MORE Nondestructive Modeling in Blender

hi I have two videos about non-destructive modeling here on YouTube and they are by far the most viewed videos on my channel many people have asked for more content like that and so in this video I want to show you a few more tricks like how to turn just the view edges into a crazy metal bracket like this or create this fan cover out of just these few vertices this video is not only how to make a fan cover tutorial but instead it is intended to hopefully give you a few aha moments and to teach you how you can get certain results with an absolute minimum of modeling mesh data let's start and see what we can come up with shall we oh okay I'm gonna start with just a plain and in edit mode I will delete these two vertices so I'm left with two vertices in an edge and chi-wai one so that it's in the center here okay two vertices in an edge is basically the minimum that you need to do anything really so maybe I want to use an extrude modifier to create a plane again and you might be thinking but there is no extrude modifier and you're right but we can use the screw modifier as an extrude modifier so we change the axis to Y and then we change the angle to zero degrees and now the screw value here is basically the extrude value so we have an edge and we're extruding it let's extrude it two meters and we're basically back to our default plane but we're creating it out of a single edge now right away when I go in here and enable wireframe we can see that we get all these edges in between and that is because we have the steps here we can turn those down to 3 and if we go in and edit them and enter one it goes to to the the lowest value we can do here is to and I couldn't find any other trick to set this to one so we always get this edge down the middle here but we will just have to live with that I wish I could set this to one I don't know why I can't okay we can also enable merge vertices but in this case it doesn't really do anything we have iterations which we can use to create more iterations going on the y-axis but really that's all we need we create it a plane out of an edge now in edit mode I can take this vertex and in front view for example extrude it and create something like this I take this one and extrude it and you can see just with one edge going along here a few vertices and edges in between we already have something that looks like this now this is set to smooth shading and if I switch that off I get this but of course I want smooth shading because I'm going to add some bevels but in order to get this looking correctly I have to go over into the object data properties here and in normals enable auto smooth set to 30 degrees the default is fine and now I have this cool now let's give it some thickness because nothing is infinitely thin so let's add another modifier solidify and give it some thickness maybe make it look like a metal bracket and if we go to front view we can see this is a little bit weird looking because this seems to be thicker than here we can do fix that by selecting even thickness now it looks nice cool now for example I want a bevel in here I want this to be round okay how can you do that well bevel there's a modifier for that let's use it when do I want to apply the bevel modifier the modifier stack here has an order and it's executed top down so first we take the screw modifier in this case is our extrude then we solidify and now we bevel that's sort of what I want I want the bevel to be on the top here okay and I'm gonna set the bevel to only vertices and now we have a round basically a beveled everywhere on all of the vertices that are not at the end so this one doesn't have a bevel and this one doesn't but these ones do but I just want a large bevel here on this edge basically although we don't have an edge because the edge is created by the screw modifier how do I do that I can set my bevel modifier again set it to only vertices because we only have vertices in our mesh and then we set it to weight and now we can hit n here oh and also let me switch on the screencast keys down here and in the item tab here a vertex can have a bevel weight so now all of the vertices have bevel weight zero but I can select this one here and turn it up to one okay so this vertex now has a battle weight of 1 and the bevel modifier set to only vertices uses the weight and assigns this bevel now this only has one segment maybe turn this up to 7 so we have seven segments here we have a nice bevel okay and we're only we only see the bevel on this vertex because all the other ones have a bevel weight of zero and we also get this horrible thing here there is a boo-boo in our mesh now because of this bevel modifier and we can see what the problem is by changing the thickness here you can see the solidify modifier always changes the thickness or extrudes basically your face on the normals and so we have a problem with the normals here these ones are going this way and these ones are going that way you can see there's something weird and the problem comes from the screw modifier but there's a checkbox called calculate order and when you say like that we have perfectly good Michigan and the thickness works okay cool so now we have one edge that has a nice round bevel but of course this bevel modifier here the first one it it's applied to all of the vertices it's just that this vertex for example has no bevel weight so what if I just give it a little bit of bevel weight looks nice how about nice which is over to madcap and takes something like this cool now this is an infinitely sharp edge I'm just gonna leave it for now but maybe this one