KIT OPS 2 Complete Video Manual for both KIT OPS 2 FREE and KIT OPS 2 PRO

so what i want to do here is i want to talk a little bit about kid ops and i'm going to kind of do the a to z of kidops and basically we'll start at the very beginning and that is really what is kid ops and and even before that was kit bashing uh kit bashing really got exposure with star wars where they would take objects like the millennium falcon or the star destroyer and they would actually go through and buy all these world war ii jet fighter tank cannon plastic kits and they would just paste them together and by pasting them together they could create these these really kind of pretty cool models they would take a rough shape and they would add these items onto it it was a purely additive process let's now move fast forward i don't know what 40 years and let's talk a little bit about kidops it's a systemized approach of kit bashing an asset management for blender consisting of add-ons and folders of acid files a lot of kit bashing systems that you get in fact almost all kit bashing assets are additive just like those ones in star wars and one of the complete differences between kid-offs is that it's not additive right you can actually go in into any one of the cutters let's just grab some some cutters for instance like grab something like this and when you add a kid ops what we call an insert you know it can actually cut into an object so it can actually remove from an object and this is very unique in the world of 3d right so you can certainly go in and you can find objects that you can add things to but it's very difficult to find add-ons you can cut into so again let me show you here's an add-on that we just add right this is just a purely an ad item and then if we go to this one here we can see that this one actually cuts into so if we look in we can see that we're cutting into this object as well so that's one of the big differences between kid ops and other kit bashing systems the one other thing i'll mention is that kit ops doesn't only include the assets but it includes the whole systemized approach to doing that so as we just mentioned kit ops is actually an ecosystem and it consists of an add-on and a bunch of folders full of stuff and so what i want to talk about now is a little bit about the vernacular of kidops and what we're calling things and kind of the structure and how it works if we look at these objects in here these are called inserts think of them as the atom or the smallest component of kit ops so and inserts are really very simple they're just a blend file for each one of these blend files we add a few special props to tell kids what to do with it when one sees it and then we can create a thumbnail and that's what this these are the actual thumbnails of the inserts so let's take a look at the file structure so here we have the file structure of this k pack we call mailbox and i'll tell you what a kpak here is in a second but each one of these blend files has their own image associated with a little thumbnail and each blend file is called an insert so if you can think of them that way you understand that you can organize these any way you want in a folder and this one we call mailbox and that folder that's full of blend files we call it k pack so when you hear the term kpac kpac is just another name for folder it's a folder full of blends files which we call inserts you can't load a kpac directly into kit ops you actually have to load what we call a master file and that's a folder above it and the reason for this is we can have multiple multiple k packs inside let me go into one for instance here's the master mega 300 tech right this is what comes with kit ops pros if you load this one master folder it will load all of these other k packs so here's a cape pack that shows you know you're going to have a bunch of different thumbnails showing you what's in this particular k pack so that's a key concept is that these are called master folders inside of master folders live kpacks okay packs are folders full of inserts so how do we load those okay before we get started let's talk a little bit about the two different flavors of kit ops one is kit ops free and one is kit ops pro and at the very basic level pro allows you to create your own inserts and that means you can create inserts you can create k packs or folders full of inserts you can sell them if you like you can use them in your projects whereas free will only allow you to use k packs that you get online you can buy k packs some of them come free or you can get them on our kid ops k pack store as well so that's a key key differentiator the other thing i'll mention is there is a whole ecosystem around kid ops there's kid house bevel there's kid ops batch there's kid up synth so we're continuing to add products to it that do different things at the very core is kit ops and kit ops pro and kit ops free are the two add-ons that you want to be paying attention to if you're going to get involved with kid ops and the free version obviously is free you can get it at gumroad or for a dollar blender market the pro versions physics is a little more expensive and you can get it at both of those places as well so now that we've gone through that let's kind of look at how we would install this so basically when you download kit apps you're going to get a bunch of different files especially if it's pro you'll get a bunch of different files free it's just one file with pro you're going to basically come in here and you're going to go into install and you're going to find the zip file whatever that is so here's an example of one here's the free one and here's let's actually look at the latest one let's go here's the 18.1 free and here's 18 one both of them will