BOXCUTTER Tutorial for Blender!

what's up guys in this video we're going to make a very simple piece like this using box cutter and hard ops and one other add-on called cable rater which is optional you definitely don't need it so this is um you know really simple it's going to be just an exercise in modeling and a bunch of different techniques you can employ using these add-ons and as always i have all the add-ons linked in the description if you want to grab those and before the video starts i just want to quickly promo our patreon of course so every single month you'll get exclusive tutorials art critique videos and even hard surface decals so for january you're going to learn how to make this sci-fi gun here modeling rendering and post-processing and if you sign up for december you'll also have access to this sci-fi door render and a few other tutorials that you might be interested in so um first thing we're going to do is let me hop to a new scene real quick so we'll just um new scene there we go and i think i got another blender file open let me close that okay so right off the bat what i like to do is get these nice little like edge indentations going on like a cavity a lot of people ask me this question i get it like at least once a week so we're gonna do is go up here i always turn on cavity and shadow for obvious reasons it just looks better you can do with or without shadow i don't really use shadow all the time but you can definitely use it so let me also turn on screencast keys so you can see what i'm pressing it always resets the position so let's pull it over here okay there we go all right so first thing i want to do with this piece is basically get the dimensions going right get the sizing get the bevels get all the usual stuff that you're going to need for the model itself so what we'll do is just move this guy up and we're going to scale it to um i don't know like 0.7.8 maybe 0.9 i don't remember what i did before it was something pretty skinny we could probably do like point eight five yeah let's do 0.85 okay so the first thing i want to do is basically get a nice bevel around the top and around the bottom and also we need to scale this on the y we'll just kind of do this one arbitrarily so i want to first tab into edge mode we're going to select these two edges and then we're also going to actually what are these separately so ctrl b and if you have like a skewed bevel make sure you press ctrl a to apply your scale and then we're just going to go in here control b and give it like i don't know eight to ten segments and then if we press the c key that's actually going to stop the overlapping problem so we'll do that and since these merged right at the top here we're going to have a duplicate set of edges so we can actually remove those by selecting everything m and then merge by distance so now we have this little area here on the front let's also press q and run a sharpen to clean that up then we're going to go to the bottom and bevel this bottom edge right here we don't need to give it like a massive bevel or anything just enough to kind of you know get the dimensions down pretty good and whenever you bevel an edge that has a sharp on it it's going to actually carry over to the bevel so the sharps going to end here and here so if you don't want that you can just get rid of it you can kind of see there's like a clear line right there so you can just go in here and simply select them both q and then on mark those with the mark tool and now those lines should go away okay great now i want to run a nice little champ chamfer around the front here so what we're going to do is simply just control click all the way around and we're going to press ctrl b scroll down and just give it a one segment little chamfer going on to make it look nice and clean i always love adding chamfers i think it gives like a nice sci-fi type of effect to it and just it's more defined really you can make it as big or small as you want i'm actually pretty happy with where that one is i think the original one the chamfer was a bit bigger but i kind of like how robust it looks so next thing we're going to do is make the little area up here in the top left so what i want to do is make sure we're in the n-gone cutter by pressing the d key and going into n-gone and then we're just going to simply hold ctrl and i'm just trying to see exactly how i cut this out i think i just kind of did like an arbitrary type of cut like this click click again and then we're going to press the tab key and just run a bevel we can actually pull this little blue icon to run a bevel we're going to pull it all the way through and we'll press the i key to run an inset type of bevel right here and this should probably be more than enough i don't think i use that much so yeah that looks good we'll press the enter key to lock that in and you're going to see it didn't really pick up the shading quite well over here so we could either go to sharpen again and adjust the auto smooth or simply adjust the auto smooth in this panel over here give it like 30 degrees or something by default sharpen sets it to 60. i think there's a setting in the preferences somewhere i just haven't bothered turning it on yet yeah so 30 degree auto smooth is like the default you should probably use in most cases but hard off sets it to 60. so we're going to do is run another little cut over here it's not going to be like super steep but i want it to be kind of like that and that should probably get the job done might be a bit too steep though let me see if i can get like a better angle going on like that yeah i think we can get away with that one and then i want to go ahead and do that little piping type of setup so what we're going to do is ctrl 3 to go to the back which in this case is the left view but whatever a 1 3 or 7 on the numpad and you can press ctrl to flip the views okay so i want to add in like a little hole right here so what we're going to do is go to our circle cutter with the d key ctrl d and we're going to make the vertex count like 64 so it's nice and smooth and then if we were to cut right now it's going to actually cut like on the surface i don't want that i want to cut like straight into the view because it's slanted right so it's just going to be like straight in so we're just going to turn on that button right there and what we can actually do just come in here and just cut through don't have to go too far