Hard Ops & Boxcutter - A tutorial for NOOBS (Blender)

hey what's up guys it's been a while since i've done a hard ops and box cutter pure tutorial so that's gonna be what i'm gonna cover in this video so hard ops and box cutter especially if you're a new user can be pretty overwhelming i remember when i first started with these tools i was watching master xeon's videos which were like three hours long like multiple times over just to kind of grasp the tools there weren't that many resources out there for what i needed and that's kind of what i aim to achieve you know partially with my channel when i show these tools it's just to make it more understandable and easy so i really love making these new tutorials so here's going to be another one by the way we've also added our hard ops and box cutter hotkey guide to our website so if you want to download that for free and use as a reference feel free to get it link in the top of the description we're going to make this interesting looking shape here now recently i've been thinking i don't want to spend too much time talking but i've begun to realize that it is so much more powerful if you learn to just kind of model your own shapes as opposed to copying things that already exist the difference is if you copy let's say you learn how to model an iphone for example if you just copy that from a picture you're not initiating that creative part of your brain that gets you thinking in terms of visual design but if you start tracing out your own shapes and playing with shapes you really begin to kind of develop this intuition and see these shapes that look interesting and appealing so i really recommend you guys when you start using these tools if you're learning the tools you can copy stuff that's fine but you're going to get so much more out of learning the tools by also trying to develop your own cool looking shape so that's what we're excuse me what we're going to be doing in this video here so let's get started now the first thing i like to do before i get started with anything is i like to take these settings that i have set up here most of these are defaults some of them have customized um don't worry about what they do just copy them it basically just kind of has like this custom pie menu set up there's a few different pie menus here when you go through it so just copy these settings i have under input okay you can pause the video and also under display i use simple pot or i turn off symbol pi sorry because if i turn this on and um it uses this different pie menu when you press ctrl d don't worry about it just copy the exact settings i have here and you should be good to go all right so what i want to do now is i want to just kind of trace out a shape here so generally what i do when i'm starting these models i like to just kind of start with a very simple block out you don't need anything crazy you don't need to have any sort of you know elegant looking shape off the bat just kind of trace out something that might look somewhat visually appealing right so what i'm going to do do something like that okay looks like a decent size we're going to press ctrl a and apply the scale what this will do is make sure when we bevel it's not biased to one side so if i press ctrl a to apply the scale it'll be a uniform bevel cool all right so the first thing i want to do is drop in a few loop cuts here so we're going to press ctrl r drop in loop cut and then right click and then ctrl b and scroll up once to kind of make another loop cut here you could also there's another tool you could also press ctrl shift and r which will basically offset an edge like that doesn't really matter you can just press ctrl b and scroll up if you prefer it that way so i'm going to go to right about here i think that should be fine and then what i want to do is take these faces here and kind of elevate them just a little bit i also just noticed we got some duplicate vertices i think it's from that control shift r command so what i can do is just select everything press m merge by distance i don't really know why that happened but i'm going to take these two faces and move them up just a tad bit maybe to here okay and i'm also going to take these faces here on the bottom just holding shift and clicking and pull this up here a little bit cool so now what i want to do is i want to take these two edges here in edge mode we'll press ctrl b and i'm just going to use a one single segment all right let's make sure our scale is applied which i think it is okay so we're going to press ctrl b and we're going to kind of get this interesting looking effect here let's make this a fairly large bevel okay and then what i can do in object mode is i can press alt x and i could use a mirror or i could also use a symmetry now the difference is pretty miniscule but i'll show you if i press alt x and this is set to modifier which basically just means a simple mirror modifier and i mirror it you're going to see we have a mirror modifier which is live in the stack now if i apply this this would be the same effect as using symmetry so if you just want to do that you know do it in one step instead of having to mirror and then apply the mirror what you can do instead undo this is you can use a symmetry so alt x change this to symmetry and you can do that pretty cool all right so now what i want to do is i want to kind of make this shape look a bit softer this is a really cool way to make your hard surface meshes more visually appealing so what i'm going to do is i'm going to alt click on this edge right here and press ctrl b and we're just going to give this maybe four segments or so we don't have to go super