Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Simple Vehicle: Seat

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[edit] Techniques

You should already know how to:

• Make a mesh
• Navigate the viewport
• Extrusion
• Subsurf
• Crease edges

This section will recap and introduce:

• Loop subdivide
• Small, consistant vertex movement

[edit] Basic Structure

The design will be a allterrain bucket-type seat. Start in NUM 1 view of the default cube and rename it. Extrude the cube multiple times to make your basic shape. In this example, a 3x3x1 block composes the body with one cube coming out the top for the headrest. The seat is the bottom cube's front faces extruded out.

To add a little texture to the mesh, we'll add some cushion seams. Use Loop Subdivide (CTRL R or K > Loop Cut) and you'll see the pink selection loop. You can use the NUM+ key to increase the number of loops made at the same time. Use mouse wheel or press NUM+ 3 times to form 4 loops and LMB the center column of blocks. You may also find it easier to add them one at a time in the correct place, than inserting them and then moving them.

(To get multiple Loops instead of pressing + just press the number of loops you want in this case "4", this is a fast easy way to achieve this.) You can use a mouse-wheel as well.

• Noob note: You should remove doubles at this point (TAB to edit mode > WKEY > Remove Doubles). When I removed doubles before adding the loop cuts, I found that they did not loop around the bottom of the seat correctly, and when I did not remove the doubles at all, I had trouble forming the seams in the next few steps.

• Noob note: Also you could try deleting faces and edges which are unused inside the object (seat) this way there are no edges to cut up the loop into lots of different sections, so now you will have one clean loop :)

• Noob note: If the loop comes up with green lines rather than purple you have gone one step too far, just press esc (escape) and try again. When you see the purple lines use your Mouse Wheel or the NUM+ button.

Go into ZX view (Num 1) and make sure the view is orthographic (Num 5 to activate/deactivate orthographic view). Place the 3D cursor on one of the sides of the head rest (SHIFT+S to move cursor). Set the pivot to 3D cursor and select the two closest loop cuts. Scale it down on the X axis to 0.3. The goal will be to have the loop closer to the cursor to go into the cushion to become a seam. Now, do the same thing for the other side of the head rest.

In overhead view (NUM 7), select the vertices in vertical parts of the two seams, grab them (GKEY), move only along the Y axis (YKEY), and type in a small number using the NUMPAD. For example, type in .05 ENTER. This will truly create the seams embedded into the back.

Switch to NUM 3 view and move the vertices in the horizontal parts of the same two seams, grab them and move them down by moving them -0.05 along the Z-axis.

Add a subsurf modifier to the object. Select the edges between the back and seat and crease them. Crease any edges you feel like to create your perfect jeep seat.

Noob note: a subsurf level 2 looks best

• Noob note: If your seat is noticeably misshapen after adding the subsurf modifier, you may just have to delete internal faces in your model. TAB into edit mode, and hit ZKEY to get into wireframe mode. Click the face select button and look for faces that are totally inside the model. There will probably be a couple vertical faces (in YZ-plane) under the seams in the seat. I found a few elsewhere, also. Deleting all these cleared everything up.

--MSK61 (talk) 16:20, 12 May 2008 (UTC): In blender 2.45, I tried getting into the wireframe mode, but didn't find any internal faces. Maybe they don't exist in all cases.

• I also use Blender 2.45 but I managed to find some internal faces (in the loops) and deleting these really did clear everything up. I was already wondering why my model looked so wrong.

• Viewer: Selecting all(AKEY)Pressing WKEY and selecting "Set Smooth" helped me a lot in the looks.

Yoshi's Addition-

After subsurfing to give the seams a leathery cord look. Hit A to select all then W and Subdivide Fractal and just keep the defaults and the seams will look like a bunch of vines until you render it and they look like leather seams .

Next, resize the seat height and widths.

As a final touch, the seat can be made slightly more concave to look like it would hold a person better.

This final seat renders to: