Blender SciFi Hard Surface Modeling Tutorial - Part 1

hey what's up guys i got a pretty special video for you here today i'm going to show you the full process of modeling the sci-fi piece and blender and texturing it in substance painter i'm going to show you the whole thing we're going to model we're going to optimize it prepare it for export and texture this thing from scratch in substance painter it's going to be really fun i'll split it into two separate parts so the next one on texturing should be out tomorrow now guys real quick i'm going to be talking a lot about design in this video so it's not just going to be you know a modeling tutorial i'm also going to expand on how i'm thinking about you know different shapes and things like that so to help you guys out with that i want to give you something here for free i've put together a short pdf of my five powerful design elements that i use and pretty much all of my models and that you can use as well it should get you some pretty instant results and immediately make your designs look a lot cleaner so i'd highly recommend picking it up it's really short has a lot of pictures in there and it should be pretty useful to you as a reference when you're modeling so like i said it's free link in the top of the description pick that up so let's hop into the video now okay so let's go into side view of course for modeling i'll be using hard ops and box cutter because you know we care about efficiency so i'm going to go in here shift a mesh and then cube okay and what i want to do is make this thing a little bit longer on the y-axis so we can do is press s y can hold ctrl okay and we'll pull it somewhere around here i think that'll be all right you know we can always adjust the scale later but right now i kind of want like the rough dimensions going on and maybe we can make it like a step higher on the z okay now i want to make sure i apply my scale to make it uniform so i'm going to press ctrl a apply the scale and now we need to do is trace out the shape now when i'm usually tracing out these shapes i'm kind of going in and getting like a rough draft you know kind of how like before you write an essay you write down a few main points so it's kind of what i'm doing here with the model i'm writing down a few main points which are which are in the form of a of a shape so we're just going to kind of block out using some cool looking shapes so let's go ahead and press a d to go into our n-gone cutter and the first shape i want to make is something up here so i'm going to cut across okay and once we get towards the you know past this z-axis line here i want to start kind of cutting down like this okay and then i want to cut down like this over here now if we double click we can cut through and i'm just going to go ahead and press enter to lock that in now i also want to make this a little bit shorter so let's go into or let's just press s x and then hold ctrl and we can make this significantly shorter maybe something like that will be okay and let's also apply our scale ctrl a and apply the scale now i don't want to have like a pure boolean cut right here i actually want to have an inset boolean and to fix that we can press q ever scroll and then if we press q again we can go to shift bool and basically shift between different boolean operations so if i scroll up or down you're going to see i can go from inset to outset which are not default operations by the way they're only available in box cutter but yeah you can kind of scroll through these but i want to go to an inset now if you want to adjust the thickness of the inset you can press the t key now i don't want this to look too weak you know if you go too thin it's going to look pretty flimsy so i want to go to about here where it still looks you know decent enough in terms of structure but not too much that you can just break it by you know picking it up so somewhere around here will be okay we can always adjust this later guys so don't worry about it now to hide the cutters notice my cutter's collection is the second one in the stack here so i can press shift two to hide it pretty cool now's a pretty good time to drop on a bevel because notice i can't really see the outline of the um of the piece here so what i'm going to do is just select it we'll press on q bevel and just give it a very very slight bevel we can move our mouse until we find a good spot and there we go now what i want to talk about is echoing echoing is such a powerful way to make your designs look better and what i mean by echoing is basically repeating shapes that already exist you know a lot of people ask me josh how do you think of these shapes in different designs and usually the answer is right in front of you look at a shape you already have and repeat it so check this out if i go back into the ngon cutter notice how i have this 45 degree angle right here what i can actually do is echo that detail but perhaps make it a little bit bigger for more visual interest now check this out what i can do is cut from here to here kind of like this maybe a bit too much maybe like right here down to here we can always adjust it by the way and now check this out notice how this shape is immediately more visually appealing we have the same exact shape here as we do right here although this one's a bit bigger you're going to see this corner right here kind of clashes with the um you know these angled cuts that we have right here so in order to avoid that clashing all we have to do is echo it once again so let's go up here we're gonna cut and now we have something so much more interesting and all by the way sci-fi designs really use chamfers so i'd always recommend using chamfers when you can a chamfer simply a 45 degree bevel easy and you're just going to see it looks a lot more visually appealing now so when people ask me how do you think of these different shapes usually the answer is right in front of you echo detail you already have i'm going to show you another extremely powerful way to make this a step a step better step improved whatever so check this out i want to apply this boolean because right now notice i have three different booleans i have one boolean for the inset and then two for these