- This, by the way also works
if you quickly wanna explode your mesh and click on, bridge edge loops. Still in this place here
which is super cool. Is this nicely projecting the mesh, increase the count of the array modifier and then we have full
control on our arm here. (enchanting music) Hi, everyone. It's Zach
Reinhardt here for CGBoost.com and I'm a little bit
late on this video here because recently, our YouTube channel reached 100,000 subscribers. Well, not so recently because we are actually at
120,000 subscribers right now, so I'm 20,000 subscribers late. Anyway, YouTube sent me
this nice package here and it was lying here in
my office for weeks now, because I wanted to finish
this video here first and then unpack this
together with you guys. And, yeah, let's do it. This play button Wars picked
by Rick. Thanks, Rick. (wrapper crackles) Oh my god. That's the play button, I
don't know if you can see it. Presented to CG Boost for
passing 100,000 subscribers. Let's put it here somewhere. Hey guys, and this play button we only got through your support, so a huge thank you for all the support for all
the years. Thanks a lot. So, yeah, and why did it take long, because editing and
putting together this video was a huge undertaking,
as you can imagine. Anyway, in this video I packed
in over 100 modeling tricks and modeling tricks in a broader sense. That means basically
everything that can help you to speed up the creation
process of 3D objects. That certainly includes edit mode tricks, modifier tricks, but also
a bunch of user interface, navigation, selection tricks,
and so on and so forth. But anything, somehow kind
of related to 3D modeling. And the best thing is for
all the tips I show you here, we only use Blender
internal tools or add-ons that are shipped with Blender anyway, so no external add-ons or
paid products required. This contains a lot of tips
I use a lot in my daily work, some things that I've learned recently and also some nice tricks
I learned from colleagues and friends, like Juan Hernandez, Julien Kaspar, Jan van den Hemel, besides probably a lot of
other people I can't remember. So thanks guys. And yes,
it is a very long video, but to make it easier to
consume, I added whole list with all tips down below
in the video description, including timestamps,
which you can click on and categorized in different chapters so you basically can
just click on the stuff that interests you. In this video you will
learn a lot of shortcuts, and I know it's hard to remember them all, and that's why we created
the "Blender Hotkey PDF", which contains all the most
important Blender shortcuts in a beautiful and
print friendly PDF file. And the best thing is we keep this updated when new Blender versions come up. If you wanna grab it, you can sign up to our free resource section/mailing list, including not only this Blender PDF, but also a full free
Blender beginner's course and many other tutorials
and the project files for our tutorials. And it even includes a downloadable version of this video here, including this robot of blend file. When signing up, you will not
only get this nice resources, we will also send out
some very useful emails, which will help you to
grow as a 3D artist, and we will certainly keep you
up to date with our content, and if you don't enjoy these emails, you can unsubscribe at any time. Also, if you're new to
Blender, you might enjoy our top rated Blender2.8
Launch Pad Course, which will teach you
everything you need to learn to get started with
Blender, and in addition, there's a huge UV mapping
and texturing update coming soon to the course, stay tuned. If you feel that the modeling
tips in this video here are not enough for you, I
highly recommend to check out the YouTube channels by Josh
Gambrel, Gleb Alexandrov AKA, Creative Shrimp, Aidy
Burrows 3D and Arrimus 3D, to name a few. They focus
heavily on hard surface modeling, and I'm sure there you
will learn a lot more awesome modeling tricks. In
addition, I can highly recommend the hard surface modeling course and the "50 Modeling Issues From Hell", course from Creative Shrimp and, if you love these short Blender tips, I can also highly recommend
the amazing "Blender Secrets" ebook by Yan van den
Hemel, which contains, I don't know how many,
but multiple hundreds of Blender tips, including modeling tips, but also including tips
to any other Blender topic you can imagine. I'm pretty
sure that these courses and this ebook can level up
your game as a 3D artist a lot. You can find all the links down below in the video description.
Just to be clear here, the links to the courses and
the eBooks are affiliate links. That means if you decide
to make a purchase, we will get a commission
with no extra cost to you. However, I'm only promoting stuff which I'm fully convinced
of, so I'm pretty sure when you get one of these
products, they will help you a lot And since people ask me of this a lot, if you're interested in my computer specs, I also listed them down below
in the video description. So guys, I know this was a long intro, but without further words, enjoy the ride. (enchanting music) When you select an object
and hit TAB, you switch to edit mode, which is nice. However, sometimes you
quickly wanna switch to the other modes and
you don't wanna go up here and select the specific
mode from the list here. What you can do, you can press CTRL+TAB
and hold this to open up the mode pie menu to quickly
switch to another mode. You can hover over to
edit mode, for example, and just release the buttons
to quickly switch to edit mode. And the same works for all the
other modes, as you can see. However, since this is
a shortcut we use a lot, pressing CTRL+TAB feels a bit weird. So let's go to edit preferences,
and here under keymap, you can either check, TAB
for pie menu that means if you press TAB, the pie
menu appears immediately, or if you still like the single
TAB press to quickly switch to edit mode, you can also
enable Pie menu on drag, which I have enabled. If I now press TAB, I switch to edit mode, but if hold TAB and move my
mouse in a specific direction, it opens the pie menu and then I hover above the specific mode and then release my mouse. And this allows us to
switch to different modes in less than a second, as you can see. As you probably know,
up here you can change the Viewport Shading to wire frame, solid, material preview and rendered. However, if you don't
wanna always go up here, you can also use the shortcut Z, which by default is just
switching between wire frame and solid Viewport Shading. However, if you hold down
Z and then move your mouse in a certain direction, you
can see this pie menu pops up, which allows us to quickly
change between different modes. Besides changing the Viewport
Shading, the X-RAY mode is very useful because it
lets us see through objects and in edit mode, it also
allows us to select anything which is on the other side of the mesh. And for that, there's also a
shortcut, simply press ALT+Z to turn it off and on. I'm in solid mode over here,
and you might wonder why the surface of the object is reflecting. And that's because if I
click this little arrow here, I change to Matcap and here we can pick a bunch of different
matcaps, like this one here. And these matcaps allow us to see surface imperfections better.
As you can see over here, I added a few bumps to the
surface, If I switch back to the studio lighting, you can see it's not so easy to tell. And there are special
matcaps like these ones here, which are looking super
crazy but they allow us to quickly identify bumps in the surface. We also have the vertical
lines here, as you can see, or this matcap over here can also help us to define surface imperfections. But usually when I work
with very smooth surfaces, I either pick the red
one or this one up here, which also gives us a good understanding on how smooth the surface is. Up here on top of this shape
I have a nice big face, right? No, it's not a face, It
is a complex geometry, as you can see. However, when we take a look
from above, we can't really see all this details. This
can make modeling harder. However, if we go up here to
the Viewport Shading settings, we can enable cavity.
Here we have two options; We have the World Cavity, which basically adds some kind
of ambient occlusion effect, and we also have this Screen Cavity, which in this case is a bit hard to see, if we make it a bit stronger, you can see this adds
this very bright edge to the sharp edges and this dark edge to all the corners here. So
Screen is very sharp and thin and World is soft and wider. You can also control
the strengths over here, and if you click on this gear icon, you can also change
the size, the distance, and under type, you can also select both to have a mixture of both,
and then you can set up the strengths for each
of them individually. And now we can see the surface
of the object very nicely, because we can see some kind of depths of the whole shape here. When working on your scene where you have many different objects, it can be sometimes hard
to distinguish which object is separated from each other.
And to make this easier, we can go up here to the
Viewport Shading settings and under color, enable Random. This will give each individual
object a random color. Here, for example, without selecting this, we can see that these
two cylindrical shapes belong to the same object. This little feature here is a lifesaver, when you select an object, you can hit period or
comma on the NUMBPAD, depending on what language
keyboard you're using. And this will center this
selection, as you can see. This can be super useful
to quickly navigate through your scene, and
sometimes you may be get stuck while navigating your scene. This can recenter everything
around the object of interest. And the cool thing is, this
not only works in object mode, this even works in edit mode, depending on what you have selected, you can center the
selection and even cooler, if you have a long list of
elements in your outliner and something has selected
over here, you can use the same shortcut to center
the selection over here. However, when you don't have a NUMBPAD, you probably should buy
a keyboard with a NUMBPAD because it's super useful
when working with Blender. However, you can always click on view and click on frame selected. In the outliner you have to right click, go to view and then click on show active. Being able to navigate
fast and efficiently in the 3D viewport is super important to speed up your modeling process. However, the default
navigation settings in Blender are not really beneficial in most cases, because when rotating, we
are not really rotating around what we have
selected, as you can see. And when we're zooming
in, our view can get stuck at some point, and this,
especially for beginner users can be really frustrating. To get out of this stuck
situation, you can use this frame selected shortcut,
period on the NUMBPAD which I showed you in
one of the previous tips. However, there are some
other settings we can enable which makes navigating much more fun. For that, we can open the
preferences over here, under edit. However, in this case, let's
change the properties editor to the preferences, so we
have them open all the time, then navigate to navigation. And first of all, as
you can see by default, we are zooming in and out
just straight into our scene, no matter where our mouse position is. And we have a nice option over here, is zoom to mouse position.
