How to Bend an Object in Blender 2.93.1 | Simple Deform Modifier Tutorial

in this video we're going to learn how to bend an object in blender using the simple deform modifier before we get started we'll just do a little bit of setup here so i'm going to make an object that looks kind of like a pipe and then we're going to bend that pipe so let's just go with shift a mesh and then cylinder and i want it to be somewhat low poly so i'll do 12 vertices and then i'll reduce the radius so it's kind of like a thin pipe and just go with six meters for depth so it's a little bit longer actually we'll go even more than that that looks good something like that next thing i want to do is i want to move this above ground so i want to move the bottom of this mesh to z0 so i'll press tab to go into edit mode press 3 to go into face select mode select the bottom face press shift s and then go to cursor to selected press tab to go into object mode right click set origin origin the 3d cursor and then in the transform we'll just set that to zero now it's above ground and i will just move the cursor to select it so it's in a nice spot there perfect so now let's go ahead and bend this object we'll go to the uh modifier tab select modifier and we'll go with simple deform and then just make sure you choose bend and right away you can see that it doesn't look like an actual bend it looks like it's just leaning to one side and it's got some angled faces actuality in the background it is bending so if you were to uh draw an invisible line from this face to this face it would go something like this right but the reason it can't bend is because the simple deform modifier relies on vertices to bend the objects so there's only vertices right now on the top and the bottom to fix that all we have to do is go into edit mode press ctrl r and then throw in some loop cuts and i'll just scroll up on the mouse wheel to add several cuts left click and then press escape to leave it in the center position and there you go now we have a bent object you can adjust the angle of that object and you can also set the limits so it sets which vertices are allowed to bend or not bend this one has kind of odd behavior and then on the other side you can limit which vertices are allowed to bend but if you want to be more specific on where the bend starts and how much the bend curves what you can do is you can actually slip you can actually select a set of vertices manually so let's just press 5 and then 3 so we go in the side view here i'll press 1 to go to vertex select mode and let's just box select something like this so we want these to bend and then we want these vertices to stay straight next we'll go down to the data properties and under vertex groups we'll click the plus button and then we'll just name this partial bend that sounds good okay and then if you went back to the modifier and go into vertex group you can select the vertex group you just made now right away you'll notice that it just snapped back to the original position straight up and down with no bend that's because we actually didn't assign these vertices to the group right which is kind of counter-intuitive you would think that when you have vertex or a set of vertices selected that would automatically be applied to the group when you add one but it's not so now that we have a group and we have the vertices selected you can click assign and that assigns it to the group and now you can see that there's some bending going on but there's a pretty obvious issue not all the vertices are bending and that's because we weren't in x-ray mode when we selected those so we only selected half the vertices so let's go back into the side view and then do another box select with x-ray turned on and then all we have to do is click assign and that adds those extra vertices to the group but there is one more issue you notice that it's a nice uh smooth curve here but it's got this weird behavior down at the bottom that's happening because the simple deform applies bends starting from the origin of the object so right now the origin of our object is down at the bottom and if you were to draw a visible line again it would be something like that so it's doing it the way we're telling it to make the bend but it's not what we're looking for so in order to start the bend from here we have two options we can move the origin of the object itself up to that position or we can use a reference object let's just go ahead and do option one first just to show you how easy it is select those vertices make sure your x-ray is still turned on press shift s cursor to selected and then press tab to go to object mode right click set origin to 3d cursor right and that's all you have to do so if you go back to the modifier you can you can bend just the top part of the the object itself and also i don't think i mentioned it already but you can choose which axis you want to bend on z doesn't really do anything in this case but you can bend it based on x and y okay so what about option two let's just undo the changes here there we go so for option two is to use a reference and since the cursor is in the right position already we'll just use that and you have to make sure that you're in object mode as well because we want the new object to be separate from this mesh right so we'll press shift a and we'll go to empty and i'll just choose arrows you can really use anything this just has to be an object with an origin you can even use meshes like standard meshes if you want but i just like something simple like an empty arrow object okay and then we'll need to go back to the cylinder and to apply it you can click on this origin area here and select it out of the list now if you have a huge amount of objects in your scene that's not the easiest way to go you could just click the eyedropper tool and then either select it up here or in the scene itself i'll just go ahead and select it up there and there you go now you can see that it's bending from this position and we can apply the angle just like before and that's pretty much it that's how you bend an object in blender using the simple deform modifier but before i go i should quickly mention that if you're seeing any odd behavior in the bend it could be due to the fact that your cylinder has scaling or rotation applied to it and also the empty object if there's rotation and scale applied to it it can really mess up the bend so if we turn off x-ray i can show you what i'm talking about so with the empty object selected you're going to apply some rotation to the y and you'll see that it's kind of kind of twisting the object here right and then for the scale you can get some odd behavior like this as well right so just make sure that your empty object has rotation set to zero for all of these and then scale set to one and of course you could do the easy way and just press control a and then apply rotation and scale and it'll jump back to normal and then then you can go about bending the object as intended alright that pretty much wraps it up thanks for watching and i hope to see you in the next video you

Channel: Game Assets Garden

Views: 1,574

Rating: 4.9069767 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, 3D Modeling, Blender Tutorials

Id: fmoacutf0fo

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021