The BEST Bowling Ball (with blender)

for some reason i want to make a bowling ball animation don't ask me why but i want to make the bowling ball and the pins and the simulation and the start of that of course begins with the bowling ball so this tutorial is going to teach you how to make a bowling ball i don't know if you need a tutorial on this but we're going to be talking about how to do this in a procedural fashion which i don't think is something a lot of people cover so let's get into it boeing ball it's probably not a cube it's probably a sphere so let's get rid of the cube and instead add in a sphere for this geometry by the way this is not the geometry i'm going to use uh to drive the simulation we'll talk about that in two tutorials from now just forget about it um even even if that's the case right we do want this to be a smoother thing because if this was simulated it'd be like very jagged it'd be like flying everywhere some kid would be hit in the line of fire you know so i'm just gonna take this and multiply the segments by two and you can just type this in right here and also the rings by two look at that that's a smooth bowling ball make it shade smooth okay um now uh really the only other modeling we need to do most of this is going to be like procedural shading and stuff um the only other modeling we need to do is make three holes and by the way i loaded in reference because i'm a professional the holes come in very different shapes and sizes you know uh some people have very lengthy kind of slender man fingers you won't want them touching you and some boys have thicky thicky fingers right um a point is the distance between these two varies depending on the bowling ball but what seems to be the same is these two are closer than than the third one and sometimes the third hole is bigger uh so that is what we're going to try to emulate i guess um to do this we are going to use a trick that is going to make your life super easy listen i'm not going to do the topology thing right we're not going to mess around with this and take forever just to cut some circles here's the fast way of doing it you're going to need this tool over here and chances are you do not have that by the way 2.92 alpha make sure you're using 2.83 or above i believe you're not going to have this tool by default i don't believe um if you do not have it go to edit preferences and then experimental if you don't have experimental in interface make sure to enable developers extra you can see it's kind of like a little konami code right there whatever make sure you enable that and then the add object tool okay and that's going to give you this tool the reason it's useful is we can click add cylinder this is the object that's going to cut out of it and the point of this is if we draw on a cylinder it does it um along the normal of the mesh which looks weird from this like orthographic view let me see if i can get back there looks weird from the orthographic view but generally it's fine so this again lets us add in a cylinder off the normal otherwise we'd have to like do it manually and it'd suck um so yeah that's the use of it so i'm gonna add in two actually just one we want this to be procedural uh one circle let's say around here so i'm going to click i'm going to drag shift to make it a um one by one aspect ratio base which is what we want we want it to be a circle not a cylinder so whoops so again click drag shift and then also alt i think it's alt centers it on the selection which is useful if you really want to pick the spot by hand so shift and alt and then i'm just going to drag it out like that okay so now we have a cylinder that has a circular base coming out of this and we can actually up the vertices a bit 48 i didn't even do this in the original but that's fine uh we're going to take this and we want to move it inwards towards the cylinder and you're like oh how do we do that we can only move z x y stuff like that you dummy change to local coordinate system okay this is the trick so this cylinder since it's oriented weirdly has its own coordinate system where now on local coordinates z-axis goes inwards and outwards it's a beautiful trick so we just bring this inwards imagine that this is being cut out of it um and just so you know what we're doing here let me just hide this so it's invisible it's still there i just clicked h and then on the sphere i'm going to add in a boolean modifier by the way we need to save our progress we wouldn't want to wouldn't want to lose the super valuable progress this is like when you're like 99 through dark souls um that that that's the stakes we're dealing with bowling ball um anyways booing set to difference with our cylinder is going to cut in a hole and do not worry about the topology we're going to fix that we're going to make the shading errors go away we're going to make the shade smooth happen and the bevels don't worry about it but for now you can see it cuts a hole into here if we want two holes you're thinking oh we need to add in another cylinder and make sure it's perfect no you don't need to do that um if we look at our cylinder and in fact add a mirror modifier and i heard from little birdie if you click m nope guess it wasn't true i heard from a little birdie if you click m mirror modifier happens but i guess that's not the shortcut um what we want to do is add in a mirror modifier so that we can copy the cylinder over to the other side procedurally right so we can like move it around and it gets mirrored um of course it doesn't really matter what axis we pick here it's going to not work for any of these because i think it uses a local coordinates or something like that a point is we want to flip it over the z-axis or in other words along the x-axis so i'm just going to add in an empty um that's on the center that has the normal orthonormal coordinate system the basis i don't know there's a