Blender 2.8 for Beginners - Making a 3D Lightsaber - Advanced Modeling (3/5)

hey guys hanging in working from flip normals here if you want to follow along with these tutorials all the project files are available for free download on the flip normals marketplace so check out a link in the description and in this video we are going to be taking our lightsaber through from the blocking model we currently have and we're going to be finalizing the action model so if you have watched the last chapter and you've been following you probably gonna have something like this so we are going to be splitting this piece here into different in two different models and then we're going to be adding subdivision modifiers to this and making this a nice production-ready model so this is what we talked about earlier in terms of material to sort of like how you how you splitted out based on material so you see there's a lot of different parts this some some things look like maybe they're aluminum and brass big brass some some plastic or rubber parts so it's important to separate these out so you can apply different materials to them yeah this is really how I think about it well is this it's the orange thing you're gonna be the same part as the metal thing here well different materials different different pieces so we are going to be starting with the top parts and now there are in different ways to interpret this and this is a lightsaber you know who knows what's going on here well we're gonna be assuming that the top part here this is all one piece and then this is one piece so let's split this up just make sure go on the front to you and [Music] we can do this easily by hitting the three key and now we can select the polygon and then we can hit ctrl + + on a numpad and this is going to select the various parts now we need to separate these pieces out because currently it's a mesh and then we hit the P key for that here you can just select by selection so whatever is selected is gonna be a separate part so we check up here now now we suddenly have this is a separate piece now one important thing to note here is that there's many different ways to do selections like this the gross selection is an excellent way to and you place one point and you grow it you could also just do a sort of like a shift selection over your entire model to select it the issue here is that you have to be in wireframe mode first so I believe it's a shift C you can shift said yeah step C subset you go into wireframe mode in order to be able to select the faces that are behind what you can currently see if you're not in wireframe mode you'll only be able to select whatever you can see in the viewport you can also go into the x-ray mode as well and so x-ray all said or you can do is shift shift C and then you can select as well it's really annoying because you actually can't select what's behind it for anyone out there listening like when we say Z or said or mean we mean the same thing yeah exactly there's always comments about that especially like for ZBrush stuff or said Prezi so now we can select this loop here and we do this by clicking on one edge on one polygon and then we just alt click on the other one now this selects the whole loop going around it I prefer to do it like this because a lot of times it's not as easy as just selecting straight ahead your loop might be going crazy around and I would just we just know what's going to work the entire way then we hit ctrl + and again numpad and we hit the P key by selection so P 2 explode I don't know people kept sorry it's separate I have nothing I don't know I can't come up with any words then we have the same thing for this one let's piece around here which looks to be a brighter color and alt-click on it and then ctrl+ and we can now hit the P key again and this is what we were talking about before just embrace that blender is hotkey based yeah if you try to fight this you're going to be going through a lot of menus a lot of very obscure menus so just get used to using these hotkeys right away and then we go all the way down here and now we just can be separating out some of these pieces one thing to keep in mind is when you're selecting a ring like this or a loop of of Polly's or if it's loops or whatever it is it's um it depends on where your cursor is in relation to selecting it so if you want to select a loop all the way around you have to select in the direction of where you want to select so you can see here you're selecting towards the right then you go right if you go up and down and select up and down so this is just something to keep in mind and be aware of yeah this was really confusing to me in a beginning of blender you see if we hit to the left side now and selects the loop going around here and you hit the top it selects up and down this this takes some time to get used to but once you know it's there yeah it's perfectly fine this is where I wish blender had a little visual indicator but uh it doesn't you can combine these as well so you don't have to only select one to the right or up or down you can combine them as well if you have the shift key now you can I can add to this as well yes shift alt and then left mouse button to combine it yeah exactly this is one of these things you just have to get used to it just takes a bit of time so let's just see what we have selected now we still have seven pieces up here but let's get to this this a bit later on we're going to be separating out this piece here now so we can do the same thing now and it's all click and then we can hit ctrl + and then we can selected and let's just look at a reference and again you don't have to adhere to this reference a hundred percent you know you can you can freeze that a little bit it is a lightsaber after all so and we also we also note modeling for instance on the paneling here we're keeping this a bit simple oh one thing as well as you can also subtract a loop selection just like you can add a loop selection