COMPLETE Hard Ops Tutorial for Blender

hey everyone josh here so this has been a massively requested tutorial i did a quick 10 minute overview several weeks back on hard ops and box cutter but that version has since become obsolete and i've learned a lot of new things since then so we're just going to cover i guess all the essentials you need for hard ops and box cutter so this is just going to be more of a casual video just letting you follow along and watch okay so obviously you press q to access the hard ops menu now a lot of you are probably already familiar with the menu and whatnot for those of you brand new to it basically all the options in here can be accessed anywhere here in blender by default the q menu just has a lot of built-in settings and just uh easier access to some of the settings here in blender let me show you the important ones so traditionally you would go in and say you had a cylinder or something that had a lot of flat edges like this you would want to smooth it out right so if you right click and shade smooth it looks terrible and then usually what you'd want to do is go in here and use auto smooth to clean that up so that's two steps to do you have to right click shade smooth then you have to go in here to auto smooth now with hard ops all you do is you press q and then you click on sharpen and what this does is it applies well it depends really so if you press ctrl and tilde on the keyboard by default under sharp options you're going to have b weight and sharp applied these by default are usually fine i don't use seem a ton and i only use creases if i'm dealing with sub surf most of the time so usually these two are just fine so basically what happens is it applies both a sharp and a smoothing with auto smooth enabled all in one click now there's two types of sharpened modes if you click on the menu here after you sharpen it there's s sharp and then there's c sharp and these two are quite different but also similar in many ways and it's also worth mentioning that the default auto smooth angle of s sharp is actually 60. you can change that to 30 and if you want it to be you know a default different value you just go to the preferences panel here and under hard ops it's under let me find where it is right here you can adjust all sorts of different settings like bevel profile sharpness angle and things like that if you want to set things by default but usually the default settings are just fine for sharpen so let me demonstrate what c sharp is this is a very important one so what i've done here is i've applied a few different cutters in here just using the booleans or more specifically box cutter which we'll also go over in just a bit so that's all i did so like i said there is a sharpen and there's c sharpen so also let me apply a bevel here because we always want to add a bevel or usually okay so if i press q and then click on sharpen by default this enables the s sharpen options and like i said all this does is it applies sharps with this sharpness angle and you can see in this case the only areas caught were the top and bottom faces for the sharpness and what it excuse me and what it also does is it enables smooth and auto smooth all at once that is all the s sharpen option does for us so just to ingrain that in your head if i were to do the s sharpen option in vanilla what i would do is i would select the top and bottom faces in this case i would press ctrl e mark sharp shade smooth and then turn on auto smooth what i just did right there is exactly what s sharpen is doing in hops and i might say hops from time to time hard ops hops same thing okay so c sharp and we need to discuss that now a little bit different but still similar so if i were to apply a c sharp and instead geez i'm losing my voice here so you can either press q and click on sharpen and then go to c sharp or what you can do is press q if you hover over it it gives you a list of options in this case if you want to apply a c sharp you can just control click it i usually just go in here and click sharpen and then go to the menu manually so what this actually does is it does all the same things as s sharpen but it applies the non-hard surface modifiers mainly things like booleans and mirrors and things like that or not mirrors i didn't mean mirrors but things like solidify so if i were to add in a plane and use a solidify modifier and i don't know one in here and dropped in a boolean or something if i went with a c sharp it will actually apply the booleans and the solidify it just depends on the modifiers you're working with uh primarily we're just concerned with c sharp applying our boolean so as you can see activating c sharp is going to apply our booleans but it's going to keep our bevels here so that's the only difference from s sharp and c sharp c sharp simply applies modifiers that aren't um like bevels and weighted normals and things like that okay so let's go over some of the other sharpen settings real quick this will be really fast so as you can see if you hover over it if you press or hold shift and click on sharpen this will allow you to adjust the auto smooth angle by just scrolling left or right going to the left increases the amount or to the right decreases it you can see on the bottom there as i scroll okay so the next one if we alt click on sharpen this will automatically add a weighted normal modifier for us so just a little bit quicker than having to go in here and add one manually and the last one here is resharp now i don't use this one too often say for example i don't know i'm gonna run [Music] i guess just a c sharp here why not so let's say i made some drastic changes i don't really know this is just me messing around with this it's probably going to have terrible topology don't worry too much about it so let's say