Create a hard-surface canister in Blender | Tutorial

what's up everyone hope you all are doing well now we're almost at 50 000 subscribers that's insane i'm i just wanna before we start say thank you very much each and every one of you i don't care about the numbers i just love being able to help people and it means a lot that i'm able to do so so thank you everyone who supported um what i would like to do is create a little hard surface canister you probably saw by the thumbnail and title so we're going to be using box cutter hard ops because you know we value mental health so we're gonna add in a mesh cylinder and let's give it like i don't know 64 vertices make it a little bit smoother and then we'll press q and then run a sharpen okay so basic cylinder of course let's go to the top and bottom faces here and um by the way you might have a blue outline instead that's just because if you press ctrl tilda you probably only have b weight and sharp turned on i still have my creases and seams turned on but it doesn't really matter in what we're doing here so don't worry about it anyways we're going to go to the top and bottom faces here and press ctrl b we're on a small little bevel nothing crazy or a champ for rather to get this now really the purpose of this video is to show just hard surface workflow there's gonna be a bunch of tips and tricks you're gonna pick up it's a pretty fun and simple object to make anyways so so yeah we're gonna do that there and then what i'd like to do is hop in the top view with seven on the number pad and then five on the number pad for ortho and we're gonna hop in here and grab the ngon cutter and just cut out a shape like this nothing crazy and then we're going to press x to turn on slice make sure you're not holding control or it goes to knife i think and then we'll just go ahead and press enter so now we have this little slice operation going through as you may have guessed now if you ever want to adjust your cutter all you need to do is press q and then go to mod scroll here and then you can just scale it you can adjust it you can move it around you can do really whatever you want to do because you have full access to the cutter now and then also once you're done with the cutter you're gonna see up here we have collections and in this case the cutter is the second collection so to turn that off we just press shift two quick and easy way to turn off the cutters turn it on and off so just thought i'd mention that now i want to mirror this to the other side so we can select this piece shift select the cylinder we're going to press alt x and modifier up here just means mirror we're going to mirror it to the other side and you're gonna see it has a bunch of z fighting and that's because this is still a basic cylinder we need to also mirror this across to make sure that cut is actually there so already you can see with just a few slices and bevels and things like that you can get a pretty cool looking object now if we go into edit mode only problem is it accesses the whole cylinder that's no good and that's no problem that's simply because this boolean is not applied so i'm actually going to press q go to operations and then smart apply and now we have access to the geo here we'll do the same thing for the main cylinder here cue operations and then smart apply and all smart apply does is it applies all the um all the hard surface boolean modifiers basically including mirror i believe so mirrors booleans things like that will be applied whereas the important things that we don't want to apply like bevels will actually stay but we don't have any bevel applied yet so in this case it just applies the uh booleans for us now we're going to add a little bit of a notch in here like in the front um i made a tutorial on how to make notches if you want to watch that i'll be honest with you i'll probably forget to put it in the description but um i have a video on making notches just type in blender notches tutorial basically i want to take this edge here and bevel it right um i don't want to bevel the whole thing though this is like a design aesthetic i want to bevel only somewhere in the middle so i'm actually going to go in here and press k while in vertex mode k and then i'm just going to hover over this vertex we're going to press the c key to keep it straight and then i'll press the z key to cut through the object and then click and press enter now i want to do this to the other side but rather than wasting time doing that to the other side we can actually just run a symmetry now the reason we're not going to run a mirror is because symmetry applies it's the same as mirror but if the geo is already locked in meaning you've applied all your booleans then you run a symmetry instead now technically mirror does the same thing if you take a look only thing here is i um i need to make the manipulations on the side that we have mirrored from so if you have all your booleans applied it's actually just a lot easier to run a symmetry instead rather than having to go and mirror and then apply the mirror modifier if that makes sense you're going to see we have a little bit of glitching going on here and that's just because we simply need to symmetrize this guy across the x-axis as well and you're going to see that fix the problem quite easily so yeah hopefully that made sense there now what i want to do now that we have these little lines going through is i just want to bevel these now the only reason this guy is here is because symmetry actually adds an edge straight through the middle when you symmetrize you can dissolve this out no problem you don't really need it i'll just leave it in just because it doesn't really hurt us here and then i'm just going to select these two edges ctrl b now make sure you only have a one segment bevel we'll pull it back and then i'm just going to go back into object mode and then cue and run a sharpen to clean up the shading so now we're just going to run a mirror across and here's another i guess some practical situation of using symmetry over mirror this geo is locked in you can physically change it it's not a non-destructive boolean so we're just going to run a symmetrize instead so that way it um it locks in the geo on the other end rather than applying a mirror which is non-destructive once again hoping that makes sense okay so now we have that not looking too bad let's also add a hole here on the top well to select the middle cylinder we'll press d go to circle now by default circle might be set to 32 for you if you press ctrl d you can actually get into this menu i would recommend going to 64. otherwise the edges will look really jagged you can see the stepping issue looks no good but 64 is usually fine so we're going to hold ctrl if you don't get the snapping menu you just turn it on up here i like turning on both snapping and grid snapping and i also have my grid snap set to .05 we'll hold ctrl pull this out from the middle and then just pull it down like this and then you know what i might go back to mod scroll and just pull this bottom face up just a tad alright it looks good and one of my all-time favorite little uh settings in hard ops is the reverse bevel so we can add a little chamfer around the edge