Blender Tutorial: Radial Array (2020 Solution)

what's up guys in this video I'd like to demonstrate a radial array now there are add-ons like hard ops that expedite this process but in my opinion it's just better to have a good understanding of how to do it in vanilla blender so let's just hop right into it say for example I have a cylinder here and a cylinder and usually I like to keep my vertex count at 64 instead of 32 just because it's a lot smoother that way I think 64 is a good number so yeah well turn the vertex count up to 64 and I'll just right click smooth it out and then turn on auto smooth so this is where the radial array is going to come in handy say I want a particular design on the cylinder but I want that same design to go around the cylinder so basically basically a nice symmetry going all the way around right and I'll just demonstrate that here I've prepared a little example I just added a loop cut here and I don't know say I extruded these two faces out right it's something like that and I wanted that same design going all the way around the cylinder well as a beginner a lot of people would you know go and select every other face and if it's a very small vertex count you can usually get away with that but it's annoying having to do that and then extrude it manually it's much easier to use a radial array and have this all done in one go not to mention this design here is destructive and there's no array in here so say I made a specific if I you know did it this way right say I made a change to this area maybe I beveled it that same change will not replicate over to the other designs and we want to be able to do that as well okay so let me undo this it's gonna keep this main design here so the first thing we need to do is some very basic calculations so we're just gonna whip out the calculator so we have a 64 vertex cylinder right here and this is gonna be very basic math everyone should be able to follow along so the cylinder is 360 degrees we have 64 vertices so we're going to take 360 divided that by 64 and that gives us five point six to five in this degree right here is what we would need to increment for each face to get back to the cylinder here and I'll show you what I mean real quick so say I took just a one segment of the cylinder duplicated it and then you know separated it and I'll hide this cylinder real quick so if I arrayed this around and empty and that's part of what this video is gonna discuss if I arrayed this around and empty let me just get everything set up and we'll demonstrate this in just a little bit and I rotate this what did we get in here five point six to five degrees R Z and then five point six to five you're gonna see the edges of map the edges match up perfectly here and you can basically increase the count until it gets back to a regular cylinder now that's basically the same idea behind what we're gonna do with this guy in this design is incredibly important because now if I go into edit mode I only have access to this one face so basically any change I make to this one face gets replicated to all the other ones you can see what's happening and this is super important to allow us to expedite our workflow because we can make changes to one area and it will be replicated around the entire cylinder okay now that our intuition is built let's build upon that just a little bit more so like I said say I want this little extrusion design to go around the entire cylinder so we're gonna take the same principle let's say I don't know every two faces I want to have this extrusion here so basically two empty areas two extrusions two empty areas two extrusions you get the memo so if I want that design obviously we're not gonna be working with one set of faces we're going to be working with multiple sets of faces here so we're gonna be working with more segments of the cylinder so like I said if I want this design to go every two phases then I also need to select this area and selected this area as well now we're not going to actually select the two empty ones we're gonna stop here because if you think about it if we're a reign it's gonna end at this edge and then it's gonna start again from the beginning so it's gonna have this face and then start again with another empty face so if we were to select this area we'd end up getting more like three empty faces instead of two if that makes sense so this is the only area we're gonna actually select here and this is where it gets a little bit tricky because now we have to calculate a different degree threshold here so instead of the original five point six to five that we calculated which is based off of every single face now we have four faces selected so we're going to need to multiply this by four right so now we have 22 point five so now we're gonna have a new angle increment so what I'm gonna actually do is duplicate this right click to leave it in place press the P key and then separate it so now if we go in the object mode we have a separate piece and then we can just go ahead and delete out our main cylinder and we just have this segment here so now like we did before we need to add an empty into the scene an empty plane axis is fine and then we're gonna go to this segment here we're gonna add an array modifier now currently by default the array just does a relative offset which just goes in one static direction we don't want that we want to turn off the relative offset and instead turn off object offset and our object offset is going to be our empty here so now the array is based off of this guy you can see whenever I move it the array kind of goes with it or if I rotate it the array goes with that in this case we only care about the z-axis rotation to get this effect so the degree we just got here was twenty two point five so basically we're just going to press our Z and then twenty two point five and you can see exactly what that does it terminates at this edge and then start to gain from the beginning at that same point and just like we did in that basic example we're just going to increase the count until it basically connects up here so now if we want to make changes to this general design but have it repeat we have that ability because if we go into edit mode and say I've Evald this for example it does it to every single area on here so it's super super powerful one issue of this though is that even though this thing is smoothed out we have these very visible seams these edges are showing up which is not what we want um and if we apply the array modifier you'll see exactly why that's happening if we tab into edit mode you're gonna see that every single connection point of the array we have duplicate vertices so it's not going to smooth those out because these are overlapping so what we actually want to do I'm just gonna bring the array modifier back and undo this but we actually want to do is also add on a weld modifier now for all you new blender users consider yourself blessed because back in the old days when I did this we didn't have the weld modifier so we were basically forced to apply everything and do it manually and we would have to go destructive in it and it sucked but now we have this thing called the weld modifier which is basically a non-destructive way of using vertices together it's basically the non-destructive merge by distance so if we add the weld modifier watch what happens cleans everything up perfectly and now if I were to apply you know the array in the weld you're gonna see we no longer have these overlapping vertices so after you do this it's always very important for you to add a weld modifier to clean up those visible scenes and that's basically all you do you can apply this to any amount of vertices to any size to any increments you want your design to go through it's just a little bit of adjusting in the calculations but the intuition still remains the same now what you are gonna notice is that we have no cap on here so you know you could apply the array and fill that in if you were completely finished with your design but I don't like going destructive if I can avoid it so instead what I usually do is I simply select these top edges I press E right click and then just scale them and we're gonna scale towards the 3d cursor so if we go up here and choose 3d cursor it scales into that it's gonna scale downwards as well so if we press shift-z it'll retain it on this area so yeah we'll just scale that to a value of 0 merge that right in the middle and we're not gonna have to worry about all of these vertices merging together here because the weld modifier will actually take care of that in addition you can see if we applied all of that it's still one vertex so yeah that's how you can cap it and onto struck we can do the same thing to the bottom as well go in here select these edges make sure we're set to the 3d cursor it's the pivot point e to extrude shift Z to constrain it to the flat surface and then type in 0 now I don't know what just happened there but yeah shift Z and then 0 and there you go you've capped it non-destructively and you're pretty much good to go so that's it for the video I hope this kind of expanded on the more general philosophy behind this and gave you some more insight to the radial array until next time I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 52,396

Rating: 4.929903 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, 2.83, 2.9, radial, array, tutoria, non, destructive, circular, cylinder, around, object, workflow, hard, surface, 3d, modeling, josh, gambrell, modifier, stack, weld

Id: HhYom1n0qZs

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020