Guide: 3D Unit Making tutorial

[bebro]

Welcome to this hopefully helpful 3d unit making tutorial

Edit: thanks to El Condoro this tut is also available as docx file for download:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16283408/Panzer ... bebro.docx


It will cover the creation of a 3d model of a „Panzerwerfer 42“ in 3d (of course) by using a basic modelling method called „box-modelling“, and finally the rendering of it into pics for use in PzC.

You need a 3d modelling and rendering software capable of doing baisc modelling techniques described below in this first part of the tut, in short: the software should be able to generate a range of basic geometric shapes, so-called „primitives“ that will appear as polygon-objects in the modeller.

You need to be able to resize, rotate or move objects around in the 3d world. There also need to be functions allowing the selection and manipulation of single or several points as well as surfaces (polygons) of these objects, and esp. to extrude polygons.

I’m using Cinema 4d (C4D) and I’m quite sure those functions are present in many other modellers in one way or the other, but for specific use of different software you need to familiarize yourself with what you use. Look into the documentation or helpfile of your software then. The web may also have tuts covering specifics of the program you use, there could be even a program-specific Wiki site somewhere.


Please understand that I cannot describe the usage of specific tools, options etc. in software I’m not using.
Maybe in case of probs with other software some other creators can come in offering some advice.

Most often there are also several ways and methods possible to come to a certain result or look. I will describe some of those from time to time.

Finally we‘ll also need some 2d gfx program (PS, PSP, GIMP, whatever)

But now in the first part, before we actually start to work on the unit model, let’s look into some 3d basics.

1. In the Beginning....



Here in the background you see a standard view of C4Ds modeller. Important is that you’re in a (now empty) 3d system of coordinates. An object’s position is described by values for x, y, z, which can also be negative. In the same way its dimensions are measured in width (x), height (y), depth (z).

New objects appear usually at the center, which would be the position of 0,0,0 – unless we change it.

To inform you about coordinates/measures a object is using there needs to be some kind of info window like the one I pasted into the screen. In C4D you can switch this (the so-called coordinates manager) on/off, and you also can enter values there directly.

For example when I select an object and enter 50 in the „Y“ row, first colum the objects gets moved 50 units up. Second column is for size, third for rotation (enter angles here)

These operations can also be done interactively via mouse move, which may be faster to do, but less accurate.

1.1. Views



Normally you can switch views around, either to go into a 4 view mode, showing the perspectivic 3d view plus, top, side, and front view, like the pics shows, or to bring one of those into full screen mode for better modelling.

1.2. Basic Objects - Primitives



As noted 3d software can usually generate some basic geometric forms, the pic shows a selection of them positioned somewhere around the center. Usually you alo can specify some parameters, like the dimensions of those objects, also how many „sections“ (polygonal divisions) they will have. This will be important for modelling, since you can basically manipulate objects only at the points connecting the polygons, or the surfaces (polygons) in general.

(Actually there is more possible, but let’s forget this for now)

Also see in the pic above that one object (the „plane“ one) is selected, showing the polygons it has (the so-called „wireframe“ view). C4D can work with both rectangular (like here) and triangular polygons.

1.3. Modes to edit points and surfaces

Surely to edit points you need to get to them somehow. In C4D you just switch back and forth between editing modes for whole objects, points or surfaces. All the resize, rotate, move features plus many others work in those modes, so you can independantly edit points, surfaces etc.

Make sure you changed to the correct editing mode for what you need to do – for example, you usually can’t resize or rotate the whole object when in point mode, and can’t edit any points in surface-mode etc.

The pic below shows two basic cube objects in point-mode and surface-mode



(C4D also offers to edit „edges“ only, but we don’t need this)



However, to edit a certain point or surface you need not only a view mode showing them, but also ways to select those. There should be several selection tools in your software. Those are often somewhat similar to selection tools in 2d programs. Once you switched to point or surface mode you can interactively select certain points/surfaces. In C4D leftclick selects, shift-click adds more, ctrl-click removes selected points/surfaces (red in the pic).

