Editable Meshes - Getting Started in 3DS Max 2021 (part 6)

hi and welcome back to another episode of our 3ds max series my name is arnold fahle and today we're going to talk about editable meshes and how we're going to use them in modeling our 3d scenes we got a lot to do so let's get started right away so you see right here we have a a scene with three boxes in it and the first thing that i would like to show you or like to explain to you is the difference between an object that is still influenced by its parameters that would be let me quickly um let me quickly maximize the viewport that was i w to get a maximized viewport and the left box here when i click on it and check out the on the right side modify you can see that it's still influenced by its parameters length width height and its uh segments and so on the middle one on the other hand is an editable mesh it looks exactly the same in fact i also copied the box and converted it to an editable mesh it's an editable mesh you can see the object type is here edit table mesh and what's typical for editable meshes is that you have five levels that you can select uh different uh parts of the geometries you're starting from the vertices all the way to the element itself and the last one you can see that the object type is still the box with an edit mesh modifier on top of it so while the first one is an object type box the last one is still a box with an editable mesh on it the big advantage of this version to create an editable mesh is that you can anytime go back to box and change its parameters the only problem is once you edit something in the edit mesh modifier you cannot go back anymore to the box so this is something that is quite helpful when you do some changes and you want to undo the changes then you can just turn the changes or the the modifier off but you cannot usually as once there is something changed and edited in the edit mesh you cannot go back to the box anymore so that was um that was uh in general the type how do i get those uh objects and let me delete the second and third one i just select my first one that is the box and let me quickly create two new copies i shift and move the object and i choose two copies the first version which is now a box a parametric object the first object i created by selecting it and doing a right click with my mouse and i've chosen on the very bottom convert to editable mesh once you do this you'll turn it into an editable mesh and there's actually no way to undo it or so of course you can hit undo but once it's turned into an editable mesh you cannot go back to a parametric object anymore except undo for one step but once you save it it's done the thick the second one i did uh by placing an edit mesh modifier on top of the box of the box so you select the box check in your modifier list and you go down to find the edit mesh modifier and it's placed on top of the box and now you have your levels to edit for right now i would like to start by beginning to explain you at a few um a few things that you can do in an editable mesh and therefore i'm going to focus on the version that i had in the middle that was the right click convert to editable mesh remember the one without the modifier that is pretty simple so let's get started by taking a look at the different levels that you can edit your editable mesh on it the edit table measures the most general form of geometry because it is just a some kind of object represented by a bunch of little triangular faces that make up the whole mesh of the of the of the object so let's start uh in this object by going into the first level and that is vertex level just a quick reminder don't forget whenever you go into one of those sub levels don't forget at the end to go out again there's a couple warnings there's a little uh highlight on the on the editable mesh there is also a a three dots here next to the to the name editable mesh so whenever you are in here don't forget to get out there's also a couple of shortcuts and that is one two three four five on your keyboard so with one for example you can go get into the vertex level and another hit on one will get you out to be honest i'm not changing that much between those levels so it's not the most uh the most necessary uh keyboard shortcut that you have to remember one two three four five just like we did with the editable splines by the way if you have not watched the editable spline video um i'm going to edit i'm going to put it into the info box it is important that you watch the editable splines first because there's so many things that apply to the two-dimensional lines just as well they do to the three-dimensional editable mesh so make sure you what you have watched the splines first and now we gonna talk about the editable meshes so uh i'm starting here in the vertex level and the first thing i would like to show you what can i do to those vertices uh first i'm gonna switch into a wireframe mode just to make sure that you see all your vertices i am in a perspective by the way but that doesn't matter we can do it in any view so here are the blue little dots for your vertices and i'm gonna pick one always make sure you don't pick those vertices by clicking on them but by catching them with a little window because only when you catch them with a little little window you make sure you get all the vertices at that location but also make sure that you don't select any vertices that are behind it so don't select anything that looks like this because now they are like in the foreground and in the background and if i select it i get the ones in the foreground and the background so always look make sure you turn rotate them to the side and then select the point with a little window to make sure you get all the points by the way you can see how many vertices that you have selected on the bottom here of the first list and it says vertex 6 for example selected so once you have a vertex selected one thing that you can do is you can move it that of course changes the geometry and here's a little hint whenever i move something in different levels vertex edge and so on i'm showing you how to move it by dragging