The MOST IMPORTANT TOOL in Blender (Aryan Beginner Tutorial)

I'm going to show you the most important tool in blender if you learn to use this tool girls are going to throw themselves at [Music] you every other blender YouTuber is lying to you they're telling you that you need to use add-ons and they're teaching about all these crazy tools that nobody's ever heard about but the only thing that you're ever going to need and the one tool that you can do literally anything with is this thing right here called the 3D cursor here are some very simple tricks about the 3D cursor that are going to level up your modeling skill so hard that you're going to be able to create almost anything the 3D cursor is simply a marker which marks a specific point in the 3D viewport if you click somewhere the 3D cursor is going to snap to that spot and if you click on the surface of an object like this it's going to jump onto the surface at that exact point where your mouse cursor was and when you create a new object with shift a it is created so that its origin is exactly on the 3D cursor if you don't know what the origin is that's this little orange dot this defines the location of an object when we measure the location of an object up here and you can get this menu by pressing n and going to item the coordinates that you see right here are exactly the location of this little orange dot so one of the most basic things that you can do with the 3D cursor is very accurately placing objects for example I can click right here and then I can select this Cube and with shift s i can get this little menu where you can perform a bunch of different actions with the 3D cursor for example in this case we can snap the selection to cursor by clicking over here and that's going to place the cube so that its origin is exactly the 3D cursor if you want to place the 3D cursor exactly onto this Cube you can select the cube and press shift s cursor to select it and the 3D cursor is going to jump exactly to the origin of this Cube now bear in mind it's possible to change the position of the origin if we move the object geometry in edit mode the vertices and the edges and the faces are going to move but not the origin point so now if we snap the 3D cursor to the object it doesn't snap to the middle of the cube anymore it snaps to the origin still and by the way we can control the position of this origin very precisely with the 3D cursor as well the same way that we can snap to the 3D cursor with shift s we can select all this geometry press shift s cursor to selected and now the cursor is going to jump to the average location of all the polygons which we have selected in edit mode in this case that's exactly in the middle of this Cube if we had two cubes selected the 3D cursor would jump exactly in between those two cubes because this is the average location of those vertices if we have more vertices over here on this side and we select everything and you snap the cursor to select it it's going to be closer to this side because there's more weight from all these vertices but any way you can select the cube shift s cursor is selected and now in object mode you can go to object set origin origin to 3D cursor and now the origin or the location is exactly in the middle of this Cube you can also place this on another part for example this face on the side here then again go to object set origin origin to 3D cursor and now you can very accurately place this next to another object for example if we select this Edge right here and with shift s we snap the cursor to this selected Edge now we can select this object in object mode and with shift s we can snap the selection to cursor and that's going to be exactly L here this is very useful if you're trying to very accurately connect multiple objects although it becomes very important to control the position of the origin so in this case if we want to connect this object with this little hole right here we first have to select this circle shift s cursor selected and then object mode we have to set the origin to the 3D cursor now when we snap this object to the 3D cursor the origin is going to snap to the 3D cursor so if we place the 3D cursor on the middle of this hole right here with shift s we can now snap this object there and it's going to very accurately snap to that position so those are are some of the very basic functions of the 3D cursor and you can use this to very accurately Place objects or align things in blender let me also throw this in if you select a face like this and you snap the 3D cursor to this face you can now press shift and seven on the number pad while this face is selected and your view is going to be aligned with this surface and now if in object mode you add a circle for example you can align that with your view you can fill this and scale it down and now when you go back to side view or regular view this circle is going to be perfectly lined with the surface below there's also other ways to do this such as this magnet up here if you set it to face projector and you check these two boxes now this is going to align with the surface below but this is very accurate because you can snap it exactly to the middle of some face or exactly to some verx or whatever we're not going to talk about this magnet in this video next let me show you something even better by default when you rotate or scale objects in blender they rotate and scale around or towards the origin point if the origin point is on a different location such as over here now this object is going to rotate around that point but it's also possible to use the 3D cursor as the pivot point you can do that by switching to 3D cursor right here in the transform Pivot Point menu and now when you rotate something it's going to rotate around the 3D cursor it's also going to scale around the 3D cursor and that's extremely useful for very accurately controlling your geometry or object for example if we have a circular shape like this object right here and a bolt on this surface that goes around it we might want to place this on a different location and still have it pointing here if we try to do that manually it's very difficult to get it right right and if you try to duplicate