Blender Boolean Cleanup: Topology Study #4

what's up everyone welcome to another topology study video this is number three i believe so i was actually working on a mech yesterday and i had this piece i thought it would be a pretty good video idea so i'm gonna enable screencast keys we're just going to hop right into it so you've seen what it is by the thumbnail so we're going to add in a cylinder here with 64 vertices 64 just because it's a lot smoother than 32 and it it's um it's a good even amount i suppose now i'm going to show you the way we're going to do this with add-ons and vanilla so you know everyone wins i'll show you both ways okay first thing we want to do is shade this smooth and then of course enable auto smooth and if you wanted to with hard ops you could just press sharpen to do the same thing i want to rotate this guy 90 degrees over the y axis now and then maybe we'll actually just leave it at this size that's fine and let me see it looks like this is the front view so let me rotate this 90 degrees around the z as well there we go and final thing i want to do is run a bevel through this guy so we'll just um chamfer just one segment bevel is going to be more than fine so pull that to about here i think it's all right and now we need to do is run the the circular cuts you saw on the thumbnail around it i'm going to start by doing it in box cutter and then i'll show you how to do it in vanilla so everyone wins um and no one no one yells at me one way or another okay so in box cutter super easy we're just gonna go to view project and we're just gonna cut straight through here i'm going to press the b key to give it a nice little bevel maybe around this size and we'll just pull this in right to about here and maybe we'll also pull this back a little bit right to about here now there is another thing you want to keep in mind when you do these cuts uh one is the amount of bevel segments you have on the cutter so if i go into wire frame here you're gonna see we don't have that many segments here and that should be okay if it looks smooth but you can kind of see this bevel is pretty jagged and what i'm going for hard surface concept type renders i definitely want a nice smooth transition around where my cuts are so i'm going to actually just bring this cutter back and with box cutter it enables a non-destructive type of bevel up front which is good so i can just go in here and increase the segment to something higher like 10 so now it should be a lot smoother as you can see and you can see in wireframe we have a lot of segments in here and also let me move this guy over to the left a little you can kind of see it's a little bit uneven so i'm just going to try to keep it consistent i mean it's going to be a circular array so it won't matter too much but uh just for the sake of consistency we'll do that okay awesome and um yeah i think we're good to go we're gonna once again we're gonna mention the vanilla way so just bear with me okay so now that we have the cutter in here how we want it to be positioned and we have a good amount of bevel segments what we need to do is take this cutter and run a radial array around this piece so just make sure this is in the position you want it to be in i think it's good then we're going to go into the front view front orthographic we're going to press the q key go to mesh tools and then radial array now radial array has two options in hard ops uh one is to rotate around the object itself and the other one is to rotate around the 3d cursor we're going to do the 3d cursor so we're going to control click that you can see the 3d cursor is in the center and now we have you know a radial array going around and this is just so so easy when you're using hard ops now i want to have maybe i think this is a good amount right here eight segments okay and we'll just go ahead and hide these guys also this little piece on the inside it looks a little bit weird it's um a radial array in hard ops uses an empty by default you can just hide this guy you don't need it don't delete it though because that's how it bases the rotation so you can just hide it all right so this is how you do the effect in hard ops i'm going to show you real quick how to do it in vanilla so let me just hide this cutter here and um let me just temporarily turn off the boolean okay and vanilla we're going to add in a cube scale it down to move it up so we'll move it to about here should be okay and then we'll just pull it out and let's scale it on the z and on the y and scale it on the x some more just kind of figure out what looks good okay now we need to apply the scale with control a so we can add a bevel you can either do a bevel non-destructively with a bevel modifier or you can just do what i do and just bevel it destructively and just trust yourself that you're not going to change things so 10 segments should be all right right to about here maybe move it down a bit more and then all we need to do is smooth it out auto smooth shift click on this guy and of course you need bull tool turned on to do this control minus on the numpad to get this effect and then yeah you're pretty much good to go now for the radial array all you need to do is add in some sort of empty to pivot around so i'm just going to add in a plain axis to make it easy scale it up okay so now we need to add an array modifier to this boolean cut so we'll just go in here we'll add an array modifier we're going to turn off the relative offset and we're going to turn on object offset and in the drop down we can pick the empty to be the object we want to rotate around now you're going to notice we get this thing and that's simply because we need to make sure that all the scales are applied this one's fine but since i scaled up the empty i need to also apply the scale on the empty okay there we go now you're going to see if i start rotating this right now we can't see the effect it's like it's it's rotating around that origin point you can see it so very simple solution you need to select your cutter object here you're going to see the origin point is still set to the center on this we need to move the origin point to where the to where the empty is in this case the empty happens to be in the same exact position as the 3d cursor if that wasn't the case what you'd want to do is shift s and then move the cursor to the selected with the empty selected and then you can just move the origin right