Hard Surface Game Asset Tutorial | Part 1 - Modeling

what's up guys in this video we're going to make a really simple game asset here in blender i'm going to actually be modeling this thing entirely in vanilla with no add-ons for those of you that use hard ops and box cutter you're more than welcome to use it it's going to be a lot easier to follow along in that case but i wanted to do a vanilla tutorial just to kind of bring some more newer faces in to enjoy the videos so why not so the first thing i want to do is start with the default cube here so we're going to just move it to the top of the grid so just g z and hold ctrl to snap it and the next thing i want to do is tab into face mode and we're just going to select the face right here and then grab it g key on the z axis pull it down to about here and then just scale it down with the s key and we're just going to pull it to right around here basically what i want is like a like a base of some sort to kind of hold something heavy so that's kind of what i'm going for here and maybe we could even move this up a bit more and kind of get like i don't know something like this and yeah it should be good now the next thing i want to do is make a bevel around the edges here so that way we have a nice looking type of effect so um the first thing i'm going to do is tab into edge mode and we're going to control alt control click to select these and then ctrl b to run a bevel now what we want to do is run an even number of segments here so basically you should see a menu on the bottom of your screen you can't see it on mine but you're going to see right here i have 10 segments you want to make sure this number is even so that way when we decimate this into a low poly later we're not going to end up decimating the holding edges here so if i were to decimate this i could just press ctrl x and make this lower poly whereas if i bevel this with say nine segments what's going to happen is we're going to end up having to dissolve one of the holding bevel edges which is no good that'll disturb the curvature so in general i'd always recommend running an even number of segments so 10 should be fine for now and we'll make this to about here and the next thing i want to do is go here to the auto smooth panel and then right click to shade smooth so that way we have like this um nice looking base here with no jagged edges or anything and just i don't know i think that'll be good awesome and uh by the way a lot of people ask me this if you want to get these nice little cavity type of whatever these you know highlighted edges are you go up here to this drop down you click on cavity and that'll actually make the edges nice and highlighted i just think it looks better when i'm working so i prefer to do it that way and you can also turn on shadow if you want to i don't like shadows much so i'm just going to keep that off okay so now what i want to do is tab into face mode and select the bottom face here and run a chamfer now a chamfer is simply a one segment bevel so we're just going to scroll down until we have one segment and we're going to drop our chamfer right to about here just a very tiny chamfer to kind of you know highlight the model a bit more looks a bit cleaner and now basically what we have is this very simple uh yet defined shape going on which is precisely what i wanted so the next thing i want to do is make some little cutouts in here and these cutouts should be pretty easy so what i think i'm going to do is simply add in a plane shift a actually let's add in a cube shift a and then cube we're going to scale this cube down and simply move it right in here and what i also want to do is tab into edge mode and select this edge right here and if we go up here to wireframe we should be able to just kind of i'm going to move the edge on the x-axis until it's roughly parallel with these edges here and then we'll just simply scale it up move it over a bit and then we'll also scale this on the y kind of like that okay cool so now that we have this effect what i want to do is run a boolean inside of this mesh right here so to do that what i'm going to do is go up here to edit preferences we're going to turn on the bull tool add-on so type in bool and you can turn that on if you're using hard ops of course you don't have to turn that on but in this case we will and the next thing i want to do is simply shift click so you select this one you shift click on this one and then control minus on the number pad to run a difference boolean now we can kind of see the cut in here but i want to make this cut a little bit change so what i'm going to do is scale it down a bit maybe move this face out a bit as well and we'll just keep playing with this a bit and we'll make this a bit bigger scale it i want to put it in a decent location and i think this will be a good one okay awesome so now that we've done that what we can do is select these edges here and run a nice little bevel so i'm going to run another 10 segments in here i think keep in mind we're making the high poly right now so we're not too concerned with the poly count at this stage so that's why i'm doing it and also notice how these are nice and jagged so what we want to do is make sure we right click and shade smooth the actual cutter to make sure those edges are smooth so we have that and what i want to do is run one more cut in the middle here so i'm going to add in a cube i'm going to scale this cube down we're going to move it up a bit and we're just going to basically just kind of play with the