Hunting Knife | Beginner Exercises | Part 11 | Hard Surface Modelling 7 | Blender 2.8

hello and welcome to gabot Media I'm grant Abbott and today we are making this hunting knife this is part 11 I believe of get good at blender and we're still concentrating on hard surface modeling do take a look at the previous ones as I'll build on techniques from those and if you're a complete beginner then you might want to check out my beginner courses if they're not good enough then there's a great course by CD boost links for that are in the description along with lots of other links there are some affiliated links in there so you'll be supporting me if you click on those okay so let's get started with the challenge as usual I'll show you the shape and encourage you to have a go this time it's slightly different because we're bringing in a reference image so I'll start off by showing you how you can do that nice and easily so here are my files and here's the hunting knife image I'll place a link to this it's copyright free so you'll be fine to use it and it's from David J so all you need to do is click on that file and drag it into blender that brings it in but it brings it perpendicular to your camera it's very easy to reset Oh G will remove any movement so we're in the center now and you can see my location has all zeros on it if you need this menu press N and I'm under item and alt our will remove any rotations now I've modeled mine on the side so our X 90 will rotate it and were nicely in position it brings it in as what's called an empty and you can hide it and view it just here so to start off with what I want you to try is modeling the handle section as you can see here so have a go at that and your hint although you don't have to follow it is to trace round with a vertex okay so hopefully that was understandable and you may have modeled this in several different ways you can start with a box and then extrude it out and then reshape it but what I like to do if I hide this is start with the plane so I'll go to front view so I know I'm completely perpendicular to my shape shift a to add and add any mesh really but I'll start with a plane and you can see it looks like this at the moment if I go into edit mode with tab and then press alt m which is the merge command and you can find that under vertex merge vertices I think in 2.83 they've changed it to just M so watch out for that if you're watching this in the future and then if we just merge them at the center we've got one point that we can start extruding and pulling around so I'll go to the front view again I'll grab my one vertex but I press G and I'm unable to move it the reason for that is I'm still in face mode up here so if I go to vertex and then grab that I can now pull it around pull it into position let's zoom in a bit and now I can eat extrude a long handle now you might be tempted to do lots of tiny points like this start off nice and simple and then you can add a subdivision surface modifier to it later if you need to so nice kind of big shapes I would say but following the curvature so where there's a curve you're going to add a point there so we might need to at the end here and at the moment I'm going to cut into this one and see if we need another one up there later on now when you get to this point and you're thinking about where to put this one look at the ones above and think you want quads so you're going to line up with those so this one's going to go down here and here and so on and we might need an extra one just there but we'll sort that out later now at the moment I can't fill this in very easily because I've got a point here I might just dissolve that point and you can press delete and dissolve vertices the shortcut for that is ctrl X and I can fill all these shapes in by going to edge mode - or edge mode up here selecting the end one and pressing F to fill and we can't see it at the moment because it's actually on the other side which makes it a touch confusing so what I'm going to do is select my image grab in the wine just move that backwards so it doesn't interfere now go back into edit mode with our object and keep filling these shapes in back to front view now I can do ctrl R and - a loop cut through the middle there it's at this point we need to extrude our shape and give it some solidity the best way to do that rather than selecting all the faces so three to face mode a to select all the faces and e to extrude I think it's better to actually think about the mirror process because if we mirror now we're gonna have all these faces on the inside that we have to delete so I'm going to undo that and just grab these in the y-axis then I can mirror now go across there my modifiers add modifier mirror make sure clippings turned on and we can see a mirror across the x-axis we want it across the y-axis are going backwards so let's click on Y and take off the X now we can see it going across the white so it's just tucked in there but now when I extrude I can extrude them into the middle like so now if I go to wireframe you can see those extra faces but we've got them selected so we can just press delete faces you could alternatively extrude all the outside edge and then you won't have to delete anything if you're confused about mirror tool at all then do look at my explanation of the mirror tool the main thing to understand is that it's going around this center point here okay so back to solid mode and we just need to make this a bit more curvy there's a few ways to do that really you can select this edge loop here and gg2 edge slide it down and this one here GG to edge slide that down and it sort of keeps the structure of the back and the front you could also grab all these edges from here to here and here to here and then scale them in but the problem with that is that we lose our shape at the back end so we've got a knife handle and we just need to add a modifier subdivision surface modifier and see what that's looking like and see how the shape is holding up so if I go to the front view again we can see that the subdivision surface modifier because it's smooth things out has changed the shape slightly so we might want a bit more solidity around the place and we might want to move some of our points so back to front view and select all and I can probably just scale it up just a touch so it hits the confines I might on my subdivision surface modifier turn the viewport up as well and let's right-click and shade smooth and see how our handle is doing if that looks fine let's add another loop cut to the end here so ctrl R add a loop cut there just to get that a bit more shape and substance and we're pretty much there it's just going to take a tiny bit of editing to move some of these into position you might find this easier in x-ray mode up here alt s is the shortcut for that and you can just adapt your shape as you need old said and I'm back and there's my handle it so that's a nice simple one hopefully to start off with now have a think about how you can do the handle I've changed mine slightly from the original because I just