In this video, we're going to block in a very simple version of our model that we can use for reference as we continue to make a more refined version of our initial block-In. I also happen to have found a nice front view. So I've brought in the front view image and after having scaled this cube to my overall dimensions and making sure it fits my image plane, I can use it to help me scale my reference images to make sure they also fit the overall size of the object. Sometimes, this thing can be tricky. In fact, whenever you're working with more than one reference image, you're always going to have to choose. I've decided that this front view image will be a secondary source. So if there's any conflict between what I see here and what I see here, I'm always going to choose the top view. Just to make sure everything's lined up, just so, I want to make sure I turn off reference here because I realized that I should rotate this back a 180 degrees so that it better fits the view that I'm looking at here. I'm just making sure things line up as well as I can get them. I'll often do a middle mouse drag after I've made one of these dimensional movements. For instance, if I pick one of these and drag it. I can be off the tool itself and just middle mouse drag anywhere and apply whatever I did last. I find it's a real convenient way without having a grab the manipulator every single time. Now, unfortunately with this model, I don't have a perfect side view. I have a couple of more or less closed side views that I'm going to use to check the model, but I'm going to have to rely on just these two views to do most of my modeling. Depending on the project you pick, you might have really nice front side and back views. But in my case, these two are going to have to do most of the work for me. So this reference cube is done its work for now and I'm going to use it later as I start modeling. Let's hide this. Don't forget to take this image plane and I can add it to the reference layer by doing add selected objects. So now, they're both referenced. In this case, move this further back, go back to referencing it so I can't accidentally select these. So I'm going to make a duplicate, Command or Control+D to make a duplicate of that reference object. I'm going to use this to start off my model. Take a few verts, pull it back till it meets the edges. I'm trying to start with the central cube of this. If I can take these faces thinking about just what fits the particular section of this model that I'm looking for. So we can see it's pretty square here. It's going to curve around here a little bit more but we're just trying to go for really rough blocking at this stage. So starting with just my top view, I'm going to create a series of extrusions. In this case, I'm going to ignore some of these cuttings, I'll build those later. I'm just trying to get an overall sense of form. But I will take a multi-cut right here in this vert and slide that in to lower or less conforms. Let's do the same thing on the backside. I can take all my faces, drag over, and control drag back to only get this face that I actually want. We'll get some of these rounder edges in a second. But right now, I'm just trying to get the main, main shapes here. In fact, looking at this I decide that's even more edges than I need right now to help me define just this form. Let's take a look at some of these other little features. I got this little bottom battery, I've got a couple of lenses that come off here. So let's go ahead and drop in a couple of cylinders. Take these cylinders. Holding J, I can rotate those down. Especially in the blocking stage, the most important thing to consider about cylinders is how many sides they are going to have. For instance, if I'm looking at this as a low poly asset, turn off my grade here. I can see it from this distance the number of edges is probably fine. But if I'm ever looking it from this distance, say it's part of a first-person asset and I'm going to get really close to it, I can start to count the edges. That's no good. If it's being held in a third person view by a character and I never get that close to it then this is fine. But because I want something that's going to be a first-person asset plus I want to make this more of a portfolio piece, you want to go a little higher than lower. You can always optimize but you need to convince people who are looking it work that you can do the best version possible. So instead of 16 like I have here, I'm going to double that and go to 32. So you can see now, we really can't see those edges until we get really, really close to them. Whenever I'm looking at a cylinder straight on like this, I try to keep the edges very high. We're going to have a couple of cylinders from the sides. You will see that, for instance, if I create a duplicate of this cylinder, if I reduce the size of this down to something like eight and smooth this edges off, we can see from this view, it's hard to tell which is the 32 sided cylinder and which is the eight-sided cylinder. But when you get into this view, it's very, very obvious. So if I ever have a model that I can't see the cylinder, I can't see the top and bottom on, I can go a lot lower, I can get away with a lot more. But if I'm looking at it from this front on view, I have to be a lot more generous with my geometry. By default, these cylinders come in with these little star caps. I don't really like those. I'll show