The complete guide to Boxcutter

greetings hobbies this is our sans of all and in this tutorial we're going to be having a look at the add-on box cutter so the first thing to say about box cutter is that it is a paid for add-on and that you can get it from somewhere such as blender marketplace and it's generally bundled together with another add-on called hard ops i would strongly recommend that you get both they work together and while i'm going to focus on box cutter in this tutorial realistically using them together is when you get the most efficient with them and you're going to get the most out of them it's also discounted buying them as a bundle so i really recommend if you're gonna get one that you get the other so as always to install an add-on you're just gonna go to edit preferences you're gonna go to add-ons you click the install button and you find where you've downloaded it the most recent version that you've got and you click that to install it obviously i've already got that installed and then you will need to activate it by making sure that that box there the check box is clicked and once you've done that you will see this icon on the bottom which is box cutter i've also got hard ops which is just there but that's the box cut symbol and you can activate it by clicking that alternatively you can press alt and w and this will activate it and you can see that because it's going to bring this toolbar at the top if it doesn't look like this for any reason just press n go down to box cutter and if you go all the way to the bottom here and click display you should have clicked this which is simple toolbar if you take it off this it goes into this much more complex version i mean if you prefer that that's fine some people do i prefer the simple version that just looks like this so i'm going to press n to hide that side panel and let's start looking through these so what we're going to do is we're going to go through these each in turn going along and talking about what each thing does at least where i think it's relevant there will be a couple that i'm going to miss out and we'll talk about why as we go through them but before we do that let's talk about what box cutter is at its most simple box cutter is just an add-on for booleaning objects together now don't get me wrong when we get into this you're going to see it's much more than that in terms of what you can do and how powerful it is but it's very basic that's what it does now let's have a quick look at how this functions in its very basic sense so all i do is i click on the object that i want to do and i'm just going to click and drag my mouse to make this shape in this instance a box i'm going to release my mouse and then i'm going to drag through and i'm going to make my boolean cut and you'll see in my outliner what that is done is it's automatically added this cutter collection with box cutter puts everything into and i could easily bring that back so i can see the cutter there i'm going to hide that i don't want that showing now as well as that drag feature there is another feature which you can use so the drag feature when i click and then release my mouse i could pull it only part way through if i wanted to to create some sort of indent like that there is also the option of if i just drag there instead of having to drag through if i just double click it automatically cuts all the way through the object i believe they call that the laser cut option and that just makes that nice and quick to do if you want to cut all the way through i'm just going to undo those so let's start going through these options and the first option that's up here is the cut option now i should say if you press d you'll get all of these options in this box helper menu so you can just do that by clicking here and i'm going to be honest i use this most of the time i don't use that top bit very often i just press d and everything's here and there's a few extra options here that aren't apparent in this top selection but it's entirely up to you and i'm just going to use this as a good order to go through so the first option is the cut and that essentially just makes a difference boolean the next option here is the slice now what this is going to do is it's just going to show in a different color in this instance yellow and as far as i go through and click it has created a slice and what that means if i come into my modifier stack you'll notice this automatically creates the modifier is i've now got two separate objects i've got one object here which was my original bit and now a second bit here and if i apply these i could for example move that out so that is the slice option then i've got the intersect tool now that just does an intersection boolean so anything that is shared space is going to be created so you can see i'm only creating a shape where the intersection with the cube that i was creating and my original box was so that's the intersect tool then we have the inset tool this is probably my favorite one what this does is this creates as the name suggests a nice inset and you'll see this has done a lot of work in the background to create this nice slightly inset series of faces and you've got that inset there which you can then control there is a lot of fun that you can do with this it's probably my favorite feature of it because it's the most time saving then we have the join and this effectively is a union boolean so again if i just draw an object here and just move it through and click all it's done is made this additional object and joined or unions them together so that is the join option then we have the knife option which if i do this here you'll see that it looks like nothing's happened and importantly this one does not add a modifier it does this destructively and there's nowhere around that but if i go into vertex mode you can see this has created a knife cut there so it's a nice quick way of creating knife cuts which is really useful then we have the extract option now i'm just going to have to go back into the cut mode to look through this just to show you what this does so for example if i make let's say cut there and i'm going to do another one there all the way through what the extract tool does is it goes over and it copies the booleans that are in operation there and now you'll see that it's automatically created a cut function but this cut function instead of being a box is now going to be this collection of booleans so if i do this here you'll see that is created the same shape it's at a slightly different angle here because of the long edge of this object but we can have a look at that or we'll have a look at that later so that will create something that is the same shape as the booleans we've already got so i guess there would be some uses for that if you've got a shape that you particularly want to replicate and the final one