An Hour with Blender: Learning 3D Modelling with GameFromScratch.com

hello this is Mike again from scratch and welcome back as you may be able to guess from the screen up in front of you today we are going to be working with blender a couple weeks ago I did a video called one hour with blender and game from scratch and the whole idea behind it was it was a one-hour introduction to using blender there's an overview showed you how to install ide navigate the different functionality built into blender sort of walks you through all of it made you comfortable the user interface but didn't go into much detail at the end of that I asked if people would be interested in further follow-up one-hour segments from game from scratch things like one hour with modeling one hour with texturing one hour with animating in blender and the one that seemed to be by far the most popular was modeling and makes sense it's the thing I enjoy doing the most - so that's where we're going to start today we are going to spend exactly one hour with blender covering as much information I can about modeling now it's a very big subject and you can't cover it in an hour but you can cover a whole hell of a lot in an hour's time frame and so I'm going to try to as much of a brain dump as I can to you now I'm going to assume you have obviously very little prior knowledge with blender but I do assume you watch the previous video if you have it I'll link it in the comments below or that you already know how to navigate around so if you see me doing stuff you're like one of the hell did he do that that's because it was covered in the video before I'm not gonna retread that otherwise these one-hour videos would become 40 minutes of video and 20 minutes of a recap basically an episode of Dragon Ball Z we don't want that so I'm going to jump right in we're going to cover as much as we can about modeling I have a pretty good list here of things I want to cover in terms of topics and like I said an hour is not a lot of time so let's get started I have 58 minutes remaining let's go so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this into a bit more friendly UI to what we want to do that's claps this down now first off if you have no idea what I'm doing right there watch the first video it's the kind of stuff that was already covered now we have a much more modeling friendly view to work with now next up I want it to be clear I want everything gone so let's get rid of it here is a basic blender scene thing in it and we're going to dealing specifically with modeling today mostly game oriented but obviously the way things work these days actually is even films use a lot of the same techniques that games do you're just you take your low res screen or low res model and upscale that's kind of how things work more and more it used to be people used a combination of technologies things like b-splines or NURBS surfaces or meta balls and nobody uses that stuff for the most part anymore splines a bit mostly to make lattices or cages that are ultimately converted into polygons anyways so today we're going to deal specifically with polygon modeling only so you come up here we're going to start with actually adding a surface so you see here there's the other options there's curves and surfaces and metal balls like I just talked about but what we want is a mesh this is a polygon mesh and we'll start by recreating our cube now of course you started with this cube and a lot of things do start with a cube there's some this actually it's called box modeling so the technique is literally named box modeling so it's so common for people to start with a box or a cube so that's exactly what we're going to do here it's back and that's why blender starts with the cube in the middle of the scene so you'll notice it was actually created bangable in the midpoint let me just delete this for a second show you why see this guy right here that's your pivot a very confusing point in blender but a pivot is sort of like your active point so if I left click here on the screen right and now I go ahead and add surface again it gets created at that pivot point now some operations also happen around the pivot the pivots a neat thing to understand not sure how much detail we're going to get into it but the pivot is what determines where the active item or modifier occur so it's a key thing to get and the fact that it's mapped to your left key or your left mouse button can be a little confusing at time so let's let's get rid of that guy go back about our pivot right here around the center ish and we'll add our mesh back in again so here's your polygon mesh now there's a something that's very critical to understand about blender right away there's operating modes and right now we are in the object operating mode and as you see we have our cube and we're dealing with the cube as an entire entity so I can move it I can rotate it and I can I have a why are my keys not working all right sorry move it rotate it and scale it and I'm dealing with all of it this entire object as an object so right down here object mode now what you often want to do is switch into edit mode now you're dealing with the pieces that make the cube so the object mode deals with the entire entity edit mode deals with the pieces that make the entity up so when you're modeling generally you're working in edit mode and here you're dealing with one of three basic building blocks or LEGO pieces so the fundamental pieces of 3d work are number one right click here and I'll select it that's a vertex a vertex can be thought of as just simply a point in 3d space now you take one or more vert two or more vertex or vertices so shift-click if I now have to value I'll use the front ones two vertex is selected two vertices selected now what I have in between them is an edge let's switch over to edge mode we had a couple key guys down here so right now we're in vertex mode let's switch to edge mode here and now when I right click to select I'm selecting an edge an edge is two or more connected vertices okay now finally you have faces or polygons depending on the reference that they want to use and this is three or more edges connected and solidified in between them so those are your three different building blocks you have your vertex your edge and your face now I'm going to throw a couple of hot keys at you that are very important and we're going to cover all the things we just dealt with right first off you have object in edit mode it's very common to switch between the two and there's a hotkey for that it's tab so I hit tab it's the same as hitting this menu okay so object mode hit tab I'm in edit mode hit tab again I'm in object mode critical hotkey to learn it's the same as coming down here and clicking but you're going to switch between those two all the time and while you're hovering you're that tab key also learn control in tab you hit control tab it pops up this control the tab pops up this guy and this is to switch between these three different modes now you can also use if I do control tab the