This week's practical revolved around making a low poly 3D house, complete with windows and doors. To begin with, I made a cube with the parameters 100x25x50 (Width x Height x Depth). After making the cube, I had to select just the front face in order to add divisions to it. After selecting the face I had to go to the "Edit Mesh" menu, and select "Add Divisions". There is a box next to the add divisions option that allows you to fine tune the divisions you are applying to the object. In this instance, I only wanted to divide the face linearly in 3 ways horizontally. In this sub-menu "U" = horizontal and "V" = vertical.
Once these divisions had been applied, I had to select the left and right face of these 3 faces and select the "Extrude" tool. This tool allows you bring a face forward (or inset the face if you extrude by a negative value) from it's original position, essentially adding a new polygonal object in the process. In this particular example I extruded these 2 faces out by 24 along the local Z axis.
Next, I needed to add divisions to the front of my house to facilitate adding windows. This time the faces were divided by 3 vertically.
Now that I have a basic outline of the house, I need to start adding features. To begin, I added 2 windows to the front right face of the house. This was achieved by dividing the middle section of the front right block in 5 pieces horizontally and then selecting the 2nd and 4th faces from that division. Once those faces were selected I once again used the extrude tool to move the faces, but this time I moved them -2 in the local Z axis in order to inset the windows into the house.
Now that I have the basic window faces, next is adding detail to the windows in the shape of Georgian bars. To achieve this I selected the 2 faces as shown above and then divided them 3x3. Once I had a 3x3 grid in these faces, I switched to the edge tool and moved the central edges inwards to create the effect of bars across the window.
As is, this effect lacks depth. To fix this, I selected the faces of the "bars" in the window and once again selected the extrude tool. This time I extruded the faces by 1 pixel, half of the distance we previously inset the windows, to give the bars some depth.
Next I moved onto creating the roof of the model. To begin with, I selected all of the faces on top of the house and extruded these out by 4.
After this I had to create a pattern on top of the roof using the "Connect" tool to allow me to bring up the edges and give the roof points and slopes. At first I struggled lining up the edges along with the tutorial.
Using the connect tool exclusively wasn't giving me the desired results so I had to start moving vertices manually to try and line them up. When I started doing this however, I was still in perspective camera mode and I found it difficult to line the vertices up accurately. This lead to slightly wonky edges.
After searching through the viewport settings, I set the camera to an orthographic camera angled down from the top. This type of camera has a perfectly straight angle on the top of the model and allowed me to be much more precise when lining up the vertices.
I still ran into a few problems while trying to use the connect tool to replicate the tutorial pattern so I circumvented the issue by using the "Multi-Cut" tool. This tool allowed me to make extra faces by slicing the current face between 2 points. Holding shift while using this tool also allowed me to snap the cut by a percentage. After making some cuts using this tool, connecting edges and lining up vertices, I eventually created a pattern the same as the one from the tutorial.
With the roof pattern complete I could now move onto giving the roof it's shape. Selecting all the "inside" edges (highlighted in red above) and then selecting the "Move" tool, I moved these edges straight up until they created a sufficient roof shape.
Now that the basic house was complete, the tutorial suggested adding extra features onto the house, such as doors and extra windows. To begin with I added a front door to the house using divisions just like when making the windows. In order to create a door frame I used the "Bezel" tool to create a smaller frame around the door faces.
While the bezel almost achieved the desired effect, the shape of the frame was too rounded for the purpose of a door frame. To fix this, I decided to manually adjust the vertices that were creating the rounded shape, once again utilizing an orthographic camera mode to help with accuracy. Once this process was complete I had a door with frame shape that I was quite happy with.
Following the example of the windows from earlier in the tutorial, I decided to try and add depth to my door using the extrude too. In order to mimic a real door I decided to extrude the door frame out by a small amount (0.2 on the local Z axis) and inset the door into the frame by a small amount (0.5 on the local Z axis). I also created a second door on the back of the house using the same methods as mentioned here.
Now that I had a door in place, it was time to add the rest of the windows to the house, finishing off the details. In order to try make something different and challenge myself, I decided first of all to try and add a larger window to the front left of the house. The method for creating this window was much the same as the earlier windows except this time I decided to add a supporting piece in the middle of the 2 windows that was slightly thicker and protruded slightly further than the Georgian bars (0.5 on the local Z axis). I added a second one of these large windows to the back of the house also.
After adding these large windows, I also added a few more small windows on the left, right and back side of the house to try and make the model closer resemble a real house.
With the house finally complete, I have attached a video below to show a full 360 view of the house. After completing this project I feel that I have a much better understanding of the viewport cameras, perspective camera controls, the extrude, multi-cut and division tool and also how to use a combination of all of these to achieve extra detail in the model. I hope to apply this knowledge to my initial star ship models in the coming weeks.
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