It’s also possible to drag a rectangle around objects/points/surface, use a free-hand selection and some more.

1.4. Manipulate points and surfaces

As noted before in the correct mode selected elements can be manipulated in several ways. Remember how to enter coordinates? The pic below shows what became of the cube when I moved only some points of it sidewards from position x 100 to 200. This will be important later when we actually model our unit.



1.5. Box-modelling

Now finally for this first part we take a look at the basic modelling techniques we will use for our unit. Some parts of it can be made by using primitives. For example the Panzerwerfer's launch tubes surely look cylindric, so we’ll use cylinders there, albeit edited for our purpose.

The hull however will be mostly done by „box-modelling“. Here we start generating a primitive form first (most often a cube – hence „box“), then extrude some of its surfaces and edit points so that it will finally resemble the look we want. Extrusion is demonstrated in the pic below.



Basically we can „extrude outwards“ selected surfaces, and in the process of extrusion there are new polygons created, which is a key difference between "extruding" and just "moving" those surface (hmm, probably not very well described, but we’ll see how it works in the next part)

That is all for today. Hope it helps to get into the world of 3d modelling. In the next part we’ll actually start work on our unit.

[VPaulus]

Thanks a lot.
I've add this thread to the Mods sticky in the guide section.

[bebro]

Thx, next part will follow tomorrow

[bebro]

2. Part

First some changes in this tut: I had forgotten it is easy to change the languages in C4D - from now on pics show the (US) English language version, which is probably more helpful. Also I changed the numeration of both the first and the new second chapters of this tut for easier referral.

2.1. Preparations

Ok, today we want to start to work on the 3d model....but not quite yet, there are some preps to make first.

To model in 3d you need reference material about what you’re going to make – for vehicles search for a blueprint-style pic, not too small, it should show at least three sides (top, front, side) in the same scale. In some cases you can live with a good sideview, and use some other pics (photos, pics of real models) to fill the gaps.

Close-up pics or photos may help you when you’re working on certain details. Color pics will also help when texturing your model, determing paint scheme etc.

For a Panzerwerfer 42 (PZW here from now) on Opel „Maultier“ (Mule) chassis, I found this: http://ww2drawings.jexiste.fr/Files/1-V ... ier%29.htm not really a „blueprint“ in the technical sense, but since it has all views we need it will do it for this tut.

There the unit is named „SdKfz 4/1 etc. auf Maultier“, but it is exactly the vehicle we want. There were also PZW 42 variants based on SWS chassis, see here: http://ww2drawings.jexiste.fr/Files/1-V ... fer%29.htm These have the same launcher, but look a tad different. We stay with the Opel variant.

So please, if you want to follow this tut, go to http://ww2drawings.jexiste.fr/Files/1-V ... ier%29.htm and save all views (three pics, front and back in one) on your computer. I named them pz42_side, pz42_front etc. when saving.

2.2. Setting up the scene, Part I

Now open an empty document in your 3d modeller. While working in 3D, don’t forget to save from time to time. Your program should have also offer undo/redo functions to correct mistakes.

We will use the pics just saved to have them present in the background of the modeller as visual help. To be able to do that, the software you use should offer to show textured objects in the modeller as well as to switch view modes for the whole scene and objects individually so that you can always decide if an objects is shown as pure wireframe, solid, shaded or even textured.

Once this is done, we will have the sideview of the PZW appearing in the background of our modeller’s sideview, the top of the PZW when changing to the top view of the modeller and so on. Reproducing this will be extremely helpful when modelling, even if sounds like more boring basics right now. With some routine you’ll produce something like that in a couple of minutes, writing this part took me a lot more time than actually doing it

The next pic demonstrates what we want using the setup and model of the AEC armored car. Note the two sideviews A and B: see how the completed 3d model of the AEC matches dimensions and shape of AEC in the pic „behind“ it? Also note how the sideview in the back is displayed textured (showing the bitmap sideview) while the AEC model in front is shown as wireframe.



