Making the razor blade

- [Instructor] Before we start designing anything new, let's establish a foundation with what we know will be a constant. The utility knife that we're designing uses a standard blade size, so if we make that first, we can fit our design around it. It's also a nice simple shape to model to get warmed up on, without the pressure of thinking about designing anything new. So let's make it happen. Let's make the blade out of a cube. Now if we go ahead and get a cube into our scene if you don't have one already. You can just click on one of the tools in our toolbox, and click on cube 3D. Go ahead and make that a PolyMesh3D, so we can edit it. Now if you turn on your polyframe, you'll notice that the topology of this object isn't really great for editing. So let's make this a new simpler cube primitive by going into our Gizmo. So go into any one of the move, scale, or rotate tools. Make sure Gizmo is turned on. And let's click on the gear icon. Let's go to PolyCube. And you can see this generates a new simpler cube. Now you might want to drag on some of these cones to change the number of subdivisions. And just set this all the way to just a single subdivision on each side, for the simplest cube possible. When that's done, go ahead and click on that gear again, and go back into Gizmo 3D mode. Alright, go back into Draw mode to get out of the Gizmo. Now I did some research online to find the exact dimensions of a standard utility knife blade. And it should be about 2.36 inches long. So let's go into our geometry sub-palette. Let's go to Size. And I want to have this blade sticking up vertically, so that's going to be the Y size. So let's click on this. And we can just type in 2.36. And hit enter. Now the blade should be 0.75 inches wide, and let's put this in the Z size. 0.75, and finally the blade should be 0.024 inches thick. So let's put this in the X size. 0.024. Okay, let's take a look around this and see what we have. Alright, so it's basically the blade shape. Not quite, but the overall dimensions are there. Next, let's give it a trapezoidal shape by tapering in one side. So I want to have the blade facing forward, so it's the side that's currently facing me. So let's come around to the side here. And what I can do is mask off that front side. Let's go into our Gizmo. And let's center the Gizmo on the edge that isn't masked. So we can go ahead and click on this icon. And now we can grab on this scale here in the Y axis, and just scale this in till we get a trapezoidal shape. If you want to look up images of a utility knife blade online to get this angle just right, go ahead and feel free to do that. Okay, now that we have that made we can get out of Gizmo mode. Going back into draw mode. And let's clear the mask, so go to masking, clear. And finally, let's make that blade edge. So let's take a closer look here. We've got this one polygon that goes all the way to the end, and what we need to have happen is a sharp edge right here on this edge, and then coming out to, oh I don't know, right about here, and then the blade is just going to be the same thickness all the way back from there. So we need to insert an edge loop. So for this, let's get our Z modeler brush. So hit B, Z, and we can just grab it here. For me, the hot key is M. It might be something different for you. But you just want to get the Z modeler brush. And let's hover over an edge, hold down space bar. Just make sure we're in the right mode for this. So we should be in "Insert Edge" mode and single edge loop. So let's just go ahead and click and drag on one of these edges. And we can just insert this edge loop wherever we want. Let's go ahead and put it right here. Now let's make that sharp edge. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer here, and let's hover over a point. Hold down space bar. Let's go into stitch point mode, and let's stitch to midpoint. So what this is going to do is you're going to click on two different points, and it'll merge them together at the point in between the two of them. So we'll click on one, click on the second, and you can see it puts them together. Now let's go ahead and do the same thing on the bottom side. Zoom in here. Click on one, click on the second. And you can see, it puts them together. Alright, let's get out of polyframe mode, and let's just make sure everything looks good. Okay, great. Now we can construct all of our designs around this blade. It'll help keep us from exploring options that wouldn't ever be compatible with it.