How to kitbash like a pro in Blender!

so kit bashing what the heck is it is where you take a bunch of assets that have been already created ahead of time and you bash them together to create one new piece of art is it cheating oh not really i call it efficient and kid bashing has been around for a long time it's been used for decades to make spaceships and sci-fi films miniatures and even movie props if you really want to see how it's done go to adam savage's youtube channel you'll find some really cool kid bashing videos there but bringing this skill set into the 21st century where everything is run by a blender kit bashing can be done all the same you can download pre-made sets of pieces parts and details and combine them in interesting and creative ways to make something new and interesting without spending all the time modeling everything from scratch you can make your own kid bash sets you can buy them online you can also find tons of really great free ones online which i've done as well in fact i've got a whole folder called kit bash that contains 50 gigabytes of all kinds of stuff and i'm pretty sure i haven't paid a cent for any of it it's all legal and free you just got to know where to look so in this video i'm going to show you how to build a spaceship from a specific kit bash set that i found for free on blindswap.com to find it just type in grebel pack and it's the very first one called miscellaneous grebel pack if you go to it you can see the user who made these and a few other really great files his name is spacehead and he currently has four grieble related packs in here that are really well done and very useful if you are into this kind of art so go ahead and download this file it's a blend file it's almost 40 megabytes and it contains a whole bunch of separate meshes now sometimes when you get a kit batch set it will be in a file type other than blender's native format this one for example by a pablo castano norcus this is a free kit bash set and look at this in the file properties i can see it's a dot obj so to get that into blender you'll have to go to file import and select wavefront obj now you have to find it it's right here select it and press import obj if you don't see the import obj go look in your preferences in the add-on section and make sure that that add-on is enabled same with the fbx format which is very popular you do have to enable the add-on in order to import fbx files and there we go we've got all the meshes and for some reason probably because it's an obj format all these pieces are combined into one mesh we can separate those pretty easily by going into edit mode which is tab press a to make sure everything is selected press p for separate and we're going to do by loose parts now when you press enter your computer might crash if it can handle all these polygons so i'm going to press enter and see what happens it's basically thinking what's separate what's loose and what's not and look at this it generated all these meshes so i'm going to get out of edit mode right now and look at this i can click on all these independent pieces cool they're all separated for me now if you get lucky and find a blend file for your kit batch pieces that's awesome too because these should already be separated and you just open the blend file and you're ready to go and that's what we'll be doing today with space heads file that we found on blindswap.com so i'm going to go ahead and open his file here and here are all the glorious pieces that he has created for us to play with so i'm going to show you how to organize sort them and efficiently use these pieces to make something cool and unique so first thing we're going to do is clean up this interface a little bit i'm going to get rid of this side panel by pressing the letter in and i'm going to collapse the shader window down here by expanding my 3d view straight downwards and i'm going to drag this over a little bit like so so what i like to do first is organize all these unused pieces into one collection an easy way to do that is press the number seven for the above view press b for box select and just select all the meshes right here and press the letter m and put the menu collection call it kit bash pieces enter now over here on the right if you expand this you can see we've got kit batch pieces with all these meshes inside of it there's a few others over here i'm not sure what these parts are it might be accidental meshes or parts of something that the creator didn't clean up i don't know but i can't see them so i'm just going to click and delete them like that delete that we've got some inserts here that are not being used perhaps because we moved everything into this collection so i'm just going to delete these on these empty collections to clean up my workspace because cleanliness is everything for efficiency and being a clean artist actually will help you be a better artist because you can be more creative and not be stumbling over your mess you made so we can leave this collection appear with the camera we can also put lighting and stuff in here but this is ultimately not going to be rendered because we're going to move parts to another collection or we're going to build our spaceship so let's expand this back click on our little funnel up here turn on the screen and the camera the screen will turn off a mesh from being viewed but it also will save your computer from processing