LOOP TOOLS for Blender - All Tools Explained! (Free Blender Add-On)

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out an add-on that's built into blender that really UPS your mesh editing capabilities inside of the program let's go ahead and just jump into it okay so Loop tools is a free add-on that's built into blender you can enable it by going up to edit preferences and you want to look for Loop tools so it's under mesh Loop tools one word and what you want to do is you want to check this box right here in order to enable this so that you can use it inside a blender now this tool is only going to show up inside of edit mode okay so let's say for example that we were to throw a circle in here so just a simple shape no big deal notice how nothing is showing up on your tabs over here so you can tap the in letter on your keyboard in order to get this to pop up but notice how that edit tab only shows up when you tab into edit mode so once you tab into edit mode like this then you can go under edit and there's a drop down for Loop tools and notice how within this drop down this is where we get the different options contained inside of loop tools so again it's only going to work inside of edit mode okay and so if you do want to check out the documentation for this tool there is documentation built into the blender documentation however my recommendation would actually be to scroll down to the bottom of the page notice that there's an option in here for the script home page if you do that there's an actual page in here that has some more information and specifically what you can do is you can scroll down and you can see information along with the visuals that are actually going to show you what the different tools do down below so if you have questions about any of these I would recommend going to this page because it's going to have a little bit more information okay so let's go ahead and let's delete out a circle right here we're just going to do a shift a and we're going to add a plane at the moment and I'm just going to tab in edit mode I'm going to right click and I'm going to go ahead and subdivide this we'll go ahead and subdivide this so we've got a few different cuts in here so the first tool that's contained in here that I want to talk about is the bridge tool and so what that's going to do is that's going to give us the ability to actually Bridge gaps and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use proportional editing and I'm just going to do something like this I'm going to scale this to zero I'm going to turn this off so something like this so let's say that we had an object like this and we lost some of our vertices in the middle right so What I've Done Right is I've created this uh this mesh right here and I want to add some additional mesh inside of this um what I can do is I can select all of these right between these two edges and then if I click on the option for bridge what that's going to do is that's going to come in here and that's actually going to bridge those Loops like this so notice what that's doing so that's coming in here and that's automatically figuring out where geometry should go and then you can come in here and you can adjust some things about this like for example if I adjust the strength notice what that's going to do since that's going to adjust the math that it's using in order to bridge across these so when I bring that strength up notice how it's maintaining more of this upward direction if I bring it down it's going to bridge them in the opposite direction if I was to put this on zero this would bridge this but it would keep it completely flat like this now not only can you use bridge in order to create this geometry like this you could also do it and add a Twist and so let's say that I was to come in here and select these two circles like this and run Bridge notice how I have an option here to add a Twist and so what that twist is doing is that's basically adjusting the reference point that this is using in order to bridge across these right so instead of these bridging straight across like this the more twist I add the more diagonally or the more it's going to adjust where those points are drawing faces to the other points like this so if you do want to add some twists there's definitely an option in here to do that the reverse function is a little bit hard to describe but basically what it's going to do is it's going to reverse the way that this tries to make the vertices match up the lines between the vertices so that's something that you should try if you ever get a result like this one where things just aren't lined up properly try checking that reverse first box and seeing if that fixes the way that everything though the direction that everything is going okay so the next tool is interesting because what it'll do is it actually changes the geometry of your object in a certain way so let's say for example that we wanted to take this and we didn't want the center of this object to be square anymore we wanted to create more of like a circular face on here well with circle what that's going to do is that's going to do exactly what it sounds like it's going to come in here and it's going to deform the geometry around this so that it's more circular and so this can be useful for a lot of things like for example say that you wanted to cut a hole in this object I could actually come in here and delete this vertex out and now we actually have a hole that's in this object so not only can you do that with a singular vertex but you could also come in here and let's say we wanted to select a path like this so I'm just going to come in here and select these you can select that Loop space and then click on Circle and notice how it's going to take that geometry in there and make the whole thing circular so then say you wanted to I'm going to tap the three key to go into face select mode but now you can extrude this up so you can use this to create um create shapes like this that are circular coming off of a flat surface like this one so note that there are a few different options in here for things that you can do with that function so say for example that I selected this vertex right here and clicked on Circle you have options in here we'll look at flatten in a minute but you can adjust the radius so that's going to be the size of the circle that's created so you can make this bigger or smaller you can also make it turn if you want to do that by adjusting the angle right here and then you can also adjust the influence to set like how far this is deforming those into that circular shape so the flatten is going to be something that you can use on a shape like this one and say that we created a circle right here if you have flatten selected it's going to take all of those and put them on the same plane if you don't check flatten then notice how it's going to keep these kind of bent along the surface so if you do want to create a flat surface like this this is an easy way to do that so what this next one does is it will figure out a curve along points so let's say for example that I had a shape like this one and I had a Vertex that was out like this so out in space and then I had another vertex over here and I wanted to move all of these so that they're in a straight or a curved line between these points right so I could use this to make this uniform well if I was to come in here and do a shift and select this and then activate the curve function notice what that's going to do is that's going to create a straight curve along this Edge right here now that's not necessarily what we would want because we might want this to come in here and actually like curve along so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move this over like this but if I select an intermediate Point like this one it's going to try to create a curve that more follows along the point we have selected so if I select a curve right here notice how that's going to come in here and that's going to try to curve along the surface and so the influence is going to set how much this influences those vertices right here notice how you get a different kind of curve in here if you uncheck the regular box so the curve just looks a little bit different right if you click on regular it's going to take all of these and notice how these are all kind of getting moved outward along