number of the menu items so 1 2 & 3 so if I do control tab and then the 1 key I switch to vertex mode control tab then the 2 key I'm in edge mode and then control tab in 3 key I'm in face mode those hotkeys are ones you're really going to want to learn because once you get used to hovering on that side of your keyboard it's very very fast now if you are the type that hates hotkeys unbelievably once again in control object mode or the equivalent of tab here and control tab 1 it's the same as clicking where does it go so I need to go back to edge mode control tab 1 it's the same as clicking this control tab 2 is the same as clicking this and control tab 3 it's the same as clicking this alright so those are your three basic building blocks your vertex your edge and your face now the next thing if there's one more that's very critical and it's very easily to show with a sphere so let's create one whatever a cube for a second and instead we are going to add a mesh and then a UV sphere here's a sphere in object mode right now we're gonna switch over into edit mode and you'll see it we're in phases so you see all the different faces etc now let's switch over to edge mode control tab - and now we're in edge mode I can select a single edge like so now I can also hold down alt and grab a single edge like this and this here this guy is a critical thing to understand this is called an edge loop this is just a continuous series of edges on the way an edge loop is determined is as long as an edge continues and is bisected by another edge so like think of a four-way intersection like I'll just select the 4-way intersection like that I turn that guy off as you can see it you have a situation like this an edge loop is continuous as long as there is a right and a left hand branch and it doesn't go so as you go so there's a right and a left but it kept going there's a right and a left but it kept going there's a right and a left but it kept going all the way around so I hit alt shift you can figure out this whole thing is an edge loop now there's also something else called an edge ring you're using a little bit less but it's the same thing just this way generally not used quite as often as edge loops but and directly related it's basically just perpendicular to an edge loop but an edge loop is a critical thing to understand so hopefully now in a sphere it's very clear because they go in circles but when you start talking about a nice organic shape that bends and twists an edge loop allows you to very quickly add detail or take it away I'll show you later on when we do an edge loop and slide how fast you can add detail into an object but the nice thing is it with a nice clean edge loop when you start doing things like smoothing it and adding more detail and such it adds it very smoothly now when you use an edge loop a nice well-defined edge loop is also a nice well-defined surface so when you animate it for example if you have a nice bicep done well with a good clean edge loop it'll animate nicely as you're adding more detail to it so clean edge loops are the key to modeling way beyond the topic I can cover here but it's one of those things to be aware of so in addition to your vertex your edge and your face be aware of the edge loop but once again you can select an entire edge loop by alt right clicking a single edge on it and you can select multiple items of any kind so if I go back to save vertex and there hold down shift and keep clicking you can select multiple same deal if I switch back then to edges and you'll notice as you switch types we'd switch between modes the selection type automatically transfers so I did have these vertex vertex is selected and then once I switched over to automatically switch to the edges that correspond but now if I click here and I say hold down alt so I select my edge room if I hit shift and then alt click another one I get that loop and that loop and that do so you can multiple select by clicking shift and then right-clicking the object you want as well so an edge loop is a very critical thing to understand in time but really it's just a collection of edges so it's not really a different primitive the primitives are vertex edge and face not edge loops but an edge loop is critical to understand and we'll use it a little bit more later on so keep that in mind now we really create key thing to understand is selection mode and I just showed you some of that so what you saw was right-click to select something shift right-click to add or grow your selection now there's a couple other things to be aware of here as well one of the ones you're going to want to write off the hop and this works in object and edit mode is a a is select all and a again is select none you're going to use it all the time so right here I've got this edges selected and I want to get rid of that well if I press a once it clears it again selects all okay so that's kind of like a toggle between clear selection and select all so here it's like every face that's selected and then a again and selected none so if you have a selection going like so and you want to clear it a but then if you want to select everything you hit a again and if you've got nothing selected and then you hit a it selects all so a kind of does double duty between clear selection and select all once again you can see it's all bunched to that left in your tab again it's very left right hand focused on a keyboard a lot of it though was based around the number pad which are becoming increasingly rare so hopefully they move away from the right-handed side a bit but you'll see a lot of the blender keys are bunched to the left and it makes sense it's very fast the idea that on the right hand side you're using the mouse and it works pretty well so once you start learning these keys you will speed up okay so that's your two basic modes I'll press a again to clear my selection now oftentimes though you also going to want to select just using the mouse now we saw individual selecting but this can get pretty slow even with the shift I start coming in and painting these selections and it works but a lot of times you want to want to do like a multi select of some kind and there's a couple of options here first off there's box select so like select nothing I hit B and hold it down you'll see I got a crosshair now and then I left click and drag like so so I've got the B key held down right now and then left clicked and dragged I just selected in a box okay very critical now next one is I press a again a clear that escape to move out clear and now there's also C which is a circle selector for C and now I've got like a radius around my cursor that you can see and this is sort of like holding down shift and clicking things but you're painting it instead so you've got a circle radius so now I can like paint my selection like so that's C and it just gives me the circle for selecting things now press C again sorry right click to clear that out so see circle select right click done and then a clear it all out now another thing you can want to do