prefer the look of this style but you can adapt it and change the shape to how you feel you want your knife to look so have a go at that one okay I did it a slightly different way from the first one so I'm just going to hide this my cursors in a good position already so shift data add mesh a cube and scale it down let's just make sure it's in line with my handle and I'm actually using a cube this time and just extruding out so let's use the auto mirror so up to edit Auto mirror if you haven't got the altmer enabled make sure you go to edit preferences add-ons type in Auto mirror and make sure it's ticked that will give you this I want to mirror it in the Y in the negative so I can edit the shape from the front so Y in the negative Auto mirror and it's set up my mirror for me so when I go into edit mode I don't need to cut out half my shape or add clipping and so forth what I'm also going to do is Auto mirror in the set I can always apply the z-axis mirror but it will help to do it symmetrically first and if I need to make any changes then I can apply that mirror and make those changes so auto mirror and there's ed as well so I've actually got two mirrors on top of each other one with us ed and one with Y so if I make those changes I can apply them if I need to so again alt Z to go into x-ray mode up there one on my keyboard and let's move these into position select the bottom ones to extrude and pull them out e to extrude and maybe start scaling in the X this time e to extrude and then scale all the axes down and G to grab old said and then have a look and see what that looks like perhaps wants to come out to the middle here slightly so I can turn on proportional edit which is already on for me at the moment o is the shortcut for that G to grab and your circle of influence as I call it you use your will to change that and I can then pull this out in the y axis I pull it out a fair bit and then I'll turn off proportional edit grab everything with a and G then Y and it back in so now it's got a bit of a curvature to it that looks fine let's add our subdivision surface modifier it looks much more blobby now let's turn the viewport subdivisions up and then we need to sharpen some edges now there's a couple of ways of doing this have a think how you might do it so the two ways are to add edge loops so ctrl R and then add an edge loop like this and that will sharpen it up and control are down the bottom here and that's fine to do it that way or if I undo that we can select the edges we want to be sharper Oh shift left click to select another edge loop and if I go up to the item I can up for me increase and give it some sharpness I might need to go up even more on my subdivision surface modifier and let's go into object mode right-click and shade smooth and see how that's looking and that's looking fine now if you do want some sort of lip in here where the handle meets the hilt then you can easily extrude these out and pull them out for that tiny lip but I think it works like this fine ok so the last one then is the blade this is the hardest bit your hint for this one is the same technique as the handle and try and follow the places where the mesh is obviously changing direction in terms of its shape so have a go that okay so I'll go back into front view and again it doesn't matter too much which object you start with I'll just press shift right click to move my cursor shift a to add and you can add any object because we're going into edit mode with tab a to select all and alt M to merge our vertices at the center so we got a center vertex here and we need to be on vertex mode remember one on my keyboard and let's start moving that into position now I'm not going to make this too complex I'm not going to show you how to do these ridges and things if you're a bit more advanced you can have a go at that but for now let's just extrude this out and follow the shape of the blade you would do this even if you were going to add those things in later anyway do also think about what's going on down below here so there's an obvious point there so I'll probably want a vertex there as well to link these two up now this is always an interesting point where we might have a triangle you think that'd be a triangle at the end here especially on the top as well where the knife goes in but I'll talk about that in a moment for now I'm just going to extrude down to here there is actually an obvious point here so maybe an extra point in here might be necessary in a second then what I'm going to do I'm going to extrude up this time and extrude out and follow this path as well and I'm thinking about how this might hook up around here I can select the last two if I want to join them and press F to fill it's not J to join because there's no topology for this to go on top of so it's F to feel it's a bit confusing that at times so these two as well I press F to fill now this is on the other side again so I just go into object mode grab and move it in the Y so it's above my shape and let's get back into edit mode so sometimes you can't press F to fill on this first one because it's not quite sure whether shape is going still need to select two faces and after fill and then it knows where to fill in from there so we've got those that's fine and I'll have to do the same here after fill now we've got a triangle at the end there so we gotta think what we can do about that there's lots of ways to figure this out and sort this out but I think the best one in this situation is to have an edge flow going around here so we can sharpen this up and we want an edge flow at the bottom here but we also want to need to flow across the top here so I'll undo that last fill and I want an extravert in here so I can have it coming down here flow of these polygons keeps going in this direction so I can press ctrl R and do a loop cut there and press F and F again and there we've got our quads with an edge flow going across the top here and here and at the bottom here so what we need to do now is mirror this again but this time I'll do it slightly differently so I'm going to select these faces in here I'm going to use C to circle select and then I can press my left mouse button to select middle mouse button is deselect and right mouse button is to get out of circle select I'll come to side view with three and press G to grab in the Y and pull that outwards now can't really see where I am so if I press control three on my numpad then I can see from the other side so G then Y or maybe the blades about this thick okay that's all looking fine so what I want to do is add a mirror and I can easily just add a mirror now without having to worry about anything so mirror and it should mirror around this point but again it's in the x-axis so we change it to the Y now I need to select these top edges here e to extrude in the Y and pull them across I've forgotten to turn clipping on so I'll turn it on G then Y and they should clip together now now there's one point we have a triangle here the one way of sorting that out is ctrl R and doing a loop cut down the bottom here