MINI: The Great Cube Challenge

Mini: This is a great challenge and covers a lot of very important skills that are needed for advanced modeling techniques.  It might look simple, but it is harder than you think. 
  • Combine Polygons
  • Extrude Edge with Attributes
  • Append Polygon Tool vs Bridge Tool
  • One sided Light vs. Two Sided Light
  • Normals
  • Soft Edges vs Hard Edges vs Angle
  • Activate Poly Count - Heads up Display
  • Show Face Centers vs whole face
  • Unlimited Undos (and the consequences)
  • Duplicate Faces
  • Merge Vertices & attributes
  • Paint Select (b + MMB) brush size
  • Move Pivot Point (Insert Key)
  • Snap (Vertex, Edge, & Grid) (V, C, X plus MMB)
  • Bevel (Fractional vs Absolute)

Create a cube with 10 X 10 X 10 divisions
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Create a cylinder Scale it  0.5  X  0.5  X  0.5
Change radius to 0.5
Subdivisions Axis to 24
Subdivisions Height to 10
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Show Face Centers
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Delete the centers faces leaving along the perimeter

Delete Caps on the Cylinder
Turn off Two Sided Lighting
Reverse Normals on cylinder
Extrude Cylinder’s edge at the Local Translate Z  to –0.025 units on both the top and bottom. **Or in the positive direction if have not reversed your Normals yet. 
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Combine both objects

Using the Append Polygon Tool, Append 1 edge from the cylinder to the aligned edge of the cube.
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Double click on one of the inner edges, the whole inner loop will be selected, de-select the two edges on the appended face and then Bridge the two edges with zero divisions.   Repeat on the other side.
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Select the center faces and extrude them out using a global extrude.
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Scale all the outer faces flat
Snap the faces to the edge of the cube
Delete faces of both the extrusion and the cube
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Using the snap features, vertex and edge, snap the edges to the extruded hole.
Merge Vertices

Second Cylinder
Create a cylinder, same as the last except change the Height to 0.5 and the Height Divisions to 5.
  • Create a cylinder Scale it  0.5  X  0.5  X  0.5
  • Change radius to 0.5
  • Change Height to 0.5
  • Change Subdivisions Axis to 24
  • Change Subdivisions Height to 5
Attach it in the same way you made the hole on the top of the cube.
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So instead of repeating for the opposite side, we are just going to Duplicate the faces we made and move them to the other side. 
Select the faces on opposite side and delete them.
cube
Select the faces of the side with the new cylinder and duplicate them.
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Scale the newly created face in the negative direction by 1 unit.  For example, if it is on the X plane, change it to –1 for the X Plane. 
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Combined objects and then merge vertices.
Bevel all “true” edges, not face edges using a consistent bevel

Here is the final project.
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