have a set of inserts included with them and the k packs of course that go with that so the key part to remember when you install it is that you just want to put the zip file anywhere you click on it and it will install so i'm going to interrupt here real quick and explain something that it took me a while to figure this out when i first started with blender and that is that when you install an add-on it typically comes as a dot zip file and when you install it blender takes that file it uncompresses it and unzips it and places it in your add-ons folder so the zip file is never used except only for installing so keep that in mind the zip file is not part of the add-on it is only used as a container to unzip and place the contents of what has been unzipped into your add-ons folder okay back to the regularly scheduled program i've already done that and after you install it you're going to have this list and you're going to see kit ops pretty much at the top of it 3d view cutoffs and the way to enable it is you just check this button turn it on okay so now we've got it turned on if i hit i go over here and hit the end panel we're going to see that we have kit ups and all we're going to have is this this is all we're going to this is all kit ups pro comes with kit ups free will come with a little with this and a few other ones but that's because kit apps pro comes with a zip file that has 300 different inserts and so let's talk about how you would install that so the best way to look at that is take those 300 inserts in that zip file and unzip it and put it somewhere safe somewhere that you know that you're not going to write over it or delete and let's go back into preferences and we're going to look at kit ops and we're going to look in inside our file paths and you'll see it's going to list the kpac and that's the kpac for the master folder that we just have now i'm gonna hit this plus button and i'm gonna choose another one and now i've got a i've got a folder in my dropbox folder actually that has all my master folders so i can go in here i know i'm always working on this something called chip working it's just a folder and inside i have a as you can see i have a whole bunch of kpacks that i use for testing and things like that so if i hit that and hit accept now i've got two and if i go over here and look over here i've just added all of those k packs here so keep in mind this mailbox up here is the name of the k pack so we do not reflect the master folder in here this is only just k packs the master folder is not reflected it is only reflected in this preferences and if i want i can hide it by turning it off i come back over here and i can refresh and you'll see that now i just have the mailbox so this button by the way refreshes as well as if we go in here this button will refresh and if i turn it back on i'll see all of the k packs that they hit to refresh i'll see all the k all the other k packs show up so the key part i want you to understand here is that this is the master folders here and you can control them you can turn them on or off you can move them up or down right now we have the mailbox as the first one if i move it up like that and hit the refresh we'll see that now mailbox is the very last one right here so that's another thing to keep in mind is that you can reorder in this list and you can turn them on and you can turn them off this is version 2.18.2 just so you know okay so let's talk a little bit about how we load master folders so i'll go to here to under preferences and i'll see i have this place at the general and i have file pass i'll get to general in a second but file passes fairly simple this was the the mailbox that came with blender so let's add another cape back so i'll click here now i can store k packs as i said anywhere but i'm they must be inside a master folder and if they're not going to be a master folder then i want to copy them into an another master folder so i just don't create a a folder and think i can load it i have to load the master folder which is the folder above it so let's go ahead and let's choose one i have one called caps wall master folders i keep it in my dropbox so i'll just go in here i have something called chip working just grab this master megatech one because that's one of the ones that comes with kit ops pro so you double click on the on the master folder and then this is the k packs folder and we can double click on any of these and once we get to the point where we have the blend files in the ping files these are the inserts we go up one level and this is our master folder level and we accept that and once we've done that we can see that over here we have mailbox and this let's add one more this time i'm going to add one of the dosh master folders let's say 1.4 master again dribble down then go up one and accept and now we're going to have all of the dosh k packs in here for one point four in here here it is it's just one k pack it's a bunch of different individuals you can drag and drop into your scene the other thing i want to mention is that we also have the general preferences and this i would pretty much leave alone other than maybe you might want to use the exact boolean solver especially if you're going to be using synth it uses the new 2.91 boolean solver which is a little bit better but it's a lot slower so you may find that if things are getting too slow you might switch it back to fast it just won't be as exact but the rest of this looks pretty good you might want to turn sort modifiers on and put your sort uv at the end and as well as weighted normal that those two might be good to put those at the very end and that's really it so that's really it for preferences for now okay so let's talk first about how we insert so