click set origin to 3d cursor so that way it's actually pivoting around like this now you're going to see if i rotate the empty around the y axis now we get the desired effect so only problem with this method is you're going to see if i rotate this and maybe increase the segment count on the cutter to eight i think that's what it was before so eight segments we kind of have to eyeball this and see where to place it like these two areas it looks even but it's not going to be mathematically even like to the t like hard ops does for you so you kind of have to guess where to end the last cutter in this case it's okay it's not too bad but just keep that in mind that it's not going to be perfectly accurate you kind of have to eyeball it another option would be to take the degrees of the cylinder and then divide it by the number of segments in your array in this case we have 8 and 360 divided by 8 is 45 so what i could do is just make the y rotation exactly 45 so that would get you perfect accuracy i just prefer not having to calculate anything i prefer to just you know increase the count and have it automatically do it for me so that's one of the perks of hard ops but yeah it's not too terrible anyways that's how you do it in vanilla so i'm gonna hide these and just bring back the original cut i had made which were these guys and i'll just turn the boolean back on okay right here perfect um we're gonna hide these cutters now we're ready to actually get into the gist of this tutorial adding a bevel on this piece and cleaning up the topology before we do anything if you have shadow turned on i would turn it off shadows always make me confuse them for artifacts when they're not i just prefer to work with shadows off when i'm cleaning up these booleans and such so go to shading i'm going to turn off shadow cavity looks quite nice you can turn that on if you want to have more of a defined set of edges anyways now we need to do is first of all clean up this shading if i go into mat cap you can see it a little bit better youtube's compression is probably going to kill it but these boolean cuts have stretch marks going all the way across if you still can't see it we'll use one of these and you definitely should be able to see it now see this line right here it's a shading stretch which is going all the way across so we can constrain these errors by simply adding a loop cut and pulling it in um this kind of takes some guesswork so what i like to do is turn on the boolean cuts and then just move it right outside of where those cuts are a little bit less so that way there's room there's buffer for the bevel so what this does here is it limits the shading areas it doesn't allow the shading to um the shading stretching to pass past where this loop cut is right if i go into wireframe with alt v that's in box cutter or if you want to go to wireframe you just go to viewport display and turn it on here anyways the n-gons that are causing the shading errors can't extend beyond this loop so they're all pushed in to where the boolean begins now we need to add in a bevel here so in hard ops all you have to do is press q click on bevel press n to harden the normals and you're pretty much done don't mind the shading artifacts that's the point of this video is to show how to clean this up and make it look good so if you want a bevel and vanilla we have to do a few more steps so in vanilla what we need to do is go to add modifier and then bevel we need to increase the segment count to around three i always use three shading we need to click on harden normals and then you're going to see every single edges being beveled so we need to change the limit method over to angle we need to go to geometry and change the outer outer miter type to an arc you can see the difference here this is with sharp enable this is with an outer miter type set to arc a little bit cleaner then we need to turn off clamp overlap to make sure the bevel actually comes through and then we need to adjust the amount until we just have a very slight bevel on there and that's how you can do a bevel in vanilla and real quick for any of the beginners out there that are watching this i know most of you are familiar with these things but let me just quickly go over it for them so what heart and normals does is it cleans up the shading it recalculates the normal orientation so that way the shading looks nicer especially on flat surfaces you can see the difference here it's a lot better what clamp overlap does is it prevents any overlaps in bevels so if i were to really increase the amount you can see the bevel goes crazy clamp overlap prevents that from happening now i never use clamp overlap i would suggest you don't either reason being is because we can adjust the amount manually and even if the shading is bad and we have overlaps we can clean them up after the fact i don't use clamp overlap unless i'm diagnosing issues so i would always keep that off if i were you okay so now that we know what to do with the bevels i'm just going to um i'm going to use hard ops bevel just because a little bit quicker that way okay anyways however you did it once you have your bevels in here what we need to do is clean up the shading the shading is bad we have these overlaps in the corners here overall this bevel doesn't look really clean so what we have to do to clean these up is we need to go destructive there's not really a non-destructive way to get the shading clean all in one go on this piece so before we apply the booleans there's one very important thing we need to do so um don't apply the booleans yet and you're going to see why we're doing this shortly we need to go into edit mode here and on this chamfer i'm going to add in like four loop cuts with a control r once again this will be clear in a little bit and then what i want to do is go to the cutter here and if your cutter is kind of extended we're just going to go into edit mode and just pull it back to the front right before it cuts off the boolean and on here we're going to add in some loop cuts as well maybe like eight or so that should be good and now we can just go ahead and hide these now we're ready to apply the bully and it looks like it made things worse but it didn't and you'll see why so let's apply the boolean modifier don't apply the bevel very important we want to leave that live in the stack so uh now you're going to see we have the loop cuts going through here and