14 Awesome Modeling Hacks in Blender

oh hi one zach here and in this video i will show you 14 awesome morning hex for blender which can be really useful so before we get started i want to thank my friend Lucas valsa for providing some of his cool modelling tricks for this video so the tips you see in this video are a mixture of mine and Lucas tips and Lucas is by the way an awesome artist check out his portfolio link in the video description also a huge thank you to 80 Brewers and let Alexandrov for supporting this video they just released a brand new hot surface modeling course for blender 100% blender and no external paid add-ons use their and I checked this course out and I'm really impressed how comprehensive this is it contains over 80 videos with a total running time of over 13 hours and it is splitted into two parts the first part is aimed for more beginners or for all the people which just want to learn all the tips and tricks and techniques everything you need to know about hot surface modeling and in the second big part they will show you how to create this awesome looking robot so if you ever dreamed of creating your own robots spaceships or other hard surface objects this is a must-have course so kudos to Etienne Claire for putting this awesome course together if you want to learn more check the link in the video description alright guys without further words let's get started heck number one quick heart surface modeling setup so here's my favorite hot surface setup because it's so easy to handle and your base geometry is super simple so just for your understanding we will use the subsurf modifier in general so let's add the subsurf modifier to this corner thing and let's subdivide this even higher and as you can see the mesh will be subdivided and we will have this wound a shape but for creating hot surface objects sometimes you want smooth and rounded shapes and sometimes you want more or less hard edges so for achieving hard edges you would probably go to edit mode and just add some loop cuts here and you can see the closer three of those edges here are together the sharper the edge will be but if you add a lot of loop cuts this can make modeling and handling your mesh much harder so there's the other method which makes this much easier and faster to handle let's take this cube here and for that we need the bevel modifier so let's add the bevel modifier and as you can see this one is babbling the edges so we basically have two loop cuts close to each other so if I now add the subsurf modifier and decrease the weights here you can see that we have a sharper edge here and if we add more segments which basically adds another loop cut here in the center it gets even sharper as you can see so we have this very nice geometry with only these two modifiers but right now if I for example at a look at here and edit this every edge on the object has the beveling which is not that nice because sometimes I want to create a smooth and rounder shape over here and for this let's limit the method to weight that means we have to define manually which edge should be beveled and which not so if weight is enabled we can switch to edit mode then press N and up here we have the edges dator don't confuse this with a vertice data because the name of the option is the same over here and now I can select edges and increase the bevel rate so the bevel a basically defines the percentage we want to use from the maximum widths we have set up over here so if I set this to 0.1 for example and up here I set this to 0.5 then we only use 50% of this value of meaning 0.05 for example so we can define the bevel widths for each edge here individually let's add this up here with one decrease this value here a bit let's enable the subsurf modifier and then you can see this is getting interesting if I for example now adhere the mean bevel weight and for example over here and maybe here as well then we have our interesting looking hearts of this object let's subdivide this even more and set the shading to smooth and then look at this this looks awesome but the original mesh is just this simple object here and we don't have any loop cuts flying around here and disturbing the editing because right now it's super easy to simply edit the shapes from the object so and we can drive this even further let's go to the third example here it's a simple cylinder and it doesn't have sickness but I don't want to add thickness in edit mode we can simply add the solidify modifier to add thickness over here then we use the bevel modifier with limit method to wait then let's select this up here set the mean bevel way to 1 and this down here then let's decrease the channel width here and let's add this subsurf modifier maybe add one more segments and now we have this very nice-looking hot surface object and now for example if I add some loop cuts over here I can change the shape and the thickness is always adjusting automatically and certainly we can also add holes here and then add the mean bevel weight and as you can see this is really fun to work with so and just to give you a practical example here is a rocket I built for client it looks pretty decent in terms of the resolution but if we are going over to scene and enable simplify and set the viewport to zero then all the subs of modifiers will be disabled and now you can see the original shape here all this stuff down here are just squares and rectangles as you can see also up here if we take a look at the hands super simple objects actually and if we enable all the subs of modifiers you can see these are pretty interesting shapes just created with a set up I just showed you egg number two limit modifiers through vertex groups so a vertex group is basically a group of vertices as you might have expected so if you go to object data vertex groups select a bunch of vertices click on the plus button and then hit a sign so all the vertices will be assigned in this group you can also remove them if you like and you can also select them or deselect them so we now have this vertex group of this ring up here now let's for example add solidify modifier add the thickness over here and now we can choose this vertex group up here that means we are limiting the effect of the modifier only to this vertices you can also invert this by clicking on this button