you can subtract the loop selection yeah same thing just hold on the shift key and do the same work just click on the same points add it and then subtract it yeah so if you like if you grew the selection for example and you didn't want the bottom part that to be selected it's very easy to just remove that now we have to peak again to to separate this out and now we have most things separated out so now we have really we have we have only like one piece here done we have to select more and then we can show a little trick I love these little tricks I love tricks tricks are the best especially in blender because there's like infinite amount of tracer is so many tricks again I'll loop select one select one loop and then grow selection and then we hit the P key now you should be familiar with this by now we're really doing the same thing over and over again and now we have a little trick so now you see we have all the all these pieces they're all separate so what we could do in order to separate them out is separate I mean they're not connected with polygons so what we could do we could select this easier and then we can select everything or we could select everything here and supper out or we could select everything by hitting the a key we can hit the P key now and now we can select by loose parts so that just means if it's not connected by at least one vertex or an edge then blender doesn't see it as connected pieces geometry which it isn't so it just automatically separates it all out into separate objects very very useful so now we can start to we can start to refine the different pieces and we can we can basically take this few to a final level so let's start now with the bottom we can also hold on the tilde key or the one below the Escape key and just go to select view and that just our view selected and that just makes it a lot quicker to go to them so let's look at a reference here we still have to refine this a little bit so let's select the loop go into edge mode alt click on the loop we can just scale this up a little bit hit the S key to scale er up and if you need time with us you know just pause the video it might take time to get used to these tools it took me some time for this to become intuitive yeah same for me and then we can hit the e key for extrude and now you can see it just extrudes it it just extrude it's based on the view axis and then we right-click so now it's still extruded but it's cancel it so we can now hit the G key and we can set we can just move this up a little bit like so we can hit the our control our key and now we can just add a bit more refinement to this so control our and then just click and drag and it we can just scale it down a little bit by hitting the S key and just scaling it down this little bit we can do is scale up a little bit again this is where you can you can really keep refining this forever so we can add another loop I just want this be in the middle so right click to to cancel it and then we hit the S key again and we just scale it up just a little bit this degree will find the shapes so a good a good principle to work from when you're doing modeling like this is that you you want to aim towards getting as few loops in as possible to support your shape if you can't get the shape that you want that means you need more loops but if you have more than enough loops to support the shape maybe you can actually take some away yeah it doesn't make sense that you just keep adding these like that does nothing that's good just confuses to shape let's add another one down here as well and just scale up just a little bit yes you can see that bottom shape there was completely straight but so we actually need another loop around to give it that rounded bottom shape then we can select this piece here this is what we call an end gone you might have heard of an gone before an n-sided face this is a polygon which has more than four sides so the the computer will triangulate every single polygon so whatever you see here it all really triangles under the hood which is very easy to do if you have if you have something like this it can triangulate it this way or I can try you lit that way or something like this the computer just goes a bit crazy because it doesn't really know what to do with this so either you should turn this into triangles or turned into into quads just four-sided polygons so we can easily do this if we just insert this a little bit hit the I key and just drag and then we can just add it do it one more time now we can we can easily turn this into into polygons into four-sided polygons if we just delete this now hit the X key and then faces and then we can select if you go to if you go into the edge mode we can now easily select the whole by holding alt left mouse button and just clicking on this so we have really nice feature here called grid fill we can use this to very quick we fill in this with quartz if you're the spacebar now which we remember in the first video we set up spacebar to be as search if not it's f3 now we can type grid fill and if we just tip its grateful now now you see it fills it in with real nice quads we you can see here though it's it doesn't fit perfectly with the axis so we can just hit offset and now this is gonna offset it and there we go we have really nice wad snow and you might ask yourself why do I need that well it's a nice modelling practice because it means that whenever under the hood when you have deformation not so much for a hard surface object like a lightsaber you can always be sure how the computer generates the triangles under the hood so either if you make it triangles or if you make it quads you you have a lot of control over it you don't want triangles just willy-nilly everywhere in your object because it does affect how the shape looks but on bottom faces like that which is completely flat you can get away with having a lot of triangles yeah we have saw a few separate videos where we rant a lot about this as well yeah