How you SHOULD be modeling in Blender...

this may be one of the most important videos You'll watch in relation to 3D modeling and creating visually appealing shapes a lot of people suck at this I did as well it's all part of the game once you understand this stuff though you are going to be creating amazing looking models and that is what the goal of this video is it's to show you the exact creative approach and how to basically design stuff in an aesthetically pleasing way let's go now in this video I will be using some basic you know 3D modeling add-ons hard Ops box cutter things like that just to speed up my workflow if you don't know how to model at all take a look at our hard surface model and jumpstart course it's only a couple hours long it is free and you can get it on our website you can take that and then you should be up to speed with blender so the first thing we need to do guys and a lot of people don't have their viewports set up properly and this is really hurting your your designs because you won't be able to see how things look so the first thing we need to do is we need to go up here make sure you're not set to Studio change over to matcap and I'm going to be using this default matte cap right here what this does is give the cube a little bit of a more interesting look it kind of darkens the areas we can't see and brightens the areas that we can see you can kind of see the difference there also definitely turn on cavity what cavity is going to do is it's going to highlight the edges and give it a little kind of like indentation almost around the edges so we're going to turn that on and I would recommend setting this to both and copy my settings and by the way just to show you what exactly that does Valley is incredibly important because what valley does is it highlights the concave areas with shadows if you have these set to zero or you have cavity turned off you're not going to have that see how boring the cube looks and this is very very important for understanding the form of your shape if cavity is not turned on and you're not using these settings here it's going to be a lot more difficult to create good shapes so just copy my settings here and you should be good to go anyways what we're going to go ahead and do is just start modeling now this isn't necessarily a video you're going to follow along with I'd rather you sit back have a cup of coffee and just listen to the commentary because the info I'm going to be presenting is very important so I'm just going to kind of be talking about things as I work so generally what I'm trying to do here guys when I'm creating a base shape is I'm first just trying to get some sort of interesting look I'm not trying to start thinking you know a year into the future like how the final model is going to look for me that doesn't work I'm not that creative for me what is easier is creating a few basic shapes to begin with and then building on top of that and I think 99 of you guys will probably fall into my category and this should help you a lot so all I really do when I first get started with these shapes is I just try to find just a decent looking shape and I can do this in many different ways I can add like loops and just kind of move things around and there's so many different solutions to this guys but um more or less what I'm going to do here is Maybe scale this up kind of like that and that could work and then I'm just going to go ahead and bevel these and then we can right click and shade Auto smooth that's a new feature in blender actually in 3.3 and Beyond I believe so usually what I'm trying to go for when I first start with these shapes is I want to get some sort of consistent type of um aesthetic going and in this case we kind of have these straight linear lines that are kind of repeating along this entire shape so this is basically something we could play off of we could say okay this type of design we're going to play off of these more linear straight elements so basically what the model is going to do is it's going to communicate to you you don't have to really think about anything it's telling you exactly what to do subconsciously so um and this is why we need to use cavity guys because if cavities turned off you don't really get to see those nice you know patterns and shapes that are defining your model so cavity is very very important for that so now what I want to do is maybe play with the scale here I can make this super long or maybe super short something like this could be okay and then I'm just going to run a mirror modifier pull that down just a bit kind of like that and then maybe I could extend this a bit and then we'll just apply everything there we go and at this point now that I kind of have a general you know aesthetic going on I can continue building on top of that now real quick what I'm going to do here is just um maybe take these edges and I could chamfer them or I could bevel them let me apply the scale and then we'll just run a bevel here kind of like that that looks pretty good to me and then maybe we could add a chamfer here on the top not too large maybe around there and then the mirror modifier to mirror to the bottom it's a little bit too big of a chamfer a little bit smaller all right so now what we need to do is we need to just keep building on this General shape and I still think this chamfer is too big let's go a little bit a little bit smaller like that so now that we have these nice defining lines kind of going in this direction I'm going to keep stacking elements and I'm going to explain like all the different design principles I'm using as I do this but for now what I want to do is maybe add in a cube move this Cube up scale it a