Plasticity / 3D Modeling for Motion Designers / Beginner Overview

hey everyone this is Ben and I'm back with a new video tutorial if you've been following me on Twitter or Instagram you might have seen my latest pieces for a series called tiles they are short animations featuring controls and physical looking products how did I model these with a new tool I've been learning called plasticity in this video I want to show you how to get started using this new 3D tool so let's Dive In [Music] so first off what is plasticity you'll find their website at plasticity.xyz and they've been marketing themselves as CAD for artists but I've been thinking of it as a hard surface modeling tool that you can easily include in your workflow they have some nice overview videos on their website if you want to give them a look there's also a free trial for Windows Mac and Linux and the pricing is is pretty good too so yeah that 30-day trial I ended up buying the Indie license myself I've been getting a lot of good use out of it I've used it in both some paid projects for my full-time work as well as the tiles series and I think it's going to be a great tool that I have in my workflow going forward and I'm sure you will too so let's get into the software now so this is what plasticity looks like when you first open it up once you get past all the authentication and activation of your license and all that yada yada so as you can see very simple very clean UI there's no four up view that you might be used to in something like Cinema 4D or blender but it does have all of the trappings of a 3D modeling tool in the upper right hand corner you can kind of see that you can click and on these different colored X Y and Z buttons and it switches to the correct view and if you were to switch or hold your mouse button the middle Mouse button and drag it rotates The View again so very easy to to move around since you're really only working on one object at a time having the center of the view is is really handy you can get pretty complex with your models though so make sure to name your layers Etc as you go on the right hand side you have all of your controls and if you hover over them the ones with hotkeys will will show you what they are by and large I was I've been clicking on on these myself um some of the things to know is that some of them have hidden options like within each one of them so for example the cube tool they call it the corner box if you click and hold it opens up this little drag out menu and I've been finding I use the center box quite a bit I'm hoping there's a way that they they can let you change it so that's like the one that you want is the default because having to click and drag out for like a Center box every time is kind of uh annoying I guess is a blunt way of saying it uh in any case it's like that for all of these um so if you were to click on uh the oops get out of this a cylinder that one always does from the center there's always these there's also these rectangle tools which we'll get into as we use it but from a very base level um let's just think of starting to add another Cube to our scene so we have this default Cube which I'm sure everyone who uses blender will love and if you were to create a new object you'll notice it starts with the this box modal in the bottom left and we click and drag or we click uh let's see that again we click and then drag you don't click and drag at the same time you click off and then you let go of the mouse and you'll notice that it starts to create like a shape of what you're going to make so let's say we want to make something like right here and it automatically will snap to some edges and I think you can also hold down shift or control in certain instances and it will enable our disable snapping so it's very handy when you're trying to match a shape to an already existing Edge which you will want to do a lot trust me so we're going to start we're going to create something like this so we'll have like a this little Ridge coming up and then it will pop up and you'll see like how tall it's going to be and you can change this and once you lock it in you can go back and change it so let's do that and once you click if I were to hit OK or enter on the keyboard it would actually Boolean this Cube this new shape this new rectangle shape to the the default Cube sometimes you might not want that sometimes you do in this case we'll just say okay and we'll we'll combine these shapes so now these shapes are combined and you don't see any like really complex geometry Lines no matter which way you like it it shows where the objects meet um and that's really all you need to know one kind of cool thing is you'll notice that you can also see let's zoom in a little bit you can also see the lines of the geometry through the object and even select them so you don't have to like rotate around click an edge Rotator around again click another Edge that would be very tedious you can kind of just click through to these edges and adjust them um so one of the the very first things you might want to try is adding some bevels to your object so we want to add like some really cool looking bevels to this Center spire and if we hold click on one of these edges you'll notice this little selection tool appears let's do this one in the front here and if we click and drag it makes that bevel if you if you drag it in One Direction it makes a curved bevel and the other way it makes it chamfer um so these are really really nice now if I were to let go click and drag to a spot let's say I want it like right here and I let go I can also go into this box in the bottom left and adjust some of these values although it can be a little finicky and you can just you can change the depth of these different shapes if I click undo it just undoes all of that stuff there's no like undo stack in that modal which I hope they add in the future so let's go back to this and so let's say we wanted the the bevels on both these sides to be the same so let's select this bevel in the front and the one behind and if we drag both of them at the same time we get the same exact bubble so now you could do this by knowing what the values are here in this box in the bottom left but a lot of times you want to select all the objects you want to adjust