ORGANIC hard-surface modeling tutorial | subd with booleans

what's up guys in this video we're going to do something that was highly demanded i get this question all the time it's going to be an organic modeling tutorial with hard surface aspects so we're going to use subsurf for the modeling to get the forum and then use our usual boolean workflows to get some more details in the scene now a lot of people are terrified to use subsurf with booleans i'm here to tell you that you can use it in any situation you want as long as you do the two correctly subsurf and booleans actually work really well together as you'll see in this tutorial now before we start i do want to mention that next month for february we're doing an exclusive organic modeling tutorial over on our patreon as well as a full game asset tutorial a lot of people have requested this but most of these tutorials are too long for youtube so in february make sure you guys sign up for patreon we have two really awesome tutorials coming and a lot of the demanded ones like game assets and organic modeling so take a look out for that okay let's get started so a lot of people when they start using these organic workflows are gonna have to get used to using quads i say all the time quads are necessary in certain situations and this is one of them if you don't use quads with subsurf you're going to have a bad day and um it's just not going to turn out very well so we're going to come in here and start with a plane right and i'm going to move the plane over one unit so just grab it and hold ctrl and just right off the bat i'm going to add a mirror modifier you can add a mirror modifier and mirror it manually but i'm just going to use the hops tool so i'll just mirror it over the 3d cursor like that so alt x and then you go to hops mirror and you mirror it over the cursor you can use a regular mirror if you're not using add-ons but it's the same thing okay so next thing we want to do is take just one of the edges of this plane and extruded i'm going to extrude it over i guess two units is fine shift r a few times to repeat it kind of like this and then we can kind of come in here let's do one more shift r and we can kind of come in here and select one of these edges and grab it on the z-axis and if we press the o key we can turn on proportional editing we have to do that beforehand there we go then we're just going to kind of scroll out and get a nice looking form kind of imagine this is like i don't know an airplane maybe like a truck or something and kind of get that general form going so i want that now i also want to kind of pull these guys in a bit proportional editing is your friend here so we'll kind of pull that down pull this area back here up i'm gonna get a nice form we're gonna grab this vertex on the x-axis and just kind of let proportional editing do some of the work for us and then do the same thing back here like that i'm not going to do like a full-on model or anything just a pretty quick sketch so that way i can show the fundamentals if you want a full tutorial i'll link reuse tutorial in the description he made a good one recently but anyways what we're going to do is take this area and maybe just kind of fatten it a bit i'm just kind of playing with shapes here and that's usually what i do for these types of models and um right off the bat we can shade it smooth and control three to run a subsurf here so we have that now what i'm going to do is take these edges here pop into the front view and just kind of extrude these down a bit nothing crazy so now we kind of have a nice little organic shape we can play with we could take this area up here and just kind of play with that a bit and also need to pull that in and maybe up here we could kind of give it a nice little hump on the back and what else pull this down a little bit just getting a nice little form going here and pull this vertex down let's turn off proportional editing for that one and just kind of pull that one down there we go and really what we're doing is making a nice little organic shape here and like i said you need to make sure you use quads because if you don't for example if i i don't know merge this one over here it's just going to get pinchy in some of the corners in this case it was you know not really a big deal but if i were to run like crazy sorts of geo in here you're just going to get really bad pinching and it's going to get even worse in general so be careful of that so you can get away with n gones and triangles here and there but in general you want to keep this whole thing full of quads so that way it subdivides properly so what i'm going to do is take this area and let's do three of these take this area and kind of pull that out we'll take this vertex move it over and move it up and play with some more proportional editing if we wanted to it's a bit too much right there all sorts of different ideas this is kind of cool it's like a whale or something so we could do is maybe oops that's the mirror and here's the sub surf by the way um mirror and sub surf you don't want to interchange those because then it's going to sub surf in i'm sorry it's going to yeah i was right it's going to first subsurf and then mirror and you're going to get this weird issue over here and you don't want that so make sure you do the mirror first and then sub surf okay so we have that we can maybe i reckon we pull these areas up a bit but you need to do this without hurting the look of the mesh here so we'll do that and then maybe what we could do is kind of extrude that down and move it over i don't know simple idea all right so very basic form here and you kind of get the gist now and that's what i wanted to show you you can do this for any form you can make a more complex object make a more crazy organic one you could like really get in here and do some crazy shapes if you wanted to and i don't know i'm not going to do that but you see my point you could do all sorts of things with subsurf i think this is a good base layout for the video so what i'm going to do is um before we run any booleans in here and do the more hard surface design aspects we have to patch this up reason being is because if we were to try to run a boolean in here right now we'll just do an n-gon cut and run a slice you're going to see that if we try to bevel it nothing's going to happen because this is not a manifold object