is the make so that is going to allow me to draw something and i'm going to make a new object now just something quick to talk about this while this is a separate object you'll see we've got this dotted line here and what this means is this has been parented to my original object as i move one it's going to move the other now i very rarely use the make option because effectively you don't need to if you are in cut mode or any other mode obviously this when you've got the object selected will create a cut but if i click off of this so an object isn't selected you'll notice if you look in the top left hand corner this is automatically now made this a make option and it's now made this object which i can move around but if you do it without an object being selected then you'll notice they are not parented together whereas if i go if i select this object here and select the make option let's do something like that you'll see this one because it was created while this was selected if i move this around that second one is now parented to it whereas the first one isn't so there are tool options now at the moment i'm just going to go back into cut mode and we're going to focus on cutting for now but obviously we can do these other options with the different things we're going to look at so let's move to the next thing which is the shapes again you've got these shape options here and if i just press d you've got them down the side so let's look at the one we're in now which is a box so if i select the object i'm drawing a box so nice and easy now we do have this other option here and you'll notice these options come at the side or if i press d they're normally here and that option is the draw line box and now this allows me to draw a line if i hold my mouse button down if i let go i then start drawing the other dimension of this box and again i can click one more time and start cutting through so this is quite useful as it allows me to do it at a different angle you should also note that when i start doing this if i come closer straight on you can see this when i start drawing my line it automatically starts to snap to different orientations and those orientations by default are 15 degrees so for example there is horizontal one two three i know that's a 45 degree angle i can release my mouse and cut through and i know that's at 45 degrees if you don't want it to snap you can just hold the control button and that will allow it to freely move so that is the line box so the next one we've got is our circle tool i'm going to click off that line so we've just got the basic circle and effectively all this is going to do is draw a circle and again we cut through or partially cut through exactly the way we do with our other ones and there are some important things for this the most important one being how many edges or vertices this circle has got and again we can see that here now typically you'll do something like 64 or 8 if i select this object and do that you can see we've got an eight-sided circle so you've got all these different options there the other one is if you don't want that especially if you're doing something for 3d modeling and you need more detail here you can either drag it along or you can type in for example 128 is what i had this on and oh that's not going to work so i haven't clicked on the object there we go so we've got 128 vertices circle there the other option we've got is a line circle so this is going to allow us to make a deformed circle instead of something being perfectly round so you can create a shape like that so that's quite useful for various different purposes and the final one we've got here is our ngon so this one's possibly the most fun all i do is click and hold down to make my initial cut or my initial line and again that jumps to 15 degree increments draw a line click if i want to add something so i might do let's say 30 degrees there and then go all the way across click and now i need to double click to confirm that and then i start moving that across okay so we get these really nice series of cuts there now importantly this does default generally to the view you're looking at so i'll normally use one of the axes on this gimbal so for example there to make sure i'm doing it relevant to the face that i'm looking at so something like that so we did four clicks there double click to activate it or to say that was the final point and another double click to laser cut through and the other thing with the ngon and again you can see it here or if you press d you can see the option there is this cyclic mode now what that is going to do is that's going to take away the fact that the first point and the last point to join together and essentially it's just going to make a line instead of something that's joined together so for example i could come out there double click and start cutting through now in this instance we're going to look at something that i'm not going to talk about until another time but if i press t i can start making that line thicker and then we've got this nice thick cut there so that is quite a useful feature there really useful for adding in panel lines and you can see that on my video on panel lines which is in the description and the final one if i just turn cyclic back on is this option here which is the lasso draw mode and all this does is you'll notice this isn't up here you've got to press the d mode for this extra menu if i just free hand this around take my mouse off and then we're now cutting an object that's got these nice curved shapes to it so the last two modes quite useful i would say i find getting this precise with the lasso mode quite difficult and then we've just got our custom shape which we've looked at previously that's what is made by using the extract option so i'm just going to go back to box to demonstrate the other things now this next box is largely irrelevant i will talk through it just for the sake of completeness now at the moment all this does is it shows where you're going to create the origin of your cutter so it automatically i think starts as the bounding box center so if i draw oops on line box mode let's just turn that off for the sake of simplicity so if i draw my box and do something like that okay again the cutter's got hidden so it's almost irrelevant if i bring this back and select the cutter you can see that the origin is the center of this because i've asked it to be the center of my bounding box if i undo that and then change this option to be where we've got the centered origin if i do the same thing again and show it you'll notice that now the origin is at the center of the first shape so the face that i was starting with there may be some uses for that depending on what you want or where you want the origins to be obviously you can come back in here and change the origin now i've got the selected i can press