Hard surface organic shapes in Blender with lattice

so one thing i notice a lot of people struggle with in blender is developing more organic forms especially in hard surface modeling i'm going to show you a few tricks that'll really help you get those smoother more natural looking forms while still having a hard surface mesh so this involves the use of lattice and lattice can be tricky but it's actually really easy to use once you understand how to combine geo with the lattice so i'm just going to do some very basic types of organic forms here and just kind of show you so maybe we'll start with the cube here the hardest of hard surface objects i suppose and we're just going to make it you know what this will probably be okay all right so let's say i come in here and just kind of make a boolean cut maybe like i don't know like this i'm just kind of doing it sloppy and just getting something that works and then maybe we'll extend this back piece a bit and put it to let's go right to about here cool and then maybe what we'll do is let's extend this over just a bit more okay cool so we can actually make this thing look a lot more interesting and organic simply using a bit of lattice manipulation so let me take these edges right here and bevel them as well you don't have to do this i'm just trying to make this thing look a bit more entertaining and you know what maybe we'll do a little champ for here on the top so we have this really basic hard surface looking object and we'll just drop a bevel as well because i absolutely love bevels and make sure heart of normals is turned on okay cool so if we go into hard ops we're gonna go to add modifier and then lattice just because it's quicker and in vanilla blender you have to like manually scale it so it encapsulates that piece to a longer process so i'm just going to use hard ops to do it for me so i'm just going to increase the lattice resolution to about 2 on the y now you want to be careful when you increase these lattices because if you go well i'll show you in a second but if you do too many you can only manipulate very small portions of your mesh and you'll see why in a second so this one's pretty long so maybe i'll give this like two segments on the y-axis and in this case if i want to you know only manipulate down up and down on the z then this y is going to be constrained or the the movement is going to be constrained up to this edge right here so check this out i could actually take these two vertices on the lattice and just kind of move this down but you're going to see it doesn't do much it kind of moves down the entire thing this is where you have to start manipulating the actual geometry on your base mesh so check this out the reason the entire thing is moving is because this is a very low poly model there's no additional geo for the lattice to work with all the lattice can work with is the geo over here and the geo around these bevels so what we need to actually do in this case is increase the amount of geometry so that way there's more for blender to manipulate and the easiest possible way to do that and i'll hide the lattice is to simply come in here and maybe we'll just um dice this a bit on the y-axis and just kind of make this a bit higher resolution now it's going to start impeding a bit on the bevel back here so what i think i'm just going to do is manually dissolve it out like that we don't need to be too picky with how this looks we just want to have a bit more geo for the lattice to work with then maybe on here we'll make these roughly square like that anyways now blender is going to be able to manipulate a lot more geometry than we were able to do before and that's precisely what we what we want so in the lattice we can now try again and you're going to see we can actually bend this a lot better because it has more geometry to manipulate see that and that's exactly what we want so you could make really boring hard surface objects go into really natural organic shapes and just a few steps like i just showed you so you can maybe move this down super easy we have an artifact right here let me just move that out of the way got to be careful those artifacts and then maybe what i could do is you know come over here on this and you know kind of bend this down and this is how you can get those nice smooth organic shapes now um one issue which i mentioned just a little bit ago is if you go too high on the resolution then you're barely going to be able to manipulate the you know the main form now if i have all these segments i can only manipulate up to this part right here so i have very limited control as compared if i have only a few of these lattice segments so you can use more lattice segments to manipulate the form as long as you're doing it with reason usually i keep the lattice very low poly so i can manipulate more areas of my base mesh so you can just kind of come in here you know play with this maybe what i could do is drop an additional segment on the x and then kind of play with this area we could scale this on the x a bit kind of make it bend that way and then maybe we could come in here and you know play with this area a bit it's really cool and then maybe we could even increase the z by one and just kind of see how much more control that'll give us probably not too much but you know you can do all sorts of cool looking things you get the exact shape that um that you want so that's really all i wanted to show you here a lot of people like getting these organic shapes but oftentimes um struggle doing that when in reality it's not too difficult you just have to kind of tweak the segments here and you know just have fun with it so basically the important part is low resolution lattice and higher resolution model then you're going to be able to get these really nice organic shapes without having massive shading errors or weird deformations going on so as long as you have ample geometry you're set that's all you have to do so that's about it for this video quick one wanted to show you how you could maybe implement this into your workflow it's really cool so thanks a bunch guys and if you haven't joined yet check out our patreon we have a lot of cool stuff on there coming in may we have this awesome mech arm design coming out we're going to show you the entire modeling process rendering process pretty much a to z so check that out if you're interested see in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 29,188

Keywords: blender, organic, shapes, hard, surface, modeling, boolean, bend, round, subsurf, subd, subdivision, modifier, tutorial, easy, 3d, lattice, bending, hardops, boxcutter, beginner, bevel

Id: 2ETpyh2TWD0

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021