Parenting and Instancing (on points) in Blender

greetings hobbies this is our sans of all and today we're going to have a look at two really useful tools to have in your workflow which are parenting and instancing now if you're already happy with parenting and just here for the instancing then please do have a look at the chapters in the description and you'll be able to jump forward to where that is so parenting this just describes trying to link two items together in a specific way that means that what you do to one and how you transform one will have an effect on the other now we'll just give an example straight away before we show how useful this is so if i just bring in a cube here and let's bring in i don't know let's bring in another cube and we're going to put that one to the side so we've got two cubes okay and for whatever reason we want to link these two together but we don't want to link them together as one mesh okay we might need to modify one and it not affect the other and that's where we use parenting let's just make the smaller cube different so it's really clear to see which one is which so to parent all you do is click the item that you want to be the minor item which would refer to as the child and then pressing shift you select the item that you want to be the parent and now you can do this in two ways object parent okay and you just parent the object or you can just press and it does say this here that's what's so good about blender it shows you what all the commands are okay if we press ctrl p we can parent the object okay and i normally use keep transform and you can see what this does is it brings up a line if i press said going from each of the origins to say that they are parented now importantly what that means is now if i do anything to the parent for example press g for grab and move it around the child the minor item will move with it but if i select the child and move it around it will not move or affect the parent so it's a really good way of having items connected together so that you can not accidentally move one and not the other or you can do various things where you want one to move and the other one to move with it so i'm just going to delete that one out and give you a good example of where we might want to use this and the one that instantly springs to mind that's caused me loads of problems in the past where i haven't parented something and i've moved it is that if i use a boolean which is really easy to forget if you've got something that you haven't parented okay and you move one in some way so i'm going to make this cube here and i'm just going to subtract it from this in fact let's move it across a little bit let's duplicate that and have another one so we've got two items here so i'll select both the items that i want to subtract from the cube select the cube last ctrl minus and i've subtracted them from that and we can see that we've got each of those as a boolean and i can still select these boxes now what typically happens here is that most people go in straight away and hide these but for demonstration purposes what i'm going to do is i'm going to select this cube and parent it to the larger cube so again control p and then i'm going to hide both of them and this is typically what you're going to do in your workflow so let's see what that does i'm going to press g and move it around and you'll see the one that was parented stays in place relative to the cube it's staying in this location whereas the other one is staying at a fixed point and the cube is moving around it having potential issues because i could move that off and suddenly that boolean is gone okay or i could move it and it just totally has some sort of unwanted effects and it ends up in the place i don't want it so parenting is really useful for stopping that happening now i should note that if you have box cutter just press alt w to start that and let me just take that off view for object if you use box cutter to cut something for example i make a cut here and confirm it box cutter automatically parents the object so if i press g now you can see that it's been parented one of the other benefits of having box cutter and hard ops okay is you don't have to worry about doing that parenting but a really useful tool so let's have a look at why that's useful other than just making sure booleans don't go wrong so i've got this series of objects here which is essentially a boxing out of what's going to be some sort of servo arm and we've got the gun at the tip okay and the point that it's rotating around the middle arm here and the lower arm there which would attach to something let's say a backpack or some sort of bit of scenery now the first thing i've made sure is each object has its pivot point or its origin at the place i want it to pivot around so that is in the center of this okay pivot point or gear this one is centered around that pivot point or gear and this one is pivoted around that center point and we're just going to parent everything now the rule for this is generally start with the most minor bit okay and move upwards so we're going to parent the gun to the middle so control p i want to parent it then the middle arm to the sort of more major upper arm or lower arm depending on where you think about it okay control p again object keep transform and now that quick all that means is when i'm positioning stuff and mapping out where i want this to be if i select this and press r to rotate it when i move this around it moves all of the other bits so i don't have to sort of faff around with getting them in place and then when i select the middle arm r and x it moves the gun and then when i select the gun r and x and i can move each bit individually okay and i can still come back here r and x or whatever okay or r and z to move it around it's really really useful for this sort of pseudo rigging so let's have a look at instancing now and there's a reason this is in the same video and that is that to instant something you need to have parented the objects together and there's a specific system you need to go by to do that so you want to be really careful that this is done in the correct order so here we've got a cube and we've got a sphere just for demonstration purposes and then we'll show how we can use this practically to do some really nice things that save huge amounts of time now the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure the