Boxcutter for Beginners! | Simple Exercise (Blender Tutorial)

hey what's up guys in this video we're going to be modeling a really simple handheld sci-fi device using hard ops and box cutter i'm going to show you how to do everything how to use the tool how to model all that good stuff before we get started i'd like to invite you guys to pick up our free sci-fi terminal design mini course it goes into a lot more depth than this video is going to show you and it also uses hard ops and box cutters so the course is free it has a lot of value in there i would definitely recommend picking it up you can get it in the link in the top of the description from our website so let's get started so the first thing i want to do is take the default queue we're going to scale it down a bit so let me press the tilde key and hop into top view i don't know why tilda's not working i'm just going to use 7 on the numpad instead cool so i'm going to go ahead and scale this a bit on the x so maybe like twice the size or something that should be good and then i'll press ctrl a to apply the scale and then what i want to do is scale this a bit on the z and maybe make it like i don't know that size should be fine maybe a little bit taller that could be good now what i want to do is i want to basically control a to apply the scale anytime you scale in object mode you want to make sure you apply it or the bevel might become biased now fortunately with a hard ops when you press q and then bevel it'll actually apply the scale for you which is pretty cool so i'm just going to go ahead and press q and then drop a really small bevel on the edge like that just to kind of pick up the highlights all right now what i want to do is tab into edge mode control r these are just the basic blender modeling tools we're going to go in here and maybe drag a loop cut over here somewhere and then i'm going to take this edge right here and press the g z and move it down a bit and i'm just going to move this edge over a little bit more so alt click on this edge here and then g and then x to move it over a bit more cool so now what i want to do is take this edge right here and then ctrl b to bevel we're going to make like a small little bevel there on the front which is pretty cool and then what i want to do is i want to bevel this chamfer a chamfer is a 45 degree bevel basically so we're going to go ahead and control b scroll up a few times and make like a small little bevel right here and now we have a little bit of a more soft edge right there so pretty cool um what i want to do next is i want to hop into top view with 7 on the numpad and i basically want to like trace out like a little cut in here so i'm going to press some i'm going to press a d to go into this n-gone cutter right here click on that then we're going to click we're going to keep holding left-click you can release it if you want i usually just hold it out of habit i'm going to click and then we're going to go over here then we're going to go over here double click and then just basically cut straight down and then double click again and that'll basically execute the boolean operation now i want to make this a bit bigger so if we want to go back to our cutter what we can do is we can press q ever scroll and you can actually scroll up or down now i only have one cutter in this case you can see down here we only have one boolean so i'm only scrolling to one boolean so i can just click press the g and then x to move it back a bit and then scale it a bit on the z axis maybe and maybe a little bit i don't know something kind of like this could be okay and then i'm going to press shift 2 to hide it and there we go now you're going to see we can't really tell where exactly this um this little angle begins what i'm going to do is i'm going to alt click on this edge right here and then ctrl b to make a really small bevel here to kind of show that definition you can really see the bevel now to kind of separate it which is pretty cool so i have that now what i want to do is maybe um let's go back into our ngon cutter which we're already in and i'm going to hold ctrl because if you click and you try to cut it keeps it straight but if you hold ctrl you can move it around so i want to do something like this then we'll double click and maybe what we could do is cue and then ever scroll and then just kind of rotate this a bit to kind of make you know a bit more definition going on kind of like that and then i'm going to press alt x and then mirror to the other side just like that pretty cool so this current cut in the middle is a little bit too big for my liking so i'm going to press q and then ever scroll and now you're going to see we have two booleans so i can scroll up between both of them and we're going to scroll to this one and then just scale it a bit on the y-axis so we have a bit more of a bigger like separation right here see that cool and now what i want to do is i want to bevel these small edges right here you're going to see if i try to bevel it right now what's going to happen is um it's going to bevel both sides because we have a mirror modifier on this um on this device see that mirror modifier cool so now if i just you know if i just bevel this piece right here on the cutter it's going to end up mirroring to the other side as well so you only have to do one side basically and also if you want to hide your cutter collection quickly you press the shift key plus the number of the collection for the cutters in this case it's the second collection so i'll press shift and then two so pretty cool now we kind of have like a nice surrounded area right here which is exactly what i wanted now what i want to do is i want to apply this boolean right here that we cut so usually what i do is i just click