Modeling without subdivision, with modifiers, for non-destructive editing workflow.

in this next tutorial we're going to follow up the use of modifiers for modeling components of a model in this particular case it's this stapler turns out modifiers are really useful for helping with this we're not going to use subdivision surfaces for this object I have done a video where I talked about modeling without subdivision surfaces and it seemed to Peak a lot of people's interest so we're going to combine a modifying stack for modeling along with a direct modeling approach that does require Subdivision Services since this is a hard body type of model so I just want to say before we get going too much further I am recording this tutorial using blender's light theme because profiles show up better so please don't make comments about the fact that I'm using the light theme inevitably I get comments of people saying why are you using an old version of blender this is blender 4.1 since normals are important for this tutorial let's cover some basics of normals before we start for the those who may be new to 3D a normal is a vector that's perpendicular to a surface at a given point in 3D Graphics normals are crucial for both modeling and shading for instance we can move a polygon along its normal Direction there are two types of normals vertex normals these are associated with individual vertices of a polygon and surface normals these are computed by averaging the vertex normals of a polygon normal play a key role in Computing how light interacts with a surface determining its shading let's break this down triangles the simplest polygons are always planer or flat quads which are composed of two triangles are more commonly used in 3D modeling but may not always be planer to create the illusion of smooth curved surfaces 3D software uses a technique called normal averaging vertex normals of connected polygon are averaged shading is then Blended across the surface based on these averaged normals this creates the appearance of curvature even on flat geometry while this smoothing technique is valuable for creating realistic looking surfaces it's not always desirable sometimes you need areas of your model to appear flat even when connected to curved sections this is particularly important when you have obvious curving regions of a mesh connected to Regions that need to be both physically and Visually flat controlling how normals affect shading in these situations is crucial for achieving the desired look in your 3D models that's exactly what this tutorial will help you master so the starting point are some profiles that I have created this could have been a bit map that you had planned out that you would put in as a template I just happened to have some profiles that I've blocked out for this part part of the stapler so let's do this let's go ahead and build it I've started my template so they're basically at the center of the universe they're offset a little bit let's do shift s cursor 2 selected and there we can see that is basically zero along the Y AIS which is really the most important axis that we're going to reference right now now I'm also going to come over here and switch my unit system over to metric because there are a lot of people who are on metric and I'm always using inches I'm going to go ahead and set ctim there as my units we're only going to really focus on this half on the left side for right now so shift a let's come over and add a cube that's 1 cm and I'm going to come up my first reference point is this right here which is the height basically of the object so s we're going to scale that up and then let's look at this in the top view so this is the component of the stapler that houses the Staples and it's got this metal thickness so s key now I've got a correct back in the front view s z so let's do this let's come over here and options Z to go into x-ray SX about like that so I'm going to move through this pretty quickly because we really want to get to the modifier part okay command a let's go ahead and apply rotation and scale so that we don't have to deal with that Tab Key takes this into edit mode and we want to remove the top back and this bottom polygon so we're going to delete those faces let's come into the top here and take a look at this so we're going to create thickness right here and we could do this with a modifier but remember the modifiers work by handing data off one modifier to the next but it doesn't hand the data off to the user so there are a couple of things that we need to do with traditional modeling before we hand off the data to a modifier stack so this is one of them let's come over here and add a loop right there let's go ahead and add three and in face mode I'll take both of these let's look at this from the side so this is the first time that we're going to look at one of the template pieces so there's a notch at the top up here and I'm going to press x y and we'll scale right to about that point and then I'm going to press X to delete that in fact we're going to use one of the first modifiers is a mirror modifier that we'll use in just a minute but let's come over here and press the K key to activate the knife tool click here to here and then up like that and then we're in face mode we'll go ahead and delete that face so the first thing that we want to do is focus on a rounding that happens around the perimeter right here we do need to encode that in the geometry itself so this will be a direct polygon modeling operation and because we are doing