If I enable this, you can see we are now zooming
to the position of our mouse. And this alone gives us a
lot of control to navigate our scene just by zooming
out, changing the position of the mouse and then
zooming in once again. Then the next feature which is
super helpful, is auto depths This detects geometry
underneath our mouse cursor, and this allows us to really zoom into where we want on the surface. And this feature helps us to avoid these getting stuck problem, as long as there is geometry
underneath our cursor, we can basically zoom in and
out without any problems. And the last feature is
my personal preference, this is orbit around
selection, which in some cases is pretty nice, but in
other cases, it's not. So you have to try out if
this works for you or not. This allows us to simply select anything, and when we rotate the view, this will orbit around
the selected elements, which is super helpful in my opinion. However, if for example,
you have something like this selected and wanna look around down here, and then rotate the view,
it is still rotating around the selection, which
then can be confusing. Certainly you can select
the element over here, but imagine this is like one big object and you wanna take a look around down here and the center is up here,
then this is really hard to get into the frame. So in
this case, turning this off would make more sense because
then we can easily rotate around our current view basically. However, in most cases I have to say, I really like this option. In addition, orbit around
selection also works in edit mode. That means if in edit
mode, you select anything, it will orbit around
the selected elements, which is pretty nice. And this
even works in sculpt mode. If I sculpt on any place on the surface, it will orbit around where
I have sculpted last, which of course can also be super helpful when sculpting something in sculpt mode. So here we have a long list of elements, and sometimes, for example,
when selecting the head, it can be helpful to
basically hide everything except the head, or if you
select multiple objects, to hide everything, except
the selected objects. You maybe know the shortcut,
H to hide the selection, so we could press CTRL+I
to invert the selection and press H. However, sometimes
you have objects hidden and you don't want to unhide them. That means when you do this,
you always unhide all objects. That means also all objects,
which you have hidden and you don't always wanna show again, and even when working with the eyes, this can be quite time consuming
to pick the right objects. So let's press ALT+H to unhide everything. There's a better way to deal with that, by using the Local View. Simply select a bunch
of objects or just one, and then hit slash the NUMBPAD. Now you can see nothing
is hidden over here, but we can only see these objects since we are now in local
view, you can see it up here. This is a kind of isolated
view where we only see the selected objects, and if we hit slash on the NUMBPAD again, we get back to the non-local view. However, if you don't
have a NUMBPAD, again, I recommend to get one, but
you can also go to View, Local View and click on Toggle Local View. In addition, if you wanna remove something from the local view, you
could certainly go back, select the objects you wanna have and then go to Local View
again, but you can also simply select something inside of
local view and press M to remove this from the local view,
This, you can also find up here under view, local view and then click on remove from local view, and then nothing is here anymore, dammit. So this tip here is kind of
special, but can be useful in some rare cases. Let's
select this object, for example, go to edit mode and let's
select this face here, now let's hit SHIFT+
NUMPAD 7 and then the view will be aligned to the
normal of this selected face. We can also use the other
viewpoints like SHIFT+NUMPAD 1,3,7 or CTRL+ SHIFT 7,1,3 to
view it from the other side. And now since the view
is perfectly aligned to the surface of this
object, we can, for example, see that this USB flash drive
is not perfectly straight, same for this thing over
here. So we could adjust this, and as always, if you
don't have a NUMBPAD, go to view, align view and
then align view to active, and then pick whatever you
want, for example, top view, and then you can view it from
the top of the face normal. Let's assume that we wanna
work inside of this robot head here, for example, and
change anything there. This can be quite hard
because the whole object is in the way we could try to zoom in here and then get inside. However, there's a
feature which can help us, simply press ALT+B and then select an area which should be visible, and
then the rest will be cutoff, but just for the view, not like Boolean or anything like that. And
now we can go inside here, simply do what we wanna
do, something like this, and then press ALT+B to
remove the clipping border. And then as you can see,
the editing was quite easy. When modeling your objects,
it can be useful to view your object from different
angles at the same time. For that, we can enable Quad View. The shortcut is ALT + CTRL
+ Q, and then you can see the 3D viewport will be split
into four different windows. You can also find it under
view, area, toggle quad view. Now you can see we have
the 3D Viewport up here, then we have the top view,
front and the right view. And with the default settings, you can SHIFT, middle mouse button, click, and move these views
around as you can see, you can also zoom in and out if you like, but there are some additional
options. If you press N, it opens up the sidebar,
and then if you go to view, you find this quad view panel over here, which only appears if you
have quad view enabled, as you can see. If you're disable lock, you're completely free
to change the perspective in each of those windows. You can even change to
perspective view, if you like, and when you're done,
simply click on lock again. Then we have the box
option, which allows us, when I move anything
here, all the other views will be adjusted automatically. Even when I change the
position here, you can see how this also affects the Y axis up here, and when I change the X axis
over here from the view, it will also change up
here. So in this way, you will always focus on the same area. And the last option we have here is clip, which adds a kind of clip
region, as I've shown before. When I, for example, move
this part here to the front, you can see this line here. When I cross this line,
this will be cut away, and this will also affect the
other views as you can see. Which is an interesting
feature and might be useful when working in edit mode, for example. Let's enable X-Ray, and now I
can see inside here directly and change anything here on
the backside of the robot. Yeah, and if you wanna turn it off, press ALT + CTRL + Q, once again. When you start Blender,
you will be created with this splash screen
which looks pretty nice and has some useful features. But if you're not making
use of this at all, you always have to do an extra
click in order to get started In fact, you can disable the
splash screen completely, if you go to, edit, preferences
and then under interface, you can disable the splash
screen, and if you need the splash screen at any
time, since from now on, it will not be shown
when you start Blender, you can always click up
here on this Blender icon and click on splash screen to get it back, if you need any option over
here, or just wanna look at this beautiful image. When working in the interface
of Blender and hovering your mouse above any option, you get these nice handy tool tips. However, when I record tutorials,
I find it quite annoying that every time I move my
mouse, these black boxes appear. So I go to edit, preferences,
and then under interface, we can turn off the tool tips. That means they are
disabled now completely. However, sometimes it
still can be useful to show the tool tip, but then always
going to the preferences and we enable this can be time consuming. There's a quicker way to
do this, if you temporarily wanna show up the tool tips, simply hold down ALT and
then hover your mouse above or certain value, and
then you will see the tool tip. But since this is now
disabled in the preferences, by default, these tool
tips will not show up. If you can't remember a
certain modeling feature or any other feature here in
Blender, you can simply hit F3 to open up the search menu, search for the specific feature,
and then on the one hand, you see this feature listed
here with the specific shortcut in this case, I, and
then you can also simply click on this to enable this feature. Now you can see, I have enabled
the insert face feature. Or let's search for extrude,
you can see the shortcut over here, click on this,
and then this will work. And sometimes also very useful
when I now hit F3 again, it remembers what we have clicked on last, and then we can simply
click on this again, but it's probably much
faster to just use E here, but in some cases, when there's
no specific shortcut set, this can be quite useful. So let's rotate this
here, maybe 90 degrees, and sometimes we wanna add
something to a specific value. Let's say we wanna add five
to the 90, so for that, let me check, 90 plus five.
Okay, it's 95, but yeah, if this is like too complicated for you, wouldn't it be nice to just
do it inside of Blender? And we can do it, simply go in here and type in any equation you
want, like 95 plus 20 minus 50 divided by 100. Oh, 115, nice. And this certainly not only
works in the rotation field, it works everywhere in Blender, where we can work with numeric values. When working with
transform values over here, we mostly have X, Y, and Z
listed underneath each other. And there's a quick way to
change multiple values at once. Simply left click and
hold, drag your mouse down and then release your mouse
button, and now we can change all the values at once. Another very cool feature
when you're working with any kind of value, is
the quick ability reset values to the default value. You
can either right click and click on reset all to default, which will, in this case, reset
all three values to default, or reset single to default. However, there's a way
to do this even faster by simply hovering above
a value and hit backpace. And this works for any kind of values, even for colors, as you can see. However, in some cases it will
not use the default value, which is set up by default,
but it will reset the value to zero as you can see
over here, for example. When you're working with your objects, sometimes you wanna place
something very carefully. And in some cases it's
moving just too fast, in order to fix that,
you can hold down SHIFT, then it will move like in slow motion and you can very carefully
place it where you want. This not only works
directly in the 3D viewport, this, for example, also
works when changing values. You can hold down left click
on here to move them around, but when you hold down SHIFT,
you can move it even slower. This also works for
rotation, as you can see, and even for scaling. When I hit N, the sidebar
opens and this sidebar shows some useful settings
like here, the transform of the currently selected object, but we also have some
additional tabs over here, with the tool settings, view settings, and maybe some add-ons we have enabled. However, sometimes you're
working in one of those tabs, but you need information
from one of the other tab. For example, the transform panel over here is pretty useful and it
would be nice to see it all the time, no matter
what tab we have selected. And this is possible by
simply SHIFT, left clicking on this panel to pin this. For unpinning, this simply
click on this pin icon, then this is gone, or
you simply right click and click on pin. Then when I
switch over to any other tab, you can see that the transform
panel will always show up. If it is appearing on the
bottom, you can certainly, rearrange this if needed. And
this certainly not only works for one panel, you can
do it for all the panels. So you could even pin
all panels from all tabs to have one long list of settings here. And this indeed can help to
save some time while modeling, since you don't always need to switch between those tabs here. When we do anything
here in the 3D viewport, for example moving this
object, this operator panel, this context menu down here
appears, which shows options for the last done action.
For example, the move action, and I can change anything afterwards, which can be super helpful.
However, if I do anything else, for example, rotating this object, it will show a context menu
for this last section, rotate, and now I can change anything here. However, sometimes it happens
that you will, for example, left click somewhere, and
then this menu disappears although we have not
done any other action. And in this case, if you
want to get this menu back, simply hit F9, and then as you can see, we have the rotate menu and then I can change anything I want. And when you're done,
simply move your mouse away. However, this will never
ever bring back the menu of an action I've done
before the last action, just keep that in mind. When you wanna learn more about a specific feature
in Blender, as you know, you can enable the tool
tips. However, in some cases, the tool tips don't give enough
information about something. so looking into the Blender Wiki can help. And there's a quick way to
access the specific section, simply hover your mouse
above for a specific feature, and then hit F1, as you can see, this will then open up the Blender Wiki showing information about
this specific features. So in this case, it shows the documents of the subsurf modifier. So it doesn't work for each
individual setting here, although we can find them in the Wiki. However, it will lead you
to the right information, which can be quite helpful in some cases. And to be clear here, you
need an internet connection to make this work, this just
opens the website here online. So this is not an offline documentation. However, this doesn't work
for all features here. In some cases, as you can
see here, for example, it just brings you to the
overview of the Blender Wiki. And I think especially when
you're starting learning Blender this can help you a lot to
learn more about specific tools. (enchanting music) Sometimes you just wanna select
a certain part of your mesh, and it can be pretty
time consuming to select all these different elements. In this case, the grow,
shrink selection feature can help a lot. So simply select a loop or one element, and then
hit CTRL plus on the NUMBPAD to grow the selection and CTRL minus, to shrink the selection. One other selection tool
I use in edit mode a lot. is the linked selection. That
means you hover above the mesh and press, L and all the
connected faces will be selected. With SHIFT + L, you can also
de-select the linked faces. This linked selection has
one other cool feature, you can see this mesh has
some red marked edges, I selected these edges,
and then I pressed CTRL + E and marked them as seam. A seam,
you need to create UV maps. If I now press L over here and down here in the operator panel, I
set the delimit to seam that means the linked
selection will be limited to the area of the seams. So up here, I have a bunch of other seams,
which can be a great tool to quickly select different areas according to different
properties. You can see you can delimit this to
other properties as well. Sometimes you wanna select
everything of your mesh, except one certain part. So
you could select everything, and then with SHIFT + L, for example, deselect what you want, but
the more complex your mesh is, the harder this can be. So let's de-select everything once again, and sometimes the easier way is to do it the other way around. That
means I select the area first, which I want to have deselected, and then simply press CTRL
+ I to invert the selection, now I have everything else selected. Sometimes it can be useful
to select every second face of a loop for example.
In order to achieve this, select one loop, then go
to select and click on Checker Deselect, now down
here, you can also check how many should be deselected
or how many should be selected, and you can
also change the offset. So, and then you can, for
example, extrude this stuff and create some pretty interesting
results, as you can see. One of the coolest selection features is, select shortest path. If you select a face, edge, or vertex, then hold down CTRL
and select another one, the shortest path will be selected. Then down here we have
some additional features, like face stepping, that
means the selected faces will not really be connected,
but it will use the direct way to connect to the other
selected face, as you can see. Then we have topology
distance, which tries to make the selection with as
few steps as possible, and then we have fill a region,
which fills the whole region between these two faces. Which by the way, you can also use directly using
a shortcut by holding down CTRL + SHIFT, and then left
click, select another face. This one is so cool,
you can select this one, CTRL + SHIFT, this one, and the
whole area will be selected. Same over here, for example. And also pretty cool, you can play around with the select and
deselect features down here. For example, let's put
the de-select to one, that means every second
face will be deselected. Sometimes it can be
useful to select random vertices, edges, or faces on your mesh. For that go to select and
click on select random. Now it will randomly
pick elements to select, down here, you can change the percentage, you can pick a random seed
and you can even change it from select to de-select. That means if you have
everything selected, you can click on select random, and then it will
de-select random elements. And then you can use ALT
+ S to the deform this, and then this looks pretty ugly. I am in edge select mode,
let's select one of those blue edges here. Here.