so now we have a really nice shape here and we are need to add some thickness to it where we can do this is if we can go into face mode or polygon mode by hitting the 3 key or it can go up here as well in this click it to the a key and now we can extrude this end if we know this is a feature we haven't used before if we hit the Alt + E key now you can see we have a menu for extrusion by default extrude we'll just extrude where they are but now we have extrude along normals and we'll explain what normal is in a second well let's just do this now you can see it just extrudes it it's like the entire thing just becomes thicker yeah you give everything a shell whereas if you extrude it with the normal extrusion not along it's normal it would just extrude it like in some direction yes it is where it becomes confusing because you have the term normal which you know it's also the name of our company so a normal for a polygon is is is the from it's a perpendicular line from this polygon so it goes straight out like this we have a point from this which goes straight like this from this so if we were to scale is on the normal it's going to scale like this this this way this this way and this this way a normal in this sense is not synonymous with regular like no it doesn't have anything to do with abnormal normal or weird like we completely understand that this is a Content that's hard to grasp because it's like what what even is stuff 3d space but normals are an important aspect of working in 3d but just being aware that you can extract or extrude along the normal means that you can generally you can just add thickness or subtract thickness from your object it's a really handy thing and it's something you you you're gonna use all the time so now we are gonna be looking at a specific thing like we need to just isolate this which you use for number back slash forward slash whatever is the slash you have any numpad so if we click this you can see that everything else disappears if for some reason for you it also moves the camera we cover that in the very first video how to remove that so you can see here that we have this piece now and it's a pretty nice piece but it's it doesn't look like this piece this piece here is nice and smooth and has really smooth edges so we need to add this this is what's called making them subdivisions surface it just means that you're mathematically smoothing the model and we can do this very easily we can do this if you go and add modifier you can see generate and we have sublimation surface and now you can see everything becomes nice and smooth the really cool thing about subdivisions is that so it's you you that's why you want to model simple from the beginning because when you model simple from the beginning you have a lot of control because you have fewer points to you know move around and manipulate if we were to move points around now we would have a lot harder time a lot harder time to to make the shape look nice compared to now so what subdivision surfaces do is they just take for size of faces like this and they just they just multiply it by four so they insert four edges for every face or four faces for every face that we have and it just becomes really nice and workable basically every single model you've ever seen for any commercial film animated series has subdivision surfaces you wouldn't use this for games but then use all sorts of hacky tricks but for for any kind of work outside games you would really use subdivision surfaces for nearly everything you're doing yeah the only problem with subdivision surfaces I guess problem in quotation marks which is what we're gonna fix is when you subdivide something everything becomes smooth and wrapping your head around this concept I don't know for me maybe I'm just I don't know slow or something it took me a while to understand when I first started with 3d but you have the concept of edges and their relative distance to each other what this means is we now need to make this add these edges here really hard because you can see here they're there they're hard edges so what we need to do is we need to just disable the solution surface modifier we can do this very easily this is a workflow which we really found in blender which we have really seen animals use it's very simple if we just disable the edit mode feature and now in object notice it can be displayed but if now go into edit mode hitting the tab key we can now just see our model without without sublation surfaces enabled and very important note here is whenever you whenever you're doing this kind of modeling with subdivision surfaces you don't want your subdivision surfaces to be displayed while you're in edit mode your edit mode should be clean edit mode should only display the the polygons that are actually there then you can hit the tab key to go back out into object mode to preview the changes that you've made and what your object will look like when you present it yeah otherwise you are starting like divorced modeling practices in the world yeah so once you understand this how to how to make a hard edges then it's like a second light goes off when it comes to modeling so we'll show you that really quickly now to just enable this again so now we can see what's going on display purposes so now we're doing exactly what we told you not to do but it's just you know for emphasis here so now if we want this this here to be really sharp now we need to add an edge loop which is close to it so if we add ctrl R now now you see the moment we add an edge loop to this and it goes closer it becomes sharper and sharper and if we were to add an edge loop right here as well it becomes really sharp so you can just see how how incredibly sharp this becomes you don't want to be too sharp because nothing in real world is that sharp yeah and a good practice here is that whenever you have an edge you would you generally want a supporting edge to make it hard on either side so then you have like a crisp clean