Original subtitles

In this 3-part series we’re going to be making this floor plan, furnishing it, and

adding materials to walls and floors, everything inside Blender. This is the third version of the

series and it’s full of new tips and tricks so you’re watching the latest and greatest.

I’m Dude Blender, and let’s jump right in! In part 1 we’ll be making the walls. Part 2

will be windows, doors and furnishing. And in part 3 we’ll apply materials to the floor and

walls, light the plan and render it. Alright, first we need a floor plan,

if you do this for clients, they will provide it, but for this exercise let’s

download one from the internet. FLOORPLANS.COM and HOUSEPLANS.COM have databases that we can use,

so you can go to either. As a sidenote, if you want to create your own, you can use Smartdraw

Floor Plan Creator, floorplanner.com or any of the bunch of resources that you can find in Google.

I’m going to go to HOUSEPLANS.COM and since this is a learning exercise, I’ll just try to find the

smallest plan. One bedroom, one bathroom, one story, 0 garages and let’s see what we

get. We can switch this to Floor plan to see the actual floor plans and I’m just going to go with

the first one, but you can go with whichever you want. The process is going to be same,

although if you’re starting with Blender you might want to follow me step by step with the same plan.

Click on it, scroll down to the plan and download that image. You can actually buy the plan which

includes a bunch of other stuff, and you can get more information about the idea of the house,

and if you scroll further down, you’ll see some of the specs and features of the house.

Okay, I recalculated the dimensions to the metric system. So just keep in mind that there will be

rounding errors. If you want to use this one, you can take a screenshot now and use that image. Now

let's jump into Blender. I'm using version 4.3, but you should mostly be able to follow if you're

using 3.6 or later. Let's delete everything. So, A to select all, X to delete and click on delete to

confirm the operation. The button appears right under your pointer, so you just have to click.

If you don't know how to navigate, the basic controls are middle mouse button

and drag to orbit, shift + middle mouse button and drag to pan. Scroll wheel to zoom in and out

and control + shift + middle mouse button and drag up or down to zoom with precision.

Open a file explorer window and find the floor plan. You can drag and drop it into the scene.

Now, if you select it by left clicking on it, you'll see here in the top left corner:

Collection | Empty. And it will also be selected here in the outliner. Whenever you drag and drop

an image into the scene, it is created as an Empty. An Empty is a helper object that you can

use for many things and it won't be rendered. If you go to the menu, shift + A and Empty,

you'll see that there are many types. One of them is image. And this is what we created by dropping

the file into the scene. Now we want to clear the rotation of the Empty and place it flat on

the grid so that its position in the Z dimension, so up, is zero. There are a few ways to do this,

but the easiest is using the alt key. With the image selected, we move it by pressing G or

grab. And then click to accept the operation. Same thing with R, rotate and S, scale. You right click

to cancel the operation. If we press alt + R, it clears the rotation. So, you might imagine

how to clear the movement – or translation as we call it – and of course, it would be with

alt + G. And now it's on the origin. If you press N to show the side panel, you can confirm that

it's in fact in the 0, 0, 0 location. And with 0º, 0º, 0º rotation. Press N again to hide it.

Okay, now let's go to top view, which you can do by pressing 7 on the numbers pad or by clicking

on the Z in the navigation gizmo. Make sure that the Z is highlighted before you click on it. Now

we need to copy the plan to something that we can use in Blender. Note that I will do this by hand.

I'm not gonna be using any add-ons like Archimesh or Archipack. So, it's a personal choice, but if

you know this process, you'll be able to adopt a new workflow with an add-on very easily when

and if you choose to do so. Okay, so we want to make an outline of these dimensions. I'm going to

ignore the deck. Make sure that you're using the right units in your scene by going to the Scene

Menu>>Units. I'm going to change this to meters. Shift + A >> Mesh >> Plane. This is going to

become the walls, so we might as well rename it now. F2 is the shortcut to rename it,

or you can double click the object's name in the outliner. Let's call it “Walls”. Now we

want it to be the size of the outline of our plan. Horizontally, it's 2.9 + 4.1, so 7. And

vertically, it's 3.6 + 4, so 7.6. Note that there are rounding errors because of the conversion of

the units, and this plan apparently considers different thicknesses for different walls,

which we're not going to do, but I will tell you how you would do it if you ever need to.

