How to Model in Blender using Curves | Blender Basics Bootcamp Part 3

welcome back for day three of the blender basics boot camp today we're gonna finish modeling our trophy by adding some beautiful handles using bezier curves and adding some text you can make it say whatever you want mine says number one blender of all time so let's get to it my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar welcome to stream school all right now to add handles to our trophy cup we're going to use an entirely different kind of object in blender called a bezier curve so to do that i'm going to zoom out to give myself a little bit more room to work with i'm going to hit shift a to bring up my add menu i'm going to go down to where it says curve and i'm going to select the bezier that will immediately bring it in to the absolute dead center of our scene where our 3d cursor is which means we can't see it right now it's being completely hidden by our trophy cup so to fix that i'm going to go ahead and hit gx move it right on over on the x-axis until it's visible and click to set it in place so now i'm going to hit period on my numpad to zoom into it and as i rotate around this curve you're going to notice that on the top it looks like a nice curved line but on the front view it looks like a completely flat straight line now we want to work on this curve from the front view so we can create these really cool looking handles from the orthographic front so i'm going to go ahead and rotate this 90 degrees on the x-axis by hitting r x typing 90 on my keyboard and then pressing enter to set it in place so now i'm going to go ahead and hit 1 on the numpad to go to my orthographic front then we're going to hop right on over into edit mode by hitting tab on our keyboard and you're gonna immediately notice that this looks completely different from any other geometric object we've worked on in blender in edit mode what i mean by that is we have one point right here with two lines or handles sticking off of it we have a curved line then we have another point over here with two handles sticking off of it now in the previous video i said that curves can't exist in 3d space without being made up of flat polygons so what gives well as you can see this line is faceted and made out of flat polygons or flat individual segments but this curve and a bezier curve is controlled by the handles of these points so if i select this point for instance and select this handle now if i hit g to move it you can notice how that sort of guides and defines the shape of the curve same thing happens over here if i select this point which will automatically select all of the handles involved and i hit r to rotate it that also guides the shape of the curve or i could even hit s to scale it if i really wanted to and that will also guide the shape of the curve and if you really want to get fancy you can also select a point select a handle and then hit s just to scale that one individual handle if you really want to so knowing the absolute basics of these bezier curves let's go ahead and try to create this cool handle curve shape right here so to do that i'm going to go ahead and grab my point i'm going to hit g to move it right on up here next to the trophy click to set it in place and you'll notice i'm not moving this right up to the surface of the trophy and that's because this line is going to have some thickness when we're done so next i want this to be a perfectly straight up vertical line for my bezier handles so to do that i'm going to hit s shift z to scale on every axis except for z i'm gonna type zero on my keyboard and i'm gonna hit enter and that's gonna give us a perfectly straight up and down line so next i'm gonna grab our second point i'm gonna move that up to about where i think it should be click to set it in place and zoom back in on it and here i'm going to do the exact same thing but i'm going to exclude the x-axis instead so i'm going to hit s shift x 0 and that will give us a perfectly horizontal line when i press enter at this point you'll notice that these handles are defining a curve that's a little bit too square for my liking so to make a nice rounded curve instead we just need to adjust the handles so i'm going to select this point hit s to scale it down a little bit now i'm going to select this point and i'm going to hit s to scale that one down a little bit as well that's going to give us a much nicer curve shape but we only have two points for this curve that's not going to be nearly enough to make this elaborate curve shape so to add more points all we have to do is extrude so i'm going to select this point hit e to extrude and you'll notice that creates a point with the exact same handle configuration but it also generates a new line segment for us so i'm going to move this down until i feel it's in about the right position we can always change it later and here i'm just going to rotate this 90 degrees based on the view hit enter to set it in place and now we can scale this up and just mess around with it to get the shape that we really want and at the same time i'm going to push and pull all of these points to create a shape that i really like so here i'm going to go ahead and extrude it again to make the next part of our handle i'm going to rotate this point again using all of the exact same hotkeys we've already covered i'm going to move this down right here maybe rotate it just a little bit more so it's sort of parallel with this it's tangent to the curve maybe i don't know math terms but you think i have a nerd so anyway i'm going to take this point i'm going to rotate it out a little bit i think that'll create a nicer curved shape i'm going to scale the handle up and all this is is me just pushing pulling and nudging the individual points and handles to create a shape that i like and i expect you to do the exact same so here i'm going to select this point and now to create this spiral i'm just gonna extrude it about to where i think it should be click to set it down i'm gonna rotate it to give us that nice spiral shape maybe something like that and you're gonna notice that this gives us a weird kind of distorted oval shape instead of the nice circle that we have here