bit and I just want to run a simple Boolean here and I'm just going to kind of cut into the shape and also if the shading strain just press q and then shift click on sharpen and blender will recalculate that and let me go ahead and mirror this to the other side and basically what I'm doing here is I'm just trying to stack on more of these linear elements in this one centered area what we call this is we call this a detail clustering this is a very very important design principle and a way to kind of bring your eyes bring the viewer's eyes to a certain area of the model and we'll talk about negative space a bit later in different shape forms and things like that but for right now I just want to kind of play with this little detail we have going on and you can just see like how much better this looks already if I turn on and off this Boolean you see what I mean we're already looking more towards the center just by adding in those lines so that's the type of style I'm going for now that I have the shape and the style I just have to continue to repeat that and then maybe what I could do is take another Cube and we could run maybe a slice right here that could be cool as well and let's scale that just a bit on the Y and you can see we're just bringing a lot more visual kind of um visual balance here to the center now I'm not going to be adding stuff here to the side where it's empty this is what we call negative space and negative space is incredibly important in terms of defining the form and the overall look of your model what negative space allows you to do is bring the viewer's eyes to a different area of your model so for example if I have a lot of detail here and I have no detail here the viewer is not going to look over here because there's nothing there the viewer is automatically going to go to the area with the detail and this is why you don't want to start scattering detail everywhere I see a lot of people do this and I was guilty of it too you don't want to scatter detail you actually want to use that empty space to your advantage because it is very powerful and the more I build on this the more you're going to see that alright so let's continue on and you know I don't always know what I'm going to add right off the bat but that's why I just keep experimenting I keep playing with different shapes and designs that I think would um you know potentially look good so maybe we could scale this and then maybe run a difference here and just play a little bit with this type of shape that we have going on so you know that you can already see we have a little bit of um a bit more visual appeal kind of going on I could even scale that up and all I'm doing just playing with different shapes playing with different ideas and just kind of seeing how can I bring more visual interest to this entire shape so I don't want to push this Boolean too close to these edges but I'm just trying to play with size this looks a lot weaker than this for example a lot of this is more of an intuitive feeling more than anything so about here could be a decent spot and then what I could do is I could move this down and I was gonna try running a reverse bevel and the way you can do that is you can select the top face and instead of beveling it you want to Bevel it the other direction so you can press Q control click on Mark and alternatively you can just press alt n to flip the normals and then bevel um not sure why that didn't work there we go you could do it that way as well so now we just kind of have like a slight little chamfer kind of going around that area you see what I mean could even mirror that to that side it looks pretty interesting anyways you kind of get the idea and I'm just going to keep stacking on these linear kind of horizontal elements we have going because now I kind of have a style on this model which is exactly what I'm uh what I'm going for so move this over and move this up and usually I'll just start with a different spoolian and then I'll just adjust it from there I'm not always using like a specific Boolean up front I'm just kind of adding one seeing how it works something like that you could even introduce some um bevels like that just keep playing with it this is more of a game of feeling more than anything you just have to kind of feel it out and the more you kind of play with these shapes the more you'll begin to understand you know the visual balance I'm discussing could run another slice through this area so now we have like a separate piece almost and then maybe run a very slight cut right here just to bring a little bit more definition and you can see all I'm doing just repeating the elements that are kind of defining this overall shape and the more I'm adding detail here the more visual appeal we're actually bringing to the center you see what I mean so there's just a very very powerful way to do that and then maybe what I could do is come in here and run like a wedge cut press the W key not sure I like that another idea I'm going to take this Boolean right here and then I'm just going to kind of scale that in and bevel it a bit apply the scale and then bevel it and I might need to shift click on sharpen just to kind of adjust those angles but uh that did not look as I wanted it to what I might need to do is press alt s instead so we scale in that way and then we could run the bevel and I'm just kind of playing with things here like maybe it looks good maybe it doesn't but um at least I'm getting you know one step closer to getting there so yeah this could this could be okay I suppose it's not too bad it just looks a little bit more interesting than it did before just need to make sure all those angles are caught and you can