here by pressing q control clicking mark and then we just kind of pull out this way now it's hard to see so we'll just hide the cutter shift 2 to hide the cutter and the shading just bad because we need to recalculate the auto smoothing so we'll just run a sharpen again and if that doesn't pick up we just need to adjust the auto smooth angle down here a bit it's set to 60 by default to be honest with you i think 30 should be the go-to but that's okay and this is a little bit too close for comfort so i'm going to go in here run a mod scroll and then scale it shift z to scale it on just the x and y axis like that let's run a sharpen again and there we go and then maybe what we could do is we could just do it once again we could just run another circular cut through here or we could just use the already existing boolean and take from that it doesn't really matter how you want to do it but i'm just going to go in here to the cutter select the bottom face eye to inset and then just extrude up a little bit and maybe ctrl b and run a few bevels down here and now we kind of have this little paneling button type effect in the middle and then you know what just for fun let's run one more through here so hold ctrl once again and pull this one out and it's um you can see it's starting from here rather than the top that's okay we're just going to pull this down run through mod scroll to this guy and then just pull it up like this maybe like right around here and we can scale it up if necessary i don't know so that way there's like a little bit of an indent in there i think it looks quite nice but some i don't know where i want to pull it maybe i don't know something like that will be okay i might adjust this later or get rid of it completely to be honest with you i haven't decided yet but for now it looks okay i think okay cool now i want to run to the front here and let's add in some more details to the front so i'm going to go to box cut now by default we have a curvy object right here right and by default it actually snaps to the surface of the object so in this case if i ran the box cut it looks like it's going to cut across but in fact it's actually not because it's going to cut in from the face we started from so we don't want to use object align we want to use view align so that way it only cuts from the view that we're facing on so let's change it up here you click on this button and then we just cut through like this and then just kind of pull it in you know however far you want to move it in maybe like right to about here looks okay and also while we're at it we can go ahead and mirror to the other side so that way anything we do on this side will be replicated across and we're going to press alt x but keep in mind we're still set to symmetry we can't symmetrize here because the boolean isn't applied this isn't actually physical geo so if i try to symmetrize nothing's going to actually happen so this is a good case we're going to use a mirror now we can just go back to modifier up here or you can alt and scroll i like to do that a little bit it's just easier to me and then we'll go ahead and mirror across like that so it looks good to me and then maybe what we could do is go in here and do like a like an n-gone cut of some sort try to make it straight you can hold ctrl if you'd like and then yeah i don't know get something like this now i'm going to tell you right now this right here is going to cause issues because we're going to have ngons on curved surfaces which i can't easily be solved with a weighted normal later in the video when we do this it shouldn't be like too much longer before we add a bevel i'll show you exactly how to fix it how to clean up the shading it's actually super super easy so don't stress it for now the shading's just bad because the auto smooth needs to be recalculated so press q and then sharpen and if you need to you can adjust the auto smooth angle down here assuming i remember to remove my face from that corner yeah just in this menu adjust the auto smooth if you need to and then alt x and then we'll go and mirror across the other side like that and now we have the same design across and then let's go ahead and do another ngon cut over here maybe we could do like a hold ctrl and cut up this way cut across cut up this way i always like to do n-gons where it goes up straight and then at a 45 up straight and then out of 45 i just think it looks nice it's like a cool hard surface design that i see a lot so now we have this let's go ahead and once again sharpen if it doesn't pick up the shading you just got to drop it a little bit until it picks up which usually isn't that far across from what you had before it's usually pretty close so same thing we'll mirror to the other side so now you know just basic boolean cuts can really start to get us this cool looking canister it's already starting to come together a little bit so in the front here i want to add like some sort of capsule or something cool give it that sci-fi look so same thing we're going to use view align with the box cut and i'm just going to go and hold ctrl and just i don't know add in a cut like this don't worry about being super accurate here because the mirror is going to pick it up and make it perfectly symmetrical so don't worry about it we'll go to about here we'll press b to bevel and we'll just pull the bevel all the way in like this and make sure you give it a few segments maybe like 14 i guess like that and then we'll just go ahead and pull this in not too far or anything maybe right to about there press enter and might be a little bit too much right to about here should be okay so we're just going to add a capsule on the inside as you may have guessed a capsule cylinder so we'll drop in a cylinder 64 verts will hew and then sharpen scale this down now let's just put this roughly in the middle and just scale it up i don't know maybe to about here or so and make sure it's actually where we want it to be on the inside so like right about here and then i just want to add in a little bit of like an end point connecting into the inside so we'll select this face and then this face i to inset alt e and then extrude individual faces so that way they extrude along their appropriate normals in opposite directions kind of like that it's not bad and then maybe it's just an idea we can alt shift click to select these edge loops and scale on the z to kind of have like a i don't know like a more natural connection going on i think it looks cool okay let's go in here to the middle we'll run a loop cut and then what we can do is just cancel that ctrl b to bevel and i only want a one segment bevel so scroll down and pull it to about here now we could either extrude along the normals with e and then alt s but hard ops has a little bit of a quicker option for that q and then alt click on em macro all that does is it makes a panel as hard ops calls it so we just pull it in like this it's basically extruded along the normals that's it so maybe two about here so we'll be okay looks pretty decent to me and then i want to add like some sort of like circular i don't know like a circular piece of metal around it with a bunch of holes in it i think that would be cool so i'm actually going