it around but then i'm hitting escape so that i jump back so that i don't mess up my geometry by doing all those changes so first with dots you can simply move them let's show you in the in a shaded view if you move the vertex you somehow change the top face of your geometry how that changes we're gonna see later as soon as we know how edges work and how faces look like let's select two vertices here the front and the back and of course when you select those uh you change the geometry in another a very specific way and this way you can go of course uh kind of can do of course all kinds of things and so on so move is uh is uh is one thing that you can do a lot with the vertices of your geometry when you select a vertex and that you hit escape then you get a big mess so you try try not to escape vertices because just by deleting one vertex you get a big hole you deleted all the faces that were connected to this one point that's why i'm going to hit ctrl c for undo so don't try to delete anything but move is something you can do in vertex level let's switch to the next one and that is the edge level the first thing that i would like to show you know let's do the same thing as we did before in the in the vertex level now you can select an edge this time i'm asking you to select the edge by clicking on it do not drag a window because there's a danger that you select more than one in the back you can also do a window but edges are also fine to click on it edges are usually not not very likely that there are two edges at the same location with vertices that happens quite a lot so i'm going to select the edge and then here in the shaded view i can do the same thing as before as if i would have selected two two vertices so now with vertex with vertex you can do a couple more things for example the vertex can not only be moved but it can also be rotated so when you rotate it you rotate your vertex or this way and so on so you alter the geometry by rotating it or and let me move or rotate my view this way you can also scale a vertex scaling the vertex just means the vertex is either the edge sorry the edge is a little bit longer or a little bit shorter again escape to get back to the original position now when you delete a vertex sorry an edge of course i messed it up when you delete an edge the the hole that you get is not so uh is not so big usually an edge is made up of two faces so when you select an edge usually two faces are connected to this edge so this is the hole that you get when you delete the edge now here's one thing that is important when you look at your box right now you can see a couple of edges actually it's a 4 8 it's 12 edges but there is actually more than 12 edges because we not only have those visible edges that we see right now we also have invisible or hidden edges those hidden edges you can get them by catching the edges with a big window and then you will see that there are some edges that have a dotted or a dashed line so now you can also see how the geometry of your box is actually made up by little triangular faces and some of the edges are visible especially the ones at the core at the at the edges at the uh where it's 90 degrees the other ones which are coplanar which are in the same plane it's invisible quite simple if you want to it's pretty hard to find an invisible edge but once you catch it with the window you can just click on it and you will also find it with a simple click when you select an invisible edge on the right side you will find here it says surface properties and you can switch between visible and invisible so you can take the invisible edge like right now and turn it visible or i can take any other edge like this one for example and turn it invisible that is not a good idea because this is an edge that should stay visible so let's try to find it again so here it is and let's turn it visible one thing let me select all of my edges and let's turn them all visible so if you have all edges visible the geometry looks a little uh confusing at the beginning but you will soon find out that it's a quite simple how the geometry is made out of those triangular faces so once you turned all your edges visible you can use something to again define which one is invisible and which one is visible there is something that is called auto edge and it's right here it says out to edge and next to the outer edge is a number and that is a 24 degrees so when you select all of your edges you can also use ctrl a when you are in edge mode now all my edges are selected and when i use outer edge with 24 that means all the edges that have an angle and let me show you all the edges that have an angle to uh the planes that form the edge more than 24 degrees then the edge is visible if it's less than 24 degrees it's an invisible edge if we look at the edges in our scene they are either 90 degrees or zero degrees so we know the ones are 90 that make up the outline and the the the edges here between the between the side planes and the one in the middle those are zero degrees because the two faces are in the same plane so by selecting all of them and hitting out to edge it automatically turns all the one in the middle invisible and all the the edges that should be visible above more than 24 degrees they stay they will be turned visible okay so that is the outer edge function let's uh jump into the next level and that is the phase level and we already know how faces look like in our geometry let me go back to a shaded view and once i click on it you can see the highlighted faces i can select one face or even with control i can select two faces and so on so a face is always a triangular phase between three vertices that's a triangular phase what can you do with it try with a with a face like this for example you can again move it so let's move it of course everything that hangs on the face will move as well or maybe up down then you can rotate it of course and you can scale it by the way the shortcut for move rotates scale is w e and r so r for scale the face will be scaled up or down again escape to get back so in phase mode there's only a few things that you would do on a regular