Let's open our side panel with N. Make sure that you're on the Item tab, where you can

see the Transform information. Note that this panel is dynamic and it changes depending on

what mode you're in. If I tab into Edit Mode, we can see information of individual vertices,

which is useful in some situations. I want to be in Object Mode, so I tab out. Now I want

the dimensions to match the dimensions of the plan. And here we can just go ahead and type

the numbers. 7 in X and 7.6 in Y. Now this has the actual accurate measurement, and you'll also

notice that the Scale has changed. And this is a recurring source of frustration for Blender

beginners, because it interacts with a bunch of other things like modifiers and textures. So,

unless you really know what you're doing, you want the scale to be 1. So, control + A for the

Apply menu >> Scale, to reset the scale to one. To keep everything tidy, we want this corner to be

in the origin. So, tab into Edit Mode and select this vertex. Shift + S for this menu and Cursor

to Selected. Tab out, right click >> Set Origin >> Origin to 3D Cursor to do precisely that. And now

as we did before, Alt + G clears any translation. Next, we need to delete this face, but not the

vertices. So, tab into Edit Mode, A to select everything, X to get the Delete menu >> Only

Faces. Now we tab out to Object Mode and select the image. We want to scale it with S and align

it to this object. So, let's do that. You'll be scaling it with S and moving it with G. If

you want to constrain the movement, press G and then X or Y and hold shift to move with

precision. Just eyeball it, it's just a reference. As we expected, there is a little bit of mismatch

here because we changed the units. If you're using the original plan in feet and inches,

you might not get this gap. Let's dim the image a bit, select it, go here to the Data Properties,

check the Opacity box and drag this down to something like 0.25. We've

got our setup, now let's get to work. Select the walls by clicking on the object or

on the outliner and tab into Edit Mode. I'm going to delete these three vertices. So, select them,

by default, you have the box selection. Select these and to add to the selection, hold shift

and select this one, X. And the menu appears with the item you last used selected to improve your

workflow. Click on Vertices and we're left with one single vertex that's exactly on the world

origin. We're going to draw the plan by extruding this vertex with E. So, select the vertex,

E to extrude and this creates a new vertex joined by an edge. We want to move this in the X axis,

so press X to constrain the movement and now we can just type the amount. In this case, it's 7 m,

so we type 7 and click or Enter to confirm. Now we make this wall, but there is a wall

intersecting here, so we want to make this segment and then this segment so that we have a vertex to

extrude later. Same thing, select the vertex, E, Y and we type 4, Enter. Then again, E, Y, 3.6.

You'll note that if we add these dimensions, 1.8 + 1.8 + 3.1 results in 6.7, which is not exactly 7,

which is the 4.1 plus 2.9. And the reason here is that there are walls and they have thickness.

And we have to account for the thickness of those walls. I'll show you how to do that in a second.

Let's finish this first. With the vertex selected, we continue, E, X - 3.1, Enter, E, X - 1.8, Enter,

E, X - 1.8, Enter. So, we'll just move this vertex to the left so that it matches with

this one. To do that, there is a very neat trick that they implemented, I think in version 4.2,

which is the Base Point. Make sure that your Snapping here is set to Increment. Even if it's

turned off, the Base Point function uses whatever you have selected here. With this vertex selected,

G to move it, X. Now we turn on Base Point with B and we need to select the start and end points.

The start is the vertex we're moving and the end is the vertex that we're referencing. Note that

the cursor changes to a square when you're selecting a vertex, an hourglass when it's

an edge and a circle when it's a face. Click and click. We continue E, Y - 3.6, Enter. And to close

the outline, we select these two vertices and press F to make an edge between them.