sizes here i think this will be good make this a little bit bigger scale this down a bit maybe you want to take your time with these because if you have like a really unpleasing looking design it's just going to throw apart the whole model so take your time scale things down don't rush through it see what looks good and at this point what i want to do is simply control alt click and then control b to run a bevel now notice we have these skewed bevels right here i don't want that so to fix that we need to make sure our scale is applied the scale is not uniform so we're going to press ctrl a and apply the scale and that's going to basically tell blender hey this is a uniform size so make this a uniform bevel so once we press ctrl b it's going to be nice and even and we can go ahead and run a difference boolean again control minus on the numpad and then shade the smooth and now we have is another cut in here and it looks pretty good now i do want to scale these a bit more i think i still i'm not too happy with that aesthetic so we're gonna go right to about here that looks a lot better and finally we don't have to run another one over here we can do is simply run a mirror modifier so add modifier and then mirror and we're going to make the mirror over the x-axis but notice how it kind of removed this one and that's because we're mirroring over itself so if you're mirroring over an object itself what you want to do is turn on the bisect and sometimes the flip option as well to fix that and essentially we're going to have is this type of effect here we're just going to take a look at it without the overlays and you can see yeah it's not too bad i think we could even scale these back up a bit and maybe scale that a bit on the z i don't know what do you think it's not too bad it's just kind of a matter of what you like design wise so maybe maybe i'll keep these nice and even as close as i can get all right now that we've done that what i'm going to do is go up here to the collection we're going to right click and add a new collection and i'm just going to call this one cutters and what i prefer to do is i like to move these cutters that we use with the m key into the cutters collection so that way i can just turn off the cutters collection i don't have to actually see those cutters but i can still access them again later which is pretty useful all right anyways now that we have this design going on what i think i'm going to do is come in here and apply these booleans so we'll click apply and then click apply again and essentially this is going to give us the opportunity to run a chamfer to make this look a bit cleaner now before i do that i want to show you one issue notice how if i try to run this chamfer it kind of starts collapsing and that's because as i bevel these are kind of beveling over each other and just causing a mess so we need to do is make these connection points a bit cleaner for blender to interpret so in general we want the connection points to run straight through the middle in a perpendicular fashion these aren't very good connection points here so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to go into the front view by pressing 1 on the number pad i'm going to press the k key click and then we can just cut through now if we want to keep this straight we're going to press the c key that'll keep it straight and it doesn't display for some reason this add-on the keys i'm pressing here so you're just going to have to listen and then we're going to press the z key which will allow us to cut straight through the mesh not just on what we see and we'll just press enter make sure you click again so click and then press enter i always forget to do that and now we're going to actually have a much better connection point and we're going to be able to get rid of these right here because in general every single boolean needs two connection points and we don't need these two anymore so i'm going to press ctrl x and get rid of those same for right here we don't need these but we can't yet dissolve these out because we also have to run a cut straight through the middle of this one as well so we're going to do the same thing k click c z click again and press enter and now we should be able to press control x and get rid of those there and we don't have to do it over on this side because the mirror modifier has already taken care if we take a look at this in wireframe mode it's already taken care of the situation for us because the mirror is mirroring what we've added on this side all right awesome so we have that let's see what else let's go to the back side here and dissolve these out we could technically run a mirror across the y as well because this is a perfectly symmetrical object but it's quick enough to just go in here and dissolve it manually so now that we've done that we can actually come in here and hold the alt key and then hold the shift key while holding alt so alt shift click basically and we're going to be able to run a nice chamfer here without any issues so i'm going to do that we're going to make this a somewhat decent size and you're going to see we have this nasty shading and that's because blender is smoothing based off of the angles of the edges here and or the faces technically and we need to make sure we're actually within that threshold so right now it's set to 30 and most likely the 30 degrees is not capturing this area so you need to make this a bit lower maybe like 23 or something and that's going to fix that and you can see with these chamfers