20+ Styles of 3D Modeling in 20 Minutes

when someone stops you on the street and asks what is 3d modeling probably the first thing that comes to mind is a standard poly modeling tool set your bread-and-butter sub D workflow with extrusions in sets all that stuff and obviously there is so much more to 3d modeling than that and this video leads to an ambitious thing let's name 20 + styles of 3d modeling in under 25 minutes this tutorial is structured like this first we'll be talking about more popular model in paradigms and gradually we'll be moving towards very exotic stuff like neural networks and by the way in Gleb Alexandra here and this is one of the bonus videos from the hard surface modeling video course modeling paradigm number one for today's sculpting basically what we do is we treat the model like it's made of clay we use various tools and brushes to sculpt the overall shape and to speed up the process it's recommended to have a tablet once upon a time this modeling style was meant to be used to produce organic models but nowadays obviously we can sculpt pretty much anything including the hard surface models the subset of sculpting is sculpting with dynamic topology or digital clay or dynamic subdivision something along these lines in theory this makes the sculpting workflow more fluent because we no longer have to worry about poly count the geometry gets subdivided on-the-fly it's very cool for improvising the overall shape before doing rate apology for example okay and the next flavor of sculpting is sculpting with masks this style is characterized by using the standard sculpting tool set but also utilizing the masks which could be obtained from textures for example so in some sense it's a cross-section of 2d and 3d techniques in other words your 3d brushstrokes are being influenced by 2d image textures which is kind of cool of course the next one is sub D modeling your good old standard poly modeling tools used with subdivision surface modifier perhaps this is the most popular way to create form in 3d it could be characterized by manipulating low resolution cage model that's being subdivided by the subsurf modifier and blender for example to become the high resolution model it has a magical power of turning triangles and guns into quads and generally speaking this workflow is probably the first thing you learn when you learn blender or other software boolean operations boolean workflow means that you use the logical operations between two models like adding intersecting or carving one mesh from the other mesh and by using the simple operators you create incredibly complex meshes this is an incredibly powerful workflow especially when it comes to hard surface modeling it's widely used to create industrial design robots Shinri and other stuff like that metal balls metal balls are just balls that interact to produce a liquid like surface when you put two metal balls near each other they merge this is an incredibly fun way to generate form and you can tweak their resolution of the resulting mesh and for further detailing you can convert it to a regular mesh in ZBrush metal balls are called the spheres the underlying principle is the same it's a polygon ization of isosurfaces basically as if I know anything about it the next one drawing topology in orthographic projection when I use the knife tool in blender to draw the 2-dimensional outline of the topology this is basically using 2d approach 2d tools to produce 3d form in the end the other example of a similar technique is projecting of a set of splines on top of a 3-dimensional object or simply drawing the outline of a shape an orthographic projection for example side projection isn't just simple vertices after this stage usually comes the stage when you turn this 2d shapes into three-dimensional objects okay what's next shape extraction to describe this style let me say something like this when you have a scaffolding model very simple low palawan and you shrink wrap the high poly mesh on top of this low poly scaffolding you kind of extracting the geometry and adding the high-resolution details while maintaining the curvature of the original model and the other example of extracting shapes is of course rate apology for example here I activated the snapping to polygons and I'm drawing this set of vertices the new topology on top of the original mesh what you get in the end is the polygonal patch that follows the curvature of the first mesh in other words it's a byproduct of projecting one mesh on top of the other mesh splines there are so many modeling techniques that rely on splines for example here is a simple lofting of the spline to turn the Bezier curve into a renderable object you can add thickness to it and manipulate the thickness of each individual point of the spline ganache that looks like a maggots is it a good thing all right what else can we do with splines how about revolving the spline to create 3d surface in blender this is called the screw modifier it takes the spline and revolves it around the origin point this is a nice way of modeling 3d surfaces which have radial symmetry the other one is the curve modifier the idea behind this modifier is that you use this spline to deform an arbitrary mesh along the spline this modifier is usually used for modeling cables wires and other spline like objects so to speak okay the last modeling technique related to splines is skin modifier probably it's very similar to just adding thickness to spline and on the other hand the domain of this modeling technique is the same as in case of matter balls the idea is using splines for modeling and just skinning it to get a 3d mesh while retaining this spline skeleton and we also have NURBS non-uniform rational basis splines it's a mathematical model for representing 3d shapes what's important about it is that the shape is fully parametric unlike the mesh which is made of vertices edges and polygons NURBS shape is defined by splines and points and it's always perfectly smooth which is very cool for automotive design for example and for many other things