and then we could probably try our best to make it nice and even mirror will take care of that but just trying to get it nice and consistent at first all right cool so the next thing i want to do is add in like a little connecting point so i can run a pipe from right here down to here so i'm going to add in a cylinder this time or what you could do is use the just the regular draw tool like that i'm just going to use a basic cylinder shift a add in the cylinder make the vertex count like 64 or so and i set a period there we go we'll just sharpen it scale it down and then try our best to kind of position this in an ideal location so we can connect up the pipe so in my original one i don't know how far i had it out i think it was like right to about here it wasn't super far so kind of like that maybe scale it down a bit okay and then what we'll do is add in another cylinder here shift a and the cylinder q to sharpen let's just move it up a bit scale it down and if we want to keep it like right on the floor we can press s and shift z and just kind of you know play with this a bit so move it over on the x and then maybe we'll just kind of you know this piece doesn't have to be super big or anything it was pretty small when i made it so let me just um try my best we'll go like right here bring it down just a bit more okay and then basically what we're going to do is run a pipe from this area down into this one so it'll look pretty cool maybe we'll move it out just a bit more okay i can kind of almost picture the direction the pipe's going to go so that's why i'm doing that all right so i'm going to use cable raider for this part because i just love this add-on because it's literally two clicks to add in a curve so we're going to press shift alt c once again cable rater it's in the description it's like 10 bucks it's one of the best investments you'll make for your modeling so we're going to do is click there and then click here we're just going to have like a nice little pipe going on i'm going to press the h key to make sure it's not like twisting around it's just going to be like a static direction for the pipe then we'll lock it in by clicking and then just to make this thing nice and straight what i think i'll do is scale this pivot point on the x to zero and then take this guy and we can kind of manage that a bit and just make sure these are all roughly where we want them to be move this one over a bit more like that so now we have is basically our simple block out design right here which is probably the easiest and hardest part easiest because once you actually get the design down you can immediately start picturing new ideas for the design and like build on it basically it's also the hardest part because getting the base layout can be quite tedious and sometimes it takes practice to really be able to picture designs in your head so that's why i say it's both easy and hard but at this point we can just keep designing really so we just want to make sure we're getting the primary details then get down to the secondary and tertiary details so another primary detail this piece had was a big little big little oxymoron a pretty large circle going in here i don't remember how big it was specifically but we'll just kind of eyeball it so we'll do something like this and then we're going to do is cut through and now if we press the t key this is going to enable solidification so we're not going to make it too big maybe right to about here double click and then what i want to do is simply apply this boolean right off the bat actually as long as you're happy with where it is if you want to make it like way more consistent you can maybe try your best to kind of even it out and get it exactly where you want it so it's like the same distance from the edges so we're not like eyeballing it and yeah it's it's pretty good maybe too big trying to figure out like the best design i think it'll be all right all right so i'm going to go ahead and apply that boolean which happens to be the last one reason being is because i can go into edit mode here press the l key p and then separate this piece and make it its own separate object okay so um i'm a big fan of chamfers and i'll probably say this a million times over my um you know course of my videos i just love chamfer so what we're going to do is control b we're on a bevel aka a champ for if it's one segment and then we're going to have like a nice little extra bit of umph to that piece right there awesome so now you can really begin to see how the how you can like picture things you can immediately look at this piece and think oh i could put this here put this there and you really have like a bigger visual library once you actually have the foundation set up one of my biggest struggles in 3d even to this day is really just picturing designs like you know snap of a finger usually i have to kind of you know sketch things out and then picture designs off of a just base layout like this and a lot of people ask me this question completely normal thing and you just have to practice really so yeah now we kind of have an idea of what we could add in next so what i'm going to do at this point is add in another detail which is up here like a little i don't know like a little latch or something going over it so what i'm going to do to make this one nice and easy is i basically want the latch going around to follow the curvature so i think the easiest way to do this would be to turn on the knife cut right here and we'll just go in with the box cutter tool and then just kind of cut down like this i want it to be relatively wide and not too close to the edge of the mesh we'll press the b key to bevel it and just kind of bring that all the way in double click or just press enter and now we're basically going to have a cut going all the way through the mesh like this reason we want to do this is because we can now come in here press the q key not too sure if that's going to be low enough i think it'll be okay we're going to press the q key and then if we shift click on curve extract what this does is it converts this into a plate meaning it separates it uh makes it in its own separate object and then applies a solidify modifier to it all in one go so we just shift click on curve extract pull this out and we are basically finished in like one click that is why i love box cutters so much so we just go ahead and apply that solidify modifier and it's going