Blender for Beginners Subdivisions edge loops part 5

hello everybody so this is Haven and I am doing number five now in the blender for beginners series part number of hi I'm going to expand today like on how to add geometry to what we're making everything that we make starts out with something you can start out with just a vertex you can start out with a plane a cube a cylinder a sphere you have all kinds of different shapes to start out with and the thing is is that these shapes do not have the geometry that you need and what I buy in my camera tree is if you look at this cube here right now it has six sides and only eight corners so if you have this in edit mode there's really not a whole lot you can make with just this geometry that we have you know just these edges and vertices and faces we need to have more than that in order to create shapes I mean what if we wanted to take the top of this cube and bring it down inside almost like a box well you literally cannot do it even if you were to scale this in and bring it down the whole thing just gets shorter you can't really tuck that in there or make it look like it was hollowed out or anything and the reason for that is is we don't have enough vertices to move around to make the shapes we want so we really need to learn how to do that the best way to do that and the smartest way to do that is to start off with a prim if we can call it that a piece of mash an object with very low geometry involved like this box and then we put the geometry we add it where we need it where we want it and a lot of times you're going to use your operators panel for this function so let me show you what I mean by that I'm gonna delete this cube and I'm gonna add a UV sphere all right so this UV sphere by default is made with as you can see in the operators panel 32 segments in 16 rings now segments are almost like the Apple segments it takes 32 of them to go all the way around to make this circle and the Rings you can think of like pineapple rings how many are stacked together to make this profile this shape well it's 16 of them so what we could do is we could bring this in and we could hit edit and this is just too much geometry you probably won't need this much for things that you're making so what you're gonna want to do is cut down on some of that geometry and that's gonna involve making different types of deletion choices so here I'm gonna hit delete and choose edge loops and so now I actually have 31 going around now this is a little bit of a pain in the butt to try and select all of these and go about you know deleting what you want to delete to make the shape that you want what's a lot easier and if I go ahead and delete this and add a fresh one I can change that number here in the operators panel now the reason that I had to delete that one that I was working on instead of coming back here to work on it was because if you had noticed this panel changed and let me change it again just so you're aware if I go into edit mode I'm now in toggle edit mode in any settings that would apply to that I can choose this edge loop and delete it again and now I get settings for deleting an edge loop so we never get back those add UV sphere settings again until of course we add a new UV sphere so I'm gonna go ahead and add another one and this time I'll keep it there I'm going to change the number of segments to eight okay so now you can see it's still somewhat rounded it's not too bad of a round shape but it only takes 8 faces or eight segments to make up that round shape of course 16 is way too much so why don't we take that down to 8 as well and now we have a ball or a sphere shape but we have 1/4 the geometry that we had before so you can see here now we've got 112 triangles if I put this back up to 32 and this one is 16 you can see that have 960 triangles and the triangles are what is calculated on for a variety of things the number of triangles is going to make your land impact what it is there's even limits to like materials how many triangles can be assigned to a material now that's a little farther ahead of us and we are right now but we'll get there one day soon just so that you know triangles are not something we want to have massive amounts that we want to start with the lowest one that we can have and we will add to it as we go on okay so something else that we want to be aware of is what's up here at the top right now these are called triangles or tries ok and tries are really hard to work with when you're trying to make selections when you're trying to use certain tools that blender gives us for adding geometry it makes things a little rougher maybe not necessarily just for a ball but when it comes to other things it makes it harder to unwrap triangles can even play a part in whether you get a good result on weight painting which is way far down the road right now so we ought to talk about all of it but I do want you to know that triangles are not the best type of geometry to model with you want to stick with quads when this quad and this quad and this quad and this one are exported from second from blender into Dae by which the mesh file it's all going to be triangulated and so you can see here and it's not working for me let me go and do it the long way I can come in here and I can triangulate the faces just that you can see that this is the way that it's gonna come into a cell and all of these are going to count so you really want to keep this count down as much as you can and you'll see how this can actually mess it up in a few moments learn a little bit another thing that we want to be aware of is called end ons and end ons are the ability to have as many edges and faces as I'm sorry edges and vertices as we want to a face so let me go over here to another little file that I kind of put together and I have the three different types of polygons that we have the first of course is the quad that is before okay the next is a triangle and that's the three and this one is an end on and this has 8 vertices and 8 edges and surrounding it and then I turned it in to try so that you could see what it would look like when it's exported from blender and so this actually has six tries to it so this piece of mesh is three times the amount of geometry then this quad here and this angle is going to really interrupt a lot of the tools that we're going to be using when it comes to adding geometry to our mesh objects so let me go back here and I'm gonna delete this and I'm gonna bring in a cube and let's start seeing some of the tools that we have and a little bit more about n-gons and tries interrupting our workflow and it's gonna become