the data i guess of that mesh the eyeball if i understood correctly will hide it but it's still being processed in your memory the monitor however will completely disable it from your scene and the camera of course will disable from being rendered when you hit f12 to render your scene so with all these things in the correct collection we're going to right click on the collection itself and select select objects now they're all selected let's use the g key to move them over here up under this kind of top left now remember i'm in my seven or top view so this is the floor grid right right there so seven and i'm going to move these out of the way because i'm going to build my spaceship right in the center so here's the really fun part we're going to look in here and pretend like we're digging through the coolest box of legos ever we're going to just select things that we think are cool so for me that's right click so i'm going to right click and hold shift i'm just going to right click on a bunch of pieces that i think i might use i like that and that that's cool that's cool cool cool cool cool this is totally part of a lightsaber right there cool i love this antenna up there that's awesome cool sphere thingy chunky thing all right cool so once i've grabbed a bunch of pieces that i like what i'm going to do is i'm going to press shift d and enter now we have duplicates on top of the pieces we have selected so if i press g look see we made duplicates of everything and these are not linked copies which means if i edit these these originals that are going to stay put over here are not going to change so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to press alt g which resets the location of these selected objects to the center grid right here now these are all the pieces that i want to use all smashed together don't worry they're not joined there are still separate see we can move them away from each other like so which we will in a second but because i didn't do a linked copy i can edit these and these will not be changed even though they're copies if you to if you want to be able to edit these originals and have that change reflected on the pieces you're going to be using say the parts that you're borrowing right then do alt d instead of shifty but that kind of depends on you know if you plan on really editing or changing these anyway so we've got all our parts here the the borrowed pieces we'll call them because they're in their copies as well so i'm going to press 7 and i like this sphere piece i'm going to actually use this as the cockpit right this front of the ship so i'm going to use my red grid line which is the x-axis as basically the center axis of my whole spaceship so over here on our tools i'm going to click the move tool because i like to be able to grab those arrows i'm just going to put this right here maybe the front of the ship let's see what other parts that we have selected we've got this cool like uh framework thing um so i'm going to stay in my at my 7 my grid view r90 to rotate it and then r y 90 to rotate it that way put that behind there i'm going to split my view here so i can see in three dimensions but also keep that flat view so what is this this is like a i've grabbed like a cylinder kind of a space station two piece so all down here ry90 plug it in there and just kind of connect it now look at this the height is different that's okay that's because the origin point look at this the origin point in the on for this mesh is like up here for some weird reason three it's right there um we can reset that by pressing w put on the set origin and origin to geometry this kind of get is going to get like a basic it's basically going to get a medium point of all the mesh geometry and place the origin right there now as long as it's a symmetrical mesh which this is it's going to be in at least in the middle on the y-axis here but if there was something like sticking out over here then the origin point would be offset but um this is symmetrical so we're good there so i'm going to press alt g again and it's going to reset it to the center of the grid and slide it out and let's see if we get lucky did it line up with the other cylinder that's a little it's a little high but that's because we have some uh some other mesh pieces so you can just kind of eyeball it try to line up all your cylindrical pieces so they're all you know in a straight line like the international space station kind of deal cool uh we got this really awesome like crazy motor piece over here so i'm definitely going to use that so on with my mouse over the bottom screen down here r90 actually i want the jet on the the back end so r180 enter there we go i'll make this the engine here's a nice like uh cabin for the people put that there what else do we got we got some like cool square great greeble pieces i'm going to use this and i'm going to put it like on the side of this so down on my bottom screen r90 or x90 here we go and i'm going to put it here here's a cool trick if you want to put this over here but without duplicating it messing up messing around with you know having to uh play with two pieces instead of just one you can use the mirror modifier in an interesting way so watch this i'm going to make sure this piece is selected go to my wrench or modifiers tab add modifier choose mirror and down here mirror object click on the little eyedropper and select this cylinder