We're done outlining and there's a couple of things. The first one is that this is a wall,

but there's no measurement. So, in that case, you would ask the client or you can just eyeball it.

I usually round to the nearest 10th of a meter, so let's do that. We don't have a vertex here, so

to cut this edge, the shortcut is Control + R and you'll see a vertex appear exactly in the middle

of the edge. Click to accept. Now let's zoom in and grab it with G. Then if you want to slide the

vertex along the edge, press G again. Our Snapping here is still on Increment, so we can just go

ahead and change it to grid so that it will align to the grid. Now, G, G, if the Snapping is turned

off, we can turn it on temporarily by holding the Control key. Let's place it here. We can also

adjust these vertices to match the position of the plan. Select them, G, G, control, let's place

it here. G, G, control, and let's place it here. One thing that you should know is that in a later

step, we're gonna tell Blender to what direction will the walls gain their thickness. So ideally,

you want each vertex to be on either side of the walls. In this case, because I know

that there's a lot of rounding errors, I'm not gonna do it. But in a real project where all the

measurements are correct, the vertex would have to be aligned to one of the sides of the wall.

Let's take a short commercial break to help support the channel and I'll be right back.

We're back. Now let's make the walls that go into the house. Let's start with this one and then

we'll just go around. Select this vertex and same procedure. E, X, and I will add the bedroom and

bath. So 1.8 plus 3.1 is 4.9. And we can press the - key at any point, even after typing the

number, -. Enter to confirm. And I don't have the information about the thickness of these walls,

but I do know that this wall and this wall sit on the same vertical axis. So, I'm just gonna do the

base point again. Change this to Increment G, X, B. Now I click here and then I click here. And of

course, if this was client work, I would ask about the thickness of each of the walls and all of this

would match perfectly. Also note that for now, we're ignoring windows and doors. Now there

are three walls that go up here. So, we need to create vertices along this edge. So, control + R,

click. Now let's say that we want this distance between the vertices to be exactly 1.8 m. The

easiest way to do it is to move the vertex all the way here and then move it back again by exactly

the number that you want. So, select it, G, G and slide it all the way. By default, you cannot go

beyond the next vertex. So just place it here. Now G, X, 1.8. Remember not to extrude vertices

along existing edges. If instead of dividing this edge with control + R as we did before, I were to

extrude either of these vertices with E and then I press X to constrain. Let's say that I place it

here. It looks like it's okay, but it's actually not. I now have two overlapping edges here and

that will cause a bunch of problems in the future. So I'm going to delete it and I'll divide the edge

with control + R. Now I'm just going to align it here. So, I want to change this back to grid,

G, G, control and I'll place it here. Now these two walls have the same length, so,

we can extrude these two vertices simultaneously. But if we use the normal shortcut E, it extrudes

the whole edge creating a plane. But then we have to remove this edge and that's an unnecessary

step. So instead, we select the vertices and bring up the Vertex menu with control + V.

You'll see a bunch of stuff that we can do with the vertices. As a side note, control + E

brings up the Edge menu and control + F, the Face menu. And we use all of those quite often. Okay,

so control + V >> Extrude Vertices, Y to constrain the movement. And here's a nice trick available

since 4.2 I think. When you're in the middle of a Transform operation, like moving vertices,

the navigation is disabled. But sometimes you need to zoom in or pan during an operation. So,

if you hold the Alt key, you can navigate like you usually do. We can pan and we can zoom.

I don't know this dimension either, so I'll just align to the grid by holding Control. Another

trick, when you're aligning to the grid, if you also hold Shift, you can align to the minor grid.

You can see the information at the top left that now we're moving in hundredths of a meter instead

of tenths. This way I can align the vertices to the middle of the square. Now we need to make a

wall here, so control + R, click. I'm just going to align the rest to the grid to do it faster.