you why in a second. I like to go to my subdivision caps and turn those to zero. Sometimes, I don't want a cap. Sometimes, I want to just be able to move the whole thing at once and it will create what's called an NGon. This is a really ugly shape that won't work well. For instance, we hit three on our keyboard and try to smooth it. It creates some really awful geometry which is going to come up later. NGons, in general, are okay if they're on a planar or flat surface, but we never want them on anything that's going to curve or angle. Let's get this position in a place. Let's take a look at this from the top view. This is again one of those cases where I'm going to have to make a decision between which of these two do I really follow here, or does this need to be resized if these don't fit in? So let's think about this right here. You'll see this a lot especially when you're modeling anything that has cylinders, is we have this fall off here. Now, we know that it's actually flat. But the point is, this piece right here, this part of the eye cup is closer to the camera when it was taken. This piece is further away, meaning, it appears to be smaller. So we get this fall off effect. We get this sense of perspective as things go. Not to mention, the horizon line is somewhere along here for the photograph so we get this. This is rising up to the vanishing point. These are rising up to the vanishing point. The rule I like to follow here is pick either the inside or the outside and stick with it. So in this case, I'm sizing this to this middle line, this inside. I'm not really going to pay attention to how this curvature goes. I'm going to say I know mentally it's supposed to be straight. I'm going to do my best to stick with that. So let's get these in here, line these up, and then take a look at this whole thing in the front view. I'm going to turn this wireframe unshaded here and see if I can use them also to help me position and line up where these are going to be. So again, like I mentioned, we're often going to have to fight some things. Sometimes, we're going to have to make some decisions that are going to throw it off from one angle but make it look better in another angle. So I'm trying to keep this as my preferred angle and I'm mostly using this one is reference, but this is going to give me a key point to help me decide heights along here even if my relative distance along here is difficult. For instance, this is why I'm setting this up using these eye cups here because this area, this angle is going to be most important for deciding how things are in the height here versus this angle up here is going to be much more useful for me deciding where things line up along these planes. I wouldn't want to use this for that very decision because as we mentioned, these eye cups are a lot closer to the camera, they're going to appear to be larger, everything else is falling off as it gets further away from the camera. I have here this little eye stock piece that comes down and pulls up. So check it from a couple of our different angles and see if we can find that particular view. This is a pretty good angle of it. It does look like they dropped down a little bit below everything else. So the eye stocks come down a little bit further and everything else sloops out from there. So to do this, I'm just going to create a duplicate of this object and let's scale it down. So we're going to take this face and snap it. Do the same with this face. Now, based on our reference here, I'm just going to scale things out. Try to generally match what I see happening here. It also looks like these aren't coming. Straight on, these can angle out. I'm going to try to model these as straight as I can. So I'm looking the front view and it does appear like these adjust, like these rotate out from each other. So that's actually going to be a really crucial thing for me to figure out is, if this view, these are straight on, and if this view, these are angled out. It does look like there's that little flat piece that's angled and I think it's angled here too, judging what I can see. So I'm going to take this object. Let's do a quick isolate on it. Fortunately, the pivot is still around this center. So I can just rotate it. Let's take that face and use this to help me scale it. Duplicate it. Let's freeze the transforms and scale in the negative one axis, so it's on the other side. I can use vert snapping to line that up with the other piece. Let's scale that back a little bit more. Probably want it pretty straight on the back then, just about, like so. This transforms, duplicate, scale negative one. This is just a rough block-in, so this won't be perfect to this. We're actually going to do this whole second refinement on this whole shape. I'm not even worrying about the insides of these. I'm just trying to get essential basic shapes. So this is pretty good. Let's do the lenses now, on the top. This little bit up here. We've got this cube piece. We've got these cylinders. We actually got a lot going on up here. So you can see we have this, two cylinders and they overlap with each other a little bit, they come to a point and then they connect where they would overlap. Then I've got this piece in between them that comes off as well. So let's go ahead and make another cylinder. Just like before, I'm going to do 32 and roughly scale it to fit my overall size. Remember, what we're trying to do as I said I'm going