I added the bevel weight To add a bevel to this edge
using the bevel modifier, we will learn more about this later. However, this edge has now
selected, and if I press SHIFT + G, I can open up
the select similar menu. And as you can see, I can now choose from different properties. For example, in this case,
bevel, then it will select all the other edges on this
mesh with the same property. If we change over to a face
selection or vertex selection, and then if I press SHIFT + G you can see, we have different
properties to choose from. For example, the face normal,
then it will select all the other faces with the same normal, and down here in the operator
panel, I can also change the threshold, when I increase this value it will also select other faces which has a quite similar normal, but it's not exactly the
same as the selected face. By the way, in object mode,
this works quite similar. Select an object, hit SHIFT
+ G, and then you can pick different properties this object has, and then all the other
objects with the same property will be selected. For
example, I can click on type, then all mesh objects in
the scene will be selected as you can see. (enchanting music) Since Blender 2.8, it is possible to edit multiple architects at the same time. Simply select multiple objects, hit TAB to enter edit mode,
and now, as you can see, we can work on all the different objects. However, it is not possible, for example, to connect two different
objects by pressing F, this just doesn't work. If
you wanna change something in the object related settings down here in the properties editor,
if I, for example, go to the modifiers, here you
will only see the settings of the object with an
active selected element. So for example, if I
select multiple faces here, the highlighted one is the active face. And if I change the active
face up here, you can see how the modifiers are changing, because these are the
modifiers of this object. If I select one face, the
active face over here, you can see the modifiers over here. So just take care when
you change something here in the settings that the active element is on the right object. If you wanna connect two
vertices across an existing face, never use the shortcut, F
because this will just generate an edge lying on top of
a face, as you can see, I can still select the whole face here. Instead, use a shortcut,
J to add an actual cut from one Vertex to the other. One cool side note, this also works if your selected vertices are lying on completely different
places on the mesh. As soon as you press,
J it will create a cut through the whole mesh
with the shortest path from the first to the second Vertex. So now let's add a loop cut
over here, and later on, I realize that I wanna
move it down a little bit. I could try to use G move it down, then scale it a little bit, but this is certainly not the way to go, because we are deforming the surface. There's a better way to do
it, by sliding the edges or vertices along the existing
surface by pressing double G. Now I can slide it up
and down, as you can see, if you have an edge selected,
which is on an open mesh, as you can see here,
and if I press double G, you can see by default, I can't go further than the original mesh was. However, I can either press
and hold ALT to extend this, or simply press C to keep
this enabled all the time. So you can extend the
mesh without extruding or anything like this. Let's add two loop cuts over
here, and both are selected, now let's press double G and
slide this. And as you can see, since the faces, these
edge loops sliding along are different in size,
they don't move evenly. For example, if I wanna
move them the same distance, and for that, you can
press E, and now both are moving evenly, and if
you wanna flip the direction, you can press F. So it flipped
to the other side of the mesh it is sliding along. Let's select this top loop
here, and when you press M, you can open up the merge
menu and you can either merge at first selected, last selected,
center and down like this Let's click on collapse to
merge all these vertices. Let's select this loop once
again, press E, right click. So it is extruded, but now the geometry lies above each other, so we
get some glitches and errors. And in order to fix this, you
can also use the merge menu, select everything, press M,
and click on merge by distance. Then down here, you can
change the merge distance, and down here, you can see how
many vertices were removed. So if you wanna merge all the vertices which lie pretty close to each other, you can increase the merge distance. And if you overdo it, you get some abstract art, pretty nice. Let's select the whole engine here, SHIFT + D, duplicate this,
press G, Z move it to the top and rotate this 90 degrees.
And now I wanna connect these two pieces here.
And for that, I can enable auto merge vertices up here. If you don't have this
tool setting spot up here, click on view and enable tool settings. Now, when vertices lie
pretty close to each other, they will be merged automatically. So I press G, C move it up a little bit so that the two loops in the
center lie above each other, left click, and now, as you
can see, they are merged. Also pretty cool, if you
select the whole loop here, you can press double G
for the slide option. And if I slide it up here, left click, it will be merged with
the other loop here. In addition, you can also enable
snapping with vertex snap, for example, and then snap
vertices on to each other, and they will be merged automatically. When you wanna remove an
edge or vertex or a face from your mesh without
leaving a hole in the surface, you can use the Dissolve options. So here, I selected one edge
loop, then you can press X, and then as you can see,
you can dissolve vertices edges or faces. In this
case, I dissolved the edges and they are gone, and
the mesh stays intact. When you have the edge
selection enabled up here, let's select a few loop cuts. Then I can simply press CTLR
+ X to dissolve these edges. And this is perfect if
you wanna quickly remove unnecessary loops from
your mesh, for example. There's another cool option, here, we can see this
perfect looking face, however, it's not perfect,
it has a lot of weird cuts. In order to get rid of these weird cuts, simply select everything, press X, and then click on limited dissolve. This will remove all the
unnecessary edges and vertices from your mesh, so that the
volume or the form of the mesh still stays intact. Sometimes
this works pretty well. However, in some cases, as over here, if I select everything,
press X, Limited Dissolve, this doesn't work
perfectly as you can see, since it removes some of the
edges which we still wanna have Down here, you can change
the angle if you like to dissolve even more stuff. And then again, we have
some nice abstract art. When you're in edit mode
and have something selected, you can simply hold down CTRL
and right click somewhere to extrude to your mouse
position, which is pretty amazing, and which can be useful
to share some love. Did you know that you
can mirror in edit mode without using a mirror modifier? Let's join these two objects together with CTRL + J, and very
important, now you can see the origin is over here, but
it has to be in the center. So right-click, set
origin, origin to geometry. Now it's in the center here,
the object is symmetrical, and now if I go to edit mode, up here, I can enable mirroring. To
know what X is to mirror, up here, change to the
local transform orientation and enable the move
tool, go to object mode, and now you can see the green axis is the one I wanna mirror it's
Y, so let's enable Y up here. And now, if I change
something on the one side, it will automatically
change on the other side. However, this will only work
with the existing geometry. If, for example, I start to
extrude something over here, this won't work. As you
can see, this will deform the other side right now, but
this won't extrude anything. So this is only useful if
you wanna quickly change the shape of an object
with existing geometry and mirror this stuff to the other side. Let's add a loop cut over
here, and now I realize that I wanna rotate this a little bit more to match this loop down here. However, if I now press R, to rotate this, you can see that we will
deform the geometry. And in order to achieve this
without deforming the geometry, we can use this nice sheer tool. Now we can click on one of those axes and kind of rotate this
loop here without affecting the shape of the underlying geometry. Let's enable the move tool, and up here in the transform orientations
menu, let's check normal. Now we can select faces and it
gives more of the move tool, will change its position
according to the normal here. Now, I can move this like
this. This is pretty cool, but it involves a lot of
steps. There's a way to do this even faster without
changing anything over here. And this is by using
the shrink, fatten tool, which you can enable by pressing ALT + S, and then you
have the same effect. This also can be used to make
things thicker or thinner, as you can see, or over
here to make this bigger, maybe this one a little bit
bigger, or let's make this one here a little bit wider, ALT + S. And as mentioned, with ALT +
S as you can also make things thicker or thinner, which is super useful. So if you wanna close an
open hole in your mesh, you can simply select all the
edges around it and press F. However, then you just have one big ngon, but in some cases you wanna
have a nice quad mesh. In order to achieve this,
select the whole loop, make sure that the vertices
around the open hole have an even number, and then press CTRL + F,
and click on Grid Fill. Then this open hole will be
filled with a nice grid of quads Down here in the operator
panel, you can change the spin to better fit your mesh
and change the offset, which basically rotates the whole thing. Beveling is not only possible
using a bevel modifier, we can also do a directly in edit mode. Simply select an edge or multiple edges and press CTRL + B to bevel this. When scrolling the mouse wheel, you can add segments
here to make it smoother. After confirming this, down
here in the operator panel, you can change all the settings,
you can change the offset, as you can see, the segments,
the profile if you like, and you can even set
this to be vertex only. This adds a pretty cool
effect, let's press CTRL + T to triangulate this.
There's even a shortcut to bevel vertices directly. Simply select a bunch of vertices and press CTRL + SHIFT + B,
and then we can extrude them. Pretty interesting. To add thickness to an object, you can either add the solidify modifier, or you go to edit mode, select
everything, press CTRL + F, and here you can also solidify the faces. Down here, you can change
the thickness and make sure when you go into the negative
direction to select everything press SHIFT + N to recalculate the normals so that you don't get any shading issues. Well, that's a thick note. Same as for bevel and solidify, you can even use Boolean
operations directly in edit mode. Simply switch over to edit
mode, add a mesh element here, maybe this cube here, move
it where you wanna have it, then make sure that the
whole thing is selected. If not, hover your mouse
above this and press L, then the whole connected
part will be selected and then simply press CTRL + F and click on intersect Boolean.
Then this will be cut off, as you can see, and down
here you can even change the Boolean from difference
to intersect or to union, If you wanna merge suppose objects. okay, this trick does
not work all the time, but in some cases, this
can be quite useful. Sometimes you have some
open holes in your mesh and you quickly wanna close
them. One way to do it is to simply select
everything and press F. Then all the open holes will be closed, however, then you also get
some of these ngons here. Let's undo this. However, there's a more
elegant way to do this. For that makes sure that
edge selection is enabled, then go to select, select all by traits, and click on None Manifold. Now, as you can see, it will
select all the open holes, and now you can press
F to fill these holes, then CTRL + T to triangulate,
and then press ALT + J to convert the tris into quads.
It involves a few more steps but in this case here, you can
see this worked quite well. However, in some other
cases, this doesn't. Up here you probably would
use the grid fill option, which I showed you earlier. The knife tool by pressing
K, is a great tool to add additional geometry to your mesh. However, by default, as
you can see it only cuts on the direct surface, what we can see. So it will not cut through the mesh. However, the knife tool has the ability to cut through the mesh. Let's
take a look from the side, press K, and then down
below in the info bar, you can see a lot of additional shortcuts you can press to turn things on and off. For example, you can press Z to enable the cut-through feature,
and we can press C to enable the angle constraint, so I can make a cut
here, and as you can see, this is constrained to certain angles. Now I can make a cut, and with E, I can even start a new cut
without leaving the knife tool. Let's do it like this and then
hit enter to confirm the cuts And as you can see, this now
cut it through the whole mesh. Let's hit SHIFT + A, add
a mesh, a new circle here, down here in the operator
panel set the vertices to eight and the radius to something like five. Then let's take a look from
the side, move this up here, rotate this 90 degrees. Let's
take a look from the front, and now we wanna project this
circle onto the other mesh. Make sure that the circle is selected and then SHIFT, select the
other mesh, TAB into edit mode, and then simply go to mesh
and click on knife project. Now, from our perspective, this circle was projected
onto the other mesh, as you can see, so it's
really from our perspective. If I click on this again,
you can see it will project from our perspective. Let's undo this. Let's click on this again, by default, it will just cut on
the visible faces here, but we can also enable a cut through, and then this will also
appear on the other side as you can see. Let's take
a look from the front again, let's click on cut-through.