name for this in calc 3 point is with your cylinder now our mirror object is going to be this empty and that's going to make everything uh just fine so we can mirror on the x-axis which is what we want or you could do it on the y-axis if you're like you know trying to make that mega megatron i don't know the magnet pokemon you know what i'm talking about we mirror on the x-axis and if we hide this you can see that the boolean since it's applied after we do the smearing to our cylinder it works out perfectly why is this useful it's useful because first of all we get symmetry and second of all we can move this and the holes move procedurally you heard me procedurally okay so now let's add in the third hole again using this tool i'm going to select i guess here depends on the bowling ball but i'm going to do this again shift for circular bass alt and i guess we want it to be either the same or slightly bigger we can always go back and fix this i mean i guess not if we bake in the geometry but whatever now it's looking like an anteater or something or some kind of like pac-man who's like trying to suck up something from a strong i don't know um again another cylinder we just take this and i guess it's already 48 vertices i guess it's good to have that in common um on local coordinates z-axis moves inwards and just like last time with the sphere we're just going to stack in another boolean modifier set to our second cylinder we hide it and now we have a completely procedural boy now we could keep it like this and fix the shading errors and stuff like this by the way we do shade smooth and i don't know if this will fix it automatically but if we enable this setting i guess it does um it automatically fixes our normals um one thing that i guess isn't uh shades smooth smoothed the cylinders themselves and i believe that's because i believe uh the for for some weird reason uh we need to actually shade smooth these objects as well i think that's the case uh so we hide it we hide it and now you see we have a completely procedural boy now again you could keep it like this you could parent the cylinders to the sphere and everything's you know going to stay there and you can move stuff at any point but for demonstration purposes just know that's possible but we're not going to do that okay so once we're happy with this in fact i think i might move these uh original cylinders a bit closer to each other this time on global coordinates so we actually know what we're doing so like closer together on the x-axis but not so they're touching just so they're a tiny bit closer once we do that i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to control a both of these or you could just apply we're doing two clicks like a loser control a control a boom and now we actually don't need our cylinders again you could keep the cylinders keep it procedural but whatever okay uh next thing you're probably wondering is okay our topology's trash we want a bevel uh if we try it normally it's not gonna work if we do it with a bevel modifier it's not gonna work right how are we going to do this again boys we're going to keep it procedural don't worry we're going to show you an easy trick for this so turns out the rest of this is actually shading including the bevel now we're actually done with modeling so shading workspace render get rid of that light and we're going to switch over to a nicer looking scene so i'm going to switch to cycles gpu and for our lighting instead of a light and of course you want to use the lights but because i'm lazy i'm just going to add in an hdri from you know it hdri haven and i guess i'll pick some interior one since usually you see bowling balls inside you know unless your neighbor is you know a nuisance and bowling outside he's been arrested multiple times but you always watch out the window because you know he's pretty good film transparent and now we have our basic lighting setup and of course normal bowling alley lighting is kind of like more directional so these holes are going to be a bit darker it just so happens that this hdri has a lot of like light leaking in everywhere but whatever lighting you can always change later how do we give this shading make it look like a bowling ball and give it bevels which is actually the more interesting part well first of all i'm going to apply a material this is just the material it already had we changed the color does the thing by the way i guess this is a pretty good beginner tutorial am i going to overthrow the donut tutorial with this one it's possible what was the point the point is how do we do the bevels well there's this nifty little node by the way 2.92 alpha has recently had a patch that if you are using optics by the way i know nobody cares but if you're using optics and not cuda before bevel um node and also ambient inclusion node didn't work but now they do you can see the bevel node kind of uses normal information and almost seems to define um this edge loop for all three of these and in fact it does it really is that good so what we're going to do is we're going to take this a bevel node which you can see outputs normal information so it takes our normals and kind of updates them just so you know what i'm talking about here is the normal coordinates this is what they look like and this is a slightly altered version that you can see almost applies a bevel in texture coordinates so before after right we take this and apply to the normal coordinates of the bsdf right tic tac toe and you can see that already it's kind of trying to do a bevel it doesn't look great but we can fix it up a bit first thing we do is we add in samples since i guess this is a i don't know what the word is but it's an effect that takes uh calculations to do it's not immediate so we're gonna up the samples um second of all this radius affects how much bevel there is so if it's zero we're not going to have