Essential Blender Skill - Stealing Geometry from Objects

greetings obious this is arand of v and in this video we're going to have a look at how you can steal geometry from objects in blender so let's quickly talk about what I mean by stealing geometry and how you can do this in Native blender then we'll go through some other methods you can use which are undeniably quicker some which are free but some of which have a cost to them so what I'm going to do is Select these faces here and I want to take this out of this object so I can use it somewhere else and what we do in Native blender is press shift and D to duplicate it then you can press escape to leave it where it is key and separate by selection and that means that now we've got one object here and we've got another object here which we typically use for things like Boolean or adding more details for example I could come to my modifi panel and add a solidifier modifier and that means I can now create some additional geometry but this is a separate object which I could then either boole in to this object or maybe even just move it around so it is simple enough to do with Native blender and there's no issue with doing it that way but there are quick ways to do it that are more efficient so let's start going through those and I'm going to start with an add-on that is free and it's one of my favorite add-ons if you've watched the channel it is Machine Tools so once you install Machine Tools as I said it is free you can get it from gumroad there's a link in the description if you go to machine tools and have a look at your settings you need to make sure for this to work that you've got the smart face creation method on make sure you save your preferences and then close that and from this point any face that you select or group of faces you select so say for example I select these all you need to do is hit four and now you've got this as a separate object now what's useful about this is it's already gone into edit mode for the object that you wanted to create so you can do things like aln e and then extrude long normals if you want to do that so that's machine tools and it is free to use now coming to our paid add-ons there are some other options as well and the other one that I really like to use is hard Ops now what hard Ops is going to do do if I go to face mode is give a lot more options with this so you can do a lot more things with it so the first thing I can do with this selected is press q and you'll notice that we've got this curve extract in actual fact this is very rarely or I very rarely use this to extract curves from an object that can be used for that you have a lot of other options as well so for example if I press my left Mouse button while holding down control it is going to create that second object you'll notice that this one is now in object mode just to be slightly more efficient on clicking if I want something in object mode and I'm going to then add a modifier I'll typically use this or if I want something in edit mode then I'll typically use the Machine Tools version but there is much more to hard Ops and what it can do so for example if I just select these ones here and press q and this curve extract tool gives us some more options we can hold down shift instead of control and that will create a new object but it is automatically adding a solidify modif fire and you can drag your mouse forwards or backwards to change the thickness of this modifier so again if you're interested in creating a solidify modifier that is going to be the fastest way of doing it now a lot of the times the reason we're creating a solidify modifier if I just come to this one and change it to there is that we then want to just scale that out slightly Boolean this from an object for example like that and we want to do this non-destructively we could have just done that in the object itself because then we can move this around or change how we want this to look so for example I could change this thickness without having to go into the geometry or I could even come here and just delete the Boolean all together now once again in hard Ops we can do that even faster instead of using let's go to this face instead instead of going to curve extract we can go to mesh tools and then selection to Boolean or being sensible it's also in the Boolean tool so selection to Boolean now what this does is automatically effectively PL is like an inser function where you can move backwards and forwards to change the size of this again very very helpful because that's a pretty common function to want to do and then as soon as you click you are now creating a Boolean so I can now push that into let's say there and click and you've done your Boolean and once again this has got a solidify modifier so effectively it's what we were doing over there but it now saves you clicks because you don't need to add the Boolean in if we just come here and delete that and delete that the other option with this in case you don't want to have a difference Boolean let's go to face mode is we can do exactly the same thing again and selection to Boolean click and then click but we can press a and this will now create a union Boolean so we've now got this added to the end which again is really useful if you want to have this as a separate object so later on you can say for example scale it on everything but the Y because you want to change the size of this or you could even G and then shift y to be able to to move this around so very effective and what I really like about this if I just bring in a cube is this generally works really well and will'll work on multiple faces at the same time so for example if I select multiple faces instead of just the one at the end Q Boolean and then selection to Boolean I can make this smaller click and then I can inser this in to somewhere around let's say there let's just hide that and again this is a Boolean so we can always using hard Ops q and then ever scroll to select this and then we can change the thickness of this now there is one final one with hard Ops that I want to mention which is really nice and that is that at the moment well if I go into edit mode there is nothing that can be selected other than these outer faces which generally is fine but what if I want to do something on these faces here well normally I'd have to come into the modifier stack and apply this to then go into face mode and be able to select some of the these faces but what if I want to keep this non-destructive workflow so I can come in and still be able to change things if I want to well in hard Ops you can do that as well you can literally select things that you shouldn't be able to select and then extract them in a similar way so if I come to this object q and this time I'm going to go to mesh tools and then face extract what this will allow me to do is Select some faces that don't even really exist because they're part of the Boolean and then in exactly the same fashion in fact actually let's just unselect those and select maybe those and those and then I can press space that'll allow me to shrink those in or not if I don't want to and again then click and add that solidify in and then click again and then we've got that done even though this geometry that we've been selecting doesn't even really exist really really cool from hardops now hardops is a paid for add-on there is a link in the description if you're interested in getting it if you are going to get it I would get it with box cutter because it has loads of additional features that work together and that is an affiliate link so while it doesn't cost you any extra it does help the channel out now there is one other method that I want to mention which is part of native blender but it requires a little bit more setup but once it's done it's really quick to use and that is if I just let's say apply all of these and want to take something from this what you can do is say shift and D to duplicate it I mean you could do this with the old version but I want to keep that and then you go into face mode and select the faces you want so let's say those faces there and then you can set up a geometry node tool which I've set up here to delete all of the other geometry so you can end up with a copy now what that means you can do is if we come to let's say this object here is shift and D to duplicate it Escape go into face mode and select just that face and then Geo tools and delete all the other geometry and then I can s this as I choose to so I guess you can call that natur to blender now I'm not going to go through that whole geometry node setup here because it would make the video officially long and it's not really at all it's something you've got to make yourself but there is a link in the description if you do want to check that out so you can see a video on that I thought geometry nodes are a bit different to what I've covered so I thought some people wouldn't be interested in that and then for those that are you can check out that video so there we go a range of different ways of stealing geometry from objects for use in your blender projects as always if you found that video useful please do hit the like button it helps share the video around so other people will know these different tools and strategies if you're not subscribed subscribe for more videos and if you want to support the channel further there is a patreon page where for a few dollars a month you get these videos add free a week early and you get other cool perks as well have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 6,586

Keywords: blender, modeling, blender tutorial, addon, different, techniques, methods, options, guide, tutorial, how to, beginner, pro, add-on, add on, machine, machin3, tools, face extract, boolean, curve extract, smart, face

Id: fpm1XTgUfr0

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024