Tricky hard surface SHAPES in Blender (Tutorial)

what's up guys got a really fun and exciting tutorial for you here today this is going to be on a more or less tricky shape that won't otherwise be super obvious until i show you how to do it so i'm actually kind of stealing this idea from ryu we recently made a video on creating this impossible shape really cool idea and i'm going to be using a similar technique in this video so make sure you check his out i'll link it in the description this is going to be a pretty similar shape so let's get started now this is my second time recording this because blender crashed halfway through make sure you save your scenes guys because you'll end up like me and have to re-record a whole video not a big deal though so let's add in a circle so this circle by default has 32 vertices that's fine so what we're going to do is add in a circle i'm going to go into top view and i'm going to be going a little bit quick so if you're brand new to blender grab our hard surface jumpstart course on our site it's free and should get you up to speed with blender pretty quickly if you're new so i'm not going to spend too much time going over all the basic commands because i'm going to assume you know most of them but what we're going to do is we're going to delete out half the circle here okay and then with this um semi-circle i want to duplicate it with shift d right click and then r rx 90 and actually the other way so rx negative 90 like that so now we basically have is this shape and this is kind of the shape i want but instead of having this really harsh you know 90 degree transition i want it to kind of ease into it at like a slope okay so we're going to do instead is move this little bit on the y move this little bit up on the z and now we have is a buffer to kind of make a nice smooth transition okay so we can do is we can join these together so shift click on this one ctrl j and now we have one single mesh and what i want to do with this is select these two vertices and press the f key and then what we can do is we can add some more geometry here another vertex by right clicking and subdividing it okay so at this point if we just go into our side view we can just kind of you know eyeball this move it down like that it doesn't have to be perfect that's fine and then you know with hard ops mesh machine or whatever you can just do a quick symmetry to the other side so now instead of having that really harsh transition what we have is this nice clean transition so a lot better and then just to kind of smooth this out a little bit more we can press ctrl 1 ctrl 2 ctrl 3 whatever i'm going to press ctrl 2 to add a sub surf with two levels of subdivisions so now we have this really clean transition now what i want to do is i want to move this over just a little bit like that and then if we press alt x what we can do is change the mode here if we click on this this will open the advanced menu in hard ops and we can change this over to cursor and mirror over our 3d cursor if your cursor is over here somewhere shift s and then cursor to world origin cool so now if we press alt x and then mirror that we're going to have that and then alt x again and mirror it this way but let's move this up just a little bit kind of move it this way and then maybe this way i want this to be a little bit i want this here to be thinner than this one here so that looks good cool i'm happy with that and then what we can do is we can yeah let's apply our mirror modifier awesome sweet so at this point i'm just going to go into solid view and we're going to fill this thing so if we just select these vertices here and fill it what we can do now is select these two and if you hold the f key it's going to actually auto fill it for you all the way around so just hold the f key and that looks good and just symmetrize it over we might need to reset the origin to the 3d cursor symmetrize it and now what i want to do is select one of these faces here on this piece and if we press shift g and then choose coplanar it'll select all those faces on the same plane and we can press the f key to fill it in cool so now we can just go ahead and symmetrize it again you'll be using symmetrize a lot and then we can extrude it just over here somewhere and then quick symmetry and now we kind of have like this loop looking thing really simple and we can shade it smooth as well turn on our auto smooth okay so now we need to do is we need to patch up this portion right here now in this case it's a bit trickier because we could do this this is going to be fine but i don't want to fill it all the way up to this point because the sub d i mean technically it'll be fine but i prefer running sub d on all quads it's not going to really matter if we have a triangle here but just for the sake of keeping it clean what i'm going to actually do is let's start here and then [Music] just fill these in like that now we're going to hold the f key up until this point here now check this out what i can do is drop in a loop cut with ctrl r and we can go ahead and fill this in kind of like that and then what we can do up here is fill this in just like that symmetrize that over and i mean we have an end gone here it doesn't really matter because what we're gonna actually do is select this entire loop of edges increase it so it's not gonna matter at all so if we just press shift e increase it all the way we're gonna have a perfectly hard edge so instead of having this weird blob right here we're gonna have this there we go and just do a quick symmetry here and then a quick symmetry down and now we have our base shape sweet so so far so good so now what i want to do is i want to actually select one of these edges here we're going to press shift to g and then choose crease so it'll select all the creased edges and then we can go ahead and chamfer it with ctrl b and you might want to turn off the loop slide feature so they don't overlap like that cool so what we're going to do now is we're just going to start adding some actual detail to it cool so the first thing we can do is make a cut here in the top so let's add in a cylinder we'll do like 60 4 vertices q to sharpen it and then rotate it like that and then all i really want to do is scale this in just kind of like you know put something here and then what we can do is run a difference boolean so select this shift click this q difference like that now what we need to do is we need to run a chamfer here around the around this cutout so a really easy way to do that non-destructively would be to move this face to about here now if i bevel it it's going to bevel inwards now i actually want to bevel it outwards so before we do that make sure your scale is applied if it's not it's going to be biased so ctrl a to apply the scale and now we can do instead of beveling on the inside we can press alt n to flip the normals and it's now going to bevel in the other direction and this is what we call a reverse bevel really easy to do and do a quick symmetry and then mirror down like that and that's why i love mirror because you only have to work on one side and everything else gets taken care of so i always recommend using mirror when you can and yeah this should be fine i could