to go in here and in face mode we can alt click on these faces here we'll press q shift click on curve extract which all that does is it creates a plate which it basically takes the selected geo separates it and then adds a solidify modifier that's all it's doing so shift click and then we'll pull it out a little bit for more solidification and then scale up a bit maybe just shift to z like that and you know what we probably don't even need to solidify if i'm going to be honest at least for right now pull it to about there so i want to have this thing with holes all around it kind of you know going down and across so you can see the inside of this capsule but it's kind of encapsulating if that makes sense so to do that first of all um adding holes all across this thing is going to be very dense and i've already tried it several times just across my time modeling and i've found to i've come to realize that you don't need really any more than 32 edges and you'll see why so we're actually going to do is take this guy go into wireframe and in edge mode we're going to box select all the edges here go to checker deselect and then control x to dissolve the mount so now we've basically taken half of those and removed them so now we're back to 32 edges on the cylinder and you'll see why just trust me for now now we need to do to get those holes going across it is we need to add in some horizontal geo so we're going to add in some loop cuts with ctrl r we need to make sure all of these are roughly square otherwise the circles are going to turn into ovals because they're going to be more stretched on the z-axis so maybe right to about here should be okay you can see all these are pretty much square okay now this is very very important and you're going to see why shortly so whenever we add in these holes we're going to have end guns everywhere and the shading is going to be terrible because this is a curved surface so we can fix that perfectly just trust me for now with mesh machine we're going to press or select everything with the a key and in face mode we're going to press y and then choose stash it this is going to stash the normal information we have right here you can see the shading is currently perfect which is what we want so we're just going to stash that normal information so now we need to do is go into vert mode with everything selected select checker deselect and you know what this might be a pro okay the scale wasn't applied so if your scale is not applied that's going to be an issue ctrl a apply the scale let's go ahead and stash the normals again and now we can go ahead and check or deselect everything go to circle we'll have something like this and we're just going to press x and then delete out the faces and then you're going to see the shading is absolutely awful around the holes here because obviously we have a bunch of ngons now and ngons don't shade well on curved surfaces so that's why we stashed the normal information before we apply this because the shading was perfect and we can basically transfer that perfect shading to this guy and we're done so real quick we need to add in some solidification here so we're going to add a solidify modifier and pull it back a little bit and then whenever we use a normal transfer to fix the shading it is absolutely essential that you do your bevels around the circles manually don't know why regular bevels whether it's with hops or vanilla don't work not sure why it's very important that you bevel these guys manually so we're actually going to do here is go around to all these edges and actually let's apply the solidify modifier go around to all these edges here and obviously it's crazy to do that for every single hole so there's a quicker way if we press shift g and then choose face angles everything is selected so now we're going to do is press ctrl b and give this guy you know a good amount of segments don't be scared to really ramp it up but don't go too high because the geo might start lagging your computer but you know something like five segments or so would be good five or six and then we'll just go ahead and lock that in so now the shading is awful especially if we go into mat cap view look at that looks terrible so that's where this normal transfer comes in now we want to select everything outside of the bevels here so another easy way to do that you can see everything is made of quads around the bevel except the faces and these are the only ones we're concerned with so we're going to go to select select all by trait faces by sides and we're going to change the vertex count from 4 and then type to greater than yours will be set to equal to by default change it to greater than and now all of this will be selected so now to fix the shading all we do is press y go to normals and then transfer then just wait a second it might be a little bit laggy at first but now if you take a look the shading is absolutely perfect not not okay not great it is perfect no shading issues at all and um it's annoying it's tedious if you want a good portfolio and want quality work you need to fix your shading errors this is a big piece it's very obvious if the shading is bad you need to get in there and fix it it's important now doing this without normal transfer would have been near impossible so use normal transfer to your advantage when you can it is a very powerful tool you're going to use it all the time and if you don't have mesh machine it is worth it just for normal transfer i promise you if you want a good portfolio and want quality work you need to invest in yourself and in your work and mesh machine is one of those add-ons that will really expedite and make your workflow top tier so um and you can do it with data transfer and blender i've had a really bad result with it i just prefer normal transfer mesh machines so there we go this thing looks cool i know it took a little bit of time to make that i understand but i wanted to show the process this got a little bit more in depth than i expected it to so i apologize for that but i do hope this gives you some insight on you know a cool little advanced technique to fix your shading i use it all the time so now we have this cool looking thing nonetheless it looks cool that's all i really wanted and i'm happy with that and then maybe we could go in here and just um raise these guys to get a bit scale them on the z axis to kind of get that effect going on and then we can go ahead and mirror this across so select and then shift select the main cylinder alt x mirror that and then we could have done that at the same time but yeah you get the point and maybe what we could do is go to the side here and add in a few little notches and cuts and things like that so i'm going to use the um the object snapping instead so that way it'll actually go to the object instead of the view align we'll do one of these and then mirror it across maybe we could do something down here as well maybe bevel it as well go in and then just pull this guy in a little bit looks good to me and then maybe something simple on the side you notice little basic cuts here and there make it look interesting i suppose there we go and then maybe we could go into top orthographic view with view align and just use a