Beginner Exercises | Part 3 | Low Poly Weapons | Blender 2.8

hello and welcome to Cabot Media I'm grant Abbott and today we're going to be continuing our get good at blender series and today is level three so do remember to look at the previous levels and also remember that there's lots of playlists on my channel for different courses to help you with different aspects in blender so do make sure you've been through the beginner series and you could look at my website which has a bit of a structure and an order to some of them many thanks to those who watched an advert for me also to those that donates and many thanks to my patrons that all makes a difference to this site and keeps all those courses free so the game is as usual I show you the object perhaps give a hint and then you have a go yourself and then I'll show you how I made it this time I try to make them objects that are more relatable can't always do that but I have this time so here's your first item hopefully a nice easy one to start off with now my hint is which may be a surprise but bevel is a useful command here don't worry that's confusing just see how you get on with it okay so I'll move this across to the side shift later add mesh cylinder and in the Box down the bottom here which you can open up with the arrow there I'm going to change it to 12 and that should be the same number it's always good to have something divisible by 4 in case you want to mirror across the X and y axis so let's just grab that above the floor scale it up a bit so a roughly the same size and of course I can get to side view to help me with that and I'm scaling with shift set this time so it doesn't scale in the z axis okay so at this point I have changed the scale slightly so if I press n on my keyboard and go up to the item you can see that the scale has changed so it'd be a good idea to set that or apply that so ctrl a and then scale now when I go into edit mode it won't have any unusual anomalies there are times where you don't want to apply the scale but generally speaking a good rule for beginners is to apply scale and often rotation if you don't want your tools to act strangely so ctrl R across the middle here and then use my will to bring it up to two and double left-click now I can scale those out into position so somewhere around there and I can look and see if it's the same now this is where the bevel command comes in handy he's I could press ctrl R and then bring this down and then bring this out and try and match them up and I'd have to do that for both sides down the bottom here as well but I can just press control B to bevel them to somewhere around there so now I want to extrude this out if I press E then s it will extrude out from the center so it's going in an unusual angle and I don't want that if I press shift Z which in this case works well but to get used to the process I'm going to go up to the top here and change it to individual origins and using individual origins like this you know it's going to work from those individual origins each time because it's taking the individual origins of the different parts hopefully that makes sense so we've got a rough barrel shape there I'll go to the top face now so 3 to go interface mode click on the top face eye to inset and then e to extrude to bring it down and we've got a nice barrel shape now I've made these a bit thinner and actually like the chunky look of these ones over here so what I can do is select this edge loop by alt left clicking on one of the lines going across the loop shift alt left click on this one to select this edge loop as well and ctrl + will grow my selection now it's added the ones on either side to that as well now with individual origin selected I can press scale Z and it will scale them with their individual origins and now it's a bit more chunky and there we have a nice looking barrel okay so let's hide those so here's the next one now it's getting a bit more tricky let's see how you get on the key to this one is the mirror tool okay so you may have found this one a bit harder but the main thing is just to break it down by areas and work on those then try and add to it I'll explain what I mean so I'll move this across to the side and start afresh down here so shift a tad and start with the cube most of my shapes that I do start with a cube I'll scale that down a bit and move it into position so it's going to be the hilt of the sword so I'll go down a bit more still keeping my cube proportions so my scale is still uniform but I can reset the scale at this point if you like so control aid set the scale if the scales uniform as in they're all the same then generally the tools will all work as you'd expect now what I need to do now is use the mirror tool and you'll notice that this can not only mirror in the X but it can also mirror in the Y so we only need to make a quarter of the shape this time I'm going to use a new plugin so if you go to edit preferences add-ons and type in mirror you can see that there's the auto mirror tool there and tick that and it's really useful it speeds things up a lot if I now go to edit you can find the auto mirror tool there and let's start with the x-axis and do a mirror there now remember with the mirror it always goes around your pivot point or center point or origin points so it's going to cut a line in here for me and create the other side so if I press Auto mirror now you can't see anything but if I go into edit mode you can see that it's cut it in half for me and made a mirror if I go to Y now if you choose the positive it will be on the backside of your cube not that that matters too much but I always choose that negative and press Auto mirror then it creates it on this side now what that does it does create two mirrors not that it makes any difference but just to smarten things up I can close one down and then make sure the axis is both on the X and y up here so you can have two separate mirrors one with X and another one with Y or you can have one mirror and both the X&Y ticked just makes it a bit cleaner okay so now I can start working on my chunky sword so three to go into face mode and let's extrude this out and let's just go to side view make sure that's roughly matching up and the width is a bit wide so I can select all I'm still in edit mode but I can scale in the Y just to bring it in a bit and there we go now can you see there's a slight circle to this section here so into edit mode so what I need to do is bring this vertex across this way so if I press one grab that one and