shift s and change it to the geometry and put it back to the middle so it doesn't stop you changing it you can also have it going to the center of the active element so again if i draw this box here and show it now the origin is actually the same as my active object and then the final one is the mouse position and what this does if i gain draw one more box and cut it through and then reveal it and select it you'll see that starts on the corner where your mouse did its first click so lots of different options there the main one that i have a tendency to use is going to either be this one the reason being that if i want to rotate it i know i'm rotating it i'm going to rotate it around that corner or using the bounding box center effectively this would actually probably do the same thing as that but if i use this and do that there when i want to rotate this i know this is instead of rotating on that corner going to rotate around the center and i prefer this bounding box center to the face center because that means i could do this from any angle that i want to rotate it around so i know how that's going to perform now i'm actually going to miss out the shift operations essentially this just sets some actions that's going to be done already it just sets something up to be automatically occurring and in most instances i'll actually do that through the shape that i'm making so i'll come back to that in another video if we have time now the next one here you could argue might actually be more important than all of the other options put together and that is the orientation or how this is going to function now what i mean by this is at the moment this is set to object which i think is what it's got it as default and you may have noticed that whatever my view when i've started drawing on this it has aligned itself to the face perfectly and that is because i'm in object mode now within that there are some different options within object mode for example this will automatically align in this instance to the longest edge you can also set it to go to the nearest edge or to be on the local axes which the local axes are essentially this now this for a cube all of these options are fairly irrelevant they're gonna basically do the same thing if i delete this and bring in let's say a cylinder and i set this to be let's say only eight edges just for the sake of simplicity and i'm gonna g and z that up and make that a bit bigger now that we've got a lot more faces here this is gonna have more of an important effect let me just hide that gizmo because it's annoying so if i change this to the let's say longest edge the longest edge on this object or this face here is going to be this one so again it will align perfectly however i might not want it to align with this and in other faces there isn't one longest edge i mean there might be if i start deforming it but the other one that's really useful is to do the nearest edge for example this one here if i go to this being the nearest edge this one will automatically start cutting down at the same angle of the nearest edge i started at and again i can just come here and it's going to do the same thing so that's really quite useful but i could still if i wanted to change this to instead of being that being the local axis of the object and if i do that you'll notice that's going to start going with the local axes of this object in this instance using x y and z so that is object mode just going to go back to my cube the other option is view mode now to be clear about this view and object are the most commonly used and you can just flick between them with that button so you don't even need to go into the options and all viewer line does is it just aligns it with exactly the way that you're looking so if i draw this box here and double click you'll notice it hasn't orientated itself to the object it has cut through it exactly the direction that i was looking at now in a lot of instances view and object make very little difference for me most the time i come into the axis or the view that i want to cut so for example here doing it in view mode and notice that once you've started the cut you can change your viewing angle and it's going to make no difference will be exactly the same as the object but it does give you an option to start cutting through things at angles should you want to so that is the view option now the last two are very very rarely used this is the cursor and the world and essentially they do the same thing one off of the cursor and one off with the origin so i guess to make this relevant i'm probably going to need to move this object so let's move it to here so this is quite useful because it can do things that are quite clever now there are better ways to do this in my mind but at least it's there as an option so if i go into face mode and select this face and i press shift and s and change my cursor to be on the face what i can do if i've got cursor selected here is you'll notice i've got the option of x y and z so for example if i select z now the z axis effectively is this line okay a line that's coming down here so if i start drawing here this isn't actually not going to make much difference because it's on the edge but you'll notice that draws in what is the z-axis so just there now if i uh change this to something else for example let's go into the x-axis and start drawing you'll notice that now this is automatically halfway through but come here activate x-ray mode so we can see this really clearly we can see this started the cut along the direction of my x-axis if i look at my gimbal so the x-axis was there it's automatically halfway up because that's where my cursor was and the origin or the world does the same thing but now it is doing it from that point if i go into y for example and start drawing here you'll notice that this is in line or was in line with that so something to play around with i'm going to be honest i never use world i think i've used cursor once in my life everything else is object and view it's just not really worth fiddling with anything else in my experience now the reason for that is because anything that we want to do with this we can generally do better with the next two options so the first one is just snapping so i mean it says what it does when i hold my mouse over it snap points when holding control so if i go to a face and hold ctrl you'll notice we've got these magic circles or dots that have appeared and essentially if i click on one of those i will start creating the object in that place so i started making the corner just there so a really useful way of getting exactly dead center now you'll notice that when i press control on this face if i drag or come over to this face it doesn't change you have to release control press down again and now i've got these but it's really useful to create these additional shapes