cuts here i just want to apply everything so i'm going to go ahead and press q operations and then smart apply which will apply all of our booleans and leave the bevel cool so what i want to do is i want to go to these edges here these hard edges and give them a very very slight bevel to them this will make the edges look softer and less kind of like sharp because you know we as humans when we when we see sharp things it kind of makes us feel like uneasy and these edges here are pretty sharp so making them a bit more round makes the entire model feel softer and more presentable more visually appealing really so what i usually do is i go in here um and if you want to keep it low poly you know you're more than welcome to just make the bevel count pretty low so for example you could do control b and then do like a you know a two segment bevel that would be fine but if you want to make it more round feel free i'm just going to make it two segments just to keep it low poly if i want to make it a game asset so we can do that we're going to do the same thing right here give that a nice bevel and feel free to vary the widths as well they don't have to be the same then we're going to go here do the same thing on this one okay right up here we could do the same thing maybe on this one i could vary it a bit more i could go for a chamfer maybe move this edge back a little bit and then bevel that chamfer like i said chamfers are very powerful elements when it comes to sci-fi design so i tend to use them quite a bit this isn't technically a chamfer anymore but you know what i mean so we're gonna go here give that a nice little bevel and already this looks a lot better notice how much softer it is let's go right here and do the same thing maybe we could bevel this area and maybe lift this edge a bit to make it a bit more interesting you can always just kind of play with these shapes and see what looks good and then we'll go here make it one say or two segments and then just look at that guys it already looks so much softer and more interesting now i also want to do it right here and right here but i want to make these very very tiny just because and you're going to notice that this um this area right here looks a bit sharp and that's because the bevel angle is catchy and so i could always kind of tweak that but in this case i'm going to have to go pretty high and you're going to see it still looks weird and that's because we also have to make the auto smooth angle the same amount the auto smooth adjusts how sharp it is and the bevel adjusts how sharp the bevel is really so we can just kind of adjust those and here we go so very simple guys you don't have to do anything complex echo detail add some chamfers add some bevels and you're gonna get some pretty cool looking designs okay now but you know a lot of people at this point would get stuck and not be sure how to continue like i said build on top of what you already have rarely do i picture the final result in my head i never really do i build on top of what i already have it's like a math equation i can't see what the answer is until i start plugging in the values okay so we're going to do here is kind of follow this shape but cut a hole into it so we can always follow the shapes and do things with that so i'm going to cut from here i'm going to cut down here i'm going to try to keep it as even as possible you might not be perfect and that's okay i'm gonna cut to here here here and then here and this should be close enough okay so we're gonna cut through and you could press the b key to bevel it i might do that actually i'll just press the b key and do a bevel with the cutter itself so we don't have to apply the boolean and check this out we have a pretty cool looking shape that follows the design and i also want to mention a lot of people try to hop into the tertiary detail stage pretty quickly i would just say relax calm down don't hop into the little details so quickly like don't start adding in random bolts and stuff you know don't start doing this when you've barely started the base design it's going to start confusing you and you're going to go off track build on the model first build the primary then the secondary and then the tertiary okay right now this is um more of the primary blockout stage the most important stage in my opinion okay so we're going to go back to the ngon cutter and what we can actually do not only can we echo shapes but we can echo cuts so i mean a cut's technically a shape i mean this cut right here is a shape in and of itself but we can echo cuts we already have so check this out i could take this same exact type of cut and just put it over here i could just kind of vary it a bit so i'm going to echo this chamfered effect all right so i'm going to start here and then cut down to here cut over to here and then i want to basically kind of cut up like this might want to adjust that but for right now that's okay and then we can just press the b key to bevel it like that awesome and notice what we've done is we've echoed kind of echoed this uh this shape right here it doesn't have the same amount of edges but it looks just about the same actually no it does have the same amount of edges but anyways the point i'm trying to make here is you're echoing that detail there's a little bit too much empty space up here on the top so what i'm going to do is tab into vertex mode go up here into wireframe and i want to press a b to box select these vertices here and then these vertices here so what i can actually do is press a g and then z and move them down while still retaining the shape so i just move that down a little bit and that looks a little bit better in my opinion so i'm happy with that and one last thing i want to do is make another little cut out down here so i'm going to start by just cutting from here leave a little bit of space here on the bottom gonna cut to here up to here and then up to here and then of course i can press the b key and drop a nice little bevel in there and there we go pretty cool looking shape now we have the basic block out here done looks really cool now what we can do is start getting a little bit more playful with it all right so what i'm thinking i could do is i could