BEAUTIFUL hard-surface curves in MINUTES with Blender

sup everyone i want to show you a really quick trick that's going to help you a ton in hard surface and it's when you're using curves kind of like this right um i just have this curve i'm working on a robot we have a big big project coming soon a lot of people have been asking for this you're going to be excited not going to announce it for maybe a week or two though so hold tight for that anyways you might have a curve like this right and you want to get the curve looking cooler so you can make a design like this to make it look more sci-fi or decent looking this is a super super easy effect a lot of people over complicate it i'm going to show you how to do it real quick and also don't yell at me about these artifacts here i promise you i'm going to clean them up not on this video but um i just i just haven't cleaned them up yet anyways so i'm gonna hide this and just do it again from scratch right so uh let me make sure i take note of the name of this cylinder 21. okay so you have a curve here right let's just pretend your curves already made and you want to make a cool design on it so what we do first is we just ignore the curve pretend it's not there and let's make the piece we want to go along that curve so in this case what i'm going to do is take a cylinder we'll move the cylinder over you know decent amount of vertices like 64. so what you could do is just make this design i'm just going to do this really quick from scratch right make whatever type of design you want to go along the curve so maybe i'll bevel this drop in a loop up here extruded along the normals a bit and blender crashed on me and rest in peace i didn't save this design but you know what maybe it was the calling from god himself saying you know you're just going to get a better design as a result of this video so let's just restart it yeah where were we so you know you make your design bevel bevel the top and bottom control b i'm just going to do this really fast maybe you know extrude along the normals here not too bad i'll even drop on a bevel just to get that nice reflection we'll get in here drop in another loop go up here and make like a curve of some sort go in here i'm just trying to make this as fast as possible for the video all you're doing is making the same type of design but just your own style and i'll just bridge these edge loops and what could i do last maybe two of these guys scale them up bevel them extrude along the normals and let's drop the bevel a bit okay now we can call it a day so let me just join these two things together i'll convert this to a mesh join it together and maybe as like a final design i'll just run an inset inset boolean through the top okay we did this really really quick and you don't need hard ops you know you can make your own designs outside of hard ops if you prefer but uh yeah let's pretend you now have your design that you want to go along a curve first thing i like to do is make sure there's a hole in the top and bottom to go along the curve itself so i almost always just inset the tops and bottoms extrude along the individual faces extrude them in so now you can kind of imagine the pipes going into this and now we want to do is just kind of get this up here near the area we want to make this go along now there's two different ways to do it one's the easy route which is with a hard ops and two's the harder route which is in vanilla i'll show you both kind of makes me sad when people call me money hungry but in like every video i i showcase i literally showcase vanilla it's just hard ops is easier right i'm not trying to go get a ton of affiliate sales i'm just trying to show you the most practical way anyways most you guys are cool so thank you what we're going to do is i'll show you the vanilla way first so what we need to do is first of all add a curve modifier to this guy so we're going to go to add modifier and then curve and the curve object is going to be whatever your your actual curve is right in this case it's this pipe here so i just go in here put it there and sometimes you have to change the deform axis to something different i'll just have to find it you can mess around with these different axes so it looks like the z-axis is the right one okay so now you have it appended to the curve in the right orientation right now if you want it to stretch or compress all you need to do is do that in edit mode you just go in here and scale it up or down now if you want to see the effect in in the on the curve as well you just click on this little button right here and you can see it you can now see the changes taking effect so i'm just going to scale this on the z a little bit and if you want to move it along the curve you just go into edit mode and move it up or down pretty straightforward now the real killer here comes when you actually add an array modifier to this now let me first scale this down a bit so it fits better and then what we're going to do is go here and add an array modifier but we want to put the array modifier above the curve so that way it does the array and then the curve at the end so that way it doesn't terminate the curve and then just do a static array so make sure the array is before the curve and then all you need to do is match the axis for the array in this case the deform axis is z for me so we're going to change this to z in the array so super simple now we just increase the curve count and this thing goes all the way along the curve super cool stuff and you can make any sort of adjustments you want in edit mode as long as you don't apply the modifiers i could go in here and like scale up these verts and do really whatever i want you can change this at any point in time and it will change every single piece along this curve here and i'm just going to quickly show you how you do this in hard ops it's just like a one click type of thing so i'm just going to remove these so here we have this piece so what you do is you select your piece you shift click on your curve then you press q and then click curve modifier and you're basically done super easy stuff and then you just do the same exact thing you go in here add an array modifier and then you're going to have to put the array above the hops curve make sure it's on the right axis in this case we'll just do relative offset and yeah same exact thing it's just kind of like a one-click type of deal and um in heart ops so that's how you do it in vanilla and in hard ops super useful tool and hard surface hopefully you can utilize this and you're not super confused about curves anymore so that's about it i was just working on this mech and i was like this would be a really good video idea so hopefully it helps you out in some way until the next video i'll see you then

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 44,280

Rating: 4.956912 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, 2.9, hard, surface, cables, curves, cablerator, ops, boxcutter, josh, gambrell, in, minutes, quick, lazy, fast, masterxeon1001, tutorial, beginner

Id: NcjxhnldwNY

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020