edge it's just a really good practice instead of having one on either side this way you can control the hardness a lot better yeah this is what is often referred to as triple edging because you have well you get the triple edges you have one two and three and by having triple edges like this it means that you can you can very easily control the smoothness of it now if you want to for instance smooth this out a little now like you see this too sharp you can use the slide tool or the grab tool with slide feature it G twice and now you can just slide this around so like now it's just sliding and you can see it becomes just a little bit softer same thing down here we're gonna set G twice and just slide it and it becomes a softer ya so the closer the edges are to each other the sharper of an edge that you get really so that's how we can do it for for this model here so if we turn off if we turn off the preview function now we can see you know this is really how you should understand to do modeling it's like you place your edges like this pretty close to each other to get the hard edge and then you tap in and out of the workflow to see your subdivision because this keeps you distraction free it ensures that you don't work with a resolution that doesn't support what you're actually doing it just keeps it very clean and it's it's definitely the optimal way to model and speaking of optimal and if you see here it was very dense if you click optimal display it's just going to make it not as dense because it's just crazy dense right here and it's hard to see what's going on yes with optimal it'll it'll it'll subdivide your mesh but it'll only show you the original edges before the subdivision surface modifier was applied so what we're going to be doing now is go out of isolation mode by hitting the slash on the numpad and then we just couldn't doing this for every single piece so with this one it looks like it goes it wraps a little bit around it so we are just going to it alt click on the edge just to select it we're gonna scale up is a little bit and then we could hit the e key to extrude it up you can also do this in in the orthographic view that is a bit easier because you can only scale on one axis so if we hit the G key now and then we hit this middle mouse button drag up now it's gonna be perfectly aligned to only one axis now remember you can cancel the extrusion act extrusion extrusion exit action I guess that's what it's called with the right leg yeah so if you don't want this you can just right click what would you do you don't set the set key and that just moves it up instead axis and then we can do the same thing as we did for the other piece we can go to faces it's a three key then we can hit a to select everything and then we can hit alt + e to extrude along normals and then we can just move it in a little bit of this and then we can also add a subdivision surface modifier to this as well now we went in here last time to add a subdivision surface we can also hit ctrl one control one control to control three this old wheel does the same thing we control one now you can see it adds a subdivision modifier with V / one if we had controlled too it's gonna set the viewport setting to two this is this is the way some people work they just hit control one two and and then hit control zero which is a long way to move your hand and now you can see it becomes red and this just indicates that there is nothing happening if it's red nothing is affecting our mesh I prefer to set this something like two or three and and then just disabling edit mode and then it going in between like this so one thing we're speaking about normals here if you go out of edit mode again so here in object mode you can see even though we've subdivided this twice now it's still kind of faceted you still get those rough edges so maybe if you're on a budget with polygons or something or you don't want to subdivide it more you can just right-click your object and say shade smooth or shade flat so shade smooth just it doesn't actually add more resolution it just looks at the borders between each polygon and just like averages that out so you get this really nice and smooth look this is really important to do and it's for free yeah when you're adding your solution like this that comes at a really heavy cost for your computer but if you do this that's for free so the optimal way is actually to combine these workflows so you wouldn't just select something and shade smooth without the subdivision modifier unless you're doing something for games probably or you want to keep it really low res and let's do the same thing for this guy here it's the slash key and then we're in here and now you can see that we still need resolution in these areas so we're just going to show you a few different ways of doing this I what we do before we straight-up hit ctrl R and we just move them close to each other my preferred way of doing this is actually using tool we haven't talked about before which is bevel that is the means that we first we just select just add an edge loop like this like we did before in the center of a loop right click so it goes in the exact center and then we have a tool called bevel which is accessible by controlled be what bevel is going to do is it's going to add it's going to add more loops it's going to split your it's going to split your face or your edge in half and it's going to add more resolution like this and this is great because now we know it's in the exact center and we get a symmetrical loop like this so instead of having to go in and just add two loop a loop here and add a loop on the other side we don't know a symmetrical right now you just know that this is the distance here is the same as the distance here so we're not going in here you can now see that it's really nice and sharp we can also add a loop here as well just with a regular loop tool and again if you didn't want the edges to be that sharp you simply just move the triple