We need three plane (flat) objects on which we will use the PZW pics as textures. Normally texturing would be a late step, but I’ll it cover at least so far here so that you can reproduce this setup, more follows later.

First look in a pic viewer or 2d gfx program how big (pixels width/height) those three views/pics are. I get 755*339 (side), 755*282 (top) and 755*330 for the pics showing front and backside.

Create a simple plane object, polygon-count is irrelevant here, can be a single rectangular poly. Now we either need to resize that object to match the pic’s dimensions, or later need to resize the texture using that pic when applied on that object. I decided to resize my plane object(s) for this, so this first one to 755*339 for the sideview.

If it isn’t already (depends how your modeller generated the primitive), rotate the plane object as shown in the pic below so that it actually displays its side when you bring up the modeller’s side view. I also moved it on the x axis somewhat in the 3d space (x-200). This means in the sideview it will be further „behind“ our 3d object which will be grouped at the center. Positions on the Y and Z axis are zero.



Now to get the sideview pic on this. Usually for a texture you need to define a „material“ that is placed then as attribute for a certain object present in the editor. In most 3d programs there’s a menu point that creates an „empty“ material (mat) you can edit.

C4D and other programs show then little previews of the materials generated, often in form of a little sphere in a window or bar docked onto the modeller window. You can rename those mats to keep some order, esp. when there are many in one document/scene – I was too lazy, so the three mats I generated (for each pic/view) are just numbered by the software. You can also copy/paste (for example when you have multiple 3d documents open), remove mats and some more.

Clicking on one of those icons brings up the material editor window to edit a number of parameters and characteristics for each mat, please see the next pic. For now we just need to deal with the „color“ parameter or „channel“ (checked in the pic, so active).



There are RBG color sliders and a button to load a pic - this will be used as color texture. So either the material takes its color from the RBG settings, or from the pic you load. Here the color setting is irrelevant, because we have the sideview loaded here, and the slider below the button says the pic is shown fully (100%). Now we need to apply this mat to the object created before, so the mat editor can be closed/minimized for now.

In C4D you either drag&drop the mat icon directly onto the object in the modeller‘s window, or you use another editor/manager tool available in C4D – the one for objects. The object manager has a number of useful functions. Think of it as an „explorer-like“ tool to organize objects present in you modeller.



You can here, too, rename, copy/paste objects here and do other stuff with objects. We will come back to this from time to time, right now we only want to texture our flat object. Alternatively to the method described above you can also drag&drop the mat-icon directly onto the object’s name given in the object manger here, an icon next to it will indicate that this mat just got assigned here.

Next is to tell the program how to „wrap“ our texture around the object. For a flat object shoing the sideview, we also want the texture to be projected „flat“. The next pic illustrates how we get that. Click on the mat icon in the object manager, and a new info window is showing that let’s you edit the texture.

Like the editing modes for objects, points and surfaces you should habe able to switch to a view mode showing the texture in your modeller like in the pic. Usually it is possible here to manipulate the texture here with the same tools described in part 1 (for example to resize, rotate etc. textures). Also in this mode coordinates for position, size, and angles entered in the coordinate window/manager will go for the texture, not the object as such.



That’s it for the sideview. You should now be able to do the same for the other two view modes.

The final goal of these preparatione is a setup demonstrated below. Note that all 4 views are now displayed at an individual zoom level, but in the 3d view the dimensions of all the sides of the PZW match. Also, the objects showing side, top, front and back, are centered at a certain axis in the 3d world (see colored lines)



Since the pics we use for this aren’t exactly in the same size you may have to move esp. the plane object showing the front view a bit to achieve that. I included a second pics showing coordinates and dimensions of all three plane objects to help with that.




Ooomph, lotsa text for little work. Now let’s do some modelling.

[bebro]

2.2. Box-Modelling the armored hull

Well, despite all the efforts put into the setup above it is useful to have the complete view of all sides from the link given above open in your browser running in the background, maybe even have more pics ready in a pic viewer or gfx progrma in the background as well, so that you can check certain aspects quickly.

