Starting with a primitive

- In this video, we're going to take a look at creating our stylized nails. And because we obviously want to maintain this simple aesthetic that we have here, we are going to create the nails with the same exaggerated proportions that we see in the wood elements of the crate. In the Geometry section of the Create panel then, let's select the Cylinder primitive option. And before leaving the panel, make certain that we put a check in the AutoGrid option. Now this is just so that we can easily create our cylinders on the outside of the frame where we need them.

Placing our cursor over one of the frame corners then, let's left-click and drag to create the diameter of our first cylinder. And then release the mouse button and drag downwards in order to give our cylinder some height, with a final left-click, locking all of the settings in place. Let's name our mesh straight away, so geo_nail. And then move on to setting up the size options. The radius of 4.2 centimeters should do nice, that's seeing as we do want to make things look exaggerated and over the top.

We want to set the height to a value of two centimeters. The height segment we can set to one, seeing as we need a one and I need height segments for this part of the mesh. But we do want to change the cap segments to a value of two though, which will give us the ability to just give the mesh a little bit of stylistic shape. And then finally, we want to set our sides to a value of six. Now this gives us a win-win situation in that it first of all makes our nail heads look very distintive in terms of their outline and with this faceted look fitting very nicely with our overall style.

And secondly, well it reduces the polygon count in our mesh which is always going to be beneficial and something we should definitely look to do whenever we get the chance. To keep our modeling parametric here, meaning we can go back and make changes to the perimeters of the base mesh should we ever want or need to, let's add an edit poly modifier to the nail head. The first thing we want to do, if I just press the F4-key, is take the polygon's created by our cap segment and use them to create a chamfered or beveled edge.

Let's come into vertex mode then and press the F3-key so that we can see what we're doing a little easier. What we want to do is select the front vertex, sitting in the middle here and then control-click to jump into polygon sub-object mode, in order to select the adjacent polygons. Let's use the r-key to switch to scale mode and then scale ever so slightly on the zed or z and x-axis plane, which as you can see pushes our selection towards the outer edge.

And be careful not to go too far as this will cause interpenetration. And so something around about the 160% mark will do. Next we can hit the w-key to engage the move tool and move the selected polygons out a little, so as to give ourselves a little bit of shape or definition in the nail head. I think next up we should spend a bit of time working on the nail point itself. To do that let's come out of sub-object mode and move the mesh forward a little way and then jump into vertex mode so that we can select the back vertex, control-click on the polygon selection toggle and then after making this successful selection come to the polygon fly-out on the ribbon and shift-click the beveled tool.

Now in the settings here, you can use whatever values work according to your own artistic taste. And for myself though I want to create quite a thick looking nail point and so I'm going to set the bevel amount to 1.2 centimeters and the outline two minus 0.125 centimeters. Next, we want to click the apply button three times so that we get four extrusions. So one, two, three and to create the last one we can simply go ahead and click the okay button, which of course ends the operation as well.

We do want to keep our mesh as light as possible in terms of polygon count here so, I'm just going to press the delete-key in order to get rid of the polygons at the back, given that we are obviously not going to be seeing these. We will probably want to add a little bit of quirky character to our nails as we model, seeing as these rigidly straight meshes really don't suit our overall style. Let's come out of sub-object mode by clicking the edit poly entry in the modifier stack and then click on the arrow in order to drop down the modifier list, from which we can choose the bend modifier.

Let's expand our sub-object options here and choose the center mode, press s to engage my snap tools and then holding down the shift-key right-clicking the viewport in order to make sure that both the vertex snap and enable axis constraint in snap features are turned on. And because what I want to do here is drag the center point along the y-axis and have it snapped to the very back vertices, whilst all the time of course keeping it in the center of mass for the nail.

This means I can exit sub-object mode by clicking on the center option and in the options folder modifier change the angle to minus 17. We can then press F3 to get a better view, maybe just move the nail out ever so slightly if needed. And there we have it, our first stylized nail has been fixed firmly into our crate.