How to fix shading breaks on curved surfaces in Blender (without normal transfer)

hey guys real quick before the video starts i just want to mention that our november patreon is now up you'll learn how to make this recon canon with add-ons and also this hand grenade using the vanilla tools and blender every single month we do add-ons and vanilla tutorials decal packs and monthly project files so take a look at the patreon if you're interested it's live right now what's up guys new video today this one's going to discuss how to effectively run booleans and curvy type surfaces without the need for normal transfer without the need for any of that mumbo jumbo just how to manage the shading and make it work flawlessly so it's just going to be easier for me to demonstrate so so i'll do all this in vanilla blender so what i'm going to do is um we're going to run a boolean cut in here and just get the curved surface just defined first so maybe i'll come in here rotate this cube a bit scale it on the y and then i'm going to go ahead and tab into edge mode and just bevel this edge give it a good amount of segments now when you're running curved surfaces like when you're running booleans non-destructively right you want to consider how many edges you have running through here because if you have two little edges it's going to look really blocky like this you can kind of see how blocky that looks but if you have too many it's going to have issues with the actual boolean as you'll see but anyways generally something like 20 segments is more than enough so i'm just going to drop in 20 here like that okay next thing we need to do with any project is to make sure everything is smooth and then auto smooth is turned on so both on the main mesh and on the cutter object and of course what we need to do is come in here select this and then shift click this make sure you have the bull tool add-on or hard ops enabled and you can press control minus actually other way around to subtract it that way and you're going to see now we have a non-destructive curved surface in here okay so now what i want to do is run a circular boolean in the side here so you know i'll run a cylinder and then make a hole and the issue usually with this type of thing is managing the shading getting it to shade properly without a normal transfer and this is kind of tricky because you have to consider the amount of vertices and edges on the cylinder as well as what you have on this base mesh so i'm not going to try to explain it i'm just going to show you exactly my thought process and how i do these things so before i run any sort of circular boolean on a curved surface i first come in here and under viewport display i turn on wireframe just so i can see exactly how many edges i'm working with here next what i do is i add in a cylinder and two little vertices once again it's going to look way too blocky too many and it's going to be unbalanced in terms of the amount of edges here and on the base mesh so usually i just meet in the middle something like 64 is more than enough we're going to go ahead and shade it smooth and turn on our auto smooth here all right next let's rotate this in 90 degrees around the y-axis and scale it down and the nice thing about using the wireframe in here is that you can actually see the edges in object mode so now i have a better idea of where to position the cylinder for optimal shading so i'm just going to go in here make this you know big enough so maybe around here and this should be plenty and now what i want to do is uh come in here and just run a difference boolean so shift click and control minus and there we go and maybe what i'll do just to have some fun with it is i'll come in here and simply add a solidify modifier so that way we have a nice gap maybe make this a bit bigger like .05 or so and i guess that'll be okay we'll just press h to hide this guy and as you can see before we even apply our bevel you can see with the wireframe turned off the shading is already going kind of bad not sure how well you can see it with youtube's compression but all around here because of these end guns we're having issues you know ngons and whatever else is just giving a general shading stretch across this mesh here so let's go ahead and see how much worse it gets with the bevel so we're going to add a bevel modifier change the limit method over to angle as usual we'll turn off our clamp overlap and then maybe give it like three segments drop the amount down to something really low and simply harden the normals for better shading and you can see this is kind of bad if we go into mat cap view the shading is absolutely atrocious as you can see all these shading breaks as we go through and this is the number one issue i see so many people run into it's a really easy fix so how do we fix it is the real question well fortunately non-destructive workflow like this as you can see we're still working with the base cube because we haven't yet applied our boolean modifiers since we're working on destructively we can fix this easily so first thing i want to do is consider what exactly is happening here why is the shading bad in the first place and if we take a look in wireframe you can see precisely the reason for that is because the shading can stretch all the way from the edge of the circle to the edge of the mesh because we have just one single face stretching all the way across ideally we want to push the shading back into here so you can't see it which is going to require some vertical loop cuts kind of helping isolate the shading back here so the trick is a lot of people make this mistake here so if we were to apply the booleans here and try to run some loop cuts right if we apply both of these you're going to see we simply can't because if we try to run some loop cuts it's basically going to terminate because we have n-gons and things like that and you could use something like a knife project to do it brute force basically very very extreme strategy no need to do