But now to the hull. It’s nice and „edgy“ so we will generate a cube first. Go to the sideview. Now adjust position and size of that cube as a whole (editing mode: full objects) as shown in the next pic. In the sideview, we mostly care about height and depth (or better length) so adjust the y and z values accordingly. Then go to top or front view and adjust the x dimension to match the PZW’s hull shown behind – I use ca. 248 for x size.



Back to the editor’s 3d view, activate surface mode and select the upper surface of the cube (marked red). Now extrude this surface a tad. Values for extrusion are labeled „offset“ in C4D; think of it as the distance to extrude. Experiment with it a tad.



Go to sideview again, and adjust the newly created surcafe so that it matches the upper end of the PZW’s main body.

Note: so far we could have done the same by creating a cube with two height poly sections, then adjusting it either in point- or surface mode. In the end with some routine you can decide yourself what method you prefer, or what is better to reach a certain results.

Now select the new front surfaces of the cube and extrude again forward again:



... and again a surface upwards as shown below:



See were we are going here?

The upper part of the hull is somewhat welded. We will go into point mode to edit our object – which after several extrusions is not exactly a „cube“ anymore – to resemble that. Best to change to the front view for that. Select points to edit their x-size as shown below:



Looks like we make progress, but the hull is not complete yet. In sideview, edit further points to get to the welded backsides of the hull and the part where the driver is seated.



The front part of the hull is tad more tricky. Here it helps to have additional pics ready showing the front in various angles. You’ll see that the lower part of the front is welded as well, but „inwards“, ending in a hexagon-like shape. See here for example:

http://www.tracks-n-troops.com/Milicast ... /g082b.jpg

In those cases take a while to look how the object you model is formed, where edges, are etc. This will help you to determine how to proceed with modelling.

There are several ways to achieve the look we want foer the PZW, I’ll use rather simple one using a sequence of extrusion and editing the newly created points and surfaces.

First select and extrude the two upper urfaces as shown below, and adjust the resulting surfaces or points in sideview so that the match with the front end of the verhicle on the z axis.



Now select the middle surface of the front we just extruded like seen below, and extrude and adjust it as well to get to the look seen below.



Finally, we select the lower surfaces and extrude them down. The point is that the new surfaces here are not directly connected to the back part of the hull anymore, which means we can work with them independantly without changes affecting said back part.



Now we resize the x value for these selected polys to get an hexagon shape.

From here I’ll adjust the sides further first. The we adjust the front surfaces to get the hexagon-like front closer to that of the actual PZW. Fainlly we render a little test pic directly in the modeller to see how the form we created starting with a single cube looks now. I pasted the last steps into one pic:



Not perfect, but comes close to the hull, me thinks. This is something we can use further for additional fine-tuning, later we will also add more details, but for today we are done with the this part

[bebro]

Second part completely uploaded. Next part comes in 2-4 days.

A final note: to each and every point of this part there could be said much, much more, and esp. advanced users could prefer to do things differently, but for a beginner’s tut I don’t want to overdo it.

[Kerloc]

nice, cool to see how other people are working ^^
im using poly-modeling btw

[VPaulus]

Great guide, bebro.

[gunhojr]

very nice bebro thanks for your time in doing this.i do have a question for another time later when you have time if only you can do it.a video of you doing this just curious if you could do something like that. thanks again for your time

[bebro]

3. Part

In the first two parts of this tut I described most steps very detailed, since I think esp. at the beginning 3d this would be most helpful. Anyone following those parts should get a basic understanding now how things work in 3d, and a bit routine with some basic methods like creating simple primitives, and modifying them via extrude, or positioning certain points etc.

To cut both lentgth of this tut and the workload to write it from now on I’ll not describe every step as detailed anymore, esp. when it covers methods that already have been covered. People can always ask if they need more description for a certain pont. When I come to specific problems I’ll go into detail a bit more again. But now back to work...

