The PERFECT Bowling Pin (with blender)

so in the last tutorial i showed you how to make the perfect bowling ball so it probably makes sense that this time i show you how to make the perfect bowling pin because of course we still want to make that simulation again i don't know why it is i want to make it but uh for that simulation we're going to need some pins so let me show you how to model and shade and make the thing and uh before we start just like last time make sure you look at some reference and in my case i actually downloaded an image that we are going to use as reference i just like this one because it has a black and red stripe whereas like i feel like everything else has like double red stripes and this one just kind of looks stupid this is like that cousin you haven't seen in a while it's like wow you've eaten a lot um don't know where i'm going with that anyways let me show you how to make this thing so this is going to be more so of a modeling tutorial than the last one which is just a sphere with some boolean so uh cube we are going to delete it and then let's actually import in some reference which you can do with image reference i think that's inherent to blender if not import images as planes add-on so i'm just going to import this immediately and i guess it does it from the view so actually let me go to the side view since it's usually easier to do it this way so again import your reference from the side view and then i'm just going to move it further into the background okay and this is what we're going to be using for the modeling really all we need to do is just start like moving a cylinder around pretty pretty easy so uh shift a add in a mesh add an a cylinder and by the way i'm using wireframe mode so we can actually see through it and not have that solid thing uh just an easier way to work and we don't need to add any extra vertices or anything so first of all let's scale it down i guess only on the everything except the z-axis so scale and then shift z to do that and then i'm just going to move it downwards and really this is kind of like a three-dimensional tracing um which i'm honored that i'm making a tutorial about three-dimensional tracing um every time you select something here you can either do it like this or just alt click to select the loop make sure you're selecting everything so when we scale up we're actually scaling that entire circle um and then so we just scale it it doesn't need to match perfectly control r add a loop cut and then you just kind of do the thing one thing to keep in mind here is as you're doing this process you want to keep this kind of like edge loop gap pretty consistent uh maybe and decreasing it a bit where you need a bit more detail just so that when we add a subsurf back in not on the z-axis just so when we add a sub surf back in it smooths everything nicely so we need that uniformity so i'm just extruding on the z-axis z-axis and then scaling it down adding in a loop cut adding in a bit of detail and while i'm working on this let me tell you a bit of a story since i have a feeling this is going to take a while so my wisdom teeth's hurting real bad dude it's not like the gum right but it's actually cutting into the cheek and have a feeling that i'm gonna have my wisdom teeth uh removed pretty soon which might mean uh that it's time to make a uh novocaine or under anesthesia style tutorial where i'm going like loopy and crazy and stuff like that maybe i will but i kind of don't want to say something i'll regret but that might be in my future so expect uh some very bad tutorials coming up where i can't pronounce anything really okay well that was the story and now now we have the bowling pin uh but yeah that's real by the way okay so here we have the uh bowling pin solid view you can see it's the general shape but it looks very bad how do we make it look better uh first thing we can do right click shade smooth it helps a bit this is kind of like a low poly game asset from 2002 probably like a weapon and dead island or something like that um either way to make this look better we're going to add in a subsurf subdivision surface control 2 as the shortcut to do that add in a subdivision surface of level 2. i can also like control one that's at a level one et cetera so i'm just going to keep this at two and one thing you're going to notice is because of the type of geometry where we have an n gone up here it's going to create some weird patterns and you know what josh gambrell or somebody who actually deals with this can tell you how to do this properly i'm just going to show you a stupid you know cheap fix that doesn't actually fix anything so uh to get rid of some of this uh or at least to hide it what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take this face i uh to inset and we're just going to inset it a bit which not only kind of makes it less exaggerated but also flattens out the bottom a bit uh which is a good thing so i'm just going to scale this down and then the other thing we can do is for this i'm just going to add in a bit of a bevel just adding in a bit of extra geometry kind of hides it um technically it's still there but we just hit data and gone triangulation and then same thing on the top so for this one we could just pinch it a little and it's not going to fix it but when you see it from far away there's no way you're gonna notice and in fact for that one we can make it just a tiny bit taller just so we have a bit more rounding and uh yeah there there's your model i guess the rest of this is gonna be shading so i'm gonna delete the light and i just wanna set up the scene uh before we actually start shading right so shading workspace oh i didn't save that's a