Rhino Sub D Beginner Tutorial (Easy)

in this tutorial we're going to take a first look at the new sub d tools available in rhino 7. sub d modeling in rhino is essentially taking a leaf out of more organic modelling softwares such as blender or maya and these tools are pretty new to rhino and don't yet quite reach the capabilities of these other softwares so this will be a quick crash course into the basics of sub d modeling so what is sub d modeling in rhino sub d is a new object type available in rhino you might be more familiar with some of the more common object types such as poly surfaces or surfaces in rhino which constitute nurbs geometries as well as as well as other object types like meshes so nurbs or non-uniform rational b splines is a modeling technique that harnesses the power of mathematics to represent geometry take a sphere for instance a sphere exists nowhere in the real world it's actually a mathematical equation and this equation is represented as a nurbs geometry and it's completely smooth and has no flat faces a sphere in mesh modeling however is made up from the combination of mesh faces that serve as an approximation of its surface the geometry still looks like a sphere but if we inspect it closely we can see the polygonal sphere is jagged and made from smaller parts now the difference with sub d is that sub d geometries are spline based geometries and they're kind of like nurbs geometries however they are modeled from an unsmooth base geometry like a mesh which enables us greater control over the manipulation of the geometry whilst giving us a continuous representation of curve geometry which is essentially the best of both worlds so let's start by modeling our first object using the sub d tools in rhino we're going to start with what are called sub d primitives and i've got a new fresh rhino7 file open to begin with i'm just going to jump into this perspective mode over here and i am going to start by modeling a sub d plane so make sure you go into the sub d tools tab in rhino 7 and click on the create sub d plane object just here when we click on it we're going to be asked as we would be to draw a plane normally in rhino with a bunch of options to how we want to draw draw it i'm going to do a typical draw of it just note that you get the option to add x and y accounts which is basically the divisions of your sub sub d geometry so i'm just going to go and click in space and i'll make my geometry maybe 100 by 100 millimeters and hit enter might just change the shaded mode so we can see that more clearly so you see that i've got a division of 2 in the x and 2 in the y direction on my base geometry i'm also going to create a sub d box so i'm going to click on sub d box up here i'm going to change my x y and z count to 1 1 and 1 and i'm going to go ahead and draw a box like this approximately the same size and you'll see straight away that i don't actually get a box output i'm getting a sphere so why is that basically subd geometries have kind of two representations that we can view in rhino one is a smooth version of our geometry which is representing that kind of continuous representation of a curve geometry and the other is the base geometry which is the more jagged low resolution version of our sub d model and to toggle between these types of geometries or these previews we can just hit the tab button in rhino so now you'll see the cube that i initially draw and the flat plane that i initially drew and when i tab again you'll see them both smoothed out so objects with higher levels of division will not smooth as significantly as ones with lower amounts of division so it's really important to take note of your x y and z count for your geometries that you're creating so for example if i go and create a another sub d box and i change my x count to 10 my y count to 10 and my z count to 10 and i'll just draw it over here we get you know about a similar looking box when i but when i hit the tab button this guy smooths out to basically a sphere and this one retains its shape because it's got all these control points that are you know basically preventing the smoothing from occurring holistically around the entire object so generally speaking low resolution primitives are much easier to quickly work with in sketch once you get to a higher resolution it's really difficult to easily manipulate your base geometry when i'm modeling i usually always begin with a box or a plane because i find them the most easiest to manipulate into other types of geometry but there's a whole collection of other primitives that we can use to start with in sub d that we can look at right now so we could come up to this tab and we can create a sub d cone and once again you'll have all these options that enable you to control the resolution of these objects i'm not going to bother right now because i just want to do a quick demo of this so our cone will look something like that and we can toggle between smoothed and unsmooth mode with the tab key we've also got a truncated cone very similar tool but just with the top taken off we have the opportunity to create a sub d cylinder we can also create a sub d sphere just move that over here and we can also create an ellipsoid a disordered sphere if you'd like and the last one that we haven't looked at yet is the sub d taurus it looks something like that and you can see how that looks as you toggle between smooth and unsmooth geometry types