just see look at how much nicer this whole thing looks what I might actually do though is remove that slice and if you remove a slice it usually adds in duplicates so just make sure you delete out that duplicate I just think no slice there looks better and you can already see how much more powerful the shape is looking I want to quickly try mirroring this across the X just to see how that looks which is pretty cool and also make sure we're marrying on the on the Z as well which yeah we are and then I'm just going to keep coming in here keep stacking those details and um yeah I'm just going to keep working on that so I don't want to run a wedge cut right there but I will however run a bevel let me quickly go to ever scroll it looks pretty good and then maybe I could control click on Mark introduce that small chamfer around there as well and you start to get the idea so notice how all these lines are really helping to emphasize the overall shape if I were to go in here for example and I were to just turn off that Boolean and then maybe this Boolean as well and then you know this one it's like the shape is just not as powerful this is why when you keep repeating the elements that already exist on your mesh you're building a lot more visual appeal as long as you're following the appropriate design rules so notice I have most of my details clustered here in the center and also notice that once we focus in on the center most of those details are concentrated more on this portion and this is what we call the 70 30 principle where we're kind of defining more clusters of detail in those 30 areas whereas the other 70 percent more or less is empty there's different ways to break this rule different ways to use it but in general this is how it works another thing I could do is Maybe Supply this Boolean and I could come in here and just introduce like a chamfer right there and chamfers are a great way to turn cavity back on Chambers are a great way to really just re-emphasize those more linear elements now let me real quick when I chamfer this um let's see I want to chat for this but notice it's kind of doesn't chamfer super cleanly right there so what I want to do real quick so maybe just run a knife cut actually that's fine we're just gonna chat for that and then shift click on sharpen until we manage to catch those two edges and then boom just symmetrize the other side and you can see just the small amounts of chamfers can really just kind of help to emphasize that overall overall look you see what I'm in let's just keep going you could theoretically do this for like days and then you know as you do this for hours and hours and days and days you're going to begin to have a super complex looking model and then when people see it they're going to be like holy crap you're really good at what you do when in reality all you were doing was just following the process and just doing it over and over and over for hours so generally when you see these more complex designs that is essentially what they're doing is they're using these basic shapes the simple elements that define those shapes and repeating it sometimes in functional elements as well but overall that's really all these complex designs you see are doing they're just kind of following the rules of design and they're just building on top of it for you know days or weeks or months at a time so yeah don't get too demotivated because it's really not that tricky at the end of the day once you learn how to model at least do something like that could even try going to I was gonna try to use an inset sometimes inset's a bit buggy you just have to find like the right spot to have the inset hit and sometimes it might sometimes it might not just kind of depends like right there I just about had it sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but um I don't think that inset looks good anyways nor does this cut and sometimes you're just going to be playing with different effects and you may like it you may not like it but the important part is that at least you tried that shape and you can always undo it if needed cool so another thing you want to be careful of guys is you want to be careful of sandwiching details and this is something I tend to do a lot then I usually have to go back and fix it is if you just keep repeating the same elements over and over and over too heavily then the stuff will begin to look more visually unappealing than it will appealing like right here now we're just kind of sandwiching the detail and it just doesn't look as good as that for example so that's why you want to really be careful in the way you're adding your elements because it's very easy to start sandwiching detail accomplishing basically the exact opposite effect that you wanted so keep that in mind you know you can do stuff like this and kind of save it like right here this is a lot better you kind of see just using that small little bevel you don't want to push that in too far I just want to keep these elements very subtle Sometimes using different sizes as well kind of like this pretty cool maybe like right around there and you can just really begin to see how all that visual appeal is being pushed to the center now what I might do is let's see maybe just run some sort of cut like that a little bit too steep let's go like at a perfect 45. do something like that yeah it's not too bad then we're just going to kind of look out all around it you know look at it from the side here look at it from the front open it from the top and generally you want all the sides to look more or less visually appealing as well but the main part here that we're focusing on is um on the top in this case so I'm going to go ahead