first off keep in mind if you want to add and insert an object you first have to select the object if you don't select the object then when you add an insert and you hit this button add insert you're going to go oh what happened to it right but in fact let's add that insert so there yeah it's just gonna pop down at zero zero at its normal scale the scale that it was built at now when we add an insert it's gonna it's gonna actually stick to the side whatever you're adding on right and you can scroll the mouse to move between large medium and small and really you can drop it anywhere you click you can drop it and when you hit the s button s as in scale you can move it and you can adjust it there as well so another thing to keep in mind is that if you want to work to accurate scale you're going to turn off auto scale right here and then you add the insert and that's the actual scale of that particular object so when we add multiple inserts they're going to come in at the right scale when we leave that alone so that's an example of showing an insert that has a cutter now we'll just say for instance i want to move this one well it's pretty easy i can just click on it and drag it wherever i want to and that's all part of kit ops free just so we're clear we haven't really talked about any of the kit ops pro features yet the other thing is that what if i just want to select just an object inside this insert so if we look at this data connector we'll see that it's got other objects inside it right so how do i select those well what i do is i'll click this auto select insert now i can select something inside it and i can move it around now typically you really don't want to do that because these inserts are designed to work with each other right so that's not an issue but sometimes you may want to say okay i want to change one of the materials here so i might want to go into here and look at what the material is some kind of chrome and i may want to say that you know i want it to be a little rougher right so it's a little bit a little bit rougher so i can do something like that if i want to but that's what the auto select button does now notice we're in regular mode not smart mode smart mode is only a kid outs pro feature and we'll talk about that in just a second so what if you want to delete a kit out so make sure auto select is on if you want to delete a kit ops insert just select it hit x and say delete and then it's it's removed right even though it's removed we still have these little collections in here and kit ops uses these collections to help order the inserts and inserts are always placed in a collection called so if you ever want to just delete all the inserts you can just delete the hierarchy so that's something to keep in mind now another thing is that sometimes you might want to remove the kit ops props from an insert and why would you want to do that well let's take a look at this winglet for instance i'm going to click here i'm going to add this to it and i'm going to scroll it up so we have auto scale off so i can use the mouse button now to scroll it up any way i want okay so i now have that now i want to add screw head let's do that let's put a screw head on top of this so i'm going to hit button add insert wait a minute it's not going to the inside well what's happening is i'll tell you what's happening is that when an insert is selected you can't add an insert to an insert so it's going to add it to the target of the inserts let's go look at this answer say okay what's that insert hooked up to it's hooked up to this cube so we're going to add that target but wait what if i want to add it to this object up here well that's when we say remove kit ops props now let's select our object now let's add the insert and now it's easy to add directly to it so that's one reason why you want to remove canops props another reason is that sometimes you may want to select a bunch of different things and you can't select them because auto select inserts get in the way or you want to move them and you can just remove the kit ops props knowing that you're not going to want to be able to use them as kit ops inserts anymore in the scene let's talk a little bit about something else i'm going to grab this data connector and i'm going to add this insert on here now this insert is comprised of as we mentioned before two let's turn off the auto select this is a cutter and what is a cutter we're going to talk about that in just a second but uh cutter is a boolean piece right and this is an object that's a solid piece right so it sits above it can be moved it just sits in the hole that the cutter makes if i if i tab into our object right we'll see that this object is still just a cube why is that well that's because cutters are actually modifiers so if i select the cube and i say convert to mesh okay so now what i've done is i have tab into it we'll see that now we have actually taken that modifier and it's no longer in the modifier list and we've applied it so just as if we had applied it using the apply button over here we apply it all over here now the only thing is we still have this wiring we have this feature called remove unused wire inserts when we click on that it gets rid of that just for you keep in mind though if i go in here and i say delete hierarchy i'm going to delete the actual connector too so it may not always be the right thing to do keep that in mind okay let's talk about smart mode now smart mode is only available on kid ops pro so that's the number one thing so let me show you an example of some of the things you can do with smart mode let's grab this bolt and let's just go up here we'll use it small and what i'm going to do is i'll click add insert and as i drag it along i'm going to hold