that instead what we want to do is keep the booleans here and utilize the cutters so as you can see this cutter right here is affecting our curved surface this is the one that we are working with for that curved surface as you can see so what you can actually do since this boolean is still being affected we haven't applied the boolean yet we can come into edit mode for this guy and run some loop cuts through here and make it you know relatively square and isolated we'll just do something like that that should be good and basically what's happening with this is it's um it's forcing geometry from the cutter onto the base mesh so if we hide this you're going to see that this geometry is basically forced on here so now if we go into matcap you can see that the shading can't really extend this far anymore the farthest it'll extend is right to wherever this edge is going across and as you can see it's not extending all the way across now the shading is still pretty bad here and no doubt about that but we'll go ahead and fix it the first step is just getting it to look a little bit better in the first place so yeah there we go so obviously we're gonna have to get in here maybe tweak the bevel a bit make it a bit bigger and you're gonna see when we do that we simply get a lot of artifacts in here and a lot of bad shading areas and unfortunately artifacts must be fixed manually so we're going to have to apply the boolean modifiers at this point so i'm always a fan of simply making a backup in case we make a mistake so what we could do is just duplicate this piece and then hide it so that way we have a backup in the case we need to revert back so i'm going to go ahead and go in here and apply the boolean modifiers we'll just apply both of them that's fine and all we have to do now is get in here oops did i apply the wrong one i don't know what i applied we'll go in here apply that and all we need to do at this point is clean up the shading i just realized my mic is like it's not really close to me but in the video it looks like i'm kissing the freaking mic so i'm going to push that away and actually be able to see you anyways what we're going to do at this point is just come in here i'll go back to studio view because this matte cap hurts my eyes we'll come in here and all we have to do is take care of some of these shading errors so most of these can be fixed by simply going in and merging these together you know the near-miss ones can be merged we can come in here merge some of these near-miss vertices together i have so many videos on this that i'm not going to bother explaining every single thing it's a very simple process you just get in here and you just slide things out of the way and you're basically good to go so you can kind of see the gist of what i'm doing right here so i'll just keep doing it this one merge these together slide this one over slide this one down we could probably dissolve out these edges because they're not hurting the curvature too much so control x on that one maybe take these together as you can see it's already looking a lot better so i was going to do this off camera and let you do it on your own but i probably should just continue this on video just in the case we have a you know complete beginner watching i want to make sure everyone understands what's happening you can always fast forward but you can't always get video back that doesn't exist so i might as well just show you so all i'm really doing in here just sliding these out of the way basically the reason these artifacts are occurring if we go into wireframe is because some of these edges are overlapping with the bevel but if we simply slide them away you can see they're basically fixed so all we need to do is make sure these vertices are not overlapping with our bevel and we should be good to go so it's a very easy process a bit boring but you know some of these you can even get away with dissolving if it's not hurting the mesh too much and hopefully you see now why i say you want to have a good amount of geo for the curved surface but if you have too much then you're going to have so much to clean up like if we had a hundred edges going across compared to you know the few we did for the bevel this cleanup would be a mess because we'd have so many vertices to deal with so that's why i say focus on a good even amount but don't go overboard because you're just gonna begin to hit your modeling life if you do that so we'll take these together and by the way i'm using the machine tools add-on for quick merging you could also simply use the m key i just think machine tools is easier and it's also free so you can grab that on gumroad put that together um we could symmetrize as well but who cares let's take this one slide it take these together the really close ones will definitely merge together these ones here these ones here i think you get the memo at this point and a few more left up here not really that many but might as well take care of them while we can and let's see okay so now you can see this shading is looking almost impeccable if we go into mat cap not going to be perfect but going to be pretty darn good compared to what we have before so for these extra shading stretches going across they probably won't pick up in your render so you could probably leave it but if you want to be a perfectionist what i usually do at this point is i simply come in here and run some knife cuts all the way around to help kind of isolate push that shading back into the mesh and as you can see now you can't really see anything unless you get really really close at a certain angle and for any newbies out there i do want to clarify this is mainly for concept work and renderings if you were to do this for a different pipeline it might not be the best choice so it simply depends on what you're doing i usually just go for cool renders so i just work on making sure the shading looks good and that's all that really matters for me so as you can see all we're really doing is coming