they make a nice little visual kind of looks a bit better than having just a generic flat edge or whatever i always add chamfers whenever i can because they look really good and in most objects in the real world you're going to see chamfers and bevels everywhere so i'd always recommend doing that we could do it for this side but i'm just going to be lazy and click the y axis we're going to do bisect and flip and we're going to have it on that side as well so basically the only area we're working on technically is this quadrant right here because it's mirroring across the x and then mirroring across the y over here so this quadrant is um basically the only area we're worried about but anyways if the mirror is confusing just pretend this is the entire thing if you make adjustments it's just going to mirror it so you don't have to worry about what's being mirrored okay we have this now and this is just a very generic type of aesthetic here so let's add a bit more maybe what i'll do is i'll come in here to the top by the way i don't really want these edges here on the top they're kind of ugly so i'm going to press control x to get rid of those same down here shift click both of them and press control x and now we're going to have that effect going on all right awesome so at this point we're ready to let me see should i apply the mirror we could probably apply the mirror modifier i think we're done with that and there we go you're gonna see we have a mirror and we also have these edges right here we don't really need these i'm going to press um alt shift click and just get rid of these so alt shift click both of these right here control x the reason that happened is most likely the mirror point was like slightly off and it was causing that but we don't need these two right here so just get rid of those and it looks pretty good we can also dissolve out the top here and the bottom all right so we're just going to add a little bit more detail and then what we're going to do is make the low poly from this piece and basically prepare it as a working game asset so we have that what i want to do next is i want to add in some some little detail here on the top so what i'm thinking is we'll take this face right here and basically make like a platform for it so i'm going to press shift d to duplicate i'm going to right click to cancel that movement and i want to separate it into a separate piece by pressing the p key and separating it that way so now we have two separate pieces here in object mode now i do want to extrude this a bit on the z axis here just uh maybe to about this area that looks pretty good and i also want to match the the curvature here so i'm going to scale this down until we're roughly in that territory of you know parallel edges or whatever it's close enough so that looks pretty good to me so i'm thinking one more small detail and this um base will be just about done so i'm going to press shift a and add in a cube and scale this down and put the cube to this corner area and maybe scale this a bit on the x now i want to do this just so i can make like a little cut out here also scale this on the y until we're kind of like that and if i shift click on this and run a difference boolean we're going to have like a nice little cut in there i think it looks cool so why not um we'll go to you know i think this is okay actually we'll do that and then we could either mirror the cutter or we could just mirror the platform itself it really doesn't matter in this case so i'm just going to add a mirror we'll do x-axis bisect and flip and we're going to have it on that side as well so let me press the m key move that to the cutters collection and we're basically going to have this little platform design going on looks pretty good the final thing i want to do is make some screw holes in here because it looks like this piece could just slide off and we want to make sure it's nice and sturdy so what i'm going to do is add in a cylinder and we're going to use the cylinder to basically make a screw hole it's going to be pretty cool so i'm going to add a cylinder we'll do i don't know 64 vertices should be nice and smooth and we just want to make sure we right click to shade it smooth and turn on auto smooth there we go so i'm going to press the s key and just move it to this corner and just try to keep it in the middle as best you can i'm not too concerned how perfect it is we're going to move that up scale it on the z and then we're going to run a difference boolean of course and i want to get the same effect to all the sides here so a quick and easy way to do this would be to mirror this platform now notice there's a few things going on we have a boolean we have our first boolean and then we have the mirror running and then we have the boolean meaning the mirror has already finished before this boolean has been executed so it's like the order of operations for the modifiers here so if we want to make sure this boolean also gets applied by the mirror we want to make sure this boolean is above the mirror so that way the mirror comes last now we should just be able to select the mirror here and then click on the y-axis bisect and flip and just like that we have a um an effect on all the sides here now these screw holes might be a bit too big um but i'm gonna leave them so maybe some engineer can come and yell at me because i don't know i'm not an engineer so there might be like something off about this and i'll get roasted but whatever it's okay okay so we have this and i think the final thing