direct polygon modeling we really need to consider the resolution of our of our geometry so we're we're going to come over to the bevel function and let's go ahead and bevel this we don't need a very big one for the inside okay but again we really need to consider the resolution so I'm going to take this up to 12 I think that'll work pretty well so let's come into the top press the a key switch over to the extrude along normals we're going to give this some thick right about like that now the thing that we need to consider and that we really want to be aware of we need to make a decision at this point about what we want to do with large planer regions relative to these curving regions there are two directions that we could go at this point one where we manually put in boundary Loops to control the shading because we've got these long flat areas that we want to appear flat and there's going to be surface normal blending between these and if you don't control for this one way or another you'll get subtle curvature that appears across the surface even though it's technically flat because of the vertex normal blending that controls the shading so in this particular case we are actually going to use some modifier functions that blender has to control vertices it really just depends in what direction that you want to go so since we're using modifiers we'll go the modifier route Okay so we've got that in place and the next thing that we need to do is add some cutouts let's do this I I I missed one opportunity here let's Zoom back in and leave edit mode we don't have shade smooth turned on blender is the only 3D application I've used that doesn't have any kind of surface normal blending turned on by default it's an oddity to me so let's come over here and turn on shade smooth and we're going to run into a change that was made in 4.1 that a lot of people did not like when you do shade smooth it Blends the surface normals of adjacent polygons regardless of the angle we now have to control that with a modifier so let's come in and add two modifiers to this let's go ahead and mirror this so we'll do the first one which is a mirror modifier then we need to come in and add under normals a smooth by angle so that used to be a menu option but it's now been moved to the modifier okay so the next thing that we need to finally get to is doing some cutouts now we could use a Boolean operation but I like the knife project since I've got profiles that are already here and I don't need to create 3D object from it so the way that this works is I've got these all these templates that I've drawn as bezier curves they could either be beer curves or they could be polygon meshes it's just the perimeter that we're really interested in so I want to be inside of edit mode for the polygon mesh and then you you just come over and select the template object which is template one right here and you want to make sure that the view is looking through the axis along which you want to project then come up to mesh and then just do a knife project and make sure in this case cut through is enabled and there it goes now let's come over and we just want to remove these parts so again I could have done a Boolean operation but I'm just going to do it this way because it's easy and we need to fill this because there's now a hole right here so in Edge mode we will select that and then you just do a new face from edges it creates an endon that's kind of filled funny but that's okay press the one key to switch over to vertex mode press the J key there and then we'll do the same thing here J key and that gives us nice quads to work with there's another cutout the template two right here this is another cutout where you can actually look in and you can see the Staples so as you're using Staples up you can tell if you're getting close to those being empty we need to create a template to project let's leave edit mode for the primary mesh that we're working on and now with just this template 2 selected tab key so I need to select just a single vertex here command L to select that I need to extract this to actually create the projection profile so shift and D escape and then P key will allow us to separate that to become its own object which we can see right there so let's leave edit mode for that and we'll select just this one let's actually convert this into a polygon mesh but I want to increase the resolution a little bit more again because we're considering the resolution of our geometry then we just need to bring up the context menu and convert this explicitly to a polygon mesh now when we tab to go into edit mode we can see that right here but it isn't filled so if I press the a key to select all the geometry it's unfilled and I want it filled at this point so we press the F key and then let's zoom in a little bit closer take the top point and the bottom Point press the J key to connect those to divide that Eng gon in half let's go into face mode and and move this over but we need to make sure that it is split G ke X and we'll move that right about there two key and then we'll select these Center edges and then we will Bridge those two together we need to remember to remove these interior edges because those would also get projected and we don't want that to happen we just want the perimeter so we'll come down and do a dissolve edges remembering to turn off the dissolved vertices because that would have changed the profile a little bit so let's come over now and turn off couple of these profiles that we've already used that we