i had this and i just wanted to reapply the sharps automatically without having to you know go mark them you can actually control shift-click and this will re-mark the sharps so just re-sharp hence the name and if you go in here you're going to see it actually apply sharps to these areas so if you just need to recalculate and run the sharpen again without removing anything just run a resharpen okay so those are the sharpen settings most the time you're simply going to be using sharpen to smooth out your object and apply an auto smooth to it and one other thing i need to mention really fast is that this sharpness option here it's um it's not in blender by default this is literally something built into hops and this is just adding sharpness based off of this angle and when it says sharpness it doesn't mean sharp specifically it means whatever you have ticked on under the sharp options in this case it would be b weight and sharp say for example i added in one more cylinder here and let's say i just turned on everything b weight sharp crease and seam and i ran this you're going to see that the sharpness angle is um going to apply you can see the seams there we also have a mean bevel weight a mean crease and we also have a sharp on there which we can't specifically see but it's definitely there so don't confuse this option with it strictly being for sharps just make sure you remember that this option is for whatever is turned on in the sharp options panel here okay so enough about sharpen that should be all you need to know so the next one bevel this one's going to be in here by default almost all the time because in hard surface you need to add bevels the bevels are what capture the light on the corners as you can see so it's really really important you add those in so all you do is you press q and you click on bevel now there's a few different settings we can select here we'll discuss that in a bit usually you're just going to left click and you have a bunch of different options here if you scroll up on the scroll wheel you can increase the segment count if you scroll down you can decrease it and if you don't remember some of the settings so say for example you wanted to adjust the profile you press p and you're going to see that adjust the profile you can see in the right it's moving but say for example you didn't remember what that hotkey was you can just press the h key and you're going to have a really really big list here showing uh some of the different settings now jerry if you're watching this this is the most amazing thing it's super useful um but it's a little bit overwhelming and there's tons of stuff in here you're not going to be using that much so what i wish hops would implement at some point is something like like a highlight of the more important things like angle you're going to be adjusting profile you're going to be adjusting things like that i wish that was highlighted so nobody got overwhelmed with this menu here but don't worry too much about this menu a lot of these are not going to really move and a lot of them i just do manually anyways just as my preferred workflow so you can also change the limit method with the l key you can change to weight vertex group none and angle of course if you want to adjust the angle as you can see it's just going to be the a button and you can adjust the angle in there and that's about it for the bevel now let's say i wanted to add another bevel modifier in the stack so if i just press q in bevel it's only going to affect the current one in the stack so if i wanted to add a new one maybe to add a bevel on this chamfer here what i can do is press q and this time i'm going to control click on bevel and you're going to see in that highlighted menu if you hold ctrl that adds a new bevel at 30 degrees so if i control click you're going to see it adds a new bevel at 30 degrees for us or if you ctrl shift click this will add a new one at 60 degrees and i usually use this one for more intricate cuts that are being picked up by the bevels i don't want it to be picked up by i actually made a video on this titled fixing blender's biggest issue with bevels so definitely watch that but in general if you want to add in a new bevel modifier press q and then control click on bevel and it'll do that for you so that's literally all you need to know for bevel it's super easy to pick up on and i think the last one was um bypass scale i to be completely honest i don't think i've used that before i'm actually gonna go look on the forums right now see what that is okay i couldn't find anything but my guess is it doesn't apply scale i also forgot to mention that if this thing doesn't have the scale applied when you add a bevel so if i press q and add a bevel it automatically applies the scale by default that's also another super super powerful trick so my guess is bypass scale means it won't apply the scale let me try it now shift click okay that's exactly it so i get i just found something out new as well i guess if you shift click it doesn't apply the scale for you so that's also useful i suppose that's all for the bevel nothing else you need to know so hopefully that was easy enough so the next one we'll just discuss the array v2 real quick this is pretty self-explanatory okay let's quickly discuss array v2 so if i press q and hover over array you're going to see what this does it adds an array on the mesh and all we have to do is click and there we go we have an array so only thing is scrolling out i don't know if there's a way to like scroll out in the viewport maybe i um just haven't figured it out yet but yeah if you scroll up on the scroll wheel this increases the amount of the array let me actually zoom out some more so yeah scroll up on the scroll wheel to increase the amount of the array