Creating, Texturing and Rendering a Wine Bottle & Box: Mocking Up a Box with Primitives & Instances

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 13:25
  • Views: 3352
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

Using primitives to block out the foundation for a model.

To begin, we’ll reorganize the wine bottle geometry hierarchy, then create an instance of the group and move it to the 2 page layer we created in the last video. Then we’ll hide the 1 page layer and build the bottom of the wine box using a primitive cube as a starting point, adding a bevel deformer to round off the sharp corners. Next we’ll make a copy for the top of the box, flip it over and adjust its vertices with the move tool to make it fit nicely over the box bottom. We’ll finish by grouping the top and bottom together and assigning the group and it’s children to the 2 page layer.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll be creating an Instance of the wine bottle to use for the two-page set up. Doing so will let us come back to the original bottle and make revisions that will be passed on to all of the Instances that we create. Then we'll assign our Instance to the two-page layer and build our wine box around it using a primitive cube for our starting point. Let's go ahead and start out by saving an increment of our file. So over here in file, save incremental. Now I'm up to V2 of the wine bottle and box naming convention. And next I want to start looking through the one-page camera. If we don't do that, you're going to screw up the framing for our one-page set up, so that's pretty important. So just click that bull's eye to stop looking through that camera. And now we're ready to create the Instance of our wine bottle. Before I create instances, I usually like to put all of my geometry in a group. So to do that let's grab the wine bottle and just hit ALT+G or Apple G on a Mac, and now we've got a new null object and all of our geometry is in that hierarchy. So I'm going to rename this "wine bottle group," and I'm actually going to select the wine bottle and hit SHIFT+G to ungroup that. So now, everything is just loose in this hierarchy. So when we create our Instance, it's going to have this as the parent with all of our geometry under it, so it'll be way easier if we want to change the bottle out later. If everything was a child of that wine bottle, that would become more difficult and be more work. So that's a good habit to get into. So now, I've got the wine bottle group selected and we're going to find Instance under the array icon here. If you just click and hold to get the fly out menu and create an Instance. So here's our wine bottle group Instance at the top. I'm going to pull back, and if I move it over you can see it's an exact copy of the wine bottle. If I just delete this label, you can see that is mimicked right here in the Instance, undo that and it comes back, and that will happen no matter how many Instances you create. So create a couple more, you can see the change ripples through all of those. So I'm just going to undo all the way back to where it was before I moved it. And this is a great tool to use if you're not quite done working on the wine bottle or any other object. You can go ahead and make Instances all over your scene. And as you continue to work, all of those changes will update throughout your scene. So let's just come back over here to the Layers palette, and the wine bottle group that we created is not on the right Layer, it's not on any Layer, so let's go ahead and just drag that down to the one-page, and let's go ahead and put our wine bottle group Instance on the two-page. Didn't quite get it, there we go. Now, the Swatch has been updated. Now, we can go ahead and turn off visibility, render, and manager on our one-page layer, and we're left with just our two-page layer and the sky, which is on no Layers. And we're ready to go ahead and start building our wine box. So to start with, let's go ahead and lay our wine bottle down on its back. I'm just going to activate the rotate tool with the R key and then hold SHIFT to constrain, and rotate that backwards 90 degrees. I'm going to come into my fore view, and in the front view I'm going to hit S to frame up the bottle. Pull back a little and just move that above the floor. The floor's right here on this thicker line. I come up here to filter and turn off the grid in my view ports. You can see, there's the world origin, or world axis. Here's the X, here's the Y. So that's where our floor is sitting. Go ahead and turn that grid back on. And over here in the attribute manager for our wine bottle group Instance, I've actually got a value we can plug in for the Y transform, and that's 4.25, just to dial that in. And now we're ready to create our wine box around this bottle. So to do that we're going to create a primitive cube just right here, just click that. It's way too big. So I'm just going to activate the scale tool with the T key, it's right over here as well, and then I'm just going to scale that down closer to the size we need. I'm going to go into display lines. We're going to move that up to where it's about centered on the box, and we can also use that 4.25 value for this box as well. So, 4.25 is the size that I want and you've got primitive handles here. So you can adjust the size of your box in all three axis using these handles. That's what's great about primitive objects, they have lots of built-in controls. You can actually come in here and filet the edges if you wanted to raise and lower the subdivisions, lots of options. So This is about the size that we need, but I also have values we can plug in for this and here in the object tab of our cube. Those values are 11 by 8.5 by 37. Those are the values I came up with for my project. And the next step is going to be to delete the top face of this cube so we can use this for the bottom of our wine box. But we can't do that until we make this mesh editable. Right now, if we jump into the polygon tool, nothing is being highlighted, and that's because we're still in primitive mode, But if I hit the C key, you can see the icon changes here on the polygon. If I undo and then hit C again, now it's an editable mesh. And if I hover over any of these faces now, they're being highlighted. So now, we can grab that polygon and delete it. So now we have an open box and the next step is to add some thickness to the walls of this box. If you look at the final here, you can see the walls have a little bit thickness and they also have a little bit of bevel that catches the light. So to do that we're going to use the extrude tool. I'm going to grab all of my faces