Blender Intermediate Modelling Tutorial - Part 2: Boolean!

ah welcome back to the anvil modeling tutorial series this is part two this is where we left off in part one we created the basic structure of our anvil so far so good you know it's you know most people could have really got here by themselves almost but now we're going to do something a little bit tricky we are going to be creating this very tricky cut out shape in our mesh because this is what makes the anvil so challenging and it's actually why i chose it partly for this reason is it's got a lot of really challenging shapes and things in it which is going to help you later on when you do fun stuff like modeling guns and different things right so this cut out shape here it's really difficult because this is this is a slope right that's a slope there but then not only that we have to do a slope around here and we have to somehow fit them in together okay so it creates um it creates an interesting challenge uh some people would say modeling is tedious other people would call it a challenge a puzzle really um so here's the thing about um uh modeling is that there's really there's no one clear way to approach something approach a challenge right what i mean by that is you've got let's say you had three modelers and you gave them the challenge of making this anvil all three of them could have come up with three different solutions for how to handle this problem of this this curve shape here okay so one of them for example don't follow along as i do this i'm just going to show you a couple of ways one of them could have created you know some messy cuts like this let's say maybe he's uh not uh not not too keen on like clean meshes or anything like that and he's like yeah that looks sort of like an anvil right there's a couple of you know a couple of ways you could do it that's one of them um with enough finessing i guess it could sort of work another guy could have gone okay top view i'm gonna perform some knife cuts along here i might delete those faces whatever okay there's a number of ways that you could do it the third way the way i'm going to show you is what i think is the correct way for something like this which is a boolean operation boolean what does boolean mean well turns out if you google it it'll tell you the answer but it doesn't just apply to 3d software it applies i think just to language even it's taking when you have two objects and they are overlapping what is their relationship one is going to intersect with the other is it going to subtract is it going to add to it whatever right so as a basic example let's just say i have a sphere i also have a cube and they are overlapping so if i perform a boolean operation i'll just i'll show you properly in a moment but this is a quick example um you can see that oh hang on hide that i'm now able to create some different shapes okay um i could also invert the direction and make it so that now the sphere is subtracting that's kind of cool is subtracting hey that's kind of that's pretty sweet actually i like that uh yeah it's subtracting like that so there are there's a bunch of cool things that you can do with boolean so the point i'm getting at and i'm sure the point that you have figured out already is that this looks remarkably like a cylinder eight away at the anvil and you would be correct that is what we're going to do so let me hide that we're going to add in a cylinder as you might have guessed and we're going to move it around about where we want it to cut away it doesn't matter where it's positioned right now because you can always move it around later just position it somewhere close then you want to select the mesh that you want to perform that you want to keep and you want the other one to subtract from um yeah make sure you're selecting that one and i'm only saying this because i've done this i've practiced the invoice so many times and like three times i think i selected the cylinder first without thinking anyway so select the anvil then go to the modify stack add modifier and you're looking for boolean okay now it's red by default because it hasn't got an object so just with this little eyedropper tool click that and then select the cylinder okay ooh what happened we did something wrong no it's actually working correctly but it's it's putting itself inside the cylinder so it's performing it the opposite that we want so instead of intersect we're going to change it to difference and that is it look at that we now have a cut in our anvil now when you look at it in solid view mode you can't see anything because they are two shapes literally intersecting with each other and you can't see inside them so here's a little tip if you go to the object settings and underneath display if you change the maximum draw type from textured to wire now it won't show you anything beyond wire so now you can move it around and you can see how it's actually affecting your mesh underneath it maybe one day in the future the boolean operation the modifier might already do that for you so you don't have to think about it maybe i don't know but there you go okay so what we want to do is just position it around about where we want to perform that cut all right something like that and i might actually just scale this along the x axis to make it a little bit pointier like so and just as a general tip here this is going to make our next bit a whole lot easier just make sure that the furthermost point like this pointy bit of our cylinder is just in line with one of those horizontal axes okay horizontal lines okay okay okay i said that enough cool all right now you might be thinking yeah that's cool but what about the other side don't we have to do the exact same thing over there no because we are artists and we are lazy and it is good to be lazy you don't want to double up on work we can perform a mirror operation for the other side so if underneath our boolean operation our boolean modifier here if we add a mirror so the mirror is after the boolean underneath now it's performing a mirror okay and the way it's performing the mirror is it is basing it off of what is what is on either side of this origin point okay and which axis so it's performing it along the x-axis of the origin point which is left and right and it's mirroring itself both ways which is incorrect so uncheck that what you're looking for is the y-axis now that still doesn't look correct and the reason for that is that you have got mesh on both sides of that origin point you want to make it so that all of your mesh is on one side all the other so you want to basically delete half of your mesh but if you were to delete these vertices like this you would see that we don't have anything that's joining them