don't need anymore okay so let's leave edit mode for that and let's come back into the main object press the Tab Key and let's come back into the front view because that is the axis through which we're going to project select here the template and we come back up to mesh and we come down to knife project but we're going to see a problem the problem is that anytime you try and cut a hole in a polygon whether it's an Enon or a quad polygons don't like to have holes cut into them and it needs to have a connection to the Outer Perimeter it's going to automatically create that for us if it doesn't find a way to do that and this is going to produce problems so let's undo and since we're still in edit mode for our primary object let's press the K key and put a cut in there for it so I'm going to click here Z key for constraint and then C key to project the knife all the way through click and return so that produced es the cut for us so we still have the projection profile active we're still in edit mode so now we can come back to mesh and we can do a knife project making sure that we have cut through enabled there we go so now we just bring up the context menu and we do a bridge Edge loops and it cuts that through for us so again you could have gone the route of doing a Boolean but six of one half dozen of another this gets us to where we need to be we've got one more feature to project in there's a little design feature on the side of it that we'll go ahead and replicate because it does fit into this modifier thing so I'm going to leave edit mode Let's select this and we're going to follow the same process we need to create an explicit profile so Tab Key select a single vertex command or control L shift and D escape and then the P key separates that to become its own object so that's way down here in fact I don't need that template anymore and let's leave edit mode and select just this again let's increase the resolution from 12 to 20 give ourselves just a little bit more resolution to work with bring up the context menu and again we will convert this to a mesh Tab Key so it's going to be similar to what we've done before a key F to fill and then we just need to divide that in half J key three and we will split that so it's dissociated and I'm just going to pull this off to the side I'm not going to go the full length because we're only we're working on a shortened version right now 2 key and then we will Bridge those Edge loops and then dissolve those two edges okay that's correct okay so let's go ahead and project this so we need to leave edit mode for that come back to our primary object primary 3D object come into edit mode and then select the projection template let's do a k key z c and click so now we can immediately just come back in and do the knife project and in this this case we don't want to cut through this isn't a hole this is sort of an embossed feature that's on there okay so we only want it on the outside at this point so let's come over here and turn off that template and immediately what we're going to do is press the I key to do an inset right down to about there now this is going to be an indented feature a slight indented feature my actual stapler had this feature on there we're going to come over and use a loop cut click and add that let's go ahead and press option Z so that we can only sort of focus on this area let's select just this and I'm going to pull it in just a little ways like that so this is going to be a beveling feature that's going to be there with a modifier but I just needed to prepare just that projection in fact let's come here now and we don't need these anymore so we'll go ahead and hide those so those are no longer needed in fact I don't think I need this one either so get all that visual clutter out of the way so we have prepared the primary object and the next stage is to begin adding some more modifiers to control detail now let's just stop and consider for a moment what we're doing let's let's come back into edit mode here let's press the two key to go into Edge mode and we will do a test here if you were going down the route where you wanted to put in bounding polygons that prevent shading from going from curved regions into flat regions then you would come in with the bevel function you would go into a 2 one configuration and we would add polygons like that and then we would come in we would reselect the these and then we would change to something like let's do a 9 by .5 which is the default rounding profile and we would add the bevels and we have these polygons which are planer so these polygons here function as a control for the shading it's a subtle effect in this particular case but when you're trying to be very precise with hard body modeling you want to consider these this would be the manual way of approaching it but in fact we're going to back up and we're going to use a modifier to control this shading for us so that you don't really have to think about it what the modifier stack does is it gives us a non-destructive editing ability in case we want to come back and change some of these radiuses let's come in now and add the next modifier in the stack which is going to be under generate and it's going to be bevel by default what's going to happen is it's going to just bevel every angle and we don't want that to be the case we want to control this and we're going to do it via a weight mechanism and by default all of the edges have a weight value of zero when we use the weight mechanism it has an absolute largest value that you need