or double edges further from each other so we can do the same thing with this as well we can we can you I mean there's a there's a plethora of ways to do this but really my preferred way is do this add a ctrl R and a loop right click and then control B there we go so sometimes you have to drag it a little further than you actually think just before the - activates and then we can hit the slash again to go out of isolate selection and then we can go up here and we can work on these pieces okay so this piece here is pretty simple as it's indeed a very simple so you see here we now have we now have the loop going all the way in here so we could delete this in order to thickness we could delete this loop here and and then just do the thicken with it before the extrusion I mean little before or we can do another way which is we all click down here and then we can do an extrusion hit the e key right click to disable and then we hit s and now we can just scale it end now we can use a tool we haven't shown you before which is called the bridge tool the bridge toll bridges different polygons together so if you want to connect this to this it's very easy to do if we just shift alt click on the loop up there now we have both of these loops selected so we can now easily bridge these two together by right click and then we have bridge edge loops so this just connects them up I always have an inherent distrust for bridge tools in 3d but uh it looks like in blender it's it's fairly stable you can run into the same issue that we had with a grid fill or sometimes like it doesn't necessarily connect to where you expect it to connect because like sometimes maybe edges are a little offset so you can't always expect that but you can always offset it yeah if that happens then use a twist attribute here so I just set this back to 0 this is also a grillak away if you want like a dagger like rifling to a gun barrel mm-hmm but we're not doing that yeah we're making a lightsaber which is far cooler yeah it's a lot cooler so we have a loop down here as well let's just delete this for now and we can hit do this by ctrl X actually ctrl X just straight up just deletes this just to solve servers so very nice and handy so if we now want this to be sharp we can do the exact same thing to do it for control R just drag it and I right-click I control B and now we have we have perfectly symmetrical loops on top and bottom can you do it for inside as well now honestly for inside is not going to matter a whole lot but you know might as well what do you sometimes do in production especially when you're modeling something like this realistically unless this object was going to be destroyed you wouldn't see the the faces on the inside you would never see those so most of the time you were maybe deleted yeah yeah there's no reason to have faces you don't need long as you're doing it tutorial tutorial so do the same thing here right-click or ctrl R right click and then just add bevel and then same thing here I click and then doing the same thing yeah so honestly from here on out modeling wise it's pretty much the same yeah there's only one surprise left and then we hit ctrl one to add the edge loops oh sorry to add the subdivision surface and we just set this to two it's really cool as well because you can set the viewport subdivisions to be zero so it's not gonna do anything in a viewport but once you render you can set this to be like 10 we can be incredibly smooth and render but really soft in the viewport and again that's beneficial because this is gonna kill your computer it's not gonna kill it when you're doing this simple model but if you have a huge character than or environment they can really get dense right click smooth shade and disable this and I can quickly going out so it's a very proper methodical approach we are not just going around and just doing random stuff that we're doing the same thing over and over again and it's controlled so once you once you've been doing this a few times you reach a point where you feel that honestly you can just model model anything this piece here as well we can you can keep quite simple because there isn't really a whole lot going on here if we were to add a subdivision surface to it just by hitting ctrl - or ctrl one and then we can right-click in the shade smooth you can see it's already it's already done and the reason is because there is nothing there is nothing on the inside of it yeah so this is an example of an object that you can just keep single sided we don't need to add thickness you know it exactly what you can do we can go into isolation mode again go into edit mode and tab key we can still just select these points and we can just move them down just a little bit just so there is no interest just so that you're not just floating around yeah this is just to create a little bit of an overlap with the previous shapes so that we don't have anything like it looks more real yeah exactly you can see it just it just goes inside here now okay and then we are we can use again optimal display and same for this guy's well this optimal display this course otherwise a wireframe it's very dense okay this here is probably easiest model in the world to do so what we can do here is add match loop here in the middle and you see it's very round so we wanna we want to make sure we capture roundness of it and if we just add a sublimation surface to this control - you see it's it's pretty much there make it round or smooth by right click and smooth and optional display and then we can just scale in the inner at just a little bit so tap the numpad slash key and select this loop and select this loop by holding on shift and alt clicking on it now we can scale these in the way we can we scale these in on one axis or anything but on only two axis there really is if we hit the scale key scale tool and then we can just hit the center one and or we can hit s and shift set and then we can just drag but again personal preference