Easy HARD SURFACE MODELING IN BLENDER with FLUENT! Beginners start here!

what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com back with another blender add-on tutorial for you so in today's video we're going to start checking out fluent the hard surface modeling tool that you can use in order to really quickly improve your hard surface modeling skills so let's go ahead and jump into it alright so you can find this tool on blender market i will link to it in the notes down below note that it is a paid product there's two options in here there's an option for the add-on itself and then there's an option in here that also contains some additional tools like the plate and wire and pipe tools i've done a video about the grid tools before so that second one is going to add several additional tools that you can use inside a blender so you can go to this page and see more about those different things but i kind of wanted to do a series talking about how to use these different tools inside this hard surface modeling tool so first things first when you first start off and you enable the add-on so you install it there's going to be a window in here or a there's going to be a set of options in here that you can use in order to adjust your shortcuts as well as an online documentation page so if you ever have any questions about how anything works you can click on the button right there and it's going to open up this page with the actual documentation itself so this is going to go through all of the tools in a lot more detail that i'm going to be able to hit in this series so if you need more information you can check that out here this is actually a really cool this is actually a really cool image that actually shows you which tools were used in order to create which parts of this but for right now what we want to do is let's take a look at this tool in general and then we can get more in depth in the future so to start off to activate fluent notice there's some other things in here as well like adjusting your default bevel resolutions and other things that we can talk about a little bit later but for now let's talk about how to activate this tool so once you install this tool you can activate it by tapping the f key on your keyboard so notice how the f key is going to pop up all of these different options in here don't hold the f key down by the way just tap it when you do this and so there's a number of different tools in here so there's some stuff having to do with the way your display looks there's your tools in here for actually interacting with your solid objects so that's where you're going to do like your cuts and your slices other things like that there's tools down below for either adding a bevel to a shape these are the tools that come with the power trip which is the uh the more expensive of the two options down below and then there's also tools over here on the right hand side where you can actually make adjustments to things you've done in the past so to start off with this tool the way that you do this is you just tap the f key and then you pick what you want to do so let's say for example that i wanted to remove some material from this object well let's do the cut or add so all i have to do in order to do that is first of all i have to select an object then we can click on cut and add and so notice how you get a tool set over here on the left hand side that gives you different options so you've got your options for your shape so you can adjust those by tapping different keys on your keyboard as well as keys down below that act as kind of like modifiers right or they give you more information so for example if i right click on this face you can see how this will draw a grid and you can actually adjust the grid on this object so you can adjust things like resolution and it's actually going to snap to these objects so if you want to use the grid you can do that but in general what this does is this allows you to draw on an object so if i mouse over this and then click and drag notice what this is doing is this is drawing a box if i let up on this or if i click again then i move my mouse down notice what this is doing is this is creating a boolean object in here that's actually cutting into my object so when i do this now you can see how this has used that object in order to cut into this other object and it's automatically beveling this there's some adjustments you can do with that i'm not going to worry about them too much for right now but one of the cool things about this is if you click and hold your left mouse button you get a number of different tools well what those tools do is they allow you to adjust your objects as you're working with them so you haven't just created this object and then you're kind of stuck right instead you can click and let's say for example that you wanted this cut to appear on the other side as well you can select the mirror option and then click on this in order to do that so notice how you can use this in order to copy across different axes in order to really kind of adjust this as you're going and so if i right click i can get out of this but notice how if i want to get back into it i can select one of these objects that i've added tap the f key and then click on edit in order to go back in there so that i can actually make some more changes so notice how there's other things in here as well so things like your first bevel allows you to set the thickness of your bevel by moving your mouse as well as your second bevel so if i was to do that again whoops i can also quickly adjust that second bevel that's in here so there's a lot of different things you can do in order to make these changes really quickly so i'm going to move this over and then let's go ahead and let's add a little bit more of an array so i'm going to click and hold my left mouse button and then we'll just set this i can adjust my count so i'm going to select my green axis by clicking and then i can adjust both the offset and the count just by moving my mouse and so this contains a number of different tools that you can use in order to make changes so let's say for example that i wanted to add a slice in here so let's say i wanted to slice this object so it's got maybe a little bit more detail in here what i could do is i could click in order to put set this slice then i can move my mouse down so notice what that's doing is that's actually creating a slice inside of my object and you can do the same thing in here where you can adjust your bevels so your first bevel and your second bevel in order to adjust the way that that's going to