simple box cut to add in like a little corner piece or something just something for a visual aesthetic i suppose let's pull this out a bit more otherwise when we add the bevel that's probably going to catch so you always want to make sure you have buffer room for your bevels because if these edges are too close they're gonna overlap and you're gonna get artifacts which is no good so yeah this thing's already coming along pretty nice i like it and then let's just go into front view and add in like one more minor design we could once again use the view align go in here and then just bevel it get in some sort of little notch going in here like that i think it'll look quite nice and yeah i'm happy with that so i say we just go full force go right into the bevels clean up any issues we have and then get this thing some materials some renders everything we need to make it look cool so i'm gonna go to this guy let's um let's drop on a bevel shall we three segments with hard and normals enabled with the n key just give it a very very slight bevel now immediately i can see we have some artifacts going on and the best way to check for artifacts is to press alt v and then go into wireframe view and you can see exactly where that's occurring this edge is way too close right here so there's um a few ways we could fix that we could apply the booleans and merge it or i think an easier solution would be to just recall this big cutter and then just pull it back a bit if we can if that's even even an option here we can do that but now we're going to need to take this guy and then give this guy some room so it's kind of a balance of figuring out what exactly you want to move and what exactly is too tedious maybe if we scale this on the y yeah i think that's all we needed to do and let's pull it back just a bit more so those issues are gone you can see now we have no overlap so sometimes it's easier to just move your booleans around if you have that freedom than actually going in and um applying boolean because i hate going destructive if i don't need to it just removes the versatility of the object so same for this guy just pull it back pull it out of the way and we don't have to deal with cleaning things up too manually so you're going to notice this guy didn't actually catch the bevel and that's because the angle probably wasn't within the threshold of the bevel modifier super easy fix we go to the bevel modifier and then just reduce the angle a little bit until that catches which around 25 degrees worked for me so now every single edge here should be beveled and it should look flawless right now so bevels aren't really that scary they're just sometimes a little bit tedious to manage if you get weird artifacts but it's all a balance of finding what works and what doesn't so the more you work the more you'll kind of pick up on different techniques same for this guy we could actually if we want to completely equal bevel is select this and then shift select the main piece ctrl c and then copy the bevel and if you don't have control c you need to turn on the copy attributes add-on it's built into blender you just go up here to add-ons and just turn it on copy attributes i need to search for it okay we have an artifact going on right here my guess is duplicate vertices or just overlaps look at that so this edge is super super close to catching so we can either go in and apply the booleans and go destructive or we can use blender's new weld modifier we'll turn that on and it may or may not work we're probably going to end up going destructive which is fine let's try adjusting the distance so yeah it's just collapsing not doing what we need it to do but that's okay because going destructive is probably going to be okay here i don't really plan to make any additional changes so that's all right so we're going to have a lot of shading errors to deal with all of these end guns here are going to be an issue so what i'm actually going to do before we apply any modifier is go into edit mode give some extra geo really so this geo is going to help isolate the shading basically so add in some loop cuts get a good amount in there and now what we're going to do is press q operations and then smart apply so now we have a lot of geo here helping to constrain the shading around the bad areas basically so this artifact probably we probably have two duplicate verts here so just turn on auto merge and slide that one together this guy can probably slide up here this guy can probably slide up here so now it's just a matter of just merging vertices that are too close to each other really easy stuff if you've seen my videos before you're probably familiar with how all this works i'm going to go up here and merge all these together at the center another one needs to be merged there so you can see there's nothing really complex it's just a little bit tedious sometimes merge that one at the center move this one up so shading is looking a little bit cleaner still not perfect though now we can go over here and fix this quite easily so just a lot of verts here we can probably merge those at the last there same here and just slide this one up nothing crazy really just a little bit of a nuisance you know what we can slide this one up and slide this one up should be fine so since this one is perfectly symmetrical across the x-axis it's perfectly fine to go in here and symmetrize across since we're not running any active booleans we're not going to use a mirror we're just going to use symmetrize and run that across so this thing looks pretty good i'm not sure how well you can see it with the youtube's compression so i'm going to go to matcap and you should be able to see this quite easily it's really starting to distort down here on the bottom so we just need to help hold the shading a bit so maybe join that and join that just help hold it a bit that's not didn't work too well but really it's all about just helping to kind of constrain the shading as much as you can so i'm just going to add some holding edges here wherever i can join those with the j key and then i'm just going to run one of these guys all the way through terminate it at that point slide that up and then let's symmetrize across so it's not terrible this should have helped hold the shading a bit yeah you can see the shading's really really confined to the edges uh not really noticeable to be honest so maybe join one of those over i don't know i'm just trying to kind of help hold this shading a bit i suppose rather than have just this big annoying mess of shading going on really maybe join that and you know people yell about the topology it's literally a matter of getting clean renders and shading so your points kind of moot we're not using this for a game asset right and uh yeah the shading is looking a lot better you can see it's there it's noticeable at the very very harsh edges but it's so so constrained and isolated you're never going to see it in a final render even up close you'd have to really try looking for it so it's really these small edges here and the most you can really do in these situations if you don't want to run loop cuts everywhere and disturb the curvature is to just isolate it which is exactly what we're doing here you can