Blender Boolean Cleanup: Topology Study #2 | Weapon Grip

what's up everyone i hope you all are doing well this is just going to be another topology study video you guys seem to like the last one and helped a lot of you out so we'll just do another one so this one's going to be a weapon grip it's not only a practical piece but it's one that i think will help a lot of you out when coming with those um when you get confused with those sub surf curvy designs it can get a little bit complicated but it's actually a super easy process so um the first thing i'm going to do just to make this process a bit easier is i'm going to use a reference photo so actually loaded one in here we go i just loaded something in this is just so i have the general proportions down because eyeballing this when i'm not super knowledgeable of weaponry and how grips work it's probably easier to just sketch out so yeah all you really need to do is just kind of sketch out the general formation obviously that's not going to be the main topic of the video so i'm going to go through this click we'll scale this up um we'll go into face mode i'm just going to do this really fast because i don't want to waste too much time because most of you are here for the topology studies let's extrude down again and i don't know do something like that and we'll extrude up through here maybe i'm just gonna really really roughly do this i'm not trying to make this crazy complex then we'll go up here and maybe just um i could probably just pull this face out or i could extrude it maybe i don't know it doesn't really matter we just want that general formation and then i'm going to scale on the y just a little bit to basically get this piece right here so what i usually do when i'm making these is i like to kind of get things into place before i use the sub surf so right now this is like a super static object and if you look at a weapon grip it gets curvy and there's kind of bumps in random areas and i'm sure there's reasons for that but none that i know i'm just gonna replicate that so maybe what we could do is add in a few loops here add in maybe two here and i'm just going to kind of go into face mode and just pull some of these faces out just give it some bumpiness right just give it a little bit of chaos here and there just make this thing look somewhat decent move that out maybe move this vertex back literally this is just all arbitrary design at this point i'm just pushing and pulling various areas of the geo now i'm not going to worry about the other side because we're going to end up symmetrizing it to the other side so don't worry too much about that maybe a loop here and just kind of let's see let's pull some of these verts out so that's going to kind of give us the bumpiness and here in the front i'm just going to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that i don't know this should be okay let's add a sub so actually let's smooth this out first shade smooth and then turn on auto smooth to see how it looks and let's drop on a sub surf with ctrl 2 on the number pad so this thing doesn't look terrible you know it kind of resembles a weapon grip now if we go back to the reference photo if it's even in here you can kind of see there's a little bit of bumpiness here where your fingers grip so to kind of replicate that effect i'm going to go into edge mode here and just pull these out some more right maybe something like this i'm not going to worry too much about the specific design because i really want this video to be more about the topology study than trying to get some sort of design like that down i'll just leave it at that so yeah if you want to get more technical with this thing you go do your thing but i want everyone to get more of the topology study out of this video than getting the general design for a grip down i mean it's just pushing and pulling vertices so a real quick i'll finish this off by selecting the top face shift g and then coplanar and i'm just going to pull that up and maybe drop a loop right about here and that looks pretty good and one final adjustment we could make is selecting these faces here let's scale them in a bit shift z and i'm just going to go to edge mode and basically alt shift click up here let's add in a bevel with two segments here and a bevel with two segments there and then there's kind of some definition there on the top i think it looks relatively decent you can you know clean that up if you want to let's do something similar down here on these guys first of all let me scale those up a bit and pull that about there same idea basically alt shift click these edges bevel and then bevel again there's a little bit of definition there on the bottom okay but this is about as far as i'm going to go in terms of just the design i just want to go over the topology now so what i'm going to do here is just kind of cut out a design here in the back and that's where the main topic of this video is going to come in understanding how to work this and make it work as intended without any sort of crazy shading issues when we cut through the boolean um so i don't actually have box cutter turned on right now because i'm using a different version of blunder for the chorus we're doing i'm just going to do it the good old vanilla way i'm going to add a single vert and what i'm going to do is pull it about here e to extrude and let's pull it in front of the weapon there we go let's extrude down this way and extrude up here okay cool so if i fill this in and then extrude through i'm gonna use this guy as a as a cutter basically so shift select this control forward slash on the number pad wrong one there we go control and forward slash assuming you have hard ops or bull tool enabled then we kind