Hi. I just spent a long evening creating a single wood board for decking. It has 10mm pitch grooves along its surface. I first thought I’d knock up a profile and extrude it to length, as I’d do in Solidworks etc. In Blender I could not find out how to place vertices and join them with edges to create a profile for extrusion. So I tried resizing a cube to a board and deleted all but one end-face, making a 150mmX x 32mmZ 2D rectangle, but could not work out how to add the necessary toothed profile to the top of the face. I ended up extruding a new rectangle from the top edge, and marked out one trapezoidal tooth shape, then arrayed it across the whole X width (32 grooves).
Initially I could not resize the board to length, probably because it had no thickness in Y. But after trying various things it suddenly became possible to resize it to the desired length. Whew!
But for the life of me I could not ‘cap’ the ends of the board, it was a hollow extruded structure with no end faces. None of the Mesh, Face or Vertex tools seemed to do what I needed, ie to fill in the end-sectional profile (a wireframe) with triangle or quad faces.
So I have some learning curve to do, can anyone suggest tutorials for making a realistic 2D outline drawing, and how to fill it to make a 2D flat face structure that will extrude as expected? I don’t need engineering precision, it’s just hard to sculpt manufactured 3D objects freehand when Blender can extrude any predawn 2D shape.
Nothing in standard Blender seems to support this kind of workflow - I believe it is nowadays called ‘Hard Surface’ modelling?
I am a product designer, but use CAD mostly because that’s how stuff gets manufactured. I pencil-sketch mechanical designs freehand while thinking, but it would be great to use Blender directly for visualisation. I see a lot of SciFi-tech Blender objects, but I don’t know how these get drawn unless it is by imagination, faithful hand-copying or scanning.
Thanks folks