A beginner starting in 3D printing with Blender - update May 18th - layers

[JCL]

Thankyou

 

In keeping with only doing things by halves, I'm going to tackle the tender top, but again, I'm only going to do half of one.

 

First of all, I left clicked halfway along the tender, just underneath the dotted line that shows the top face of the tender top.

1. Then I created a cube and made it's height (the x dimension) 1mm.
2. I then used the dimension field so resize the top so that it was slightly bigger than the space inside the tender walls.

• Doing this, I realised that the corner of the top came through the rounded back corner of the tender. My aim is to make an exact fit, but if I started carving up the tender top to fit the side walls, I'd have a bit left over in each corner. See bottom image below.

 

To get around this I decided that I had to bevel that corner. This is what I did.

 

I changed the selection mode. Until now, when I right-click on a part of a model with the mouse, I've been selecting a vertex, a point. In the image below, you an see in the bottom red box I've selected the middle option. This option allows me to select an edge. Then, I made sure I was in edit mode, and I selected the vertical edge that makes up the corner of the tender top.

 

 

I've found recently that I've been using a lot of common keyboard commands fairly regularly. These have been as follows:

• Z - toggle between wireframe and solid
• B - select using a boundary box
• Ctrl+R - divides a loop in two. A loop is a series of faces that join together, such as a cube.
• F - create a face within three or more edges - this can be useful for putting ends on pipes.

I've also finally got a pattern of working. It's been good to get to a point where each step isn't a new problem to be worked through. I'm finally finding that I already know how to deal with different issues as they arrive. I'm not done with Youtube videos by a long chalk, but at the moment I'm getting by without them.

 

My select method includes the following:

Selecting one side of a box - to do this, I need to select the whole of one side including both the top and bottom edge. I do this by changing to wireframe mode so that I can see, and therefore select all vertices, and then I press the B key to lasso just the ones I want. An alternative would be to use the face select button (the right button inside the lower rectangle above) and move the viewpoint so that you can see the face to select it.

 

So anyway, I selected the top face and pulled it back until I could just see the edge in orange, then I did the same with the side so I could just see that edge. I know that there is less than 1/10mm in it. This now shows me where the bevel needs to be as that part of the highlighted edge is missing.

 

 

1. In Edit node, next I went back an reselected that vertical edge sticking out through the curve of the tender wall.
2. I then showed the top view from the View menu in the bottom left of the screen.
3. To start the Bevel, press Ctrl+B. you then get a leash that you can wave about until something seems to work. Frankly I've not worked out the best way of doing it yet, but there must be some sort of reasoning behind how it works. I also made sure there were 8 segments, and I used the Amount box until I started to see the edge of the bevelled curve. I've shown the edge in the image below, but to be honest, I don't want to quite see it in reality.

 

Now, if you know you are going to output the model as one object, then you don't need to be quite to accurate about all of this, but looking at Shapeways pricing, it's cheaper to produce a kit of sorts. I want to give myself both options (whole or kit), so I'm going to be as accurate as possible with the fitting of the parts. This next step is only necessary if you are going to break your model up into parts.

 

I'm now going to profile the edges of the top to make sure that they are a good fit into the sides. First of all, in the second image, you can see that in the top red box that the back wall of the tender doesn't quite get to the green line indicating the middle of the tender. To fix this, I changed to wireframe mode, selected just the left-hand edge of the tender, and then type 0 in the X location box (I'm moving the edge to the left, which is the direction of the red arrow, i.e. the X axis.

 

 

Finally, I can carve the tender top. To do this:

1. in Object Mode, I select the tender top.
2. then I click on the blue spanner on the right for the Add Modifier list
3. I choose Boolean and Difference and select the tender side.

 

I've used this a few times now, so hopefully it's familiar.

 

Although I've made use of the Boolean modifier again, I'm using it more sparingly than I did. Blender is good, but it does have some problems, and the Boolean Modifiers where you can join two objects together or use an object to punch a hole in another is one of those problems. The meshes that it creates can be ugly in the least, and can cause problems later on if you aren't careful. In the next step-by-step, I'll show you what I mean with a door.

 

So finally, here's where I'm at right now. I have one half of the tender that I've temporarily mirrored (mirror modifier used, but not applied) to show what the whole thing looks like.