so those are the base primitives that are available to us in the sub d tool kit with rhino and everything you model will start from one of these things and it's about how you manipulate the geometry to create something else that is most important with these tools so i'm going to delete a few of these things i'm going to keep the sphere and my initial cubes over here so to quickly model sub d objects in rhino we need to make efficient use of something called the gumball tool and you'll probably be familiar with this if you use rhino quite a bit but you can turn the gumball tool on down here so you just come down and left click on gumball and it'll go bold and now when i click on an object you'll see i get this little icon that is basically a little transformative icon it's going to allow me to click on you know the arrows and drag my geometry along a defined axis so in this case this is the y-axis along the x-axis or even along the z-axes we can also rotate our geometry or we could even scale our geometry using the gumball tool so that's really helpful tool because it saves us having a type up here you know like scale in the command line to manipulate all of our objects and because we're going to make so many small manipulations when we're modeling in sub-d it's really important for us to have the gumball on to quickly make those changes on the fly one other tool i highly recommend you turn on when you're sub d modeling is the grid snap tool here you'll find as you model in subd that accuracy becomes less of a major issue for you or less of a goal generally in rhino you're modeling for accuracy because you're trying to make or fabricate the things that you're outputting but with sub d modeling it's more of like a sketching tool so if i turn on the grid snap and i scale things it just gives me a little bit of accuracy in case i want to get things into a reasonably correct location but also still enables me the flexibility of freeform modeling just you know dragging things by moving scaling and rotating the other really important trick to know about the gumball tool is something called the shift control click tool which allows us to select into a piece of geometry and you might be familiar with this because it exists in typical rhino geometries as well but basically if i shift control and click on the top of this cube i've got here or this box i'm able to select the top face only which gives me the ability to easily manipulate only that top face so i could move it i could rotate it or i could scale it and i'm holding down shift to do a uniform scale but i could also do a one directional scale by letting go of shift i can also extrude objects by hitting on that little circular button there so that's a really important tool it can work on edges as well we can move you know particular edges and we can also move vertices in our sub d geometry so this is what i was talking about before where it's much easier to manipulate a low resolution sub d object than it is to manipulate a higher resolution say for example if i wanted to scale this one up in the z direction or just move this top face up i could shift control and click and easily move it up but if i wanted to do the same for this one i suddenly have to go through and select all of these guys if i don't get them all i get an object that starts to look a bit distorted and ugly so it's really important to try and keep your sub-d modeling as low resolution as possible as you're going so one last really important tool i want to talk about with the gumball is if we right click on the gumball down here we actually get a few settings that we're able to turn on and off so we can easily turn the gumball on or off there's a few reset gumball options as well that you can look into up here but most importantly what we're interested in is these alignment gumball options so right now we're currently aligning to an object and what that means is if i shift control click on say this face my gumball aligns specifically to that face and we can see this more profoundly if we actually click on the sphere so if i go shift control click you see my gumball now aligns to the face of that sphere so if i shift control click on that again and i right click on gumball i also have the option to align the gumball to the c plane which is this preview plane we've got here in rhino so if i change that i can easily you know go and align back so when we want to move things in x y and z based on the world coordinates we would either go to our c plane or a line to world and if we wanted to align to an object we would change it to object so this is really important if i wanted to you know extrude this face using this circle tab it's way more likely i'm going to want to do it in the normal direction of this surface than i am to want to do it in the seaplane direction like this okay so it's important just to be aware that you can swap between those things and we will do this a lot as we go through and model in sub d so just remember aligning to the c plane or world is going to give you a much more defined x y and z directional transform and aligning to the object is going to align to the very specific object that you're selecting in your tools so to get the hang of some of the different sub d tools we're going to model up a collection of abstract objects based on a descriptive adjective so the adjectives i've chosen for this tutorial include squashed ribbed splayed crossed