perhaps well first thing i want to do actually is press q go to ever scroll and if i scroll up i can scroll through these different cutters here i'm going to go to this one and i just want to move it down a little bit just because i don't like where it's positioned so i want to kind of keep these lines roughly at the same height and i'll press shift two to hide that cutter that looks a bit better to me now what i think i want to do is make like a nice horizontal line that cuts all the way across this piece so not exactly sure where i want to put it maybe i'll move this up just a bit more to make some additional space like that and if i press a one on the numpad i can go into front view and you can also press um the tilde key to do that and i just want to go into our box cutter and just kind of add a nice little cut right here make like a nice line going across the mesh you can always go to ever scroll and kind of move it around s and then z and kind of play with it that way that looks pretty cool i want this to be a bit more deep so i'm going to go and move this on the x a little bit and just kind of make it a little bit deeper i guess we can always move it around as long as we don't apply the boolean okay that looks good and now what we can do is just add random little concentrated detail that's a really easy way to make the design more visually appealing now what i want to do is make a nice chamfer on this area right here but the issue is i can't really do that because of this bevel down here it's going to kind of clash i can't really end it it's just going to kind of like collapse so that was a mistake on my end but a really easy way to fix this is to press control x to dissolve that edge out control x to dissolve this edge out and then what we can basically do is go up here to vertex snap and with this edge we can press g and then z to snap it here and then we can press a g and then y to snap it here just to make sure these are all completely flat we'll do the same thing up here ctrl x and then ctrl x g y snap it here like that and then g z snap it here to make sure it's completely flat and now what i want to do is make a nice little chamfer on this edge and a nice little chamfer on that side as well so we'll do ctrl b go to somewhere around there and if it's shading weird all you have to do is tweak your auto smooth which we messed with earlier so that chamfer is a little bit too big i think so let me make this a bit smaller maybe to about here adjust the auto smooth and you're going to notice the bevel hasn't picked up on it either so we're going to adjust the bevel angle here as well until it picks up and just like that guys we have a really nice chamfer kind of highlighting this interior area so you know building chamfers on top of detail like really small ones like this is another powerful way to enhance the visuals of your design so i definitely like that i might add some more in different areas later i'm not too sure yet but this definitely looks good where it is cool so now what i think i'll do is just make like a nice little cut up here no real reason i just kind of think it'll look interesting so i'm going to kind of cut from here to here like that and then what i think i'm going to do is go back into front view and with box cutter i'm going to make like a little cut kind of going across like that i think it looks interesting and maybe i'll move it down just a little bit more until it just kind of catches that bevel right there and make sure you scale this really far so you have plenty of space for it to move and if it's still not catching where you want it a really easy fix just change the bevel angle to something a little bit more realistic if you go too far it might catch this one so we're just going to keep this a bit higher and if it catches this one first then you might want to change this to a weight limit method but i just i would just kind of drag this down until you get something like that by the way don't worry about the artifacts we have going on here the reason those are occurring is be because we have a cut going on along a curved piece and that's always going to produce some bad artifacts on an ngon so you could technically you know move this down so it hits the flat surface right here but you're still going to have some minor issues so most likely what we'll do later is fix that manually i wouldn't worry too much about it right now the artifacts are one of the easiest things to fix if you know how to do it next what i want to do is i want to make sure all the detail we're adding is mirrored to the other side you're going to notice this cut right here is not currently on this side so easy way to do that is to press alt x and then go here to modifier which is basically just a mirror and then click on this and the area you want to mirror from and that will mirror it so pretty cool now what i want to do is go back into front view and maybe make like a a little cut in the front so just kind of a random idea but i'm gonna um if i click here what it's gonna do is it's gonna snap to that face and it's not gonna actually catch here on the front so to fix that i'm gonna go into view align instead so that way it aligns from the view and not from the surface so we'll click on this and then we'll just cut up to here as a matter of fact i'll just go all the way up and we're just going to kind of kind of cut back like that let's actually move that a bit more s and then y and just really get ourselves like a pretty deep cut like that looks pretty cool and just to make it a bit more interesting maybe what we could do is we could take this edge right here g and then y and kind of move it back and now we kind of have like a little angle in there you know you can always do random little stuff like that or maybe you could even just control b it yourself it doesn't matter too much guys if you are going to bevel this make sure you apply your scale or the bevel will be biased so we'll press ctrl a to apply the scale and then if we go into edge mode we can you know do something like that it doesn't really matter just kind of play with it get some interesting shapes you can do this on your own i want to hop into front view one more time and make a kind