Hey, first off wanna say welcome to the 3D modeling community. 2nd off I wanna give you a few things that should help you on your journey.
CTRL + D to duplicate an object.
Hold Z allows you to go into different modes to see your material.(The materials tab is the sphere with a black and white texture at the bottom right bar of your screen.
ROBLOX HAS A 10k TRIS LIMIT <— This is very important as roblox will not export anything over that. There are ways of exporting over 10k by just exporting parts separately. It also helps with optimization and lag. Tris can be seen on the bottom of your screen.
Ctrl + B helps you bevel. You can bevel in vertex, edge select and face select mode.(Only in edit mode, which can be done by pressing TAB). Use scroll wheel to add more layers onto it, which means more tris however.
The wrench is the modifiers tab and very essential. Mirror, boolean and subdivision(in rare cases) are what you will be using most of the time. Boolean is how you make a hole in an object using another object.
Press H to hide an object and ALT + H to unhide all the objects you hid.
Right clicking an object and pressing shade smooth will make your mesh come out weird, do not worry. If you go to the green triangle on the bar to the right and then press the normals tab and turn on auto smooth with shade smooth on This helps improve your mesh’s shading. any further bad shading issues from my experience can be solved with the modifier weighted normal, where you can play around with that.
If you want to export with textures. I will also teach you how to do that and will provide images, because not a lot of people know how.
First click your object and click material properties. Then click new
Then click the small circle and click image texture.
After clicking image texture, open the texture you would like to apply.
After putting on your texture, hold Z and go to material preview. Your texture may seem weird but I will explain how I fix it.
Then press TAB and click UV and smart uv project. And press ok.
Congratulations your texture has been applied.
Now to export, if you have more than one object with different textures, or want different colors on, then I suggest opening a new blender file and pasting it there. If doing that make sures its in material preview mode. If not, and its a simple mesh like this gear, go to file, export as .fbx file.
From there launch roblox studio, and insert a meshpart into studio.
Then open the .fbx file on the meshpart.
Then you’ll have to go through these prompts. Experiment and see which fits you best. I press YES on resize and no on location. In some cases you will have to invert mesh faces. For that, you need to test and see which makes your mesh look its best.
Finally, as you can see it has worked. My mesh is see through but this is just an example so no biggie. However when I DO get an issue like this, I just slap a solidify modifier on it with no messing of settings and just apply it. The textureid in the properties is the texture ON the mesh. If you want to use roblox textures, you can delete the link in the texture ID and do it your way.
Hopefully I remembered EVERYTHING that can help you. I wish you very much luck on your journey to modeling. Sorry for this long essay, hope this helped you.