go out of isolation mode like isolation mode is really one of these things can be using a lot I haven't really seen a whole lot of people in blender really use it but it's really one of the tools you wanna you want to get used to we're going to edit note again and we just want to push this thing down into it so there's a bit of overlap so make sure you're in edge mode and then we select an edge loop and just go away from that mode hit the G key hit the set key and now we can just move it down it's a really good idea to to get used to these hotkeys like hitting G for grab or move and hitting set to constrain it on our axis yeah and here for example let's say you didn't have the image or the reference you poured up on the left and it was hard to see remember you can hit alt said to sort of like have a transparent views to see okay how far into the object have I moved the edge now can also move this up as well I select the edge loop and hit the G key and then hit the set key this cream just can move up you can see in the left screen there that it's moves up I mean the same thing for this yeah we all remove this down a little bit so there we go and now we can quickly add some edge loops here so I'll use to get the sharpness I hit ctrl R to add it in the center right mouse button and then control B to scaler up like so just to add a bevel to it and then we can we just need one edge loop here and then we can just control right mouse button oh and then drag it up and then we probably also need one only one here as well and this this becomes intuitive after a little while ctrl - to add an edge loop oh sorry not a troop add subrogation surfaces and then adding a lot of edge loops and then shades right click and shade smooth and an optimal display again so we're almost done with our model now you can see that you know now we have a model which is really nice and smooth and this is this is proper production topology this is this here can be used in basically any game or any any film right now so let's take this part here as well and very simple pieces well what we can do is it it isolates elected or local view is column lender and then we alt click on top edge it EE key right-click to cancel and no need to scale it and now we can just add edge loops here on the bottom like this and using top like this that sharpness control are in this and then right click to kill it so what we will talking about for in summer videos is that for modeling you you're using like five tools and and that's that you're using just a few tools and use them over and over again there are all these tutorials which uses like 30 different modeling tools or all sorts of crazy stuff you really don't need that you really just need to master a few tools and you really can model in most things control to to add a solution surface modifier right click and shade smooth and then out of isolation mode and then the very last piece we have here is little bit more complicated but you can keep the complex's as high as you want to select the bottom edges by alt clicking on it it G and said to bring it down like this and then we're just going to extrude the top one out a little bit just we get this nice little lip around here I control are to add a little edge loop and then we can just select the edge loop here alt left mouse button and click on it and now we can hit extrude but special extrude the ratio but normal extrude yes alt e' and then extrude along normals you should just give them all really like clean names like normal extrude plain clean extrude and you see you have some slight variation here we can easily add this it adds a little bit more complexity to it we want to do that we can add just a few more loops we can actually do this if we undo this control R and then we can control our ctrl R and then we can use the scroll wheel to add loops to it like this and now we can right click and then we can just select a few of these loops ctrl shift alt and click on it and now we can scale these in just so we get a little bit more variation that is s and then shift set now we can see just scales in just a little bit like this we can also scale the entire object up a little bit so it doesn't intersect with this just the set is just hit the S key to scale and object mode select everything first and I'm going to scale it up this a little bit and now we just gotta fill in the bottom part as well so alt left mouse button click and now we select this and then we hit extrude for efore extrude and then we hit the S key to scale in like some so what we can see is gonna happen when we add a subdivision surface now this is gonna just going to be nice and smooth like this disable the edit mode now we can just hit the tab key to go between this now we need to add a lot of a lot of supporting loops here so we can do this by control our might against it control B say you just keep using the same tools as before we're just gonna speed up a little bit maybe we want this er to be a little bit sharper as well so add a little bit rounder so out of one in the middle right clicking - it's a really simple workflow once you start to get it down and you might have to sit with this for a few days before all the hotkeys become intuitive but just for pure modeling like this there aren't actually that many things to to consider and keep in mind like any said it is it is you're using a select few tools every single time let's just scale this up a little bit cuz looks a bit weird like this and then for the center one as well we have this is we now have an end gone here which again we just in to fix this time we can fix it with a different in a different way we can use some inset just hit the i key and then we can do it again and then we can hit Alt + M this is going to merge it submerged center and now you can see this creates triangles for you and triangles is really not a problem when they're inside here tab key to go out of it and now you can see we have a very nice very nice and clean model