BEGINNER hard-surface modeling tutorial in Blender!

what's up guys in this video we're going to do a vanilla tutorial you know me i like to do a good balance of both add-ons and vanilla stuff just to kind of um appease the whole community so yeah we're just going to kind of hop into it and um let me turn off my add-ons as a matter of fact because i might unknowingly try to use it so yeah add-ons are great but if you're new it's like trying to learn calculus without knowing algebra you need to know the fundamentals so that's why i do videos like this so basically you've seen from the thumbnail we're going to make so we're going to go to mesh and then cube and the first thing we want to do is convert this cube into a sphere now there are sphere options as you may know but the best way to get a perfect sphere is by using a cube and subdividing it into a sphere so what we're going to do for that is press control 3 maybe control 4 ctrl 5. let's do ctrl 5 to add five counts apply that then we'll apply a cast modifier we're going to change the cast type to a sphere put this up to 1 not 10 1 and now we're going to have is a perfect sphere and we can go ahead and right click and shade that smooth so i want to start slicing this guy up and getting the piece that you saw in the thumbnail so if you're a beginner then what you need to do is go up here to edit in the preferences and you're going to turn on the bowl tool add-on here it's free comes with a blender just type it in enter bull and like you know like you're chilling on the couch and then um turn that guy on what we're going to do is hop to the top view and what i want to do is add in a cube here what we're going to do once we add in that cube is pull it down a bit on the y axis and then i'm just going to basically chop out this front half so we'll go ahead and shift click on this press control minus on the numpad and now we have is the ability to kind of move this thing back and forth if we select this cube here we can kind of move it back and forth to get all sorts of different effects here you're going to notice that as we move it we get these weird shading errors going on and see that as we kind of move it we get um just shading issues in general and that's simply because if i were to which we're going to do in a second maybe put it here and go to this guy so i kind of want to you know focus this on beginners as well so to hide this guy you press the h key and now we have is a cut that's what we just made issue here is if we tab into edit mode what do we have we still have the sphere and a lot of people ask me this what gives this is intended functionality so whenever you add in a boolean and you don't apply the modifier over here you can see there's an option to apply it that means it's still live in the stack meaning the change is shown in object mode but in terms of the physical geometry that exists it is not actually applied this is the real mesh this is just a preview of what it would look like when we apply that boolean so if we want to have access to this geometry what we have to do is come in here and click apply and now we're actually going to have access to that geometry as you can see and you're going to see we have a lot of geometry in here i mean we probably could have gotten away with the less but um yeah it is what it is really it's probably a good enough amount so next thing i want to do right off the bat is apply a bevel modifier and once again you know if you're familiar with my channel and watch my videos you know what bevel does basically bevel is going to give a nice rounded edge to this piece so um right now the limit method is set to none we want to change it over to angle so that way every single edge doesn't get beveled it only bevels based off of the angles of the edges so we're gonna go to angle and now we're gonna only have this side beveled here okay so now as you can see we have a um a small little bevel let's first of all go in here go to normals and then turn on auto smooth that'll help clean up the shading a bit and you're going to see now we only have a bevel here issue is if we go in here and try to adjust the offset you're going to see it only bevels a little bit and this is intended functionality so if i were to go in here and go into viewport display and go to wireframe you're going to see kind of how the bevel's working if i turn this up you're going to see we have a small bevel but it'll stop beveling once it starts overlapping with edges like right here it's going to start overlapping see this we have a bevel come in and then as we push it out right there is when it would start overlapping so that's why the bevel stops going but if you want to keep going and overlap and just kind of override that all we have to do is turn off the clamp overlap option and now we can go as high as we want as you can see and the way i use clamp overlap is more so for a um i guess a diagnosing issues purpose more so than actually using it for what it's intended for yeah i always turn off clamp but it's really good for quickly diagnosing issues and see if you have overlap so for example if you have a bevel and you turn on clamp overlap and it gets smaller that basically indicates to you hey i have overlaps going on i need to go in there and fix that we'll discuss more about that in a second so what i want to do is turn the segment count up to about three you can go higher if you want three five ten i just three is enough for me if you go too high you know the more segments you go the more geometry you get but three is probably just fine for the human eye and i'm actually going to go outside of wireframe view here and you're going to see what we have is a nice bevel but really really shaded strange and this is actually intended functionality we'll kind of explain what's going on for beginners out there and even people experience they don't really know the back end reasoning so every single point on your mesh every single vertex has an orientation to it if you've taken a calculus course before