Blender Modeling Tutorial - Advanced Hard Surface!

so I've been following polygon pen for a long time he's got some of the best subd modeling tutorials out there I posted his latest one which was modeling this laundry detergent bottle and I got a message from one of you saying polygon pen is using Cinema 4D how would we do this in blender so of course I reached out to polygon pen on Twitter to ask for permission to build on his original video he said he'd loved to see how it could be modeled in blender so here we are before you watch this one please go sub subscribe to polygon pen in the description I'll also be going Beyond modeling the bottle showing you UV unwrapping texturing scene setup and lighting for a product rendering if that's relevant to you just check the description for details on that in blender the first thing we'll do is drag and drop our reference image into the scene check the description for that image as well clear rotation and location with alt R and ALT G rotate 90 degrees on the x axis we can lower the opacity in the image properties this makes it easier to see what we're doing by the way I do have screencast keys turned on so if you look at the bottom left of my screen you could see what buttons I'm pressing at any moment add a cube with shift a and start to roughly scale and position it every time we model we go from primary detail to secondary and eventually our fine details right now it's just about getting the overall dimensions of our main bottle mesh blocked out subdivide and blender by pressing contrl 2 let's add a loop cut with crlr we want to even out the topology so we don't get these extra long and Tall faces where we can help it jump to face selection mode with the number three and let's select and delete the top and bottom faces we can destructively apply our subd modifier with contr a in this case we actually want the extra geometry to work with now hit shift s and send our 3D cursor to selected with this shift a and add a lattice a lattice is kind of like a cage we can place around a high resolution mesh to move it with fewer or low resolution points let's just scale it to fit around the bounds of the object and with the object selected go to modifiers and add a lattice modifier selecting the new lattice object as the target as you can see we have our cage to control the object's shape we can add more resolution as needed in the lattice properties tab this is a great way for us to start honing in the shape of our original mesh while getting a smoother result because we're working with fewer points so I'll just take a minute to eyeball the placement of each set of points sometimes you'll find you want the points to have stronger control of the mesh maybe the mesh is lagging behind and not totally influenced by the lattice to adjust this go back to the lattice modifier and increase the overall strength you can type in values above one as I go I'm getting to a point where I need more lattice resolution so back in the lattice settings I can add that my reference image is getting in the way a bit so I'll bring down the opacity even more just making some final tweaks here once we're happy we can select the object apply the modifier withr a and delete the lattice now things are looking good but I wish this hole at the top was a perfect circle to do that we need to just turn on a tool that already comes with blender go to edit preferences and the add-on is called Loop tools once we have that right click Loop tools and circle now our opening is a perfect circle I'll just take a moment to adjust the placement and scale to better match the reference let's also go through the same lattice process again for good measure add a lattice and scale it to fit our overall dimensions add our lattice modifier select the Target and this time we'll go with a resolution of three on each axis we did this so we can uniformally scale the rounded y AIS thickness towards the center of the bottle once you're happy apply the modifier with control a delete the lattice let's subdivide with control 2 and right click to shade smooth just have a look at your primary shape so far and make sure everything is looking smooth because we're about to move on to our secondary shape let's save our primary shape as it is for later reference do that by duplicating with shift d and moving it to a new collection with M we'll name that ref short for reference we can call the object ref as well for good measure now apply the subd model ifier with crl a and just uncheck or disable this collection so we don't see it back with our object we can actually delete half of it and utilize a mirror modifier to save half our work going forward that mirror modifier should be calculated before the subdivision so just drag it up set it to Y AIS and turn on clipping clipping just merges the verts at the center I usually turn off subdivision preview in edit mode so it doesn't get in my way now about that Circle in this Center let's select the rough area where that'll go by selecting the top Corner holding control shift and getting the bottom corner in Edge mode by pressing the number two let's get our Circle select with the c key and hold down middle Mouse to paint over the edges we don't want if we go to our viewport overlays we can turn on statistics and see exactly how many edges we currently have selected as you can see that's 24 edges or vertices we did this so we can add a cylinder that has the same amount of 24 vertices so we don't have to guess or try and make things line up later so shift s again to send our cursor to selected and in object mode we can add our cylinder let's rotate 90° on X and again make sure we have the exact 24 vertices let's increase our image opacity again and just scale this to where it needs to be there's another blender add-on we need to just turn on called called bu tool it gives us a nice shortcut to add a Boolean just select the cylinder then the bottle and press control minus to cut one object with the other in the modifier tab you can see all that did