 

[Jaz]

being  a dunce on this.....although I can do technical drawing with regards to engineering parts...well gulps 30 years ago I could.......

but have had no practise since on the engineering side.....and even back then only the old fashioned way on a drawing board)

...and never having taken to CAD...(used a simple version...hated it).....used some other software for interiors for some strange reason....must be  a woman thing LOL...and then it was simple stuff....size a room drag in squares and rectangles....doing a basic 30/60...office layouts to help my boss fight for a share of our building (we kept the space that they were trying to grab and agreed that technically we need more - which never happened - but my boss was pleased as i did it in my lunchtimes initially...when he saw the results he told me to cary on during work....then I did the Finance floor as well...I think I used Visio)...

anyway.........I find this really fascinating.....keep up the fine work......something might eventually click in my brain............

[backofanenvelope]

Hi Jazz, and welcome to the group. I don't know if you have or would want to look at Sketchup as this is a very good place to start with beginners 3D CAD. I started using it many years ago and have used it to show family house alterations and mockups for various ideas and projects. Although it is aimed primarily at Architectural modelling others have used it effectively for making trains It has limitations but the basic principles are there. Blender is not the easiest of programs to learn but Jason is doing a great job of de-mystifying it and we can all learn from the errors as well as the successes, I certainly have!

[JCL]

Hi Jaz, thanks very much. I too owned a Rotring pen back in the early 1980s for Technical Drawing, but I'm not sure that's helped me here!

 

My advice is to take things slowly. I've slowed down a bit at the moment because it was becoming a bit of a chore, and because I have been boxing up more of my house ready for my move in December. I think that by doing it a bit at a time I'm keeping myself sane. It also means that I've looked forward to getting back to it. The other thing I've done is diversify by creating T9 to HR Castle class parts for Andy, and messing about with a Barnum Coach for me, just to see how much it would cost to print (seemingly $60). This means that if I get bogged down with one thing, I can do something else.

 

Blender does get a bad rap, and I have had my share of the problems, but the first part of the learning curve is genuinely the worst.

 

10 points to anyone who saw that there was no room for coal in this tender.

Edited November 12, 2014 by JCL

[backofanenvelope]

I didn't like to comment Jason as yo had done such a good job up until then and as I have posted nothing on here.....

Tom

[JCL]

Haha, thanks Tom. I was just making sure everyone was awake. I'll have to get the current tender from the 4-4-0 County class out to see what my clearance is. Should be pretty good, because this tender is that much taller.

[backofanenvelope]

Sorry to drag OT a bit but I paid for a tutorial from CGcookie earlier today on solid surface modelling and have found it useful already! I think a lot of the techniques are just learning which is the right way to do it. Of course they make it look so easy but now I can watch over and over till I get it right

[JCL]

Hi Tom, is there a link to the tutorial that you've bought?

[backofanenvelope]

Hi Jason I took this one

T.

[JCL]

The introduction video (below) looks really interesting. The tutor seems to cover a lot of techniques that would be useful to me. So, the only question I'll have to think about now is, do I buy the tutorial for $14, or a month's worth of subscription for $18 and gain access to other tutorials for that month as well?

 

[backofanenvelope]

Well it certainly is interesting. I just got the tut as I thought it would be enough and if I wanted more I can get a month later

[JCL]

I did the same in the end. It's -20C tomorrow in my part of Canada, so if there was ever a day that required me to stay inside, tomorrow is that day.

[stadman]

The introduction video (below) looks really interesting. The tutor seems to cover a lot of techniques that would be useful to me. So, the only question I'll have to think about now is, do I buy the tutorial for $14, or a month's worth of subscription for $18 and gain access to other tutorials for that month as well?

 

There's also blender guru on you tube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewPPrice/videosin case it hasn't been mentioned here before). I watched both of his 747 tutorials.

Kev S

[JCL]

I've watched the first four or so. The tutor works in a very clear manner, and covers a lot of ground even in those first four videos. I know already I can make use of some of his techniques for generally working more quickly, making holes, and maybe even creating curved cab rooves; the sort you'd find on a class 47 for example. His mantra is "keep the mesh clean". That is, do as little as possible with the mesh so that it doesn't become messy and unpredictable. I'e already got to the cockpit for example, and he hasn't once used those Boolean modifiers that I've been relying upon. I'll give you an example that I found of what can go wrong with working with booleans.