origins are in the same point okay so effectively the thing that we want to instance around and you'll see what instancing is in a second the thing that we want to object around needs to have the origin on the same place that we want to have instances of you'll see what i mean when i go through this but we need to get that origin to the same origin as this place now you could just have these created in the same place but i like to have my objects to the side so i can see them and edit them so we need to have the origin over here so i'm going to press shift and s and i'm going to move the cursor to selected now if you don't have machine tools you'll have a different pi menu to this but you can still move the cursor to the selected so now my cursor is there come to this object shift an s and then i'm going to move the object origin to the cursor so now this object has its origin at the same point as this one if i move that you can see that that's now there so let's just move that back we need the object that we're instancing to be the child so i'm going to select that first shift select the other one control and p and i'm going to set the parent so now this the thing we want to instance around is the parent and where a lot of people go wrong with this is this feels like it should be a modifier but it's not a modifier okay this is something that comes in the object properties tab of the object that we want to instance around and if we go down here we can come to instancing and we have three options none which is what it is at the moment vertices and faces so let's go through each one quickly just to show what it does but it should be fairly self-explanatory if i go into vertex mode there is a vertex on each corner and if i turn my instance into vertices this creates a new instance of the object that was the child in each of the vertices similarly if i come back to here and click face there'll be one in each of the faces perfectly dead center for each of them so why is this actually useful then like who cares why do i want this i could just move this to each place now actually this can save huge amounts of time okay depending on how many faces you've got but the one that i find this really useful for from a 3d modeling point of view is for rivets but this will save hours and i wish i knew about it earlier so let's start again [Applause] so we're going to make a cube and just so it's easier to see i'm going to bevel it using hard ops you don't need to do that and for 3d modeling i wouldn't but it just makes it easier to see and let's modify this a bit okay so it's a bit more of an interesting shape so i'm going to bevel that edge something like that uh let's i don't know let's do something over here let's put an edge loop there okay and then i'm gonna go to face and i'm gonna extrude that out so i've got this object here and it's not symmetrical um but i might want to do something with this so for example let's say i want to put an additional panel on it so let's go to face and select those two faces and i'm going to press i okay to inset them and i'm going to extrude that out slightly so i've got this nice panel here and i want some rivets i want this to be riveted onto this object and before i knew anything about instancing i would get my quad sphere okay and i'd get the size that i wanted to beat for my rivets so i'd scale that down and i would start fiddling around moving that to the place i want it to be somewhere like there okay i'm going to put it there it was a lot of guesswork and i could even do things like adding in an array so array okay and i want that to go in the y direction so let's do one there and zero and i could do sort of one there and then i want the second one so that's or a third one really okay to be there and is that gap there the same as that gap there like you can do it okay and it's fine but it's not great and you're not gonna be that precise so let's move that rivet to the side okay now let's get working on how this is going to look so we want to put rivets here okay on this object so all i'm going to do is go to face mode and i'm going to select those two and i'm going to copy them to make a new object so shift d okay and then i'm going to press p and separate by selection if you've got hard ops there's a quick way of doing that okay if i just delete that if you go to faces with hard up you can just select them press q and then go to curve extract and make sure that you are pressing control at the same time as curve extracts and it makes a new object so it's really quick and easy so i've got object there object there so we're gonna make this smaller and this is where this is quite nice that we can do it this way because normally if i was going to make things smaller i'd have to scale it and then i don't know the exact measurement i'm making it smaller by but for this actually i can go to face select these two faces select i and i can make it smaller by whatever amount i want okay so i can actually type in let's say 1.5 and that's 1.5 millimeters from every edge well meters here but either way 1.5 units hit enter and it's there okay and now i'm going to go to vertex i'm actually just going to get that outer edge and i'm going to delete those so i don't want those anymore so i've now only got this in a bit and this one here don't want that so i'm going to control an x to dissolve that out so i've now just got this object okay so now let's get the instancing going i need the origin of this to be the same as this location okay so the origin for our rivet shift s i'm gonna bring my cursor to the selected this one shift s i need the origin to the cursor so now that's there and we need to parent them so child to major object and control and p and we've got that parented now i can go here go to our object properties instancing vertices and now i've got those rivets at every single intersection that i want it's taking me no time there's no guess work so much easier and what's even better about this is if i go to edge and select the edge and right click and subdivide it i can put one dead center or change the number of cuts to have two same with on this bottom let's subdivide it let's put those up something like that okay and i know these are perfectly equally spaced effectively i've done what an array would do but i know that each endpoint is exactly where i want it to be really really useful now let's just finish those up so i'm going to subdivide