Hard Surface Mechanical Kitbashing Workflow with Blender 2.8

hey what's up everybody welcome to another CG cookie livestream and today we're gonna be talking about hard surface kit bashing which is going to be a super fun topic I really like this one because it allows you to get like really complex and interesting looking models with not really that much work so it's gonna see you all in the chat it's been I don't know maybe two weeks or so since they've done a stream and I think I fixed some of the like latency issues so hopefully this goes a little bit more smooth than the last one but today we're gonna be looking at kit bashing sets that you can use some that I found for free online and also how to put those together in blender to make an interesting scene because half of it is just like getting this stuff and getting it into blender and like getting it usable and then the other half is how to put it together so it's not a ton of like new information but there's a lot of little like subtle tricks that can go into it to help make the process a little bit easier so first I want to look at a couple examples that I made so first one is this butterfly that I made for the blender market sale there is a 25% off sale and so my job was to take some of the pieces from the blender market and make them into an image that just like it seemed cool and interesting and that was super fun so I used a couple different like kits and I'll show you the different pieces here thanks Omar so what the scene is is a bunch of flowers and stuff which was also another like under market product and then each of these individual pieces that make up this butterfly but they're all part of this kit of mechanical parts see if I turn on that collection so there's really not that many parts that make up this butterfly there's also a few greebles from a different kit but I only used like one or two of these just because they're all pretty flat and didn't quite fit into what I wanted though some of these worked really well for like an antenna but as you can see there's not really that many pieces here but you can put them together in so many different ways that it's kind of just like what together interesting like Legos they're like connect so like different toys that you can shape however you want and what's cool about these is that like if it doesn't fit exactly say you need this to be like a little bit longer then you can just edit it and do so but you don't have to make everything from scratch so getting kits that you can use is super helpful of course you can make your own that does take a pretty good amount of time but I think if that if you wanted to do it there's a good opportunity to do so because there's not really that many good ones out there there's a lot of like kind of subpar sets and there's some like super super good ones but there's only a few of the good ones so if you wanted to make your own then you could probably do pretty well either selling it or like just sharing it with people because there's not a lot of good like blender specific ones and I'll show you that in a second so what I did here for this particular one and then we'll take a look at another example later but for the butterfly what I did is I just outlined the basic parts of it first like outlines the the most important features and I've separated out into different like sections in my collections here so first I just picked like a box for the body and decided to use this little piece for the tail but one thing that I've done here is used parts in ways that don't really make mechanical sense so it looks like a mechanical creature or like a insect but if you really look at the individual pieces how they're put together makes absolutely no sense it's totally absurd because this thing is you know it rotates around and the purpose of these little like notches right is to drive like Pistons up and down or I think that's what it's for as it rotates but of course there's nothing on like the right side of this and there's nothing on top of it there's no Pistons for it to hit so the way that I'm using it is just like it makes no sense at all but it looks good in this context so it depends on like what your specific goals are if you have to have it be as like accurate and functional as possible then it's gonna take you a lot more time but it's still possible but most of the time if you're just making something that needs to like artistically look cool then you can kind of just take a bunch of stuff and smash it together and that's what kid bashing is in general is just taking all these different parts and bashing them together and it's just a ton of fun so I blocked out like the main portions of this and then filled in the details so like things like this little engine cap and these things are all things that I added in later but the larger pieces such as this like big box and like the eyes things like that are all things that I put in first and once you get those like large chunks then you can kind of fill in in between and make sure things connect well so first I don't really think about how things were going to connect I just kind of as long as it looked like it might connect then I figured it out later for example like this piece right here I stuck on the end of this cylinder and just kind of like assumed that I'd figure out a way to make it connect to the rest of the head and by just you know combining different pieces together eventually you know just kind of like finagle things into shape and it eventually works so you try to line things up as much as possible and just try to put things together in a way that looks looks possible or looks convincing but it doesn't have to be like 