you're probably familiar with the concept of a tangent and i'll just pull i put up a picture just to make it easier so this is oops let me get this one this picture right here this is a tangent it hits a curve like this at exactly one point but doesn't intersect the curve that's how a tangent's working now a normal is completely perpendicular to the tangent so the normal um i'll just type in normal and tangent so you can see i kind of like to explain back end stuff right here good example so this right here is a normal and it hits the tangent perpendicular and we call this the same thing in 3d we call these um these points normals so with that in mind if we were to go in here and turn on normals for vertices you're going to see that every single little edge coming out of these vertices is completely perpendicular to that vertex like i just showed in the picture so that's what a normal is now there's actually an issue when it comes to normal sometimes when you start going over a curved surface the normals can be incorrectly oriented causing bad shading so the best way to fix that and reorient the normals to make them completely perpendicular is to either one turn on the heart and normals option or two turn on a weighted normal now these are both one and the same the only difference is the harden normals option is built into the bevel modifier whereas the way to normal is a separate modifier only difference is harder normals apply as a sharp weighted normals doesn't if you don't know what that is don't worry about it basically all you need to do to reorient the normals over bevels to make it shade properly is tick on the heart of normals option so we're going to do that and you're going to see already it starts looking a lot better minus these weird shading issues here which we'll take care of so what we just fixed is the shading problems now shading is completely different from artifacting shading like i just explained has to do with how the normals are calculated and by taking on the heart of normals option we fix that the real issue here comes with these really dark spots these artifacts going on and this is not on a rendering level this is on a physical level what's happening is the geometry is overlapping and causing these distortions this has nothing to do with shading and everything to do with how the geometry is being positioned so take a look if i apply this bevel modifier you're going to see some of these points are overlapping it might be easier to see if i do this in wireframe instead so turn this on check this out we kind of mentioned it before but as i start pushing out the bevel more eventually look right here it starts overlapping see that and that's precisely what's happening so the way you fix this is to one prevent overlaps or two drop the bevel to be smaller so overlaps don't occur sometimes that's easier said than done the easiest way to fix this is to do a little combination of a smaller bevel as well as just fixing it manually so i'm going to drop the bevel a bit more just because when i do bevels i like more of a machine look to it and in general machine type of objects don't have a really massive bevel they're usually quite tiny so just a small bevel is enough to kind of capture the reflections on the edge it looks better so yeah do that and now all we have to do is take care of the overlaps which is really easy we just go in here let me also turn off this um normal stuff i don't like it turn that off so all we have to do is simply select a vertex and double tap the g key to slide this out of the way now these aren't overlapping anymore this one is going to have be an issue simply because these vertices are too close to each other and that's also going to cause an overlap so what we can do is go up here turn on this auto merge option and simply merge these together we'll just double tap the g key and then slide this one in and now that's taken care of as you can see and basically you do the same thing all around so for this one same idea all you do is you come in here slide these guys out of the way so they're not overlapping slide these together really really easy stuff and yeah basically you're going to do the same exact thing all the way around this piece i'm not going to bother doing that on video because literally all i'm doing is coming in here and just sliding these guys out of the way so yeah all you need to do is find the bad spots with the shading artifacts and do the same thing we've been doing all right so i just went ahead and fixed everything up now what you may have done is went all the way around the circle and cleaned everything up manually so you might call me an for this but i wanted you to feel that annoyance of having to do that so you can understand that you need to take shortcuts when it's possible let me show you something really cool so obviously you would have had to go all the way around and do this manually it sucks instead what you can do if you're working with a symmetrical object like this is you can simply deal with the first half and then symmetrize to the other side and just basically knock out half the work so we're going to do is simply go into the front view you're going to press 1 on the numpad and then 5 on the numpad to go into orthographic view so that way you have a completely perfect view of the front and now we're going to do is tab into edit mode you can go into any of the modes here and what we're going to do is go up here to mesh and then symmetrize and in this case we want to symmetrize over the x-axis so now there's two different axis options one is negative to positive one's positive to negative so you want to make sure you're symmetrizing from the good side to the bad side not the other way around so in this case i want to symmetrize from this side over to here so let's try positive x to negative x and see how that works and there we go now as you can see we actually have the correct side being symmetrized and we just eliminated basically half the work actually it looks like i forgot