How to 3D Model Using Blender - Easy Beginner Guide + Tips and Tricks

in this video I'll show you exactly how to 3D model using blender now blender can feel really overwhelming at first but the goal for this video is to make it as easy for you as possible so let's go ahead and start with the basics to move around in the viewport here simply click on the middle Mouse button to rotate around and I highly suggest using a three button Mouse while using blender it's really hard to try to use blender with a trackpad so what are these objects in our scene here if we click and drag we can select all of them and you can see the objects are listed here so here we have a camera we have a cube and we have a light to move an object simply select on the object and you can use the move tool over here you can simply just move it and drag it around like so we could also rotate the object and we could scale the object as well so when you're designing things you don't really need the camera or the light I'm going to go back to the selection tool so we go ahead and delete the camera in the light so all I have to do is right click and select delete select the light as well right click and delete and now the only object we have in our scene is this Cube but where is the cube exactly well if you press n on the keyboard and for Nancy we can see all of the object properties we have the location the rotation the scale and the dimensions of the object so right now it's important to note that my dimensions are in millimeters because I've set up the units already so if you're designing something for let's say 3D printing you'll want to set up the units so to do that all you have to do is select on this scene properties button right here so right here and then you select metric set the unit scale to 0.001 and set the length to millimeters and the reason I chose millimeters is because a lot of times your three your 3D modeling for 3D printing and 3D printers are typically in millimeters so now once you set all of these things here your grid will kind of get messed up so we'll have to go up here to the viewport overlays and we can set the scale of the grid set set it to 0.001 and then you should have a perfect looking grid and your Dimensions should be in millimeters so let's go ahead and change the location of our object let's set it back to the origin point zero zero zero now let's say we wanted to design some sort of bracket some sort of custom bracket but what we could do is we could uh go ahead and set the dimensions of the bracket so let's say we we know our bracket needs to be maybe 100 millimeters wide and maybe it's 12 millimeters deep and it's pretty thin maybe three millimeters thick and now we have the basic plate for the bracket so for this bracket let's say we want to add some holes to it well what we could do is we can create cylinders and use those cylinders to cut some holes so to add a new object go up here to add go to mesh and you can go to cylinder but before you click anything after you select cylinder so if you select cylinder before you click down here on the bottom left you'll see add cylinder and you can open up this panel here and we could increase the resolution to make it less like a low poly because right now 32 vertices if you print it you'll kind of see the polygons so let's increase it to 256 and that'll be a really high resolution cylinder go ahead and press enter and click anywhere on the screen and now we have our Cube which let's go ahead and rename it to bracket just double click and we can rename it to bracket and cylinder maybe we'll just call it a whole cutter and it doesn't really matter what it's called but right now our hole cutter is two by two by two and let's say for our bracket we want to make uh make it so we can put some five millimeter bolts into it well we could set this Dimension here to 5.6 5.6 and let's just set this to 10. now you may be wondering why am I adding the extra 0.6 millimeters and that so the bolt could easily slide into the hole it feels exactly five millimeters and it would kind of be really snug and it wouldn't just easily be able to go into the hole so now we have one cylinder and the reason I made it 10 millimeters tall is because when you cut an object out of another object you want to make sure the object is bigger than it so for example if I just made it three millimeters you'll see these two faces are overlapping and if I move the screen around you'll see it's kind of glitching out and we don't want that at all so make sure set it to something bigger in this case I'll just do 10. okay so now how do we cut a hole out of this object and actually how many holes do we want first off let's say we just want three holes kind of evenly spaced well we'll need to duplicate the hole cutter three times and it's just a cylinder I'm just calling it The Hole cutter just right click on it and go to duplicate object and then I'll just press Escape so that way just it doesn't change the position of it duplicate objects in and let's say I accidentally click right here and it's not where I want it to be or we could just easily change the location just by typing in zero zero zero and now we can set the location where we want it to be along this bracket so let's go ahead and set it to maybe 42 so it's kind of near the edge or I can even do maybe 45. closer to the edge we select on another cylinder and let's do negative 45. okay so now we have three cylinders that we could use to cut a hole in this object now we could cut each hole individually or we could use a little shortcut Here If We Hold shift and select on all of these objects here you can right click and just select join and now they're all just one object so you see the whole cutter is just one object here we have our bracket and our hole cutter and now also I wanted to mention I forget if I mentioned how to pan on the screen here if you hold shift on your keyboard and the middle Mouse button you could pan side to side up and down and the middle Mouse button alone is just to rotate and there's also the shortcuts up here you can pan by holding this button here yeah so I forget if I mentioned that but that's an important thing to note so you could practice kind of moving around the scene like so okay back to the hole cutting here so let's select on our bracket and to cut holes in it holes into it we'll have to use what's called a Boolean modifier so we go over