see all this is pushed up where it needs to be and i think we can get away with this this isn't really a huge problem like people like to act like it is it's really not i promise so that looks okay to me and honestly all this extra geo around here we can just dissolve out we don't really have a need for it it's not helping us not really hurting us from the looks of it but i'm gonna get rid of it because we don't need it and yeah we basically have this entire string of um of edges really just helping to constrain the shading maybe we could pull one of these in just help it out a bit more join this up here help hold the shading and just see what we can get turn this into a quad turn this into a quad let's just go from a distance i don't see any real errors you have to really get up close to see anything and even still just so minor so this is a good solution here i'm happy with that now unfortunately we can't symmetrize to the top because if we did then we're gonna get rid of this cut here so same idea for the top we're just gonna go in here let's just run a knife cut around to kind of help ease the shading a bit run one more down through here maybe join that up join that up to help hold it if that even did anything for us maybe not you know i just like trying different things different solutions and seeing what tends to work uh the nicest so yeah it's not terrible let's look again from a distance a little bit sharp right here not a fan of that but we could just go in here slide these a bit closer go in here and then slide these a bit closer to help push that in right there and let's see let's see how this looks much much better not perfect but like we said you can't get true perfect shading with this unless you're running normal transfers so and in this case normal transfer wouldn't have worked too well i've already tried it so yeah you can see you know this shading is about as good as we're going to get it and anything if you look at this in a rendered view you're not going to see an issue so constrain the shading don't stress about it don't worry about the n-gons make it look good and then over here it looks like we have some near-miss vert so we'll just go ahead and slide these up here and then slide these up here and we're looking pretty good and for anyone new out there just the the reason we add bevels is because they just look better look at the difference with no bevel compared to with a bevel we get this nice reflection captured off the edges that you see in the real world which is why it's important to add bevels we can do the same for this one add in some bevels this one shouldn't really give us any problems right here we already have a bevel we did that manually earlier so that's okay not terrible let's go up here and take a look at this at this piece right here so you can see very very bad shading situation so i'm going to hop into the front run a knife across to help isolate that a bit and you know maybe we might need a few more let's see what we can do and you know what i probably added in one too many vertices for this bevel unfortunately can't really go back now we've already went destructive that's why i like to keep non-destructive to fix things but we've kind of passed the point of no return here so ideally i'd have more geo but there's not really an option here so i should be able to get away with maybe is dropping a join join that and then join that and to see if that helps the shading at all and if it doesn't we could perhaps just pull this up and then run a knife cut just help hold that i don't think there's a really really an easier solution at this point because we're already so far in but sometimes you have to make a do with what you have and if we pull one of those the shading shouldn't be too awful to really kill us here but ideally i would have had a better solution now this isn't horrible i can probably make a do with that probably not the best um practice really but i kind of screwed myself over by not having enough geo in there but if we take a look at the shading from here i don't think there's too much of a problem so yell at me if you want i think we just um one we added in one too many segments for this bevel two we don't have enough holding geo going across and down to really help clean that but um maybe we could we could pull one of these and you know what they did a pretty good job actually you know join that across make this a quad make this a quad and it's actually not too bad we managed it pretty well and i don't think it's going to hurt us in the render so just go ahead and symmetrize across ideally what you would have wanted to do here is added in less bevel segments and more geo to help hold it but in this case we kind of um we didn't have that luxury but overall the shading looks pretty good once you kind of help confine it there's usually a solution even if it's not the best solution so that looks alright there we beveled the inside what else do we need to bevel i think we might have beveled everything actually let me go back into studio view this is beveled yeah everything looks beveled to me yeah situations like this come up quite a bit actually and you know what i could i could turn this part into a quad actually you know if you have the opportunity to run a quad i would definitely do it um but yeah situations like this actually come up a lot where you just find that you just screwed yourself over really what i want to see is um i don't know if it's possible i'm not a programmer it would be cool if machine could come up with a solution to run normal transfer from a separate object so i could basically take a segment of a cylinder just make a new one and have the normal information from a separate object transferred to this one for situations like this no clue if that's possible would be cool if it was but uh for now this is probably the best solution to help isolate that shading there for hard surface so everything else looks okay on this side i forgot to symmetrize over so just make sure everything's looking good which it looks like it is and we're looking pretty good so now is the fun part where we're going to add materials and also add in some decals so hopefully you enjoyed the modeling part if that's all you wanted to learn you could probably leave the video now one thing this right here let's go ahead and run a smart apply some iffy shading here we could probably fix that by just merging those maybe not that makes the shading even worse so what i'm simply going to do is run a knife cut all the way across like so and then maybe what we could do is do a similar thing but just start here knife cut across that and then knife cut across whoops knife cut across this right to there so yeah much better that fixed the shading quite well all i'm going to do is just pull some of these verts down to help manage this area a bit more because this is an end gone and as long as we pull the shading in there so it's cleaner we should be good to go just make sure you're moving that across the right axis so yeah it doesn't really matter if these vertices are positioned because it's following the curvature the same way so that doesn't matter this here we can dissolve that out too close same for this one dissolve that one out