Hard Surface TUTORIAL in Blender - Mechanical Joint

today we're going to be doing a bit of hard Ops box cutter and mesh machine magic this one's going to be a super fun modeling exercise so let's hop right into it now before we start this you do need to have a slight foundation for blender so if you're brand new go to our website and take our hard surface model in jumpstart course on blunderbrows.com jumpstart that'll get you up to speed with blender and also if you're familiar with hard Ops and box cutter and mesh machine I'd recommend taking our sci-fi terminal design course that one is free as well and then I'll get you up to speed with the add-ons so what we're going to go ahead and do is take this Cube and we're going to scale it so s y and then two scale it by two and let's see I want to press the D key and we're going to go into the n-gon cutter here so basically what I can do is I can click I can cut down like this actually let me get that a little bit closer I'm going to cut from right here and then I'm going to cut down at an angle and then over and then down at an angle again and I'm not worried about this side I can just double click because what I'm going to do now is press alt X and then what we're going to do is click on this button to mirror to the other side so just like that and maybe what I'll do is press G and then Y and you're going to see the mirror kind of works it's magic I'm going to move this over just a bit right to about there and then what I'm going to do is apply that mirror modifier so actually let's go ahead and apply the Boolean and then we'll apply the mirror modifier here as well alternatively you could just press Q operations and then smart apply and that'll do the same thing cool so we have this basic structure now what I'd like to do is take this um Edge right here and Ctrl B now we're going to do it to the other side as well but a really easy way to get it to the other side without having to physically select it is you can just do one side and then with mesh machine you can press alt X and then just do a symmetry to the other side like that really cool stuff now what I would like to do is I'd like to re-center the origin point on that 3D cursor so let's right click set origin to 3D cursor and now when I symmetrize it won't make that it won't move it so just like that cool so now we have this really simple interesting structure and what I want to do is make this look a little bit more Dynamic now the way we do this is by introducing bevels so anytime you have a hard like angular model like this it's always a good idea to introduce some bevels it's going to make it look softer and more visually appealing so I'm going to go into Edge mode and by the way I am using the free Machine Tools add-on to go in and out of edit mode it's a lot quicker so you can get machine tools for free on a gumroad so I'm going to press Tab and then go into Edge mode first let's select these two edges and bevel them we'll introduce a few segments here like that and then right here I'm going to Bevel it and then right here I'm going to Bevel it as well and then here I'm going to go ahead and bevel these not too big something like that and then alt X to symmetrize to the other side and now we have this you know cool looking piece right here now next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to Bevel these edges right here so Ctrl B you can bevel that and then alt X to symmetrize to that side as well and now we have this interesting looking piece so pretty cool stuff you can see how much better it looks by just introducing those bevels and by the way I'd highly recommend turning on the cavity feature it's going to highlight those edges and make the model look a lot more appealing to the eye so now what I want to do is I want to go ahead and go into side view and what I'm going to take is the n-gon cutter and I'm just going to cut down kind of like this maybe here to here and then double click so now we kind of have this effect and then I'm just going to go ahead and ALT X to mirror that to the other side and in case you're wondering the reason I didn't use the let me cut this in again the reason I didn't use the mesh machine symmetry here is because it won't work let me show you if I try to symmetrize it doesn't do anything and that's because mesh machine symmetry works on the real geometry right now this geometry is not real until we apply it so if I apply the Boolean then I can use mesh machine symmetry no problem but until this Boolean is applied I have to go non-destructively by using a regular mirror modifier so in case you're wondering that's the main difference symmetry is for when your balloons are applied and mirror is for when either either or when your booleans are applied or when your booleans aren't applied so hope that makes sense either one's totally fine and then I'm going to press q and go to ever scroll I want to move this back just a little bit right to about there scale this a bit on the X so it doesn't do that so right to about there should be fine and then let's just go ahead and apply the Boolean and since we have a mirror modifier whenever I make a change over here it's going to mirror to the other side which is cool now I want to Bevel this but notice it doesn't work and that's because this Edge right here is in the way so what I'm basically going to do is I'm just going to take this vertex and then merge it here with Machine Tools you can press the one key then we'll just do a symmetry this way and then a symmetry this way and now I should be able to Bevel this up until it hits this Edge right here so we'll just stop right about right about there should be fine and now we have this nice looking bevel on this area as well so so far so good really liking how this thing looks now what I'd like