so for this we honestly need an extra point between these two points so to add that i'm going to go ahead and select the first point hold shift select the second point right click and select subdivide that will immediately give us a nice new point in between these two points but it won't change the overall shape of the curve which is super cool in my opinion so i'm going to go ahead and select the middle point now i'm going to drag it around rotate it and i'm just going to mess with all of these handles of all of these points to get the shape that i really want i'm thinking this is starting to look pretty cool oh maybe something like this and again we can always change this later oh i think that looks pretty cool so finally we just want to create this spiral end piece so i'm going to select this vertex i'm going to hit e to extrude it move it to about where i think it should be rotate it and finally i'm gonna scale it down maybe something like that i'm gonna select this point i'm gonna scale that handle until it looks just about right so now that we have all these points in place i might still nudge and move them around just a little bit more to create a shape that i really like let's add some thickness to our curves so to do that i'm going to hit tab to go back out into object mode go all the way over here to the right i'm going to select the curves properties panel which looks like this green sort of distorted backwards cursive c i guess that's probably the worst way to explain that anyway i'm going to go down to the geometry drop down on the curves properties click on that scroll all the way down to where it says bevel and if that's not dropped down you can drop it down and here the default option is around so if i add some depth to that by clicking and scrolling on the depth slider you'll notice that this is going to give our curve some depth it's going to turn it basically into a really thick tube it's a perfectly round cylinder going around our curved line which that's pretty cool but it's not quite what we're looking for to make a trophy handle i think a more ergonomic trophy handle would be more of a rounded rectangle kind of shape so to create that we're going to use the object profile for bevel what this allows us to do is we can create a completely different curve object and then extrude that along the path basically so let's go ahead and do it so for that i'm going to go ahead and hit shift a i'm going to go to curve and i'm going to add a circle then i'm going to hit g x to move it over on the x-axis like we've already done set it into place just so we can see it and now we're going to select our curve we're going to select little eyedropper next to object and we're going to select our curve circle and wow that's a lot thicker than we really want it to be so i'm going to go ahead and select the circle hit tab to go into edit mode hit s to scale and i'm just going to scale this right on down you can notice the one to one match up of the thickness of the curve with our curve profile which is this circle so if i go to one for orthographic front view and i come up close here i can scale this down about until it matches our colored stripe on our trophy so here i'm going to go to the top view and i want to make our handle a little bit more of an oval shape so to do that i'm going to select this point hold shift select this point hit s and then hit y to scale on the y axis just like that we can create a nice oval and in real time that is updating the shape of our curve which is so cool so for this i want this to be more of a rounded rectangle shape than an oval but we do have a little bit of a problem here if i select this point and select this point and hit s x it's not going to let me do that that's because by default these curved circles come with the automatic handle type instead of the aligned handle type blender has a whole bunch of different handle types for these bezier curves so to change that i'm going to hit a on my keyboard hit v to bring up the set handle type and i'm going to set these two aligned so now if i select this point hold shift select this point hit s y now or s x now we can scale these out on the x axis to create more of a rounded rectangle shape then i'm going to do the exact same thing on the next two points by selecting those hitting sy and scaling those out on the y-axis so this will give us a nice rounded rectangle shape for a handle and you can see that being updated in real time on our trophy handle which is super cool so the last thing to do on that is to make this taper because you're going to notice our handle is one consistent thickness all the way down the length of the curve and we don't want that we want this cool taper where it starts small gets bigger and thicker and then it gets small again by the next end so to do that all we have to do is hit tab to go out of edit mode select our curved handle hit tab to go back into edit mode i'm going to hit 1 to go to orthographic front i'm going to select the point any point that i want probably the end one though which is what i would recommend and i'm going to hit alt s on my keyboard move my mouse in and that will allow us to change the thickness of that individual point like so so we can go through all of the points and change the thickness of them individually like so or you can select multiple points and change their thickness at the same time but i'm just going to go through and hit alt s on each of the individual points and give them thicknesses that i think look about right maybe something like that and i think that's looking pretty cool and while we're here now that we have this with some thickness to it we can see that our curve looks kind of lumpy so it like kind of lumps out there and lumps out there so i'm just gonna adjust the handles here to make my curve a little bit more appealing i think i'm just gonna scale this down maybe even rotate this some move it around just to give it a much nice rounder shape uh you could honestly mess with this and finagle it forever and ever and ever and never truly be happy with it at some point you just gotta call it done so the next thing you're gonna notice is that this curve if i click on a point hit period to zoom in