and pinched and we're going to try and model something up that represents these adjectives just to get a feel for these tools you can of course choose your own adjectives and practice as you go as well so to do this i'm just going to start a new rhino file so i'm going to go file new not going to save changes to that and i'm going to go large objects millimeters and we'll go from there so the first tool we're going to look at is the extrude tool and we're going to try and create a squashed geometry using the extrude tool so i'm going to just rotate around here and open my sub details and we're going to create or start with a sub d box i'm going to make sure my x y and z count are set to 1 1 and 1 because i want that to be as low resolution as possible and i'm just going to create a box that's 10 sorry not 10 i want to create a box that is 100 so 100 by 100 by 100 there we go i'll just change to shaded mode so we can see it and we can tab between those to see our box preview i'm in a model in smooth preview for now and the extrude tool is actually up here where we've got extrude subd so we could click on that and we could start you know clicking on a face it'll prompt us to select the sub d faces or edges that we want to extrude and we'll press enter and then it's going to ask us to you know extrude based on a direction of sorts which is a little bit tricky because i want to extrude in this direction you can hold down the shift key and kind of get that and we'll get a bit of an object that gets extruded onto it so if i hit the tab you'll see that i now have a new kind of box it's almost like two boxes are attached because i've extruded that face out but i don't really want to keep using this command line and having to extrude over and over again so i'm going to undo that guy instead we're going to use the gumball so i'm just going to make sure that my gumball is aligned to my object right now i'm going to go shift control click into my gumball and i am going to extrude this guy out here and what i might do is i might actually go and push him inwards a little bit i'm just trying to see how that would work and maybe scale him in just a little bit i think actually i might scale my geometry up um just by double just because i want a little bit more than i'm getting from the grid snap right now so i've got a little bit of an extruded face going through in our object like that so to get this squashed geometry i'm going to try and create a few layers of squashing so i'm going to shift control click into this surface here and do another little extrude and then i'm going to scale this one up so you start to see how we get this kind of squashed face or this appearance i'm going for i'm going to click on this little bubble again and extrude another face out i might scale that guy down and pull him in so i'm just swapping in between my smooth and unsmooth modes at the moment so i can really quickly manipulate this geometry now i've kind of talked a little bit about selecting all the faces that we can in these objects but i haven't talked much about selecting the edges so i'm going to double click on this edge and i'm going to move him back a little bit basically double clicking on an edge will try and find things called a loop so i'll do that again if i double click on this edge holding shift control click you'll see how it selects the loop one click will select that edge but a double click will try and select that loop which just gives me a little bit more control over the geometry that i'm kind of manipulating so it's all about massaging the geometry until you're kind of happy with it so i'm going to make that a little bit smaller there then i might go and do another extrusion out here maybe i'll make this one a scaled up one to start to get a bit more squashing going on in that geometry maybe slightly bigger and then we'll move this guy inwards just a little bit in fact maybe that guy wants to move outwards looking at that i might actually scale this one up just a little bit as well and i'm holding shift to do a bit of a scale and then i might actually select this loop here and maybe scale this outside guy up so we get a little bit of a casing around my squashed object so then you can of course you know go and tweak your geometry as you like like moving these guys in maybe moving him out to make him a little bit rounder but that's kind of the basics as to how you might go ahead and start using the extrude component so rather than using this command up here it's much easier to shift control click into your object and extrude using the little dot that appears on the gumball so one thing that's really helpful to do when you're modeling sub d geometries is to make copies of these guys so i'm going to hold down alt and drag with my gumball to make a copy basically if you say you've created a geometry you're really happy with and then you continue manipulating it further you might make a mistake or screw it up because it is a little bit of an exploratory modeling task the subd tools and it's really important to kind of make copies of the geometry as you go so you have a record there so if i go and experiment with this guy now i always have this one sitting here as a reference to always come back to if i mess it all up somehow so make sure you're constantly making copies of your geometry as you go i'm actually just scale this one up again i feel like i underscaled these guys and i'm not getting