Blender - Subdivision Modeling

in this video we're going to do a little bit of subdivision surface modeling i'm going to go over the basics on how to get started with it and talk about some of the technical aspects of it we're not going to be working on like say an entire project using this method but i'm going to just get you kind of familiar anyways so let's just get started default cube here uh you got a little modifier panel here it's a little tool and we're gonna go down to subdivision surface boom just like that you can apply that super quick press x you can delete those um there's another way to apply it you can hit control and then one through six i think one through five so control and five while your object selected will automatically apply it and bump the levels of the viewport up to five so if you hit control one it'll be one control two it'll be two you can see how that works right but you can always change these just by clicking on it it's not a big deal don't forget your render if you're going to render this object you want it to be probably what you see in the viewport or higher so you can always change it higher if you need to um and then just work with a lower poly mesh and basically what's going on here is it's taking that cube and it's applying a mathematical algorithm to it to smooth it all down um just like the cube here or the it's a sphere now all right kind of go into edit mode hit tab key go to edit mode you'll see here we have the cube we also have the mesh inside of it basically this is your mesh that you originally model is going to be your control cage the mesh that's generated is placed kind of inside of that mesh generally speaking it can go outside sometimes but um nonetheless your low poly mesh controls everything it's it's called a cage it's called a um let's see if i remember here correctly yeah it's just called a cage all right and um so let's play with this modifier if we click this little icon it's going to do end results and so now we can actually see the cage onto the model here we can actually select it as such too so if i just hit two and select edges you'll see i can actually select those pieces and i can do something like bevel this so ctrl b bevel it you can see how it takes effect now modeling like this seems like a good idea but a lot of times it will actually mess you up because you'll have things you're making adjustments to and then when you look at your cage again later on you'll see that the cage is actually really really messed up looking and it's not doesn't make a lot of sense it's hard to select things and whatnot so i don't recommend working with this on but turn it on and off if you need to for certain situations but normally what i would do in edit mode here turn this one off okay this button is going to give you just a cage all right so you can work on just this base mesh model and when you go back to object mode now the subdivision still applies you can turn it on and off in the viewport with this one and that works with um whether that cage is on or off that works with this one as well so keep that in mind and then you can turn it on and off in the render it's very simple and so i'm gonna press alt z here turn it off in edit mode select a couple of these faces i just want to show you kind of how this algorithm behaves and you'll see that just two planes or uh these sections of this box are cuber anyways kind of two planes connected together in a 90 degree angle you'll see it creates like a pringle shape almost and this is fine but it's smoothing between vertices basically and so that's kind of the result you get if you have like a loop cut so ctrl r add a loop cut right click right and now you'll see that what you end up with is kind of the same deal here but if i was to move this down you get a lot more of that pringle look going on right and so the idea behind using this method of modeling is that you can adjust your resolution or your model up or down as needed so you can make everything as simple as possible and the closer it is to the camera you can just increase the render amount here because you got to remember these are key frameable so i don't know if that's a word but you could keyframe these so you can adjust this as you animate and so as your camera might get closer you can use it like a semi lod system if you would like a and um you know as you as you get closer to an object maybe you want to do an extreme close-up you can have super smooth geometry still and then if you're further away when you're rendering an object you don't need all that mesh you can bump it down to what works right so something like this would be a lot nicer even further away you could just bump it down to nothing you know depending how far away it is and so that's that's kind of the general purpose behind it and this is extremely useful for when you're doing like baking on low poly models for games because you can get all that nice normal data all this all these faces the smoothing and everything onto your normal map but nonetheless so there's a couple different ways you can control the shapes that you're going to create if you were to add loop cuts a lot of people call these like control loops or whatever the case you can see you can kind of strengthen up that corner section and matter of fact if you press g twice you can slide an edge you can push these right up to the edge here and