HardOPs and Boxcutter - BEGINNERS TUTORIAL for Blender

hi guys SRI here from blender Bros and in this video we're gonna talk about how you can easily start with hard Ops and box cutter add-ons let's go so the first question usually I hear is like should I get hard elves or should I get box cutter well you should get the bundle because technically it's one add-on it just comes with two files okay so think about it as one add-on don't think about it as box cutter and hard Ops you really want them both because they just it just makes sense okay they work so well together and there's so many intertwined tools you don't want to separate them now there's a link in the video description so if you don't have them just go ahead and buy them and also we have a fantastic course that will help you to go a bit deeper into the add-on workflow it's called sci-fi terminal design in blender and we use hardops box cutter and machine pulls over there it's free go ahead and grab it like I said Link in the video description so in this video we're going to be talking about the very basics of hard ups and box cutter and we're gonna talk about installation first so when you download the zip files from blender Market or gumroad wherever you bought them from you install these add-ons as usually you will install any other add-ons to go to preferences and install and install from a zip file now I would suggest you install hardops first and box cutter second and the reason for that is because when you install them in that order you will have hard-ups here and boxcar on the bottom so when you press RW to enter the you know box cutter hardops mode because you can press RW to switch between them you going to fire up box cutter first which is important because that's usually what we're going to be using right so when you have a cube with shift a let's add some cavity as well I'll W as hard ups and cavity and you know when I'm gonna enter box remote I want to start cutting with a box cutter but then when you press Q you can enter hard Ops menu regardless that you're in the box cutter mode okay so this is really cool and very fast way of working because when hard UPS is in the bottom you need to actually press it twice to get to box cutter Okay cool so that's one now let's talk about versions if you want to check whether you are up to date what you want to do is go here to this top hard-ups menu and you want to click on that hard UPS version and it will tell you here in the bottom that you're in the current version okay so if you're not you can go ahead and and you know loaded up not a really useful menu here is this link menu many people don't know about it and you have very very useful links here including you know a Discord a channel for hard Ops which is really useful and also you got access to documentation and other resources including Josh's and our and my YouTube channel so you know this is a fantastic source of information and help for heartups on box cutter you can also join our Discord um our blender Bros Discord we have like 1.7 key members over there go ahead and join it the link is in the video description and you can ask questions over there as well so if you need help there's plenty of places to get help alright so the way I set up this menu here I click on the star and um usually when you open hard UPS you're not gonna have these options here enabled so what you want to do is you want to enable auto T panel and auto end panel that is really cool because when you work let say on some object and you have t and you know and uh endpoint kind of open when you start babbling something let's say you're gonna go to q and bevel I want you to see what's gonna happen to these menus okay see they slide away and they slide away because when you press h you're gonna get H menu H menu helper for whichever operation you perform right so in this case we're working with bevel so we can actually for example change uh profiles one two three Etc you know so you can do really a lot of stuff with this H menu and when the end panel is in you know it's kind of rolled out you can't really see that everything is very cramped so that doesn't look good now when you click and confirm that the H menu is going to disappear and your panel is gonna be rolled back in that is really cool normally I don't really work with tier and pound because I don't need them but you know if you're starting with blender you may need them okay so that's a really cool option second option here that's really important and another example uh you know how closely these adults are related that you can enable box cutter notifications so when you actually work with the Box card let me just enable the t-panel when you work with box cutter right and you can see on the bottom here you're gonna have these notifications so for example when I'm gonna go to B to Bevel you actually Can See For example segment number Etc right so this is really really you know important because you can see what's actually happening to your mesh you can have arrays Etc so all the information is going to appear in the bottom right so you want to have that enabled because it's useful now the Cuban is sequential is good for small screens because if I turn it off and press q and go to a menu it's going to be a you know longest menu right but when you want to compact that you can turn it on and when you're gonna go here you see you're gonna get this menu kind of sort of cascading to the right so when you have a smaller screen a smaller resolution of a screen and everything you know appears bigger the text is bigger this is