the snap on the grids that i would have loved from the beginning so i've got these two kind of geometries that are sitting here now that i've modeled up using my extrude component what happens if we wanted to maintain the curvature of this object without having this unsmooth version that we see when we hit the tab button in sub-d tools there's a command called subdivision that's going to enable us to add complexity and resolution to our geometry to hold its form uh much more significant so that it doesn't become this kind of blocky mess once it's smoothed and i'm going to demonstrate this first just by creating a sub d plane here in fact i'm going to make it without any well one x and one y so it's just going to be a flat plane like that if i click on that guy there's a tool in the sub d toolkit called subdivide so i'm going to hit subdivide just here and you can see straight away it's gone and added a subdivision to my geometry so previously i had a you know one by one square and now i've got a subdivision that's cutting me down the four so what happens if i hit subdivision again basically what the subdivide tool is going to do is it's going to try and split each of these faces into four as well so i'll go ahead and do that like that and it's starting to hold its form a little bit more compared to what it does in the original instance so we can visualize this a little bit better with a box that's one by one by one as we know that will subdivide into a sphere but if we add a few subdivisions like that we're basically creating a low resolution version of our smooth output so in this instance if i grab this guy and i hit the the subdivision tool here you'll see my low resolution version of my squash geometry starts to look a lot like my um high resolution object or a smooth version of that object so it basically adds a little bit of complexity and allows us to hold that form which is kind of sometimes important i know i've mentioned that it's better to model in a low resolution geometry but there are some instances where you want to maintain or freeze that level of smoothness in the low resolution version of the geometry the sub d toolkit also comes with a really fantastic and powerful tool called the reflect tool so this isn't to be confused with the mirror tool in rhino so if i were to type mirror you know what's going to happen we're going to get just you know a copy mirrored version of the object we've selected the reflect tool actually reflects our sub d geometry along an axis deletes half of the geometry and then joins it together with its reflection and i'll demonstrate this live with my subdavide squashed object over here so i'm going to just pull my squash geometry over to the side here and i'm going to give it a slight rotation of negative 30 degrees like this and what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to hover it over the top of this y-axis because i'm going to use the y axis as my reflection plane i might try and get it so it's just poking this edge here it's just poking ahead of that y axis just like that there so i'm going to come up to my sub d tools toolbar and i'm going to find the reflect subject d object component here so i'm going to click on that guy it's going to ask me to apply this to a sub d component which will be this one here and then we'll get the option to draw our own reflection plane which you can do by clicking and drawing in a direction i find it a lot easier to control if i'm just using one of the axes in this case i'm using the green or the y axis so i'm going to click on y axis and that will serve as our reflection plane here and then what it's going to do is it's going to ask us which side we want to keep so remember how i said one side is going to be kept and then mirrored and joined on and the other side is going to be deleted i want to keep this side on the left here so i'm going to just click arbitrarily on the left hand side of the axis and then when it asks you to snap to the reflection plane i'm just going over the automatic settings for now and hit enter and you'll see i get a reflected and joined version of my geometry so it makes my initial squash geometry slightly more interesting kind of like it's squashed from both directions and we also get this strange little shaded output based on the reflection that we just kind of proposed on top of this geometry whenever you see this shaded reflection occurring after you've done a reflection on your sub d component make sure that you're aware that this means that a reflection is still applied to the object so what that means is if i manipulate any part of this geometry say if i shift control click onto one of these faces and i move that out it's going to have the same effect on this side here which is not always what you want sometimes it's really great because it means that we can do reflective transformations that might be relevant to the modeling exercise we're doing but sometimes you might just want to edit this side of the component so to turn this reflection off we need to go back into our reflect subject object option and click on one of the or click on the object that has been reflected and there's an option to remove existing reflex symmetry so i'm going to click on that guy and the shade of grey will be removed and now if i moved this face we can shuffle that object over there so i'm pretty happy with this squash geometry so i'm going to move these guys to the