sometimes is increase the radius of that circle so right here I'm selecting a fair bit now if I use my scroll wheel with the C key held down I can select more or I can select less so here I'm going to select very fast now what you'll also notice is let me spin this guy in 3d so I'll right click to finish my selection and we look and you see ok our background did not get selected there this is toggleable over here you'll see limit selection to visible and a lot of times well you know be honest the mode that you're going to want is highly dependent on what you're working on at the time but sometimes you going to find yourself not wanting to select like here we only selected visible so as I was painting it we were only getting the front side of this object if I toggle this guy over so I click this button here so now I'm selecting back you can see through our shape all of a sudden so now I'm going to clear my selection and put my seat back on with this huge circle and we're just going to do that all right so now when I rotate it I right click finish' and rotate around and you'll see we selected both sides so this determines if you've got this guy right here if you've got it enabled only what you can see is selected so the back side of your object is not selected you turn it off now you can see through your object but it'll select both sides at the same time if I click this guy back on again so even with that on if I want to have that 3d look through thing there's an x-ray mode you can press is Z Z puts you into wealth see-through mode so now you're seeing back faces and front I press Z again and I'm only seeing the front so that combination this guy here toggles if you're selecting only what you see or everything that's underwear you were so in addition to our be box select like him what did I do first off accidentally move my pivot so be and drag to select okay and then a to clear our selection see for circle paint or so hold down see and then scroll wheel to change your radius and then draw there's one other option and that is holding down the control key and then your left mouse button and then you can last sue paint select like so so click that out so just hold down the control key and draw around the shape that you want to select very nice for precision selection and done and once again that will be affected by this guy so here its turn off so if I orbit you'll see we didn't get everything if I turn that guy back on and hold down control and then we look at the other side you'll see we got both sides so those guys combined and then once again a to clear your selection so those are your basic selection modes very important to get once again you hit the z key to switch into like x-ray mode and you can use this guy to toggle what is and what is not selected based off of where you're locating a final thing that we're gonna cover here not really selection related but it is important especially you for things like see-through is you have different vision modes or display or render modes for your display port so right here is probably material mode okay so you have these different options first often come down wireframe and this is just the mesh that makes up your object there's no texturing or anything applied to it now next up oops click the wrong guy solid which is basically just your wireframe but all connected so you're seeing the faces in between and then you start getting into the ones with the texturing on them this will show texture Maps this one on top will show a materials material is a little bit beyond texture map there's some procedural materials built into blender things like God say a marble render or Gai render material those aren't necessarily textures so there is a distinguishing factor there and then finally you've got rendered and rendered basically does micro rendering of your scene as it goes I deleted the lights and such so you're just going to see a black blob this guy you really can't edit in its form or for like real-time ish previews and as you can see here it's not the fastest thing you'll ever deal with and it's not really that useful right now but it's one step short of doing a full render yourself to see how something will look so let's go on back to the solid so those are your different display modes all right there most of time you'll probably either deal with I almost always leave it in solid or material person or sort of solid or textured personally because if solid doesn't work for me and I need to see something like I would for a wireframe then I hit Z and I get the same basic effect I just find a cleaner but you can use whichever modes you want obviously it's fast to switch between them and you can have multiple windows with in different modes so it's it's all tied to the particular view you're looking at so what's what can be quite common is if you're working on this guy and then up here say you wanted a preview you could actually do a full time rendered so here you can still do your editing in normal speed so let's grab a face and move it out so and then you'll notice this one slowly updates but with a lot more detail so that is your option let's close that guy where's that guy out and that's that so those are your selections those are your so we've covered primitives and selections now let's actually get on to a modeling all right now when you're modeling it's amazing how little you're actually working with you're normally working with a fairly small amount of tools and making more and more complex shapes it's actually the basics of modeling are quite simple which is very cool now let's go back to object mode come on object mode delete this guy and let's go back to a cube so my pivot back to centre ish and then add mesh cube here we go so let's go back to edit and let me show you one thing straight away we're in face mode right now as you saw earlier you can use G to grab and move now unfortunately turn this guy off so this is your widget control turn it back on I want my widget so use G to move like that or along particular axis so blue corresponds with the z-axis we're currently right upside down right now let's make that make more sense yours that axis your Y is your green axis your X is your red axis and you can move along each one individually but as you can see a face can be moved and manipulated that way you can also hit let's hit s for scaling we can scale it in either direction should we wish or you can use R to rotate and then ditto this is true for edges as well all three operators work for an edge we can scale an edge and we can rotate an edge now once again let's go back to vertex the vertex is mostly the same thing you have a single vertex you can move it now rotating it I'm sure you can do it at scale sure you can do it but it has absolutely no meaning you can't rotate a single point now if you do select multiple vertexes though so let's shift click now scaling makes sense and rotating make sense so the the transforms you use these three guys right here are just as applicable when dealing with components as they are when you're dealing