actually quite handy because the money you can just disappear below your screen so you need to reopen it somewhere higher so that's really convenient for smaller screens and I have it open I mean I have it turned on because you know I'm recording videos so it's easier for folks to see and this one is also cool because it will allow you to display the same color of material more or less in a viewport that's actually in a render um display case so if I turn it on and I'm gonna go alt M and add the material this color is going to be very similar to what I'm going to be getting under um you know render situation okay so you know it's kind of similar it's a bit darker but you get the point otherwise if you turn it off you're gonna get a bit of a part of the fact okay because um you know you're gonna have random colors here assigned a blender Crush so let's do it again you're gonna have random colors assigned to this cube in viewport so let me just do it again and ALT M here and I see that the color is here it's it's a bit different than it's gonna be here on the viewport okay so this is what this menu is for okay this is what I usually have enabled here under these options and that's it guys okay when it comes to box cutter uh you want to enter box credit mode so press RW go here and the only settings I change is I enable this right Mouse button to cancel and gone that is really cool because uh you know I like uh I like working quickly so if I'm gonna go to top view here and let's say I wanted to start cutting this cube with handgun so I'm going to press D with box cutter and go into and gone card and then I'm gonna press shift V and enable this view align in Auto which means when I'm gonna be an orthographic view my cat's gonna be aligned to view not to a face or angle okay so now when I'm gonna start drawing an end going right and I want to redraw it really quickly all I need to do is press the right Mouse button to cancel it if you have to disabled um you will have a lot of points because every time you click and you right click now you'll be going backwards through all these points you created that annoys the out of me you know you can press escape to cancel it as well but uh you know I just prefer right Mouse button to cancel so for me this is a nice option and I have it on and that's it in terms of settings guys you don't need anything else now let's talk about you know the most important functions you're gonna be using with heartups and box cutter because you know these addons are quite um extensive and you know they're quite deep and there's a lot of functions options and tools and you may get really easily confused now the very Basics guys okay you're going to be using Q money from hard Ops okay and this is one this is the most essential menu you're gonna be using there are many menus and hard UPS in fact I don't really use all of them but there's quite quite a lot of them it's also another menu that you're going to be using and that's control tilde these two menus are like you know almost 100 of the menus I'm using from hard UPS because I don't anything else but here q and the first thing you're going to be doing is battle suit click on the battle and you know you Bevel your your shape you can open this H menu and for example press Z to preview the wireframe this is really cool when you uh creating bubbles on surfaces that may overshoot so the buffer is going to overshoot on itself and you can see clearly where the wireframe is press Z again you can very easily create um different profiles of bevel suppress one and scroll down to create a chamfer you can press two uh to create bevels and Corners so there's three to create a kind of like a supporting bevel for your sub D so if you click that and press Ctrl 3 to use sub D on that model you see that it will not collapse on itself you know if you had the regular cube without these bevels and you press Ctrl 3 you know um this will happen right so you can very easily create bevels around your shape and kind of parameter for the subject work another very useful trick here would be after a bevel especially when you have some cards on the mesh right you want to add weighted normals so you press q and ALT click on sharpen which will add weighted normal modifier so when you go to Ctrl tilde menu you will see here that you're gonna have these two modifiers running now the cool thing about hard ups and box cutter is that you know especially hard UPS it will automatically sort all your modifiers so you don't have to worry about it like you know in vanilla that when you create for example a Boolean here so go to D menu click on this square and just click and drag the shape release your mouse then pull your mouse down and click this is how you create a card with the box cutter and here you can clearly see when I press Ctrl tilde again that the Boolean was actually placed above the bevel and above where your normals whereas in vanilla blender you would have it here in the bottom so you would need to kind of drag it you know you need to drag it down from underneath the weighted normals above the bevel manually every single time which is annoying so now here um when you create a Boolean the Boolean automatically is going to disappear unless you're gonna press shift so let me just go back here on this and when I'm gonna draw this cartoon again here so click drag release your mouse pull it down and shift click then your cutter is gonna stay here live okay and every time you want to see some kind of options that you can perform in addition to the regular operations listed on the menu just