basis and one of them is fixing normals that point in the wrong direction so right now i'm seeing my box and i can see all the front faces of of my faces but also those faces have back sides but the back sides they all look towards the inside of my box so um how can i check out which is the front side which is the back side sometimes when you import it from a different software package it might happen as to those two get mixed up so you might need to fix it so what you want to do is find out where is the front side and therefore here's a little button that's called show normals and when you click show normals on then every selected face will get a normal i don't know if you can see it but it's a blue line let me zoom in a bit so here it is that's the axis right that's the axis right now and above the z-axis here is a blue line uh when you select more than one you see it may be better all the blue lines they show you the front side so whenever there's a blue line that is the normal vector and it's uh it's it's it's attached to the uh the center of gravity center of mass of every face and um that points towards the front side so let's take one face any face and flip it so flipping means making make the front side and the back side switch you select your face and here is a button on the right side somewhere oh let me find it normal flip here flip and when you hit flip now this piece here oh that looks strange that's not the way it's supposed to look see there's something wrong with the graphic card uh let me get another edge let's take this one see also messed up okay so that usually it should be the the whole the the the the black part that you see here uh it should actually be uh diagonal not like this but you can better see it if i i think if you render it it will not show up because it's set to arnold render engine is it yes oh that looks awful anyway it is it is not working properly so now let's go into a wireframe mode select all my elements and now you see some of them are a little bit darker red and those are the back sides so they uh there's no blue line attached to the dark to the darker red uh faces so that means those are faces that are looking in the wrong direction and that happens a lot when you import it because what is the front side and what is the back side it's basically defined by the order of the vertices of every face so if i take this face which is regular showing me the front side then the its vertices 1 2 and 3 are in counterclockwise order mathematically positive so whenever they are counterclockwise they are you see the front side in a flipped face you will see you see the back side of it and that means they are clockwise ordered so that's why the other why the front side points in inward so but pretty simple to fix you just select the uh the face that points the wrong direction here now you can see the normal points to the inside of the box and you hit flip again and it's done here was another one this one also pointing towards the inside here is the blue line selected and flip there is also a flip normal mode here so if you have a lot of faces to flip you can just go into your flip normal mode and click that flips the face and click again it flips it one more time flip and flip i'm sorry about the this some has to do something with the graphic card i've never seen that usually the faces show up uh the flipped ones show up in a diagonal way okay the unified normals that usually doesn't work well because yeah that would only work if it's a plane or something where they all point in the same direction here it's some point up some points sideways and so on so that was uh one thing the next thing that i would like to show is what happens if you delete a face so select any face and hit delete and obviously the hole that you get is now only one face so when you select the face no no other faces that are attached to it are also deleted uh here's my hole and now this is also the first time that i'm showing you i'm not hitting undo i'm showing you how to fix how to close a hole in a mesh so if you have a mesh with a hole in it and in this case there's only one face missing and that is a simple hole you can simply fix it and the way you do it you make sure you set your view so that you see all three vertices so make sure you see all of the three one two three and make sure they are not like uh like really small so you look from the top and you see nicely all three uh elements all three vertices of the missing face now in face mode you will find here on the right side where it says edit geometry you will find create and you you highlight you start you click on create and now i don't know if you can see it but the vertices got highlighted and when you look at my mouse cursor where it's light looks like this and when you move your mouse and you're on top of a vertex it changes so you have to click three times or actually i think yeah three times the third one is a double click in order to close it again but be a make sure you do it counterclockwise because you want the front face to be visible so you start anywhere i'm starting here on the right side make sure the cursor is changed you don't need object snap because it finds the vertex automatically so it's not creating a new vertex it's finding the existing ones and creates on top of them so mouse is here i click once now i have a rubber band on the bot on the on the vertex i go to the next vertex and click again and now i have a triangle and now all i need to do is click a third time oh sorry third time's a double click and uh here it is let's get out of create and there it is i'm gonna do it one more time so i hit undo to get rid of it let's make it properly turn on create start one then go counterclockwise second point and the third one is a double click and there it is right mouse click or turn off create and now you're ready to continue because the geometry is perfectly closed one thing the diagonal line here that is is now visible we know how to turn it invisible simply select it and say it's an oh sorry it's an invisible edge okay so that was the vertex level the next one is uh sorry the face level the next one is