should have a little bit of a bevel too you know so now we have I don't have mesh I'm not editing mesh I can still go in and change the size of the pebble just by using the bevel weight which is a form of parametric modeling and it's non-destructive I can always go back in and change stuff if I had this bevel in a real mesh by going into edit mode and hitting ctrl P and then using the scroll wheel to define the amount of segments then I have this bevel and editing it is kind of a nightmare but here by just creating everything with modifiers nothing is a nightmare I can select more segments I can change the general size of all of the bevels with the bevel modifier and I can change the size of one of the bevels just with the bevel weight of a vertex okay so this is already cool now what if I want it to have nice round corners here at the ends can I do this yes I can I'm gonna select this one and that one those two should have a nice round corner going this way I'm gonna go over here add them to a new vertex group I'll call it round corners and assign those two selected vertices to that and then of course I'm going to add another bevel modifier by the way these buttons up here they are from the add-on that comes with blender that's called modifier tools so you just go to add-ons and enable the modifier tools and then you have these buttons and I like this one here because it just expands or collapses all of the modifiers so these two vertices are in a vertex group now called round corners let's add another bevel modifier we're in the modifier stack does it have to be let's think about it so here we have the pebbles to go this way right from front view we have these pebbles then we add the screw modifier to get this going back on the y-axis and right now the next step should be this bob bevel modifier I will call that round corners as well so here I want it in the stack at this position after the screw which is an extrude enable it use vertex group the round corners vertex group and only vertices and here we go now we have this we can turn up this segment and we have a nice round corner here on all four corners and like I said before the screw modifier doesn't allow steps of one which always gives us this edge down the middle here and the bevel modifier that we have now for the round corners using the vertex group of course also adds a bevel here to this you have to imagine this virtual vertex here because this vertex is in the group then this one and that one are also in the group so we get this horrible thing here in the middle and I guess we're just gonna have to live with that for now so now we have this we have to solidify and it looks like that and that's already kind of cool now let's cut some stuff out of this because that's always fun boolean operations let's add maybe a cylinder place it somewhere I'm going to edit mode scale it down maybe here like that and try and cut away something from here now how do we cut stuff out while we go to our metal bracket or whatever this is and we can use boolean modifier the boolean modifier has an operation difference Union intersect and n weakens select an object here but doing all this manually here is a lot of work there is another add-on that blender comes with you just have to enable it and it's called wool tool so you go to your head on search for pool tool enable it and it gives you this edit tab here and here's the pool tool and the way you can cut something out of or one object out of another object is by simply selecting I want to cut this and then shift select this want to cut this out of there and then I want to use the brush boolean not the auto boolean this actually cuts stuff away and modifies to mesh this is just modifier and since we're doing non-destructive stuff here this is perfect I want to brush boolean difference and here we go we cut the cylinder away the tool creates the boolean modifier sets it to difference because I clicked on difference the cylinder is being cut out of my metal bracket here and the tool also sets the viewport display here to bounce so that it's actually you know the cylinder disappears because otherwise we wouldn't even be able to see that we cut stuff out so it's it automatically sets the cylinder to bounds but it's still there in edit mode we still have a cylinder we can still edit it you can still move the cylinder and this is the cool thing about the non-destructive workflow so we have this cylinder inside of this object inside in edit mode I can still do shift D on the x-axis and maybe cut this out here rotate it let's do 90 degrees like this okay so it looks like that I can still go in here and extrude this up and change the shape of my metal bracket completely what is happening here well this vertex here this guy is inside of my rounded corners group so I just have to take this out I just want this one in the group which it is because I extruded this one up okay so now I have this can hide the wireframe so this is that I can go in here into edit mode maybe select this cylinder shift D scale it down put some holes into the mesh here like that and you put a hole here shift D on the X another one there shift D scale it down shift e you know can play with that or I can even do a shift D bring it over here rotated cut some holes into the bracket on this in this area here also of course I can el shift D rotate maybe cut a hole here and over here make it look interesting so this is what I have now cool now the modifier stack of this guy here the last thing we're doing is cutting in with a boolean modifier I can also see that I need to go select this and shade smooth so I'm shading all of