Getting Started with Plasticity for Beginners | V1.4 Update | UI and Modeling Overview

hey everyone this is Matt with learn everything about design and in this video we're going to be updating some of our plasticity content last year we released some plasticity quickart videos talking about the UI basic modeling and how really how to get working in plasticity well in the last year a couple of versions have been released we're on version 1.4 now and there are a couple of things that change now the overall work process and the workflow is the same but some Shortcut Keys have changed so it's a good time for us to just refresh that content what we're going to be doing in this video which will be kind of long is we're going to go over the UI and basic shortcuts that you should be familiar with and then we're going to get into some modeling practice so if you don't know what plasticity is definitely check out the website you can go to the description of this video download the 30-day trial and play around with it so it's going to be a CAD program but it's CAD for artist and it's really more of a direct modeler even though it has a lot of the cad tools that you come to expect but it's not a parametric CAD program what that means is we're not creating a sketch driving dimensions and then having those dimensions and sketches linked to the solid objects it is essentially a non-history based direct modeler but with that we get a little bit of Freedom we don't have to worry so much about all those definitions and we're really free to explore the shapes now if you happen to be purchasing it there's an indie and a studio license and there are some differences you can read that here on the screen but basically you get a couple of different export and import options with the studio version but you also get access to the beta program which means you get to see new features before they're released and you also get to give feedback on what features should be in the software and how they should work now if you are planning on purchasing it there is a discount code lead 10 we are an affiliate so that'll get you 10% off of a purchase of a studio or Indie license and it also does help about the channel now there's also another Link in the description and this is a user based unofficial documentation for plasticity but this is a great list of shortcut keys now these do change from time to time but most of the things that change are actually contextual shortcuts which means what happens when you're in the middle of creating a rectangle or a line or something like that so if you're looking for this reference go ahead and check out the link in the description I have no affiliation with this site but again is an unofficial user created site that does have a lot of great information on it so back in plasticity if you've never used it before we're going to take a quick tour of the user interface we're not going to cover everything in depth because really I want to get you started in modeling so first things first go into your user preferences make sure that your navigation preset is set to something that you're familiar with I'm going to be using plasticity default I really like the way that this was set up because the middle Mouse is orbit and zoom and then the right Mouse will let you pan but the right Mouse button is also accept when we're creating something so it's really comfortable it's really intuitive and I like to leave it at that for grids and units I think that the default settings come in at meters but I have mine set at millimeters with the grid size set to 100 I don't use grid snapping so really I just try to minimize the impact of this you can set it to be whatever you want you can have accent lines let's say 500 grid size is a th000 uh but again play with it whatever you want to do there is perfectly fine it will not have any effect on what we do in this video and the last setting here is in the general section just make sure that checkbox is on this will allow us to automatically start commands like offset extrude and fill it and for example if I select this top face I Can Begin pulling it out I can add to it and I can just make the object bigger if I select an edge I can add a chamfer or a fillet pretty easily can hold down control and add additional edges so it's a great and quick way for us to model with that said let's take a quick look at the UI I'm not going to drive real deep down into everything but I do want to point out a couple of things and make sure that we are comfortable and understand some short cuts so first things first in the middle of the window is our object obviously solid surface whatever we're working on make sure that you are comfortable with rotating it around panning and zooming that's going to be key to change our view we can click on the XY or Z in the upper right hand corner these are going to go to some default views we can also do that with a numpad which is one for front view control and one for back view three for right control and three for left and seven for top and control and seven for bottom now obviously if you're working on a Mac you can replace control with command and you can replace Alt with option and those should be the same for you with that now it's important that we understand where we can change our selection filters now in plasticity that's in the upper leftand corner and by default if all of them are turned on if you want to select an edge to add a fillet for example we need to select the object and then select the edge it's much quicker for us to change our selection filters to only look at edges and then we can do that without having to select the body first now in addition to that the numbers across the top of your keyboard will let you pick what these are and if you hold down the shift key you can add to that selection or remove from it and you can also hit tab or the number five on the keyboard to turn them all on I think that this is incredibly important making sure that we're comfortable with going to our different views and make sure that we're comfortable with changing our selection filters on the Fly the rest of the shortcut keys we have are great to know but honestly we can find them in other areas going back and forth between our SEL ction filters those are really going to make a big difference the next thing that we do want to make sure we're comfortable with and understand is the nuanced difference between shift and control and ALT when we're modeling so what I mean by that is if we turn on our Edge selection and I just select a single edge and I start to add a fillet um that fillet or chamfer automatically follows the tangency if we want to add to our selection we need to hold