We will begin modeling few simple bolts and screw heads. This screw head, is made of a circular shape connected to the six flat facets. We start with a cylinder. Then add a number of
segments using the connect tool, that should be
enough for the circular shape in the center. We removed the edges in the center in order for
the GeoPoly tool in the ribbon to function. Now, after we have the circle shape, we can
delete all identical sides and use instancing with
the array tool. We can also use symmetry to make it even easier
to model the form. We need to weld the vertices before we
subdivide the mesh. You can see now, that we only need to control
few vertices to modify the whole shape. We are now close to the final form, but we just
need to prepare it for smoothing. We can attach all sides now, and weld the
vertices so when we subdivide, the circular top
can keep its form. When we applied auto smoothing groups, you
might have noticed that the circular top is now
smooth, since it's now the same smoothing group as the
polygons surrounding it. We can quickly correct this by assigning a
different smoothing group. Now the circular top has a different smoothing
group which can be used for subdivision. You can see how subdividing with smoothing
groups on will keep the form intact. When subdividing without smoothing groups
ticked, you get the standard smooth subdivision
you'd normally expect. Adding the number of iterations with smoothing
groups on, will add more edge loops and
preserve the form. So that when you add another turbosmooth
modifier, with smoothing groups off; You will see that you get the desired look. This method is usually called the double smooth
technique. The number of iterations you have with
smoothing groups on, will determine how sharp
or soft your final mesh will be. Now let's try to disable subdiving with smoothing
groups, and to experiment with the standard
method of support loops. The standard technique is simply adding support
loops manually to control the subdivision
outcome. Adding Support loops is an absolutely essential
skill, using smoothing groups is only a sort of trick
to speed things up. But as you see here, we need more segments
around the corners to make it sharper Adding them at this stage could deform the
circular form and be a little harder to refine than
using smoothing groups. Ok, back to using smoothing groups. Alternatively we can simply be flexible. And use a combination of smoothing groups and
support loops. You can see here how freely we
can add support loops or use smoothing groups. You should feel free to experiment with any
modeling method. There are no set rules. We will start with another simple screw head.
Hopefully demonstrating some different
techniques. We will use symmetry multiple times to speed up
the process. With symmetry you are not
restricted to the X,Y or Z axis. Click on the symmetry modifier to pick the gizmo
and then rotate it. Now we have a nice topology that we could use
in 3D modeling the details later on. We collapsed the mesh and discarded the
symmetry modifiers because it will be easier to
extrude and modifiy the mesh as a whole Doing an insert will save the effort of adding a
support loop Add few more support loops and it's done! This is the last bolt or screw head we will be
doing, but there is a small point we wanted to
show. Namely, that you should always try to separate
meshes when you could. In similar fashion to
what we will do with this mesh. Using Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown will grow
or shrink your selection. Hit Shift+E to extrude Making good use of the fact that I have a natural
seam in my mesh, I could create a new object
instead of trying to make one continuous object. Notice that we were very careful in choosing the
number of segments from the cylinder we
created. Using "Shift" when scaling, moving or rotating will
extrude your edges. Similar to the GeoPoly tool in the ribbon which
operates on polygons The curvature circle tools inside loop tools can
make circular edges. Here we again used the double smooth method,
adding two turbosmooth modifiers, one with
smoothing groups on and the other off. Swiftloop tool, has many useful features. After you've created your edge loop, hitting
"Ctrl+Alt" and selecting the edge loop will snap it
to the closest loop and "straighten it out" If you hover your mouse over it, you can learn
more and try them out You could select your edge loop and do a
chamfer tool from editable poly Or for more control you could add a complete
chamfer modifier This object, is a little more complicated than all the
previous ones, but is somewhat on the angular
side of things. We will use the same tools we have been using
so far. you can use the auto smooth button to quickly
create hard edges where you need them. Using edge constraints is very useful and can
preserve the mesh form. Double checking the smoothing groups are
correct. A support loop here could help smooth the
topology. Straighten corners option will give a slightly
different result. After applying the shell modifier we will most
likely have to do a lot of corrections. Because we are using the smoothing groups
feature, we would need to reapply it to the newly
created polygons from the shell modifier. These artifacts are a result of smoothing groups
not matching up between the edges. They can be fixed by adding support loops or
changing the smoothing groups of the shell
polygons We can always use boolean or shape merge
operations for detailing, but we need to be
careful about the process. A simple vertices weld operation can sometimes
help optimize the number of vertices. But in this occasion it didn't work out. Doing an insert with "zero" value then scaling the
polygons adds an edge loop which can be easily
selected to chamfer later on. Using smoothing groups is very similar to
Opensubdiv, but we just prefer it because it's
simpler to use. And see close results to the final version
immediately without even subdividing. But please feel free to experiment on your own. We will leave you with this final form model
where we use all of the techniques we have
shown so far. Thank you for watching.