the shift key down and before i click to set it i'll put the shift key down and i'll click and i can keep doing this as long as i hold the shift key down until i'm done and so it allows me to automatically place inserts anywhere i want to as long as i have the shift key down with smart mode the other thing it allows me to do is it allows me to do things like i'm going to take this one and i want to center it top and bottom so you can see that right this one i'm going to center so i'm going to hit the center and i'll hit this center but look it put it in the center of the middle so what's going on there well that's because the align vertical has a z axis so now we're we're set correct we can say move it to the left or move it to the right the other thing to keep in mind is that smart mode is very taxing on the processor so any time and i mean anytime you're not needing these features go back to regular right so if you're in regular mode let's say i want to do something like duplicate and insert watch i'm going to hit shift d and i'll go y and i'm going to play the insert notice what happens it didn't bring along the cutout with it right that's another thing that smart mode will do for us so i'll click over here go into smart mode shift d to duplicate y on the y-axis and up it doesn't work again why is that well i'll show you why that's because once we turn off smart mode it doesn't really know what target object is of the insert so i go over here select smart mode grab this little eyedropper drop it now it knows it's this box now if i say shift d y and drag it it comes along quite nicely the other thing you can do is let's say shift d x and move it over and then you can just say shift r shift r you can just keep doing that as many times as you want again once you're done turn off smart mode because smart mode will slow down things considerably so we just go back to regular that's really it um as far as the inserts go themselves let's talk a little bit about materials next okay let's talk a little bit about how you can use kit ops to add materials to objects this is really something we've added a while back but we've actually made it easier with this new add material button so let me show you what i'm talking about i'll click select this object right here and i'm going to go into one of my materials so actually i don't have any of my eevee materials here so let's go ahead and go under preferences and let's look for my definitely eevee material system there's eevee materials i'll click on that i'll click one more down here all the files go up one level and we should be good if i look over here we'll see now i have all these eevee materials let's just jump into wood i'll select this and we can see that we've got a bunch of different wood materials let's just grab this plywood one and we'll say add material and look at that just puts it right there let's go over here and let's select a plastic paint one let's grab a blue matte one add material there it is we zoom way up we're going to see that there is a very fine texture there and if i want to increase that texture size this is the synth i'm sorry that's the synth plastic material but i can't increase that with the synth one by the way these synth ones are are free they're cco so you can use them to create your own k packs if you like even and i'll show you how to do that but i'm gonna just basically make this material like one and now you can start to see in this keep in mind this is a 2 meter cube this cube is larger than a human so that gives you an idea let's go back into our plastic plus plant and let's just let's grab this plastic mat and we'll add that as a material and then we there you can see that's got a little different material texture looks more more plastic plasticky if you know what i mean you know the point is that you can choose any of these materials in any of these kits that we have and you can make your own too this one's kind of an interesting one and let's talk about it for just a second i'm going to select this plywood object and i want to add a dirt coming up on it first of all let's look at the material itself here's the plywood if we look we have a scale and i can just adjust all three of these by clicking and dragging down into the third spot like this and say oh let's make it one and there you go it's a little bit maybe a little bit larger i can actually click and drag down say 0.5 makes it a little bit larger there you have it so that's one way if i want to make it shinier if let's say that we want this plywood to have a little bit of a gloss coat to it i just go in the roughness amount and i'll drag this down and as i do that you'll start to see that it's getting shiny but we're showing too much of the wood grain through so what i'll do is i'll come over here and i'm gonna just turn off the bump now we have a shiny kind of more reflective surface on that right so i really don't want to do that i'm going to come back up here and adjust that back off but that just shows you some of the power that you have on these ev materials so once this is done let's go ahead and i'm going to grab this dirty up one let's add it there it is x delete so dirty up so i'll click on this and i'm going to scroll right to here and in between the the last node and where it goes into base color i'll host shift a and group and we'll do this one right here there we go there's that dirty up for that one and you can adjust the dirt color of course and the amount of dirt and the actual height of it so there's all kinds of cool things you can do with that so that's the materials for you real quick okay while we're talking about materials let's talk about how we can actually save a material as a kid ops insert if we have kid ops 2 pro so real quick