Work with basic polygon tools
There are certainly a wide range of modelling tools available in Blender, but a great place to start is with honing your good old-fashioned polygonal modelling skills
Sculpt a robot in Blender with this step-by-step from Glen Southern
It can be a real challenge for someone new to modelling to know where to even begin. Do you start with sculpting, then retopologise your model? Do you begin with Boolean tools like Hard Ops or Box Cutter and use cutting tools to make your models look amazing? Or do you perhaps poly model them in a way that’s been very common since the industry began?
This tutorial will help you start your journey by exploring a very basic polygon workflow. If you grasp all these basics, you can move onto the more challenging topics listed above. You can then begin to combine the different types of modelling and start to expand your skills in new and exciting ways.
We will start here by making a little robot with a core body, four legs and a single eye. It’s going to be suitable to take into a game pipeline and at the end we can look at it in a 3D painting program like Substance Painter from Adobe.
If you learn some of these basic techniques, you can create assets for games, TV and film and even for 3D printing, and it may help you move to those higherlevel workflows as you further develop your skills.
01 START WITH PRIMITIVES
Blender is a very complex program now and you'll have to get to grips with the basics before you can get stuck into the more complex stuff. There are many ways to create models and a wide range of techniques to use, but let’s focus on a very basic polygonal robot model. As always let’s start with a primitive shape. Press Shift+a to add objects and then choose Cylinder. If you want to move it around use G and then X, Y or Z to move it along an axis. Blender is all about the shortcuts!
02 THE VIEWS
You can switch your perspective to an orthographic view, or even a quad view. To access this, go to View>area>toggle Quad View. It's really handy to be able to see the perspective view and also get a fix on the side and front as needed. It helps as things get more complex, and if you switch to wireframe later the side views really help for selecting components.
03 POINTS, EDGES AND FACES
The core DNA of polygonal modelling is the components that a model is made of: the points (vertices), edges and polygonal faces. There are two main modes in Blender and you will spend a lot of time switching back and forth from Object mode to Edit mode. To edit any of the components we need to be in the Edit mode and then choose the aspect we want to work on. In our case here we want to manipulate a face, so go to the Face mode and then click to select the top one.
04 EXTRUDE FACES
Another feature you are going to be using all the time is Extrude, or E. This allows you to extrude out a face, edge or vertex. Make sure you have the top polygon selected and hit E. Extrude the new polygon up a little bit and extrude again. Now use S to scale and shrink it down a bit. At the side of the menu are icons to manipulate the components. Pick the cross that reveals a gizmo for moving and scaling items. Extrude the top up and then recess it as shown. Always leave a supporting loop – I’ll show you why next.
05 SUB SURF MODIFIER
To smooth a model you can use a Subdivision Surface modifier. From the right menu look for the spanner icon. This is where you will find the Modifiers, a huge part of working in Blender. Look for Subdivision Surface and click it. This adds a Sub Surf modifier to the mode in the stack (top right) and you will see that the model looks more rounded.
06 GRID FILL
There is still a hole at the top so we need to address that next. Blender always has lots of ways to achieve a task – we could start connecting edges with a Bridge tool, but there is a much more efficient way. Select the edges around the hole and use Ctrl+f for Grid Fill. This will fill the hole with a lattice of polygons that won’t cause any issues with the Subdivision modifier. There are lots of different combinations here, so try doing it with points instead.
07 LOOP CUT AND SLIDE
Do the same at the bottom of the cylinder, and aim for quite a deep indent. To add extra edge loops make sure you are in Edge mode and right-click. Look for Loop Cut and Slide to add in extra supporting edge loops. If you want a nice, tight edge then bring the edge loops closer together. We will be adding legs under here so the deep recess will help hide the joints at the top.
08 ADD MULTIPLE EDGES
Press Ctrl+r. Move your cursor around the model to select where you want to add the new loops. You may see a preview of the cuts. If you now roll your scroll wheel up and down you will see it adding or deleting rings. Hit enter to confirm when you have the rings forming a grid of squares. We want to add a ring coming out of the front of the model, so predictable quads will help.
09 SELECT A SQUARE
We want to bring a ring out of the front of the model that will become a single eye. Select a grid in the middle of the cylinder and include 36 squares as shown. Use the gizmo to move these out from the model a tiny bit so that it protrudes when you view it from the side. This will be the start of our extruded rings and the next job is to make that a circle. You can use Smooth from the side menu if you want to tighten it a bit or rightclick>looptools>relax.
10 CONVERT TO A CIRCLE
We want to make a tube-like extrusion to hold a sphere, so the next job is to make sure it is circular. Keep the faces selected and rightclick>looptools>circle. This takes the selected polygons and makes them into a perfect circle for you, saving you a lot of manual work. Move the whole selected group forward and then use E to extrude again. Switch the Sub Surf modifier back on or add it again if needed.
11 SHAPE THE TUBE
Extrude, scale and move the selection out, then in, then indent it again. This is all done by repeating the first steps and tweaking the result. When you have the tube made as shown, you can go back with Loop, Cut and Slide and add edge loops to make it look more crisp on the edges. It will look blocky unless you have your Sub Surf activated. Try not to overdo it with the edge loops.
12 QUAD VIEW
If you're ever struggling to select a section of your model, don’t forget you can go to View>area and look with the quad view. If you then change to a wireframe view from the top-right dropdowns, you can select right through the mesh and choose polygons on the back as well as the front. Do this if you are ever struggling to amend more complex selections of polygons. If needed, select the whole tube part at the front and move it out to make the tube look good where it meets the body.