press GG to edge slide I can slide it across this edge to around there now what I've done rather than just extruding this area up I've actually inset it slightly that means there'll be a slight gap before our blade comes out now this is the part where some of you may have modeled this in a way which I will talk about after I've made the object so three my keyboard to go to face mode select that face and press I to inset and you'll notice there's a problem the inset is actually taking the boundary into account as well and we can go down to our tools over here and take on boundary to get rid of it now we can extrude this out and you can see it's inset slightly I'm not sure why but I decided to make this go up a little bit I don't think I'll do that this time see how it looks okay so I'll grab this in the z-axis again and go up to that point and then scale it in the X extrude it again up to around there and scale in the X and then lastly we can take that one point here G said to move it upwards now realistically this is actually bad topology to do this because can you see how there is actually a triangular edge there but it's not shown but in order to render it does need to render everything as triangles so you can see when I come across to this side it actually shows that triangle in the shading although when we're modeling we're only seeing the quad so for shapes like this you do really need a triangle so let's actually do that I can select these two points with shift and pressing J to join them together and create that triangle now we're seeing exactly what blender is showing us and we're not going to get any glitches later on that can be quite important when it comes to topology which we'll talk about in later episodes okay let's come around to the bottom I think it would be best if I hide this floor so H to hide back into this and into edit mode okay so we'll do the same thing for the handle let's grab this one GG now we've got a circle let's go to face mode and then set this in fact I didn't insert it on here and I think it will look better if it does have an inset so I to inset and then e to extrude and then s to scale let's go to front view e to extrude s to scale and then what I'll do is I'll just extrude the whole bottom section like this and then go to face mode and select that face loop there's only two of course and then we can extrude and scale but not in the Zed so shift set and scale that out now interesting when you do that and you've made twice it can scale slightly unusually and you do need to adapt the shape which is what I want to do anyway because I want to select these two faces here and grab them in the Y slightly to make it slightly more circular and this one here grabbing the Y and in fact let's grab this edge loop down here so alt left click and I'm going to grab shift said so it doesn't grab in the z axis and just by I move it around so there's a bit more of a circle to it so a bit more manual adjusting with this one I think this one needs to come out as well so GG to edge slide and then grab shift Zed and put it outwards okay so a few things going on there at the bottom here I think it is nice if it's slightly rounded as well so I can grab this bottom face G then said and move that down and I think it looks nicer if there is a slight taper down there so I'll use the grow selection tool again ctrl + but actually I don't need this one do I so it's control - to deselect if you've gone too far with your ctrl + and then grab in the z axis so there we have it a chunky sword I think that one looks a bit better than the other one and that's mainly down to these insects here now some of you when making this I'll just add a new cube over here and scale it right down and scale in the X and do my auto mirrors now some of you might have thought it was better to do ctrl R a whole loop cut across there and then another one across there and then extrude out your handle which is working fine but if we compare the two topology now if I go into edit mode with both of them you can see that this one has this extra topology down here which we don't really need because this is still in quads and this is in quads but generally this is the way you do it within sets and the reason being if I want to add let's say some topology in here I can do a loop cut in there nice and easily and let's say I wanted to move that up a bit and scale this one in in order to make more of a taper I can do that but if I want to do that in here I have to do a loop cut in here and another one in here and drag it in and the topology starts getting very messy so where you can ideally you inset your shape instead okay so here's the next shape a nice straightforward shield possibly a bit easier than the sword now I'll give you a hint but perhaps it's more preference of mine but for this one I actually started with the circle mesh but don't panic if you want to do it in another way or that's too confusing so have a go at that okay so let's bring this across to the side I'll hide my ground plane and shift day to add mesh circle I'll go to top view and actually I'll rotate this one around the x-axis so that we can see the shape still and with my circle selected or when one thing I forgot to do was to change the amount of points but we'll see how we go with 432 and see whether we need to change it later on at this point I could just add the circle in again but I'll show you ways you can change it later on so let's use the auto mirror and mirror our circle now into edit mode and into vertex mode and then let's start pulling it around so I'll select on one of my points and press o which is the proportional editing tool here the default curve is this smooth curve here so I'll change it back to the default and just make sure it's highlighted blue like that so o is the shortcut for that and if I press G to grab now I can then move these sections around I can use my scroll wheel to change the size of the circle of influence and I can just move these into a position that I want now because I've got lots of points down the side it takes a bit longer to move them into position and that's why it's always best to start with the lowest poly object possible and then add points in if I need it so I don't need all these points I can go across and select let's say these points here delete and instead of deleting the vertices I can dissolve the vertices and I'll just give that a bit more support down here and reposition these I probably don't need as many across the top either so I just delete this one or