to actually share the same information of modifiers as the mesh we took it from in this case these booleans aren't doing anything at all because they were just you know other areas of this piece we can actually just get rid of them just delete them out and yeah if you ever wanted to make this like longer you could simply you know pull this area down or pull it up whatever you want and also we don't really need this cut out on the main mesh anymore so what i'm going to do is um just press whoops fill that in fill this in with the f key and then we can go in here and alt click control x alt click and control x so that'll basically get it back to it it's uh original state which we you know we don't really have a need for that geometry after the fact so now we have this plate right here which is exactly exactly what we want i'm exhausted guys so if i'm stuttering my words forgive me last week is our examination week i have like one more semester of school left i am completely ready to get out i'll tell you that much anyways so we're gonna do is come around here we're just gonna alt shift click and ctrl b to run a nice little champ for here like that and sometimes i don't know why it does it sometimes cavity turns off just randomly i don't know if it's a bug or what you can turn it back on up here or simply press the alt v key with hard ops and just turn on cavity like that and yeah now we basically have an extra design on here this makes it look better and better as we go so what i want to do on this one is maybe add in a secondary detail just because i'm already here and i can picture it so i'm going to go in here make sure we're in circle select or circle cut rather i'm going to turn off the view align because this is just a flat surface and now if i hold ctrl it should or if we turn on snapping right here it should actually come up with a perfectly aligned point in the center let's make sure we turn off the knife cut so we're back into boolean mode it's going to kind of go in here and then just cut through like that and we could also alt x and mirror the thing to the other side like that and then what i want to do is press the q key and go to mod scroll this will actually allow us to scroll through all of our current cutters which in this case is only one and we can scale this down just a bit more and what i think i'll do is tab into face mode and we're going to do a reverse bevel which is going to give a nice chamfer around the cut here so i'm going to press the q key click on mark and what this does is it adds in a bevel in reverse so basically a flip to normal and we kind of get this effect it looks pretty cool in my opinion so i'm going to leave it and yeah this thing is looking pretty cool all right so next thing i want to do is maybe add in another chamfer around this little piece right here so right now if we try to run a chamfer we're probably going to get an overlap because this is running almost tangent and as you can see it overlaps like almost immediately so whenever you run your boolean cuts you always want to connect them orthogonally meaning at a 90 degree angle or as close to a 90 degree angle as you can get reason being is because the more tangent these get to the circle the the more it kind of overlaps so you can kind of imagine like if you were running a perfectly tangent line to any set of these vertices the ideal connection point is the one that um is the the vertex intersects with it's it's more mathy and that's my degree so that's the best way i can explain it but basically when you run a tangent it only hits the circle at one point so ideally you want to connect to that point which would probably be like right here or you know right here it doesn't really matter as long as you're roughly 90 degrees and we're just going to dissolve those out and now as you can see we have a lot more buffer to run our chamfer because it's um at a perfect 90 degree angle and there's going to be no overlap so we'll press ctrl b give a nice little chamfer in there and uh yeah there we go i also want to come in here and select this piece again we're going to press the d key and go to box and make sure you're still in the surface align mode which is whenever this is turned off and your snaps turned on so now if we hold ctrl it's going to snap to the center we can drag out now this part's tricky we're going to hold ctrl and we can release it at this point once we have it snapped and then we're going to press the alt key and hold the alt key make yourself a nice little rectangle right here however big you want and then we're going to press the v key twice so v v to run a radial array like this and then we're simply going to pull this in and then pull this up to make a nice bevel and press enter so now we have a cool little design on this piece right here which we could also alt x and mirror to the other side as i believe i did on my original one so yeah at this point we're going to run a reverse bevel again so q mod scroll and if we just tab into face mode we can come in here and control click mark q control click mark that is i always like to save my hot keys and then shift three to turn off the cutters collection or shift four whatever whatever number your collection is in my case it's one two three for the cutters so to turn them off or turn them on i press shift three yours might be four or five or whatever it might be cool so this thing is coming along we have some more details coming in this is probably more of a it's it's close it's either a secondary or a primary i'll call it secondary because it's a little bit smaller alright so i am enjoying the result so far what i want to do now is run a chamfer on these edges right here so let's control click them also let's symmetrize see how this side we made this connection but this one isn't fixed yet if we simply run a symmetry alt x and then go to symmetry it'll um fix that problem for us so yeah there we go okay so what i want to do now is simply bevel this area so we'll just control click around this ctrl b to run a bevel like that okay and then we can probably come in here and just apply the boolean so i'm going to press q and we can apply booleans a few ways the long way is to come in here and apply them all manually we don't want to do that the second way is to run a smart apply which basically applies everything except your bevel and weighted normal or the third way is to simply run a c sharpen which is