look so you can use that in order to make that change and then as well there's other things you could do too but let's say i just wanted to mirror this it's really easy to create that mirror on my object and then once you're done you can just right click and there's a ton of different there's a ton of different settings in here i'm not going to get super in depth with all of them right now more just want to give you an overview but now i've got this object that's been created with the boolean well i can just create an inset as well so let's say i want an inset down into this object i can do that and i can adjust the inset thickness as well just by clicking and holding going in here and adjusting this and then i'm going to go ahead and mirror that one as well so that it shows up on both sides so that allows you to kind of adjust the shapes you can also click on objects like this one tap the f key and you can adjust the width of your bevel so notice how as i adjust this bevel you can see how the width of the bevel adjusts as i adjust the bevel width in here so you can set this to really kind of whatever you want all right so in addition there's also down below these are the tools that come along if you get the power trip version of fluent and so this contains additional tools that you can use to model things like wires and pipes and grids other things like that personally for the additional nine dollars it feels like it's kind of worth it to get these tools but that's kind of up to you so things like if you want to add wiring for example so let's say we had a wire that went from this point to this point we can add that using this tool and then you can also adjust it so you can adjust things like the root strength you can adjust things like the radius of the wire and the number of wires that are in here you can also adjust the size of all of those wires if you add the multiple wires and adjust things like the twist as well so quickly adding wiring is pretty easy using this tool so the wire tool also supports other kinds of wires as well so for example you can add things like you can add like a shielded cable like this you can adjust like the radius of the shielding that goes on here you can adjust the gap between those it's very adjustable in the features that you can use here so you can add chains with the wire function if i was to click from here to here there's a chain option where you can adjust the offset with the number of links so a number of different things you can do with that wire tool so you can add a pipe just by selecting the pipe tool then just kind of giving it two points between which the pipe is going to go so you can click and hold and you can adjust the path that follows just by moving your mouse so my mouse right here will notice how now i can adjust things like my root length meaning how far off of this wall it's going to come as well as things like your pipe radius number of pipes other things like that so you can use this to quickly add piping to your models and that actually gets a little bit more in depth i'm pretty sure you can use this to add like your own objects as fittings and other things like that if you guys are interested we can talk more about that in a future video so the plate tool allows you to add things like plating by thickening faces so if i was to click on plate right here i can select faces that i want this plate to run along so in this case we'll just click right here in order to select this hit the enter key then you can use the solidify function to adjust how thick that plating is as well as how beveled it is but then once you've done that and we're just going to bevel this off a little bit more you can use those same mirror functions in order to quickly mirror this all over your object so you can use that to really quickly add plating so you can also use the cloth panel tool to simulate cloth over a surface so i could come in here and i could select individual surfaces hit the enter key and that's going to simulate this as cloth notice how what this is doing is this is actually creating this um this is actually creating this as its own geometry so you could also come in here if you wanted to and ins you can adjust all the simulation settings so you could set it so each individual face is a piece of cloth as well so if you were to click on this just like this you can click on ok and then let's run it again so if i wanted to set up a cloth panel over here now it'll simulate each face as an individual cloth panel so you see how it's going through and it's doing that and so obviously there's a lot more you can do with this i'm not super detailed with it right now but you can use this in order to simulate cloth across certain different surfaces and then finally and i think this is probably one of my favorite tools in here is the grid tool so let's say we were to cut an opening on this face so i'm just going to draw a rectangle across here click and then cut this back what we can do is i'm going to right click then i'm just going to grow in my grid settings what my grid settings are going to do is they're going to allow me to draw a grid across this face and so what we want to do is we want to show the boolean objects that are in here and then we want to select this one right here so we want to select the boolean that it's using in order to create this well then within the grid settings you can click and hold and you can select different kinds of grids to place inside of this opening so notice if i move my mouse down i can use this to quickly add a grid in here so we can position it so that it's further in or out in here you can also adjust the solidification of the grid as well so this is a quick easy way to add grids inside of openings that you create inside fluid so that's kind of a quick run through of the tools contained inside of fluent obviously we could get a lot more in depth with each one of these if you're interested i'm planning on going through and making more detailed tutorials about some of the different functions in here but i'd love to hear what you're interested in seeing more of in the comments down below if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new blender content every week if you like what i'm doing on this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 30,210

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender hard surface, blender hard surface modeling, blender hard surface add-on, blender fluent, blender fluent modeling, blender fluent tutorial, blender fluent add-on tutorial

Id: ayxeS3qiDx4

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020