Blender Tutorial | Lofting Shapes

[Applause] [Music] maybe we might have the general idea of the outline of our shape that we need to create but we don't know what options we've got to get that done cleanly it's actually pretty simple to do in blender but there are a few things we need to keep in mind for example first of all we need to make sure that all of our shapes are in the same object so for example here i have these two circles and this little diamond in the middle but they are all one object you can create them separately but we're going to need to make sure they're all joined to be able to do this operation and what we're going to do here is just go ctrl e and then bridge edge loops and it's really just as simple as that now notice that blender does give it a really good go of reducing the poly count so for example here we had 16 edges on each of these and only four in the middle as we can see there now that's not really that ideal so i'm going to undo that but notice that blender does do this fairly intelligently as well so for example if we just move our shapes around so i'm going to take this one and this time i'm going to move this actually let's go alt z make sure i get all of those and then i'm going to move that there i'm going to rotate these and then rotate that so i've switched the order around so let's see if just by selecting everything with a it can figure out in what order to loop from one shape to the other and blender should be able to do this so control e and bridge edge loops and it's done it again perfectly fine we do have other options here for example we can change the number of cuts but notice for the area where it's trying to drastically reduce down from 16 to four it's really just sort of slicing across it's not really keeping very nice geometry so if i was to right click and shade this smooth we can still see that it's kind of having a little bit trouble there especially here and if we go ctrl 2 to take a look with our subdivision surface modifier at two levels that's not really going away that's just getting enhanced more than ever so the other thing that we have to bear in mind as we do this is that we need to make sure that the shapes that we're lofting through have the same amount of vertices which is what i've set up on this basically each of these shapes has 16 sides i'm just going to select them all ctrl e to bring up our edges menu and then bridge edge loops and then from there that looks a lot cleaner let's right click shade smooth ctrl 2 to drop in our subdivision surface modifier maybe at three levels this time and this looks a lot more neat a lot cleaner from there of course we can take this shape maybe and ctrl b and bevel it to tighten up that central shape but really just depends on the kind of style the kind of look that we're going for here i've got those same shapes again and what i'll do is just go ctrl e and do that bridge edge loops again but this time let's take up the number of cuts and we might say well so what we could just go ctrl r after we're done here but what we've got in this tool is we can change things from linear to one of these more curving options so we can try the blend surface for example and now we have this smoothing option or we could try our blend path and i just tend to try both of these with different smoothing amounts just to see what i like and personally i kind of quite like that interpolation so i'm going to just tab out of that tool shade it smooth ctrl 2 and then we can turn off the wireframe and everything just to get a nice clean look at that i think that's looking pretty good let's try tackling a more practical and more complicated example so here we've got our general shapes that we know we want to transition through we're going to go from here into the here and we're really going to up the complexity by going from one shape into two the first step would be to just join everything together which is what i've got here i'm just going to turn off the subdivision surface modifier for a moment though and what i've done is i've prepared the geometry by just matching up the number of edges along our curved areas with similar edges on the flat areas so on here for example we only had 14 edges to work with and on here we needed to be able to go into 32 so i've added some extra edges along the top to make this loop have the same amount of edges which is 32 so we're going to go from 32 into 32 and then from 32 we're going to need to go to 32 again so extra edges were added to help work with that just before we tackled this more simple cylindrical object i've created another example just off to the side which is this still fairly simple example but i've just stretched it out in the middle a little bit more of a capsule shape and i just wanted to quickly discuss how we might go about this kind of shape and we'll discuss another option with the more typical cylinder which is probably easier and faster but with this kind of shape what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to stretch this out a little bit and then i'm going to duplicate it and let's just come and find this actually let's call this capsule one and the other one we're going to name what could it possibly be capsule two let's tap into edit mode on it and all i'm going to do is just shift the end vertices just off to the side slightly and then we're going to join these together we're not going to just join them with control j we're going to go full on union boolean style so let's turn off these subdivision surface modifiers on both of them just to keep things simple and then i'm going to make use of the boolean add-on bool tool so make sure that's enabled if you want to follow along with this bit and i'm going to select them both and go control plus on the numpad and that automatically creates what we need for our boolean so with that done i'm going to apply it and if we move it off to the side we can see what's happened there it's changed our other object capsule 2 into just a wireframe display i'm going to move that out of the way though into my temporary collection if we really mess this up then at least we can get it back from the dead in our temp collection so from here this is done but there's a lot of work that needs cleaning up in there a lot of these faces we didn't really want it's not too much of a problem to clean this up though i'm just going to press n to open our sidebar and come down to the 3d print tab and we're going to need our 