5 Quick And Powerful Blender Modeling Tips To Instantly Improve Your Skills

I would like to show you five tips that I find extremely useful in my workflow first one is etch slide with clamp so let's duplicate this object to show you how it works so if you go into edit mode Let's delete this face if we extrude this Edge now e for extrude Z and now let's move it along and let's say we want to slide this Edge we know we can slide it this way fairly easy but did you know you can also slide it this way which maintains the exact Direction with the edge slide tool if we drag this we move it only in that direction if we see the history of the tool there's an option to clamp if we uncheck that nothing happens I think it's some kind of bug but it cannot be set also in the tools properties there's nothing that tells us that we can clamp however if you click and drag and press C now we have unlocked this hidden fantastic tool which allows us to move up as opposed to just down and the same two is available for me right click context menu if you go and click on edge slide and you start dragging it if you press C now clamp is turned off so we can slide as much as we want is that useful for other usages well you'll find out in a second once we go through this third one which is extrude along normals and solidify the next step is something that's a little bit more common you might be aware of it but I think it's still fantastic to show you how easy it is to do it so if we duplicate this object and we want to move this face along the exact Edge at which it is aligned if we go into edit mode click on that face and change here from transformation orientation from Global to normal with the Gizmo enabled so you can go to move and now we can perfectly move and align along that edge so and in a way that's an edge slide but with the face as long as that face is perfectly aligned to the direction that we want to go you might forget that you're going for normal to Global and lose your bearing sometimes so there is another tip later down which will show you how we can do this without the normal transformation but let's jump now to the next one which is extrude along normals versus solidify if we take this first object that we have here and put it somewhere over here and we probably are very well aware of the solidified modifier if you're not you definitely should because it's the easiest thing to do basically we add a solidify modifier and we can supply thickness and change the direction and we can create an even thickness there's various modes that are more complex but this is the gist of it we can also do the same thing in edit mode so if we go into edit mode and you hold down on extrude button and you go to extrude along normals so select your faces and now we can move up there is the option to offset even which we can do post or there's also the option in the two settings to offset even and we can specify very specific distance now that might be useful in some cases when you know you definitely need to solidify everything fairly evenly as it saves a few clicks then going to solidify and then applying that and then going back into object mode the next one this is a fairly new thing that came out of Google summer of code last year the year before that which is knife to axis lock let's duplicate this element here and now let's go into edit mode and we're going to click the knife tool and we can start cutting so click on somewhere and what if we want to lock an axis so before this tool only worked with the axes that were based on the 3D view that we were in in other words if we pressed on Z that's it aligns only to the 3D view whereas now if you press Z it locks on the global Z axis which is of course the only useful thing you would want to do and we can do the same so now I'm going to press enter let's continue by cutting along the X so I'm in the knife too now so if I press X it locks in the x-axis press enter let's do another Cut From Here press Z and enter so we have these perfect cuts that are completely aligned to our axes so it's a very useful thing in case you need to modify your geometry a little bit further because after we have cut this we could very easily start to modify this geometry with the extrude region tool so if we select all of these elements we extrude one with the select one we extrude deselect extrude deselect extrude and you can see how quickly that works just with the knife to when understanding exactly how we want to cut your mesh and the last two that I want to talk to you about is shrink and fatten that's a tool that the friend that uses 3ds Max only made me aware that it actually exists in blender as well so how does it work so let's duplicate this object here go into edit mode and if we scroll down in the toolbar you might need to scroll if you don't see it and it's this tool here called shrink fatten so let's select everything and we need to enabled let's click on offset even and with the tool enable we either shrink or with fatten and of course we can change the radius afterwards however it's not perfect what do I mean by that if we go into object mode and drag this we notice that it's done things that weren't quite the same in the original Mass because these edges didn't quite align so it's something to be aware of but if you sometimes need to expand everything or contract it it's a very nice tool to use we can even try with these examples here so I'm going to duplicate this element that we did here go into edit mode select everything go to this shrink fatten tool and now let's give it a shot and you see it doesn't work that well in this case but it is also extremely useful in different ways so we can click on this face right here and remember how I told you back when we were doing these normal Transformations there's another way to do it without going into normal here and that is again with the shrink fatten tool if we select this face we can basically drag it forwards or backwards and we can do that to any face we can drag these two faces and they drag as well of course this mesh is already a bit tricky so let's start with something that's a little bit tidier if we duplicate this item here now let's select these two faces and they should move pretty neatly forwards and backwards it's another tool that's very useful if you need to move a lot of faces along they're normals again it's not perfect but in many instances I think it would work rather well and it can also save you a few clicks so you don't need to go to normal Transformations and then forget that you're even in that those are the five tips for today let me know what you think about them and if you'd like to see more tips like this for Blender make sure you click the like button it helps me out a lot and subscribe if you like to see more content about blender now thank you to all my patreons for your support for making these videos happen you can become my patreon and support the content on this channel including getting some of the files clearly this is a simple one but some are a bit more advanced so they might be very useful to actually have a hold of thank you very much and see you next time

Channel: UH Studio Design Academy

Views: 33,835

Keywords: blender, architecture, blenderarchitecture, conceptdesign, concept architecture, architectural design, design, parametric design, non-destructive design, procedural design, parametric, computational, blender architecture, blnder, blender 3d, autodesk maya, architecuture, prametric, parametricism, procedural, parmetric

Id: cUWIwkJ5cbc

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023