with the object itself ok now let's take a quick moment to talk about entering controls here this is a valuable thing you've covered in the previous tutorial I don't remember this point to be honest but it's important enough that you should be aware of it let's get our screen here and focus and n so n brings up this properties window so you kind of it's a dynamical generated property settings let me go back to object mode and I'll show you this firsthand you'll notice right here there's X Y & Z keyboard input you can put in for direct entry and let's say we want to move this guy right back to the origin so 0 0 & 0 there you go so you can actually keyboard entries wise directly enter the rotation scale and rotation scale location right here you can also lock in access if you want so now we can no longer move on the x axis you don't even see it see I've got two available i unlock it and you got three available now remember before I said to move is G so G and then move s is to scale and then R is to rotate now you can also combine these with letters and numbers for defining the access to deal with and the amount the deal by and it's easy to show you with rotation so let me show you something really neat really quick and the keyboard stuff will make you faster so you kind of kind of get used to doing this stuff but right here say is my y-axis what I want to do is I want to rotate this guy 90 degrees about here now I could grab it and I could go over here and I could say enter rotation of 90 like so let me undo that or you just come in hit your are like that so I'm saying rotate now I'm gonna hit Y to say which axis to deal and you see this green line just appear to show you that's where we're working around and I'm just gonna type 90 exact same effect and you can do the same thing scale Z 10 so we just scaled 10 times down is that axis and adds undo that so you can use this combination of the hotkey to do something and then the axis to limit it and then go one step further and actually put the number to specify the amount or I could just do rotate Y and then manipulate with the mouse and it still locking me down the Y or rotate Z then lock down the set axis very handy those keyboard shortcuts are going to make you faster so they are worth learning but it was back into the object mode so as you saw you can use any of these operators to move things around as you want now let's look at some of the actual manipulators are the the modifiers that we can deal with there's a couple of keyboard shortcuts or menu items to be aware of and first off is this guy very handy set of hotkeys a lot of what we're going to deal with is available here so if you're more a visual person than a keyboard person look over here in your transform window and if this guy doesn't appear you can toggle that on with the key key or by clicking this little plus on the left hand side of the screen but that guy has a lot of shortcuts the stuff we're going to be working with and as as blender is evolving a bit they're cleaning up and focusing this guy a little bit faster so you can look here for most of the things you want now on top of that there's a context menu called W and this quick brings up the specials menu there's a lot of stuff that's context-sensitive to what you need will appear there now there's another set of menus to be aware of that kind of stripped down this but bring it right into view and it's all based on what you're working on so right now I'm working on the vertices vertices and there's a quick vertex menu of ctrl + V yes pasted but ctrl + V in blender brings up this menu and these are operations that only happen for vertexes and it's right at your mouse point so if we want to slide a vertice like so we just go a vertex slide and we're in slide mode let's undo that actually let's just get rid of all this right now we've created coops let's switch object mode and we'll do a delete let's create a new cube again so at the same time switch back to alright tab control tab to edge mode like so control e brings up the edge specific mode and then if your interface mode like so control F brings up the face mode very fast and all of the stuff that every single thing we're working on except for I believe edge loop and cut is available in these quick menus but you can also get them mesh and then you go up to faces this is the face menu this is the same as pressing ctrl + F edges this is the same as pressing ctrl + E vertices same as ctrl + V but another set of hotkeys definitely worth learning and that's where most of the stuff that we're dealing with now is or it's available down here okay so you saw by manipulating the vertices the edges in the faces you can shape things into what you want but next thing we need to do is start adding geography object Rafi geometry to our scene a cube isn't much you're kind of going to want to build more out of that and one of the most common ways is extruding now extrude you can do by hitting E or coming up here and clicking extrude so E and you can see this blue line just appeared shows the axis that we're extruding upon and dragged so you can think of extrude the same as like pull so you're pulling out that face and it works for edges as well and vertices but for the most part it's something you do on faces and that's how we add more details now that I've pulled this guy out I can go ahead do is that say just hit s to scale it and bring it down so there's a very quick way to add some more jug so I could grab another face and I can do an extrude and bring it out and you'll see down here are they it's expand this out a bit are the controls for that particular thing so if you want a little bit more control over what's happening it's right here now there's something to be aware of and this is very dangerous in blender I'm going to see here so I've got this face left and I just pressed E ok and now I click and I go elsewhere while this was a bit of a trap because now what I've actually done is I extruded but I didn't move anywhere so I just created a set of faces right on top of another face very dangerous so if you use the e key just know that you are actually extruding but if you don't use your mouse you're not moving anything so you end up with duplicate geometry right on top of each other so be careful there so if you hit the e key and you didn't mean to you should almost always do a ctrl Z to make sure that it gets rid of it and I'll show you what I mean a little bit more so here I go and I hit ctrl e oops I hit e to extrude I didn't mean to actually move my mouse ctrl Z so there I actually did I just undid the move but see now if i zoom in here and I switch over to vertex mode there's actually two sets of vertex sitting on top of each other right there see very dangerous you can easily accidentally create geometry over top of other geometry by using extrude wrong so if you do use it you didn't mean to make sure that you do an undo to get rid of it basically I'll tell it by the fact that it popped away from down here so when I hit extrude you'll see it popped up here