high and then what you can do i use mesh machine by the way which has a symmetrize feature in edit mode if you don't have mesh machine you can just go back into object mode alt x and then symmetrize again and do it that way you're going to notice these edges are kind of jagged right here now the way we fix that in hard ops is we press q and then sharpen it which will basically smooth out this mesh but you're going to see it kind of cause some problems and that's because we need to adjust this auto smooth angle right here and we can do it directly in this little menu down here or we can do is press q and then shift click on sharpen which will allow us to kind of move left and right and just find that good spot in terms of the angle and you're gonna see right down here on the bottom around 43 degrees seems to catch all those edges like i want so now we're only smoothing out over those edges that we want to have smoothed out so now we kind of have this soft looking shape now i also want to do the same thing over here now there's one thing worth pointing out i see this issue a lot so if you press ctrl tilda this will open up the hops helper menu and you're gonna see we have a few sharp options here now in blender sharps can be confusing because there's two different ways to refer to sharps the first way is to literally press ctrl e and use a sharp in terms of hard ops we have four different types of sharps so when i refer to sharp i refer to one of the four different types here which is either crease seam sharp and b weight we don't need a crease since we're not working with sub d and we don't need a seam since we're not unwrapping so usually what i do is i just keep apply sharp and apply b weight turned on those always seem to be the ones i use the most now bevel weight we only need if we're using a bevel set to weights in this video we're just going to be using angle so this one doesn't matter too much whether it's on or off anyway so these two turned on if i anytime i sharpen this with the cue menu not only does it smooth out the object it also applies the b weight in the sharp to all these um sharp edges here as you can see now the issue with this is if i try to bevel this edge here for example you're going to see it kind of bevels out those sharp edges as well and if i go into object mode we're going to kind of have this very sharp edge across the mesh so what i like to do before i bevel like that is i press q and then unmark it and now if i bevel it we won't actually have that sharp there it's going to be a lot smoother see that so hopefully that makes a bit of sense so now what i want to do is press alt x and then just symmetrize the other side really easy so already you can kind of see we have this visually appealing looking shape and this is what i mean just kind of play with your own shapes play with different effects and you'll end up getting a decent aesthetic in style for yourself now what i want to do is i want to go to front view so we can just press one on the numpad or tilde doesn't matter and what i think i'm going to do is i'm going to maybe let's try going to these edges down here we'll unmark them and then maybe bevel them we can scroll up and make a few more segments so it's more round that could be a pretty cool shape not sure i'll keep that but so far so good i kind of like the aesthetic of that so now what i want to do is maybe let's see maybe i could go here and control click on this area and bevel this one so before we do that let's unmark that edge and then ctrl b maybe we can give it like a nice big bevel right here that looks kind of cool maybe that's a bit too big we could go here instead if you undo it make sure you unmark it again because it'll undo what you did that could be pretty cool maybe a little bit bigger let's go right here that looks pretty cool and then of course if you want to symmetrize it to the other side you just press alt x and then symmetry one other thing by the way if you ever want to mirror or symmetrize or whatever and you want to switch between one of these menus here you can also just press the d key which will kind of give you a few different options here this is kind of advanced generally i just go up here and i choose modifier or symmetry depending on what i'm doing so if you're a beginner in these tools literally like 99 of the time you're gonna be using modifier and symmetry so don't stress about it cool so already this is looking a lot more interesting all right so now we could do is maybe kind of play with the shape here so sometimes what i like to do is just um play with a mirror a bit so maybe what i could do is press alt x change this to um or i could try symmetrizing it and you're going to see when i symmetrize it actually symmetrized over this origin point which is down here i want to symmetrize over the center so what i'm going to do is right click and set the origin to the geometry and you're going to see it's kind of centered but not really it's almost centered the center is like around here somewhere so i'm going to right click origin to geometry and then change this to bound center instead what this will do is create an invisible like bounding box and then put the origin in the middle of that so now if i were to symmetrize this it'll symmetrize directly down the center now we kind of have this cool looking shape here now to me it's a little bit too thin there's not much space here in the middle these bevels are almost touching so what i think i might do is i might take this bottom portion here you can just go into edit mode and then press z to go into wireframe and then b to box select this portion here maybe we could pull