to do is make this kind of look a bit more mechanical like it could be a piece and what I'm kind of envisioning here guys is maybe this piece like attaches to some sort of you know um engineering piece some sort of mechanical piece whatever it may be I kind of want to give that impression that this thing screws into something it's some sort of you know joint or mechanical piece what I'm going to do is press shift a we're going to add in a cylinder and it goes 64 vertices okay I'm going to press q and then sharpen and all I want to do here is just rotate this to the same angle as this Edge so r x 45 actually RX negative 45 like that and then what I'm going to do is scale this in side view and just more or less kind of line it up right here you can press s z z to scale it on the local axis and basically I'm just trying to get this right around here maybe gzz kind of kind of move that out it looks good and this is where mesh machine is about to come in handy now normally what I'm about to show you is much more suitable for CAD because CAD isn't going to give you any sort of headaches when you try to Bevel because CAD doesn't use polygons to define the mesh but with mesh machine you can basically get the same exact workflow as CAD inside of blender so you know their strengths and weaknesses to both but I think blender is by far the most efficient workflow for the work I do so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to Union this piece to this piece so we'll shift click on both q booleans and then Union and now what I want to do is I want to add a bevel between these two pieces but right now I can't and that's because I need to apply this Boolean so I have access to that geometry so let's go into Edge mode we're going to alt click these edges but you're going to see it actually doesn't select around like I want it to so this is where mesh machine comes in handy I can select one Edge alt click that edge again and it'll know exactly where to select now what I want to do is I want to introduce a bevel here but you're going to see the bevel starts overlapping and going crazy now I could technically turn off the loop slide feature but it doesn't do anything in this case so this is a really good situation to use the offset cut feature so I'm going to press y offset cut and if you don't see that feature just go into your mesh machine preferences mesh machine and then we're going to go down here turn on the experimental feature right here otherwise you won't see this menu and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to tweak this width a little bit maybe to about here don't go too far otherwise it's going to hit that top Edge so let's bevel right here and now you're going to see we have this really nice Fusion between the mesh the main mesh and this um little cylinder looks really good now I'd like to pull this face up just a bit more but you're going to see it doesn't it doesn't work so what we're going to do is go up here add a new transform orientation and now if I press G and Z it'll move along those normals so very clean very easy and then maybe what we could do is introduce a chamfer here on the top that's pretty cool and this is why I'm keeping the mirror in the stack because anything anything I change here gets applied to the other side as well so this is looking very good so at this point what I want to do is clean up a little bit of these shading artifacts you probably can't see them with YouTube's compression this is why if you use CAD for example you wouldn't have these issues but with polygons you are going to have these shading artifacts and that's because these faces are n-gons one two three four five six vertices and you know so on so anytime we have n-gons on a curved surface we're going to get these nasty shading errors so we're going to do is Select an edge and then alt click that same Edge tab into vertex mode and with mesh machine we can use the Boolean cleanup feature so I'm going to press y Boolean cleanup and I'm just going to move my mouse now you can scroll up but I want to use the one that doesn't affect the curvature I'm going to scroll up again I only want to affect these edges down here so basically I don't want these edges on the cylinder to move so once all these dots are green we can click and now you're going to see what it's basically done is it's submerged those together into triangles so technically the shading issues are only going to be in here but they're so small we can't even see them and now you're going to see the shading is absolutely perfect around the cylinder no issues and the same is going to go for this portion right here let's go ahead and same thing we'll go into vertex mode Boolean cleanup and this time I can't really use I don't want to use either one to be honest so maybe what we'll do in this in this portion I just kind of merge these manually just go here and just kind of merge these into into triangles that's fine and then Symmetry and then symmetry again and now you're going to see the shading is absolutely perfect now we do have a little bit of a shading error right here that's no problem all we need to do is add in a weighted normal modifier and turn on the keep sharp option since we don't have any bevels introduced it's going to be a good idea to turn on the keep sharp option until we do if we do introduce bevels to the mesh so hope you're following along so far shouldn't be too difficult just a lot of different operations that are quite useful when you're modeling so now you can see the shading is absolutely perfect on this model even though it was a little bit messy before and also I forgot to do down here as well so don't forget about these pieces and I'll make sure you're not sliding these edges because these edges are the ones that are going to have bad shading