manifold simply means water tight so you can kind of imagine if you want to make this thing watertight we need to close it up so to close it up is really easy what we're gonna do is take the front here press the f key oh by the way um i'm totally gonna forget so let me mention it now if i press the f key it's gonna fill this in and it might not do that by default for you you need to go into the edit preferences panel and turn on the f2 add-on i'll just show you real quick you go to preferences you go to add-ons and you type in f2 turn that on otherwise you won't be able to do that trick where you can press the f key right here so yeah that's what we want to do you might want to turn off proportional editing because it's just going to get annoying and now we can do is simply grab this on the x-axis in your mirror modifier as long as you have the clipping option turned on should allow you to merge it if you don't you can kind of like go over it which doesn't really matter but just to keep the positioning clean turn on clipping and just kind of close that up so we have that and to patch it up is the same exact process for the rest of the mesh now let me turn off face orientation that is one of my default settings but it gets annoying sometimes so same idea we're going to go in here and simply start filling these in make sure that proportional editing is turned off it's really annoying and we'll just kind of repeat the process and grab all these guys and move them over looking pretty good only issue is notice that as we start patching this up we kind of lose that nice i don't know it you see how it's just kind of it looks more like a hard edge down here which i usually want we can fix that i'll show you how but um just uh bear with me we're gonna do this for now even though it might not look the cleanest because it looks more organic and sometimes a more hard surface look looks nicer so just for now fill these in we'll do one more here patch that up a few more back here as well we have this vert so we'll take that oh geez this one's a bit messy what we're going to have to do is start from the back i think we'll fill that one in and what we can do is fill this in fill that in close that up and now we should have a bit more room to patch up the wing actually we kind of have like a triangle going on right here we'll take care of that in a second for now let me just really work on getting this one filled so f key here f key here there we go now we should have like a more decent patch i guess i'm going to fill that in fill this one fill this one and then fill this one and it looks like some of these automatically started merging now this one we're going to have to merge at the last like that and now we have a completely manifold object issue here though it looks a lot worse because the bottom is way more rounded we might want to have more of a hard edge look to it so once again let me just show you if we have no faces here on the bottom looks pretty clean right but when we add them it looks more organic which you may or may not like i personally don't like that effect but we can't run booleans without it because we need to have the object completely manifold i'll show you how to easily fix that though once you do make it manifold what we do is use something called a crease now you may have seen people come in here and use something like a proximity loop to tighten things up and that gets the job done the issue here is a few things one the geo in here if we turn off our optimal display is going to be a bit more congested because we have a proximity loop down here kind of holding the edge together number two it adds more geometry to the mesh whenever you add in more loop cuts into it so if you want to have a pure and true hard edge you can use a crease for this and it won't add any extra geo or make it more dense on the bottom let me show you what i mean so let me remove that and what we're going to do is select all the edges make sure you're not selecting the faces but only the edges here so go into edge mode and control click all the way around we're just going to grab the entire bottom portion here we're going to do is press shift e pull this crease all the way in like that and the shading is going to be a bit nasty and some of these other areas here might need a good creasing as well we'll have to kind of play with that in a minute sometimes creasing get a bit messy so you have to be careful i don't think i'll mess with these but anyways we need to fix the shading first so go into your auto smooth turn that on and now you can see we're basically at the same exact position we were before if our face were deleted it looks exactly the same just like that so creases are great if you want to have that hard surface look to it but without having to have a non-manifold geometry okay so we'll take care of that in a second the creases are going to cause some problems down here which we do need to assess so what we're going to have to do is just kind of play with this a bit so sometimes you can do little creasing tricks but often times it doesn't want to work very well so we're going to try to come in here and crease this area up that's actually a terrible idea what we could do though the issue here is we have a poll we have one two three four five actually have six verts going into that which is going to be problematic i would recommend trying to avoid pulls like the plague because then you just get annoying issues but in this case since the bottom was creased you're not going to really get like a big pinching effect except for right here you could play with the auto smooth angle and tweak that a bit that's probably we're going to do to make it a bit more seamless i guess kind of catch that we're also going to add in a loop cut right there to kind of make it transition a bit nicer we'll drop that and that's not too bad all right so we have that we could also try well i don't think we need to crease anything else the top here you could do the same thing i'm not going to crease the top because i like that organic look to it but if you wanted to you could also crease the top and get yourself an interesting type of effect make sure you don't get the middle though let me fix that so make sure the middle where the mirror is is not creased and then we have pretty cool organic look but i do not want that effect so let me undo that i just want to show you