undo it goes away and back to this node so what most things be careful but sometimes you'll actually will see this shortly you want to actually do an extrude without a move it's a way of creating geometry that doesn't necessarily get offset now most of time what you're going to do when you extrude and my definition extrude actually means to pull out so without that movement it's not really an extrude but you do sometimes want to create a face that stays in the same spot which we again will see in a little bit so let's continue on so that's an extrude to create new geometry by basically pulling it out of an existing face another very very common thing is a bevel now a bevel is a way of adding rounded edges and let's grab a face here and we'll bevel it now and I'll show you another way of evidence oh there's bevel on here I never actually used this menu so I'm not positive it's here yeah so I'll just show you this way ctrl F to bring up the faces menu and bevel see I always use the ctrl P hotkey and you'll see if you bring these menus up on the right hints that here there's the hotkey that goes with it but in this case I'm using the face quick menu so I'm gonna do a bevel and now I'd move my mouse and you'll see it's kind of creating a new edge and sliding it in so now we've got this nice little cornered surface let me switch over to vertex mode and show you a different kind of bevel so we'll grab this top vertex here him and we will do the same thing so ctrl V to bring in the vertex menu and bevel and then as you move the mouse you'll see there it's a nice way of adding corners and in shape you just basically yeah corners edges that's what a bevel is used for and as you saw the tool works slightly different if you've got to face selected or if you've got a vertex selected or an edge selected and online let me show you with an edge control switch let's go over the edge so here and we'll bring up the control e to bring up the edge menu and you will see that bevel is here as well and then move the mouse slightly and there you go so it's really just kind of rounding a corner or adding an edge and you can almost bevel blender is pretty smart about this you got multiple surfaces selected like so okay I'll just use control B this time to do a bevel and there so a nice way of adding nice little edges to your corners is to use a bevel so create new faces by extruding out and then round them off by using a bevel now sometimes however you want to add your detail at a much more precise level and there is an option for that as well and that's the knife tool let's switch back to the Select nothing and then you just hit K to bring up the knife tool like so or you click knife right here you see my icon is turned into like a little exacto blade and I just pick my edge I want to start with and then drag it over other edges like so then click and then right click one oops no it's Enter sorry I always switch that hotkey personally so drag it over the edges you want to cut like so so each one of those green dots is going to be a new vertex and then left click when done and then enter and then that has created a new edge very cool now also very dangerous and you're going to see we've done a lot of things here that will actually lead to very poor mesh design remember I told you earlier the edge loops are very important well generally when you're working with a mesh surface you want to use four-sided polygons or less and what you see here is we've actually got this single face let me switch over to face mode it's like this guy this is certainly not a four-sided polygon in fact it is a one two three four five six seven sided polygon and that is actually kind of impossible because it can be made and bent to be not flat let me show you up there you can see perfectly what I mean it doesn't know how to deal with this weird non-plan or edge and this is going to create weird rendering problems when you actually create your object at all it'll if you're working in a game engine ultimately this all gets turned to polygons anyways it's going to be goes through a process called tessellation and it is going to be made into probably triangles so how game engines generally work OpenGL and such can only really render triangles or they can do like polygons our quads as well but generally a quad has just turned into a triangle by dividing in half anyway so ultimately you're dealing with triangles if you're dealing with something that's not a triangle it doesn't know how to render it you can get weird shadowing issues on this let's see if it actually shows up if I go into the material I'm a hoops not material texture isn't going to show it well unfortunately I deleted my light so we're not seeing a nuance let's go back now solid this edge is very confusing to the system and what you want to do is try to keep this as well-defined as you can and as an example and I'll show you a new move at the same time switch back to vertex mode here it will grab him and him this is the confusing point between our face it doesn't know how to deal with this because it's not flat it allows you to move it in to impossible areas in here on actually illustrate a little bit more if I do something weird with this guy there it doesn't know how to think with this because this shape is impossible for it so all you do is figure out the two vertexes like so and then hit J or is it here as join no I don't think it is I think if we go to the vertex mode though it will be yeah connect and then I just go pop and then suddenly it knows what to do it can deal with this and it can handle it now you also run into weird situations here and this is the FINA key stuff I created a very much that was a very bad I think I had multiple things selected like it let's see vertex mode click him click him and join all right much cleaner sorry I had multiple items selected it was making it not do what I actually meant now we've run into a weird situation right here we're probably have more crap going on here than we want it so like this guy in this guy do we really need this extra edge here now what happens if we want to get rid of an edge well there's a couple options you can delete things and I've been deleting like mad what but I've been deleting entire objects like map addictively components too or you can dissolve them and the behavior between those two things it's kind of critical to understand or you can also merge them let me show you first merge so all of these common phases we want to turn it into one so just pick them all and I'm gonna bring the vertex menu I'm going to select merge and then we're going to merge in the middle and then boom you see it all got back together to one and now we're dealing with nice little four-sided a nice little actually sorry three side a three side three side and say if we want to fix this guy right here we grab these two and we'll join it and we got a nice little three side three sets so we got nice easy shapes well define you can merge and collapse all of these things together now we've got these two guys right here it's like