this bottom area so let me just take care of that and then same idea you can hop in here select everything and then go to mesh and then symmetrize again and just the easiest thing and now we have a completely symmetrical and perfectly shaded mesh here all right so next what we're going to do is get into some more detail on this thing so we're going to do something called the slice operation so what i'm going to do is hop into the front view once again one on the numpad and i want to take this guy and do a slice in the middle you'll see what a slice is in a second so i'm just going to add in a new cylinder here let's make it like um 32 not not 32 64 vertices if that hawk outside will be quiet or whatever that bird is 64 vertices we're going to right click and shade it smooth and then go to auto smooth so that way basically smoothing it out gives you okay shading but if you want to even out the edges so it doesn't smooth over the edges as well you have to turn on auto smooth so we're going to do that in addition and now we have a nice cylinder here and then what we're going to do is rotate this guy 90 degrees over the x-axis so rx and then 90 and then if we just scale this guy down we're going to put it right on the inside here around here should be okay and we'll grab it on the y-axis as well and what i want to do on this guy is shift click on the sphere and we're going to press ctrl forward slash on the numpad to get a slice now make sure you're doing it on the numpad not on the keyboard people ask me this all the time the numpad is not the keyboard it's the thing on the right of your keyboard so make sure you do that control forward slash and now we're going to have is basically two separate objects with a slice right here on this ridge so all that really did was it separated these two objects based off of where the cylinder is positioned so that's all that's happening so yeah pretty cool what we're going to do is actually hide this guy with the h key and just go in here and apply the booleans on both of these guys now sometimes when you run slice operations it shares the data which um it's separate objects but it's sharing the same data and then what happens is it doesn't allow you to apply the modifiers don't worry about why this happens just go in here to this triangle panel tick on this number and then you'll be able to actually apply your boolean and here you're going to apply the boolean as well don't apply the bevel because we want to have full control over that bevel and if we apply it then we can't really change the bevel as you can see and as you can see once we applied that boolean it also picked up our bevel as well which is nice so we're going to do is let's see tab into face mode i want to select this face as a matter of fact let's select these two faces and press the f key to fill that into an n gone there's no need to have the edge in the middle and we're going to press ctrl b to run a bevel and i'm just going to do a single segment bevel so scroll down until you only have one and we're basically just going to pull this guy in to about here and now we have this thing and this is actually one of my favorite things to do with models like this i love adding in slices and then adding in a manual bevel afterwards because it gives you this nice cool effect here so yeah looking pretty good so far no bad shading errors or anything so i'm making good progress next what i want to do is run some array of circles around the edge of this sphere here so i'm going to go into the front view and we're going to add in another cylinder so shift a at a cylinder we'll go ahead and shade the smooth and turn on auto smooth and let's rotate this guy 90 degrees over the x-axis again so doing a radial array basically arraying around in a circular pattern is not that easy in vanilla well actually i shouldn't say not that easy it's not that beginner friendly i guess so i'm going to show you step by step what you do so first thing i want to do is move the sky up just onto the top here this is roughly where i want to start the radial array scale it down a bit and then let's go ahead and just move it out like that okay pretty good maybe a bit more okay and now we're going to do is simply add on an array modifier and you're going to see what this does is it makes the piece array in one direction you know you can make this the x you can make it the y um if i can type this in right you can make it the y-axis or z-axis in this case this is the y-axis but it's going on the z because the rotation here is not applied but if i were to apply the rotation with control a and lock that in it'll actually be on the right axis now but yeah basically this gives you control over whatever axis you want to array this on now i don't want to array it on an axis i want to array it around a circle so to do that i'm going to go into the front view and we're going to add in an empty object and this just basically gives us a pivot point there's no reason i'm using an empty you could use any object you want nice thing about empties is they don't add any extra stress to your scene so i'm going to press shift a and add in an empty plane axis like that and what we're going to do is allow the array to go around as we rotate this piece so what we need to do is a few different things first of all we need to take this guy and make the object offset based off of this empty here so take off relative offset turn on object offset and pick this empty right here next we need to press ctrl a to apply the scale on the cylinder because um if the scale isn't applied like right now it's 0.052 it's basically multiplying that 20 times the size because 0.05 is you know roughly uh 20 of the even values of one like we should have right so basically this is 20 times bigger so yeah make sure you press ctrl a and apply the scale and for good measure you could do it on this as well if you scaled up the empty but i didn't so i'm going to leave it alone and now you're going to see if i were to move this around it kind of you know