was add a Boolean modifier as with all modifiers the order of operations changes the effect of the modifier stack in this case let's get rid of subdivision for now as well as the mirror modifier if you get unexpected results like this try changing the bu solver to fast instead of exact and there we have our perfect circle cut into the surface of our mesh so we can now just apply the Boolean modifier with contrl a for apply and delete the cutting object now in edit mode our topology needs some fixing up go to the tool property Tab and under options turn on auto merge in our snapping menu let's snap to vertex now we're taking any pre-existing point from the bottle menu mesh and merging or holding control to snap to the new cylinder mesh that was added in The Bu operation you can tell it's a pre-existing bottle vertex because it'll be attached through edges to other verts in the bottle mesh it may take just a second to comprehend what's going on here but play back the video think it through and feel free to ask questions understanding these Concepts is key to moving past modeling Basics and getting into your own intermediate problem solving and troubleshooting we'll inevitably end up with some awkward Corners that we'll fix in just a minute what we're doing here is called topology redirect it's an essential skill and one that'll take time to develop to get to a point where you can have a mental image of where you need to take things and how to get there the reason I'm merging on top of the points we got from the cylinder is because we already know those are a perfect circle let's say you aren't totally confident you chose all the right points you can visually check to see if it's in the shape of a circle but if you really want to double check you can just add in another cylinder with the same 24 verts and double check to see that there's a point in your bottle for every Edge or point in the cylinder this is just a sanity check for myself but it looks like we got it right so delete the cylinder and it's time to start redirecting some of the points we have without an edge on the circle just get out the knife tool with K and start drawing in our new edges once we draw in the new we'll dissolve the old with crl X again this is the kind of thing that just takes practice to understand the principle is we're going for Quad topology and we want that topology or parallel edges within to flow in a certain direction so I'm cutting in those parallel edges and dissolving anything that disrupts that on the diagonal same thing for the bottom we're cutting in the new correctly angled edges now before I dissolve what I don't need I'm comparing the left side to the right as I start to cut I'm noticing something looks off and what it is if you don't see it is we have this vertex we failed to merge in an earlier step so I'll just merge that now and keep moving forward with our cutting and dissolving now everything's redirected we have a great foundation for not only our primary bottle shape but now our secondary Circle inset if you look at the side profile of the circle detail though you'll notice it's a bit Jagged this came about because we prioritized merging onto the cylinder points which intersected our bottle at various depths we can just go to our side view with number pad three and start to adjust the just by eyeballing them and by hand when we model we try and keep things technically exact whenever we can we use snapping and primitive shapes like the exact circle shape cut into the cylinder but remember this is ultimately an art form and now and then you'll have to use your own visual intuition to adjust or correct some things by hand like any art form this is another area you've just got to practice and hone over time for me after a of adjustment that's looking much smoother remember the primary shape the reference object we set aside earlier we can enable that and now we have our secondary detail cut in we can reconformation utilizing a shrink wrap modifier just select the reference object as the Target in the viewport overlays we can enable wireframes to see what's going on we can turn off the reference collection again and I'll turn down the wireframe opacity I'm looking at the topology but also looking to make sure things overall are nice and smooth I'll add another subdivision modifier to preview the shrink wrap modifier is common to conform our object with secondary detail back to our primary object shape before we messed with anything I did notice one area of pinching so I'm just sliding those vertices around by double tapping G even though the reference collection is disabled the shrink wrap modifier is still active since that looks good let's apply the shrink wrap modifier with crl a now with the circle Loop selected let's hit crl f for some fill options and go to grid fill you can play with a span and offset but what I'm going for here is trying to roughly match the The Edge flow we'll need for our handle that'll make sense in just a second for now let's brace this circular shape by insetting the faces with i for inset back in object mode you'll notice the circle area is cratered in a bit we can fix this once again by conforming to the primary reference shape just select the circle press P for the separate menu and separate by selection now so things aren't so crowded select these inner vertices and come up to vertex and smooth vertices you can repeat that action by holding down shift R for repeat until it's nice and averaged out now we can add a shrink wrap modifier again and set the target to our ref object now that's generally pretty close but we'll need to connect some vertices by hand in just a minute the important thing is we've once again conformed to our primary shape let's apply the shrink wrap with controll a and in edit mode if we turn on x-ray with alt Z we could see our edges are pretty close to the overall cut in or Ridge shape of the handle here but we could slide these ones along to fit that Ridge perfectly with the primary and secondary shapes locked in