Office's Unused Cardboard Box

Don't really know when are they going to throw these away... these cardboard boxes are really old and we have too many of these unused cardboard boxes in the office's storeroom!

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Process

To start off, I used a cuboid, which is closest to the shape of a cardboard. I set the subdivisions of the box to 3 for all the sides. Then, I scaled the top middle face, by selecting all the vertices involved and scale them, so that I can extrude it into the box, thus creating the inner side of the box.

So what happens to the rest of the faces of the top surface? Eventually, they will get extruded out, and get rotated by the rotate manipulator tool (E), in order to create our folded flaps! I had to manually set the pivot for the rotate manipulator tool so that the flaps rotate correctly, instead of ending up in a random position.

Next, I used the Edge Loop Tool to cut up the box into several sections, so that I can just move the vertex to bend my flaps. Before bending I also apply Bevel on the box so as to give a smooth edge for the flaps and the box.

Then it was time to bend the flaps and make it look old!

Once that was done, the remaining thing to do was to make the box look smooth (because right now it still looks too straight for some of the parts), by using the Smooth function. Other than the flaps, the other parts of the box still looks new and close to flat, so I applied 2 deformers to take care of those parts and made them look like it has really been used to put things inside the box.

Reflection

This is the first time where I create a model with only 1 primitive: the cuboid. In the previous labs what we were doing was to create several primitives, move/rotate/scale the entire primitive, in order to create our final model. For this lab however, we went further beyond just doing those 3 operations, and instead modify the cuboid by doing extrusion, and manipulating each individual vertex, edge, and face.

In this lab, I have also learnt about the Smooth function and the Deformer function. These two functions are pretty useful as these two made the model look more natural and less flat.

This exercise also allow me to see the different perspective of modelling. Turning something from a primitive to a real world object isn't hard at all, but part of the reason is because instructions are already given. If I had to create my own models, I will have to plan carefully before I start creating my model.