right here now it's using this as the center point let's change the axis to y there we go so now it's mirroring not along itself but along the center point or the origin point of this guy now if we move this it's going to mess with our mirror modifier but as long as we know this is going to be in like the central spine of the ship we're good and we can move this out and the other one copies it look at that so we've done two pieces of work with just one so that's awesome you can also mirror it on additional axis axes like y and z then you can have like double like this or x and y and now we can have four of them oh x y and z let me turn off z there we go so now i have one actual mesh which is the real one down here and it's being copied all over the place and i think i kind of like that yeah let's keep that okay what else we got we got this another cylinder piece i don't know if i'll use that some of these you know additional pieces just kind of move them off to the side remember this is just legos right we can make a mess at first and then we'll we'll clean it up later here's our our lightsaber piece come back to my above view darth vader's hilt right there right um we got an uh satellite dish here i'm gonna put that on top of the ship so i'm just gonna scale it down and you have totally you have total control over scale of rotational placement so you use those as you want and actually i'm going to plug this into this circle piece right here look at that nice cool what else we got we got a another lightsaber piece there cool sphere oh that'll be a cool like tank right let's do that so i'm on my my bottom screen is a side view so i'm going to press g to move this over here there's a little thing sticking out so i'm going to do rx90 there we go and plug it in right there nice maybe that's a sensor dome maybe it's a gas tank we'll never know unless we ask mr spacehead of course all right i'm going to size this guy up this set of cylinders and i'm going to rotate it along the y and you can also scale things you know like this you can squish it as long as it's not obviously like getting out of proportion which this is an abstract shape there's no squares or anything like that so we're okay to squish things however we need we can size this up too you know don't let your whole spaceship be the same thickness give it some variety what else we got there's a cool centerpiece there's that cool octagon thingy here's an antenna let's add an antenna um i'm going to flip it around flip bit upside down r 180 and it's really big so i'm going to scale it down and just put it like right there bottom part of the ship ever in space there's really no up and down right so if you're making spaceships that are traveling like only in space and not landing on a planet it doesn't matter what direction things are pointing keep that in mind now i think things are getting a little messy so here's a nice trick to keep things visually understandable not viewport shading but go to object view click on this down arrow and press random look at this now every mesh has its own random color and it just helps your brain help me kind of differentiate what is what all right so i'm going to line this up with this cylinder over here now i'm going to click on this object right here and let's see what the origin point is it's over here i think the order point is correct if we go to uh not front view but reverse view yeah the origin point is in the middle of this circle so that means i can shift s and uh cursor to selected okay so now my 3d cursor is actually where the origin point is i'm going to use my 3d cursor to rotate and duplicate this tank all the way around so press negative three and i'll i'll go over here on this bottom screen so you can see what the heck i'm doing but it looks like in this new version of blender what a man 2.92 you have to be in a flat view to do this duplicating trick which i'll show you in just a second so so i'm going to duplicate this cylinder around this stuff down here and i need to to be i need there to be nine of them so we've got our 3d cursor set now we need to set our i don't know what this is called like our pivoting point the 3d cursor now i'm going to press alt uh with my with my mouse over this view it has to be on a flat view it seems like blender 2.92 you have to be in a flat view to do this duplicating trick so watch this alt d r 40 enter now i did that is basically all one key stroke step now we can repeat that over and over eight more times with shift r r r r r r r there we go now i did alt d remember which means they're an exact copy so if i edit something they're all going to do the same thing cool huh so materials you know modeling tweaks whatever they're all going to copy each other all right so we just filled in that empty kind of skinny spot right on that mesh and let's add this sensor beacon to the top here i'm going to put it right here r90 enter oh look at that it pivoted it on my 3d cursor which is still back here so switch this pivot point to individual put this over our crew cabins is what i'm going to call it side view move it on top here scale it down antennas can come in all shapes and sizes big and small okay we've got some more agreeable pieces here i'm going to put this on the side here so i already have a side view up here so i'm going to line it up scale it down a little bit place it right roughly in the middle move it in and we're going