Easy Sci-Fi Structures and Panels | Blender tutorial

the Sci-Fi aesthetic has long been established as being plenty of geometric shapes and panels and all sorts sticking out of walls what do they do no one really knows but we've come to expect it now as being part of that sort of sci-fi look it's become the first thing we think of when sci-fi comes to the brain now while this concept is easy enough to wrap your head around it's a real pain in the butt to model because it's just endlessly repeating these panels all over the place and it can take so long if you don't know what you're doing it's a it's a pain in the butt so what you really want to be doing is finding a way to automate this let's hop into blender foreign S tab with add-ons there is the beautifully named add-on the discombobulator it's a brilliant name for a brilliant add-on so you're just going to want to turn that on and then laugh at the fact it's called discombobulator let's go [Music] fated is we're going to hit shift a while selecting our Cube here another mesh you'll see right at the bottom here we've got the discombobulator so if we click on that we get this drop down menu here and I'll run you through all of the settings first but for now we're just going to hit OK and we end up with this we get a couple of little like extrusions on the um on the various planes and the best thing about this add-on is it's completely non-destructive so it means that when you add in a discombobulated mesh again love that word it adds in a whole other object on top of what you're doing so if you don't like it you can just delete it and start again you don't have to like undo a load of times or worry about sort of things going missing or changing or anything it's great and now let's take a look at some of the actual features that this add-on has so you have the minimum and maximum height so you can turn this up and you can get some real crazy effects we just wanted one say on each side we can do that so we can just disable it and now this is just going to randomize the size that it's coming out at and it won't just necessarily get bigger because as I said completely random it's just playing around until you get the sort of desired effect that you like for me I want it to be quite small so we're going to lower these like way down we're going to go sort of Point naught 2 and maybe 0.1 and the taper we're going to turn down a bit because it's a bit intense at the moment it's reminding me of those Mayan ruined pyramids the the places not the not not the software so the way that this works is When You tab into edit mode all of the faces are selected but you can select the faces that you want this to apply to so if we just select these four here and then tab out and go ahead and go back to the discombobulator now when we use this it's only going to affect those four faces that we've selected and we can change all of the settings for this without affecting the whole rest of the mesh so if we bring the the Max and Min taper way up and we have the sizes a lot bigger as well you can see we get a completely different effect on this and then again you can just go ahead and repeat the protrusions and get some real weird stuff going on there that's pretty cool but you can see it starts to get really customizable in that sense so you can have this side staying exactly the same and then this side going in here so a lot of what happens in sort of VC in Star Wars in just general sci-fi ships in general is they'll have like a sort of cut out around the middle it happens in the Death Star that's how you get the Trench Run it's on the Superstar Destroyer it's there's loads of things where there's like a cutout where you want things to happen so we're going to do that so I'm going to select this top face here and inset this and then just extrude that middle bit into there and that'll be one of the faces that we're going to use so now we're going to put some in the middle I'm going to hit Ctrl R and then just scroll up so we have two put those in the middle you can right click and that'll just put them straight in there and then I'm going to scale this on the z-axis we get quite a nice thin bar like that and then just hit option or alts if you're on Windows or Mac and then that'll select the ring around the outside then so if we hit e and s we can scale that in into the middle and now we have all of these faces selected here so you can select all of them or you can just select the ones that you want to so I'm going to start off just selecting this top one and ignore the middle for now we're going to Tab out it'll remember that that is the only face that we've got selected so if we go back into the discombobulator hit OK we now have this we're going to turn it down a bit because it's pretty intense at the moment and we're just going to bring all of these settings down quite a lot because we want this kind of inset in to the into the thing so it looks like almost loads of little tiny buildings or something that's the kind of effect that we're going for here so I'm going to just tab in and start repeating the process so I'm going to select all of these you can hit I and individually inset all of these just like so and then just keep doing it [Music] and there you have it you have this sort of cool sci-fi looking City kind of thing but that's really easy look at how easy that was that was what like you need about 10 minutes tops like sort of if you're just really dialing in a lot of the settings and then at that point you can just start assigning whatever materials you want to and you may have noticed another thing in the menu if we come down to the discombobulator you'll notice this one here make doodads and this entire this entire add-on they might they must have had a they must have had a laugh making this so the doodads are a little bit finicky they're a little bit awkward to to get right and I'll show you on a different object rather than this one because it'll be easier to see so we're just kind of making another Cube here gonna move over to that and so if we do the discombobulatory again we can turn on make doodads and then we can pick that Cube as our doodad and what to do that is is essentially it's like instancing that object kind of like when you go into the geometry nodes Tab and you take an object info and put it in there it's kind of doing a similar thing to that so if we do that and leave these as minimum and maximum when we hit OK you'll see rather than getting what we got on here with all of the little like extrusions we now have doodads under this object here the dude underscore obj honestly these names it's like they're trying to make this difficult to do without laughing it's great so you can again as I said delete that and you're just back to the way that it started beforehand or if you undo it's all back so what that's doing is essentially it's mixing these objects so the cube there on top of the faces that it's creating so every time it sort of makes a little it makes one of these little uh faces come out here so we've got four on each side each time it does one of those it's scattering a random number between one and six in our case because that's what we uh that's what we left it on so you can change that as many if you want so if you want exactly six on each of them or if you want exactly say two on each of them you can just change that and set it to whatever you want and it'll just add in those cubes so the one drawback to that is it can't be any object it has to be made up of quads and a quad is it's quite easy to understand it's a square face so if we added in say a circle let's just do that real quick if we try and make this our doodad it's not going to allow us so if we pick doodad now that this has what like 32 sides to it it's not gonna like that it won't do it it has to be a not a cube but essentially it has to be made up of squares so you know if you can make something out of a load of squares that's really detailed good on you you can do that and you can scatter it all over your object but yeah there you have it dude had some discombobulating all to make cool little sci-fi environment go absolutely wild and make whatever Starship you want to make the Superstar Destroyer make cities make whatever you want it's a powerful add-on and you should go ahead and start using it right away anyway with that I'm Gonna Leave This right here if you enjoyed it found it useful leave a like hit that subscribe button and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Littlerolz

Views: 29,707

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Id: 5BbWPtO8Z9E

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022