How to bend solid flat objects with precision in Blender.

hi there my name is Bryson Jack and I have a quick tip on how to do some precision modeling bending a solid flat object and so sometimes you'll be building metal pieces or whatever and you'll be fabricating them the same way that would be done in real life and this can be kind of tricky and so I want to show how to you do it with using the curve modifier and let me just start by showing you know kind of what the end result should be right here is what I'm looking for I want that flat piece to Bend like this and this I'll show you what it so this right here is an example of you know what is easy to do in blender but it just doesn't look like what you would want the final output to be in real life so anyway that's kind of the reason why you'd want to use this type of operation and so the first thing that you want to do after you've modeled your object and right here I've just got holding edges everywhere so that it can be subdivided but I've just gone ahead and added extra geometry here so you want to just go ahead and make sure that you have you know supporting edge loops or you know whatever expert geometry that you need in order to make the bend happen probably edge loops like I've got alright so the thing that you need to understand about the curve modifier is that it needs the object needs to be resting in a particular place which is the top view so if I take this object right here and I go to the top view what I need to be seeing is I need to be seeing the profile and that's not what I'm seeing so what I've got to do is I've got to select my object and so I'm looking down the z-axis I'm going to rotate it on the Z 90 degrees excuse me I'm rotated on the Z 180 degrees now and then I'm going to also rotate it on the X and if I went into the side view would be easier to understand but I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees so when I go into the top view I'm seeing the side profile of my object and then I see the increased resolution where I want my bend to occur okay so the next thing that we going to do is you just place the 3d cursor somewhere near where you want the bend to happen and then adding a Bezier curve but you could add whatever kind of curve you want I can't see right now because it's so big so I'm gonna I'm working in meters and I'm actually working in real-world scale so this object is in in centimeters anyway so I'm going to select this curve here I'm going to scale it down so that it's you know something I can work with okay and I wanted that in there little tip you can do with Bezier curves they start out looking like this but maybe you don't want that maybe you want it flat so you can just go into edit mode and just select the curve and then you can cyst so this is the y-axis the greener ear so you can just select it and then just scale it in a Y and flatten it out that way so what we want to do here with this curve is I'm going to scale them a little bit more kind of want to just assume in this curve doesn't have to be in the exact position so don't worry about that but just what you want to do is we're going to want to make a curve that kind of simulates the bend that we want to make and if you don't get it exactly right we can fix it I'll show you but anyway so I'm going to take this these are the handles this is the vertex point of this Bezier curve here and so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select this handle here I'm going to rotate it I'm going to say 90 degrees and then the negative there and just kind of oops I'm in the y-axis now just raise that up and then I'll just bring this over here let's see just kind of pull it down here so I'm doing is I'm making a curve that's only going to wire oops I'm going to wireframe here so you can kind of see the the bend that I want to have happen and the next thing you'll want to do after you've got your curve made is you want to take your curve and you want to extrude this one will go on the Y and I'll look through this one into X and I'm just doing this just to make sure that my you know these are flat or that these align to the axes so that the only real modification that's happening is this Bend right here and what you can also do if you need to is you can just make sure that these are flat by selecting both of them and so this one I would scale on the y 0 and then this right here this is really not necessary probably but for this example that I'm just showing you in case you ever want to you know make sure that it's flat so anyway so I just have my Bend here and if I was not happy with that I could you know clean it up or whatever but anyway I am happy with that I think that looks like what I want this object to do so I select the object and then I come over here to my properties editor and in the modifier panel I'm going to add the modifier and I'm going to select the curve deform modifier and then I'm going to come down here to the object I'm going to select the Bezier curve that I created so what you can do here is take your object and then just drag it and move it to where you want it to be now you'll notice that that's not giving me the bend that I want so you can you know adjust it by bringing it you know anywhere around the curve now this curve here appears to to large so what I can do is I can select the curve and then I can scale the curve down a little bit and then I can grab the object and then come over here and you know place position this where I wanna and it's just really up to you how you want it to look but anyway so let's just say that I'm happy with with that that's exactly what I want so now I'm going to do is I'm going to just go over the add modifier I mean excuse me the curve modifier here I'm just gonna hit apply and now I've applied that this curve no longer matters so I complete that if I want and then the only problem I have now is I just need to make sure that I know I reposition my my object here so I'm just going to go into the face mode select it and I'm going to make cursor go to the selected here and then I'm going to do the really hard hotkey where I select the origin to the 3d cursor like that shift c2 so just to put the 3d cursor back in world view and then with my object selected just shift s selection to cursor to snap it there I'll go into my side view here rotate it 90 degrees and the negative hit enter and then in the top view I'll just rotate it is where I want to sell just rotated 90 degrees and the negative here all right and then finally what I'll do is I'll just take control a and I'll freeze the rotation and scale on the load locations already frozen but anyway and so now I've got my object here and it's got the bend that I wanted anyway I just wanted to show that because it can be kind of tricky when you're trying to do precise bends and that was just something I had to figure out and I thought I would just pass it along so that you know other people can can you know work with exactness in their modeling so hopefully that helped you and have a great day

Channel: Bryson Jack

Views: 150,974

Rating: 4.8912697 out of 5

Keywords: Blender (Software), 3D Modeling

Id: kbUy4OVz4M0

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2016