using CTRL+A. And one thing I want to point out is you see these little lines sticking out of my faces here? That's not on by default. I actually turned that on. So let me turn that off. So this is what you'll normally see. But if you come up here to options and turn on polygon normals, now you get these little spikes and these are showing you the direction of your polygon normals. Hey, let's pay attention to what happens when we use the extrude tool to put thickness on our walls. We're going to go to mesh, create tools, extrude. And since we have all of our polygon selected, they're all going to be extruded. So let's go ahead and extrude just by clicking and dragging on any of the polygons. You can see we're getting thickness but we're not getting interfaces, and that's because we need to turn on create caps before we extrude. So I wanted to show you that before and after, so I'm going to undo. Now, let's create caps and extrude again. So now, as we extrude we're getting the thickness, but we're also getting inner faces. So if I select all. you can see that all of the polygon normals are facing outwards to where we can see them. So I just wanted to point that out. Let's watch what happens if we extrude the other way. So if I extrude inward and select all, you can see we don't see any of those normals. And if I go into display lines, you can see all those normals are facing inwards, and that's usually not a good idea. Unless you have a specific purpose for that, you don't want to do that. So I'm going to go back to hidden line, undo that extrude, and now we're going to go ahead and extrude outward one more time. And even though I've let go of the tool, you can still come in here and plug values into these. These are still active. So the number that I came up with is 0.15 centimeters, and that's a number I got off Wikipedia on cardboard widths. That's another useful tip is if you're building to scale, you can easily find values like that off the web instead of guessing. And now that we have our thickness, we want to add that bevel to the corners of our box. So for that I'm going to come back into model mode. And instead of actually effecting the geometry, what we're going to do is we're going to add a bevel deformer, and that can be found up here in the deformer pull down. And with our cube selected, I'm going to hold SHIFT and create a bevel deformer. And you can see it's now a child of the cube. The offset is way too high, so that's why it looks so funny. If I come in here and plug in 0.025, now we're getting a nice bevel. If I come into the side view though, you can see that's just a straight line bevel which kind of looks machined. I want to add some subdivisions to that. Now we're getting a rounder bevel, which is what I'm after. Looks a little bit more natural, a little more cardboard-like. The one issue that I have though with this bevel is if I turn it on and off and we look in this perspective view, you can see this inner edge here is being beveled. And what that is going to do is as we start rendering this, we're going to get little folds or creases in the surface of that box, which is not what I'm after. That's the only inner edge that we have on this geometry. So it's a really easy fix to get around this. So let me show you how to do that. I'm just going to turn off the bevel, and what we're going to do is make a selection tag for the edges and tell the bevel which edges to use for its beveling. So we just grab the cube, jump into edge mode, and select all. And now, I'm going to grab my live selection tool, and I'm just going to CTRL+CLICK each one of these inner edges one at a time. Now, I've deselected all four of those. Then we just come up to select, set selection. And you can see it's created an edge selection tag right here. And if we look at our bevel deformer, there is a selection field right here we can drop that into. So we can just drag our edge selection right into the bevel, turn our bevel back on, and now you can see those inner edges are no longer being beveled. So if I delete this, you can see now those edges are beveled. If we drop the selection tag in, everything but those is being beveled. And you can use selection tags on vertices, edges, and polygons. So that's a really useful tool that you'll need as you work in cinema. So that's it for the bottom of our box. So I'm going to go ahead and rename this "bottom." I'm going to go back into model mode, and to create the top I'm just going to CTRL drag a copy, double click, rename it " top," I'm going to activate my rotate tool with the R key, flip this over 180 degrees. And now if we look in the front view, you can see the top and bottom are intersecting because they're the exact same size. So to fix that, we're just going to adjust the verts at the top. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off the bevels for just a moment so it cleans up this viewport and it's easier to see what we're doing. I'm going to go into the vertices tool or vertices mode and I'm going to use the rectangle selection. I'm just going to click and drag a marquee around all the verts on the right and we're just going to move that out. And you can see we're just adjusting the size of that box at this point. We can grab any vert we want and adjust this topology. So I'm going to grab the other side, move out, and then I'm going to select all the bottom verts and move those down. So now, if we look in the front view, our top is fitting over the bottom instead of intersecting it. But we also need to do the same in the side view. So I'm going to hit S to frame up our object, and then I'm going to drag the front verts out. Do the same with the back and there we go. So now the top of our box is fitting over the bottom of our box and not intersecting. We can turn our bevels back on. And if I move the top of the box up, you can see the results. Looks just like a box would look. I'm going to undo that. Now I'm going to go ahead and group the top and bottom together with ALT+G, or objects, group objects. That creates a null and makes top and bottom children of that null. I'm going to rename this "Wine Box." I'm going to come into the layers manager and I'm going to go ahead and middle click so it selects all the children, and put this on our two-page layer. And that'll do it for the wine box modeling. Blocking out your model with a primitive like this is an easy way to get started, and the built-in controls will get you close to what you need very quickly. Then you can just make the mesh editable and start customizing away. In the next video, we'll go ahead and texture our new wine box.
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