TGJ2O

Modeling

When most people open Blender they are barraged by a complex looking series of panes and options. So much of Blender is shortcut-based that it pays to know your shortcuts. Here is a fantastic resource for you

Assignment #9 - follow this tutorial over the next several pages to create a series of flying saucers invading earth

Use the menu bar above to click your way through the 3D animation section starting with this page >materials>lathing>extruding>ray_guns etc...

Invasion!!!!!

If you need the latest version of Blender, you can get it from Blender's Website

Start up Blender and you begin modeling in OBJECT mode. 

This it like a "virtual fabrication workshop" where you can construct props for your animated movies. In this exercise, we're making flying saucers similar to those found in "Mars Attacks"

Step 1 - creating the sphere

The 3D cursor is used to determine placement and positioning of objects in 3D blender space. To move it, press Shift + RMB. To get it to go back to the origin (or frankly to snap it to anywhere) simply press SHIFT-S which allows you to choose snap the CURSOR TO CENTER. 

You may at this point press alt+A to deselect anything (or click off in space) you have selected and now press LMB (Left Mouse Button) to select the square at the center of the space. Delete it by pressing delete on the keyboard.

1. Create a SPHERE

By pressing SHIFT-A you bring up the ADD menu. We're going to add a MESH>UV SPHERE. We can see it's been added by looking to the top right in the layers panel (technically called the COLLECTIONS Panel)

2. BEFORE YOU CLICK ANYTHING ELSE you can edit the raw construction of the sphere. On the bottom left of the screen is the Add UV Sphere menu. Open it and:

Change the following:

* its radius to 5

* its segments to 24 (we're reducing the number of polygons or "poly's" to reduce the size footprint of the file and render time of the final output)

* drop the number of rings to 10 (we're going to squish the sphere so we don't need a lot of fidelity on the Z axis)

You've created a sphere. Whee! Let's name this object in the Collections panel as Saucer_disc

Step 2 - Scaling the sphere

We're now going to turn this sphere into a disc. To do so we will do the following:

1. Let's go to the side-view of the object. To do so we will press 1 on the keypad. (1 is Front View, 3 is Side View, 7 is Top view. You can toggle between Perspective View and Orthographic View by pressing 5)

2. Make sure the sphere is selected (that is, it has the orange bounding box around it). Press SCALE (or tap S). You can either use the object transform panel and put in 0.2 in the Z box on the right OR simply just type in the information you want by doing the following: 

This scales the object only in the Z axis. 

Let's preview what our sphere will look like in the camera by pressing 0 on the numberpad. This gives us the camera preview of the object. Press 0 again to go back to model space.

Step 3 - Creating the dome

We are now going to create the dome of the spaceship. In order to do this we are going to first deselect everything we're working on by pressing alt+A until nothing is highlight (or left clicking into empty space):

1. We want to hide the saucer part of the UFO. Go up to the Collections panel and press on the eyeball icon next to SAUCER DISC. We want to hide the saucer while we design the cockpit of the UFO.

2. Create another UV SPHERE (Shift +A) centered at 0,0,0 Use the following characteristics (picture at right) on the dome of the ship.

3. We now want to get rid of the bottom half of the dome. To do so we will go into EDIT MODE. We get there by either pressing TAB or clicking on the dropdown menu at the top left.

4. We're going to select the bottom half of the MESH and delete those VERTICES. All shapes are made from points in space and lines connecting them. When you have 3 lines connecting or more then you can have a surface. Notice on the edit panel at the top there are the three toggles (Vertex, Edge, Face). We want to delete the actual points in space (Vertices) that make up the bottom half of the sphere. Make sure you've chosen the leftmost icon VERTEX editing.

Next to the menu where it says EditMode there are 3 buttons:

THEORY

We want to select the bottom half of the vertices. To do so we want to press alt+A (to deselect anything active). 

The default select tool will allow you to "box select" (drag a box around the bottom half). We could have alternately pressed 'C' circle-select (think of it as a brush you highlight the vertices you want) and painted the bottom half. Hit delete.  Then choose the default (vertices). Orbit your dome to the side (middle mouse button). Notice what happened? Only the front half of the dome bottom was deleted. UNDO that step (ctrl+z)

That is because we were on the bounding box view of our object. In order grab all of the vertices to delete we need to go into WIREFRAME mode. 

We get that by either pressing Z or select the wireframe option instead of bounding box (though frankly learning the keyboard shortcut Z is WELL worth remembering). This lets us see through the model and select ALL of the vertices.

Deleting the vertices

Notice only the front half was delete?

Going into wireframe view by pressing Z

A bit of viewport theory:

Back to the action

Go back to Front view (keypad 1) and either circle-select or box-select all those vertices in the bottom half. Orbit to see if you got everything (picture at left below)

On your keyboard press delete. When the delete menu comes up click delete-vertices. You'll be left with the frame of the top half.

Go back to object mode (TAB). Go back to solid view mode (Z>solid). Go to your layer panel and rename this 1/2 sphere you made as Saucer_cockpit. 

You can unhide the saucer_disc up in the Collections panel and orbit your your masterpiece.

5. One last thing to do to ensure we parent the two objects together so they can be move together. 

Click on the COCKPIT. Then SHIFT CLICK on the DISC. Press CTRL+P and a "parent menu" will appear. Take the default menu option - OBJECT. Notice in the collections panel the cockpit appears as a structure INSIDE the disc?

You can now grab the saucer and when you hit G (translate) you can move around both the saucer both and the saucer cockpit. If you grab the cockpit of the ship itself and move that, only the cockpit will move.

SAVE YOUR FILE. Choose the appropriate directory and title it (bottom).