Saturday, March 12, 2016

Part 2: Midi Pedal Board Prototyping

This is a more advanced design prototyping construction tutorial.  The aim of this is to provide information on steps and modeling techniques in designing a Midi Pedal Board that includes, for instance, plywood media wall thickness into the overall design.  Added to this, you'll learn how to make usefully convenient component layouts of your design, so that this can be used in furthered refinement of your given design.

Covered in this tutorial:

-Precision numeric design working principles in Blender
-Previous research to have in mind before diving in...
-Use of unit system in design translation.
-A vertex oriented approach to precision working in Blender with mesh design construction.
  - This includes in design finding points on a given edge where such edge is neither perpendicular or parallel to a 'global' coordinate axis.  
-Better design practices when refining an overall object to sub component objects/parts.

Pre requisites:  You'll want to have watched the previous Tutorial in the series that I have done for the basics of layout, and I presume you have some basic working knowledge in Blender.  I'll cover more advanced topics such as individual vertex extrusions in redefining your design mesh.

Useful Blender functions:

Handy Blender Hotkey functions (used for this tutorial):

Transform viewport view (with mouse): Hold the middle mouse button down and drag mouse, or use numeric buttons (4,8,6,2).

Align view to selected object (with mouse cursor over the 3D View viewport window) press '.'
Top down view (in 3D view) press 7

All transform operations and extrusion have similar option inputs as follows:
(optional: single toggle + 'x' or 'y' or 'z' to global axis restriction or double toggling 'x' or 'y' or 'z' restriction to a selected transform orientation...also hitting shift+'x' restricts transform/extrusion to yz plane or shift + 'y' restricts transform/extrusion to xz plane or shift + 'z' restricts transform/extrusion to xy plane) + optional : other transform type (you can mix and match for instance Scaled Extrusions by pressing 'E' + 'S' + other optionals) + optional : numpad entry for numerically controlling transform/extrusion as opposed to providing mouse input..

Box Select (either in Edit or Object Mode) : B + mouse input boundaries (left mouse button to confirm boundaries)

Circle Select (either in Edit or Object Mode) : C + optional (middle mouse button rolling to increase
or decrease radius of selection boundary...optional left mouse button to select ...optional middle mouse button pressed to deselect

Translation/Move (either Edit or Object Mode): G + optionals mentioned above.
Scale (either Edit or Object mode)  'S' + optionals mentioned above.

Align Object to Transform Orientation:  Object selected in 'Object' Mode, select Object > Transform > Align Object to Transform Orientation:

Converting a Bezier Object to a Mesh Object:  With object selected Alt + C
Extruding (Edit mode) : 'E'  + optionals mentioned above.

Joining any added mesh object to another:  Select the first object (Object Mode), then hold the shift key and right mouse button select the second object, and then

Cursor Snapping:  In this tutorial, I do use cursor snapping to a given face especially in rapidly finding geometric centers.  For instance, selecting a face (Edit Mode) on the object, and then selecting Mesh > Snap (or Shift + S) > Cursor to Selected allows for selecting the face centroid rapidly on such mesh object.  This in turn can be used when adding any new object type and snapping it into a given coordinate position rapidly (e.g., with the newly added object selected in Object mode use path Object > Snap (or Shift + S) > Selection to Cursor.

Toggling Wireframe Mode on/off: 'Z'  This makes selecting groups of vertices, for instance, on a given perspective view axis easier.


Topically you'll learn also some new things such as:   in Edit Mode, duplicating selection vertices, and then separating selection vertices (while duplicated and bounded to the present mesh) to a new Object.

Prerequisite data for design:  W 12.5" x 5" L or 317.5 mm W x 127 mm L
Switch holes: 9.75 mm diameter
Led holes: 3.0 mm diameter
Plywood thickness 5.08 mm

Blender file: Pedal Board Blender File for this project

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