we're just doing some final preparations before we cut in the third level or handle detail let's inset here one more time to brace this Edge I don't want to slide the outer point because I want that to remain a perfect circle I'm just sliding these new inner edges over to match the ridge closer now in object mode let's join the two objects with contrl J for join we could merge these by distance and increase the threshold until they snap together but I want to be more exact so I am taking a second to snap every inner point of the circle to the outer point of the bottle I try to avoid tedious moments like this but with 24 points this one's not too [Music] bad and there we have it let's grab the Inner Circle and finally move it back on the Y AIS now let's grab where we want the handle to go again I'm just holding down control and shift to select the shortest path in between and let's inset with I we can delete those faces now in the front view we can start to manually move these points around to conform with the shape of the handle nothing to do here but just sit and watch let's grab the resulting Edge Loop by Alt clicking s to scale Y for the Y AIS and zero to scale down to zero in the side view we can move it back to get that final inner surface of the handle let's press e for extrude and press y to restrict the Extrusion on the Y AIS we can add back our subd modifier with control 2 and we can see the shape is overall pretty good but we do need to brace some areas so if you select this Loop and everything inside we can actually perform what's called an outset just press I to inset and then press o to toggle to the outset tool a surprising amount of blender users don't know this tool exists but this is a perfect example of when to use it we can also outset this inner surface here which is more even than we'd get with a loop cut for the final Ridge however I think I will use a loop cut with controlr but I'll redirect the topology with my trusty knife tool again we access the pattern of cutting and detail redirecting and dissolving what we don't need in some cases I'll just merge two existing points to one and while we do get an end gone the most important thing is checking out what things look like with the subdivided mesh in this case it's perfect no pinching no artifacts so we'll go ahead with a few endons now we're pretty close to being done let's add in a mirror modifier yet again make sure it's above the subd and enable clipping you can check out your model whenever we add a mirror modifier it's always good practice to jump into edit mode and just make sure the edges on the mirrored axis are all flat I'm just having a look around now we can turn on a matte cap material to get some shinier highlights I'll turn off wireframes so nothing is visually in my way and things look pretty good I will say there's a bit of pinching here which is easy to fix we just slide some vertices by double tapping G as for the bottom we can just select these edges extrude in on Y and merge our lonely little point at the bottom same exact approach for the top we'll need to Bevel the top Loop so it's not so soft with the subdivision modifier since the bottom is softer instead of beveling a sharp brace we'll just inset the faces on the bottom and take the outer edge and just nudge it up for that soft transition last step is we'll select various areas and in blender we can turn on something called proportional editing that's just the top menu up near the snapping menu and as we grab points we can use the scroll wheel to grow and shrink the falloff for our proportional influence basically instead of moving individual points we're moving larger spheres of influence this is perfect for these final adjustments to the overall shape to make sure we're really matching the reference photo and that's it we blocked out the primary shape cut in the secondary detail of the circle indent and finally cut in the handle the order we took things and the utilization of Smart Tools like the shrink wrap modifier have made for an efficient polished result all that's left of course is to model the lid and I'll work as I talk but this isn't as technical so just watch and enjoy now you may say Riley 20 to 30 minutes modeling a laundry detergent bottle that's a long time for something so simple so how is this worth it can I do something easier like say photogrametry and the simple answer is no for product rendering like this typically the client is asking for perfect or near perfect surfaces and something like photogrametry although it could potentially be a starting point would still need retopology and in the end 30 minutes is a relatively small investment but don't limit yourself just to product visualization the techniques I'm showing you here in blender apply to a much wider variety of Industries as I start to wrap this up just another thanks to polygon pen for the original Cinema 4D walkthrough on this model and thanks to you for asking how it'd be done in blender go check out polygon pen in the description his YouTube his patreon and while you're at it check out my site Riley b3. comom I'll be posting this model in the library as well as eventually a more in-depth training Beyond this where we UV unwrap we texture and we get it placed within an environment for some client style animations this is something you could use as a jumping off point for even your own 3D Services it's been a great way for me to make a living to support my family and if nothing else I hope these videos inspire you to try and do the same here's one last look at the final model thanks for watching hopefully I see you in the further trainings and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Riley Brown

Views: 16,781

Keywords: 3d design for beginners, advanced modeling, blender learning tutorial, blender mastery, blender modeling, blender tips, blender tutorial, hard surface, modeling workflow, product rendering, topology secrets

Id: jbx5xz0uj7s

Length: 22min 24sec (1344 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024