Blender Modelling – Chess Pieces

I had an idea the other day to set a watch (The Lindum), I had designed last year, in a close up image surrounded by some Chess pieces. A warm garden scene created using Blender that could make a nice web-page header. I set up a quick test image to block it out and help me imagine what it would look like. I already had the watch modelled, I created a mesh model for the table and used a suitable PBR material to create the chess board. I discussed this with the people at Harold Pinchbeck Ltd watchmakers, who the watch was designed for, and they agreed it could look good.

This was all modelled and rendered in Blender 4.0, with some slight post-editing made in Adobe Photoshop.

Here is my quick block-out image below:

The Chess Pieces:

I set about deciding what Chess pieces would suit, I wanted them to be strong, imposing looking, and aesthetically pleasing … I decided on the ‘Knight’ and the ‘Bishop’. Two very imposing and pleasing designs that I imagined would sit well in my image.

The Knight:

I found a suitable image of a Knight chess piece online for a reference and started to model:

The base was relatively simple to model, creating the base edge by extruding a vertex and then applying rotation on the to fill the base body, or of course you can use the screw modifier. The main body was not so simple, again I created the main profile by extruding a vertex, then slowly drew in the rest of the shape by traditional vertex modelling, a possibly longer, but satisfying process. It is of course much more complex to do well than my brief overview here explains, and I am not going to go into all the modelling process in complexity, as this is just really to showcase the models. If you do want to learn how to model this yourself, Grant Abbit has made a wonderful and complete tutorial on this on his YouTube channel, so there is no point me trying to better that tutorial here. You can view that tutorial here: Making a Knight Tutorial by Grant Abbit

Once finished I used a nice ‘Wenge-Wood’ Material and added some natural wood defects. The finished model is rather nice I think:

The Knight Model Render:

The Bishop:

Even though the Bishop piece was much simpler to form the main body, the slot on the Bishop head, or hat, is much trickier. To create the main body of the Bishop model you can draw the outline by extruding vertices, or using a bezier curve, and then use ‘rotation’, or a screw modifier to solidify and create the mesh body. To create the slot on the Bishop head you could just use a Boolean to cut-out that section, there would still be some tidying up of the mesh, but this is certainly a relatively quick method.

I decided to make the slot section by re-building the mesh – using a retopology method, a slower and more taxing method, but more rewarding I think. Basically this involves making a duplicate of the base model, using the Shrinkwrap modifier in Blender to shrinkwrap the duplicate onto the base model, deleting the section of the mesh intended for the slot, then re-building this section modelling the ‘slot’ section as you go. Again I wont go into this in detail as Grant Abbit provides a fantastic tutorial on this in his ‘Chess Piece’ modelling series on his YouTube Channel.

You can view this video by clicking here

The Bishop Model Render:

Completing The Scene:

Once both models of the Knight Chess piece, and the Bishop Chess piece were complete, all that was left was to append these two mesh models into my scene of the Lindum watch atop the Chess Board. It takes a bit of playing around to get the scene looking how you want it, moving the individual models and scenery into place. But of course one of the wonders of 3D mesh modelling is the relative ease in which you can play with scenery, lighting, and camera set-ups to get the scene you are looking for. Also you can run many different variants of the base model and scene set-up with differing camera angles and back-drop.

Here is the my render of this complete scene:

I am pleased with the initial result, and of course, as suggested above I might make more variants of a similar scene.

I hope you like it as much as I liked building it 🙂

Until next time….have a great day all.

Kind regards, Jay 😊