Blender BEGINNER Modeling Tutorial with Hard Ops | SciFi Tire

hey guys real quick before the video starts gotta always give a plug for our patreon we're trying to build this thing we're trying to get 200 patrons by the end of the year so link in the description we have a really cool add-on tutorial this month i think you'll really enjoy it involves creating a sci-fi door with all the usual add-ons and we also have critique videos project files and decal packs every single month so take a look at the description for that hey what's up guys and welcome to a new video on modeling a sci-fi tire um just gonna hop into it i am freezing and i woke up with a dead transmission in my car so i was like i'm just gonna make a video because what else am i gonna do you keep on trudging no matter what life throws at you anyways we're gonna just start with a basic cylinder uh 64 vertices and uh we're just going to sharp i'm just going to do all this with the usual workflow that i use and also if you hear noise outside there's some construction so i i apologize for that so we're going to do is um basically a tire is cylindrical right so we're going to do is just make something kind of scaled like this nothing complicated and uh right off the bat let's actually scale this up a bit more on the y so that way we have some buffer for a chamfer on the side and we're going to apply the scale i'll also enable screencast keys here okay so jeez i i reinstalled blender and this stuff always resets there we go okay so we're going to take these two faces on the side here and just run a chamfer with control b so this is going to give us a nice little outline and more of a sci-fi feel to the tire and also make it look a bit more robust and just the general form of the tire is really simple there's not a lot you're going to have to actually end up doing here there are a bit technical things which is where a lot of the learning is going to come from but um basically we're just going to do a lot of insetting and extruding so we're just going to inset this side extrude and we're just going to inset again and then extrude and let's just run a chamfer with ctrl b just like that not too bad okay so this isn't too bad but i do want it to be scaled a bit more on the y make it like a little bit fatter almost because i don't know if you've seen like sci-fi tires in video games they tend to be pretty thick so something like this will be okay then we'll apply the scale and i'm just going to run a symmetry to the other side with alt x in hard op so now we're going to have this little basic block out next thing i want to do is drop in a loop right here right click to cancel it we're just going to press ctrl b to run a um little loop in here and then let's just go ahead and you can either extrude along the normals with e and alt s or the easier way with hard ops is to just alt click on em macro we're just gonna kind of pull that inwards to about there and symmetrize again you could just use a mirror to automate it but that's you know pretty simple so now let's go ahead and hop into the front view here whatever area direction is facing where the treads of the tires would be rather and all i want to do is just come in here let some dissolve out this edge because we don't need it so alt click it in edge mode and then press control x and at this point we can just come in here and maybe take four of these shift d to duplicate these faces and then p to separate by selection and now we have is just one face here now here's where you can get really creative with it make any sort of design you want but we're going to utilize some sub surf so you do need to be careful so first thing i want to do is make sure this thing is square so that way it subdivides evenly so just run some loop cuts like that you could do you know however many to make yours square i'm going to go ahead and subdivide it maybe one more time and just to avoid the z fighting right here i'm going to hop into local view and all we're going to really do is come in here and maybe select i don't know these areas you can get as you know intricate as you want with it we'll select these areas as well in these areas and then basically what we can do is just press e to extrude and now we have this you know what let's undo that let's also add in maybe these squares you can do whatever you want really so you do extrude actually no this looks like minecraft now i like where it was before we'll just extrude that okay and obviously it looks you know pretty awful nothing exciting is going on here so now we can run a sub surf with one or two subdivisions i'll do two that's good for now so control two and now we basically have uh somewhat of a tire tread here so that's uh pretty cool i'm gonna also try to well i don't think beveling this would really make it super exciting now what it yeah probably not and i don't know how well it'll hold so what we're gonna do is we're gonna press um alt v to go into wireframe otherwise you can just go in here to the viewport display panel to turn it on and at this point i want to turn off optimal display so that way i can actually see the true geo here and then we're just going to come in here with the ngon cutter and maybe make some sort of exciting type of cut like this click through a few times actually extended beyond what i wanted but i actually like that looks pretty good i couldn't move it you know run the oh it's because it's