the green axis if you uncheck it then this is letting these deform along the red axis as well now there's different times that you could do this so let's say for example that we were to tab into edit mode on this cylinder and let's just say and this is kind of an odd example but I think it's going to work for what we're doing here let's say we're to move this out and then let's say we were to move this out like this so what you could do is you could select these vertices like this doing a shift click and then click on the curve option what that's doing is that's coming in here and that's kind of interpolating a curve using these options now notice how if you adjust the influence it's going to adjust the overall effect and you can also click on boundaries and what boundaries will do is that'll limit the effect to just the vertices that you have selected so if you do need to create a curve between some vertices this could be a good tool for that okay so flatten is going to do exactly what it sounds like it's going to allow you to select a number of different vertices like this so let's say that I was to come in here and select these vertices right here and then I was to activate the flatten tool what that's going to do is that's going to flatten those now in this case notice what it did is it flattened it so that we have a plane between all of our selected points like this now you can come in here and adjust the influence in order to adjust how harshly this is doing this but you can set it in order to create that kind of flatten and so best fit is going to select the best fit for where the where the vertices are right now if you select the normal what that's going to do is that's going to average the vertex normals in here which notice how in this situation gives me more of a flat plane like this and so let's say you were to select the option for View what that's going to do is that's going to flatten those based on your view or based on your current camera location so if we were to run that what we might want to do is we might want to toggle this to a straight up and down View and then toggle back into view we'll notice what that does is that adjusts those relative to your camera location so that could be an easy way to do that top down um just from looking at everything from over top okay so this next one is a little bit odd especially if you're using a newer version of blender so I'm using like 3.4 right now I think after 2.81 this might have changed so what you need to do first before you try to use this is you need to go into your G stretch tool you need to make sure that you select the option for annotation or G pencil I don't think it really matters which one you select so what you can't do is leave it on none or else nothing's going to work so I'm going to leave it on annotation right now but say that I was to come in here and I was to draw an annotation right so something like this so I drew it flat like this well now what we can do is we can select our Loop so I'm going to select the loop right here and we can run G stretch and so what that's going to do is that's going to take this and it's going to try to match it up to this stroke right here and so notice how if you come in here and you adjust the influence you can set how much this tries to follow along this right here so you've got some adjustment in here you've got some other functions in here for things like limiting vertices or doing exact vertices honestly I haven't played around with those too much I'm trying to decide if I would ever actually use this I guess it's good for like quickly adding some geometry in here but to me it's not especially precise so it's an interesting tool but maybe not something that I would always use so loft is basically going to act the same as the bridge tool so I personally have not been able to get this to act differently between bridge and Loft one thing that is a little bit better on loft is setting the segments to automatic might be better for the Loft tool because it might add more segments now one thing I did want to show you really quick is when you do run this tool I'm going to go ahead and undo all of this so I basically just created what's in the example file but when you run this tool and you run Loft first off you might have to add a Twist in here so for me right none of my segments were lighting up but if I added a one twist in here and I reversed it everything worked fine so that's an example of when you might use that reverse function but notice how that cubic function is really kind of following along more precisely but if you were to click the drop down and click on linear notice how I'm getting a smoother result so sometimes those results like linear are going to give you or those settings like linear are going to give you better results notice how I can add numbers of segments in here using this segment count relax is an interesting one because what it does is it tries to take a number of vertices and make them into more of a smooth curve so for example if I've got a curve like this one I run relax notice what it does it kind of like averages this out and when it does that it kind of Smooths out your curve now you can set the number of iterations in here so that's the number of times it's going to run notice how the more I run this it is smoothing us out but eventually it Smooths it so far that it's just a line right so depending on what you're trying to do you use this in order to relax sets of vertices so you can also do that with something like the shape right here so for example I've got this Loop right here that's got this kind of like larger up well if I run relax in here notice how first off there's an option here for selection right and if I put this on selection what that's going to do is that's going to try to relax this off across just what I have selected and I could set my iterations in this case to probably something low but notice how it's coming in here and just trying to smooth that out now if you were to select the other option which is parallel all that's going to come through here and it's going to try to relax everything so notice how it's making changes to all of the vertices in here and again if I was to run this whole thing right it just turns into like this flat surface so um you can use this to try to relax or smooth different curves or groups of vertices in your models this last one's interesting because it's going to come in here and try to evenly space out vertices so notice how for example I've got this mesh in here and things are kind of like uh they're they're just not really spaced out very well and so what I could do is I could come in here and I could select some of these and if I run the space option notice what that's going to do is that's going to give me the ability to space things out in a way that's more even and so you can kind of see that if you adjust the influence right here and notice how it's evenly spacing everything now if I was to select the option for selection it's just going to space vertices right here and you can kind of see what that's doing by playing around at the influence now one of the cool things about that is you can lock the direction what's in here so for example I could leave the y as is by locking it and then only do the X right notice how if I click on these it allows me to lock directions so that those aren't affected just the other directions are now I can also do more of like a linear interpolation if I want to do that so the linear and cubic the cubic is going to try to maintain the positions a little bit better but you can kind of adjust those either way and so you could do the same thing with curves like this one so for example notice how some of these are closer together some are further apart if I was to run space notice what that's going to do is that's going to move those so these are a little more equally spaced in here right and you could either do a linear or a cubic interpolation of that as well so there's a lot of great mesh editing Tools in this free add-on I recommend you go check it out day uh leave a comment below let me know what you thought as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 26,610

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender loop tools, blender loop, blender loop tools tutorial

Id: o4LopQs2bBQ

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023