The Conform Objects addon for Blender

greetings hobbyist this is Aran ofo and in this video we're going to talk about the add-on conform object so conform object is an add-on that's available from Mark Kings North he makes a lot of really nice add-ons and honestly most of them are really worth checking out I'm going to do a video on FL fin a little bit as well and that also offers some really cool options but I thought I'd start with conform object because it deals with a problem that I'm currently looking into so conform object simply just conforms objects to another one pretty simple in its basic nature but I wanted to talk through this in a little bit more detail so you could have a look at this and understand why it is better than the native tools that blender offers so I thought I'd Show an example that's shown on the conform object page as it gives a really nice demonstration of the power of this tool so let's just move this to the side and then we're going to create effectively something that we're going to bolt onto this surface but if you want to skip past me making this object just head to the 2 minute 45 Mark so I'm going to start with a cube let's scale that up a bit but scale it down on the Zed axis let's apply the scale and then we're going to bring in a cylinder let's up the detail on that so let's go for 128 vertices and then let's just G that up to somewhere there maybe a little bit more and then let's scale this up on everything other than the Zed and then we'll come into this go into face mode add an edge Loop and then we'll add some threading to the top of this so face mode and x-ray mode and then we're going to right click and I'm going to use Machine Tools to add a red let's add a little bit more than this so let's go to five and let's maybe exaggerate that a little bit more so we'll go to there and then we want a face inser there extrude that down I to inser it quite a lot and then e to extrude that up and then we'll make sure this has got the scale applied and then control and B to round that out so we've got a part for like let's say a computer Jack where you'd plug this in and you'd want to be able to screw this in let's actually give this some bolts as well I'm going to be really lazy with this and just do a quad sphere probably only need four subdivisions and let's s to scale that down and then we'll put that on each of these Corners let's just scale that up a bit so these are going to be our bolts and again being a little bit lazy with this but that's fine for this demonstration and then let's just use hard Ops to copy that over right so we're just going to bring these together oh actually before we do that let's just go into face mode so let's just select there and there contrl and E and subdivide this and we'll do that quite a lot we'll go somewhere about there like 50 and then we'll just combine these objects together so control shift and plus to do that as a destructive method now I'm going to do something that could easily happen so I'm going to actually move this off to the side here so it's not actually dead straight which is going to be important for this demonstration of how powerful this is and let's rotate that round 90 and then let's apply the rotation in the scale and we're just going to bring that over to somewhere like here so what I want to do is conform this object onto this surface let's maybe scale that down a little bit but either way and normally we'd attempt to do this with something like a shrink wrap modif fire or something like that and that's going to cause problems because this is quite a thick object you can do that for thin things but maybe not with something with this level of detail so instead we're going to use conform object now there are other ways of doing this like we could use the simple B end but that's going to affect everything and that's going to deform these threads that we've got on the end here and we don't want this bit to be deformed cuz we want this to look like it could screw into whatever object we're screwing it into so all we do is Click hold down shift click on the object that we want to conform to once you've installed the conform object add-on you can either come up here to this symbol there or you can just right click and then go to conform object and conform object and you can see it's had to go conforming it now this won't be perfect straight off mostly because I've screwed this up on purpose by putting it offset in a way that isn't going to be particularly nice but you'll notice I haven't tried to match the angle of this to this circle which is what you sort of need to do when you do these in other methods so we're going to talk through some of these options that we've got here and these are going to be the important bits now I'm not going to talk through everything because it would take forever I can do that in some other videos if people are interested in having a look more into this add-on but we're going to just have a look at some of the more important parts of this add-on itself so first of all we've got some options with Direction and we've got an auto setup or we can do this with a different thing like an axis line or nearest okay so we can do various different things or custom I'm just going to leave this as Auto for now we can also go and use our standard shrink wrap but you'll notice how much this screws up our object and it just doesn't look right so I'm going to stick with grid and to help me out we've got the this defamation grid here and I'm going to click it so I can see where the grid is and we can see that we've got this defamation grid being applied to this surface and then we can start with our projection and we can either do a medium point or we can do our origin and these don't make too much of a difference in my example cuz my origin is in the center of my object but sometimes if you've got an object which was say uneven it wasn't symmetrical you'd want to go with the origin if it's in the center and other points you can just stick with the median point so I'm going to stick with that for now and if I need to change it I can do now I'll come back to this defamation grid because it is