polygon and the polygon now if i go into polygon level in this case in my box here the polygon is a is two faces so or it's here one side and here one side remember you can see that the show normals is still on let me turn that off because we don't need to those show normals so even when you are in polygon mode and you have show normals turned on you can see that you can see all the normals so polygons don't have their own normals they just have the same normals as their faces are have so what is the difference between a face and a polygon a face is always one face a polycon can be multiple faces but not necessarily it is all the faces within um hidden edges ah sorry within visible edges so if i look at the top now and i select i mean polygon and i select and it's a polygon made out of two faces let's let let's go into the edge mode and select this invisible edge here and turn it visible now as my top now is made out of two pulled two faces with a visible edge in between in polygon mode i cannot select the top together anymore because now the polygon is the same size as the face so a polygon is all the faces that are not separated with a visible line so as long as the lines are invisible the polygon can select more than one face you can do the same thing you can move you can rotate the polygon you can scale it and you can also delete it let's do that quickly uh i'm going to turn the edge back to a invisible edge so the top is one polygon uh let's go into polygon level i don't need to show you move rotate and scale but let's delete it one more time and now the box is open i see all kinds of back sides which are in this case black so when i see a back face it's black and now i'm gonna use the same create method to create a polygon that closes this thing it works the same way you choose in polygon level you choose create you start anywhere you go counterclockwise and you double click before you know the last one not you can also go all the way and click on the same but you want to save some time so start go counterclockwise and the last vertex is a double click so i'm starting here on the left side and i'm going this way this way and here's a double click and it closes the polygon don't forget to turn create off usually with a right mouse click and also the face is done okay so that was the most important things to do in each and every level you might ask me what about the element level the element level let me get out here of the of the of the polygon level the element level is made for uh when we have more elements attached together and let me quickly do this here is my box and i'm quickly creating another box a smaller box and also let's do a sphere over here so now i have three objects only one is an editable mesh the other one's a box or a sphere so i'm starting with my editable mesh go to modify and without going in any one of those levels i'm gonna choose attach here on the right side attach and click on the box and click on the sphere don't forget to get out of attach now you can see they have the same color in our list of elements we see we only have one object left and it's called box o2 so that means they are all attached together into one object when you have an object made out of different elements like we did with attaching we can go we can use the element level to separately address them so element is always the whole element uh together and as those have been attached i can later on like move them i can lay down delete them hit delete and so on and so on hit delete yeah you get the point right so that is the element level what what everything that is its own element can be addressed with the element level so um while we here's i'm still having an object two objects attached together i don't need to show you attach anymore here it is the attach button we also did that with the 2d lines if you have like 50 objects to attach i would recommend to use attach list and that brings up a list of all attachable objects and you can select them by name or whatever and attach them all into one thing so that is a polygon or object can be attached and attached by list if you have an element already attached like i have the small box to the big box i'm going into element level select the small box and when there is attach there's also detach so let's see uh here is also a is the attach button here's also a detach when you hit detach on the whole element it will asks you how do you want it if you if i detach it what should it be called let's call it this you can either detach it but stay in the element like stay inside the object as a separate element makes no sense because it is already a separate element or detach it as a clone so it stays in the object but it detaches a clone i don't want to do either of those so i'm going to want to get it out of the of the attachment and have it as its own object with this name okay so uh go out of the element level right now you can only see it here in the list of objects that i have now two objects you can also see that it's its own object if i change the color of it and you can see it's colors only can be attached to one color per one object okay so attach detach and so on let's show you i'll show you one more thing in detach and that is i'm deleted it here i'm back to my starting box now i'm going to detach sorry now i'm going to detach not an element but only a polygon and i'm going into polygon level select this side polygon here and i cannot take it and move it away because it sticks to the thing if i want to move it away i'm gonna have to select it and detach it either as its own object yes i want to do this because later on i want to attach it again or detach as an element so i move it away and it stays a separate element that you can touch with the element level or as i mentioned as a clone so i want my own object so i hit okay and now this side plane here is oh sorry got the wrong one i have to get out of polygon level so here it is it's an extra object here's the list with its extra name so there it is now i would like to show you something it's an extra object to show you even better let me switch its color so there it is now if i take the object