at once and apply those bubbles so if we hit OK then our changes is is baked into our model you'll notice that it's still one object in the object list unfortunately there is no parametric shapes that persist when Boolean operations are done within plasticity so just keep that in mind as you're building your shapes now if we wanted an object cut out of this we could do and make another shape in this case we're going to make a cylinder and let's add it to one of the faces here and you'll notice that it kind of it likes to Center and it makes tries to find like a good center point but we want the center point to be like right here so we're going to do that and because it's it's detecting the face it knows what face I clicked on and we're going to make this like a like it's a hole cut through so if we drag the the cylinder through it it's going to cut the hole for our shape so that's that's really handy and then again if we if we want to just create this cylinder and have it be a separate object we would hit X in this cylinder box and it would unselect it from the the shape you notice the Boolean goes away but if we click it uh click it again can we can we get back no we can't uh so let's click okay we'll create this object so now we have two objects uh and we can move these and have them move it and be centered a little bit um actually no I need to switch object mode and then Center it so let's Center that object so now we have very basic cylinder inside and let's say we wanted to uh model this or then Boolean this cylinder and have it removed we can do that very easily we select both shapes so if we click on the base shape and then hold shift and click the cylinder and then hit Q on the keyboard or this Boolean button in the bottom left you will be able to click uh it'll activate the Boolean and it by default it like Hollows out the shape and it's going to remove any geometry that is uh outside of the boundary boundaries of the original selection that you made so we're going to do that and hit OK so now we have our shape cut out and it looks pretty great we might wonder how to add additional detail well we could keep slicing away with booleans and and make the shapes that we want to make we can then even add um bevels to like the whole exterior of the shape which is very easy to do so let's switch into Edge selected mode you notice in the upper left hand corner there are different selection modes that you can switch between if you hold shift and activate them it will have multiple selection modes active at the same time but you'll notice earlier when I was clicking it was selecting a face of an object and not the object itself so sometimes you just have to click on one of these to make it uh the only type of selection mode that's active and you can get used to using the hot tools too so four for body three for face two for Edge and one for control point or like a Vertex point um so let's imagine we're we're going to add some bevels here in fact let's not imagine that let's do it so we're going to have some Edge selection here now if we were to select one of these edges in some cases plasticity will bevel an entire Loop around an edge so let's see if it'll do that we've done some Boolean operations here let's see what it does nope it's only doing the one that's selected and we can we can create some really cool looking shapes by doing these kind of bevels and it probably is thinking they might want to do like a cool like Arch that kind of like Peaks up here uh and that that does look cool so we'll do that and then we can if you right click it active it completes the operation that's what I'm doing instead of hitting return right click works too so let's select one of these edges and if we then we can bevel it again and we can dial these all in so if we wanted all these bevels to be the same we would select multiples even the ones like underneath and behind and on the right and up here and get all of these right sometimes you just gotta click and get them all I think sometimes alt box will click them yes Alt will select them as well in certain instances and that could be very handy when if you don't want to have to click a billion times like I'm doing right now it doesn't always work though you have to have a it has to know that there's like an edge there so now we have all these edges selected and we can drag these to all together and it will like cap out so like the biggest bevel it can give without the geometry starting to intersect it'll do that but notice the Box turns red it's like oop that's too big so we go back the other way and we give it like a really slight bevel so that's then we hit right click and it completes it we must also might want to wonder how to do Extrusions in a shape so if we take a go into face select mode we hit three and then we select a face you'll notice it has a different look to the tool so if we just drag this it makes an extrusion pretty nice and we can right click to apply it we also might want to inset a face and I believe it calls that something different it's called just called offset so if you hit o and then drag on your mouse it offsets the face you notice it's kind of creating a new set of geometry a new face within it you hit right click to bake it in then you can select that face interior and then click the the selection and just drag it and it makes the the side of the face go in or out and you can adjust this however you like and the cool thing about this type of tool is it does it you can go back and edit it again whereas in other tools it might extrude again um this one just lets you keep going and you can select different faces and do cool things and it and it starts to do weird things like why is it going like up now it's because it thinks like you want to have some kind of shape at the top which can have like a lot of uh interesting results so then you could take something like this these edges and we can bevel them too and we have like a cool shape going getting something like this in in a traditional modeling tool would be very challenging because you'd have to think about if you're just like doodling and you want to you're just sketching out shapes it can be very challenging to think like okay what's the geometry going to be like but now with this kind of tool we have the