Models aren't that complicated with this approach! (Blender Tutorial)

so i just recently finished this piece and it gave me a really good idea for today's video something that i think is going to be very very valuable so first thing i want you to do before you even watch this video is look at this image and try to recreate it when you try to create it you're probably going to be approaching it more complicated than necessary and if you do manage to create it you're probably going to have one through way more steps than i went through and that's what this whole video is about i want to show you that pieces that look decently complicated are actually incredibly simple when you look at it with a different vision what this tends to do is it tends to create a lot of discouragement among 3d artists so people go to art station and they see these overly complex objects and they're like this is amazing there's no way i could ever create this and it couldn't be farthest from the truth it is simply the way you're interpreting the actual model you're looking at so once again look at this piece how do you think i approached it the way you should actually be looking at this piece is not that the piece looks complicated but rather that it's a very simple structure built from a primitive instead of looking at the entire completed model what i want you to do is look at it in terms of cylinders cubes or spheres basically the main three so when you first look at this piece you're going to notice we have this cylindrical shape here in the center right so that's the first way we could break down this model how was it approach well we could start with a cylinder we drop a cylinder into the scene so that's what we're going to do we're going to go in here and once again we're not thinking about the entire object we're just adding in the bare basic form that we think of by looking at it so out of the cylinder it's all we're going to do just drop in the cylinder we're going to see okay well we're one step closer to creating this piece the next thing i noticed is that the cylinder it has a hole in it right let's add that in let's go in here just quickly add a hole into it we'll just use another cylinder to actually probably scale the cylinder down a bit and do something like this and basically this is the uh this is the general structure and then it also looks like if we go back that this hole also has a small little chamfer around it so let's add that in so what i'll do is maybe scale this up just a bit more and what we can do is add a chamfer here make sure our scale is applied and there we go so now we have the basic shape of what we see here in this image but obviously that's nowhere close to what this entire image looks like how the heck did i do the rest of this once again you want to go step by step looking at it like i keep saying in terms of primitive objects so now that we've basically established that there's a cylindrical structure how do we get the rest of the shape well if you look at it just in terms once again as a silhouette you can kind of imagine that this cylinder right here at some point it had some faces on the side right kind of like we have right here and if you kind of imagine these faces being extruded over and to the left we get this wing formation it's going to be a very similar structure so you can kind of imagine you have the cylinder here and when it was being built part of the cylinder was extruded to the left here let's do that and go in and we'll just select and these faces are fine and extrude it on the x-axis like that and it also looks like that the other direction has that wing effect so we're going to do so we're just going to add a mirror modifier to the other side now you're beginning to see that we kind of have that general structure going on so once again we're going to go back to just the basic shape so what has been added after this has been added well i can certainly see there is a hole cut into those wings so how about we add that in so we're going to do is we're going to add in a cut right down to the center there so there's a few different ways we could get like a clean cut in here so the first thing i'm going to do is run a limited dissolve just to get rid of those extra vertices but the best way to probably do this would be to just duplicate this top set of faces and separate it with the p key and basically what i could do is inset these faces invert the selection and delete those outer faces and just to get rid of this junk on the right i'll just use like a cutter let's get rid of that and basically this is a bit of a mess but we can use the unfuck tooled mesh machine to fix that up cool so now we can do is we could use this piece as a cutter into these wings as i'm going to call them so we're going to extrude this down recalculate the normals and then run a difference boolean in here and look at that we're already a lot closer to that shape now the next thing i notice is that this cut is kind of following that cylindrical pattern that circular pattern right here it's nice and round right now it's pretty flat so to get that effect all we really need to do is add in another cylinder and then use the cylinder to cut the cutter so we'll run a difference boolean on that cutter and now we're going to have that cylindrical effect and there we go it's basically matching what we have here so far so slowly you should begin to kind of see that you know what this piece isn't as complicated as it looks maybe i was overthinking it and trust me we all overthink it when we look at these more complex models but as you begin to break it down you gotta you almost begin to have some hope you're like i'm not as bad at this as i thought i just have to look at it from a different perspective so you know now we could do here is kind of look at some of the more minor details right well i noticed we have a nice rounded formation right here nice bevel we have a nice bevel here in here and we also have a nice chamfer around that cut and it also looks like the cut kind of goes down at