Blender Hard Surface Modeling Tutorial - Curvy/Organic Shapes

what's up guys in today's video we're going to do a little bit of hard surface subd organic modeling it's going to be really fun because you're going to learn how to get those curvy looking shapes while still retaining that hard surface look so let's get started also my mic's been like acting weird i don't know if it sounds distorted on your end i hope not sounds good now um but yeah let's hop into it so i'm just going to start with the default q and we're going to scale this guy on the y-axis just a little bit maybe to about here and then just drop a few loop cuts in so maybe four of those okay so essentially what i want to do now is make this a little bit thinner i'm going to more or less kind of have the block out i'm going for like that and then what i want to do is i want to take this entire portion except for the top faces and delete them so x and then delete faces like that now what this is going to do is it's going to allow us to go into object mode and then add on our subdivision surface modifier so if i press ctrl 4 it's going to get nice and rounded but you're going to see none of the areas here on the bottom or sides are affected because the faces don't exist so let's go ahead right click and then shade that smooth and basically what i want to do now is start kind of manipulating this shape kind of play with it see what i can get what type of cool shapes we can achieve so i'm going to go into wireframe and box selected these vertices here and then if i press o that'll take me into proportional editing then what i can do is grab this area go back into solid view and if i scroll up or down you can kind of see how i have an influence on the other geometry right so if i scroll up it starts kind of grabbing those other vertices once it goes within that circle now if i go slower or lower rather you're going to see it's only affecting these two vertices because those are the only ones on the inside of that circle pretty cool right so let's put that right about there and then let's go to the back here and let's maybe just keep playing with this shape and just see what we can get you can scroll up and down see what kind of different effects you can get with the shape it's um there's no right or wrong to this you just kind of want to play with it and more or less see what type of cool results you can get so maybe grab that down scale this up a little bit on the x just a little bit and then what i want to do is i want to go into the bottom here and kind of play with the vertices in this area so maybe what i could do is pull this up and more or less what i'm trying to go for is like a shell kind of you can use all sorts of reference photos but for me i'm just kind of playing with shapes kind of imagine almost like a snail shell here or something but more or less what i want to do is kind of get like a wide elongated bottom here and then kind of like a curved up like it curves down then up a little bit then down really low that's kind of the shape i think would look kind of cool here so another way you can do this is to turn off the overlays panel and do it this way then you kind of have a little bit more of a idea of how this thing looks so i want this to be just a little bit longer so what i'm going to try to do is i could do that i could also for example grab like multiple areas and then just kind of elongate it that way so many different solutions here guys it's really fun to just kind of play with these um different shapes and see what you can get something like this looks good i like that yep i don't like how curvy it is on the top but we're gonna fix that so um let me first show you a few different solutions to getting hard edges and sub d based models now the one you've probably been taught before is the technique of proximity loops which is basically where you add in a loop cut you move it over you move it over and then it gives this beveled effect to it right this is what most tutorials probably will show you when you're doing destructive sub d based modeling now i much prefer a different approach to this i prefer to use creases and then on top of those creases add a bevel later on so for example if i come in here and i press the n key and go to item there's going to be an option here for mean crease you can turn this all the way up to one and then all we have to do at this point is we have to turn on our auto smooth so we'll do that and you're going to see now we have a perfectly sharp edge right here and by the way to get this nice little highlight you can turn on cavity here in the panel right here just makes it look a bit nicer and then basically what you could do is you could just do a quick symmetry with a machine or mesh machine or you could just do it on the other side as well and kind of get this effect right now this looks okay but this is pretty amateur pretty boring what i want to do instead is kind of make this a little bit more dynamic so instead of putting the crease right here what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to put a loop cut actually i'm going to put one and then bevel it kind of like that and then i'm going to move these edges right here down just a bit let me turn off overlay or proportional editing and i'm going to move these edges down just a little bit now watch how much more visually appealing this will look notice now it kind of like curves down and we have a little bit more of like a hall going on the top and then i can just do a quick if you use hard ops you can press alt x and then run symmetry like that and now we have a much more dynamic looking shape sometimes it's really just the small things that make or break how your design looks so i really like that now we could of course you know put another set of uh creases right there but then i just think it's gonna look a little bit too busy as you can see so i'm not gonna do that actually but what i am going to do is just keep adding bevels to this so first things first let me dissolve out this middle edge and then on these two what i'm going to do is make a nice round set of bevels just kind of see how that looks not particularly the effect i'm going for so maybe not what i could do here is put a set of bevels on that area yeah that looks really nice and then we could just symmetrize it over here then we have this really clean looking type of effect and then we could just keep playing with these edges if we wanted to we could maybe you know move it up move it down just kind of see like what different shapes look more appealing now this kind of has a little bit more of a nice um aesthetic to it let me turn cavity oh it is on okay so you know you can do little things like this just to play with it but