Take care when you click on this the cut will be done
again. So if you are here and click on cut-through
something like this will happen. So, let's disable this, now
we can delete the circle here, we don't need it anymore. And then we can quickly fix the mesh, let's add a new loop cut over here, let's press J to connect these two, then let's enable auto
merge as shown before, and then the edge slide function, which I also showed you before
to merge close lying geometry then let's deleted the faces
here, and then we can select this one here, extrude and
scale, along the Y axis, and use a bevel function
to edit bevel here. And then let's enable
the subsurf modifier, and look at that. (vocalizes) You there, drink more water. You can see this one mesh
consists out of two parts, and now I wanna connect these two parts. Let's ALT left click, and
then SHIFT + ALT, left click, select these two loops here. Important, both loops needs
to have the same vertex count, and then we can press
CTRL + E and click on bridge edge loops. And now you
can see this was connected, And down here in the
operator panel, you can add, for example, some cuts,
or you can twist this, change the smoothness
over here or the profile. Which can result in some
pretty interesting things. Here is another cool way on how to use the bridge edge loops tool. Here I have this cylindrical shape, and I have this circle
on top and on the bottom, and I wanna create a simple hole here. So I don't wanna remove
the faces and then manually close the open mesh. Instead,
you can simply select both spaces here with the
same amount of vertices, and then press CTRL + E
to open up the edge menu and click on bridge edge loops. And as you can see, this
creates the hole for us. This object here is selected
and it has still the flat shading enabled, and to make
the surface look more smooth, right click and click on shade smooth. Now everything looks way better. However, on these sharp edges
here, this looks pretty ugly. in order to solve this, we
can go to the object data tab and under normals, enable auto smooth. And then you can see some of
the edges will be displayed as a sharp edge, and this can be defined with this angle here, which
defines the maximum value between face normals, which
are considered as smooth. So for example, here we
have a 90 degree angle, and if I go over 90 degrees,
you can see that this here won't be considered as sharp anymore. So you can play around with
this angle until everything fits but sometimes you don't
get the result you want. And in this case, you can go to edit mode, simply select one or multiple edges, CTRL + E, and then click on mark sharp. And then this was marked
as a sharp edge as well. However, this custom
sharp edges will not work if auto smooth is disabled,
and if you only wanna use custom sharp edges, and the whole mesh should not be affected by this angle here, simply crank it up to 180 degrees, and then you can go to edit
mode and only select the edges you want to be considered as sharp edges. By the way, if you wanna
remove a sharp edge, simply select it, press CTRL
+ E and click on clear sharp. And here with this auto smooth
feature you can also make ugly cylinder look awesome. Sometimes your object consists
out of multiple parts, like here in edit mode I can, with ALT, select the underlying connected mesh, and if I move it around, you can see these are different parts. But
sometimes you wanna work on one of those parts
without separating things, so that you can better access
each individual element. However, here in edit mode,
you can also hide elements. So let's select this one here with L, then I press CTRL + I
to invert the selection, and then I simply press H. Then the other two objects are hidden, then I can do whatever
changes I wanted to do here on this object and with ALT + H, I can unhide the stuff. One note here, sometimes when you hide
stuff in edit mode, you might forget that
you have hidden this, and then when you're in object
mode, you can see everything, but when you TAB to edit mode,
suddenly this disappears. And if this is the case, most of the time, you simply need to press
ALT + H to unhide the stuff. As additional note, hiding with
H, and unhiding with ALT + H also works in object mode. Let's select these faces
here, and you probably know, the inset face tool, you
either find over here or by pressing, I. However,
what you maybe don't know is when you take a look
on these overlays up here, that you can press a bunch
of additional shortcuts. For example, CTRL to move it
in or out, you can press O, to outset the face, or you can press, I, to use the individual faces here. Then let's delete these two faces, so the selected faces are
close to an open hole here. Now, if I inset the face again, we can also press the shortcut B, then there will be no inset
on the edge with an open hole And in this way, we can give
this robot a face he deserves. Sometimes you wanna create nice creases. For that, you usually
add multiple edge loops around one existing edge
loop, and then with ALT + S you can shrink fatten this. This works, however, this is
not the best way to do it. One other way to do this is
after selecting the edge loops, you can press CTRL + B to bevel this, and with the mouse wheel,
you can add multiple segments like one in the center, then
you can select both of them, ALT + S, scale them in and out. And there's even a third way to do this. let's select these two. Hit CTRL + SHIFT + R to use
offset edge slide feature, this creates two new edge
loops around the selected ones. And you can slide them
along the existing geometry, as you can see. However, the
distance is different here, according to the size of the
faces they are sliding on, but you can use additional shortcuts, as you can see up here,
for example, by pressing E to make them even, with
F you can flip them and with C or ALT you can clamp them, so you can go further than
just the existing geometry they are sliding on. Then
place them somewhere here, select the inner loops, press ALT + S, and then you have some nice creases. When you wanna edit something
in a more organic way, the proportional editing
feature here is quite useful. You can see when I grab one
vertex, I have this radius, which I can change with the
mouse wheel to dynamically change the shape of the object. We can even change the offset here, maybe to random, to
quickly deform everything. However, this feature is
sometimes not so intuitive since we always need to select
all the different things. What we can do instead, we
can go over to the sculpt mode and use the grab brush instead, which you can also enable by pressing G, and then with F, we can change the size. Let's disable X mirror
here, and then we can simply drag and drop the geometry, which is pretty cool to
quickly dynamically change what we have here.
Certainly you can also use all the other brushes
to do some crazy stuff with your existing geometry. This one object here consists
out of multiple mesh parts, If I go over to edit
mode, hover my mouse above one part here, press L, you can see all the connected
elements will be selected, and when I move it, you can
see this is not connected to the other pieces. And this object consists
out of multiple such pieces. And sometimes we wanna
separate all these different individual elements from one
object into multiple objects. You maybe know this feature
when something is selected here in edit mode, you can press
P and click on selection to separate the selected
elements into a new object. However, when you wanna do
this for all individual parts, this can take awhile. But luckily there's a fast way to do this, by simply pressing P, you
don't need to select anything in edit mode, and then
click on, By Loose Parts. And now all the different
elements here are separated into different objects. However, the origin, the
yellow dot down here, is still where it was originally. However, you can simply
select everything, right click and click on set origin,
origin to geometry. And now all the origins
are kind of in the center of these different elements. Sometimes you have
objects which are weirdly rotated in space, but if
I check the move tool, you can see neither the
global, nor the local transform orientation aligns with
the object rotation. And now let's go to edit
mode and let's select these faces here, and
I wanna move them along the existing surface. So
when I just try it manually, you can see everything gets deformed, and we destroy the whole mesh. However, the first
logical thing we would try is to use the normal
transform orientation. But as you can see in this
case, this doesn't work either. But there's a nice trick in combination with the normal transform orientation, which works like magic. Let's go over to the transform pivot point and change this to active element. This will set the pivot
point onto the last selected element, so the
highlighted face in this case. And now you can see the
transform orientation aligns to this specific phase. And in this case, this works like charm. And even cooler, you can even use a transform
orientation of faces which you don't wanna move. For example, I can select this one here, however, if I would move this now, this face will move along with the rest. But if I SHIFT select this
once again, this is deselected but it's still considered
as active element, and the pivot point is
still in this place here, which is super cool. Let's select this one here, for example, and move it along here. This active pivot point can
also be used to rotate stuff. Let's select this stuff up here, and with CTRL plus on the NUMBPAD let's grow the selection,
let's select one vertex here. Now, if I rotate, you can
see this active vertex will be used as pivot point
to rotate the selection. The same applies for scaling. For example, let's use the edge selection, let's move this edge down here, and if I now select multiple other edges, and this last one, this one here, I can simply press S for scaling, lock this along the X axis in this case, and hit zero on the NUMBPAD, ENTER, and now, as you can see, all
these other selected edges were scaled to the height
of these edge here. Same applies for faces, make sure that normal transform
orientation is enabled. Let's select multiple faces, then select one as active element, let's enable the move
tool to better see it. And now if I scale this
along the Z axis, press zero, everything is scaled to align
with this specific face. Pretty awesome. Let's select multiple faces here, which are not connected to each other. And if I now hit scale, for
example, you can see by default, everything scales together,
since up here, median point is enabled for the transform pivot point. However, if we change over
to individual origins, and if I now press, S,
you can see, I can scale each face individually. However, if there's a bigger area selected and all the faces are
connected to each other, this will be considered as one element when I scale rotate or extrude. This also works in object mode, if I select everything and
now press S for scaling, or R for rotation, you
can see it is now rotating around each individual origin. Let's enable X-ray, either
up here or press ALT + Z, so that we can see and
select through the mesh. Now, let's take a look from the front and select the upper part here. Now, up here , the
transformative point is set to a 3D cursor, and now
with SHIFT, right click, you can place the 3D cursor somewhere. And when I enable the move
tool up here, you can see that the transform gizmo is
now placed on the position of the 3D cursor. That means
if I now press R for rotation or S for scaling, it will use
the position of the 3D cursor. But take care, by default,
the 3D cursor will be placed on the surface, so when I hit scale, it will also scale to this position here. But this is especially cool if you quickly wanna rotate stuff. There's a nice tool in
Blender that lets you repeat the last action, but it will
only remember the very last action you did. However,
when you are duplicating, let's select this one here
with, L, and hit SHIFT + D, it will immediately go to the move tool. So after duplicating,
this is now duplicated, we are now in the move operation, and now I can lock this
along a certain axis, for example, Z, let's
move it up a little bit, and now let's confirm with left click. So that means the last action
was not only duplicating, but this also included moving. And now if I use a shortcut shift + R to repeat the last action,
you can see it will duplicate, and move it for this certain distance. This can be used to quickly
create some kind of array stuff, if you don't wanna use an
array modifier, for example. And this not only works in edit mode, this also works in object mode. Let's hit SHIFT + D, don't
confirm the position yet, move this along a certain
axis for example, like this, and then hit SHIFT + R to
repeat the last action. When you're working with
the Boolean modifier a lot, it can be quite time consuming always going to add modifiers, Boolean, then pick the Boolean object
and then work with this and then add the next object, add another Boolean modifier
and so on and so forth. And in this case, the bool
tool add on comes in handy, which has shipped with Blender, we just have to enable it
under edit preferences, search for bool, and then enable this. Now simply press, N, and here
you find the bool tool add on settings under the edit tab,
and here you have the typical Boolean operations plus
the slice function. And now all you need to do
is to move these two objects into each other, auto Boolean
will add the Boolean modifier, and then apply this immediately. So in this case, I select this one first, the Boolean object first, then the object where we wanna apply
the Boolean modifier on, and then we can either
click on difference, union, intersect or
slice. And as you can see, no modifiers will stay here,
we just have the finished mesh. However, when you wanna stay flexible, you can use the brush
Boolean options down here. So same workflow, select this
first, then the other one, and then click on difference, and then as you can see, on this object, Boolean modifier was applied. The cube over here will be set
to wire frame automatically so we can better see what's going on here. And certainly we can also do
this for multiple objects. So let's select these two,
and then this one here, and then let's click on
difference, for example, then you can see it creates
two Boolean modifiers, and over here, we can
also control everything; We can hide the Boolean objects, we can apply all modifiers, or
we can remove all modifiers. And down here, you can
control the settings for each of the Boolean modifiers, and you can also change
the order if you like, and even delete them. Another awesome modeling add
on which will make your life a lot easier is the loop tools add on. Go to edit, preferences, add ons, search for loop, and
then enable mesh loop tools. And then you also find it in edit mode when you press N, go to edit
and here you find loop tools. It has a lot of
functionalities, as you can see, and I don't wanna show you everything. One thing I use a lot, which
helped me in many situations, is the circle option. Just click this and it will turn everything
you select into a circle if it's possible. And each
feature as you can see has additional options, but these up here will only be applied when
you click this button again. If you wanna change this
on the existing circle, which you just created,
you can go down here into the operator panel and
change the values over here to make it fit your needs better. Now we can extrude this
and then let's also use the flatten function
over here, for example. Then let's add the mean bevel weight and let's also add this
to this loop over here, and then you can see we created this nice cylindrical shape very quickly, which is directly connected to the mesh, which is otherwise much harder to do. So check out all the other
features you have here, they can help you a lot
when modeling stuff. And here's another small,
but very cool modeling add on which can make your life
easier. Go to edit, preferences, add ons, search for F2, and enable this. This now gives us the option
to simply select one vertex in the corner, so we
have two edges connected and then press F, and this will
create a new face over here. Right click, and then it will jump back. In this case you can very
quickly close meshes, and this tool is also
very useful when it comes to a retopology for example. (enchanting music) When you move, rotate
and scale your object, there's a quick way to reset everything. You probably know there are shortcuts, G for moving, R for
rotating and S for scaling. And if you combine these
shortcuts with ALT, ALT + G, R and S, you can
reset the location rotation and scaling of the object. Let's enable the move tool here, and then we see this manipulator, this gizmo on the selected object. This can be pretty handy,
especially if you, up here, change the transform orientation to local, to see the individual local axis of all these different objects here. However, sometimes you wanna
use a different tool over here, or don't have the move tool enabled, but you still wanna see this gizmo, and this, you can turn always on if you click on this arrow
here under viewport gizmos, and then you can enable
move, rotate, or scale or all of them together, I
think move makes more sense. And up here, you can also
change the orientation, default values, orientation
we set up over here, as you can see. And
then no matter what tool you have selected over
here, it will always show the move manipulator
which can be quite useful. Sometimes the origin of
your object is out of place, and you want to change the
position because it affects rotation, for example, and scaling, and also in animating
the objects later on. In order to change this,
you can enable the move tool and up here under options,
you can enable origin. Now you can simply move the
origin wherever you want, you can even use the rotate
tool and all the shortcuts for transforming objects,
because it basically acts as if you were to transform an object, but in this case, you
just transform the origin. You can even combine it
with any snapping tool, for example, snap to edge
center, so it snaps to the center of an edge underneath the mouse cursor, and when you're done with
positioning your origin, you can simply disable
this option up here, so you can move the
whole object once again. Here I have this head object
and all this other objects are parented to the head.
