10 Hard surface tricks for Blender

[Music] okay so I just downloaded the new blender 2.83 and I figured this would be a great time to show some hard surface techniques that I have learned along the way some I found out myself others I've learned from various sources and videos online but I'm gonna cram a whole bunch of them into this one video and hopefully you learned something useful all right so let's get started with the first one which is creating pipes so I'm going to delete my default cube I'm going to add shift a to get the add menu add a cylinder and I'm gonna bump this up from 32 to 64 vertices it's a little bit smoother there we go now I'm going to a press number one to go to a side view and going to edit mode with tab shift Z to make it a little bit of a taller cylinder I'm going to zoom in to this top corner I'm going to show you how to basically bend this pipe at a perfect angle and give a give it a nice pipe looking shape so we're gonna use our 3d cursor tool over here and anywhere you left-click drops your 3d cursor and we're gonna put it right on the corner of the pipe not on the inside but just on the outside of that corner now we do need to have this top face selected so I'm gonna use faces right click if that's how you're a villain blender is set up mine is set up for a right click select that's what I've gotten used to so once we got this top face selected I'm gonna go back to the side view with number 1 and now we're ready to bend this face 90 degrees so use the spin tool and once it's selected go over to your tool setting here and let's change the access to Y now depending what angle you are you know what direction you're gonna need to change the angles but for now from a side view Y will bend it this way it basically bends that face based on how many steps we have in our settings over here on the right and it will make the curve for us it saves us all the time I'm gonna make this step 16 if I hope control it snaps onto perfect angles isn't that nice so I'm gonna leave it right there now look we still have this face selected so I press II I can extrude this that way and now we've made a pipe let's do it on the bottom one so right-click number one I'm gonna zoom in a little bit drop my 3d cursor right there click and drag this while holding ctrl there zoom out I'm going to extrude this roughly about the same amount as I did the top one and there we go if you want to make this like a handle or some kind of fastened pipe to some surface you can select these two faces press E and press Enter don't move the mouse because we're gonna drag this out Oh change your origin to individual origins that way we can scale this extruded face make it larger and then again right there fall a lot you've got a handle or a pipe or something cool okay I'm gonna delete my pipe and before I start the next technique I'm gonna re Center my 3d cursor to the middle by pressing shift to see now wherever your 3d cursor is that's where the next object will be placed when you create a new object or mesh so let's start with the next one shift a mesh and cube this next technique is a mirror modeling technique this is how I start a lot on my meshes with the cube and a mirror modifier so first let's go to edit mode tab control R to make a loop cut press enter and then enter again make sure you don't move your mouse after that first interview cuz you'll slide your loop cut up and down we don't want to do that we wanted to be right in the middle so enter enter we'll give you one loop cut right in the middle okay what we're gonna do next is delete half of the cube so that the mirror modifier can do its job and make the other half for us so with face selected let's grab one face and view ctrl + to expand the selection and then delete faces there we go now we have one half of the cube and it's open that's good we don't want to face there now let's go to our wrench which is our Mount of fires press add modifier and select mirror now we don't see anything that's because the modifier is mirroring along the x-axis which is not helpful because we did it the other way so unselect X and so why there now we're ready to start modeling one half of the cube whenever we do to this half is going to be mirrored on the other half which is a huge time-saver and it's really the only way to go if you're going to be modeling things that are symmetrical you know hard surface stuff sci-fi stuff spaceships you name it it all starts with a mirror modifier if it's going to be cut in half you can actually use it double you can mirror on X&Y make one corner and then everything you do to that one corner quarter piece will be duplicated by four and copied across the x and y corners and again you're doing a little bit of work and it's doing the rest of it for you and I love using the mirror modifier next is we're going to add rings to a cylinder with a very easy trick I discovered let's add another cylinder shift a make a cylinder let's zoom in a little bit go to edit mode with tab now we're gonna do another control and we're gonna do another loop cut like we did earlier let's do to them so ctrl R press the plus button to increase the number you can use plus or minus to add more loop cuts and enter enter again because I don't want to move them around here's the weird trick we're gonna bevel these but because this is on a flat face all the way around its going to just add additional loop cuts right next to the ones we just maze but it's gonna duplicate these loop cuts into two or three or four whatever we want so control B for bevel look at that now it's making more loop cuts we can increase the bevel which will really just add more loop cuts next to where we did it but for this trick I'm gonna go back to just one with the double so let's press ok click or you can press Enter now here we're gonna turn these into extruded rings all the way around so I'll press e enter switch to face select mode and we're gonna scale these out with s now make sure that you're on individual origin if you're in median and watch this as skill set