actually i liked where it was before now what i want to do is add a little bit of solidification to this shape because right now it's a it's a completely non-manifold object here this couldn't exist in the real world there's no thickness so we're going to add a solidify modifier here so we're going to go to add modifier and then solidify then we're just going to kind of let's move this outwards so not this direction or it's going to collapse but this direction instead let's also make sure auto smooth is turned on and now we're going to have this really nice kind of shell looking thing looks pretty cool and keep in mind as long as you don't apply your sub d you can always get back in here and just keep kind of manipulating with these different shapes here and just kind of pull it out more if you want maybe i'll take let's see you could drop in a loop cut here as well just to kind of see how it kind of tightens everything up a little bit that could be a good option and then maybe you could use this vertex right here just to kind of add a little bit more dynamic elements to it so many different opportunities here now what i want to do is cut in a little bit of booleans into the shape and then i'm going to let you do the rest on your own because you should have a good understanding of how to make these shapes how to kind of use the boolean hard surface workflow and add to these organic sub d meshes okay so this is why we always do the sub d first because subdivision surface is at the top of the stack everything below it is going to be you know solidify boolean that type of thing the reason you don't want to do subdue later is because if you start running booleans and then run the sub d after you're probably going to be running the sub d on top of n guns and it's just going to collapse so that's why you always define the shape first run the booleans second or third or fourth or whatever you want to add your booleans just make sure subd is first in the stack so now we're going to do is i'm just going to use box cutter for this and we're going to go to the front i'll make sure i'm in view align because i just want to align it from the top we're going to cut to about here okay now if blender's slow for you this is normal and this is because we haven't yet applied our sub d modifier so what you could do if you're happy with the shape is you could apply it now before you apply the sub d i would always recommend saving a backup copy before you apply it so that way you always have a file to go back to if you need to make changes so i'm going to go ahead i've already done that i'm going to go ahead and apply the sub d apply the solidify and actually before i do that let me undo it before i do that i think i accidentally made this bevel a little bit too dense so basically i added in a ton of um a ton of bevel segments and then the sub d ran on top of that and it just became really really dense as you can see here so what i'm going to do instead is turn off the solidify go into edge mode and dissolve out some of these so i'm going to press alt shift click and go in here and control x and then do it one more time and actually maybe not because i don't want to dissolve out that holding bevel that should be enough and then i'll just do a quick symmetry to the other side and now if i turn the solidify back on and take a look at this in wireframe so alt v wireframe still a little bit too dense but this isn't going to be a game asset or anything this is purely just a shape to play with a shape to practice with and maybe a shape to render so that should be enough for me and now what i want to do is turn the levels viewport down to three so that way it's a little bit less dense i think four is too high that should be enough and then we'll apply both of these and all we can do is run our booleans so now what we have is this nice defined curvy looking shape and all we need to do is use the same exact workflow i've shown you in all my other videos we can run booleans just like we've done at any other point okay so super easy let's go into top view and then i'm going to use a box cutter to cut in some sort of detail up here here in the front don't worry about being perfectly centered we can always mirror it and we're just going to press the b key to bevel and let's move this because i don't want this bevel to encroach on this area so move that there and now we have this nice little cut here on the front like that and select this piece right here now what i want to do once i'm happy with the placement which i am is i want to make a nice little chamfer on the outside of this area here so let me go in here and apply the boolean so that way i can access the geometry so we'll apply this boolean here and basically i want to take this set of edges and i want to run a chamfer on it now this is where blender and poly base modeling can kind of mess up you're going to see if i try to chamfer this it starts overlapping with the surrounding geometry and it becomes a mess so the tool i use personally to deal with this is i use the offset cut feature in mesh machine so mesh machine if you go to the this is a paid add-on by the way so you don't have to use it and the other solution i'll show you in a second but with mesh machine if you turn on the experimental features here what you can actually do is use this feature called offset cut and if i just kind of adjust this width it kind of eats the surrounding geometry and gives me space to put this chamfer which i didn't have before so this is the tool i prefer to use personally if you don't have mesh machine i'd really recommend getting it but if you can't get it right now i understand and your best option here would be to do one of two things dissolve the surrounding geometry to make space for it and the second option would actually be to use a non-destructive bevel and what i mean by that is you could go in here and basically use a bevel we'll go in here you would go to i use hard ops you could control click on mark and this would essentially add a non-destructive bevel meaning i can turn this off and on and then what i can do is kind of dissolve the surrounding geometry while having this you know preview set up so there's a few different ways to do it guys but both of them are a headache i'd really recommend just using this offset cut feature it's as close to cad as you're gonna get in blender so something like that put a nice little chamfer here and now we have this really clean looking chamfer on the top of the design now there is one thing i probably should have mentioned here and i'm just going to undo this a few times you don't have to follow along but notice how you kind of get these nasty shading artifacts here there's a few ways to fix this the first one