Mesh Machine Tutorial for Hard Surface in Blender.

hi guys are you here with naravid for blender in this one we're gonna be talking about mesh machine now mesh machine is one of the most important atoms in terms of hard surface and it's one of my four core atoms that i would recommend for anyone who's into hard surface in a with blender i would say hard ups and box cutter it's what i'm installing first then it's machine tools and the last one is mesh machine and these four add-ons are always in my so now if you would like to grab either of these i don't star links in the video description so hop on blend the market to gumroad and grab them mesh machine is a bit expensive but uh you know i think that you should get it if you're really serious about hard surface because it's just amazing and speaking of hard ups and box cutter if you would like to master these add-ons we have a fantastic course and i believe that's the only course on the market that actually covers them in such depth and it's called ultimate guide to hard ups and box cutter check out the bundles as well because we always bundle our courses with some interesting deals on which you can save a lot of money and if you would really like to push your ad in hard service workflow we have a membership on our website called blender bros coaching and community and you have access to i think now 13 courses or something like that immediately tons of decal packs and trim sheets as well as the community which is amazing great people and also 15 discount on upcoming courses and speaking of upcoming courses there is a fantastic course coming very soon we are we are literally wrapping things up now this course is going to be amazing not just the modeling it's going to be way more advanced than the previous course so we're going to teach you how to create you know an aaa quality a game asset but also the workflow is going to be so universe and so flexible that you can apply to any other game asset you wish and they're gonna be some really unique bonuses for pre-orders as well of course it should be out very soon all the links are in the video description so check them out okay let's get back into it i remember questions you know like is hard ups the same as mesh machine well it isn't mesh machine is completely different does certain tools like mirror that are sort of overlapping but they still add a bit different so mesh machine is nothing like hard ops and vice versa so you need both uh for the you know for the full package all right so let me show you what's the first about we're gonna talk about all the functions so once you've got mesh machine installed you don't have to enable any special settings in preferences it's plug and play basically you you have access to mesh machine on and panel if you have digital machine as well you're gonna be on the top so but i'm usually accessing mesh machine through y panel so it's a wire menu okay so when i'm going to add a cube to my scene let's just turn on screencast keys so you can see what i'm doing and i'm going to press y you will see that there is a menu okay no many options here you got plugs starship etc you know quick patch i'm going to be talking about later but um when you go to edit modes that's where the fun start because that's where the main menu is okay so we're gonna discuss all these options here one by one so let's talk about fuse first okay so fuse is really cool if i'm going to grab a chamfer here with ctrl b and i wanted to change this one into a bevel i can do it with fuse right and you got different options like for example you can press w to change width you can press t to change the tension or you can press r to rotate it which is kind of cool right next one is going to be changed with all right so let's say that i have a chamfer here right and i have a chamber here and i wanted to change the width of this chamfer right you know normally i would need to play with some uh veritz etc but mesh machine makes it really easy and fun so you go to change with and i can change width of select edges so for example i can you know press r to rotate that i can press t to taper it and you got different options uh to choose from so it's really cool and fun then we have flatten flatten is brilliant okay let's say that i had this transfer going on here right let's just make it let's make it a bit smaller and i wanted to flatten okay this with this which means i wanted to elevate this edge up so it flattens with this surface right manually would be difficult to do especially without you know changing the shape of this cube but with mesh machine you click this shift click this one y and flatten and you're basically done so it's really cool and you can use it on multiple faces okay so now i'm going to show you a mirror because i want to symmetrize it to the left side so i'll show you a symmetry with mesh machine which is down here uh when you press alt x you're going to have this gizmo okay and it's based view meaning the way you orient it with your mouse which i mean with your viewport is important okay so if i wanna symmetrize from right to left i have to be kind of oriented more or less you know towards this face right so alt x and if you move your mouse okay you can see there's like a square dancing it shows you which way you will be symmetrizing to so in our case i want to symmetrize to the left so when you're gonna keep moving your mouth to the left after you press alt x eventually it's going to symmetrize it now you can do it very quickly by simply you know pressing alt x and moving your mouse and boom that's symmetrized so now let's go back to our flatten select this face shift select this face select one of these y and flatten and boom bob jungle okay then you got some rogue edges here but you know it's easy to remove it you can symmetrize it to the right side press three with machine tools and clean done cool next one on fuse well um you know let's just remove this edge here in the middle dissolve i just let's select these right with control and now this is fused but i can unfuse it and it's going to go back to a chamfer if i want to remove this completely i want to go to unbabel and here if i want to remove that i'm going to go