this down just a little bit like that and now we could try symmetrizing again so alt x and then symmetry and let's make sure we reset that origin point again bound center we could try symmetrizing that now we have a little bit more space here we almost have a bit too much in this one but it's it's not too bad perhaps we could move this up just a bit more reset the origin point again and then symmetrize and now we kind of have this um a little bit more space here so the bevels aren't that close cool so so far so good and i don't think i mentioned it yet but sometimes people ask me how do you get this nice edge highlight you just go in here and turn on cavity that's how you do it looks a bit nicer you can turn on shadow as well but blender shadow option if you have a lot of geometry really slows down your machine even if you have like the highest tier machine it's simply a blender limitation so i don't use shadow because sometimes it tends to lag cool so this is looking pretty good maybe what we could do is we could press go into edit mode press ctrl r now we can't actually add a loop through here because the loops will not pass through n-gons like this so maybe what we could do is we could just use the knife tool or we could take this edge that's already in the center and just move it on the y-axis up here kind of like that and then maybe what i'll do is ctrl b to bevel it just give it one segment okay and then we can press e to extrude right click and then alt s to kind of scale in you can also do this in hard ops by simply pressing q and then alt clicking on em macro that'll kind of pull it in does the same thing basically cool and sometimes um oh that's that's not the cavity issue i just realized we don't have bevel on here what i always like to do is add a very very small holding bevel to kind of make the edges pop a bit more so i'm just going to press q bevel and if for some reason the bevel isn't catching on these edges here you might have to press the a key and then adjust your angle until you catch them kind of like that cool so now we can have a bit more of a separation here on this area and then maybe we could do is we could alt click this edge and then alt shift click this edge and then scale it a bit on the y y-axis kind of make a bit more of a visually appealing type of you know shape there kind of cool and then maybe what we could do is we could press the d key and change um well i guess we're already on the box tool but if you wanted to change like a circle you could cut with a circle we haven't done any cuts yet so let's just choose the box tool okay and then just click and maybe make like a little notch right here and then press alt x to we can't symmetrize in this case if we symmetrize nothing will happen reason being is because this boolean right here is not technically real symmetrize only works on real geometry this is not real geometry yet unless we applied that boolean then symmetry would actually work but if you have a live boolean meaning it's not real geometry yet you would simply just use a mirror instead okay you could do that then you'll kind of have this nice effect now the nice thing about non-destructive booleans is we can press q and go to ever scroll and just kind of scroll between our booleans now i could just basically grab this and kind of move it over right pretty cool you're also going to notice we kind of have this pool right here and the way you fix that is by simply going to the bevel modifier and under geometry turn off the loop slide feature that'll fix it cool all right so now we kind of have this cool looking shape here it only took a few minutes and obviously if i wasn't making a tutorial you could probably make this in like a minute or two at most awesome so so far so good now we could do is maybe make a little bit more visual interest here let me go to the bottom of this piece and tab into edge mode what i think i'm going to do i was kind of playing with this a bit off camera and i found that maybe if we chamfer this right here so we'll control click around and we press ctrl b we can make like a chamfer here now remember we already have some sharp markings right here we're just going to press q and unmark them so we have a cleaner shading and i'm just going to ctrl b and just give this a one segment bevel and kind of get that effect now you're going to see it kind of stops beveling right here that probably means the angle is not catching with our bevel modifier right now the angle is 43 degrees so we could do is just adjust it just kind of pull that down alternatively what we could do is press q bevel and then press the a key and kind of move our mouse to the right and do it does the same thing basically just a bit quicker and now you're going to see all those edges that we want to have caught were caught awesome so this is looking pretty cool i do want to point out i don't know if you can see it with youtube's compression so i'll just turn on a matte cap real quick notice we kind of have the shading stretch right here try to find a better angle see that right about there if you ever get one of these make sure that your bevel modifier has a hard and normals turned on and to do that in hard ops you press ctrl tilda and make sure hn is turned on that means every single time you run a bevel hardened normals will be applied by default so if yours are turned off just turn them on here in the bevel modifier cool but you're going to see it still doesn't fix the issue so in this case what i do instead is i turn off hard to normals and i use a weighted normal modifier instead and that tends to fix the issue cool so so far so good pretty interesting looking