How to create complex panel lines in Blender

greetings hobbies this is our sons of all and in this tutorial we're going to be having a look at how to make more complex panel lines so in a previous video we have had a look at different methods of making panel lines but that was to have a look at the different ways that we can actually make them work not how to make more complex shapes if you do want to check out that tutorial because you haven't seen it there is a link in the top right hand corner and also another one in the description in case you want to have a look at it later and that covers both how to do this in native blender or how to use different add-ons for example hard ops or box cutter to give effectively the same result but doing it in different ways so i'm starting off with this and effectively this is meant to be an alien type door or sort of portal that's going to open up and as you can see i've already put one of these panel lines that's a little bit more complex around the outside of this and i want to add some detailing onto the door itself now i generally go about something like this and i have seen people do this in some hideous ways that just seem to make life much more harder than they need to be by using just a simple circle so all i'm going to do is firstly make sure that my cursor is in the middle of the door just to make things a little bit faster shift an a and i'm going to bring in a mesh and i'm going to bring in a circle now i've got this set to 128 vertices because that's the same as i've got for the door this is for 3d printing and i want it to look more rounded and a bit smoother but obviously if you're doing this for cg work as i've said many times before you'd probably have it lower than this now i'm just going to press shift and z to go into x-ray mode and i'm going to press r and y to rotate that round and type in 90 to get that to the correct orientation then i'm going to make that a little bit larger probably something about there basically the size that i want it to be in comparison to my door and i'm going to press g and x and bring that out in front of my object so i don't need to be looking at this in x-ray mode so that looks about right now importantly if i press n to bring up the end panel because i've enlarged this the dimensions are all off so i'm going to press ctrl a and i'm going to apply the scale to set everything back to 1 on the scale and i'm going to press n to hide that don't really need it so what i'm going to do is make some of these shapes here that are quite typical in sort of alien type designs to make the panels more interesting so i'm just going to go into vertex mode and we can see here i've got all these vertices and effectively all i want to do is just select the ones that i want to bring either inwards or outwards depending on the way i'm thinking of this now just for interest i've got a big section over here and then little ones on this side so i'm going to actually do the opposite on this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select one of the vertices or i could select off so there's no vertices press c to bring up the circle tool which i can make bigger or smaller and let's start with this large one but this time i want it over here so i'm gonna get a nice group of those by clicking and selecting those i'm gonna make this a bit smaller and get maybe one two actually i could make these the same size that's six so i'm gonna make that one six as well and then i'm gonna do maybe one there six maybe another one there of six and i'm probably gonna leave that there at this point obviously i could do more or less entirely up to you i'm going to press escape to get out of that circle select and then i'm going to scale these in just to make the shape and what it will do is it'll give these nice cuts they're going to be at about the right angle as if they're going towards the center so if i press s we can see that there okay now if this isn't working quite right for example if i press s you can see this isn't quite scaling towards the center if i go in it's going to go over there and that is because it's selecting the average of these points and that's because that's what i've got here and there's more of them over this side than that so that's causing a bit of problems so all i'm going to do is select the 3d cursor as that point now if i press s you can see it goes right towards the middle now you can also see if i come to the side while i'm scaling these it's also scaling in this way which i don't want now to solve that all i need to do is confine that so i don't want it going along the x-axis so i can press shift and x and that will go in now what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to do this wrong on purpose so i'm actually going to go back to that imagine that i've come here i'm going to go to shift and z so i can see an x-ray so it's not going to be a problem seeing where it's going and i'm going to press s and i'm going to do this intentionally wrong just so i can quickly talk you through how to fix it so let's go to somewhere about there so having a look at this this is obviously wrong it's going to cause a problem if you ever come across this just select everything change the transform point off of the 3d cursor and just change it to the active element and then just press s confine it to the x-axis and then just press zero and it's going to line everything up so you've got that now straight so that's quick easy way to solve that if you need to then i'm just going to press e and extrude these out again on the x-axis just to give a bit of depth there finally all i need to do is come into the modifiers select the solidify modifier and then all i need to do is just change this thickness now firstly you'll notice this looks pretty rubbish it's because i haven't clicked even thickness as soon as i click that it's going to look a little bit