Created Caged Designs in Blender | Hard-Surface Modeling

what's up everyone Josh here and welcome to this tutorial on getting cage designs inside a blender now if you've seen different hard surface or mechanical designs you'll notice that a lot of things like computers in the front of cars and just various hard surface designs have this nice caging effect that just gives a lot of extra detail really and a lot of people don't add these into their designs but they're super easy to add so let's go ahead and get started with how to make them okay so what I have here is a cube with an incentive face extruded inwards so let's say I want to get a nice caging effect here on the front of it right inside of this little box so what I'm gonna do is show you two different ways and these are gonna be two of the main ways you'll do this so the first one in the easiest way is to go up here to edit and then preferences and under add-ons if you type in extra you'll see this add mesh extra objects tick box you can just turn that on and then if you press shift a go to mesh and then extras you'll see something here called honeycomb now this is a pretty basic kind of a cheating way to do it but if it's easier I don't see a problem with it what you can do here is you can add in honeycombs that kind of give you that nice little Cajun effect you can also adjust the cell diameter and you can also adjust the edge width to your liking and then what you can do is of course just rotate it 90 degrees and put it into place you know just scale it down rotate it if necessary and boom just like that you have yourself a a pretty basic caging effect here now the issue with this method is you're gambling you don't know automatically how many rows and columns are gonna want and you don't know how thick you want the little honeycombs to be and at the end of it you might have to end up scaling these anyways so this method is probably my least favorite and I would recommend only using this for very basic designs so instead what it's best to do is once you've found an area where you want to add in a caged effect so in this case this little hole in the box here and we'll discuss curved surfaces a little bit but for planar surfaces like this something really easy to do is to tab into edit mode you're going to duplicate whatever area is inside of the hole so in this case for me it's this single face we'll press shift D and then duplicate it and then we just move the sky a little bit into the front scale it up ever so slightly and then we're going to press the P key and then choose selection to separate by selection so now what we have is a plane here that is precisely the size we need for our caging effect now be careful because if you had modifiers applied to your base object then your duplicate here is gonna also have modifier so in this case I have a bevel modifier on it which I'm just going to remove here so now we want to do to get an accurate caging effect is we want to tap into edit mode we'll select this face here I'm gonna subdivide it just I don't know 4 or 5 times let's do 5 for now and now we're gonna have is this little grid of lines going through it just a subdivided plane and usually if you take a look at any caged effects their diagonal so what we can actually do is press a I'll press the f3 key and type in Polk and that's going to be the Polk phases option and then after you've done that what we're gonna do is press f3 again and search for a tries to quads and now these are going to be at 45 degree angles instead and then at this point it's super easy all you have to do is go to add modifier wireframe and then adjust the thickness a little bit so in my case I don't want it to be super thick I probably put a little bit too much geometry for this example but it gets the job done it's not too bad so just like that you have a Cajon effect that fits the exact size of your hole so this is probably about the maximum I would go in terms of detail and mesh density for the Cajon effect any more than that it's just going to really bog down your scene I probably should have even done a little bit less in terms of subdivisions but I think this gets the job done quite well now we need to discuss how to do this on curve surfaces now curved surfaces like cylinders are pretty similar to planar surfaces like we did with the cube but there is a little bit of a difference here now of course on any sort of curved surface like a cylinder you have the straight vertical lines going down to make up the cylinder right so maybe if you have a hole like this and you try to do the same strategy by selecting this area and then press shift D to duplicate and then just moving it forward and scaling it out you know we're doing the same exact thing we did for the cube but in this case if we start trying to subdivide to get more geometry it's kind of unbalanced we have way more vertical lines than we do horizontal so in this case it's very important that you balance that out with the appropriate edge loops here so in this case we're just going to add in some horizontal ones until we're full of squares here and now if we separate this with the P key and subdivide it you'll see that these are all squares now and it's a lot more balanced and then at this point we just do the same thing we did before we press f3 search for poke and then f3 tries to clod and then you can just add on your wireframe modifier like so and get the exact effect you're going for not too bad now for spheres it's the same process fears are already made up of squares assuming you have a cube with sphere cast on it and not using like a UV or ICO sphere or anything but yeah spheres are the same process because they're already made up of squares so you just go into your hole you duplicate