HARD OPS for BEGINNERS - Blender addon tutorial for hard surface

hi guys you're here with naruto for blender and today i want to show you the basics the very basics of hard-ups how to get into hard ups and how to understand the whole um confusing and intricate you know manual system and options and tons of options right it's really easy so let's make it easy first of all how do you install the damn thing so you need to go to gamra to blend the market of master z1001 you can do it through the links in the description of this video which will help my channel as well and doesn't cost you anything so once you get the add-ons and i suggest you get both box cutter and hard ups and the reason why i suggest that is because these atoms are so intertwined and also work together and have tools supporting one another that it would be just dumb not to get them both okay and you're gonna be getting both eventually anyway so i'm not doing it now the way to remove because let's say that you install them and you want to change the version of the hard ups which by the way evolves quite quickly and you might be needing to reinstall it quite often to get access to new options or for example some bug fixes right so what you want to do is go here and to your preferences and type hard ups and simply remove it right and then save preferences and then go to box cutter and if you want to remove it too do the same thing remove and you know save preferences and then you quit blender right and then you reopen it again all right now with the hard ops uninstalled we can install it back on so let's go to preferences and you click on install and you simply install the add-on from the file that you have wherever you saved it once you find the file on your drive you simply click on it and install it on you wait a little bit and click on this box you wait a bit and you're done save preferences you're good to go now to access hard ups of box cutter all you need to do is press rw and it's gonna flip between them w gonna get you out of the zone out of the bat you will see a top bar menu um i discussed this bar menu in a different video i have a series of videos on hard ups on my channel there is a special list for a playlist for it you can watch these videos in here and they will explain the basics of um of that menu but this menu doesn't really change these are like smart object which means you can drop them in here and you know bevel them and when you press and hold ctrl you can simply reshape them change bevels you know etc right so these are pretty cool to play with then and the other stock on the right side you have modifiers but there's smart modifiers so for example if i went to grab a plane and i rotated it by 90 degrees on x and had some loops and went to this default modifier and apply rotation and then hold ctrl because these are smart modifiers and right click in here you can see that i can now you know bend this plane and apply some smoothness to it so that's in short the top menu okay the most important menu however is the queue menu because that's your operations menu and when you have something selected or you for example in edit mode or for example in sculpting mode this menu will shift to and adjust whatever space you are in so again solid mode different edit mode different etc right now another menu that's quite important is this one and the same menu you could find by around the end panel so here where is it hard ups uh this one that's the same menu as you can see so there is no point really going there if you can access it in here and i usually set this before i start working i turned on auto t panel and pc notifications now out of t-panel is simply when you start working for example on modifiers you can see that the t-panel is going to automatically disappear on the left side and when i stop working on modifier it's going to pop back in and the same thing actually going to happen with the end panel this is gonna disappear to make more space for this h menu which is a helper menu text otherwise it would be simply too congested especially on smaller monitors or laptops that's your uh menu in here and bc notifications is simply notifications from uh box cutter at the bottom just gives you some you know interesting information on what's happening and this one here um sequential menu is simply a menu that displays modifiers and all this stuff on these um rollout menus in a much more uh compact fashion in the original hard drives there is like a long list of modifiers going up and down and you can see it in here so if i go to modifiers there you go it's like a long list and you have to scroll it which is a little bit annoying so this one is a very welcome addition to and change to um to hard ups if you're coming from the previous version of hard ops this video probably is not for you but uh if you for example struggle with the new array the v2 array and you want some functions from the old one this is where you change it to array v1 um so that's that another menu is control tilde menu which is very important because um it will show you the modifier stack as well as you have access to the most important functions and settings of hard hops this is the heart of hard ops right another menu is gonna be shift q which is uh like a quick access menu with all kinds of interesting options in here quick access to bevel solidify and sharpen as well and mirrors so that's that's a very interesting menu then you have shift ctrl b menu which is actually a bevel menu so let's go to a bevel first and then access bevel menu and this menu will not work if you have ball tool installed so when you have a ball to tool add-on installed right uh ball tool add-on by a default has this um where is it ctrl shift b so that's the main menu for the bluetooth i usually have it changed to something like um ctrl shift alt b so when i go to bool here under keymap let me see that ball tool here ctrl shift alt b because if you leave it on ctrl alt b ctrl shift b you will not be able to access the hard dubs bevel menu so just switch the key up and you're gonna be fine now the deeper you go with hard ups the denser the forest gets but the basics are usually not changing and they stay the same but again the hard-ups is an