much if it's 0.02 we're going to have a bits and in fact that might actually be what we want i don't think we want too much and especially when we zoom out you can see this kind of fakes a bevel that looks very good and actually has nothing to do with topology because it's all based off normal coordinates which is super nice so yeah this is how we do it procedurally i'm gonna keep it like point three five or so oh three five or something like that um and yeah it really is cool no matter how we rotate it and all that since normal coordinates move with it so do the new bevel coordinates okay um so now we have a nice way to do that for the actual color of this i guess before we do that just some general principles we'll start off with a black bowling ball um if we go back to my reference you can see that bowling balls are actually super super shiny almost like perfectly reflective but not quite especially if there's a bit of dust on it and a lot of them are just like a solid color so we'll start off with that and then do something interesting okay um so again these things have a very shiny uh surfaces so we want to take the roughness and not necessarily lower it to zero where it's a mirror ball but something like point two or maybe even a bit lower uh just so it's super reflective but there's just a tiny bit of blur and it's not a mirror ball so i'm gonna stick with a 0.15 and again if you didn't bake in the cylinders procedurally you can always uh i mean i'm regretting the this so far because like your thumb you have to be like andre the giant over here to get your thumb in there to perfectly uh fit but either way um you could change this uh if you didn't do what i did but we're just gonna stick with it right now we're all in material mode we have this shiny black material you could add a clear coat because i think bowling balls might even have a clear coat i don't even know um but you could add in a clear coat just for an extra layer of like shininess like a thin film on top you could do that but just to make this a bit more interesting a couple of surface imperfections you could do is if you mess with the roughness we can well there's a construction going on construction going on outside there seems to be construction going on in my mouth too a quick way to add a bit of dust noise texture which you know simulates some noise that actually is using generated coordinates so it moves with it you connect this to the roughness and let's look at that and i guess one thing we want to do is filter this a bit so i'm just gonna not using a color ramp or anything just a power node um this is base if we add in a number that's bigger than one you can see it adds in a bit of contrast let's add in some detail and a bit of roughness set this to like five or something just so it's super contrasty i'm gonna connect this to the roughness see what that looks like i guess we still can't see it too powerful yet powerfully yet so take this and then we're gonna multiply it by some number bigger than one so you can see when we go up to like four or something you have some areas that are super shiny in some areas that are a bit dusty and a bit blurred um and this is a good way to simulate surface imperfections you can make make it so it has more of these etc and uh yeah you could keep it at that and then just change the color of the bowling ball if you want like a simple thing so yellow bowling ball with some dusty imperfections or a blue one etc any level of vibrance i think usually bowling balls are a bit darker um you could do stuff like that or or and i guess we'll keep this for later so i'm just gonna shift p that tuck it away um or what we could do is actually give it a design and the nice thing about bowling balls is most of them are really just distorted noise textures i don't know if you ever noticed which is super convenient for us because we don't need to do anything fancy right bowing balls are designed badly so we're going to design them badly so noise texture this time i will use a color ramp since i'm also going to be messing with the color so you just bring these handles closer together it will effectively up the contrast i'm going to add detail i'm going to add roughness and most importantly first of all it's connect this to the base color so you can see it's actually texturing this most importantly i'm going to add in some distortion which is what makes it look super stylized and like a bowling ball uh you can pick what you want something like 0.7.5 something like that is good enough for now and uh let's play around with the colors i really like the look of like there was this pink and white i don't know if it's gonna be here i think it was like it was similar to this it wasn't necessarily this one um there's a pink and white bowling ball that i super like so let's do that for the black i'm going to make that color white so again we still have the same contrast we're just changing the colors and for the other one i'm going to make it slightly pink and we're not seeing it because i guess we need more contrast so you bring it closer and maybe bring the white further away so there's not as much and there's a bit more fade and you can see we already have a super simple bowling ball again this is procedural you can control the look of this with a bit of roughness and in fact i think roughness is the trick to making it look pretty realistic so this is with low roughness super well defined lines we don't actually want that uh we want like these uh blurred lines um that's a controversial song we can also up the scale or down the scale for the design right so we can make it so there's a lot of detail or there's only a couple swoops i think i'm gonna keep it at like something a bit lower than five uh detail stuff like that you get the drill you just mess around with these and you can also mess around with the colors and stuff like that um a couple other