of get this design going on here so you can basically position this wherever you want you can you know rotate it if you want it to be something more like this i don't know maybe some of you are more up to date with the weaponry and how it works and which position they should actually be in but for now i'm just going to leave it about here and i'm also going to tab into edge mode for this guy and let's bevel ctrl b give this a few segments give a nice round bevel there okay cool so at this point once we're done with this design we can go ahead and hide the cutter let's hide it and of course what we want to do is add some bevel in because this is just a hard edge and it's not going to look good without a bevel and that's where the main topic of this video will come in with cleaning up this boolean and fixing the topology so what i'm going to do well first of all we have to apply the boolean because we don't have access to the geo of this piece if we don't um right now it's not letting us apply so if we go to this green triangle object data panel do a new user then we should be able to apply them so i'm going to apply both and now we actually have access to this geo here so i'm going to actually do just this whole video in vanilla if you have hard ops then even more power to you but i guess this will help a lot of beginner and vanilla people out there so of course we want to bevel this right so we're going to add a bevel modifier now the reason it's not beveling properly is because one the clamp overlap is kicking in and that's probably because it's um there's an overshooting or overlapping vertices like immediately so there's not even any bevel occurring and basically for those of you who don't know clamp overlap just prevents say i were to bevel these edges if you bevel far enough they start intersecting but clamp overlap prevents that from happening so this is just doing it with the bevel modifier non-destructively now i never keep clamp on i always turn it off i use clamp to diagnose issues but i never use it as a final solution because almost all the time you're going to have a very slight overshoot that's going to be caught by the clamp just don't bother if you have a tiny tiny overshoot it doesn't matter so we're going to turn that off and then just adjust the offset by shift scrolling maybe to about here and let's take the segment count up to around three and now we just need to change the limit method to angle to bevel based off of an angle and yeah we're basically there for that area it's beveling but of course we need to clean up this geo here it looks awful now first things first let's shade this guy smooth right click and then shade smooth yep shade smooth and then we'll turn on auto i guess it's already on and we could harder the normals see if that makes a difference in shading there kind of i'll just leave it on and now of course we need to go in here and deal with this monster now there are a ton of add-ons that can help with the cleanup process like mesh machines boolean cleanup check this out i'm not going to use it for the tutorial but i'll just show you look it's just it's an amazing add-on i love it but um we're gonna do all this in vanilla so you know if anyone's new out there they'll understand so usually these weird artifacts are caused by overlapping vertices the vertices are sitting right where the bevel occurs so to fix those you basically need to identify where the artifacts are and 99 of the time you're going to notice that there's a vertex sitting right where that bevel is and you can do a few different things you can move the vertices you can merge them it really all depends on the situation and as much as i wish there was an all incumbency and answer there's really not this is something that's pure intuition that you build on the more you do these types of cleanups so i'm going to demonstrate how i would do it and hopefully it helps build your intuition so um in this one you could slide it out right or you could first of all this verts close so we're going to merge it and you're going to notice it didn't merge and that's because auto merge is not turned on turn that guy on so now it's going to merge so there's a few different solutions we could just slide this down and fix the issue on the spot we could merge that and then pull this down it would give a pretty similar result i think i'll just leave it at that so yeah let's leave it there for now let's take a look up here so this vert sitting on the bevel this one is easily fixed by just dragging down double tap g the corners are a little bit crazy so let's go into object mode and just see how bad the shading is let's do matcap okay not terrible now let's only worry about the shading on this piece for now because this is the one we're focusing on at this point so okay so for these you can see the overlapping we could slide these easily but in situations like this the edges are so incredibly close to being merged with the corner that you might as well just merge them it's not going to really change the curvature that much now if i were to for example slide a main piece of curvature like this you're going to see a clear flat area so you don't want to merge areas that are important to the curvature of the object but you're more than welcome to just merge areas that aren't going to really affect the curvature kind of like this if that makes sense so we're just going to double tap g and proportional editing needs to go away double tap g and then slide those and you can see that did not affect the curvature even in the slightest so no biggie there let's check this out maybe that's not affecting the curvature too much we'll move that we have an overlapping one right here um it probably doesn't really need to