Blender 2.7 Tutorial #7 : The Mirror Modifier

hello and lockhardt 730 series now to use blender 2.7 in this video we're going to continue on from the last video in which we made this cartoon Bunny hid in the last video though we made it so that we had to make both halves of the character at the same time in other words we have to model the left side of the bunny's face and the right side just to make the bunny but I mentioned in the last video that we could use what's called the mirror modifier to model both halves of the character at the same time so that's what we're going to cover in this video let's go ahead and click on our splash screen now in the last video we started with our default cube and we made it round and then we modeled the facial features and made it kind of the right shape and it drew the ears but it's at this point after we make it round that we're going to cut the character's head in half and use the mirror modifier to duplicate it and flip it as we move along so let's go ahead and zoom in on the cube and I'll press tab to go into edit mode and I'm going to select all my faces and we're going to use that W key that specials menu again and select subdivide but I want to make more than just one cut in each direction I want to make two cuts that's it so of course so we can select all the middle faces of all six sides of the cube and from my front orthographic view that's one and five on your numpad we can tap s to scale out from the middle of the cube making it basically a sphere now of course we still have those pointy corner sticking out from the original cube so in vertices select mode I'm going to select all eight of those corner cube vertices and I'll tap S and I'll scale them inwards towards the middle of the circle or the sphere so that it is now basically a sphere made out of a cube let's go ahead and go to our front view so I'll press 1 on my numpad of course if you don't have a numpad in the second and video in the series I believe it was I show you how to go in your preferences and turn on your number row so you should just be able to use that again preferences are under the font menu when you use your preferences um and we took up the characters head in half from hanging a loop cut around the face front or up and down so I'll tap control R that's loop cut or I'll use the loop cut and slide button over here on my tool shelf in the tools tab there it is right there I'll make the cut up and down but it's very important this time that once I click I then right-click to put the cut exactly in the middle if you just ctrl R and click and then click again you might not get it exactly on you need it exactly lined up with this orange dot which is the origin of your object which kind of tells blender where the objectives the objects coordinate is based on that orange origin dot and the origin is used to place the mirror which is very important so ctrl R click and right-click I'm now going to select or deselect all with the a key and we want to select this half of character's head and delete it the reason why we're selecting this half the characters right or our left on the screen is because when you press 3 on your numpad to go to the side view or right view it's going to look at this half if you delete this half you'll be looking at the wrong side so I'm gonna buck select that means you press B and you get these lines coming out of your mouse that's the box select option and now you can click and drag to block select the vertices but I didn't do it properly I only slept the ones that I was looking at in other words it wasn't the ones on the front of the characters face and not the back half the way we solve that is I'll tap a to deselect everything is this button right here that's the limit selection to visible button and when you make it light it meets like the light is passing through your object and you're able to now select things in the back and the front whereas when it's dark there is no light pass of your object and you can only select things in the front so with that limit selection divisible button light we're going to go back to front view deselect all box like with the B key select that half remember that we're in vertices select mode right now so when I tap X to delete I want to delete the same mode that we're currently in which is vertices select mode and now we just have the 1/2 it's important to note that I did not select the middle row as well only the ones on the actual side so X and vertices now that we have just one kind of hollow half of the character's head I'm going to press tab to go back into object mode and this is where we add the mirror modifier the mirror modifier or all modifiers are located under this wrench tab in the properties window and with the mesh selected you go to add modifier and you select mirror under the generate heading when you add the mirror modifier you'll let us two things happen the most noticeable you get your entire character head back you'll also notice that on this or in this properties window you get the mirror modifier options and when you add multiple modifiers to the same object they become part of a modifier stack kind of like filters and Photoshop basically you can add multiple effects multiple multiple kind of procedural changes or effects to objects using these modifiers and they become ordered and it doesn't matter what order you put them in so keep that in mind if you made a mistake and you add the wrong modifier or you want to get rid of a lot of fire at any point you can always click the X and that will get rid of it or you can add it again there it is right there if you hit apply what that will do is it will make the effects of linear modifier or any modifier permanent now you don't want to do that until you're finished modeling and in this case you probably actually would want to apply the mirror a lot higher because you know after you're finished modeling you probably want em baby because for animation add bones or texture the whole object or maybe you just want to make both half the character a little bit different add a scar on one half of the characters face make them make the two sides of the character's head not quite totally some cool you do that after you hit apply which would then make the error bar fight disappear but you'd have both halves of your mesh back to work with the mayor modifier on the object it's exactly the same as far as going into edit mode as you would without the mirror modifier so if I taps tab you'll notice that only 1/2 of the object though goes into edit mode that's because the half that the mirror modifier is generating is called or I'll call it the virtual half the virtual half you can't actually select or work on but you can select and work on the original half and that will automatically effect and change in real time exactly the other half so that's great it even means that I can do more than just move things and scale things and rotate things I can actually add geometry if I hit ctrl R to make a loop cut around the characters face like we did for the kind of eye and eyebrow shape it'll actually make that same cut on the virtual side to remember it's just mirroring what you have on this side so if I go ahead and select you know this edge and pull it back it'll do the exact same on the other side so that geometry is there