Every Modeling Tool You'll Ever Need in Blender

in this video we will take a look at blender's direct modeling tools these are the tools we will be using day to day when it comes to generally poorly modeling our objects such as extrude bevel bridge knife and so on this is in contrast to the more procedural tools such as the modifiers now the first thing we'll take a look at is how can we actually delete things in blender this is a little bit of a quirk of blender and we just have to talk about it before proceeding now if you select some of these pulleys just by going into edit mode hitting the tab key and simply selecting the polygon so the left mouse button now you hit the x key and you can see that we have already brought up the pi menu for deletion this is in contrast to you if you if you click for instance the delete key now you get up the old menu for this but regardless the information is the same in either one of them now you can see that we have two options which are relating to faces the other ones here aren't relevant whatsoever because we're dealing with polygons right now we're doing faces so you can see here we have delete faces and we have dissolved faces and let's take a look at what they're actually doing by going to the sole faces you can see that this actually deletes the edges this is like it merges the face together without any of the edges connecting it if we undo that ctrl z and we in the other hand use x and then delete faces now you can see it actually deletes the faces around here now if we do the same for the edges as well and we hit the x key now you can see we have dissolved edges and delete edges what you can see if we do delete edges now you can see that the edges per se are deleted through it but the skeletal structure is still there this is something i never really use i never ever really use delete edges i always use dissolve edges so that's something to be aware of delete edges is what you most likely want to use you can also hit the hotkey ctrl x for dissolve edges as well instead of going to the menu and going down here i simply just hit the control x key and this removes it quite nicely so when you delete something most of the time you want to for polygons you want to use delete edges and for this i use the menu i just go up here and just use the menu or for edges i hold down i just select edge loop alt click on it and then ctrl x now you can also customize this of course if you prefer to have for instance you prefer to have delete edges or so delete faces such to control x you can of course easily do that as well so that's deletion for you pretty nice and simple now let's just delete the entire object select it here and then hit x key and then we'll go through the various objects we have in our scene we've set it up in collections so it's easy for you to to follow along and you can use very specific examples like the extrude tool which is the first tool we are going to be looking at select the tool let's select the polygon you want simply just click on the eye icon here and we will have it selected now select the polygon you want and then we hit the e key e4 extrude very nice and simple you see we have some options down here as well but in general you just want to keep this nice and simple now if you extrude something now this is very important to talk about if you extrude something and then you hit the right mouse button you're going to be canceling it but what you're actually canceling is not the extrusion it's the translation so let's say you actually do an extrusion now now you're creating bad geometry because let's scale it down you can actually see that the extrusion is still there and this is one of the key mistakes people make when they are modeling in blender they extrude up like this and then they extrude in the right mouse button and they're like all right that's fine because they assume it's fine and then they extrude again and let's just do it again and let's just start again and this is insert loop here so now you can just see that this line here is darker than the other ones and this is due to the fact luna have geometry exactly on top of each other you can also find these tools under the left mouse button as well you can find all the tools we're talking about either here or you can find them under the different menus up here as well if you prefer to do that or if you want to use this menu here as a starting point for your hotkeys for instance here you can see extrude faces you also have more extrude tools under here as well you see here current is set to extrude to cursor but you can also just quickly set this to extrude region and that's the same thing as before another cool little tip as well for this is this is a tool they recently added i'll just have to add a loop here we'll talk about this in a second how to add a loop but if you now select a polygon here and set this to extrude manifold see what happens now it actually removes it down it actually just scales it in like so it creates bad geometry but it's really cool for concepting it's a very powerful tool if you want to move something down like this instead of having to go in and out and and start to cut and all that this is fantastic for concepting as you're now just creating really cool extrusions in your model like so this is when we care more about the shape so extrusion very simple select the tool hit the e key and just move it up you can also scale it down with the s key and you can move it up and down with the g key g and set i'm just going to move it up and down like so then next up we have extrude cursor now if we check take a look at this as well what this will do this will extrude to our cursor and if we go into if we select the polygon and then we go under here which is extrude manifold currently and do extrude the cursor now wherever we click now this is where it's going to be extruding to and this looks a little bit chaotic and in this case it very much is but if we go into something like the front view now just hit the tilt key and then front view and now you can see that you can build almost like this like armature structure really useful if you're doing something more ornate or if you're doing maybe a base for some kind of prop or maybe even if you're doing some kind of character work so now you can