down the control key and that will let us add additional edges to our selection now I'm going to hit Escape for a second here if we want to manually select that entire Edge we need to hold down the ALT key now the reason this is important is because some tools like the pipe tool for example those are going to require us to have an edge selected before rather than having it automatically follow tangency like fillets and chamfers do so once again alt will let us select an entire tangent chain of edges if we want to manually add to our selection we need to do that holding down the shift key to remove from that selection we hold down the control key but if we've already invoked a tool like the fillet or chamfer then control temporarily disables our preview and allows us to go in and add additional selections those couple of things are really going to make a difference when you start modeling because you have to know what these control shift and ALT keys do because that's going to make a big difference on how you go about selecting edges a couple of other default things that you should be comfortable with is going to be the options that are in the bottom leftand corner for move rotate and scale now if you're coming from blender these are the same shortcut keys g s and r but for example if I select this body and I hit G I can hit X to move in the X direction or Y to move in y or Z to move in z or shift X to move in plane and we can also hit g a second time to move in screen space in addition to that we can use options like Freestyle which lets us pick a starting point and an ending point we can also use V to reset where our pivot is going to be so for example if we wanted to move out normal to that face we can do that and those options are going to be especially important when we start doing things like trying to rotate a face and you can see here plasticity is really good at updating our geometry but we may want to let's say move the pivot point so that we're rotating the face about that side and that's going to be important that we understand how to do that and the second point of this is that anytime we have a tool active the available shortcut keys will be displayed in the bottom right hand corner so make sure that you pay close attention to that because that's going to help you understand which tools you have available and you don't have to remember everything the other thing that we should note is the tools in the bottom right are contextual meaning if I select an entire object or I select a face or an edge these tools are going to change based on that selection these are going to be some of the most common tools that you're going to use and of course A lot of them have shortcut keys like offset curve lets us offset that face now this is much easier to do if you have a face selected and you hit o because it's going to be based on the center of that face so if we for example select the face and come down here then we need to worry about where our cursor was at the time we made that selection but uh o on the keyboard is is certainly a whole lot easier but that's just a quick way that we can begin modeling and making changes to our design with that said a couple of these other tools down here are things like duplicate the mirror and a Boolean so Boolean will let us add solid bodies together or subtract them from each other and duplicate has shortcut keys as well we can do shift d to duplicate uh we also have another option which is called contrl d uh so if we do that we can select a position on one and we can create a duplicate using that position in orientation so let's say I can just stack another one up here and then now we've got these these duplicates and we moved them around based on those pivot Points uh there is also another option which is alt D alt and D will allow us to essentially make a silhouette duplicate of that curve so this is basically the outside shape and then that curve is now sort of this profile which we could use to extrude a new version or we could sweep or we could do something else with it so there are a lot of tools inside a plasticity a lot of them you can find in these menus if you can't find them there using the SE all commands or hitting F on the keyboard is a great way to search for the available tools and you can see what they short cuts are so alternative duplicate and duplicate are both here shift d and ALT d uh then again I mentioned control D is is the duplicate with placement which isn't actually called duplicate so if we look up um copy with placement you can see here that we've got duplicate and an alternative duplicate but the place command is control D but essentially what it's doing is it's taking whatever object we have selected and then we can duplicate it by picking its position and we can hit things like f to flip its orientation and then we just essentially created a duplicate of it so I know that's a lot because there is so many shortcut keys but once you get into the modeling process and you start to figure out how you work that all is going to start to make sense because there'll be a handful of shortcut keys that you come up with that are are used over and over again but I believe that the top priority are the numbers for your selection filter the numbers for your view orientation and just a handful of things like move scale and rotate with all that out of the way let's go ahead start a new file and let's begin modeling using curves now most of the time if you're creating something that is not based on these Primitives like a sphere or a cube or a cylinder what you're going to be doing is creating curves as the basis for your design whether it's an extrude or a revolve or a sweep or some other version like a loft so we're going to start by selecting and hitting delete to delete our Cube and then what we want to do is we want to start with curves now there are some nuances here if you are using the line tool and you just start creating a line you can go across some of the default axes like X Y and Z and you can snap to Geometry but that's not super helpful because in the end we need to have a planer curve and we need to have a closed profile that we can extrude so the way that we do this is we're going to start with with a default view just hit seven on the keyboard which will go to our top view I'm going to begin with a circle and I'm going to snap to the origin and just draw a circle doesn't matter the size right click to accept and then I'm going to go to my corner rectangle once I start my corner rectangle note in the bottom right hand corner the c key is Center corner so if I hit C on the keyboard now what I've done is I've created a rectangle that's symmetric about the origin I can