scroll down to decrease it you can go in any direction if you want to swap the axis all you do is you press the x key and you're going to see that swaps the axes and if you let me run it again if you press control x what this will do is it'll keep the so say i moved it a bit on one axis if i were to just press x it's going to reset the axis and just go strictly on the axis if i press control x it'll keep that offset from the original distance we moved it so check this out i'm not explaining this good so if i move this and press x you're going to see it resets the position but if i move it and press control x it keeps that position and allows us to move on another axis so maybe i wanted to do z instead there you go you just press control x you can do a good combination of both control x and x to use the array to your advantage so there's other options here in the array panel you can press a and add a new array so you can do something like this and add in like a third array do something crazy you can also press g and you know what i don't know what the hell that is to be honest with you i have no clue oh but yeah that's about all you need to know for these arrays and you can do all sorts of things look through the menu here most of these are not going to be touching too much but there are some that are useful like if you press s it'll actually snap based off the grid increments and things like that so go ahead and mess around with the array options here all the info you need is literally in this help panel so don't be afraid to look at it so let's go over the mirror slash array tool i barely use this menu so don't be too annoyed if you find yourself not using it i'm going to show you a much more efficient way than using this menu so if i click on this this enables the mirror gizmo we're not going to be using this at all because i'm going to show you a much more efficient way in just a second but if you control click on this this is basically an array which just gives you a little bit more versatility and manual control you can increase the by the plus button or decrease with the minus button a little bit more controllable than the last array we went over i don't really use this one too much though so don't worry about it these basically just give you access to the gizmos rather than working directly with the modifiers like i said you're probably not going to really use this menu too much let me show you the way you should actually mirror so let me start with a cube because cubes are more fun to work with so if i went in here and just added in you know cutters for example using box cutter see that so if i wanted to flip this to the other side i press alt x and then i click now it's a little bit counter-intuitive but if you want to mirror to this side you don't click on the side you're marrying to you click the side you're mirroring from so like this and if i wanted to mirror over the x i can go alt x and like that now i also get a lot of questions about the difference between mirrors and symmetry and it's quite self-explanatory so right now i'm working with a boolean right here right and the boolean is not applied the boolean is live in here it's non-destructive i still have the base cube and i can make any adjustments i want so symmetry wouldn't actually work right now symmetry is for locked in geometry meaning that it's physical geo and not theoretical geo it's locked in so if i'm going to flip this to the other side and use symmetry it's not going to do anything but if i just use a simple modifier this modifier just means mirror in this case you're going to see it flips just fine now if i were to apply the boolean now you're going to see the geometry here is actually locked in and this is the case in which i would actually go with a symmetry instead so i can just flip it to the other side and we have physical geo on the other side as well and then some people also ask me well why would i want to use symmetry in the first place why not just use mirror so that's a good question so say for example i um i wanted the changes to reflect on this side but i didn't want this to be perfectly symmetrical at all times so right now if i were to make a change on this side it's not going to reflect the geo is going to be here but it's not going to reflect over so if you wanted this to stay perfectly symmetrical as you work that's the case in which you would actually just use a simple mirror let me undo it this is the case in which you'd go in you add a mirror modifier so now if i tab into edit mode you're going to see it'll actually mirror to the other side as well so it really all depends on what you're trying to do and when you want to use symmetry and mirror so if you were just trying to do like a one and done type thing you wanted both these sides to have different cuts you know a unique cut here unique cut here definitely just you know use symmetry because that way if you make any further adjustments here it won't reflect to the other side so just be careful with that symmetry is going to lock in the geo whereas mirror is just going to flip it and any replications you make on one side will be flipped to the other we'll also discuss a few more things here so if i press alt x once again so like i said modifier just means mirror new modifier means it's going to add an additional mirror so watch this say i ran a regular one and if i ran it again over here you're going to see all that did was it reused this mirror here and just ticked on these axes if i wanted to add a new physical mirror modifier without changing the same settings in the first one all i do is i go here and click on new modifier and it adds a new mirror and you're going to see the settings are also reflected based on the axis you selected so that's the difference between modifier and