these boolean objects here smooth so that when they cut into my object the inner edges faces here I'll also shade it smooth so this looks very nice now sometimes or most of the times with the boolean modifier when you create or when you cut into stuff the boolean operation creates new edges and faces right so it creates this kind of mess here and sometimes this can create shading artifacts so you know what I also want a nice little edge on all these infinitely sharp edges here so I want another pebble at the end set to angle which gives me this and then there's also one thing that I might also put in here and that's the new weld modifier which is basically a merge by distance which you might be familiar with when addicting mesh you can always go to clean up where is it let's see mesh clean up and then merge by distance which will merge vertices that are very close to each other and now there's a modifier in blender 2.82 and later I believe which is the weld modifier where you set the distance here I will put that up underneath the boolean so after the boolean I want to merge the vertices that are close to each other okay so weld and then I have the boolean at the end here which gives me this nice bevel along all of the edges and then if we get horrible looking triangles like this these are boolean artifacts shading artifacts because the boolean operations create all these edges and doesn't create very nice mesh basically there is one last thing we can do and that is the weighted normal and that usually fixes shading problems after the boolean z' on the the flat surfaces so you still might be seeing some charting shading artifacts like right here I don't know if this shows up in the in the recording but here we have these triangles in the smooth areas but the weighted normal usually fixes things on the flat areas so I think this looks very nice and remember this whole thing I mean except for the cylinders for the for this stuff but this guy is still just a few vertices and edges and you can still move that around extrude maybe down again we have this vertex in here that is now in the round corners group we can remove them from the group to get this now this is a very sharp edge oh I also moved them here which is just select sy 0 bring it all in to the same plane here ok maybe do something like this take this guy give him a little bit of a pebble wait okay so we have only one sharp edge that's that one just for demonstration purposes oh this one is very sharp too which is fine so that's what it looked like we can still go in we can still edit of course now that I moved to this stuff around these two cylinders here are not really doing anything anymore but we can cut oh let's cut in here like that cool at an angle you get the idea this whole object is created with just this okay that's that part done now let's delete all of that and start again and the second thing I want to show you is I recently bought a new PC case and it came with a like a fan cover and I'm not using it but I thought that it looked cool and here's a picture of it so looking at that I thought how can I use non-destructive modeling to create something like this and the first thing that you always start with this basically the negative space so you think about the stuff that you want to use is a boolean operand to cut away from the metal piece so how do you cut away these slots or slits or vents or whatever you call them well first I I would usually maybe start with a UV sphere rotate it sideways going to edit mode take take all of that maybe move it out like that and then use this object to cut away from the metal plate but there has to be a better non-destructive way to do this and of course there is I'm gonna start with a plane and I will delete I will delete these two so I have just this key y1 to bring it up and then key X move this one over here so I only have this one edge with these two vertices okay now how can I make a cylinder that has round caps out of this all in a non-destructive way well to give this some volume I'm gonna use the skin modifier switch this off and switch on smooth shading maybe and it gives me this cube sort of thing now in edit mode the skin modifier uses the size of a vertex yes the vertex has a size although it's always just infinitely tiny little point in 3d space it still has a size information assigned to it and you can edit the size information of a vertex in edit mode with ctrl a so ctrl a and then move the mouse here we go I'm scaling the two vertices to about this size and now to make it round I'm using a subdivision surface modifier okay so now I have this all made out of a single edge well this looks cool now still in edit mode I take them both shift D on the y-axis and maybe GX this vertex inwards to get this shape take those shifty on the y-axis bring it down here I'm just eyeballing the distances here okay and maybe move this in a little the origin of this object is still in the center here and that's where it should be and has to be just make sure it is okay so now we have this how do we get for around well I'm just gonna add in empty sphere scale this size down like this now take this guy with the skin and the subdivision on it add another modifier array not relative but object use the empty and now take the empty and rotate it 90 degrees and I can set the array to 4 and now I have 4 cool now I need this a diagonal a slot here of course I can do that by simply taking these two v D Y over here rotate 45 degrees place them somewhere where it looks nice now I want this to be longer I can Gigi which is it slide but I can't slide it beyond this point unless I hit the see