hit tab to go to my Dimensions I'm going to do 8250 Tab and let's call this one 3600 and hit enter twice to accept it so we've created two different curves if I rotate this around you can see that each of these curves are their own inside of our panel over here but I can select each of them I can select both of them and I can begin creating a solid before we get to that I'm going to go back to my top view with seven and I want to make a couple of notes here because this is a basic shap shape the rectangle is made up of four lines that are joined together in a single curve what that means is that the corner points can be filleted and we can make adjustments to them now there's a couple ways that we can do this if I just doubleclick that corner what this ends up doing is it increases the number of vertices it essentially is going to turn this into a beer curve or a spline if I double click this one it does the same thing and you can see that we've created this smooth transition if I want to instead fillet this I can select the point and I can hit B on the keyboard be like boy and then what we do is we can drag it inward for our fillet or outward for a chamfer so these are two methods that allow us to create a basic shape like a rectangle and then quickly manipulate it there are a couple of other things that we want to note if I start a new line so two straight line segments and right click we have some options down here called subdivide Curve which takes our current current curve and it divides it up and what this means is that we can take this vertex I can use G on the keyboard and I can start to manipulate the shape now if we repeat this process and I just do something very similar and this time I rebuild the curve uh you can see the rebuilt curve has a couple of other things going on for it we've got a refit which is a tolerance-based refit and also a number of points when we do this it highlights the fact that the center of this is is now smooth so when we take a look at this curve we can take this internal point and we can start to move it around and this is a nice way that we can start to build pretty simplified versions of a design and then we can use this refit option with a number of points and turn it into a nice smooth curve so I like to use this method when I'm laying out a complex shape and I don't necessarily want to go in and create a control Point spline and work my way like this so basically what I do is I use the straight lines and I start to build out just essentially that control frame I reposition the vertices and then I use the rebuild option with a number of points and that helps me get a little bit closer and simplifying that process cuz sometimes using straight lines is just a little bit easier either option is perfectly fine but for the most part you can play around with those and see that there are a lot of different ways that we can do this from double clicking a corner point to adding a fillet with B on the keyboard to refitting or subdividing a curve now that we've got these two profiles all we really need to do is select a profile and begin pulling it up in 3D after we've done this I don't need these curves anymore so I can hide them or delete them I'm going to delete them in this case just to keep everything nice and clean over here after we're done with this we're going to move into what's called direct modeling so instead of adding additional curves which we will still do what we're going to do is manipulate the geometry directly so the first thing I'm going to do is select the top face and then we're going to rotate it you can use r on the keyboard and we want to reset our pivot point which is V so V we'll put our Pivot Point back here and then about the z-axis we're just going to taper this down so now we've taken our basic shape and we've added an angle to that top face there a couple ways that we can do this but rotating it is arguably the the simplest and quickest way now that we have this I want to add some additional geometry here so I'm going to select this face and I want to create a plane from selection and you can do this with the space bar or you can click here I'm going to use space bar and then I want to begin adding a a line so I'm going to come here and notice that because we're not on the default plane we're on a temporary construction plane that's based on a face we don't have XY snaps so there's a couple things that we can do we can come back to to this last line hover over it and tap the shift key as soon as we do that this is going to enable a couple of snaps you can see now we've got a perpendic snap I'm going to snap here this automatically defaults to parallel but I want it to end at this point so I'm going to tap shift and this gives me my extension and allows me to come back and create that closed profile I'm going to hit X to end that construction plane then I'm going to take this and begin pulling it down I want to remove it from the solid body so I need to use W which which is the difference and then I need to select the body I want to remove it from right click and say okay I'm going to delete that curve cuz I don't need it now if we decided that we actually want this to go all the way through all we have to do is select the face and just pull it down through the body and now it's moved all the way through next thing I want to do is add some fillets to these Corners so I'm going to change my selection filter to Edge I'm going to hold down shift to add to my selection and then begin dragging this inward to add our fillets we'll right click to accept and then I'm going to select this upper Edge and this one and begin adding a champfer now you'll notice when I do this that these two chamfers overlap now if I wanted to move the position of that opening in a traditional CAD program what we need to do is go back to our sketch and we would need to modify Dimensions but we're going to be direct modeling which means that we're just going to move it directly so I'm going to change my selection up here to face I'm going to grab this face and just begin pulling it now notice the fillets go with it but as soon as the fillets start to overlap then we have a sharp Point here so if you want to move this to a position where the fillets create a true slot then what we want to do is we want to use the move command so again G on the keyboard as we begin moving this notice the fillets still go with it but now what we're going to do is use freestyle which is f on the keyboard and we'll simply move from this point to this point and right click and say okay now now plasticity is really good about this type of thing you can see that it healed those two fillets and now it's a single Arc so it