and add in yet another Cube and go here maybe do something like that I can kind of scale it and that could possibly work it's not too bad now let's go ahead and mirror this piece on that direction and then mirror this piece in this direction and now we kind of have you know this since we mirrored it across the X now we kind of have this symmetrical cluster of detail going on now I don't know what happened here on the bottom it's interesting let me um just mirror that again now you can kind of see we have this really clean cluster of detail here towards the middle the only thing I'm not really liking about this shape right now is the fact that the shape is pretty symmetrical it's symmetrical on the Y symmetrical on the X and it's symmetrical on the Z and this isn't always a bad thing but it is a good idea to break the Symmetry because what breaking the symmetry does is it introduces a calming effect to your model if you break the Symmetry what this is going to do is make the model feel more balanced and a lot more calm that's the best way I can really explain it if you can make your model feel calmer you can do that by breaking the Symmetry and it's really easy to do it's it's not rocket science for example let me just apply this um let me just smart apply everything at this point smart apply this and that'll just apply all the balloons and mirrors smart apply this and smart apply this and breaking the Symmetry is incredibly easy watch this I could do something as simple as scale this up we'll cut through and not sure why that didn't work let's try again cut through and to break the Symmetry all I could really all I really do here is Maybe you know move it back this way so we kind of have like um the cut over on this side but not over on this side and see what this is doing what this is now doing is not only giving direction to our model notice now this is the front without that effect if I were to delete that Boolean now we have no front there's no front there's no back we don't have any direction on this design but the moment I add in that bulletin we immediately have Direction being pushed over here you see what I mean just by breaking that symmetry we have a lot more visual communication to the viewer and at the same time the object looks a lot calmer when you introduce too much symmetry it doesn't look as calm as introducing some sort of symmetry so I hope that kind of makes sense to you intuitively and you can kind of see what I'm getting at here now what I've done is I've introduced direction to our model here and I could keep stacking on that you know asymmetry here we just maybe make a cut on that area and then a cut over here and I can keep kind of stacking on those elements that kind of break the Symmetry it's a really easy way to do it it's not rocket science it is in fact really easy to do and then maybe what I could do is pull this face down and just introduce a reverse bevel that'll give us like a little chamfer in there but I think we have a bit too many chamfers so maybe I'll just leave it alone I don't know it's ultimately kind of up to you now at this point this is where we could start introducing more minor tertiary level details so you can do this by introducing very small elements that don't pull attention from the main part of the design you can do this very easily for example we could perhaps introduce some very small circular elements so maybe I'll go in here and I will cut in just a really small circular element and then I can mirror it to both sides and we're just kind of very very slightly introducing these more tertiary level effects we're not doing anything crazy just slightly enhancing the overall look of the design you see what I mean and tertiary elements are really great for this and I'd recommend using them so we could do that and then we could even maybe we could come over here and make like some little wedge cuts for example I could come to this part cut through and then array this see what I mean that in and of itself could be a more like tertiary element because these details are pretty small and looks pretty good see what I mean you don't want to make it too big either because then it's just gonna pull a bit too much attention but just small stuff like that can really help um not sure I like that but I'm just kind of trying to give you an idea there for how to do it and one other thing we can do guys is we can also break into the empty space whenever I explain negative space and empty space to people they're the same thing by the way empty space is the same thing as negative space I just kind of use them interchangeably but when I tell people don't break into the negative space a lot of people don't really you know they think they should never touch the empty space which is simply not true you can add detail to the empty space so long as you're not breaking that actual empty space meaning you can add details but make sure it's not hurting the actual empty space and I'll give you an example here check this out what I could do is maybe let me shift-click smart apply and I'm just going to kind of strip these edges right here I'm going to invert the selection delete the other edges I'm just going to strip X and then delete only faces make sure you don't delete faces or they all go away this time only faces and what this will do is um kind of give us an outline that we can work with check this out I can get rid of these vertices so what I could do here is I could fill this and then I could maybe inset this and set this again delete this face and then delete this outer face and I could actually use this strip as a Boolean cutting through the object and this is going to be a very subtle intrusion into the