that one once twice probably twice okay and similar for these do that twice so divide that do that twice and the thing that's great about this is even like if i want to change my mind i think that actually needs an extra one now if i go to vertex i can now select those two vertexes control and x dissolve them out and i'm back where i started i can just go to edge mode and subdivide it again really really helpful so let's put that to three this time i think that looks better and same here so we'll subdivide that one let's do two and this bottom edge looks like it needs more now so let's go to vertex mode select those vertex control and x to dissolve the vertices out edge mode and we'll subdivide that let's get something looking pretty good that looks about right maybe i could do another one that looks really nice now because this isn't a modifier and everything is linked together there is a slight problem here now this looks pretty rubbish okay we've got these two faces on top of each other and it's not looking very nice so i would quite like to hide this but if i press h you'll see it hides everything so that's not helpful it hides all the instances now blender has thought about this which is great if i come over here to my instancing i can actually hide the object in the viewport and the render so that i only have the instances there great for 3d design for graphics but that's not great for 3d printing because actually this isn't being combined together and that's going to cause problems but easily fixed you just need to know how all we've got to do is control a to apply okay you can just go to object and apply so there's two options there so control a and apply and all we're gonna do is make instances real click that and then we can delete that object now everything's been separated okay it's not parented anymore so i can delete that and now i've got each of these as a separate rivet such a time saver absolutely unbelievable so that was instancing on vertices but what about faces now this is actually what led me down this rabbit hole and i must say a massive thank you to sergey who's the man that created cable rater and i can't express how fantastic he's been answering my various questions on this when i came to him in a problem seriously you get some people who develop apps and they are more than happy to make it and take your money but you ask them for some help with it and they do a little bit but that's about it i can't express how much time sergey's been willing to give up to talk me through various different things honestly for a man i have never met before he's absolutely fantastic now previously in videos where i talked about cable rater uh i talked us through doing various things and if you haven't watched those videos do feel free to go back to look at them but one of the things that's really cool is that you can make cable really quickly and you can do something like putting something that goes along it so for example i'm just going to do this quickly i'm going to make this and i'm going to make it a little bit more interesting so let's uh do that edge there and let's do that edge there let's bevel that and then let's do something a little bit sci-fi so we're going to bevel that do my classic thing of actually let's extrude that outwards to make it a little bit more interesting okay and then we'll do one the other side and we'll bevel that and then alt e and extrude that in and then we'll just mirror that or symmetry that to the other side so got this uh let's just bevel that again just for you to make it easier to see wouldn't be doing that for 3d modeling normally so we've got this here and let's make that a bit bigger and i want to put this on this cable so let's just do that with cable rater so select the object select the cable shift alt and c and i'm going to add or edit segment and i can press d to move that along now there is an issue with this and that is i say issue it depends what you want okay you can see this is actually deformed the object it makes it follow the curve and it makes it deformed to follow that curve as if it was a tube and that's okay sometimes but in other instances i might want that to be a rigid shape that's not changing so i'm going to control z and undo that now that is where this can come in for just using the instance on a face because as opposed to vertices where we're going to have multiple vertices if i make another object that's a plane say mesh and then plane i'll make that a little bit bigger this only has one face therefore it's only going to make one copy now i've got the plane let's control an a i do need to scale that i also need to scale this so control a and scale and once again the origin needs to be in the same place and just for simplicity i'm going to shift an s and move this to where the cursor is because that's the same place so same process that's going to be the child i want to parent it to the plane so control p object keep transformation and then all i'm going to do is the plane select the cable and use cable rater to add a radix segment you notice it moves it automatically or the the thing that's going to be copied onto it to the place that it needs to be that's what's so good about cable racer i'm not worried about where things are located and move that to the place that i want it to be and then i just need to select the plane and activate the instancing on the face and there it is okay this time without being distorted and i can hide that if i want to when i come time to 3d printer i need to do the thing of object apply and make instances real but really useful to be able to have that on a curve without it deforming that object that i'm using as a segment so really really helpful so hopefully you found that interesting and you've got some plans on how you might use those instancing abilities or how you might use parenting to potentially stop yourself having some problems or maybe do some of that simple rigging as always if you have any questions please do put them in the comments section and if you click that like button it would always be really appreciated it lets me know what people want to see more of and hopefully you'll tune in for the next of these videos

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 23,520

Keywords: blender, 3d design, 3d printing, parenting, instance, instancing, cablerator, rivets

Id: tsko8B_-hjI

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022