you can end up with a result like that which looks nice at first glance but there's this little button optimal display what we're looking at is the end result here kind of applied to the the low poly cage applied to the end result so if we turn off optimal display you'll see this is real dense right here now okay so keep in mind this kind of stuff can happen and occur while you're doing um subdivision modeling so if i was to just add a couple loop cuts up here what you'll see and down there what you'll see is that um when you do that it's still pretty thick in there but it kind of alleviates it a little bit just a tiny little bit and those additional loops just do that i don't know exactly why but they do but there's other ways to work so just take this into consideration um in blender there's something called creasing edges so if you press n let's see there's a mean crease here let me increase value this works but there's a caveat to it i'll explain that in a second so this is your shape right now and if you were to apply a crease to it you can press shift and e to start creasing uh you can hold ctrl to snap it to different values and say 0.8 here you can see how it holds that corner kind of like the way we wanted it to but when we look at the wireframe of it the faces behave much more predictably here they're not um they're not as bunched up so they're not kind of crammed into that corner the caveat is even though this is a nicer result usually and kind of generally speaking if you're working in just blender that's fine but if you're going from blender to maya to whatever else you might be using max or this can be problematic because sometimes you might have a hard time transferring over your crease values to the other software not always the case but this is why a lot of people recommend not actually using this and instead just zero it out go back come back all right just zero it out and um they'll actually use the control loops instead in this way no matter where this model goes you always know what that edge will end up looking like and you won't have any problems with it okay so if you ever seen people working um and and they say you know add loop cuts here or add control edges this is what they're doing um you can use the crease tool as well in conjunction with that you can actually use both methods together it can be quite useful so you can get even sharper edges with uh less values and stuff so this does work and it works nice you can always shade things smooth voila there you go now another trick here i want to talk about real quick we're going to just um just going to press shift a and create a plane to kind of demonstrate this there's a couple of faces you need to keep in mind there's um i'm just going to modify these real quick and that is that fact that um this type of topology or this type of modeling method anyways you really want to use um we're going to turn the effect off just for a moment you really want to use quads four points four edges on everything as much as possible if you can't get away with it you can use n-gons and triangles if the end result comes out looking the way you want it to and it doesn't mess up your mesh or anything like that but there's caveats to it i'm going to demonstrate it on the model in a second but um keep in mind in gone five or more vertices and edges per face right triangle is three that these ones you want to avoid if you can and in certain situations you might end up using them but generally speaking um subdivision doesn't like them very much i'll just keep it at that if you're using this shape on some surface that's really flat generally you won't have too big of a problem but that's not always the case so i'm going to add some loop cuts here and one other thing subdivision really likes using plantar faces and what i mean by planter is if you pull up one vertex here on this end gun you'll see that it cuts a hard kind of edge right here and that's because everything is triangulated so every mesh that you ever work with in well most meshes you work with in blender you're gonna end up having triangulated faces and so they do some things like this just automatically and it could be kind of hard to control guns and and um even quads you can get these little triangle cuts kind of hidden away and you can't control them all that well you have to make an actual cut to kind of fix it or whatever and uh so be careful with that you want to use what's called plantar faces because you notice this i can't bring it up and make it planter right um if i brought two sides up we're still gonna get a bad result but if this shape was like this this is still technically planar because it's all flat so there's a couple ways you can keep things flat you'll see even the quad does it right there's a couple automated tools so select smash cleanup um make planner faces boom you'll see that it actually makes it planner okay so it's completely flat that's what plantar faces means all right so we can get rid of these real quick that's just one way you can do it there's also if you go to loop edit preferences add-ons look for loop tools check mark it enable it there's also flatten here which generally will make a um a planter face as well you play with that tool a little bit so if i select all of these just control and shift select all of them go to flatten boom just like that you can see flattens them out whereas