let's just take this box i'm going to move up this shader editor workspace and i'll hit this x button to get rid of that i'm gonna with that box selected i'll go ahead and add a bevel modifier and we'll just give it maybe a few segments here and i'll say give me a new model with the node wrangler add-on installed i can hit the control t and it's going to actually put a image texture mapping and text recorded notes for me and i'll just say open and i'm going to go to my textures concrete tile something that's tiled we'll grab this one right here and we'll turn this from uv to generated here and then we need this is going to be box there we go so we have a box map and so now we have this nice material that looks pretty much like what we want we might want to actually add a bump node to this and that's just easy enough to do g a search and just type in bump and you'll get that bump right there and you can take this color and put it into the height here and then you just take this and move it into the normal so you grab it just like that and now you can see that it's very very rough and we just need to move these down to something like 0.1 10.1 and now it's going to look much better so that's our material let's call this one cinderblock good enough and now we want to save a material for this so i'm going to go back into kit ops pro with this selected i'll just say create material insert once it does that it brings it in like this i want to probably make sure it should automatically do this but i always want to make sure there's automatically packing to blend isn't is set because we want to we don't want that that material saved and then once that's done i need to save the insert first let's find a place to save it remember i told you that i use a working folder so i'm going to go in here i'm going to look for the test and i'll call it cinderblock blend it named it for me and i'll say camera to insert i can hit the c button you'll see that's what it looks like and just say render thumbnail it's going to render the thumbnail for me close factory scene we're back here new general don't save and with this set we'll go into kit ops and i'll go into that test folder and you can see there's cinder block and add material and it just works so that's how we create material inserts using kit ops 2 pro okay so let's talk about anatomy of an insert real quick first notice i've got two different objects right and you guys probably know this but if i want to if i use the bull tool and command minus i now have one object subtracted from the other the object that is subtracted from has a modifier and that modifier is a difference modifier and it's using the first one if i move this around it's going to actually continue to cut so it's non-destructive that's what we mean when we say non-destructive and i can actually say unionum union then you can see that now they're all together and if i intersect i just get the intersection of the two so and if i want to all i have to do is just go under here and say apply and now if i tab into this you'll see that this is has all of the geometry applied to it in the negative boolean so that's important to understand is that with kidops we use a similar approach we use booleans and modifiers to cut into objects how does that work well let me show you okay so we're back here on our default cube i'm gonna go into kit ops and i'm gonna grab one of our inserts here this data connector and i'm gonna add the insert here scroll down make it a little smaller and as you can see if i turn off our overlays we've actually cut a hole into this cube and we've put in that hole a connector not a solid object and so that's what an insert is and if we look at this insert we will see that it is actually a modifier as ins as applied to this box and it is modifying the box in that it's subtracting the first mesh this mesh right here let's turn off or auto select and subtracting that mesh from this box that's key to understand and where is it being placed well the actual surface of the box is being attached to the center or the origin point for the cutter so that's critical to understand is that as you create an insert you got to make sure that the center of the main part of the insert the insert can have lots of parts right but the main one the one that we call the main cutter the main object is got to have this origin set of that object to where it is you want it to be applied and typically it's easy just to think of that as being a zero zero point let me show you what i'm talking about i'm gonna hit this edit insert button and i'm gonna lose on save changes and let's go here five and notice this is our cutter and it is directly on the x and the y axis it's perfectly aligned and that's really one of the ways that you want to start to construct your inserts that's a real important concept and in fact if you look at this object it's not actually you can see the center that said down here it's not critical but what is critical is that the scale is set at one and this scale is set at one that part is critical so wherever your cutters are you want to make sure that the scales are set correctly and that they're not different because if they are they're going to have trouble now the other part that you have to do is as we look at this let's take a look at our get ups this is the main object but sometimes you're going to find out nothing's working correctly and it's because you've set the wrong main object or there's no main object set at all there has to be a hierarchy if i move this you'll see that it this moves with it why is that because it's parented right we look over here we can see this is parented to this if i unparent it and then save the file i'm going to have something that's broken so these are