and this is a pretty powerful tool actually if we go back to this rocket here let's take a look at the wiper over here and as you can see this is a simple but decent looking object but if we disable all the modifiers over here you can see this are actually just a few planes placed above each other and here we are using a vertex group to control the thickness of the solidify modifier so let's enable all the modifiers up here and let's remove the vertex group just for a second so this is what it would look original if I would just use the solidify ur as it is but now I want to control the thickness of all the individual paths over here let's switch to edit mode select everything and first of all pick all the vertices into one vertex group create a new group hit assign and let's go to the solidify modifier and here we have to add the group and now in order to change the thickness we have to change the weight of certain vertices so we can define how much the vertex group should affect the modifier so for example if I hit L above this object I only have this one square and now down here we see the weight value so let's set this to 0.5 and hit a sign now this vertices are only affecting the modifier 50% basically and in this way you can easily change for example the thickness or things and the cool thing is you not only can effect this in general you can also create this transition basically so if I for example select this four vertices here and then set this down to a lower value you can see we have this transition from thicker to thinner heck number three skin modifier modeling so there's one modifier I love because it's so simple and you can do some pretty cool things with this I'm talking about the skin modifier so let's and the skin modifier - this cube here and as you can see what it does it basically generates this geometry around the edges so if I go to edit mode and disable this button down here I can see all the edges I can move stuff around and you can see how this is changing also if I select edges here I can press ctrl-a to scale this so I can make the thicker or sooner also with single vertices here as you can see and if I add a subdivision modifier afterwards we have this rather complex shape so in for example I just can duplicate one edgy or shifty then you can see it can happen that the skin modifier doesn't have effect on this you have to select one vertice off the object and add this mark root this root vertex point and then you have a single edge with geometry and then you can just place it over here change the shape scale it with alt s you can also for example if you want to have a sharper ending here you can extrude this and put two vertices pretty close to each other and for hard surface modeling I feel this is really really useful to quickly create interesting looking shapes so if we take a look at my robot car from my artwork the journey you can see that I used this technique in some cases like for example over here if I take a look in edit mode you can see that I used the skin modifier over here plus an array modifier so actually I just this one edge here and then added the skin modifier and array modifier same thing with the cylinders over here and even for this larger thing over here I used simply the skin modifier technique also over here this thing was modeled with the skin modifier as you can see just a few edges and for example also over here for this thing neck number for multi-resolution modifier instead of subdivision surface modifier usually if you create such an object over here your model is in relatively low poly and then add a subdivision surface modifier and this is looking fine but for example if you want to add damage to this element if you now go to edit mode maybe enable proportional editing you can add damage but you are limited to the vertices you have so for example if I want to add this dent here it will be pretty big and doesn't look really interesting so what we can do instead here is to use a multi resolution modifier so let's add a multi grass modifier and subdivide this a few times and the cool thing right now is that we are able to sculpt on the subdivisions from this modifier this is not possible with a subdivision surface modifier so if I now switch to scope mode maybe use the standard sculpt wall brush here disable symmetry and then we can for example if I hold on control quickly add some damage over here and this is stored inside the multiverse modifier and if you want to have more details just subdivide this even higher and then you can add more interesting damage over here but this is also useful if you for example quickly want to add some folds to the closing of your character here for example as you can see I also used the multi ways modifier to quickly sculpt some nice folds into the clothing without modeling this in high details which would take four ever HEC number five safety formation in shape keys okay let's take a look at the creature once again let's say I have the best year and I want to add some deformations for example the armature deformation has caused some troubles on the clothing and some of the deformations I don't like so I can add shape keys to deform this without affecting the original mesh so certainly I could get into edit mode and change stuff around but yeah then I would affect original mesh so what what I can do I go to object data at a basic shape key here is the standard shape of this object stored and then I can add new shape keys and then I can go to edit mode for example let's enable proportional editing select a few vertices here and change the shape so I'm now changing the shape of the object without affecting the original mesh or the original shape so if I now hit back to object mode you can see this is disabled by default so we have to select the key and set the value to 1 and now you can see this is changing I have to change in my mesh but I can always go back to the original mesh by disabling this shape key or by removing this completely this only works for deformation not for adding new geometry so pretty nice also if you just want to test some deformation for example what if the ear is shaped a bit different let's add a new shape key here select it and change it a bit maybe like this here and then let's enable this then you can shake okay does it look good no