through these and i find out which one is which and then i just go in here and then apply it pretty cool so now what i can do is take this edge right here you're going to see for some reason we have like an extra vertex right here just press ctrl x in vertex mode you can dissolve that out and then if i go back into edge mode i can press ctrl b and make a small little bevel right there which is pretty cool and that'll end up mirroring to the other side because of our mirror modifier makes sense cool so now what i want to do is i want to take the back part we'll tab into edge mode and i want to bevel this edge and this edge but instead of doing an actual bevel i want to make it a chamfer so i'll scroll down and do something kind of like this and then what i could also do is i could bevel the chamfer to make it a bit more interesting so ctrl b scroll up a few times and there we go now we have like a more rounded chamfer at the end so it looks pretty cool so far it's kind of like a little interesting looking device not too much going on yet but don't worry we're going to keep adding more stuff in so now what i want to do is i want to hop into side view so i'm going to press 3 on the numpad maybe one in this case what i want to do is tab um or press the d key and go back into our n-gone cutter okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click i'm going to cut straight across and then maybe kind of cut down like this cut through cut down and then double click to cut all the way through and we can kind of adjust that now you can actually switch between different boolean types if you look at the bottom bar you're going to see we have a bunch of different letters if i press the x key this will run a slice operation which is pretty cool so i'm going to press x and then you can either double click or just press the enter key on your keyboard to lock that in see that cool so you're going to see it's a little bit sharp right here so what i'm gonna do is cue to ever scroll that cutter and then i'm gonna go in here and i'm going to bevel these two edges right here to make it a bit more soft see that pretty cool and then what i could do is maybe come in here and just um do like a little ngon cut kind of like this whoops make sure you have the bottom one selected or it won't cut the right one so i could do something kind of like that kind of have like a little piece in the back there which is pretty cool and what else do i want to do maybe i could apply this slice so this one right here and then tab into edge mode and just bevel this edge right here kind of get something like that awesome so so far so good and i'm kind of liking the shape so far which is exactly what i want i want to make sure the shape looks cool as well okay so let's hop back into our in my case the side view so three on the numpad and i want to make like a little notch here in the top so i'm going to go in and maybe let's do it on the bottom one actually we'll press the d key to go into our box mode we can click and we can drag and then maybe cut up like this and make like two little notches right there by the way you can press the w key to make it a wedge cut which is pretty cool but in this case i'm just going to keep it as a default one you just press the w key a few times again to get back to the normal one and there we go so you're going to see sometimes you get these nasty shading issues i don't know if you can see them but if i go to a mat cap you should be able to see we have some nasty shading errors so make sure that your heart and normals button is turned on there we go and if it still doesn't look good then turn hard to normals off and add a weighted normal modifier and that'll fix it so i'm going to do the same thing for both the bottom and the top i'm going to make sure i have a weighted normal on both of them and make sure that's at the bottom of the stack at all times so that way everything above it is affected by the way to normal okay so i'm just going to go back into studio view here so we can see it and so far so good so now what i want to do is i want to bring a bit more visual interest to the front of the device here and one way you can do that is by adding in concentrations of details in areas that are more important and leaving empty space in areas that are less important so you're going to see the more detail i add in the front the more important it becomes the less detail i add in the back the less important it becomes so that's a pretty easy way to make your visual designs look a bit more appealing right so what i want to do is with the ngon cutter we'll press the d key select it and i want to click here cut to here here and then just kind of like follow it across and then we'll double click and we're going to press the x key to run a slice so now we have something like this and now what i want to do is maybe scale this down just a little bit so i'm going to press um actually what i'm going to do is tab into vertex mode and i'm going to box select these vertices and wireframe and then just move them over a bit and since we have a mirror modifier it'll automatically move these over as well cool so i'm going to go ahead and apply the slice operation tab into edge mode and then bevel this edge right here see that pretty cool and sometimes on top of this i'll even make like a little make it a bit more rounded kind of like that so just kind of bevel that area and now it's a bit more rounded and check this out what i want to do is press forward slash on the numpad to isolate this piece so now i can basically you know i can go here and bevel this edge and then bevel this edge as well and since we have a mirror modifier it's going to go to the other side as well and before i apply that i want to make sure i copy this width so that