moves this arrayed cylinder with it now that's not what i'm going for i want this piece to go around in a circle so we need to select the cylinder here right click and then set the origin to the 3d cursor which is in the center of the grid as you can see so now we're doing is basically allowing this pivot to go around the middle so now if i rotate this around the y see what's happening now it's rotating off of this pivot point right here so what i'm going to do is rotate you know it kind of depends on how many pieces you want let's say i added in like 10 pieces so if i wanted 10 of these guys going around and we're going 360 degrees then we need to do 36 degree increments 360 divided by 10. so i want 10 of these so i'm going to select the cylinder and make the count 10. take this empty and then rotate it 36 degrees and now we have a completely even set of points around here and now all i want to do is take this guy and then shift click on the sphere and press control minus to add in a difference you're going to see these are kind of weirdly shaded we need to make sure we also shade smooth the cutter so select the cutters shade it smooth turn on auto smooth and make sure that this piece is shaded smooth as well and if that's not working i already know what the problem is you need to make sure your booleans are above the bevel because what's happening right now is it's first applying the bevel and then running the boolean operation i want to run the boolean operation and then have the bevel pick up on those cuts as well and yeah just like that it's a little bit tedious like you saw but you'll get used to it the more you work with it and now we have a pretty cool looking piece here i'm happy with that and i'm going to show you one more cool trick that i love to use so if we take this um take the cylinders back so in this case whenever you run a boolean difference it actually makes like a bounding box around the cutters in reality this is just a cylinder but it takes the bounding box of all the pieces whenever you use the boolean difference i don't mind it so i'm going to leave it alone but if you don't like that it does that you can actually go in here go to viewport display and change this to like a solid which would basically show the array or maybe like a wire or bounds i like the bounds effect though because i like seeing um how big the bullion is so let me show you this cool little trick that a lot of people don't know about if you see in my reverse bevels tutorial you know what i'm about to do first thing i want to do is scale the sky a bit in edit mode if we were to scale this in object mode it's going to scale everything in a weird direction so if we scale this in edit mode it'll actually affect all the arrayed pieces as well so we're just going to scale that a bit in edit mode make it smaller and then i want to go into face mode take this face and then grab it on the y axis so g y and then pull it back a bit right to about here and now what i'm going to do is bevel this piece i kind of want to have like a nice chamfer going outwards like we have on this piece so if i press ctrl b and apply a bevel right now you're going to see the bevel is going inwards instead of outward that's not what i want so if we want the bevel to go outwards instead we need to flip the normal direction remember we discussed normals before if we flip the direction of the normal then it will bevel in the opposite direction so because it's going to push in the opposite direction that the bevel would normally go right so to do that we're going to go up here to mesh normals and then flip the normals you can also press the alt n key and do it here if you want to have an easier to access menu and now if we press ctrl b it's going to bevel outwards like this very very neat so we'll just bevel that and then hide this piece and let's also drop the segment or not the segment count the offset amount a little bit so that way it's kind of more like um like a machined look to it like that maybe a bit more so it doesn't look too bad like that so really all this did was it gave it a bit more oomph to it just made it look more i don't know detailed and sometimes the small changes are what make the most detail in your models so yeah when you can do stuff like this i'm a fan of it and yeah we're going to do now is just keep adding a few more pieces of detail you know i don't want this tutorial to be way too long i just want to make sure i'm covering all the important stuff and then you know allow you to make your own so next thing i'm going to do is go into the front view and i want to add in a cube here so we're going to go to mesh and then cube and scale down the cube pull it up to about here and i'm also going to pull this out on the y-axis a bit like that and what i want to do is shift click on this piece in the middle press ctrl forward slash on the numpad and run another slice operation so now what i can do is tab into edge mode let's do it for the cutter only so select the cutter tab into edge mode now check this out see how the cutter is what's controlling that slice likewise we can make cool designs to the cutter as well to make the slice look cool so what i'm going to do is take these two edges here shift click both of them we'll press ctrl b and run let's run a champ for just one segment and maybe pull this down a bit like that and now we kind of have this detail and all i want to do from this point on is hide it we're going to go ahead and apply the boolean so like i said if you can apply it you have to go in here and turn on the this button and this only does it when you're using the slice operation because it's sharing data so just make sure you click on that number we're going to first of all apply the boolean and i just do want to mention one thing notice how when we apply the boolean the bevel kicks in this is basically doing the same thing if we put the boolean above the bevel what happens is it always calculates the top of the stack first and then works its way down and booleans