new modifier these other ones are self-explanatory so if i wanted to mirror quickly and also apply the modifier on the same click i can go here and go to modifier and apply and it applies it now i don't really use that at all i usually just go with modifier and symmetry as my main go-to's but that's what that does you can also bisect if you wanted to if i wanted to bisect it i can do that and i can also go with a bisect and a mirror at the same time so what that does is it you know bisects it but it also adds a mirror for you so that's useful i don't use that too much and yeah that's about it that's all the settings in here you're mostly going to be working with modifier and symmetry probably 90 of the time okay so we've got a bit more to discuss here so if you have any modifiers applied to your object any at all specifically booleans if you press q you're going to have this option here for mod scroll now if we click on that and scroll up on the scroll wheel this just scrolls through all of our different booleans you can see so this is a really quick way to go and access your booleans on the go so say for example i wanted to delete out this corner cutter instead of just going in here and guessing which one it is which is what you'd have to do in vanilla all you do is you go through mod scroll and you can scroll up or down till you find it delete it out there you go so i guess that was the wrong one so scroll back through delete it and there you go so mod scroll just a quick way to go through your booleans and if you need to delete them out or make any sort of adjustments you know you can go in there and do that on the go it's infinitely easier to do that than to have to go in here and guess and click on and off and just geez it's just so much quicker to just go through mod scroll now this is another one of my personal favorites if you hover over mod scroll if you shift click mod scroll what this does is it disables all the modifiers and if we scroll up on the scroll wheel it goes through the modifiers top of the stack to the bottom one by one so check this out shift click mod scroll we're back to the cube all the modifiers are disabled if i scroll up on the scroll wheel it slowly brings them in one by one so boolean boolean boolean boolean then the bevel and then the mirror here and you can also go back down if you like by scrolling down on the scroll wheel so that's pretty cool to kind of preview how you built the object so there's a few more settings in here if we hover over so control click will just toggle the modifier's offer on i usually just use the modifier tools add-on to do that so you just turn on or off viewport vis but you can also control click mod scroll if you want to do it that way instead and there's one final option here and it is smart apply now we're going to discuss smart apply shortly here but in general what smart apply does if i alt click what it does is it applies smartly the modifiers that you're ready to apply and the modifiers that you don't want to apply so specifically if you want to apply modifiers they're usually going to be your booleans and not your bevels rarely do you want to apply your bevels so um in vanilla blender what you would have to do if you wanted to apply everything but your bevel is you'd have to do it manually you'd have to toggle the stack and apply all the booleans manually and you can imagine if you had like 100 booleans in there you'd have to apply them all just to avoid having to you know apply the bevel modifier so smart apply basically it just gives us that freedom to alt click apply everything except the bevel so that's it and you're going to notice now that all the booleans are applied we actually don't have access to mod scroll anymore because we don't have any modifiers to uh to scroll through so it just brings us back to the array v2 menu in the mirror array menu so if you're a little bit confused as to why you might have had mod scroll on uh well that's why because you had your booleans so that's a pretty useful thing to do is use mod scroll now we need to get in here and discuss some of the operations so if we go to operations here we're going to have a few different things there's the mod scroll this is just a menu that kind of encompasses everything we've discussed some things we haven't discussed and some things we have a lot of these i don't use that often because i can just use the hotkeys for it but if you go to operations we have mod scroll we have the bevel and edge manager so you can kind of adjust some of the bevel settings in here if you'd like i don't really ever go in here though you also have sharpen if you need to adjust the sharpen settings but once again you can just press q and go to sharpen for that you have step now step bevels are interesting and i'm not going to discuss them in this video i don't think it'll be in the documentation but they're very useful for adding different levels of bevels you know what screw it i'm just going to show you how to do it so let me see it's not too hard to discuss so let's say i move this boolean below the bevel say i wanted a smaller bevel here but a much bigger bevel on a different cut so what you can actually do is you can go in here and you can run a step bevel and you're going to see this adds a brand new bevel here and you can just go in here and adjust the offset basically without adjusting the width of any of the other cuts now obviously this one's going crazy simply because it's um it's overlapping the geo but you know you can manage that however you want you're going to notice if i try to adjust the bevel with the cue menu it adjusts this one only if i want to get back to the original bevel i control i click control and then scroll up and that just lets us adjust this one instead now i'm not going to go