use my object snap and bring it back if i bring it back i need the object snap otherwise it will not perfectly sit in the in the original position now it's still two objects and now i'm going to attach it again to its original box so select the box choose attach and choose the uh the object to attach it has the same color it has only one name so it is already attached but watch this when i now go into the element level you will find out that although it has been attached it is still an extra element so go to the element level here that is one element and that is one element so just like we did with the 2d lines just by attaching the object to the other one it doesn't mean that actually those vertices are welded together so those vertices here are actually there's two vertices one is part of the big box and one is part of the side element so i can prove it by going into vertex level use a window to catch the vertex or the two vertices and you can see it here it says two vertices selected so that's not one it's two at the very same position and in order to fix that to turn them instead of two vertices into one you can use the weld function here it says weld and select it and what it says next to select it means every the every vertex that is 0.1 units so really close together this is the same point not really close together everything within the range of 0.1 units will be welded together so in this case i have to weld this one i have to weld those two those two and those two so it's much simpler to select them all at the same time because there's there's no danger that those two opposite vertices will be selected because they are much further away than 0.1 so if i hit select all that happens is those two those pairs will all be welded so here it is eight vertices selected and now i hit weld and now it says four vertices selected so now they're valid together that means that now in element level it's all one element so it's now no longer a separate element because those vertices have been welded together and now it's only one object okay so so much for the attach and detach function remember when you attach the two together always check the point where they are attached together might also need some uh some welding good now here is uh let me show you something uh one more a couple more things and one of them is in vertex mode if i select this vertex here for example and when i move it up i'm going to move it up you can see that what it does it actually it its geometry the change in geometry depends on which way this top uh top polygon has its hidden edge so right now the hidden edge now it's not hidden anymore you can see it the edge is visible here so that means uh it this is uh it's a very specific way the geometry looks if the if the edge goes the other way uh this part will stay flat and only the other one will will be moved up so uh we can this is something we can influence uh the the hit the the hidden lines not only the hidden ones also any other if you have two faces next to each other then they have a certain uh edge between them separating both faces and this one line can be turned so instead of having a left in this case the the in the back and in the front i can have a face on the left and on the right you can only do this in edge level so you're going to edge level select the face that you want to turn it's called turn so you select the face and then you hit turn here on the right side oh sorry uh sorry uh that doesn't work you need to uh select turn first and then click on the edge and then it turns it doesn't work when you said when you pre-select it it's not turning it so you need to click on it okay one more time and clicking on it turn okay so one more time turn so that turns and the geometry looks totally different sometimes if you want if you move certain edges and you are certain vertices and you want the edge to react in a certain way or want them all to be parallel especially with imported geometry you sometimes want to go in there and turn the geometry of course also an edge here that makes up the essential box can be turned when you try it it totally messes up your geometry see that's not good but we can bring it back and there it is so that is something else that we're going to fix in a minute okay that is turn in object in in edge mode let's leave it as it is the next thing is the question is why are some edges why do some edges appear to be a sharp uh corner like this one here some edges also here but some edges don't in this case it's clear because it's it's flat between those two faces so you actually don't see those uh actually it's totally different who is responsible for if this edge if this uh edge here is a sharp corner or it's a smooth looking corner that only depends on one thing and this is called smoothing groups and you can imagine a smoothing group just being a label on every face giving the face a number let's say seven okay so if this face here on the top has number seven and its neighbor also has number seven the edge between the two smoothing groups number seven will be smooth in this case in our case uh they they don't have the same common smoothing group because they it's not smooth i'm gonna show you with exactly this example it's all done in face mode so when you select face mode and you select one face and then look on the right side here it says uh with all those numbers next to each other it says smoothing groups and this one that i have selected has smoothing group number four if i select the neighboring one it doesn't have any smoothing group at all so if if a face has no smoothing group at all it means it looks like an edge at with all other faces so no so let's give it this face here also smoothing group number four and then we see what happens now suddenly this edge here you see it's still an edge when you look from the front you can see it's still a sharp edge but when you look from the side it is very smooth so the brightness of every phase is only interpolated when the smoothing group between the two are the same so let's do something let's select all the faces and not only can you manually change the smoothing groups or later on