Every tool I use in Machin3 Tools explained for Blender

greetings hobus this is artan of v and in this video I wanted to spend a bit of time going through my main function use of Machine Tools so I think it'd be remiss of me not starting this video with the sad news that machine tools is no longer available for free on Gum Road this was originally available on gumroad and you could put in a price that you thought was fair with an option of putting in 0 therefore making it free and a lot of people did that with some coming back and then buying the DSX version which has a few extra additions to it and other people came back and then donated a bit of money as well just because they tried it out and then really liked it and obviously is very sad this Now isn't available for free I know a lot of people where this was their first add-on that they used outside of the ones included in blender and it's a pretty good introduction to what most add-ons do and it gives you a chance to try out installing an add-on for free without you having any concerns and it's from a really reputable Source now before we go through all the tools that are included that I use I just wanted to mention why this has happened but feel free to skip past this if it doesn't interest you at all so in essence the main reason is that this is probably the tool that machine has to spend the most time on every single time blender is updated and blender is updated fairly regularly it's one of the great things about it and while that's fine for a paid for add-on that people keep purchasing so it's paying for that work one where people don't have to pay for it could be problematic and unfortunately with less than 1% of people choosing to donate when purchasing Machine Tools it just seems that that's not very sustainable and I think that's probably fair enough so now there's two price points Prime which has the vast majority of the features for $5 and let's be clear where I am that's less than a pint so I don't think that's an outrageous price and then you've got $15 for the more expensive version I will add to this that machine did if you donated some money bump you up to the next level so if you donated $33.50 or more then you got Prime and if you donated only $5 or more you got the DSX version so I think that's pretty generous All Things Considered now I'm pretty biased in this I'd already bought the DX version so this does nothing to me in terms of having an additional cost so I'm not going to be particularly put out by this and if you have used Machine Tools I think you'll realize how worth it is for just $5 but what I thought I'd do today is go through the tools that I use in Machine Tools really rapidly I've got many more detailed videos on the Channel and there's a link to that playlist in the description where I haven't gone through all of them yet but I've gone through a lot in a lot more detail so what I'm going to do is go to edit preferences so you can see which of the Machine Tool add-ons I use so here we've got the tools that I use here now what I'll do is I'll just bring this up every so often so that we can talk through this and just go through what each of those tools mean but I'm just going to bring this over to the side for now so let's talk through these first ones but before we do that I'm actually going to scroll down here to the mode pie now the mode P when I press tab is what comes up to change modes instead of using the normal tab then one two and three it gives you these options and obviously it looks really slow here but what you really do is just Tab and go to the left for vertex Tab and to the bottom for Edge Tab and to the right for face and it just makes things really really quick to do and then up to go into object mode I really like this mostly for the speed but also so it's gives something really visual that I quite like to show what mode I'm going into it's also useful for the YouTube channel just because people can see what I'm doing but what importantly that does if we go into vertex mode is it frees the one two and three keys up and then we'll also use the four key for these top four functions so these each have a lot of different things that they do I'm not going to go through all of them there's videos on that I'll just talk through the ones that I use the most so the most common one I like is that one is very much closer to my finger than M so for example most of these merge options or at least the ones I use which is normally at Center and at last is available if we just press one so if I just press one here it goes to last if I select two and press shift and one it merges at Center and this is really really handy for cleanup it makes things so much faster to just be able to go around and do that really quickly smart Edge does things well shockingly for edges so if I go into Edge mode here and I'm just going to Bevel that what we can do with smart Edge is pick let's say two vertices and if you press two it's going to join them again just quicker I don't need to look down at my keyboard to find where the J key is you can also if you've got no vertices clicked click the two button it starts the knife tool so again just something helpful to be able to do the other thing it does is if I select multiple vertices the one I select last if I press two it will join all of those previous ones to that last Point again speeding up this join process by a massive amount oh I should mention the other thing that machine tools does is gives you a quad sphere option you can do this yourself using the rounded Cube but this just automatically has it there ready to go let's shade that flat so the other thing we can do if I go into Edge mode and I select a load of edges is if I press two it will automatically select everything internally to that which is really handy and I'm now in face mode or I can press let's say grab a selection there and then press two again and it's just selected the outer edge so smart Edge loads loads of tools that's not even all of them but I find that really handy right with that in mind let's two again and I'm going to delete out these faces so let's have a talk about one of the other tools so we're going to go to smart face now what this does if I go into vertex mode is allow you to recreate face so for example normally if we wanted to put some things together if I went here you'd hit the f tool and it would attempt to join things but here we don't have a point somewhere here to try and join to well smart face which uses the four key will automatically attempt to predict where those points should be having a very good go at maintaining the curvature of the object that we're working on it's also really nice let's just come over here because it automatically tries to predict where you're going to go next so if I press four it knows that the next place I'm probably going to be is there and then here and then here so really useful when you've got curved or unusual shapes that you're trying to form together because something that's an odd shape like this you can't just use the grid fill option now I would be able to though so contrl and F and now I could go to grid fill but it's really useful for setting that up to begin with the other thing the four key does look