it looks like crap so let's remove this shape key heck number 6 link measures for better editing so let's take a look at this cowboy creature again let's go to the layer with the gun here and now I want to edit this but right now this has this rotated position but I don't want to change this position but I only want to edit this part here and it's always easier if this part is in the for mirroring features and also if I just want to view it straight this is pretty hard to do if this has this rotated position over here so what we can do if I only want to edit on one part here I can press alt D to duplicate this but with all T this will be automatically linked to each other that means if I edit this mesh this one up here will be edited automatically as well so now I can press alt or alt G alt s maybe if I have scaled this a bit and now you can see this is perfectly lying here in the center and now I can easily edit certain parts let's do a few changes over here whatever just to do some weird changes and now let's take a look up here you can see all the changes were also done on this mesh over here so you don't have to move this part here then edit everything and then move it back over there because right now I can simply delete this part here and then I have the changes on this thing here saved HEC number seven keyframe original position so let's take a look at the gun again it's basically a similar situation then in the tip before but right now I don't just want to edit one part I want to edit the whole gun here but I want to somehow save this position up here so I parented all the parts of the gun to this one main part here as you can see all the other parts are simply children objects so what I can do is select this object here go to frame 1 for example press I and save location rotation and scaling now I have saved this position I want to have then I go to frame number two and now I press alt or LG old s press I and click on lock Road scale again now you can see I have saved this new position on key frame number two and if I now move to key frame number one I have the original position so now I just go to cue frame number two and start editing and now I'm not limited to one object I can also add stuff over here if I like and when I'm done with all the editing I can go back to key frame number one and then everything is back on the position where I want to have this and then I quickly switch to the dope sheet editor select all the keyframes with a press X delete key frames and then I can remove this and now all the changes are in place act number eight rotate origin so let's take a look at this robot car again and especially here on the robot legs and as you can see if I click on objects I have joined many of those objects together but let's imagine I want to animate and for example separate the piston here I can quickly do this press L and then P selection now I have this as separate object but as you can see the origin is somewhere here in the center also I have a mirror modifier on this I should apply this as well and maybe move one of the objects press P a selection and the origin is over here in the center certainly what I could do is to select some vertices then hit shift s cursor to selected and then I can go into the tool shelf edit set arch into 3d cursor then I have it in a right position but the rotation is still wrong what you would usually do probably is to go to edit mode rotate everything and then move it somewhere here to have the rotation somehow aligning properly but we want to have this a bit more precise so what we can do is to simply add a cube for example let's scale this down a bit then let's go to edit mode let's select this part your shifty aiyah quickly duplicate this press P selection so I can hide this with H so I have only this part here then let's quickly add a face over here and maybe let's disable the subsurf modifier for a while now I have a face and every face has a normal if I enable this this is this line which is 90 degrees to the face itself and this is the perfect alignment to the direction of this piston here so what we can do now is to select the QP R in object mode enable snapping face snapping and also align rotation with a snapping target so what we can do now is simply press G to move this around and as soon as it is above or surface as you can see it snaps to the surface so I can move it over here and if I make it a bit smaller you can see better and now aligns perfectly with this face here so the rotation is perfectly now what we still have to do is press shift s again selection to cover so that also the position is nice then let's remove this part here hold H so now what we can do let's go to wireframe for you you can see here is the cube so we can simply join this thing to the cube so I select this and shift the cube ctrl J and now if we take a look at the local view it has the same rotation as a cube what I would probably do first is to duplicate this once to save a snapping here so I have all the modifiers saved then I join those two things and then I select this thing then this thing with shift ctrl L and Link the modifiers so I will use the same modifiers over here on this object and then I can go to edit mode as you can see this cube thing here is still selected delete this and basically I now have the orientation from the cube on this object I know it's not the simple super quick and easy way but sometimes if you really want to have the perfect alignment of the rotation this is a nice workflow to do it make number 9 custom transform orientation so there are some preset transform orientations which you can use right now we have global selected so our manipulators always rotated along the global axis as you can see down here you can also switch with for example to local then you have the local axis of the objects or here you can see it pretty well now we see the local rotation of the object and then we have a few other ones as well but sometimes you need a custom orientation so that it is pointing in a particular direction you want to have it so let's get back to the legs here let's for example take this part here and now I don't want to remove anything and do the complex workflow I just showed you in the tip before but I just want to align my manipulator that it is pointing perfectly in this