Learn how to create procedural chain links in Blender

so you've just created a great asset but it's severely lacking in the chain department you've seen a few tutorials online and they all involve things called rigid bodies and colliders whatever those are you just want to set something up that's rather non-committal in case you need to change it later I'm chunk traffic gander with CG cookie and in this tutorial we will take a look at creating a procedural chain-link setup in blender let's get to it so I popped into my blender scene and I've got my pillar assets here but I'm gonna need to connect them via a chain link now there's a couple different ways we could go about creating the chain link but I know that later on down the line I might need to go ahead and resize this chain and move the chain around and maybe reorient the chain to fit a different configuration of these pillars so the best approach that we can take to fit that modularity or those ever-changing factors is thinking about how we can do this as procedurally as possible so to start off we're going to have to manually create one of these chain links but this is about the only manual part of the entire process so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come to meshes and I'm going to add a tourist mesh and you can see we've got our torus right down here I'm quickly going to just bring down the major segments to something like 16 and I'm gonna change the minor segments to 8 again this is just to keep it relatively low poly for the tutorial but again you can kind of configure whatever you want to fit your need so I'm happy with that and I'm gonna quickly just rename this guy chain-link and I'm gonna come up top with the seven key on my keyboard I'm going to make sure that we scale this guy really down and we'll scale them in maybe just a little bit more then just kind of trying to eyeball the size here and I think that's pretty good so I'm happy with that and now I'm going to come in and edit mode here and I'm just going to get rid of half of our chain and I'll come over here and I'll just make sure on our modifiers that we're going to mirror that selection there right so now if I just bring this out a little bit and enable the clipping I can come in here and just extrude these faces along our hex and with everything selected I can just bring it out and this is going to be pretty much the most difficult or labor-intensive part of our chain link here it's just actually developing manually that first chain link I'm gonna go ahead and just shade this guy smooth right so that we get some nice shading on there and now we need to go about setting up the procedure ality aspect of it so the first thing I'm gonna have to do is figure out how I can go ahead and start tiling this geometry here and we have an array modifier which is going to allow us to do exactly that so if I come to the modifiers and under generate I can find array you can see that with the array modifier we're gonna be able to pretty much add any number of chains that we want but the initial problem with this is that if we actually take a look at a chain link we can see that the chains are crisscross with each other right because they have to go and actually link up with one another and we aren't going to have that option natively with this modifier so instead what I'm gonna have to do is actually use an object offset to set the rotation and the location of each one of these chains so what does that mean well let's run by it a little bit slowly and we'll take a look I'm gonna uncheck this relative offset and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna add an empty right just an empty point in space here and I'm going to use this empty as our object so now the first problem I'm going to have is that our chains are going to get bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where they're actually so large that they just keep kind of going out like a Russian nesting doll and that's because if we take a look right on my chain you can see that because I've scaled it down and not applied the scale it's going to give us this scaling issue so with the chain selected I'm just going to hit control a to apply our scale and that's all going to disappear so now if I come down you can see that when I take the empty and I start to move it around right it's going to follow an array off of the origin and the location of our empty here so now what I can do is move this array just on our x-axis here and it's basically going to do the same exact thing that we did with the base modifier but what's really cool about the object offset feature of it is that it also takes a look at both the scale of this object as well as the rotation and so if I rotate this guy on 90 degrees on our x-axis there you can see that now our chains are starting to line up like a proper chain link that's starting to look really sweet but we're gonna run into an issue now right if we try and move this around or we try and move this guy around and we're not going to want to try and figure out how we're going to you know move this over and start to manipulate it this way and it would be a lot easier if I can just instead have a few control points to move this around and it just kind of follows the flow of those points and I think this next step here is really where a lot of the cool procedure allottee aspect comes into play so what we can do to set up this kind of manipulation system is we can go ahead and if I come into my 3d view and create a curve I'm going to go ahead and create a path and again you can use any one of these different handle types but for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to go ahead and use a path here and it may look like it's not added anything to our scene but if I start to move it you can see that we've just created a NURBS path right so we've got this spline here with these different pivot or control points and I want to cast our array here overtop of that curve so I'm going to come back into our chains here and I'm going to add another modifier the curve modifier and if I take a look down at the bottom here you can see that we have an object selection I'm going to come and find our NURBS path and you can see now if I select the NURBS a little bit of difficulty there so I can select it in our outliner if I start to move this around now we're going to be able to very simply and efficiently play around with the orientation of this chain-link here so if I go ahead and start to move this guy up we can try and find a little spot where we come you know best add it to our chain link there and I'm going to do the same thing for the other side and we'll notice immediately that as I start to do this right we only have our chain link going so far so even if I bring this up to here it's not going to do anything so what we can do is we can come into our modifiers here go to our array and start playing around with the number of the chain links but that's not really procedural in the best sense and depending on the circumstance or the situation that we have to use this it might be a little bit difficult to go in and play around with kind of fudging the numbers and the amount of chains that we want in this link so we also have the option if we take a look right here with the fit type and instead of fixed count we can just go and fit curve and so now we need to select the curve that we want and again using the nerds path that we created we can see now that if I go to our curve here and I start to play around with this end point it's going to procedurally change the number of chains that we have in our link here and that's really really cool with this element of procedure reality and our modeling toolkit we will be able to rapidly develop many different assets in a breeze with a little bit of ingenuity we can develop flexible modular workflows to expedite our creativity and focus on perfecting our 3d designs you

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 105,166

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender 2.8, blender how to, chain, links, modeling

Id: 4GQzWLY0jPY

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020