issues we want to move these instead these interior ones so I'm just going to kind of merge these real quick and that should remove those end guns so we had an end gone here one two three four five but once I merge this here now it's one two three four and the shading is going to be fine so alt X and then alt X again and now the shading is um absolutely Flawless very good cool so so far so good now what I'd like to do is I would like to maybe cut a hole in here so let me dissolve out this Edge go into face mode and I'm just going to inset this face and then inset it again and then we'll press G and then Z make sure you're still in that custom orientation we added G and then Z and kind of move that down maybe we could bevel this a little bit maybe we could bevel these as well just make it a bit softer and then what I would like to do here is I like to cut a Boolean through this hole so I'm going to press Q booleans and then selectionable in what this will do is it will take this face separate it and set it and then extrude it as a Boolean so watch this I click it I move my mouse in a little bit I click and then it adds a Boolean very very easy this is why I recommend hardop so much because if I wasn't using that tool then I'd have to duplicate it and then I'd have to separate it and then I'd have to inset it you know and then it'd have to invert the selection this is just it's just way longer than using the tools that get the job done quicker and that's why I'm such a big proponent of them so you could do all this in vanilla of course it's just a waste of your valuable time so we're going to go ahead and like I said selection of Boolean and just like that we're done and check this out I'm going to show you a really cool trick here let's go ahead and apply this solidify operation that was added and what I'm going to do is take this face and move that down a bit and if I press q and then control click on Mark what this will do is add in a bevel in the inverted Direction which is going to basically add in a chamfer on the mesh now sometimes when I use that operation my cavity option turns off I don't know if that's a bug but I'm just going to go ahead and turn that back on and now as you can see we have a really clean you know hole going through that now one thing I do want to mention notice these really hard kind of like gray edges right here that's because we actually have sharp smart so to fix that what we can do is recalculate the sharp so I'm going to press Q Ctrl shift click on sharpen and then basically what that's going to do is it's going to recalculate only add the sharps on the actual sharp edges since we added in a bevel these are no longer sharp so recalculating them remove them pretty cool stuff and then I'm just going to go ahead and I guess we could apply this Boolean as a matter of fact I'll just smart apply everything operations smart apply and then maybe in here what I'll do is let me press um let me sharpen it again I noticed this Edge wasn't sharpened so Q sharpen there we go and then on the inside what I like to do is add in a loop cut so Ctrl r right click and then I'm just going to Bevel this loop with Ctrl B scroll down a bit and then I'm going to press e to extrude right click to cancel and then alt s to scale along the normals here and then maybe what I could do is introduce like one more little chamfer right here maybe some bevels here let's just go ahead and sharpen the mesh and now we kind of have this cool you know attachment or whatever and let's go ahead and symmetrize to the other side as well so this thing is looking really nice really clean and at this point it might actually be a good idea to introduce some more small elements some more like secondary or tertiary level elements so maybe what we could do is we could press a d go into Circle cutter I'll give this 64 vertices and maybe here we could add in like a like a little bolt or something so cut into there maybe a little bit smaller than that and then we'll press Q ever scroll and control click on the face not sure why this is not catching maybe we need to go into the auto smooth panel and set this to 30 instead of 60. for whatever reason hardops defaults this to 60 but I think 30 is a better value to catch those edges and then at this point what we're going to do is we're going to mirror alt X and then mirror again we're not using symmetry because I haven't yet applied that Boolean so we'll just use a mirror operation instead cool and then at this point um you know you could introduce some like like a bolt inside of here something cool but I honestly like how this thing looks just as it is and then finally what we could do here is maybe tab into Edge mode we'll alt click these back edges or select the edge and then alt click the same Edge and then here what we could do is add in a small chamfer here in the back chamfers always Elevate the aesthetic of that mechanical design I love using chamfers for that reason and now we can kind of Imagine like hey maybe this piece is like maybe in some sort of like engineering context maybe this piece attaches to something to the back and you know this could be any sort of engineering piece and that's kind of the workflow I would use to create it very very straightforward stuff now what I'd like to do just quickly show you how to add in some cool materials and things like that this part's optional but I think you'll have fun with this one so you might as well check it out so we're going to go into look Dev mode and I'm just going to change my hdri I use the abandoned slipway hdri from polyhaven.com you can import your own custom hdri's here by going to the settings menu and go into install and like I said you can get the abandoned slipway hdri for free on polyhaven.com I don't like the ones blender has by default