at an angle that's why it was weird you know i could always move it across the x or y to where i want it but i actually like where that is so let's go ahead and alt x to mirror to the other end and there we go now we basically have ourselves a an okay tire tread i suppose what we might need to do is uh move it out just a bit on the x like that and then we could probably just come in here and extrude this area out a bit probably the easiest way to do that is with a solidify modifier so we're going to come in here and add a solidify modifier notice how the subserve comes first so that way the subsurf executes before the boolean otherwise you're going to get a boolean and then subsurf a boolean which is going to run it over n-gons like if this is above here it's gonna it actually held okay in this case but you know in some cases if you didn't have a solidify modifier it might uh just completely collapse i'll even show you here so watch what happens if i put the boolean before the subsurf and then apply the solidify modifier it's just going to collapse and start pinching because it's trying to run a sub surf over n-gons and anyone who's watched blender videos before you know subsurf and n-gons do not work well together so generally if you're running boolean operations with hard surface and you have a sub surf subsurf should almost always be on the top of the stack otherwise you're just asking for trouble okay but now we have is a pretty cool looking tire tread here perhaps a bit too i don't know too too thin so we're going to come in here the solidify and just pull that out move it over and there we go now comes the fun part and this is probably where hard ops is going to come in handy more than anything else and also let me come in here and make sure auto smooth is turned off on this guy so the sub surf works alright and we could also probably yeah we could put the solidify above that that might look a bit better let's put the solidify above the sub surf and then extend this out a bit i don't know how well this is looking down here though yeah it looks kind of off doesn't it you know what we'll just leave it how it was and let a bevel take care of it all right anyways what we want to do is come in here and run a radial array all the way around the tire so uh easiest way to do this is to press the q key and go to mesh tools and there's a radial array option doing this in vanilla is a so there's two different ways to radial array one is around the 3d cursor and one is around itself so if i were to just click this right now the origin point is in the center so we're going to get like this weird star formation we want to array this around the or the 3d cursor which is in the center of the tire instead so instead we're going to do what are these things did the cutters somehow get like interesting something weird with this bullying let me i don't know what happened let me undo these steps there we go i think um the radial array must have messed with it anyways instead of clicking it we're just going to control click radial array and just scroll up a few times and now we're going to have this type of thing going on pretty cool and see this in like what two clicks now we have this really cool looking type of uh pattern going around the tire and yeah it works and you can make whatever custom designs you want on your treads i'm just trying to keep the tutorial basic and kind of get you accumulated to the workflow so um the next thing i think we'll do let's hide this radial array piece this empty the next thing i think we'll do is drop a bevel on the tire so we'll just run a bevel and to harden the normals and just give it a very slight bevel here and same for these tire treads now there's probably going to be a few issues here one because we have a lot of geo in these treads see that this is going to be heavy on a bevel modifier it's probably going to lag badly not only that it's also most likely going to overlap the bevels so if i try to run a bevel on here at this point just to keep it safe we could probably run our smart apply there we go so at this point if we try to run a bevel let me actually save the scene before it crashes on me so we're gonna do sci-fi tire save it okay if i try to run a bevel it's probably gonna take a second but i can almost guarantee you the moment the bevel applies we're going to get overlaps in here see that it's really really slow and even with a tiny bevel we're getting overlaps because of how dense the geo is so we don't want this obviously so we want to do instead towards the end of the video when we render we're going to run a bevel shader on it and i'll quickly show you just as a um you know little hint basically with a bevel shader check this out this thing's super cool so so instead of actually running a true bevel on it we could come in here make this i don't know that's fine we can come in here add in an input bevel and connect this up to the normal input of the principled shader now check this out give it one sec i think we need to go into cycles here you can kind of see the bevel coming on to it if i remove it these kind of go back to normal the edge looks really hard but if we add the bevel shader we kind of get like a smooth transition here now the radius is way too big so we want to bump the radius right to .01 or a little bit higher is okay and now you can see it's very subtle but we have some very smooth shading around the