let's just select some faces here is if you don't have hard Ops and you want to extract this from it instead of having to go to shift d Escape P by selection and now we've got this as a separate object let's just delete that go back into face mode what we can do with this tool is just hit four and it's automatically made a new object so we've got a separate object here and it's coming to edit mode so we can edit this or we can just start moving it around so just a great great timesaving tool then we've got cleanup now this does loads of things in one go but my probably most used instance of it is if I control and B these and press C to clamp that bevel what this does is cause a problem of overlapping vertices it's a really common issue when Boolean objects if you just hit the three key don't even have anything selected it's just gone through and deleted any vertices that are overlapping it also does a load of other functions as well at the same time so this is pretty much my go-to when I have an issue with a object not being manifold I just come in hit three and I'd say probably 80% of the time that solves most of the issues with it right I'm going to miss out Edge constraints just because it's part of the DX version if you are interested in a video on that I'll be happy to do one right let's bring in a cube again and let's go into Edge mode and controll and E and subdivide those a couple of times and we'll talk about about the extrude function so this is actually called punch it it is sold separately as well so you can get it but what it does is add a more effective extrude manifold that's really simplifying it but if we just Al an e and then I click punch it it will allow me to go down an amount click and it's going to then click again and it's done extrude manifold now what's clever about this tool let's just select some edges here is if I G and then x that out like 0.00001 something like that if I was to normally extrude manifold so alt e extrude manifold and extrude down you can see that it hasn't perfectly worked this out we've got this face here that's going to be a problem if I come to punch it and so this issue of there being not perfectly perpendicular faces happens a lot when you've done booleans and things like that if we alt e and then punch it and go down there we've got this problem but if I press W it basically sorts it out so really useful as tool right Focus let's just select a couple of these so the focus tool is I really like this so normally if we want to select this and just view it by itself we'd press the forward slash key to isolate and it does this annoying zooming to it thing and then when I want to come out it zooms out I find it really tedious whereas the Focus key if we do this and just press f it gets rid of the other objects without doing the whole zooming in and out what's really nice about this is I can select multiple things press F and you can see we've got Focus level one and if I come here and press F again we focus in another level we can focus out by then one more level and then one more level again so we just do that by hitting the f key each time without something being selected really nice I vastly prefer this to the forward slash the only issue with this is that it won't work when you're in edit mode slight shame there if that worked in edit mode this would be Godly right next we're going on to the Align function let's just bring in a cube here I'm going to shift and d and then let's rotate that on the Zed and then I'm just going to grab this one and let's scale that down except for on the Y so we can see what's going on so the Align function really easy to use click shift click on the second object Al and a and it will automatically align those two objects by the origin together so the first object is align to the second you can actually do this with other things so for example you can align the floor the cursor the origin as well and you can select to do it just in certain axes so for example if I want things at the same height I can use that there or can do everything you can also turn the rotation on and off or you can turn the location on and off so a massive amount of functions there right let's just delete that we've got the group Tool that's a function of d x I've got a video of that in the playlist for Machine Tools it effectively allows you to do a pseudo rigging that I actually prefer for hard surface check that out if you want to then we've got toggle region so toggle region is just that if I normally press the T key over here it would bring out the T menu I'm just going to minimize that normally you'd have to hit n to bring out the End menu what this does is it basically just means that whatever side you're on it does the tool for you each time by hitting just the T key again just meaning you don't have to move your hand as far and it also brings out your asset browser either there or at the top which is really handy so just a bit of a Time Saver again right next one up surface slide let's bring out that quad sphere again and note that we normally have a problem that if I want to move a Vertex around we will almost always deform this face in a way that we don't want now what I can do is press GG and that will go along this line which is okay but what if I want to move it at an angle basically across this face now again most of these things you can do in a really roundabout way in vanilla blender you could duplicate this object and then do a snap to surface or something like that but surface slide if I press tab you can see we have this surface slide option here if I click that now when I press G it will slide across these surfaces perfectly which means that I can go to anywhere here and it's going to keep that shape or whatever shape we had before and then if you just want to stop that you just press Tab and then come out of surface slide so really nice function there very quick and easy to use the thread tool puts in a thread shockingly let's just bring in a cylinder and let's go into Edge mode and control and R there so we going to leave it at that point going to go into face mode select those faces right click Machine Tools add thread and we can add a thread we can change all of our options so how many threads do we want change the diameter of it and you'll notice that we controlled that by only going up to that area it's really really nice just something you can very quickly use to make a threaded object then we come into the P menus yeah that's not it and notice I don't even use all of it there's many other things we could do actually I do occasionally use mesh cut so let's just bring in a cube and shift and d and bring in another Cube select two of those right click machine tools and now we have mesh cut and what that will do is that it is now put a knife through those two and added those edges and verts in so a useful tool there if you need it right so back to the pi menus so we've shown the mode P there's also the cursor and origin manipulation do know I'm not going to go through the ones I don't really use a lot I'm probably not the best person to talk through all of those cuz again I don't use them loads I don't use materials a lot for example and bear in mind I'm using about half of these tools