An INTUITIVE guide to sharps in Blender

what's up guys in this video i want to talk a bit about s sharp c sharp and smart apply in blender specifically in hard ops although the same principles could be applied um in vanilla so i see a lot of people especially those that start off with hard ops struggling with this concept i had the same exact issue so um in heart well actually let's start off with sharps so in blender or any poly based software like maya i believe moto as well i might be wrong there's there's different types of sharps as we call them and you can think of sharps as edge markings basically and the four different types are sharps um mean bevel weights we just call them bevel weights you also have seams and you also have creases so those are the four different types and i'm going to show you real quick what all of them do so the first one is crease now creases are pretty common when using subsurf to kind of hold edges together and not have them affected so for example if i had a cylinder here let me move it up and move it over so if i have a cylinder here you're going to see this one has 32 vertices and if i wanted to smooth it out i could use a subsurf modifier for that so i drop on a sub surf and you're going to see it kind of turns into a pumpkin because it's running a sub surf on these n-gons here on the top so there's two different options i could delete out the faces but in the case you don't want to delete out those faces maybe it's a different model you can use a use use a crease i almost said sharp you can use a crease for this i'm going to go to item and just increase the mean crease to 1. and it basically creases these to a value to where the subsurf is not affecting it you can also press shift e to activate this command and basically what this is doing is it is if i uh shade it smooth and turn on auto smooth all it's really doing is smoothing it out but it's not affecting the end gone areas because of this marking okay so simple enough that's what it creases now the next one is the seam option so most you know seams use it for for unwrapping you know you mark a seam with ctrl e and you can do this for unwrapping you can also do this to isolate areas so if you mark a seam go into face mode and press the l key it'll actually separate the selection area so that's what a seam is and the last two are bevel weights and sharps so let me add in a new cube here so sharps are really easy and oftentimes if you're using bevels you don't need sharps but basically what sharps do is if you're in shade smooth and you don't want to use auto smooth for whatever reason you can actually manually mark your sharps with ctrl e mark sharp and do it that way and you're going to see once we mark the sharp nothing happens but if we turn on the auto smooth no matter what the angle is at these are always going to be marked sharp so the angle is kind of obsolete in this case sharps are the least of your concern especially if you're using bevels so i wouldn't worry too much about those and the last one we have is the mean bevel weight really easy if i want a bevel based off of an edge marking i can just go to the end panel and i can do mean bevel weight to one and now if i add a bevel modifier and set this over to weight only the areas that are marked will be beveled so that's the those are the four different types of sharps and once again sharps are edge markings although the word sharp can be used interchangeably depending on what you're referring to sharps edge markings same thing so once again we have four different edge markings and now that we've showed those if i press ctrl tilda here in the hops helper menu you're going to see we have sharp options right here you can just replace the word sharp with edge marking options it's a lot easier to understand that way so the default ones are apply sharp and apply b weight most of the time these are going to be fine for what you're doing but there might be some cases where you want to also apply a crease or maybe apply a seam now if these are ticked on these are going to be applied based off of the sharpness angle right here so you know you should already understand kind of how the auto smooth angle works it works in much the same way so as long as it's within this 30 degree threshold these sharps will be marked when we press the q key and click on sharpen very simple but there are two different types of sharpens the first one is s sharp the second one is c sharp and we also have smart apply we'll discuss that in a second so the first one is really easy to understand it's the default one and it is s sharp if we just press q and then click on sharpen all this does is it runs a sharpen and based off of what you have selected here and as you can see since this is the fully 90 degree cube pretty much every single edge is getting marked so we have a seam here if i remove the seam you're going to see we also have a bevel weight if i remove the bevel weight we have a crease and then we have a sharp it can only display one of the colors though but in fact they are all there and likewise if i turned off let's say i don't know crease and seam and i marked this again in edit mode you're gonna see now we only have a bevel weight and now we only have a sharp so it just depends what you have ticked in here all right easy enough not too difficult to understand so that's what s sharp is you press q click on sharpen it's going to sharpen based off of these selections right here and based off of the angle of your object for example if i had like a really really slight angle right here you're going to see that it won't actually