here down to the modifier tool or the modifiers blender modifiers and we can add a modifier and we could add a Boolean modifier now what a Boolean modifier is is it allows you to join objects and cut objects from each other and it's pretty standard for applications that use meshes and we're designing things uh these are meshes so all you have to do now is select the object select hole cutter and make sure it's set to difference that's a subtract so it'll subtract the cylinders from the bracket and go ahead and select this drop down and click apply so once we do that it may look like nothing happened but you'll notice that we can kind of see a hole there if you rotate around you'll see some kind of yellow circles so if we select on our hole cutters right click and go to delete you'll notice we have three holes cut into our bracket but now right now it's not really much of a bracket it's kind of a plate how do we actually edit this object right now we've just kind of used other objects to cut it and we kind of change the shape and kind of a really basic way so in blender there are two different modes that you could be in if you go to the top left you can see which mode you're in right now and right now we're in object mode and there's also edit mode so these are really important and you'll when you're designing things you'll be jumping in between object mode and edit mode all the time so I'll emphasize it again object mode and edit mode very important okay so let's just uh let's go ahead and jump into edit mode so now let me explain how edit mode works basically right now we can select on vertices so you can see these little dots here if I zoom in and you'll notice we have a lot of dots because we made that cylinder have 256 vertices so you can see it's it's really high resolution if we if we zoom in so up here we can see there are the vertex selection mode there's a edge selection mode and there's a face selection mode so vertex selection we can select on all these points like so you select multiple points you could hold shift and select multiple points Edge selection kind of makes sense you just select on edges like this you select a bunch of edges and a face selection mode you can select faces so it's all pretty straightforward now you may notice that some vertices let's go back to the vertex selection mode some are hidden in order to see like let's say I want to select all of these here it may look like all of them are selected but they're actually not if we click on this button up here on the top right I'll go to it again so you can see this one right here this is the x-ray mode and now we can see through our object and select all of the vertices so why would we want to do this in the first place I'm going to turn this off well now we can actually edit the mesh of our object and there's some really convenient tools here as well so right now for example let's just say actually I'm going to turn X remote back on let's just say we select I'm going to go to the top view so if we go up here click the Z button here if we want to resize one of these holes we can select all of them like so make sure you're in x-ray mode you can see we select all of those vertices go back up to the top by clicking on there and now we can use the scale tool where was that right here and we could scale our hole and if you notice if you get too big it kind of breaks but we could change the hole if we needed to so I guess that will uh it brings up a point of how do we know how big the hole is now and this it can be a little confusing at first and blender unfortunately doesn't have a great way of measuring distances so to the best way that I've found is you could go and add a um an add-on that'll allow you to measure distances so like let's say we wanted to know how big is this hole you go select this point and this point let's just go back to the selection mode here and right now there's no way to really tell how far how far apart those are well we could go up to edit and we go to preferences okay and then just pulls over here in the middle and we could go to the add-ons right here and let's go to it's already built into blender type in measure and you'll see it says 3D view measure it so go ahead and check that and then go ahead and click these three lines here and save preferences so now we have our measure it add-on we could go into the properties here so press n to open up the object properties and we'll go to view and down here you can find the measure it tools and it is kind of hidden and like I said this video is going to be packed full of info so I hope it's not too much here for you but this is really important stuff to know so now if we want to measure this here let's select this point and let's select this point and we'll make sure they're the top two points here and now let's find the distance between those points well we could add a segment so now we've added the segment and we click show so now we have our measurement and right now unfortunately it is in meters so we could go ahead and I believe the configuration is here and there's a spot here let's see the scale no right here units there it is set it two millimeters so now we can see our distance here is 5.6 so if we go back to the top view and we select all of these here when we scale it you can see how big your hole is so let's say we want it to be seven millimeters you just simply scale it to seven millimeters okay so now you know how to measure distances we could also let's say we want to measure how long our object is I'll turn off x-ray mode we could go into the edge selection mode here on the top left the edge selection mode and we can select on an edge and simply add another segment and we can see that it's a hundred millimeters long so now let's go ahead and finish our bracket just making sure everything looks good yeah so it's looking good now let's go ahead and finish our bracket and a bracket usually kind of is like a L shape we could use some really convenient tools over here some of the most important tools are extrude we have inset bevel and the knife tool let's go ahead and just use bevel or not bevel let's go ahead and use AP extrude tool it's probably the most common tool so first we'll go into face selection mode and let's go ahead and select the face first and then let's go to extrude so now you can either pull out this object manually or what I find to be easier and much quicker