Creating the windows - Blender Tutorial

- Well, now that we have the walls roughed in, let's go ahead and work on the window over here in this wall. If we look at the reference images, we can see that this window is inset into the wall here, and the window frame is actually fairly thin. It also has four panels, crossbars vertically and horizontally, and this windowsill at the bottom. So let's start working on that. We have in our reference images a blueprint for this window wall. Let's go ahead and bring that in. I'm going to press the n key to bring up the Properties panel and scroll all the way down to the Background Images section, and here I'm going to click on Add Image. Now this image I think we want to see only from the right side, and if I click on Open, I can browse to the reference images folder in the exercise files, and it's this blueprint window. So now if we press the 3 key on the keyboard and z for wireframe, we should be able to see that blueprint. Now it's a bit big, and I've done a little testing and have some numbers that we can plug in. So in the x field, I think if we plug in 0.175 that should help, and then in the y, 2.185, and for the size, 3.1 seems to work pretty well. So now we have our blueprint scaled to our scene size, and I think I'll take the opacity down to 0.25 as well. So now we can see that we're going to need to insert an edge loop up here at the top of the window and one down here at the bottom. So I'll press the n key to get rid of the Properties panel, and I think I'm going to hide away the pieces of the room that I don't need, like the wall hallway here and the wall corner, and I don't think I need the ceiling right now either. So if I select that wall and go to Edit mode, and let's go back to the side view and wireframe, let's insert edge loops here to block out the window. I'm going to press ctrl + r and bring this edge loop up to the top of the window, and again, bringing this edge loop to the bottom. Now we have faces that we can delete to create the opening for the window. So I'll delete those, and there is going to be our window. Now we're going to have to fill in this gap in the wall here, and to do that, let's go to Edge mode. Let's select this entire edge loop by pressing alt and right mouse button, and then to add another edge loop I'm going to press alt and shift and select that edge loop. Now to fill in this gap, let's use the Bridge tool. I'm going to press ctrl + e to go to the Edges menu, and there's this Bridge edge loops tool. So I'll select that, and it fills in the gaps, and that's great, but I also want some extra edge loops in here, and to do that I can go to the Bridge edge loops tools over here that comes up when we run Bridge, and I'm going to increase the number of cuts, and I'll increase the number of cuts to maybe three. And I'm doing this just to block out the width of the window frame. So now that I've got that, what I want to do is just select this loop of faces. This loop of faces will define the window frame. So, I want to select this face loop, so I'm going to press alt and click on an edge between these two faces, and that will select that whole loop. And now what I want to do is create a new object from these faces. So to do that with these faces selected, I'll press shift + d to duplicate and click the mouse to apply the tool. Now that I've got new faces there, and while they're still selected, I'm going to split them out into their own object, and to do that I'm going to press p and then click on Separate by selection. Now that's created a whole new object over here, and I'm going to call this window frame. Now I can see that if I go to Edit mode, these faces are their own object. So I'll alt click the edge between the faces to select the whole edge loop, and now I want to extrude these to create the frame. So I'll press e and click, and now I'll go straight to the scale tool and begin scaling in a bit to create the window frame. Now I need to know how far I need to scale in, so I'll go back to my side view and wireframe and take a look at how much I need to scale these in or out. So that matches up pretty well there. And for this, I'll match it up right about there. So that gives us that main frame around the window. What we need to deal with now are these center braces. So to do that, I think I'll go back to Edge mode and insert some edge loops to frame those out. So I'll insert an edge loop up here at the top and then scroll the mouse wheel a bit. As I scroll the mouse wheel, I can add edge loops, and I'll just create two and click and click again to apply. Same thing down here, two edge loops, click and apply. And now I'll use alt shift to select these edges and scale them in a bit to match the width of that center brace. Now we can use the Bridge tool again by just selecting this face and this face, going to control e and Bridge, and that creates that center piece. Let's do that again for the horizontal pieces. So I will press control r. Scroll the mouse wheel and click. Control r over here and insert them over here as well. Now I'm going to select these edges and scale them in and move them up, so they're the correct width. And once again, now just select these faces and Bridge. All right, so there we have our window frame. Now all we need to do is just create that windowsill, and it looks like, if we look at our reference images, it looks to me like it's two pieces. We've got this top windowsill here and then pretty much the same object but inset just a bit. So let's do that. For that, I think all we need to do is just create a cube over here in the Create tab, Cube, and I'll just pull this up. And let's take a look at it in the side view again, and I think all we need to do is just move this into place and scale it so it fits. Let's just move it into place now, and it looks like it's a little wide. So we can go into face mode and pull that back a bit. And then, to create the one beneath it, we probably just need to duplicate, shift d, and bring that down and inset it just a hair. All right, so there's the window. In the next video, we'll work on detailing the walls and creating the fireplace.