something i should probably do we will call this a very good tutorial of a bowling pin boom um before we do this set up the scene i'm going to set this to cycles gpu just so we get actual like ray tracing and stuff like that evie doesn't look too good i would recommend maybe shading in cycles and then switching over to eevee if you've got a real hard on for it but uh cycles is what we're gonna be using for now and then for the lighting i'm just gonna set up an hdri that i downloaded from hdri haven something on the interior not one of these outdoor ones i'll pick this one for now and then film transparent will hide that okay so we have our lighting again with hdri we don't have an actual light and at this point we still want to keep our reference around since this time let me actually move it over to the side uh we actually want to use it for the um texture information and we could do some project from view stuff but i feel like that's kind of cheating so um how do we do this uh procedurally well first of all let's add in a material we're going to call this pin and you know that this material is linked because when we change the color it actually affects this okay first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to make this very white or i guess very vibrant or very luminescent very basically the highest thing that we can do here and then second of all i'm just going to make it a tiny tiny bit yellow just so it's because it's not perfectly white or maybe this is just the environment that's in but of a feeling it's a tiny bit yellow next thing we're going to do roughness just bring that maybe all the way down or close to it because this thing's super shiny i feel like roughness of zero is never good at a good idea so just a tiny bit 0.05 at minimum or maybe even 0.1 and yeah now let's actually start layering effects uh first thing that's obvious is we need this black stripe and this red stripe which doesn't actually affect the material right it's actually equally shiny maybe there's a tiny bit of like normal mapping here but generally it's just a color change right so that's how we are going to do it so texture coordinates uh since we need to access that information generated coordinates we can separate into x y and z because the z data gives us the vertical gradient going along the z axis why is this useful it's useful because with a single node that's right with a single node set to compare we can actually make these stripes so first i'm going to do it then i'm going to explain what i'm doing i'm just going to increase this and then shift it up okay so what is it now let me explain what i'm doing so again we're accessing uh z gradient information so it's black at zero and one at the top so zero to one grading from here to here uh what the compare node basically does is it says hey blender look at these z values or whatever we're inputting compare them to the second number 0.6 so we're comparing z coordinates to 0.6 and say make it white whenever it's within a threshold of this much okay so when that threshold is smaller it's going to be thinner because you know less stuff's going to satisfy that and when it's bigger it's going to be wider right and then what we're comparing it to is effectively sliding it up and down right that's why it's called the compare node so uh let's make this a bit thinner i'm thinking like half the thinness so times point five or twice the thinness it's half the thickness it's kind of like an inverse thing you got to do with your brain we're just also going to bring this up and this is just going to be our black stripe we basically repeat this process for the other one it doesn't need to be perfect but i kind of want it to be there you go so then now we have our mask for this which seems to be pretty much infinitely sharp we could blur it a bit but this looks pretty good we also need to make a second mask for the second stripe which we can just kind of reuse the stuff from before but this time just bring it a bit up and make it like i don't know 25 percent thicker or something like times 1.25 that looks pretty good so now we have one stripe and then another and we can always uh modify these procedurally so how do we actually incorporate this into the color or actually the base color easy i guess there's a couple ways but i'm just going to use a mix rgb i feel like that's the cleanest way to do this and not very computationally expensive now what i'm going to do is ctrl c while hovering over this to copy and i'm not sure if you knew about that we could do it ctrl c and then paste it into here so we just paste it in the color i'm going to use this mask right here and hook this up right here so that's and you can kind of already see what it's doing it's saying mix rgb with this mask so in other words where it's white show the bottom socket where it's gray and then otherwise show the top socket so for the bottom socket i'm just going to choose a color that's i guess maybe perfectly black or nearly black something like that uh that looks pretty good and this kind of shows that i guess we have this roughness a bit too low that that is way too sharp of a reflection let's try point one yeah just bore it out a bit um and then you know we just do the same thing so another mix rgb and you can just keep chaining these and i think we are gonna add a bit more of this uh so now i'm using the second mask and this one is for the red stripe i believe so we make it red we make it bright and you could do a color picker on this right you could but i feel like that might not be the way to go it could get us started so i feel like we want this to be a bit brighter and maybe a bit more saturated and we can always mess around with