pretty evident pretty soon so you can see here that there is no settings to make more faces or less faces to the makeup of this cube so we have to add whatever we want to to this one so I'm gonna go ahead and tab into edit mode and just something else that you'll learn inside a blender is that whenever you want to do something to something you have to have it selected so if I wanted to subdivide this cube I have to have it selected if I select just this top face I can subdivide just this top face there are a few tools that don't require you to have a selection made I will see one of those in a moment but for now subdivide you must have anything you want subdivided selected so what is subdivide well sulphite subdivide works only on quads basically it works on something else that we'll get to in a minute but it's meant to work on quads and what it will do is it will cut every face in half from one side to the other and then of course the third side to the opposite side however you want to number these are think about them it's gonna cut it in half both ways so I'm gonna hit W for subdivide if their specials menu here and their subdivide in it or you can always come here in your tools and let's see which one is it mesh tools there we go you can also find it here in the subdivide section so W subdivide and you can see that everything got cut in half now you can subdivide it again and each one of these little triangles queires these quads will get cut and of quarters as well so W and subdivide W and subdivide and you can see that every face gets cut into quarters now that isn't exactly what we want sometimes sometimes what we want to do is maybe have two cuts instead of three so you can see that one subdivide gives us one slice in each way if we start divided a second time we've got eight and a four-by-four here what we can do is hit subdivide and then go into the operators panel which settings for the subdivision by default it is set to one cut so we got one going in each direction we can change this to two and now we have two going in each direction if you cut it into three or three cuts you'll just you do see that you do have subdivision done twice on here it pretty much is equivalent and add three cuts to two subdivisions anyway so you can keep going up and up and up when you get to ten it will look like that's the limit like that's all you can do but it's not ten is kind of a stopping point because subdivisions can add a lot of work to blender to calculate it can bog down your blender depending on what you're doing you could end up crashing your blender and you really don't want that so a little safeguard here is for blender to stop us at ten cuts but if we click on the number ten and change it to eleven we can now scroll up to twenty cuts and if we click on the 20 and change it to 21 we can now scroll it to 50 again if you change this to 51 you can scroll all the way up to 100 so you can keep subdividing but you have to come in here and set the number that you want when it's above ten let me go ahead and take this back down to one for now okay so we have some other tools here and we'll look at those right now and I want you to see one other thing so here we have we're gonna select just the face of it at the top of it we'll hit W for subdivide and let's look at the tools that we actually have available to us let me go ahead and close those down a little bit so let's take our number of cuts all the way up to ten and you can see again only this base was subdivided into ten what also happened is that this face here now is actually an end on because you have all these additional edges and vertices up here so this is no longer a quad which means that this is really high in geometry now this is going to be a lot of triangles when blender turns a face into triangles or you're mashing two triangles it makes every vertex part of a triangle so it keeps cutting this into triangles until every vertex is used all around it okay so back here in the settings we have what's called smoothness and smoothness watch what happens when I adjust this just kind of pops it up there so that's kind of fun that's something that you could mess around and play with for different things we have fractal and what fractal is going to do is it's going to take every single vertex and it's gonna lift it and shift it around a little bit randomly so there we have something like that happening so that can get kind of fun be careful that gets carried away really fast if you like to use the fractal but maybe you don't quite like this particular way of it being done we have random seed and you can just simply click on here and it's changing how those are actually kind of randomized so that's also a good fun thing and now if you were to select just the bottom face of your box here and maybe scale it down a little bit what do you think we have there well if we put a nice texture on there we could have a box of popcorn or we can have a waste can pull the paper trash and stuff so we're just a subdivide tool on a simple cube we were able add geometry in a way that we've actually made an item so let's go back here for a second into edit mode now that whole thing about subdividing and turning things things game turned into any guns W and subdivide so these are still sets - those were still set because when I call them so dude ones subdivision again whatever settings were here before usually stay so we have to change those back all right so now the thing that you have to be careful about is if you're not used to subdivisions giving you an end gun what could happen is you can come here you say okay well I want to subdivide this nice now so you click W and subdivide but you'll see you didn't get what you expected this face isn't cut into quarters like the top one is instead what's happened is every edge was cut in half so from here to here was cut in half one got an extra vertex from here to here was cut in half and we got an extra one we also got one here and here and here so now we have a really messy and done a really messy end to our mesh and one that we probably didn't want to get I mean there may be times where you want to split an edge in half so you can hit select it hit W and subdivide for that but that's done on purpose you can't subdivide and end on and you can't subdivide a triangle so that's how triangles and and gods interrupt the ability to use this tool now we do have another tool that is kind of nice because it doesn't create end odds when you add it to your match see this unless you do the whole cube is going to add an Gonz but there's another tool here and for this one is also the one that you