is this guy giving us anything Oh even better I've got this garbage going on down here I've created this weird corner right here and we want all those to be it's just wasted geometry it doesn't make sense to be as it is all right what did I do come on come on page way off it doesn't make sense to be this little triangle in existence and you can get rid of that face quite simply and once again just control V merge and then Merchant Center and now it's all in one now let's use a different example let's take actually this mesh is very confusing to work with switch back to object mode we'll kill it and we'll go back to a cube let's go back into ortho alright so now let's add in start from scratch for the cube oops my pivot wasn't about the origin so about there okay so there is our cube I so let's get rid of an edge instead let's go to edit mode edge mode select this guy and we'll hit X X is your universal delete hotkey so and you will see I can delete an edge or I can dissolve an edge and the difference between those two is very profound I delete an edge and all the connected faces die so let's get rid of this edge and you will see this face this states can no longer exist because their common edge is gone so let's do that we'll do a delete and edge that's exactly what happened see now let's undo that and instead hit X and dissolve and this is going to get rid of the edge but try to preserve the geometry as best as possible now what we get then is a triangle so there is your your two different kind of destruction modes you've got delete which gets rid of it completely and dissolve which tries to get rid of it smartly while maintaining a good solid mesh now let's go back and I'll show you something else really important here let's let's go ahead we'll kill this guy again well so we'll actually delete it all right so now we are left with this open box with two sides got now what I'm so if we want to create that again well there's a couple of options here first thing we're going to edge mode here and we can select the three combined remaining edges and we can actually create a new product a new polygon by filling it so ctrl F you'll see there's bill or there's grid fill but we want fill and fill is um actually won't make edge weird I don't actually know what the difference is going to be between those two but I'll do F and then boom we've just created our face back and then we do the same thing so click click click click so we've got our bounding faces and then we just do fill and ah that's what it is all right Oh oops look click click click make face ah so that's their screen fill in faces the one will fill it that's why we ended up with a divided surface whereas make face will actually turn the selection into a face hopefully that made sense the distinguishing factor there so again you can dissolve something by clicking it and then deleting it you can create it back by selecting the bounding points and hitting F to make a face same thing and then F and then to show you something a little bit this is a little bit of duplication in white blender works so remember I told you earlier you could select two points like this and then do a J to connect them what you can also do select two points and hit F to connect them and you end up with pretty much the same thing now where you don't probably got is you probably wanted that line to cut across and that would be where you'd use your knife tool instead of your fill because it's not cutting that sort of is just connecting it just takes the two points and fills between them but your jafer can join and your F for connect when dealing with vertices there's almost an identical thing all right so let's undo that like so now back towards the beginning of the video I told you about edge loops and how critically important they are well now I'm going to show you how to add them and it's very simple you just hit ctrl + R let's see actually have the window highlighted ctrl R and you will see this overlay shows up and depending on which axis I'm around it moves accordingly okay so this is adding a new edge loop which is cutting around the contour as it's defined so I'm going to go ahead and I'll click once with my left mouse button and now you can slide it along the contours like so alright so once I've got that click again and now we've just inserted a new edge loop it's a very fast quick way to add detail to an entire shape and where it gets a lot more handy so this edge selected let's just scale that out a little bit so now I'm going to go ahead and add another edge loop so ctrl R see now that slide though takes the basic shape preserves it very handy very fast way to add detail you can do it in both directions and it follows the contour of the underlying shape so another fast way of adding nice clean geometry is by cutting edge loops now the downside is you're also adding detail where you may not need it so that loop goes all the way around the surface so sometimes you just actually needed to go say from here to here to here and then back up there in which case you're kind of creating an excess amount of geometry you don't need but for the most part unless you have a very good reason add geometry via edge loops really you want to and then once again remember you can do alt and then keep losing focus all right edge mode click right so alt click selects the entire edge loop and then ctrl R add a new one and then slide and click again edge loops are a very cool way of adding surface level detail in a very fast very global manner at the same time with this edge loop selected I can hit X and I can select delete edge loops and it's gone so the nice thing is if we were working with an edge loop and you've added a lot of precision something and you need to get rid of it it's very fast get rid of the entire thing you added not just have to go in and pick each edge as you go so that's one of the big advantages of working with educators you can make fast quick edits both adding and removing now another thing you're going to often want to do is add a lot of detail to an object so what's very common and I'll show you actually I won't bother is to create a very simple shape and then divide it to make it much smoother using our example here let's just grab this one face so we're going to say a quick finger so this guy's here extrude out like so extrude out like so and then one more little extrude will scale that down for the fingertip like so and then each one of these corners say we want it to be a little more rounded so we'll just switch into edge mode here and grab oops missed that guy got that guy grabbed that guy grabbed that guy and that guy right so we get each one of those corners and we were going to want to bevel that to add a little rounding on the edge so and drag our mouse out right so very quickly very roughly we've created might be a little phallic - I didn't mean to do that but say this was our finger pointing now what you don't want to do a lot of times is add precision or add smoothness to that right away and that can be done using subdivision