in here and pushing that shading back and it looks pretty much flawless now so yeah some of these are just way too obvious and i'm not going to be able to deal with that so i'm just going to get in here and simply connect all these guys up with a knife tool once again the k key for that maybe for these guys we could slide these in a bit will that hurt the curvature not really it should be okay and we're gonna get up here and basically do the same thing it's not really anything tedious or complicated and yeah we're just about there so we do have one additional issue i need to discuss let me just finish this up maybe we'll slide this one double tap g slide this one up a bit and this one up a bit and you know what this is probably as close as i'm going to get to what i want so maybe a few more on this side and once again you could always symmetrize to cut half the workout but who cares we're almost there anyways so maybe join these two up and let's see all right i think we're good to go and then we'll just slide this area here over a bit and let's go ahead and take a look in object mode now you can see if we look at it from a distance like this the shading is pretty much impeccable there might be some minor areas you see along the edges but we're using a very unforgiving matte cap here if i were to go into material view and maybe add in like a i don't know metallic one make it something very obvious like a very reflective surface and perhaps like right here this is way too obvious so what i'm going to do is dissolve that out and slide this over and the reason it's so harsh is because we had an overlap right there sometimes the overlaps are too severe you have to merge them but sometimes you can get away with it like right here too close join those together slide this up a bit anyways if we go into rendered view let's go into cycles gpu computes fine get my hdr i loaded in now you can see this is pretty much fine for a concept render right no one's going to go in here and zoom in really really close and try to find any minor error that you might see this is the point i'm making you want to isolate the shading don't deal with perfection this is pretty much all we need for a good render now we have an additional issue here that i wanted to kind of bring up so right up here on the top you're going to see that part of it is not beveling the beveling kind of cuts off right here and that's because the bevel angle needs to be adjusted we need to simply decrease this until it catches you can see and that should take care of the rest of it and it looks like we just need to slide these vertices here up just a bit because they're overlapping with the bevel and there you go pretty much finish with it now in the case that you adjusted the angle and the angle started catching other areas you didn't want to be affected you might have to go in and use a bevel weight instead and also i just noticed right here we have some edges we don't need so control x dissolve these out you can just alt click these edges and press ctrl x and that should take care of it okay anyways so yeah if the angle wasn't working out for you you could control this by using a bevel weight and basically all you do for that is you go in here set this to weight and right now nothing is going to be beveled at this point right now the only thing affecting this is our auto smooth as you can see here so maybe i'll decrease the auto smooth to make sure it picks up the top as well so right about there okay so what we need to do is mark the edges we want to have beveled manually now usually i'd use add-ons for this just to make it like a one-click deal but i want to do this on vanilla so basically what we do is we go around to all the edges we want to have beveled and run a bevel weight on it the easiest way to do this is to go up here and go to select and then select sharp edges and it's going to select all of the harsher edges of the mesh here you can also adjust the threshold to make it catch or release some of the edges there as you can see we have just about everything we want and all we have to do is go in here to the end panel go to item and then increase the mean bevel weight for edges data up to a value of 1 and as you can see we now have a bevel so basically anything marked with this blue bevel weight line is being beveled because we're using the weight limit method we could always change back to angle and it would just calculate based off of an angle instead so this is precisely how i attack pieces like this right when i'm going for concept stuff i'm all about efficiency and getting the render out in a reasonable amount of time so i'm not sitting here stressing about every single tiny little vertex i'm going for clean shading and in the case i have artifacts like i do right here i just hop in and i take care of the issues so you can see we did miss some areas here we might have to clean up manually right here as well so be careful of that and yeah we're pretty much good to go and then you can just hop in here add in whatever material you want you could add in you know metallic materials make it more dark maybe use something like the kid-ops material system put like an aluminum mat on here just for fun and as you can see no shading issues no real issues at all with this thing it looks pretty good overall as you can see so that's about it for this video i really hope it helped you out and kind of gave you a better insight as to how to approach these types of situations so thanks for watching once again we have a patreon in the description if you want to support us on there we do plenty of exclusive tutorials every single month and it'll probably help you out a lot so until next time i'll see you then

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 39,885

Keywords: blender, 2.8, fix, shading, tutorial, clean, boolean, curved, curvature, cylinder, the, right, way, hard, surface, modeling, josh, gambrell

Id: XVInQxb8gHc

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020