and then i'll just go ahead and symmetrize to the other side there and yeah the shading is just about fixed maybe help pull this up a bit see what we can do about that it looks okay most of the time your minor shading issues actually come from these little tiny end guns that kind of appear out of nowhere seemingly sometimes you can help hold the geo a little bit by simply connecting a triangle kind of like this you can see just connecting a triangle doesn't kill the shading too much and if it does it's so constrained down here that it's not really a huge issue like that one's kind of stretched so you don't want to overdo it but as long as you are careful with where you constrain that shading it usually becomes unnoticeable so if you can do something like that in your hard surface modeling i would recommend doing so because there's absolutely no way unless you really zoom in here you'll see that triangulation and with the youtube's compression you probably can't see it anyways so that just goes to show it's um it's a game of managing shading not making it perfect and this looks fine in the render so i think that's about the only other issue i encountered so now we can add some materials so what i'm going to do is just go to i guess this piece first we'll add a new material we're gonna make it metallic fully because i just love metallic objects and then we'll go and drop the roughness a little bit lower and maybe give it a lower base color and then for this one we'll add a new material do something similar lower roughness make it metallic and then drop the color a little bit this one will just give the first material this one we can maybe just give the second material to keep it nice and even and i want the inside to have kind of like an emission going on i think that would look quite nice so i'm just going to select this piece and tab into object mode or edit mode rather she had been using blender seven years and still said object mode for edit mode anyways we'll go in here and add in a new material make it a mission and then we'll just assign that and to actually get that uh bloom effect we need to make sure the strength is something higher like five or ten and maybe give this one like a nice little blue tint to it i think it looks quite nice and the other side should have the same thing now this is you know pretty basic not exciting this is where decal machine comes in you can make this thing look decked out with the decals so you know and links in the description for all these all these things by the way you just hop in here you grab some cool looking decals also we're dropping a free decal pack for those of you with a decal machine on the blunderbros gum road in a couple days so keep a lookout for that but yeah we can just go in here with some decals and start making this thing look super awesome you just project it mirror it across like this and just add in whatever decals you need to add in so you know this process is so simple you go in you drop decals and make it look cool i'm actually just going to do all this on my own and pause the video and return once i get all the decals applied okay so i'm back so i spent a good bit of time just sitting looking for cool places to put decals and that's how i you know just get some music on get a podcast on and uh just pump out some decals so you can see this thing looks absolutely amazing compared to what we just had before all you really need to do just find cool spots and cool looking decals and just drop those on and this is why decal machine is so powerful because if we turn off the decals just take a look look at how boring this thing looks so then when you put on decals it's like wow it's amazing and it's not even geo it's literally just all planes or just very very slight curved surfaces it's just a decal machine is probably my second favorite add-on behind hard ops of course so yeah you need decal machine if you want to get cool stuff in your renders so last thing i want to do is get a little bit of a mission here in the top just because you know why not so maybe i'll assign that set of faces the emissive material and just um doesn't show up too much because it's on the inside but you know it's something i guess and the render is probably going to be somewhere at this angle so it doesn't really matter too much but i did add some decals here on the top just in case i want a different angled render so yeah this is not not geo this is literally just all flat plain single um single decal from dcon machine once again if you don't have it gotta grab it link in the description super powerful add-on and let me adjust this just a bit kind of intersecting and there we go so you know after you apply your decals we're about ready to render so we need to go ahead and do that okay so now we're ready to render and i've mentioned this in my previous videos before but when you render you want an overcast hdri so i personally use if i go into rendered view the render already looks good but by default you're probably going to have like this generic dark color which you can adjust but the lighting's just so flat and boring and it just sucks what you want is an overcast hdri which is representative of real world lighting and uh it's a pretty neutral lighting you know cloudy skies basic lighting that's exactly what you want this is personally the one i use right here hcrihaven.com to search for abandoned slipway super useful one you can see the lighting is pretty neutral overcast day it just gives you that nice natural lighting and isn't too um isn't too intrusive so you can download this here just go and get the 8k or 16k those are going to give you the best quality and yeah you just go in here to the world settings go to environment texture you go ahead and just open that up but i already have mine in here so we'll put that one there it is okay cool so yeah you're going to have a lot nicer lighting once you put that in so now we need to set this up for rendering and a lot of people over complicate the rendering process it's so easy and simple and by the way if you don't have the transparent background you can turn that on here and um under the rendering settings under film just turn on transparent if you don't want to see the background it's useful to see it if you want to see where the lighting is coming from but i'm not too concerned with it i actually like where it is by default for right now so yeah what we want to do is add in a plane and we're going to position this plane right on the bottom of this guy here and if you want to be perfect you could even go to face snap and just snap it to that top face if you really wanted to be perfect with it doesn't matter too much and then all we're going to do is just scale this up give this a good bit of room to work with and you're going to see a lot of the light reflected off this plane because right now it's rough by default and it's white so it's reflecting a lot of the light so we're going to add a new material here i'm going to make it metallic just because it looks nicer and then go to base color give it you know a darker silver so that way a lot of the light is not reflected back onto the object you can see the difference here you know white black and then silver kind of