to the middle on each of these. I'm duplicating this one, dragging over the other side, and I should adjust just a little bit of overlap between these two, scaling them up together to see, I want to get this line. I want them to overlap at roughly the same point. They shouldn't be any taller. Let's check some of the images from some of the different angles. They shouldn't be taller than this part of the model. They definitely looks like they shouldn't be taller there either. We had that side view that showed me where these came into place. I can see these overhang a little bit, but these shouldn't. I want to make sure I don't go overboard with this. Let's go pull this back a little bit more. I'm going to bridge these across at some point. I had to figure out about how high. This is one of those areas where I'm doing a little bit of visual measuring and I'm trying to see, relatively it seems like from here to here. I'm using an app called Epic Pen. It can be really helpful for doing a little bit of this sort of visual measuring, or I'm identifying that I have a line from here to here, and then I have this line here. I'm comparing the distances between the two. So it looks to me like this distance is about half from here to here and that's really helpful information for me to be getting. Sometimes you're sketching over something like that can really tell you a lot. So I'm going to take these two objects and I'm going to combine them together. Select these and adjust this view. I'm using the grid here, actually I got one, two, three, four, five, six. So about these three, somewhere in the middle roughly, one-and-a-half to about one-and-a-half from where I'm going to be bridging. I could double-check that on my top view and it does look like that lines up where these start to bridge. I do a bridge faces and it's going to connect to those across for me. Double-checking it. I think it's too far. I think it's too much. So I'm just going to go back to my faces, de-select from the top and the bottom, and let's redo that bridge. That looks a lot better. As for this piece in here, let's take these verts, snap them to this part of the model, take another cube to roughly cover this area. I want the top and bottom here to line at the top and bottom of this. So I'm using that vert snapping that I'm so fond of, just lining it up on all the crucial dimensions. This is why while I took the end caps out of these, I left them here, makes this a little easier to have something to line it up with. Take this multi cut right there. Take this face. Just scale it down a little bit. I'll combine these objects in a little bit just to get all the forms together. But for now, it's okay if I have pieces that intersect with each other. They'll eventually all going to be fully together pieces. Last, but I really want to get in here is knock in a block for this battery piece and try to build it from this view. Now, I know from my reference here, that it looks relatively square, so how wide it is here is probably about how long it is there. I'm just going to scale it in all dimensions until it lines up more or less than the sides. Then scaled down in this dimension. I use vert snapping a lot for this stage of modeling. Just holding V and snapping to a vert is a really helpful way of making sure that you just get things lined up at this stage. We're trying to avoid gaps. We're trying to save ourselves time as we go. Trying to go a little bit bigger than this form. Let's take a look at some of my references to see about where this battery pack is. So you can see a good image right there. A good sense of its overall size. So I think I'm going to have to scale this up, so hit D, hold V and I can snap my pivot here, which is going to make it a lot easier for me to just scale it up on the object. So it looks like it's really pretty flush with that and it looks like it more or less lines up with the centers of each of these. Here's another view and I can get a good look at what's happening in the front up here. I'm going to combine these pieces together for now, and just like before, snap their pivots back here. It's just going to make it easier for me to rough and size things in. I have a lot more features to put together on this and a lot more areas that are going to be roughed and smoothed out and detailed, even in the low poly stage. But as far as the reference goes, this isn't a bad block end. So I'm going to select everything. I'm going to delete its history. You can see over here, it cleans everything up. My last step is I'm going to take all of these objects here and I'm going to hit control or command G. Turn into group. I'm going to call this group, Block-in. This Block-in group is going to be really important. I'm going to keep refining it. I'm going to keep working on it. But this serves as a folder for all these models. Later, I'm going to do the high and the low poly. I'm going to make duplicates at this Block-in group. If I ever mess up a part of a model or a need to fix or change something, I can always come back to it, and fix it from here. In the next video, I'm going to continue refining the block-in, nailing in all the major key features that are included in this model including some of these small scooped up areas, all of these little extra clips for things, insets for the lenses, things like these extra dials and buttons. I'm going to make sure I have something for all of them. See you then.