and bevels are not interchangeable pieces so the moment i apply the boolean it's um it's treating it as if this boolean was already on the top so that's basically what's what's kind of happening anyways we have some issues here we'll take care of that in a second for this one let's do the same thing apply the boolean there we go and there's one thing i want to point out that i absolutely hate i wish it was not a default in blender but it is so if we go into you might be able to see it here but if we go into wireframe you're gonna see we have these really weird like pinching effects like a triangle going into the corners this is called the miter type i hate these because it looks too pinched to me what i like to do is go in here to the bevel modifier change the outer miter type to an arc so that way it's a lot smoother like that and if any developer happens to watch this video i would love if the arc was the default one but anyways you can't get everything you want in life so what we're going to do is turn off wireframe and go to this one as well change this to an arc just because didn't really make a difference but whatever and then just like we did at the beginning of the video we have to clean up these shading artifacts here so we're just going to tab into vertex mode and just take a look now if this is too awkward to look at you can press the forward slash button on the numpad to isolate it also press five on the numpad to get into perspective and as you can see here's the issue and also if you try to zoom in and you get this weird clipping going on go to this view panel press the end key go to view and drop the clip start to like point zero one instead and i can kind of zoom in anyways you can see the issue here this one needs to be merged down so double tap the g key slide that and then maybe slide this one as well just for good measure okay same idea for this piece slide this one slide that one and that was a really easy fix so forward slash on the numpad again to go back into global view so same idea for this piece right here we'll select it and get to work so by um default intuition you might think okay let me slide this one in and in this case we actually got lucky it worked but if this slid any closer we probably probably would have gotten like a um shading artifact right there this is not a good move so for this one i would only move this one down or what you probably could have done is selected this edge in edge mode press the x key and then went to dissolve edges and that would have probably done the same thing in terms of shading so either way works i'm just going to keep it consistent slide this one down and there we go so same thing to the other side we're going to take this vertex and double tap the g key to slide it down and there we go so we'll go outside of local view and now we have a pretty cool little indentation or notch whatever you want to call this in the top and to make it even cooler i'm going to tab into edge mode and control click across to these edges here we'll press ctrl b actually let's just do it for the bottom ones here control b on this one run a very small notch there pretty cool and i'm also going to drop the offset a bit to give it more of a machine look to it so right about there and this one point zero zero three as well not too bad and then what i like to do is something i like to call scaling geometry some of you may have seen this trick before what i'm going to do is tab into the or not tab into just press one on the numpad to go into front view go into edge mode and i'm going to control click all the way around and just select this set of edges here now i want to duplicate them so shift d to duplicate right click to cancel and then p to separate by selection so now we have a separate piece here which we basically stole from this guy so whenever you steal geometry it shares the same modifiers as the geometry you stole from so in this case we have a bevel on it for now let's turn that off what i'm going to do is now to scale this in a bit can't really see where it's scaling into so if we press the z key we can go into wireframe i'm just going to scale this in some more like that we'll move it outside to the front and now let's simply go into vertex mode select everything with the a key now i just want to extrude these so e to extrude and then alt s to scale along those normals so like this like that and then we'll go and um just select everything with the a key as a matter of fact this is not flat right now so let's select it with the a key scale it on the y axis so s y and then 0 to flatten it and now if we press the e key we can simply extrude into the mesh here like that pretty cool and now all i want to do is shade this smooth and then turn on auto smooth which it should be on and we're just going to shift click on this guy and run a difference boolean like that and of course we might need to reposition the booleans so make sure the boolean is above the bevel here now we're going to have a pretty nice result and we can also maybe move this back just a bit like that pretty cool i'm just going to hide this guy and the last thing i want to do before we um this thing looks boring i know but i'm going to show you the power of rendering and getting nice composition this thing can look really cool if you actually set it up properly so what we're going to do now is add in a cylinder let's rotate the cylinder in 90 degrees over the x-axis so our x and the 90. right click to shade smooth and then turn on auto smooth what we're going to do is scale this guy down bring it out a bit and then simply run a difference boolean here with control and minus on the numpad and of course make sure your boolean is above the bevel like that and all i want to do now is that reverse bevel trick will go into face mode move this face back a bit alt n to flip the normals and then control b to run a bevel like that and there we go so i just taught you most of the modeling tricks and the fundamentals you need to know to actually get started on