on it you're gonna notice that it's completely hollow now we're not trying to make some budget stupid trophy cup we want to use that premium solid material so to fill in our end caps all we have to do is go to our curves panel go down to the bevel section and where it says fill caps you want to make sure you check that and that will fill in the caps and make sure our handles aren't completely hollow if somebody gets up close to examine them so the next thing we want to do is probably add this cool two-tone pattern like this now in blender if we just made our profile look like this for a curve have like these sharp corners on it we wouldn't be able to give this two separate materials so we're going to need to add an entirely separate curve handle object for that extra profile but the cool thing here is we can have two curves that are exactly the same and then just use two different bevel profiles to get this offset what i mean by that is check this out so i'm gonna go ahead and hit tab to go back into object mode i'm gonna hit shift d to duplicate my curved handle i'm going to right click to set it back into place it still exists it's just exactly overlapping our other handle and i can prove that by hitting g to move it right click to set it back into place and here we're going to create another bevel profile so i'm going to go ahead and select my circle hit shift d to duplicate it right click to set it into place hit tab to go into edit mode i'm going to hit a to select all of the points i know this is a whole lot of commands i'm going to hit gx to move it on the x-axis click to set it into place then i'm just going to scale it down to make it a little bit different than our previous bevel profile maybe move this a little bit further back on the x-axis so it's not quite so drastic and then maybe select this point and scale it down just to round it out a little bit so now i'm going to hit tab to go back to object mode i'm going to select one of our handles whichever one gets selected first when you click on it and here i'm gonna go to the object under our bevel profile and i'm gonna hit the x that will completely erase that and give us just a straight line for this object again here i'm gonna hit the eyedropper again now here i'm going to select beziercircle.001 instead of bezier circle so if i click on 001 now you're going to notice we have a completely different bevel profile for this curve which will allow us to give it a completely separate material when we get to that stage and it also just looks pretty cool looks like an entire extra level of detail on our handle which i think is pretty neat so here i'm going to hit 1 to go to the orthographic front and let's go ahead and smooth out our curve just a little bit more because i'm a little bit of a perfectionist but to do that we're now going to need to edit both curves at the exact same time to do that we can just select the first curve hold shift select the second curve hit tab to go into edit mode and now if i click and drag to select a point and scale it or rotate it that's going to edit both points on both curves now there is a little bit of a tricky situation here i can't just select one handle and move that or else that's going to move only one of the curves so to fix that i'm going to go ahead and hit alt a to deselect everything you have to make sure you do that then i'm going to click and drag to select that point and now we're going to use something called the box select tool so if i hit b that will bring up this cross hair right now and by default if i click and drag that's used to select just like the default selection rectangle we've been doing the entire time but if i hold the middle mouse button click and drag that allows us to deselect so now if i release we've deselected everything except for these two handles and now i can just move these two handles by themselves but it will affect both of our curves which i think is pretty dope oh i'm gonna move this in maybe something like that to make it a nice curve then i'm gonna do the exact same thing down here and then deselect those two points and maybe move this down just a little bit to give us a much nicer curve shape so at this point we have one really cool handle on one side of our trophy although it might be a little bit thick so let's go ahead and fix that before the next step really quick so to fix that i'm just going to select the first bevel profile go into edit mode hit a to select everything hit s x to scale on the x axis i'm just going to make this a little bit thinner tab back out go into the other bevel profile hit a to select all the points g x to move it in a little bit tab the tab back out now we have a little bit of a thinner handle which i think is going to look a lot better so now we have one handle on one side of our trophy we ideally want another handle on the other side of our trophy but we don't want to do a whole lot of work there and we definitely don't want to recreate it now we could go to orthographic front and we could just duplicate this handle rotate it 180 degrees and put it on the other side of the trophy but that's pretty tedious and if we make changes later now we have to make changes to the other side as well so blender has something absolutely beautiful called the mirror modifier which allows you to mirror an object over its origin so you have two copies of it but if you edit one it's going to edit the other side of it in simultaneously while you edit the original copy so to do that all you have to do is select an object go to the wrench icon for your modifiers panel select the drop down and go to mirror and immediately you're going to notice that this is mirroring right across the origin of the object which means the mirrored copies ending up over here so to fix that we need to reset the origin of the object to the center of the scene to do that all you have to do is hit ctrl a that'll bring up the apply menu and then just click on location that will completely reset the origin of the object to zero which means this will now be mirroring over the correct axis so now we're gonna do the exact same thing for the next handle we're gonna select it we're gonna hit control a select location and then we're