side and then we're going to start looking at how we might go ahead and model up a ribbed geometry let's take a look at the bridge tool in the sub d tool kit and try and create a ribbed geometry so once again we're going to begin with the primitive and i'm going to use the mesh box tool i'm going to make sure my xyz is one one and one i'm just going to kind of arbitrarily model up a bit of a rectangular object here so i might just start by doing a bit of extruding with the gumball i'll pull this guy up here maybe move it around a little bit and give it a little bit of articulation tiny bit of movement so you can kind of see how it's a good little sketch tool i might move out this way a little bit and then maybe i'll oops maybe i'll extrude an object down this way maybe down that way and then maybe another one over here um so what would happen if i wanted to create a join between these two faces here so this guy here and this guy here the first thing i want to do is i want to imagine how that would happen essentially we're trying to create four new faces one that would bridge on this side another bridge on the outside and then two that would cap the top and the bottom of that and then we'd have to remove these two faces to enable that to happen so we can do that i might just go and shift control click on those two faces and just hit the delete button and we'll get these little holes in our subd object so if you toggle between smooth and unsmooth you'll have a geometry that looks something like this and to create this connection where you want to use something called the bridge tool so the bridge tool can be found up here it's got the little two arrows i'm going to click on it and it's going to ask us to select the first set of edges or faces to bridge so i'm going to double click on this edge here and of course when we double click we're going to select that edge loop and i'm going to hit enter and then i've got to select the second set of edges to bridge i'm going to double click over here and our sub d tools should be smart enough to bridge between those two things which you can see here and you get a few little bridge options so we can increase the number of segments that are occurring between this bridge so if i increase this you see we get more divisions that are occurring in that geometry we have the option to unjoin them or join them um and then we have the option to change the crease value um sorry that was me just toggling with the tab key there um i'm sorry not the crease value the straightness so you get like a curvature through the object there i'm going to go with one segment for this one which you won't see any variation in the straightness here and i'm just going to hit ok and then we've managed to go ahead now and create kind of a nice ribbing effect in our geometry so i'm going to do a little bit more modeling on this what i might do is i might go ahead and keep extruding out with this guy so grab that here and then i might extrude this one up here and then we could extrude that guy again extrude him again and extrude again like that then maybe we want to bridge between these two pretty sure we can actually just select the faces as well and use the bridge command through them so if you don't want to delete those that's a little bit of a shortcut that will enable you to go and bridge between objects as well and then you could start you know adding even more complexity to this output by trying to potentially extrude away in three dimensions so maybe what we want to do is pull this guy out here and then maybe we can go and select that one and just continuing to like slowly extrude and create geometry maybe we pull out this way like that and start to create really easily a bit more of a complex geometrical outcome and then we can bridge between these guys again this time i might add a couple of extra segments like so to kind of create my ribbed geometry and i'll keep extruding out here and sometimes to make the form a little bit more organic it's good to um you know add some variation to that guy i'll extrude that one up here again then we could bridge between these two here i'll make the segments one just like that so go ahead and practice some of your extruding and bridging together in tandem see if you can create some kind of ribbed geometry similar to what i've been out of create with those tools once you're happy with it we can start moving on and looking at another tool as well maybe i'll bridge this guy here actually just as one last little bridge like that so we get a nice kind of 3d ribbed effect coming through that object so now we've got a squash geometry an unmirrored squash geometry and a ribs geometry i might just label these squashed oops squashed oops gonna let me scale it's annoying ribbed cool and the next geometry we're going to create is splayed actually one last thing that i might mention about this ribbed geometry is you might have noticed so far in all of our sub d modeling we've created only quad faces or faces with four sides basically and sometimes in our underlying mesh topology or sorry sometimes in our underlying sub d topology we want to make use of triangular faces so say for example here i want to transition to a more smoother kind of turn of this corner rather than getting this hard edge i might want to create a more triangular element for this little piece here and i can do that by very simply just selecting that edge there and