freedom to just model without fear of geometry and add bevels and insets and things like that uh very easily um so that's that's the basics of this kind of modeling now you might wonder um how to to do something like a tube for example um oh there's there's a tube tool that's built in here um so what we'll do is we'll hide this shape and we'll start with something very basic we'll start with a line so let's create a line and we just click on the origin and we're going to create this line along this axis it's going to be 2 uh we'll right click we'll just have one line very very simple and they call them curves so just be aware of that that nomenclature and if you look at the bottom of the screen there's something called a pipe so if we click on the pipe tool and we zoom in you can kind of see that we have our pipe going and there's two controls there's like that exterior one and uh the um let's see what kind of options I have here we go bigger drag this handle it's pretty cool and we can make this bigger thicker tube or a thinner tube and this is really nice for adding um some tube-like geometry to your uh to a curve that you might have and then you can model on top of this you can Boolean things to this it works just like the other shapes so if you're okay it actually creates a new shape called a solid and your curve is still there so it's not like this curve goes away but again they're not tied together so if I were to to take this curve and move it around if I hold the g hit the g key it activates the move tool and and I move this around it doesn't change like where the the tube goes it's not like a dynamic spline like in Sigma 4D where you have spline Dynamics and all that stuff it's all kind of like one and done you made your shape um but I mean this this curve can be anything you want we'll get rid of this and we'll create a spline curve but we can make this go you know look look like a curve and it curves around and it does some cool stuff and we'll just leave it like that and again we can add a pipe to it and do all the same things make the pipe bigger if we click and drag we can make the opening bigger and I think there's like a maximum size that'll let you do compare like depending on how big your uh how close your spline gets to each other doesn't it doesn't like to create like intersecting geometry all right so that's the curves and pipes and things like that so we'll turn that off next are these things uh the the other flat shapes think of these like a Circle object or a rectangle object or a polygon object in Cinema 4D um and they they can drive the creation of shapes uh as well so let's create something like that we'll create a a center rectangle so this is uh the the rectangle tool and you can drag this and you'll get something just a flat rectangle here right and now we have this rectangle now from here if we go into face select and click on the the Curve it we can then extrude a shape from this just kind of like the pipe tool did with the the curve that we had before and this again we can use this to to draw a plane on an object it's also helpful for creating other objects from a particular point in the the scene that you're building so very handy to do and it works the same for like the regular polygon tool um and there's also um a circle tool so it works the same way for creating cylinders so let's create something a little bit more simple so one of the very first one of the very first things I made in plasticity was a little knob that had that you could turn or that I had then animated in Cinema 4D but let's just make the basics of that and we'll start with this plane um and we'll extrude it up because we want to have that that plane start on a base so that's looking good we can leave that we can turn off our curve and we'll call this our base next I created a cylinder again very simple started started from the center and I went up from there so something around there feels about right and we I wanted to um Boolean this from the or on the shape so we're going to do that and right now it looks kind of like just very basic but then I went into the edge selection and I made like I beveled the the the side of the the shape into the surface of this base plate so now we have the startings of something that we can use for an animation so we right click we bake that in um and the next I wanted to add that little divot that was on the top of the button kind of like that little like you put your finger on it and it's a a spot to turn the knob um so we'll do that with another Boolean operation we're going to use a sphere and we're going to take this sphere we're going to create it right from the middle here uh we don't want it to be too big but you'll notice let's let's not make this part of the object that when we switch into one of our side views that it would be way too deep for this size so if we select this we'll go to object select mode for object select hit G to for move we'll pull this up so it's only intersecting just a little bit and we want to scale it up so if we hit s on the keyboard it switches to the scale tool and it'll grow a bit now we'll have a much shallower Circle when we move it out so we'll hit G on the keyboard again and move this up on the vertical axis there the z-axis so now we have it it's very shallow but it'll still be circular so we move up here we can kind of see like where it's at I don't want it necessarily at the center so let's move it to the side we want inset a little bit from the side and that look is looking good for me so go back up to the top and I select hit right right click to apply my my changes and click on the base click onto the cylinder and hit Q and it cuts out the base from the cylinder or the the sphere from the the base now we have our cut in the top of our our little knob our basic basic knob and this one we might want to add some additional detail because like a very hard Edge on the top nothing is ever perfectly hard edged but you want it to be have like just enough softness so that it catches light and reflect has like a cool highlight on on it when we're when we're lighting it later so we'll do something like point zero zero five and that's looking good it's very very subtle bevel but that's looking good and we can do the same thing over here we can get making