100% completely functional let's see I'll look through some of the comments William says this sounds really easy what's the catch honestly there's not a lot of catch like it takes time putting the pieces together but it's really not that difficult and I think that uh anybody can do it I think it's a perfect like beginner project too because it kind of forces you to like manage your scenes well and put everything in like collections that make sense and I'll show you a little bit of that later on I can see here I've had to like separate everything out into different parts here and so it it's a good beginner project because you don't really have to do that much modeling yourself a lot of it is just you know putting things together but you do have to know some things about like rotations and pivot points and the things that will get into it I mean it can't be that easy to keep bashing a complex mechanical thing together right well it actually kind of is yeah just give it a shot it's really not that hard nothing worth doing is easy this is true this is very true but the fact that it's easy means that you can spend more time on the actual design of the object and like the creative part of it and less time on the like things that just bog you down like the the technical modeling the topology things that would take like days you know now you can actually just do this very very quickly and so that's why you can get some really cool things because you can focus more on the creative side of things than the technical side and that's why I just had like a ton of fun with it nobody said that's why I'm here for to get an idea why Jonathan didn't use free kit bashing sets so I am in the next example I'm using only free stuff but for the blender market sale like I use stuff from the Wonder market because that's what the the task was but yeah either way is this the same crash e 2.8 version can to use last time hopefully not so far it hasn't crashed on me but we will see okay so let's take a look at some of the different sets that you can find online or at least the ones that I found if you found others then definitely link them in the chat I'd be curious to see but the ones that I got our first from the blender market this is the one that I used for the butterfly for pretty much all of the pieces and it's 14 bucks so for all that really not too bad but you can see that there's a decent amount of meshes 77 objects so pretty good amount not a ton but they're all like pretty good quality and then there's the Griebel pack as well so this has a ton of like little things that would be good for like sci-fi like spaceship type stuff that you can kind of slap on that's not really the style that I was going for or didn't really work super well so I didn't end up actually using this that much but that's an option then there's another collection of little parts these are pretty simple and I didn't end up using any of these I didn't really find any in particular that I loved but that's another option there's modular pipes and this one looks pretty darn sweet and also didn't end up using it but I do really like the idea of this one because pipes that can just like made to fit pretty much any shape is always really good and then there's this guy Andrew African on Gumroad and so this is a completely free or pay what you want hard surface pack that comes with quite a few objects 414 to be exact so this is a fantastic deal and so I'm using this in the next example and the mother lode of all of them is this guy Oleg a shinnok I don't know how to pronounce that but he has some really really good sets so some of them are free and some of them are paid so for example the free ones there's this hard service kit Bosch Volume one and it has so many models in it um just have a object count here no it doesn't but there's quite a few and then the other ones there's another free one this one's like ten bucks for four hundred and thirty objects and they're all like decently complex like they're they're collect compound objects so not just like some single ones but uh objects made of lots of different parts so this is a really really good set but the thing about these that are not blender specific is that it can take a while to like adapt them to blender because they're not using subdivision surfaces they're not using several modifiers right they're just a hundred percent just pure mesh so it's really really heavy on your seam and when you have hundreds and hundreds of objects things slow down quite a bit so one of the things that I wanted to show is just how I like managed that inside a blender because things can get really slow especially when you're trying to like undo stuff which you're going to have to do a lot when kid bashing so well link says links please yeah I have listed all these in the description below the video so you check those out there so if we look at the k-fashion set so these are the two like last free ones that I showed you and there's 7279 objects with 28 million tries so this is a lot of geometry and this is yeah so these are just the raw meshes that I got and you can see that they're really detailed if I go to or let me turn on the wireframe instead of going to wireframe view you can see that some of them are fairly simple but a lot of them are just really really dense and when you have you know hundreds of these things get very slow very very quickly but when you start out they're not all the same size of course so you have to take everything and then scale it down and then you need to apply the scale because for example this one all of the scales are different you can see it even just takes a while to select stuff these have a scale of 0.2 these have a scale of 