this later uh so now we have these stripes going perfectly you know with this and no matter how we rotate or move this thing which again is important because we're going to be simulating it uh the stripes actually stick onto it because it's using generated coordinates if instead we use something like windowed coordinates so it's not going to be very good nor would it give us the stripes i guess but whatever you want to be using generated or object coordinates for this okay the next thing i want to do is actually just fix the geometry just a tiny bit more because this like flat top is bothering me so i'm just going to inset one more time and raise that one just a tiny bit more that looks a tiny bit better especially from the side view okay next thing i want to do for the material is i guess you see how there's a lot of grunge and dust and dirt and stuff like that i want to add that so we break up this kind of shiny thing and add a bit more color variation as well to do this super simple kind of like a joel trick we're not going to do any math to make the dirt noise texture already does it for us it kind of stretches this and by the way if you're noticing that you have a very stretched noise texture and you don't want this just use object coordinates like that and that's going to give you a more fine dispersion um but maybe we do want stretch but we'll go back to that later so with this noise texture we're going to make it more high contrast so we can actually see the dirt or rather the dirty areas uh we're gonna take this up the detail so it's more well defined and definitely uh bring up the roughness because that's kind of like what dust does it's kind of like more uh dispersed it's not like areas where there is dust and isn't dust it's more like finely dispersed uh with areas that are more high probability of you know it being there and you could use concavity mapping for this but i'm not gonna um so here we have a roughness map i'm gonna scale this down just so it's not as like you know detailed like it was before right so something like that and we want to use this for the dust so first thing we can do just to gauge what this is going to look like is another mix rgb again use this as the factor and this time we can use a kind of yellowish color that's not too saturated as our dust thing and you can see that it kind of exists but it's not very visible which is actually a good thing uh but for now i'm just gonna bump it up so i'm just gonna up the contrast by bringing this in a bit and you're gonna notice uh the dust is actually starting to i wouldn't say accumulate but it's becoming more visible it's almost like we're multiplying it by something so this is just so we can see what it's gonna look like so i think i want the dust to be a bit more fine so i'm just setting this to one instead of three so we don't have all these patches but more general bigger trends okay so that's a good start so okay so now that i'm happy with this i'm going to bring this back down just so we can see it but not as much you can see it's very visible on the red stripe so i'm just going to do it like that and by the way if you want to keep it as is but make it like less strong on these stripes you could totally do it by like subtracting away these factors so like for example the way you do it is that you take this our color ramped dirt or dust mask you take it and then you subtract away both of these stripes so i'm going to subtract away this one set it to clamp so we don't get negative values and then also this one and you're gonna notice we still have dust and i can make that more obvious uh we still have dust just not on these uh stripes and if you want that to be less of a kind of intense effect is what we can do is we can take this the subtracted version and a mix it with this version which maybe let's actually do that so we're going to mix it this one with this one so the version that is and isn't subtracted we can flip flop between the version that has dust everywhere and the version that doesn't have dust on these stripes so we can just have it be very subtle so maybe it's like 25 percent uh the strength of dust i'm on that area and let's bring that back over okay so now we have a bit of dust but of course if there's dust accumulation that's going to mess with the shininess of it wherever there is dust in other words wherever this is white because again white is representing where we have dust wherever there is dust it should be a higher roughness in other words less shiny and it just so happens that we have this gradient perfect we don't need to invert it or anything we can just connect it to the roughness and now you can kind of see not only do we have dust but in these areas it's kind of uh breaking up this reflection a bit which looks pretty good if you want this effect to be less intense we can just multiply this chain so that's just the one going to the roughness if it's one it's as is if it's zero everything's going to be perfectly shiny we don't want either of those so somewhere in between like .5 i guess is a good way to start okay so now we have the stripes we have the dust and again all this can be controlled procedurally so we can make the dust more clear if you want a more weathered kind of look and change the colors and stuff like that but i think the last thing we want to do and i guess this version doesn't have it and i'm not talking about the stamp you gotta totally stamp something onto there and maybe maybe i'll do that later but um i want to add a bit of a dirt on the bottom where it's standing on the floor uh nothing crazy but i just want it to exist okay plus it shows you a nice uh trick about uh texture nodes not texture shader nodes which