gonna do add modifier mirror and now we have two really cool looking handles on either side of our trophy i'm gonna hit alt a to deselect them and we can rotate around to get a nice good look of this which i think looks pretty cool and again the really cool thing about the mirror modifier is if i select both of these handles go into edit mode select the point and move it now it's editing both sides of the trophy at the same time which is awesome so the last step of this tutorial is going to be to add some text to our name plate right here so to do that blender has a really cool tool if you guessed called the text tool you would be correct so we're just going to hit shift a we're going to add some text and that'll bring it in right in at the center of our scene just like it did with our curve so i'm going to go ahead and hit gx to move it over on the x-axis just so we can get a better view of it click to set it in place and text is really cool in blender because if you hit tab to go into edit mode it becomes just a regular text editor so you can backspace to get rid of the text and we can type whatever we want here so my trophy text is going to say number one blender of all time then i'm going to enter for a new line then i'm going to type chris folia just like so then i'm gonna tab back out into object mode and you're gonna notice that this isn't quite centered and it's not the font that we want and we can change all of those settings in the text options panel over here on the right so if i click on the little green a and then i come down to where it says paragraph alignment i can change the horizontal alignment to center and that will center it on the object's origin then for the font i can go to the font drop-down and i want something a little bit fancier maybe like a times new roman or something that has those nice serifs on it so if i click the folder it's going to take me to c colon slash windows fonts i'm going to scroll down until i find times bd for times new roman bulb right there i'm gonna double click on it and now our text is times new roman bold which is awesome so the next step is gonna be to put it on our name plate here and to do that first of all we want this to be centered on the x-axis so i'm going to hit n to bring up our transform panel i'm going to set the x location to zero like so then i'm going to hit three to go to our orthographic right view i'm gonna hit g to move our text over here i'm gonna scale it on down until it about matches what i think the width of this panel is finally i'm gonna hit g to move it down and hit r and i'm gonna try to just basically match the angle of this nameplate doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect just has to be pretty close i'm gonna move it on in next to the nameplate and see how well i did i'm gonna rotate it just a little bit more again using the exact same hotkeys we've always been using so here i'm going to drag it into the nameplate by just a little bit like so so we know it's going to absolutely be touching the nameplate when we extrude it now if we go back to our 3d view we're gonna notice that this is a little bit close to the edges so i'm gonna scale this down just a little bit more like so and now i'm gonna hit g z z or g y y i guess to move this just on its local y-axis and slide it along the plane that it's rotated until it's aligned just about perfectly and here we need to extrude our text so it'll be visible so for that we just go back to our text panel go to where it says geometry we can click and drag on the extrude to extrude this just a little bit and again if you want to extrude this in smaller increments you can hold shift on your keyboard to extrude it in smaller increments like so so i think that looks pretty cool i'm gonna zoom out hit alt a to deselect everything and now we have our beautiful trophy cup we have our text on our name plate and we have these awesome handles there is one final thing i want to cover here really quickly before we end the tutorial and that is you're going to notice that this handle looks a little bit faceted it looks a little bit jaggy as you can see it looks even more so if you look in wireframe and you can see these sharp faces so to up the resolution of that curve we can do that in the curves panel so i'm going to select the curve go to the curves panel and here i'm going to change the resolution preview up to something maybe like 24 and you're going to notice it's going to look a lot smoother or if i drag it down we can make it look a lot jaggier this just ups the amount of faces that are used to extrude around the curve so it looks actually curved instead of jagged so i'm going to set that to 24. i think that looks pretty cool i'm going to select the other curve also set that to 24 and i think that looks pretty cool so in the next part we're going to create a really basic trophy case to actually put our trophy in but until then i'll see you in the next video at this point you should have your trophy entirely modeled and a pretty good understanding of how to use curves and text in blender and i know i sound like a broken record at this point but i want to encourage you to explore here mess around have fun and come up with something that is truly yours if you found this video useful and want to stay tuned for day 4 make sure you hit that like and subscribe button and ring the bell i'll be releasing these basics videos on a daily basis for the duration of the course and if you want to come hang out with me live i'm live at least every friday over at youtube.com oraclefish also if you want to download my example files or just support what i do here on the channel make sure you check out my brand new patreon link in the description until next time my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar and passes out you

Channel: Stream Scholar

Views: 828

Keywords: stream scholar, blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, how to model in blender 2.9, blender 2.9 beginner tutorial, blender beginner, blender 2.9 tutorial, blender curves, blender text, how to add text in blender, how to add curves in blender, how to taper curves in blender

Id: qwnqHW2UljQ

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021