the concept of using splines to represent the surface could be implemented with vertices as well it's not the same as nerves but has its own implications like for example you can build the outline of the mesh with vertices then use the grid fill command in blender to build a surface out of it so it's a decaffeinated alternative of nurbs in the absence of NURBS modeling tools or whatever ten vector graphics to 3d this is yet another hybrid workflow which involves 2d vector graphics for example we can create vector graphics in Inkscape or illustrator and import it into blender and so it becomes a set of splines and we can use our usual spline modeling tools to tweak it and this opens a broad range of possibilities of inter operation between 2d and 3d software I like the hybrid approaches like this 11 shadow box this is a pretty unique way to create 3d surfaces ZBrush documentation describes it as a tool which is able to create all kinds of 3d primitives based on the projection of shadows toward the center volume what that means is that you paint back rights and bottom projections and they kind of intersect to produce this 3d mesh the next method of 3d shape creation is displacement in blender you can use the displace modifier and load the procedural texture or the image texture into this modifier and what will happen is this texture will influence the geometry the dark areas will be pushed into the geometry and the bright areas will pop out this technique is often used in conjunction with height maps generated in world machine or other software what we do is we plug this height map into the displacement socket of the material control the strength of the effect and make sure our initial mesh is detailed enough have enough polygons and we get this beautiful beautiful displacement the upgrade of this technique is vector displacement when instead of the black and white maps we use this rainbow hewed vector displacement maps which pushes the geometry not only in the direction perpendicular to the face normals but in other directions as well it definitely gives us more freedom and displace in 3d surfaces it's awesome kit bash kit bashing is a practice of taking this ready-made model parts to quickly sketch out brand new models others style of modeling is very popular among hard surface artists and for a good reason an alternative flavor of kid bashing is sculpting with the insert brushes for example in ZBrush the underlying principle is pretty much the same you use a premade kit to sketch out 3d shapes in a very fluent freehand way usually at least in ZBrush it's followed by remesh in all the parts into one mesh so the kid bashing like this could work as a pretext for the additional sculpting and I wonder how can we classify the semi procedural brushes like the curved brush is it good old kid bash or something entirely different I have no idea but it looks gorgeous in blender we have a bunch of similar tools used for snapping one object to the surface of the other object applying the subtraction operations using the kth assets okay so that was the practice of assembling the model from pieces in other words kid mesh the next modeling style if you wish is photogrammetry for the gramma tree is the process of synthesizing 3d form out of photos essentially what you do is you take a bunch of photos of the object from all possible angles then you align images in a software like reality capture and you get this point cloud next step is reconstruction of the geometry based on this point cloud and on the depth maps which are calculated automatically all this works like a darkest magic but we definitely can say that it's a cool style of modeling because in the end you get 3d model alright let's talk about particles forces and again meta balls I want to say meta blobs always so this method of creating 3d shape relies on particles force fields that influence the particles for example you see the vortex field right now and finally Matt opposed to mesh the particles turn them into mesh it's very tricky to imagine how the shape will look like after all forces applies and meta balls rematched but nevertheless it's very interesting modeling style very scientific I would say sometimes when we say modeling we actually mean scattering the objects on some other object and that totally makes sense if you imagine something like a pile of rubble it's very efficient to just scatter particles and assign the objects to these particles and then just to ramesh the object or leave it as it is so scattering could be modeling computer-aided design or CAD imagine the software like sketchup which is usually used to model architectural structures stuff like that it doesn't use polygons to represent the surface so get ready to use parametric tools mathematic equations analytic surfaces and one of the benefits of not using polygons to represent this surface is that we can for example define any kind of bevel without having to worry about the underlying geometry intersecting vertices shading artifacts and other bugs number 17 poly modeling primitives and camera calibration I think we can call it a workflow when we use a blem in blender for example camera calibration toolkit to calibrate the camera to the image to basically to sync camera angles between this virtual and the real camera then we use the standard polar modeling tools and primitives to quickly reconstruct the geometry and visit it simulation could be also used for 3d modeling very obvious one is cloth simulation you can use it tomorrow well cloth objects which could be really hard to model otherwise and not only this but if we approach it creatively we can use the cloth simulation to model like metal barrels and other very surprising objects so it's definitely worth mentioning self fracture could be also very useful some types of measures could be modeled in the easiest way by simulating the internal structure like with the self fracture add-on which splits the object into many chunks and what we can do afterwards is run physical simulation stop it at some frame convert everything to mesh