3.1. How to do the front fenders

The hull we have now is still very basic, even lacks some parts. This is going to change now, first we add those front fenders.

A simple way to get them would be to add another cube with either enough subdivisions or his front face extruded, then with his points modified to match the look of the PZW fenders like shown below. It works as intended, if you modify the points correctly you’ll not see much of a problem when rendered. See here:



However, it’s not very elegant, but more importantly has some disadvantages: you create another object, which is even overlapping to a large part with the main hull. With more and more details things can get quite confusing this way.

Wouldn’t it be nice to extrude the fenders directly from the front hull? We don’t have enough polygons there right now. Fortunately someone included a „subdivide“ (functions > subdivide) option and an interactive „knife“ (structure > knife) tool in C4D. The first adds as many subdivisions as specified, but I esp. use the latter here, since it gives me more control where new polys are placed.

First, get the previous „fender“ object out of the way (activate object > del key), unless you really want to use it later. I this tut it’s not needed anymore.

Activate the main hull object now, select the lower front hull faces, then call the knife tool. The next pics shows what we want: a plane cut done via mouse click going only through selected faces.



But we need more than one cut. Please see next pic: first make another cut above our first (note: the knife can be set to make several parallel cuts in one step), then we need another vertical one. Zoom more into the sideview to work more accurately.



Then extrude as illustrated. You’ll probably not get nice, straight extrusions this time since you extrude from angled surfaces already, but by adjusting points you’ll finally get the fenders right as in the pic below:



So much work when it seemed so much faster and simpler with using the additional cube above, you may ask? Well, it is not that much, esp. with a tad routine, and if you go more into modelling it will pay off at some point. In the end it’s up to you what method you use anyway.

In short, sometimes you better use extra objects, and sometimes better not. Usually they are needed to either have them textured independantly (example: hull, wheels, tracks), and when they’re moving parts (wheels, launcher) which are good to have separate even when you not really animating your model.

There are also ways to texture specific polygons or selections of multiple polys of a single object with specific textures, but if you have the whole model in one texturing lots of polygons individually can get quite a hassle.

[bebro]

3.2. Adding further detail

With the tools and options introduced above we can now add several details directly on the hull without adding more individual objects.

First let’s add those three „block-style“ thingies on each side of the hull. In the following pic the knife tool is set to make two cuts each step. This reduces needed clicks here, and ensures the new poly sections have all in the same length. Then, before you waste more cuts, select the resulting faces as shown in the lower part – we will use another extrude variant now.



Instead of placing more horizontal cuts we will extrude the selected faces within first (structure >extrude inner), see below. Then adjust the resulting faces as shown and extrude („normal“ extrude) them to get the boxes shown looking out a bit from the hull.



Before we add more details let’s work on the hull’s edges a bit. Right now they’re very sharp, which is not how most things look in reality, even when they’re supposed to look „edgy“. First select all faces from the front, top and back, but not the sides or the underside, then use „Bevel“ (structure >bevel), try out some values.



Bevel is somewhat similar to extrude, but as result you’ll see the hull’s edges changed now, being not that sharp anymore due to additonal polys. If you like to have the effect being stronger, bevel more or in several steps, or with more subdivisions so you can edit further in point or face mode.

Armed with the knife tool, extrude, extrude inner, and bevel I now added several more details to the hull. The following pic shows how it looks now – only by using methods covered in this tut so far:



As said, if you want to have the hatches be able to open/close, you need them as separate objects. I decided I don’t need this here, so what you see above is still a single objects that once has been a cube.

That’s all for this part, next is the launcher, and maybe we get to start with the chassis.

[bebro]

Now it's up, next part in some days

[El_Condoro]

bebro, this is certainly 'above and beyond'. Thank you for the amazing effort and help this will be to the modders in the community. Cheers.

[bebro]

Thx, I hope it's helpful.

[VPaulus]

bebro, this is certainly 'above and beyond'. Thank you for the amazing effort and help this will be to the modders in the community.

Indeed.

[massi]

bebro thanks, wonderful tutorial!