very subtle bevel don't want it to be that much at all because we want still want this to catch some light and not smooth out too much all right so that's one good zoom in it might look like there's not that much geometry here but you'll see what happens when we get ready for export so one thing to keep in mind is when I had this done in in cinema I wanted like an inset line on here and it's kind of tough in plasticity to create like a a seam in in existing geometry there might be a way to do it I need to look into that but the way I was doing it because if you try to do an Offset you can do one out from from where you were at and we could do that let's let's just do that this way if we hit o on the keyboard and then drag out a little bit of a seam and right click and then we go into face select and we look at this and we select it we we just drag it down see how it moves everything that's not really what we want we want it all to be separate but now we have our geometry there for when we go into Cinema and we can actually transform it the way we want it to do and we could do this a number of ways like we could um Boolean out things so that it punches a hole in the object I kind of wanted it to have a seam um so we'll do that if when we when I move this over to cinema so now we have our very basic knob shape and we can get it ready for export so how do we do that well plus the city has some great export tools if we go to export and save as and I'm just going to save it on my desktop and we're going to call it a wavefront obj file and it's just going to be knob 01. and we're going to hit save and it's going to give us a bunch of options now you might think like oh I need to go into quads but you'll notice that the quads aren't super great like they're doing some wild stuff and I found when exporting it works best to use n-gons and you might think that's counter-intuitive but trust me it's not and if we change this density to one you get a lot more geometry and then if we set our Min width to .005 you get a lot of that fine geometry especially in bevels you can go even smaller than this if you want like two five and you'll get more curvature on bevels that you've made which is exactly what you want because we don't want to have to remesh this in cinema if we don't have to and then we go to Max width and we set this to something like point two five so now we have some better geometry I mean it's not perfect like if you were to zoom in and look at like where seams line up like some of them do but then others like you'll get some weird stuff going on especially in more complicated topology um but it's not actually too big of a detail because it renders looking great and you'll see that if when you try it out yourself so hit OK we'll have our object exported so let's just jump over to cinema real quick so you can see how it goes importing a shape like this into Cinema straight from plasticity as an obj file so here we are in cinema we're going to drop our obj file right in to the this this open File by clicking and dragging the file and holding down shift and it'll open it up and you can delete everything default it's just fine it makes things pretty small though so what I like to do is take it and then scale it up and you can go like a thousand percent if you want why not and we can zoom in and you'll notice the axis is not the way we want it so hit r on the keyboard rotate so we get a nice 90 degree axis but it's already looking pretty good like the geometry came in looking great into cinema right off the bat so let's get it ready for rendering you'll notice that when you import to cinema it has a base material and this material isn't like a redshift material or anything it's just a very basic material we don't need it so select it delete and then delete it from your material manager so now we have no materials in our scene and you'll notice that we don't have our seam yet so if we go into face like mode and we select our seam here and I don't think it'll do a loop selection it might it does not but we do get a loop selection here so we'll take we'll take the seam from from this particular piece and hold down on our keyboard Mt and we scale and drag down so now we have like a nice scene a seam in our knob now what if we wanted to have this knob as a separate piece um now we could have like booleaned it out in plasticity and that's what I've done on other projects but for this one this is actually how I did it when I was first learning so you get to see how I did it um and we can select all this all this geometry here so let's do another loop selection but are we going to Loop selection like this curve that's inside here so we're going to get all of this geometry here and we're going to do a u hit U on the keyboard and you'll notice f is fill selection so if we hit fill selection it's going to fill in everything around that Loop so now we have all of the geometry outside of or inside of this knob so if we right click and then hit split will have a new shape here so we have one with the base and one with the base one which we'll call the knob and if we go back into our base and we select it and hit and then um I think you got to click it again and then hit delete we have no more geometry in place of where this knob was you might think our seam is there why can't we see it and that's because of the way the normals come in from plasticity it automatically adds this normals tag and normal tag and if we were to delete this um you'll get some more you'll see what what the shape looks like because it's going to use whatever normals that it has so that's looking good but you'll also notice like some weird like banding and stuff so sometimes I like to leave the normals tags because it actually provides a pretty good result but you don't have to worry about banding and things like that you'll get really smooth looking renders Straight Out The Gate so um materials work exactly the same as you might think so let's pull up some grayscale gorilla stuff a little bit on my plus Library and we'll use a keyboard material that I really like so if you just go and all click keyboard I'm going to use redshift and we'll use the keyboard key I'll drag that in and that'll look nice and now all we have to do is drag this onto both of our objects and