direction of this part here for example what I can do is simply go to edit mode look for a face which has this orientation so for example this one over here if there is no face you can certainly temporarily create a face which has the orientation and then press n go to transform orientation and simply hit the plus button and if I now go in here you have this new one which is called face you can also do it with edges and so on and now let's quickly go back to object mode and if I now go to face you can see this is aligning perfectly to the face normal of this face up here so let's add a new cube for example make this smaller and now you can see this transform orientation is aligned to this so I can move this along this axis here and you can also remove this transform orientation by simply clicking this X button here HEK number 10 change view to face normal ok let's use this leg part here once again and let's just say with the subsurf modifier applied there more modifier and now I want to add a knife project so let's for example create a plane here rotate this a bit and here for example the custom orientation would be nice again so let's quickly add one and now as you can see I can move this along here so I just have this few planes and there's this nice little tool which is called knife project that means I have one separate mesh and project the edges onto another one and this will happen from our view so if I look at this like this and then execute the operation it will be projected from our view onto the other mesh but in this case I want to have this perfectly aligned so what we can do is to change our view to the face normal of this selected face over here so importan select face selection and then hit shift numpad 7 now as you can see our view perfectly aligns to the selected face to show you this better I select this one here shift 7 and now as you can see this perfectly aligns so and now let's go back to object mode select this one then with shift this one over here switch to edit mode and then we can use this knife project and now perfectly straight from our view this was cut into the other mesh this is just one simple example there are many examples where you can make use of this shift numpad 7 phew heck number 11 optimize display with local view so let's imagine we want to work on this belt here but as you can see the creature is covering quite a lot of the area from the belt and this would make this a bit hard to edit so what we can do is press a slash on the numpad to switch to local view and start editing this so we can only see the selected objects then hit slash again to go back but the problem is if I now start to edit this over here and then go back it might happen that I added this so far that is intersecting with the body or the vest here so it would be cool to have both things to see one view with the creature and one view without and this is possible by simply splitting your view and one of them hit slash on the numpad and as you can see this is only affecting one viewport and now if I like and can go to edit mode and see what happens over there on the creature but at the same time I can freely navigate around here and see it from every angle and this makes editing much easier in hack number 12 convert hair particles to curves this one is a pretty cool trick I learned from Lucas valsa so if I add a particle system to this plane here switch the type to hair then we have this nice hair particles let's put this down to zero then we can switch over to particle edit mode press T and click on the add button and set the count down to 1 for example and then I can add single hair strands as you can see so let's add a few then let's go to their hair particle settings go to children's enable simple and then you can say how many you want to have let's keep it by 10 right now you can go back to it to particle edit mode and go to calm for example to move the hair particles around and if this is too rough in resolution you can increase the power steps here like this also for object mode display you can go to display and increase the steps if you like and then we can go back to the children's and for example at this radial increase the amplitude if you like so you can use this kink methods there's also the curl one to make something like this or the wave so just try around with different methods also you can add a braid which is looking also pretty funny right now so let's go with the radial here and increase the frequency bit and now let's go over to the modifiers and here we can convert this so let's click on this and now if I go to edit mode you can see this is a mesh now and if you hit old see you can convert this curve from mesh into a curve for example and then go over to the curve settings go to shape set the fill type to full and then under geometry can increase bevel depth and you can increase the resolution to make this route then let's set this to smooth shading and then you have as we would say in Germany the cobbles a lot and if you like you can go into edit mode press L a few times to basically select some random cables here and scare them with alt s so make them sooner then maybe with L select another few ones make them thicker and then you have this crazy-looking cables in edit mode you can select all this up here for example enable propose no editing and move them around if you want to edit them and as you can see the original hair particles are still there can disable them if you like look at this heck number 13 convert edges to curves for creating pipes so just in the tip before I showed you how to convert hair to curves but you can also convert edges to curves so for this I can for example add another cube here and then start to edit edges over here so for example let's select this one here and press control B to add a bevel then this one here for example rubella layers so basically I kept always one edge in my view and this is this one which is going here then over here and then over here so then I select this one edge here this one and I'm press ctrl I to invert the selection press X Delete and then we have this shape left so basically you can create whatever shape you like or select loops or whatever then go to object mode press Alt C and then we again convert this mesh or these edges into a curve curve from mesh and then same