key on the keyboard I just realized it see oh when I hit the C key here in edit mode it doesn't show up down here for the screencast keys interesting okay well it is to see C like Chris okay so now we have this this object just has four edges eight vertices and it's creating these three-dimensional objects with volume with rounded ends and now this is perfect to cut into my metal plate so let's create a metal plate shift a mesh plane edit mode maybe bring it in a little okay now this has to have some thickness so solidify make a metal plate out of it in front view bring it up a little to be in the center like so and now I want to cut this shift select into this in edit rule tool brush difference and here we go now this metal plate of course needs some rounded corners here that looks horrible so in edit mode I'm taking these it just has four vertices it's a very simple plane but this plane obviously needs a bevel modifier the bevel all the way at the top here so the first thing I'm doing before cutting into it or solidifying it is to round the vertices with maybe seven segments to have this nice round stuff here and I also want to shade it smooth which gives us this horrible thing because we need to enable auto smooth which just keeps the normals you know flat when when it's flat and here the around the corner here has a nice smooth shading now okay this is cool now on top of all of that I want to add another modifier a bevel to give me this nice bevel here because we don't have infinitely a sharp edges in the real world now all that's missing is the center hole how do we get that well you saw before that I used a cylinder so of course I could use a cylinder but that's not very non-destructive is it because you create the cylinder you define how many segments the cylinder should have and then that's it and in order to edit it it you have to edit the mesh is there a way to create a cylinder boolean operations always have to be on objects that have volumes and that have mesh data you can't use curves for boolean operations so how can we create a cylinder in a sort of a non-destructive way and just like with the with these guys yes there is a way to do this I'm gonna add a plane or start with a plane go into edit mode scale it down maybe bring it up the C axis okay I don't know how big is this whole doesn't matter I'm going to bring this or delete these two take these two so I still have only a single edge I'll bring this guy to a Y location of zero and bring both of these vertices to an explication of zero so I have an edge where one one vertex here is in the center of the world the other one is just stretched out here on the y axis it's just one edge and now to this single edge you know what I'm gonna hit the slash key on the numpad to isolate this view single edge I'm gonna take a screw modifier on the C axis 360 degrees that's good let's see what the mesh looks like looks like this we can select merge vertices and call it order and we can define the steps here from a triangle to any detail circle that we want so looks like that let's just leave it at 16 for now and now I'm going to add a solidify to give it some thickness so basically extrude it down okay now I have a cylinder and I made a cylinder out of a single edge and just like before select a cylinder select this go to the pool tools brush difference and we have a hole in our metal plate here so we have this boolean operation here I'm gonna move it up so that the last thing I have is the bevel and then we have that end and I can select this object which is this edge rotated around and extrude the town or solidified and I can still go in here and change the resolution can make it a triangle or a square or maybe go to 32 to give it a nice round circle cut out in the middle it is shaded smooth so the inside here should be smooth and that's it that is our fan cover done all done with a single edge here and then those few edges here and remember we can still go in and edit this so if we're not happy with the shape of our or the design of our fan curve we can go in here and do this we can maybe selectees alt a and make this slot larger we could even maybe go to top view G wine do something like this G why okay I'm still eyeballing stuff and we can even scale this and this vertex alt a and maybe do something like this is this cool or is this cool even here make this vertex larger and it's all non-destructive we can still edit everything and then of course when we're done and we want this object to be a real object without any modifiers we can always first copy it duplicated to have a backup and then just apply all the modifiers and then you know work from there I can see some shading art effects going on here maybe the weighted normal modifier at the bottom here helps of course it does looks very nice alright guys I hope you learned something new I hope you like this video if you do please smash that like button subscribe to the channel if you aren't already I have a lot of videos on here about modeling about materials and animation notes if you're interested in that I just recently published a new beginners series with 10 videos on how to get started with animation notes so check out all the videos on the channel have a good day and as always thanks for watching krispy out [Music]

Channel: Chris P

Views: 102,344

Rating: 4.965364 out of 5

Keywords: cg, 3d, blender, blender3d, b3d, tutorial, how-to, training, learn, eevee, cycles, non destructive, parametric, boolean, bool tool, modifiers, modifier, stack, skrew, extrude, bevel

Id: PAcTlQWmizo

Length: 35min 4sec (2104 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020