don't need to have anything selected for it's called edge loops so I can use my hit my ctrl or hold my control key and hit the R and when I hover over an edge you see I get this pink loop that goes around our object goes all the way around so this is this is almost like half of a subdivision and again this only works on quads it doesn't work on and Don's and guns will stop this from going around your object all the way so when I get this pink loop here I can decide where I wanted hit n I'm sorry hit your left mouse key and now it turns yellow and before you do anything else you can actually move this around with your mouse I'm not holding any buttons right now it just free flows up the side of the cube and when I left mouse click again I can place it wherever I want to I could also control R and left click to confirm that I want that edge loop and then I can right mouse click and it will snap it to the center so now this is perfectly centered from the top to the bottom okay now when I said that we're going to confirm it what we're really doing is confirming the number of edge loops because you can use your middle mouse wheel and you can scroll up on it to make more edge loops you can scroll down to make less can't go less than one now or you can use the plus and the minus button on your number pad and when you get the number of cuts that you want and you'll see them down here on the bottom in case you the case you put like ten of them you know or twelve of them it's hard to count that well you can see them down here and on our window you can lab mouse click to confirm that you want those twelve and again you can move these up or down but they do stay the same distance from each other you can't change that right now and if you right mouse click it puts them all to Center so now every one of these edges is evenly spaced apart again control are you can put as many as you want in left mouse click to confirm that number right mouse click to set them in the in the center or you can move them around and let mouse click to place it so that's another way of getting geometry something that's kind of fun is what's called edge slide so if I just shape this box a little bit differently for a second here let's say I add an edge loop right here well when I left mouse click it to confirm that I just want the one watch what happens it takes the shape of the cube the width of it and the height of it as I slide along the edge it's not changing the shape of it at all it's just sliding along it and I can left mouse click to confirm where I want it now if I move it you see that it just changed the shape of the mesh so when you're placing it in your or on your object you can slide it as much as you want now let's say you put this here and you're thinking oh maybe I should have put it down here instead well instead of going back and undoing it what you can do is use your ctrl e ctrl + E brings up this edges menu and in this edges menu you have what's called edge slide now edge slide will begin to work moment I pushed this so let me click on it and now you'll see when I move my mouse it goes back to sliding along that edge and I can then place it down here that's what I actually wanted now a way that blender thinks is that if we have a ctrl e menu for all of our different edge functions and that's what this is we also have one for ctrl F which is for faces and it gives us different things that we can do relating to our faces we also have one ctrl + V for vertices so these are three menus that you're going to be looking into and finding some really nice tools to work with as you begin to explore blender a little bit but of course it's not something that you need to go ahead and do just yet don't get used to the basic tools first so that edge loops and that's subdivision and that shows you some of the things that you have to work with let me show you one more thing if I were to come here and add an array of edge loops left mouse click and right mouse click you'll see that I get another menu here for loop cut and slide I have a number of cuts now which are 15 and I can actually change that now so if you did make a certain number of cuts before you go on to another tool or manipulating this in another way you can adjust that number of cuts you can also use smoothness which is just like what we did for the subdivision kind of pops it out a little bit what I really like about this is the fall-off you have what's called different fall offs and that's the way that this edge shapes itself so right now do you see how it's kind of like curvy like that that's called the root to fall off now if I click here and I choose smooth watch how that edge shape changes and if I go ahead and I choose to sharp I change it to linear or change it to a constant isn't in here I thought constant was anyways you can change it to these different different shapes so that can help you create an object as well you also have a factor and it's an edge side factor so it will take all of your edges and let's just bring the number of edges down a little bit okay they're all evenly spaced apart and I'd kind of like to see a setting that can actually set these closer together if we want to but an edge side factor will slide it for you so you can slide it this way as well as with the control e see I'm just going from one side to the other and there are a few other little things there but of course give you something to explore later on as you need it right now we're still working on the basics so don't try to overwhelm yourself with anything that's gonna be it for now so practice using your subdivision and your edge loops a little bit of homework could be for you to take a cube and to use these two tools to give you some geometry to create something does that be anything fancy but just get your hands busy using those two tools and don't forget to go ahead and look into the vertices edges and faces menu look at the W menu just to see what's in there like I said you don't have to really know what they're all for but just see in the words the terms the names of these different tools and functions is helpful when they start to become familiar to you the next video is going to be on extrusions and it's also going to be on the knife tool and I'm going to show you a few little surprising things with those so stay tuned make sure you subscribe and stick with series I'll have you blundering in no time

Channel: Niche Nook

Views: 6,479

Keywords: blender, mesh, content, 3d, edge loops, subdivision, geomerty, secondlife, second life, ditko, modeling, building, creator

Id: QkIxj4IAhmg

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2015