[bebro]

Thanks

I hope to have the next part ready wednesday or thursday. After that I think there will be only 2 additional parts to be through.

[bebro]

4.Part

In this part we want to model the launcher. You may wonder about other details of the hull that aren’t made yet. We even have left out the lower part of the hull so far.

Well, as said, I will not describe everything as detailed as before unless it covers something new or specific, or if there are questions. The methods introduced so far should enable you to add further detail to the hull. The underside otoh can be very simple. As rule of the thumb, don’t model out what is not or hardly visible. I come back to the lower hull when we add wheels and tracks.

Generally for the level of detail: it depends on what you plan to do with your model. If you want to go professional and render screen-filling, high-detail or close-up pics you need to worry much more about detail than we need for usual unit gfx in PzC.

The more details you need the better reference material you need as well, and your model will have much more polygons in the end. It’s all possible as long as you don’t slow down your hardware to a crawl with ultrahigh poly models aimed for cinematic CGI on Pixar quality, but that is far beyond the scope of this tut.

At some point you always need to decide what a reasonable level of detail is for a certain model and your specific purpose. It is also a queston of time and effort you want to spend, esp. when creating many models. Even when routine makes everything easier and faster, this usually gets still an issue sooner or later.


4.1. Organizing objects

Right now we have only those plane objects for the background, and the now heavily modified cube we use as hull object present.

Since we need more separate objects for the launcher and later it is a good idea to establish some order now, the object manager introduced earlier is the right tool for that. Like mentioned before, other programs should have similar functionality, at least partly, but info about their specific usage should be taken from that software’s doc or help file.

First I renamed my object to „hull“ (in C4D right-click on object name in the manager > rename). Being here it’s the right time to provide more info about the manager. With several objects I also recommend to organize them in a better way. To do this you can groups several objects together.

This works in C4D like the folder/subfolder structure in Windows. A folder can contain files, and more folders, and so on...Here any object can act as ‚folder‘ or ‚subfolder‘ (though the terms are not used here) simply by dragging one or more objects in the manager onto another one’s name.

You can also create one or more so-called „null objects“ that have no points or faces, but all three axis and act like an empty folder in which you can throw other objects (thereby becoming sub-objects of the null object).

I demonstrate this here with all my background objects renamed and grouped together:



This is not only a question of order, it‘s helpful in many cases. For example, we‘ll group objects of the launcher together later so we can select and rotate the whole launcher whithout affecting other parts, like the hull etc. Bottom line is that it is best to group your objects together in a logical order.

Since we applied mats to the plane objects (see part 2.2) we have the „material“ attribute or tag present as icon right next to those objects. There are many more tags possible that serve specific purposes, I’ll describe some more now, and will to cover more later if needed.

In C4D new primitives generated get two tags as standard from the get-go: for Phong and for UV coordinates needed for specific texturing. Let’s concentrate on the first here. Phong aims to give polygonal objects a more „rounded“ look, depending on the „angle“ value you specify, and the number of polys on that object.

Bear in mind this tag is also used on „edgy“ objects like our hull, but may be unwanted here. You can remove unwanted tags by selecting their icons (leftclick), then press del. I didn’t, but gave it a lower value instead. In short, use high phong values if you want a more rounded look, less for a more edgy look. But be aware that phong cannot „round“ objects perfectly when there are too few subdivisions, so experiment with this a bit.

The pic below shows some examples, and the phong setting I use for the hull.




4.2. The launcher

4.2.1. ‚Socket‘


Looking on more close-up pics for this part may help a lot here again. Here are some very detailed pics for the PZW on SWS, but the launcher itself is identical to ours on Opel chassis, so it is a great help:
http://www.onthewaymodels.com/reviews/M ... r_man2.jpg

The launcher sits basically on a conic ‚socket‘ with two ‚rounded‘ metal parts on each side plus some other details. We will not aim for the same level of detail for this tut, but noone stops you from adding more detail than being described here.