much more into step beveling but essentially if you want to get a different level of bevel you know maybe a smaller one here and a bigger one there you can use a step bevel for that so that's that now we also have c sharp and we discussed what that does already so i mean if you want to access it quickly there you can you're probably not going to ever use it from this panel though now clear sharps is interesting is as it says right there in the menu it removes all the bevel modifiers and the edge markings and just resets the mesh completely basically so if i click on clear sharps it literally just reverts this it removes all the modifiers or moves the sharps and orders back to a simple cube i don't really use that one too much though as a matter of fact i don't think i ever have so well now you know what it does i guess so clean mesh i haven't really used this either so it looks like it cleans duplicate faces and stuff like that i don't i don't really know i haven't used that one much either i just go to 3d print toolbox if i need to do that so smart apply we already discussed what smart apply does just smartly applies the modifiers keeps the ones we want and keep removes the ones or rather applies the ones we don't want like the booleans and mirrors and things like that so we went through most of these a late parent is pretty interesting so by default what hard ops does if you use a boolean is it will apply a it'll parent the cutter to the object so let me run through one of these as a matter of fact if i move this you're going to see all the cuts move with it and that's because by default when you run a cut and hard ops it parents it right when you run the boolean so if i were to go in here for example and control p and unparent or actually i have to go in here to object parent and then clear parent now check this out watch what's going to happen now this one's not going to be parented it's not going to move with it so sometimes you run into situations where your cutter isn't actually parented to the object so instead of going in here and manually parenting it with control p you can actually go to the cutter go in here and click on late parent and it'll parent it for you it's just a quicker way to do that late parent is an absolute time saver for me i use it quite a bit so what else do we have so we have a two shape and i don't think i've really ever touched that to be honest you can look through it if you want curve extract is interesting we're going to be using this more in edit mode though as a matter of fact don't even worry about these other ones because they're going to be more practical once we do stuff in edit mode you can look through them though you can add a camera quickly you can quickly set up lights in the scene so if i go to rendering view if i go to rendering view there we go i can quickly set up lights in the scene if i wanted to and you can just scroll up on the scroll wheel and kind of cycle through different lighting systems so that's pretty cool but i'll let you go and experiment and look through some of these other ones in here i don't use too many of the options in here because there's hot keys for them now what i'm going to do is i'm going to run a smart apply here so obviously to smart apply you can do it in the operations panel or you can go to mod scroll and just alt click and smart apply so say for example well not now i'm in edit mode basically so if i were to select some of these faces here and press q we have an option here for mark and this is similar to sharpen so i can mark all the edges here by just pressing q and clicking it so if i wanted some more control i go in here and i can just mark all these edges but rather than marking all these manually assuming i want all of these harsh edges to be marked rather than going in here and doing it all manually let's do the original thing go into object mode and sharpen based off of this angle here and it'll do it all at once for you but if you needed a little bit more control just depending on the situation you can really go in here in edit mode and mark manually now you can also apply modifiers so if you want to add a modifier go ahead i don't use this like ever this is probably going to be one of the most useful ones you're going to have the next one i'm going to show you so let's say for example i wanted to take this face and extrude it out and i wanted to turn this into a separate object so i'd have to go around here and you know separate it into a separate object and do all this boring stuff hard ops makes this way easier you select the area you want to make a panel you press q you go to curve extract and then you shift click on curve extract and what that does is it separates the face and applies a solidify modifier all at once super super useful stuff i call this stealing geometry i made a video on this for vanilla blender and you're going to see how annoying it is to do in vanilla so this is one of my all-time favorite strategies is going in here shift clicking on curve extract and there you go now if you wanted to do that but not add a solidify modifier at the same time what you can actually do is control click on curve extract and that'll just make it a new object without adding a solidify modifier to it and by the way if you forget these hotkeys just hover over it it tells you everything you need to know this one's also fun so if i have a face selected and i go in here and alt click this will basically use the edges and turn them into a curve and all the curve settings are listed over here so you can do some pretty cool stuff with that as well a little bit easier than vanilla blender having to go in and you know separate the edges manually and do stuff like that and for the last one just the default setting just the good old left click all this