edges there and we're not using any extra geo or overlaps because it's all procedural we're going to deal with this later though so let's just um you know delete it for now forget about it remove the material and yeah we'll deal with it later for now we have our very you know simple straightforward design here it doesn't take us too long to make it all a few extrusions insets and a radial array and you're almost done so oftentimes the modeling is not the hard part people will look at some of my renders and be like josh how long does it take to get this good and i i laughed myself and i say it doesn't take long at all because a lot of these models are so basic but just the other stuff materials rendering angles things like that are what make it look good make it look cool so you know hopefully it gives you a little bit of inspiration you don't need to spend years practicing to get a cool result this took like what couple minutes now we're gonna make this look even cooler because right now it is boring there's nothing going on so let's add some materials to it okay so we'll just hop to material view here and we can just make this we can make this a basic principled shader for now or we could use some like kid ops grime and things like that for now let's just um let's just put a basic principled shader we'll add a metallic one i'm going to give it maybe a little bit less roughness and then maybe a very slight tint to it i don't know kind of like that and then i'm going to go to these tire treads we'll add a new material give this i don't know a bit more roughness a bit more base color you kind of get the memo so this meant to be like i don't know some sort of rubber or something i suppose and yeah roughness no metallic we don't want it to be metallic because it's a tread so yeah maybe a little bit higher on the roughness scale okay and let's make this a bit darker as well kind of like that could do some clear coat if we wanted to get you know fancy with it but i think it's fine where it is okay so looking uh looking pretty good no real complaints here so what i think we'll do is just detail this a bit now because yeah could use some detailing so what we're going to do is hop into the front view and this is from our emissive decal pack or maybe it's from our patreon i don't know we have an emissive decal pack on gumroad for free you can grab it i'm just going to use something from our patreon pack just because i like these a bit better so maybe what we could do is use let's see there was a specific one i was eyeballing not too long ago maybe it's not in this pack which pack is it it was a pack that ryu made i know for sure we have it somewhere um it had like a little little light on the side i'm gonna find it because i really liked it okay here it is it's from our october patreon pack so we're gonna add this ever by the way on patreon uh shameless plug you'll get decals every single month for any tier on our patreon 20 per month so if you're interested in that definitely take a look but for now we're just going to kind of rotate this scale it up and then we're just going to grab it let's make sure we're in face snap mode what did i do there we go face snap mode let me just reset the origin maybe okay maybe blender just wants to i don't know pivot from that position instead whatever it doesn't really matter we're just going to rotate this scale it up make it i don't know that should be okay now let's just go ahead and project it and we're just going to mirror it to the other side with alt x so now we have like these two cool looking little leds on the side of the tire we could also add in some screws so i'm going to use some screws from this is oz's pack oz has a really really good pack of bolts and things like that on gumroad i'll try to find it and put it in the description it's like a couple bucks for this pack best investment i ever made so let's get like one of these sci-fi looking bolts here and we're just going to come in here and scale this down something with the origin is all messed up but you know what doesn't really matter we're just going to get in here put a screw right about there and then just like we did for the treads we're going to go ahead and run a radial array here so let's go ahead and go to mesh tools and control click on radial array this is way too many maybe like six or so there we go then we'll just go ahead and project them so they match the material and then just mirror to the other end like that and let's also i don't like how the contrast is so we're just going to go to match and then i guess have blender throw an error to us let's try that again 2.91 has seriously been acting up with the decal machine if you guys have not updated to 2.91 yet i would suggest not because i've just been having problems so yeah i don't know why the hell it's doing this so you know what um until i go back to 2.9 we'll just leave it like that that's okay or what you could do just come in here and go to the base color and pick this to kind of match it and it's not too bad but you know it's really not that big of a deal just um it's it's only been doing this in 2.91 so i think there's some sort of bug conflict i just purged blender like yesterday so i don't know what the issue is but um it's not really a big deal we'll just hopefully hope for an update anyways let's go into cycles now and take a look as usual i'm using the abandoned slipway hdri from hdrihaven.com