to unchamfered okay next one is on and this one is really cool for two reasons one of them is name because it's cool and here i'm gonna make a small like a really tiny tight bevel right cool so if i wanted to you know insert this face like that it's gonna work right but if i'm gonna go too deep you'll see on the bottom you're gonna get a problem right the reason being is because this bevel is really tight and it overshoots on itself eventually right so in order to fix this we can select this edge right then ctrl select the outcoming edge and it's going to select all these edges here that run through the bevel and then you press y on and you simply move your mouse and that's it you're done okay and you can then scroll your uh wheel to include more areas into your you know into equation okay uh so you can you know either adjust this bit or both right so let's say i wanted to adjust both i'm going to click symmetrize it remove the middle i'm done so very quick you know this is really quick okay so that's that and what else we have here turn corner and quad corner right so now let's actually symmetrize it into a cube and let's remove this one and we're going to select everything control b okay scroll down to a chamfer now if i wanted to fuse the top i wanted to run a bevel here on the top i can't do that because mesh machine needs quads to run fuse you see you will simply have an error now the problem here is this triangle which we need to turn into a quad you could do it manually by knifing you know the edges etc but what a with this right it's 2022 after all so we're gonna crop this triangle and i'm gonna press y and we're gonna click on quad corner and this will change your corner from triangle to quad then you can rotate your mouse and change the direction of the flow um so let's say we wanted to have the flow being directed on the top so you know this way so when i alt click here is going to be you know going around here around this area and if i wanted to fuse it now i can so let's now symmetrize it here and here so we got quads everywhere i'm going to out click this i'm going to press y and i'm going to fuse it right and now it's going to work see what i mean so that's what squat corner for turn corner is basically you know when you want to turn this thing around okay so you know you want to change the flow basically next one is loops all right this one is easy let's say i wanted to run the fuse here okay and you know i'm going to run a fuse and everything is peachy by the way with fuse you can press f to add or remove these faces these caps here these ones on a on the end okay so you got this and everything is fine you see that the line is straight okay here this loop but if this was you know slightly misaligned like that and you're gonna run the fuse through it okay you'll see that the line is going to be a bit squiggly right so what you can do you can mark this one okay so here you can go to uh loops and mark loop which will then fix the problem because when you're on fuse you see that this edge now here uh you know this one is straight right awesome let's keep going now boolean cleanup and chamfer and offset starship and viewstar should conform and normals these are actually kind of together so i'm going to show you this on an example okay it's going to be a bit more complicated it's about with me i'm going to grab a quad sphere which is from machine tools it's just a cube changed into a into a sphere by modifiers now before we do anything we want to stash normal information stash all the normal information of these faces now you can do it with the whole item object or you can do selectively with you know few faces right i want to select the whole thing so i'm just going to select an object press y and stash it and you'll see the object with stash you can actually go here and view stashes okay now i'm going to cut it with box cutters so i'm going to cut it like this right and extend it up press j shift click to shift it to life and now what i need to do is start the boolean with the object i'm cutting so select the boolean shift select object press y and stash it okay then shift two to remove the cutter click on the ball and then we're gonna go with multiply so now this is one mesh okay now to clean this up is gonna be an absolute batch right but we got stuff like bullion cleanup with machine tools we got select as well so we're gonna talk about all these options here um select's gonna be included because it's quite important as well so now first let's talk about selection because it's important normally in blender if i wanted to select you know this loop around this um cylinder it's impossible because of angles and triangles everywhere however with default settings for selection we're going to use the l select option so you can either click on an edge and then go here and click on l select which will select the loop around or you could simply click here right and then alt click is going to do the same thing as a shortcut okay with this selected what we're going to do is we're going to press y and we're going to do boolean cleanup now you're going to see dots red dots are bad green dots are good if you're going to scroll your mouse you'll see that site a and b is going to pop these are different modes of this tool okay different ways of cleaning and basically what it means is that either it's going to pull the the edges on the cutter or we're gonna pull the edges on the object you're cutting in this case it's better when we're gonna pull the edges on the sphere because if you're going to do it with the cutter we're gonna change the shape of it and the shading we don't want to do that so we want to do this so you want to move your mouse until all the red dots disappear right right and then you click and you cleaned okay all i just connected peachy right there was this selected what we're gonna do we have we can do two things okay we can either go with a chamfer or an offset chamfer is going to create a chamfer and by scrolling your mouse you can select which edge you want to adjust right and when you hold ctrl and scroll you can change the method of you know creating this chair frame how it connects to the mesh then when you