Slice and Bend meshes in Blender

[Music] hey guys chip here so as many of you may know recently Anthony and I introduced a new product called slice it and slice it was great for a number of reasons which I'm going to get to here in a minute but I just wanted to mention to you that we've updated this product in a significant way and we've added the ability to bend objects after their slice and the reason why this is interesting is because we've done it in a very simple way where we use wizzywig icons to tell you exactly how the Bend is going to happen and many of you may know how difficult it is to get objects to bend the way you want them to in blender as I've said in blender bending objects can be quite challenging and time consuming where you have to try and do things over and over to try and bend on the chosen Direction it typically requires a use of modifiers or curvs and creating an earth sphere from a flat map is particularly difficult however with bendit this process becomes much simpler and more efficient but first let's talk about the basic function ity of slice it and highlight some new features added since the last version the original version of slice it can divide objects in One Direction and then we added a second Direction so you can divide for instance an XY plane and it maintains Square divisions and the new version now supports dividing it in three directions as well and this is especially useful when creating meshes for displacement Maps as applying a subdivision modifier to meshes with varying face sizes can really cause issues so by using slice it users can quickly generate uniform faces that work well with subd modifiers allowing it for very quick creation of dense meshes for optimal displacement mapping and that's just one thing it can do so now let's talk about bended and I think maybe the best way to do that is to demonstrate exactly how it works okay so let's first just go over a little bit of the sliced functionality if we select our object and we said we want to go on the ZX plane so I'm going to go right here you see we have X here Z here and I say slice at 30 so it's going to give me 30 this way and then I'll just try and do its best to get squares in this direction that makes sense if I did 10 and slice it again you'd see we get 10 this way and then we're going get five this way so that's basically how that works and now if I just move it out a little farther I go all three and I say slice it it's going to do the same thing so I'm trying to get squares on all sides of that and I know that's the same as if I go over here and basically say not quite the same if I say subdivision surface simple and and then start doing this but what you'll see is none of these are really square and furthermore we're going to add a bevel on here move it at the top and so you can see see on the edges we get this real tons of slices so what we'd rather do is let's just delete this and let's take this and let's slice it now and you'll see that's a much better easier to use mesh and what that means is that when we want to add displacement to it or bend it or do anything we want to do with it it'll actually work quite a bit better right so one thing I should mention about slicing is that you really want the object to have no rotational aspects to it so if I go and to slice it and I just want to say let's slice it here it says object must have no rotation we're going to get that control a and Supply the rotation then when we slice it we're going to get the right slice the other thing I'll mention is that also you can actually select faces to slice and when you slice it in edit mode you're just going to slice that face so I can go here slice that one if I want to make this one maybe 20 and I want it to be in the cyz and slice it I'm going get 20 so anyway that's another neat feature of slice it and now let's talk about bend it a little bit so bend it we can slice while we Bend so if I look at this and let's say we want to bend the x axis or actually this way if we're going to bend the x- axis maybe we go let me get thin like this so we're going to say we're going to bend it around the x-axis and I'm going to say give me a slice every two deg this is how many degrees or this says don't slice at all but this will if I've already sliced it I'll turn that off and the bed scale is how far so 0.5 is going to be 180° if I said bend it you see that it's going to do something weird and that's because it's very difficult to tell which direction to bend it so we just say flip and bend undo flip and bed it and that'll get it so that's why that is and that's because sometimes an object might be like this and this bend it will actually work correctly so the the objects can actually be facing different directions but what you'll will notice is that it does go ahead and creates the correct number of slices in the direction that we want it to bend in this case it's every two de so I'm going to undo that so now you understand bend it and flip and bend let's just make it one here and let just say bend it and that'll make a complete circle and we might want to add a weld modifier to just a weld it just go in here and say and I'll seal it up also notice that this is the curve right here that's the curve that we're using to bend it so I can take that curve and I can scale it and do things with it also so that's another thing to keep in mind and the other thing I can do is I can open the curve so this is neat so when I open the curve I've got this let's just tab into this curve and let's just go ex delete this one and I want to delete this one and I want to delete this okay I take this one and let's rotate it so it's just 90 and bring it down somewhere like this and this say maybe over doesn't matter say e and I move it e I'm extruding it right so I can e r e r that and then all I need to do is just go back out of this take this object and we're just going to move this along here and I can move it right around that object so that's really cool that's how I made this uh little cable right here as you can see that's how that's done so the the open curve feature is a really neat feature also and then obviously when we're done with our Bend I can say baked Bend Bend and now basically this is just a complete mesh there's nothing we can edit it at any stage anymore so that's bend it so one control that's that works with both bend it and slice it is this wireframe so let's say we want to basically slice this in all three axises and let's give it 40 and we'll select that object and we'll say slice it now we don't know how dense that mesh is we have no idea and that's what this button does it just toggles on the wireframe it's literally the exact same thing as right here toggling this it get it just puts it right here so we have a real fast way of looking at it let's just talk for a second and show you a little bit about how this tire was done it was done actually with just a very simple image so this image was brought in as images to plane so I could basically create a polygon I use the actual polygon that this was on and just to get the aspect ratio correct and this was the actual plane that had the uh image on it so we took that plane and I basically add just a little thickness and then I bent it and I used the open curve setting to to build this and I converted the curve to a mess went ahead and mirrored it so I can get it exactly right the way I wanted to then convert it back to a curve and it just automatically lines up like that and then it's a real simple thing to I can bake this and then turn that directly into the tire tread using a 360 bend around the y AIS right here so if I select this and let's just make it let's look at the wireframe see what we have yeah we have a pretty dense mesh but we don't have anything going that direction and I might just just get it on the side here let's look at it close and we'll go into slice it maybe put it Z I want to I going all the way across this way actually Z would go this way I want to go across the x- axis so let's do X and what I'll do is I know I want this to go Circle so I want it to be like one every degre so I'm going to make it 360 and I'll slice it now I could also just leave this here on the slice setting here but sometimes this will actually depending on the what it's doing it may add a second a second slice so if I'm going to do two bins I'll always on the second one I'll always manually make sure that I get it correct there we go so that looks pretty good and now it's really just a very simple matter of we want to bend it around the y- AIS like we're showing right here and the bend scale is going to be one I don't need slice turned on I just say bend it and it goes almost instantaneously and I'll go ahead and as we mentioned earlier want add a weld got rid of that little seam right in there and that's really it now the issues just apply the correct displacement maps and if you haven't seen my Ghost in the Shell videos you might check that out for how to create and apply displacement Maps as well as optimize them basically generate them in a way that you can later on optimize them so you can get much lower triangle count so that's the new slic it bendit and you can get it at blender market and I hope you like the video and if you have any questions jump over on our Discord and ask them and we'll look forward to seeing you online bye

Channel: chippwalters

Views: 3,062

Keywords: Descript

Id: LGuPIA4_8Oc

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024