the key things that you need to keep in mind every insert has to have a main object and that needs to be the parent of all the other inserts and keep your scales to one and keep your origin of the main object of the main object at zero zero zero and you'll be in good shape okay there are three different modes for creating inserts not counting material inserts of course and they are in scene factory mode new scene factory mode and open scene factory mode and let me show you those and then i'll talk a little bit about how i like to make them they were going to create something i'm going to say ship a and i'm going to create a cylinder and i'm going to scale it down and i'm going to move it up here and i'll right click on shade smooth and auto smooth it and that's going to be our hole right so i'll just take that and i'm going to hold the shift key down and say command minus right so i've got the whole set that's using the bull tools extension i can actually come in here on here and just basically say look at these uh viewport display and let's make that wire instead okay so now with that selected let's say shift a i'm gonna make a cube i'm gonna move it up and i'm gonna just make it kinda a little different just so it kind of slots in here like this i might make that a whole or i could use that as something that's positive i don't know we'll talk about that in a second but what i do know is that i want to take both of these and the first thing i'll do is i'll look at my item here and i'll see that their scales are all off so if i say control a and i say uh scale let's move the scales so control a scale i want to select them both and we'll go into kit ops and i could pair them here or i could do it in pair in kit ops but if i keep them both selected and i say create insert we're going to go into this scene right one of the problems is that we're way above the actual ground as you can see and also we don't know what the hierarchy is of this so we don't know which is the main object so what i'm going to do is i'll select this object and then i'll select this object and i'll go under object and i'll say parrot and i'll say object and so now now this one right here g controls both of them right first let's go ahead and select this shift s and i'll say you know snap selection to cursor and that's what i use because i use a a special add-on a free add-on made by master xeon and team c to do that but i did find where that's located it's under snap selection to cursor so that pulls it right down there and if i hit the five key and the one key and z you'll see that we're in exactly right spot so that's pretty cool now let's say that i want to move this down a little bit something like this okay even though that's where it's supposed to be centered that's where the object is going to be added it's underneath this other object is underneath the ground plane so what i can do is once i get it there that's when i do control a all transforms now we're in good shape now we just need to tell kid ops what we're doing right so i'm going to go over here and say well that's going to be my main object don't forget to do this if you forget this you're going to have the thing not working when you drop it in you're going to look at it it doesn't work or you don't know why it's because this main object and i've had i've actually fallen for that myself so be careful of that then the next thing i'm going to look at is i'm going to look at this other object and that can be that's set up as a solid but i can also if i want to i can take that and i can use that as a union with this so if i collect this one and i if i select this and i say add a modifier and i just go down here and i'll say boolean and then i'm going to say union and i click here and i select that now that's a union and when i turn that into a this this object into a cutter it's going to hide it but the cutter i want to be is an insert it's not a difference because i'm not really subtracting from the object below i could but but i'm not and it's not a union because i'm not adding to the object below i'm going to say it's actually whatever the insert this insert whatever it thinks it's doing that's going to use that object for that so i'll click on here and say insert and then i can save the insert okay so now that we've done that now we need to create a thumbnail so what we'll do is we'll say camera to insert hit the zero key on our numpad that's going to show it oh that's not too good uh and then i go into view camera to view and i can actually move this around select it if i want i'll move around it so you can see that what's going on is that we have an extra cutout where that other insert is i can look at the rendered view and i'll see exactly what i'm going to get and once i've got that all i have to do is say oh render thumbnail i can't render a thumbnail why not because i haven't saved the insert so let's go over here and let's call this widget and we'll save the insert first my chip working test folder and i'll call it widget.blend and now once we've saved the insert now it's easy just to hit the render thumbnail button now we have a rendered thumbnail now i'm going to go ahead and say close factory scene and we're going to come back here and we'll see that we have where we left off now one thing i didn't do is i didn't save the scene before i jumped into insert mode that was a bit of a mistake right so i needed to actually save the scene and i use power save for that but i always say the scene before doing that but to be perfectly honest with you i don't really use this mode at all when i'm creating inserts i very rarely do very rarely do but i want to show you how you can use this if you want let's go ahead and create a new file and we'll go back into kit