Blender 2.8 Basics Tutorial pt. 4 | Intro to Mesh Modeling

so up until this point all of the work that we've done in blender has been at the object level which means that we're just working with objects nothing above that and nothing below that but if we're stuck working with these objects how in the world can we expect to create more complex and intricate models say a car or a helicopter a spaceship or even a realistic human face it seems trivial to try and create a face using primitive shapes doesn't it and that's where mesh modeling comes in mesh modeling is an entirely different type of 3d modeling than the primitive modeling that we did earlier because mesh modeling allows us to actually define the shapes that were working with from the ground up so let's start talking about the basics of mesh modeling and that all begins with some 3d modeling theory just about every 3d model that you have ever seen whether it be in a video game the visual effects of a blockbuster film or even an animation were made with the same three components a vertex an edge and a face so let's talk about what exactly these are and how they make up the 3d models that we use today we'll start small and work our way up a vertex is simply a point in 3d space it has no scale it has no dimension it's simply an XY and z coordinate it's really not all that interesting on its own until we add a second vertex into our scene once we have another vertex in our scene we can connect the two vertices together with an edge an edge is a one-dimensional piece of geometry and on its own it really isn't very interesting but if we take at least three of them and connect them together at their endpoints we get a face which is a two-dimensional piece of geometry and by combining these faces in different ways we can create just about any piece of 3d geometry that we could possibly imagine I mentioned that there's a specific mode in blender that we need to switch into in order to modify our mesh that mode is called edit mode and in order to switch into edit mode all we need to do is come up to the upper left corner of our 3d viewport here currently you can see that I'm an mode but if we need to switch into edit mode we can simply click this drop-down and select edit mode from our list alternatively you can use the hotkey tab to switch in between edit and object mode so if I press tab I'll switch to object mode now if I press tab again I'll switch back into edit mode now one thing you will notice when we switch into edit mode is that the appearance of our cube changes slightly at every corner we can now see that there is a vertex and between every two vertices there is a line this is the benefit of edit mode we can alter the vertices edges and faces of our meshes so let's start with some basic vertex selection and transformation believe it or not there are lots of different parallels between object mode and edit mode here selection and transformations being one of the biggest so if I want to select an individual vertex all I need to do is click on that vertex or if I wanted to select multiple vertices I can just do the whole shift-click thing just like before and if I want to select all the vertices we can press a or deselect all of them we can double press a so just like we can in object mode now similarly if I were to select a vertex and turn on my translate gizmos over here you can see that we can position these vertices however we would like now you will notice that if I try and rotate a single vertex or if I try and scale a single vertex nothing will happen and this is because a vertex has no orientation or dimension it is simply a point so obviously we can't scale something that doesn't have size and we can't rotate something that doesn't have orientation however if we do select multiple vertices say these four we can then rotate them and scale them just as we could before because when we have multiple vertices selected our selected data does have orientation and dimension now vertices aren't the only thing that we can edit in edit mode we can also select edges and modify edges like we just did with these vertices or even faces and in order to switch what type of data we're going to be selecting all we need to do is change this toggle up here currently we have vertex select enabled if we choose this option will switch into edge select mode which when we left click on things let me turn off my gizmos here I click there you'll notice that we can select individual edges and similarly if we switch into face select mode we'll gain the ability to select individual faces so these tools are going to be super useful for you so you can select different parts of your geometry at one time so that was a lot of information in a very short period of time so I encourage you to go ahead and open up blender now and play around with edit mode all you need to do is come up here to the upper left and select edit mode or just press the tab key make sure you play around with transformations selection tools all of that jazz it's all good stuff to know and the more practice you get the better off you'll be so to continue our trend of drawing parallels between object mode and edit mode we can also add and remove vertices from edit mode just like we could add and remove objects from object mode even better the two used the same set of hotkeys we can use shift a to add and X to delete but here's the catch when we add and remove vertices in edit mode it works a little bit differently than we'd expected to at least with our past experience in object mode so let me demonstrate exactly why these differ starting with removing things because I kind of want to get rid of this ugly deformed cube I have in my scene right here first things first I'm going to switch back to vertex select mode up here in the upper left and I'm simply going to select a single vertex to work with here I'm going to position my 3d perspective here so I'm looking at it and you know if I were to guess right now I were to press the X key to delete I would say that vertex would probably disappear and also the lines around it and the faces that are dependent on it right well let's watch what happens if I press the X key ah we get a menu we get a bunch of different options for what we can delete which is a little bit weird I mean what in the world do have these things being long story short you're probably not