is instead of actually using the extrude tool we could use the keyboard shortcut which is E for extrude so I'm just going back to the normal selection mode we don't need to worry about this button here you could manually pull it out if you don't care about the dimension but if you want really accurate Dimensions I I recommend using the keyboard shortcut so just simply select on the face here press E for extrude okay and then it's going to uh basically now I need to type in the distance so let's say we want to be four millimeters and Siri just turned on here come on Siri turn off okay let's say we want to be four millimeters we could type in four and now we have this piece here that's four millimeters uh extruded outward and now let's say we want to finish our bracket and select this top face here and kind of pulled up and let's say we want to pull it up uh let's say 10 millimeters so we could press e for extrude and then type in 10. and now we have our bracket and if you want to confirm the distance of everything let's go and add a uh a measurement so go back into the vertex selection mode we can select on this vertices and let's select this one here hold shift to select two of them and let's go ahead and add another segment and now you can see it's 13 millimeters because we have three millimeters plus the 10 millimeters that we added and now we have a very nice looking bracket and it wasn't too bad to design at all and you could always go ahead and select individual vertices and use these tools to to move everything like so however you start moving things like this it could get messed up very easily okay so that's how you design some sort of functional 3D model using blender but what if you wanted to make a more organic model while there are a few ways that we can do this so let's go ahead and go back to file and I'll create a new project here and I'll click don't save I'll delete this camera here delete this light and let's say we want to make it more organic object how could we do this well we could start with our default Cube here and I'm going to go to uh I'm going to scale it up here like so and right now if we go into edit mode you'll see there's only like very few vertices so I'm going to introduce you to a thing called sculpting and basically it works exactly like how sculpting Works in real life except we'll be sculpting inside of the computer so we'll need a lot more vertices though in order to sculpt our object so let's go back into object mode and we'll need to add what's called a subdivision surface modifier so we'll go over here to the modifiers the blue wrench and we'll go to subdivision surface and now you'll see it automatically changes the shape and let's go ahead and type in or not type we'll just click of the arrow here and let's go to six and that'll be very high resolution and go ahead and click apply so yep that's looking good now we go up here to this tab that is called sculpting and we could sculpt our object so here all of the tools I could use I just recommend going through and trying them out but the most common ones are the clay strips tool where you can kind of just you know add clay strips digitally also there's the smooth tool right here where you can smooth out the object and you can change the size of the tool here and also the strength so I'll go ahead and change the radius and now we go ahead and smooth out our object and then also we have the grab tool or the grab tool right here so right here we can basically click on our object and kind of pull it out like this so if you want to make some sort of uh all right because it's kind of looking like a cat already I could do that and just kind of manually shape it and the last thing that's a really good thing to know is what's called masking now this gets a little bit more complicated here let's see uh for some reason I lost the mask tool here it is the mask tool is here now what we could do is I'm going to change the radius lower and then I'm going to Simply like let's say I'm trying to create some eyes I can kind of draw out the shape and maybe I'll make it a little bit less yeah do that let me make the hardness even higher or let's see yeah that's fine and then let's say we want the uh maybe it's a it's going to look kind of bad but this is a uh a scared cat okay so now we have our mask uh see okay and now what we could do is I believe we're going to press I no uh control I yep control I or command I on the Mac and now we've inverted our mask and now if we take let's just say something that is a negative sculpting tool here uh well let's just do oops let me scroll up here let's do the clay strips but to make it negative you're going to press um control and then you could indent like so so now it's indenting and we have it basically based off of the uh the mask and we do the same thing for the eyes see if the if clay strips is the best idea here yeah it looks that looks good you kind of just rotate around like so make the eye sockets for it and you may notice it looks kind of low poly well what we could do now is we could go to What's called a remesh the remesh tool and actually let's do the keyboard shortcuts because a little bit easier press shift r on your keyboard and you'll notice this grid pops up that is the voxel size and it sounds fancy but it's basically the resolution you might go right about until the grid starts disappearing and so click to confirm it so now we've changed the resolution of the remesh now we actually have to remesh and to do that press Ctrl r and it will load and then remesh the object so now you can go back into it with our smooth tool decrease the strength and we kind of smooth everything out and if it lags a lot it's because our model is uh really high resolution and to change the resolution you can go back into the remesh tool and kind of change it but right now I'm just going to kind of smooth everything out here so it's not so harsh looking like this just taking my smooth tool and smoothing everything out and just knowing those few tips alone you get already start sculpting a lot of things the mask tool is really powerful highly recommend using that to get those details and that's how that's a basic introduction in to sculpting okay so now we've kind of gone over uh basically hard surface modeling which is not really hard surface modeling for the the first practical object the bracket and we've gone into sculpting and made