you can get it for free on the website so i'll put it in the description if i remember i just use this one because it's a very static just overcast day if we go to the film tab you can see very cloudy very neutral light really good for renders like this but um the lights hitting it from this side so on this angle so i want it to hit this side so what i'm going to do is just come up here to the shader editor we're just going to rotate the hdri 180 degrees so 180 and now it's basically going to hit it from this angle which is precisely what we want there we go and now we have a pretty cool looking tire here so this material system and these materials in general need some tweaking we're gonna do that after we set up our backdrop and floor we'll just leave it for now so i know it looks kind of weird but we'll take care of it let's go into our front view we're going to add in a simple plane we're going to move the plane down and we're going to scale it up to make it pretty big now notice how pure uh what am i trying to say how planes with pure rough materials and no sort of metallic on it reflects all the light back up so if you make this super dark it's going to reflect dark light to the bottom and if it's super white it's going to kind of highlight the bottom a bit so it's really all about finding that balance there so what i'm going to do is make this metallic because i want to have some nice reflections drop the roughness a bit maybe give it a bit of clear coat as well so increase this a bit and we're just going to make this a little bit darker like that that should be okay maybe a bit higher all right and now what i want to do is hop to the top view and then we're going to add in a backdrop so we'll add in another plane rotate this 90 over the x and then 45 around the z and let's just scale this backdrop up all the way and just kind of position it over here like that okay let's also make this a bit bigger as well okay so this is generally what we want for our our setup so i'm going to just move that over and this backdrop will also move back a bit basically just a combination of scaling the backdrops moving the floors around doing what you need to do to find yourself a uh you know a decent looking type of angle here so what i want to do also is take this back vertex and ctrl shift b to bevel it and give ourselves a really really nice rounded floor here kind of like that so now we kind of have like a horizon almost and one of my favorite things to do in combination with a metallic floor is to make the the backdrop here completely rough no sort of metallic and by doing this you can actually simulate an infinite backdrop on this um on this scene here so what we're going to do is take this piece make sure you do not make it metallic you'll see why in a second we're going to come in here and just basically select this color and as you can see the closer we get to matching the floor the more of an infinite backdrop type of look we have going on so in this case i might need to scale that up a bit to mask it and here we're just going to kind of fiddle with the settings until it's pretty much masked as good as we can get it so if you go too low there's a clear border if you go too high still there's a clear border so maybe somewhere around here to kind of mask it but yeah basically once you find that right position for the materials you're going to see a very very subtle border not going to really be obvious at all it might be noticeable a little bit on the edges but at the end of the day it's really not a huge deal it's kind of hard to find that perfect spot anyways so you know try your best see what you can get and we can tweak it again later so now we want to do is add in a camera so when we add in a camera if we press or just go up here to view align view and then align active camera to view we essentially have a camera positioned right where we're looking and one of my favorite things to do is make the focal length more orthographic so like 135 and then just kind of pull the camera out like that you can just press g z z and then scroll out with middle mouse button and then just kind of put this over here and now we have a pretty cool looking angle for the tire i would also recommend going here to the output panel and turning on render region so that way it only renders the area we need to see so this thing looks pretty darn good we could make this a bit brighter though so let's make the backdrop a bit brighter and let's also make the floor a bit brighter as well so that way it's more highlighted we're going to have to get back in here and match the backdrop as good as we can just like that perfect now i actually see no border at all so it looks like the light kind of helped so at this point you're pretty much ready for a render but i do want to use some kid ops cmf materials because it's going to look way better if you guys haven't picked up the definitely eevee material system which works fine with cycles you're missing out because this is one of my favorite add-ons and makes your model just 10 times better in my opinion so i want to get a more natural finish to this tire so what i'm going to do is go to the cw metal and i'm going to use maybe the aluminum shiny aluminum mat i'm just going to kind of mess with them let's try matte first so control click add material a little bit too bright let's try shiny nope it's actually way too much you know what we could