 

In my case I've been having a look at the Barnum Coach to see how much it would cost to produce in 4mm scale using 3D printing. The answer is around $50 for the body, and probably about $70 overall. I don't know what the Shapeways exchange rate is, but it might be that this is comparable to the Hornby 61' Gresleys (although I'd still have to paint it and add handrails and glazing). So, the part that I was trying to replicate was a door. There are four small windows in the door that I initially punched out using cubes and the difference boolean modifier.

 

1. The first thing I did was create a door shaped rectangle.
2. Then I created four cubes, each representing the cutout for a window.
3. Finally, I selected the door, chose the boolean difference modifier and chose a cube. I did this four times. Once for each cutout.

As you can see below, it all starts of very neat, but after punching the rectangular holes through the door I get a lot of diagonal edges. Unfortunately these edges can be unpredictable, especially if I then needed to move vertices around. This wouldn't be a problem on this example, but what if I was creating portholes in the hull of a boat?

 

 

The other way of doing this is to make sure that the mesh is ready to accept the holes in the first place. It's actually just as easy to do, and looks far neater. In fact, you end up with something that mirrors the real world.

1. I recreated the door shaped rectangle.
2. I made sure I was in Edit Mode
3. I clicked on Cut Loop and Slide in the Tool Shelf (just above the Spin tool I used to make the chimney).
4. Next I hovered the mouse near a vertical edge and displayed a pink horizontal line. This tells me that I'm going to create a new loop of vertices horizontally. After clicking to confirm this, I can move the loop of vertices up and down the door. I then moved the loop to one of the window edges.
5. I did this a number of times, until I had edges around each of the windows.

 

Next, I clicked on each of what would be the window panes and pressed D to delete each face. I did this both front and back. So this gave me some holes, but the object isn't watertight, as I didn't have any side walls between the front and back of the door where I'd deleted the faces. To rectify this:

1. I selected an edge of the window frame in the front of the door, and the same corresponding edge in the back of the door.
2. I then pressed the F key. This makes a face between the two lines.

Don't forget to do the upward faces as well!

 

 

I hope you'll agree that the second method looks much neater than the first one. I will have to watch a couple of videos again, but I can see how this can also be used to make circular holes as well.

 

So that's one of the main principles that I've learned already - keep it simple. The videos are very good, my only slight gripe is that he goes too quickly at times, and he can't resist moving his model around as he talks. Other than that, I'm happy spending that $14.

 

Once I've got through all of them I'll have a good look at Kev's suggestion as well.

 

cheers

 

Jason

[JCL]

I've also had a brief PM conversation with Mitchell (aka SpoorObjecten) about printing using Shapeways as I wanted to know about minimum sizes for sides, grooves, holes, etc. He very kindly sent me a PM back with this information:

 

"

 

Smallest diameter hole:

FUD: I recommend to use at least 0.2mm

WSF: I recommend to use at least 0.5mm, however the bigger the better as holes might get fused together when being small 

 

Grooves:

FUD: I personally use 0.25mm deep grooves and 0.3mm wide on my own models (N scale mostly), this way the groove won't be too big and still look nice

WSF: I use 0.5mm grooves for this material, though as I don't use this material really often, I'm not 100% sure if it will look great.

 

Note that I use 0.8mm thickness for the walls on my models (and thus 0.25mm would make those areas 0.65 thick)

 

"

 

This will be very useful to me as I would like to get as much right as possible before I send off for a print. Living in Canada it starts getting a bit expensive, and I don't have the money for lots of prototype iterations.

 

Anyway, I'll get back to the tender this afternoon. I'm redrawing the sides to make the top of the flare thinner and introduce the beading.

 

cheers

 

Jason

[JCL]

The beading around the top and front edge of the tender is quite possibly the most difficult thing I've had to work out since I started this project. The problem is that curve in the red box below. Not only does it curve backwards, but it also curves outwards. Now, all of my jobs so far have really been very 2D in scope. The GNR railing post, yes it's 3D, but I only had to think in two dimensions at a time. Even chimneys and domes have started in 2D mode with profiles before using the spin tool at the end to turn them into 3D items. The beading on that curve will have to twist and turn in three dimensions, all at the same time.