of like this just because i think it'll look cool literally no other reason just because why not looks cool all right let me hop back into side view and just kind of take a look at this take a look at the whole thing it's looking pretty cool i definitely like that next what i want to do is make a few cool looking slices on this piece so i'm going to go into front view and if i go into the the end gone cutter here check this out i'm going to cut from here and then just kind of push it this way cut down and then just go all the way through and instead of doing a regular cut i'm going to press the x key to run a slice and now we're going to have is a cool looking little frame down here on the bottom kind of making it a bit more you know visually appealing let me take a look at that um hmm not sure let me press ctrl z a few times to undo that there's one thing i want to do here real quick i want to make this frame here this little interior piece a little bit bigger so i'm going to tab into face mode i'm going to select this face here and press g x to move it out a bit and since we have a mirror modifier it's going to actually mirror that effect to this side so we only have to do one side and you're going to notice this cut actually goes away and that's a really easy fix we just need to scale the cutter because right now the cutter is inside of this so if we press q go to ever scroll we can scroll until we find the cutter you might not see it immediately but eventually if you like go into wireframe mode with the z key you can find it and the issue is this one just kind of sitting inside so if we just press s and then x to make it a bit bigger we should be able to see it there we go much better and now we have a bit more buffer here on the inside a bit more um you know robust i guess let's try this one more time we're going to go into front view go into our ngon cutter and i just want to make like a really simple little like plating effect here so we can run a slice cut through we'll press the x key and we could even go to ever scroll and move it up a bit more and just kind of find you know a decent spot for it doesn't have to be perfect now another thing i like actually let's not do that yet let's let's hold off on that i was going to show you a cool trick with materials but i don't want to do that yet we'll get to it i promise let me go to the back view we can press ctrl 1 on the numpad or just press tilde and then choose back um what i want to do on the back here is let's just kind of make like a cool looking shape i'm going to go into our box cutter and kind of cut from here to here and just give this an interesting looking shape i'll press the b key to bevel it give it a few more segments and i can press the q key to bevel the other side as well and i'll just press enter and now we kind of have like this little cut here in the back just a random idea i don't know i thought it would look cool let me just take a look at it we can move this up a little bit maybe but overall it definitely looks pretty cool maybe we can move it down to avoid some of those shading artifacts but overall not a super big deal kind of move this back move it up i don't know just kind of play with it now make sure you're careful here because notice how these bevels kind of move into each other notice how the reason we're getting these artifacts is because this bevel here needs to be a little bit above that edge so that way that bevel is not affecting it so we just have to move that up a little bit more and now we should be clear of any of those weird issues looks good and then just to make this a bit more interesting we could even come in here and make like a little cut like that just some random ideas you could always throw in there so i'm just kind of showing you what i'm thinking about when i model move that up i don't know scale it a bit all right so now what i want to do is make a cool looking shape in this area so i'm just going to go from here and then just kind of cut and follow the the general form nothing crazy and since we have a mirror we don't have to worry about this side we can just go ahead and cut straight through so i'm going to cut all the way through like this and i like that that looks interesting i guess let me take a look on the side maybe we should move that down just a little bit so i'm going to go to everscroll and just kind of move that down just kind of move it around and see what i like not a 100 sure if i like this but i want to give it a try there we go that looks much better not sure why but i dislike it and what i could also do is maybe i was going to say to bevel these edges but i'm not going to bother it looks fine where it is now i want to select this plate right here and go to ever scroll and notice how i'm missing just a little bit right here so to fix that we can just scale it a little on the y to elongate it now we should be good now i want to apply the most recent boolean so the slice on this piece so if we go here and click apply on the drop down now what i can do is take this edge and this edge right here and give it a nice little bevel just to bring in a bit of more variation um this one does not seem to want to work with me so what i might do is just select this entire strip this entire edge and then ctrl b to kind of bevel that and now this looks a bit more visually appealing you could even go further if you wanted to just depends how big you want that bevel i wouldn't go too overboard you know this looks cool and then maybe i could add in a few notches right here so like a little cut kind of like this right and then i could do the same thing here a little cut kind of like uh like that just makes it a bit more exciting i guess you can always move it around and just kind of play with it see what you like i'm gonna have to ever scroll maybe center that a bit more so it's not super offset this is an example of where i would center things i don't like to usually center things but here it actually works pretty well and i'm just going to go into back view real quick and just make like an additional little cut on this area just because i think it would look pretty cool just like that now i don't want to cut all the way through i just want to kind