How to Cut a Model in Blender

all right guys so you want to learn how to cut apart a model and key it like this not a problem we're going to go ahead and do that so first we need a couple tools the first thing we're going to need is blender if you want to use do this in blender of course that's what this course is about so to do that go ahead and just google download blender the first link here is going to bring you to the download page go ahead download that and install it so then you're going to want to bring your model in to blender so let's go ahead and delete him file import stl and i'm going to go ahead and find the stl right here and import it all right it's going to hit g to move him all right so i have my screencast keys here so if i ever forget to say what key command is you can look right there okay so we have our model here let's go ahead and isolate just him by hitting the slash on the numpad and we want to cut him apart but before we do that we need two add-ons and so we're gonna go here to edit preferences add-ons and if we look in here we want to get 3d printing so let's type in printing and you need to make sure you have this checked and that will install it i've already got it on and then the second one you need or at least i think you should have is bool tools so type in bool you'll see bool tools i've got both these enabled bull tools will help you go ahead and cut this into pieces very easily and then the 3d printing one will help you prep your model for print okay so we've got this here let's go ahead and start cutting this along the joints i think that sounds like a smart idea so i'm going to go ahead and shift right click right there and what that's going to do is it's going to move my 3d cursor right there and then i'm going to hit shift a come up here to mesh and i'm going to insert a plane now that plane is good i like it but we're going to need to rotate it so let's hit r and then rotate that in the y axis and kind of get it as close to what we want as possible that's nice so let's go ahead and hit s and scale this up and just do that one more time now it's not quite where we need it so let's go ahead and hit g move it back like that all right so it will cut it off this would work technically but you know we kind of want it to be really nice and cut along the seam and the jacket to hide it when we print so to do that we're going to tab into edit mode so it's literally hitting tab with this mesh selected and now we've got that in there we want to come over here to our loop cuts tool not the knife tool but the loop cuts they look very similar and i'm going to add my first loop cut here and then maybe one up here and then one down here now we're going to go with the really big edits first and then we're going to start refining it more and more so up here we have three different ways of selecting stuff we've got our vertex so these little guys right here are vertexes it's one little point then we have edge and just two vertexes so that's this vertex and that vertex and then a face is basically four vertexes and all three more than three but right now let's go ahead and select in our edge mode now you can access any of these by using the one two or three key so if you want to be really fast at a program like blender get used to key commands trust me all right so i'm going to go ahead and move this on the x axis access only by hitting x after g and i'm going to move that over so that's starting to look good let's go ahead here and do the same thing here g z and [Music] let's see we could probably put another loop cut in right there so let's do that and then click back up to our arrow and then g x back again like that and there's another one right here g x and oops and now we're going to go ahead and just move this one and i'm the way it keeps going back to the sides like this and the top i'm using my numpad keys to do that so g and we're going to move that right there and that's a little off right there so let's add one more loop cut right there so if you want to move these around you can click here and then drag up and down to find where you want to put it but let's go back and select that one and hit g x again and move it to that area so that looks like really good for this area for the most part it's going to cut right along that seam or so we think but here's the problem jesus ain't only on the front side the back side it's going to cut horribly so what we're going to do for that is we're going to use the one key and we're going to come up here to just vertex select and we're going to start at the top and we're going to start moving these one vertex at a time over to where we need them and i might actually just move this entire one that way just a little you know we're going to come back and fix up the front some too when we're done with this but that's fine that's part of the process here okay so that looks good on that side we now we've done some edits and we kind of messed up the front a little that's normal this happens so we're just going to kind of start to put it back the way we had it all right that looks pretty good you know you can always continue to tweak these as much as you want i don't want to spend forever doing this because it's a tutorial but if you've gotten this far you'll understand kind of the premise of what we're trying to do here okay so that's really good that's going to cut that arm right off like we want but it's going to cause a problem right now so what we need to do is make this a little bit thicker because right now it's only a one dimensional shape so let's come up over here to our modifiers panel and let's add a solidify modifier and that's too thick so that's going to cut all that area out of the model but if we hold shift and we click in this area we can drag it smaller we just want to give it the smallest amount of thickness so there we go we're going to apply that modifier by coming up here and hitting apply so then we're going to go ahead and select our cutting plane then our model and then do shift control minus okay so that disappeared you're like wait a minute where did it go so we zoom in real here you can see that we have a slight cut that's awesome so now we have our model what we need to do now is go into tab mode and that's going to ignite edit mode hit a to select all and then we want to hit p and separate by loose parts all right now we have successfully cut off this arm so if i hit g or click on hg and then x i can swing it out so we have the arm cut off perfect all right so let's go ahead and keep that arm selected let's hit the tab the tab key but the slash on the numpad key and let's do that shift click again hit a and we're going to add in a cube pretty little cube let's hit s to scale it up and then we want to go back into edit mode for this so again that's tab and this time we want to select that front face so we'll come up here to there and select it or you can hit three and hit the s key just to scale it in this will just help it fit a little bit better so oops all right so now with that still selected let's go ahead and select our model 2 with shift click and we have that there so let's duplicate this with shift d and now let's keep that selected let's select our model and then hit that shift control minus again alright so if we hide this piece real quick here you can see we now have a hole the perfect shape that fits that piece awesome okay so now let's go ahead and shift-click the arm go back into isolation mode again and let's select this and we want to shrink that face just a little bit more now just that way it's a little bit smaller in case we have a little bit of swelling when it prints and we're going to click this select that hit shift plus this time and that's going to join it together so now if we go ahead we move this out you can see we have a spot for it to go and obviously this area here is bad but this is just a demo and that should slide in perfectly and it's ready to print almost the last thing we're going to need to do is make sure these are manifold because sometimes when you cut apart a model you're going to get non-manifold areas so if we come up here to the 3d printing tab and we go make manifold you'll see these numbers show up here at the bottom sometimes if these numbers aren't all zeros keep hitting make manifold and the bigger the model is the higher density the longer it will take see that we had seven and seven so let's go ahead and do it one more time okay now they're both zeros and then you just select where you want this to save to and you hit export and you are done and ready for print i hope you found this useful i know i usually do painting tutorials on this channel but i've gotten a lot of requests on how to cut apart a model so i thought i'd show you guys if you have any questions drop them below and if you like this blender tutorial of stuff to do with 3d printing let me know below as well you know i don't mind doing these i use blender a lot and i'd love to share the knowledge i have but only if you guys really want to watch so thank you for watching and i'll see you guys later

Channel: Filaments Folly

Views: 237,387

Keywords: blender, 3dprinting, 3d printing, booltool, cut model

Id: moPDPB4MY2U

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 12 2022