going to be using anything in the lower half of this at least anytime soon but as you more experience with mesh modeling you'll definitely start using these more often we're gonna focus on these first three here though deleting vertices edges and faces so let's talk about vertices first vertices while deleting vertices will delete any sort of vertex edge or face that is connected to the vertex or it's dependent on the vertex so let me click out of this menu here right now this face this face in this face as well as this edge this edge and this edge all depend on this vertex to exist if we delete this vertex we're going to delete all of these along with it so let's try that out if I press X and then select delete vertex or vertices you can see that we lose all three of those extra faces that were around our vertex now let me undo that this time let's select two different vertices I'm going to select this vertex right here and we'll select this guy down here as well now let's try a different deletion mode well actually let's try the first one first if I press X and then select vertices of course it's going to delete all the edges and faces that are dependent upon those vertices as well but what happens if I select just edges this time if we delete the edge we're only going to delete the edge in between and anything that's dependent on the edge in this case this is the edge we're going to be deleting right here so we'll also delete this face in this face because they're dependent on the edge but because an edge is drawn between two vertices the vertices aren't dependent on the edge itself so if we select delete edges it will only delete the edge and the faces that are dependent on it because the vertices are kind of like the base construct all right let's delete that or sorry let's undo that and let's go ahead and select a whole face this time so I'll select two more vertices and just like that you can see we have a face selected because it's grown glowing orange here and now what happens if I go through these same three options again if I press X to delete vertices obviously will delete the vertices and anything that they're dependent upon if I click edges it will delete all of the edges around the edge there but you can see it leaves these edges in two but of course these faces in between here did disappear because they were dependent upon these edges that went across the top and if I press X again to delete the faces and only the faces you'll notice that it only deletes that top face that was selected leaving everything else intact so this kind of puts in perspective why it's a little bit more complicated we have to pay attention to what we're deleting and have motive behind what we're deleting as opposed to just deleting things willy-nilly so I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of this entire cube by pressing a to select all and then we'll press X and delete all of the vertices associated with our cube here because I just straight-up don't want this cube anymore so now that it's gone well it's gone right well not quite let me switch back into object mode here you'll notice that when I switch into object mode and I look up here in the upper left this is the area where it shows what object we currently have selected and it's less we still have the cube selected and if we look up in our outliner you can see that we still have a cube in our outliner despite having deleted all the vertices associated with it that's because we only deleted the vertices of the cube we didn't actually delete the object itself you can imagine the vertices is kind of like a child of the cube or a child of the object if the vertices are deleted the cubes not going to be deleted so we still have the cube object it's just empty there's nothing in it so let's go ahead and actually delete our cube object I'll press X and confirm my deletion and as you can see my cubes now gone and let's add in a different shape to work with I'm going to go ahead and add in a cylinder now let me switch back into edit mode by pressing tab on my keyboard now just like before we can delete all these vertices but what about adding vertices what if I want to have another vertex in my scene to work with well there's no easy way to add a singular floating vertex in blender but we can add primitive shapes just like we could when we were in object mode so currently I am in edit mode and if I press shift a to add an object you can see that we have our mesh list here with all the different meshes that we have from our plane all the way down to Suzanne here so if I wanted to add a Suzanne head to our scene you'll notice that I've added a Suzanne head to our mesh just like that let me move Suzanne up a little bit here just like that cool so now we have Suzanne and we also have our cylinder but let me switch back into object mode you'll notice that I'm unable to select the two independently of each other and that's because both of these are part of the same object the Suzanne head and the cylinder although they're separate bodies of geometry are still just a cylinder object which means that no matter what we do with them they're always going to be stuck together if we want a separate Suzanne head we'll have to add one while we're in object mode and when we add one here we can position it and if we'd like to we can now switch into edit mode on that Suzanne head while leaving everything else unaffected so once again that was quite a bit of information so go ahead and take some time to experiment in blender try and mess around with that cube deleting different parts of it at a time and then try adding some geometry and seeing how it works with blenders asset management and object management so it turns out that when we actually dive into 3d modeling it's not as useful to just add vertices willy-nilly like we did in the last video adding a cone to this cube here is not going to do much if I want to create a realistic human face so what can we do instead it turns out that edit mode actually offers a lot of different tools that we can play with to create really advanced 3d models and I'd like to talk about a bunch of those in this video so I'm going to be demonstrating these on our default cube here so first things first I'm going to press tab to switch into edit mode and we can tell that we're in edit mode because we can see the individual vertices on the