0.02 point 0 to 7 right so it's kind of all over the place point 0 4 4 so you're going to want to apply the scale otherwise when you go and either like parent stuff to each other or if you want to apply procedural textures then everything can be all out of whack so you do want to apply the scale and one thing that you could do that I didn't do here is you could kind of like scale them I kind of made them all about the same general size but you could scale these smaller pieces down like there's some screw bolts over here and things like that uh you know it doesn't really make sense that these are as large as some of these other pieces there's like an entire foot here over on the right oh don't crash don't crash DOMA yeah it's uh it's pretty dense ok oh no ok well if it does crash what I was gonna say is that you could go ahead and oh if you scale down these screws and stuff to be there like you know relative size compared to everything else but it just makes it really hard to find so I didn't do that I just kept everything roughly the same size another thing when you're importing things from other programs especially hard surface assets a lot of them are going to have custom normals and I found that these I've already applied but over here in the object data under normals they're going to have this like custom split normal and you're gonna have to click clear on every single one and you can't do the like hold down alt and click to apply to all of them so that was a hassle so I ended up making a super simple script just to get all of the selected objects and then for all of the objects that are selected make one of them the active object and then clear that custom split normal move the next one clear that split normal so that way you don't have to go and click that seven thousand times that would be off so a super simple script to do any of that like to clean up stuff that you need to do will work really well I have a second version of this file here let's see that I made and this one I simplified using the decimate modifier which is pretty destructive and it it kind of like mmm it kind of messed with a lot of the topology a bit so things still look pretty decent in it it reduced the poly count by a lot remember this file here is like 28 million triangles and the next one is much less let's see I think it's like 13 million so it's like still a lot but the assets look about the same but some of the normals are a bit messed up some of the topology just because I used the decimate modifier inside this like loop in the script to basically cut all of the poly counts at half so it's a pretty like destructive not necessarily ideal thing but it made it so that it's much more usable why would you want to get the more complex ones wouldn't they limit your choices not necessarily because you could the complex objects are made up of multiple objects so you can still take them apart if you want okay yeah so you can see here this has 13 million tries and things still look about the same but you'll find a few areas where you might need to do like a little manual cleanup yeah along with the complex objects you'll see that they're still made up of individual objects right so you can still take this like side piece and just take it off and use that by itself so it's less like a hard and fast like this is the only way to build it and more just like possible combinations but each of these that make up the complex objects are like individual unique parts you can see here that this is one area where the normals kind of got you got screwed up a bit so if I was going to use this I'd have to do a little bit of cleanup but the trade-off for the cutting poly count at half is well worth it so the way that I did this is a little bit different than what I did in the first round with the butterfly because in that one I had all the parts in the same file as the actual object that I was making and that was fine because I didn't really have that many objects I had like 770 and that was great um but with this there's just too many and it slowed everything down now blender in the future is going to get an asset manager where you'll be able to actually see like a preview of these things and drag and drop them into your scene and that way you can manage you know thousands of objects and it'll all be fine but we don't have that yet and so we have to do things a little bit more manually and the solution that I came up with is just to do things in two separate files and that works really well so let me open up I started making a lion which was pretty fun hmm maybe there should be a blender black market yeah that'd be be interesting if there was a blender black market what would you put on there that's what I want to know is this all the volumes from Oleg ah sure knock or just the free one that was all of the free one so like two or three plus the other free one from Alex that I linked to so I didn't buy the other ones but if I was working on an actual like production project and needed it like I would do that hands down but yeah that was only like two or three of the packs of he has like five or six right so there's so many is there any hope at all maybe a small chance that the file would be available for download unfortunately not because from the butterfly those were paid assets that I can't give out for these they're free assets but also assets that I don't have permission to give out so sorry I can't okay so for this one I approach things a little bit differently than the other one so I don't have any of the Kip ash items in here I have them all in this other file and so what I do is I just make this window really small control space to only look at the 3d view and I would