shape here all right now what i think i'm going to do is make a make like a little kind of case around this thing so what i'm going to do for this is i'm going to press the d key make sure we're in box cutter mode and if i click from here and then here maybe go like that and then i release my mouse and cut through you're going to see it actually runs a boolean cut i could also use other cuts by pressing the x key and swap between like a slice and an intersect and an inset boolean but in this case i'm just going to press the k key to run a knife now if i go into edit mode you're going to see we kind of have this knife cut that went through right here what this means is i can simply go into face mode so tap into face mode alt click these faces here and then check this out in hard ops if you press q and shift click on curve extract it will take those faces separate them and then solidify them isn't that pretty cool so we could go right to about here maybe for some reason curve extract turns off the cavity feature so i'm just going to turn that back on and we kind of have this nice looking little case here maybe we could drop like a small little bevel on it just press q and then bevel for some reason it's not working so let me maybe remove this bevel and then just add a new one like that okay and then maybe what we could do is we could cut through here and this time let's press the x key twice until we get to the slice operation now we kind of have like a cool looking little thing here on the front and finally what i think i'm going to do i'm not sure how it'll look i'm going to try pressing d and go into this ngon cutter here and then make sure you turn off knife by the way if that's still turned on and maybe what i can do is kind of cut through here and make like a shape like that honestly i don't really like the look of that i'm just going to undo it and just kind of leave it as is cool so we could maybe cut it like that that could actually be a decent shape and then what i want to do is i want to apply all these uh booleans and stuff on here so i'm just going to press q operations and then smart apply and that'll basically apply everything except for the bevel modifier cool and then maybe i could just go in here and chamfer this edge looks kind of cool right just some different ideas maybe pull this back just a little bit nah i'll just leave it where it was okay now check this out there's just two more things i want to show you that are pretty interesting tools um so what if i wanted to make a hole in the bottom of this thing what i'm going to do first of all is i'm going to press c for circle select i'm going to paint this flat surface because notice this whole portion right here is completely flat see that so we can just press the f key to fill that into one single end gun now what i could do is i could press the i key to inset and then extrude this back and kind of make a shape like that if you wanted to do that more non-destructively meaning you're not affecting the actual geometry of the mesh what you could do instead this is a really cool trick i want to make sure you understand this if i press um if i go to object mode and i press q and shift click on smart apply what this will do is it will duplicate the mesh and on that duplicate it will apply every single modifier except your bevel modifier so check this out now i have a complete duplicate with all the booleans applied and what i could do is i could steal the geometry from this duplicate so check this out if i steal this face right here let's press ctrl i to invert the selection and then just delete it we can just press x and then delete faces now i'm left with a single little piece right here so if i were to maybe inset this right and then invert the selection again with ctrl i now what i have is a piece here that i can use as a boolean isn't that cool so if i extrude this through let's um extrude that all the way through and then just run a simple difference boolean select here and shift click here cue booleans and then difference check this out now we kind of have this cool looking shape here which is completely customizable we can always turn this off or on so maybe what i'll do at this point is make a small little bevel on these edges as well just so it's a bit more round right cool i just wanted to show you that because it's a pretty cool way to make a more non-destructive effect of what you would have otherwise done destructively so i think that's enough for this video i showed you most of the essential tools here i know some of it can get a bit complex but hopefully i explained it in such a way that makes sense to you if the video helped drop me a like it does help people find my video which is just going to help grow the hard surface community so i'd always appreciate a thumbs up helps me out a lot and also check out some of the free guides over on our website they're pretty useful some are related to modeling some are related to design but overall i think they'll be a great resource to your blender endeavors as well i'll link that in the top of the description too so thanks much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 69,628

Keywords: blender hard ops tutorial, hard ops tutorial, blender boxcutter tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial, blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial blender, 3d modeling, hard surface, blender hard surface modeling, blender 3d, hard ops, boxcutter, blender bros, ponte ryuurui, masterxeon1001, josh gambrell, blender beginner tutorial, hard ops beginner, boxcutter beginner

Id: -sSQeJhUJ_U

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022