evolving tool and you need to get used to it that hard apps will will always change and neutral is gonna come around something's gonna change so you kind of need to roll with the punches but again the basics usually stay the same so first of all bevel right that's what you do when you start your modeling you you know you want to drop a bevel and again you can access this h menu in here and you can see plethora of options usually it's really easy all you do is screw your mouse to it or deduct segments and switch between different type of profiles or types of bevels and that are accessible to you you can turn on or off the wireframe and that's pretty much it so for example if i want to change it to a chamfer i'm going to press one scroll my mouse to uh one segment like you can see in the bottom and bob's your ankle if i want to add another bevel to this for example what i'm going to do is ctrl click on level which will add another bevel on top of it now i can switch between these bevels by pressing q so you see that on the left bottom corner if i press q i'm switching between the small one and the big one and you can adjust them accordingly the next very simple and basic operation would be like let's create a cut with a box cutter you can see that shading breaks so we need to add a weighted normals and the way to do it is simply by alt clicking sharpen in any case if you hover your mouse over a tool you can see that um the plateau of option is going to pop up and you can see um what these keys or options will do when you for example hold shift control or alt or whatever key you're gonna have different functions um that you can perform with them right so for instance sharpen if you hold alt and click on sharpen is going to add weighted normals but you know let's say we have more more cuts in here we want to apply all the booleans at once all i need to do let me just make this a little bit smaller all i need to do is ctrl click on sharpen which will actually apply all the modifiers to the model plus at sharpen to the model if you don't want sharpen to be added to the model you can actually switch it off so if i'm going to remove the sharpen i have to just run sharpen again which will clean the sharp edges then go to control tilde menu and simply turn off everything in here on the sharpen so you can have all four one two or none so now if i ran ctrl sharpen on this mesh it was applied you can see this message here but no sharp edges were applied to my mesh so that's how you work with basic functions in hardups now this menu is very interesting because it will actually suggest from the top the most important things that you might want to perform with the tool kind of like an intelligent menu so for instance if you know if i want to have mirror i'm going to click on mirror but mirror can be also accessed by alt x so alt x will access the mirror if you press stop you're gonna have additional options in here and again as always if you press h you have additional options on your right hand side like a tooltip helper and then shift d will bring another menu and this menu will depend on which mode you are in so if i'm in a simple mode by pressing tab again if i go to shift d the menu is going to shift as well and you simply click on a you know handle and you copy if you want to copy on two axes you have to hold shift and then you can copy on any axis that you want so you can for example have a three-way mirror with you know three clicks which is really easy and control tilde go to modifier stuck and you can see that mirror was deployed on all axes in here and was placed in the correct order so after beveling so for example it's not a fantastic function of hard upset it's actually sorting the modifiers for you because for example if i create a boolean card you can see that in vanilla blender this boolean would be at the bottom of the stack because it's the last modifier edit so it will look like this which means like so you would need to manually bring this boolean to the top of the stock in 2.9 you can actually drag it because the button has a drag and drop kind of you can drag and drop modifiers literally you can just grab it and drag it but in 2.83.4 or higher you can't um because it's just not there so um you will need to do it manually but hard up is going to actually sort it for you so every time i actually you know create a bullion um you will see that my my boolean is gonna be sorted um automatically let me just expand it so there you go it's gonna go above the bevel because now first you need to boolean and then you need to bevel to ensure that you know the the edges were cut into the mesh are actually beveled because if the bevels could not be at the top of the modifier stack you'll see that these edges inside won't get beveled which makes sense right because you first bevel and then you cut through that bevel so there you go and again if you want to apply everything just ctrl sharpen and bob's your uncle and this will leave this will apply literally all the all the booleans so there you go so hard ups has a lot of quality of life um it's a quality of life too really and there's a lot of quality of life functions for example if you click on a face and you want to rip it off you can do it with ease but you can do more than that you can for example go to curve extract and hold shift and you can rip it off and solidify at the same time which is bloody brilliant you can for example easily bevel verts if you go to bevel and control click on mark you can actually bevel a word and this will behave like any other bevel which means you can change profiles and and have fun with it so that's genius if you want to add second bevel all you need to do is ctrl-click on a mesh or go to an option known as step which is in here which will also add another bevel again if you hover over a function it will tell you what it does now hard opposite builds in support for certain add-ons like decal machine kit ops through for example the asset loader so if you go to asset loader and you have ktops and digital machine installed you can load assets through hard dubs so for instance if i wanted to apply a wood texture to my scene all i need to do is ctrl click on on this material and it's going