Mastering smooth surfaces in Plasticity (Drawing in 3D)

in this video I want to cover how to create a more complex shape and plasticity using the concept of three-dimensional tangents so our goal here is to create a basic shape that has an inset and the idea might be that this might be some kind of grip on some kind of joystick I've been you know really focusing on the joystick shape in the last few videos and this getting this right took me a number of attempts I wasn't quite sure why it was so trickier complicated turns out I don't think it's actually all that difficult to make but you do have to understand which tools to use and why so I'm going to hide these objects and I'm going to turn on our curves and we might actually make a few adjustments here make some modifications but uh let's start by deleting I'm actually going to delete this we'll recreate it and I might actually delete this curve as well and let's take a look at using the control Point curve I want to make sure that we snap this to the very edge of the oval that we've created this is basically just a circle that we've scaled down and maybe something like something like in fact I'm I'm going to start with the line tool first just to keep things simple and maybe do something like this and snap to this outermost point on the circle here now if you've watched the last couple of videos you'll know that if we use this curve as a curve guide in plasticity this is going to cause the Loft to fail and we don't want that so what we need is all of the all of the lines here to have basically for the tangents to line up and right now they're broken because these are hard angles rather than than smooth curves so I'm going to press the b key and I'm going to smooth that out probably probably a good bet something like this and this will allow us to use our lofting tool I'm going to select both of these curves press l and then use shift and click this curve and then click this line and again this is really big but this will help us establish the process here all right so now what we want to do is create a couple of cuts in fact what I learned is if let's see let me unhide my original object here there's a couple ways we could approach this we could create a cut here and make some modifications to create our nset um but I've found that that's a little bit I think that's really the wrong way of going things about going about things the wrong way we probably want to start with these slices into our surface here and then create this that way we can use the slices as a guide and I'll show what that looks like in just a second so let me hide those again and before we even get to this I'm going to need to select this object and I've got a line here that I created just along the x-axis and I want to make sure that we cut this in half because this will make our job easier if we have two halves that we later mirror so I'm going to going to delete that and hmm from here we want to make sure that we have a couple of cuts in our surface so I might create one maybe about here and this will serve as the outermost Edge from that that inset cut that we're going to be making are really not cut really a patch as we'll see in a bit and then create one here and now the advantage of doing this is that I can use the curve tool I might even snap to this point here and do something there's a couple different ways that I could do this um I think I'm going to make this curve this way and then I'm going to create another one here and do something like that and looks like these are not aligned so we want to make sure that they snap together I'm going to use control to make sure that they're together and we might in this case I'm not sure may not make a whole lot of difference to actually have this cut here now that I think about it but at least it gives us some kind of guide so Let's uh let's say we create something like this if we wanted to be real fancy we'd extract this curve and combine things together but I'm not going to bother with that now I want to make sure that this curve is flat so I'm going to scale it along the the y-axis and make sure that this is zero and then I'm going to use control and snap this together and grab all of these press J to join them and now we can use this to cut into our our service now again if if we add more complex uh a more complex shape here that this were basically brushing against this might be a bigger issue but in this case I think we can get away with it so now I'm going to select this object and then this curve press C perfect then I want to delete this and I also want to make sure that I delete this surface here okay so the reason we have these these sections is because we're going to create a loft here and this will help us understand 3D tangents a little bit better I know there's a lot of setup in this one this is a um simple to understand once you uh once you understand it but a little bit more complex process is going to take a little bit more time okay so I can Loft these together by pressing l and I want to use the tension option to bring these inward so what this does is we now have tangents that make sure that this surface is smooth and aligned from this side all the way to over here and lofting allows us to do this easily plasticity doesn't really have a lot of options for changing the tangents after we've created a shape but in some ways this makes things a little bit simpler because it lets us focus on that ahead of time and we don't have to worry about the the process um afterwards so it's it's got some disadvantages if we wanted to change things but it also makes you know kind of forces us to figure out that ahead of time and again what this is allowing us to do if we bring this in maybe a little bit maybe not too much but a little bit more um is it's giving this uh us a uh inset or this this top part overhangs this bottom part and so it should uh allow us to create the shape that we want now I want to be go a little more advanced with this and I want to select this Edge and press shift d and that's going to create a curve here and I want the bottom