would be to merge the these uh near-miss vertices together and mesh machine also has a feature for this boolean cleanup and that will kind of help clean up the shading as you can see another option would actually be to use a normal transfer now i'm not going to cover that here it's a little bit more advanced and i don't want to confuse too many people but if you are curious look up mesh machine normal transfer we have videos on this already and it's a nice clean way to get clean shading without manipulating the geometry itself so for right now the shading is actually really clean if i go into matte cap you're going to see i don't have any sort of shading areas except maybe a little bit around here which can't really be helped i could try merging these a little bit and i can more or less kind of help that shading you can see now it's pretty clean but yeah i think this is more than enough as long as you don't have any major artifacts and then down here i might want to do the same thing just kind of merge these a little bit so just use a boolean cleanup and then here i did the same thing use a boolean cleanup and just make that shading a little bit more manageable and the shading is never going to be perfect guys you just kind of got to work with what you have the main goal here is you get a clean looking mesh now although i don't want to extend the tutorial on too long i do want to show you some additional techniques and cool little things you could do to really bring this design together now the first thing i want to mention is that i could use a bevel just to kind of make everything a bit nicer the issue is since this is a pretty dense mesh things might start overlapping especially once i start using boolean cuts so what i'm going to do instead is use a bevel shader it's going to be a bit easier so i'm just going to drag out a new panel here and what we can actually do is we can add a new material and we can go to the shader editor and really easy you can just press shift a input and then bevel and you're just going to connect this bevel up to the normal slot and what's going to happen if we go into rendered mode we might need to add some lights i'm just going to do that with hard ops you can press q add lights and then you can press the w key to make it white and we'll just make this a little bit a little bit darker and a little bit shinier and you're going to see that what this bevel shader does is it adds the illusion of a bevel by kind of extending a shadow over the hard edges and we can make this like .02 make it a bit tighter and you're going to see now we basically have a really nice illusion of a bevel on it it might be a bit more apparent once we add a slice so let's do that real quick let's go into our solid view let me quickly turn these off and what i could do in this case is maybe run a slice operation right here press b to bevel and then x to run a slice and now if i go into rendered mode you're going to really see how much more that bevel shader kind of pops out the mesh and we could even go in here and just make a new instance of this material and perhaps make a little bit darker just to kind of have a more highlighted effect on that area it could be pretty cool and we're just going to do one more additional detail to this because um i don't want to drag this tutorial on too long so what i'm going to actually do is steal some of the geometry so check this out what i want to do is um let me collapse this panel here i want to go into edit mode and i basically want to remove any geometry that's redundant so i'm going to select everything we're going to press x limited dissolve and we're going to make sure this max angle is like 0.1 degrees and basically what it's going to do it could even go a bit higher you don't want to go too higher it starts collapsing but basically what we want this to do is remove the geometry on the flat surfaces and retain it on the curved surfaces because it needs to support that but you're going to see right here it actually dissolved out a little bit more than needed so what we're going to do instead is select a face press shift g coplanar and then just have to fill it that's a nice easy way to do it cool and what i want to do now is i want to take this face and duplicate it so we're going to press shift d right click and then we can separate it by pressing p and by selection now we're going to have this mesh and then this one right here now check this out what i could do is maybe move this down scale it up a little bit and this is going to kind of flow along with the curvature of this mesh and we could use this as a slice so this will be the last detail i add i'm just going to move it out a bit and then we're going to go into edit mode and extrude it all the way through and just to make sure the normals are correct correctly calculated we're going to press shift n recalculate those normals and now we can basically do is shift click on our main piece and then run a slice operation so we'll press q booleans and then slash and now we're going to have this really nice kind of um line going along it and if we go into rendered mode you're going to see it kind of just emphasizes the mesh even more and then we could even you know just kind of play with the different materials and just get like different highlights different effects and you can keep building on top of this guys just keep using the same techniques we've done in here add booleans add slices add whatever you want really and just keep building on top of this mesh so i'm going to leave it here for you to keep building on because i think you should have a good idea of how you can use this mesh and keep adding detail to it so i hope the video helped i hope it gave you some good ideas for how to use sub d modeling along with our usual hard surface modeling techniques and as always guys grab our hard surface modeling ebook on our website it's totally free has a lot of cool information in there that i think you'll enjoy and if you want to grab some of our more premium products you can also head over to our website and check out some of those so thanks much for watching hope this gave you some value and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 70,550

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, blender subdivision surface modeling, blender subd modeling, blender quads, hard surface modeling tutorial, subd with ngons, blender subd modeling tutorial, blender beginner modeling tutorial, blender donut, blender 3d modeling, hard surface modeling, blender 3d, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blender bros, masterxeon1001, blender beginner tutorial, 3d modeling, blender scifi

Id: 3_RkY_mtlC4

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022