Shelf 2x4

Today, my girlfrient sent me to the Swedish furniture supermarket to get some of these shelves for our house, because they're a special offer for a few days. But, of course, to be able to try how exactly they'll fit into our new home, I had to make 3D-models to use in SweetHome3D. So I started FreeCad and got designing. Above, you can see the result: a 2x4 rack bookshelf in white and with a birch wood texture, which are the two designs we'll be using. Look for EXPEDIT, if you want the real stuff.

You can probably already imagine, that it wasn't a big deal to make these, since they are box shapes all over.  First, I needed to find out, how thick the side walls are and how thick the inner shelves are. The overall dimensions are available from the Swed's website. With some educated guessing, I soon got the correct thicknesses and was ready to go. In FreeCad's part view, I created a box with the original dimensions, 149x79x39cm, by the way. Then, I created another box, which is exactly as big as one of the eight racks: 33x33x39cm. I set the position according to the thicknesses of the outer and inner walls. The same was applied to copies of the box until I had 8 of them, all at the right places (where the racks have to be, that is). Afterwards, to make my like a bit easier, I selected all 8 boxes and merged them to a single object. Note, that this works, even though the boxes to not intersect! As a last step, I cut the 8-box-shape from the big outer shape and it was done.

This time, there was no material copying. For the birch one, I needed a texture, which I found on google. Try searching google images for the material you'd like to have along with the word "texture" and you'll most likely find something suitable within the first couple of hits. I imported the .obj file, which I exported from FreeCad to SweetHome3D. Then, for the first time, I used the material "editor" built into the latest version of SweetHome3D. It can be found on the properties page of any object:

The good thing about this editor is, that one can set the brilliance of the material with a slider, instead of just choosing between glossy or matte. So, I chose the birch wood texture, set the brilliance to a reasonable value by experiment and the exported the whole thing as .obj again from SweetHome3D to create a clean .mtl. The same procedure was for the white one, but of course there's no texture, but simply the color set to white.

Feel free to download the files for use with SweetHome3D, or any other program that supports .obj, here.

Glass Cube

Now here is something that looks pretty boring at first sight, but comes in quite handy for different uses. It's a cube made of glass. I must confess that I - again - copied the material from a .mtl file that came along with another object that contained glass. To be honest, I'm a bit unsatisfied with the material, because it is almost invisible on rendered images. That may be because it needs a little less transparency, or because the refraction might need enhancement - I don't know. Probably it would be a good idea to open it in Blender and experiment a little with the material properties. Unfortunately, I don't yet feel too confident with Blender, so I haven't tried enhancing the glass.

Saying that the material was copied from some other object's .mtl may already have given you a clue how to make such a cube of glass. It's pretty much the same procedure as for all the other objects I've showed you so far. Using SweetHome3D, I created a box. Then, I exported the box to a .obj file. After that, I used a text editor to copy the material definition and altered the .obj file to use the glass material for the box. That's it!

But: still wondering, what you could do with this? Well, the good thing is, that due to the box shape, it can be resized to glass sheets in whatever size one would need. I've used it, for example, as a filling for a guard rail (which I'm planning to show you in a later post). It could be used everywhere, where glass sheet is needed: frameless windows, coffee tables, parapet guards, aquariums, etc. I've also used a thin glass sheet on top of a box to generate interesting reflection effects from objects put on top. That's what I use as a presentation platform for images I'm rendering for this blog ;-)

If you ever need glass, you can download it here.