3d print toolbox add-on enabled as well for this so with this object what i'm going to do is check all and we'll find that there's a few problems so we've got a whole load of non-manifold edges the ones at the very ends here are perfectly fine but we don't really want these on the inside a good place to start is probably with these intersect faces and that's going to select a lot of what we want to get rid of so i'm going to press c to enter into our circle paint selection tool and i'm going to middle click around the load of this because i don't mind this these are pretty much fine and let's check the rest and that's probably where we want to x and delete so that's gotten rid of a lot of the problems there's still some issues that we might want to just quickly come in and correct x to delete that i'm going to select everything and go m to bring up our merge by distance and that's helped clean it up even further this edge coming down here we don't want so i'm going to in fact it's actually two edges so i'm going to x and dissolve those down here appears to be a little bit of a problem we've lost the face here so i'm going to press f to create that and this clearly looks like some strange shading so i'm going to go x and delete this face and i'll start again with this bit f to fill that then i'll go ctrl r to add in an edge loop here and then let's just join those up let's go slash on the numpad to isolate this and then we're almost there so i'm going to select these two and press j to join those and then let's check all again and i'm liking the look of all these zeros from here we don't need that tool anymore i'm going to come out of isolation with slash on the numpad and then what we can just do is select both of these join them together with ctrl j let's put the subdivision surface modifier that the other object had back on and then i'm going to select both of these control e bridge the edge loops let's turn off the modifier just so that we can see that and you can see by all this triangulation that i've forgotten to make sure that the end of this has the same amount of edges so this one has 32 and this side had 34 so i'm going to need another two edges on this side so let's just select both of these and go ctrl b and where there was one there is now two so that should now be 34 so i can select both of these ctrl e and bridge loops that's looking a lot better i'm going to create some extra cuts something around two or three usually helps us to see what's going on with our curving the smoothness of this and we can see that that's not looking very good so i'm going to try blend surface and take the amount down i'm not too concerned with this because we're asking quite a lot with this very short distance that we've got i think in all reality we would probably push that back but i'm liking the majority of that now what i'll do is come over to this side this amount of edges is 34 and down here is 32 so we need to do the same kind of idea on these just gonna give these an extra two edges each so i'm just going to bevel those that should now be 34 which we can go ctrl e and bridge edge loops increase the number of cuts to say four and i'm liking the general shape of that so i'm going to repeat that again i'm just going to round that off just in case i need to remember it so ctrl e bridge edge loops and then we need to set the number of cuts again to four but it's remembered our smoothness and let's take a look with the modifier on shift alt z to turn off all the gadgetry the on-screen widget tree and i think that's looking pretty good all right so what i'd like to do is come back to this more simple version and really the only thing that i wanted to discuss on this is the fact that we have another add-on that can help us with this so if i just come over to preferences with f4 and we want to filter by just showing our add mesh options and we're going to add some extra objects so i'm just going to enable that and now when we go to use shift a and go to mesh we'll notice a whole load of extra stuff going on down here and what i want is the pipe joints now going from one cylinder into two is basically just the same as a pipe joint a y pipe joint like this and we've got lots of options here so we can change exactly what we need in fact i'm just going to come to this area and just double check again so we had 32 edges and we can come to this and we can right click and change the y joint and get our presets back up so we have our 32 divisions i'm not sure exactly what the radius is we need but i'll set that up in a moment and the angle for both of these i think i'd like to keep them quite straight in fact one of them is almost right in front of the other so that means that one of these angles should probably be zero and this one should come off just a little bit like that and that's all there is to it from there i'm going to take this and move it into position rx90 z90 minus 90 that is scale that down until it sort of more or less fits and that's good to go so i'm going to tap into edit mode on this one l to select this piece and just extra delete it because we have this piece instead now i'm going to tab into edit mode on there now i want to bring all that in a little bit further like this and on the ends here i'm going to take these loops and double tap g to slide and i don't want them to be taking the shape of the inner join so i'm going to press e for even and then f to flip that i'm going to just bring them in just a slight bit closer there so double tap g e f to flip and then just bring them in then i'm going to join them with these ctrl j right click to make sure that's smooth come over to here take this loop and this loop ctrl e to bridge the edge loops give it about three and come over to here and here ctrl e bridge edge loops give that about four cuts and the same on this one to finish up ctrl e bridge edge loops for cuts let's take a look turn our subdivision modifier back on shift alt z to get a nice clear look at this and there's no real artifacts there let's join that all pretty nicely if we wanted to we could actually come through and add any additional edges just to tighten it up or we could slide things around but that's just a personal choice

Channel: Aidy Burrows 3D

Views: 102,459

Keywords: blender, 3d, cg, tutorials, gamedev, aidy, burrows, creative shrimp, 2.8, lofting, loft, bridge, hard surface, hell, modeling

Id: M4F6Q6h2-ao

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020