The Trick that will Make Your 3D Models 10X Better!

a lot of 3D artists tend to forget one major thing when creating their models and it's the difference between something very CG looking versus something that feels right and real you can see it in action here and in this shot too or even in this one but what is it and if you mastered this modeling technique which isn't easy to do at all you'll level up any model you make now a lot of people slept on a Bava modifier and call it a day but besides the countless issues you can run into doing this is actually unrealistic so in this video I'll show you how to really use bevels to get greatl looking portfolio ready models before we do that though it's important to understand why we use bevels in modeling it's not because modeling programs require them in fact programs like blender are unique in a sense that they can actually create a connection between phases that comes to a perfect Edge which is not possible in the real world if we could do this in the real world however we would effectively have something so sharp it could cut through anything probably even through itself and who knows what that would do anyways what I'm trying to say is that nothing in the real world no matter how sharp it may seem to the eye is ever a straight edge everything has a bevel and that's just a technical limitation of well physics and this also means that as with anything centered around realism achieving the best result comes down to mimicking what our eyes and brain are used to seeing day in and day out which are edges that properly catch light show thickness Define shape and give weight to a model or beveled edges so that brings us back to taking a model slapping on a bevel modifier and Calling it Quits right but let's get into why that is so I've said it a couple times now that the bevel modifier is no good but that's not entirely true the bevel modifier is amazing for what it does beveling every sharp edge on a Model now if you're unsure what a sharp edge is you can go up here and click on select and use this function to find every sharp edge on your model which are all the edges that will be beveled with the bevel modifier on real objects however not every Edge is beveled equally some edges are beveled because they have to be due to production limitations others are seemingly sharp but are still beveled one zoomed in greatly and other times objects have different bevels because of design choices the bevel modifier and blender bevels every Edge that exceeds a certain angle this angle is 30° by default and can be changed here the higher the value the more edges are excluded from the effect and the lower the more are included for example this icosphere is Untouched by the standard bevel settings but if I lower this angle value here to 15 for example it starts beveling all of the edges and on this object here you can see the differences that happen once I lower or increase the value all right so on one hand the bevel modifier simply bevels all edges above a certain angle threshold but what if you want multiple edges with different bevel values or you maybe want to exclude certain edges which is sort of the standard for real life objects the modifier does does have some form of a solution to that by changing the limit method from angle to weight you can use something called etge Data to drive the modifier if you then select an edge open up the item tab with n and change the mean bevel weight for the edge in the edge data you can control how much that edge is affected by the modifier this can be a relatively flexible way of getting bevels on models in the right places and having various bevel amounts across your object this also makes sense for for example a glass window where the edges from that glass shouldn't be beveled because they're two separate objects in the real world it also pairs up nicely with subdivision surface based hard surfice modeling and can be a good solution for simpler hard surface objects and that's why it's also what I teach in my own course over on CG cooki for example and while we're on the subject of courses this video sponsored skillshare is an amazing place to learn all about blender modeling with over 700 quality blender courses aimed at every skill level from complete beginner to Advanced it's easy to learn on skill share skillshare is the largest Learning Community for creatives and probably the biggest resource of blunder courses out there including courses led by industry professionals such as Derek Elliot and Alden Peters for example Alden here has five courses part of his learning path blender for filmmakers and production designers elevate your scenes and lighting that will teach you all about using blender for film making compositing lighting and Atmospheric effects taught by a professional filmmaker and VFX artist which is awesome because skillshare has content on so many topics that overlap with creatives interest such as animation design entrepreneurship or even music learning some or all of these skills will not only improve your blender art but also enables you to get better clients ask for better rates or find better jobs based on your multi-skilled portfolio with Summer breaks and slow paced work environments around the corner honestly now is the perfect time to start learning and to make that even easier to do the first 500 people to use my link in the description receive a one Monon free trial of skillshare okay so back to bevels like I said the weight method can be a great fix for certain objects however even for slightly complex objects with different parts or edges this method can be a pain in the butt this is because the bevel modifier breaks if the topology is no good if there's not enough room on a Model to fit in a bevel and if using the weight method is impossible because you need a lot of different weight types it also leaves very little freedom to control your apology since the modifier will automatically be applied when exporting the object to for example a game engine and there's no way of controlling its values precisely on a model so how then do you do proper bevels well simply with some good oldfashioned elbow grease manually by selecting an edge and pressing Ctrl B we can add in a manual bevel in blender or we can select a vertex and press shift control b instead to Bevel a Vertex after beginning the bevel we can control quite a few settings down here at the very bottom of the blender interface you can see which shortcuts will give you access to what features of the bevel tool however ever I find it messy to look at and hard to remember which shortcuts do what most of the time instead I find it a lot easier to use the bevel menu down below here which contains all of these settings too the first since this menu is nondestructive until we close it is choosing whether the bevel is an edge or vertex bevel now if you use the right shortcut this should always be set correctly to your