gives that nice balance there so it looks quite nice i would drop the roughness this one's completely subjective uh the color is what's important and what you want to consider as for roughness though it doesn't really matter i wouldn't like crank up the roughness because that's boring it's nice to see reflections and have that you know very subtle hint of reflections being there for your object you know you don't want to overdo it and you don't want it to be too rough you just want it to be somewhere in the middle maybe around point three something it's really all up to you so that looks good and what you could do it well first we want to find a good angle for the render so there's not really any specific location i want it necessarily but you know if you go from more of a bottom angle it kind of gives the illusion that it's a massive object and if you go from a higher spot it gives the illusion that it's more of a tiny object so you need to figure out where you want to put the camera it's all camera tricks really so you know find a good angle for this guy put it wherever you want i'm just going to spend a second finding a good position maybe somewhere around here we can always adjust it so once you've found a good angle for where you want to place this you can add in a camera shift a we'll add in a camera then we're going to go up here to view align view and then align active camera to view and by uh by default it's going to be kind of zoomed in i like to put the camera to around 135 for just a more orthographic effect and then we can pull it back and just you know kind of find a good angle for this guy you don't want it to be too close and taking up camera space but you also don't want it to be too far away so it's really about finding that balance of where you think would be a cool location so maybe pull it in just a tad bit more nothing crazy so now we have a good balance we have breathing room around the edges maybe we could move it over a bit and yeah this is looking pretty good now we see all this transparent area in the back so let's add a backdrop for it so once again we can just add in a simple plane and we're going to rotate it 90 degrees and really we just want to scale this guy up and rotate it about 45 and put it over here we can scale it on the z we don't need all that space so there we go we have a backdrop kind of sitting there i need to be careful with where it's positioned and the material settings for it because this does absorb and reflect and does all sorts of things with the light maybe not super strong because it's not close to the object but it is something to consider so sometimes i'll use a rough background sometimes i use a metallic i just like to mess with the settings and see what see what looks good really for the rendering for the reflections everything so it's not like there's a right answer for what you should use for the backdrop it's literally all about messing with settings and seeing what looks good for your specific render and the lighting angle so sometimes i'll use a nice contrast like this and sometimes i'll use a very similar color to get more of an infinite type of backdrop looking situation one thing i hate about this composition is this corner right here is just it doesn't match how the how the render needs to look what i'm going to do is select the plane rotate it around the z axis to the center and then tab into edit mode select this vertex and then press ctrl shift b and just really really crank up on the segment count here so now we have more of a round backdrop and i just think that looks a little bit nicer in my opinion now sometimes the perspective illusion can make it look like it's tilted which we have right now this area looks more tilted to the left so we can kind of balance that by just rotating you know you could cheat it in photoshop or something but i'd rather cheat it in blender so now we kind of have this effect going on and it's not terrible so what i'm going to do now is mess with the settings for the backdrop make it metallic maybe see how that looks maybe give it a similar base color it really all depends if you want more of like a nighttime looking scene or you know something brighter in the back but you see what i mean here's a nice contrast here you might like that and here's something that matches more of the flooring gives that infinite backdrop type of look which i quite enjoy doing from time to time so maybe a little bit darker if you go too far you can see a line in the background which is okay it's just why not avoid it if you can so right around here looks like we have a decent type of situation decent type of setup and one final thing i like to do with my renders is um i like to adjust the hri rotation to see if there's any better lighting angle in this case the lighting is coming and hitting the right side which i actually enjoy and then the darker area kind of gets illuminated by the emissions so it's all up to you and your composition skills and what you like but if you want you can go in here and just mess about with the heck let me connect this back up you can mess about with the rotation of the acri and just kind of see how you want the lighting to hit and you can see the more we rotate around the more ugly the lighting gets so you got to be careful with it you got to be conservative with it and make sure the lighting is set up lighting and materials are everything in your renders so lighting first and material second so that way you can see how the materials work with your lighting so i quite like this default positioning i think it looks good so what i'm going to do at this point is you know as like a final little adjustment i like to go in here and just mess with the roughness some more and to see if there's any other material settings that make it look better you know sometimes higher roughness looks better sometimes lower roughness looks better it just depends how the material reacts with the light here and sometimes a bit of clear coat goes a long way as well if you if you're into clear coat it just depends you can adjust the clear coat roughness as well if you like that but you know i'm not going to use too much clear coat i'm going to use a little bit on this one just a tad bit and give the roughness a run for its money and yeah there we go looks pretty good so we're about ready to render i might put the hri lighting to about 1.2 just make it a bit brighter nothing crazy i would not go above like a strength of two because if you're compensating for a bad render with a lot of lighting there's something wrong with it you should not have to usually double your hcri lighting to make the render look good that just doesn't make sense so 1.2 is okay to get away with i don't recommend you adjust the strength too much but if you have to it's fine so yeah now we have a nice looking composition here a little bit of room for photoshop post processing and text and whatnot um really you just have to go mess with the settings in here you know gpu compute light paths you can just copy my settings here clamping you can copy my settings transparent turned on sampling you don't really need a high sampling 200 is usually more than enough but what you do need to do is go to the compositor and