be fixed any further but just for good measure we could slide it up here or slide it down here i'm going to go with the bottom one it just looks a little bit cleaner that way and let's see let's slide this and let's slide this and sometimes in situations like this what i really like to do because if we look at it from an angle maybe it's not super apparent but you know this might cause a shading issue this massive end gone right here so rather than trying to fix the shading issue completely it's better to just constrain it so you can do that in situations like this by just pressing the j key you can kind of see the shading's been tightened a little bit maybe you can't with the youtube compression i don't know but sometimes i just kind of join those up to just give more of a constraint around the edges for the shading let's see sometimes they're literally on top of each other you can't really tell so don't forget about those that one's fixed and you can still see there's a big shading error right here we could probably constrain that by joining those it's not too bad that did an okay job let's see what we can do slide these up a bit maybe i don't want to go too far because i don't want to distort the curvature too much but it looks like that did a fantastic job i don't see any more real shading errors there maybe if you use like a super reflective matte cap at a steep angle but i mean even in real life what metal is perfectly shaped you know it's not a huge deal if you want to make this a little bit more even you could even slide those a bit but i don't really think it's necessary and there's a stray vert right there and it looks like the bottom held up pretty well this edge was really close to hitting see that so usually with those i like to just slide them a little bit just because it makes me more comfortable it's like standing on the edge of a skyscraper i just feel more comfortable standing a few feet back that's kind of how i feel these edges are that are close and it looks like we did a really good job here there's not really any other issues now of course there is on this one but we haven't went to that one yet let's check up here a little bit there's a little bit of shading error going on here let's see what we can do about it so i don't know if you can tell the youtube compression but it's really hard to show let's try a matte cap okay right here there's a little bit of shading areas so i'm just going to constrain those we could join these two vertices with the j key and just pull those up as close as we can not too close for comfort though and maybe join these constrain that even more join those constrain that even more let's make sure these tries didn't give us any problems i don't think so we could probably just leave it right at that let's see can we move this a little bit get a happy medium let's try sliding that one see this one's a little bit tricky because this one's a pretty apparent shading error so i want to try to fix it as best i can all this really is is analyzing the geo and just seeing what types of solutions work so let's see i'm going to slide that one instead you know what that one actually held the geo really well as you can see so i'm going to leave it at that maybe just um if we zoom in there's a little bit of a glitch here push that over and there we go looking good i'm happy with that now if you zoom really really far in that's about as close as you're going to be able to see the shading issues that are actually still apparent but who's going to render this close right like no one back in the day i used to be that quad purist guy when i didn't know much about hard surface but i've learned that in hard surface it's not about the perfect geo all the time it's about constraining and fixing shading errors shading is like the number one thing that's gonna make your hard service model look like so do whatever you can to just constrain the shading and don't worry about anything else so yeah that's what we're gonna do here let's go to this one so i'm going to go to this guy here we're going to do the same thing we're going to we need to apply these mods both of them there we go and we're going to apply a bevel and we'll do turn off clamp tighten that up a bit i think the normals are incorrect are they yeah they are you can see that they're beveling the wrong direction so that kind of tells me the normals are wrong so select everything in edit mode shift and recalculate those normals and we'll change the angle limit method and maybe three segments now i don't think i shaded this one smooth either so we'll do that and then you know the usual auto smooth and then hardened normals we i guess i'll just leave off for the time being now really we just have to get in here and do the same thing it's not so much difficult as you've seen as it is just tedious trial and error work i actually find this stuff to be kind of therapeutic i enjoy it just kind of figuring out what looks good and then it's satisfying when you finish so let's take this guy we'll slide him we'll take this guy these are very near miss so we'll slide these let's see usually if i don't know which one to merge to i just see what looks better this one looks okay this one looks okay i just literally just make a decision it doesn't matter in most cases so let's try that let's make this a little bit more even actually now we'll leave it because then the auto smooth is going to pick up okay so these ones are near miss hmm oh there's three of them aren't there interesting okay there's that one now these guys you can see are way too close to the bevel they're actually right at the point where the bevel starts which is why the shading is a little bit dark so slide that up a bit try to make it even if you can