 

An ex-GN 0-6-0 at Grantham. Ex-Great Northern J6 0-6-0 No. 4199 may be working a local train to Nottingham (Victoria) via Wikipedia

 

I tried a lot of different ways to do this ranging from moving vertices around to Boolean manipulations to proportional editing to goodness knows what. Each method got me so far, but always seemed to end up looking pretty bad. In frustration I finally started thinking about Bezier curves. I mentioned them briefly once before. Bezier curves in Blender are curves which exist in 3D space, and people often use them to make snakes or pipes - exhaust pipe anyone? They could also be used to make beading, and the way they work could allow me to be pretty precise in the curve's placement. Here's a video I found very useful.

 

 

So, this is the kind of thing I'm aiming for:

 

 

Warning, I'm still working this out as I write this and the next post, so please bear with me as I may not do things in the most efficient order.

 

First of all in the Right view, I positioned the 3D curve at the bottom of the tender flare in the middle of the beading.

My front view showed that although the 3D cursor was correct on the Y and Z axes, it was about  5 scale feet away from the tender side. With the front view active, I clicked and dragged to the left over the X location box until the 3D cursor was nestled against the side of the tender.

 

 

Next, I added a Bezier curved, and typed 90 into the Y rotation box. In the front view, all you can see is a straight line, but in the right view you can see an odd looking curve. I've shown it in Object and Edit modes. In the latter, you can see the red control handles.

 

 

Each control handle has three points. The middle point is used to move the control handle around, and the points at the end of the two red lines are used to change the direction of the line emanating from that middle control point. Not only can you wave the outer control points around, they can also be moved closer to and further away from the middle control point to change the "strength" of that part of the curve.

 

Next, I moved the control points as per the image below, and changed their directions so that the bottom one would be vertical, and the top one, horizontal. These directions are chosen because I'll have vertical beading descending from the bottom of the curve, and horizontal beading coming out of the top curve.

 

 

I then changed to the top view, and moved the upper control handle to the right so that it lines up with the edge of the flare.

 

 

It would be very difficult to show you this in 3D, so if you haven't yet, please have a look at the above video. Well, that's the basic shape I'm after, but it will need quite a bit of refining. For now, I need to redraw the tender side and flare. I did this by creating two cubes.

1. The bottom cube was .8mm thick (the thickness of the tender side, as tall as the tender side, and about 5mm long.
2. The top cube (shown by the orange dot below) was the same length, but 1mm thick and only .2mm high. It overlapped the bottom cube slightly, and it's left hand side was aligned to the left hand side of the bottom cube.
3. I then went into wireframe view type (Z) and selected the top vertices of the top cube.
4. I moved the 3D cursor so that it lined up with the top of the top cube.
5. Finally I used the spin tool with the values in the boxes below.
6. I then selected both cubes and used Ctrl+J to join them together

It might look excessive to use two cubes, but I needed the flare to be slightly thicker than the sidewall, and the other methods I used to create this just caused problems. Anyway, I ended up with the image below. As you can see, the curve is slightly off, so I'll need to rectify that.

 

 

First of all, I need to increase the length of the tender side. I did this in the Right view by using the B key to lasso the right hand vertices, pressing E and then dragging for a few mm. I did this a few times until I had a grid that I'd be able to manipulate later. You can see that the front view and side view plans are out slightly!

 

 

In the front view, the bottom control handle was in the right place, but the curve didn't follow the curve of the flare. I dragged the top control point upwards until I had a better fit.

 

 

I couldn't select the top control point in this view, so I changed to Top view and moved it out, then Right view and moved it upwards. I then played with the controls on the ends of the handles to refine the curve so that it followed the beading in the drawing. I ended up with the line in the image below.

 

 

That's the end of part one. Next I'll have a look at the thickness of the flare - should I make it thinner as it gets to the outer edge? I'll show how easy it is to make the actual beading, and I'll finish off the tender side (again - this'll be about the 8th time!)

 

Thanks again for looking.

Edited November 16, 2014 by JCL

[JCL]

Part two of making the beading. I've decided that that flare is too big, and I want to taper it a little towards the top, so I'm going to delete it and redraw it. The good thing is that I can show you how I'm going to do it.

