Design a House

In Tinkercad you build by adding boxes together. Blender works the other way round: you start with one cube and you push, pull and cut it until it is a house. That is called box modelling, and it is how most of the buildings you have seen in games were made.

Three ideas do almost all of it

• Edit Mode (Tab) — where you stop moving the whole object and start moving the vertices, edges and faces it is made of.
• Extrude (E) — pull a new piece out of a face you have selected. A wall becomes a wing; a roof becomes a chimney.
• Loop cut (Ctrl+R) — add a new ring of edges, because you cannot pull out a doorway from a face that has no doorway-shaped piece in it yet.

Blender does not guess your units

The default cube is 2 m across, and Blender will happily let you build a house the size of a stadium without ever mentioning it. Open the N-panel (N) and read the dimensions as you work. Decide your house is 8 m wide and keep it that way.

Save now, and save often. Blender has no autosave you can rely on mid-lesson. Ctrl+S before every big change is a habit worth building in lesson one.

By the end of this lesson you can:

• Move around a 3D scene — orbit, pan and zoom — without losing your model off the edge of the screen.
• Switch between Object Mode and Edit Mode, and say what each one changes.
• Select a face and extrude it to make a new part of the building.
• Add a loop cut and explain why a doorway needs one first.
• Check and set real dimensions in the N-panel.
• Add a light and a camera, and render one image of your house to a PNG file.

Work in metres. The house is 8 m wide, 6 m deep, 3 m to the eaves.

1 · Set up

1. Delete the default cube? No — keep it. That cube is the house.
2. Press <kbd>N</kbd> to open the side panel. You will be reading the Dimensions the whole lesson.
3. Set the cube's dimensions to 8 × 6 × 3.
4. Object → Set Origin → Origin to Bottom so the house sits on the floor rather than half through it.

2 · Into Edit Mode

Press <kbd>Tab</kbd>. You are now editing the mesh, not the object.

Press <kbd>3</kbd> for face select. Click the top face.

3 · The roof

1. With the top face selected, press <kbd>E</kbd> then type 0 and <kbd>Enter</kbd> — that extrudes a new face in the same place.
2. Press <kbd>S</kbd>, then <kbd>Y</kbd>, then 0, <kbd>Enter</kbd>. The face collapses to a line along the middle.
3. Press <kbd>G</kbd>, <kbd>Z</kbd>, 1.5, <kbd>Enter</kbd>. The line rises and you have a pitched roof.

4 · The doorway

A face with no doorway-shaped piece cannot become a doorway, so cut one first.

1. <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>R</kbd>, hover over the front wall until a vertical yellow line appears, scroll to 2 cuts, click, then right-click to leave them centred.
2. <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>R</kbd> again for one horizontal cut, click, then move it down to about door height and click.
3. Select the face that is now the doorway and press <kbd>E</kbd>, then <kbd>Y</kbd>, and push it through the wall.
4. With that face still selected, press <kbd>X</kbd> → Faces to open it up.

5 · Light it and render

1. <kbd>Tab</kbd> back to Object Mode.
2. Add → Light → Sun. Lift it above the house.
3. Click the camera icon in the top right of the viewport, then <kbd>F12</kbd> to render.
4. Image → Save As… and save a PNG.

Save the .blend file too — <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>S</kbd>.

Add windows, with a loop cut.

Put two windows in the front wall, either side of the door, and one in each side wall.

Every window needs its own loop cuts first — you cannot extrude a hole out of a face that has no window-shaped piece in it.

Make them all the same size. Check in the N-panel rather than by eye.

Hint: cut once, make one window, then select the finished window faces and use Shift+D to duplicate rather than cutting again from scratch.

Give it a material and a floor.

• Add a plane under the house, scaled to 30, so it has ground to stand on.
• Give the walls one material and the roof another, in the Material Properties tab. Any two colours that are not both grey.
• Render again.

Compare this render with the one from Basic. Write down one thing that is better and one thing that still looks wrong.

Make the roof overhang.

A real roof sticks out past the walls so the rain runs clear. Yours currently stops exactly at them.

Select the roof faces and scale them outward on X and Y only — not Z, or the pitch changes. Aim for about 0.4 m of overhang all round.

Think about it: you scaled the roof about its centre. What would have happened if the object's origin had still been in the middle of the house rather than at its base?

Model the same house you designed in Tinkercad.

Take your TKD-L5-01 house — same footprint, same door, same windows — and build it in Blender instead. Then render one image of it.

You will notice the two tools disagree about almost everything:

• Tinkercad adds and subtracts solid shapes. Blender pushes a surface around. Neither is wrong; they are for different jobs.
• A Tinkercad model is solid. A Blender model is a shell — there is nothing inside it. That is fine for a picture and a problem for a printer.

Think about it: which of the two would you reach for to make a part that has to be 3D printed and fit a real bracket? Which for a house that only ever appears in a game? Say why, in one sentence each.