we also have the loop cuts running through this area if we had tried to do this after or um yeah after applying the boolean we wouldn't be able to we can't run loop cuts through all these different n-gons it simply wouldn't work very well so that's why we applied these loop cuts before we went destructive so that way we still had access to that geometry and the reason we added in these loop cuts here is because any changes we make the shading might adjust right so the shading might extend all the way back to here we might have a shading error you know pushing all the way back but if we just added in some additional loop cuts the shading is going to be really constrained only near the bevels so if you want good bevels then i would recommend adding in additional loop cuts and keeping the topology even so that way the shading errors aren't very noticeable and are mainly pushed back to where the bevels are and the more you work with booleans the more used to this you'll become this type of thing ideally is for something like a cad software where it's not poly based you wouldn't have to deal with all this but i think polygon modeling is important and understanding these fundamentals is also important hence why we're doing things like this okay what we need to do is get rid of this crazy shading going on what i'm going to do is select these three m to merge at the center this vertex is inside the bevel so they're overlapping we don't want that we need to move the bevel out here so double tap g move that a little bit this one as well double tap g and move that out we can merge this one down here now make sure your auto merge is turned on up here otherwise it won't actually merge which is very important so merge that one in there we'll get these three m to merge at the center and then move this one out slide that one just very basic movements okay now we need to double tap g and slide or select this and then double tap g slide that one down slide this one down and then same type of idea for this side we're going to need to merge some of these up merge some of these at the center this is all whoa that was crazy i selected the wrong one try that again yeah this is just um all all comes with practice really there's no right or wrong it's just about cleaning the shading if the shading looks good then you're probably more than fine so merge those up and then move this one down and move this one out so now the shading over here is pretty good this is a problem let me slide this one up much better and then same for this one slide this one up and now the shading is pretty clean so let's pan around and see if there's any noticeable shading areas because our goal with these is to make sure the shading is flawless or at least close to flawless right flawless is sometimes difficult to achieve on really any model but if it's not noticeable or we can't um or it's like pushed into the bevel then we're good there is a slight stretch right here which i'm not a fan of not sure how you can see it this is probably just me being a little bit you know too uh meticulous with it maybe we can join up an edge there that helped it a little bit sometimes joining edges helps out the shading as well so if you have like a big end gun i'd try joining some edges together and see if that does anything for you that didn't help too much let's undo that what i might do is join these here maybe not they didn't do very well try joining this one okay this one's being a little bit difficult so you know what i'm going to do i'm going to join up these two right here and then i'm going to run a knife cut up through this area that should help it out a little bit um this shading kind of went ballistic now didn't it let's try joining these we could dissolve that out okay and um it's a little bit weird here i'm not sure i'm a fan of that so i'm just going to join up a triangle in the triangle um even though there's a triangle there it does help hold the shading has a little bit of a triangulation effect there in the bevel but i mean in in real life machine tools like this that have bevels always look like it's made by machinery the bevels are unbalanced you know warped here and there and aren't perfect so in a way it's almost better to have this type of effect and you know sometimes just difficult to remove completely so it's um it's all about cleaning the shading if you have clean shading and it looks good that's what i would focus on and also if we had higher mesh density around here we'd have even more areas to connect so that's another thing to keep in mind is having a good balance of the mesh density on the piece that's cut out and the surrounding geo and we have a pretty decent balance maybe not perfectly accurate but you know enough let's do the same thing over here let's cut that in and then hold that shading a bit by joining what did we do over here we did it on this one okay there we go that helped hold the shading a bit more okay so now we have this nice boolean cut the shading is clean around the corners it does look like it's kind of machined around the bevel which is also good and the inside looks really nice as well so one last gloss over make sure we're not missing anything severe okay there is a little bit of a pinch in this corner this one's a super easy fix though notice this is an entire end gone but with one connection we can turn these into two quads so we'll press j here and now we have two quads and now the shading's super nice on that corner i mean a little bit's noticeable just because of the the curvature is not super flat but it's way better for sure so i'm not going to worry too much about it same thing over here will help tighten that up a little bit so the shading should be cleaner and also if you wanted to you could move some of these verts even closer just pull them in i would pull them on one static axis to help push in the shading more if it was really bothering you but i think it's fine so now we're going to do the same thing to um we don't need to do the entire thing right this is a symmetrical object so we can work in one co one quadrant symmetrize over it then symmetrize down so that way we're doing a quarter of the work so i'm only going to fix these two other ones and then just run a symmetry along the two axes so let's just uh fix these two pieces then we'll basically be done with the video so we'll do this one on video as well i would suggest you try doing this on your own