move this off to like my other monitor while I'm working and then I'd go through and as I'm you know looking for a particular piece I would go and say okay I think this one works really well then I hit ctrl C and this is super handy just copies it to the selection buffer then you can go to your other file hit control V and paste it right in now it's gonna paste it way over wherever the heck that went I was in it added it to an invisible collection okay let's move that up to scene collection and not make it the active collection okay so it's gonna add this like way over here but you can hit period on your number pad and zoom right to it do all the cleanup that you need if there is any a lot of these times I'm gonna take a bunch of the objects that make up like the larger objects and hit ctrl J to join them together but it doesn't look like I need to do that here and then I'm gonna hit alt G to bring that back to the center and so that it's right in the middle of my object so I'm making all of this like directly down the center line and I'm using an empty to mirror everything I didn't do that before with the butterfly I mirrored around this object and that's what I started to do initially you'll see if I grab this and move this that everything else is gonna shift and that was not a particularly smart move because if I need to change this object then I have to go through and change every single one of those as well so a better way to do that would be to actually just use this empty here I just select it there we go and that way you can manage things a little bit better see is there anything that's not mirrored nope not yet yeah so try to mirror around something like that instead of just the like any arbitrary object and another thing that I would do differently if I were doing it again was in the butterfly file I parented things to each other in order to like pose it and just kind of figured that I would just clear the rotation in order to change the pose let's see let's go to that file again wasn't something with GPL compliance for all the add-ons dude to do I think I'm missing the context for that um okay so for this butterfly what what I did at first which I thought was a good idea and then it turned out not to be is I rotated these objects into place and then I applied to the rotation and then you know rotated them to make the pose so that I can you know flap the wings in whatever and then hit alt are just to clear that rotation and this works pretty well but all of this stuff is just like parented to each other so there's no real rig and if I were doing this again I would want to make an actual rig and that's what I did end up doing eventually but this was turned out to be a hassle because I had forgotten to like apply this scale right and so now it's all applied but once you you know change the scale of an object or apply scale to this then it's gonna affect all of its children and so as soon as I tried to apply the scale everything just like blew up now there's so many like little things like that that is just not worth worrying about so in this particular file everything's just like parented and it it still works the main thing to look out for is that number one your pivot points are around the like correct points of rotation right so this we know is going to rotate around the screw so that's where I put the pivot point and then you can rotate around it there and also making sure that the local rotation is pointing in the right direction so it's not like pointing off to the side or whatever yeah but if I were doing this again I would definitely use an actual rig and then parents these individual objects to the bones in that rig and I think that would just save me a lot of time and that waking like redo things if I need to and not have a beak quite as much of a hassle and also it'd be easier to select the bones in pose mode then go through and like accidentally select that one nope not that one that like is just way too easy to select the wrong thing when you're working with just tons of objects so I definitely recommend making a rig in rigging mechanical things is pretty easy because you know where the point of rotation is and there's no bending there's none of that it's just you know parented directly to it and that's all you need to do another thing that was helpful when I was doing this was I made a collection instance of the wing instead of duplicating it over so instead of mirroring all the objects which I guess if you were making a rig you would want to do so that you could apply that on the other side but since I didn't make a rig what I did was just made the entire wing its own collection you can see that here and then hit shift a collection instance and then you can just choose any collection so let's make another it's make another head so you can do that and think just move this wherever and then when you make a change to one even in object mode you can see that it effects the instance of it so this was really handy and helped me to duplicate that wing over to the other side without really having to do a whole lot of work and you can of course mirror this right so and rotate it do whatever you need to but it's still going to update and since this is an instance it's very very fast and you don't get bogged down with duplicate geometry this would be a fun rig yeah yeah no this would be a fun rake it would not be too scary originally I had made this if I went through and like cleared all of these rotations for example like that and see that one you see everything is pretty flat so yeah I'd have to go through and actually remember which things were the main parents yeah you can see I made everything completely flat in line