How to add panel line details to an object in Blender

greetings hobbies this is our sans of all and in this tutorial we're going to have a look at how to add panel line detailing to objects in blender so panel lining is really important for certain projects in blender on the screen now you can see a project i did a while back designing some alien buildings that were going to be used for some scenic bases and if i go and you can see here that these scenic bases come out and it was going to be a scene that you can put these bases into i still do need to finish the printing of this actually but importantly this has a lot of panel lining on it and panel lining can make a big difference to objects in blender it gives a lot of information or visual information to the person looking at it for example it gives a sense of scale and it gives the viewer an idea about what the material is that's in the scene for example if i look at the walls that we've been making previously you can see that this is quite clearly some sort of concrete or stone because of the wear and tear and damage whereas panel lining will give the impression of something a bit more advanced and futuristic and it will also give you the idea that it is made out of something that's different to concrete perhaps some sort of futuristic material or ally that gives a different effect so i've made this object in blender that we're going to have a look at putting panel lines on and importantly it is not just a flat surface i want to make something with curves so it's easy to see that this works on any object of any description and we're going to have a look at the three major methods of adding panel lines now the first two of these methods just use the tools and add-ons that are available in blender as standard however the third method uses hard ops which is a paid for add-on but it does make things a bit quicker and easier so we'll have a look at both now for most of these methods the first thing we need to do is create an object that is going to cut our panel line so i'm going to go into side view here press shift and a and i'm going to bring in a cube i'm going to press g and move that up and i'm going to press s to scale it so it is larger on the x-axis than our object because we're going to need to cut through it fully and i'm just going to g to move it to somewhere like there that will do i think now i'm going to go into edge mode i'm going to press ctrl r to make an edge somewhere about there and then i'm going to go into face mode and select that face and g and z to move it down and actually i'm going to come into side view and i'm going to try and match my angle here to the angle on the object so that it looks a little bit nicer and then at that point i'm gonna press e to extrude down and then back into edge mode and i'm gonna press ctrl and b to bevel that now the first thing i've done here is i've made this object have an inset the one that's going to be cut so that we can talk about a couple of potential problems the first thing is when you're doing this you need to make sure that any detailing isn't being affected for example if i press g and y and brought that forward to somewhere like there here at the bottom this is going to cause a problem with this technique so we just need to boolean that middle section out or just be careful that it's not there in the first place so back in side view let's have a look at this and i don't think this is quite perfect so i'm just going to go into face mode and i'm just going to g and y and get that so it does a line and again check that it doesn't impact the inset or doesn't overlap now we're gonna be using a couple of add-ons for this and these are the free add-ons so edit preferences and i'm gonna go to add-ons and i want to activate ball tool now i use ball tool a lot it's a fantastic add-on if you've watched any of my other videos you'll see it gets used a lot for design in blender so make sure that's selected and auto save those preferences or just click save preferences i've just noticed i'm gonna have to g and z those up so the first way of doing this is you making a panel line using bevels so what we need to do is we need to say that this line is going to be of importance and we need to cut this line into this object so what we're actually going to do is split this object into two pieces so that we've got something to bevel again so all i'm going to do is select my object that's going to be the cutter shift select the object and i'm just going to go to object ball tool now that it's added and i want to do a slice and you'll see that that sliced the two objects here but it has done it and it hasn't actually put things into the modifier stack it has done this fully the other way that you can do this if i undo that is you can select the object you want to be your cutter shift click the other one and then you can press ctrl and forward slash and what that does is that actually keeps this remaining here and for example i can still keep moving this around and change where i want it to be but to do this technique you are going to have to come to a decision about where you want this to be finally but it is quite useful that you can see the whole of the object because this becomes see-through i'm going to hide that and we do need to apply these now we can have a problem here you'll see if i click apply it doesn't apply it and at the bottom we've got this notification saying applying modifiers has failed and that'll be the same for both now the reason this is is that at the moment we've got two objects that are now separated because part of the slice action creates two separate objects and it's being cut as being sliced by one object that's being shared between them this cube here and we need to tell blender that's okay we're fine with this and it's not a problem so with one of these objects selected i just need to come down here to the green triangle which is the object data properties and you'll notice that by the name of this it's got a two and that is because the moment two objects are being sliced by the same thing and if i just click that two it separates them out it says that's fine and at this point i can go back to my modifiers panel and click apply and do the same for the other one so that isn't a problem it's just blender trying to be a bit smart and you having to tell it what to do now we need to do is add a bevel to these panels so what i'm going to do is come to add modifier bevel and you can see we've got this going on but it's doing something i don't want it to do it's beveling the rest of the object too it might be that