13 MATERIAL
Not strictly necessary at this stage, but it’s sometimes nice to start using materials in the modelling process. On the right of the screen is a little red button that gives you access to the material panel. Find the little + and add a new material. For now, just slide it to slightly green and increase the Metallic amount. We won’t be covering materials in too much depth in this little tutorial, but there is a whole world of complexity to play with in there alone.
14 RENDER MODE
Let’s take a look at the scene in a few different modes. If you hold down Z you will see several view modes including Rendered, Shade Flat, Solid, Material Preview, Wireframe and so on. We will spend the most time with Material Preview or Rendered as we are using a real-time render engine in Blender called Eevee, and there’s nothing wrong with modelling in a live environment if the model isn’t too big. Head to Object mode and add a couple of lights to the scene. Make sure they are powerful enough to show your model in all its glory.
15 THE BASE
With the few techniques we’ve covered here we can make most of the rest of the robot. Learning these simple polygon techniques really helps you get to grips with the basics of Blender, and then that helps you when you want to move onto more complex tools and pipelines. Make a new cylinder and with extrude, scale and move, edit it to look more like a dish. This is where the legs will join soon. Duplicate it with Shift+d and Z to move it up a bit. Scale it down to fit. Copy and paste the basic material onto this part.
16 LEG ASSEMBLY
We will be making four legs; first, create a cylinder in the same way you did in the earlier sections. Make it so that it subdivides well and then rotate it. Hitting N on the keyboard gives you access to a numerical editor for doing a 90-degree rotation. Select a square of polygons on the outer edge and delete them. We will now duplicate the cylinder and then join the two together.
17 JOIN THE CYLINDERS
The two cylinders now form the top of the first leg. Go to Edge mode, select the open loop on both cylinders and right-click> Looptools>bridge to join the two together. Then add some loops down the central support. Add a Sub Surf to see if the model deforms well when smoothed and copy/paste the material. You can move your pivot point by looking in Object>set Origin>origin to Geometry. Later we can locate the pivot correctly to allow movement.
18 SECOND JOINT
Continuing down the leg we can now add a bar made up of almost exactly the same thing as the last section, but duplicated to give us a back and a front bar. This one is much smaller and the connecting bar needs to be much longer. Position it so that it wraps around the previous piece, and it should look like a joint that can swing down and around. Feel free to jump into different modes if you want to see how the model looks.
19 THE TOP OF THE CLAW
The claw is again made up of a cylinder, then we have to select a group of polygons and extrude them down in the next section. Make sure that you indent the cylinder as before and that it is the same on both sides so that the bar can go down either side of it. Make it the largest joint in the leg because we need to extrude an entire claw from the bottom of it next.
20 SMOOTH IT OUT
The last section of the leg will be mimicking the end of a crab’s claw, so it will start off in the same way as earlier by selecting a square of polygons that we then extrude (E). We then need to slowly angle the claw around to make a nice, smooth curve. If it looks blocky select the faces and use Smooth from the left menu to even out the polygons. Extend it down and taper it off.
21 JOIN, PARENT OR GROUP
You have several ways to join, parent or group in Blender. If you just want all your parts to be in one group, for maybe exporting to 3D print or just as a static rendered piece, then select them all, rightclick and Join. The better solution would be to organise them in the correct sequence after naming them joint 1, leg 1 etc, then right-click on each part and use Parent to parent the item to the one it is below in the hierarchy. For the purposes of this tutorial it doesn’t really matter which method you choose, but you may wish to research this part of the process further.
22 ADD TO A SCENE
Use Ctrl+a to add a plane to your scene. Scale it up to act as a floor and then use Z to make sure you are in the Rendered mode. Go to Edge mode and select the edges at the back of the plane. Use E to extrude them up out of the scene to act as a back wall. Make a new material, pick something like a dull grey and take away any reflection for now. Move around to make sure the walls are out of the scene. Add some lights and see how the lighting affects your new model now.
23 PUT IT ALL TOGETHER
With relatively little time or experience you can create really complex pieces with just the basic polygon tools in Blender; we haven't even touched sculpting tools, or Boolean tools like Box Cutter and Hard Ops. The next stage is to add a UV map in Blender or even another program, and then we’ll be heading to Substance Painter for a special paint job.
24 IMPORT INTO SUBSTANCE PAINTER
Substance is an amazing way to get your models painted and textured and then get all the maps out that you might need, like diffuse maps, normal maps, ambient occlusion and so on.
A lot of it can be done in Blender, but there are more tools and options in Substance Painter. Save out a high-res and a low-res version of the robot. I only texture one leg. Import the model into Substance, where you will be able to tell where the textures are, before rendering out your maps.
25 SMART MATERIALS
If you know Photoshop you probably know Substance to some degree. It is a layered system, in which you apply your materials to each layer then reveal the lower one with masks. You can drag and drop smart materials that will help you build up elements like rust, paint peeling and specularity. As the model is a very clean mesh, the texture is a very simple one to generate. When you are finished, simply export it to go back into Blender and it will generate all the maps for you.
26 RENDER FUN
Rendering is a whole world of learning on its own. With a project like this I like to set up a little scene with a HDRI map to achieve real-world lighting and keep the lighting very simple overall. Because you can use Blender Eevee right out of the box, the render setup is very easy. Do all your exploring in the material preview and then do the finished render in the full Rendered mode. •