even for whatever reason there we go looks good and i think that should be big enough that should be fine now what i want to do is press q and then ever scroll it because check this out what i can do is i can press q and go to settings and if we shift click on shade solid this is going to take the cutter solid or make it a solid and then move it out of the cutters collection so now if i hide the cutters collection with shift 3 we're going to have our own separate piece and [Music] here it is and let me actually let me delete out these vertices here and then just patch this up kind of like that and then all we really have to do is mirror that put a nice little chamfer right here and then we kind of have like a bolt or something mirror it down there we go and let me just drop a bevel on everything so select everything and then just drop a really small bevel kind of like that cool and then what we can do is we can actually start adding some additional detail so for example maybe i could add in a cube scale this down really really tiny like that tiny and then you know you could do something like this and something like that pretty cool and then what we could do is maybe go into box cutter and then run an inset boolean so if we cut through here and press the i key if blender crashes i would just um either make sure you're up to date with your add-ons i don't think i am actually or you can just smart apply everything that's like the lazy way to do it it's usually what i do then what we can actually do is come in here and the inset boolean should work we'll press the i key press enter work that time and then what we can do is we can do a cut like that looks pretty cool and then maybe we'll just apply this boolean here and yeah let's alt click on this edge actually what i would do if you have mesh machine what you can do because if we alt click it now it won't work but with mesh machine you can select an edge and then alt click the same edge and it's actually going to select through the end guns here which is pretty cool and run a small little chamfer like that just to kind of give it a little bit more emphasis and then maybe on these pieces right here we could let me reset the origin to the geometry and if that doesn't work let's just apply the mirror so what i'm going to do is dissolve these out with control x and then maybe bevel this and then run another loop cut and beveled up and then s shift y and then maybe just kind of you know move this over just a bit kind of scale that do it the lazy way and then we could mirror that down and then i want to kind of get some more visual appeal in here so what i'm going to actually do is drop a loop cut bevel this one again and then if we just go into face mode what we can do is check or deselect but set the selected value to 2 and then e to extrude right click to cancel and then alt s to scale along the normals now if i scale this in it's going to go the wrong way so instead let's press the let's go up here change to individual origins then we can kind of scale that in on their own individual origins like that maybe give it a small bevel and now we kind of have this cool looking like knob or something cool and now we can maybe do is this looks cool but we could add in maybe another cylinder actually before we do that i'm going to make some small little bolts right here i just think it'll look kind of cool so we could do something like that and then all you really have to do is take that cutter and then mirror mirror mirror again over that 3d cursor and then what we could do is cue settings shift click on shade solid kind of scale that in you know bevel that just kind of make like a little bolt or something for some additional detail there maybe move it out or move it in like that and yeah it looks pretty cool now one thing i like to do in hard ops is go up here and go to this menu and if you turn on blank material similar to viewport what you can actually do is press alt m and this is going to make like a different shade of gray so you could just kind of cycle through these and then once you find one you like maybe here alt m and give it the same one and then maybe i could even do something like this there we go and now we can have like a little bit of a separation in here and as a little bonus if you want to get like a cool looking render what you could do is maybe add in edit in empty and then ctrl i to invert the selection shift click on the empty and then control p to parent parent and keep the transform so now i can kind of rotate this and um you might want to smart apply everything or it's going to be kind of laggy but in this case since i parented it there's pythons getting through but um if you want to get a quick and easy render you could just add in a plane scale the plane up move it down give it a new material and basically if you just go into rendered mode give it like a metallic um you want to load in an hdri the one i use is the abandoned slipway from polyhaven.com it's a free one so you can just load that one in now we have a much nicer type of environment lighting and you know basically the floor here could be metallic you could make it a little bit more reflective make it a little bit darker right and then you could just kind of rotate this r y negative 90 right you could just kind of move that down right on top of the plane as best you can to actually go into wireframe so we can see it better okay and then just scale that up and you can just get like a really simple render give it a little bit more you know like interest to it kind of rotate it and then you could even like i don't know give it like a little more variation like that i'm just doing this nice and easy i'm not going to spend too much time with the render then if you add in a camera you know you could load in your camera here zoom it in then basically at this point you just kind of play with the rotation just kind of look for a good composition really so play with that play with the material see what materials look good on your mesh and which ones don't because that's just kind of up to you to play with so pretty simple piece with pretty simple techniques and although the piece looks complicated it's really not so that's it for today's video and of course i'll have all the links to everything i use in the description the add-ons i use some of our resources our courses things like that all that will be linked in the description i hope this video provided you some value provided you a new workflow and different ways to approach your modeling your hard surface modeling and blender so thanks much for watching guys and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 36,424

Keywords: blender tutorial, tricky shapes in blender, blender hard surface, hard surface modeling, blender hard surface modeling, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial blender, hard surface, hard ops blender, boxcutter blender, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, 3d modeling blender, blender beginner, blender 3d modeling tutorial, blender bros, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blender beginner tutorial, impossible shape blender, subd modeling, boolean

Id: Gf92AO4jf_s

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022