does is it takes the edges you have selected and turns them into a curve so it's basically like we just did over here by alt clicking but instead of it deleting the face we were working with it'll actually just keep the face and turn this into a curve so that is about everything you need to know for curve extract the one you're going to be using most probably is the shift click to turn it into a plate so the next one we'll go over is circle so say i had some loops in here like this and i wanted to i don't know do some sort of grading effect what i could do i'm going to actually do just box select this and let's run a checker deselect so if i press q you're going to see the circle option here so if i click on it you can guess what it does turns them into circles so now i could do like some sort of like a grading effect or something whatever you want to do that's a pretty useful tool so this next one is super cool so say i selected this face for example and i wanted to have it subdivided a bit more if i go and press q and click on dice this basically adds in loop cuts through the n-gon super powerful stuff now it can get a little bit crazy if you're not careful with it you can easily get that place in the wrong spot and disturb the bevel so for that reason i don't use that option too much usually when i'm dicing i go in here and you can run a dice in object mode through the mesh tools option and do it that way you'll usually be adding in dices through object mode rather than edit mode but that is something you can definitely do you know you just go in here you run dice you can run dices that way or whatever you want you know experiment with it okay let's discuss some other things i tend to use quite frequently so i'm just going to run a few loops through here so we also have one that's super useful so if you ever wanted to extrude along the normals for example it might be better to use a cylinder for this demonstration so if i ever wanted to extrude along the normals you know what you'd have to do is you'd have to press e cancel the extrusion with right click and then press alt s to extrude along the normals much easier way with hard ops you press q you go to em macro and then you alt click on the em macro button and all that does is it runs a an extrude along normals basically pretty useful there you can also turn things into grates so if i selected these four faces and clicked on em macro you're gonna see lmb left mouse button just add to gradient so you can add cool designs with that there's also some other stuff you can add a knurl knurl is pretty cool for like indents and things like that and you can scroll up on the scroll wheel to increase the count you just want to be careful with it and we also have as the as the last one here if you shift click this this will basically do what we did with the extrude along normals but it'll do it for the edges you're going to see it kind of moves the edges along the normals in an interesting way i don't really know how to explain it but you can see visually what it's doing i don't really use that one too much but it is helpful in some cases okay so that's about it for the edit mode options you need to know some of these other ones are just other plugins i have like i think i still have bull tool on for the course i was making i have mesh machine and things like that so don't worry about the other ones now now there are a few more things i'd like to discuss in the mesh tools menu as well as the settings and then we're about done with hard ops that'll cover literally everything you need to know about hard ops at least the really really important stuff like 95 of it but it is 5 30 in the morning right now as i'm recording this i've been recording all day for the course and then recorded this video so i need some sleep but for you it'll be like two seconds so i'll see you in just a second okay i'm back so there's a few different things we need to discuss in mesh tools now i don't use all of these uh reset axis i don't really touch you can do things like view align into ortho if you want i don't really touch that ever auto smooth pretty obvious you can just hit on auto smooth real quick if you like i usually just do that via the sharpen tool though so dice we already discussed dice a little bit but you can do this in object mode as well it's so powerful because this is basically a um an interactive way to add in loop cuts even if you have n-gons in the mesh geez i'm losing my voice here anyways so yeah there's dice dice you're going to be using a lot so if you just click lmb this is just a simple dice now the interactivity is a little bit wonky to me in my opinion you just have to move the cursor around to random locations i don't really like the functionality of this but it's easy enough once you get used to it so as you can see all that does is it drops in loop cuts for us so here's a more practical situation in which you'll use dice so let's say i have this type of cutter going on and i run a difference boolean and i'll just go ahead and apply that boolean and get in here and delete out the cutter so i have this piece right here right and if we want to clean this up to you know add a decent looking bevel without all this stretching what you would have to do is add in more constraining geometry going this way so in vanilla blender you'd actually have to go in and add in a plane scale the plane up subdivide the plane a few times to get a good amount of geo then you'd have to go up you'd have to go to the top and the reason we can't add in loop cuts is obviously because we have n-gons here and there it's not going to go all the way through see on vanilla you'd have to go in here you'd have to delete only faces then you would shift select this guy go into top view tab and then i believe you just go