The Edge Flow Addon for Blender

greetings obvious this is how it sounds of all and in this video we're going to have a look at the free Edge flow add-on so this add-on comes from Benjamin Saunder and you can get it from GitHub making it free if you come to the GitHub page there's a link in the description you just click on the releases and this is the latest release and it'll come to this section just download The Edge flow zip and then install this in the normal way so what does this add-on do well several things actually so let's go through these one at a time I've got a cube here that's just s to scale that up and then I'll apply the scale just so there's no confusion and I'm going to go into edges and I'm just going to add an edge here let's say an edge here and then we'll come to this one and on Ctrl and B and add in a bevel pretty standard things that we might want to do for various different reasons now as a demonstration piece let's talk about this in its simplest way what I'm going to do is add a couple of edge Loops in here and then I might add an extra Edge Loop there and the first thing we've got is a lot of edge Loops that are will not evenly spaced so let's have a look how we can solve this so what you do is you select your edges that you want and then you can either use Ctrl and E to get up the edge selection and you've got set flow and set linear or you can right click and again set flow and set linear we're going to start talking about the set flow first I'll come to the set linear last so in this situation if I right click and then set flow it's just going to even out the spacing and importantly what it does is it looks at the spacing either side before it decides what to do with the spacing so you don't click the outermost selection that you want to be thought about just the ones you want to be affected now if I just undo that I just want to mention one thing with this which is if I select this one as well now this is going to be looking at this section and this section and that's going to cause a problem because of this one the reason for that is that it's going to look or I believe it looks off the normal and the normal of this one is pointing well basically at 45 degrees out and that's going to cause this issue so shift click set flow and you'll notice that it basically goes a bit wonky now there's a reason for that we'll talk about that as we come over to our beveled section but what it's trying to do is smooth this out so to solve this what we can do is come to our Min angle and just rotate that up until it gets to the point where it keeps it flat so there we go so that'll work but just remember that it's going to keep that setting next time you use it so you might have to change it again you'll also notice that because of that this actually isn't perfectly equal this one is slightly longer than the other ones so if I just undo that again and control an e and set flow is you can just up your iterations and then basically you get to the point where it can't get any better so you can use these tools to tweak everything to your liking get it perfect so that's the first use of this just equaling out distances between it the second is if you've got something like this bevel I'm just going to cue and clean mesh to clean up this Cube to make this a bit easier to see but if you've got this bevel here and you suddenly realize that you want to have more of a rounding to it basically it's too low poly we can also use Edge flow to fix this as well so what I'm going to do is Select these edges Ctrl e and subdivide so I'll just do this once but at this point this actually hasn't made it any more rounded we can see we've got these edges here but it's still flat so what we're going to do is we're going to select all of those edges remembering not to select the last two that we don't want to move and almost act as the guide points of this and then we can just right click set flow and I'll just take that Min angle down to zero to make sure it's working and then we can see this is work now once again the iterations if we up those just a couple of times we can see it becomes a bit more perfectly rounded than when it was left at one so that's worth doing so this gives a really nice and free way to be able to modify these bevels I will say if you've got mesh machine this does become vastly easier you can just select those faces Y and then refuse and then it will do that automatically and you can just up the amount of edges that you want but you have to pay for mesh machine whereas set flow is free so it depends what you want to do obviously mesh machine has a lot of other tools in it as well there's a link in the description to a place where I go through a guide of those now the final thing that we need to mention is that it has got this set linear function so I've just made this object here and it's just a cube with an inset and then we've insert that down and it's got messed up for some reason now this actually happens quite regularly if you use things like booleans it might not be perfectly straight now we can straighten this out in a number of different ways for example let's ask to select all those edges and then shift select and then all those edges we could just use Machine Tools which again is free to do an online so I can alt a and drag to the side and it aligns it but you'll notice that it's aligned it to the furthest point to that side which is there if you do want to have a look at a video on how that works again there's a link in the description so that goes too far what we want to do is set these up in a linear way whereas actually it will keep the thickness of this Edge basically to this amount so again right click set linear and it will sort that out now it's worth noting that this works off of as far as I can tell the vertex that's here and the vertex that's here and makes this straight in between so for example if I select less let's come to here where it's a bit more extreme so let's go to there and then there and there and then there and then come to top view so we can see this if I right click and then set linear you'll notice that it doesn't move the vertex here and here when it's deciding that you'll also notice that it's made these relatively uneven in terms of their Gap don't worry if you right click and then set linear again you can click this to space evenly and it will keep that nice spacing but if I wanted to fix this what I'm doing is there to there there to there right click and then set linear and then the same thing over here right click and then set linear so three awesome functions using set flow to even up spacing or to be able to correct the roundness of a shape or set linear to straighten up some edges awesome functionality and it is a free add-on if you found that useful please do hit that like button so other people are more likely to find this as well if you're not subscribed subscribe for more great content and if you want to support the channel 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Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 9,022

Keywords: blender, add, on, straight, straighten, mesh, machine, machin3, bevel, beginner, pro, guide, tutorial, how to, walk, through

Id: IeVlM6RnjMA

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023