out based on the center point which is in the middle of these two we don't want that we just want them to go straight out so individual origin face select with these ring selected and you can scale these out just a little bit like that or I can bevel this e inter scale it down and add a whole bunch here watch this there you go bevel these just a little bit there e inter and s to scale them out cool huh very useful for making pipes lightsabers all kinds of ribbed and ringed pieces and gives them lots of nice fine detail to increase the photo realism okay this next trick is going to apply to this mesh so I'm not gonna delete this just yet I'm gonna smooth this out see how we can see these phases we can see all the edges and lines it's not smooth we want to smooth that out but we don't want to get rid of the parts that do need to be sharp which is these 90-degree edges so we're going to press spacebar for the search function and just type in smooth now click on shade smooth now the smooth parts are smooth but the sharp parts are smooth too and we don't want that so let's bring back the parts that we wanted to be sharp by going down to the little triangle vertices icon here and expand the normals panel and click Auto smooth so what this is doing is any angle I think it's below 30 degrees will be smoothed out but anything over it will be hard so you may need to play with this based on your mesh but normally 30 degrees works for almost everything and now even though this is kind of a low poly cylinder it looks smooth so we're saving memory we're saving processing power but visually it's gonna show is a perfectly smooth round cylinder without having thousands of faces added around the edges and the edges that we want to be sharp are nice and sharp all right again I'm gonna continue on the same mesh for this next technique I'm going to show you how to add kind of grippy teeth or edges along a cylinder which can be used for Gears or grips of various kind so I'm gonna grab this bottom face it's gonna move it down along the z-axis so we have more room now in face select mode if I hold alt and right click it grabs all the faces around here so once you have all these faces selected we're gonna press I for inset you may have you may need to press it twice what we want to get to this individual incest so each face now has an inset on it once you get it to where you want it you can click or press enter and now we're ready to extrude these to give a nice like I said kind of a grip or gear teeth look so you can go to extrude individual press E and then drag your mouse a little bit you can do a lot if you need to like looks like an air vent on a car but I like to use this technique for just kind of like a subtle inset or an out set like that now we've got these little faces all over it looks like a grip or a gear or something interesting you can take it a step further by beveling these so those are not perfectly sharp so if I go back the tab look they're still selected and that saves me a lot of time just press control B and very careful you can hold shift if you need to you can drag this out maybe add a few segments the plus button to make them smooth if you hold shift and drag like that it drags them with a more finer precision and that looks very nice right there now if you want to make gears there is a really cool add-on in blender for making gears I suggest using that but I'm going to show you how to make one more specific kind of gear here so I made a circle go into edit press F to fill it enlarged it I in set to make an inset delete this face in the middle now we've got this empty kind of ring of faces it's flat I'm going to select all with a and E to extrude it up okay now I'm going to alt click this inside ring takes a few times to get it there we go got all the inside faces now I can press I to inset at individual in sets there we go and then E and watch they're going to extrude outwards along their normal which happens to be inwards towards the center I can even like scale these if I go to normal here I can scale these along their y-axis ease which makes it kind of interesting there we go we got a cool gear or Stargate or something interesting going on there so yeah inset and extrude on a circular range of faces can make a lot of great effects alright next technique I'm going to show you how to punch a hole through something without using the boolean operation so I'm going to add a cube I'm going to zoom in a little bit now watch this I'm going to grab these two faces holding shift to select multiple faces and I'm going to inset them now if I want to connect these two faces to basically turn them into a hole through the cube without using the boolean operation we can do that by choosing so press space for search and just type in Bridge bridge the edge loops and there we go it connects them just like that pretty cool next I'm going to show you how to duplicate a whole bunch of objects around a center point which is great for things like bolts or small details like screws and things like that so I've got this kind of pipe thing going down with a base we're gonna make a quick six-sided bolt by doing shift a circle and down here type in six vertices Tab F now I can't see it because it's in the middle there there it is if you get out of tab you can see it let's drag it out here and move it up a little bit it's too big so let's shrink it and then extrude it downwards and there we go we've kind of got a hexagonal ahead of them kind of bolt I'm gonna bevel this top edge to make it smooth there we go that's good enough for me for this example now this is one bolt I'm gonna copy it all the way around a circle so first we need to set up our center point which is gonna be a 3d cursor to do that we can select this pipe which is basically this Center right the axis and do shift s and down here on the bottom cursor to select it so that puts our 3d cursor right where the selected object is which is the pipe now let's bury carefully right-click or select your bolt object without moving the 3d cursor and