hover over and you will see a tooltip that's going to tell you what you can do so for example if you press Ctrl shift you're gonna add a new bevel at 60 degrees right and when you press Ctrl you're gonna add new bevel at 30 degrees so you could add and stack for example multiple bevels on on the mesh the other ways of doing it but let's not come over complicated things in here so why would you want to bring it to life well you know you want to bring it to life because maybe you want to you know add additional Cuts like this okay or for example like this or maybe you want to mirror this cutter across the shape maybe it's you know maybe it's kind of misaligned here and you want to mirror it so click on the shape alt X that's a mirror from hard Ops and mirror right so you can do a lot of stuff with this cutter it's really cool and then shift to to remove it now box cutter will automatically create a collection for Cutters called Cutters so the moment you start cutting something in blender right let me just reset that here for you okay so shift a cube and now watch if I'm going to add a bevel here very quickly and I'll click on sharpen to create where the normals when I'm going to start drawing a cutter you will see that this shape is gonna get cut so so you're gonna see that this menu is gonna be crazy so click and drag and you see that the Cutter's collection was created and what I'm going to click here this card is going to disappear it's going to be added here so when I press shift 2 you know I can kind of recover it by pressing alt H okay so you know shift through to hide it or unhide it right another way of finding Cutters on your mesh when you have more than one color right will be through other scroll so you click on the mesh and then you press q and you click on average scroll and then you can scroll through the Cutters okay that's why I'm saying that you know box cutter and hard UPS they work so well together you really can't separate these two items it's just unreasonable to do that all right cool so shifted to hide that so these would be the basic operations with hard Ops and now box cutter has a few tricks here if you press D menu you can change between you know a circle uh draw Square draw or angle draw you can also enable lasso draw which are used very early and you also have custom shape here okay so when you click on the End Gun you could enable lasso draw here and you can have custom shape here as well you can create custom Cutters you can even borrow shapes to create custom Cutters okay so for instance if I'm gonna create a cube right and move it somewhere here and I'm gonna start cutting it so let's just go to square and I'm gonna start cutting it here right uh like that then what I can do is I can draw a shape here drag it all the way down press y to extract this cutter click and then this is going to become a custom cutter and automatically you're gonna have a custom cutter enabled so when you start now cutting this shape here you will be using this extracted uh cutter from this shape here right so there you go this is custom Cutters but that's a bit more advanced let's talk about but you know Basics a little bit more yeah so again bevel right and then alt click weighted normals and you're done here and then we're gonna start cutting so let's say if you wanted to create cut in the middle of this Cube what you can do is you can enable something called dots I have them enabled by default so when you're in box cutter mode just enable this here this um magnet and when you hover over imagine in perspective View and you hold Ctrl you will see dots these dots will appear in in the middle of edges okay and in the center a certain uh face and you can start drawing from these dots your Cutters so if I'm gonna start drawing a cutter here in the middle let me just switch to a regular square or even to the circle if I'm gonna start drawing here I'm gonna be drawing from that center of the shape right so I can release now my control and I can release my mouse and drag it down and then click okay and you're gonna go cut in the middle of your shape and then when you click it again you'll see dots in different areas because there is you know they're affected by the card inside so you can create another card in the middle of that Circle okay so you can keep going and this is going to be you know perfectly in the center here okay so that's really important now this is a good example when you could actually use this Z shortcut on in hard Ops to preview what's happening in here I guarantee you that this is caused by edges running either here or here possibly in here and connecting this cut here in the middle because every Boolean needs two connections right so when I'm gonna go here to Bevel and press Z well there you go see what I mean that's how you can check what the hell is happening with your battles and this is to create a clear example of overshooting so if I go to alt if I go to Ctrl a and play visual to mesh you will see that this bevel caused this problem because it simply pulled an edge through the bevel like this so you can very clearly check what's going on with your with your geometry by you know enabling this uh this option cool so that's the cut in the middle now you can create different effects with your Cutters while cutting so let's go to a square here and you can you know start cutting this object and when you press X you enter slash mode okay when you press X again you will enter intersection mode and when you press one more time you will enter insert mode when you press T you're gonna enter solidification