together so before you delete them make sure that you do a loop cut right here just by hitting control r and then click and then when it's sliding around just right click to cancel its slidiness and then we're just going to select half of it with the box tool click delete vertices and there we go cool so we've got it on both sides now and the cool thing is is that you've still got your underlying mesh here so this is still exactly the way it was it's when you exit edit mode and you look at it from object mode that you're actually seeing the cutout shape there okay so what we're going to do next is we're going to be applying this boolean we're going to click this apply button which means that you'll actually see it in edit mode as well however before you click apply on any modifier i always recommend that you first of all duplicate what you have and then move it to what is called a trash layer which is basically i i just make it the last layer it's a little tip i think andy goraltic does it as well but it's like you you keep things on a spare layer just in case you need to go back to it because otherwise if you've applied it and then later on you decide you don't like the shape you can't change it so but if you've got that then you can anyways so i am now going to hit apply on the boolean and it means i can delete my cylinder and now when we go into edit mode look what we have haha lovely okay so that is the boolean operator it is pretty cool it's pretty nifty um but if you're thinking this is awesome i never have to worry about modeling again i'll just use boolean operator if i'm going to make a building i'll just make a cube and subtract a bunch of other cubes from it there is unfortunately a dark side to the boolean operator and that is that the boolean operator generally makes a mess of your mesh okay so if you look at it in edit mode you might not be able to see a problem because you know you've got a nice line across here what's the problem right well the problem is the way that meshes need to be made up let me say that again the basic uh basic crash course in uh in a mesh right is that what you want to have is you want to have four vertices for each face of your mesh okay so these little dots those are vertices two dots together creates an edge and four of them together with a face on it creates a face and we are always looking for four vertices per face you never want to have five or six or seven and you never want to have three unless you're making something for a game a game engines for whatever reason use tries triangles um but for us we're always looking for four okay and the reason we're looking for four is that they have a direction if i'm in face select mode and i was to alt uh click on any of the edges it will show you the direction in which the faces are going see there's that direction and then there's also this direction okay so there's two directions for it to go and the reason that that's important is because of the subsurf modifier 99.9 of every single model you are ever going to make will probably need to have a subsurf modifier applied to it if we were to do that with our mesh right now you will see the problem subdivision surface what happened to our anvil right this no longer looks like a nice clean shape looks like something a jedi should fall into it's uh it's a horrible mess horrible it doesn't know how to deal with what we've got going on right here it's freaking out and the reason is that these faces are made up of not four vertices they are made up of five or more or even less it can cause problems so whenever you have three whenever you have five or more uh you're going to have problems okay so that's what we've got going on right here so what we need to do is we want to keep our shape we like the shape that we've got but we want to have four vertices so what that means is we want to make each of these faces here four not the number that they are currently now again there are a number of ways that you can do this fix this yeah this problem solving we'll call it right the old method the method that old andrew would have used is the hard way which would be to basically say like okay i don't want that line there so i'm going to delete those vertices and now i want to draw lines down from those because that is going to make me a nice square so i will draw those down i will extrude them down and now let me select that line there because i want them all to now be in line so let me hit s scale along the z axis and then hit zero now they're all lined up now i want to make that a face so i just hit f and i want to make this a face so i hit f and then those would have to be a face again and those would have to be a face again clear the normals to fix that little dark problem and now we've fixed it okay so i was able to make there we go we've now got a direction to it okay oh i didn't mention it before but yeah there's a direction in all of these but the moment it goes down to anything that has five or anything else it cuts off it doesn't know what's going on over here but now you can see with this one it does because there is four so that's what we're trying to do now that what i just did there it works but it's uh it's a long way and there's a lot of clicking and deleting in things and there's actually a much easier way which i guess i learned years later and that is to use the knife tool so the knife tool is enabled by hitting k k4 knife and if you were to click and just draw on your mask and you would just draw around like this what it's doing is it's from whatever view that you were looking at it is uh yeah it draws onto your model okay it creates vertices and dots and lines and things good explanation um but the important thing is that it keeps the faces that you've already got it just adds extra vertices um to it so what we can do is we can use the knife tool because i want to i want to just draw a line basically straight down into this edge right here so if i go to front view and front view is important as i'll show you in a second and then turn on the knife tool you'll see that by the way when you move it around when it gets close to an edge it snaps to it and when it gets close to a vertice it also snaps to it and there's a red outline so when it has a red outline i'm going to click and then i'm just going to pull it down right or just move the mouse down and what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to create a straight line and it's hard to get a straight line too fiddly but there's a keyboard shortcut you can remember or actually you don't have to remember it's actually along the bottom of that toolbar there you can see it says enter space all that kind of stuff that's giving you the the keyboard shortcuts that you