to determine so for instance if you knew that you're not going to have any bevels that go above a particular size then you need to set that size as the dominant maximum value and in this particular case I think what I want to do is set the value to something like half a centimeter well let's just leave this and sort of let's do shift s cursor 2 selected let's just visualize this so if I had a cube in let's put in a half CM Cube and imagine a full fillet going from that corner to that corner that would be the maximum fillet everything else is going to be a fraction of that value that you define so that's why I Define that I didn't think there would be anything that would produce a larger value than that so what we want to do now is come in press the N key and where it says mean bevel weight under Edge data we're going to put in a value of point one look at that so let's come in and increase the number of division so we're going to come over now to this area we've got an edge here here and well we'll we'll do this one let's do this one by itself so let's kind of find a bevel value so if we put in uh 0.1 in fact let's do this let's do 08 and this one and this one and the one down at the bottom will'll do 06 something about like that I think that works pretty well well so again remember we aren't putting boundaries on here so we're going to be taking care of this shading issue that's going to come up in just a bit with another modifier but let's continue down let's do a loop select around that perimeter and this perimeter the real model the actual stapler that I had when I was looking at this has a slight rounding around there that's apparent enough to go ahead and produce it so in this we're going to come back again to mean bevel weight and we'll do 03 and look at that produces that right around there so the waiting mechanism is really nice it works really well so let's come over now take a look at this so here again we just need to come in and figure out a value for this so let's do 05 and then you can just play with at 08 and you can get it right to about like that and then I'm going to do a slight one for the interior so this would be 02 and I like that I think that's going to work so we produce this blending from this flat area and then back out and I just think that works really well such a cool feature so the next thing that we need to consider is that on the geometry we're also going to be having a little bit of bevel around the prim but we're going to run into a problem now so if I double click in fact let's let's select both of these inner and outer boundaries I will go into face mode and double click on an edge and it produces that Loop for us we need to operate on the boundary Loop so come up to select Loop select boundary Loop and there we go now watch what happens if I try and come in here and add a bevel weight to this it starts doing something kind of funky here and this is a condition that's going to happen that you can run into it starts running into too kind of a complex of a situation so I'm going to undo and we need to actually set this up with another modifier to handle these edges so let's create let's in fact let's come over here into vertex mode we need to create a Vertex group for these but we need to be aware of what's Happening how blender handles this press the n key to remove that we have a series of vertices selected and they do something actually pretty smart you can see that there's a blend going between this selected vertex and one down here that isn't selected but we have fills being visible between some of the vertices so for instance here we've got a PO a Vertex vertex vertex vertex which forms a fiill polygon and that is letting us know that in modifier that acts on these is going to see a connection between these and it may throw a wrench in the works for a modifier like the bevel modifier and we need to make this a little bit more predictable so let's come over first and we're going to create a group and we'll call this perimeter and then we need to assign these but we need to add in some new geometry in this case a loop cut we will do a loop cut that goes all the way around click and you're going to note that if I come over here and do a select it automatically interpolated these new vertices as being part of the selection because they were in between two vertices that were in the vertex group so we need to take these and remove those okay so now we can come in and reselect and you want to look for these regions that still have fills in them so we're still going to get some problems that show up so what we need to do is add in a little bit more geometry I'm going to press the K key start right around over here click X key and then C to project all the way through and return now I'm going to select just this new Loop and we want to deselect it but there are two points here and here that I don't want to have removed from the selection so so we come over here and we do a remove and then we reselect to look and to make sure that we only have vertices along the perimeter where we want the bevel to be established and it looks like that's going to work in fact I'm going to come to the back here too and I'm going to have us remove these polygons it's going to be inside the model X key and we're not going to see those Okay so let's come over here again do a select so now we're ready to establish the bevel around the perimeter by adding another bevel modifier and in this case we're going to go not from angle but to vertex group it's going to be enormous