now the one thing we have left well two things to have left to model we have the actual lightsaber beam light laser I don't know that magical crystal beam that one which is going to be probably the easiest thing to model we had probably so what we can do now is we're going to model these things here and we're gonna use a slightly different approach this we're gonna be doing this in more procedural way we just means we're going to let the computer do a lot of the work so we already have the base for it like we already have a cylinder for the bottom here so what we can do now is we can go into edit mode and then we can just cut where one of the myths sure that this is a disabled so you're not as seeing sub relations in your model and then just cut for this is and then we can alt click here and we can select the loop now if we want to duplicate this we just want to create another piece of geometry from this we hit shift D and then now we have another piece right click to cancel the moving and then we can P key to selection and this might seem a bit complicated but this is exactly the same thing you'd be doing now for last 20 minutes or so it really is it really is just the exact same thing so now we have separated this out as a separate piece and now we can just find this in the outliner this is now cylinder o8 it the tab key to go into edit mode and now we can very easily extrude this up at the a key it alt e' and we can extrude among along faces as normals now we can just see we just want to extrude us out so it has some thickness to it and what we have here which is a bit of interesting challenges we have we have this we have these this metal thing in the middle so we're just quickly going into this to add that now this is where you really want these here to not be connected because this would have to be separate materials so if something has a separate material you really don't want this to be directly connected to it so we'll show you that this is also where we run into an interesting dilemma because what we've done before is whenever there's been a different material we've separated it out as a separate object but what we're gonna do here is we're actually going to keep everything as the same object but we're still gonna have the faces be disconnected so they're technically not connected but they still contained within the same object yeah you couldn't Theory have like a thousand different objects within the same mesh item or it we might be a little tricky to understand but we'll show you in fact so ctrl R just to add an edge loop right click and then we hit ctrl B again and then we just add it based on reference so it fits approximately here then we're going to scale it up just a little bit just s and then shift said this is scale up like so so we get a bit nicer shapes for it then we can use inset inset is realized in these situations you can scale it in just a little bit like so in this insert again and then we can scale it out again shift set so you can see here we're using inset to actually create our beveling as well so it's like if in one operation an important difference to note here between extrusion and in an in setting is that extrusion actually creates new geometry that you can extrude out from or as in setting only creates new geometry within the object itself yeah instead doesn't really change the shape of it so what we can do now is we need this to be a separate to be as actual separate piece so what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be selecting the edges on top in the bottom here and then we're gonna be splitting them off so if we now shift click here and shift click or alt shift click then we can right click and then we can do split edge edge split down here so that effectively takes the edge and then creates another edge and then disconnects them so now the top part the middle part and the bottom part aren't connected by edges anymore because it's kinda like you took a scissor and just cut them yeah you can see this forward to move this around you can see they're no longer connected so if we hit the tab key now we over have a modifier because it was on the older object like you now Summa gets incredibly sharp a nice line here we can add another another loop here on top is to give it a bit more sharpness right click to kill it or to kill transformation right here and now we can just see what looks like so the real magic here really happens when it comes to the the modifier system but we already used one modifier and that's just to make it smooth but we can also use another one too to duplicate this around this has huge benefits because now we can make one and we can modify to our hearts content and it's always going to be live if we hit add modifier under just make sure under the wrench and then we add modifier and we hit array now you can see what happens it just adds a single copy of it in the X in the x axis you see you know it's under X because it has because it's under X Y and C let's just collapse this so if we were to move this right now it would move it in the X x axis set this just zero because we don't want any transformation in the x axis and we don't want anything in the y axis but we do want something in the z axis so we just move it up just a little bit so if it's reference around 1.3 1.4 it's gonna work quite well for this I think if you want a bit more precision as well you can hold on the shift key and then you can just you can just drag on the slider here so now we moved it to where we want be we don't have the correct amount so now we can go under count and hit one two three or and we can just move this up just a little bit more as well now you can see that we have all these pieces here and it's all procedural so if we go to the original shape and we were to add more more like finer loops here too to sharpen up you can see this propagates through to the other ones this workflow in blender is super useful and it's honestly one of our favorite pieces of blender