um well let me apply the boolean first you're going to see that it won't actually pick that up because it's not within that threshold it'll pick these up right here but this edge right here is not within that sharpness threshold and of course you could adjust that in here if you wanted to all right next option we have here is the c sharpen command and this one is quite easy to understand so if you press q and sharpen that's the s sharp but c sharpen is a bit different notice how these modifiers aren't applied but if i use a c sharpen by control clicking it's going to do the same exact thing as s sharp and it's going to mark your sharps based off of the sharpness angle but it's also going to apply the booleans and mark the edges in those booleans as well as long as they're within that 30 or whatever degree threshold you have defined right here so that's it that's as sharp and that's c sharp and you can think of s sharp and c sharpen is the same thing except c sharp applies your boolean so really simple now smart apply smart apply is a bit different you can use smart apply in a situation where you either don't want to mark your sharps or maybe it's just easier oftentimes i literally just use smart apply to quickly apply my booleans in most situations i could just use c sharp and smart apply interchangeably there is a bit of a difference though if i press alt x in hard ops here and add a mirror if i run a c sharp and it won't apply the mirror but if i run a smart apply it will apply the mirror so that's like a main difference there if smart apply applies different things so that's basically it smart apply and c sharpen work in much the same way except that smart apply if i were to run a smart apply in the case i don't have any edge markings you're going to see smart apply won't actually mark any edges whereas if i used a c sharpen it would do the same thing as smart apply but it would also sharpen these edges here and based off of these selections that you have turned on so that's it most the time you're just going to be using the b way and apply sharp options but truth be told a lot of times you don't even need any of these if you're not using bevel weight you don't need bevel weight but it doesn't hurt to have the bevel weight enabled because it's just there doing nothing right so usually i have bevel weight turned on by default in the case i want to quickly swap to weight it's already marked apply sharps are good because if you're not using bevels then what you could actually do with a sharp is we come in here and we'll apply that boolean and if i come in here and i have the apply sharp button turned on you're going to see it sharpens it whereas if i have it turned off let me undo that change if it's turned off then it won't actually have anything being done to it but like i said sharps are not necessary if you're using bevels because bevels are naturally going to get picked up based off of your bevel weight or the angle of your bevels i never have much use for sharps at all i don't need them so because i use bevels on everything so you don't really need this but it doesn't hurt to turn it on so bevel weight and apply crease and apply seam just depend on what you're working on i use these sometimes for example if i have a rounded surface with a lot of different angles and i just want to quickly you know come in here and sharpen this thing up i could go to apply crease q sharpen and then that way when i run a sub serve it's already going to be there and ready to go so that's a situation in which i might actually use a crease now as for seams like i said you can use seams to just isolate selections it's pretty useful for that but mostly i'm using the seam option right here if i'm doing some sort of unwrapping i'm not always but sometimes i am if i'm doing a game asset or whatever in which case this might become useful for you especially on hard surface objects applying seams in such a manner just you know with one click without having to mark every single sharp edge manually is super super efficient and if you guys haven't grabbed it yet make sure you pick up our new unwrapping course our essential techniques for uv unwrapping and blender it shows literally the entire process of using seams and using sharps in game asset workflow probably the most comprehensive hard surface on wrapping course 10 bucks not too expensive i'd recommend getting it if you're interested but most of the time you won't need seams unless you're unwrapping so really you can get away with just b weight in most cases so i hope this kind of explained the differences explain what sharps are what edge markings are it's it's a hard concept to explain and really i had to build the intuition myself because there were no good videos explaining the concepts when i was learning so i hope this at least delivered some of that information to you in an understandable manner because it's just it's way easier to just learn it intuitively in 10 minutes than learn it yourself trust me so that's it guys if you have any questions or anything was confusing i tried to explain it to the best of my ability but if i didn't leave a comment i'll answer any questions you have and that's really about it for today's video and i hope you enjoyed it see ya

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 11,137

Keywords: blender, intuitive, guide, to, sharps, edge, marking, tutorial, 3d, hard, surface, modeling, beginner, cg, blenderbros, hardops, boxcutter, ssharp, csharp, smart, apply, crease, seam, bevel, weight, sharp, mark, guru

Id: ODsZqVILLNs

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021