 

1. First of all I changed to Edit mode, wireframe view type (Z) and the Right view and deselected all of the vertices by pressing the A key.
2. Then I pressed B to boundary select all but the front face of the tender side (see middle image below),
3. before pressing delete and choosing vertices.

 

I then changed to the Front view and then deleted all of the vertices that were created by the spin tool in exactly the same way. You'll see from the image below that all I'm left with is the tiny cube that I created to start the flare from. The curve that is coming out from the right hand side of the cube is the Bezier curve and has nothing at the moment to do with the flare. Note that the tiny cube and the tender side are still joined from before. I haven't done anything to change that.

 

 

I'm a lot happier with the flare below.

 

 

The next thing I did was move the upper Bezier curve control handle until they lined up with the outer top edge of the flare again so see how it would look. I did this in both the Top view and the Right view as seen below. In the image you can also see that, although the flare is closer to where I want it to be. That top most line is still high though.

 

 

The composite image of the front and right view shows you where I'm at at the moment. The red arrow shows where the top of the Bezier curve is located. I'm going to taper this flare a little from the back, and reduce the height of the topmost point.

 

 

I want to taper the flare with a consistent curve, so to do this I'll create a circle to use as a guide, and move the points of the back of the flare so that they touch the circle. In the end, I did this with both of the flare faces. This brings the width of the top of the flare back to 0.7mm The fery end will "thicken up" again once the beading goes on.

 

 

Well, that probably wasn't very interesting, so I'll get on to the beading now. Incredibly this is the easy bit. I clicked on the curve button in the top right of the rounded rectangle and then changed the following properties:

• Fill: Full
• Resolution Preview: 64
• Bevel 0.394
• Resolution 10

I turned off smoothing because I want to see the actual vertices and faces - these are what will actually be printed!

 

 

Turning off the Wireframe view type, the beading looks like this.

 

 

I used the Front, Top, Right and Left views to reposition the two control handles for the beading so that everything lined up. That's the great thing about creating beading, or indeed pipes in this way. You can carry on moving the control points until everything is in the right place; and you are shown instantly the effect of those changes.

 

 

The next thing I did was to use the method a few posts back with the Difference boolean modifier to carve the front curve into the tender side. As you can see below, it's more or less worked, but the tender side does poke through the beading in a couple of areas. This is one of the reasons why I extended the tender side in small increments. Now I can move those vertices around and tuck them inside the beading without affecting large areas of the flare. Each vertex move will only affect minor edges of the tender. In the image below (the 50th I've printed on this alone, I'm really dragging this out!) I've highlighted the tender side for clarity.

 

 

After a lot of tucking in points and moving the control handles around I've managed to get a smooth beading transition from the horizontal to the vertical. Now, being in Canada, I've no local access to a British tender, so I'm hoping that the beading I've done is correct in relation to the tender side. In any case, it looks neat. If the worst comes to the worst, I've been increasing the number of the end of the file name so I can always go back to a previous version.

 

Now I need to extend the beading down the front edge and along the top edge of the tender side. I'll then join the beading to the side before extending the whole lot around to the back as I did before.

 

To do this, I

1. selected the tender side, went into Edit mode and selected one of the vertices on the bottom edge. I then copied the Z location value.
2. Then, I accessed Object mode and selected the beading before changing back to Edit mode.
3. I selected the middle control point on the lower control handle and pressed E to extend the beading downwards.
4. Next, I pasted the value from step 1 into the Z location box so ensure that the bottom of the beading exactly corresponded with the bottom of the tender side.
5. Finally, I did the same with the other end of the beading, this time using the Y location value.

 

Wow. Finally, I selected the beading and pressed Alt+C and "Mesh from Curve" before selecting both the beading and the tender side and joined the two together with Ctrl+J, in Top view, selected just the top row of vertices, and pressing G and Y to move that top row of vertices down to the other end of the tender.

 

 

This is the end result with side extended around to the back (see the previous posts), and the Mirror modified on.

 

 

I hope this post saves! Thanks for reading through this one. I realise it's a long one, but I think that everything else will be plain sailing after this. At least on the tender...