Now you want to extrude this to the right in a way that it aligns to this vertex. So E, X,

we'll use Base Point. B, click this vertex, then this one. Okay, we need to cancel that and turn

the Snapping back to Increment. Now, since we extruded this vertex, even if we canceled

the move, the second vertex still exists. So be careful not to extrude it again to avoid doubled

vertices. So now G to move, X, B, now we click and we click here. And now to make an edge between

these two, we select them and press F. Now these are actually sliding doors,

so we just need to connect these vertices and these vertices. So, we can just do it with F

and then these, F. Great. Now here, control + R, G, G, control, and we'll place it there. E,

Y, B, we click here and here. Select these, F to make an edge. And to finish,

we just need an edge here. I think we're done. If you feel that you might have doubled vertices

somewhere, you can select all with A, M for the Merge menu >> By Distance. And it will show

here if you deleted any vertices. Now save your work with control + S, I'm gonna call it FPTut,

Enter. Now let's tab out to Object Mode. And we want to duplicate this with shift + D and right

click to cancel the move. That will be our floor. So, let's rename it here to “Floor”. Now let's

make the floors faces quickly. So, with the floor selected, tab into Edit Mode. And now it depends

if you’ll want different floor materials for different rooms. You want to make separate faces

for rooms that have different materials. And you don't want overlapping faces. So, for example, if

you do a face here and then I do a face here, and now you’ll see that this face is overlapping this

one. And you can see that by moving this vertex. We don't want that, so control + Z. So here in the

mudroom, I want the same floor to be in the closet than in the rest of the room. So, I don't need

this geometry. I select the vertex and delete it. Let's hide the walls for now because since

we can still see that geometry, it might be confusing. So, by clicking here on this eye,

you can hide that object in the viewport. Now let's do the same thing in the bedroom. We

don't need a different material for the floor in the closet, so we can delete this vertex.

It's also a good idea to tidy up and remove any unnecessary vertices. An easy way to do that

is by turning on Auto Merge with this button. Now if we overlap a vertex on top of another,

they will merge. So, select this one, G, G, slide it all the way, click. And now it's

gone. We can make sure that it's actually gone by clicking away to unselect it,

now selecting it back and moving it. There should be no vertex beneath it. Let's do this one too,

and this one. If we wanted to separate the kitchen and living room materials, we would need to cut

this edge and create a new edge here to separate the spaces, but I'm not gonna do that. Okay, let's

be good and do this one too, and this one, this one too. Okay, this is as clean as we can do it.

Now for each room, we're gonna select all of the vertices that make it up and press F

to make a face. So that, bathroom, mud room, and now the living room and kitchen combo, F. Lastly,

tab out, and we're gonna duplicate the floor. Shift + D, right click to cancel, and we're

gonna rename this to “Background”. Now with the Background selected, we tab into Edit Mode, and

this is gonna be a plane surrounding the house. We delete every vertex inside it, A to select all, X

Faces. Let's also turn off the floor for now. Now if it's not selected, we select everything with

A and E to extrude everything. While the move is still active, we press S to scale. Now we click,

and we have a background with a cut where the floor will be to prevent Z-fighting. Now if we

ever need to make this bigger at any point, we don't scale the object because the hole will

also scale. We need to go to Edit Mode, alt + left click on any of these edges to select the

whole outer edge, and then we scale that with S. Tab out, let's hide the background and unhide

the walls. With the wall selected, tab, now we're going to extrude in Z. So, we select all with A,

E, and now Z to constrain to the Z axis, and we type the height of the walls. So,

let's say 2.3 meters, Enter. Now we need to make sure that all

these walls are facing the right direction. Right now, all of our walls are two-dimensional faces,

and faces have a front and a back side. We can show their orientation by clicking here on the

Overlays menu and checking Face Orientation. The front of every face is blue and the back is red.