of like cut right to about there like that and we're just about done with the overall model here so there's a few things i want to do now i kind of want to make like a little bit of a piece down here on the bottom just because it looks a bit too empty to me so what i'm going to do is go into our ngon cutter okay and whoops yeah our n-gun cutter we're going to click and try again click and if it's gray that's good because we're not using a boolean we're just drawing a shape and then we're going to click over to here maybe go a bit further down go over to here i'm still not getting what i want i'm just kind of making an interesting looking shape really that's all i'm doing so you don't have to be as picky as i am and then just kind of make a shape like that we can move it into the middle once again you don't have to be as picky as i am and now we just kind of have something a cool looking shape that echoes you know this little edge right here this one echoes this one here same with these little chamfers it just looks pretty cool all around so all i want to do is give these a nice little bevel on all of these edges right here so control b give it a very very slight bevel like that and that looks a bit softer i might try adding one right here but i can't actually select this edge so to fix that i can just go through these different booleans and figure out which one needs applied so in this case this one here needs applied and i also need to apply the one going through here so usually i just kind of turn these off and on you could use the ever scroll um there's like an option in here if you shift click to go through them but i don't like using that i just i don't prefer it i like going through here manually and just finding out the right one here it is we can apply that and the reason it's weird over here is because we have a mirror modifier don't worry just select these two edges and give it a nice little bevel and the mirror modifier should take care of it maybe it won't maybe it won't but you know we're pretty much at the point where this model is almost done so if you're really worried about it you could just make a backup save so i'm just going to go ahead and go to q operations and then smart apply just clean up all the booleans apply all of them make life a bit easier and we have some random mirror lines here sometimes those happen you can dissolve them out with uh control x so control x and then we can just do a nice little bevel right there this looks a bit softer and i also want to take this vertex and merge it here m and then merge it last and then m merge it last this is a little bit close for comfort but i think it'll be fine because it's not really it's not too bad i guess we can leave that not a not a huge deal not a deal breaker but usually i wouldn't try to push it this close to another edge there is a little bit of a shading break you could try joining this into a quad it's still going to pull a little bit but i wouldn't worry about it to be honest it's not going to be noticeable as a matter of fact on my original piece here let me put this in on my original piece you can actually see that i got this one pretty close as well and we had no issues so i'm going to leave it cool so we're just about finished the last thing i want to do here is make a few little like little i don't know what they're called they're like these little metallic bumps that kind of stick out of random metallic things there might be a name for them someone can tell me in the comments but like i just think it'll look cool if we do like a little notch like this now instead of cutting in i want to press the j key and union it and you always for some reason with this union you have to press the e key to extrude it back a bit and then what we can do is press the b key to actually now we can leave it as it is that's fine you can do a little cut like that and then we can go up here somewhere and do a similar cut so we press the j key and then the e key to cut through and there we go just a random little shape i thought would look cool okay now what i want to do is i want to go to this bevel modifier that we have on our little piece here and i want to change the segment count to one a few reasons here one you can't really see much of a difference between three and one i mean it's insignificant besides the corners you can kind of tell but the reason we want to change this to one is because a one segment bevel is a chamfer and chamfers have hard edges and this is crucial if you want to get properly baked maps it if you have a rounded edge and you put seams there you get all sorts of issues with the unwrap that that would require a separate video to go over but just trust me if you're going to texture an object or export it out of blender change your bevel segment count to one just trust me on it you're gonna save a lot of headache and it looks exactly the same i mean you can't see a difference between the three and the one unless you really really get close in there so change that to one and you should be good to go next what i want to do is kind of fix up some of these shading errors we have going on for example i have a pretty nasty shading error right here now the easiest fix in these cases for one i also notice we have notice how this bevel is picking up right here i don't want that so the first thing i really want to do is i want to adjust this angle a little bit put that to like hmm maybe instead of using angle we could do is use weight so check this out if i change this to weight we can choose which edges we want to have beveled now we don't have any edges marked with a bevel weight right now but we can fix that what we're going to do is um first of all i think i already have some marked here with bevel weight so i want to clear that out i want to select everything with the a key ctrl e and then we're going to go to edge bevel weight and type in zero which i guess doesn't work so we can just do it here in the slider press the n key and then slide that down to zero so that'll reset any bevel weights we already have marked sometimes you'll just have some random ones marked here and there and that'll clear it out now what i want to do is remark them i want to go up here to select