Create a cylinoid in vanilla Blender!

what's up everyone so we're going to be doing a vanilla tutorial today a lot of you have asked for that and uh i'm delivering what can i say so i'm going to turn off box cutter hard ops hell will turn off kit ops too why not we're going to be making a solenoid in this video so solenoids are pretty easy to make but the main takeaway from this video should be the process so um yeah let's just hop right into it now we could do this completely non-destructively that seems like the cliche thing to do um i honestly starting with a cylinder is more than fine to me so yeah we're just gonna kind of just arbitrarily start making this thing we'll add in a cylinder with 32 actually we'll crank that up to about 64. so it's a bit smoother and let's also rotate this 90 degrees over the x-axis oh and by the way i've been messing with this um this blender theme here if we go to preferences and then themes i was using uh blender light deep gray one of these i don't know i've been messing with different themes and i actually really like this one so that's why it might look a little bit different anyways we're gonna shade this smooth and then turn on some auto smoothing here and let's also go ahead and bevel this or chamfer rather a single segment bevel this front face here so next let's run a cutout here in the left of the cylinder so maybe we can just add in a cube scale this down and move it over some of you might be saying oh you're copying master xeon jerry's videos or to be fair though he uses box cutter and hard ops in those videos and this is vanilla so it's kind of different but i would definitely be lying if i said i didn't watch a ton of his solenoid videos when i was uh learning the add-on workflow they were just easy things to mess with and learn add-ons but this is vanilla so it's not really the same thing anyways cube in the side let's shift-click the cylinder control minus on the numpad like that looks pretty decent now if you're a complete complete beginner then of course you're going to need to turn on the bull tool add-on just type in b-o-o-l tick on the bull tool add-on super important then basically you can go in here select the cube shift click the cylinder control numpad minus to add in a cut here so yeah it's a pretty simple operation now i know some of you are a little bit more advanced with hard surface so uh just bear with me if i try to explain things at a more basic level i'm trying to actually help out those that are also complete beginners as well so um yeah what you can actually do with boolean cuts like this is if you want to get a different design in your cutout you can actually go to your main cutter object tab into edge mode for example and if i wanted to bevel these edges i could just go in and control b to bevel them i could make a more rounded fillet type of thing you know really whatever you want so there's a lot of versatility when it comes to booleans but just to keep things nice and um decent looking i'm just going to do a single segment chamfer we can always adjust that later if we want so now we kind of have this effect going on so that looks a decent now what i also like to do with the cutters because we're going to have a lot of boolean cuts in our workflow is i like to go up here to the cutters collection right click new collection and just call this new one something like cutters right and then we can select our cutter m key and then move it to the cutters collection and then if you just have the cutters collection off by default then it's just a quick way to manage your cutters and get them out of the scene without deleting them so that's uh that's pretty useful so this is um it's coming along i guess we haven't really done much let's add in a cut directly here in the center so of course what we could do is we could tab into edit mode and do this destructively you know inset the front face and extrude it back and this is fine but once again this is doing it destructively meaning this geo is actually locked in and you know when you can keep non-destructive it's always a better choice in my opinion because you have a lot more control over the mesh later on so what i'm actually going to do instead of doing it that way is i'm going to go into the front and we'll just add in another cylinder so shift a add in the cylinder 64 verts same thing whenever you add in a new cutter shade it smooth and turn on auto smooth off the bat a lot quicker that way then we can just rotate this 90 degrees over the x-axis and then i don't know wherever we want to scale it maybe we could scale it to about here pull it out and let's just see how far in this cylinder is going to go maybe we'll make it deeper than this cut here shift click the cylinder and then control numpad minus to get this effect here actually we ended up getting rid of our nice little chamfer didn't we that's no fun let's actually pull this back a bit maybe to about here that looks okay now what if we wanted only a certain area of this to be booleaned out so you know maybe this area to this area is booleaned but the rest of the inside is still the same width as this it still extends out to this point so two different ways you could do that actually the first one is by actually taking your cutter here and right now it has a bounding box that's just how the bull tool works if this bothers you you can actually go into a viewport display and change this to wire if you want to see it that way instead i just prefer the bounding box personally so the first way you could do this is by let me go to the modifiers panel is by simply adding in a solidify modifier so actually in this case it might be better to go to wire so you can see so the solidify modifier does is it takes this guy and just solidifies it like this and you can kind of see the effect that's happening right pretty cool effect it just depends how far you want to solidify it so that's the first way the second way is by actually going to the cutter itself go into wireframe with the z key in setting the back face and then extruding that out so basically what we're doing is we're taking the cutter and removing parts of the cutter which in turn brings back part of the solenoid if that makes sense so if i were to isolate this cutter here you can see that all this is doing is it's removing part of the cylinder which in turn brings back part of the area we're booleaning from so if you're a beginner beginner then i understand this might make a little bit of sense but mostly is confusing i was the same exact way i would just suggest following along and gathering the intuition more so than trying to understand everything off the bat it's a learning process right so as long as it makes some sense as to what's happening that's all you really need it'll come with time i promise you so yeah those are the two ways you could you could do that effect i don't really know which one i prefer in this case i guess it doesn't matter too much but what i am going to do is inset this a little bit less and just do it the cutter way it just all depends on what you're going for really so we'll move this to the cutters collection and now already our solenoid is looking pretty cool so next let's add in some little notches or something here on the left hand side so we'll add in a cube and most of the times when working with these solenoids you don't need too much besides like cylinders and cubes which makes things nice and easy for us when we're working so scale this a bit on the x-axis and then pull it out this way maybe scale it a bit on the y looks decent and then let's go ahead and shift click the cylinder control minus and let's say i want to get another notch on the bottom here so if this thing is if you're sure it's going to be perfectly symmetrical what you could do is you could simply mirror it across the origin point but i'm not sure i'm going to actually end up making this thing perfectly symmetrical so if that's the case what i would do is mirror it over an empty object instead actually you know what let's just make this a simple solution the easiest way to do this would be to add a mirror modifier choose where it says mirror object you can choose which object you want to mirror over so we're going to choose the solenoid so click on this little picker tool choose the solenoid and you're going to see that it's mirroring over the wrong axis now we want to mirror over the z axis here so we're going to change it to z and you're going to see it's still mirroring