there's two ways of subdividing one is using operators I don't think I'm going to have time to cover that and the other one is to actually divide the mesh which is quite common we're going to one is apply to the entire surface after the fact and the other one is just adding new geometry and that's the one we're going to look at today so let me just go here and I'll just do a box select around shift I want these guys to if be come on how am i doing first off I got it turned off here I'll use can ya clear that selection ah bugger come on get it all you two come on am I not getting my face I'll put the whole thing all right so I want to add smoothness to this entire thing what we can do is go into here I think it's available here or it's not so right here and I will go to why the hell is it on here so it's under the W menu sorry I'm certain it was there but it's not W and what we want to do is either subdivide or so device smooth buns do you want just more detail or do you want more smooth detail we want more smooth diesel so we'll go ahead and click that one there you see we've created a nice more organic shape by doing the subdivision now we can keep adding more cuts and getting a smoother surface and this is how you turn a very simple object into a very smooth object like so now it's also a very badly formed object we'll ignore that for now so I've just been screwing around with it as opposed to a shape you want to do but subdivision is a way of adding a bunch of detail to a surface very fast at the same time I've created something I've created a monster here let's get rid of it and we'll go back to just a stock cube put my pivot back if you're used to this part by now queue all right you could also select it just hate when I do that face like so turn that guy back off and you can subdivide just hit so hit W and we'll just do a subdivide you'll see we now have four where there was one and we'll do it so divided and we now have four with it now once again though you are creating these weird non-plan or shapes which you kind of generally want to stick away from because then you can't do weird things like this and create this very strange surface that blender struggles with more your game and your struggles with what to do with but subdivision can definitely be way of adding detail very fast okay I'm running out of time I'd better you okay I guess probably what I'm gonna do now is actually show it all together um so I'm going to put it back on it completely new scene I'm going to show you how to use some of these things to very quickly model something from scratch so you can see it all working together and I'm going to show you one other little object option it shows you how compound shapes can be put together into a single entity and that's kind of a confusing thing to get your head around so I'm going to show you that quickly now so I'll switch back into object mode so I keep screwing up because I keep losing focus on my window and then when I come back my hot keys aren't working so in order to give instruction your mouse actually has to be over the surface but it also has to be active and that's something I keep screwing up so let's I'm doing it again no tab let's go to object mode and we shall delete that sucker like so put our pivot back to normal and now what we're going to do is model a set of dumbbells very quick very fast and instead of our trusty cube over and over again this time we're going to actually use a cylinder like so now we want to modify it a little bit at the object level before we get into editing what I want to do is squish it and this is going to be all stuff we've used already first thing we're going to do is scale it down the blue axis here the z axis sometimes going to scale so s hit Z you can find it down that axis and then I'm just going to make it about that big all right so now what I want to do is flip it about 90 degrees this way so I want to rotate it about the x-axis here so that's just R to rotate X 90 okay so there is one half of a dumbbell okay let's move this guy over a little bit and now we're going to switch into edit mode or hit tab okay so first thing we want to do is create a nice little rounded a rounded edge for this corner here that's going to be first let's get into edge mode and we will alt click to grab this edge loop right here and we will do ctrl e to bring up the edge menu and do a bevel and it's at a slight bevel so now in the opposite side actually so add our bevel and then click the interface so alt and then click move it out slightly now let's grab alt click yup that guy right there ctrl e to bring up the edge mode and then bevel and then once again pull it out a little bit then alt click bring that guy in and rotate alright so there is our basic weight on one side being modeled now what we're going to want to do is create the handle to come out so I'll click and grab this loop right here remember I told you earlier that sometimes you're going to want to extrude but not actually move and that's exactly what we're going to do so just hit the e key and we've just extrude it and but we don't want to move the mouse because we don't want to actually pull it out we want to make this an inset as opposed to an extrude so that's what we've done we just created another loop that's directly over top of the loop we're on now I'm going to do is hit the S key to start scaling our current selection like so just drag your mouse there you go so that is the inside of our dumbbell so let's just scale that a little bit more there we're in face mode now and I want to actually go ahead and I want to get rid of this guy okay so that's a hit an X key and then we are going to delete not dissolve delete these faces like so okay so now nice little weight with a hole in it and now I want another one of these so let's switch back to the object mode so we're dealing with the entire entity as a whole and hit shift D which is duplicate so now you can't really see it but there's two of these now and what we want to do first off is rotate the one about the z axis so rotate Z 180 like so and now let's move it out a bit so boom now we have two very handy very useful now what I'm not showing you unfortunately it's what they are so let's bring back our properties window like so oh no no we don't want properties my bad we want outliner so you can see there's actually two separate objects here cylinder that we started with and then our duplicate over here that we moved and flipped from it but we want to do now is join these things together so grab the one again we're in object mode not edit mode because if I go into edit mode I can only edit this guy right so if I go back out I select this guy right here and I go into edit mode I can only edit this guy now what we want to do is have blender treat them as one entity so even though they're not physically connected they're the same thing so now we got to do is go back to object mode and shift collect so we've got both of them in and just hit ctrl + J or you can do object C is it actually there yeah joint that's what