at 10 cm so let's let's take this to a small value 01 we need to establish the perimeter as the vertex group to be used and there we go so now we can see that going around let's go ahead and add a few more segments probably four is quite sufficient it's a small detail but if we hadn't gone to that work you would have gotten some really weird results and I wanted to go through this so that you could be really cognizant of how it is that you have to be aware of what's happening with these vertices to understand what's happening when you're using the limit method being in vertex group so let's take a look at this now in shaded view Tab Key and option Z to leave edit mode and when we zoom in we can see that we have some hard boundaries going on right here so next we're going to start looking at some shading so we need to figure something out here to deal with this now this would be a very small detail right probably wouldn't see it but for the sake of this exercise we're going to deal with it we've got a clear hard boundary there well if we come to the second bevel modifier which is using the vertex group we can come down to shading we can tell it to use the Harden normal function and look at that it creates nice shading so what's that doing it's looking at the fact that there is a large polygon here and we've got all these small angled polygons and by default it would normally produce this hard boundaries so if we come back over here and we look at it it would just break the shading because we have the smooth modifier at a 30 Dee angle that's breaking things so what do we do we we could come in here and turn on this Harden normals which will automatically override that because it's Downstream and it will produce a blending it takes the the vertex of this large Eng gon and imposes it on the vertex that it's adjoining to for these smaller polygons and it maintains the flatness and then starts to create visible curvature only in the area that you want it to be it's a visual trick of sorts but we have a limitation with that if we come back over here and we look at this you can still clearly see that there's a hard boundary here and a hard boundary here if we come back over to the original bevel and we turn on it hard normals nothing happens again because the geometry has now been handed off to the second bevel modifier so we don't see the effect of it trying to affect normals so we've got sort of this compounding issue with surface shading happening but it turns out there's a neat way that we can solve this with yet another modifier so let's come in here really quick and let's just name I want to name both of my bevel modifiers so this one is bevel do weight method method and the second one is bevel do group method just I like to have those visual names there so uh in this case we're not even going to worry about trying to do any kind of Harden Harden norming and shading control with these we're going to introduce another modifier under edit called weighted normal and I've done an entire video on this but watch what happens when we add this is that it automatically cleans up those hard visible boundaries that we don't want to be there because the previous bevel modifier now hands off the geometry to weighted normals and what weighted normals does is something that's actually really cool it looks at the relationships between adjoining polygons and it sees that there are a bunch of relatively small polygons adjoining much larger polygons whether it's quad or big endons and it says wow the area of these flat polygons should be flat since the polygons are flat and it imposes the normals from these big polygons onto the adjoining smaller polygons and prevents vertex blending from happening so the shading comes from this small polygon to this perimeter and this perimeter has the flat shading and so you get proper shading between these areas between these large flat areas and the curving areas and it's just doing some smart calculations to make sure you have curvature where you want curvature and flat where you want to be flat and that's what the weighted normal modifier does okay so we were able to take care of everything through the use of these modifiers now the interesting thing to note is that we could backtrack to this smooth angle modifier at this point it's not doing anything anymore so we come over and let me rotate this if come over and just turn this off it's no longer having any effect because the bevel modifiers have introduced new geometry that's having a large effect on the shading and they then are handing off their geometry to the weighted normal function which is controlling the vertex normal smoothing on a polygon by polygon basis and so we no longer need that smooth by angle modifier at all and there we go all we need to do now is come in go into edit mode option Z and we can I'm in select box and I can pull this out like this to match up to the template that I had and we are done the great thing that's just so awesome about this is let's come back to the first Bev bevel modifier we can come in and because it's non-destructive I can come back let's say for uh let's do this let's come over and select these edges here and we determined that we wanted to change n key the weight of just those we still have the ability to do that because it's being handled by a modifier so I hope you found this to be a really useful tutorial

Channel: Christopher 3D

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Id: 6pKoUrW-lbQ

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2024