is always a good thing so to make ground ground what uh to make some dirt on the floor but only in that area again we want this separate xyz but i'm actually going to make a new one and you'll see why in a second so same setup as last time generated going to z coordinate and you can see it's already kind of isolating that area that down there what i'm going to do is we kind of want to invert this so i'm going to add in a math add in a math and then subtract and then kind of invert this just so we're making a gradient that we can control the center point of and claim that okay so what we have right now is a gradient and we can just make that a bit more intense just multiply it by like 10 or something we have a gradient that describes where the dirt is going to be but of course if we kind of do the mix rgb trick from before uh where we mix rgb and then we connect this as the factor and then we view it and let's say that this version is going to be like i don't know kind of very dark dirt kind of color and i guess we need this to be much stronger to see it you can see that generally not only does this not affect roughness but it's kind of too clean as is so we need to distort it um so let me show you how to do that the way you do it is you add in a noise texture really any kind of of randomness to it it can be noise texture voronoi whatever you take this and what we're going to do is first of all make sure these are both using the same coordinate system so generated coordinates and noise texture using generated coordinates what we do is i feel like this is the tutorial mix rgb but you mix rgb these together it doesn't matter what order and you set these to linear lights which is going to do some math for us for free what this does is when it's set to zero nothing happens but otherwise it's going to add in a bit of distortion we need to make that distortion cleaner so let's up the detail and the roughness a bit and also part of the reason why this is still kind of faded is because again we use the subtraction kind of thing so we just want to multiply it by something more intense like 40 and that's going to make it a bit more crisp so now you can see we got something that looks better and again procedural we can control the height of this so you don't want it to be too high and we can control kind of the quality of this dirt by changing that noise texture stuff i'm just going to add in a bit more distortion and then also uh we want this to affect the roughness uh so for it to affect the roughness i guess we need to have it contribute over here so i think quick way is we just take this and then we add uh this mask over here okay uh because we're just adding roughness in some areas in other words that less shininess and that should look pretty good okay um only thing that kind of looks really bad about this is kind of the color of the dirt so maybe it should be a bit more red and that definitely a bit less intense so i'm just for this chain i'm just going to use the multiply and this time do it by like 0.2 or something like that 0.56 you you play around with this until you find the right number but just a very very slight dirt that you can see does add a bit of realism to it so if it was sitting on like a a ground plane uh you can see yeah dirt would accumulate i guess this one's hovering but whatever okay so so far we've got a pretty uh realistic uh looking thing and i think the last thing i want to do and i wasn't planning on doing this but we'll just do it off the cuff you know what it um i'm gonna add in a emblem or badge like that uh somewhere on the pin so i'm just gonna go to google images and find one of those be back in a second okay so i found a starbucks coffee logo i know it's not the kind of thing that would go on a pin but it just kind of looks very bowling ball burn no bowling pin like and i'm like you know what screw it we're just gonna make it a starbucks theme thing this is what's called earned advertising they don't even need to pay for this it's free um so here i have the png of this and that's what we're going to use as the emblem i don't know where we're just going to do a technique is the same for i guess whatever emblem you want to do so just take this drag it in and i know some people would like lead you to believe that you know object coordinates with an empty kind of like stamp method if you've seen that is kind of the best way to go um i don't think so especially if we need to parent the empty to this and there's simulations going on now we want this like bake to write in using a uv map so first of all here's what the image looks like it's a very distorted because again it's using a uv coordinates even though it's not showing it right it's using uv coordinates and first of all we need to set this to clip so it doesn't repeat and second of all we need to fix this uv map before we can do anything okay so what we are going to do is first of all define a uv map so i'm just going to pick uv editor and we kind of don't care about the unwrap for most of this except the area in the middle so i'm just going to select a loop here a loop here whoops a loop here and then one seam here so this is just kind of like a basic unwrap where all we really care about is the center thing so you can kind of imagine that as like a piece of paper we're going to unfold we're going to mark those as seams and then you unwrap and we can see we have our basic unwrap so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select this area l while hovering over it to select to linked ctrl i to invert all of these faces right click this to make sure that whatever we select here is in the uv editor all this we don't care about we don't want that logo to be