an angle a little bit but let's just approach it one step at a time i think the first thing we could do is bevel this little corner so what i'm going to do is bevel this let me dissolve out that edge and we'll bevel that right very good and since we have a mirror modifier it's going to carry over and then what we could do is we could go to our cutter here apply that boolean and then add the cuts and or the bevel in here so bevel there and then bevel right here as well so far so good so now we've established that we have that nice rounded effect here here and here just like the image has now the next thing i notice is that we have a small little chamfer kind of going around that cut but i also notice it kind of cuts down at a slope well that's not a problem to kind of get that you know it's a little bit lower right here than it is here to get that effect is really simple we can literally just go in and just cut that detail right just do something like this and there it is so what we can do is um you know apply that give ourself a nice set of bevels right here just bevel that and look at that we have the same exact effect that we have on this piece and now what we could do is we could um you know chamfer these edges right here much like we have in that image so we have that nice little chamfered effect right very simple and it also looks like we have a mirrored effect of this so the wings are on this side as well it's mirrored so all we need to do is drop in a mirror modifier now this one's a little bit yeah it looks about the same maybe a little bit different than this one but the same idea right so now we have basically that entire structure established instead of looking at it as this complex looking piece we look at it in terms of primitive objects step by step and kind of reverse engineer how this thing was created and then you're like you know that wasn't too bad so it looks like this hole right here um there's like a it's a little bit hollow on the inside you can kind of see on the side we have like this rectangular cut with chamfers on it really easy to add and we just go into the side right we just go in and literally just mimic that shape can bevel it put a nice little chamfer right there right and then all we really have to do is go in here and maybe just put some nice bevels on top of that chamfer just like that and my friends were basically there we basically created the same thing i think i'll make this hole here just a little bit we'll just scale this s shift z make that a little bit wider there we go and then it looks like the only thing we're really missing are these little holes or these bolts are so that's not difficult to do we just go in here with a cut circular cut just cut that in easy right nothing complicated and then the very last thing i notice about this shape is that we kind of have this horizontal cut kind of going right through the middle you um if we zoom in kind of see like right here so to add that once again very very simple shapes um what we can do is actually before we do that it looks like it's also mirrored on the z-axis down so let me just quickly do that mirror like that on the z-axis and then finally we just make that little you know horizontal cut go in here and then we just do something kind of like this and there it is and as for the bolts guys all i really used for those bolts were some kid ops inserts they you can get them for free um look up hard ops classic inserts on gumroad i think they were by chip walters if i'm not mistaken basically i just went in here and i grabbed some inserts just you know add them in remove the materials and then kind of scale that in and put it into place that's all i did so the point i'm trying to make here is that when you're on art station or instagram or whatever platform and you're looking at pieces and they look complex most of the time they were built from very very simple structures all you need to do is break it down piece by piece primitive by primitive and figure out you know this this started from something how can i start from that something and build this complicated piece right and this is the exact process you can take if you're trying to kind of figure out how people did certain things and also hopefully it doesn't get you as demotivated because i think one of the biggest things with 3d artists is that they go and look at all these you know high level artists and their artwork and they're like man i wish i could be good be as good as them and you can you're just over thinking how the shape is actually working it's usually simple and the artist is just good at presenting it like kind of like this right so we need to do is just take a step back look at it step by step and figure out how is that final result accomplished don't look at the final result look at the base shape and build on top of that once you start doing that in your workflow you're going to find that hard surface modeling is a lot more fun you're not going to get as demotivated and you're going to be able to create some shapes and kind of reverse engineer what people have created already which is really good practice so hope you learned a little bit hope this kind of gave you some ideas and by the way don't copy people's stuff if you're copying use it to learn the tools but afterwards start making your own stuff i just wanted to show you that complicated things are not that complicated so thanks a lot for watching hope this gave you some value and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 146,115

Keywords: models aren't that complicated with this approach!, blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling tutorial blender, mesh machine, hard ops, boxcutter, hard ops tutorial blender, boxcutter tutorial blender, blender 3d, blender beginner tutorial, blender hard surface, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, 3d modeling, blender donut, blender guru, blender bros, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui

Id: kJyEba6gI2c

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022