Blender Intermediate Modelling Tutorial - Part 1

ah modeling some people love it some people hate it and some people use it to get millions of followers on instagram but regardless of your personal views on modeling every single 3d artist needs to have at least a basic understanding of modeling why well because it's the foundation for which everything else is built on texturing lighting animating they all require you to at least have a basic mesh to start with and if you can't model then you're always going to be reliant on somebody else's work which is not very good so there's no excuse everybody needs to have that basic understanding of modeling so that's what this video series is going to be about and we are going to be modeling not a car not a character but an anvil yes that old medieval blacksmith tool they hit with a hammer that's what we're going to be modeling now you might be thinking come on why can't we do something more fun like a car or a character and a lot of people they jump to that stuff first i see a lot of beginners they start modeling a face as like the first thing they make the trouble with that is that those are very complex you know the pro level stuff and if you don't understand the basics of topology how to you know get edge loops and flow and all that sort of thing then you end up with all these problems and these users they get to the end of their project it's got all sorts of problems going on they can't fix it and they never finish it and then they give up and that sucks so that's what we're trying to avoid so i'm giving you a basic introduction to modeling in blender if you haven't watched it already please watch my donut beginner tutorial series if you're totally new to blender that's where you should start this is what you can complete after that so without further ado let's get into it all right so the first thing i'm going to do is set up my workspace so i'm going to collapse all the panels that i don't need and i'll just squish that over to the right so that i can grab it again if i need to but i am going to load in a reference image so i'm going to split this view here and load in the uv image editor which is normally where you would see your render when you render something but you can also load in a image any image so i've got a bunch of different reference photos here one thing to note with anvils is that you can see that they come in all different shapes and sizes little tiny stubby ones and really long ones there's not really a standard you know this is an anvil but i certainly like the look of this one at the top so i'll load that in and since we have room here for another one i'm going to split the view again making sure my head's not in the way and i'm going to load in another image i like the texturing on this one so load that one in and you can sort of see it yeah you don't really need to see that one anyway yeah okay we're all set up ready to go so i'm going to delete everything in the scene and yeah we can finally get started so when you start modeling something the first thing you want to ask yourself is which one of my primitive shapes and by primitive i mean these shapes here which one of these shapes best resembles the object which i'm modeling and for a lot of objects this is quite clear if you're making a world it's a sphere if you're making a cup or a you know drink bottle it's a cylinder but in our case what what which one of these shapes actually matches this and there's not really a clear answer because you've got a whole range of different things you've got a sort of a cone shape at the front here you've got i don't know some sort of stretched side some curve shape up there you've got this cylinder shape that's sort of cutting into it so there's not really a clear shape to start with so you could really start anywhere but what i'm going to do is start with somewhere that i know for sure and that is that this here if i go from there to there ignoring everything else i know that that is a square so that means i can start with a plane drop that in okay so up from the floor drawing up i can see that there's a little step that it's on so in edit mode i'm just going to extrude that up very slightly just like that okay so that's good so we've got the first step baby steps now what we're going to do is focus on this tapered i don't know if you could hear that some guy blowing their nose really hard uh this tapered edge here right so ignoring this bit right that whole cylinder cut in shape just imagine that that wasn't there so you would have what a cube that essentially sort of you know yeah tapers into itself so how could we do that well a lot of artists would go like this they would take this uh bottom bit that would extrude it up they would scale it in extrude it up again scale it in and they would do this and you know that that's fine the problem with this though is for one it's it's fiddly which we like to avoid uh but two you're it's not very exact and so you've got varying distances like between this loop cut and that loop cut sorry by the noise and yeah it's not exact and the computer is far better at doing these curved shapes so we can actually do it in blender so i'll show you how we do it all right ah by the way i like to leave this turned off the limit selection to visible so i turn that off and then that way when you select something you know that it's selecting everything right like both sides of the mesh so i'll leave that turned off anyway so i'll create a new face there let's just do this again so what i'm going to do instead of going up one step scaling it in i'm going to go all the way up to wherever i want it to end so let's say it's yeah it's about that so it's basically the cube that we had at the start and i'm now going to create some loop cuts which we do by hitting ctrl r and then here using the scroll wheel on my mouse i can choose how many cuts to give it and if you look in the bottom left hand corner you'll see a number of cuts and i'm going to increase that until it says 12 okay which is just a nice amount and then i clicked and then right clicked to put it right in its spot okay so now once we have this what i can actually do is if i was to scale this one you know as you would predict it would do that but if i turn on proportional editing which i do by hitting o or just turning it on down here in the base now when i scale it in you can see that i'm grabbing everything around it and i'm scaling it inwards and you can see that that now is with with my scroll wheel here i have some control over how it looks um now as this is it's you can see that it it's creating a pinched effect where it's actually sort of shrinking the distance between all the lines as it pulls it inwards which isn't actually what we want i want to maintain it so that i get you know a nice looking mesh but i still want that shape so what we can do is we can choose to scale it on every