can use whilst you're in this mode so one of them will say c for constrain to angle so if you hit c it's now snapping it to 45 degree increments which is perfect so now i just want to draw it until i hit that bottom line there i'm just going to click and then hit enter and that is it so i was able to draw a straight line through it whilst keeping the face there so i didn't have to redo face hit f and do all that extra stuff i was just able to draw it but we still have this these vertices here so how do i fix that well here's another thing you don't have to just delete those and then you know do this thing what you can actually do is if you were to uh like if you hit g right that is just going to move it you know in relation to what what the camera is currently looking at right but if you like to double tap g what it's doing is it's doing an edge slide okay and if you just slide it all the way doesn't matter which way to do it one or the other it's now doubling up okay so you can see right here i've now got two vertices right on top of each other and same down here and that is not good that's actually the one thing that measures hate doesn't know how to handle that in shading it's the cause of all sorts of problems so much so that there is an operation if you select everything and then just hit w you'll see something here that says remove doubles now if you want to click that it searches the whole mesh and if it finds any two ver if it yeah any vertices that are on top of each other it will merge them together so i don't know if you just saw it right there but it said removed two vertices so let me do it again i'll select this line here double tap g slide it along doesn't matter which way now i just hit a twice to select the whole mesh w remove vertices and it says removed two vertices and by the way if you don't want to remember the w i think it's actually in the toolbar yeah there it is remove doubles so exact same thing so we now just need to do that for the rest of it which i was doing so much explaining that it probably confuses you into thinking it's a huge long process but it's not so i hit k down c click enter k click c click enter k click c click enter and now [Music] i just take these double tap g slide it along double tap g slide it along double tap g slide it along same with this one slide it along and actually same with this one slide that along slide this along slide this along and we'll fix that what's going on there in a second but now i just select everything remove doubles removed 14 vertices look at that so now look at our mesh aren't we clever oh okay so this one is still not working because if you zoom right in our positioning wasn't exactly perfect so if you see this you've got three that need to be merged into one because we don't have any any other way to merge this i'm just going to make a loop cut right here like vertically like halving it basically right there and then what i want to do is i just want to merge these so i'm going to hit alt m so that's how you merge things if you've just got vertices you want to connect together merge them together hit at center and now right here i'm going to select this face i'll just delete that face there's a gecko in the roof [Laughter] now i've deleted that face i'm just making another face there and another face there now if you have done this correct you should now see clear lines so clear flow that way a clear flow this way clear flow this way another flow this way and also this direction so now we have got a nice nice flow to our mesh okay the reason this is so important is check this out with the subsurf turned on we no longer have a sarlacc pit we now have a nice smoothed off edge there and if you're thinking like okay but i don't want a really smoothed off edge like that well in the next part we're going to be doing what you call proximity loops whatever they're called but it's it's where you add in edge loops like this and you add it in close and you now have control over how round that edge is there and same with down there and you know you can add more across here don't do this by the way because it'll create all sorts of problems up here which uh yeah it's easier if you do it after you do the next part of this mesh but yeah so that's that's why we went to all that trouble uh the only other final thing that we'll do in this video i'll just close up the bottom here so it's actually quite easy first of all i'll just delete that edge and then just select all this so holding down alt and then i am clicking on that edge right there i'll deselect these end pieces so i've just got the ring and then what i'm going to do i'm going to extrude and i'm going to extrude it along the y axis so it extrudes it into itself and because we've got the mirror turned on what we can do is we can turn on clipping like that and when you've got clipping what it'll do is that now when it gets close they'll stick together it's a very satisfying thing i love doing that doesn't need the sound effect you're right cool so now i've done that i'll make a face there because i know that's four vertices and four vertices right there and we've done it yay well done so i'll just make that a little bit thicker thick awesome lovely so that was in a roundabout way how to make that cut out shape of our mesh there so as you can see the boolean tool it's very powerful does require some manual modifications in order to make it work properly with the subsurf modifier sometimes you don't need to do all that rearranging there's there's a bunch of people that just do a bunch of boolean stuff now and they don't worry with the subsurf but if you want to make a nice clean mesh this is sort of what you need to do to patch it up so it's something to keep in mind the boolean like this what i just showed you the boolean thing it used to do a horrible mess before b mesh was in blender which don't worry about if you don't know what that is but um before that was the thing like it just made triangles everywhere like it made an absolute mess of everything whenever you use the boolean which is why most older blender artists don't use it at all but since bmes it's a lot cleaner and it just it works a lot nicer but anyways that's the tutorial if you found it useful please give it a thumbs up so that other people can find it and i will see you in part three thank you for watching and if you want to get the keyboard shortcut guide if you don't have to remember all the keyboard shortcuts the link for that is in the description as well thank you for watching bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 893,903

Keywords: blender, tutorial, beginner, modelling, modeling, anvil

Id: WxMwa0njGSM

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2017