control click on the sharpen command just applies the modifiers for you except of course like bevel and i believe it leaves mirror as well so control click on sharpen is like my go to most of the time or smart apply now as you can see this geo is locked in and we could probably also come in here and run a nice little chamfer around this territory control b and as you can see we don't have any sharp corners right here so let's run the sharpen again bring down our auto smooth a bit until it picks up and there we go all right awesome so i think we need to add in like one more of the more primary details here and that is going to be some sort of cylinder going into this piece so i'm going to go into the back view and what we're going to do is simply add in a cylinder 64 verts is fine q and then run a sharpen so we can rotate this 90 degrees over the y and basically just put it right in here now if you wanted to be a hundred percent accurate you could also simply just you know control click and go out this way probably a better solution actually control click and i want this to be a separate object not a boolean cutter so what i'm going to do is press the a key to make a new object and then e to extrude it out right to about here there we go maybe out a bit more or let's see this might be okay let's actually leave this for now i think it's good and we'll just come in here and run a nice champ for there and what i think i'll do is run a few loop cuts in here with ctrl r and then we'll just bevel those ctrl b and what we can do is extrude these along the normals so there's two ways to do this one is pressing the e key right click and then alt s to do that or if you want to do that in one click instead you can go and press the q key and alt click on em macro which basically does the same thing so um i actually don't want any cuts going down there so what i'm going to do is just um oops let's let's isolate this with forward slash on the numpad and we're just going to select these with alt shift click and dissolve them out with control x okay so now we can actually use these again control b and then alt click on em macro like that and there we go and maybe since this is intersecting a bit we could just scale it down so that way that is not happening and there we go pretty cool okay so i'm pretty happy with where this is right now and let's just um preview it real quick yeah not too bad okay so i guess we can get into the more secondary and tertiary details at this point because the base layout has now been created so i think you guys will actually enjoy this part because you'll get to use a lot more box cutter and really get creative with it so i guess the first one i'll do is either here or here let's start at the front here so what i'm going to do is go into ngon mode and i'm simply going to hold ctrl we're going to cut down this way cut down this way just be very careful with it while holding control and then cut down this way and cut down to this area i think that's how i had it like something like this okay so what we'll do now is double click cut through we'll press the x key and if we wanted to we could bevel that but i actually like the the flat side so we'll just double click and lock that in there we go very nice okay so maybe we'll make a few ngon cuts in here as well so hold ctrl run these through i think that hit the curvature a bit didn't it it's not really a big deal but um it might cause a little bit of shading issues but i'm not too worried about it it's fine we'll fix it later if we need to and then up here we're going to run a cut like this it's a very very tiny one like that make it a bit bigger maybe let me just undo this i still can't decide where i want this one maybe yeah that'll be good okay so we could probably work on the front here as well so let's go to the front and same idea we'll come in here with a circle cutter and hold ctrl and we'll just kind of cut in we'll just cut all the way through why not let's also maybe move this guy up a little bit to about here that'll be good and then run a reverse bevel because you know me okay pretty happy with that result we might not need it to go so far through though so maybe we'll pull this back and yeah that'll be okay all right and then what i want to do is maybe run another cutter in here not a cutter a new object and then press the a key e to extrude and then maybe shift t to actually no because that'll go on the other side let's cancel that so we'll press the a key e to extrude and then maybe lock it in right here and then i'm just going to run yet another chamfer with control b and set this face extrude it back inset again and then let's see let's inset and then inset one more time and grab this a bit on the x-axis to kind of get something like that it looks pretty cool and then champ for this again with ctrl b so really just basic operations nothing crazy all right so back to front view i'm going to make a few more cuts i think actually side view first what i'm going to do is come in here with the ngon cutter and maybe cut that out and then what we'll do is come to the front and add in a few little notches here on the front so what we could do is maybe you know what let's do a wedge cut let's make sure we go to line box line box will be this button right here and if we go to the wedge button what we can actually do or we don't even have to turn it on we can simply hold ctrl and then cut across here and then go down click and if we press the w key this will actually make a wedge for us so we can make like a nice little wedge in here and i just think it looks kind of cool in my opinion so it might not pick up with auto smooth so i'm going to drop that a bit more and then we'll have that and then alt x to mirror make sure we're set to mirror mode that is so modifier there we go and what i think i'll do is come up here with the box cutter tool let's turn off line box we don't need that and let's make sure wedge is turned off i guess we don't i think this might be a new update i didn't realize we could use wedge without line box that must have been an overlook of mine so maybe you don't need a line box anyways you learn something new every day so that'll be good maybe a bit too big there we go and then we'll come in here one more time and this is separate so we're safe we can just come in here and then cut through and there we go some nice detail there on the front so now what i want to do is come in