axis except the vertical axes and we do that if whilst you're scaling like this if you hit shift and zed that's telling blender scale it on every axis except the z-axis and it's at it's hard to actually see it from this angle but if i do it here you'll see this is how it looks normally and then with shift z that's what it's doing so it's now only scaling on the x and the y axis not the z and that is how we're going to create our beautiful curved shape there what's more as you can see that in this case we're getting this um this smoothed off bit at the base there so if you don't want that you've actually got control over what the actual curve shape is like if you was to use linear it would be a straight line if you were to use random it would be like a piece of weird art um and there's a whole bunch of them like sphere is good for some objects that's pretty cool the one that we're going to use is inverse square which is really good um in this particular instance because what i'm going to do is uh yeah not taking the top piece i'm taking the you know sort of somewhere up near the top and i'm just going to scale it in shift z and you'll see very quickly that we can create the basic frame of our anvil like so cool and the other thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select the base here and i'm going to set this proportional editing falloff to sharp and then what i'm going to do is hit scale and scale it again shift z and just extrude that out a little bit and that's going to going to allow me to sort of exaggerate the base to be however thick i want it just you know if that's what we want which in my case i do so that's looking pretty good okay wonderful so we've we've done this ignoring you know the cylinder shape cut out that we've we've got here with all this spaghetti mess we've now got the basics of our mesh this whole whole bit up here what i'm going to do now is you might have noticed looking at our picture here that it and actually it's probably easier to see it on this side above where my head is but it extrudes out a little bit further like that so what i'm going to do is take this and first of all let's let's extrude so let's create this part extruding that upwards okay so that's basically a cube on top here so that i i know if i extrude pull it upwards until that looks like about a cube about a nice square on top right now if i select this section here i'm going to extrude this out and this is just going to be the part that's overhanging this like the part under here right it's hard to see i'm talking about this part right so i'm just extruding that out and now this part needs to be slightly raised the bot the base of this so just like before i'm adding in loop cuts to give us more geometry so i'll just do one loop cut right click to cancel its movement and then i'll just you don't need proportional editing for this you can just move it up very slightly because there's only one that you're dealing with really like so that's pretty good and now i'll create this really long bit that overhangs the back here this part okay and the way i'm going to do that just like what i did before extruding it but extruding it this way i'm extruding it a lot further in this case because it's obviously a lot further out and then as you can probably guess we want to create a smooth curve effect there so first thing we do is add a loop cut so i'm scrolling up until i get to let's say five cuts click right click to cancel its movement and now i'm going to select this part of it making sure that you've made sure you've got that turned off when you do these selections otherwise you'll only be selecting half your mesh it'll look all weird so turn on proportional editing now if i pull this up you can see that well first of all you can see that i'm moving the top part of this that i don't want to move so i want if you want part of your mesh to be unaffected by the proportional editing easy way to change that is to hide it so you select that part of the mesh you just hit h now when i select this i can pull that up and it won't affect the other part that's hidden but you can see that the falloff here is the wrong type it's going the wrong direction i want it to be um yeah i wanted to sort of like taper there downwards so easiest way to do it is by setting it to sphere so with sphere now when i pull this up you can see the effect that it's having just pretty well perfect like so so i'll just click right there and now if i hit alt h it will bring back the part of the mesh that i i i almost said hoed the part that i had hidden and um yeah that is looking pretty good um cool so we are going to leave part one here but just before i close i'm just going to scale this down just squash it a little bit because i can see in this example here i mean as i mentioned every anvil is different but in the one down here at the bottom i sort of like this stumpy sort of base if it's if this middle part here is too long like it is in our case it could sort of look like top heavy the anvil like it's sort of on its tiptoes or something so i'm just squashing it down if you hold down control might do it until it's point seven it's pretty good then i'll bring that up to there lovely and then if i want to make sure i bring it back down to its origin point i'll just drag it down and there we go all right so in part two we're going to be doing that cut out shape making that that cylinder inbred in shape in cut whatever um in part two if you like this video if you found it helpful please give it a thumbs up so that other people can find it otherwise please click on part two and i will see you there bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,868,921

Keywords: blender, modelling, tutorial, beginner, anvil

Id: yi87Dap_WOc

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/butthe4d]

Great video for beginners like always. Maybe this sub will now be anvil land instead of donut country!

[u/PsychicApple]

I just finished your famous Donut tutorials a few minutes ago and it was very helpful/informative. Didn't think my final product would come out nearly as well as it did. Will definitely check out more of your vids. Thanks for the great work!

[u/hairybrains]

Just watched it, and I was like, "Great tutorital, aaaaaand now on to part 2!"

Sadly, there was no part 2 yet. :(

[u/RabaGhastly]

Just wanted to say thank you for the tutorials! The fact that you have to reshoot your videos so many times is really noticeable by the quality of your content.

[u/HomoMilch]

I see tons of anvil renders flowing r/blender's way

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Bancai]

I don't use blender but I'll subcribe to your channel since maybe sometimes I'll want to go into blender.

[u/IwanaLegendaryWeapon]

yes,ive finished the legendary doughnut and strait after i get a new cool tutorial. thank you

[u/bolche17]

Anything plans on a sculpt tutorial?