to get added to my cube so again asset loader and control click and your wood is added that's easy and the same with um decal machine if you click on this here it will switch to a decal machine and you can add your decals from your decal packs other add-ons integrated to uh hard ops is machine tools bezier mesh shaper mirror tools for example if i press ctrl shift tilde i'm going to access mirror tools but you need to be in invert mode so let's select all these three verts go ctrl shift tilde and you see now i'm in a mirror tool setup which is actually the same the same thing as if you were going to mirror tools and going to see stretch curve right the curve stretch it's the same tool simply integrated to hard ups for easy use and you can also go through um the plug-in um in edit mode and you can have curve stretch of mirror tools or you can go to the bezier mesh shaper which is also very interesting tool for uh you know reshaping reshaping your mesh another function of hotdogs that's really great is an ease of adding material so i alt m will open a new menu which will actually allow me to add material very quickly to this cube the materials are random and they will be generated within like a sci-fi environment so you know metallic kind of thing and you have choice between different types of materials if you go and open this menu in here you can see that you can change between different types of material on the fly in addition to all this you can actually use the material um i mean apply material by pressing for example shift which will add glass or alt which will add a missive this is you know really a great addition to uh to this add-on because it allows you to work extremely fast you can also add multiple materials to multiple objects you can randomize materials it's very powerful um this tool so that's alt m menu ldv menu it's also very interesting menu for hard drives which will allow you to manage your scene uh like you know for example camera let's say for example if i wanted to render this and click on this cube and one to ald v and click on camera it will add a camera with an empty so if i went to timeline so let me expand this and go to timeline and press on play you'll see that i will have let me slow this down i'll have a turntable set for my camera and i don't have to do anything and it works very simply there is an empty inside in here which is which to which camera is parented and it literally turns around the mesh so if you want to create very quick turntables this is you know just a one-click deal it's fantastic you can add scene lights which will add a random lies to the scene you can rotate through different combination you can go to look depth mode and this is extremely powerful as well because you can very easily for example holding shift change environments you can blur them with b again h menu should help you with this one now the alt v menu is really powerful and it would take probably a separate tutorial at least to explain all the functions of it but the settings you know like for example ev settings which um are all set in here so you can turn them on and off very easily very quickly you don't even have to have this panel open so for instance if you wanted to work in a full screen mode by pressing ctrl alt and space bar you can do that because you have access to all these tools very quickly throughout the v menu and you don't really need um you don't really need this menu on the right hand side here another interesting things that you can do with hard drives is for example um these little tools in mesh tools right it's just a plethora of options it's a fantastic like you know regularized arrays with one click you know all i have to do is move this a little bit in here and then i press q and go to operations and um sorry mesh tools and regular array with control and literally i have access to my regular array with ease it's just brilliant you know so easy to do these things you don't have to set anything up it's fantastic then you have stuff like a line tool which is to be found in here and i have it remapped to control q control q is mapped by default to quit blender you don't really want to quit blender so um i just deleted it so when you go to keymaps and you type your quit i don't even have it on my menu because i simply deleted it but you can change it to something else and then you can remap this to right click and add you know at shortcut uh to control q and now when i press ctrl q it will enter this alignment mode which you can see the options here but basically when you scroll your wheel you switch views and then when you hold ctrl and scroll you can actually rotate around and you press shift you can rotate this way so this is a very powerful way of actually aligning for example cutters because if i go to box cutter and go with shift v menu and switch my cutters to view i can cut at any angle i wish which is extremely powerful if you work on some um some stuff that is you know angled in a very peculiar way so aligner is an extremely powerful tool it's recently added to uh to hard ups not a great tool for example i can show his dice which is basically slashing mesh um with a knife now in this case you would think well why would i need it all i need to do is just run the loops yeah fair enough but how about if this mesh you know if this this mesh is sliced heavily let's say you want to do something like this let's uh let me show you a practical example of dice let's let's slash this mesh you know um in here in different ways and you know let's apply this okay sharpen and let's run bevel through it and wait it normals and good luck running loops through this mesh isn't gonna happen right so what you need is a dice and dice is just you know like a projectable knife that will simply run in any axis that you want because you can actually switch and the axis between x z and y so you can add them deduct them and we can run them on all x's on one axis so when i press now it will literally run edges across this mesh now you say why would i need that well if you go to measure and go to twist 360 that's why because it simply allows the mesh to bend without being disfigured because if i did that without dice right so i went to mesh tools