here with an inset boolean so i'm going to make sure we're in the box cutter mode so click on box and what we're going to do is you can make this really as far as you want i believe in my original one i want to about here and then want to hear so and we're going to do is cut through and if we press the i key this will make an inset but nothing's going to happen and sometimes this happens because maybe an overlap or something like that to adjust it we can press the t key and then it should allow us to fix that problem a bit so we'll just kind of pull this out to right about here should be enough and now we have a nice little inset that might be too shallow we can always adjust it by going to mod scroll and just kind of adjusting the solidify you just press the q key and then solidify and that should probably be more than enough and yeah if you don't like where this is now you can always adjust it because it's still non-destructive so what we can do is just recall the cutter now with inset booleans it basically runs booleans within booleans it's a very complex operation i would not recommend trying it in vanilla unless you want a therapist so yeah don't even bother what we can do is mod mod scroll to recall this cutter and then mod scroll again to recall the cutter's cutter like i said it's a complex operation this is why we have hard ops to help with it and yeah you could scale that up some more if that is what you want all right so now i want to come up here with the ngon cutter this time and we're going to hold ctrl and i just kind of want to i don't know i'm gonna have to be kind of manual with this one cut up like this cut through double click and we're gonna run a slice with the x key now this is actually going to intersect a bit with this which is going to be an issue it's going to be really close because when we run a bevel it's going to be an overlap there's like no buffer so maybe we'll just move this up a bit more so there's some room and if we need to move this later we can as well but for now i think it'll be okay and i also want to come up here and just um slice off a bottom piece i always like these nice little chamfers kind of separating the two i think it looks nice really so we're going to do now is hop to the front and maybe we could even pull one of these like that make it look cool and we could also come in here and probably just apply all the booleans at once but just to be safe i only want to apply the one with the hole so i think it is this one this third one so you can turn those off and on to see so i'm going to apply that and now i should have access to the geo there actually no maybe we didn't even have to apply that it was for the whole thing but yeah anyways let's do it anyways and alt click alt shift click and run a nice champ for right here just because it looks cool and then i want to go back to the front because this is this top part's basically done i just want to run a nice little design here so i'm going to do is hold ctrl we're just going to cut a nice little panel maybe come right there cut down cut that in we could also maybe move this back and let's go ahead and run an array press the x key to swap it and maybe we could even make that a bit bigger and now we kind of have that effect i'm also going to make this inset boolean a bit bigger or smaller not sure yet i don't really like where it is so maybe i'll scale it down a bit and yeah i think it looks a bit better in my opinion and i also want to run a little cut down here like this so we'll just come down and make like a nice little notch and then scale this up a bit and yeah now we kind of have that effect i think it looks pretty cool all right now for the tricky part tricky but fun i think you guys will like this one so uh in the original one you may have seen i can't switch the screens right now because i'm using a new recorder but you may have seen there was like a circular type of caged pattern going on in the front here really easy to make tedious to get used to though i'm going to go ahead and show you so um i'm going to see i'll just try to switch monitors real quick one sec there we go um so yeah this is the original one as you can see i have this like little circular pattern going on there are some limitations as you'll see very soon but we're going to try to not have to deal with those let me see if i can swap windows in one click yeah i can okay i'm using camtasia if you guys haven't used it it's so bad i couldn't stand it anymore so i switched to obs and i'm trying premiere now and hopefully it's not too hard to learn anyways i want to get that effect on the front so what we're going to do to get that effect is we're simply going to press q go to operations and then shift click on smart apply what this does is it removes all the mod actually it applies the booleans removes the bevels and makes a duplicate so now if i press forward slash on the numpad we have a separate object right here this one has all the booleans applied and the bevel has been removed because we don't need the bevel in this case so and you'll see why so whenever we do this we can basically steal geometry if you haven't seen my stealing geometry video definitely check it out it's a very similar process here so we're gonna do is maybe ctrl x to delete out that edge and then these as well unless we need those maybe we need those yeah i think we do anyway it's not really a big deal all right so what i'm going to do is come in here select this control click or you know what we'll just paint it with a circle key so c to go in the circle select and we'll do that and then i'm simply going to press the q key and then shift click on curve extract to bring that out a little bit and then we can just delete this one out we don't need it anymore so there we go now we probably have some overlapping or duplicate verts here we don't need let me turn off the solidify for a second so i can see yeah we have these right here so i'll just press three with machine to clean that up machine tools is a free add-on and it is super awesome for merging pi menus and for cleaning up things so instead of having to go in here and dissolve them i can just press three and machine tools detects exactly what needs to be fixed so anyways now i can actually run some loop cuts through here now we ideally want these loop cuts to be square-ish we want this thing to look square really and you can kind of get that effect this isn't perfectly