your own or maybe just to build up more of your wealth of information and just kind of know what's happening so this here we discussed topology management how booleans work how to set up bevels modifier stack all that good stuff that is literally the gist of hard surface modeling now this is a very very basic piece as you get more experience you could probably recreate this in five minutes especially if you're using add-ons but this is you know simple enough for a beginner's tutorial and i think everyone can probably make something like this after having modeled this piece so now we're going to do is actually make this thing is exciting because modeling is half the battle right you can have the best model but if you don't render it or make it look good it was all for nothing so we're going to go and make this thing look really cool so when we're rendering we want to always pay attention to the angles and how the lighting is hitting the object very important stuff so before we actually render we need to add some materials to it so what i'm going to do is go up here to the material view and right now the just the default material is a white material let me also hide this empty with the h key so i want to give this guy a metallic material to it so we're gonna go to the materials menu here and click on new and just put the metallic value all the way up to one so now this is a metal and then what we can do is go to base color and drop that a bit and then maybe drop the roughness a bit as well like that let's actually make this a bit brighter and put the roughness to about here and you can also give these objects a bit of clear coat you don't have to but sometimes it makes it look cool so just a bit of clear coat to kind of pick up those reflections on the side now your um your viewport we'll discuss in a second let's just hold off on that anyways let's go to the next one here this middle piece and let's add in the same material from the drop down and what we can do is click on this number next to it to make it a separate material and then maybe make this one a bit darker or something to make it have some variation and this one will give the original material as well like that so this is the gist of things if you want a metallic material you put the metallic slider up to one if you want a dielectric material put it to zero you can adjust the roughness as well to make it reflective or rough and you can always adjust the color as well that's basically all you need to know about materials and how they work the next and most important part is setting up this thing for rendering so i'm going to go into the front view here and we always want to set up our render in general with a base plane to let it sit on so i'm going to press shift a and then add in a plane let's put this right on the bottom make sure there's a small enough gap to get the shadows as well so right about here we'll scale this guy up make it really big like that we can go in here and add in a new material and make this one metallic maybe with some lower roughness to kind of capture the reflection some more and now we want to do is go into the rendering view so i'm going to go up here to the rendering panel and just give it a second to load and what you're going to have is a much more accurate representation with the cycles rendering engine now for the floor i'm going to make this base color a bit darker and i do want to mention your rendering view is going to look way worse than this you're probably going to have something like this reason being is because i'm using an hdri for the lighting i'll link the hdri i use in the description it's free to download basically you're going to download that go to this color input panel under the world tab go to environment texture and then simply open that hdri file that's in the description just download it and we'll just um open that up and now what you're going to have is a much nicer calculation of light because this is actually using a real world photo for natural light whereas before all we had was just a completely dark and neutral background so that's why you want to go with hcri's that come from the real world like this and basically you have a pretty cool object here now we need to do is add in a backdrop to actually make this thing have something in the background we also want to consider where the lighting is hitting this thing from in this case the lighting is hitting it from the rear side which you know you may or may not want what i actually want is for the lighting to kind of hit it from the front so i'm going to go up here drag up a new panel we're going to go to the shader editor and go to the world tab now you're probably going to have these three right here if you don't have these two simply go to edit preferences and turn on the node wrangler add-on just enable that guy and then all you have to do is select this and press ctrl t on the keyboard to get that and hang on a second yeah then basically you just connect these up and they should be connected up then what you can do is rotate this hdri until you get it where you want so you'll see as i rotate this more the hdri starts moving so i can basically move this so the lighting hits it more from the front so if we take a look you can see this is like 45 degrees for example this is like 60. you get the idea i'm going to do like i don't know 75 degrees or so that should be okay maybe 85 or something 90 i'm just trying to find a good position for it and also this uh lighting orientation is also dependent on where you're viewing it from in the camera if we look at the side right you know compared to in this angle you might have a different view of the light so this is where the composition kind of comes into play you have to figure out where you want the surrender to be from this in my opinion is a good enough render right here so what we're going to do is set up a backdrop and then render this guy so to add a backdrop i'm just going to go in here to the top view add in a single plane rotate the plane 