and select the sharp edges okay now this is going to select based off of a 30 degree angle which is basically the default and this usually works fine so now we can do is just drag the mean bevel weight all the way to one and we're basically going to have the same exact result that we have with angle here you're going to see it's basically the same but now what we're able to do is have a bit more control i can actually go in here to you know these edges for example you can turn off this button to see it a bit better you can go to these edges right here and just drag it to zero because sometimes these angles catch incorrectly like um this is within the 30 degree or whatever this threshold is sometimes that might catch so if you go to weight you can just turn it off so it's super easy we might have some other you know areas like right here for example this one in this case needs a bevel weight so we can turn this one to one to fix that there we go and basically what we do is we just kind of go through here and look for any areas that are incorrectly marked in which case there were only two i don't see any actually no three select this edge and set this to zero okay and i think that takes care of almost all of them we have one in here as well getting a double bevel so we'll set that to zero and now i think we're good next thing you're going to notice we actually have also before we do that notice we now have a weird looking line here just go ahead and change the auto smooth just increase that and that'll fix it anyways you're going to notice we still have a pretty nasty shading error right here this could be for a few reasons one it could be because this face isn't actually flat so what you could try doing is pressing s y and then zero to flatten it but it's already flat so that didn't fix it another reason is because the hardened normals is not working as it should and what you could actually do to try to fix that is turn off the hardened normals and turn on the weighted normal and you're going to see way to normal in this case fixed it there's a bit of a difference in the algorithms between weighted normal and hard to normal so what i would recommend doing is trying both if you're getting a shading error with hard and normals add in a weighted normal and that should fix the issue and you're going to see it looks pretty good i don't see any additional shading errors here i do however see notice these little cuts right here need a bevel weight applied now what we could do is we could apply these booleans and then mark them manually but hard ops actually has a feature for this if you press q and then control click on sharpen this will sharpen it automatically and you're the reason it's going to do it automatically is because if we press ctrl tilde you're going to see in the sharp options we actually have apply b weight turned on so what it's going to do if we control click on sharpen is it will apply the booleans and simultaneously mark the hard edges with a bevel weight so i'm going to control click on sharpen you're going to see our angle set to 30 just like it was up here and it's going to actually mark this automatically for us so it looks really good and let me go up here and turn cavity back on that should fix it awesome so this model is completely finished i am very happy with it looks cool and it's going to look even better inside of substance so we have a few things left to wrap up the first thing i want to do is i want to actually i notice we're missing one thing this will be really quick to add in so i'm just going to go in here to the end gone cutter make sure everything is deselected and i just want to make like a little a little latch right here because i did it in the original model so i'm just going to kind of like draw in a random little like latch or something so we're just going to kind of like move this over scale it down a bit and you know you can just kind of play with it oops slide this up a bit i just want like a little hook right here i think it's going to look cool and then just give this like a nice little um [Music] bevel right here as well cool move that over just a bit and we should be good to go and then i just want to give it a bevel so we'll do q and then bevel go to there set the segment count to one and now we're good to go cool now we need to do is we need to uv unwrap this model reason being is because we're texturing this and to texture it we need uvs so let's do that it'll be very easy technically you could use the automatic uv in system and blender but i never like using it because it just doesn't give you the best results so what i'm going to do in this case is just um let's click on this piece add a new material and if we drag out the shader editor we can add in a uv material so i'm going to press shift a texture and then image texture here going to click on new we can make this 4k and then set this to uv grid connect it up here and then we should be able to go into our material view and you're going to see the uvs are kind of a mess so let's fix that now you've probably seen my earlier uv videos if you haven't i have a ton of them and we also have a uv unwrapping course just a full like everything you need to know about unwrapping course you can pick that up if you want but basically what i do is i go into edge mode i deselect everything with alt a and then i go up here to select and then i select the sharp edges when you're unwrapping hard surface models you want to put the seams on the hard edges so we can select the hard edges by clicking on this button and then we're going to press ctrl e and then mark the seam now nothing changed and the reason being is because we don't have this live unwrap feature turned on if you don't have that turned on you're going to have to unwrap it manually every single time so i'm going to press ctrl e mark seam and it's going to automatically update now we are going to have to unwrap this manually for the first time because it's on the wrong setting so i'm going to select everything press u unwrap and we need to set this to conformal when you're using hard surface objects set it to conformal if you're doing characters or organic meshes set it to angle based in this case it's hard surface