this one up here clean up make planner um doesn't always kind of get it just right you know because they aren't already all planner right but sometimes it'll actually skew things as well because it can't make every face planner if they're not implanted to begin with so it's one of those weird things but um i hotkey that so you can see i got hard ops installed now um but i still have my quick favorites so make planner faces boom you know just click away under the mouse still more conveniently coming up here every time in my opinion so keep that in mind and um all right so let's go ahead and create some errors i'm gonna turn on auto merge i'm gonna add a couple more loop cuts all right so i'm gonna auto merge this section right up in there so we have this vertice with all these this vertex here with all these different edges coming out of it and we're going to apply this the subdivision surface again notice this is a flat surface right so even though there's there's triangles here followed by these quads um it's a flat surface so you don't see any real major difference on our edge here it doesn't really affect it and um so all we got to do is take a look at the wireframe and you can see how your mesh is behaving and this is just simply under here if you didn't watch my introduction video uh wireframe i hop map that to a shortcut or hotkey or something um but that pole right in the middle that's what that's called a pull you'll see that it actually kind of stretches out away from that a little bit and then you get these little uh pinching points and that's because those are created by the triangle more or less so that's kind of what's going on there so that this isn't a bad example until you start doing it on edges and things like that you can start to see how these poles might be able to get into the way um let's create a set like a triangle there and so this is going to kind of create a denser piece of the mesh there's a pole right here and when we look at this edge now it becomes imperfect just a tiny little bit it's not too bad actually but you can you can kind of geek things up and mess them up real quick and start creating these little poles in these little dense spots like this so you have to be real methodical in how you're going to lay out your mesh and what you're going to do with it and i am doing these tutorials live so this is a recording that i'm doing if you're watching live and also if you're watching this as a pre-recording there's people asking me questions right now so basically uh the question came in how easy you say learning blender is i'd say it's really easy and actually subdivision modeling is probably one of the most challenging things i think you can do in 3d software like animation and stuff can be tedious to learn but just learning how to work with these kinds of faces and stuff so i just i'm using a knife tool right now pressing k hitting it with the knife tool um but it just depends on how much time and patience you have to learn this kind of stuff it's not challenging otherwise as long as you got good tutorials and stuff to watch it's no problem so we got i want to try to create a real bad error here let's just try dissolving all these edges that should work okay so this n-gon's creating them what looks like a pull right in the center followed by these pinching points over here let's move this one out a little press g twice you can slide to single vertex okay and so n-gons obviously won't let you run a loop through them i think blender tried to just fix this they might have they might have done it they might have not but they were supposed to make something like that anyways nonetheless let's see what we got now see how bad we geeked it up okay these shapes can become real problematic on bins that's why i keep trying to go for the bin something like this perhaps you can see it just it does not look good at all right you start adding some other things like insets and extrusions in you get some weird results like there's no control to this almost because of those those shapes n-gons and triangles tend to do this kind of thing they're not careful you can't always fix things so keep that in mind knife tool press k i hit e so i can keep cutting usually you see here okay and then e if i need to spacebar to finish it out and now you know i move things around and kind of make sure everything is squared up right no triangles or anything and you'll see here this shape um just with those couple minor fixes all quads now behaves a lot more predictably and so let's do end result here i'll select this loop by hitting alt and left clicking now if i press shift e add a crease to it you can see i can sharpen it up too so this is actually pretty nice because otherwise you'd have to add a another a loop here kind of sharpen it all up for you my auto mergers just do that yeah i think auto merge might have just collapsed it so you can do this all over though control loops and then by pressing i you can do insets sometimes you get away with that sometimes it won't control and then the minus sign on your number pad press e oop let's do i let's do an inset press e now so you can start making some pretty cool shapes real quick uh when you do a loop cut press e sometimes you can do what's called an even loop cut so it stays a little bit more flat sometimes otherwise you got to just kind of scale it on y and then hit zero you can