ideas i'm going to stick with this one but a couple of other ideas to add a bit of interest voronoi texture we're going to mess with the texture coordinates that are inputted here so you can see if we just do this we already get something that's pretty interesting with these circles all we need to do is mix this with the original generated coordinates so i'm just mixing these two together even though one's a vector and one's a scale or float i don't care i just do what i want we're going to mix these together one side is gonna have the rings one side's gonna have the normal thing and if we just mix them slightly now you can see we kind of get a mixture of both where we kind of have these rings so we can keep that low at point one and it just adds a bit more visual interest on something like zero would maybe it's a bit more clear with point two um so you could mess around with this do a bunch of stuff as ducky three i feel like this again i say this all the time but whenever i'm doing like super kind of simple noise materials that look pretty good i'm always like this is a ducky tutorial and that's nice to think about well he looks surprised gasp um point is again all this could be procedural i know i keep saying it but that's the point and also this material is all based off generated coordinates if it's not make sure it is so generated coordinates you don't actually need these here but it is um the point is no matter how we rotate it the texture is actually or the noise is going to actually stick with it which is pretty important okay i'm just going to re-add in you can either re-add in your like roughness thing just add a bit of random dust and this is what i would recommend or you can actually plug this in right here so the dust actually corresponds with the areas that are pink and white wouldn't recommend that so i'm just going to plug this in right here and then final thing and this is just a tiny detail just to make it look a bit more boiling ball like is other than the bevel thing i want to mess with the coordinates just a tiny bit more so we're just gonna add in one more noise texture for this one i'm gonna make it super tiny so like a hundred you can see makes all these dots and if we send this through a bump node we can send this float or height information so height information and turn it into normal information which again we want to modify with our bevel and i don't know if order of operations here matters so you either plug this in here or literally exactly the opposite we can actually test with both um i know it's looking horrible we'll fix it in a second uh first of all i want to add in a bit more just so it's a bit more tiny and then we want to take the strength and then lower it and probably even a bit more but this is just going to add a tiny bit of surface inconsistency which it really shouldn't have that much let's divide that by two just a very tiny bit because this thing isn't perfect i mean i know it's supposed to be that's the point of a bowling ball you want it to be this frictionless thing so i'm going to even lower it a tiny bit more but all things have a tiny bit of surface and perfection that's just the thing make it even smaller there you go so that's just going to add in a bit of something so if we didn't have this before it's kind of like perfectly smooth after just adds a bit of visual interest and again i'm not quite sure about the order of operations i mean this looks fine is the point if you want to experiment you just connect this normal to this normal so now the bump incorporates our bevel information and also adds in the height with some scalar you know for the strength um it seems like there's probably is a correct way to do this i think i'm going to stick with this one to stay safe but at least at these scales it doesn't seem to matter by the way if somebody knows comment below i'd be interested i probably won't read it but other people would be interested for sure um and yeah that's kind of like the basis of the bowling ball once we have some color here i think we could even play around with making the roughness like less intense like closer to zero um but i think i'm happy with the way this looks so you now know how to make a bowling ball procedurally maybe keep the cylinders you'd have to parent it to the sphere uh maybe don't but um yeah that's a tutorial um and i think for the next one i'm going to do uh the pins and then i want to do the simulation or i'll just quit here we'll see but yeah you now know how to make a bowling ball and i guess it's time for me to wrap up the tutorial if you enjoyed uh that's a good thing but also i just want to mention patreon exists you're going to get the blend file over there for this project i think i'm going to clean this up a bit more maybe keep it procedural get the bun file so you don't have to make it yourself and also with the pins in the simulation so once we do that also access to all other blend files i've ever uploaded become a patron any other any blend i've ever made you get that also exclusive tutorials that are on neither channel and also a tutorial series or i guess a paid course that i made a while ago that's there for not for free but you know you get that as a patreon you don't have to pay anything more also exclusive tutorials i upload a couple times a month um additionally early access to some videos behind the scenes stuff like that and i just want to give credit to everybody who already is all 570 some of you bless all of you um i'm tired of making this bowling ball i want to get out of here so hopefully you enjoyed see ya

Channel: Default Cube

Views: 37,009

Keywords: blender, tutorial, bowling, ball, procedural, boolean, bevel, bevel node, cycles, eevee, 2.92, 2.9, beginner, easy, modeling, 3d, animation, animated, vfx, visual effects, shading, nodes

Id: Lv4iNlOHOm8

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020