you want that beveled and this isn't a problem but for me 3d printing this i just want this on this panel line so i need to tell it to only bevel this line so i'm just going to hide that bevel moment to make it easier to see i'm going to go into edge mode and i'm going to start selecting the edges that i want this panel line to be on so i'm just going to select there and i'm just going to use control button while clicking to select all of the lines where i want this panel line to be and once those are selected what i need to do is add something that's going to tell blender to pay attention to these lines and we call this a weight so if i press n to bring up my side panel and go to where it says item you'll see that it says mean bevel weight just here i want to slide that all the way up to one and on my version of blender that turns it blue now if i go back into object mode and make my bevel be able to be visible and at the moment it's doing this by the angle method we call the limit method is the angle and i just select that and change it to weight and now it's not doing it to my other edges it's only doing it to the ones where i want my panel line because they're the ones where we added or changed the mean weight now i can change the offset here so at the moment it's 0.1 i can make that bigger or smaller and change that to 0.1 but we do have to be careful with this i'm going to talk about that in a second just to show you some problems that might be caused now at the moment my if i come inside view my panel line isn't even it's only doing on one side so i need to do it to the other object as well so i'm actually going to do this in the opposite border so i'm going to go to edge mode select this edge again use control while clicking so that i have less clicks and i'm not going to miss something out because it automatically chooses the shortest route between the last thing that was selected and where you're clicking now come to our mean bevel weight up that to one go back to object mode bevel limit method change that to weight and now we've got this nice even looking panel line now one thing to be aware of we do need to be careful with this offset amount because if i up this what you'll notice here is that one it won't be even and two you're going to start getting a vertex when you apply this that's here for this object just get my grease pencil so we're just going to get a vertex just here for this object but for this object there's only going to be a vertex here and this isn't going to be very good when we saw them to join this together for 3d printing if you're not planning on 3d printing this then that's not an issue but it is something we should pay attention to to make sure we get a manifold object now there are other problems that we need to keep an eye on this is one of them if i just come down here instead of creating this nice neat line here blender has done something else and this is not going to work very well when we try to bring these objects together into one mesh for 3d printing so we're going to have to fix this now for me the easiest way to do this is just to do it manually so i'm going to click apply all on this bevel and apply all on that one as well so you have access to the geometry and you can see here we've got this overlap that's a bit of a problem so i'm going to come to this object tab into vertex mode select those two vertices and i'm just going to press m and i'm going to bring them together at the center and again that's not going to be perfect so what i'm going to have to do is activate my snapping bring that to vertex if it's not already and i'm just going to press g and snap it to that vertex so now it's perfectly in place i just want to do the same thing to the other side so select those two vertices m at center shift and z to go to x-ray mode and then g to snap that vertex and now at this point everything should be in the same place we're gonna have no problem making a manifold object so we could do this by booleaning but actually i find it causes less issues to do it the way that i'm about to so i'm just gonna click one of them and shift click the other press control and j to join them into one object shift into vertex mode a to select everything m to merge and we want to merge by distance which means that anything that's in the same place is going to merge together so what that means now is each of these vertices is just one i'm just going to turn off the snapping and you can see here that this has also worked where we did that change earlier now this does have one problem in that it doesn't make a manifold object if i slide into this you can see here we've got this face i'm just going to face mode it's just here and it's essentially where these two objects were joined together but blender will fix this relatively quickly for us if i go to edit and preferences and type in print you can see something called the 3d print toolbox make sure that is selected and once you do once you press n and bring out our n panel we've got an option here called 3d print when i click that i can select it click check all and it'll tell us how many issues we've got and straight away it's saying that we've got 96 non-manifold edges and that's each of these edges here where it's joined to the internal face that we don't want so all i'm gonna do is select make manifold and this is deleted some edges and faces check all and now we've fixed all of those issues there's now no internal face blender has realized that's an error and fixed it for us so this is quite a nice simple way of making a panel line it does have a bit of a lack of control in terms of the depth and the panel line isn't that obvious as well especially if you make them quite small now if you are going to do it this way i would strongly recommend that you make some blanks so for example i just made some cubes and made some panel lines on those cubes and then printed them so i could get an idea of what sort of size panel line i needed to be visible on my printer i also tried this with having a rounded bevel instead of just this chamfer or a one segment bevel and actually found the one segment bevels look much better and more clearer but you can try that out and see what you like so that's the first method so i'm just going to undo that and we're back to the point where we've got our cutting object and the thing that we want to cut so for the second method we need to make the panel client cutter itself and turn that into the panel line so all i'm going to do is go into face mode and have a look at what we've got here now here's a little bit of a secret for this or a