square but it's good enough issue here is we don't have a lot of geo so we're not going to have a lot of circles so if we want more circles or geo we're probably going to have to subdivide this what i'm going to do is um let's turn off solidify for now we'll just delete it we'll add it back later and what we should probably do is run a subsurf control 2 or control 1 maybe let's see what's better let's do control 2 and what we also want to do is press ctrl tilde and turn on apply crease so now if we run a sharpen on here it's basically going to crease all the essential areas or it should at least if not we might need to okay i think it's because it's just a flat object no solidification but uh yeah issue here is this roundedness so the crease only going to go so far so what we're going to do actually no we just got to select those two don't we i guess the sharpening didn't pick up the top which was the issue so what we'll do is just um basically crease all these outer edges here to make sure we don't get any rounded effects so shift e and then that should just bring it back to its original location and we should also have a lot more geo applied this is exactly what we want right here all right so i'm going to apply these solidify modifiers sorry subdivision surface modifier and there we go looks pretty good now we probably have a few extra loops we want this to all be even and consistent and this is rectangular this is square so we're going to do alt shift click control x get rid of those so now this the whole thing is basically full of squares now up here is kind of inconsistent so what i'm going to do is just add some loop cuts manually to make this easy i'm going to kind of be tightened up here but no big deal we'll just make it kind of sloppy it doesn't really matter too much and then just try to separate these make it a bit more even so that way it doesn't hurt the curvature too much and then what we can do pull these out a bit and yeah we're just going to do that now we're basically full of squares here all right perfect so what we want to do is first of all this part is very important so i'm going to apply the solidify modifier just to kind of pull this out a bit all right so right now the shading is basically perfect it's really smooth and looks good when we make this little circular effect it's going to look bad because we're going to have circles and it's going to create n-gon so the shading is going to go crazy so what we want to do here is transfer the normal information to stash the good shading now with mesh machine we can actually do this or you can use the data transfer modifier i have videos on that as well mesh machine just makes it easy and once again all the links to the that stuff is in the description so what we need to do is go into edit mode and select everything here press the y key and then stash it this is going to stash the normal information here basically the shading so now we can actually do is go to select and check or deselect in vertex mode and just um let's deselect all the sides with alt shift click because we don't want the sides to be selected and then what we're going to do is press the q key and go to circle it's going to go crazy so make sure this is kind of pulled in and also i want to deselect these ridges right here that's going to be a problem as well okay so q circle bring these in make these as big or small as you want um right here then we'll press x to delete the faces and now we're going to have basically that effect pretty cool all right so it kind of messed up in here when you get to like super curvy areas it tends to mess up sometimes you have to do a few uh do it a few times until it works in this case it worked okay so delete off the faces now all right so now what we need to do is apply a bevel so what i'm going to do is press q run a bevel we'll press n to harden the normals get a nice little bevel on there and now if we go into mat cap we're gonna probably see bad shading actually here it looks pretty good it's um not really that noticeable but if you zoom in close enough we're probably gonna have somewhat of shading warp so i wouldn't really concern yourself with this this one actually looks good but what we could still do is transfer the normals anyways unless for some reason it messed up then i'm just not going to bother because it looks completely fine to me the matte cap flows through very nicely okay let's apply the solidify and then apply the bevel and the reason we have to apply the bevel is because we need access to all of these ngons right here so i'm going to go to select select all by trait faces by sides and we want to select the n-gon so make sure this is set to greater than four okay so now we're going to do is press the y key go to normals and then click on transfer and what this is going to do is going to transfer the normal information or it should at least unless something messed up now this is a hefty operation so yeah this is limiting because you can see some bad shading warps up here so although it made the shading perfect it kind of hit the edges a bit bad which is probably a limitation of the solidify we added so i could just kind of chop this out or try again it's probably gonna do the same thing so i'm actually just gonna undo that and not even bother because to be completely honest this shading i don't see any warps at all like if you really want to look at it from an angle you might see it but like look at this this thing looks perfect it's not even yeah i don't see any issues with this at all so even if we want to like a very very unforgiving mat cap this thing flows through perfectly so it's not even worth your time worrying about so at this point what we can do is press forward slash on the numpad and now we have that grading effect so it's um pretty cool i like it i think it was a nice little extra detail to add to the mesh here and we're going to do something similar for this outline and then probably like a little similar thing over here and then we'll basically be done all right so what i want to do next here is add this little ring kind of going around this piece right here so to do that we're going to do something similar to what we did for um this one right well no not this one which one was it for this one right here we're going to do the stealing geometry trick so we're going to do is um select this and then go to operations and then shift click smart apply forward