Blender Hard Surface Modeling | Slice Operation

when I was a beginner at hard surface modeling I would commonly run into issues like this or I want a little tiny cutout like you can see here with these little gaps going around the base mesh now when I was first starting as well what I would usually do is I would add in my base mesh like so just give it some nice smoothing and then some Auto smooth there and then I would just added my cutter object say for example a cube just kind of choose the area I want to cut out let's say this area and if I wanted to get that nice little effect where we have those gaps going in with a tiny little cut what I used to do is I would just add in a cube or whatever object matches the best and then just try my best to fit it right inside of that area just so it's a little bit smaller just so it kind of looks like we have that cut out and as you can see in this case it looks okay it doesn't look terrible it kind of gets the job done but having to do this in every situation and do it manually is very inefficient it's much better to allow blender to automate this not to mention there's some situations like this where it just doesn't match the overall curvature of the object so to get some nice cuts that look like this we can use the slice operation so the first thing I'm going to do is turn off this collection we'll start fresh I'm gonna start with a cylinder so I'll press shift a go to cylinder I'll add some smooth shading by right-clicking and then under the object data panel we can turn on Auto smooth and now what we want to do is duplicate this base mesh right here so I'm just gonna press shift D right click to duplicate and for that duplicated object I'll just rename it to something like DUP for duplication and I'll just turn that one off for now so right now we have our base mesh and we want to add in our cutter objects so I'm gonna press shift a we'll add in our first color objects which will be a cube I think I'll cut out somewhere in the middle here and then for the second cutter I'll duplicate this cube and I'll make the second cut out here near the top like so and since we're gonna be doing two different cutouts I might as well join these two cubes together with ctrl J and now you want to make sure in your user preferences the bull tool add-on is enabled this will just expedite the workflow so if we select our cutter object and then hold shift and select our base object if we press ctrl - this is going to give us a nice difference boolean here so already we're halfway done our next goal is to get that piece filled back in but with a little gap going on and to do that we're going to turn on our duplication cylinder and we'll turn off the main cylinder that we just cut out like this so now we're back to step 1 basically and we're gonna do the same exact thing we're gonna select our cutter object hold shift and select our duplicate cylinder here and if we press ctrl - it's going to add another cut but this time I'm gonna change from difference over to intersect you know this is gonna do is it's going to create those cutter pieces that we wanted so now if we turn back on our original cylinder you're gonna see that we have the exact effect that we were going for so this is a very important strategy in the non-destructive workflow at this point you can select your cutter and then hide them you don't need that anymore and just like real world objects have we need a little bit of a bevel every single object in the real world has a little bit of a bevel that reflects a little bit of light off the corners and we can duplicate that effect by selecting the main cylinder here add a bevel modifier and I'll change the limit method here to angle like so add maybe three segments we can adjust the width and then just get a very slight bevel going on almost like a cavity right there we'll do the same thing for this little cutout piece we'll add a bevel modifier give it three segments and then make it just very very slight there at the corners and we'll turn this one to a limit method of angle as well and to get rid of this ugly shading if we select the cylinder and take on hearted normals that's going to get rid that ugly shading so basically what we have here is a nice cutout using the slice operation super easy and very beneficial for hard surface modeling so I hope this video helped you out and I hope you can incorporate this technique into your workflow

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 268,776

Keywords: blender, hard, surface, modeling, slicing, slice, operation, boolean, cut, bevel, intersect, guru, cg, non, destructive, 3d, design, printing, tutorial

Id: IRJCChNu_pQ

Length: 4min 41sec (281 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020