so we're going to go with the conformal method and you're going to see it looks a lot better now what i like to do is i like to work backwards i like to go into our models and unmark seams we don't need so blender has done most of the work for us up front now we just have to work backwards a bit so for example these two edges right here could be unmarked control e clear seam no need to have those marked this one here you don't have to be you know perfect with this i would recommend as a matter of fact not being perfect with it for the sake of time this one maybe let's give it a try that looks good this one's probably going to need to hold a bit so i'm going to leave it this stretch right here we can clear out i think kinda it's not too bad but maybe not tough decision there i'm not too sure we could try this one instead there we go it's a lot better cool and um i would recommend well we'll fix this side in a second let's just start on this side we could easily unmark these four edges right here with ctrl e clear the seam and i think that's probably good enough now to do this side as well you can just press go into object mode and press alt x and then go to symmetry like that and that's going to fix that slide as well and you're going to see compared to what the automatic unwrap would have done in blender you can kind of fix it make it a bit cleaner by just unmarking a few edges is it necessary you probably know you probably won't even see a difference but there you go so that one's done we can go ahead and just um just hide it now i want to go to this piece and give it well first of all i want to smart apply everything there we go and then i want to give it the material same idea select sharp edges here we're going to ctrl e and then mark the seam and what i could probably do is like i don't know chamfers you don't need double seams so you can always unmark one of them and then we'll just go ahead and symmetrize it call it a day okay we're gonna go to this one same exact thing this one will be really easy select the sharp edges ctrl e mark seam um you to unwrap if it doesn't work and that one should be fine let's clear out this one that one caught un unnecessarily and then the last one is this one right here as a matter of fact i want to make a little hole on this piece so i'm going to go into circle mode set this to like eight vertices and then just cut a little hole in here just because i don't know i think it'll look cool and then we can apply that boolean and then go into edge mode select the sharp edges give it the material and then mark the seam and there we go that one's done so let me just unhide the base piece right here and now all we need to do is um keep the texel density consistent because right now the squares are of different size so we're gonna fix that so to do this is a joke if you see any tutorials showing you how to like manually scale up and like move things just ignore it because it's going to waste so much time all you have to do is select everything in edit mode you can open up your uv editor if you want to see the result i usually like seeing the result just kind of is satisfying and then you just press u on wrap and now everything is in its own spot see all the squares are basically the same size now what i usually like to do is i like to try to pack everything in because there's a lot of unused uv space that's a lot of wasted texture resolution so what i usually do is i go up here to uv and then pack the islands and sometimes when you pack them the squares become like different sizes so to fix that you can go to average island scale now to be fair i don't actually do this i use an add-on for it which i've shown in videos before uv pack master it is the best packing algorithm on the market i would just buy it it's well worth the money because if i click on pack you know compared to blender's packer here watch what this does it's just so much better i mean you click it a few times look how much more space is being used and i also turn on this normalize islands option which is basically the same as the average island scale i always turn that on and then all the squares will be the same size so you just click on pack a few times i try to get above 0.7 you can't always get it well you can if you split the islands up more but in this case i might not get it so i mean if i really cared i could try you know splitting up some of these islands and to be fair i could actually overlap these islands here um i don't know of a native way to do this in blender without do you know you'd probably have if you wanted to i'm losing my words saying a million different things at once these two are identical they're just rotated it's because this side is mirrored of this side so i could technically overlap these no one's going to really notice the issue is if you want to keep you know a shape or like a little alpha decal on one side it's always going to get mirrored to the other side because these would be overlapping so in this case i'm not going to bother i'm just going to go ahead and just try packing it a few times and if i get like .65 that's probably okay for this model if you want to get something a bit heavier a bit more dense you can always kind of like add some more seams and split these up into smaller pieces i wouldn't bother guys i mean this is a really good resolution in the first place so don't waste more time than you need to alright so we're just about done here all we need to do now is join this entire piece together okay so overall this looks pretty good but notice if i were to join this piece to this piece we have an issue reason being is because this piece is separate has its own bevel modifier set to angle and this one's separate with a bevel modifier set to weight so we're not going to actually have any sort of markings here that we need so just like we did for this one i would set this one to weight go into edit mode clear everything out clear out all the main bevel weights we have going on okay do that and then go to select sharp edges and then add the mean bevel weight manually here now i just noticed we had a few unnecessary seams going on so i might actually unwrap this one more time just to get a bit of a better result so