Meaning when I move this, everything else moves along with it, but I can still move each
individual child object on its own However, now I realized
that the parent object, the head here is moved too far downwards. Now I wanna move it up without
moving all the child objects, which is not possible right
now, in order to do that, you have to go to options up
here and click on parents. This means if I press G and
Z, I now can move the parent without affecting the children.
so I can move it up a bit until it fits, and then I
simply disable this option here and now the parent works as expected. Here I want to change the
distance between these two objects but I don't wanna move this one first. Remember how many
centimeters I've moved this, and then this one, maybe we
have even more objects selected. This can take some time. However, there's a quick way to do this, select both objects go up here
to options, enable location. And now I simply press S for
scaling, but in this case, it won't scale the objects, it
will just change the position So I can easily change the distance between these two objects.
This, by the way also works if you quickly wanna explode your mesh. Here, I have this little
bolt object, very important. I have local transform
orientation enabled to see the local axis and the Z
axis is pointing upwards. If this is not the case with your object, press CTRL + A and apply the rotation. Then the origin is moved
a little bit upward, so it's not completely on the lower end, but it should be set pretty
low. Now enable snapping, or you can also hold down CTRL
to temporarily enable this, which I will do, and then
let's enable face snapping. What this does, when I know hold down CTRL and move the object, It
will snap to the faces. But you can see the
rotation will not align, so let's also enable,
align rotation to target, which is already better,
but still acts a bit weird as you can see, and to fix that, click up here and enable
project individual elements. And now if I hit G to move it and CTRL to temporarily enable snapping, you can see it will perfectly
snap to the surface. And if I enable this all the time, I can simply SHIFT + D, duplicate stuff, and then I can quickly add all
these bolts to the surface. So here I still have
face snapping enabled, and I have this bolt selected, which I showed you in the previous tip. And when I now duplicate the
same object all over the place, certainly the blend file will get bigger because we add more, more data. However, you can also duplicate an object with ALT + D, this will
create a linked duplicate, as you can see down here. So that means we have
two different objects here in object mode, but
when I switch to edit mode, both elements will use the same mesh. Let's take a look in here in the outliner, we can see this is bolt
number five, and this is bolt, and if I open this up, this one is using the mesh cylinder 005, and
this one here, the same. If I click on this and make one change on one of these objects, the
other one will change as well. One additional info here,
modifiers won't be linked. That means if I have some modifiers here, I can change them individually
on all these objects, which can also help to create
variations of the same object. And, if I disable all the
modifiers for all these objects and TAB to edit mode, then
we can also see the changes on the other objects in real time. So ALT + D, you can simply duplicate them, and now all the objects
will change at once. This is perfect if you
have the same object all over the place. And then if you wanna
make quick adjustments, this works perfectly fine. Coming back to linked data as
discussed in the previous tip, what if you forgot to hit
ALT + D, and pressed SHIFT+D a few times, and then realizing, okay, all these meshes are
not linked to each other. How can we change this? Simply select all the objects
and as the last object, the one from which you
want to link the mesh to all the other ones, and simply hit CTLR + L and click on
object data. Now, the mesh from this object was linked
to all the other ones here. So if I change something
on one of these objects, now it will affect all the others. - So our robot here is in a
weird position, weirdly rotated, maybe it's even animated.
And now we realize, okay, we wanna make a change on
the head because this robot has no nose and no mouth.
However, editing something, which is weirdly rotated is
always a bit inconvenient. And I rather would move it back
into the center of my scene and rotate it straight, so that
changing it is much easier. However, when I now move this
out of the position here, place it in the center,
make all the changes, and then I would probably have
a hard time putting it back into the right spot.
However, what we can do, we can make use of linked duplicate. So let's ALT + D, duplicate
this, press, ALT + R, ALT + G to reset the rotation and position. Now let's make the changes here. He needs a little nose and let's give him a little smiling face. And now
when I go back to object mode all those changes I made
over here are now also done over here on this original object. That means we can simply
delete the duplicate and all the changes here, stay intact. And now our robot can smile again. So now you use some of the previous tips and positioned all these
bolts you on different spots, with the snapping and the linked
data, but then you realize all of these bolts have
the exact same rotation, and now we want to randomize the rotation. For that, go to object, transform and click on randomize transform. Now down here in the operator
panel, we can change this. We can, on the one hand
change their location, we can randomize the
rotation, which we wanna do, in this case, the Y
rotation, as you can see, but we can even scale
all the objects randomly or click on even scale,
if you just wanna change the overall size of an object. (vocalizes) Pretty cool, but in this
case, scaling makes no sense. So let's just change the Y
rotation, and now all these bolts are rotated a bit differently. So we have two objects here
weirdly rotated in space, and now I wanna copy the
location and rotation of this object, to this object. So that both objects align
exactly on top of each other. For doing that, simply
select the one first, where you wanna copy the information to, and then, SHIFT select the
object where you wanna copy the information from.
Make sure that with N, the sidebars open, under item,
you find the transform panel and then simply right
click on the location, and then you can either
copy the single information from, for example, the Y
axis to the selected object or copy all which I use in this
case. Copy all to select it, and then it copies the
position and then right click on rotation, copy all to select it. And now you can see this
object, copy the location and the rotation of this object. Certainly when I enable
local transform orientation, it's important that the
local transform orientation is correct. And to make it
clear for this operation, it will use the origin
of the object and copies the coordinates of this to the
origin of the other object. (enchanting music) When working with modifiers
that can be quite time consuming to always go to the modifier
tab, click on, add modifier and search for the specific modifier. There's only one shortcut
I know for the modifiers, which is CTRL plus any
number on the keyboard to add a subsurf modifier with a specific amount of subdivisions. However, there are some other modifiers which we are using a lot. For
example, the bevel modifier, the mirror modifier, solidify
modifier, you name it. And indeed you can add
a shortcut to these, right click and click on assign shortcut. However, since Blender is
using so many shortcuts, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this because we might mess up other shortcuts, but we can add these to
the quick favorites menu. So simply click on that, let's
also add the mirror modifier and the bevel modifier,
and now all you need to do is press Q and then you can
simply use the mirror modifier and the bevel modifier, and of course you can change
any settings over here. If you wanna remove anything
from the quick favorites menu, press Q and then right click, remove from quick favorites menu, and then next time you open this menu, these entries are gone. And
of course you cannot only add modifiers to this quick favorite menu, you can also add any other function. For example, the randomized transform. So this is especially
useful for all the features which don't have any
shortcut assigned to them. Sometimes you wanna to
apply all the modifiers from different objects, but
you don't wanna go through them one by one and apply
each and every modifier. There are add-ons,
which allow you to apply all the modifiers. However,
there is a tool in Blender which has a different purpose
but also does the same. So simply select all the
objects where you wanna apply all the modifiers, go
to object, convert to, and click on, Mesh from
curve meter surf text. So these objects are mesh objects already, and not curve meter or text objects, but when you click on that
it will convert the mesh into a mesh basically.
And in this process, all the modifiers will be applied from all the selected objects, as you can see. So here, a few of these objects are using the subsurf modifier,
and now I wanna change the viewport subdivisions
for all of these objects. When I have these three selected and just change the subdivisions here, you can see that it will only change it for the active element, the
one with the bright outline, which I selected as the last object. So it's not automatically
changing the values for all selected objects.
However, if you hold down ALT and change a value, you can
see this will then affect all selected objects. This not only works for modifiers,
this works for basically all values these objects
share. So I can also select the location values, enter something here, and before I hit ENTER, I hold down ALT and then press ENTER, and
then this will be applied to all selected objects,
or I hold down ALT and simply change
something. And you can see that this will apply to
all selected objects. Sometimes you have set up a
stack of modifiers on one object and then you wanna duplicate
this modifiers to other objects to save some time. And
this you can easily do, first select all the
objects where you wanna copy the modifiers to, and then
with SHIFT select the one with the modifier, that
means this one is active now, this has the bright outline
and now simply press CTRL + L and click on modifiers. Now you can see, all the three objects are
using the exact same modifiers. So here I have a simple object still with flat shading
enabled and now let's add a bevel modifier. A bevel
modifier is always nice to add this beveled edges
and there the light reflects in this, so the whole thing
looks way more realistic. By default, now all edges from
the whole object are beveled. In my case, I set this to
weight, you will learn more about the limit method
in one of the next tips. And now let's right click
and click on shade smooth. But now you see that
everything looks kind of smooth and weird, so it doesn't feel right And there's a quick way to fix this. All you need to do is to
enable hardened normals in the bevel modifier settings. However, you get a warning
message down here that we also, in the object data tab
under normals have to enable auto smooth. And now all
this weird shading issues will be solved. As you can see, the flat surfaces will look flat and the curved surfaces will look curved. And when you change the offset a bit, you can get really nice
results as you can see. So here I have this very
simple cylindrical object, and now let's add the bevel modifier. Again, let's enable hardened
normals and auto smooth as shown in the previous tip. Now let's get back to
the modifier settings, Let's change the offset a little
bit so that it is smaller. And by default, as you
can see, the limit method is set to non, That means
every edge on the surface will get the bevel, which in
most cases is not what we want. So we can try to use angle,
which uses a certain angle to define where the
edges should be beveled. So that means the lower the angle, the more edges will be beveled
and the higher the angle, the less edges will be
beveled, as you can see. However, sometimes you don't
get all the edges beveled, which you want. For example,
I wanna have one beveled edge up here and maybe one on this edge. So what I would do instead, I would change this to be weight, that
means I can go to edit mode, select all the edges
or loops in this case, which I wanna have beveled, like this, and then up here in the
sidebar, press N to open this under item, we find the edge data. Make sure it's not the vertex data, and here we find the mean bevel weight. That means this we can
set from zero to one. One means it will use the
full 0.02 centimeters, which I've set up here. If I
set this, for example, to 0.5, it will only use 50% of this
and zero, certainly nothing. So you can define the
strength of the bevel modifier for each selected edge. So
you can also go in here, for example, and say, okay,
here I would want the effect to be not so strong. So
I make it a bit smaller, and on others, I wanna have it stronger. And now you can clearly
define which of those edges should be beveled and which not. Now let's have a look how
we can use multiple bevel modifiers to stay very
flexible while modeling. First of all, here in the object data tab, I have auto smooth enabled so
we can use the hardened normal feature from the bevel modifier later on. Then on the modifiers, I
added a quick mirror modifier, as you can see, to mirror
this shape to the other side. But this looks pretty harsh and edgy, now let's add some nice bevel modifiers. First of all, let's create
one, TAB to edit mode, let's select these two
edges over here, press N, set the mean bevel rate to one, and let's change the
limit method to weight. Now we added the bevel here on the side, let's add a bunch of segments
here and let's play around with offset until this looks nice. This already works pretty
well, now we wanna add a nice bevel edge on the side here. For that, let's add
another bevel modifier, and let's set this to angle first. Let's change the size, and
as you can see in this case, this works quite well since here we have these very sharp edges. However, now we would be
limited since we can't add any other bevel modifiers
using the angle method nor the weight method,
since the mean bevel weight is a global change which will
affect all the modifiers, which are set to weight. And similar to angle, this
is calculated automatically, according to the angle you set up here, so we don't have any fine control. However, we have a
fourth option over here, which is called a vertex group. That means we can define a
specific group of vertices on the mesh, which this
bevel modifier should affect. So that means, let's
select this stuff here, and then let's go down
to the object data tab, vertex groups, create a
new vertex group and assign all the selected vertices to this group. This does involve a lot of steps, so if you wanna make it
faster, let's remove this, and simply here after
selecting the vertices or edges in this case, press CTRL + G and then
assign to a new group, and then it creates a
new group and assign all the selected vertices
to this automatically. Now let's go over to the
modifiers once again, and down here, let's click into this field and choose the vertex
group we just set up. And as you can see, now this
edge over here is beveled, we can add a few segments if we like, and we can also enable hardened normals. Then we can play around with the offset, in this specific case, it also creates a bevel on
these edges, which I don't want. This happens because these two vertices were added to the vertex group,
and two vertices selected will result in one selected edge. So we have to separate these
two vertices basically, so let's add a loop cut over
here. The loop cut is selected, and then let's remove this
loop cut from the vertex group, and then you can see that
this looks perfectly fine. So, and in this way, you can add basically as many bevel modifiers as you like, assign them to different vertex groups, and then you are very
flexible since you can change any value on all the
different bevel modifiers. So here I have this
head model of the robot, let's right click shade
smooth, and as you can see, this looks pretty ugly and
the resolution is quite low. So let's add a subsurf
modifier with two subdivisions by pressing CTRL + 2. However, this leads to a very
smooth result. What we can do, we can switch over to edit
mode, select some edges, and then we have the mean
crease, when we increase this, this edge will be sharpened
when using the subsurf modifier. And to be honest, for years,
I thought that this option is totally useless because
when we switch over to object mode, we can see quite clearly this leads to ugly looking results. But since now we have a new
option in the bevel modifier, this option is actually useful.