intentions of course but you could still switch it if you wanted to next is the bevel width type which is set to offset by default and I've personally never changed that ever but if any Pro Models prefer other types do let me know in the comments and why you use them next is the width controlling the overall size of the bevel then we have the segments letting you choose how smooth or segmented the bevel needs to be the shape choosing between completely concave or convex with 05 being a perfectly rounded bevel and also the default the material index for if you automatically want to apply a different material to a bevel Harden normals which matches the normals to adjacent faces clamp overlap which prevents overlapping phases when using two high width values Loop slide which is on by default and controls blender preferring sliding edges which are edges that take into consideration the adjacent Edge shape versus even width edges which are a more spaced out version marking bevels automatically as seams for UV unwrapping or sharp for shading miter settings for the inside and outside which are actually really important but we'll get into that more later intersection type for well whatever this is this face strength yes the profile type which lets you use custom bevel profiles versus the standard super ellipse for example this is a great way to create stairs very easy very convenient to do let's dive a little deeper into the ones that really matter to improve your models first of all the max amount of bevel or the width you can add on an edge or vertex is always the amount needed to have the newly formed edges overlap with other preexisting edges w a that sounds kind of complex but if I show you what I mean on this Cube it kind of explains itself and it's actually quite simple the maximum amount of bevel I can add is when the new edges these two overlap with the previous edges or the existing edges which are these two segments however are a different till most beginners like to crank this up real high but if you're using a subdivision service modifier there really is no reason to do so since that will do most of the heavy lifting anyways I recommend always using an even number of segments like two four or if you really needed six this way you can easily remove edges by simply selecting an edge Loop and pressing CR X to dissolve it this allows for easy creation of low poly versions of your high poly beveled models for non-hero game assets you can even get away by only using one segment also known as a camper and combining this with a weighted normal modifier this way you get a smooth look especially from further away at the cost of practically no additional geometry at all and the final setting that's important is the miter which is formed when two beveled edges meet at an angle there's an inner miter for angles less than 180° and an outer miter for more than 180°. in this example you can clearly see a difference in using the different miter types for both the inner and outer miter I personally like using the archetype for outer miters and then the sharp one for inner miters but it's kind of dependent on your model and the resulting geometry and shading look after you've applied the bevel to see which type of miter works for you okay so that's all fun in games and as you can see there's quite a lot to using bevels so let's take a practical example and not just use blobs and cubes here's a relatively complex hard service model that I made based on my drinking cup lid it's low poly and it has pretty decent topology all around and is a great base for a subdivision surface modifier to get that nice high poly hard surface look it looks nice and smooth but it loses all its form which is why we need bevels so here's a version with a bevel and a subdivision surface modifier slept on with two segments as you can see it's not terrible but we have little to no control over the amount since there's a lot of different geometry with various possible sizes it also breaks with basically any value since the bigger sizes won't fit in the smaller areas resulting in very sharp bevels everywhere now I'm using two segments for this but you could use more like four for example but since I'm using the subdivision surface modifier already adding additional geometry is not necessary and in my opinion looks worse than just using two this is a personal choice though and should always be something to look at for your own models in your own circumstances however do take into consideration that using more segments comes at the cost of adding in more geometry which can quickly ramp up if you use more than two or four segments for a bevel as you can see in the numbers on screen now anyways let's compare this version to a manually beveled one with this edge here all around the top of our model let's add a big bevel with only two segments because we don't need more because of our subdivision service modifier let's make sure clamp overlap is enabled so we don't get any of the weird shading here next we have this edge here around our drinking lip and we're going to give this a relatively large but still quite small bevel now let's select the outer rim at the top here give it a larger bevel and the inner rim and give that a small bevel now we can select the edge going around here making sure we include these edges as well select these two as well and give them another small two segment bevel the large edge around here gets a larger bevel so we get a nice smooth look with all the edges at the back part here selected let's add another very small bevel and make sure to use the proper miter now I'm going to use the outer miter type of Arc just because this will result in a smoother look when applying the subdivision surface modifier but you can get away with using the sharp version as well now let's select all of the edges on this thing here and we can finalize our model let's once more apply a very small bevel like so and in this case I am going to use the sharp aom miter just so we can maintain proper quad Supply ology for all the parts around here and here's the final version with the manual bevels applied and if we put that side by side with a simple bevel modifier version like I've shown before you can tell the manually beveled part looks much more natural and generally has a better way to it simply put it feels more real which in terms of portfolio pieces is always a good thing and so now you know how to really do bevels and blender by hand but that great looking model could use a proper light setup don't you think so make sure to check out this this video in which I'll show you everything you need to create better Lighting in blender [Music]

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 20,278

Keywords: blender 3d, blender, bevel modifier, blender bevel modifier, blender modeling, blender modeling technique, 3d modeling, 3d artist

Id: ozkJaQYpNaQ

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024