with the x y and z axes perfectly straight so that it's much more easy to build all of these things weren't built rotated they were built you know straight up and down you know like so but yeah so I would if are doing this again build everything completely straight not have a ton of all this like you know natural kind of form to it and build everything completely straight and mechanical and then go ahead and read it maybe add like a little bit just so that the bones don't like pop but for the most part keep it simple okay so let's go back to that lion and look at some more things yeah if you have any questions let me know in the chat be out for the rest of the stream I'm just going to try to work on this line as I would have normally and just kind of see where it goes so if there's anything in particular that you want to see let me know what I did get kind of stuck on before is I wasn't sure how to make the main because that's one of the most important parts but I just couldn't figure out the shape of it so I made like a block out object and even this I still might want to tweak a bit it's still a bit off but if you're not sure like what the actual shape of it is instead of trying to make it with like a bunch of tiny pieces make one big object that could just kind of like shows the overall volume of what you want to make and then you can go ahead and you know tweak this to get the right shape and then find pieces that fit this form and that way you can kind of like outline things first and then fill in the details about what I really want to do is to finish this up I need to find pieces that fit inside this nose here inside the head is a little bit empty and I'm not gonna worry too much about that except for the areas that were there's really big gaps like behind the eyes kind of needs to get filled in so that it doesn't look too Hollow and then I definitely need to add the mane and I haven't figured out whether I want to do that with like cables that might look really cool either cables or just more hard surface mesh I think that wouldn't look as like nice and flowy so let's try to go with cables and just kind like finish off this neck here and and tweak this as we go but again you'll notice that these things are just kind of like roughly fitted together and you know they they fit but not necessarily in ways that make you know logical sense for the mechanics of pieces so they are very truly bashed together nothing to finessed about it um but what I did first was just outlined the main shapes so before I got through all this detail what I did was I found a part that looked like a jaw and put that in this part looked like a bridge of a nose to me so I put that on the bridge of the nose made this around the eyes and just kind of put in you know the main pieces first and then filled in everything around it adjusting things as I go and try to get really true to the form of the animal this one is kind of tricky because it's it's a whole face it's really easy to make it look not quite real so I am using reference I'm using pure ref and bring that up here I have a feeling that this is exactly how most of the models for the transformer movies were made hundreds of parts combined but with no real need for accurate mechanical continuity yeah maybe I'm actually really not sure about that because I mean you have to start with a car and I would assume that they started I mean they obviously started with some car pieces your wheels and the steering wheels and all that different type stuff but I would have assumed that they modeled the engines and stuff as well and used those as like base parts so they may have had a few things in there or a lot of stuff in there that was just kind of like made up but I think all of the main pieces were from actual like functional components but the way that they fit together as a character obviously was kind of I don't know not quite as realistic obviously in is more just smashed together like this but I think the parts themselves were we're all car parts so it's kind of like an interesting mix but that'd be so much fun I would love to try to make a transformer at some point that would be super cool and I've seen it done so I know it's possible but yeah question did you have to model anything in particular or is it enough with the packs that you download so far I pretty much only used the downloaded packs at least for these two projects there hasn't been anything that I necessarily need that wasn't there excuse me but I've definitely like adjusted stuff all right so say I want to make like this plug longer then I'll just go through and and just pull it out and simple things like that where if I just need something be longer or shorter or you know adjust it in one way or another then it's pretty simple to do but I haven't made anything from scratch it's all been just using other people's stuff as a a real artist would do I suppose so I feel like I mean that definitely makes it like less impressive when you're like oh all of this is just like free crap from the internet smashed together it it makes it whole hopefully it makes it less intimidating for sure to try to make like if you haven't tried it before like definitely give it a shot because it's not that challenging now pure eff sounds like a good title for an addon bracha pure F raka I like it so right now I'm just looking for different pieces first I want to try to fill in this like gap in the eye we're just kind of like floating in space I want to connect that to the head a little bit and this is the part of process that like might take a while because I already have like the main pieces in place so all the big work I guess has been done but it's still exactly