going to be important for certain aspects but what we'll focus on next is our object transformation now this allows me to affect where the add-on considers this object to be now you'll notice we offset this slightly which was a problem and that's a problem because we want this effectively against the tangent of this object basically as if it was here in a straight line so what we can do is actually rotate this object or how the computer is considering it so what I'm going to do is rotate take this around the Zed AIS and then I can bring it there so we're a little bit more flat on and you can see how you can sort of rock it side to side so you can work out where it's going to be best so about there then let's have a look side on here and we can see we've got a similar problem so we're going to move this around the xaxis to get that perfectly on the surface so we've done a pretty good job of that so this deals with one of the biggest problems that we have when we're trying to conform objects to a surface you can also so move this up and down and sort of move things around if you want to let's put that back to zero so you can affect things in a slight way you can also tell it to either work on the closest point or the center point which would be the center of your object I don't want to do that but it is an option that's there so this is working pretty good now at this point I'm just going to mention one thing with the defamation grid and that is that you can see here we've got a lot of subdivisions and I can change how many subdivisions I've got individually or you can you can change the scale and various other things one of the most useful things is I can change the grid smoothing so if I come here and up the grid smoothing you can see that this starts smoothing out our results and especially on something where we've got some really dense mesh for example on this cylinder the more you have this the better it's going to be until we get to the point where it's pretty much perfect now all this is doing is subdividing the grid and as with any other subdivision if you've got something that's very very dense this is going to push the power of your computer so just be aware of that finally we've got this which is worth talking about which is the gradient effect now this is probably the most clever bit of this add-on as well as your ability to affect the transformation it's what makes this really work and you can either have this work in a linear method now what this is going to do is effectively have it work from the object you're conforming to outwards and it will basically gradiate that transition and you can change this with your start and end point so for example I can see how much this is going to affect the end I want to be affecting as little as possible of the object that's further out and then most of the object or all of the object that's close to the surface so you can fiddle around with that to make that work this will be a gradient so you can see it gradually shifts now for this because of these bolts that are sticking out this probably isn't going to work very well if I get too far so for example here we can see we've got this wider part just at the beginning of the thread instead what I'm probably going to want to use is a constant method I know this looks rubbish now but give it a chance what the const method does is it is either totally applying this to an area or totally not and you can control where the edge of this is so for example in this instance I can just drag this down to the point where there we go and I'm perfectly happy with that now so it depends what result you want but for me our constant offset is probably going to be the one that is better for me and as I showed you can change where this starts and ends so you can make this happen exactly where you want it to be or with the linear method you can do the same where you choose where the end is but you can also choose where the start is as well so you can do something a little bit more extreme there so you can probably get good results both ways in fact there is pretty good as well it just depends on which result you find easiest to deal with and certain situations will require one being better than the other now let's go and hide that grid so we can't see it and the final thing I'm going to mention is there are a range of other options probably one that's most important is that you can parent your Source object to the other object which means that after this they're going to move together I'm going to click that on that's fairly useful so you don't get things misaligned and the other one that's quite nice is you can get the normals to be transferred effectively from one to the other basically this means that you're going to get slightly better shading on your now deformed object and again you can fill around with that to see which works best for you in terms of your shading possibly there I've just noticed actually when doing this with this linear method you can see it's given a slight defamation to the end of my rivets there which I definitely don't want so I'm going to go to constant which won't have that as a problem because it's going to deform all of this up to a certain line and then stop it so in this instance the constant is definitely better for me so that is the conform object add-on taking something that can be very annoying to deal with in blender and making it very simple to be able to pull off I do also want to add that this isn't the only thing that it can do I was just taking what is for this tool relatively simple example to show what you can do if you'd like me to go through something a little bit more complex that this can do feel free to say in the comments section but there's also a link to this add-on in the description which has some nice animations on exactly what this can do so do check that out have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 5,757

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, blender modifier tutorials, how to, guide, addon, add on, add-on, tutorial, deform, deformation, beginner, pro

Id: TaarbMFEt64

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024