make sure you have this exact node setup that i have right here and if you don't have this um these denoising information you just have to go to the layers panel and turn on denoising data so pause the video here if you don't have this in the compositor you should save this for your default settings the denoise removes any noise and the glare set to fog glow very important gives that nice bloom effect in cycles so yeah copy these settings then go to the rendering panel you can render at 1080p or a little bit higher i use 2560x1440 16-bit tiff all that good stuff actually if i remember in the description i'll link reuse video on setting up all the rendering settings if you just want to do that all in one go and save your startup file very important settings so yes 16 bit tiff make sure that's set and then all we need to do is just do a quick preview make sure everything's looking good which i think it is then we can just go ahead and go up here to render and then render the image so here we go here's the final raw render you can see we have that nice bloom effect coming through and the lighting looks super good and the render only took me a minute 36 it was really really fast uh gone are the days of these two hour renders with like 2 000 samples no need for that to set up the compositor like i showed you and you can easily get you know renders done in a couple minutes so at this point all we need to do is save the image and then bring it into photoshop for post processing so here we are in photoshop this is one of my favorite parts of hard surface is finally getting the render to look even cooler so it looks cool now wait until we're done with this we're just going to press ctrl j on the layer that's going to add in a duplicate layer so we can keep it non-destructive so now all i really want to do is go up here to filter and then camera raw filter the process for post processing is super easy shout out to ryu for showing me a lot of hints to help this what we're going to do is go to basic let's bump the exposure just a bit maybe like point two bump the whites just a bit and then i think the highlights we can just leave it zero or maybe drop them a bit i don't know and then let's go to the brush tool and we're going to brush on some shadows some texture and then some clarity to make this thing pop so only over the canister area so look at the difference now before and after this thing looks a way cleaner and sometimes it's even nice to go in here with the brush as well and you know let me lock this in with the ok button you can already see it looks better sometimes i also like to get like a bloom effect around the canister or any render really we use the brush tool and then just bump the exposure a bit and just paint around it you noticed a very very slight hint of of like a bloom effect going on i don't really know how else to explain it now that one was a bit too strong i just want to avoid hitting the canister and kind of get it painted around so it's something that you can kind of like balance it out over there i don't know it's all up to you but it looks a bit cleaner that way in my opinion you can see the difference and you know it looks okay i just yeah i don't know i might actually turn that off i think i like how it was before anyways then usually i'll go to this infinite color plugin super useful it kind of generates random colors and random post-processing effects to make it look like look at that first one and um looks pretty decent so you can just go through all sorts of different infinite colors here until you get something you like i actually really like this one right here i kind of got lucky on the first one and then we have all these different settings here basically you can kind of see we have the color look lookup gradient map some of these i haven't really even messed with before to be honest i just use photoshop literally for post processing like 99 percent of the time and sometimes for thumbnails but there that looks pretty cool we can go and add some text in it's all pretty basic stuff really i just thought i'd show the whole process while we're here you can get sci-fi text from any website really that has fonts so you know do what you want there's a bunch of cool sci-fi fonts i have i like oasis oasis is one of my favorites so we can just kind of pull that up and you know put it over here drop the fill a little bit kind of make it match actually this one looks pretty cool the which one is this called made future x i got that on some font website somewhere i think it looks nice i'm going to actually leave that one looks i wish it was a little bit more bold but you know it's okay we'll kind of plant this over here maybe put the fill back up a little bit maybe and just you know place it somewhere in this area you don't want it to be too big or too small you kind of want to find that middle ground and then you can add in some more text with a different font give it like a sci-fi name to it maybe like x4 storage unit or something cool i'm not being super creative here usually i'll sit and just think of cool names or use a sci-fi generator for um the final result but you see what i mean you just go in here and just think of something cool you can drop a different font under here definitely drop the fill though so that way it's not too imposing on the scene you know what i'm going to use space age space age is one of my favorites so you can add that in x for storage unit i don't know really whatever you want give this you know just find the middle ground for what looks good and then finally you know you always want to add a signature to your works because you don't you don't want to make a work and then not get credit for it right so put your name down in the bottom you can use really whatever text you want usually i'll just um go for one of the texts i've already used and then just make it really tiny because you don't want it to be superimposing on the on the final result you just want that little watermark to be in the bottom there just kind of saying hey i'm the one who made this just um don't steal my work so that's about it that's how you can do post processing at the end you can save it as a jpeg and there you go you know do whatever additional post processing you want make it look cool but this is the general process so i know it was a long video but i hope you guys learned a lot learned a lot about the modeling process some of the add-ons and then how to do cool post-processing effects in the end so once again all the links to the add-ons i used in the video for the workflow process will be linked in the description if you want to grab those i use them all the time they're an essential for blender hard surface absolutely essential so hopefully learned a lot i really appreciate every single one of you for watching and learning if you have any suggestions or recommendations just let me know and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 77,056

Keywords: blender, 2.8, hard, surface, modeling, tutorial, beginner, josh, gambrell, hardops, boxcutter, complete, workflow, 3d, curved, curvature, cylinder, boolean, bevel, artifact, shading, issue, fix, how, to

Id: hV8OzyChrFE

Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020