the same just on a different scale let's see so I'll try to take this piece right here it's all one piece ctrl-c ctrl-v and I'll stuck it in the other collection again dang it okay move that to the Lion make that the active collection alts G here we go and a lot of these will already have like rotations and stuff so you may want to control a and apply your rotations before putting things into place so that you can alt R and clear the rotations later in case you want to get back to the original state and same with a scale no control a apply scale can always be good but since I'm not like parenting anything I can do that all at once with these thankfully but if I was parenting that would be a massive headache so with this I want to take it and just kind of figure out how can you shove this into the eye hopefully in a way that looks decent what I really need is to make this connect like this way just kind of make a curve that goes around and forms that like inner part of the eye and comes out there I don't know if I showed you the sketch so I did make a sketch based on my references from the side and I've just been trying to fit everything into that and looking at the reference from the front and making sure that it's actually like fitting like the cheekbones and the mouth and things like that as much as possible so I didn't start with that sketch but now I just have it off most of the time question isn't the tricky part to make it your own like you can tell it's your style even though you use somebody else's git bash yeah for sure that is a very good challenge and frankly I couldn't tell you what my style is I guess I haven't done enough git bash is to have like a definitive this looks like it's made by me so I think that's a fantastic challenge I'm still not used to one or two point eight default of like when you hit the X&Y keys then it'll go to local rotation instead of global I still need to get used to that a bit more hmm I'm not really seeing it like I'm working this all around and I'm not seeing a good way to fit this in here so at that point I generally just hit alt R and far as ticket somewhere else like maybe up here imagine the maintenance that lion needs yeah he drinks a lot of oil it's uh pretty crazy okay so this seems to fit pretty well but it doesn't quite match up in place like it doesn't actually fit the pieces but the shape fits the form pretty well so I'll try to just kind of work with it until it gets in the right spot maybe I can place it underneath the other one as sort of an eyelid as you can see this is not like a very like exact technical process like this is sitting here and adjusting stuff 90% of the time so it's not it's not hard it just takes takes time takes some patience for sure but you can see here that I'm like messing with this but it just it just does not fit in a way that I like and so at that point I'll say okay let's try somewhere else alt our alt s give it another go maybe can fit because since this is a curve I can maybe fit on the side of the head where we need to curve the kind of the back of that jawbone up into the head and of course you don't need to use every piece so if it doesn't fit anywhere then you know you can just delete it and try another one no reason to get stuck on any particular piece I'm learning mathematics for mechanical engineering program et cetera nice Rita that's awesome that is a very valuable thing to learn I need to get back into math as well especially for programming and such I haven't needed it yet so far so I'm just doing like super basic stuff but I think that will definitely come in handy and so I'll be on the lookout for things like that okay so I'm kind of liking how this is is fitting let's see yeah it kind of is right in there I think that works pretty well and if not we can move it but then the the next step is just a mirror this and I've been using hard ops for mirroring just to do things super quickly so hit Q and mirror but I think right now it is broken I'd like this particular build a blender because this is the fresh one for today so I'll give it a shot but I think it's not working so what I would do is I'd select escape that select the object then select the empty here and that's right it was unselectable there we go select that then select the object that you want to mirror it around hit Q really what happened okay maybe because it's not mesh it doesn't want me to mirror it around it yeah so yeah I was doing this not that long ago okay well either way you can always just add a mirror modifier with the old-fashioned way use the eyedropper tool and call it good so I added the mirror modifier to my quick favorites so I can also get to it there so just find it in here and did you do whichever modifier you want it always takes me way too long to find a modifier you would have think I would have memorized it by now I would take a mirror and just right-click and assign it to your quick favourites then you just find it in your cue menu and if you have part office it's just at the bottom of the list and you can find it there so there we go someday I want to be a math professor nice that's awesome where it says US a lot of details a lot of work available of discipline and patience thank you I appreciate that but yeah it's definitely mostly patience right it's it's not particularly challenging it's just it's just being willing to sit there and tweak things for a couple hours but of course this is definitely the slowest part of the process is finding these like exact final pieces to fit in there at the beginning things go a lot faster it's probably a bit more exciting as well because you're finding those overall shapes and you're seeing you know what things have