see how quickly you can block something out using the extrude to cursor tool then we have extrude along normals extrude along normals is really handy let's say you want to add some thickness to this not in a procedural sense using modifiers but you actually want to add thickness to it select everything we're hitting the a key and then we can go under this menu here then we can do extrude along normals and i can see we have this we have this little gizmo which allows us to do this now so if we can do this now now we can extrude it out and now you can see that we have some nicely extruded normals a little issue now and so you can see that the normals are really soft so we can do we can go into the object mode hit the tab key for that right mouse button and then shade flat and now you can see we're back to this nice shaded flat view this is normal how i prefer to work in in blender when it comes to models because i'm seeing it in an honest fashion but if we do if we do a little bit now and we select everything and then we extrude this inward so you can now see that we have to flip our normals you can also see that there is a quick little button for that here but this doesn't do exactly what i want to do so what i can do is i can just commit to this hit the a key now everything is selected then i can hit the spacebar and you can search for flip normals and now you see where we have a command the spacebar is really useful this is can be used in a case where for instance you don't know exactly what the hotkey is or you don't know where it is so now by doing this we can see that it lives under mesh normals and hotkey is alt n so now you can click here and then we have it which means if you want to find this in the future you can go under mesh normals and you can flip or if you want to do this with a hotkey you can hit alt and end and now you can see that we have a menu for our normals and just hit flip here so this is just a nice opportunity for us to talk about how we can use the space bar to find something like this for instance let's say you want to you have no idea to extrude to a list up to the interface or something you can just type extrude and now we have extrude along normals and there we go then we have the loop cut the loop cut is when the tool is going to be using all the time this is the tool i just used briefly before in the examples and this is where you can simply insert the loop into the model the hotkey for that is control and r you see down here in the bottom right now and this allows you to simply click and now you can move around like so simply just click and drag as you can see with blender it's very immediate it's very gesture based so now you just move it based on where the cursor is then left mouse button to commit to it or right mouse button which again doesn't cancel out the operation itself what does it cancel out how much it's going to slide from one side to another which means that now it's going to be in the center so if you very quickly want to add a loop in the center you hit control r your left mouse button once and it doesn't matter if it goes up and down and then use the right mouse button now it's going to be exactly in the center see up here right most button goes in the center so if you want to be in a specific spot though ctrl r move it up where you want to be and then just left mouse button and there we go now you can see here if you want multiple cuts you can do that if you want to change the smoothness of it you can do that you can do all sorts of sources all sorts of cool stuff with this as well you can like slide it around like this it's generally a very powerful tool so just ctrl r and then you just insert it right away this is a tool you're using all the time there isn't a way of inserting a loop as far as i know right where your cursor is so let's say you want to insert the loop right here you can't just hit insert loop at this specific spot you have to hit control r and then you slide it up to where you want then we have the bevel tool bevel tool is really handy and you can find this on control and b so with this active we can alt click on the edge then simply control b and now you can see that we can add a bevel to this and with this tool we actually have a lot of different options for instance we change it to vertices which will actually bevel the verts change back to edges and we can change the width of this we can change the segments of it we can change the shape of it as well if it goes in or out if it's concave or convex so there are really a lot of options with the bevel tool it's a really powerful tool in general you can do a bevel here as well and now we can just start to add a bevel and then we can go back and we can set this to be one now we can just use the offset like so and we can still just enable some of these and then we can set the shape back to one and there we go now we have a really nice and sharp shape so bell tool really handy this is this tool i use all the time when it comes to sharpening up my my loops like this then we have the joint vert tool joint verts is really useful and the hotkey for that is j j for join what this allows you to do is select two verts hit the j key and now we have a line or an edge between these two this is really cool as well because you have multiple edges and hit j key and we'll go through all of them you can also go through multiple loops select one here it's like there and it's just going to go through all of them it doesn't really care about creating bad opponents or anything like that it will just do what you tell it to and be like yes sir i will go from here to here so this is really useful and hotkey is again j little tip if you want this to go from here to here here you just select the in-betweens and now it's just going to nicely go between these then we have one tools you can be using all the time and this is the knife tool this is similar to the multi-cut if you've used maya or just general cutting tools in any other software that is k k4 knife because english is a consistent language now we can simply just cut from one point to another basically just cut every anywhere you want to and then if you want to commit to the cut you hit the spacebar and now this has been committed this is a tool you can be using a lot when you're