in 360 you see the problem right the mesh isn't actually curving so these kind of tools with hard ups they will make your life for you know when you when you model hard surface extremely easy and modeling becomes modeling becomes scarily fast q menu is is is basically by default mapped to favorites so if i you know if you go to preferences and go to keemup and type priorities you can see that it's q menu by q minus maps to hard up so how can you deal with favorite you know key shortcuts well simply if you press q twice you will access a quick favoritis menu so q twice and you're in here so you can you know if you for example have something like i don't know um select sharp edges added to authorities you know and you have you know you want to select them on a mesh double queue and you have access to this option that would be all i think about very basics of hard ups and how to start using them again if you need help with hard ups you can always go to settings and um go to hard ops learning and you can see that there are all kinds of different resources including you know a hard ups channel um all kinds of youtube channel even including my channel thanks very much jerry for adding this i really appreciate that and you know hard up documentation if you're lost you should always look up the documentation or master xeon videos which are coming really really often and if there is a new development or new update most likely master xeon is gonna just drop a new video and show you guys how to use those new toys from hard ups but once you master the basics of hard ups it's really easy to understand how it all works and find your way around so you know play with the basics and then move on from there you don't have to learn everything at once you can just you know go easy through the process and start with the basics but once you start using hard ups you understand how fast you can move through your modeling process which will become more intuitive and more artistic in a way because you don't have to think about oppose your artistic your creativity you know and start moving for example um modifiers um one thing i forgot to mention which is extremely powerful is actually modifier stack so let's add some you know some modifiers in here let's waited normals and we have a bevel already going on if you click on q and go to uh operations and modify scroll you can see that well let me just hide this uh menu for a second let's do this again let's click on modify scroll you can actually access modifiers and scroll through them so you can go to the very basics of where you started so when you scroll with your mouse you can see the sequence in which the modifiers were added more importantly you can actually move them so for instance if i hold shift then grab bevel i can move it to the top of my stock this is very useful when you for example work in stuff like mirrors so when you add the mirror to the modifier stack and you go to modify scroll you can actually you know you can scroll your mouse down to a mirror and you can move it up to start until you know until you happy with the position so extremely powerful you don't have to fiddle with with you know again your modifier stuck in here you can work in full mode as well which is fantastic if you want to have more real estate on your on your screen and you know you don't really need these windows on the sides that's why hard ups menu was designed that way to you know give you a comfort of of work in a large large environment that's it for hard ups for beginners that's how you start with hard ups and the very basics of it and again remember the tools is evolving rapidly so you you should stay up to date but i would recommend actually keeping older versions of hard ups if you get used to some tools because literally you get like uh you know a new version every two weeks and among bug fixes and some minor changes usually getting some experimental tools with it so if you're not used to if you're used to some tools like for example people are used to this v1 array and i i actually prefer the v1 array because it's it's more versatile it gives me options under one menu but it was changed to v2 so you know you have this option here to switch between them but anyway keep your older versions of hard up that's what i would suggest if you know if something changes that you don't like it just hold on to the older version i know that josh for example you know doesn't update his hard-ups all the time he just keeps it for like you know a couple weeks or a few weeks and updates updates when it feels like it i also rarely managed to catch up with the updates because they just were very frequent but it's no need really to you know keep this uh up to date like hundred percent of the time because it's sometimes it's overwhelming especially when you start learning how hard ups i would suggest to stick to one version for some time until you you know understand what's going on and then you just you know start following the updates and see what's happening there what's new or what's new in the market right box cutter is very different it's actually way more stable in terms of functions and development they usually update it to work with new functions of hard ups but box cutter is more or less i don't think you know once you learn how to use it you're probably going to be okay for a long period of time but like i said you know hardup's main functions usually don't change the core ones here and um you know mostly what we get is just a new toys under these two um windows operations and mesh tools and that's what's um what's up but anyway guys that would be it for the very basic of it on hard ups hope you enjoyed the video again the links in description to master z1001 store if you're interested in buying these add-ons go through the links you're going gonna help me as well which i appreciate greatly thanks for watching i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 22,899

Keywords: hard, ops, blender, surface, addon, tutorial, beginner, blender tutorial, hardops tutorial, hardops for beginners, blender addons, hard surface addons, hard surface tutorial

Id: uCdgIu7BCjo

Length: 26min 56sec (1616 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020