we're doing joining these things together so click boom so now we have one object again with two sets of details so now we can deal with this guy if I go back into edit mode it's one thing we can edit from either side which is exactly what we want to do we want to go in and grab so go into edge mode and grab this guy here and alt click to get the entire oops I missed a to clear our selection so alt click to grab that inner loop hold down shift come back over here to this guy and alt click so we've got both of these guys selected now what we want to do let's go ctrl e to bring up our edges menu and we want to do Bridge edge loops like so thank and boom just create a connection between up now it actually only created this this is all like one single polygon gripped so what you want to do sometimes is cut that so if we want two or three segments we just change that here let's make that mini-grant it we added a whole lot more objects to our our scene but you can also twist not much use in this particular case let's cut that back to two there we go so that determines how it's done but that bridge between these two objects and now we have dumbbell not a particularly great dumbbell but it show you how all this stuff goes together to make yourself a nice compound object so that a very very simple building blocks like we built this without explanation I could have done that in about 40 seconds and then you just sort of keep adding detail adding detail and that's how you model in well any 3d application for the most part now sorry one second now I can touch on one last thing we've got about four minutes remaining and that should be about enough to get what I want in if I go back to say we wanted to make this smoother nicer looking first off you'll see it's rendering with these very sharp edges um this is controlled by go come on click focus there we go grab everybody the way and edge.you is actually shown if it's smooth or not is controlled by this guy so if I switch to smooth you'll see a profound difference in the way things look there switch back to object like so switch that back and then make those into flat again and then switch back to object you'll see the difference so if you don't want this segmented look it's set by going into shading and either smooth or flat or a combination thereof and you can also do it with edges um and you can set an edge as either being let's see let's go so edge and you can make an edge sharp or not sharp and this is important not for this particularly but for something called a subdivision surface which is the last thing we're going to touch on so earlier we added definition if I actually modify our map so here we've got all of our faces selected I'm going to switch over here and we're going to do this subdivide again you see we add a detail to our object by adding detail to our object we just divided the hell out of it and we went from let me show you right here we have 354 faces so once we did a subdivision we have 1400 faces and then each iteration adds a whole lot more face so now we're up to 88,000 now you got a lot more detail very much much nicer precision object but it's at a cost now this is a straight forming of the mesh modifier we're adding but a lot of times you actually are creating a cage and you want to just add that after the fact and this is built right into blender I'm not going to show you it that way because it's a little confusing however I go here I'll go back to modify that here I'll go to properties even go over here under this little wrench icon here let me just undo the damage we did here so we don't so we're back to a non smoothed out object it's going to edit mode so we're dealing with this whole entity you can add a modifier to it in this case we are going to add a subdivision surface modifier like so and that is kind of doing the same thing this is subdividing the cage but the cool thing is modifiers are added through the object after the fact they're not destroying it they're changing it and the order that you add you can keep adding more multipliers and they will modify the previous modified thing in the stack so you can see here I can switch the values by going up and down or I can have it while I'm working on it being low detail but when I actually render it being higher detail this is a very handy thing now I click this apply button there's no longer a modifier and it actually just changed it completely but I can also turn it off you see we've done no damage at all or I can just get rid of it and it's gone completely and you can stack these modifiers and some of these are really kind of handy way beyond what we want to talk about like decimate is the opposite of set of ideas if you've got a really high detail you want to take some away you can apply a DES apply modifier or I could actually do do an array and then we'll end up with let's see did it at it that I lack of them but this is applied to the object as a whole and it is non-destructive so if I click here it goes away and I'm back to where I started from so when you're dealing with a surface a lot of times you will want to use either subdivision you'll subdivide it directly or you can do something called a subdivision surface which subdivide your result and finish it after now sometimes you want a sharp edge and you'll see should I know you have time to explain that sometimes when you want an edge to be cursed with subdivision doesn't know that that's where it comes back to that hole let's see grab a red and we have some edge there prefer edge menu that is where this mark sharp comes in so when you want it to subdivide but you want to treat it as a crisp edge you mark it a sharp apply your subversion and it will be a nice crisp edge so here mark sharp that is now a sharp edge I go ahead I add a subdivision to it like so and you'll see it is sharp so that's how you control a crisp edge on a smooth model all right that is it I am at one hour I am done I hope that was useful to you I can do a quick recap on Canada at the time pretty much you start with very simple shapes you can modify them you are either in object mode or edit mode when you are in edit mode you are working with vertices edges or faces your most common modifiers to be using on those are extrudes bevels fills and deletes using that combination of things as along with a long rid edge loop insertion and the knife tool you can make just about any shape starting from a very simple shape and just kind of building it once you've got the outline you want you can either subdivide it like you see here using a modifier or you you can subdivide it destructively using the W menu and bringing up the subdivide or subdivide smooth option and that adds more detail but it also adds more faces so that's going to take longer to render I hope you enjoyed that see you later bye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 15,135

Keywords: Gamefromscratch, Blender, Tutorial, 3d, Modelling, 3d modelling, gamedev

Id: 2y5DEX9H5FQ

Length: 61min 12sec (3672 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2015