to use our mirroring trick again so with this object selected add modifier mirror uh mirror object is this octagonal piece oh that's weird not sure what's going on there let's go let's go to this object right here and see if it's rotated oh it is look at this the object itself has been rotated so here's another good trick you need to know when you're using kit bash stuff because sometimes the creator does not pre rotate or apply rotations so this object even though it looks nice and straight to us let me show you this one it looks great right it's actually rotated so if i reset the rotation this is the real original orientation of it um so let me undo that so if i want this to be the original rotation of the whole mesh i can apply rotation so with it selected ctrl a rotation and if you noticed over here on the right all the rotation numbers went to zero without it actually moving that's good so let's get out of our solo view which by the way is forward slash if you select an object press forward slash cells it out press it again it gets out of solo mode at least that's what i call it you know i don't there's a lot of things i don't know the proper terms for in blender so i just make up words uh let's do y there we go copied along the y axis cool we got some other greebles right here let's put this on the top of our crew cabins and shrink it down a lot this looks like some kind of thermal exhaust or even a port perhaps a little space space port for them to exit the ship and do a little spacewalk i'm going to put it right here and then we're going to use array duplicate it the other way so negative 1.1 just to give it a little space maybe a little bit more a little bit a little bit less there we go and now we can do our mirroring trick on top of this mirror and what are we going to mirror it on and collapse these guys this octagonal piece and along the y-axis so there and there on the bottom as well okay now let's pretend that this big cylinder right here is some kind of fuel tank or container and we're going to use this like framework here to to hold it maybe it's transporting something so we're going to move this up here ry90 if you press period by the way it zooms into your object that you have selected i want this to fit within this framework so if we need to we can scale it without it intersecting and you know crossing into the other mesh pieces right here okay cool and let's do our mirroring so add modifier mirror object is going to be this one and voila symmetrical cool now we can of course modify kid bash pieces it's not illegal so i'm going to go into edit mode grab this face press control l and it grabs all the linked faces for this bracket piece i want another one so shift d x and there we go two bracket pieces holding these containers or boosters or whatever you want them to be also i don't like that these are open so select it space so in edge select mode alt select it grabs a of the whole ring i'm going to press f to fill and then ctrl b to bevel it i'm going to make this nice and rounded on the front so i'm going to while i'm still in this bevel mode i'm going to press the plus key to increase the segments of the bevel nice and round and back here i'm going to extrude it shrink it and bevel that as well cool looks a little bit more like a pressurized container all right let's grab this round piece ry90 above view place it right here to kind of cover up and add some some shape to this that wasn't there before if you want it to be exact go to your object properties and look at your location stuff so y is not quite zero there we go now it's zero and it's perfectly centered along this mesh assuming that this mesh is of course perfectly on the zeroth place which it is the x is just how far forwards or backwards it is so that looks cooler than it did before this nozzle is kind of boring so let's just delete it right so in face select mode i'm going to grab these faces and the inside faces and just delete those faces but we got some more little little guys here ctrl l delete faces and now we can add uh let's see i like this one here so one quick way to get this all centered is just with a selected press alt g to reset the location move it over here ry 90. there we go and s to scale it up nice and big have a real big boost booster on the back awesome that's a big booster maybe a little too big okay we can put this little frame piece back here too alt g now it's perfectly in the center just slide it back here rx90 rz90 oops i wanted to go the other way so before i press enter just hit the the minus key and it makes your 90 a negative 90 and then press enter so i want this to actually be like like a protective you know bracket or something and we need two of them so modifiers add mirror object is the booster thing there we go i already had x's apparently the correct coordinate awesome now let's pretend we are all happy with what we've created with our kit bashing let's uh get this more uh ready to render now there's some pieces that we didn't use that's okay we can leave them there but remember these are all still in this one kid bash pieces collect collection but we want to make another collection just for our render so let's go to an above view press b for box select and try to just to select the pieces you've actually used to double check that you got them all just hit g and wiggle it around oh i accidentally got this guy so hold shift and select that