nicer and all i need to do is make a decision of if i want this to go in so there or out and i say that because sometimes you do get better results going one way or the other in this instance it's not really a problem it's not as complicated as it could be so either way is going to look fine so effectively just see what you like in terms of the positioning i think i'm going to go with that so it's more towards the outside you can come over here and select an exact thickness but i'm doing this fairly roughly the other way is if you've got a thickness that you're happy with for example i want it to be this thick you can just change the offset from -1 to 1 and it will go the other way so it's a quick way once you've got the exact thickness of sorting it out i want minus one so we've got there once you've got that we can apply it but in this instance we don't actually need to i'm going to press g and x move that in i'm just going to use the really simple method of just cutting it in so something like there let's just have a look at how much it's in that should be about right and i've got ball tools activated we're going to use ball tool quite a lot later just to make things nice and easy so if you don't have it edit preferences come over here get the add-ons up ball and you want to have ball tool activated that means instead of having to use modifiers to add things in all i need to do is click the object that i want to be the cutter then shift click the other object and then press control and minus and that's going to delete it or cut it out it makes a difference boolean so i'm just going to hide that object i've got that nice and sorted i've got my interesting panel lines and if i want to i can just come into this object and start adding in whatever extra details i want to do for example windows so they've got my nice simple window so that works really well if we want to have something circular but what about something a little bit more complex especially something where we're going to have maybe crossing over panel lines this is something that really often causes a lot of problems so what would be something good to demonstrate this on let's go for something like a six millimeter landing pad so bring a cylinder and i'm gonna change that to six so it's a sort of good shape and that's probably a bit small so let's scale that up a bit i'm not going to be too exact on the size we'll just go with that for now in fact that's probably actually really too small but whatever it's fine then i'm going to scale that on the z axis so s and z and let's go into face mode select that face and we'll scale that a little bit smaller so it's a bit more of an interesting shape something like that all right okay and then i to insert that e2 through that down and we've got a sort of beginnings of a landing pad so this is something that's going to be relatively non-detailed unless we put some panel lines on it so let's get started with that now i'm going to do a couple of things quite intentionally wrong with this just to demonstrate points then i'll obviously fix them but i just want to talk through some of the issues that i see people doing so let's start with bringing in a circle shifted zed so we could see that and let's scale that up to something like there and okay now to demonstrate a point with something that can go wrong i want to actually have something that's got a little bit more geometry on it so i'm going to bring a circle as well so i'm actually going to go into this go into vertex mode and shift an a and i'm going to bring in a circle and let's go to one two eight and let's scale that up to about there so this is gonna be the center of the landing pad and i can go to object mode g and z that up so it's visible vertex mode a selects everything e to extruder up z to constrain on the z-axis back into object mode and add a solidify modifier just to get that having some thickness to it and usefully because it's all one object they're gonna nicely have the same thickness oh and i haven't control an a applied the scale which is always the biggest crime so let's go and fix that and let's do something like that that should look alright so everything is the same thickness so we've got this going on now this would be fine to go and cut straight into this but let's add a little bit more detail to it let's do something like some additional panel lines that will come from the outside to the center if you imagine there'd be like these landing lights going into the middle so we want some panel lines for those lights to go into so let's shift an a and i'm just going to bring in a cube to be my additional details i'm going to scale that down i'm just sort of guesstimating it for this and where do you want this to be so let's rotate this so that we can have it coming out almost like a spoke so firstly s and y scale up on the y i'll probably need to do it a bit more or less than that i'll worry about that in a second and we want to rotate it around and i'm just going to guesstimate it but essentially that's going to be well a circle is 360 and then i'm going to need to divide that by the six sides and i want it halfway so that's going to be 12. so there we go and i'm going to press g to move it and then y and y again to constrain to that axis and actually that's a point i probably want to make this go exactly up to the edge so i'm going to g and said that's a bit easier to see go into snapping mode make sure i'm on edge mode and then if i g y y that's going to be perfectly on that edge and i just need to go into vertex mode grab those g y y and move those to somewhere there so i want this to be part way across my mesh there so it doesn't look too in fact let's g and y y that a little bit more oh let's turn the snapping off g y and y there we go now i've got the issue that stupidly moved the whole thing i don't know why i did that so shift an s and i'm going to