deleting it and you'll see i get a much more smoother transition of that geometry coming through there i might want to do the same up here so if you're ever looking for a smoother transition of your geometry just be aware that you can try and use some triangular faces mixed in with the quad or four sided faces in your sub d modeling and it's very much about trying to pick and choose the correct moments where you want to actually go ahead and use those triangular faces instead of the quad faces so just be aware for those more smooth transitions to try and test out some of those triangular faces with this modeling technique so let's take a look now at the edge loop tool with the subd toolkit and we're going to try and create a geometry that would be described as a splayed geometry making use of the edge loop tool so once again i'm going to start with a sub d box that's one by one by one in the x y and z axes i'm going to make it a little bit more rectangular this time i'm going to swap into unsmooth mode with the tab and we're going to come up here to the insert edge loop or edgeling edge ring tool so i'm going to click on that normally in like blender or maya i always go for what i'd call loop i've never really really heard of ring i don't think until i've gotten into sub d with rhino but i want to go with ring from my experimentation so far with it ring if we click on one of these edges we'll try and select all of the edges in our geometry that are kind of you know running perpendicular to one another and if i hit enter what will enable us to do is to create basically a ring of edges around our output so i'm going to click one here and i'm going to do it again i want to do a ring and create them you know here and then we'll create another ring going around this side like so in fact i actually wanted to do it this way so we'll just go and perk that up like that and i actually also wanted in fact i want to add one extra ring to this so in here and i might just slide this edge over like that and like that so what i'm going to try and create from this is a geometry that's almost like a branching effect that splays out from lots of different directions as we kind of move up so i'm actually going to extrude from multiple faces this time so i'm going to hit the extrude button like that and what they'll actually do is they'll all stick together so they're not separate boxes that we've extruded up if we extruded them one by one like if i did this then this you'll notice if i grab the top face it's disconnected from its neighbor but when you extrude them all together that disconnect doesn't occur and the faces get stuck to one another so i'll kind of move those guys over to the side here like that and i'm going to do the same for these four up here we're going to extrude up and move it across like that and then we can start splaying out again so i'm going to splay out individually now so i might actually grab these two move them across like that grab these two extrude up and move out across like that like grab these two extrude oops didn't get the extrude there got the move extrude up and move across like this and then these ones as well will extrude up missed it again can be a bit frustrating sometimes and then we'll move them across like that so we're starting to get a little bit of a branching effect in our geometry and now that i've got all of those ones i can start to go and create some branching effects so if i hit tab you'll see i get quite a blobby kind of geometry coming through here i might just manipulate these things a little bit like maybe we move these edge rings over a little bit get a little bit more of a splay coming out in this geometry type so as always your sub d modeling is a little bit by eye trying to you know massage that into an output that you're kind of happy with until you kind of splay that thing out a little bit so you can sit around and manipulate this yourself until you get a nice display through cool so there's my splayed geometry um i'm not super happy with it so let's try and add some articulation to our splayed object using something called the crease tool in the sub d modeling toolkit so the crease tool essentially turns our softer edges into hard edges so for example if i have this edge here and i come up to the crease tool which sits here called add crease and i click on it you'll notice that the preview of that outcome becomes very much closer to the hard edge that we see in the unsmooth geometry and i can go and you know add a few of these creases into my geometry so hit crease like that and it gives me a very different articulation on the representation of my object so i might add some creases to the top as well and type increase like that in fact i might add creases to the overall top because i don't like these blobby edges that i've got going on up here like that and maybe a bit of articulation to these kind of interior ones as well that a little bit looks a bit better and then we can oops we can start to manipulate you know this geometry a little bit more we could also with the creases our kind of uncreased outputs can give us a little bit more of a articulation on the surface so if we move those guys in maybe we can crease the bottom so we have a flat base so i'll go and crease at the bottom and then i once again move these guys in so we get a bit of jaggedness coming through in our splayed object like that and it really looks it starts to feel