so we're going to go here it's going to be a bit more flat lighting and maybe what we could do is add in a material we already have one we're going to go to metallic make this metal and then what I'm going to do is maybe make this a little bit less rough maybe a little bit darker pretty pretty cool stuff right and then check this out what we could also do to make this look even more realistic is if you look at metal you'll notice metal has these really tiny like bumps and scratches that go on it and you can imitate this effect here in blender by going into the Shader editor and what we can do is we can add in a texture noise texture we're going to connect this here to the normal value so to do that we have to add in a bump node Vector bump we're going to connect the factor here to the height and the normal here to the normal and it's going to go crazy once this loads up but that's because we need to make the scale like 5000 or something and also what we need to do here is we need to make sure that the strength is set to like 0.1 needs to be very very low so like point one should be fine and then if I zoom in you're going to see these very small surface imperfections on the on the mesh you see the difference here we could even try like 2 000 maybe depends how you know how big you want those bumps to be and you can maybe even make the strength like 0.2 but notice this thing is just going to look a lot more natural when we do something like that just here's the before here's the after it's very subtle but it does look look good so we're gonna do that and then maybe what we could also do is um add in a small bevel so Q bevel just a very small bevel there on the edge you could also use the um bevel node so instead of using a bevel modifier you could just connect up a bevel node here just wait for that to load in and you won't be able to see that until you actually go into Cycles Render and then that bevel should actually show up set this to like 0.01 but in this case we can get away with just using a regular you know bevel modifier it does the same thing essentially and now we have these really nice Edge highlights see what I mean just a very small bevel on that and you know one more thing we could do here is maybe add in a small decal or trim sheet effect now check this out if you have decal machine what you could do is maybe grab you know a decal here for example we could scale it in rotate it and basically what this is going to do is it's just going to give this give us this really subtle kind of like um you can kind of Imagine maybe someone manufactured this piece so maybe put the alpha value down to like 0.2 and then we don't really know what this says but it kind of gives the idea that maybe this is manufactured and there's some branding on here which is pretty pretty cool stuff another thing we could do check this out this is really really awesome so what we could do is maybe select these edges press Y and then offset them with mesh machine we'll scroll up just give a very small offset here and then maybe what we could do is alt click on these faces and introduce a trim sheet so we have a massive trim sheet pack available on our website it has over 12 trim sheets and 400 decals so if you want to pick that up it's a really really good pack I use it in pretty much all of my projects so I'll link that in the description as well but basically you could grab you know one of our blender Bros trims here from the pack alt click on the on the trim and maybe you could introduce like some sort of subtle like effect here on the edge so I can just kind of control scroll until I find a detail I like maybe something like this now we kind of have these cool effects going around without having to actually model that it's so powerful so and they could do stuff like that maybe even around here we could introduce a loop let's press um GG and then usually you can flip it with the F key but maybe here I'll just go ahead and offset that and we'll add in one more trim sheet on this portion as well so let's go to the trim three again it's my favorite one and then I can just add in like a small little detail around there or maybe even like one of these for example and then you just kind of have these really subtle effects without having to model them in so like I said that packs available on our website if you want to pick it up super useful stuff and it is compatible with the decal machine as well so that's really it guys that is how you model a simple piece like this not too complicated this is why I use add-ons like mesh machine because it really helps us with those bevels and you know fixing the offsets and shading issues and things like that so I would highly recommend you pick up mesh machine as well as the hard Ops and box cutter bundle and as always I link those in the description as well those are the only tools I'm really using for modeling so I hope this video was valuable and again if you want a little bit more experience and practice with hard Ops and box cutter take our free terminal design course over on our website that'll go a little bit more in depth in the different modeling techniques and things like that so that's it for this video thanks a bunch for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 31,430

Keywords: blender tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial blender, blender 3d, blender beginner, blender donut, blender, blender hard ops, blender boxcutter, blender mesh machine, mesh machine, hard ops, boxcutter, blender modeling tutorial, blender hard surface, hard surface modeling, blender cad, mesh machine tutorial, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, 3d modeling, blender guru, blender bros

Id: G9U109kzUWo

Length: 23min 19sec (1399 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023