[JCL]

Blimey, that post felt a lot bigger than it was! I'm surprised how short it was in the end. The thinking about what I needed to do, and the screenshots etc meant that those few words took about 2 1/2 hours to put together! If I was to do the beading again, I'd move the corner, marked by the arrow in the fifth image, inwards, before cutting off the front corner. This would make life easier when tucking in the points.

 

One final thing, you need to remember to put a cap on the bottom edge of the beading, otherwise it isn't "watertight" and the tender won't print.

 

I did this by moving the view to the underneath of the tender, selecting the bottom circle of the beading and pressing F to add the face.

 

 

I think it's about time I got out of the house and took the dog for a walk.

Edited November 16, 2014 by JCL

[JCL]

I'm getting towards the end of the tender body work. Most of what I've done since this morning has simply been a case of creating cubes, cylinders and cones. The cover at the back was a cube with bevelled edges (as per the tender top that I wrote about the other day, and will have to be detailed with hinges and suchlike later.

 

In the meantime, I created the toolboxes this afternoon. These started as cubes that were elongated along the length. The curved top was done as follows:

1. Select the cube in Edit mode
2. Choose Loop Cut and Slide
3. Click near the front of the toolbox until you get a magenta line along the length of the box. Click, then click again to choose where the finished line should be.

This should, in the end, give me 8, 10 or 12 faces on the top of the toolbox; see 1.

 

Next, I enabled Proportional Editing from the toolbar at the bottom of the screen and chose "Sphere" in the option list on the button next to it. See the red box in image 4.

1. I changed the selection type to edge, and selected the middle line of the toolbox
2. and pressed G and Z to grab the line and move it upwards along the Z axis only.
3. The proportional editing mode includes a circle that shows the influence limit of the tool on the mesh.
4. I rolled the mouse wheel backwards and forwards until I had a smooth arc across the top of the toolbox.

I could have used Bezier curves, but this is a quick and convenient way of producing an arc.

 

Image 4 shows the tender's current condition.

 

 

I've still got a few things to do, such as a hinge at the back, sidewalls for the coal chute, and to hollow out the boxes to save material, and therefore money! Current price in FUD in US dollars is $30, $14 in WSF. Still not too bad, but I've the sideframes to come, so it'll be interesting to see how I get on.

[uax6]

Are you going to do the sideframes as a seperate chassis?

 

With regard to the beading on the edge of the tender flare, I think the best way of thinking about how these things are in real lift is to imagine a tube with a slit in it. That slit is the same width as the thickness of the side sheet, which the tube is pushed over. So looking at your underneath shot of the cap above, the tube should be sat back so that it sits right on the end ofthe side sheet. Unless you have it where it is to desgiuse the thinkness of the material used, which, if this is the case I would flare the inside back so that the thickness increases away from the bead.....

 

Andy G

[JCL]

Hi Andy, I've been looking at the beading again, and the beading doesn't seem to have a circular profile, more of a oval. This would allow it to cover a lot of the thickness of the tender wall without it being too prominent from the sides.

[JCL]

OK, having looked at a tender for a model K3 I've seen that the beading is on the outer face only. This means that it could work better as a D shape, rather than an O shape. I'll redo the side in the next couple of days.

 

In the meantiime, I've been looking at the frames. The way I'm going to do this is create the frames so that they are exactly the same distance apart as the Hornby County class ones. I'll still need to cut the Hornby chassis back, but at least the inside width will be the same.

 

There are three axles that all look exactly the same, and there are two lozenge shaped holes between them that are also the same. Instead of creating three axleboxes I've decided to create just the one and then copy it. I will also only create one piece of the frame and copy that as well.

 

First, I created a cube. Changed its thickness to .8mm, and it's height and length to suite its situation. I also used that Loop and Cut tool on the toolshelf to cut the part up so that I can later take chunks out of it and make some rounded corners without messing up the rest of the mesh. These are highlighted in red below. Next, I selected some faces that I wanted to remove and deleted them.

 

 

 

Deleting those side faces means that there are gaping holes between the two sides that need new faces adding to make watertight. I did this by using Edge select, selecting two opposite edges and then pressing the F key to make a face.