T always stands for solidification in hard ups and box cutter so you can create Cuts like this very easily this is extremely complicated in vanilla blender you need I think two modifiers and you know quite a few minutes to spend on this to create this is just um you know it's paining us so here when you start drawing out whether you go back to this card you can also enable knife by pressing K and knife is something that's gonna kind of remain so you're gonna remain in knife mode until you're gonna turn that thing off okay so to turn the knife mode is press D and switch here in this menu from now if you can hover over and see what it does to cut and you're gonna have you know back the card by default you can press X slash uh intersection and inside right so there you go all right another really cool tool in the heartups is a clean mesh tool which I use a lot for this kind of a situation when you have a lot of edges you don't need go to object mode Q operations clean mesh salted you know what I mean so there you go you can do a few things with Cutters uh with box cutters so for example you can draw it and you can create a wedge by pressing W you can hold Ctrl to create perfect wedge which is going to be 45 degrees wedge right difference W to sort of switch this wedge and you will see which direction the wedge is going by the uh by this edge here being highlighted right you can also rotate your cutter by pressing R okay you can press V to create array and you can press one more time to create circular array which is interesting right and also you can press T to solidify it like this right and you can press shift T to taper it okay in addition to that you can press B to Bevel it so press B and you can bevel it press Q to quad bevel it and you can also press shift F to flip it and create you know kind of a bevel like this let me just shift click that gy and with somewhere here so it doesn't you know clash with other bevels and there you go you can create really cool shapes very easily using these tools now other tools with hard upsets I use a lot is gonna be adding material so alt M and you can add the material very easy to your to your model when you go to this view here you can see they're gonna be sci-fi themed materials so kind of you know like black and gray they're not going to be colorful and they're going to be mostly metallic and kind of either matte or you know really really glossy you can use one of these options here for example material scroll or when you press Ctrl and click you'll be able to scroll through mods existing in your scene we have only one but when you press shift click here you will be able to actually create random mods on the Fly choose one of these and you know when you like it just simply apply it and you can use it right so there you go so that's a trick with a mud then you got this standard operations like for example you know array so you can go here and click on the array and you just scroll your mouse to adjust this array you have a lot of options here you can look into them and this is you know they're more advanced you can for example press 8 with another array and a to add another array and you can keep going like this you know for eternity okay so you can add a lot of arrays to your scene another really cool tool that I use quite a lot is going to be extractable so when you grab a face for example like this you can go to Q menu and shift click on curve extract this is a tool I use quite a lot and you can create a paneling effect here okay so let's say you have a cut here like this okay so let's select the cube let's cut it like that because k for knife right and when you actually go to um this edit mode here you can grab these faces rescue shift curve extract and you got this paneling half effect on top of your model which is really cool now there are some tools gonna be curve extract so when you want to create some um you know like cables or pipes let's say we got this edge here and we select this edge here and we're gonna extract that I'm gonna go here to um a curve extract and you just click that and you're gonna create a curve out of this press s and you got yourself a curve really easily uh you know perfectly running around this edge here so you can drop it down like this shift click here I'll text to enable mirror click and boom you got to go now I have a video on hard up some air so you can watch it I'll release it quite recently so I'm not going to be explaining mirror here because I already done it in the previous video but you know you can create some really cool stuff with it okay so there you go that's the curve extract another tool I use a lot is going to be RTM macro so let's say we're gonna have these two faces I'm going to I insert them cue and ALT Click On Em macro which will allow you to inset or outset a specific geometry which is pretty bloody cool right so you can create you know shapes like this with ease in you know in seconds right so the bevel and there you go by the way when you enable bevel or sharpen your manager do whatever with hard UPS or box cutter on your mesh you automatically shade it smooth and add Auto smooth here under this menu okay so it's automatic you don't need to do it through when you're not tools right another really cool tip that I can give you is that when you have something scaled and your skill isn't uniform so when I press n Go to item you'll see that the skill is in uniform so what I'm gonna try to for example you know run a bevel here on this Edge right you will see that it's gonna be you know kind of wonky right not uniform so when