that you can play with creases and figure out the type of design you're going for so uh this is generally what we want now that we've done the organic part with subsurf let me show you how you can do the same exact modeling strategies i've taught in most of my videos here on youtube and implement it into an organic mesh like this okay so let me kind of start from step one so we ran a subsurf subsurf is nothing but a way to increase the density of your object and also smooth it out very nicely that is all the subsurf is doing here if we go into wireframe all it has done is made the mesh a lot more dense this mesh is the same as this mesh only difference being the subsurf modifier has smoothed it out and increased the mesh density if i were to hand you this object and say make this a hard surface mesh you'd probably laugh at me and say josh that's easier to start running booleans and slices in it but the moment you see an organic mesh people tend to freak out it's the same thing if we just consider the topology and manage it carefully we can do the same exact boolean cuts that we usually do in our main hard surface meshes now there's a trade-off here so whenever you run boolean cuts remember when you run a bevel on those booleans you can get overlaps really easily if the geometry is super dense you're going to get artifacts almost immediately but if the mesh is more low poly you won't run into overlaps as quickly so it's kind of a game of cat and mouse figuring out how dense you want the object to be in turn making it smoother or how low poly you want it to be in turn making it a lot more a lot less clean but also making it easier to use your boolean methods i tend to meet somewhere in the middle because let's be honest the difference between a level of three and a level of four is close to nothing and it's just not worth going to four subdivision levels so i'm gonna leave it at three and what we're gonna do now is first of all actually not we'll do that in a second let's go ahead and run some boolean so what i'll do is come in here with an ngon cutter and make like a little hatch here in the front we'll press the x key and what i'm going to do is also make sure my mirror is applied so apply that and apply that because the mirror is going to make a um an issue with manifolding so just apply those and just like that it's the same exact type of method you just run a boolean and all you have to do now is consider the topology so for example now when we run a bevel for example let me rotate this just a bit there we go when you run a bevel on here you're going to see the bevel works fine but we are going to get over artifacts over facts we're going to get artifacts pretty quickly so you just got to make sure you get in there and clean those up and of course the best way to clean up artifacts is to either reposition your cutter so that way it's not hitting overlaps on the geo as quickly or what you could do which is way easier come in here apply your boolean and we need to apply the subserve first and then the boolean and then you just kind of get in here and clean up whatever you need to clean up really easy i'd wait till the last few steps to do that though so that way you're not going destructive so soon so let me undo that same for the main mesh you can see we have a nice bevel here on the bottom getting picked up where we added the crease so here's the before here's the after we have a really nice bevel going on and we can make that a bit bigger in turn gonna cause some issues up here but at this point you should know how to clean up your artifacts you just get in there apply the boolean and move around and join geo together really easy stuff so yeah you can just come in here and be like a boolean monster just make whatever you want maybe come in do something like this we'll bevel it and then run a slice and then we have like a little piece up there you can play with the sub surf a bit more in the back if you wanted to you know extrude back or maybe inset do whatever you want on the front though what i think i'll do is inset this just a bit we're going to have to do the same thing to this piece though and set it just a bit to kind of have like a nose or something like that pretty cool and you can really get in here and just play with all the geo because once the sub surf is done the sub surf is done it's important though that the subsurf remains at the top of the stack because the moment your sub surf runs after a boolean you're going to get some crazy distortions not in this one but maybe on this one it'll be worse it's just going to go crazy and you don't want that so make sure the subsurface at the top of the stack because that means the subsurface running well before any booleans are running maybe we'll do one more detail in here then i'll let you go on your own we'll do like something like this pull that over and then mirror and there we go caused some problems right there interesting i think it was the mirror mirrors kind of acting up but we could just mirror the actual cutter instead and call it a day uh let's see what is the issue let me reposition these there we go but yeah guys that's how you use organic meshes with booleans and you subserve to make all sorts of cool forms a lot of people requested this type of tutorial and hopefully now see it's not really that scary it's really simple you just have to know how to manage your modifier stack and manage your sub surf so as a recap one run a subsurf full of quads so that way it deforms nicely two run your booleans and three be happy that you know how to do it now so that's about it guys thanks so much for watching uh give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed this one i don't usually ask but a lot of people wanted this tutorial so it'll let me know if you want more tutorials like this by the way guys keep a look out next week we have a huge release coming i won't give too many details now but here's a sneak peek you guys are gonna love this one so keep a lookout hoping around friday we'll have it out and we'll definitely let you know so thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 70,822

Keywords: blender, beginner, tutorial, hard, surface, organic, mesh, subsurf, subd, boolean, workflow, 3d, modeling, hardops, boxcutter, sculpting, curved, smooth, object, blenderbros

Id: kBfpl0-AxiY

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021