(Sorry – this is a repost as my database corrupted and I had to do a restore. Annoying as I had been in a hurry and had not done my normal post-post backup. Lucky I had a copy of the text.)

I’m a Blender noob, so let me show how I used my simple skills to make the objects.

Now the bench was really easy. Essentially it is a whole bunch of cubes that I stretched and beveled PLUS a 2 dimensional shape that I extruded. In retrospect I now feel confident that I could have crafted the latter within Blender in its entirety – but I was still learning when I started this. The lesson from making the bench is “Don’t confuse complexity with difficulty”. For a beginner there were a lot of shapes that needed to be crafted. But each of them was possible from a simple cube. So with a bit of patience and not letting myself be overwhelmed it became easy.

The c-arm was next. Four cubes and a curve. I shaped each cube (again the bevel played a prominent role) and then created a curve around another extruded 2 dimensional shape. Once again this latter was a sign of my noobiness as there is a better way to do this as shown below.

I guess it was while making the mount-interface that my brain started realising the opportunities that other shapes presented. In particular the torus struck me as something I might use. I created two and then deleted one side of each. This gave a nice cradle for the c-arm to rest within. Then I just used a cylinder and two cubes to finalise the back where it would meet the mount.

Here you can see that I have grown in my understanding. Making the ceiling mount I bend a stretched cube. To be honest this did confuse me until I realised that I needed to add a point around which it would bend (the plain axes).

By the time I got to the monitor I had all the skills needed (as well as the right way of looking at objects) to throw it together very quickly using only two types of shape.

I won’t show the control panel as it is simply a triangular prism with short cylinders for buttons.

All this takes me back to being a kid learning how to draw. I had an old 1950s book on drawing people and animals. It taught me to start with basic shapes (circles, rectangles, triangles, etc) and then build upon those shapes. The body of a horse, for example, is two circles with soft arcs linking them. The head of a horse is a circle with a cylinder. And so on.

With Blender I can do that in 3D. Hence this project is about 80% cubes that have been stretched, cut and beveled. Taking them one cube at a time.

Once I simplified everything in my head into basic shapes, there was very little that was difficult. So let me reiterate my lesson learnt: “Don’t confuse complexity with difficulty”.

Thanks for reading.

Greg