release control you can hold alt and you know screw your mouse and you can adjust the area of reach basically how far you want to reach with the for example rebuild or replace right you see different methods here so that's one method okay another my dot is to create offset which is a flat strip of quads running on the cut mesh or on the cutter you can flip it with your mouse okay same here hold ctrl and scroll and then you can hold alt and you can you know rebuild it further away from the mesh click when you're done okay cool now we got a problem because you can see that um this edge here it's a bit wobbly right it's a bit wobbly we can fix that by selecting the edge pressing y and going to conform conform and use the normal data information from the mesh or the cutter we want the mesh and conform this edge to the shape of the sphere you see now it's nice and flat don't worry about this edge we're gonna you know this one we're gonna be fixing it in a minute okay so now what we're gonna do is we're going to click this edge right and then out click then we're going to bevel this like this we're going to make a really thick bevel okay like that then we're going to select this ring okay and we're going to press ctrl plus twice to select this area and we need to remove these two edges and these two loops because they are elevated okay they're not part of the sphere they actually elevate it up and now we're going to replace the normal information of this sphere with the original one which will fix the sheeting right fix all the problems so watch y then you go to normals and transfer and you can choose now between the cutter or the sphere we want the sphere right so click and now the shading should be perfect so if you go to mud cup and shading you can see that the shading is beautiful it's just you know it's just flawless right so this is the power of mesh machine that i don't know if another addon can do and it's really superb in this kind of situations okay it's unbeatable basically in my opinion so this is why you want it in your life okay cool so now let's just turn it off and let's keep going then you have symmetrized recovered select there's one more selector it's called visa like we're gonna talk about it now so let's just delete that and let's grab a different quad sphere okay now the other v select is linked more or less to plugs and plugs are accessible in object mode so with object selected press y and go to plug libraries you can create your own plugs but we're not going to be doing that we're going to be using uh plugs from you know from from default mesh machine but before we do that let's just simply go here and stash this sphere and then we're going to go to plugs and you know add one of these let's say this one and we're going to scale it right just like what you do with decals then we're going to shift select this object we're going to press y and stash it so we're going to touch the information of the plug select the rim of it select the sphere with the shift and then we're going to plug it and this is going to plug it into its surface but you can see clearly that we got you know shading problems all over the place right so now watch we're going to uh first select this edge here i'm going to bevel it okay like that then what i'm going to do right is i need to select the affected area so the area that was affected by the plug doing it manually is a bit of a bastard but fortunately the v select comes in this like for stands for word select which stands for vertex group select there so the plug assigns all these vertices here that were altered to a vertex group so if i click on one of these elements here and i'm going to go to v select it will select the vertex group that was assigned to this area by the plug and then i'm going to go to normals and transfer and you know i'm going to choose this sphere here right and my shading is back to flawless right so i think this should cover it and let me see if i missed something oh yes the wedge right let's remove that and let's go back to a normal matte cap let's grab a cube and here what we can do is you know select an edge now watch the wedge how it works you need to have an edge connected to two other edges right so like here for example and i'm going to select match and then you press y and go to wedge and then when you hover your mouse you can actually determine which face you want this white to run on let's say you want it here so click and hold your mouse button you go either in or out okay it goes both ways and then you release and you got a wedge okay and then you can keep going you know with it so wedge and you know here hold and boom right then you can symmetrize it you can start having fun now i'll show you one more tool is the bonus which is from machine tools and i think it's called let me see that i always forget the you know which tool does what let me see that i think it's smart that it's ea smart that so watch this if i want to move this uh this one a little bit to the right all i need to do is select that shift alt one and i can move it like this you know mirror here or there and i got cool shape in two seconds all right i'll click on sharpen with weighted normals and you know this is how you use hard dubs and mesh machine in conjunction with one another okay you know it's just a lot of fun like i said hard ups and boxes are my core add-ons so if you would like to learn more about them we have a fantastic course called ultimate guide to hard ups and box cutter a link in the description grab it it's fantastic we don't have a dedicated course for machine tools or mesh machine but we're using machine tools in at least i'm using in every single video of mine mesh machine is a bit more rare because it has its specific uses and applications but you know it's always in my loadout and i bloody love this item so you know give it a bash thanks so much for watching see you next one

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 40,764

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, hard surface, scifi, 3d modeling, mesh machine, mesh machine tutorial, how to use mesh machine, blender addon

Id: dDUwFzvA8eI

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022