bit of a cheat essentially we're going to want to inset these faces but we want to inset them in a way that just ends up with a single line a single panel line that's going to be in this instance on the right hand side now if we were to inset this normally for example if i select those and press i then it's going to insert it on all edges now we could go through and delete this top bit in this side bit but even then it's not going to create a flat top to this which can be useful if we need to change the size of this panel line for example if we decide to scale this object or just move it around so blender has a function to do with its insets that i believe is based around when you want to mirror something and to do that we need to delete these faces so i'm deleting the faces on the side of the object where we don't want it to inset you'll see what i mean as i do this so then i'm going to select my faces so i've got the three there i want to do the same on the other side and i'm going to press i to inset and it just insets normally but now that i've started the inset if i press b you'll see that that puts a boundary feature on this where it looks for the edges that don't have faces attached and doesn't insert them on that side which is really helpful it just saves a lot of time and i can make my panel line as thick as i want it to be let's say for example there and then all i need to do is delete those faces so nice quick way of saving some time and then to make this a solid object or a manifold object i'm just going to select one of those edges and press f and that's going to keep filling this out to create quads and then i've got my potential panel line so not particularly time consuming though the next bit is a little bit not a lot but it's a little bit fiddly so i'm going to select that select the object and then using ball tool i'm going to press ctrl and minus and that is going to cut out that object so here we've got where the panel lines going to be but at the moment this is a complete cut through it has taken away the cutter from the object and i don't want that totally i want something that's just cutting out the outer edge now this isn't too difficult to solve though the order of this is quite important or at least the way you think about it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select my original object and press shift and d to duplicate it and i'm going to press escape so it goes back where it is and at the moment we can't see anything because this second object has still got this boolean so i'm going to come over here remove that boolean and we can see that these objects are overlapping that's why we get this funky distortion except for in the place where the panel line is and now all i need to do is just scale it there is an initial problem with this and that is this you'll notice that this is creating a thicker indent here than it is at the side and that's not to do the scaling the scaling is correct that's just to do with the fact that this object is longer or taller than it is wide so at some point i'm going to have to come in here and i'm going to have to press s and x to just scale it on that axis now to make this better what i can do is click here to come into front view and i can scale this to try and make sure it's accurate here so i can see the green outline of where it is and we can see again the top is still slightly thicker than at the side so s and x and let's even that out something like there now this is the classic mistake that typically is made here what people then do is select this our shrunk down version of the original object and then they add it to that object thinking well this is going to sort that out now one you can do it but it's a little bit messy and i wouldn't advise it and second where you've got this inset here which i put for this very reason to show this problem you'll notice that we've now got this causing this overhang and this would look really ugly if we try to boolean it together so what instead we're going to do is we're not going to add this to our original object we are going to select the cutter which we've still got this bounding box for it and we're going to subtract it from that bounding box now what we'll do for that is ctrl minus to do the boolean and press h to hide that and now we've got this object now i will say this is not the easiest to see so i'm going to change this quickly by going to object properties viewport visibility instead of having this as bounds i'm going to put this as a wireframe so now if i go into isolated view we can see that what we've got is the cutter but now we've cut out of the cutter the internal object or the shrunk object that we wanted and what that's going to do when i hide this is it's going to make a nice neat panel line so this is quite an effective way of doing it and if you don't have hard ops to be honest this is my preferred way of doing it i find the panel's a little bit easier to control and i can always make sure i can see this i can always shrink it so for example i could press s to make this bigger and smaller i might need to fiddle around with this then and move it around and if i decide that i want this to be not as deep an inset or as deeper panel line i can bring back this and i can always press s to scale it up but again you'll notice that it's not gonna scale evenly so i'm gonna have to pay attention to that so that is the second method a few little tricks to be careful of the main one is the order that you do it in now if i undo this again and come back to the point where we've got this shape i just need to fill those in again now if you've got hard ops there is a better way to do this because hard ops will do this for you now hard ops is a paid add-on and if you do purchase it i would strongly suggest you buy it with box cutter i'll show you box cutter in a second because this makes this even easier we wouldn't have had to have made this shape in the first place but hard ops gives us additional boolean options as well as a myriad of other things and one of those is to effectively do what we just did manually where we're going to recognize that we've got this outside edge it's going to shrink it in except it's going to do it uniformly and then it's going to cut everything out or boolean it now if i select the cutter and then shift select the object that i want to boolean or cut the object out of and press q that's the hard ops menu and go to booleans we have this fantastic option called inset if i click inset you will see this has done a number of calculations and we now have this perfect inset without us having to