over the wrong axis and that's because our mirror object is the cylinder but the cylinder currently has a rotation of 90 degrees that is not applied so if this ever happens really simple you just press ctrl a and you can apply the rotation if for whatever reason you don't want your rotation to be applied you can simply just swap the axis here and change it to y instead usually you don't have to think too much about the intricacies you can just mess with the axes and see what actually works for you you can just choose y or like i said just apply the rotation here it doesn't matter cool so we're making pretty decent progress here i'd say let's move this to the cutters collection with the m key i like that and if you wanted to get a little bit more stylish with this you could even go into edit mode and perhaps bevel these guys you're going to see the bevels are not uniform either so to make sure it's beveling in a nice uniform fashion all we need to do is go into object mode ctrl a apply the scale so now you're going to see that the scale isn't biased anymore it's completely uniform so now whenever we bevel it'll bevel nicely like this so maybe we'll pull the bevel to about there move this to the cutter's collection now if your edges still look a bit rounded and jaggedy all you need to do is make sure we already smooth the cylinder we need to make sure our cutter is also shaded smooth so right click shade smooth and that'll fix the problem so i'm happy with how this looks and like i mentioned before you can do some pretty cool tricks with the solidify modifier so if i selected these cutters and used a solidify we could get an even more interesting type of effect here by simply adjusting the solidification distance i'm not going to actually do that i just thought i'd mention it because you can get some pretty cool results that way anyways now we can do just continue on with this piece basically just got to kind of think of what type of effect you're going for so next thing i think i'm going to do is press ctrl numpad 3 we'll go to the left hand side view here you're going to see we have some shading errors the stretching is kind of if we go to mat cap i'm not sure how well you can see it with youtube's compression but right about here we have a stretching issue where it's kind of stretched across the solenoid if we go into matcab you can definitely see it see that and that's because we don't have any constraining geometry it stretches all the way over here as a matter of fact if we go into viewport display for wireframe you can see that's only happening because we have an n gone here we have one two three four five six vertices for this single face which is definitely gonna cause shading issues so what you can actually do is simply just add in a proximity loop close to this edge so you can just hover your cursor over there go into edit mode and it looks like right around here should be okay so maybe just uh double tap g and just slide that over you don't want to get too close so that way we actually have room when we add a bevel later but that's going to get rid of most of the shading errors in the first place so yeah that's just something i thought i'd bring up we're not going to worry too much about that for now we'll discuss it later so yeah let's um let's just continue on with this thing next what we could do is recall the cutters collection by just clicking on this eyeball here and if we select this cutter the first one we made what i think i'm going to do is actually select this back face and i'm going to inset it with the i key and then extrude back a little bit more just to kind of have an extra cool looking design there you can kind of see with cutters you can do all sorts of cool tricks with it so next i'm going to introduce the slice operation i use it all the time in hard surface it's essential to understand what it does so i'm going to go into the front view here one on the number pad we'll add in a cylinder we can go ahead and shade it smooth and turn on auto smooth that's like always the default thing to do rotate this 90 degrees over the x-axis and then let's pull it out to about here or so so if we shift-click the solenoid and press ctrl forward slash on the numpad make sure it's numpad people mix them up all the time control forward slash we get this type of effect if i hide this we have like a little border going around here like a little um like a little crevice and this here is the slice operation um it's not very exciting until we add a bevel when we add bevels later you'll see the importance of it but for now just kind of accept that as this cool little border here you'll see the importance a little bit later what i think i'm going to do however is actually no i could probably leave it here i'm going to go into let's see edit mode select this face here and just pull it back so i'm going to pull it just out front just out front of this face right about there and that looks decent so this next trick is pretty cool actually wait i lied the trick i was going to show you well we'll hold off on it actually isn't going to really work here anyways let's continue on with this piece you know just a few bullion cuts you get all sorts of exciting things so next we can maybe add in some cuts here like around this piece so perhaps we could add in a cube as we've been doing scale down this cube about here scale it on the z a little bit really however big you want the cut to be is how big you need to scale the cutter and we'll pull this over and shift click control numpad minus to add in a cut here so same idea for this piece we can just mirror it to the bottom here so add a mirror modifier we'll choose this to be the mirror object and then we'll just i'll just take on the z axis here and then maybe we could scale this a bit on the x-axis like that looks pretty good and then move that to the cutters collection so yeah looks pretty decent now maybe we could add in some circular cuts here in these corners i'm choosing these corners just to kind of show a little bit more of the tool set here in blender so i'm going to add in a cylinder we're going to scale this down now it's easy enough to you know position the cylinder like right on this flat plane right that's easy enough but if you want to get it onto a slant you either need to rotate the cylinder to the same angle as the slant or a much easier way to go up here to the snap menu go to face and then choose a line rotation to target take that on then we're going to press the g key to grab and hold control and it's just going to automatically snap to the correct rotation of that face there to scale it down and now if we grab it on the local z so g z zz we can pull it in like that we're also going to right click shade smooth that guy will turn on auto smooth and then just run a difference boolean like that now if i want to keep it consistent or the mirror is from top down then you know perhaps i could have just uh perhaps i could have went up here and did it instead i don't really care as long as we get the mirror in i'm not worried about consistency so let's mirror this to the top we'll add a mirror modifier choose this as the mirror point on the z axis and now we have another cut up there so let's move this guy to the cutters collection and now what i think we could do is run a big difference boolean all the way in the middle here and also you're going to see since we extended this i actually forgot i kind of need to move this loop cut here over a bit so in edge mode we can just alt click this and then double tap g and this is more of an estimation as to where it needs to go not worried too much about the accuracy for now okay so let's go into the side view here control numpad 3 add in a cube scale down the cube let's move it over a bit and then scale it on the y scale it on the x and then just move it over scale it on the x some more let's just run a difference boolean here and move this guy to the cutters collection so a little bit more complex now now you're going to see this thing didn't actually slice all the way through remember when we added the slice operation to get this crevice here now the slice operation actually creates a new object so we also need to run this guy as a difference boolean let me undo this we also need to run this guy through here as well so ctrl numpad minus and now that issue should be fixed we can move this to the cutters collection there we go actually the next trick i want to show you is cutting the cutter super