Easy Guide to HardOPS and Boxcutter for Beginners - Part 1 - Blender Tutorial

hey guys ryu here with nineveh for blender and this one we're gonna be talking about how to start with hard ups and box cutter it's gonna be an introduction for anyone who wants to get into add-on workflow and uh you know has no idea how to do that so first thing you need to know is how to install and how to uninstall box cutter and hard ups because both of these addons are being updated quite often in fact probably they are the most frequently updated add-ons that i know of and the support for them from team c is just incredible so you probably gonna be you know uh needing to uninstall them at some point and install them again so i'll show you how to do it very quickly i have them installed so we're going to start from the you know in a reverse order i'm going to show them how to uninstall them okay properly so what you want to do is go to preferences and first untick box cutter and hard ops okay that's uninstalling right you save preferences you close the window you close blender then you open blender again okay once the blender opens what you want to do is go here preferences and then you want to go into box cutter and remove it and go into hard ops and remove it then usually i refresh it and save it okay and then you install it all right so then go to wherever you have your add-ons and we're gonna install uh the latest version of box cutter which i think is this one and you simply take this on just wait until it's gonna highlight itself don't be you know too quick on it because you might get errors then go to heart ops and get the latest version and then click here wait boom save preferences you're good to go and you will see that there is a hard ups icon here on the top right so out of the bat what you want to do is you want to take a few windows all right go to this star here and we're going to take on the auto t panel i'm going to tell you what it is in a second and then box cutter notifications which is great and then we're going to turn on the cube menu prefixes and uh you don't really need to take this on but i like to take this on this actually allows you to see mod previews in a similar color and tone that you'll be seeing them in render view and then when you do that go here and save preferences so save preferences and then save your startup file okay so here defaults save startup file and one more time defaults say start the file boom right so then when you open your blender again you'll see that these options gonna be here um ticked on okay now let's talk about these options very quickly okay auto t panel on to endpoint it's really cool so when i'm gonna add a cube with um shift a right so let's let's just add a bevel so let's go to q menu which is uh the main hard-ups menu it's like operational menu okay so you press q you get access to all the main tools here very quickly like for example sharpen bevel array and this will change based on which mode you're in because if i go to edit mode very quickly you will see that my menu changes so hard up simply selects the most important things that you might want to do with that mesh in edit mode right so anyway let's go to q menu and click on bevel and then when you move your mouse you can adjust the size of the bevel all right and if i had the t panel so i press t and n panel open when i actually go to bevel they're gonna disappear to make space for the h menu here on the bottom you see the h menu here and i press h this will show you what kind of commands you can use with the bevel when it's been live so when you're adjusting it to enable some options like for example i press z i can see the wireframe right press z again if i press for example one two three i can change profiles of the bevel uh to a different one etc so not all these options here are important i'm just using mostly okay i'm mostly using one two three i'm also using z sometimes and quite frankly that's about it all right so you know you don't have to be intimidated by these menus too much all right so i'm gonna add this bevel so that's how you add bevel and if you want to change segments you simply press q bevel and you scroll your mouse okay to add or deduct segments you can see it on the bottom the info has been displayed right now uh let's talk about uh the second option here which we enabled with box cutter notifications well if you're gonna go to box cutter by the way to enable box cutter or hard ups you need to press rw so if i press alt w you will be in a constant cycle between these two if you want to switch them off to toggle them off press w okay i'll doubly gonna enable you to enter box cutter hard ups and w is exiting the application right so if i'm gonna draw the shape with a box cutter right so i click hold my mouse button i drag and then i release my mouse button and i move my mouse right so one more time click and hold drag release and move your mouse okay and then you can see on the bottom you get notifications and it tells you the depth of the cut which is one meter because our um our um measurements are in meters and the cube is you know two by two by two so this would be about a meter a meter deep right and then you got uh two modifiers running on the mesh which is basically the uh bevel and the boolean and then by pressing alt e you can switch very quickly between fast and exact solver for the boolean and this is simply a different algorithm for a boolean um that you can experiment with sometimes especially