you do anything with hard absolute box cutter so for example if I'm going to add the bevel to it look what happens to the scale it's going to automatically applied so um boom right so you can do that really easily the same goes to cutting with um hard a box cutter so when I'm gonna start cutting the moment I start running a card then skills gonna get applied so really convenient because you'll have to go Ctrl a and apply scale every single bloody time you want to do something you can also very easily do that by if let's say you don't want to have a bevel under smash but you want to apply skill you can go to Q menu and just run a bevel in console I can do it we can do really quickly and this will also apply skill right it's a level in the console you see what I mean you can do it very quickly and it's very convenient okay when it comes to hard-ups when you go to hard UPS menu so press RW you'll see a whole new amazing menu here on the top I don't use it that often but occasion is quite useful you can for example create ships with ease like for instance you know a screw and these objects are smart objects what does that mean it means that you can hover control you can hold control and when you hover over shape you can actually use these dots to affect different modifiers actually run on this mesh okay so I could for example you know ground of that and pull it up and you know grab this Dot and make it thicker or grab this Dot and you know scale it it can perform a lot of things here and it's really convenient I use this menu occasionally I really like the abandoned curve tool which is fantastic because you know bending and curving geometry in blender is a painter so I do it with hard UPS so uh R1 rx9ts and let's scale it here let's apply this skill here actually and let's just run some Loops uh maybe in this fashion and then let's go to hard Ops and we can click on this modifier here which will allow you to bend it now we rotated this mesh so we need to apply rotation so Ctrl a apply rotation and now you can easily grab this dot here with control and you can do something like this okay it's pretty cool right you can solidify it if you want to so solidify and you got some really cool stuff going on okay cool another tool that's really useful in the heartups is going to be sharpened so when you go to control tilde you will see here that when you click on sharpen you will add crease bevel weight and sharp edge to your edges at the same time so when I'm gonna click on this Cube cue and sharpen all these edges okay which are above 30 degrees will have B white crease and sharp so for example if I'm going to create here a variational um you know angle like this right like that and then I'm going to apply bevel to it okay so I'm going to apply bevel to it you will clearly see that this Edge will not be caught right but when I switch it to B white it will because my edges were marked as B white okay um B weight was applied to every single sharp edge now when you're doing you know when you're performing uh this kind of operations you probably want to remove sharpen from these edges because you can see creates weird artifacts here so when you select everything and right click and go to Edge mode right click and clear sharp it's gonna look a little bit softer now you can use this menu to your advantage for example you can switch all of these and enable on the same okay so now let's say this cube is subdivided right so I'm going to right click and subdivide it with shift R to repeated operation draw a cut in here like this and apply it with control sharpen control sharpen by the way will apply all the booleans just be careful because when you do that you will not be applying the modifiers and if the booleans are in weird positions sometimes it may actually mess up your geometry but normally I use it quite a lot to just quickly apply booleans to my mesh you can see the Boolean was applied now I applied seams to to all these sharp edges meaning when I'm going to hover over this mesh here and press L it will select only this face here so this is a really good way of sort of separating um you know your mesh with seams okay not a useful tool and hard up is going to be a smart apply so let's say you have a bevel here and you have a Boolean and you have waited almost and you have array and you have a Race So let's go to modifiers and click on array okay let's just press X to array it this way and if we go to modifiers now you will see that you have quite a few modifiers right let's say I wanted to apply only Boolean and array the easiest way to do that would be to go to a queue operations is multiply this will apply all the modifiers except for the last bevel and the weighted normals which is really cool and very quick way of applying select modifiers without you know having to go here and doing money Molly so either use Ctrl sharpen or use Smart apply and these two options I use all the time I like working semi-destructively when I know that my shape is you know I'm kind of ready to go I just apply my modifiers and keep working I don't really like running with 50 million modifiers on my mesh it slows down blender doesn't matter what kind of Hardware you're using blender has limitations so when you have like you know more than I don't know 10 10 billions or 15 billions and a bevel blender is gonna you know throw in some tantrum and slow down so it annoys me I like working quickly okay so there you go now other tools here that um you might be interested in is asset loader that's really cool that's a menu that works together with for example kit