useful tool i use it all the time so i'm going to turn on the cutters collection here and it looks like this is the one i want to cut from so all these other ones are kind of in the way so we can just go in here and disable those so they're not in the way so this is the piece i actually want to cut through so you'll see what it does in a second but for now i'm going to go into the top view here z to go into wireframe let's add in a few cylinders here maybe drop them down to around 32 vertices we don't need like a crazy high amount let's drop a cylinder here a cylinder over in the corner and then a cylinder up here in the front so now if we take a look at these we kind of have these cylinders all inside the mesh as you can see so we'll go ahead and shade this smooth and then turn on auto smooth i guess for each of them now the issue here is that these are separate pieces so when we try to run a bevel later to this piece i'll even show you as a preview if we try to go in here and run a bevel modifier later we'll discuss the bevel modifier in a bit just for now take my word for it let me adjust the offset you're going to see we don't actually get a bevel around these cylinders in there it doesn't look good and we obviously want to have a nice bevel around there later on and that's going to be an issue so instead of having these are just separate pieces floating around we can use these to cut through the cutter here so if we select all three of these cylinders shift click the cutter object here and press control minus what this is actually doing is it's removing portions from this original cutter the one that's moving around right now and it's removing areas from this cutter which in turn brings back the areas from the piece we're cutting from once again might be a little bit confusing so i'll just kind of demonstrate it to give you a little bit more intuition so if i apply all the booleans here on the cutter and isolate the view let me just isolate it and tab into face mode we can also change this to textured so as you can see this cutter now actually has three holes in it so whenever whenever we run a difference boolean through a piece these holes won't be accounted for there's no area to remove here this is just kind of air so that's exactly what's happening on the main piece here is there's not any anything to cut from in that area so in turn this part of the mesh from the original cylinder stays there so yeah anyways we can just move all these guys here to the cutters collection just select all of them get rid of them we don't want them anymore i mean we do want them in case we want to make changes but we don't want them to be viewed in the scene so we'll just move those to the cutters collection turn off the collection and we're good to go so this cylinder or these cylinders rather actually part of this main mesh here um they're all joined together nicely and you'll see that if i add a bevel modifier we actually have a bevel coming through here so yeah hopefully that makes sense there next i'm going to do is go into the front view let's add in some extra designs here on this sliced piece so i'm actually going to use this slice piece to my advantage now if i tap into edit mode on this piece it actually shows the original cylinder because we haven't yet applied the slice modifiers here which are basically just booleans in combination with um with unions you don't need to worry about how they work but yeah what i'm actually going to do instead of applying all these and going destructive i'm just going to duplicate this piece right here so that way we still have that other one as backup and i'm just going to apply all the booleans in here so now we have this piece which is separate now you can see if i go into edit mode we have access to all the geometry so that's good i'm actually going to press forward slash on the numpad to isolate it and i'm going to work with this real quick so i'm going to go into face mode we're going to select this front face here and press i to inset now the geometry over here is going to go crazy doesn't matter at all and you'll see why in a second just ignore it i'm only worried about this area roughly around here and then i'm going to go ahead and press ctrl b to bevel this once again it's going to go crazy don't worry about it you'll see why so i'm going to bevel to about here something like that and then what i want to do is literally just select maybe this ring of faces here so just control click all the way around to about this point and then i'm going to press ctrl i to invert the selection x and then delete out the faces so that's why i didn't care about that crazy geometry over here we're just going to delete it anyways so now we just have this piece and you're probably wondering well why exactly do i want this piece well if we press forward slash on the numpad to get back into global view now we have this separate object which we can actually we can either add a solidify modifier to it and pull it in this way so it's basically a non-destruct non-destructive extrusion or what we could do is um simply extrude this inwards it doesn't really matter too much in this case it's just a simple cutter piece so so when it comes to cutters i'm not worried too much about whether it's destructive or non-destructive i don't care it's usually the base mesh that i want to have complete control over and i like to keep it as non-destructive as possible so i can make changes up to the last second so in this case i don't really care we have a boolean here for some reason let me i think it's because this original one had a boolean we'll just delete that we don't need it and we're going to extrude this inwards and you're going to see the shading is a bit off if we go to face orientation you can see that the normals are bad so we can simply select it with the a key shift n to recalculate very important because the shading won't look good otherwise and then now we can simply run a difference boolean right here so what we just did there is a little trick i like to call stealing geometry i made a video on that if you want to watch it yeah it's a pretty cool little trick so i'm going to move this to the cutters collection and already we have a pretty decent looking design here next i'm going to do is add in one more cylindrical cut in the middle to show an even more powerful tool that i love using so we're going to add in one more cylinder here let's give it 64 vertices to keep it consistent shade smooth and then auto smooth rotate this 90 degrees over the x-axis like so and i don't want it to cut from these notches so we'll scale it down a bit more and pull it in this way that should be enough and then control minus to add in this cut so what i'm going to do with this one is i'm going to go into the front view add in a i guess a cube's fine and i'm just going to position it down here and rotate it somewhere so now what i can actually do with this guy is let's uh box select these set of vertices and wireframe and then at this point i can literally just grab these up and then just do some random extrusion magic i don't really care too much about the outside of the cutter we'll extrude this inwards maybe like this and then this is really sloppy but it doesn't matter because that's not going to show up then we'll extrude this way so now i can actually use this to cut from the cutter so if i just scale this really really wide wider than the cutter itself and shift click the cutter and run a difference boolean check this out now we have this cool little like um i don't know like bar design in the middle just a cool little trick i thought i'd show you you can rotate this really in whatever direction you want just a pretty cool trick i like using sometimes i'll actually set the origin to the geometry and then you know you can rotate it to whatever point you want it to be in maybe like right here and then just move these to the cutters collection and we are good to go now maybe it's like a final design here i can add in a union boolean to the top because like the purpose of this video wasn't to do a crazy complex solenoid it was to show you a lot of essential hard surface modeling strategies in vanilla to kind of build the intuition intuition is so important in modeling and i think this last design is going to really make it click for some of you so we're going to add in a cube here scale it down scale it on the x scale it on the y maybe a little bit more on the x and then i'm just going to pull it up to