so we've got that support along the edge here but we've also if I delete this edge here press ctrl X to dissolve the edge we've got a quad at the end there so we can then ctrl R and our loop cuts should go all the way through now that one doesn't for some reason so if I press ctrl R you can see that it's not gone through the end quad there now have a think why that might be and what mistake if I actually made whilst modeling this now it's difficult to see from my mesh but if I select everything let's get to vertex mode just so you can understand a bit clearer if I press alt m to merge my vertices and by distance you can see that there's one vertices removed or one vertex in this case removed so that now should mean that when I press ctrl R it goes through that end shape so what I've done is I've created some sort of doubles around here probably when I extruded there's an extra point in here so if you ever get that where your loop cuts don't go through quads it's probably because you've got doubles ok so let's turn on the subdivision surface modifier so I'll go up to here add modifier subdivision surface modifier and you can see it's gone or blobby so let's up the viewport resolution let's go into object mode and shade smooth it's not looking too bad but it looks very unsharp knife so we can add in some supporting edges we could try sharpening edges up and we could add supporting edges as well if we need to so let's try sharpening up first so let's select the bottom edges along here and then turn up the mean crease and you can see the difference that's having although I've just realized I've selected these ones as well so I'll undo that and press seat sir chol select middle mouse button to get rid of those ones now let's increase the mean crease and I've missed a few again undo that let's go to the on cage option for my subdivision surface modifier then I can see the lines and see the circle select and get rid of them make sure I've got them all mean crease and put them up okay so that's made our blade a bit sharper let's try the top edges along here so alt left click those and select that edge one there and turn the mean crease up and you can see that brings the point right to the edge of there never go to one you suddenly get shading anomalies can you see there right at the tip just go to the point nine five if you want it really sharp and let's see what that's looking like it's not looking too bad now we just need this section in here so ctrl left click and there's a pole there now that may causes problems all shift-click on these ones and up the mean crease and see how that goes let's turn the on cage option off and go into object mode now you can see there's slight pinching where there's a pole and that's always a problem you have with subdivision surface modifiers so if you're going to sharpen edges up a pole is a vertex that doesn't have four edges going into it so it can be three or five and above and we've also got slight problems here if I go back into object mode you can see it's sharper down here than it is along here and the reason for that is there's a proximity loop or there's another loop down the middle here and that's obviously going to sharpen this area up now it can be quite tricky to get round these problems there's a few ways around it using the mean crease doesn't really help us understand what's going on so sometimes it's more useful to actually use loop cuts to explain it so just for the explanation benefits I'm going to turn the mean crease off and talk through what's going on now if I add a loop cut in here I can add a proximity loop and sharpen that edge up and if I add a loop cut in here it's going across there because of that pole so actually it would better if I had one coming down here and across to sharpen this edge up but first let's see what that looks like and to be honest that's not too bad and it probably only needs to be this sharp but if you really wanted a loop cut down there then we can start off by doing this loop cut I could have used a bevel on the original line but you can also use the knife tool to tidy things up if you need to and then to dissolve these edges use our knife tool in here it's getting a bit complicated and cut up here and across here and then ctrl X to delete that one CS what we have is the same as a bevel but I'm just showing that you can use the knife tool for these things as well now our pole is moved slightly we can see this is sharper but smoother so having a nice clean edge flow without any poles will help us so that's why the mean crease wasn't helping us because it was trying to pinch up hole basically so dealing with this problem at the end is very difficult because we got proximity loops here which is sharpening it up so the easiest way to sort that one out in this case is just to dial down these mean creases here until you get something that's working but because this comes into a point and it's got that proximity loop getting closer and closer it's quite tough so again the mean crease isn't working particularly well in this particular area so I'm going to select all those down to the end here and turn off the mean crease and use proximity loops instead so you'll want to select that top edge and add a bevel to add those proximity loops so have a go at that on your own and see how you get on so yes that's quite complicated in order to get a nicer crease down the edge here and we still got slight issues coming in here and that we need to sort out by moving these across so they're not too close to the other ones an inch like these and can you see what's happening to this curvature in here it's slowly smoothing that out but that's starting to get into the complexities of using the subdivision surface modifier with good topology in order to get creases that's why I tend to shy away from using the mean crease option especially when introducing these subjects to beginners because it's not really showing us what's going on underneath and why we're going to get problems later on so there's a bit of knowing when to use it and when not to use it so I hope this helps a bit of a longer one today hopefully this is helpful to you and you're getting a lot out of this if you want to know about the texturing of this I can do a separate video on that but it's a very simplistic way of doing it give me a shout in the comments below if you want to see the texturing thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 67,146

Keywords: understand, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, graphics, game, guide, easy, how to, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender 3d, 3d modeling, simple, create, model, beginner, starting out, grant abbitt, blender beginner, blender (software), blender low poly, subdivision surface modifier, sunsurf modifier, loop tools, bevel, modelling techniques, blender 2.8 modeling tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender 2.8 modeling, edge flow, topology, hard surface modeling, mean crease, hard surface

Id: QXNRrt8EcEg

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020