doing any kind of poly modeling again k and now we can do some more cuts like so and if you want to do more cuts let's say you want to do a cut over here as well you hit the e key e is really handy because this allows you to continue cutting it means you don't have to commit to the cut right away and if you are happy with this now just hit the spacebar and we're good to go this tool is also cool because this allows you to cut from one side to another you can just cut like this a little crazy we just cut around like this in the space bar and i can see there is a cut going all the way through like so so just hit the k key and then just drag from one side to another and spacebar n there we go now the k key is a little bit awkward because it's all fully far to the right on the keyboard so you might want to set this to something else just if you do a lot of quality modelling i just prefer to have everything basically all my hotkeys on my left hand so i can use all that right away what you what i also recommend you to do is just to get a reminder that all in the bottom here you can see all the different commands and all the help of all little help tools for this specific tool so that's really useful i highly recommend that you do that so that's really useful and highly recommend that you look into every single one of them we're not going to go through each tool in depth here because honestly what i'm showing you now is going to be good enough for most cases but if you really want to go in depth you don't have to watch a tutorial on it you simply just click on the tool you want and just go down to the bottom and you can just see what's going on the next step we have merge verts this is this is a tool we set up when it comes to merge words to center so if you've been following along so far you can simply select these two hit shift x and now it's going to do that if not the hotkey is going to be m m for merge and so now we can do at first we can change this to at center you can change it to first at last so this is just a really handy way you can also do collapse which collapses to the center so this is a pretty handy tool like that and i highly recommend that you set up a hotkey for this as soon as possible because in during poly modeling this is something you're going to be doing a lot speaking of merging verts there's a little related tool which is really useful when it comes to this and that is you can see that all these verts are really close together and it's a bit annoying to do this by hand so we can merge by distance as and we can do this if we go under tool options auto merge and now we can set a threshold for this like so so now everything which will be in within certain distance of this will be merged together so now let's say we want to go in here select this one hit the g key set and go up now you can see that once it's within the distance it's going to just merge together like so so this is a great feature when it comes to this if you want to g and set for this as well once it gets close it once it gets within that threshold this is gonna merge automatically so you're gonna be doing this a lot for a cleanup so we're just gonna we're just gonna be disabling this for now because otherwise we will cause all sorts of mayhem with the with the remaining tools then we have join objects join objects is very simple this is uh if you use maya this is the combined feature maya you want this and this to be in the same object you hit ctrl j and voila they are now combined into one object go to edit mode and now we see we have combined these two separate is exactly the opposite of that if we select everything now just go into edit mode hit the a key and then we if you hit the p key you can now see we have separate and now you can do by selection by material and by loose parts by selection is going to take the selected object into a new object material that's going to separate by material and loose parts this can be loose parts by individual polygon islands for instance here the eyes are not connected so now if we hit separate by loose parts it's going to separate out the eyes and the head into one shape if you want to do by the selection we do the same thing we select it hit the p key and then by selection and now you can see that these are now extracted into one so this is like the separate and the extract feature in my combined into one tool like this then we have fiddle fill is one of the coolest tools in maya if you alt click on a on a hole like this and hit the f key now this is simply going to fill it in like so nothing special about this when it comes to this is simple just you simply alt click and the f key now it fills it in like so where this becomes very handy though is that if you want to fill in this you can but if you just select the single edge here this one to the side hit the f key now you can see what it's doing it actually fills it in and it bridges bridges it at the same time we can do this same thing here just pick shortest path just select one select the other x and then we delete face and now if you hit the f key again you're going to see how it fills it in this is a crazy crazy good tool and i haven't really seen this in any other 3d software at least not this intuitively obviously you can just bridge this as well but the fact that you just hit hit the f key for this it's really nice you don't even have to hit it check it out i'm just going to hold it down and now it just fills it in like so so that's enough geeking out over the fill tool let's look into a similar tool which is grid fill this is also very nice now we are just going to be selecting the center we're going to be something like selecting the center loop here which goes all the way around then we're going to hit the spacebar and we're going to type grid fill and there we go grid fill and now you can see that this has now filled in our entire square we can also set the spans change the amount of spans we have we're going to set this to four this is the default and we can offset it you can see that by default it's actually a bit off-center which is really annoying because currently you know if you want to cut this up into some pieces that doesn't work but if we just do this a few more times you can see that this now offsets it so if you need to fill