kind of a scary looking cat guy let me show you some tips and tricks as well and there are a lot of things that you could do in in a blender so you could feel free to you know explore those two areas first there's already a lot of stuff let's go into some tips and tricks as well there's a really cool object uh let's see add we could go to What's called a meet uh metabol not meeple um and we could create a ball like so and if we right click and if we go to duplicate object you'll notice it kind of does this really cool like blob type effect and you just keep doing that and you could create some interesting looking objects and you could use like the scale tool we could scale it but it's kind of a really easy way to kind of block out or prototype shapes and you can see I'll just kind of melds together like that it's kind of really interesting but feel free to explore that once again that is the metabol right here okay and let me just go oops Zoom back in okay so here's some so you may notice I was a little difficult to navigate around here are some settings that you could use to improve user experience go to edit go to preferences okay and go to navigation and set auto perspective and depth first off and then we want to do orbit around selection so make sure these three check boxes are selected and that's about it you could also change this setting here for emulate numpad so if you're having if you have a keyboard that doesn't have a uh the extra numbers on the right side you could click emulate numpad that way you could use some keyboard shortcuts for The View for instance one let's see select on our object here and go back to it you could press one to go to the front view you can press 7 to go to the top view and you just kind of experiment around and press all the num keys to see what type of see the angle it goes at okay so now let's say uh we want to let's go back to the Boolean modifier here let me just you can press a so there's another shortcut press a to select everything and then X to delete okay so now let's say we created let's create a a cube here scale it up and let's go ahead and create another Cube I'll duplicate it let's say you wanted to join these two objects together and right now it may look like they're joined together but they're actually not if we go into edit mode and well first off we could only edit one of the objects and we turn on x-ray mode you'll see we have this point inside of it that's not at all what we want we want them to be just one mesh which kind of opens an entire can of worms into meshes and how they could be broken and how they could be fixed so let's go ahead and go back to object mode Let's just combine these together turn off x-ray mode and let's go ahead and go to slides.object here add modifier Boolean and this time we'll select Union that way we could join two objects together and go ahead and just select the other Cube and now you'll notice it kind of looks like it's glitching that's okay go ahead and click this drop down and then click apply now we can select on this Cube here press X or right click and delete and now we have let's go ahead and select this object if we go into edit mode and then turn on x-ray x-ray mode here you'll notice now our objects are combined together perfectly and that's how we want them to look so now let's go ahead and jump into the can of worms of all the issues that you could have with meshes and unfortunately meshes are really easy to break so let's say we select on this vertex here and we delete it now we have a broken mesh how can we actually fix this well what we could do is we can select on this vertex right click and you should be able to well we could extrude it we could extrude out like so now we have this vertex so we could do is we could select on this vertex this vertex this vertex and this vertex and press F to fill so now we've added that face back and we can select all of these vertices as well hold shift to select multiples press F to fill and we go over here select this this this and this and press F to fill as well so now our mesh looks like it's correct I'll go ahead and move this you just go to the move tool I used G grab the shortcut keyboard shortcut is G for grab is to move you think it'd be M but it's not it's G okay so now we have our two objects and we think it's fixed but we need to check to make sure the normals are correct so basically sometimes there's a thing called normals it's which way this faces direct uh which direction this face is facing and it could be flipped and that messes things up so let me show you how to check the normals so basically select everything by pressing a go to here and go down to normals and then click this button here and increase the size now you know it's good when all of the blue lines are pointing outward and we go back into x-ray mode if there are ever blue lines pointing inside your object that is bad and it means something is broken and fortunately for us nothing is broken here but if it is broken just go to press press a to select everything go to mesh and go to normals and click recalculate outside and if that doesn't work go to mesh and go to clean up and go to merge by distance and you can see it says zero vertices removed which means everything was perfect so there's some tips that could hopefully help you if anything breaks now I think that should give you a lot to go go with uh for blender there's just a ton of other things I could teach you but this video is already almost 30 minutes long so I'm going to leave it at that and if you have any questions go ahead and leave it in the comments and I'll do my best to answer all of your questions so I hope that helps blender is a massive program and it's really powerful but it's really a amazing program so once again if you have any questions leave them down in the comment section below and I'll try my best to answer every single one of your questions best of luck on your uh 3D modeling Journey go ahead and check my website www.3dprinteracademy.com for a bunch of Articles blogs tips tricks stls and some online courses as well well thanks for watching best of luck in all your projects and future endeavors my name is Steven and I'm glad you're here

Channel: 3D Printer Academy Tutorials

Views: 15,679

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Id: 8_0RptMbhe0

Length: 29min 9sec (1749 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023