i'll show you how to do it automatically you have to move it up here's also a clear all button if you do clear all that means all edges now are look like hard edges to make it a little bit better visible let me move this a little bit and let me move this a little bit so wherever there is an edge as soon as they are not perfectly aligned anymore they appear like a really hard like a crystal edge there so because no one of those faces has a smoothing group so now i'm gonna select in face mode select this and control this one and i'm going to give them one smoothing group in common let's take 19. it doesn't matter which one 19 okay now they have one smoothing grouping common now it's a smooth edge between the two faces one more time here this one and this one let's give them three and four i gave them two common it's not getting smoother just because they have two in common but uh they have three and four now if i select this one here and give it three then also this edge is trying to look smooth i know it looks weird so it's smoothing around an edge that yeah that is definitely not a smooth edge and that's why it looks strange if we have an object like ours here we can also give the object smoothing groups automatically so like auto smooth it and this is done the following way in face mode you select all your faces i used ctrl a to select all the faces and now i'm going to use the function a little bit down here that's called autosmooth and autosmooth has a value next to it and that is 45 degrees so any angle between two faces that has more than 45 degree angle i have an angle of more than 45 degrees will be turned into a sharp edge and everything that is below 45 degrees towards each other will be a smooth edge you can adjust the value here for example uh all those faces here will be smooth anyway but i'm not sure about this one is it more or less it's almost exactly 45 degrees so i don't know maybe it's a little bit below a little bit above so i don't know what the outcome is so let's do the auto smoothing and let's turn it to 30 degrees because that is uh less and it will definitely be a sharp edge so all this all of the faces are selected i used 30 degrees here in auto smooth and click on autosmooth and now here they are okay ah it is still smooth so the angle looks like is remember when they are like this they are zero degrees and 30 degrees so it's it's a little bit let's go for oh i made it worse even sorry about that so let's select those faces again let's do uh let's do 60 degrees no i didn't make it worse sorry it was less than 30 degrees that's very unlikely let's make it 20 and there it is so now it is between 20 and 30 degrees because now with 20 it made a sharp edge okay that is the autosmooth function works with all kinds of geometries with smoothing it also when you render it of course it will render as a sharp edge if the smoothing groups are the same so let's select this one and this one and give it one in common now it's smooth and when i render it again it is a smooth edge here and i cannot tell which way that the diagonal line goes okay now let's do something else let's get out of element level and kick out the box now i'm going to do a sphere select the sphere right click and convert it into an editable mesh now i'm looking from the side choose polygon level and what i'm doing is i'm selecting all those polygons that kind of uh defined a cap the poles of it and i hit delete now it's an open uh open form there what i wanted to show you is one more function in edge mode and uh now for example if you want to select all the edges here that are you can select you know edges and there's a sphere has a lot of edges a couple of visible ones and a couple of invisible diagonal ones and also those are edges which are very special because they are so-called open edges they are right here where the object is open so an open edge is an edge that only belongs to one word out to one face usually edges are between two faces but sometimes one is gone and then it's the open face the open edge here in edge mode is a function on the right side that's called select open edges so no matter what you have selected when you hit select open edges all the open edges maybe you see it a little bit better here in wireframe mode all the open edges will be selected so just nothing selected and you hit select open edges now the open edges you can do a couple of things for example create shape from edges if i hit now create shape from edges what do you want a smooth shape or a linear i want to stay the same as the geometries i'm using linear because now i'll get a little line check check check check check for everything it will look smooth but it's a line uh and there it is so what i have created now let's get out of the edge mode is a line right here at the edge there it is let me move it up so here is a little circle and you can do something with it physic for example you can give it the renderable spline modifier and uh there it is the edge that i have just created so let's hit delete so select open edges and then create shape from edges but what i wanted to show you except not the select open edges but no let's do something else let's um let's leave the the the open uh sphere here for a moment let me quickly create a box like this only now um box a little bit larger only now i'm gonna use two two two height width and length segment so it kind of subdivides length width and height by into two segments and i got this little box box that's made out of like eight little boxes right click convert to editable mesh because what i would like to show you now now this is all a polygon so if i select this in polygon mode i can select the polygon this polygon this polygon and so on what i would like to show you it works in both polygon the options that you have here on your right side and i'm just showing you a few of them the options are almost the same for polygon and vertex actually not almost the same they are exactly the same so everything i say now that works in face mode also works in polygon mode and vice versa so i'm going to show it to you in polygon mode in poly mode and let me select one of the top