worry about copying things and subtracting from other things it's done it all for us and what's great about this is that one it is perfectly uniform i haven't had to worry about that it's going to be the same thickness everywhere and the second thing is that i can afterwards start fiddling around with this thickness so i can change it to whatever i want if i want a less deep panel line i can do that very quickly and easily now because of the functionality of this this does create two objects so i have to hide that and then press h to hide that one but it's just one boolean here and i can just apply it to make that work so much much quicker no fiddling around and it's more perfect now if i go back once again so that is our third method and i'll count this as the same thing because it's still using hard ops and box cutter if i delete that out we can actually do this much more quickly using box cutter so i'm going to go into side view and i'm going to activate box cutter by pressing alt and w and that brings this menu up at the top and we can fiddle around with all these things here just there i actually prefer to press d and bring it up here it gives us a few more options and things like that so i'm just sort of used to doing that now and we don't want a box so a box will just create something that is a box i should say we need to select the object first and then we'll see it comes up in red to show that we're cutting now i don't want a box i want to actually create this custom shape so i'm going to go into an ngon which is here or at the top it's just there you can change that here now at the moment this will create a box still but we have more control over the sides so for example i can go there and so on and do whatever but it's still making a box which is annoying we're still gonna have to delete our bits if we either click here which is the cyclic option or press d and select cyclic here what this does is it stops the last point in the first point being connected and creates essentially just a line now depending on if you've used this before the thickness of your line is going to differ don't worry about that you can change that at a later date really quickly i'll show you that in a second but all i'm going to do is click and we've got this line and then each time i click i can move around now what's useful about this is that it moves in 15 degree increments so it's very easy to get say a perfect 45 degree angle now at the moment we don't want a perfect 45 degree angle we want something that's going to go in the angle or to match this edge so i'm going to just hold down control and now i have the freedom to move that as i want so i'm going to go somewhere around here i think that looks about right i'm going to take my finger off control so i can go vertically down again come to that 45 degree angle come to the side here and you'll notice you can move around with this so it's really useful and easy to use and i'm going to double click to say that's where i want to finish so double click and now i can start moving backwards and forwards to cut this out now at the moment this is a cutter but we can change some things now i'm going to move all the way over to the side and i'm going to press tab which essentially doesn't finalize the cut but allows me to start modifying things and it's got all these options we can modify for example i can bevel different corners and things like that but i like to do this because it makes it easier for me to look around and check things out now you'll also notice that at the bottom here we've got all these options for example i might want to make this thicker so i'm going to press t which is the solidify option and then if i just move from side to side with my mouse i can control the thickness of my line so i'm going to go to something like that and you'll also notice at the moment that this is actually cutting all the way through we don't want that we want to inset it and again that is an option at the bottom we've got a lot of other ones for example we can actually use the slice feature which is what i did in the first method so we can do this really quickly with box cutter as well or i can use what i want which is the i which is the inset so i'm just going to press i turns it to this purpley blue color and now i've got the inset and now if i press t i can change the depth of my inset so i'm going to go to about there double click and it's done now again i can still come in and change this for example if i just press q and everscroll i can bring this up click on it and i can still change the thickness if i want to so it's still modifiable i can still go around and play with it box cutter is absolutely fantastic seriously get it i don't get paid anything for saying that it just is really that good there's a reason it's the number one selling add-on for hard surface modeling so we've got our panel line from this point onwards using box cutter this is very very easy so i can come in here click and just start making our object and again we're going to be able to use the same angles because we know this is 45 degrees and usefully it remembers the last time we did this it was this thickness and you'll also notice it comes up with these dots which tries to match other items so for example at the moment is here it is matching different things that we've used before for example at this point is making sure that everything looks correct click there go through eye to inset it remembers the thickness so it's all the same double click and we've got our second one so very quick really simple box cut is awesome hopefully from those three sort of four methods you've found something that you'd find usable for you whether you want to make panel lines using a free method or you want to invest in something like hard docs and box cutter to be able to do this a bit more quickly either way you can create the same results and make these nice panel lines for whatever you want to 3d print if you found this useful or you thought it was interesting please do give this a like it helps disseminate the video because youtube will show it to more people and it gets more people to know about the channel and if you have any questions or video requests as always please do ask in the chat it's great to hear what sort of things you guys would be interested in seeing and it means you get the content that you want

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 25,432

Keywords: blender, 3d design, 3d printing, box cutter, hard ops, details, detailing, panel, lines

Id: kNpB0RrhuOA

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022