about here and i want to first of all control a to apply the scale so that way the bevels aren't biased so ctrl a apply scale let's tab into edge mode and select all four of these edges here and i'll press ctrl b and let's do about 10 segments so you just roll up on the wheel on your mouse until you get about 10 you can see in the bottom there your segment count so pull it to about here shade it smooth and then turn on auto smooth and now let's go in here and run a union boolean so if we shift click the solenoid and press control plus on the numpad now we've union this piece so let me actually pull this top face down so it's not so tall but if i were to go into wireframe you're going to see that this piece is actually in fact one entire uniform piece and you're going to see these edges right here actually sitting right next to the edges of the cylinder that's going to cause some problems i'm actually glad that happened though so that way i can demonstrate the problems and show you how easy it is to fix so yeah this thing looks pretty cool now so now let's get in into the bevel modifier add the bevels then we'll be just about done also if we try to move this piece which is basically the main piece and the slice cut if we try to move it you're going to see that the the cutters don't actually move with it and this is part of the reason i don't like vanilla workflow because if you use add-ons like hard ops the cutters automatically get parented which means they move along with it but in vanilla all you need to do is simply take your cutters and parent them to the main object so for whatever reason you want to move this piece you just go to the cutters collection we're going to select click on the cutters collection right click select objects which will select all the cutters in here actually it's only going to select the active cutters so let's press alt h to unhide all of them and let's try that again select objects so now we have all the cutters selected here what we need to do with that is shift click on the main cylinder control p and then parent with object keep transform so now if we turn off the cutters collection and try to move this it's actually going to move everything with it maybe not maybe maybe the boolean for the slice piece this one here might need to be a separate parent let's try again okay something's missing here what did we not would it be not parent it might just be this piece itself try shift selecting both of those there we go that's what it is so i'll make sure you also select your slice slice piece and everything will move together so yeah if i'm making a detailed tutorial might as well throw that in there so yeah that's how you can move the entire object without the booleans going crazy anyways back to the important part which is the bevel modifier uh and here we need to add a bevel to it right now all these booleans are in here if i drag this out we have a lot of boolean operations now i actually want to collapse the stack here if you don't have this menu you simply go to edit preferences under add-on just search for modifier tools if you just type in modifier that'll come in and then you should have access to all four of these buttons here just click on toggle stack and it'll just clean it up a bit more and then finally in the last part of the stack i want to add in a bevel so you're going to see it actually bevels every single edge which is no good we want a bevel based off of the angles of the edges so all we need to do for that is change the limit method over to angle so now it's going to separate the bevels and only bevel the areas that are in this threshold of 30 degrees which in a solenoid is actually every every edge here basically so now you're going to see these edges are the ones that should be beveled but we can't see anything and that's because clamp overlap is kicking in and what clamp overlap does is it prevents any overshooting vertices that come because when you start beveling the vertices can actually overlap with each other i don't really use clamp overlap ever unless i'm diagnosing problems so i'm going to turn that off change the segment count to about three so it's more rounded and now all we have to do is decrease the offset just hold shift and decrease it and just give it a very very slight offset there you're going to see this piece is actually going crazy right now my guess is this is stemming from the slice here so what i'm actually going to do if i can find the correct boolean whatever cylinder this was for the slice this one's called cylinder001 so i'm actually going to go to this piece and find the boolean that represents cylinder01 it was one of these cylinder o2 so right here i'm going to actually apply this boolean and if the apply option is grayed out you just go here to the object data panel and click on this number and it'll fix the problem so we're going to apply that boolean so now i think if i bevel this it'll actually fix there we go and if you're a beginner and don't really know why that was occurring off the top of your head that's completely fine i just knew it right off the bat because i've been doing this for years now so i just kind of know common problems and how to fix them but the best learning you're going to get is from problems like that so you can go in there and diagnose the issues on your own the best learning comes from finding your own solutions so now you're going to see we have a pretty nice looking bevel around all these harsh edges here if we turn it off and on it just looks way better it actually reflects the light those rounded corners in real life actually reflect light which is why we use bevels and hard surface it simulates the real world lighting reflections so this is an issue over here let's not worry about it right now you're going to see it still looks um a little bit flat like we have these stepping issues let's take on hard and normals and that'll actually smooth it out for us so it looks a little bit nicer so this whole thing looks pretty decent now we need to take a look and look for any crazy shading errors kind of like this so i'm gonna actually go to a reflective matte cap this will help highlight any shading errors more so so this one's stretching all the way across because we don't have any proximity loops terminating the shading right here so i need to move this loop back so we'll just do a bit of guesswork here just do it the lazy man's way so i guess right about here should be okay we can check in wireframe so now you can see the shading can only be up to this point so it's only going to stretch up to this point because this loop right here is actually holding back the shading from moving over here it's like a wall basically so when it comes to hard surface and polygon modeling software it usually comes down to not making the shading perfect but actually constraining the shading areas now you could use a normal transfer here um i made a video on that the video before this was on normal transfers if you want to watch that same idea applies here but really this is more than fine uh the shading is pretty much isolated you're gonna see in the corners of the bevel here it looks really pinched it looks bad so i would always recommend i wish this was a default setting but in the bevel modifier change your outer miter type to an arc that'll actually round and make it look nicer so uh yeah that looks a lot better so as much as i want to use a normal transfer here i um i don't want to make this video too overwhelming if you want to understand normal transfer or data transfer and how to use it just watch my last video the one before this on cutting holes and spheres same idea applies to this but um you know for beginners it's more than fine to really just get in here and add in some isolation loops as i like to call them and just really pull the shading back to a more convenient location we'll add in one more right here and help constrain some of that shading there now if you wanted to you could run an edge horizontally across this way i would not recommend it and here's why if i were to do that drop an edge here and pull it down it helps isolate the shading but the innate issue here is that the shading is only affecting this area by adding that edge in it goes all the way across the entire cylinder and actually disturbs the curvature this cylinder is now uneven on the curvature so if we actually take a look there's a very visible harsh seam right here which is not good for the curvature and it's not super