I created first a normal ‚cylinder‘ primitive as lower base, then a cube. Modifying the cube to come close to the socket shown in the pic is somewhat tricky. Basically, I start with two subdivisions in height on that cube. I modify the upper part in point or face mode to be conic, the extrude the side faces of the lower part to get a cross-style shape, finally editing in point mode again to get the result as shown below:

[bebro]

4.2.2. Launch tubes

You could use cylindric primitives for those, but C4D even offers a ‚tube‘ primitive already hollow which I use.

One thing I never mentioned before: In C4D, new primitives aren’t polygonal first, only if you press “C“ to convert them. Thing is that you can specify subdvision etc. as shown in the pic below under „object properties“ before the conversion like shown in the pic below, after it you usually need more steps to get to that.



Until conversion to poly objects, you see these objects as blue solid icons in the manager. You can use those normally, but you cannot edit single points or faces on those, only after conversion to poly objects. Also you can use the further tools (example: extrude, bevel, knife) only with poly objects as well. In short, always convert to poly if you need to edit a primitive object beyond defining some basic properties. I mostly did this throughout the tut, it becomes routine quite fast.

I place the tube object parallel to the z axis for now, we turn all ten together upwards a tad later to achieve „firing position“. Yep, we need ten of them, in two rows. As often there are several ways to get this done, here we use the method via menu > functions > duplicate, because this one also allows it to specify positions of new copies of an object so we have less work positioning each tube. See pic for the duplicate function.



We use this two times for the first row to get two additional tubes on each side. First we create two more tubes o one side, moved 23 units on X, in the second stept we do the same, but moving to the other side (-23), see pic below. C4d creates new copies under a new null object automatically then. You could create all copies in one go, but have to adjust their positions then, since you cannot move them to both sides at the same time.



Alternatively you could use copy/paste with the one we have to get the rest via object manager > edit. You can also copy elements you want to reuse between several open documents/scenes in that way. Or you can duplicate objects and groups of them by selecting them in the manager, then using ctrl-mousedrag to an empty space in the object column of the manager. However, you have to adjust their position manually using the latter methods.

Now that we have enough tubes for the first row we group them all together, then copy the whole row via object manager > edit. Then paste in as new, second row, and move it down a bit as shown.



4.2.3. More details for the launcher

So far our tubes hang freely around in the air, which we now change. First we create those bent parts looking a bit like „horns“. We’ll use another new function here: deformer objects, specifically one for bending objects.

I opened a new document for easier modelling, created a cube with three Z subdivisons. Then I extruded to faces to get some „profile“ in. Finally I set X size to 400, turned it around, and used the knife to make 12 cuts in one go to have more subdivisions since deformers don’t work without them. You should have now something like this:



Now create a „bend“ deformer via Objects > Deformation > Bend. It appears as a simple cube first, but after editing its properties as shown below it will shoow a curved/bent state:



When we now group this bend object under our new cube the cube will take the bend state from the deformer object. So far the cube itself stay unchanged, he’ll revert to the „unbent“ state when you remove the deformer again. But we want him to be in the bent state permanently, so we select both the cube and the deformer grouped together (both should be red), then call „Functions > Current state to object“.

That will create another object looking as we want, and fully editable. That one we’ll copy/paste into our main document with the PZW. To get the same part for the other side copy paste the resized and edited one again and rotate it as shown below:



Resizing and further optimzing in point mode gets me to this:



By adding further primitives and modifying them I get to the end of this part:



These recent additions go somewhat against the advice I gave earlier (at best no objects overlapping others largely), but I use this method here anyway for several reasons:

First there are time concerns, this is just faster right now. Second we have several objects anyway, so while positioning them some overlapping is not soo problematic here.

Most important: to work totally accurate here would require to model ‚holes‘ into some parts, which we have not done before in this tut. We’ll come to that in the next part though, when modelling wheels. It’s up to you whether you want to use the same methods then to edit other details, like the launcher again.

There are some details we left out yet, but for today, that’s all.

[bebro]

Done for today