to a knife project like that and uh i guess it didn't reach all the way through you could can you tell i don't really use vanilla blender that much i'll try scaling this guy up we'll try again i'll tap into edit mode and then run a knife project oh i see why you have to click on cut through and okay it did it but it did it oddly but you get the point right it's i haven't used knife projected forever but instead of doing that why would you go through all that effort when you can go in here and mesh tools and just go to dice and just run a dice like this it just saves you an incredible amount of time and it's so powerful because you can add in loop cuts through ngons essentially i just love this tool it's so useful so that's the dice tool now we also have twist 360 so but just by clicking it just the regular left click this adds an array modifier and deforms at 360 degrees so you can do like cool twisting type effects like this i'd encourage you to just experiment so if you're going for like a um a circular array of some sort go with the twist 360 and you can do cool stuff with that you can also control click on on the sky and not control click shift click and it won't actually merge the thing so like um i'm pretty sure it merges at the end points and i guess that's what disables that functionality i don't know i i usually just use the left click option and call it a day so that's twist 360. you'll probably use a radial array more often though and let me demonstrate the radial array so i'm just going to add in you know a cube to make this easier to look at and let's say i wanted a circular pattern here around the top of the cube so usually what you'd have to do is you know you'd have to add in a cylinder scale down the cylinder get in here and if you wanted to spin it all the way around 360 degrees i guess you could technically run a twist 360 and then just reposition it but i mean no one wants to do that and it's just it's not going to be as accurate or as even because you're going to have to guess where to place it so usually for a radial array you'd have to add in an array modifier you'd have to add in some sort of object to array around say an empty like this and then you'd have to turn off relative offset turn on object offset choose the empty apply the rotation and scale for those guys and then you'd have to reset the origin to the 3d cursor here and then to get the radial array how you want it to be set you'd have to you know pull down the empty and then you can go in here and rotate it you can increase the array count and there you go there's your radial array and then you have to really get in here and get this precise it's so incredibly and mind-numbingly annoying to do it that way where instead in heart ops you just go in here you can go to radial array so there's two different ones there's the array around the object's center so that's just where the object's placed you're going to see it's just around where that object was or you can array around the 3d cursor by going in here and just control clicking and that'll write around the 3d cursor it'll give you a perfectly even amount of segments and the height is going to be the same as well so then you can do like a boolean difference or something like that so it's uh it's just way easier than vanilla and people still tell me they don't want to buy the add-ons but they'll spend hundreds of hours of extra time working in vanilla it's it's um it's a waste of time honestly so i understand not everyone everyone's in a different financial situation but at some point even if you can save up a couple bucks a month hard ops is an absolute necessity if you want to progress as a 3d artist so that's really why i'm trying to demonstrate this and especially help people out that already have hard ops so there's that we have radial array sphere cast it's literally just a cast modifier turning it into a perfect sphere now i actually just use the quad sphere option that comes with i think mesh machine maybe i don't know but yeah that's just a quad sphere option now we've already discussed these stuff with curve extract you know where you can turn things into a plates and do things like that you know you can mess with that if you'd like curb extract i mainly just use in edit mode though so it's really all up to you what you want to do with it object mode works equally as well so there's that and then there's the array v2 which we already discussed earlier it just allows you to add in an array basically and what else do we have we have just you know the regular good old smart apply which you can just do in the operations menu if i'm if i'm not mistaken i think the smart apply in the operations is the same as the one in mesh tools i don't think the functionality is any different i think they're just in both menus so there's that now this one's pretty cool there's the material list this is just going to be a little bit of extra i don't use these too much but in the mesh tools you can go through a material list so if you have materials in the scene you can kind of scroll through those you can add in a blank material and just get some quick default settings so if you wanted to make it glass you just take on glass and you don't have to deal with nodes and stuff like that and yeah it's a pretty cool functionality but instead of doing that you can actually just press alt m and that will bring up the list so if i just wanted to add a new blank material really quick with uh just a lot of versatility in there i can just click and then you know go in here and adjust whatever i need i can make like a it's going crazy right now but yeah you can make in a mission you can basically you can customize all the material settings here i don't really use this option too much if i'm honest i prefer to go in here and