the right curvature to them and what things have the right you know form so finding like the last last few bits might be a little bit more boring but that's okay I'll take this piece ctrl-c and ctrl-v to paste alts G ctrl a apply that scale and rotation and you'll see for whatever weird reason the rotation is like way off when you paste stuff in and that's because it's like averaging the previous active object and this one just very odd but if you just click off of it and click back again then you'll get the correct rotation so since this is a pretty blocky piece I just want it to fill in some of that void inside the head that also sounds like a good song name boyd inside the head you can see here as I'm getting up in objects right now I have about three million tries and 42 objects so not a ton but still quite a few and it's starting to take longer longer to do undos and things like that so you can only imagine if I had all of those like thousands of objects here just be absolutely a nightmare I'm definitely using the period on the number pad quite a bit to make sure that I zoom to my object and can like rotate around it hmmm even here there's like not that much room in head all these are kind of like weird shapes that need to fill in okay so let me alt G and Pulte are and I do need a block shape right around here in the back let's try that and this is kind of funny this is the exact same shape that I used on the front but maybe no one will notice and that is true with the butterfly I used the same piece so many times and as long as you kind of vary things up a little bit it turns out fine it's not it's not too big of an issue and this one has C it has some normal problems that it looks like actually fixed on this one so I may as well just duplicate this one I'll use shift D instead of alt D rotate that 180 degrees scale it down it's already got that mirror modifier so it should just work filling that gap here pull it out along the x math is hard to understand if you professor can't explain it well great professors are valuable this is super true a the right math teacher can make a huge difference that's definitely been true of when I was in school I had some good math teachers and some bad ones and the good ones made like all the difference in the world Fang zero 104 six and you two would be very jealous I'd I don't know who that is should I look him up what does he do I'd be crazy if he does stuff like this and I'd probably watch it okay so once you got a piece there then apparently you tweaked it for about 30 more minutes and then move on to the next one those pieces are not topology friendly how would you go about texturing if there are no you v's retopo the whole thing that would be a massive pain in the butt and it would be horrible so one of these actually do have simple UVs if we go to one let's go to UV editing a lot of them are unwrapped but you can see that they're not the best unwrapped but they they are they do come unwrapped however if they don't then what you can do is use take away your seams so if you're using hard opps and you have things like your s sharpen and c sharpen and you have at least the shading looking okay then what you can do is use those sharp edges and select them all in edit mode and then set those as seams then use those seams as your unwrap and then use an addon like shot packer or something to get a better more dense pack than you would get from blenders default and that would be like the quick and dirty way to do it and it wouldn't be like a great unwrap in the sense that like it would be pretty like messy you'd have things all over the place but it would so any work it would definitely do the job that's problem with unwrapping hard surface things though is like no matter what you're gonna have a ton of seams anyway so yeah it's kind of a kind of trade-off whether you want to spend all that time or whether you want to just get it done quickly I was a mechanical engineer and highly prolific creator in YouTube he has thousands of videos he makes one to do almost every day holy cow that's pretty insane I really admire people who can like just make that much stuff it boggles my mind honestly I've been trying to do a few more like just make more videos in the sense of like speed up my production time but I can't imagine doing one every single day that would be insane I don't know how they do it but I guess if you know he's made that many then you certainly got his process down by now I would assume okay so this guy I'm looking for more of those like blocky spots apply my scale and rotation rotate this over and let's try putting this on the back of the neck also yeah I don't know if you guys know this or if you guys use this or not and it took me a while to find actually but if you hold ctrl and use your number pad it'll do the opposite of the like normal so one is front of you holding ctrl is back view so that is quite nice but also if you hold like shift then you can do local top in front view alright so everything is local to this object looks like shift one shift 3 pretty useful this looks like it could fit pretty well right in here maybe hmm that angle doesn't look like it would work very well bummer it could go inside of here though or if I do that kind of fits right in here okay so I filled one gap and basically that's the process is taking each of these pieces and just outlining two major forms then filling in the details at this point I really don't have that much else to share at least I can't think of anything let me run through my notes really quick but we talked about already where to find some of these kits the fact that they're not really optimized for blender unless the ones in the