Learn Boxcutter in Blender in Under 10 Minutes

so welcome this video is gonna teach you how to learn box cutter in ten minutes in blender I tried doing five minutes way too short couldn't do it so I'm gonna teach you all the main fundamentals and basically everything you need to go to get up to everything you need to know to get up to speed with a box cutter there are gonna be some things I skip over but those are things I deem quite trivial and not very important and if you ever need them it's something you would naturally look up how to use anyways most of everything taught in this video is all you're gonna use so what we're gonna do is start with the basic cube make sure you have your box cutter add-on turned on very important then we can press the alt W key on the keyboard to enable box cutter very useful and also if you press the N key the box cutter settings are here on the right but I'm not gonna scare you too much with those right now they're not bad I promise but it looks intimidating at first so if we press the D key we have this pie menu 90% or so of the work I do is all on this pie menu the other 10% is probably in this menu here so if we press the D key the first three settings we have our circle custom and n gone so by default these are the three different cutters we can use actually for one of them which we can't see which is our current cutter the box as you can see but these are where all of our different box cutter shapes are so by default we're using a box so if we select the object click and then drag and then release we can kind of just add our own cuts if I press enter that'll lock in the cut if I want more control over the cut I can press the tab key and I can kind of adjust this more manually as you can see we also have this blue dot which adjusts the bevels so I can move that and then scroll on the scroll wheel to adjust the segment count very easy and you can do the same exact thing with the circle cuts and the same thing with the n gong cuts now you may have noticed when I tried cutting with a circle it was more of an octagon shape so to fix that if I press the N key you can change the vertex count to 64 years is probably already on 64 by d well I just had changed mine previously so this is where you can change the vertex amount at any time you can make a triangle you can make a six count an eight count thirty-two sixty-four is always my go-to though so that's very useful so that is the circular cut and we also have n gone this allows us to draw our own manual shapes here like so and once again once you're ready to lock in that cut you just press the Enter key very useful there now we also have one extra setting here which is for custom cutters you can actually make your own custom shape I'm not going to discuss it in this video because it might take too long but the documentation will be linked in the description you can definitely make your own custom types of cutters if you'd like okay so this is the different shapes you can use very simple shapes so up here this is where we have the boolean operation so by default it's set to a cut mode which is just a boolean difference modifier so if I were to add a cut in here it just adds a simple boolean difference nothing crazy the next one adds the slice operation there you go the third one adds an inset if I click and drag you see we have a nice inset here and if I want to adjust the amount of inset I press the T key and that's just going to allow us to adjust that fourth one we have here is the join this just unions two objects together click drag and move boolean Union that's all it is and the fifth one is the knife tool if we click and drag it adds a destructive knife cut so be careful if you want to keep non-destructive you can do that with circles as well you can add a simple knife cut that way if you like I don't use that one too often though to be honest with you okay so the next one we have is extract this is once again how you make your own custom cutters we're not going to discuss it in this video and the last one we have here is the make tool is this just allows us to make our own objects like that very useful if you don't want to cut anything and you just want to add an object in okay so we discuss the shapes menu and we discuss the boolean operations men you hear so by default you're gonna be on the difference boolean operation this one here I almost never manually choose these you can use the hotkey instead to expedite this process if we press the N key and then click on the help icon for box-cutter whenever we add in a cut we can see all of the different settings we have so rather than manually selecting the boolean operations we can just do them with a hotkey so I can add in a cut and if I don't want a difference I can use for example a an inset I press the z key and then if I want to adjust the inset I press the T key to solidify it if I want to add in an array so more than one cut I can press the V key as you can see I can add a nice array there very useful I can also add in for example a slice I can press the X key all of these different hotkeys are much more efficient than manually selecting these so if you're ever looking for a different type of cut just consult the help menu it tells you everything you need to know you don't need to memorize this or look over it now I just want you to start on your own projects and then whenever you need a certain boolean operation literally just add the cut and then go in here and look for the key left to press it couldn't be easier than that so yeah that's what you do there now we're gonna press the D key this has to do with snapping point or origin points rather not gonna really discuss these because they're quite trivial for the origin point you can look over them if you'd like next one here has to do with where the cut is placed by default so the default one is object whenever I select an object and click and drag it aligns to the surface of the object the next one here is view this one will align to the view rather than the object sometimes you want that type of effect the third one is cursor this one aligns the cursor so it might look like I'm cutting on the top but in fact it's aligned with the floor of the cursor here and the fourth and final one is world if I click it might once again look like I'm cutting the cube but in fact it's aligned with the world instead 99% of the time you're going to either use object or the view option most of the time you're going to use object okay if we press the D key again we have these two menus here so yours is probably gonna have the snapping option turned on and if you hold ctrl you can snap on different centered points so if I wanted to add a circle right in the center here I could hold ctrl click and drag out and now this is perfectly centered I can also press this button here and this gives us some more control points to work with on the grid the menu next to it just allows us to adjust some of those settings like the increment amount in the rotation angle so that's pretty useful we also have this area here I don't really go in here too much but there's a bunch of different settings that you might use at some point you can just go in here and take a gander there's a lot of different settings here but don't worry too much about them because you won't have to go in here that much and finally we have all of these different settings this is the default one I use but if you wanted to start operation the default operation to be like an array for example you could turn that on or if you wanted the default to be a solidify it could solidify by default or it could bevel by default just depends on the effect you're going for most of the time I just click on the default start operation here and then just use the help panel to select some of those manually so we've about covered box-cutter that's like the gist of things it's not that bad also up here if you want to work destructively you can change it so if I were to make a cut you're gonna see it applies the modifier but if I'm working non-destructively it doesn't apply the modifier as you can see I almost always working on destructively with box cutter but I just thought that was worth mentioning there also if you have multiple boolean cuts and you want to apply them all you can just click on this arrow next to non-destructive and that will apply them sometimes you might want to do that so everything over in this end panel is literally available here in the D panel so don't worry too much about this versus this they're just about the same but the difference in the end panel is that you have access to this help menu which you're going to use all the time to just quickly make a different sorts of cuts so make sure you consult this as much as you can so that's box-cutter 90% of this add-on is just you adding cuts and then identifying the correct boolean operation you're gonna use so if I wanted to add a cut and I don't know add an inset I could look for inset and then if I wanted to solidify press T or maybe I wanted to add in a slice if I don't know what the slice hotkey is I just go in here look for slice I press X and then just like that I have myself a nice slice last thing if there's no active object selected and you try to draw it's just gonna go to the make option instead it's gonna make the object emanuelly so real quick I have like 17 seconds left if I press ctrl D this will access a little shortcut menu you can use this for different things as well I don't use it that much though also if you add a cut and press the G key you can move it R key to rotate and S key to scale it so that's it that's the entire box cutter add-on super simple the more you use it the easier it'll get I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 144,087

Keywords: blender, boxcutter, tutorial, 2.8, masterxeon1001, boolean, bevel, hard, surface, cutter, 3d, modeling, beginner, advanced, intermediate, under, 10, minutes, quick, fast, lazy, guru, 2.9, update, features, tips, and, tricks, learn, hardops

Id: O9DkIz5ctmg

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020