visible but it is something i would not recommend doing so i'm not going to do that so in this case the only way to truly eradicate this shading error is to either one use a data transfer modifier like i said i'll put it in the description or two we could go destructive man i'm losing my voice here i need to get through the rest of this tutorial before it's completely gone anyway so i'm gonna show you just a more beginner friendly way to do this and it's just simply go destructive so like i said i don't like going destructive unless i'm perfectly sure i'm not gonna make any additional changes in the future and since this tutorial is about over i'm actually just going to go and apply all the modifiers as they are so usually what i do is i'd use a smart apply and hard ops to apply all the booleans at once and leave the bevel but in vanilla all you really need to do is click on the toggle stack button here and just apply all of these booleans manually i think batch operations also does that i'm not 100 sure anyways yeah apply all your booleans and now we can really get in here and have a bit more control over the shading so we can work our way from left to right here these shading errors are mostly confined to this area because of this proximity loop we added but they're still noticeable probably not in the youtube video but on my end i can definitely see it so really the main solution here would be to let's grab this on the y-axis and pull this as close as we can without disturbing the bevel so right about here and that's going to essentially make the shading even more isolated maybe a bit too much let's space it out a bit more and then here i might double tap g and just slide this down a bit make it a little bit more confined it's not too bad now moving these edges here disturbs the curvature a little bit because this isn't uh truly uniform anymore it depends how much it's noticeable and it actually is kind of noticeable here so i'm actually gonna undo that that wasn't the best idea and this is probably about as good as we're gonna get you know you could try connecting these up into quads but you're not gonna get perfect shooting really without a normal transfer here and like i always say it's always about confining shady not eradicating them and from a distance you're probably not going to even see it in the render really now if you get really close up renders like super close to where the shading is you can see it you should do everything in your power to remove it in this case you just need to go normal transfer but it's um it's not really that noticeable from a distance i'm not too worried about it you know you should work smartly and not overwhelm yourself with unnecessary adjustments if you can avoid it this one right here is pretty stretched let's try joining up these two verts you can see that kind of helps relax the shading a bit more it kind of pulls it to this point but it's a lot more confined than it was stretching over here so i'm not going to actually do that to that point looks good for this one same idea let's try joining that in that one oh that didn't look very good did it that's too much of a stretch for my liking so i'm going to leave it there now even from a distance this shading error right here is way too obvious and i'm very meticulous when it comes to shading i think if you can see shading areas you need to get rid of them it's not good practice to just leave shading areas in your mesh i don't think that shows mastery of the subject i think it teaches you how to run away from your problems really so avoid very obvious shading errors like these ones here you can't see okay this one here is way too obvious so we need to fix this one somehow and i actually think i have a good solution is to run one more vertical loop um basically straight down this way but since we already went destructive we don't have the luxury to just cut straight down through here so we're gonna have to work with some of the geo we have here already so let's put this one on pause real quick we'll get back to it very shortly but up here we really need to fix this is this is crazy we have a bunch of shading artifacts and that's no good so first things first we need to we need to deal with this we need to start merging some of these verts together so i'm going to turn off the bevel modifier you're going to see these verts are all really close to each other let's turn on auto merge and what i'm going to do is just merge all these close verts together help get rid of it now these guys we'll uh double tap g slide those up okay that looks good slide this one you know just fix what you can these are just any near-miss vertices are never good so i just like sliding them and getting them out of the way okay slide these up and same for these slide these in and just a few more left to clean up and this should help constrain the shading make it a little bit nicer okay there we go so now this thing is actually accurately fused to this edge now maybe what i should do is run a loop cut with ctrl r through here help balance this one a bit let's um select them j to join them and then slide them same for this side select them both j to join them and then slide them in that'll help it a little bit there we go if we turn the bevel back on though i think this is still going to overlap a bit maybe we can go into wireframe and look okay it actually isn't so i was worried this bevel was going to overlap this edge now it would if the offset was higher or maybe not i don't know but either way it's not it's not overlapping so the shading is fine so that did a pretty good job let's turn off wireframe and inspect the shading real quick see how it looks a little bit too stretched around here we'll fix that so i'm going to run another loop cut with ctrl r to about here and then join these vertices with the j key and all we really need to do now is just kind of pull these in and this is just going to push all the shading back so it's not really noticeable at all so to slide all these guys back now i guess a little bit more geo through here would have helped out a bit more but i mean look at that i can't see anything anymore so i mean who cares pull this in if it really bothers you you could add in another loop here i suppose and join this up and just you know assist it even more i just think it's kind of overkill and this isn't hurting the curvature at all because it's going straight through the curvature the only important part of the curvature are these edges here these ones not the ones going through it that doesn't affect the curvature at all so we're good there look at that shading's much better a lot more isolated maybe we could join in there pull that in you know what this one here is just causing issues i'm going to hold alt and click this one control x actually know what i'll just undo everything this loops just causing too much too much of a problem that it's not worth dealing with let's just slide this one over and yeah this is this is more than enough in my opinion this looks good a little bit of an error right here not super noticeable not terrible what we could do here to help hold it though is add in a loop go into edge mode and then select this edge and control x to dissolve it out and then if we just go in here and join this up that should that should help retain the shading a bit i could slide it there we go that looks good i can't really see yeah this is barely noticeable right here most of it's pushed into the corner here so i'm not worried about it like i stated earlier more geo off the bat going in this direction would have probably been the best solution here um but you know i can get away with this this is all right maybe join this up looks pretty good i also try to go for somewhat elegant topology like what we just had before was just that looked terrible so i just kind of joined it into some more practical locations to help it look cleaner so yeah look at this from a distance looks pretty good now can you notice this not really no like i said if it's not noticeable don't stress about it okay so we need to do the same thing to the other side but no one has time for that so all we really need to do to put it to the other side is go into top view we'll select everything with the a key f3 and search for symmetrize so s-y-m-m and then mesh symmetrize and we're going to symmetrize across let's try it's going to be x-axis let's see which one it is though it's going to either be negative or positive first i guess it doesn't