Answer: A bunch of number keys and a non-de-script knob

Past week I spent time making a keypad for the doors in one of my previous posts. This guy took some doing: specifically because 1.) I didn’t know that grids in blender existed and 2.) the coloring on the keys made me anxious every-time I tried to make something.

Here’s the greybox:

I had a bunch of iterations here but the three main things were having a keypad, a indication LED and a screen. My hope is to hook this baby up to the doors i made previously to have a quick key code minigame thing in unreal.

By far the hardest part was making not the keypad keys but the plate that would go in between the keys and surround them. One of the biggest things I always try to prevent when using blender is having any issues with normals. Usually it’s hard to come by them if you model in a proper manner (which can be summarized to: always make quad faces.). However, in this case I thought I could use a boolean modifier to make the plate which turned out pretty bad:

You can see here the whole face is messed up however in blender things were looking fine. I don’t have an image for what it looked like but basically it was the keyholes with a subtraction modifier then beveled. Here’s quick demo of what I did:

Now there’s some disconnect because if you pull this into substance (I didn’t do this with the demo) all hell breaks loose and your normals are thrown into a rock tumbler to get that keypad image above.

However I got past it by using the now holy grid:

Which is a bit more painful for inital creation because you have to line it up with your keys but once you do it’s just a quick insert faces, then delete command.

But anyways It seems to look fine in game:

The knob doesn’t have the notches I want, but I can easily make the screen look like it’s on with emissives:

Pretty cool, now I gotta hook it up and import the new doors to start fleshing out this building.