over it okay we only care about this section right here which is the middle section okay um and if we were to kind of like place this over and make it like bigger and whatever so the logo is actually in there you are going to see in a second heavy heavy distortion right that's not what we want it's not placed correctly etc so a bit of a uv mat trick and i know we're getting into weeds here i thought this was a bowling pin tutorial um to make this a flat rectangle which is actually what we want we just need to make one of these faces straight so i'm going to take these two edges get on the x-axis so now they're perfectly level that way scale on the x-axis by zero so now they're perfectly vertical relative to each other and then we're going to do the same thing with these pairs but for the y-axis again i'm just taking this polygon this rectangle this face and making it a perfect rectangle okay then we select it so just uh i guess select that face and then l to select the region so we have this as the active one right click follow active quads and there you go it's kind of a weird one but uh it exists it's a trick that works um and you can see that now it's placed incorrectly but the distortion has gone down quite a bit so we can actually scale it which means that this emblem is kind of like smaller um in reference to this so it kind of makes it look smaller we rotate it by guess negative 90 degrees so it's facing the correct way and then we can just place it so scale like this and i guess we should be looking at it from this view just to see where it should be going so somewhere like this kind of a weird way to work but whatever make it a bit smaller even something like that and we can always change it later even though it's not like procedural and the other ways uv maps are in some sense procedural we can still mess with them so what do we have so far we have our bowling pin uh we have the starbucks logo for some reason uh how do we slap one on top of the other same way we've been doing it every time so mix rgb we are going to mix this image over over and by the way if you are having some issues and we got to use the alpha channel too as the factor um by the way if you're having some issues with like repetition which we might uh if he said it's a repeat make sure that you don't have it sets your ep make sure you have it set to clip so again a reason we use the alpha channel is if we just slap it on there it kind of doesn't know how much to mix it and wear well the alpha channel shows exactly where that emblem is it's that circle uh so we put that in there and then i guess final thing is this a color scheme is garbage right like a red black and green white uh we should make this logo either black or red okay what do we do again makes rgb like every other time and this time i guess we could mix it with let's try red and see what it looks like so i'm just going to i guess we could actually copy the shade of red so again ctrl c and then hover control v as now we have the same shader red and we can mix it um i guess by 0.5 and this will make it more of a red logo we could do that for any color we could even mix it with the color black although i feel like we then need to set this to multiply or something like that so i'm just going to keep it simple um so let's do it like this and i think by the way if we set it to hue maybe that will give us a better result yeah set it to hue bump it all the way up that will give you a nice sharp thing with both red and black there you go i feel like we made it work so i feel like uh only other thing that would make this look a bit better is maybe like blur out this image before you put it on but maybe maybe we do want it infinitely sharp and also it does kind of look elliptical even though we find this out so we could just scale on the y-axis just to compensate for this and then bring it back up and i guess scale on the y-axis a tiny bit more just to get rid of that distortion now it's more circular and if we look at it from the side view looks pretty good so now we have a starbucks starbucks brand of bullington make that a bit bigger starbucks brand boiling pen by the way i forgot to mention if you want this blend file it's going to be available over at the patreon including all other blend files you can get access to those immediately but uh you know what who doesn't want a starbucks coffee bowling pen um get the project file over there so you don't have to you know mess with this yourself i'm gonna make sure to clean this up before i upload so you can actually follow this node graph and stuff like that but uh patreon is a place to get one files exclusive tutorials you know the drill at this point i just like to put you guys in the credits at the very end is the point and i just need to talk for long enough that it scrolls uh slow enough because at this point there's like 580 of you so i can just really talk about anything but i guess meanwhile thanks for watching the tutorial i hope you learned something this one turned out way longer than i thought it would like 30 minutes or something like that but it means we only have one step left which is gonna be the simulation uh which i think might even be like a three minute tutorial i mean you might like uh reference this later when it's like a 20 minute tutorial like what the were you talking about but uh uh yeah i think i've talked for long enough your credits are probably done scrolling see

Channel: Default Cube

Views: 49,546

Keywords: blender, tutorial, bowling, pin, modeling, shading, photorealistic, nodes, beginner, easy, procedural, 3d, vfx, cg, cgi, animated, animation, grunge, dust

Id: oiPy9nBdL3c

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020