way i can do the same exact thing to the other piece right here so let me apply the slice all right i'm going to go forward slash on the numpad to isolate the view and i'm going to tab into edge mode and bevel these two right here and we can just paste in that width value so now it should be following along perfectly with the other piece alright so so far so good pretty interesting looking piece i like it um let's see what else we could do maybe i could bevel let's go to the other side because of the mirror maybe i could do like a chamfer right here just kind of see how that looks i could chamfer it and then i could i don't know bevel it so i could take these two edges and then [Music] you know do something like that and then on this piece i could even do like a bigger one kind of like that actually i think i'll leave the other one alone and just do it on that one only because i don't know i just think it looks better awesome looking good so far so let's go back into top view and what i want to do here is go to box cutter with the d key and make like a little cut right here make sure it's on the side with the mirror so this side make a little cut right there then it should mirror over to the other side so looks pretty cool just those little notches right there and as for the back i want to do something to the back so maybe i could go in here and i want to click and cut through but you're going to see based off where you click it'll actually snap if your view aligns turned off here it'll actually snap to the normal orientation and cut in a different direction so if you want to cut straight through and you don't want it to cut weird like this what you want to do is make sure your view align up here is turned on okay and if you turn that on and you cut it's going to only cut based off of your view orientation so you can do something cool like that makes sense cool so uh pretty easy to understand now what i want to do is maybe take the bottom here bevel that just a little bit make a little bit softer now check this out if we go up here to the hard ops menu and go to the star menu and turn on blank material similar to viewport if i press alt m and click on add blank material it'll add a blank material with a certain shade of gray like the viewport has so i could actually do you know this a few times until i find the result that i want and i could maybe you know kind of like separate the colors a bit like that cool and if i haven't mentioned it yet make sure you go up here and turn on your cavity feature it'll make the edges a bit more lit up which is pretty interesting when you're modeling so i like that let's go back into top view and maybe right here what i could do is i could let me see how do i want to do this maybe i could take the box cutter and make a cut like this but i want to align this cut to this edge right here so what i can do is go here to the line box tool and then i can click and drag and i can kind of like cut at different orientations i can hold control and snap it exactly where i want it to go and then i can cut through and now we kind of have something like that awesome so now what i want to do is hop in the top view and i want to go into our box cutter okay now i'm going to click here and then i'm going to drag across and then i'm going to cut down but i want to press the w key to run a wedge cut so i can actually kind of make like a um like an incline type of cut like that and you're gonna kind of see what exactly that does and now we kind of have a result like this which is pretty cool all right now i think would be a good time to add in some sort of handle to the front here okay so what i could actually do is i could do something called cutting the cutter so think about it for a second when you run a boolean operation what the boolean operation does is it removes a piece of your mesh right if i cut like that it removes it now if i cut from the cutter itself it's going to remove part of that cutter which in turn brings back a certain part of the mesh because the cutter would no longer be affecting that area makes sense so with that idea in mind what i can do is press q ever scroll and scroll up until i find this cutter right here and then if i just cut the cutter maybe i'll go into side view here check this out if i cut from it it's going to reveal the old portion based off of where i cut it from so now what i can do the cutter itself is now going to have its own boolean it can be kind of confusing at first but you'll get used to it so now with the boolean on the cutter i can scale it down a bit on the x i can move this forward and we're going to basically have like a handle right here which is pretty cool let me make sure it's you know inside the mesh we'll scale it a bit on the y and we could also turn off the overlays panel to see how exactly this looks doesn't really look grippable right now so let me scale it a bit more on the x-axis to make sure we can actually you know pick up that handle we could do something like this and then maybe we could i don't know round it out so tab into well first of all ctrl a to apply the scale and then tab into edge mode and bevel all four of these edges so control alt left click and then control b so we could basically you know make like a small little rounded area right there just to make it look a bit more interesting and there we go now we have like a soft handle here kind of fused to the mesh which um kind of makes it a bit more visually appealing awesome so now what i want to do is i want to go ahead and apply this boolean right here okay so now that we applied you know this piece we're going to have access to the geometry of this handle in the middle so check this out what i want to do is first of all i want to click this button to turn off the bevel