By default, Blender uses a very saturated red color that's too bright to be comfortable. So,

if you want to change it, you can go to Edit >> Preferences >> Themes, look for the 3D viewport

and expand it, and scroll down until you find Face Orientation Back. I just desaturated the red

color, but you can use any color that you like. Now to give the walls thickness, we're going to

use a Modifier. Modifiers change the geometry of an object non-destructively, which is super

powerful. So, let's go ahead and click on the Modifiers tab and Add Modifier. Start typing

“Solidify” and click on it or just select it with the arrows and press Enter. Change the

mode from Simple to Complex and the thickness to whatever thickness you want. I'll type 0.15, since

I want my walls to be 15 centimeters thick. All right, now we have thick walls. The modifier

generated all of this extra geometry for us and we can change the thickness at any point.

Now we go to Top view and analyze our walls. Let me hide the image for a second. You'll notice

that some of the walls are incorrect. In my case, this, this, and this wall, probably this one too,

have a weird shape. It's not straight, so we're going to fix them. Now note that which walls are

wrong will depend on how you extruded the vertices. So, if you're following along,

but not exactly, you might get a different thing, but the fix is going to be the same. Let's turn

the modifier off by clicking on this monitor icon here. This shows our original geometry

before the modifier. Whenever we have walls with more than one segments like this one,

we need to make sure that all of the segments are facing the same way and that the red side is

facing the direction to where the wall will gain its thickness. Let's get the plan back again. So,

for example, this wall should gain its thickness to the left. So, this face should be red,

which in this case is the other way around. Now sometimes, and I'm not sure when this happens,

it's possible that you cannot see your floor plan if you are in a perspective view. If this happens

to you, select it, go here to the data properties and make sure that both Show In Orthographic and

Perspective are checked. If Perspective is not checked, you'll only be able to see the plan when

you're in orthographic view, which you can easily change by clicking on this button. In any case,

I want it to be visible in both, so I'm just going to check it. Okay, now with the wall selected,

tab into Edit Mode, press 3 on the keyboard, not the numbers pad, or click on this icon

for Face Select Mode. Now we select the faces by clicking on them instead of selecting vertices.

Now all of the outer walls should be blue because we want the walls to go inside of the house. So,

if on the outside of the house, you see any wall that's red, select it by just clicking on it,

shift + N, and it should now turn blue. Next, we need to make sure that the inner walls are

oriented in the right way. So, these three seem to be right. The thickness of the wall should go that

way. So, we change this one, shift + N inside. And we continue to check. This one's correct,

this one's correct, this one isn't, so shift + N, that's good. And this one is also wrong,

so shift + N, this one, I think it could go either way because of the way we did it,

so I'm just going to leave it there. And this one should go this way, so that's correct. And

it seems to be that we are good. So again, make sure that any wall that has several segments

has all of the segments facing the same way. So, this one, this one, and this one. Okay,

everything seems to be correct now. So, let's go again to modifiers and turn it back on, go to Top

view, and just review every wall to make sure that everything looks good, which seems to be the case.

Okay, now that we fixed everything, note that all of our geometry is now blue. Both sides of every

wall are now blue. And that's because the solidify modifier is actually generating new geometry. So,

this wall has now this face, which is the original face that we created in the previous step, but

also this face on the top, this face on the other side, and the one below. And now if we actually

go into the wall, you'll see that inside all of the faces are red, which makes sense, this is the

backside of each of these faces. So, everything looks good, we can now go ahead and turn the Face

Orientation overlay off, we don't need it anymore, and we can also show the Background and the Floor.

And this is what we have so far. Save your work with control + S,

and then Save As with control + shift + S, and call this file the same thing with an

identifier at the end of the name. I'll just call it FPTutB, Enter, Enter again. We wanna

have our history of files, in case we ever mess up, we can always go back to our previous file.

That way we don't lose all of our work. Now the final note here is that if you

wanted some of the walls to be thinner, you would need to create a separate Walls object,

and change the thickness of the Solidify Modifier of that object to a different thing. With the

solidify modifier, there's no way to give different thicknesses to different walls.

Okay, if you followed all the way, great job. You've used some basic modeling, navigation, and

all of the transforms. A bunch of more advanced tips and tricks, and even modifiers, so well

done! In part two, we'll be adding windows and doors, and furnishing the plan, so see you there.