blender market are I looked for the ones on blend swap but they like theirs weren't any so they're pretty pretty tricky to find and the reason that is helpful to have them optimized for blender specifically is that again these scenes get really really dense and so if they're using modifiers like subdivision surface modifier or the bevel modifier instead of pure geometry then you can turn all of those off in the viewport and still have them show up in the render so you can go ahead and simplify your scenes and that's something that's super handy you can find it in the render setting under simplify and you can limit your amount of subdivision surfaces in the viewport or in the render and so that's what I did with the butterfly just to you know cut down my my viewport lag and also if you're using the bevel modifier then you can just apply a different number of cuts to the or turn it off all together if you want but apply just very few cuts for the viewport or a lot of cuts for the final render so having things specific to blender is really helpful so all that to say if you feel the itch to make a bunch of mechanical parts and you want to put them online I think it would go very well for you because there's not a ton of good ones out there if you find more let me know that'd be cool Omar you are a math genius uses Adobe inventor instead of AutoCAD free cadiz open-source alternative to AutoCAD I think you can use it with blender hmm interesting I'd have to take a look at that because I've never really used CAD software all that much here's kickback kit Bash from typo let's see let's check it out oh I think this is uh I think this is this one by Andrew African so I think I'm already using this one oh wait for Oh kid ops inserts for blender 2.8 oh maybe I should actually watch the video instead of uh just assuming but yeah it actually looks like the same parts um but maybe made for blender well that's cool Oh downloads it right away that's interesting whoo this is risky should I should I open it alright let's save it but it'll is using kit ops and I don't have kit ops so I can't actually show the how this works but yeah it actually looks like the exact same parts you can see that this piece right here that he's using in the end is saying that I'm using forward the ear so it's the same pack but uh made for kit ops which is cool Oh kit ops looks pretty neat I haven't really checked it out or used it much but I think I should the question will Eevee hold up if you start applying metal materials to the lion Eevee actually works pretty well I'm using it for just like general previz for this and I have started applying metal materials but I haven't really done that much with lighting or anything like that I think it cool just like your dark shiny vibe with like lots of rim lighting I think would look best just a general HDR without that much shadows doesn't look super great BBC takes a little bit of time to load but once it does it's super fast and looks pretty good you could change your HDR and I recently added a few new ones to these in the Preferences which has been kind of fun I just all from HDRI Haven none of my actual own yeah Eevee works pretty well so it it holds up but as you can see it like it's gonna take some lighting to make it look really cool because this by itself it actually kind of flat and you know it's missing a lot of those like inside shadows cycles as well is what I'll use for like the final render just to get all of those like little reflections and stuff just right if I can see it it's gonna take some time to load up but once it does then it'll be pretty darn fast tae-bo says kid ops is convenient but I don't find it outstanding so far I use it more like an advanced asset manager okay okay yeah I'm really looking forward to the official blender asset manager I think that'll be pretty awesome assuming that it works works great yeah I think that's it if there are no other questions then that's all I have to share hopefully you learn something other than the fact well if nothing else hopefully you learned that this is actually pretty easy to make very complex looking stuff you just need to get the parts to make sure that your rotations are in order and just spend a lot of time tweaking but beyond that it's really not too challenging yeah definitely make your own pieces I would encourage you to do so and maybe I'll try to do that as well and share that with you guys at them that'd be a pretty fun be fun challenge hmm I'll have to think about that yeah until then have fun with one or two point eight and I really want to see if you do end up making something from this and you download these packs or a different pack and you make a cool animal or whatever let me know in the chat what you'd want to make and I definitely want to see that in the blender community or on Twitter Instagram tag me in something that like you make and I will be super happy just to see it because I think it just is such a cool style it like it looks really cool and just hits all the the fun fun like visual interesting things without really being too difficult so thanks for watching and I'll see you again mmm actually yeah next week we're doing a stream on art critiques so if you have anything ready go look in that and post your work and we'll kind canted myself we'll take a look at it should be super fun so have a good one and I'll see you later

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 46,145

Keywords: blender, tutorial, hard surface, hardops, mesh, modeling, addon, models, mechanical, steampunk, creature, design, sci-fi, mech, robot, transformer, transformers, beginner

Id: Dp8dDQdWA0g

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019