that i want to start cutting through so it gives me that i know it's exactly halfway up which means that i didn't really need to use the cursor option and now that i've made that cut even though it hasn't been applied and i press control again you'll see i've now got another one for this half so i could do the same thing again so this allows you to be nice and precise about that going to halfway points now the other thing we can do is you can start to manipulate this for example if i go to edge mode and i did something like control and r to create an edge there and i did control an r to create an edge there now when i go into object mode and press ctrl it's got separate faces here so i can start breaking this down a little bit more so for example that is an eighth in so you can do little things to be able to manipulate this and where the faces are now the other option you'll notice this automatically starts snapping is grid mode now there are again quite a lot of options here and if i press d and i come down here to the snapping you can see all these options here as well just slightly in a different format and if i press ctrl now you will see i've got this grid now this grid is created at certain increments in size and they are going to be based on the object or and what you've set yourself so for example if i come here and select my options these are currently set at one meter so this create a grid here where we can see we've got these meter increments so this allows me to be nice and precise with how big i want this to be so say for example i wanted this cut to be i don't know one meter by two meters and i let go and start cutting and you'll notice if i keep holding down control it's still snapping to meters here so that's one meter in two two meters in three meters in or i can release and i've got my control back so you've got a lot of options here using this grid which is really really helpful now the one thing i should mention about this is you'll notice that this grid does snap based on where the origin was and the origin is in the center here now that is useful in some ways for example this is 10 wide so i can go from this edge and count 1 2 in but you'll notice because this is five meters or five whatever units high because this is being measured from the origin you'll notice that it's only going one two and then a half up without me being able to select that edge so you've got to be aware this is coming from the origin and if you want to if you came into face mode and let's say selected that face to face now if i tap into object mode and go here and press ctrl you'll notice that now it is on that top edge it's not half an increment so you can move your origin around of your object to be able to manipulate where this grid is snapping to so some fun things to play around with there but something that's great for you to be able to make specific shapes for example if i want to be one in one down so i'm going to start there go three across go up a little bit extra snap and then press ctrl one two three and i've got that done now obviously we don't have to do this in meters you can click here and change this to whatever increment you want for example i could change the 0.5 and then i've got even more options here so i can do this as precise or as big as i want so i could just go half a meter in one meter down and then let's say one and a half across go up and then control again to go half a meter in so a lot of control with these options here and again with d all of this is being shown here and you can move your increments as you want and have the grid or not now i'm going to turn off snapping and the last thing i'm going to mention for today is this button here now with the exception of the knife tool everything automatically is done non-destructively which means over here in the modifier panel we get our booleans and we can turn this on and off from view and it hasn't been activated yet or it hasn't been confirmed would be the better word and i can apply this here and now it is done it's part of the geometry or i can decide i don't like it and just delete it now if you change this to being destructive what that will do is anything you do will be created and you'll notice as i was doing this it creates the modifier until i click and then it has automatically applied this so it's automatically there now i generally do everything or as much as i can non-destructively unless i'm 100 positive that that's exactly what i want so it's up to you whether you want to use that or not um i will say if there's certain things that you know you're not going to change for example if i'm creating an object here and i know that i'm going to have something cut out so for example if i get my grid up here and i know that i want something cutting in from the middle here 45 degrees down there and then all the way to the edge up there something like that if i know that and i'm not going to want to waste time applying it then you could do this destructively but to be honest i would probably keep it non-destructive just for simplicity's sake so that's why we're going to leave it for this tutorial in our tutorial on monday we are going to carry on with this so i'm going to start having a look at more of the finessing points that we can do with this for example if i go into let's say box mode and i want to change this to be an inset there are lots of additional options and shortcuts you can use for example if i start drawing this we can also do a lot of things like changing the thickness here we can also make a bevel to the different edges here and then the ones at the back there as well so we can start changing these around have a totally different shape so there's a lot of different things that we can do here so say for example i change this to a cut there are some really fun things that we can do for example making a cut there for example i could change the amount of bevel that there is on that and i could even add in something like an array to turn this into let's say there something that's going to be maybe a vent system so there's lots of little things we can do with our cutters that really speed up our life and we will start having a look at those different options on monday's tutorial so do subscribe if you're not already so that you're going to be able to get alerted for when that happens as always i hope you found this video useful as i said it's going to combine together with our video on monday to have gone through everything that you will need to know for using box cutter to be able to create these complex objects really really quickly

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 10,549

Keywords: blender, boxcutter, addon, hardops, hard surface, modelling, 3d design, 3d printing, add on, box, cutter, guide, how to, tutorial

Id: 3zLBmHVXpsk

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022