we're gonna copy it all the way around so to do that change your origin point to 3d cursor which is in the middle now look if I rotate like it's rotating not based on the bolt but based on the 3d cursor and this is good now let's do 6 copies of this bolt around the pipe now if you divide 360 by 6 you get 60 now to duplicate this bolt you could use shift D to make a duplicate object but that object will be disconnected from this original bolt so if we make any changes to the mesh or we add a material to one bolt all the other bolts we'll need to do more work for all the bolts and it'll be the same work which is dumb so we're going to do alt D instead to make a linked copy so alt D and enter now we're gonna rotate this RZ which is rotate on the z-axis 60 there we go now you got to do this a few times yeah it was some practice you'll get faceted but here we go Google from a top view this is make it a little bit easier it'll actually save us a step now all we need to do we just make the copy so alt D and enter our negative 60 alt D enter our negative 60 and keep going there we go so we just alt deduplicated this and we rotate it along the z axis 60 degrees which gives us all six of these now the reason why I locked alt D is because look if I make a material on one of these it's gonna make it on all of them because they're all linked and that is a huge time-saver even if I edit the mesh like watch if I make like a inset thing like that they're all edited and yeah lots of time saved all right this next technique I'm going to show you how to make a cool sci-fi a panel with some depth with relatively a little amount of work so let's add a flat plane by she's going shift a and plane let's make it big so s2 which skills it up to maybe again s2 again alright now we're going to add some lines along this so let's do ctrl R + + + + + and maybe on this side a different amount there we go now we're gonna grab some of these lines so holding shift and right-clicking on a few these random lines we can kind of trace some different paths don't let them intersect with each other make sure that they stay separate from each other there I think that's as much as I can do with these amount of cuts I have now once we have these edges selected remember make sure your an edge select mode up here I want to do control B to bevel them I don't want a whole bunch of segments like that so I'm going to press - so I'm beveling just one segment worth now hold shift and make this bevel very small there we go now delete and delete the faces you just made and look at that we've got this nice cut out but wait there's more go to the modifier add modifier and use solidify and zoom in you'll see the beauty that you just made three dimensional panels with some depth and all you did was delete some faces and this is technically a flat plane that you can do more stuff with but the solidify a modifier is doing the thickness and you can control the thickness by turning up this fader and look at that it turns your flat plane into a thick you know three-dimensional face if you want to take this a step further and give some more fine details to this you can do add modifier again and choose bevel I put your bevel let's collapse our solidify put your bevel at zero hold shift and slowly drag up from zero and you can get like point zero zero five or something real small if you want to round those edges you can add another segment and there we go we don't have any harsh edges anymore because one of the tips to photo realism in your 3d renders is to pretty much never have a completely hard edge like that unless it's like a blade or a diamond or something other than that even hard surface objects generally have some amount of softness to the edge it just makes it more appealing and realistic so there we go all right my final tip I'm going to show you how to use hierarchy to basically make what could be a robotic arm or any number of other objects I'm going to speed this part up a little bit all right so here we go we've got three joints and a wrist I guess so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna use parenting to basically make a hierarchy of this robot arm without using any bones and it will be basically opposable so let's start from the top down let's start from the outermost extremity which is going to be the wrist so select it then shift select the wrist joint control P parent and keep transform now we're going to move on the way all the way down select the wrist joint select the forearm control P and enter select a forearm select the elbow joint control P select the elbow joint and the upper arm P select the upper arm and the shoulder ctrl P enter there we go so look if I select my shoulder joint and move this everything's connected because they're parented or I can just move this one or I can move this one now next tip which applies to this and some other things is we're going to limit the rotation so that it only rotates the right way so the correct way for this wrist joint to rotate is along the y-axis so I'm gonna lock the others if you go to your object tab here click the little padlock there and there so we don't want it to rotate on X or Z only Y so I just press R and it can only rotate on one axis so there we go same with the others like these and the shoulder lock those so now I just do R and I can pose this thing however I want you can animate it very easily I'm actually working on a project right now that has a very similar robotic arm that does some really cool stuff and I use the same technique to save myself a lot of time and the best part of all no bones are rigging required alright well that's it for this video thanks so much if you have any questions comments or additions let me know in the comments and let me know which of these techniques is your favorite in the comments thanks for watching and have a great week

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 91,408

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Id: dv19VOEKILo

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020