matter really did that do the job okay yeah it did so now it's completely even on this side which is good because now all the changes we made over here are now also replicated on this side so these shading arrows should now be pretty much fixed okay so i think this piece is good maybe we need to do something similar to this side here unfortunately no easy solution on this one so let's um just drop in a loop do the same type of idea just help constrain the shading as much as we can pull this up and around maybe add in another loop through here and another loop through here we don't want to pass it through that area it's going to be a bad idea join that with the j key and then just you know help push some of the shading in join these guys up just push all the shading in get rid of it it's not going to look good maybe fill that in or not i don't know it looks better okay also you can see this right here it looks like a shading error but it's not it's actually the shadow if you have shadow turned on shadow can be the most misleading thing ever if we turn that off you can see that's actually just the shadow causing weird issues so most of this looks good shading's still a little bit so so this i'm not a super big fan of around this area let's fill this in much better looks good so this triangle right here is causing some unwanted shading the reason the shading is really distorting around this area here is simply because the curvature has kind of been disturbed a little bit which in this case it's so isolated it's probably fine but you really need to get in here and try to find a even even more of a constraint for the shading really and maybe joining this into a quad might help which it does so you can see really any shade and error we have are kind of pushed back into this area this see if we push that back it's just going to bring us back to the triangle from before which in my opinion it just wasn't looking that good so we could probably get away with this to be honest it's not super noticeable this area is okay as well uh there is going to be a little bit of stretching simply because this curvature is disturbed so let's just pull this back a little bit and you just have to figure out is this one worth it or would you rather have this shading error here yeah it's just really all trial and error for this type of thing and if you're a beginner it's um it's an eye you develop over time and you know the more i do hard surface the more uh different variations i'm discovering myself for right here these two these are simple enough so just to keep things consistent i'm actually going to um turn off the bevel join these guys up and slide them you know i can make some easy quads here dissolve these edges with control x join these up and then slide upwards like this and then maybe do one more here i mean this curve this isn't hurting the curvature even in the slightest so you know if you can like completely eradicate the shading errors like why not do it you know it's like right here the shading's pretty much perfect in this area now the only area is kind of iffy is right here you can see it so let's knock the rest of this out before my voice is completely gone um we did pretty good here i mean the topology in this area isn't the best but um it's it's not terrible either it'll work what i probably should have done before i went destructive meaning i applied the modifiers it's kind of planned beforehand and added in some additional constraining loops just to help hold this we got away with it manually which is fine but you know if the shading's gone then it's gone it's just uh this isn't as clean as i would necessarily like it to be but i think we can get away with it anyways this right here this is on a curved surface a big end gone i don't really see many shading errors but right here it's a planar surface and if we have hardened normals on a planar surface no matter how bad the topology is on a flat surface it doesn't disrupt the shading at all so what i'm going to do to actually make this area as perfect as i can is i'm just going to go into the side view and i'm just going to knock the rest of these off with a knife so k and then c to keep it straight click and press enter we'll do the same with these here just keep um keep cutting with the knife tool so now we're just turning these guys into quads basically which shouldn't really disrupt the shading pull this one down okay so that's better and it's going to terminate and turn this flat surface into an n-gon but it's flat doesn't really matter and you can always scale it on the z-axis to zero if it's you know slightly curved this one's completely flat though this right here is an issue let's um slide that up a little bit there we go so that looks good this is still a pretty bad shading error however this one is just pretty harsh at some this is a common type of shading area you're going to run into on curved surfaces where the corners terminate into an endgone one of the most popular reasons you're going to get shading areas and uh really without weighted normal this is just hard to constrain like you could try different connection points and seeing how they look that didn't work too well uh you could try something like this which kind of translates the shading errors over to this one you know this is this is a hard one to deal with without normal transfer unfortunately so yeah this is just one of the clear limitations of poly modeling software tons of pros tons of benefits to it but um you know a cad software this is where cad might shine a little bit more in terms of shading and visual acuity really so you know it's not terrible we could probably just slide this one up and call it a day and get something that's a little bit easier to the eye to look at than this one you can see that one's just harsh and this one's a little bit better you know not the best not the best but um something we can definitely get away with maybe join that up there to give it a little bit more relaxation there so yeah i can for a distance i i think i can deal with this it's not terrible okay so now we need to do is first of all i'm going to symmetrize the other side notice how i flipped this piece to the other side as well when we symmetrized it did that the last time so you know when you run symmetry be careful because it'll basically take the geo from one side put it on the other so if you don't want that you don't want to run symmetry so we're going to go up here tab into edit mode of course f3 run symmetrize again you can see that did a very nice symmetry here maybe pull this one in to make it a little bit more even so if we take a look at the top see if there's any really bad shading errors going on if it's uh if it's not showing on the right side it's not going to show on the left because it's symmetrized so we'll go down and i don't really see anything crazy maybe a little bit here let's zoom in so yeah you can see the reason the shading's kind of warped here is because this curvature gets disturbed if we go in edit mode you can see this continues and then the curvature kind of moves up this way and isn't in a continuous fashion anymore so i mean you could join these up see if it helps at all might help push it up a little bit more so you know if something like that works but i don't think it's a huge issue really what we're really concerned about is how this looks once we add on a metallic material to it but one final thing i would like to do is also symmetrize this down on this way so that way it's like a it's a completely symmetrical in all four quadrants type of uh solenoid so i'm going to go into edit mode here f3 will run symmetrize this time it's going to be on the z-axis so it's either going to be one or the other in this case it's positive z to negative z so all the shading on the bottom should be identical to what we have on the top so now we kind of have this and the last thing we need to do is bevel this interior slice which is actually really easy all we need to do is select the one here with the bevel shift-click on this one on the slice without the bevel and if you have the copy attributes add-on enabled just type in copy in the add-ons menu turn it on you can press ctrl c copy selected modifiers and then we need to get the bevel this one maybe it's the other way around let's try that yeah it's the other way around so slice and then the main piece ctrl c copy selected modifiers bevel and we're good to go okay so the thumbnail obviously looks pretty cool and