slash on the numpad to isolate the view and uh basically what i want to do here is i could kind of like approximate where i want this circle to be cut like i could come in here and just guess but i want to keep this thing nice and consistent so what i'm going to do instead is maybe just alt shift click around here shift s and then cursor to selected so that way it's dead in the center so now what i could actually do is add in a cylinder sharpen this guy and then rotate it 90 degrees and now i'm basically perfectly centered or maybe a little bit off it looks like maybe that wasn't perfectly centered but you get the memo as long as it's like you know pretty much even all the way around we can scale this up to about here shift click on this guy and what we're going to do is let's see how do i want to do this maybe we could just do a difference or on the difference control forward slash to add in a slice and then what we're going to do is just simply apply this boolean and delete this out and we're going to have quite a few i guess it um went back into global view so in local view here we're basically just going to take this we'll fill that into just one end gone really and let me see how far in is that going okay i'm just going to take this face right here ctrl i to invert the selection x and then delete the faces so now we just have this piece perfect so at this point i'll just add in a solidify modifier pull it out to about here and then what we could do is maybe like cut part of that off and then ctrl-click sharpen to run a c-sharp and simply run a nice little chamfer on here and there we go really really easy all right so i also want to get some little bolts going around it so to do that what we can do is add in another cylinder we're going to sharpen it rotate it and we want these to be pretty small so once we do that we can actually go to q and then run a radial array to kind of run a radial array out from the center of this set of pieces out to about here maybe scale it down some more and [Music] yeah there we go so now it's basically going to be exactly where we want it um can adjust it as much as we want really okay we'll try to get it right in the middle there and then what we can do is simply q and then smart apply to apply all those modifiers move this out a bit and we don't need these three over here so we can just delete those out and there we go you could also come in here and maybe move these in just a bit more and i want to chamfer all of the front faces here so we can do is just select one face instead of all of them select one face shift g and then coplanar so anything on that exact point um on the in this case the x and z axes on this direction if it's in the same location uh coplanar will select all those so perfect then we're going to go in here ctrl b to bevel and there we go now we have some really simple bolts there in the center cool so that's done which means we can simply take these two shift click and then alt x to mirror to this side and there we go and finally i just want to do a few more little things before we're almost done so what i'm going to do first of all is let's see for this little pipe right here let me move this over just a bit okay that shouldn't be too much of an adjustment but we can always move that instead okay i'm going to go ahead and inset this face and extrude it down and i'm also going to select this pipe here and press ctrl 1 to make it a bit smoother maybe even ctrl 2 and then alt click on this edge and then bevel it or maybe apply the scale first and then bevel it like that let's just make sure this guy is you know as far down as we can get it there we go and maybe just s and then shift to z to make it just a bit tinier so it'll fit fully try to get that right in there okay and then this one should be okay we're just gonna have to do the same thing i to oops i to inset extrude back and then bevel this area right here very simple okay and maybe we could also bevel that because why not no one's telling us we can't and bevel this side because we can okay so at this point what i want to do is maybe add in let's press shift s select this shift s cursor to selected well um i guess the origin points up there we'll just reset the origin right click origin to geometry shift s cursor to selected so now what i'm going to do is simply add in a cylinder sharpen it and scale it down i'm going to get like a nice little effect up here or something okay this should be good all right so what i want to do for this is simply alt click this set of faces and delete out the no not that's not what i want to do okay what i'll do instead is delete out the caps and then we'll just kind of scale this into place that'll be enough okay and then all i want to do is run some loops through here to make it relatively square and what we can do on this one is like we did on the piece in the front that one is we can simply stash the normal information with the y key with mesh machine stash it and then we're going to go to vertex mode checker deselect deselect the top and bottom which is the end points q circle bring this out a bit x to delete faces and then you guessed it we're going to add on a solidify modifier and we're just going to have to run a bevel so q bevel going to be a bit laggy because it's pretty dense actually you know what let's first apply the scale and then apply the solidify otherwise going to be some problems probably a bit too much there okay so we're going to run a bevel just a very very slight amount there and then apply the solidify and the bevel and if we were to go into mat cap probably going to be bad shading this one's very very noticeable i don't know what in the world happened here okay that's interesting let me undo this and try again like i said sometimes this operation just collapses so sometimes you have to run it multiple times and try it again okay so solidify bevel apply the scale first jeez this is annoying okay there we go and then we should be able to bevel finally get a nice little bit of reflection around the borders there okay apply the solidify apply the bevel and then we're gonna go ahead and select all faces by side set to greater than four vertices so that way we can transfer all the good shading to the bad shading that is caused by these n-gon so we're going to press the y key normals and then transfer probably going to be a second because this is a lot of geo it has to work with here so just bear