what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull on that vertice and that's great but I forgot to mention something if you add me a modifier what you should do right away is you should check clipping because what clipping stops from happening is problems around your mirror right now these vertices are real along the mirror as are the edges between them but I can move vertices away from the mirror that can happen for a lot of reasons as you're modeling that just might happen or the opposite might happen they might go or vertices or I just might go across your mirror that might cause bad things as well you don't want gaps and you don't want overlaps so if you check clipping in your mirror modifier options that won't happen vertices get glued to the edge you can still move it up and down you can still move them front and back you just can't move them away from or across the mirror anymore and that's normally a good thing I will mention though that if you take an edge and you grab it and pull it into the mirror it'll then be stuck same thing goes with a vertice so you in this case if you a mistake and grab something and put it into the mirror that you didn't mean to you can uncheck clipping and then move that back over and all because I'd do a few times there we go and we can undo it so you know you most the time you want to have clipping and turn on there are a few quirks with working with their modifier especially when it comes to working with faces and edges and vertices that are near the mirror now I want to scale the character's nose down like in the last video we made sort of an Elmer Fudd or light bulb shaped nose you would just select this one square on the front of the characters face and scale it down to a smaller square to then extrude out and scale an extrude and scale to make that light bulb shape nose stick out the problem is when you scale anything like an edge or a face next to the mirror it doesn't scale the same way notice that when this original square was scaled it would just scale to a smaller square but when you scale this rectangle it's sort of when you scale it down it doesn't make that same nice square again that means that every time you scale next to the mirror you then have to push or pull away from the mirror to make the right shape in this case I need to push into it a little bit because by default it was like this but I would want it more like this you can just grab edges or faces next to the mirror and it'll automatically squish that face you don't to scale it you can just grab or use your gizmo okay so when you're scaling things next to mirror pay attention to the length of the edge perpendicular to the mirror so don't care about that edge don't care how wide it goes care about the height of this when you're scaling so I want a square to be about that but same with as well so I'll make it that tall and then I can just drag it and adjust it manually okay the other important thing to know is that when you have clipping turned on and you extruded the mirror you do not get internal geometry in other words if I go ahead and click the I to hide the mirror just temporarily there is no face that's internal right there but if I uncheck clipping and do the same thing I do get internal geometry at the mirror which is not a desirable thing so just keep that in mind the best thing to do is just turn clipping all right away and then you won't have so many issues the last thing I'll talk about is the inset tool because that has a special option for when you're using them your modifier so I'm going to redo or turn back on the visibility of my mirror modifier and I'll make a cut through my character's head right there and we're going to make the characters mouth again so if you think back to the last video I selected all six of these faces and I use the eye inset faces tool to make a mouth when I do that this time though we're going to have a problem actually or not that's because I've already changed the option that's what it would normally look like okay so if you do this on your own you would get that same problem where you get an inset right here the way you solve that and you hope we just let me do it is you have to and your inset faces options uncheck boundary that's what you want that's what you don't want so again you can leave it just unchecked and now I'll select or uncheck select outer so I get my inner ones and you'll move that out I'll tap I again and again that works okay maybe I'll move that back in if I scale this up remember that I have to adjust a little bit it's scaling but it's making these ones that one too narrow so I have to move it over and kind of play with it a little bit more if I want the desired result okay so I'm quickly Maul the characters nose I can just extrude out don't worry about internal geometry because we've clipping turned on I can scale but of course I have to pull out and adjust every time I scale at that boundary it's might seem like a big issue but it's really not normally it just takes a little bit of getting used to what you have to do to make things portion all the way you want when you're scaling at the mirror and of course you can drag edges and vertices along the mirror as long as you're not moving them away from the mirror making a gap or towards the yeah let's say I'm happy with this head I want to may start making changes to both sides and make once a little bit different the other what I can do is I can go back into object mode and click on apply when I click apply the modifier goes away and if I go back into edit mode there are two real halves and I can start making one half a little bit different than the other half very easily one last thing I want to mention though before the end of this video is I'm going to undo I had the modifier again if you do find yourself with a big gap in the middle of your object so let's say I select all the vertices and I move them away from the mirror so I have the origin where there is no geometry what I can do especially that's a little gap and I want to solve it very quickly is I can change the merge limit now what this means is in the mirror modifier options there's its merge limit it'll automatically fix for any tiny errors you have at the mirror point so right now it's only fixing a very tiny bit of area if you have a little tiny gap it'll fix it I'm gonna check clipping and then if I turn this value up you'll see that eventually two halves will come together eventually there we go the problem with using this as a solver though is that you then get a weird sort of off sided mirror you can see my real geometry is not quite up in here and that might cause me issues especially if I'm doing lots of little details around the care nose or nostril or something like that but that's going to be it for this video thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: BornCG

Views: 261,179

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.7, 3D, Modelling, modeling, tutorial, lesson, help, tip, tips, beginner, Blender (Software), computer, mirror, modifier, half, halves, halfs, b3d, #b3d, blender 3d, blender3d, CG, CGI, animate, animation, learn, dummies, bunny, software, Tricks, Cartoon, 3D Modeling (Film Job), clipping, merge limit, inset, inset faces, extrude

Id: 3LwQO_tWTAQ

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 19 2014