corner of our cube here and you'll notice that when we switch into edit mode we get a bunch more tools over here in our tool bar now we're not going to be covering all of these in this video because not all of them are super necessary to know yet but we will be covering the first five here from the extrude region tool all the way down to the knife tool which are all very useful tools to know so let's go ahead and get started I'm going to go through these one by one and explain what they do at this point it'd probably be best if you watch and absorb and then at the end of this video you can take some time to experiment with all these tools and maybe even some of the others if you're feeling motivated so let's go ahead and get started this one's gonna be a fun lesson alright so first things first let's look at the extrude region tool here I'm gonna go ahead and switch in to face select mode and I'm just going to select this top face and extrusions basically allow us to add additional geometry or expand from geometry in a certain direction so if I select my extrude tool over here you'll notice that we get this little plus gizmo looking thing over here if I click and drag on this you'll notice that we can extrude outwards from our original geometry you can see that the vertices that we were working with before are still here we just added four new ones and extruded them upwards we can also extrude in other directions and by doing so we can make some pretty interesting pieces for example a Tetris shape not what I intended to make there but came out looking like that additionally we can also use hotkeys to perform extrusions so the hotkey to perform an extrusion if you don't have the extrusion tool enabled is simply by pressing E and E for extrude allows us to extrude in any which way just like that so let's go ahead and look at another tool now that we have a bunch of faces here to play with we'll have a lot of fun doing different things here so the next tool down here is the inset faces tool so I'm going to select that tool and I'm going to select a random face will say this face right here now you'll notice off the bat that we have no gizmo to allow us to inset faces but that doesn't mean that the tool isn't active basically what the inset faces tool allows us to do is click and drag on our shape and by doing so we can create a inset face so we have four different faces along the outside here with an inset face in here and now if we wanted to we could extrude from this face and now we have a tiny little inset face there so that's a pretty handy tool and will be very useful throughout your 3d modeling career so now let's go ahead and jump on to another tool which is one of my favorite tools the bevel tool the bevel tool basically allows us to make nice smooth cuts around the edges of our mesh here so if I switch into edge select mode and I select well say these three edges right here and just like the inset faces tool all we need to do is click and drag and just like that we can create a nice smooth edge that's pretty neat and additionally if we really wanted like a rounded edge here we could open up the bevel tools down here the bevel properties and we can add more segments to our bevel so we can have a nice smooth transition between one phase to another you can also adjust things like the width here and some other settings but that's all up to you to play with if you choose to do so so I'm going go ahead and shrink this back down next let's add some loop cuts to our scene loop cuts are pretty useful because loop cuts allow us to add geometry to places where it didn't previously exist so for example what if I wanted to make this cube up here look more like a house so let's say it had you know the main body of the house but it also has a roof on it we can't currently do that because we don't have even if I switch into vertex select mode here we don't have any geometry to select in the middle that we can move up so what we can do is we can use the loop cut tool to insert a loop cut as you can see this yellow line is going to be where our loop cut is placed if I click you'll notice it adds in those extra vertices and so if I switch back in to or to use my transform gizmos or my translate gizmos over here I select these top two vertices and I move them up whoo-hoo we now have a little house on top of our really weird abstract geometry here and finally we have our knife tool and our knife tool is similar to our loop cut tool in that it allows us to add extra geometry to our scene except it allows us to be very free with it we can add faces wherever we want now the knife tool is great but it is something to be careful with because as you become more experienced you'll learn how important it is to have clean and good-looking geometry and the knife tool is a great way to mess that up because it allows you to do so much so if I wanted to say add an extra triangular face in between here all I need to do is use my knife tool to create cut between these two faces then when I hit the enter key you can now see that we have one face here oops I still have the knife tool enabled here you can see that we can just basically add faces wherever we would like which is cool and it's handy but it can also again lead to some poor geometry so there you have it those are the five main modeling tools that we're going to be using here just as a reminder we've got the extrude tool which allows us to extrude from faces we have inset faces which allows us to create smaller faces inside of existing ones we have the bevel tool which allows us to make nice smooth or cut edges we have the loop cut tool which allows us to neatly add new geometry in the middle of our faces and then we also have the knife tool which allows us to just go absolutely crazy with whatever we want here so good things to know about good things to use and go ahead and experiment with these now because these are a lot of fun and with these you can do a lot of different things

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 29,453

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender 2.8, blender 2.8 beginner, blender beginner, blender beginner tutorial, blender 2.8 beginner tutorial, blender 3d, blender objects, blender how to, blender basics, blender cgcookie, cg cookie, 3d modeling

Id: k8h57a-rwGE

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019