in some holes this is a phenomenal tool then we have bridge bridge is essentially the same tool as in all other 3d software there's very really nothing special about this whatsoever you select one edge alt click on it here shift alt click here then you can go and use the hotkey setup which in this case is the slash key which is the one right above the left windows key if you haven't set that up you can go to edge and you can do bridge edge loops like so and here you can also set for the number of cuts how many segments are in the middle and you can also twist as well this is really handy because now you can really create some cool twists or if for some reason this doesn't cut up properly let's say this cuts like this and now you have to and now you have to actually do a bridge uh now you actually have to do a bridge now you can do the the twists to get to get it back [Music] but it gets like this actually you can just hold on the f key and there you go this is actually a way i often do bridging is i select this one delete face then i select this hit the f key and then i just hold on the f for a few a few times it just depends on the situation the the fill tool is really handy but if you don't want to use that simply use select alt click alt click and then use the hotkey for bridge now the next one we're going to take a look at is the slide tool this is a really useful tool which you're going to be using all the time in order to use it you simply just alt click on the loop you want then you type double g so just hit g and then g again now you can see you can slide this up and down like so alt click double g and move it up like so really useful you can even you do it down here with the numerical part as well then we're going to take a look at grow and shrink this is a really useful tool which allows you to move stuff up based on its normal select the all the polygons in this little tube and hit alt s and now you can just scale up based on this normal so if you want to make this tube really thin you can just leave it like so or if you want to make this a lot bigger alternase and i'm going to scale it up to be massive so a really handy tool in order to basically scale things up and down based on its normal all right the last tool of the direct modeling tools are going to be repeat last this sounds a little bit like maya but it's not unfortunately it's not as powerful as maya but it's kind in the same vein let's say we want to add a bevel to this edge here we can now hit ctrl b and we can add a bevel and now we have the same settings as before we can just change this to be maybe like this and then let's say we want to repeat this on another edge we can simply select the edge and then hit shift and r now you can see this is being repeated on this edge as well so the repeat last is really useful if you want to repeat the actual last modeling command i honestly don't tend to use this a whole lot but it's still pretty handy to know about there are times where you really just want to repeat exactly the same last thing as you did before and now you can do that shift shift r and it was just going to repeat the same thing as you did before now let's talk quickly about proportional modeling this is what's known as soft selection in other software if you want soft selection you can simply just hit a vert like this just anything just have any selection then we can go up here and you can see we have proportional editing if you click that and use the g key now to move stuff around now you can see that we have a fall off and now you can just move things around like so and you adjust the fall off with this scroll wheel up and down so now we can just very easily and nicely just move this around like so so we know from before that the eyes of the monkey are not connected to the rest of the head so let's say we want to only move those or move everything apart from the eyes we can go and select this vert go up to the settings here and then we can enable connected only and now we can start to move this around like so and now you can see that only the connected parts are actually being moved so a soft select is very nice and easy proportional editing as it's called in blender select the move tool hit the o key to enable or disable it and use the scroll wheel up and down to change the influence and then go to the settings and use connected only if you want that you can also change the presets here as well for the curve but in general i find that the smooth is more than enough then the very last thing we are going to talk about is going to be duplication and instancing we've already briefly talked about duplication and that is done by shift and d but what if we want to instance our model we can easily do that as well if we hit alt and d now if we move this up you see that these are now the same model but if we change one of them this is also going to change around as well so that's how we do instances in blender we'll talk a bit more about instances in the data we actually talk a little more about how to actually like how it actually works under the hood but as a quick teaser for that the way you stop an instance is if you go to the data object properties which is the green button here it says object object data properties and then there is a shield and there's a number two this shows how many instances there are so if we do alt d again it's gonna be three if you do four five six and so on so if you want this one to be on instance you simply click on this guy right there and now all the other ones are going to be changed but this guy is going to stay you want this guy to be on instance we simply click click here and then this guy's also an instance well all the other guys are part of the same happy instance family so that's it for the modeling chapter we have a lot more cool things when it comes to modeling later on particularly comes to modifiers so i think you'll look forward to that as well

Channel: FlippedNormals Marketplace

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Keywords: flippednormals, tutorial, training, cg, games, film, morten, jaeger, henning, sanden, vfx, marketplace, curated, career, blender, b3d, modeling, modeling tools, learn blender, switch to blender

Id: sc24Yu9eCS8

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021