i don't really want to be clickbaity i'm not a fan of that so i'm just going to quickly show you how i got the render in the thumbnail to look cool so we're not just like left here hanging can make it look uh look decent especially if you're a beginner and want to show something off i'll show you exactly how you get the thumbnail render okay so this thing looks pretty freaking awesome i like it what we need to do now is go into look dev view and we need to add on a metallic material so add a new material and let's give it a dark silver metallic like that and maybe the middle one we can choose the same material but give it a unique user and just make it a little bit brighter like that real quick here we have a problem we have some artifacts in this middle piece which are a little bit easy to fix up my guess is because of an overlapping bevel as you can see some of that's overlapping so what you could do is drop the offset of the bevel to fix it but you have to go too low before it fixes and i don't want to go that low so the other option is to simply just apply all the booleans we're going to be rendering this soon anyways so i don't really care i only go destructive towards the end and we're at the end so you know it's fine to do that so this is a really easy solution we can just turn off our bevel modifier and you're gonna see this edge here is just too close so we can dissolve it out with control x it doesn't really hurt the curvature that much so this one we can slide in all right let's try again let's turn this on you know what we can probably just slide this one over a bit this fert we can slide down you can see it's mostly these vertices just being really close to each other this edge is way too close it's going to overlap immediately so ctrl x to dissolve that one out this one's really close as well the bevel is going to hit you always need buffer for your bevels so keep that in mind when you're doing these types of things um let's turn this on see if that's fixed yep there we go maybe not up here one more let's dissolve this one out and now i think we're good to go so yeah if you get artifacts don't worry too much about them just fix them and you'll usually be good to go anyways back to materials this thing looks pretty good one thing i also like to do is mess with the roughness settings of the metallic materials so a low roughness usually looks pretty cool just depends what you're going for so this one maybe a little bit lower i don't really like going high on the roughness it looks bad in the final render and also i found that giving it a little bit of clear coat tends to give like a nice depth effect you can kind of see what clear coat does and i want to go too high it just doesn't look good if you go too high maybe give it some roughness as well but i think a little bit of clear coat always looks quite nice on your final renders if you use it appropriately now i'm not going to actually use it in this tutorial but i always advocate for it uh decal machine if you want to have a really cool looking render decal machine is just simply the way to go you can really get in here and you don't have to do any additional modeling you literally just go in you drop in some decals you know really whatever you want you don't have to do any modeling at all it's just super super powerful and you just get in here you just add in some decals and just make this thing look cool and you know the more decals you add the cooler this thing looks but i just thought i'd showcase this if you guys are beginners and do have some money to spare um it's not my add-on i don't i'm not asking for your money but um decal machine is a good investment i use it all the time i'll link it in the description if you uh if you want to grab it but yeah decal machine is pretty cool anyways we're just going to render it like this so let's go in here and add in a plane the rendering is actually a pretty easy process once you get seasoned with it takes a little bit to get used to and wrap your head around at first but hopefully this video tutorial will help out a bit with that so yeah out in a plane make sure it's sitting right on the bottom of the solenoid make it you know fairly large maybe that's a bit too big something like that and then we'll add a new material to it and just call it floor so we know i always like to make the floor a nice dark metallic material and drop the roughness a little bit just enough to capture a slight hint of a reflection of the solenoid and also give it a bit of clear coat why not now we're just going to go into cycles rendering engine if you're not in cycles change the cycles easy enough cycles are just the way to go if you want a visually appealing renders and now you can really see how your final render is going to look this is as close as you're going to get to seeing your final render without actually rendering it might be a little bit noisy though now if you're a beginner here most likely your render isn't going to look like this if you've seen my other videos you know i absolutely support using overcast acris most likely right now your render probably looks like this or um if it's brighter maybe like this terrible terrible idea because this isn't representative of the real world this lighting just a stagnant light it's just it's not it's not realistic at all what you want is a naturally occurring light based off of a real world photo that accurately um that accurately illuminates your model and i suggest overcast hris for this so something that you'd see on like a sunny day with lots of clouds in the sky very static neutral light so hcri haven has a ton of these great overcast hris i'll link this one in the description it's completely free to grab i use it in all my scenes you can see it's a cloudy day bright out a very neutral and static environment this is some of the best lighting you can get for your scenes and if you don't yet have this i know i've mentioned it in other tutorials but i like to make sure everyone has access to the same information i'd get an 8k or a 16k if your scene can handle it 4k is fine really it's just i think 8k is a little bit higher quality anyways yeah download that and then what you do is you simply in this world tab you go here to color click on the dot click on environment texture then you just open that hri which i already have loaded in here so yeah now your solenoid is going to look a little bit better in terms of lighting now i do have transparency turned on under film you know it's up to you if you want to use that if you're trying to figure out where to put the lighting then i would turn it off if you already want it where it is you can turn it on but i do want the light comes from this direction i want the light to hit it over here on this side somewhere so i'm just going to pull out the node editor or the shader editor whatever go to world and then with this vector mapping node with the node wrangler you just press ctrl t to add that in anyways you can just rotate this hri until the lighting hits it from the direction you want so in this case somewhere in this direction is okay so at this point all we need to do is add in a camera and render this thing out so i'm going to press shift a and then add in a camera now if you press 0 on the number pad it'll zoom in right now the camera is in a weird location so we're just going to go to view align view align active camera to view i'm just going to move this over a bit we want it to be mostly on the right because when we add in some cool text we want the text to have some room over here so at this point i'm just going to turn on transparency under film maybe move this down so at this point all we need is a backdrop here to make sure the transparency is you know it's not just nothingness back here right so to do that we'll just go into top view we'll add in a plane a single plane rotate it 90 degrees over the x and then 45 around the z we'll just put it back here somewhere it doesn't have to be super big just enough to fit in the camera kind of like this plus if you make it too big then you're going to end up blocking the lighting so just use what you need and then for the background we could maybe make this a different color now every single material in the real world reflects light differently keep that in mind when you're rendering mess with different materials mess with metallic materials dielectric materials different colors see what makes your render look the best i'm kind of rushing this you know i could