So let's go to edit mode, let's select one of the
blue edges over here, where I already added
the mean bevel weight, which we discussed in
one of the previous tips and which we will make use of in a second. However, to all of these
blue edges, I also wanna add the mean crease. What I
can do, select this edge, press SHIFT + G, and we open
up the select similar menu and here I click on
bevel. So all the edges, where I added the mean bevel
weight will be selected, and now let's simply increase
the mean crease to one. Now all of these edges are sharp, but they look kinda ugly as mentioned. And to fix that, let's
simply add a bevel modifier, set the limit method to weight, which now makes use of the
custom mean bevel weight, which we added in edit mode, and now let's also
enable hardened normals. Make sure that in the object data tab, auto smooth is enabled.
And now, as you can see, all these ugly artifacts will be removed, and we have a crystal clear mesh with basically no weird stretching in it. And certainly you can
play around with offset of the bevel modifier,
and then you have this perfectly looking hard surface object. Using a bevel modifier is awesome, however, combining this
with a Boolean modifier can lead to problems. Let's press N, here, I have
the bool tool add on enabled, which comes with Blender.
Let's select this cube here, and then this robot head
with the bevel modifier on, and then use the brush Boolean
and click on difference. Now we have this Boolean object
and when we move it inside, you can see this will be
cut off the other mesh. The current setup is set that,
first, the bevel modifier will be calculated then the Boolean. That means the Boolean is
just cutting away the area of the bevel modifier. However, if we wanna have the
bevel modifier on the edges from the Boolean object,
we have to invert this. So let's move the Boolean first
and the bevel modifier after However, you can see that
when I move this around, the bevel modifier is
changing quite a bit. And this has to do with
vertices lying pretty close to each other. So the closer two vertices
on the whole mesh are lying, the smaller, the beveled edge will be, because we have clamp overlap selected. That means it prevents the
bevel modifier from overlapping, otherwise it would look like
this and we can have a lot of weird artifacts. So clamp overlap is
actually a good option, however, this can change the
bevel modifier quite a bit. So let's go to a point where
we don't see any bevel anymore. That means somewhere on the mesh, there are lying two
vertices so close together, maybe even overlapped so
that we don't see any bevel. However, there's a fairly new
modifier, let's add this one, it's called the weld modifier. And let's move this above the bevel, but below the Boolean modifier. That means the Boolean
is calculated first, then the weld modifier, and
then the bevel modifier. And all it does, is merging vertices, which are lying very close together. That means we can increase
the distance to merge all the vertices, which are
lying pretty close together. Take care however, if you overdo it, you can lose a lot of your
details as you can see. However, if you use very tiny values, close lying vertices will be merged, and then we get our nice beveled
edge back, as you can see. This, however does not solve
all your Boolean bevel problems but in many cases, this can
help a lot, as you can see. And now we have a Boolean with
a nice beveled edge over here Now, although the robot looks quite nice, this is still missing this
typical straight, safe high lines on the surface. For that,
let's add a simple cube, scale it down over to the side here, move it somewhere here,
scale it a bit wider, let's hit CTRL + A, to apply the scale, to avoid any issues with
modifiers and so on. And then with the bool tool enabled, which I showed you in
one of the previous tips, press N select this cube thing first, then the head of the robot,
and then under brush Boolean, click on difference. This
stuff we know already, you can see this is now
cutting into the mesh. However, if I now add
the solidify modifier to this cube here all the
faces will have thickness. And this thickness is
now cut into the mesh. And now we can play around
with that in edit mode. Let's make sure that this
front face, this lower face, and this face back here are deleted. Don't get confused because
right now the viewport display is set to bounce, we can set
this to wire to better see what's going on here, but
still be able to see through. And then let's simply select
these two top edges here, press CTRL + B and bevel
them. Let's add a few segments by scrolling the mouse wheel. You can certainly also do this
by adding a bevel modifier to this object if you wanna be
able to change this later on. And now this was cut
into the mesh over here, make sure that we set this
object to shade smooth, and also let's enable
auto smooth, just in case. Now we get this weird artifacts,
make sure that in this case the Boolean modifier is on
top of the bevel modifier. That means first we calculate
the subsurf modifier to get this nice, smooth surface, then the Boolean modifier to get the cut, and then the bevel modifier. As we also know from
previous tips, this Boolean is probably now are destroying
the mesh completely, and that's why we don't
get any nice bevels here. We can try to add a weld
modifier as shown before, move this above the bevel modifier, and this then merges
some of the bad geometry. We can try to emerge even more, and this is indeed helping a little bit. So let's try a value of 0.06,
and if this line is too thick for your taste, you can
always make it smaller by changing the thickness
of the solidify modifier. Now when you select both
objects and move them around, this can be quite slow as you can see. That means when you're
completely done with editing all the meshes and have
saved a backup of your file, I would recommend to
apply the subsurf modifier and the Boolean modifier,
and probably also the weld modifier. You can
apply the bevel modifier, but in this case, you don't
have to, then we can get rid of this object here, and then
we have this nice slice cut in our mesh, which makes the whole thing look way more beautiful. Let's imagine you have modeled
your object symmetrically using a mirror modifier, and
at some point you applied the mirror modifier. And then later you realize that
you need to change something on the mesh symmetrically.
However, the simple symmetry function up here is not enough
because it's only useful when you wanna change the existing mesh. But if you wanna add something
to the mesh it won't work. In this case, what you probably
would do then is to remove one half of the mesh, then
add the mirror modifier again. However, you don't have to do this. We do need to add the mirror modifier, but we don't need to delete
anything from the mesh. So let's simply move this up here, make sure that the right axis is mirrored, X axis is correct in this case, and now do any changes
you want, like adding these super realistic arms here. All in all this looks
okay. However, in reality, the mesh is just overlapping
here, as you can see. And in order to avoid this,
we can add the bisect feature, which basically cuts everything away, which is at the mirroring
axis here in the center. You can see this when I
enable this button here, this is what happens. If it's
mirroring the wrong side, you can click on this flip button and then everything is
fine. And now if you like, you can simply apply it, and
then you have a perfect mesh, no overlapping, no bad geometry. So you have modeled your object,
and now you want to mirror this to the other side
and full of excitement, you add the mirror modifier, and then something like this happens. The more modifier is using
the origin of the object as mirroring axis by default.
You could define a separate object as mirroring axis. However, this is not
what we want to do here, we wanna change the origin. And here we use a tip, which
I have showed you earlier. Simply go to options up
here, click on origins, and then you can simply move the origin, and this will also change
the mirroring axis here. This might be not like super precise, but this is like super fast, and when your object is
directly in the center, you can press N and then for example, change the X location to
zero, and then we make sure it's perfectly in the center here. Here's a quick and easy way
to create array pattern. Add a mesh, a cube, then
go to the object tab, viewport display and under
display as, click on wire. So this object will always
be displayed as a wire frame no matter what you have set up up here. Then let's hit SHIFT +
A and add a simple plane here in the center. Then
that's select the cube first, SHIFT, select the plane,
then press N, go to edit, and when you have the
bool tool add on enabled, which is shipped with Blender, just enable it in the preferences, we click on brush Boolean, intersect. All this does is adding
as simple Boolean modifier to this plane, using the
cube as Boolean object and with operation intersect
the plane will now always stay inside the volume of the cube. And the cube now acts as our boundary, that means we can add an array modifier. Let's increase the count to five, let's disable relative offset,
because relative will change the distance of the object
according to the shape, which we don't want. So let's disable this and use constant offset instead. Let's set the centimeters to
200, which are two meters, since this plane has an
edge length of two meters and also enable merge, that
means all the duplicates will be merged on the edges
where they meet each other. You can also play around
with the merge distance here if it's not merging perfectly. Then let's also copy the
array modifier once again and change the offset to the Y axis. So we have this big square,
now anything I change here will affect all the other
squares here as well. Now let's do a quick change,
let's scale this for example, then let's add some loop cuts here, maybe move them down a
bit, select everything, SHIFT + D, right-click, then scale this along
the Z axis negative one. Then let's rotate this 90
degrees, and then we can take this all together, scale this up a bit, so that it's pointing above
the edges of the cube. And if we like, we can
select all these edges here, and with CTRL + B, and
scrolling the mouse wheel, we add this smooth bevel.
Now back in object mode, you can see that it
cuts away all that stuff which is outside the cube.