do we could use one of these dirty materials and control click this is a new one actually and yeah we can make the tire like kind of dirty and also metallic so that would be pretty cool i'm going to also go here to the shader editor and adjust the the colors a bit so we can make this like a little bit more tinted you could increase the dirt to mount if you wanted to ao amount all that type of stuff so lots of control and versatility with this that's why i really like this add-on so darts no dirt scale we don't want to mess with but up dirt amount we could okay so it looks like the dirt is coming in at this direction like sideways and that's probably because the rotation is not applied as you can see here we have a bias 90 degree rotation so let's press ctrl a apply the rotation and now we can get in here and kind of fiddle with this like that just kind of get it wherever you want that'd be pretty cool it might it might be like too dirty for a sci-fi tire so you can mess with it i'm also going to add that to this guy over here these little tire treads like that so maybe we'll do that and turn down the metallic and then just for the main tire because this is meant to be sci-fi right and sci-fi is almost always pristine from what i've seen so maybe we'll do like more of a metal let's try silver don't get into the technicalities as to how a tire would actually operate i just go for a cool looking view right that's it so um let's try maybe iron i think this one's iron yep i'm really thinking the aluminum mat is going to be my best bet here so we could try that um we could come in here and mess with other ones like there's a grungy material under other we could come in here and kind of mess with that and just um you know see how it looks adjust the metallic stuff but i'm not really gonna bother with that let's do aluminum matte and for the tire treads we're just going to make the color a bit darker so just kind of darken that pull it down to about there and for this aluminum one i want to give this a very slight tint of blue as well it's going to be too much maybe right around here or so and we could also tweak the we already made the metallic change didn't we okay so i think this is probably going to be good enough for what we're trying to do what i think i'll do is pause the video and kind of tweak some of these materials a bit more until i get it looking exactly how i want it because i don't want people to get the idea that this type of thing is um is is immediate right this takes time and i also noticed this thing got symmetrized let me remove that mirror there we go okay but yeah i'm going to take a few minutes on my own and kind of tweak the material see what i like i also encourage you to do the same so that way you have a cool result as well so i'll see you guys in just a few minutes while i make my necessary adjustments okay so i fiddled with this for a few minutes and this is the result it's just a very basic principled bsdf material lower roughness you know darker base color whatever you want it's all up to you this is just what i ended up going with for mine so i also didn't want it to match the backdrop too much otherwise it's going to like blend in and the composition is going to be off so this was okay for me i like this this will look even better once we actually render this and bring it into photoshop and do a little bit of post but for now yeah i can't complain too much about this guy i might increase the roughness a bit but other than that we can go ahead and render so i might end up bringing this a bit up on the z-axis so that way it's kind of touching the floor like that okay looks good and now we're gonna do is simply uh you need to set up all your rendering stuff i have a dedicated video on this i'm not gonna go through all the rendering settings every single video i make because i have a video discussing that so this might be a bit too you know it would be cool if we made it like levitate in the air that would be kind of interesting so maybe move that floor down a bit yeah that actually looks pretty cool because now it looks like a it looks more sci-fi because one is floating two it looks way lighter and less intimidating compared to if the floor was moved here see how much heavier that composition looks when it's touching the floor compared if it's down here i just think it kind of looks cool almost floating like that and maybe a bit lighter but it's really all up to you and what you want now i i almost forgot we need to add a bevel to the tires here it's going to be very subtle but it's going to be important so what i'm going to do is just hop over here to the node editor and we're going to have to go to the object panel and it looks like yeah we can use this input so we're going to press shift a add in a bevel node and we're just going to connect it up we've already discussed this earlier so we're just going to connect that up we're going to go to cycle so we can see it just get a really close zoom in here and let's try .015 for the bevel radius and i can kind of see the difference here as before really sharp and after a bit more smoothed out as you can see it's very very subtle that's the point of these bevels so you're not going to see too much of a difference but i like adding them just because it would probably pick up a lot more if i was using like a more metallic material perhaps if i show you real quick if i made this like super