cleaned up the geometry for us at the same time I'm going to go back to my Edge selection which is two on our numbers and I'm going to just grab these upper and lower edges and begin adding a chamfer I'm going to right click I'm going to grab this upper Edge shift select this lower Edge and I'm going to add a fillet around that and right click and say okay now the next thing I want to do is I decided I wanted to add some more geometry here so back to my all selection I'm going to hit space bar to create a new construction plane and I'm going to add a circle that's snapped about the Y AIS right click and I'm going to get off my construction plane and begin pulling this up now before we did the removal of geometry this time we're going to do a union or join them together so we're going to hit Q on the keyboard which is going to default to this target bodies we'll select this right click and make sure that we have a single body and then I'm going to delete that curve if we don't have a single body when we try to do something like fill it that edge you'll notice that it rounds itself under instead of over now a lot of times when we're modeling adding a construction plane then adding a curve is not the most efficient way so there's a couple other ways that we can use these direct modeling tools for example we can select this top face we can hit o for offset begin offsetting that inward right click to accept and then pull this down through the model you can see now we've created a hole all the way through and then we can add things like chamfers to these upper edges as we need go ahead and pull that in add a chamfer another thing that we can do is we can divide faces up with a couple of different tools so first of which is we can cut or imprint a solid body with a curve now that's one way that we can do it simply go to something like a side view and we could draw a line and then we could use that imprint option but there are a couple of other ways that are a little bit more efficient one is called the iso param so if I select a face and I hit F and I start to type in ISO param we can see that this is controlr now again if you're coming from blender this controlr should be familiar to you this allows us to divide faces up and I'm going to hit tab I'm going to hold down shift and start to roll the mouse wheel and now I've added those divisions which means I can quickly and easily pull this section out so that's one way in which we can divide things up another way that we can do this is with the line tool or curve tools there's a knife option so if I hit K on the keyboard what I can do is draw a line right click and what I've done is I've used it as a knife tool rather than creating a curve I've simply split or divided that face up we still have a single solid body but now we've been able to divide that up the next thing that I want to do is create a cut going through the side and there are a couple of different ways that we can do this now one way is for us to take the profile of the side face and project it and and sort of project it to that Center section offset it and then we can use it to create that cut we could also do this directly by hitting o and creating an offset of that face or we can start to create new curves now one of the benefits here is that we can hit shift and we can create a parallel relation so for example I can start to create a parallel here I can come up vertically and then I can tap here and I can create the uh extension or intersection of those right click to say okay and then if I take this end point I can say G and I can move this using my freestyle method going from and to let's go ahead and do that again G let Me zoom in so we can see it f we're going to start here and go there right click and now we've created our closed profile so using those uh Extensions by tapping shift and getting those extensions or parallel or perpendicular relationships can be a quick way for you to create something like this rather than doing some sort of a projection or offset from those faces so now that we have this we're going to do is take this and extrude it all the way through you using W for difference and allowing it to cut through that body and then deleting this curve we're going to change to our Edge selection which is two on our numbers we're going to hold down shift and we want to begin creating a fillet here and once we have that fillet we're going to hold down control which will allow us to add the additional edges if you need to rotate go ahead and do that and then we'll right click to accept that now that we've got this we'll go to the outside edge and we'll add add a chamfer rotate it around hold down control add a chamfer there and you can see that we've now added that extra little detail it cuts through both of those openings and we did it relatively quick and simple by sketching from the side view and then just using some extensions or snaps to allow us to create something that was both parallel to the side faces and vertical or perpendicular to our ground plane so those tools that we used and the general process for modeling is going to be pretty common across the board now obviously there are a dozen or more common tools that are used for traditional modeling and there's an entire list of tools that we didn't even get to cover so when we're dealing with things like curves and splines we cover that a lot in our concept car modeling Series so if you're looking for content on how to create complex surfaces I do suggest that you check that video out there are also plenty of other tools that we didn't get to in this video things like using imprint or doing some additional duplication options but for the most part the common tools that we use in the common modeling approach of creating a basic shape using some direct modeling tools to do things like rotate face and then some of the other tools like ISO pram or the knife tool and creating those additional details that's going to be a pretty common way that you can use plasticity as a modeler now if you have any questions on this or if anything didn't work quite right for you please leave a comment and let me know I do plan on doing more plasticity content but I did want to re-release a sort of getting started video so that way people can get comfortable with the program before moving on to more complex models so as always thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Learn Everything About Design

Views: 55,435

Keywords: Plasticity, CAD, Design, 3d, modeling, cad for artists, ui, how to, tutorial, guide, getting started, v1.4, update, extrude, curve, fillet, chamfer, iso param, knife tool

Id: 9cgBK8ljH1k

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024