when you i don't want to get into too many details but if you really are close to a surface or you for example bullion into items and they kind of touch the faces of each item touch touch one another do not do not intersect fast boolean might not be the best idea exact probably going to get you better results so you know this is just a quick way of switching between them and then you can press b for bevel if you want to move your mouse to the right or left if you move your mouse to the left and you reset it and you move your mouse to the right you're going to be in chamfer mode and then again bevel mode and with your mouse you can scroll and you can see in the bottom there's a number of segments right so this information here is very very useful and then when you click you're going to apply this right so i'm going to click and i'm going to apply this now the mesh is a little bit messed up you see that the shading is messed up and that's because we need weighted normals and to add them in uh hard ups it's really easy you just press q with the object selected and you alt click on sharpen and this is like the most basic operation that you'll be performing over and over again right so you're gonna be simply you know adding cube shift a and pressing q bevel adjusting bevel pressing q alt sharpen and then in box cutter mode switch you know starting to cut your booleans right if you wanted to for example do a bit more with your booleans so for instance what you could do is draw a cut right and then hold shift and click which will shift the boolean live which means you'll be able to see that boolean after it's been cut because what box cutter does it creates an automatically right it creates a folder for cutters okay so when i start cutting watch this uh let me just delete that right so delete the carricky and then what i'm gonna start cutting is gonna um new collection is gonna appear right boom see what i mean and automatically box code what's gonna do move that cutter to this collection so if you press shift two you can toggle between uh and alt h shift to you can toggle uh between the visibility of these all the cutters all the cutters here right they're going to go to the same collection see all the cutters right so you can toggle them on and off out age they go on and off with other problems okay you might want to shift a boolean live so what you might want to do is you know cut right an object and then hold shift and click and then you might you know for example want to cut the cutter so it could do something like this you know right just to create an interesting shape and then another very useful function is of a scroll so you select an object you want to recover cutters off you press q and you go to every scroll and this when you're gonna scroll your wheel you will be cycling through the booleans running through that mesh in our case it's this one so we click to enable it go to edit mode and for example you can do something like this right let's just decrease the bevel because it's a little bit crazy so cube bevel and hold shift you can hold shift to make it a little bit more precise and you know go with something like this now let's grab this cutter again right and go to edit mode and we could do something like this okay so you're gonna get some really interesting uh shapes here on your mesh and then let's press shift two and there you go yeah so uh you know box cutter and hard ups it's just extremely fast for uh creating ships like this and uh it's it's extremely easy to operate these add-ons once you get used to it another very useful thing to know is adding sharp edges too much i'm going to just hide the end panel because i don't need it i'll leave the t panel so you can actually see whether i'm in hard ups or box cutter um but i want to show another function that's really important and that's in hard ups so i'm going to press ctrl tilde and by the way if you don't have a tilde key on your keyboard or you don't know where it is you can go to uh hard ups options here so go to preferences here or you can press um ctrl k which will give you also preferences window and you can change the key map for your tilde key here so you can remap the tilde key alright so you can choose another key but by default it's tilde key so uh control tilde and you're gonna access this really important menu and if you click on this icon here on the top with a wrench you can see that here in this section you can um enable or disable all these edge attributes so crease seam b weight and sharp by default sim is off and you have crease a b weight and sharp so when you're gonna click on your mesh and you press q and you click on sharpen what it will do right it will sharpen all the edges above 30 degrees and we'll add sharp crease and b weight to all the edges of that angle right and if you want to remove this you simply select everything and you press mark again it will remove it so let's say i wanted to add only seams to my mesh so i can just remove all these options click on seams press okay select my mesh go to cue and sharpen and now i have seams running on all these edges another useful option of the sharpen or mark because you can see that the option changes depending on which mode you are so in edit mode it's going to be mark but in object mode it's going to be sharpened so another useful option uh a shortcut that i use with sharpen is ctrl click and by the way if you hover over your menu you can see the tooltip right so if i ctrl click on sharpen