How to use the spin tool in Blender 2.9

hey and welcome to another blender video this video is going to be about the spin tool so the spin tool is something that is only available when you are in edit mode so if i were to grab this cube and jump into edit mode you're going to find a new toolbar pops up over here on the left there's my toolbar now if i click on this spin tool here looks like the pi shape i'm going to get a couple of handles and i'm going to zoom in here so you can see very closely what's happening this is going to rotate around the z-axis if i grab one of these handles and start spinning i'm not just rotating my cube that's different i'm creating individual vertices and faces and edges and many many of them in fact because it's making a copy of every single vertice in that cube if i open up my spin options down here i have spun 84.7 degrees and i have 12 steps or 12 copies of what i was spinning i shrink that number back down it starts to be a little bit more noticeable about what's going on here and that would not be the most useful way to use the spin tool because the other thing you might have noticed is it's spinning right around the center of the object and that's because that's where my 3d cursor is at the moment but you also have let me actually put it up to about four you also have controls over the center point here and so if i slide that center point along the x-axis you can see all of my copies are rotating around that center point and if i increase the angle the copies are going to spread out more and more all right now that there is of limited usefulness it's kind of like a circular array or a polar array in some other programs i'm going to make lots of copies of something while in edit mode there are other things you can do with this command though so what i'm going to do is just undo what i just did and instead of selecting the entire cube this time i am going to select a single face so i'm going to go into face select mode grab whoa don't know what just happened there i think i slipped to the mouse grab this top face and now i'm not going to spin around the z axis because it's going to spin right here in place so i'm going to choose a different axis your axis is available up here you've got x y z so if i choose y you'll notice now i get a green axis a green widget and if i grab that plus sign and move with it we're rotating again with the 3d cursor as the center point if we wanted to change that center point we could move our center maybe in this case up in the z direction to spread those out a little bit more let me undo that let's see what would happen if we went in the x direction see how that's going to go i'm just gonna grab that symbol okay that's all well and good but we can do better what if we were to move the center point first so if i'm not the center point the the 3d cursor and that's where the center is going to be what if i put my 3d cursor say here and then i use the spin tool and i don't see many options there with the x the way i set that up so let's go to y ah now look now we're getting somewhere you can actually make useful shapes this way okay one more thing to look at while doing this style of spin is there is also a used duplicates option over here and if you click that you're not going to get a mesh that stretches all the way back to the beginning you're going to get individual copies of whatever it was you were spinning so if i click it now remember i started with a face now i've got 12 individual faces there are times when that could be useful let's go look at another scenario click to set that and undo it and i'm going to select everything here i'm going to zoom in i'm going to go into vertex select mode and i'm going to shift select one of these vertices and i'm going to do that just before pressing x and deleting all the other vertices so i'm left with one single vertex and from there i'm going to model an outline of a shape that i will then revolve around some center point so i would like that vertex to be back at the world origin here 0 0 that way i have a known starting point so what i'm going to do i'm just going to switch to my selection tool here i'm going to press shift s and i'm going to snap my cursor to the world origin then i'm going to select this vertex shift s again and i'm going to slap snap my selection to my cursor now i'm on the zero zero i'm going to go to a front view pan it up so it's more center of the screen and i'm just going to press e and pull out another vertex and place it somewhere and i'm going to press e and i'm going to do the same all the way around and i'm going to create a shape i don't really have a shape in mind yet i'm forming an idea as i go uh maybe i'll do like this kind of an outlying shell and watch what i end up with i'm even going to stop just shy of uh hitting that z-axis line again now i'm going to select all of my vertices and you can see the shape i've created now i'm going to use the spin tool and i'm going to spin it around the z axis and watch what happens in fact yeah i make sure i'm on the z-axis i'm just going to click one of these widgets and i'm going to click it once and let it go i'm not going to drag it this time if you do that it automatically gives you 360 degrees you can see it over here in the options and auto merge becomes very important because at 360 you end up with two sets of vertices along this edge your starting and your ending vertices but take a look at what i got i took that outline i had go back into wireframe here and it has revolved it 360 degrees to create a complete shape if i wanted this shape to be smoother i could just increase the number of steps and there's a reason i didn't go back to the z um because i knew at the end i'd have this circle of vertices here and i could just merge those at the center so this is just one step in the modeling process and you don't have to do everything in the spin tool you can combine that with every other skill you know so i'm just going to zoom in here and i'm going to circle select those vertices and press m and merge it center and i've closed up the bottom of this bowl shape and there you go the spin tool

Channel: Rick Kelley

Views: 22,281

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Id: 2MVmxTzbSrU

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020