space over here so let me just go to the difference Boolean and you can see I could do something like that which isn't really hurting the empty space it's just kind of emphasizing it now this is a bit too heavy in my opinion I only want this cut to continue to about here so what I can do is I can actually take this cutter object and I can just remove the rest of it by running a Boolean on it kind of like that and then I could just make that a lot more subtle and then I could just kind of adjust where that's cutting and I can just introduce those really small elements in the empty space but you can see I'm not actually breaking it if anything I'm kind of closing in the shape you see what I mean and then you could even you know top this off more or less maybe you want to come in and you want to add in like a little Notch over here um I don't think that'll look good though I'm just going to leave that side alone but we could also maybe put like a little Notch right here and then just mirror that this way and then mirror that over here as well and that could be like another tertiary level element I don't want these to be lined up I want these to be kind of pushed in a little bit so that way we're not like hurting the visual appeal too much or push these more towards the end maybe not like I said this is really a game of kind of feeling it out seeing what looks good and seeing what feels right and just playing with it that way and the more you do this the more it's going to begin to make sense to you I actually don't like that effect I'm going to delete it but it's worth a try I guess and also I'm just going to go ahead and remove these little notches right here I'm not really liking them I think I'm just going to stick with maybe a more linear tertiary element so maybe I could do something simple like this and this would be yet another way to kind of break that symmetry since we only have that there in the in the back you see what I mean and move that in and overall you get the idea so the last thing I'd like to do is soften up these edges the issue is if I try to add in a bevel for example it is just going to start overlapping with all the geometry so usually what I found that I like to do when I'm finished when I'm completely finished with this is I'll just save a separate file I'll smart apply everything so operation smart apply and then what I'll do is I'll add in a remesh modifier and I'm going to set this to like .01 and then smooth shading and then turn off auto smooth and what this is going to do is highlight those edges for us it's going to remesh the entire thing and we're going to have a much softer more highlighted look if I turn this off and on you can kind of see the difference there but we need to turn off auto smooth because the auto smooth kind of catches or you can also like tweak the size if you wanted to do that instead or just turn it off I think that's an easier solution and then if you have copy attributes turned on in the preferences you can just copy over the um remesh modifier to the rest and boom there you go now you have a much more visually appealing clean shape with all the edges highlighted very nice we'll turn off the auto smooth on all of these as well and just like that guys that is how you build aesthetically pleasing shapes now the reason this thing is so important I don't want you to click out yet because I need to summarize this because this is super super powerful the reason this is so important is because once you understand negative space detail balance detail clustering echoing elements on the design that already exists once you not only understand these but you also understand how to use them your designs are going to be better than 99 of people this is why you must practice and you must show up every day training your brain to see these things you might not get it today you might not get it tomorrow but within a few weeks of practicing these types of things consistently your models and your level of designs are going to Skyrocket now Ryu and I are actually working on a course covering all of this stuff in detail it is not done yet we're still working on it but I wanted to get a video out here on YouTube to show you how important this stuff is and to kind of give you an idea of what this course will act actually be about so whenever that's released obviously we'll let you guys know because that course is going to be insanely good it's going to show you everything in terms of theory in terms of practical application literally everything so that's something we're working on right now something that I think will be very beneficial for you guys but I hope this video at least helped you get the fundamentals and the general idea down so go ahead start practicing and try modeling your own design using the rules I showed you in this video I would love to see what you can come up with and if you want to join our Discord server you can post your results and that there's a link to that in the description as well so thanks a bunch for watching I really hope this video was powerful and helpful for you and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 54,893

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial blender, hard surface tutorial, hard surface modeling, blender 3d, blender beginner tutorial, blender hard surface tutorial, blender, blender hard ops, blender boxcutter, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, 3d modeling, hard surface, blender bros, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, masterxeon1001, blender visual design, blender scifi, blender modeling tutorial, blender mesh machine

Id: pEYP9NBsl_Q

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023