this a couple times it's almost impossible to do this accurately but if you snap your 3D cursor to the middle here with shift s and then you go to top view you use your 3D cursor as a pivot point now you can very accurately rotate this exactly around this point it's going to keep the exact same distance so it's very easy to duplicate this and place it somewhere else although if you're trying to duplicate this and arrange it in a circular pattern it's easier to just use alt e spin use duplicates and now you can control the number of instances and also the spin angle another thing that you can do with the 3D cursor as a pivot point is this let's say we want to make this hole here deeper if we select it and we scale it up on the z-axis it's going to scale up from the middle which means this is also lifted up and I don't want to change the shape of this surface but if I place my 3D cursor on this Edge Loop right here with shift s then I use my 3D cursor as a pivot point and I select all this geometry on the inside now if I scale this up on the z-axis it scales only from this point so it's not moving up because there's no distance above the 3D cursor there's nothing to scale upwards you can also place a 3D cursor on other locations and scale it from those points or rotate it around those points very precisely here's another 700 IQ trick that I know nobody told you before you don't have to scale only on the z-axis or only on the x- Axis or only on the y- AIS and you also don't have to scale on all axes at the same time you can scale or transform on only two axes at a time for example if we select this area and we want to make this hole smaller but we want to keep the same depth you can press s to scale and then shift Z to exclude the z-axis from the scaling now it's only scaling down on the X and the y axis but not the z-axis do you see what I'm talking about you can also move it along only those two axes by pressing G and shift Z and now it's only going to move along this plane but it's going to move freely it's not going to move up or down the last trick I'm going to show you in this video is probably the most important of them all I call this trick Vector scaling because you can use the 3D cursor and any other Vertex or piece of geometry to Define find a vector along which you want to perform a transformation if you don't know what a vector is you didn't listen in school so go Google it right now I don't know how to describe this example that I'm about to show you so just watch what I'm doing if I select this verx right here and I press shift s cursor is selected the 3D cursor snaps to this vertex and since my 3D cursor is the pivot point I can now select this vertx or any other vertex and if I scale it it's going to move exactly towards the 3D cursor since they are both on the same height there's not going to be any change height if I would have placed a 3D cursor down here somewhere it's going to also move inwards and that's going to create a bump on this surface but that's why I placed it exactly on this same surface because now I can pull this inwards and I can also pull the other vertices around this inwards as well and this allows me to very accurately create a dent or a bend on this surface do you see what I'm talking about this is very useful if you have objects on an angled surface like this one right here because now you can place your 3D cursor at a point like this which is also on the exact same surface as the origin of this object so now when you scale it down it's going to move in that direction but the extra thing that you need to know here is that you can move it towards the 3D cursor without changing its scale let's say I want to move this object in this direction I want it to stay along this surface and I don't want to use this magnet for whatever reason that doesn't work very well maybe because I need to place this exactly halfway so I need to scale this by 0.5 here's how you can do that without making this smaller as you get closer as you scale it down towards a 3D cursor you go up here to options in object mode you check locations and now when you scale scale this the location is still getting affected by the scale as it did initially before we checked this but it's only the location being affected as it says right here so when we scale this the scale stays exactly the same but the location changes as it comes towards the 3D cursor so now we can duplicate this with Shifty and right click scale that to something like 7 or 75 if we want to do a quarter then duplicate it again right click and scale to 0.5 then one more time right click and scale to 0 25 and finally Shi the right click scale to zero and now these are perfectly aligned in a row and they're all still exactly on this surface now if you align your view with this surface you can rotate all these around this point and since effect only locations is checked when you rotate this the rotation is not going to change so they stay fixed in the rotation whereas if this is unchecked the rotation and alignment is also going to change those are just a couple of quick tips to level up your modeling game go back to your project right now and figure out a way to use this this is going to help you a lot to do very precise changes that would otherwise be impossible to do obviously there's a lot more to this but I'm just giving you free at this point so I don't have to talk anymore go figure it out if you want we can do another video on this so let me know in the comments if you want to see more tips about how you can use a 3D cursor properly in your projects guys I put these videos out every single day you got no idea how much work that takes if you're not going to support the channel by buying the ebook or becoming a patron then at least like the damn video And subscribe to the channel and by the way I'm about to launch a huge update for the ebook and until that comes out you got a 20% discount code so use that while you can let me know what you want to see next and I'll see you in the next one [Music] PE

Channel: Aryan

Views: 7,855

Keywords: blender, tutorial, beginner, topology, cursor, aryan, 3d

Id: P2KPkyp32gA

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024