though because it's a it's good practice so start up here and work our way down this one will slide down this one will merge once again make sure auto merge is turned on very important these three we can merge at the center these three we can merge at the center this one needs to slide out a little bit this one will just merge down move this down move this one down move this one down it's a little bit weird at this angle but we'll get used to it we'll merge that one merge these three at the center these three at the center and also if you want to zoom in you can press period key on the numpad that'll help you zoom in and we'll go ahead and slide that one and then merge this one down and then one more up here okay it looks like i missed one let's uh let's slide this guy okay not too shabby now we still have some shading problems here in the corner as you can kind of see it see how the um the matte cap is being disturbed right here so let's zoom in and clean that up so i'm going to try a connection right here with the j key and then like we did in the other one we're just going to use the knife tool maybe slide this one a bit and then run a triangle here to help kind of tighten up that shading a bit it doesn't do a terrible job makes it look more machined anyways in this corner as well it's not really as noticeable now is it but just to be consistent i'll do it again join this one up press the k key and run a knife cut up through how do we do it on this side did we terminate at the vertex yeah we did so we'll run this up through here maybe pull this down a bit join these up okay that's much better this could probably be pushed in a little bit okay there we go and then up here in the corners let's do the same thing let's join these into quads to keep it consistent join those up okay looking good and then we need to do one more then we can just symmetrize around and we'll be pretty much set so same idea for this one we're going to do the same exact process i'll just do it on video for the sake of consistency we're just going to merge all these i'm going to go through this one quickly because it's the same exact set of steps so just going to keep merging these sliding these and uh you know you get more efficient with it the more you do it so we'll slide this vert in here merge these three let me actually press period key on the numpad to zoom in this angle is just uh messing with me merge that at the center merge these at the center move this one down a bit slide this one and then slide this one and i think we'll move that one and i think we're good to go now that looks good then we'll just do the same thing we did to the other two by joining these up and running a knife cut so when i say that things come with practice this is like a prime example because now you know exactly what you're doing and it's the same idea with hard surface eventually you'll just do it so much that it'll just click you'll just know exactly what you need to do so it's um yeah it's nothing super complex it just takes a little bit getting used to we're going to connect these up and this one needs to move down just a bit join these guys and um yeah i think that's good so like i said we don't need to do the entire thing we can just symmetrize to the other side because this is a symmetrical object so i'll show you the add-ons and vanilla way to do symmetry with hard ops to run a symmetry what you do is you press alt x you change to symmetry and then you just select the axis and you're done to symmetrize in vanilla we have to do it a little bit differently i'm going to go into the front view orthographic we select everything in edit mode i just prefer to search for it you can go to mesh and then symmetrize if you want you can search for it as well anyway symmetrize we want to symmetrize over the x-axis we want to make sure we're choosing the right one though so what i would do is try the two different x values see which one is the correct one actually we need to look at this side so whichever one has the cleanup is the one we're going to stick with so in this case it was i think okay we it'll it'll fix when we do the y-axis so we'll do this one we're going to symmetrize again mesh and then symmetrize and this one's going to be the y-axis that's why it wasn't flipping to that side okay so let's do a little bit of a pan over and make sure we got everything correct make sure we did the right axes you can always switch them if you need to because you want to be careful to not symmetrize the side that has the incorrect shading you want to symmetrize from the side that has the correct shading so that's why there's two different directions here so like i said i just prefer hard ops symmetry it's just easier and i don't have to guess which axis i'm symmetrizing from so i'm just going to press alt x and do it this way just way easier however you choose to do it doesn't really matter as long as you have the symmetry on all the sides so now we're pretty much done as you can see we have some very nice manufactured looking bevels in here which is exactly the effect we're going for and wasn't too difficult either you can get this done in like half the time the video is slower to show the step-by-step process what you could do now if you wanted to is you know add a material on it make it more exciting because uh material just give that element of photo realism to it so give it like a metallic material and look at it this way drop the roughness a bit and now we have a pretty cool manufactured little um what would you call this like a notch or recess whatever it's called and it looks really good so that's about it for this video you learned a little bit about boolean cleanup shading fixing artifacts and just making it look good overall so as usual i'm gonna have the box cutter and hard ops affiliate links in the description if you um would like to get those buying through those links supports me if not that's fine that's why i'm trying to show more vanilla workflow in the videos as well other than that i hope the video helped and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 23,646

Rating: 4.9206214 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, 2.9, 2.83, topology, study, boolean, cleanup, mesh, shading, artifacts, glitch, distortion, 3d, modeling, hard, surface, bevel, workflow, non, destructive

Id: 6hZxr7UDucs

Length: 26min 1sec (1561 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020