with the machine while it does it okay there we go and now still didn't decide to work so this is my problem with the mesh machine is it's like a hit or miss sometimes it doesn't even work so um what we're going to do instead we're going to do a little bit of a hack we're going to go ahead and add in the cylinder sharpen it and we're just going to position this manually we're going to scale it right to about there and all we need to do is really just align these things so we could go to like a vertex snap a line there and then a line there okay so we'll just do it the good old-fashioned way with the data transfer what we'll do is um just rename the cylinder and transfer just for clarification we're going to go to this piece we're going to add a data transfer modifier and what we need to do is make sure all of these n gone phases are selected and add a new vertex group so what this will do is tell blender hey i only want you to deal with the selected vertex group in this case so we're going to add a new one click assign deselect and select to make sure it worked and this was really easy all we have to do is select that normal transfer cylinder choose this vertex group and then go to check this out we're going to go to face corner data custom normals and then projected face interpolated now look at that shading is perfect so that's like the alternate solution if mesh machine decides to bug out on you it is a little bit weird down here didn't get everything perfectly so you could try like rescaling this but it doesn't even matter because we're not going to see it it's going gonna be in the bottom anyways cool so that's done and now we can do is maybe come into this piece and just select this um you know what we'll do we'll just um hold ctrl with circle on pull this out a key to make a new one e key to extrude and then make like i was thinking we could make yeah it's not covering it perfectly so okay what i'm gonna do is just go ahead and convert this to a mesh a little bit dense but it's not really a big deal or you know that's fine that's fine don't need to waste time and then if i alt click at this set of faces i can just control click around and then maybe we'll just shift click on curve extract and make a nice little ring around here just um you know because we can there we go looks pretty good and that's it guys we are basically finished with this model here so uh the only thing we're missing now is some bevels because of course we want bevels for that nice reflection so what i'm going to go ahead and do since i'm done is just control click to apply all the booleans because usually if you run bevels with a lot of booleans you can get lag and if you're done you might as well apply the boolean so we'll press q to run a bevel we'll press the n key to harden the normals and then what we're going to do is decrease the angle a bit until it actually captures all the way up to the top and then we can do the same thing here run a nice little bevel it's a very tiny one same for this guy run a bevel actually you know what we could just union this guy control plus to the mesh there so we have a nice little you know indentation going on bevel this guy can't bevel the pipe because it's not gonna do anything there's no sort of like um convex surface on there or concave it's like completely round it's not like either or uh this one will run a bevel on that just very very slight bevels are all we need this one run a very tiny bevel and then what we can do is take these pieces and maybe let's apply our mirrors to be safe so we don't have any issues what we could do is take these guys and then shift click here control plus to run a union so now we have a nice little transition or fusion there we're going to have to bevel this one we can also control click on sharpen to apply those booleans maybe even apply the mirror why not and what else are we missing this area up here needs a very tiny bevel nothing crazy shading looks alright so i'm not going to worry about it this one needs a bevel and we do have some slight mesh intersections right here so we can actually do is um control click sharpen same for this one i just need to figure out what in the world is what happened right here interesting something weird happened let me try running a smart apply instead something with the sharp and mess it up okay anyways looks like we have some overlaps right here so to fix that what we're gonna do is turn on auto merge and then slide these in merge these guys together like that very very simple stuff a little bit annoying but it happens so we'll do that merge this one up here slide this one out a bit and then slide this one out a bit and there we go looks really really clean and the last one need a bevel is this piece right here so you know the drill and that should be everything i think i lied there we go uh now we should that should be everything so yeah that's it for the modeling here you can pretty much do whatever else you want you can join things together if you wanted to you know i don't really care what you choose to do because you are your own person and i trust your choice of whatever you decide to go with but maybe what we could do it's like one more thing right there okay anyways now i'm just getting picky so that's it for the tutorial here that is um completes the modeling completes like everything we're not going to do materials or post in this video or rendering simply because this video is already really long and let's be real most people don't want to watch more than like an hour of videos if anything i'd split it up but i don't think i'm going to post this one in a video maybe i will who see who knows so we'll see so uh yeah that's it it's um very simple model but really fun to make i hope you guys enjoyed hope you learned a lot about box cutter and hard ops and just general modeling techniques so once again the links are in the description if you do get these add-ons it also helps me out and supports me so i really appreciate if you get those through my links in the description and we also have a patreon if you guys want to sign up to that and we have a lot of cool tutorials on there as well so thanks a bunch for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 203,271

Keywords: blender, boxcutter, tutorial, hardops, for, beginners, modeling, hard, surface, 3d, 2.91, 2.92, boolean, masterxeon1001

Id: 7SIdytU0FX0

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020