like those are splitting i wonder if um if we crease this yeah that probably adds a little bit to it so we could crease that interior edge i'm not sure if creasing the whole loop is going to be aesthetically pleasing we can see it's not bad actually so creasing gives us a little bit more of um you know articulation and change in the way we're representing that geometry from the more jagged version to the smooth one it just gives us those nicer harder edges that sometimes are a little bit welcome so you don't get too lost in the blobs like we did in the rib geometry just before so i'm pretty happy with that splay geometry i'm going to move all of these objects over here there and next we're going to have a look at the bevel command in the subd and we're going to look at it in conjunction with creating a crossed geometry so i'll just get a crossed adjective out here so as always i'm going to start with a sub d box one by one by one in the x y and z account and i'm actually going to start by rotating it by 45 degrees i'll move it up here and just make sure you have your gumball set to align to object right now so i'm going to select in on this face and extrude out twice and i might do this in unsmooth mode so i get a nice evenness through these extrusions so extrude again here and then i might extrude out here so i'm creating a bit of a cross quite literally with my geometry oops didn't mean to do that and we'll extrude here so if we go smoothly start to get that i might go one extra out so two extrusions on each kind of leg of the cross the arms as well like that and so we have a nice crossed geometry here cool and so what we're going to do is coming up to our um insert edge ring tool i'm going to make sure i select ring and we're going to actually add a ring going along here so hit enter and go down the middle of there and we're going to do a similar one on this side so edge loop ring like that just to add a little bit more detail and you'll see the cross starts to hold it form a little bit more easily so we already have like something that looks a little bit like a cross geometry here what i want to do is basically try and add a little bit more articulation and detail to the surface of this cross so i am going to now select the bevel tool in the sub d toolkit and so the bevel tool is just up here and what it enables to do is it lets us do something with the edges that basically kind of splits them off and adds detail to them so i'm going to do it to this edge loop first and hit enter and you'll see what it does is it goes from one segment and extends it out to two so essentially we're going from a really kind of smooth rounded cross here and we're kind of trying to turn that into something a little bit more rectangular but also that just has a little bit more detail so i'll do that for that side i'm going to do the same thing here and just extend that off we can add detail to this so we can do like five segments to the bevel and really add detail but for the purposes of this modeling task we want to have about one just like that so now we've gone using the bevel tool and added in a collection of faces in our cross geometry and the next step here that i want to kind of try and do is basically select this interior cross that we've now created and extrude out from that guy to create a little bit more articulation i'm not super happy with the way these edges are forming so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select these guys and because we're moving our gumboy or manipulating via object if i select those four they're all in alignment and i can actually scale them inwards nicely i might turn my grid snap on sorry turned off by accident and we're able to kind of real with a lot of control just manipulate the size of that cross that we've got coming on top of our crossed geometry so i'll select these four now move those guys in these four as well and move those guys in so you can kind of see what we're doing a little bit there maybe what we want to do is make it even more defined and potentially move these ones in so we get like in the unsmooth version it's a bit truncated inwards but what it does is it just highlights that kind of joint that we've got there so we can go and do that for this one as well move them in this one here and this last one here we can do the same thing move it in like that so we get a little bit more articulation on our geometric face so now that we've got cross geometry we can use some of this subd modeling to our advantage by doing some freeform editing with this output in rhino what i'm first going to do is i'm going to do a copy of this guy because i'm kind of happy with the cross geometry that we've got in fact i'll move him over here to the side so i can clearly move some things around so because we have this you know control over shift control click every time we go into our sub d geometry we can quite easily just you know select a kind of part of the geometry that we want to quickly manipulate and i'm going to try and select the middle part of my cross geometry here and what this enables us to do is really quickly kind of just move things around i'm going to change over to our world plane here and i'm going to try and create a little bit of a almost distorted cross instead like we could even potentially try and do a bit of a distortion through rotation and movement here so we just get something that's a little bit more dynamic and you