sit here for an hour and get the perfectly best result but i mean is it worth it you know get something that looks good but don't spend a crazy amount of time getting like the tiniest difference in your lighting it's just it's an easy way to make yourself go crazy in my opinion so yeah i'd recommend you know spending a bit of time on these backdrops and lighting setups but you know don't stress too much about it just make it look good so i mean i think this looks good and then finally i'm just going to go into edit mode and press ctrl shift b on this vertex and just give it a nice rounded corner looks a little bit cleaner and then maybe what i'll do is give this backdrop i don't know a little bit of roughness to it increase that and we are looking pretty good so now we're ready to render and of course we're using cycles i'm using gpu to render 200 samples i should really just do a video discussing all the rendering settings you need because in every tutorial i'm showcasing these but that's okay under light paths literally just copy these settings they should be fine uh clamping you can just leave that how it is i suppose um what else tile size depends greatly on your graphics card or if you're rendering their cpu i can't really give you an answer on what the best is here so yeah next thing in the layers panel tick on denoising data and you need to make sure your compositor looks exactly like mine right here this denoise is going to get rid of any noise in your scene and this glare set to fog glow is going to make any reflections have a little bit of a bloom effect to it and yeah both of these nodes here can be found in the filter panel both the denoise and the glare i trust that most of you can pause and copy this with relatively minimal issues but anyways after you're done doing that uh just make sure your resolution is set accordingly i'm using 2560 by 1440 and then all you have to do is press f12 and wait for this thing to render so yeah here's the raw render here looks pretty good now i want to quickly show you how you can make this thing look even better with just a few settings in photoshop i always always post process in photoshop makes things look 10 times better and is crucial for a good portfolio so here we are in photoshop this shouldn't be too long at all maybe like five minutes or so i'm going to press ctrl j to duplicate the layer so that way we have something to compare it to so at this point we just select the copied layer we go to filter and then camera raw filter and let me zoom out a bit okay so i think the exposure needs bumped a little bit so just turn up the exposure until you don't want to go too higher it'll kind of look washed out so maybe like and .35 is okay maybe drop the highlights just a bit and knock the shadows up just a bit and what we can do is actually make this thing look a lot clearer by painting over some clarity so i'm actually going to boost make sure you go into the paint brush tool here i'm going to boost up the shadows and then turn up the clarity something around 30. and then really all you have to do just kind of paint around this thing now i'm actually just going to increase the size so i can knock this out pretty quickly and you can see that the before and after is just crazy good this one looks a lot clearer and a lot sharper now which is um one of the main reasons i love photoshop for post processing now you could use just about any image manipulation software like affinity photo whatever you want i just prefer photoshop so that looks good we're going to click on and what we could do real quick just to make this thing a little bit more aesthetically pleasing is we could increase the exposure to something like point one and then make the size of the brush smaller and then just paint something really really subtle like a subtle bloom effect around the solenoid you can kind of see the difference the before and after it's just um just makes it pop a little bit more next we could maybe mess with some of the curves a little bit let's um let's use this guy and maybe pull out some of these levels here i don't know something very minor and then usually what i like to do for color balancing and color grading i have this add-on called infinite color you literally just tick on light and it just auto-generates a cool-looking render so i usually just click through this until i get something that looks pretty decent it really just depends on the mood you're going for with these types of scenes it's um it's very subjective there's not a right or wrong when it comes to the color grading it's what looks good to you most of the time see something like this has a nice little bit of tone to it but also looks um you know it looks calm and pleasing to the eye if we take a look here you can see the difference this is the before and this is the after and we did all this in like two minutes it's just a crazy difference so at this point all we need to do is add in some text i'm just going to click on the text symbol go up here and you could use you could just download sci-fi fonts wherever i'm using alasis one of my favorites and i'm just going to call this solenoid because that's what it is and find a good spot for this maybe make this a darker color for the text like this really whatever you want and then i think it just depends where you want this thing to be placed it's you want to make sure it makes sense like down here the eye gets drawn to it and we want the we want it to look balanced based off of where this is placed and where the solenoid is this solenoid almost it almost looks like it's looking up at this text here so that's going to be pretty good composition wise and you know composition is something i'm constantly improving in so it's uh it's all a process really when it comes to composition but that looks good and then you know for the thumbnail i might drop in something like tutorial right and this is if you really want to see the entire process behind how i do these types of things you know maybe make it like a really imposing green color so that way one you can read it in the thumbnail too it brings attention so people know it's a tutorial i mean how can you miss this very obvious green text so that's basically my entire process literally everything you saw was from modeling to tutorial to upload to youtube i showed everything so hopefully it made sense that's about it for the video at this point you can just save it as a jpeg or whatever you want you know save as and then just call this you know solenoid save it as a jpeg and you're basically good to go so for those of you that made it to the end i'd like to ask this question do you guys like these long form tutorials are they too long are they too short are they um are they clear do they do they help more than the five to ten minute tutorials i was making because most of these tutorials i've been making recently come directly from what you guys have wanted i i take i take advice from you guys as well as requests more than most people can imagine i absolutely value every single one of you and what you guys want to see on this channel if it weren't for you this channel would not exist and we want to be able to share this wealth of information with everyone so thank you first of all but yeah let me know do you guys like these long form tutorials would you rather something short would you like a combination of both i'd really like to know how you guys want this channel to be structured so thank you guys a bunch these tutorials actually take me three to four times the amount of time to make compared to the length of the video so if you see an hour long tutorial chances are it took me three to four to make re-recording editing uploading all of that takes a while so i never ask or bring it up but if you guys could leave a comment or just leave a like it actually helps boost the video and recommendations and things like that it helps me out a lot and keeps me going for these long form tutorials you can hear my voice it's almost broken now that's about it thank you guys so much i appreciate every single one of you and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 42,028

Rating: 4.9734807 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, beginner, tutorial, hard, surface, 3d, modeling, vanilla, no, paid, addons, free, hardops, boxcutter, josh, gambrell, masterxeon1001, cylinoid, rendering, materials, boolean

Id: Nxj7AcWl_iE

Length: 70min 55sec (4255 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020