polygons here there's an option called extrude so if you select extrude then go with your mouse onto the selected object click and drag you can extrude a new face or new piece of geometry out of it one more time i'm not holding the mouse anymore so click hold and drag it out or this way hit hold and drag it out okay that is extrude if you want to extrude it for example this one precisely 10 then you can also not only use the extrude but go next to extrude here is a value you can enter value 10 enter and now i have it exactly 10 units extruded same thing works with bevel bevel is the same thing as extrude only it extrudes the geometry and changes the scale of the of the top uh of the top face so let's go to bevel and if i take the top one bevels first is pulling out and then if i let my mouse go you can either make the end larger or smaller i'm going to use it for making it smaller or here pull it out let the mouse go and then make it smaller that is bevel it works the same way but not so well because you have extrude and scale so i would not do this with uh with this what means group and local for example if you select this and this together if you bevel them both at the same time and you are in group you will notice okay they do this it works the same way here it works the same way um oh no that was that was a bad example sorry um they have they have to uh it should it would be better on the bevel group and local works better here on the on the on the sphere because when you select a sphere and then you select a couple of polygons that are next to each other they have to touch each other in order to see the difference between group and local if i use group group and use bevel then they are beveled as one piece undo if i use local bevel then they are locally bevel the hell yeah that works again much better this is something that is usually done in an editable poly this is not what editable meshes are famous for extrude and bevel so if you stay on to this channel a little little bit longer let me by the way remind you make sure you subscribe to the channel that helps a lot also add your comments there ask some questions i'm i'm trying to answer all of them and of course recommend the channels to your friends and colleagues so this is something that i will i will talk about later and that is the same way as we have editable meshes here is editable police but the police have much more options when it comes to put it that's why it's called poly modeling when it comes to model your geometry but uh to finish this up we have a couple more things to do uh here is uh here's my uh the box again because uh there's one thing that i wanted to show you the extrude and the bevel and now uh here's a few modifiers that work well with editable meshes let me get out of the level here's the first one uh let me extrude a little bit more because then it's funnier to to show you the modifier so i'm going to make a couple more things here also maybe down way down down and down there as well and on this side here's one and also maybe maybe bevel the outcome a little bit more so here's one so like this because the modifier that i would like to show you is let's get out of the polygon level don't forget this before you place the modifier there is actually two modifiers that do similar things and the first one is called turbo smooth so you select your objects go to your modifier list and find the modifier called turbo smooth here it is turbo smooth and what it does it creates an almost organically looking little figure turbo smooth basically takes every 90 degree angle adds another subdivision and instead of having one 90 degree angle what it does it creates two 45 degree angles so it kind of smooths it smoothes up the whole geometry if there is i'm going to turn off the modifier if there is more geometry to start with it's not that much deforming it if there's not so much geometry like here with the larger boxes it is deforming the geometry a little bit more so the turbo smooth can be turned on and off and you can also choose how many iterations so a 90 degree angle is 2 times 45 if i click one more time it is actually uh it's actually subdivide it one more time and every ep every iteration kind of subdivides it um subdivides the geometry and multiplies every time everything times two so don't enter 20 or so that will uh slow down your computer so even two or three is already quite smooth geometry so um when you render it it's run rendering in a really smooth nicely plastic looking thing in this case is really the standard uh stand now there's actually no material on our object the standard material for render ring in arnold is looks quite nice plasticky so this is the iteration when you use a turbosmooth modifier usually you use it of course at the end there's um there is also um a nice way to make it uh invisible or not and what you can do is with your turbo smooth and it's it's a modifier so it's stacked on top of the editable mesh you can always go back to the editable mesh do some more editing for example here in poly mode let's uh do some more beveling here and also on this side let's bevel something here the more you bevel the less it will be deformed uh don't forget to get out of it and then turbo smooth looks different you can also instead of going when you go back to editable mesh you can see the effect of turbosmooth is turned off here's also a button and this one i don't know exactly it's a stack it's called show end result so you have a modifier stack and when you go back one step the the top effect will be hidden but when you turn this on it always shows you the end result of your modifier stack so you have the end result although you can work on it and here's the orange piece as if it's still an editable mesh so i'm here in poly mode and let's do some more extruding of of this piece here and now when i extrude it it looks weird but it will come out here this way and so on with turbo smooth it looks quite funny that is the show end result here or not show end result but it's easier to to to model your geometry uh let me uh remove the out oh i'm gonna turn off the turbosmooth because i would like to