since we don't have anything in this scene yet to look for lighting we're going to create a very basic lighting environment using everybody's favorite hdri the creative office so I'm going to create a quick dome light using HR link plus which is another graysco gorilla plugin we're going to get the creative office in there because I have the tag selected it'll automatically add this to the scene for lighting and I'm going to go in here and we'll see if the brightness may need to be turned up just a little bit so now let's see what this looks like activator render View and you'll notice that the materials look wild like they're so bad like when you first apply them and that's because for some reason these these particular Imports all default to a spherical projection for the material so what I like to do is just switch to cubic and we can do that for both the knob and the base and you notice it's way over scaled so what we don't we definitely don't want that so we're going to go into both of them with the cubic selection and we're going to scale it down to something like 15. which you get a much more like refined look and we might even go lower than that like 10. because you don't necessarily want to see all the individual grains of plastic but you want to get the sense that uh that there that there's some texture to the material one cool thing about these materials is they work great since the the base is basically just a solid color we can drag in a new color absolute node and we can drag it right into the diffuse and if we change our color to something lighter we get like a nice white color and that's looking good but we might also want to Bevel the edge of our knob a little bit because we want this knob to have like a nice uh looks looks natural so it doesn't have this hard Edge so if we go into our object selection and then we select our edges we can apply a bevel m w oops wrong one m UL MS sometimes you switch in between tools and you forget what the hotkeys are all right I'm going to add some subdivisions to that not too many so now we have like we can see like we have a little bit more natural looking geometry if we were to do the same on our other object it might glitch out because the geometry kind of sucks for this so let's see what happens MS that's actually pretty good all right so now we have some good looking objects all right so let's get the camera in a good position I like to start with a very basic camera get it in there reset the position [Music] um you also notice that because our our stuff is still like really tiny our camera is gigantic as well so if we go into our Corner coordinates and we change this to like 0.4 or 0.4 or 0.4 we'll have a more like a realistic size to the camera object the way it looks um all right so we're going to move it along this axis and we're going to point it at the the stuff in our scene and to do that we can set up a null so we're going to call this cam Target and then we're going to add a Target tag to our um our camera animation Target tag I'm going to drag our tan cam Target into that so now if we move our camera here we'll zoom out so we can see what's happening if we move our camera it will always point at our center point so that's what we want if we moved our Center Point now it'll point to where that is this is really handy for like doing depth of field or making sure like a shot is centered because you always want it to like be pointing at a specific spot so now if we we pop into our our cam View and we can we can push like right in on this shape and it's going to look really good we might notice that it's very like distorted kind of lens because we're so close up so we can change our lens to something like a 300 millimeter lens and then we can pull back on this shot so that we have less of a a difference in the the perspective lines so that's looking good we might notice too that the the shape of our geometry here is not ideal like it's it's not extending out into the distance like we might like and that's very easy to tweak all you need to do is go into your base we're going to pop into a different view here we're going to call this perspective we're going to select a perspective view in this other viewport I'll just do a quick shading and hit on our keyboard Center we'll select our perimeter in the face select and then we're going to I believe I can just transform and it doesn't it's fine yeah so if you just scale it up and push it out you don't have to worry about UVS or anything like that I'm noticing like the camera is in position exactly the way I want it so we can tweak that another easy way to do this is by putting the camera inside of the the target null and then just rotating that because then it'll always point to where you want it and then you can tilt that camera and pull it down now if anything in another view so that it's always kind of pointing at the spot you want it to be pointing at we can adjust where the position is so it stays centered in our our frame here still looking a little bit low so let's get it dialed in get it because it's a dial okay enough with that um so we can close the gap between like this this little Valley that we have going on here and by making our knob a little bit bigger so if you select it it's still the vertex Center is going to be right at the middle so we just take the whole thing and scale it up we can bring that edge like really close to where the seam is so we get like a really fine seam that you want so that's okay good so all I did was import our shape we got it in there it's lit nicely it has a material on it you can animate this knob now so if you were to spin this knob it'll it'll spin the whole thing whole piece of geometry will spin very nicely and you're ready to go so it's very easy to get started with plasticity and bring things into another 3D program like Cinema like I showed you here so if you like this video please subscribe and like and tell your friends I appreciate you watching the video taking the time to have a great day [Music]

Channel: Ben Fryc

Views: 45,225

Keywords: plasticity, hard surface modeling, beginner, tutorial, 3d modeling, knob, motion design, modeling, c4d, cinema4d, overview, help

Id: ikR1VQOCdl0

Length: 38min 25sec (2305 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023