Blender - A better cylinder - #5 Subdivision Surface Modelling in Blender.

[Music] so we want to create a cylinder for use with a subdivision surface modifier but first let's talk about the ones blender provides you with and why they're not really up to the job let's delete the default cube and add one so go to the add menu shift a and then mesh and cylinder and we can see in its properties that uh it gives you one with 32 vertices which is quite heavy uh a radius of depth the important part here is the cap fill type and we either get nothing at all an end gun or triangle fan and if we look at the ngon version if we add a subdivision surface modifier to that we can see well that's that's a mess it's nothing like a cylinder so that's no good to us what about the triangle fan let's add another one but this time we'll choose triangle fan and then we can see it's got this single vertex and all of these triangles so i don't have high hopes when we add a subdivision surface modifier no it's uh it's a little better but it's still absolutely no good to us at all we definitely need to make a new one now this is the easiest of the primitives to fix but we can make some really good discoveries here about how subdivision surface models work so let's go to the add menu and add another cylinder this time it's easier to work with the end gone strangely so we'll start with that this time we want to change the vertices to eight now one thing you might have noticed is that the vertices at the very top and and bottom of our cylinder are all three spoked poles and we don't ever want to have three spoked poles on a corner or an edge so our first job is to move those away from that edge if we select the top and the bottom face we can press i to inset those and that allows us to move these new edges in and out i normally like to start with 0.1 which is kind of 10 10 is a good place to start when thinking about curvature so that's where i generally start now we'll see that on our corners we have four spoked poles that means that curvature is going to flow over there correctly if i go to edge select mode i can select this and this loop here is going to be one of the loops which controls our curvature i just go back to fair select mode and make sure that both of these are selected again so we're doing everything at the same time now we can insert again and press note 0.5 this time just to push it as a distance away and now we can see we have all of this area along which to slide our control loop now we don't want this face in the middle it's an end gone so it's good to go so we just press delete faces and that should delete the top and bottom now if we go to edge select mode and select the inner loop we can go to face and grid fill and that perfectly fills that in with quads now i normally like to rotate them and keep them aligned with the axes so we can just use offset here and move it round by one and that flicks around this cross to match up perfectly you don't have to do that it's just something i like to do to keep everything neat and then we go at the bottom and do the same there face grid fill and again it needs to be rotated and that's perfect what i sometimes like to do is borrow some functionality from the uv system in blender to highlight my edges so alt clicking one of the edges to select the entire loop i can then right click and say mark seam and that's just some of the functionality that's used to unwrap uv models but for our purposes we're just using it to highlight that we have a control loop let's do the same at the bottom so alt click that loop and say mark c it's purely a visual ad and we can get rid of this red border at any time so now we have a control loop on the top we also need a control loop at the bottom to control the curvature flowing over the top of the model there are many ways to do this but the one i normally choose is to go to face select mode and alt click any of these vertical edges down running down the cross section this selects the entire ring of faces around our cross section i can now press inset but i can type north point one again giving us kind of a ten percent curvature and i've created two more control loops so i can mark these again say mark those seams just so that we know that the ones in red are our control loops now i don't normally like to have two control loops that are holding each other so what i'll often do at this stage although it can be deleted later because it's not really doing anything is to put an extra holding loop in between the two of them and just leave it in place so that's our cylinder finished we can now go to object mode and add a subsurface modifier change it to smooth shading and we can see that now we have curvature which the subdivision surface modifier works really well with and we can select any of these red highlighted loops and we don't need to worry about which axis they move along we can just press gg and they will slide between the areas of safety that we've created for them controlling the curvature over the top and the same with the ones on the side so we have full control over our curvature it's made from all quads and most importantly we've really thought about the idea of an object having a top a bottom a cross section and areas of curvature connecting these things and that's it for the cylinder next we're going to have a look at the cone although what on earth you're modeling with cones i cannot imagine

Channel: Ian McGlasham

Views: 59,208

Keywords: quads, blender, blender 2.93, modelling, subdivision, surface, better, rounder, tutorial, tips, poles, n-poles, primitive, primitives, smoothed, smoother, cylinder, sub-d, subd, hard surface, topology, good topology, quad topology, blender topology

Id: pWOh9cWwYqU

Length: 5min 28sec (328 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021