you know what to do and of course we have fluids if you have ever tried to scoped fluids by hand you know it's literally it's painful very very tedious and it's much more convenient to use Gerstner wave simulation the ocean modifier and blender in other words or to use a fluid simulation watch this now try to sculpt hits and literally in seconds we get something like this we can continue to tweak it if we'd like now I'd like to talk about math functions we can also call it analytic services in blender if you activate the extra object add-on you can create XYZ math surface and then we'll have to put X equation y equation and zette equation to generate a 3d mesh in a parametric way or you can just select from a bunch of presets every object in the universe can be described potentially with some mathematical function so go ahead try it out all right let's continue with parametric modeling parametric modeling means that instead of creating your 3d model by hands you use a set of parameters and a done for example animation nodes to mathematically generate a surface based on some properties the good example of parametric modeling is SpeedTree for example you define a set of parameters like pruning branching I don't know age of the tree and the software generates 3d model for you hey well how about drummer based structures and generative modeling that's practically the same way you define the grammar or the set of rules and based on this algorithm defined by you 3d model is generators do you feel the difference in classic modeling paradigms you push and pull vertices you act like an artist and here you hacked like an artist ooh but some different dimension by using that generative modeling tools you model in an indirect way as opposed to direct sculpting for example the next thing that really turns me on is organic growth algorithms from The Ivy mesh in blender which simulates the procedural growth of ivy while it defined some basic parameters of this growth to diffusion reactions and some other cryptic things look at this it grows like don't model things you grow things now that's a cool modeling style you don't touch a thing it just grows crazy but not as crazy as fractals a fractal is geometrical figure each part the wish has the same statistical character as the whole when you zoom in into a fractal and by the way this software is called mantel builder you see the same distribution of shapes which resemble the larger hole on a smaller scales and you can try to export it and maybe you will even succeed the other interesting thing is dynamic paint at least it's called dynamic paints in blender the concept looks like this you have brush and a canvas one object which influences the other object in some way for example it displaces the other object what's inherent to this concept is the interaction between some meshes based on the distance from one mesh to the other on something like that in this example I'm using dynamic paint to paint with vertex weight and this triggers the displacement modifier so that's a pretty interesting way to think about modeling 25 voxels voxel is like volumetric pixel or volumetric cell in 3d grid and you can create and represent a 3d surface with the help of this three dimensional units in software like magicka voxel or have you played minecraft voxels can be used to create a very detailed geometry like in the auto montage engine and when you think about voxels and classical modelling tool set it's very very different things voxels are truly volumetric unlike polygonal surfaces what does it mean for us 3d modelers could be many things now we go to really interesting exotic things like marching cubes the algorithm that can be used to polygons eyes Skylar fields for example here we see an MRI scan which is basically a bunch of slices and usually two polygons eyes things like that March in cubes algorithm is used don't ask me how it creates a polygonal surface based on color field or volumetric data and is it right to call it a modelling style well it depends maybe you use MRI scans as a modeling tool now a 20-7 modeling or sculpting in vr that's a hot new direction in 3d model and when you can manipulate mesh in real 3d space as opposed to this implicit 3d space on your two-dimensional monitor here we can jump straight into virtual space using gravity sketch application for VR for example and modal 3d objects in 3d that sounds reasonable I guess and the last model in style for today's using artificial intelligence for example neural networks to generate 3d meshes we can use images as an input and that technically sounds insane but in principle neural networks are capable of reconstructing 3d objects based on images or if not searching the furniture catalogs and other 3d model catalogs and finding the right model awesome crazy unbelievable alright guys my name is Gleb Alexandrov thanks so much for watching this video this is one of the bonus tutorials from the hard surface modeling video course that we are working on at the moment with algae burrows from Siddha masters dotnet and while the temporality of YouTube videos could be tricky and maybe by the time you're watching this video we have already released the course who knows or maybe the world is in ruins and you're watching it on an old PC that has survived the catastrophe nobody knows thank you for watching stay tuned and make sure to subscribe to not miss the innocent things subscribe subscribe subscribe if you know any other modeling paradigm that we haven't included in this video let me know in the comments below

Channel: Gleb Alexandrov

Views: 495,745

Keywords: Hardsurface, modeling, blender, hard-surface, 3d, 3d modeling, tutorial, tutorials, robots, design, how-to, video course, blender (software), creative shrimp, cgmasters, aidy burrows, gleb alexandrov, boolean, hardops, subd, learn, blender tutorials, “hardsurface modeling in blender”, “hardsurface modeling blender”, sculpting, zbrush, voxel, nurbs, fractals, procedural, photoscan, reality capture

Id: DeHasEMCzcc

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018