just to be consistent and um by the way i didn't symmetrize the other side on this piece yet we're going to do that i just want to get the both of these done first so i can demonstrate now once you've cleaned up most of the shading we can get to the step where we just work on our our um shading constraints basically so join these bring them in and you can do this with mesh machines offset tool by the way but like i said i'm gonna do this in vanilla for demonstration purposes this this vert right here is not doing anything for us literally no difference so we can get rid of that that makes a quad there which is what we love to see another quad there we love to see and slide that one to make another quad i don't know how bad those tries are going to cause shading areas i don't think very much now i don't see anything it really comes down to just being a trade-off between what type of shading you want to accept and what type you want to get rid of we just made two tries here which we can f to fill into a quad and i don't know think we can just terminate the constraints right there that should be fine now up here this is that looks bad but it's not really a part of what we're fixing we'll fix it later um hmm do i want to do anything there no i'll just leave it like that i don't see any sort of shading errors and you can just pull this in as close as you want let's see any difference now i'm kind of getting a little bit selfish now i'm just going to leave it there i'm waiting for a quad purist to come into the comments so i can link reuse video where he basically defeats you in the argument of quads or non-quads because man i know i'm gonna get a comment about that it's you know i'm gonna make a video on that soon about um just when quads are and aren't important and just more technicalities behind it i just haven't got around to that video yet this one's i'm not happy with let's see can i move this maybe let's try knife tool and fill these in there we go look at that sometimes just the simple nice nice sometimes just the simple knife tool can do us a world of favors there this is looking absolutely amazing i swear sometimes i nerd out whenever we use bevels but like can we sit here and just appreciate how ugly this geo is without a bevel than how beautiful it is once we add in a bevel it's like it's unless you appreciate hard surface you won't understand how amazing bevels are but yeah okay this thing's looking really really good i'm happy with it so let's go up here and just fix this this is so i think i know what this is this is probably an issue with the bevel angle picking up we can diagnose it by just turning on and off the bevel look at that that's exactly what it is so we can just adjust the angle let's see what we can oh geez increase this just a bit and that fixed it okay now all we need to do is symmetrize to the other side these weird glitches as well then we're basically done okay so before we symmetrize i like to press ctrl a and apply the rotation and scale and i'm just going to go into the back view and what we can do is tap into edit mode we're going to select everything with the a key and usually there's probably another menu to find it in under mesh yeah you can search for it or just go to mesh and symmetrize i usually use the box or um hard ops one but this is the default so it looks like we're symmetrizing over the y-axis usually what i do is i try one or the other and see which one's the right one because i genuinely don't know off the top of my head sometimes unless i look at the gizmo but that looks okay now threshold you can see we get this weird like whatever this is right it just looks terrible increase the threshold and it'll kind of capture those so we don't get that and this thing is looking good now we need to do the same thing to this piece so ctrl a apply that rotation scale it did make a slight adjustment to the bevel but i mean i don't really care enough it still looks good but this there we go okay there that was just me being picky okay so we're going to go into edit mode select everything same idea we're going to go to mesh symmetrize and this one looks perfect actually i guess the threshold caught up with what it would have been before so everything's nice and connected okay so now we didn't even have to do the other side it was just symmetrized basically just the the same exact result was moved to the other end and we are essentially done now let me see if this issue came back of course geez let me move the bevel just a bit more let blender be happy maybe it's not even the bevel maybe it's the auto smooth we need to move around so yeah if you get weird pinching or shading it's probably the bevel angle or the auto smooth angle just try both of them and it'll fix okay and there we go okay so this was yet another topology study video i know these are a lot longer but these are probably some of the most important videos you'll watch when you're learning hard surface and how to deal with shading artifacting slice operations beveling it's just i'd rather sit through you know a 20 30 minute video and just learn everything and then go jump around so i'm gonna keep making more videos like this because a lot of you seem to enjoy them and get a lot of information from them so yeah that's about it and hopefully you can apply this to your own personal projects until the next video i'll see you then

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 77,684

Keywords: blender, 2.8, 2.83, hard, surface, modeling, topology, study, boolean, cleanup, geometry, subdivision, non, destructive, slice, operation, holes, distortion, mesh, fix, tips, tricks, beginners, shading, artifacts, fixes

Id: QcM8WbxWipM

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020