just have complete control over the material but if you just want something quick you can press alt m and deal with that and also if you have a ton of different materials you can go in here and material scroll you can just scroll through all the different materials and see how each of them look now i haven't customized any so they're all going to look the same but if you have a ton of materials you can just scroll through them and see what you like so if you're someone that deals with uvs then bless your heart you can do an auto unwrap in here and mess around with that but um i try to retain my sanity here and there so i don't really do a lot of unwrapping unless you know i have to do some sort of game asset work and there's some other stuff in here you can take a look at and mess with most of these i don't really use they're just there is like extra settings if you need to mess with them exports here as well if you need to quickly export and goodness gracious it is about to storm now settings i'm just going to quickly go over settings is like any settings menu in the software if you're looking for a specific setting you just go in there and take a look so say i shaded this to a a wired view so perhaps i added in like a boolean or something this automatically turns the wire if you want to change that back to a bounds or something you can actually go to shade solid and there you go a little bit quicker than going in here now i really want to keep this video down to all the essentials so i think i've covered all the essentials at this point so as for the extra stuff you know what's in settings and whatnot you can go ahead and take a look at those the only one i really use in here under settings is wireframe which you can also access with the alt v menu if you press alt v you can easily go into wireframe or turn off overlays or turn on face orientation once again the alt v key but you can also access that stuff in the settings menu and one last thing is in the settings menu we have pizza ops so you know if you're getting hungry when you're working um you can grab some little caesars or maybe domino's papa john's if you're feeling a little bit weird and there you go so sometimes they'll just be working you know i want a domino's pizza there we go it just brings up our good old domino's website and you are ready to order so we covered mostly everything with hard ops i guess the last thing or functionality that isn't really a setting but that's just built in that just works in the background is modifier management so traditionally in vanilla blunder if you added in a boolean or say you had a bevel here and then you added in a boolean so you know i go in here and just run a boolean difference operation or something in vanilla blender what this actually does is it puts the boolean just last in the stack it puts it on the bottom but as you can see with hard ops whenever you add in a boolean it automatically sorts it for you so the boolean will always go above the bevel and heart ops tries its best to figure out where modifiers should go by default and you can customize sorting so if you wanted to add in booleans and not have it sort for example if you didn't want sorting to work at all if you press ctrl tilde on the keyboard here let me pull this out ctrl tilde you can actually turn off sort modifier so if you don't want it to sort by default you can um you know just turn that off and you're going to see that it doesn't sort the boolean for us but if we turn that back on and run a difference boolean you're going to see the boolean goes above the bevel and you can also customize which modifiers are sorted and which modifiers are not sorted if you want to have a little bit more control so this is the only menu we haven't really went over but there's not really a need to go over this menu simply because you can look through most of these most of these i don't even touch this is just additional settings you can use for like um you know dicing or booleans but most of these settings as you can see are actually the same settings we have over here in default blender they're just a little bit more accessible i don't really use this menu too much though unless i'm trying to adjust the workflow settings or the sharp options and honestly i think my favorite part about hard ops has to be the the modifier management it gets so incredibly annoying having to go in and reposition the modifiers every time i add in a bullion it's just it's just crazy how inefficient it can get so that's about it for our heart ops overview i really hope this video helped there are tutorials out there but i don't think there was really a full comprehensive one um the main way i learned hard ops personally when i was learning it was i went through most of jerry's videos and just followed all his tutorials just sat through them replayed them several times spent hours upon hours just going through them and that's how i learned it so at the end of the day if you want to learn hard ops this video is just going to be a supplement you have to actually work and practice to get used to the workflow so don't expect this video to just make you a pro at heart ops expect this to give you the tool set needed to become a pro so that's about it for this video i really hope it helped you and i'll also have some affiliate links to heart ops as well as a box cutter in the description of this video and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 84,647

Rating: 4.9282384 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, hard, ops, hardops, tutorial, boxcutter, decal, machine, masterxeon1001, jerry, perkins, surface, modeling, non, destructive, hops, 2.90, installation, guide, beginner, josh, gambrell, workflow

Id: N6mfFv_7jYo

Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020