3D in Blender #2 – Extrusion and Parenting

I’ve created an Illustrator Document that is 3m wide and 3m high. My plan, ultimately, is to be creating modular parts of a city scape, and 3m is to be the default unit: it’s roughly the hight of a floor in a regular building, and it divides and multiplies easily.

Each layer is going to be a separate part in Blender.

Importing as SVG this translates as 2.4 meters once within Blender. Not what I wanted, but I can live with it. Seems importing at 80% of source size is something that has been queried before and 2.4 is a good number.

First step: Give everything a sensible name.

The order is important from here, and note which of the vertical line of tabs is selected, and which drop downs may have been expanded in the screenshots as it can be hard to navigate this lot.

Firstly, make sure everything has the same Origin Point by selecting them all then following the process shown in the previous post (in this case it’s the left hand corner that I want to use as the base point).

Then, move everything so their origins are at 0, then make all of the objects parent the outer ‘Wall’ object so they can be moved around with it.

Stand the whole lot up by changing the Wall objects X rotation to 90 degrees and then scale it by 1.25 to account for the 80% shrinkage from illustrator: everything else moves and scales with it.

Then we can individually extrude the objects. Extrusion can be found in the tab that looks like the curve object – hidden in a dropdown called Geometry bottom right in the next screenshot. The other parts of our window don’t inherit from the extrusion of the wall.

I’ve made the Top Frame be the parent of the Top Glass and the Bottom Frame be the parent of the Bottom Glass, so I can now move them backwards and forwards or up and down in the window casement and have them stay together.

Then I moved the wall so it’s flush with the 0 line and that’s it for this bit.