Ops so when I out click that I'm going to enter ketops menu here which is a traditional and panel menu uh when you click normally you'll get this new hardups menu I prefer the old one so I out click on that and I got this uh old style you know menu here which I prefer this is a really quick way of working this kit ups for me and I really like using these menus one of my favorite menus I use it a lot settings menu has also some interesting stuff for example I can give you some more advanced tip here and then when you create a battle let's say and you create a cutter here let's say you wanted to shift click the cutter to shift it to live let's just create a wider normal to fix the shading let's say I wanted to change this cutter to solid shape there's a really quick way of duplicating this counter and changing into solid shape by going to queue menu and shift clicking on shade solid this will duplicate the duplicate this mesh this cutter sorry uh it will remove it from the cutter from the cutter menu move it to this main collection right so press shift to it will not disappear you see what I mean and it will shed it solid which is pretty cool so you can keep working on this so let's say you have this is really useful when you have like cylindrical Cuts in your mesh let me show you uh let's say I have this mesh here and I get you know some something like that and I'm gonna cut it through here using dots so click and it's gonna go through and then I'm going to go to other scroll and then I'm going to click and go to shift click on shade solid you see I can create this shape in the middle here which is pretty cool right so I can now go here and start playing with this um you know inside of this the shape here I could grab this modifier out and to flip this face Ctrl B to create a chamfer and I get you know and I get this kind of a shape and going on here in the middle so it's really interesting what you can do with this tool it's very handy for creating kind of Pistons or whatever another important menu that I mentioned briefly but I'm gonna repeat that here when you press D you're gonna get under this main cutter menu right but you also have this shift V menu I don't really use it that often but it's quite useful especially when you enable this VL Line Auto you're not going to be entering that menu that often because the lines automatic and orthographic view but this menu is really useful okay so let's say you have a you have an element here that's at a specific angle like this okay and let me just combine these two here with Machine Tools so this angle is really peculiar right so when you're going to be drawing normally a cutter here you'll be drawing along the global or local axis but since this Cube isn't rotated you know because Cutters will align with a local rotation you won't be able to align to this edge here now what you can do is click on this line box and you can actually align yourself here but since this Edge is on a custom angle okay it's not at a 15 30 45 degrees it's probably like 37 or something or 47 degrees right so it's kind of like an odd angle um so you can't really align it that well with this line box what you can do here is press shift V and align it to the nearest Edge which is really cool you need to be in perspectively for this one and it's going to perfectly align itself to this Edge you know angle which is really useful and if that doesn't work switch it to the longest Edge um you know which is going to align itself to the longer side so try these two options and you'll be able to align yourself to any Edge on your surface without problems which is really really cool right awesome and of course it's work on any at any angle it doesn't matter okay it doesn't matter what angle you add it's gonna always work you know see now here doesn't work because it just shift to the nearest Edge and there you go there you go now it's lining properly you see so when you get more cuts on your mesh you need to be a bit more precise because sometimes may not work depending where you're drawing from right if you join here it's gonna align yourself to a different night so when you're drawing from here you're good to go Okay cool so that's a tool I use quite often especially when I'm cutting some difficult surfaces and Guys these are the major functions and options you're going to be using in these add-ons probably 90 of the time of course there are more advanced options and functions but if you really want to learn hard ups and box cutter in depth we have a fantastic course for it it's called Ultimate Guide to hard ups and box cutter which been updated three times already it's really robust you have the massive Theory section where we discuss all the tools and how they work and also there is a practical section where we build a Sci-Fi spaceship so you can actually follow along and create something with the tools you've learned in a section number one so anyway guys that's it for this video hope you enjoyed it thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 45,922

Keywords: BEGINNERS TUTORIAL for Blender, blender, blender tutorial, blender bros, ponte ryuurui, ryuu, hard surface, Modeling tutorial, begginers tutorial for blender, blender 3.0 tutorial for beginners, hardops and boxcutter tutorial, hardops blender tutorial, hardops and boxcutter, hard ops box cutter tutorial, hard ops boxcutter, hard ops demo, hard ops workflow, hardops blender addon, blender hard surface, blender modeling, blender addon tutorial

Id: Yodb3m6Co4s

Length: 35min 17sec (2117 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022