we'll add in is a screw hole or a screw hole an actual screw to kind of make this finish now um you can probably model a screw on your own they're really simple i personally use the free inserts i'll link it in the description i use the free hard ops in search it's made by it was made by chip master xeon they made this pack a while ago it's free you can download it and it's basically just a huge collection of these bolts here you do need the kit ops free version to install it but everything here is free and nice and accessible so i'm going to add in one of these here we'll do let's see what looks the most sturdy we'll do this one right here this flat head and um add it in now it does have these materials by default which is kind of annoying i just remove them because i don't need them and we're just going to move this into this spot and scale it down and just kind of fit it on the inside and then move it up a bit yep there we go and i would recommend kind of varying the rotation of these pieces so that way for example let me show you if we were to run a mirror modifier here we'll add a mirror we'll run it on the we want to make sure we're mirroring over that 3d cursor there so perhaps what i'll do is just make the mirror object this piece and then mirror it on the x and y and you're going to see this is all like one direction this is not something you'd naturally see in real life there's no screw that's perfectly aligned except by a pure luck so what i would recommend doing is making a random rotation on each of these pieces so apply your mirror modifier go into edit mode and just kind of vary the rotation on each of them so i'm just going to press the l key if you want to select something in edit mode that are joined together you press the l key we can rotate this around the z a little bit alt a to cancel press the l key again alt a i actually don't like where that is like right there maybe then we'll do one right here rotate it on the z and then rotate this on the z so now these are kind of like all skewed and unnatural which is exactly what you'd see in the real world so i'd recommend doing that okay i decided to switch the screws because i thought they looked awful so i made these instead but same applies to whatever screw you want to use just make sure you rotate them alright so now we have the general base defined it's pretty much done there is one final thing we have to do and that is apply a final holding bevel so take a look at like your phone for example anything it's going to have a small little bevel around the edges and nothing in the real world is perfectly sharp not even a blade of some sort so we want to add a bevel so add a bevel modifier we're going to change the limit method here to angle which should be by default and i want to make sure the segment count is set to 3. we're going to do that we're also going to turn on the heart and normals option that'll make the shading a bit nicer see how it kind of cleans it up see that and you're gonna see nothing is really happening with the bevel and that's because we need to turn off this clamp overlap option that means there's an overlap somewhere blender was preventing it and now we can do is basically hold the shift key and just kind of drag this amount and make like a really tiny bevel around the edges here see that looks a little bit nicer just a very subtle effect but i personally enjoy it now you're going to see the angle doesn't catch here either so we want to make sure that angle for the bevel is the same as the auto smooth so i'm just going to control copy paste and we're going to have the same effect there and you can see the difference it's very subtle we'll make this a bit bigger as a matter of fact very tiny but i do like how it looks so we're gonna do that we're gonna also make the same effect on all of these we can actually copy modifiers to another piece by going to preferences and enabling the copy attributes add-on just turn that on save your preferences and what we can actually do is come in here ctrl c we select this one shift click this one and then ctrl c copy selected modifiers and then bevel and we're basically going to have a bevel on there nice and easy now you could bevel the screws i don't know how well it's going to come through we can try let's try copying it to this one it might kind of collapse but it also might not you know these screws are so tiny and not really noticeable it might not even be worth your time but i'm going to go ahead and do it we're going to copy the bevel and yeah there we go that's just fine all right so we're gonna end the video here and in part two we're gonna make the low poly from the high poly unwrap it and then in part three we're gonna make the final product whatever you wanna call it so part two which should be coming tomorrow you're going to see the decimation process as well as the unwrapping process for this thing so we have a lot to do i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 52,808

Keywords: hard surface game asset tutorial, game, asset, tutorial, modeling, boolean, beginner, blender hard surface, josh gambrell, blender hard surface modeling, hard surface blender, hard surface modeling blender, blender tutorial, blender boolean, blender box cutter, hard ops, boxcutter, box cutter blender, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface game asset, hard surface, unreal engine, unreal engine tutorial, baking tutorial, 3d modeling, 3d modeling blender, blender

Id: xOiVIeOxrMU

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021