it makes modeling so fast and if you were to change the vertices or like move the faces around on the original putting Henning mentioned before about it being live means that that update gets propagated to all the other arrays as well very useful stuff so the last thing we have to do now we have to make the blade up here the actual light blade so we're gonna be using a start of technique for this we're gonna be using what's called a 3d cursor so we see down here we have a 3d cursor and we briefly talked to this in the first video the if we were to make a new piece of geometry now this would be made at the 3d cursor so we are going to move the 3d cursor up here to this point so select the top piece hit the tab key and it was like the piece where we want the 3d cursor to be basically where do we want this new piece to be created the reason we do this is because we want we want the cylinder to be created here so we have this nice lightsaber blade and we can do this by hitting shift s and then we can do cursor to active and now you can see we have a 3d cursor at this point now by itself that does nothing you know right now we just have a 3d cursor there but if we now we're to hit shift a mesh and the cylinder basically same thing we did before now we can we're first started now we have a new piece of geometry at this exact point we can set the vertices down to 16 like so and then we can scale it down now you can see it fits in the exact spot we had and then we can we can actually delete the bottom part we don't need that I'll just zoom in delete and hit the X key and delete phases we can take the top part and now this is where the question becomes like how long is my plate I I don't know we're just gonna kind of try it out we can it G and then said and we can just move it up this could just constrains it to it so you see in the left viewport here I'm just moving I'm just moving the mouse up so maybe this is a good length for it yeah we're probably gonna get a lot of comments on like how inaccurate this is it's interesting as well with the lightsaber thing right because it looks kind of flimsy when it's like super thin like that but in reality quotation marks are being made here you know like it's always always looks like a steak beam here so now we can do the same thing with it before as well now it gets a bit tricky to and navigate up here sometimes so you just need to hit the tilde key or the key below your escape and hit view selected now it's gonna zoom in to this and now we can can extrude this this a little bit up and then we can scale it in we want this to be like a nice rounded effect extrude up a little bit and scale it in and screw it up a little bit and scale it in let's move it up a little bit you [Music] like so and then we can use the grid fill feature from before as well just hit X fleet faces now we can go into the edge mode up here at the Alt key and then spacebar and then grateful we already it's already selected because it's the last thing we search for and then we can just hit the offset this doesn't really matter it just makes my model or brain a lot happier to see this so let's see what happens now if we were to add a subdivision surface to this control one so up here you probably see a lot of stretching right now just because there is enough there are no loops in between so we just probably just want to add a few loops in between here ctrl R and then we can just add a few loops it's always good practice to have loops especially on really long objects like this just distribute the subdivision so the way that subdivisions work is that they look at how far away is the next edge and then little try to average the position on the middle edge in between those two edges then we right mouse button and shade smooth and we now have a really nice model here which may or may not be correct based on Star Wars lore yeah it's probably not correct yeah exactly so they're obviously more things you can do here as well you know you could add you could add this paneling here which you would do just by adding a cube and just modeling this here adding the cylinders for these these things you can always add more resolution to it but at some point you just gotta say it's fine as well make sure that every single piece has smooth shading on it this becomes important later on so whenever you're done modeling just make sure everything has subdivision surfaces everything is smooth shading and everything looks good in the viewport so in the next chapter we are going to be looking at how we can assign the shares to this in blender and then eventually we've been looking into how we can make this a really nice and sexy render within blender so we'll see you in next chapter and if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe and definitely there's no one in comments what kind of what kind of assets you want to see us do in the future what can a more blender videos wanna see us do so if you want to follow along with this chapter that you've just watched make sure to head over to the flippin almost marketplace there's a link in the description where you can pick up the free project files for this lightsaber project so we have project files for each chapter so you can you can kind of follow along to see okay what is the progress from chapter to chapter here you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 42,911

Keywords: sculpting, zbrush, concept, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, texturing, pixologic, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, blender guru, blender 2.8, blender 3d, b3d, Blender tutorial, blender tutorials, learning blender, 2.8, blender modeling, blender interface, beginner tutorials blender, how to learn blender, introduction to blender, intro to blender, best blender tutorial, lighting blender, blender UI, blender flippednormals, blender lightsaber, lightsaber 3d

Id: BnEYA0d58UI

Length: 48min 19sec (2899 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019