that interior area move it up a little bit scale up slightly press the P key to separate and then just the usual process what we do is be subdivided a few times we use the poke tool and then convert that from tries to quads and just like that we can just use our wireframe modifier to get the same effect spheres are really easy cylinders are the hard ones with curved surfaces now there are cases where it becomes a lot more complex and this is when you're working non-destructively so here's a little sci-fi piece I whip together what I'm gonna do is just isolate the pieces here that have the caging effect just for demonstration purposes I'll forward slash to isolate okay so what I have here are these nice little designs here I have the caging effect as well but if I tab into edit mode for either of these you'll see that since were working non-destructively we don't have access to that underlying geometry we haven't applied the modifiers yet so this is a situation in which it becomes a little bit more difficult to practically apply these caged effects and I'm gonna show you the easiest way to do this non-destructively so really for your non-destructive pieces all you have to do is since you don't have access to the underlying geometry you just duplicate the piece here whatever one's being worked with non-destructively so I'll press shift D to duplicate right-click to cancel that and then we can essentially just remove all the modifiers here you can also click on delete all if you have the what's it called modifier tools add-on enabled you can click on delete all to do that at once so now what I have is the base object before I did any sort of adjustments to it so this should realistically fit our curvature quite well which if we take a look up here it does a pretty good job of that we'll just scale it down maybe to make it have less of these stepping issues we could even subdivide it maybe control two to make that a little bit more consistent you can see that's a lot straighter now we'll apply that subsurf and just like that now I have an area I can put inside of the hole here without having to apply the modifiers now just to demonstrate I'm gonna delete out those cages there and since we also have a lot of extra area here we don't need like I can just delete out this entire bottom portion because I'm not gonna need it at all so we'll just delete out this bottom portion do we know this upper portion is kind of arbitrarily doing that so that way when we apply a wireframe modifier to this area it's not going to be bogged down too much by the amount of geometry okay so now at this point we just subdivide maybe one more time will poke the faces and then will convert from tries to quads like so and now we have that nice spherical curvy effect on me on the underlying geometry and then at this point all we have to do is apply our wireframe modifier might be a little bit slow because we have a lot of area we don't need but it's not too bad so we'll put it to around there let's maybe move it down a little bit actually no it's in a good location so now we have that nice little Cajun effect inside of those holes but there is one issue we have and we have all of this extra area here so if we apply the wireframe modifier we could go to each of these vertices and just start manually like box selecting and cleaning up and deleting the areas we don't need but that's a really time-consuming process and there's a much easier way to do that so yeah don't delete out manually it's gonna take you way too long and is not efficient even in the slightest so what we're gonna do is select the base mesh shift D to duplicate right-click to cancel and with the modifiers tools add-on you can just apply everything at once so once you do that you should have access to all of that underlying geometry as you can see what we're gonna do with this piece selected here is hold shift and select the caged area and if you have the bull tool add-on enabled which you should by default unless you're using hard ups you get a pass but yeah make sure a bull tool is turned on or you have hard opps on and then press control forward slash on the number pad this is going to make a slice operation and then all you have to do is select your cage and then apply that modifier and sometimes you'll get this error thrown to you from multi-user data I don't worry about it just go to the object data panel add its own separate user by clicking on this number here and now you should be able to apply that boolean very easily then at this point you can delete out this cube here we don't need that guy we can delete out that extra cage and now all we have to do just go into edit mode and press the L key to just kind of manually delete out the areas we no longer one like so and delete out those vertices and as you can see now we have a nice cage area that is only fitting the area we need it to fit so super easy and very efficient for our scene so that's it that's how you get nice cage designs inside of your 3d models and blender you can do it destructively and you can also do it non-destructively just the non-destructive side of things takes a few more extra steps so hopefully this video helps hopefully you can get these oops sorry hopefully can get these designs put into your models pretty easily and I'd love to see what you come up with doing this I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 120,178

Rating: 4.9764094 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 3d, modeling, tutorial, beginner, hard, surface, caged, cage, caging, design, effect, wireframe, modifier, curved, holes, cut, cylinder, cube, sphere, non, destructive, cg, guru, tips, tricks, lazy, fast

Id: 5-U7npqY2Hk

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020