I bought the D version not for the additional functions though I've now realized they're great but because I just wanted to give some money for the work that was done so let's just bring in a cube again and then let's move that over here somewhere so say we want to move things around for example I want to move this origin if we just press shift and S we get the cursor and origin Pi so I can now move the cursor to the origin that it's already there I can move the cursor to selected I can let's put it back to the origin I can change the origin for the object object to the cursor or I could put it to the bottom face which is really helpful when sort of aligning things this combined with the Align p is brilliant because let's just bring in another Cube so for example there I can go into face mode object origin to the face and then alt a and they're on top of each other or I could just do that in one axis now we do have snap base in blender 4 but I still find this really useful for huge amounts of reasons probably the main one being that I can select an edge there put the object origin on that edge and now I'm going to rotate around that edge so it just speeds up life as most of these tools are designed to do and then finally we have the alignment P let's just bring it in a cube and then let's go into vertex mode and then just move something there so the Align Pi is similar to the Align tool the Align tool is there to move objects around this is there to align vertices so for example if I select that vertex there and that vertex there if I just press alt and a you bring up this align p and I can just drag down and say downwards is where I want to go and it will align it there or I can do it much more quickly there or however you want it to be so let's go there and there and go that way so it's really useful just to make sure that you've got things perfectly aligned now don't get me wrong if I put an edge Loop here and then G and Z that up and then G and then Z that up you can align things together by let's say s and then Zed and then zero to do that but what that would do is that if you notice averages out the space between them so it centers it whereas this will bring them down exactly to that point or you can do multiples so it'll get them perfectly flat so that's really nice oh I just realized there's one I haven't gone through where's that do I not have that assigned at this point oh no the mirror don't know how I missed that out my apology so let shift and D there so this just effectively does the mirror like you would as a modifier but it's vastly faster Let's uh control and R and then G and then x that out oh did it on that side as well oh well it doesn't make a difference anyway if we just come into object mode and then shift Al and X we get this mirror Pi I drag to the side I want it to be and it's mirrored over to the other side just adding in that mirror modifier so you can also let's take this object do it around the second object so shift hold X and then do it there and it's mirrored it across this object so a really quick way of just mirroring different objects so really effective there instead of having to go through the whole pain of going through and adding modifiers in and then selecting the object you want to mirror around and then so on and so forth it's just really tedious so a much better way of doing it oh damn it I nearly forgot the best one of all of them I'm just going to set things up here so I'm just making some random shape and I'm adding adding some extra details to it and then I've made some multiple copies of it I don't know what this would be parts of a robot something like that whatever so this is the Align relative function and this is just absolutely awesome so what we're going to do is we're going to select our details do note we've got some objects with different alignments and we've got this object where we've got a different size to it it's actually smaller than the other ones so what we're going to do is Select our details click shift click and then shift click on the object we want to align to last so you want everything to be affected by what is well this elongated part right click Machine Tools align relative and then we're just going to click on the objects that are like the first one so there and then I'm just going to shift click and there and you can see we get these mock versions of this just to show us where everything's going to go we can also scroll up to have an instance instead of a duplicate and if it's an instance let's just hit space you can see how everything is aligned perfectly we've got exactly the same positioning and this one is even shrunk to be the correct scale because we did the instancing option what I could do here is come into let's say this face I and then e that up a little bit and then we've got a problem here but oh that's because of the issue that I mentioned before so let's three to fix that select I and then e that up and then we can see that's done it on all of the other ones because they are instances so the Align relative tool is amazing absolutely fantastic again I've got a slightly more detailed video going into some of the possibilities of what you could use this for there's a link to that playlist in the description so there we go that is all of the tools that I generally use from Machine Tools just a quick overview of each of them as I said I've not really talked about many of them in detail and actually some of them especially the smart vert smart Edge and smart face have way more functions than this I just don't use them all that regul so just haven't spoken about them but I do have more detailed videos on that playlist that's in the description so if you honestly don't think all of those tools and the time it's going to save you is worth $5 that is totally your choice but if you do and you want to save yourself a load of time I personally think Machine Tools is probably the most used add-on that I have of all of them even before hard Ops and box cutter now there is a link in the description of where you can purchase Machine Tools in blender Market it is an affiliate link which means that as opposed to when I used to have it up and it was free this won't cost you any extra but by purchasing it you will not only help support the Fantastic work the machine's doing and at the moment he working on what looks to be an absolutely amazing new add-on called hyper cursor honestly it looks absolutely outstanding so you're helping funding that work but you'll also help fund this channel as well if you found this video useful please do hit that like button if you do think this isn't worth the cost then feel free to say so in the comment section I'm well aware that you can do all of the things that I've just shown through various means using the native Tools in blender they just take two three or four times the time and if you'd rather save yourself $5 than save yourself hours of time more power to you and I commend your patience have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 2,673

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, guide, addon, add on, add-on, how to, tutorial, walk though, beginner, pro

Id: P_3yh2m-uw4

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2024