show you another modifier that does the same thing and that is called mesh smooth so i'm gonna select here and i'm choosing mesh smooth h where is it here is mesh smooth and it does the same thing with only a little difference you can now choose you have the same iterations here we had three iterations there it doesn't show all the geometry than you had before remember with turbo smooth you could see all the little uh polygons there here it doesn't show a lot of polygons but they are still there it's just showing you those those iso lines uh they're somewhere here shown in there here it's called isoline display when you remove it see it also shows up even more geometry oh because i said iteration five sorry three was the other one here is iterations three the only difference is to do them to the uh to the turbosmooth you have now a couple more options that you can choose and you can also choose which method is used for subdivision they look almost the same but not so you can choose which one fits your outcome best is it the nerms or the the classic and so on and so on you can play with uh old style mapping if it's different applied to the whole measure only to the selected area and so on and so on if you want to know what all those parameters are don't be afraid hit f1 and f1 will give you the autodesk help file and when you are in a certain uh in a certain command then you will get it much simpler in this case for example turbo smooth and so on can find it and can't smoothing mesh turbo smooth starter turbo smooth where's the turbo smooth modifier yeah you'll find it i'm sure okay so that is the two modifier the turbosmooth and the mesh smooth two more things or two more things yes one modifier that i would like also show you is here the hole in my in my sphere when you have a simple hole that means a hole that can be simple simply closed with one plain object then there is a nice modifier that does it for you and this modifier is called called cap holes so you select your object with a hole in it and give it a cap holes modifier here's the modifier cap holes and it does just what the name says it closes or it caps your holes it doesn't work it doesn't work if there are holes all over the place but if there's one nice hole that can be capped with a flat with a flat plane then this is the modifier of choice of course now you can put another um another editable mesh modifier on top of it and uh keep on editing your uh your object remember that is not a modifier where that is also not a modifier when you do some changes later on you cannot go back later on that's any time when there's an edit mesh involved an editable mesh modifier or so then you cannot go back or you will get unwanted results okay that was the cap holes modifier and now here's one more thing that i that i'm sure you like if you have a simple plane so not a box but a like a two-dimensional plane so i go to plane and i'm going to create a plane that is also something that you can start with extrude something out and so on all i want is i want a plane with much more segments so right now i have four segments in each direction so i'm more thinking about 40 so maybe uh 40 segments that is uh i have a lot of segments there and i'm going to turn my plane right click into an editable mesh now we know when i go in the edit mesh in the editable mesh i go into vertex level and i select one vertex here let's get one or in this case i did it without the window because it's in the middle here if i select this one vertex and i pull it up what i get is a little peak or a little spike coming out this is not what i want i want to show you something and i key i still have my vertex here selected in the middle in the modify panel there there is a there's something there's a category that is uh collapsed and it's called soft selection when you open up soft selection it says you can turn turn it on but use soft selection as soon as you turn use soft selection and that depends on how large your plane is it will give you you see effect uh it it uses a soft selection and it has a fall off of 20 so that means from the vertex that you selected 20 units all the vertices will be affected in this curve so when i select this one vertex and i pull it up it will be pulled up in the form of this curve and if you don't like the form of this curve you want to have it in a different curve you can always use those two values to give to to adjust the curve here and then pick any other and move it up you can select it you can also change the fall off by making more pixels affected and so on so that is something that you can nicely use if you need some kind of random some random terrain or so you can just select some pixels with soft selection again this is something that you would usually not do in edit mesh this is something that you would do in an edit poorly because there it works much better but also the soft selection here works quite quite nice of course the soft selection is also available in other objects for example here on my sphere uh let me remember remove the cap holes for one moment i select one vertex here and then i use soft selection and i can also pull out oops i picked one in the back sorry undo uh here is my vertex and i can pull out a vertex here with with a soft selection okay so that was uh the last part here for the working with editable meshes i hope i got some ideas how to work with it it is important to get familiar with it check out also all the other parameters there how what you can do to those different levels vertex edges and so on it is especially important when you import from other software packages but because this is the tool how to fix errors how to fix hole how to turn edges how to flip the edges if they are looking in the wrong direction all those things can be done in editable meshes i hope you liked it thanks for your attention it is an hour long and i hope that was some time well spent and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: AF Tutorials

Views: 4,571

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Id: uGMWgBaR99k

Length: 60min 16sec (3616 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020