Doc:Tutorials/Modelling/BSoD/Our Own Genesis

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The time has come to start our journey of discovery and modeling adventure! Fire up your Blender and we shall begin. In this tutorial, we will look at making a nice, tiled floor that looks something like this.

[edit] Let's begin

Press Z, now, the first thing to do is destroy everything on your screen. To do this, press A followed by X, confirm when the following dialog pops up. If you didn't understand what we did here, don't worry -- it will be explained later.

Now let's add our first object, a simple cube. Press SPACE ==> Add ==> Mesh ==> Cube. Press TAB, this will take you into Object Mode. Make sure you've done this, otherwise you will get confused later. The cube should turn white/pink. (more on this, later) Now we want to scale this cube so it's thinner in depth, this will be our first tile. To do this, go to the side (NumPad 3) or front (NumPad 1) view.
To start scaling the selected object (in this case - our cube), press S, the cube should turn white. By default, Blender starts scaling on all axes. However, as we only want to make the cube thinner in depth, we want to constrain the scaling to one axis. So start moving the mouse upwards, ie/ in the axis we want to scale by and then press MMB . Move the mouse towards the center of the cube to make it thinner, away from the center to make it thicker. An extremely important method to know about is the grid snapping. Hold down the Ctrl and scale as you were before. Note the fact that the scaling is now stepped. The only other thing to note at this point is the value of the current operation, in this case the scale. Look to the lower left hand side of the 3D window whilst you are scaling and you will this value. Scale the cube by a value of 0.2, so it is 5 times thinner than it was. LMB will finish the scale.

Save here by pressing Ctrl W - save the file as temple_tutorial.

I recommend you practice scaling the cube in different ways, just to get the hang of constraining the scaling to the axis you require. It's not difficult, but it is essential. Remember, once you've finished scaling, just press Ctrl O to reopen the file at the point when we last saved.

[edit] Needs More Tiles

Now we have our first tile, we need more of them. The tile you see on your screen is going to be one of the larger floor tiles from the design. Next, we are going to make some of the smaller, corner tiles. First, let's go to top view NumPad 7, next we shall clone the tile we already have by pressing Shift D. A new tile (square, in this view) should appear as a white outline, we already know this means we are editing it in some way. When an object is cloned (or duplicated), Blender creates the new object and sets it in translation mode.

Translation is the technical term for moving an object about. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Move your mouse around the screen and watch the new tile follow. Note, if your gridlines are very close together, ie/ the cubes look like they are larger than two gridlines wide, zoom the view out by scrolling down with your mouse. You can also achieve this by pressing +. Can you guess what will happen if you hold CTRL when you translate the cube? Try it and you'll find out that it does exactly the same as it did for scaling. And constraining work the same way as for scaling too. Try that, if you don't remember how to constrain an edit to one axis, scroll up.

We now want to translate, to do this, we press G (Think G for Grab). Translate the new tile by a value of 2 to the left (again, the value will appear to the lower left of your 3D window).

We now have what is going to be one of our smaller tiles... But if you notice, it's neither the right size, nor in the right position. A conundrum we shall rectify. Firstly, let's scale the cube first by width, then by height, (or the other way round, if that tickles your fancy) by a value of 0.2. Now zoom in a little bit, until you can see more of those gridlines. When you edit and hold CTRL, the edit is snapped to the nearest gridline. This means that by zooming in and out, you can control the distance between snaps. Now you should translate the smaller cube by X:0.8, Y:0.8 so you get something like this.
Now that we have a basic setup for our tiles, we can start making more of them and building our floor. For now, save again with Ctrl W. Click here to proceed to Part II