metallic you'd see the reflections a lot better around the edges make this a bit darker yeah it picks up a lot better on metallic materials but um like look right here see that picked up does a decent job that might just be the side though but anyways it's not going to pick up super well on rough materials like this dirty one but it's still worth adding in for the realism anyways now we can just press the f12 key to render it so let me just um hop in here we'll press f12 and then wait for it to render alright so here's the final render doesn't look too bad but we really need to do some post processing to it in photoshop so let's go ahead and we're going to save this as a 16 bit tiff and bring this guy into photoshop alright so now that we're here in photoshop let's go ahead and just right off the bat uh this layer zero let's press ctrl j to duplicate it and what i usually like to do at the beginning of these types of things is go to the camera raw filter under filter let me scale that in there we go and i like to increase the exposure a bit if it's too dim we can just kind of ramp this up a little bit to about there maybe point no i think that's fine .25 is good we can also increase the highlights a bit and maybe drop the shadows a little bit and finally what i like to do is come in here with the paint brush tool and increase the texture and the clarity and kind of paint around to increase the overall clarity of your object and here's the before and here is the after kind of brings a bit more oomph to the scene which is precisely what we want and next thing we can do i use this add-on called infinite color it's really useful you just kind of click on these and you get all sorts of different color variations like that one's pretty cool this one's alright i like the one before but we can also do is go to the color lookup tool so instead of using this i could just um go over here go to color lookup and there's a bunch of different lights you can kind of load up there's you can just scroll through them and just use some of the presets and then combine this with like curves color balance really whatever you want there's all sorts of different combinations you can make this infinite color tool just kind of combines everything together so it's like one click rather than a bunch of different settings but you can make this however you want really so yeah i mean it's all up to you so i could probably scroll through these a bit more until i find like a really really good one but i actually quite like how this looks so this one's cool as well i kind of like the pink variation to it so i think i'm going to leave this alone and one of the usual things i do is i come in here with the text tool use some sort of sci-fi fonts and yeah i basically come in here and just type in whatever i want you know make it like a sci-fi name don't just put tire but i'm probably going to make this the thumbnail for the videos so you can get creative with it make it whatever you want name it whatever you want and you'll be good to go so yeah get creative with it but basically once you've added in whatever text you want whatever adjustments you want really whatever you're trying to do the last thing i do is i combine everything except the first layer into one layer with ctrl alt shift e and then i go over here to the filter and then knit collection color effects pro this is a plug-in for photoshop you can probably do this in the default contrast settings in photoshop but this is pretty cool because check this out let me scale this in this is a nice way to kind of close off your scene give it a bit more power with some contrast so kind of adjust this a bit and then increase the shadows a bit and now if we wait for this to load in you're going to see it kind of pops a bit more so here's the before and here is the after very subtle effect but looks a bit better in my opinion and then finally what you could do this is all up to you but i like to add a little bit of vignette to my scene so we're just going to go to the camera raw filter we're going to go to effects and then drop the vignette down just a bit and just kind of you know bring focus into the main part of the scene like that and there we go so quick and easy tutorial nothing super complicated but i kind of wanted to get a video out for today and i thought this would be a fun little design to create and it doesn't take you too much time so hope the video helped hope you enjoyed it um our patreon is live for december by the way if you haven't checked it out there's a link in the description tons of exclusive tutorials the decal packs and art critiques for the month so if you want to support us there it would be heavily appreciated because i need to buy a new car soon because apparently mine wanted to bug out on me today so probably get something cheap and in cash because why take out loans on a piece of metal you know anyways let's um let's uh end the video here thanks a bunch for watching really appreciate it and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 18,453

Rating: 4.9010601 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.9, 2.90, 2.91, 2.92, beginner, modeling, tutorial, hard, surface, hardops, boxcutter, decal, machine, mesh, josh, gambrell, non, destructive, part, texturing, shading, materials, rendering, post, processing

Id: -mqu21hWSeU

Length: 33min 54sec (2034 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020