ops and we'll go back into our test and we'll let this thing redraw a little bit and we can see there's our widget and if i add the insert here you'll see that it is doing a good job of cutting out that hole in that object in fact let's just look at this way you can see cut out the hole right nicely so that's how that works now i'm going to talk a little bit about some of these other modes here in a second but this pretty much covers the inseam factory mode and as i said i don't use it that much every noun that i might but i prefer the new scene factor mode which we're going to go over next okay so before we move on i want to talk a little bit about face orientation and as you can see if i hit q and say face orientation we don't see anything is wrong and usually we'd see all blue right here but we don't and i'm going to show you a little trick but first before i do that let me just go ahead and grab this and flip it okay and then i'm going to go ahead in kit ops and i'm going to add something like this data connector notice it comes in upside down and it will come in in the direction of the face normal and that's why it comes in upside down one of the other things to be aware of is that if we're using exact exact is not at all forgivable for the cutting when you're doing a boolean so it's really important to understand that we want all our faces to point out right so tap in this object hit a shift n recalculate normals we want that to be like that tab back out now you may say wait a minute how come we're not seeing the blue and i'll show you why we're not if i go into the preferences and i look in our themes for our 3d viewport and you'll see that the face orientation front over here in the alpha i've got it set to zero so that means that while i'm working even if i'm working in the look dev mode or the viewport shading mode that's what it's called now i am going to see the problems that i'm having right so by the way notice that now tab all these faces are correct but if i go tab and just select this one and let's go ahead and flip it and then tab back out now even though i'm in this this uh viewport shading or look dev mode i'm gonna see the faces that aren't working correctly that's a great little tip i learned online from somebody i forget who but whoever it was is really smart and i use this quite often so i can continue to work and if i see that i just come in here tab you know if you flip it back out and i'm i'm good to go so that's an important concept to understand is you always want to be working with your normals facing outwards even on your booleans i'll talk about that in a sec let's talk about my favorite way to work and that's in the new scene factory mode so i've created a new scene i'll say it select everything x delete it then i'll delete all these collections and then i'll just say shift a mesh and we'll do plane and i'll tab into the plane and extrude it down so that's going to the surface i'm going to cut into and then you know i need to apply a material to it so i'm going to go over to kit ops and i'm going to use the new free scent materials and the special mat i want to use is this sy cutter i put it on all the scent cutters we'll talk a little bit about that later but i'm just going to use that material here so there we have it remember previously we talked about we want to turn on our face orientation and when we do whoa we look we got this all this red so let's control let's tab into this select everything shift end and invert it tab back out now we're uh now we're in good shape so the next thing we want to do is let's go ahead and add a cylinder like we did before i'm going to scale it down i'm going to right click and say shade smooth i'm going to say cue auto smooth that's the same thing over here as click on the vertex normals auto smooth 30 and now i want to subtract it and i use the bull tools make sure it's enabled do the bull tools add-on creates this little edit menu down here you can see it and if you select this and you select this and you say command minus it's going to subtract it and it basically puts that modifier that difference boolean modifier in there but you notice that we don't have it doesn't look right in here let's right click on this and say shade smooth and then we're going to also auto smooth it so now it looks looks correct in there so that's good what we're going to do next is add a cube scale it down like we did previously something like that drop it down a little bit farther maybe something sticks out like that and that looks pretty good so let's take that let's take everything a and we're going to shift click on here so this is the last object and we'll go under object make links and we'll say materials so now they're all the same material and we'll select this and we'll select this and we'll select this again and go object parent object so that's parented correctly and now i'm going to basically go over here and say power save this is going to save it to the default power save and what i'm not going to do is do this create insert what i am going to do is i'll take this whole file and say file and i'm going to say save as and i'm going to put it in that test folder and let's call this widget it's going to replace the other one save as and now notice that kit ops is completely changed because it now knows that this is an insert great so now i don't want this anymore so i'm gonna hit x delete so that's gone so i have is this and this so if i go up here and say that's gonna be a cutter it'll set that to cutter and this one instead of making it a cutter i want to make it a union and what does that mean so that means that it's it's going to union with the original whatever whatever the target object is it's going to actually add a union and