is obsessed with Cancolline!).

Now you have an idea of sizes, the only thing you have to add is shapes. Meshes and unions are now your best friends.

Let's start making details! It's sometimes cool to have shaped doors instead of a completely flat brick. You now can change the brick you used for the size into new blocks that make have shapes. Instead of using the scale tool, you can also use the size property to make smaller differences in size (like on the white door frame in upcoming picture)

I will make an example of a modern door, you’ll see now how it’s so basic but looks great.

That door isn’t that bad “heh”? Well guys, I only added 7 block meshes!

Imagine what you can do with 50 of them. The only thing we need to complete this door is the handle.

Making handles requires precision too. You need to play with small details. But when you use meshes, you can make good handles with little bit of details.

I used 4 blocks and it still have a good effect. ¾ of them have meshes.

To be more precise, I suggest to change your move tool studs to OFF.

(To the top of Roblox Studio, in model section…)

It was so simple to make. You only need to use meshes for that style. Look what it looks like if you use them in an house. (I used meshes for the floor and white finition)

Making a door can be more simple than it look like. Sometimes you need more efforts to create a bigger impression, like we do for some of our games.

That there concludes our first House Design lesson! I hope you enjoyed reading though the lessons of this course can be long. Next time we will discuss how to make an amazing foyer. Seeya then

-Domswolf

-Electiz