move the origin back to the cursor and what that's going to mean i can do is press shift and d to duplicate it r to be rotating it straight away and then that is going to be well 360 divided by 6 so i needed 60. and if i just press shift and r to repeat the action i've got all of those done and just to make it a bit easier to see i'm just going to increase these in height slightly so come to the x-axis vertex mode x-ray mode select all of them g and z i'm just making them a bit thicker so they're easier to see now this is the mistake that i see people make a lot so now we need to cut this out of our landing pad and there are a couple of ways of doing this the first is that you start cutting all of these objects individually out of this landing pad and that can work but a lot of the time because you're getting things cutting over each other it causes issues i generally find the best way to organize this and this is just something that i do to find everything easier is i'm going to make one overall cutter and that makes everything a lot easier to solve when there's problems so i'm just going to come here in fact actually let's duplicate all of these so i can talk about this correctly so i'm going to put that over there and i'm going to select all of these and i'm going to add them to this cutter i'm going to turn the snapping on i'm going to g and zed that up so they're all aligned because otherwise our panel lines are going to be all at different heights and i'm going to shift select that control and plus and now i've got one big total cutter and then i'm just going to cheat and zip those down just have a look at that yep until they're going to cut out and now what that means is that i just need to click my one cutter here and if there's any problems with this i'll see it and then control and minus it from here and what you'll see now is we've got nice clean cuts nothing's have a problem we're not getting any weird boolean issues where faces aren't showing up and what's nice about this is that i've only got one boolean to look at here and if i want to do anything with this cutter i can click on the cutter and i've got all my individual booleans there attached to it it makes it a lot easier to look at especially if i go here and press q and ever scroll that means i can select this one and then i can use q and everscroll to go through the other ones i should say everscroll is a function of hard ops it's really useful for helping to essentially sort out your life and this makes it work quite nicely but there's a problem with this if i just hide all of these objects and have a look here this looks great until i apply it if i go into vertex mode you'll see what i mean here where we've got this complex intersection here because we've got all of these bits of the circle and then our big cutter here was cutting through it this is going to cause a lot of little issues we don't like that it's going to be a problem it's not going to be the biggest problem in the world but it's fairly ugly geometry it can cause problems if we start doing more with this object so let's make it so we don't have this issue in the first place and actually this makes your life simpler not having to do this so i'm going to kind of fix this over here so all i'm going to do is the same thing i'm going to select all of these objects that i want to select and this time this is what makes this great i'm not even going to bother aligning them i'm just going to press ctrl and plus to add them to this and then importantly i'm just going to press shift a add in a cube you could just do this with box cutter i do want to say that let's turn off snapping s to scale that up and g that down to about there let's just check that it's there we go so we do want to move that around so g and x it's covering everything and then i'm just going to cut this out of my main cutter so control and minus and what that means is we've got nice flat bottom to this i haven't had to mess around with any of this lining nonsense and all i'm going to do is select all of these and move them down again with box cutter this is a lot easier because it parents everything but don't worry about that for now so g and z moving everything down there is where i want to cut it and i'm going to select the cutter select the object control minus and we've got exactly the same effect now as we did over here looks no different all i've done is instead of having to align everything i've just brought in this cube to effectively do the aligning for me to cut off the bottom but importantly if i just uh select all of these hide those and hide that and apply this if i go into vertex mode we suddenly have much much cleaner geometry if we look at these side by side here we have this horrible mess of geometry here here we have very clean geometry so not only is this method a little bit quicker and easier it means that we don't have to worry about all of this faffing everything going wrong it just makes life easier so that process there seems to get better results for me it also causes less problems whenever you're gonna do something with it honestly it's the way to go so hopefully that's been some useful tips there as always please do give the video a like if you found it useful and if you've got any questions or anything else you'd like me to demonstrate that you've seen either on the channel or you just want to do and you're not sure how to do it please do feel free to ask in the comment section or drop me a message somewhere on facebook or on instagram you've got my instagram handle at the bottom of the page you

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 43,697

Keywords: blender, panel line, tau, modelling, warhammer, 40k, 40000, landing pad, alien, door, details, detailing, 3d design, 3d printing, 3d print, 3d printer, guide, tutorial, how to

Id: L0752ooFmU0

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022