it's going to actually grow out of the top and i'm going to show you that how that works in just a second so with that said i'll say cutter and i'll call that a union right there so it's going to look like this and now we we know that we're at widget blend we save the insert and then we can say load the render scene and here it comes in and i'm going to say camera to insert and you can see that the cutter is cutting through and the union is is coming out now i want that union to show all the way through so that doesn't work now here's the key thing i can't save this because i have all this other stuff in here i have to go back file revert revert so what i want is i want to do the cut first and the union next what it's doing is it's doing the union first and the cut next how do i fix that well the reason for that is because cube is in front of cylinder so if i make this let's call this z cube now alphabetically it's below so now let's save the insert let's load the render scene and now you can see it works just fine now what i want to do is again i'm gonna like we did before i'm gonna lock camera to view move it up to where i want it turn on the render and say render the thumbnail and now the real important part is i need to say file i want to make sure i revert i don't want to save this okay so now with that done let's go back into another version of of blender which i always keep a couple versions open so i'm going to go back into this version and i'm going to go kit ops and i hit this refresh button and i'll go into the test folder right there and i should find our object widget and let's add that insert okay so now this is showing us a problem we thought we had it right it rendered right why doesn't it work now that's why we left it open so i'm going to go back into here and try and look at this and understand what's going on ah it thinks this is the main object over here is the main object not this let me turn this on the main object go back to here make sure this is off then save the insert now i'm going to go back here x out of this delete and refresh and then i'll go grab that again widget and let's add the insert and now we're good to go now why would i just make that a solid well let me show you why is that is that if i look at this i'm going to go ahead and convert this to mesh i'll convert this to mesh right so now that's convert to mesh i'll remove unused wires i'm going to tab into here and we're going to see that this is all part of a single mesh so if i decide for instance to say add a modifier like a bevel you see it adds it to the whole entire mesh how cool is that okay so now you're saying well wait a minute chip you forgot to scale your objects well it actually does work if you leave everything at the zero zero point we didn't move anything around but later on after we apply the insert things can get wonky if we're not careful and so that's the key thing that we need to be able to make sure we remember to do and that is just going to the item and just say i would just select all a and then say control a all transforms and now we have everything set to 1 1 and then i would say i would go back to kit ops and just save the insert so that's a key thing to remember okay the last factory mode that we want to talk about is open scene factor mode and it's really not much different than the new scene factory mode except that we're already opening an object and we can of course go in and we can open the recent widget that we just saved that way but one of the nice ways that i like to use it is i like to just go into let's go to test and we'll grab that widget object right there and just say edit insert it does the same thing lose unsaved changes sure it does the same thing and then all the same things apply let's just for this one let's go ahead and and select this other object instead of calling it a cutter we'll call it a solid and now i want to give it a color but the problem is i can't use any of my materials from my kit ops collection because i'm in kit ops and it won't allow me so the way i do that and get around that is i should say i go to append and i go into some of my materials let me see you can find some real quick okay let's go into the synth plastic paint i'm going to grab this blue shiny material double click on it go into material and grab blue shiny append it now let's click here and instead of cutter i'm going to make it blue shiny it's going to compile the material and you see it's it's the blue shiny material now if i hit just save over here it'll work but if i hit save insert what's nice about this is that it's actually going to strip out any extra materials or any extra data blocks that's really important because you could be adding all kinds of stuff in here so that's why i save inserts better than just doing save over here so hit save insert now set load render scene like we've done before camera to insert and i can just say runner thumbnail we'll just do that and then remember when we're using new scene factory mode or open scene factory mode we want to go file revert we don't want to try and save this we say file revert revert we're back here okay and let's just go ahead and look at our uh at our new insert and i'll go here and hit refresh again and we'll go in here and there's our insert and we'll say add insert and there it comes in you can see it works just great so now now that i've gone through the some of the basics of creating inserts i'm going to kind of get into some more advanced techniques and especially techniques that i want to use for creating synth inserts you

Channel: chippwalters

Views: 20,654

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Id: F3oqNribdT8

Length: 45min 54sec (2754 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021