However, all the edges of the duplicates are not
meeting at the right spot. So what we do here, we simply
apply the Boolean modifier. We can always re-edit
later on, if we like, since the cube still is in place, but then the mesh is cut here
and then we can simply select all the outer vertices here. Then let's enable proportional
editing so we can change this more smoothly when I
increase the radius here. And then I press S for
scaling, Z for the Z axis, and then type in zero, so
everything is flattened on the same area. And then
let's go back to object mode, shade, smooth, let's
add a solidify modifier and make this a bit
thicker. And if we like, we can also add a bevel
modifier with hardened normals and the normal set to auto smooth. Let's also change the
limit method to angle, so it looks a bit more
smooth, and now certainly we can play around with
all the modifiers here. For example, we can
increase the array count to change the size of the
pattern, and you can always go back to edit mode to change anything on this one specific object here, and this will affect all
the other duplicates here. And certainly in the end, you can also apply their array modifiers, certainly also all the other modifiers, and then you are able to edit
everything all together here, if you like. So yeah, go
crazy with this method. Let's have a look on how
we can quickly create a circular array. First
of all, here I have this very simple scaled cube. Let's delete the two outer
sides here, that's important, then let's add a bunch of
loop cuts here like this, maybe some here as well, and
some on the other side as well. And now we can go in
here and really go crazy with the shape. Let's
extrude this one here, let's push this one to the
inside, and let's also extrude this one here. Since we
want to add an array, I don't delete these faces here because they will be appearing
here on the other side. If I would delete them, we
would have some open holes. So let's add the array modifier
here, as you probably know, with this you can duplicate
the shape along a certain axis. When I press ALT + Z, you
can see that we can see these edges here, that means
these duplicates are not merged into each other. So let's enable merge, and now comes the magic. Let's add the simple deform modifier, which allows us to twist, bend,
taper and stretch objects. And in this case, we wanna
set this to bend, axis to Z, so it's using the Z axis to bend it around and let's set the angle
two or 360 degrees. Now you get the idea on how this works. When we now increase their
count of the array modifier, we can increase the size
of this circular shape. Also, let's right click shade smooth, let's enable auto smooth,
and the cool thing, now we can go in here and change anything on the shape we want, and
this will nicely affect the whole circle. One little
note here, you can see that the first and last
object is meeting each other and there's still this edge which is open. The first, last option
here on the array modifier is not working in this
case, so we have to add a simple weld modifier to
merge this last open edge. And of course we can add a bevel modifier, limit message set to angle, and let's also enable hardened normals, ALT + Z, scale this down
a bit and now you created an awesome circular shape,
and you are very flexible. By the way, if you wanna have
some fine tune on the size, you can go to edit
mode, select everything, press S for scaling, in this
case, scale it along the X axis and then, as you can
see, when I change this, it's also changing the size of the circle. And when holding down SHIFT, you can find you can
fine tune this nicely. And now let's thank our little
robot here with a nice crown for all of his hard work. In the last tip we
created an array object, which is deforming around a circle. However, sometimes you
wanna just duplicate objects around a circle without
them to be deformed. Here, we have this object
and now I want to place three other copies around the head here. In order to do this, first of all, let's go to the local
transform orientation and check the axis, you
can see this as rotated. So let's press CTRL + A
and apply the rotation so that this is pointing straight up. Then let's SHIFT + A, add
a simple empty object, in the object tab over here,
let's go to viewport display and enable in front. So it
always will be shown in front of all the other objects, which
makes it easier to select. Let's move this up, hit SHIFT + S and click on cursor to select it, to place the 3D cursor here.
Now let's select this object, right click and click on set
origin, origin to 3D cursor. It's important that the
empty object and the origin of this object are lying
exactly on top of each other. Then all we need to do,
let's add an array modifier to this object over here,
disable relative offset and enable object offset, and here let's pick the empty object. Now we wanna have a count of four, this number includes
also the original object. And then all we need to do
is to rotate the empty object in this case, 90 degrees
along there Z-axis. Now you can see these objects
were duplicated four times. The nice thing here is that we
are now completely flexible, and that means we can add more duplicates, we can change the rotation
if we like, to match the new number, and we can
even create spiral shapes, if we move the empty up and down, and scaling the empty, as you can see, will also affect all the duplicates. So this trick has many other applications, as you can imagine. Robot
tentacles, for example. Talking about robot tentacles,
now let's have a look at how I set up these
robot tentacles here, which are basically fully rigged
and super easy to control. So first of all, I have the local transform
orientation enabled, over here I have the move tool enabled, so I can see the local axis of the object, and here, I created this very
simple cylindrical object with a bunch of modifiers on it, subsurf modifier, and a bevel
modifier, nothing fancy. Now, in order to control
this tentacle arm, we need to hit SHIFT + A,
curve and add a busier curve. A path is also working, but
to have better fine control, I recommend to use a busier curve. Then we get this curved shape, in edit mode, select
everything, press S for scaling, let's choose the Y axis,
hit zero, and then enter. So we straightened the whole
curve here, as you can see, and now let's make sure
that one of these dots here, the center dot, is in the
center of our scene here, basically at the exact
same spot as the origin of this object here, that's important. Then let's keep this object here selected, then let's add an array
modifier. If it's not duplicating into the right direction,
make sure that you change this axis here, X, Y, and Z, depending on the local axis of the object. Then in order to make the
array automatically fit along the curve, simply change
the fit type to fit curve. Then let's click on this eyedropper, and choose this busier
curve. One little note here, when I go to edit mode of the curve, it always fits the lengths of the curve, but not the position of the curve. So if you wanna fit both, place a curve as I have described before. Now, in order to see the
curve through the object, let's go to the object tab over here, let's go down to viewport
display and enable in front, so it will always show up
in front of the objects. And now we need to tell
the array object to deform along the curve. For that,
let's go to the modifiers, add a curve modifier, and here
let's pick the curve as well. Now, if it's doing
something weird like this, make sure that you pick
the right axis, in my case, positive X, because the
red arrow is pointing in this direction, and
now if I go to edit mode, I can select this points
here and move them around. And as you can see, the
array will automatically fit the length of the curve,
I can also play around with these handles here, the size will change the curve here a bit, and if the resolution of the
curve is not high enough, go to the curve settings and increase the resolution preview U. However, the render U is set to zero, that means in random mode,
we have the highest amount of subdivisions anyway.
Now let's make sure that this is straight again,
let's select both points here, right click and click on the subdivide, so that we get a third point
here in between to have a bit more control.
However, in object mode, when we wanna animate this later on, nothing happens as you can see. So we need to add some
control objects for that. Simply select a point here in the center, press CTRL+H to add a hook and
click on hook to new object. Let's do the same thing for
all three vertices here, then in object mode, we
can now select these hooks, move them around, we can even scale them to change through the curve.
And then we have full control on our arm here. One note
here, you can see on one side, the curve is extending and
on the other side, it's not. If you wanna change the
side so that this side here is extending and this is not, simply go to the curve,
select everything, right click and click on switch directions. You can see all these little
arrows here on the curve, this is showing the
direction of the curve. And now, as you can see, it has
turned the other way around. For this robot, I just
changed the appearance of the empty objects, go
to the object data tab, and up here, you can change
it to anything you want, like a cube. And then I simply
parent this empty object to the hands with CTRL+P, and
now if I move the hands around this empty object is following
along as you can see. But I still can scale it separately. And with this super
efficient robot design, this robot is capable of
serving us a cup of water. Here we have three spheres,
they look kind of the same, but they are quite different. Over here we have the UV sphere, which we can add with SHIFT
+ A, mesh and then UV Sphere. However, when we add a
subsurf modifier, you can see we get this weird rippling
up here, which is caused by these triangles on this pole here. And strangely this is the sphere
object which is used mostly although we get this weird error up here, just imagine you wanna
use this as an eye ball for a character, let's say, and
you get this weird rippling, it just looks ugly. The second sphere we have
here is an icosphere, when you hit SHIFT + A
you can find it over here, which is a sphere made out of triangles. And although the shape is pretty nice, you can see when we
add a subsurf modifier, the surface is very uneven
and it also looks weird. And in addition, editing a mesh
with triangles is very hard, since you can't select any
loops here, as you can see. The third option we have
here, is not even a sphere, this is just a cube. However, when we take
a look at the surface, this looks nearly perfect depending on the subdivision
level of the subsurf modifier. All I did here, besides
the subsurf modifier, I added a cast modifier,
which you can find over here. Here, set the cast type to
sphere, and the factor to one, and then this will turn this
still cubish looking object into a perfect sphere. And
then you won't have any weird artifacts on the surface. When I apply all the
modifiers here, you can see even the topology is
very nice to work with. There's even a quicker
way to add a cube sphere. For that, we can enable we
can enable a free add on, go to edit, preferences,
add ons, search for extra, and then enable, add mesh extra objects. And then if you hit SHIFT + A, go to mesh, you can find this round
cube, which by default will add this cube. However,
up here, you can change this to quad sphere, and then
down here you can increase the subdivisions if you like. So we can give our robot
here perfectly round eyes. The stand I modeled
for the robot head here looks an extruded cylinder,
although it's not. Let's select this, go to
the modifiers and disable all the modifiers here. As you can see, this is a simple extruded
edge, nothing fancy here. And a simple edge combined
with some modifiers can make your modeling life easier. So let's enable all the modifiers,
I have a mirror modifier, a subsurf modifier to
smooth this out a bit and then comes the magic,
I added the skin modifier, which adds a mesh around an edge. Let's press, ALT + Z to
enable the x-ray up here. And now you can see, I can
easily edit this edge here and the shape follows. We can also select this stuff here, SHIFT
+ D, duplicate this, and you can even scale this by
selecting a bunch of vertices and press CTRL+A and then you
can really go crazy with that Let's enable clipping
for the mirror modifier, and then we can create this
weird looking skeleton thing down here, and in the end, I
added another subsurf modifier to smooth out the whole mesh. If it ever happens that the
skin modifier is not working, then all you need to do
is to select a vertex, go to the skin modifier settings and mark this vertex as a root. The skin modifier needs
a vertex marked as root in order to calculate the mesh. Here's a quick way to add
deformation to objects, which are using the subsurf modifier. Unless we are not using
the subsurf modifier, let's deleted and let's the
add multires modifier instead. Important, the multires
modifier can only be first in the modifier stack, so
this trick is not working if you're a subsurf
modifier was somewhere else, not in the first position.
