SubD with Booleans.. how the heck do we do it?

what's up guys in this video i want to talk a bit about boolean and sub d workflow a lot of people seem to get this confused and think it's impossible to do it's not it's pretty easy once you understand how it works so what i'm going to do is make like a random little shape here so just kind of extrude this up maybe something kind of like this and then maybe we'll extrude this over here i'm just making a random shape nothing crazy maybe move this down here i don't know then maybe extrude these two and pull them down and then what i'll do is just press ctrl 3 to run a sub d modifier and then just kind of tweak it a bit maybe pull that over here pull this up here just trying to make like an organic type of shape here nothing crazy and then what i want to do is right click to shade it smooth and then i'm going to go ahead and add a solidify modifier we'll increase the thickness here and then we'll go here and then turn on auto smooth to make it shade better now this is where i want to really show you how you can use the subd workflow with a boolean workflow simultaneously but things can get kind of tricky so i want to try to make this as intuitive to understand as possible so i'm going to do that here so the first thing i want you to understand about subdivision surface workflow is what it does to the topology so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go here and then turn on the wireframe feature so we'll go to viewport display and turn on wireframe and right now we can't actually see the true topology it's kind of like a basic you know overlay of the topology but if we go here and turn off the optimal display we can actually see it now notice how our levels viewport is at three now if i turn this to one obviously the topology is significantly lower i mean the polycount sorry significantly lower but it's also a lot more blocky but if i go into like three or four it continues to smooth out it looks a lot more organic right now in this case there's really not much of a need to go beyond like three because after three you can't really see too much of a difference in the roundness if i go here i mean it basically looks the same now 2 and 3 you can definitely see a difference so i'm just going to put this to 3 and go back to the wireframe view here so what we can do is we can run a boolean through this topology so i'm going to go ahead and add in a cylinder i'm going to just right click to shade it smooth and turn on auto smooth and then scale it up a bit now what i want to do is run a boolean through this thing so i'm just going to go ahead and run a simple difference boolean and you're going to see when you do that there's no issues at all you know a lot of people seem to think when you run a boolean on sub-d it doesn't work and the reason people say this is because they're trying to run sub-d after the boolean has already been executed notice right now the sub d is the first thing in the stack which means sub d goes first and then the solidify and then the boolean so the sub d has already finished executing before the boolean actually hits it and you're gonna see let me hide this real quick you're gonna see if i apply the um if i apply all these modifiers you're going to see we have lots of n-gons here if i go to select and then select all by trait faces by sides greater than 4 you're going to see we have a lot of n-gons around here so if you tried to run a sub-d on these n-guns then of course it wouldn't work but we're not doing that in this case we're running it after the sub-d so you know when people say you can't use them together they're saying it in this context they're saying you can't you know do this have it at the end because of course you can't because the n-gons are going to be hit by the sub-d so that's why you always want to have your sub-d as the first thing in the stack it's very important and then what we could do is we could go in here and run a bevel so we could drop a bevel on here now you're gonna see when you run the bevel you end up getting these artifacts and the reason these artifacts occur is because of the positioning of this um cut out notice that the cutout is positioned so when i run the bevel it starts to overlap with the other edges so what you could do is you can make the bevel smaller like this or if you wanted to make it bigger you might just have to find a more uniform location so you know i could move this somewhere in the center to where you're not really getting any artifacts with the overlaps and there we go that's really it the only other issue i notice here is these minor shading issues on the side so what you could do in this case is you could apply your sub d solidify and your boolean then just kind of get in here and clean it up so you could slide these vertices and merge them together manually but what i prefer to do is i prefer to use an add-on like mesh machine it kind of expedites the process so you know i could just go in here and run a boolean clean up and just do it in a few clicks like that it's not perfect but it does kind of save you some time and you're going to see guys we get some pretty damn good shading here if we go into mat cap and kind of look at the reflections i mean you might find some distortions here and there this where you could use like a shrink wrap workflow or you could possibly use a normal transfer workflow or you could even you know go in here and try to isolate the shading a bit but overall i mean this is the generic type of you know approach to this type of thing it's really straightforward and i just want to kind of clarify that you can use them together if you approach it in the right way and this kind of leads me into one last thing i want to mention i think i mentioned it in the last video as well but we're re-uploading all of our handbooks back to our website they're free we made them like a year ago but we took them down for some time they're back up we have the hard surface handbook the topology handbook and the boolean handbook they're not actually books they're videos but i think you'll really enjoy them and learn a lot of similar techniques compared to what i showed here so yeah check that out a lot of people don't even know they exist i'll put a link in the top of the description i think you'll really enjoy it and i will send you all sorts of cool stuff each week as well just about blender and if you guys want to see a shrink wrap type of workflow let me know i'd be happy to make a video on that i don't use it as much but it can be incredibly useful not only for cleaner topology but also for better shading so thanks for watching guys hope this video helped and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 40,903

Keywords: blender, blender subd modeling, blender tutorial, blender subd, subdivision surface, boolean, blender ngons, blender hard surface modeling, hard surface modeling blender, hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling, blender hard ops, hard ops, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, blender beginner, blender booleans, subd with booleans, 3d modeling, hard surface, blender bros, ponte ryuurui, josh gambrell, 3d

Id: 1IQbXf-MgL0

Length: 5min 53sec (353 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022