twice to deselect it now just g to test it out yeah we've got our whole ship now with them all selected press m new collection and ship pieces here we go okay now look at this we've got a ship pieces collection whereas these guys are still in you know they're still being borrowed from this collection over here but they're not going to be rendered because over here let's turn off kit bash pieces render and we can even turn off the screen to just get them out of our view cool kind of reminds me of the 2001 space odyssey ship i guess because the sphere up front and the long skinniness of it all right cool so let's do a quick space render so let's expand this go to our world and change the background to pure black and then we need one light which is sun so shift a light make a sun let's just make it point straight downwards and see how that looks go to the light settings change your angles of something very low like below number two or three so it's a sharp you know harsh sun turn the brightness up i i like four like three and four is a good starting point and we don't need a bunch of balance points so just put that down to eight and let's uh oh we need to set our camera so we do have a camera if you press zero it goes to this random view i don't want it to look there i want it to look here so with a camera in your scene that is the active camera you can just press ctrl alt zero and it grabs for edit whatever your active camera is and it moves it to your viewport view roughly it's not perfect but close enough so now i'm going to move it backwards by pressing g z z z a second time moves it on this z axis g to kind of re-compose my shot and that's fine right there let's press f12 and see what happens all right not bad we have kind of this uh concept art you know clay render is what it looks like because there's no textures except for up here randomly there's like a gray texture that's not doing anything so let's fix that by going back here selector object material and yeah it has a blank material whereas these don't have any material so let's make them have all the same material here's a nice trick first select the object you want to copy the material from and then b for box select select everything and there we go everything is selected but what's the active object the front piece because it's more yellow whereas the other things are outlined in orange so now we can press ctrl l which is make links and go down to material enter now the active object basically we copied that material and pasted it to everything else so if i right click over here look at this all these meshes have the boring material material added cool let's make sure that color is pure white and almost pure white turn up the specular metallic is up let's turn down the roughness a little bit to give it some shine and another tip that is uh good for space renders but not completely scientifically accurate is adding a second light in space so with our sun selected i'm going to press shift d and just move my move my mouse down i do need to angle the sun so you can just press ry 180 or x180 whatever so now our normal sun is pointing downwards right whereas the second light is going to point upwards but make it much weaker put it at maybe 2 and give it a little blue color a little bit of blueness to it i don't know why blue is just nice it's kind of dark and nighttime looking let's render this f12 all right interesting it's a little strong and we turn it down to like 0.5 or something make a little bit richer now this looks totally different than before right because we lowered the roughness so if you have a cylinder mesh that looks like this it's very jagged and low poly what you need to do to smooth that out is select it press w and go to shade smooth oh wait you're not done you'll need to go to the object properties here under the normals panel expand that and check on this and put it anywhere between 30 and 60. that will smooth out any edges and make it look high poly when it really isn't so this is the render so far i noticed it's really noisy and uh pixely so let's see what's going on in our renders tab we've got a decent amount of samples but denoising is not turned on so i'm going to check that i'm going to choose optics let's render this and see how it looks different should be nice and smooth once it denoises those parts it will take a little bit extra time but it's worth it for a clean render that looks great and that is it for this tutorial be sure to check out my product i just released on my gumroad account today it's a free kit bash set of pipe pieces you can build all kinds of stuff with pipes they've got really good realistic looking shaders and i am working on updating my space station kit bash set which is going to be incredible it's full of over 100 high quality meshes that you can use to build all kinds of spaceships space stations space capsules all kinds of awesome stuff so go get it today and when version 2 is released probably next week you can get that update for free of course well that's it for this video i hope you enjoyed it hope you learned something new if you have any questions ask in the comments down below and thank you so much for watching have a great week

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 15,122

Rating: 4.9851303 out of 5

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Id: 89FEqJh8rV8

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021