So as I was cleaning my ceiling, I thought it would be cool to try to create my ceiling fan, so here we go!
Completed the base ,lets make a arm
wow very nice work man! Love the precision and detail 
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Ok, so I wanted to educate on a topic , something I had to talk about was this Bolt factory addon, a bunch of people have said just use the bolt addon to make screws and nuts, the Bolt addon is fine for screws and bolts that you don’t need to get close up and quickly put something together. I didn’t really look at the bolt aspect of the addon as much , so im guessing its similar, so here we go.
First I wanted to say , these points I am going to talk about are the very reason I don’t use a addon without knowing how to do something by hand, some addons is a quality of life thing or math related , I lean more toward those more then the “do this for me” addons cause as I said I want to know how first. This being said I know there is a place for addons like the “time is money” situation, but this addon is a “quick fix” in my opinion.
So I wanted to make screws for the fan , I immediately at the start saw two issues. One was the limitation of what kind of screws it can make, As I was working with the addon , it was very finicky with the head of the screw, kept clipping into itself. I thought maybe I can at least use it to get a idea how it was made to make my own screw which then brought up problem two which is a huge factor, it does not make quad topologized screws, and you should always try to have quad topology in you 3D meshes if possible.
Now you can use the addon to aid in you work if you know what you are doing, but still I can’t make the screws I want with it that look like the ones in the fan. So this won’t work for me, as a side note I watch a lot of maker videos,how to make anything and the thought process, and something I have learned is any form of art seems to go hand in hand, and I saw one video that I found interesting was Adam Savage talking about how anyone can make things , but how do you show them your skill and accuracy, how do they know you didn’t take a decade to make something that was complicated. You break it down to the core, something as simple as a screw or bolt cause if you can show them the accuracy of a screw, nut or bolt from scratch, then you can show them how much skill you really have. And now my mission is clear, I need to make those screws properly.
Is the fan going to be perfect in the end? , probably not, but the quality will be better and I will feel like I made something really nice that I can be proud of and show off to employers if I ever want too and didn’t cut corners to do it. If I want to zoom in and show off the details I can, I can use any angle I want to render this fan and it won’t be weird artifacting or shadowing.
I didn’t want this to be this long and this could even just be my opinions, but I hope this information will help some of you and that is the goal of my WIP’s , is to let people into my thought process, and see how my brain works and maybe they will learn something from seeing it. And so now it’s time to make some screws.
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i do believe the 2 times the addon was suggested was just suggested to save you time… as most addons are intended to do… because then you can focus on something else… as if you are making an entire scene… and didn’t want to spend so much time… making screws n bolts for 1 object of the entire scene…of course… having practice using an addon also gives you ability to tinker with it a bit more too… but i agree the true ability to do something manually absolutely will always weigh out more than just using an addon… by far… if things are made without cutting corners you can be more proud of it… you can show multiple angles… you can have it exactly the way you want… and you can use for numerous purposes… I also suggested the manual way of making the screws n bolts as well… but eh lol
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It is a mixed bag for sure. You are obviously focused on precision, and therefor modeling every detail yourself Is very important. If the goal is to be good at building large scenes or grabbing that great perspective, then the screws would be much less important in every aspect. Personal goals is the only thing that matters.
On a side note I am personally unimpressed with Bolt factory all together. I have and will use it, but only when I’m pressed for time or it just doesn’t matter that much.
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I think I will practice some more making these, could be useful
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your fans will be happy you did 
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Feel like I accomplished quite a bit today , finished brackets, scaled things proportionately, bracket angle, and then tilt in fan blades, made sure its centered, and now it just needs some new screws lol
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I agree on the principle. For me add-ons or any type of cheating or shortcut is fine if you’re pressured for time and you’re doing something that should be delivered as a good result and that’s all that matters.
So for example if I want to make a cool render I’ll cheat and use add-ons and everything to make it as fast as I can because the goal is the render itself and nothing else.
(Of course Blendermania Contests are an exception since there are rules we must follow to keep the game fair for everyone.)
Same with client work, I’ll use any shortcut I can to make the deadline and give a good result (helps that my client work are sculpts for printing so I don’t need to care about any technical stuff)
So I agree that if you are learning as most of us are here on the site, it’s best to actually learn and go through all the manual labor of getting the result without any add-ons.
And it’s not even about bragging rights or anything I just think it’s super helpful. It’s not about saying “Oh you kids these days with your add-ons back in my day…” No! It’s the simple fact that someone who goes through all the effort of making everything from scratch learns more, they will have the hours of practice and skills that someone who uses an add-on will not have.
So even though the add-on user will be doing more stuff faster, the “manual” user will have less completed works but they will also have more practice with more techniques, will have encountered more problems and have come up with more creative solutions and simply put will have a greater mastery of the tools than the add-on user.
So when the manual user decides to take shortcuts they can blow the competition out of the water.
As a side note, all this talk about saving time from everyone (including myself) as if we are some optimized fully efficient machine that given the correct resource allocation we can be fully optimal, is in my opinion pure nonsense.
Humans aren’t efficient, we get distracted, we have thoughts and daydreams we like to slack off, we get absorbed in one thing and disregard everything else. “Saving time” is just a high functioning form of stress. The other end of the spectrum being not doing anything other than binge watching netflix all day long (or youtube in my case)
I think we are supposed to “waste” time on skills we can acquire. It’s not saving time if you’re not learning how to do something, it’s not learning how to do something. Saving time comes from acquiring a certain mastery over something to the point where you are optimizing your process, which seems to be what Gral is building on.
So I say don’t think about saving time, let’s be honest chances are you’re not gonna be doing anything super valuable with that saved time, instead invest your time into learning something you didn’t know how to do until now.
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control module is done
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