here it will apply all the booleans and then apply sharp edges to them so let me just remove this the seams so let's go to edit mode and select everything with a click on sharpen or mark to unmark this go to ctrl tilde and remove the seam and apply these and press okay and then i'm going to you know go to q and if i control click on sharpen it will apply the booleans and sharp edges to everywhere okay look at this you know i mean so there you go that's how easy that is right another way of applying your booleans okay would be to go to q menu operations and smart apply or you could do this via ever scroll by simply out clicking so this will apply the bullions as well as all the modifiers except for the last bevel and weighted normal so if i'm going to go to ctrl tilde and go to modifier start you will see that the bevel and weighted normals were not applied okay but my boolean was applied all right there's one more thing i want to mention and that if you go to hard ups menu and you click on hard ups icon and you click on this hard ups version it will tell you whether you're using current version or you need an update box cutter version is displayed here okay so now my advice to you is to keep these items up to date and make sure that you're working in the at least latest version of blender hard op c and box cutter are constantly evolving but they you know they optimize for the latest version but you can also work in future versions of blender i'm working in 3.0 i've been working in 3.0 for many months now i'm recording my tutorials in 3.0 so i'm basically working in 3.0 all the time make sure that you're up to date because there's a lot of new tools coming up and i'm usually covering them on my channel so if there is something interesting coming up i'm gonna talk about it like my recent video on for example curves etc um and you know box kind of version you can see in here on the top so if you just go to whatever website you bought it from like gumroad or blender market you will be able to see the version of it there and you know you can download the new one and have fun with it all right so the last thing i'm going to show you is the different booleans in box cutter when you're in box cutter menu you simply press d and you will see this menu okay this one is a little bit more complicated so if it's too complicated for you you can either use ctrl d menu okay or you can go here to uh input and you can turn off the d helper and this will basically reverse the order so when you press d you're going to enter the the old menu the pi menu and if you're going to press ctrl d you will enter the box helper menu which is a new one so anyway with this enabled when i'm going to press d you can change the type of cutters okay you are using here so you have a circle box and gone and custom however you can also hold out and scroll your mouse to change modifier very quickly this way so you can see you have more options here like for example you got wedge cut line box um lasso etc and we're going to talk about it later because they are more advanced but um the most basic ones is a box right then we have uh you know circle right this right and you can hold shift and scroll your mouse to increase or decrease number of verts you can see it in the top here and also on the bottom right and you can adjust the you know density of this cut and then you have also ngon right and then gone is an interesting one so let's go to top view so now ngon works in the same way as an already cutter so you click and hold and then you drag and you can see there is ngon snapping two angles right if you hold ctrl it will stop stopping okay and then you simply release and it's going to create a point and then you move your mouse to whatever you want and you click and you click and you click right and then you know you're done all right so that's how you create an angle and cut now there's much more to it of course we're going to talk about more advanced you know options for these cutters in upcoming videos we also have a complete course on hard ups and box cutters so if you're really interested into going deep and you know mastering these add-ons and maximizing the efficiency of your workflow i highly encourage you to look into that course it's only 30 bucks and it's quite extensive it covers all the tools and there is a massive course on using hard apps and box cutter and we're creating a really cool sci-fi spaceship and there's not a course in that in the term course which is the off-roader so it's the previous version because we we created this course quite a long time ago and it's been updated recently so you have access to two courses in one uh so you can use the new hard ops tools to create the uh you know to follow the older course and then you can do the new one so there's tons of content over there and it's you know really the most compact package on the market if for people who want to master the add-on anyway guys that's it for this one hope you enjoyed it and give us a like and sub if you did if you don't have hard ups and you want to buy them links are in the video description thanks for watching catch you in the next one

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 4,412

Keywords: blender, 3d, hard, surface, tutorial, scifi, blender tutorial, hardops, boxcutter, beginners, easy, how to use hardops, hardops guide, hardops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial

Id: 04TCID4cDBo

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021