Blender | Bend Objects | Curve Modifier | Beginners

welcome to another blender tutorial and today i'm going to be talking about the curved deform modifier and blender so this is going to be probably an unnecessarily long video just covering one quick little modifier but i really do want to make this for very um beginner people like somebody who might not understand some of the issues they might run into so you can see here i've just got this object and i'm animating it along this curve and it's deforming i'm going to talk about some of the the drawbacks from using this method where it's a little bit limited and i hope this is something that is useful so let's get into the tutorial and i hope you guys enjoy i've got a new scene open up in blender i've deleted my camera and my light and we're just going to be using the good old default cube to demonstrate how this works so before we get any further let's make this into something that we can actually deform along a curve so let's make a super primitive snake so let's just select the cube and let's go s x and type in one zero so that's ten so we've just scaled it along the x axis by a factor of ten if you hit the n key on your keyboard and you come over to items you can see under the scale vectors here on the x-axis it's 10. okay now what we do want to do because it's important when we're working with deformation modifiers we want to apply the scale so go ahead and hit ctrl a and apply the scale if you did that step in edit mode say for example you scale it by 10 in edit mode then you don't have to do that but only in object mode so now that we have that out of the way we can see we have this object here but one thing we want to keep in mind when we're working with deformation modifiers like deforming something along the curve we also want to keep in mind geometry so this is something i see people do when they're beginners i did this myself many many years ago when i was a beginner at 3d you can't just make things deform without having the proper amount of geometry in here so we have the length here established but we do need to add more geometry or it's not going to have any places where it can bend simple way to do that is just to hover over one of these edges with your cursor hit control r and then roll your middle mouse button and just roll in some extra geometry so about that much should be okay then we're going to tab out now we have something that we could deform along the curve speaking of which let's just go shift a and let's go over here instead of our mesh we're just going to go underneath it and we're going to add in a bezier curve so let's add in a bezier and let's just hit z go into wireframe you can see there is our bezier so at the moment you can see our cube here or our snake primitive thingy whatever is way too big so we're just gonna select it and hit s to scale it down and let's scale down about that much just for an example you can see it's quite small so once again just go ctrl a and just apply that scale all these transform vectors are set back to one and now let's go over to modifiers and this is the fun part let's just go add modifier let's go to our curves and let's come here to the curve object click on the eyedropper and let's select that bezier curve now you can actually use just about anything in blender to deform something but a bezier curve really is a good thing to use because it's kind of like a path that you can animate along and easily manipulate so we're going to select by clicking on it and now we can see our cube is kind of positioned here and if we hit g to move it it's going to go all over the place so what we want to do we can see here by default it's kind of constrained it to the deform axis of x right here so if we hit g and we hit x to constrain it to the x axis we're gonna see that works really well so if we were to actually come here and change it to negative x and we went g x and now you can see it's the opposite so if i'm trying to move it to the right of my my monitor you can see it's not working so now i have to move it the opposite so i'm moving the cursor away the opposite way because it's now in the negative so it kind of just makes sense if you think about it if you change it to something like y for example and you went g x you can see that's not going to work either you'd have to go g y to make that work so this is what these um d form axes are so let's just change it to x because in this case we have an object that we want to move along the x-axis as you can see here which is this red line indicating that so let's select the bezier curve itself and let's go into edit mode and when you select that bezier curve you can see it's got these points or what we call handles so you can actually select these handles and you can control them you can select the ends of the handles and that just gives you a little bit more control over the rotation of them and the pointiness of them so for example if we just select the handle here itself the main handle right and we hit e we can extrude it like a point so i'm going to maybe extrude it over here rotate it and maybe i'm going to go grab the first handle here and i'm just going to rotate that so now you can see here we have this nice curve that we can go to edit mode we can select our primitive snake object here and we can get g x and we can just move along the x and you can see it's deforming we could even animate that with some basic keyframing if we wanted to now one thing you might not like if you select your object here that you're deforming and you tab to edit mode you can see it just all of a sudden appears over here so why is it being placed over here so that's where the origin point comes in so what we want to do if you want it to start at the very end in a controlled way what you can do is just simply select your curve tab into edit mode and hit a to select all of the points or handles here and then hit g and just move the whole thing until the very first handle is right on the origin point of this curve this bezier curve so we went into object mode again and we double tapped r you can see it's rotating around that origin point now and we can do the same thing with our primitive object here we can go to edit mode select everything we can go g x and just move it till its own origin point is in the very end here and now you have something like that you can come in at any time and move it away from that origin point so now if we tab in and out of edit mode you can see it's not just jumping around it's kind of where we want it to be in that space so you can also go to edit mode and duplicate this so you can make multiples of this and it'll all still work if we go into object mode and we go g z and we move it along the z axis you can see it's deforming so let's quickly go to our timeline here let's go to frame 10 and then we can hit i insert a location keyframe let's come up to frame 50 and then we're going to go g x and we're going to move it move it until it gets all the way to the end and we're going to hit i and insert a location keyframe so now if we go to frame one and we hit the spacebar we're gonna see we have this animation and that is how you can deform things along the curve so there are some drawbacks to this which i'll explain quickly if i went to edit mode and i just selected one of these guys here this is how i rotate it on the x-axis or the z-axis by 90 degrees and i tabbed out let's quickly see what happens when we animate this or when we run the animation see what happens maybe i should just drag for you can see if we look at from the top view we have this deformation happening here so it's moving along the curve but it is making it deform as well so that's one of the big drawbacks with this method so that's why we'd probably use something like constraints when we're working with this but other than that it's actually pretty fun there's a lot of cool things you can do with this especially when you're working with organic things um this doesn't work very well for like steel structures or like architectural things where you might have like a steel girder or some paneling that's warping around a building because you can get kind of this deformation thing happening which makes things stretch and look funny but it works for organic things quite well like maybe a limb or some tentacle or something like that but this is the basics of working with curve deform in blender and i hope you guys are able to just you know make something of this i hope i've explained it well enough without going too over the top with details and i'll see you guys next time for another blender tutorial

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 40,021

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.9

Id: Tw16zVjjtqw

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021