do something like that make a a loop cut put one in the center you can drag it down you can start seeing how this all comes together starts to take effect anyways i'm just trying to try to expose you to the uh the basic ideas here of subdivision modeling playing with shapes and hard surfaces is probably one of the most challenging things you can add loop cuts to get certain edges a little sharper if you need to that looks a little bit better in my opinion actually oh no no no no i hit the wrong key i just want this to be a little softer then maybe right here i select all this and i bevel it you'll see that end result mouse wheel up once it's gets a little bit tedious to work with because your shapes are so small it's hard to tell what's going on sometimes so this whole section i wanted to just push it like inwards and i can't do that with that by the way i need to select that whole loop all e extrude faces along normal push it all in now if i wanted i could add a loop cut in the middle select the two edges and dissolve them that's kind of a little cheat there that kind of a shape and remember game models if you are going to do game models you want to try to leave the edges a little overly soft because your normal maps will pick it up better than if you were to use um like real crisp sharp edges so it tends to work out all right some weird situations like this if i was to crease this edge um you'll notice that i get artifacts in these corners um that's possible because it's just it's trying to smooth from here to there right and then all the way back around and then when you crease this this face here still tries to smooth so a lot of times you got to crease those edges as well um that might be something you need to do personally i would bevel this down here gives it a little bit more control or you can add a loop cut place it right up there you'll see how that crease sharpens up that corner at the bottom now these ones in order to make these sharp it would be a little bit challenging because if you let's say you just press shift e and you start creating a crease you'll see that it kind of behaves weird even if you select more of that it behaves a little bit better but then it starts digging into the other side you gotta cut things up a little bit more and you can still see it's causing problems so um sometimes you just have to do it gotta add another loop sometimes it's gonna change your model uh geometry personally what i like to do is work a basic shape into something like so and then subdivide it maybe once or twice i'll duplicate the whole object height one just press h to hide it so we got two and now apply the subdivision this is destructive workflow by the way so uh we'll do it twice all right this gives me a little bit more control here on this mesh now so if i was to go back and do subdivision surface bump it up turn off the end result there i could shift things like this around if needed using a proportional editing and stuff like that and be a little bit more precise with it that might be a little too much that second a second subdivision there a little too much all right i might pull that corner a little let's see how it looks if i subdivide it now not quite as sharp as i want pull it in a little so you can manually edit things like this later some guys really don't like working like this because there's a lot of stuff to look at personally doesn't bother me and i would i'd probably move those on their normals by the way i wouldn't probably just kind of free eyeball it like that but i can't crease those manually just by moving topology around say like this rises too much here you can work with isolated selections as well so i only want to work with this area press um shift h i can hide everything else and i can see only this right here so i don't have to modify mesh that i don't want to press alt h unhides it you'll see this doesn't change at all only this side sometimes you're running this situation as well where like you're working on your model and you start doing one side and forget the other so using mirrors of course is very powerful so you can turn a mirror modifier on and what it's doing is it's doubling up the uh the mesh right now basically you have to bisect it that's going to cut it in half and right now it's cut in half right here where i don't really want it to so personally what i like to do is i like to cut off excess so i'll press alt z so i can select all the way through select all these vertices press x and delete vertices oh maybe i didn't have all z on i didn't all right and um something closer to that not not necessary that you have to do this but i prefer it okay so it is by second but it's basically killing itself off you got to flip it keep that in mind as well and some of these extra faces here we can clean up delete those oop here let's do this select this edge alt left click alt and left click s x zero all right the only problem with doing this is sometimes you might get this um this kind of little pointy edge going it does happen unfortunately you can try to move things around a little bit and then put the subdivision below it the subdivision um or the mirror above the subdivision kind of clean it up now this also lets you do something really cool which is let's say you grab these faces if you were to press i into an inset you're used to this or i twice you can do that right but now you can do