dissolve this one I should say okay so we've got roughly the same shape I suppose I've scared it up so it's a bit more similar and it looks like it's a bit wider as well now can you see that when I scale in the X in edit mode can you see how it actually scales just this section here so watch that bottom vertex when I scale in the X it wants to squeeze into the other one so actually to scale in the X you press G then X and move it outwards and that makes it wider but it doesn't scale all your vertices so you have to sort of move them across and then scale them in the X if you want to spread out your vertices as well I just don't do that then move it into the correct position okay so I've got the nice outline shape and I feel like this is quite a nice way of modeling objects that are fairly sort of uniformly flat just model it from the top down and then you extrude it backwards okay so we've got this outline and you'd think it would be easy enough to just press F to fill and then I to inset but nothing's happening and you can see when I click the boundary on that some things are happening but it seems to be a bit confused so I'll undo that and undo that face what I've found with this is that you need to have an extra face so II then said so extrude that out in the Zed first otherwise it gets a bit confused with what's going on everywhere else so let's go back to top view with seven on my numpad and now we should be able to fill in that face although I've chosen the bottom face by accident so let's choose those top vertices back to top mode and fill in that face now when I press I it should inset okay what I do have to watch out for is this corner here so I won't go beyond those edges and overlaps them like this you can see there's a problem there I do need to take boundary off and there's an interesting problem here with the clipping so I've got clipping on but it's going over the edge there I may just have to quickly edit that by hand the reason I want to use the inset tool is because it will scale inwards uniformly what we can do instead of the intersect tool as it seems a little untidy in this case is the extrude and scale tool but you can see how that's not giving me a clean scale so we'll undo that what you can do if you know that your object origin is right in the center you could change this to 3d cursor e to extrude and then scale it down and now it's scaling into that 3d cursor which is a bit better then I can scale in the Y to do it little bit by hand at this point but you can see some of the issues I'm getting doing this inset now there's a few reasons I believe this is happening the first one could be that it's mirrored so it's taking this kind of as the center point in a way so it gives us a few problems the other one is that this is quite a big end gone and perhaps there's other reasons that I don't understand but whenever you come across problems like this occasionally you have to go in and tidy things up by hand or use the different tools and the different options available to you so instead of inset I'm using extrude and scale and I'm using the 3d cursor as my center point so often a lot of time it is to do with just problem solving okay now we can extrude this one downwards so II then said and we're getting there with our shield now I want to mirror this to the other side so let's select these bottom edges and move them up so that it's not such a fat shield remember it's kind of doubling its width when it's being mirrored so somewhere around there but I will need my origin to be at the bottom here so it mirrors correctly so there's two ways of doing that now I can select all G and then Zed or there is if I go back to object mode up in the options here you can change origin to just move the origin so if I press G then Zed it's moving the origin so back into edit mode and let's click on the said for the mirror and now I can select all my shape with a grab and Zed access move it down until it squeezes together now the last bit is getting a bit of a curve now that's a little bit tricky the best way is probably to use something like a lattice the easiest way and perhaps the quickest is to apply your mirror and then use proportional editing in the middle now before you apply modifiers it's a good idea to copy your shape so I'll press shift D and X and notice I'm actually just moving the origin now so undo that and turn off the origin now let's shift the annex that's better now the reason I've created a new one is because when I press apply here it's made it one full object and if I change one side it's only going to change that side so that's called destructive modeling and if I want to get it back need to chop it in half again or do the auto mirror at all again so it's a good idea often if you're going to do something destructive to have a saved version that you could go back to now I can select this loop cut so into edge mode with to select that middle loop with alt left click o for proportional editing G to grab in the Zed axis ah now can you see I've got a slight issue here and that's the fact that I'm moving it around the 3d cursor still which is over here so let's undo that and change this to medium point two which is the default G then said and move it up and we've now created a curve on our shield there's slight issues with this and it's a good idea to go in by hand and just move some of these into position and notice because I haven't got my mirror turned on I need to do it on both sides it is worth pointing out that a big end gone like this in the middle is not ideal but it does work in this case in future episodes I will talk about topology and how it will work together so you can get better models that will work better with the tools okay so a few issues there you might come up against that might make it a bit more tricky but hopefully that's given you enough ideas with the knowledge that we've got already to do basic modeling do you comment below with any thoughts and ideas that you might have for this series so until next time thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 114,305

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, shader, shader editor, baking, normal maps, texture baking, texture maps, cavity, ambient occlusion, low poly, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender 3d, 3d modeling, simple, exercise, create, model, beginner, starting out, grant abbitt, grant abbit, blender beginner, blender (software), blender low poly

Id: -0tMeMZpeXE

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020