know it's really easy for you to control these things by just moving or selecting multiple kind of faces and vertices in the sub d and just easily manipulating them you can even select the edge loops like that so all of that control immediately gives us you know the ability to go from what's a very symmetrical cross something that's much more dynamic by doing a bit of free form editing and you know making the most of these sub d tools in rhino so i'm pretty happy with that cross i might move all these guys over and we'll get on to our last adjective which was a pinched geometry so go and type in pinched like that and to create our pinched geometry we're going to take a look at the stitch tool in the subd modeling catalog as well i'm going to start with the primitive and for once i'm not going to start with a box i'm actually going to go and start with a sub d plane and i'm just going to make the x and y count one and one and we'll just model a little plane out here like this oops so what i'm going to try and do here i'm going to kind of do this pretty quickly i'm just going to pull out a little bit of this geometry in fact maybe what we do instead actually is we'll model our plane and we'll give it an x count of 3 and a y count of 3 like this and i'm just going to delete the middle of that geometry like that so i've got a bit of a hole in it might make the hole slightly bigger than what it currently is i'm going to move it up a little bit and we're going to extrude these three faces downwards like this i might move them across oops i didn't want to do that just get those three edges again and move them across so we're starting to get a geometry that starts to look a little bit like that and then i'm going to extrude down again and i'll move it across here and what i want to do is actually try and align this guy here this guy over here oops so we're almost aligning to the edges in fact we can align to the edges so i'm going to use a just a normal rhino tool command because we are able to actually manipulate our sub d geometry with very typical rhino controls so i'm going to use the setpoint command in this instance and i'm going to align the points of this edge here to what looks like the y axis so i'm going to set all the y's no it's the x that i want to do it because they're all at this x value that's right and that'll just nicely align it to that edge but on the same plane that i had before i can do the same thing with this guy and then i'm going to move this one out a little bit in fact i want to move him in i think i've put the wrong ones out for my pinch geometry yeah have a little bit so how's that looking it's not bad maybe what we want to do is just give a little bit more breathing room to these vertices here like that so we're kind of getting this funnel that's coming through in our pinched outcome i'm going to rotate that guy by 45 and then once again i'm going to use a more typical rhino command which is going to be the mirror command so i'll just mirror that guy here and now we have two separate sub d geometries but what we're going to do is we're going to stitch up these edges so they become one geometry we can and we can use that by using this stitch mesh or sub d edges tool up here so i'm going to click on that it's going to ask me the first set of vertex set vertices or edges so i'm going to go with these three here and hit enter and then these three here is my second set and i'll go and stitch those guys up nicely and i'm gonna do the same thing for the top so i'm gonna hit enter again or we'll just click on it so stitch oops set the first set which is those three hit enter select the second set which is not that one those three and we'll align it to the middle here like that and now we've stitched those two pieces of geometry together and we've created kind of this kind of pinched outcome so to accentuate the pinching of this geometry i'm actually going to pull in these edges a little bit like that and really get a pinching outcome coming through maybe we can pinch these guys in as well and then just for you know argument's sake we've got this kind of like pinching [Music] idea coming through i want to potentially pinch these edges in a little bit so a lot of your sub d modeling is tweaking aesthetic changes based on you know the design intent you're going for you could even start to think about you know giving this a little bit more form so maybe this guy could go upwards and then these ones could go down so it's almost a bit more of an undulating effect or maybe they could go up depends on what you want to kind of get as an output here maybe you can get a bit of asymmetry through those geometries as well like that and there's our pinch geometry cool so there's our collection of final geometries that we've gone and created and hopefully that's been an interesting crash course into some of the sub d tools that you can use in rhino following on from this i'd highly recommend you try and pick your own adjectives and go and you know practice with some of these tools we've looked at in this course and see if you can create your own little geometries is a good exercise to get familiar with the sub-d modeling toolkit in rhino

Channel: Grasshopper Tutorials

Views: 16,639

Keywords: Rhino Grasshopper, rhino sub d, rhino tutorial, sub d tutorial, sub d beginner, sub d

Id: WgUO5JaQ3Zo

Length: 50min 5sec (3005 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021