drawing shapes in Blender

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Hi,

I’m new to Blender but have worked in 3D Studio Max extensively. I cant find any tutorials describing the drawing of shapes (which can then be extruded), it seems that modifying a plane / control clicking in edit mode is the extent of shape drawing.

I’ve been using this technique with varing results, some filled shapes refuse to be extruded. Can anyone give me a brief overview/rundown of drawing tools or can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial?

Many thanks

2

Indeed, there’s a whole lot of different way of extruding shapes in Blender, so much so that you won’t find it singled out in a all encompassing tutorial.
One can draw 2D shapes as meshes, curves or surfaces. Check the ‘space bar/AKEY’ menu for a list of primitives in the ‘ADD’ sub-section.
All those primitives can be modified and if there’s need any can be created :

  • for meshes just create a plane or other 2D primitive, select all the vertices in edit mode, press the XKEY to erase them and just click away with the LMB while holding the ctrl key. To close the shape, select only the two end vertices and press the FKEY;
  • for curves or surfaces either start from an already open curve or open a closed one by pressing the CKEY while in edit mode with at least one handle selected.

So there you got your shapes.
Extruding a mesh is a simple matter of selecting the vertices you want, pressing the EKEY, then pulling the vertices in whatever direction that suits you.
Extruding a curve can be set with the edit buttons (F9) ‘width’, ‘ext1’, ‘ext2’, ‘BevResol’ Please experiment.
One can use a curve as an extrusion path to another curve that will act as a profile, just by writing the profile name in the ‘BevOb:’ field of the path curve.
Then you can extrude along a serie of 2D surfaces that are joined using shift+f.
Then you can extrude and shape the extrusion using the animation IPOS.

Call back for details. But I surely forgot some means. Guys ?

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