Now hit, subdivide. and as you can see, it is
basically the exact same result as we have with a subsurf modifier. With the one difference,
that we now can switch over to sculpt mode, and now we
can sculpt on the subdivisions of this multires modifier. First of all, let's disable symmetry, and now let's add a few
bumps here and there. Maybe use the crease brush to add nother kind of damage here and there, and when you're done simply
go back to object mode and everything's working fine. And the cool thing is,
we've not even destroyed our base mesh here. If I
disable the multires modifier, everything is still in place. So now we wanna connect the
eyes with the head here, although I don't wanna
just move this in here, because maybe I want to change
something here on the edge and it should lay exactly on the surface. And we can quickly do this. First of all, let's go to edit mode, make
sure that this whole loop here on the edge is selected. Let's press CTRL + G to
assign this selection to a new Vertex group. You can
also do it manually down here in the object data tab,
under vertex groups, create a new vertex group
and then hit assign. Now let's go over to the modifier tab. You can see, we have a bunch
of modifier here already, the subsurf modifier, bevel
modifier, and a mirror modifier. Let's add the shrinkwrap modifier, make sure that this is above the bevel, and the in mirror modifier in this case, but below the subsurf modifier, because we wanna make
use of the subdivisions of the subsurf modifier. Then let's choose a target
where we wanna project this mesh on, let's use this
eyedropper, pick the head, now you can see the whole
mesh is now weirdly projected onto the other mesh, which
certainly can be useful in some cases. However, in this case, we don't wanna project the whole mesh, we just wanna project the vertex group. So let's click into vertex
group, choose a group, and now you can see
only this specific group is projected on the mesh, but
it still looks pretty ugly. And because of that, let's
change the mode to project, and in this case, since
when we go to the local axis of this object, this one here is a Z axis. So let's pick the Z axis,
and in this case, negative. Because it's like the opposite
side of where the blue arrow is pointing, and now you
can move this stuff around as you can see. Either in object
mode or even in edit mode, which is better in this case,
since the mesh is mirrored. And now look at that, this
is nicely projecting the mesh onto the other surface. And we can even create something
nice looking like this. And of course you can always
apply the modifier if you want. (enchanting music) There are different
ways to rename objects, you can either select
it here and then search it in the outliner, double click on this and simply rename it. However, if you have
a bunch of collections and a long list of objects,
this can be quite time consuming to find the right objects. So there's a quicker way to do this, simply hit F2, and then
you can rename your objects And another cool feature,
when it comes to renaming, for example, here, I have
a lot of bolt objects, let's select them all,
and then we can press CTRL + F2, and this opens
the batch rename menu. Here, make sure that you
pick the right data type, in this case, it's objects,
but as you can see, you can also rename a
whole bunch of other data. Than here choose either,
all selected objects or all, and then down here you
can also find and replace certain things which can
also be super useful, or just set the name, either
this should be a suffix, prefix or a new name. Let's call it
awesome bolt and hit okay. And now you can see all these
objects where were renamed, and if you don't like to use shortcuts, you can also find these
features under edit, rename active item, or batch rename. When working with complex objects, which consists out of many elements, it can be helpful to organize
each group of elements into separate collections. You can see I have a
main collection up here, for the robot which I can turn on and off, but I also created collections
for sub parts like the head, the gallon, nodes, the arms, you can see the arms
even have sub collections for the right and the left arm. And this can make working
with a complex scene, much easier since you can easily
turn off different things. For example, all the
bolts here to only see what you need to see in your scene, or maybe to try out
different things without all the rest in the way. You can easily create new
collections by clicking on this button here and
then double click on them to rename them. When you're working with
a bunch of collections and you add new objects to your scene. For example, this super
exciting cube thing here, which we wanna add on top of
this robot like this here, pretty nice. And now we wanna put this into one of our collections over here, but maybe you have, with
CTRL + SPACE full screen, your 3D viewport, and
you don't wanna go back and show the outliner. You can use a shortcut M,
to move this selected object or multiple selected objects
into these existing collections Or you can even put this into a new one, and then you can rename
this and hit, okay. And now if we go back, you can see that this new
collection was created inside the robot collection
with the cube inside, awesome. You maybe remember duplicating
something with ALT + D which creates a linked duplicate. That means if I change anything
on of those two objects, it will also affect the other. However, this is only
possible for single objects and not for a whole group
of objects unless... It is possible but not with
duplicating this with ALT + D but by creating instances of
our collections over here. As you can see, I have
the robot collection and now let's hit, SHIFT +
A go to collection instance, search for robot, click on
this, and then you can see it creates this kind of
new collection down here, which is, when I move this to the side, an instance of this
whole collection up here. If I look inside, you can
see nothing is in here, and if I select this one, I can't go into edit mode or anything. And you can also see this
on this brownish outline, and now if I change anything
over here in this collection, move something around, this
will be mirrored inside, of the instance collection.
That means I can move something here and who it will affect
the other one as well. And then you can create
the gazillion objects here, and this basically won't
affect the size of your scene because all it does, it's
taking the information of this robot and it just
displaying it multiple times. We can still, like change the
position of these instances and even scale and rotate
them independently. But everything else is just copied from the original collection here. So we can make the robot dance. (vocalizes) So instancing collections is pretty cool, and we can even use this to
make our modeling process easier First of all, let's disable
the charger stuff on the side. And now I wanna mirror
the whole collection of this cups holder to the other side. You can see, I have this
cups collection up here, maybe let's select these
bolts here, press M, move to collection, robot, and cups. So these bolts here are also
placed in the cups collection, and now all I need to do is
to hit SHIFT + A collections and click on cups, and
then we have an instance of this sub collection. And now let's press CTRL +
M for the mirroring function in this case, X axis and
mirror this to the other side. And now everything I do
on the one collection here on the objects of this
collection will also affect the other one. And certainly this doesn't have
to be placed like perfectly on the other side, you can
also move it up here if we like or make it a crazy rocket
launcher on the other side, and then it can shoot some nice rockets. There's a small problem when working with instancing collections. For example, let's move this
object a bit to the side, and this one here is placed
into the gallon collection over here. And if I know hit
SHIFT + A collection instance and click on gallon, it
will create the instance of this collection. However,
if I move this to the side, you can see if it will use
the center of our scene here to generate the origin of
this collection instance, which is, in some cases,
not really usable. However, we can change this
by selecting one object which is inside of the
original collection here, and then use the 3D cursor.
Let's go to edit mode, select this loop here, SHIFT
+ S cursor to selection and replace the 3D cursor here. And then when this
object is still selected, we can go to the object tab, collections, and here you can see
this object is assigned to the gallon collection.
And on the one hand, we could manually adjust
the position of the origin, this will then of course change the position of this instance. Or we click on this dropdown and then click on, set offset from cursor. Now you can see it uses the
position of this 3D cursor in context of this object, and
then repositions the origin of this new collection.
And now this collection is much better to handle, and
when we duplicate this around, maybe this are some Tris for our scene, this is now much easier to work with. But take care, as soon
as you change anything on the original object here,
this will certainly affect also all the instances. Parenting objects onto
each other is super useful. For example, I can select
this two objects here, and then SHIFT this one here, then hit CTRL + P, and
set the parent to object. That means if I know, move this around, the other two objects will follow, but they are still separate objects, which can be moved individually. Did you know that you can
also parent stuff directly inside the outliner over here? If not, I will show you how it works. Simply hold down SHIFT,
then select this gallon here and drag it on top of
the head, and that's it. Now these two objects are parented, and if you wanna remove the
parenting simply go inside here. Here, we can see the great water gallon. Hold down SHIFT, left click on this, move this somewhere else
on to this collection here, and then you can see the
info, drop to clear parent, and then the parent is
gone. So in this way, you can like pretty easily
parent a whole bunch of objects to other objects. (enchanting music) You know what makes robots look
much cooler, adding cables, and I mean, a lot of cables. First of all, hit SHIFT + A, go to curve, add some kind of curve, then
let's go to the curve settings and under geometry increase
the depths of the bevel. Let's use a value of
0.25, which I think adds a nice thickness over
here, and under the shape let's set the resolution
to 64, so it looks really nice and smooth. Now in edit mode, select everything and delete it. Yeah, don't worry. We will add a new one. So we stay in edit
mode, we just wanna work with a clean canvas here. Let's
go to the settings over here and down here you can see
projection depths as set to cursor With SHIFT, right-click, you
can position the 3D cursor and then at this position, the new curve will be added. Let's take a look from the front and now let's use this draw tool here. And now we can draw some nice cables. Now, certainly you can go in here and change anything you like if you feel that you don't got
the shape completely right, no problem at all, and of course you can with, L select a whole cable and with ALT+S you can scale them. Then with CTRL, NUMBPAD 7,
let's take a look from below, and then we can place these
cables in different spots, ALT + S to maybe make
them thicker or thinner, and then just duplicate them a few times. Maybe make them a bit
smaller, and as you can see this looks much better.
But now even cooler, let's go back to edit
mode and let's change the projection depth to surface. Now let's use the draw tool again, and right now you can see
the offset is set to zero. That means if I draw the curve, it will be placed on the surface, but the curve itself will
be placed on the surface, that means half of the
cable is inside the mesh. And if we set the offset to be one, it will be placed perfectly on
the surface, as you can see. And now we can go crazy, we
can draw cables everywhere on the surface and
create some crazy shapes. And certainly when you're
done, you can always go in here and change stuff, you
can delete vertices here, you can scale stuff up,
so in the end that it fits your needs nicely. And of course, we can use
this also to make him look a little bit more alive,
like these little eyebrows, or this nice, happy face. Oh, isn't this looking nice? I this final tip, I will
show you how to create these sticky notes, since you
will probably ask me anyway, how I created these, since
we can move them around and they will stick to the surface. First of all, hit SHIFT
+ A, create a new plane, move this a bit to the side, in edit mode, scale it smaller, right-click subdivide, and down here increases
subdivisions to four. Then let's enable the move tool and local transform orientation, press G and move everything down
here so that the origin of this object is in the
center of this top face here roughly, and it's important
that the Y axis is pointing to the top and the Z
axis is pointing upwards. Then let's enable proportional editing and use this sharp curve,
ALT, left click to select this loop here, move this up a little bit, scroll the mouse wheel
to define the bending off the sticky note,
then back in object mode, right click, shade smooth, then let's add the subsurf modifier
for a smoother surface, let's set this to two, and in edit mode, let's select all the outer edges here, press N , set the mean crease to one, so we have sharp outer
edges but the whole surface is smoothed out, and then let's
also add a solidify modifier make sure that the thickness
is pointing to the top here, and I wouldn't make it
too thick, so maybe 0.03. And in order to don't get
these ugly shading issues, let's also enable auto smooths down here. Now, nearly everything is
done already. If I go up here, enable snapping, face
snapping, and then enable these two options down
here. I simply press G, move it across the surface, maybe let's scale this a bit smaller, CTRL + A, apply the scale, and
then we can move them around, and it sticks to the
surface, at least kind of. Because when we take a closer look, these parts are not really
sticking to the surface. So let's fix that. For that, let's add the shrinkwrap modifier, let's move it completely to the top here, as target object, let's
pick the water gallon and make sure that we use a bit of offset. So it's like hovering above
the crown and a little bit, but we don't get this weird intersections. And from far away, we can't see it anyway and let's change the mode to project, and also enable negative,
which will result in a better projection on the surface. However, now the whole note
is projected on the surface, we only want to project the
top part to the surface. So what we do, let's go
over to vertex groups, create a new empty vertex group and put it into the shrinkwrap
modifier under vertex group. Now, since the vertex group is empty, no vertex will be projected
onto the other surface. And now let's hold down,
CTRL, move our mouse up into the top left corner and switch over to weight paint mode. And
now we can define the weight of this vertex group. That
means we can give each vertex, let's enable this one here, we can give each of these vertices here, a weight between zero and one. Right now, everything is dark
blue, that means it's zero, that means all the vertices
here will have no effect on the shrinkwrap modifier,
but as soon as I draw over these vertices here,
I increase the weight. And then you can see that
this will have an effect on this modifier. Up here you can change the
weight, the radius of the brush and the strength. So with
weight you define the maximum value and with strength
you define how much you wanna draw per stroke. So for example, if I set this
to be one and this to be 0.5, and then I paint with one
stroke, the full 0.5 weight, but if I paint over this,
I can't go over 0.5. If I set this to be one, I can go to one, and if I said this to be zero,
I can remove stuff basically. So now we just have to make
sure that we paint this in a way that this looks nice, because
if we make it too strong we get some weird bending in between here. So paint over this a bit
until you have a shape, which looks nice, and that's it basically. Now we can move this around, make sure that snapping
is enabled up here, and then this will stick to the surface if I just duplicate a few of them. And if you wanna switch
the object, duplicate one, go to the shrinkwrap modifier
and change the target object. So let's remove water gallon
and let's pick the head instead Now, if I move it down here to
the head, it will also work. When you get ugly results like this, you can increase the offset of
the shrinkwrap modifier a bit So you can place sticky notes
everywhere on the robot, so you will never forget any
of the tips you have learned in this video. That's it guys, and I
hope that some of the tips will help you in your
modeling work to speed up the whole process for you. Let me know in the comments section below, what was the best tip you
have learned from this video, I'm really eager to know. And if you have some other
awesome modeling tips, share them with us in the
comments section below because I also love to learn new stuff. If you like what we do and want
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beginning of this video. All the links you'll find down below in the video description. Guys, thanks so much for
watching and I will see you in the next video. Goodbye. (vocalizes) (enchanting music)