and edit mode so i can see the edges and then what i want to do is control click around by the way this shading looks weird because of our weighted normal modifier you can always turn that off if you want as well but i'm going to control click around select all these edges and then ctrl b to bevel them but you're going to see we kind of get like this nasty overlap right here so what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to press k to run the knife tool click click press enter so we're connecting orthogonally at a perpendicular direction and then maybe i'll come here and this edge is actually okay so i'm just going to leave it and now we can do is try beveling it again so let me press control x to dissolve out this edge and then we can go around here and control click around control b and now we have like a nice fusion to the mesh there pretty cool right makes a little bit more you know visual appeal to the object which is exactly what i want and then maybe we could go to the handle here and make like a little i don't know do something like this in the back of it we could cut through and then maybe press the i key which will run an inset boolean and then you can press the t key to kind of adjust where that inset boolean is placed now these are very tricky to use you can see it's very hard to find that right spot but eventually you'll be able to find it you can kind of get something like that which is pretty cool but you're going to see we kind of have some overlap so let me make the bevel a bit smaller here and let me also adjust the auto smooth angle here to like 30 instead and you can kind of see we have like these sharp things right here if the auto smooth doesn't work then maybe we just need to apply that boolean and then fix it manually so you're going to see the inset boolean causes a lot of grief it's annoying so what you can do is you can just merge these vertices together so take this one you can merge it or just press ctrl x control x control x and control x and since we have a mirror modifier it'll basically do the same thing to the other side and now you're going to see the bevel actually looks okay right here which is awesome so i hope everything is making sense so far i understand these tools can be a little bit intimidating at first but um if you watch a few more of my hard ops videos it will all make sense and also like i said make sure you pick up that terminal course it's free on our website and it uses hard ops and box cutters you can get a bit more practice from that course as well okay so you know if this is still confusing it's normal it is going to take time to get used to but if you're following along okay so far then you're in a really good spot all right so let's go ahead and see what else we could add here you know i could stop the video at this point but you know i want this piece to look cool i want you guys to make something that you're proud of so i want to really show you kind of what i'm doing so maybe what i could do is make like a little notch up here as well just to kind of see how that looks pretty cool and then what i could do maybe is i could let's see i could come to the back here and make like a little notch right here with our box cutter this time i'm going to press the w key to run a wedge cut we'll press the w key again to flip it and now we have like some small little notches there in the back to make it look a bit more interesting and i'm going to press q ever scroll and then move them back over this way a little bit kind of like that so let's stop here for a second and talk about the visual design of this object okay notice how we have a lot of detail concentration here in the front and a lot of empty space here in the back this is powerful because it immediately tells the viewer hey this is where i should be focusing my attention this is the important area this is the less important area makes sense so it's kind of an interesting way to kind of think about things let's see what else could i do here you know what i think i'm going to do is press q ever scroll scroll to this cutter right here and just delete it we'll press the delete key because what i want to do is i want to do something else instead i want to come in here with our box cutter and just run a um let's try running a wedge cut first kind of like that i think it looks a bit softer this way i like that now what i want to do is i want to press q ever scroll and scroll to this cutter because on this cutter i want to take these two edges the top and the bottom and press control b to bevel them and we'll get like a nice little rounded effect there on the back looks a bit better in my opinion and so far so good so i think we'll stop here guys i think we went far enough now like i said we do have a free sci-fi terminal design mini course available on our website it uses hard ops and box cutter and i would recommend picking it up because it goes into a lot more detail in terms of modeling design and presentation it even shows you how to render as well so take a look at that i think you'll enjoy it link is in the top of the description but as for this video hope it helped you out hope it gave you some ideas and got used to the tools and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 2,997

Keywords: blender beginner tutorial, blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, hard surface modeling, blender hard surface, blender 3d, blender 3d modeling, blender beginner, blender hard ops, blender boxcutter, hardops, boxcutter, blender mesh machine, 3d modeling, blender modeling tutorial, blender beginner modeling, blender hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial blender, blender bros, josh gambrell

Id: o-GllMx0inQ

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021