of this surface to actually be more aligned like it was before basically a long the oval or at least close to it and then this top one we want it to be a little bit more in set so that we have this this curve here and we're controlling the overall shape so the way we can do this is we can select this surface and delete it using shift delete and looks like for whatever reason I don't know if it's the lofting process but plasticity creates this curve and uh or maybe the deletion process I'm not exactly sure so I'm going to delete that because we don't need it and I'm going to select this and this Edge and press L and then use shift to select that curve as a guide and now we have the shape that we want okay so finally going to select both of these edges and press L and here's where kind of the trick comes in now this is not actually too bad um but it it does require some understanding that a couple of important points one is you'll notice that we had kind of this horizontal tangential consistency which is a complex way of saying that this surface would smoothly transitioned to this surface which smoothly transitioned to the surface over here but we weren't really concerned with that on this top Edge and this bottom Edge because you know it this bottom Edge will be kind of flat and then this top Edge we don't have anything in this hole now to fill in this hole we really want this Edge to smoothly transition to this Edge and same from here all the way to here um you really can't do that with lofting let me let me hide my curves here if for example I were to go from here to here and Loft it would break I could attempt to select these here and create some curves and I could get something really close if I lofted here and then selected these curves but you'll notice that the I mean this is all crazy right here if I if I confirm this we've got this really weird break here that might look cool if that's what we're going for but in this case I want everything to transition smoothly so that's essentially completely broken so what do we do how can we get these to transition smoothly well there's not currently a way to do lofting in a four-way pattern that I know of in plasticity but there is a way to fill in this and I mentioned it earlier and that is to use the patch tool now the thing about the batch tool is it's not going to work if these are separate surfaces I'm not exactly sure why but maybe it's just a feature limitation maybe that's changed by the time this video has come out or not not by the time it's come out but by the time you're you're watching this and so this solution should be as simple as we grab all of these separate pieces all these sheets press J and join them and then want to select all of these and click this tool here now there's one more really important option that we need to think about and that is the smooth option for the fill preference and we can see that down here that this surface kind of slams into this surface and completely changes Direction and we want it to be smooth so if I click smooth everything is smoothly transitioning we have smooth tangents from top to bottom and from side to side and we can say okay in fact if I if I use the render mode if I right click here and use the render mode here we have a little bit of pinching on this side but I don't know that it's going to be really a problem there's maybe some and I think the reason for that is we really tightened this edge up and maybe we could have when we were working on the tension made this a little bit smoother and so things wouldn't have been quite so pinched together but overall we have a shape that pretty much smoothly Transitions and we can again test that with these horizontal lines we have besides this pinching we have no sudden breaks or weird changes and of course we're going to have some change here but that's to be expected and again looking from this side we get a nice smooth transition so that's a just you know a part of modeling that it took me a while to understand the three-dimensional tangents and plasticity and really how to control them and I think that's the solution for this kind of issue is to use the patch tool because it's going to allow us to get that that uh a tangential smoothness from top to bottom and from side to side in ways that lofting really only focuses on the two like if we Loft two edges it's really going to only focus on the top and bottom like in this case when we created this side to side we could create curve guides but they don't create the Perfection from um that they they create it from one side but not from the other if that makes sense so it's kind of confusing to think about but definitely practice that take a look at um you know using making sure that the all the tangents are lined up and you know it's something that I think as you practice you'll get you'll get better at it and of course we can flip this using the mirror tool and we can combine these sheets together and I'm going to hide this group I'm going to grab all of these and use the patch tool in this case we can use the non-smooth because we're just going to create a basic patch and of course when we've done that everything is now solid we do get a weird pattern here that's actually I think the first time I've seen it when I've practiced it but I have seen it in a video so all that to say here's how we can create more complex shapes make sure that everything is smooth and the transitions work well and play nice together and [Music] um yeah it's just something that I hope you'll find helpful it took me took me a while to really understand this but I think it's a really important skill and plasticity to have so that concludes things for this video thank you so much for watching if you like this video please consider subscribing liking this video sharing this video with friends and hitting that 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Channel: Rebound Animation

Views: 5,398

Keywords: Drawing in 3D, Plasticity, Tangents, 3D tangents, smooth surfaces, lofting

Id: BJheCEw2_84

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023