you know some of these edges might catch so go ahead and clear out the mean bevel weight like that and now this one's good we're going to do the same exact thing to this one set it to weight we're going to select the sharp edges and then mean bevel weight to 1 and if we turn this button off we can hide the bevel temporarily and i'm just going to clear out the random little selections here on the inside of this cut so we'll clear the seam mean bevel weight and let me just unwrap this one more time real quick because we have a different result now so we'll just do this again we'll go to the uv editor we press u to unwrap and then we want to pack this i'm just going to use uv pack master pack the islands a few times see what i can get 0.661 0.662 and there we go now that this is set up we can join everything together we can select select this piece press the a key and then ctrl j so everything will be joined to this main piece and i just notice we also missed this piece right here so no problem just like we did before select the sharp edges set this mean bevel weight to one remove this one that accidentally caught and try this one more time ctrl j and now we're good to go awesome so the entire mesh is joined together as you can see we have a pretty nice textile density going on as well and this is going to look really nice when we texture it in substance painter so the very last thing we need to do is add a triangulate modifier and the reason we need to do this you know a lot of people are like oh you can't use n-gons they're they're lying to you don't listen to them in some cases they're right but um if they're giving you a blanket statement saying hey don't use n-gons they're bad you can just laugh it off because they're not even giving you a ch they're not giving you a specific situation i i hate hearing this because it's it's it's a it's a lie so you can use zengons they're totally cool there are certain situations in which you can't use them though and that is where i have an issue with people saying don't use n-gons because they don't give you the situations in which they're okay here they're totally cool the reason we need to add a triangulate modifier is because these n-gons right here what will happen is if you bring this into a different engine it automatically triangulates in that engine and those triangulation algorithms don't always triangulate properly and they can lead to overlapping geo which will not render properly if at all so i always recommend in blender adding your own triangulate modifier manually clicking on the keep normals button and leaving it like this you could also drag the triangulate above the weighted normal and to be honest it just kind of depends on the result i usually put it at the bottom and tick on the keep normals button and it works fine blender's triangulation algorithm is very good because it triangulates in such a way that it never connects and causes an overlap so it's always going to give you a perfect result when you import this into a software like substance painter so add a triangulate modifier and you're going to have zero issues so the very last thing we need to do i promise this is the last thing we're just going to rename this i'll just rename it to object i know boring enough and then we're going to go in here i don't know if this is necessary i've just always done it i always drag this name in here to keep the object data name the same and now we just have to export this so we're gonna go to file export fbx and i already have one right here but um turn on selected objects and then just um you know name it export it and you're good to go now we can bring this into substance painter and it should render just fine we'll do that real quick so in substance painter we're just going to go to file new select our fbx file and then click ok all of our maps will be baked inside of substance painter manually you could use marmoset if you wanted to but i'm going to do it here in substance because it's pretty good and you're going to see this thing imports into substance painter just fine absolutely zero problems and as a little i guess sneak peek i could drop on like a random material which we'll be doing in the next video by the way texturing it but you could just kind of drop something on for fun and see how it looks and you're going to see there are absolutely zero problems with using a hard surfaced base mesh with n-gons so if any quaters come at you and start trying to say oh why do you have n-gons and they like collapse of like panic because they see an end gun in the mesh you can sit and chill rest assured your mesh is going to be working just fine it's like magic guys like wow you have a ngon based mesh and it's working fine the quaters don't want to hear it well sometimes they're right i don't want to bash the quaters but i do want to bash them when they're wrong so if anyone tells you you can't use an ngon based mesh and substance or a game asset or whatever depends it depends and in this case it's totally fine all right guys so that's it for this video on modeling and this is what we're going to make tomorrow in the texturing video i think you're going to really enjoy that portion to me it's a bit more fun so i'm pretty excited to present that to you and like i said guys make sure you pick up that design pdf in the top of the description i think it'll be extremely beneficial to you especially tomorrow when we start using this for texturing and balancing colors so there's a link in the top of the description for you to grab that and until tomorrow i'll see you then

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 40,089

Keywords: blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, blender tutorial, blender hard ops, blender box cutter, hardops, boxcutter, blender scifi modeling tutorial, blender beginner tutorial, science fiction, 3d modeling, blender 3d, blender modeling tutorial, blender hard surface, hard surface modeling, blender bros, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blender addon, substance painter, substance painter texturing, texturing, rendering, design, blender design, 3d

Id: 6jSK7TQ2s5w

Length: 53min 22sec (3202 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021