90 degrees over the x-axis and then rotate it like that and then just kind of scale it up and pull it back really easy stuff so i want it to be right around here [Music] actually wrong side let me make sure it's on the other side so over here somewhere okay and all we're going to do is just basically rotate this guy and scale it until it's how we want it to look something like this should be okay and for the backdrops getting backdrops and floor reflectivity is tricky because everything you change adjusts the effect of the light for example on the floor if i made the floor really dark you're going to see the bottom of the cylinder is going to be dark or not the cylinder but the sphere here you're going to see if it's really bright the bottom gets to be really illuminated so you have to find a good balance of what type of color you want and how much that light is going to reflect onto the object so i'm going for more of a darker color here then maybe for the backdrop we can do a new one you can make the backdrop metallic if you want i would suggest experimenting in general i leave them as dielectric and increase the roughness and then maybe drop the base color a bit and really just play with it so something like this would be okay and then maybe for the floor i'll give it a bit more clear coat just because clear coat looks nice and then maybe a bit less roughness as well like that and at this point all we need to do is set up our camera for rendering so we're going to press shift a add in a camera we're gonna go to view and then align view align active camera to view now we're gonna have this so this is the hard part getting a good angle for the camera all you have to really do is move this thing around until you find a good position now in general something like 135 millimeters will give a more orthographic view of this so i'm going to do that and then root or move it back a little bit like that maybe a bit more like that really it's all just experimentation figuring out what you like and what looks good in the scene in this case this is good just make sure you give the side some breathing room as well you don't want it to be all congested in the camera and also we can go to this output panel and turn on the render region option so that way it's only showing what the render is going to look like so maybe move this sometimes you could also even reposition the floor kind of make your objects float in the air make it look more light really do whatever you want i also want to tab into vertex mode and bevel this vertex right now this point is way too sharp so if we take this vertex we can press ctrl shift and b and run a bevel like this and just make it a bit more flat like that and yeah we have a pretty good view now and we're just about ready to render so the last thing you want to do is make any final adjustments adjust your materials adjust your lighting adjust your camera angle sometimes a more um dutch angle looks pretty cool for your objects if you do like you know one of these and kind of make it rotated sometimes those look pretty cool really all up to you though but you don't want to go too harsh with it sometimes it doesn't fit either sometimes just having a straight shot is um is better so you know play with it play with the camera and see what you like there's not really a right or wrong it's just what you like and what you don't like so i think this is a good angle here really sometimes just a bit of camera rotation makes all the difference aesthetically talking so what we're going to do is get this thing ready for rendering i have a separate video on rendering settings i'll link it in the description and um yeah you can watch that or i'll just quickly show you why not so i render with the graphics card you don't need really any more than 200 samples simply because we're going to be using the ai denoiser light paths you can just copy the settings here and performance really depends on your system i'm running with a graphics card so i'm just using 1024 by 10 24. last setting go to the layers panel turn on the denoising data option and then all you have to do is go up here to the compositor and set up this exact node setup right here what this will actually do is clean up any noise you get as a result of your final render now in this case you don't really need the glare node simply because we're not using any sort of emissive lighting if you were then you would actually get a nice bloom effect if you use this node so basically what you do is you go up here to click on use nodes you're going to um i'll remove this one you're going to press shift a go to filter denoise and then literally connect up the denoise node like you see here that's all you have to do and then you're basically ready to render and for rendering i just render at 2560 by 1440 same aspect ratio as 1080p just a bit higher you could get away with 1920 by 1080 though that's fine i use a 16-bit tiff for best quality and um yeah that's all you have to do so just go ahead and press the f12 button on your keyboard or go up here to render and you're ready to go so here's the final render and here's the result after doing a bit of post processing in photoshop really easy to get this effect just a few clicks in the camera raw filter and you're good to go so thanks for watching i hope this video provided some insight into the technicalities and fundamentals of hard surface modeling and also if you want more exclusive monthly tutorials like this consider signing up for our patreon every single month we do two complete tutorials one with add-ons and one in the vanilla workflow and we have tons of other perks on there as well you can check out so once again thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 203,636

Keywords: blender, beginner, hard, surface, modeling, tutorial, workflow, no, addons, boolean, bevel, intermediate, new, vanilla, 2.90, hardops, boxcutter, non, destructive, rendering

Id: ZNFu2VgQfJo

Length: 42min 20sec (2540 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020