border selection so you do i hit b and it will keep that border there so you can push things in remove middle sections if you need to do a lot of quick edits real quick so uh let's try it let's try rotating this a little nah i don't like that it's really only this face i don't like or this vertex so when you get into this to your part of your model where you start just moving every individual vertices around um it's called pushing and pulling or at least is what everybody used to call it pushing and pulling uh hertz or polly's and um it's still an effective means of getting a job done and keeping your models as clean as possible can help still so even though we did subdivide this quite a bit we can always uh select loops and just put an x on it keep using that modifier by accident dissolve those edges do some things like that all right so we can bump up the subdivision amount there we go subdivision modeling in a nutshell one more little ex uh kind of example here we're gonna create a cube and i'm gonna explain this one because um originally one of the original articles by pixar talking about how to use open subdivision they were kind of showing props from toy story i think it was something like that and they use creasing i believe a lot because they only care about their in-house stuff i think for the most part so but something like this you press i do an insect control e you can do bridge edge loops create a cut in it now you can do a subdivision surface you can see you can create like chain links super fast things like that but also you can do all kinds of shapes and i'm going to use loop tools for this loop tool circle let's do a circle here as well circle you can see that even though this is weird it's going up like that still subdivides mostly okay it's just the nature of the beast sometimes you can make some really weird looking models i would not recommend doing that though personally i think it means something's wrong with it you're better off cleaning it up and getting your geometry right but it's not saying you can't use it you certainly could if you wanted so i'm going to select these edges on the outside press shift e create a crease to 0.8 all right pump up the subdivision amount a little bit so that original paper that i was talking about is they were kind of demonstrating playground equipment and they were really simple models so maybe like this is like a hamster wheel or hamster house or something and that's like where the tube would connect you can do things like this so i just copied that edge i'm going to press p separate the selection i can grab it go back into edit mode so i got to go to object mode then edit mode i press e and then s and scale it out grab the faces here press e i'm going to extrude them out on y so i hit e and then y just like so see it's behaving badly um i'm going to select it i'll press m and merge by distance see what happens oh i got creased edges i'm sorry that's why turn those off oh maybe not what we got what we got going on huh what's up forward slash question mark there we got a back face just delete that sometimes you can get away with deleting back faces you select all of it make sure this is at zero merge by distance kind of a rare kind of thing going on here something going on here and um i believe mesh has one of these you can select let's do select let's deselect everything first let's do select um [Music] interior faces see if anything's inside of it nothing huh all right something going on here i'm not sure what oh the normals might be backwards here uh go up here backface calling there you go look these normals are backwards so that's back face colon right it's going to show you which way the normals are facing basically making them clear if it's the back side i'm going to select it all press alt n and recalculate outside so now they're all facing outwards only took a minute to figure out usually it's best to turn that off by default you'll never question it if you do but so you can make like plumbing and stuff here on the outside if needed all e extrude faces along normals you'll see here it's kind of like that little rings section this is a good time to use creasing if you wanted so i'm going to hit it to 0.5 makes it a little sharper she had it smooth shade smooth the downside of working this way is look how many extra polygons you get throughout your model so sometimes if you don't really need the fidelity of us of the subdivision model um you don't have to use it and it might be quicker or easier to do it other ways that's a topic for a whole nother video so i'm going to leave it here and i hope you enjoyed watching i'll check out the next one all right

Channel: PzThree

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Keywords: tutorial, how, to, guide, easy, fast, quick, explination, blender, 2.8, 2.9, 2.92, 2.91, 3d, modeling, game, development, dev, concept, art, design, visual, use, tools, what, does, where, pz3, graphics, beginners, indepth, advanced, best, practice, 2.93, simple, basic, artist, uv, mapping, unreal, unity, engine, addons, review, pzthree, 3.0, effects, learn, detailed, pro, advice, studio, lighting, materials, normals, maps, substance, painter, designer, mesh, for, sale, lazy, face, vertex, color, modifier, decal, baking, cycles, eevee, baker, environment, hard, surface

Id: GEpuDY6iMq0

Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021