The RIGHT way to cut holes in surfaces in Blender

hey Josh here and real quick the first part of this video is going to discuss how to cut holes the right way in the curved surfaces and the next part of the video is going to discuss some of the more common and more traditional ways that most people use and why I believe you should stop using them why the first method is way more efficient ok let's hop right into it I'm gonna add a cylinder shift a mesh and then cylinder the vertex count of 32 is fine I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees over the x-axis here just because this will be easier for demonstration purposes and now what we want to do is add a cut in here at a whole rather so this is going to be the correct method and I'll explain why as we do it so right now we have a cylinder and we want to add a hole into it what we're gonna do is use a circle to add the hole in so I'm gonna press shift a go to mesh and then circle and we'll drop the vertex count here down to about 12 because eventually will subdivide this and it'll be a lot smoother so 12 vertices is fine we'll pull out the circle will also rotate it 90 degrees so that way it is facing the cylinder here so I'm going to go into the side view here with 3 on the number pad just so that way I can see the front of the circle here and then I'm just gonna scale this down you can make the hole as big or small as you want I'm gonna put mine to about here that should be okay and then I'm going to go ahead and press the e key right click to cancel the extrusion and scale it in just so that way when we actually create the hole here it'll have some thickness to it like that so that's basically what we're going for and actually I'm going to scale this up just a little bit bigger right to about there should be okay now once this is aligned with the cylinder like this essentially what we're gonna do is tap into object mode and shrink-wrap this circle to the cylinder so that way it matches the curvature of it so I'm going to go to the modifier panel go to add modifier and then shrink wrap for the target we'll just choose the cylinder it's going to shrink wrap but it's not going to do a very good job so we want to do here is change the mode over to project and make sure this is projecting along the proper axis in this case it's the x-axis and if that's not working for you you want to make sure that your rotation is applied with control a so now we've selected the x-axis in my case and we're gonna make this in the negative direction so that way it's shrink wraps properly to the cylinder and once you've done that we're just going to apply the shrink wrap modifier so now it's matching the curvature so now once you've done that we're gonna go over to the cylinder tab into edit mode while we're in the side view and we can add in two loop cuts with ctrl R drag up one and then scale this a little bit on the y-axis just outside of where that circle is and now we want to do is delete out the faces containing that circle so in this case it is these four faces we'll press X and then delete those and now all we have to do is select these two with shift and then press ctrl J to join them together so at this point this is a very easy cleanup job we don't have to do a lot of work at all we just have into edit mode and we start filling these vertices in with the F key we'll fill that in we can just select this edge down here and press the F key for it to automatically fill will stop once it gets here and then same for this side fill in these vertices select this edge and then fill it a few times and then to fill in this area we can just drop a loop cut down the middle and then fill in these sides pretty easy stuff with topology nothing too complicated fill in the bottom as well and just like that we have something that is working with the cylinder we have a topologically consistent cut here with a hole and all full of quads no sort of n-gons or triangles or anything that might give us issues so now what we can do is go into face select mode select this ring of faces with the Alt key and then e to extrude that and then even scale it on the x-axis to a value of zero to flatten out the front so there it is and of course we want to apply a subdivision surface modifier to smooth it out so I'll press control 3 give that a good amount of cuts there now this doesn't look very good and that's probably because the normals are oriented ink incorrectly so we'll tab into edit mode select everything with the a key and then press shift and and that should fix up any normal issues and these sides don't look very good so I'll just select the faces and inset them just to get rid of that issue and then we can right-click and shade smooth and as you're gonna see we have a very nicely fused cut here and a nice little hole extruded out now if I quickly turn on a matte cap just so you can see it better you're gonna see that it's fused good but it's fusing more of a square fashion it doesn't look as natural as it should and that's because the entire surrounded geometry is basically a rectangle here as you can see this area so to make this fused a little bit nicer all we have to do is go ahead and bevel this set of edges here select it and then press control B maybe give it an extra edge there to bevel that and now you're gonna see if we turn the subsurf back on we have a much nicer looking fusion and then since these vertices here are a little bit tight you can usually just double tap G and just move that up a little bit not required but usually gives a little bit of a nicer effect in my opinion you could do it to this side if you want but they're not that close so yeah as you can see we have a very nice fusion there okay so this is the right way to add a hole I'm gonna show you another way you can do it that most people do as a matter of fact but why I don't think it's as efficient or as powerful as this strategy so I'll just move this guy out of the way and add in another cylinder same idea adding a cylinder with 32 vertices I'll rotate this 90 degrees over the X move it over a little bit and the way that most people do it in most at Oriel videos show is that you should use a boolean cut and then fix up the geometry so we'll do that strategy adding another cylinder to use as a boolean same idea we'll use 12 vertices just because we don't need that many rotate this 90 degrees over the Y and basically just align this up with a cylinder here and scale it down just like we did the circle in this one so move this a little bit in front and scale it down to about the same position as the one on here so right about here should be okay and then we'll just pull this into the cylinder so that way it's intersecting and then we can use a simple boolean to cut that out so we'll select this cylinder add a boolean difference pick this as the cutter object and then apply it and then if we delete the cutter you'll see that we have a very nice boolean cut now obviously if we try to subdivide this it's not gonna work very well because this is full of m'gann's in bad topology now there are a few different ways to clean this up but just to keep this cylinder consistent with the geometry like for example if I were to move these it's no longer a topologically perfect cylinder because these edges are biased so I'm not going to do that strategy and so what I'm gonna do is add in some edge loops kind of like we did here so press ctrl R drag up and then scale on the Y a little bit and then just join these vertices together with a J key like that so just like we did for this cylinder we need to delete out the faces that are within the boolean cut here so what we're gonna do is basically select these four faces because all of these faces have part of the boolean cut on it you might have to select a few more times because these are n-gons so select those and then press X and delete out those faces and essentially it's going to be the same exact problem we did over here we're just gonna fill in these vertices and make them full of quads now already you're going to see that this takes extra work we have to dissolve out these extra vertices here which really doesn't take that long we just go around and dissolve these unwanted vertices here and then just get back to our a problem over here fill these in add a loop cut here and then fill in these vertices you get the idea so fill these in and then one more fill that in but now I want to have this circle extrude out like this one okay so to extrude it out this way we'd have to either add in a loop cut here with an even offset but that's still not as even as I'd like it to be so our other attempt would be to select this set of faces e to extrude it and then cancel it and scale it in and now we can select these edges and extrude them out as we were going for and now we just have to add on our subsurf with control three to give it three of them smooth that out and then same issue here it's a very square fusion so to clean that up we'd basically just bevel out this set of edges like that you can see that looks much better and then if I just clean this up a little bit and set that side and then sharpen these like that okay so now we have the exact same effect as this one maybe this one's a little bit skinnier but you get the point so these two are for all intents and purposes identical this strategy was just way quicker and required less steps than this strategy and I would be willing to bet money that most people still use this strategy here which is fine it just takes longer and you want to save time whenever you can so hopefully this video helped you out if you are one of those that uses the old fashioned way hopefully you now apply this strategy to your toolkit it'll help you out a lot and you'll be more efficient if this video helped you at all I'd appreciate a like on it because it helps me in the YouTube algorithm and recommends this video to more people other than that I'll see you in the next video thanks

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 675,658

Keywords: blender, 2.8, cut, holes, in, curved, surfaces, tutorial, boolean, hole, topology, geometry, shrinkwrap, circles, circle, surface, hard, modeling, 3d, cylinder, sphere, round, curve, curves

Id: Ci1jBOm_5NY

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020