 

 

After this, I selected an edge (the red one in the image above) and used Ctrl+B to create a bevel. In this case, the bevel gives me a quarter circle, so I then selected the corresponding lower one and created the other quarter. I made sure that when pulling on the dotted line to create the bevel I didn't try to get the quarter circle past them middle line (red arrow in the image below) as this could cause problems

 

Next, I made two copies of that first section and flipped the middle one by rotating it on the z axis by 180 degrees. As I copied each one I moved the copy along the Y axis using G (grab) and Y (along the Y axis). I selected the three parts and pressed Ctrl+J to join them all together. Although the parts are technically joined together as one unit, that unit still had gaps between each part.

 

 

To get rid of the gaps I just repeated my previous action and selected two edges on either side of the gap and pressed F to create a face. I did this for each of the four faces that should straddle the gap.

 

 

This left me with some inside faces that can be highlighted by choosing Select and Non-manifold.

 

 

I then pressed the Delete button, and Faces from the menu to delete the non-manifold internal faces, and then Select and Loose Geometry and Delete to delete all the bits an pieces that shouldn't be there.

 

Finally for the curved end, I pressed A to deselect everything, and B to lasso just the far right-hand vertices. Then I used E to extrude the side out to the buffer beam.

 

 

Now I had to make the curve you can see above. I did the subdivide thing here. If you select two opposite edges on a face and choose subdivide from the toolshelf, the face will be split into two equal parts. If you select all four edges, then the face will be split into quarters. In the image below, I selected the two long edges, and the subdivision was put in at 90 degrees to the edges.

 

 

The only annoying bit was that I had to move the view slightly to select the subdivided edge and then put it back to Right view to show the side plan and be able to then move it to the right position.

 

 

So, that's how I did it, but art lots of points along the way, I could have done it differently. For example, at the very beginning I could have just created a big old box, and then used 3D lozenges to punch out the holes with the Difference boolean modifier, or I could have created a plane, turned it into a vertex with Alt+M and then created the side in one go by tracing around the drawing (in the same way that I did chimney profiles).

 

I only made the frame in three parts to make sure that the holes I created were exactly the same, if I wasn't quite so bothered about this, I could have used exactly the method that I I used in this post, but created one large side frame, divided it up using Loop Cut and Slide and then created each hole separately.

 

[uax6]

Don't forget that the frame will disappear behind the steps to the left hand end!

 

Andy G

[JCL]

Yep, no probs Andy, hadn't quite finished the frame I still have that portion, and the steps, to do.

 

Before I do that, I'd like to take a minute to talk about mesh problems. While I spoke about some in the previous post, I'd like to take a bit of time out to go through them here.

 

Non-Calculated Normals

 

Normals are used by Blender to fake the lighting of bumps and dents. First of all, have a look at this side. As you can see, the original part that I created is light grey, but the other cloned sections are a dark grey. This is because actions have been performed on the mesh, but the mesh hasn't then been recalculated. To rectify this all I had to do was select the whole frame (A) and then press Ctrl+N.

 

 

Non-manifold

 

Non-manifold edges and faces are edges and faces that cannot exist in the real world. A couple of examples are two or more edges that are in exactly the same place, or an external face inside an object (as in the previous post when I joined two parts together). If you enter the Wireframe View Type (Z) and choose Select and Non-manifold from the menu, the non-manifold edges glow orange. Deleting these edges will normally do the trick. If not, you'll have to hand check them.

 

Another reason for non-manifold edges is that an object has a face missing. If you create a cube, then select a face and delete it, you will suddenly have a non-manifold object. This is because there are faces only on the outside of the cube. Those faces aren't double-sided, so what looks like an inside face through the cavity you just made is no such thing. To make the cube watertight again, and to remove the non-manifold warning, you just have to click on two opposite edges and press the F button to recreate the face.

 

Flipping Normals

 

In the paragraph above I said that faces only have one side. There isn't a back to the face. Sometimes you might find that you have a face that is back to front, and the "side of the face" that should be pointing outside is actually pointing inwards. To fix this, you need to select the face in question and press the W key, or choose Mesh, Normals, Flip from the menu at the bottom.

 

I'll add to this post as I find other issues.

[simon br blue]

One way to avoid non manifold edges and making some items easy to draw (on the tender sideframes for example) is to draw it 2D and then extrude the sideframe to the thickness required when complete.

 

Regards

Simon.