thing as before we can create a pipe out of this so let's do duplicate this to create another pipe here all des to scale is and certainly what you can do right now is press alt see again and convert this to a mesh if you like and then you have the option to I don't know like cut this here or extrude this if you like to add some more interesting shapes here and then certainly you could add a solidify modifier over here to add thickness set this to be smooth shading and maybe add edge split modifier to have sharp edges over here and then you can easily create some interesting looking pipes pretty quick and final hack number fourteen convert edges to curves for creating seams so in this case I don't mean seams for UV mapping I mean this seams here to add this nice seam on clothing to add this high-level detail to make this look much much better and so if you would turn this off this wouldn't look that interesting anymore and actually it's pretty easy to create them it took me I don't know like ten or fifteen minutes to create all the seams for all the clothing parts here so let me quickly show you how I did it so the bad thing here on this cloth is that the edges which I have here did not perfectly fit to this in areas where I want to edit this so what you certainly could do is select an edge if this is perfectly aligning with the seam line basically you can press shift e to duplicate this press P selection to separate this remove the solidify modifier and then convert this into a curve but if you have it like in my case that there is no perfect edge in edit mode which you can use you have to do it manually so what you can do is to simply add a new plane switch to edit mode press alt m to merge all the selected vertices into one vertex so I have one vertex left then I enable a snapping face and enable all these buttons over here and now if I move this over here it will snap to the geometry here so I can easily press e for extruding or simply control left click here to add this edge over here there we go also in this way and then all over the place then you can also shift E one vertex and then go on on different areas so something like this now I have three different lines let's move them to a empty layer let's enable the great floor for a second shift see - we Center the 3d cursor now let's set the origin of this object to the center here set origin origin to 3d cursor and then I go to edit mode press P and then separate by loose parts so everything which is not connected will be separated as separate object in object mode so P by loose parts now let's add QP R scale it pretty small and important the cube should be at the exact same position as the origin of these curves here which is down here so let's make it pretty simple scale it a bit at some loops maybe a bit bigger you can also add a bevel modifier whatever you like but certainly this is only a small detail so you don't need that high resolution let's add a way modifier and crease the X distance here a bit and then we can increase the count now all we need to do is to add a curve modifier so I notice I didn't convert them into a curve so I select all of them first all see again and then curve from mesh text click on this and now these are curves so this is important and now let's select this object down here and then we have the curve modifier on this and this one has the name zero eight one so let's just type in the weight one click on this and now you can see since they are lying on the exact same spot in terms of the origin now this is perfectly aligning here and then we can increase the array count then I simply duplicate this object not the curve the seams here then let's select this one it's called zero eight two so select one of those two here and change the name to this one here to crease account a bit can also shift and then left click and drag on this value to slightly change the distance to adjust the length of the curve and then let's duplicate this again and this curve is called zero eight zero let's change this over here and then certainly you have to adjust the count so and in this way you can easily add seams for example to your clothing and let's take a look at here this is what my final result looks like yeah guys this are my 14 tips for you hopefully they are useful in your projects if you want to learn even more tips check out my other video 17 tips to speed up modeling and blender I guess if you like this video you will like this other video as well also if you have some other cool hex for modeling in blender or if you know some ways to optimize the workflows I have showed you in this video let me know in the comments below yeah if you like what I'm doing hit the like button share this video subscribe to this channel and hit the bell I can to get notified for future videos and again a big thank you to 80 Brewers and Colette Alexandre for supporting this video check out their latest hard surface modeling course link in the video description hello guys thanks a lot for all your support see you in the next video goodbye oh one thing I forgot if you want to meet me in person or all the other cool blender guys I encourage you to join the blender conference 2018 in Amsterdam it will happen on October 25th to 27th I've been there five times already and it's always the highlight of the year to meet all the other blender people talk to them listen to nice parks and workshops so tickets are sold out pretty fast so hurry up if you want to join would be awesome to see you guys there check the link in the video description for more info thanks for watching guys goodbye

Channel: CG Boost

Views: 438,896

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender modeling tutorial, 3d modeling pro tips, 3d modeling, car modeling, creating wires in blender, hard surface modeling blender, hard surface course blender, robot modeling, hard surface, organic modeling blender, blender 2.79 tutorial, 3d, rendering, wires modeling, tutorial, blender modeling hacks, rotate origin blender, blender car crash, fast modeling in blender, quick modeling blender, pro modeling blender, creature modeling, character modeling

Id: UwgDXP9lG_I

Length: 38min 35sec (2315 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dnew]

The amount you know about Blender is astounding. I'd never keep all of this in my head.