Understanding the Boolean Workflow in Blender

what's up everyone Josh here and this is gonna be a little bit of a different style of video it's gonna be a follow along workflow this is gonna discuss the general boolean workflow so the purpose of this is for you to open blender and follow along with what I'm doing so you're gonna work along with me so go ahead open up blender whatever version you're using you should have your default cube which we're going to start with so pause the video if you need to otherwise let's get started so what we're gonna do here is first of all I'm not gonna use any external add-ons unless they're included little blender and one of those add-ons is going to be the full tool add-on and just to make sure I don't have any extra ones I'm going to turn off the hard option box cutter and instead we'll use the bool tool turn this on it's included with blender and we'll be using that momentarily but for now what we want to do is go over here to the modifiers panel add a cast modifier okay now we nothing's gonna happen right now but that's because we need to add a subdivision surface as well so if I press ctrl 3 or control 4 let's do control 4 it's gonna turn it into this sphere type of thing and we also want to make sure the subsurf is above the cast so that way it rounds it out and then applies the cast and all the cast does is it turns this into a topologically accurate sphere and we're gonna turn the value and the factor here to a value of 1 so now we have an actual sphere and the reason we're not using a UV sphere is just because this one's a little bit more consistent in terms of the geometry so yeah once you've done that you can just go ahead right-click and shade smooth and apply both modifiers here so now you should have an accurate sphere and your scene so if you've seen the thumbnail of the video you should have a general idea of what we're making but I want to get this kind of landing pad type of formation so I want to chop off the bottom part of the sphere and also the top part of the sphere just a certain area of the top and bottom I want to remove and we're gonna work non-destructively and with boolean so the best way to remove bottom part non-destructively is to add in a cube move this guy down and sometimes you might just be guessing where exactly you're doing your cut so say I placed it right here right I went right here and then held shift and selected the sphere and press ctrl - to add in that cut now in this case it worked okay but let's say it was in a different location you start getting these shading issues here and this is why it's really important to make sure you have your wireframe mode toggled before you do any sort of boolean operations especially on spheres because spheres can be tricky so I'm going to go ahead and select the sphere here go to the object data panel or object properties panel and under viewport display you can tick on wireframe I also have a shortcut map - semicolon just for ease of access so yeah go ahead and turn on your wireframe and then almost immediately you can begin to see where exactly the issues are stemming from so sense wireframes on I'm going to use my manual selection here with wireframe on you can see that this cube that's acting as a boolean on the sphere is basically intersecting right with the really important areas of our sphere this curvature right when it hits those edges we start getting really really bad shading and this is a very important consideration whenever you're using the boolean non-destructive workflow because if you get any sort of intersections with your boolean object in your base object in terms of where the topology is positioned you're gonna always run into these issues and there's a name for it like right when two faces intersect to each other it's called hot lining so that's a pretty common issue so really the way we fix this is just by putting the boolean in an area where it's not actually intersecting with parallel geometry so I'm gonna move it to about here instead and you can already see that basically all that shading has went away there's no sort of issues there exactly what we're going for now there are obviously other reasons as to why shading issues and artifacts could occur such as with bevels and intersecting geometry just as a basic explanation with what we're working with right now the main reason you'd run into shading issues off the bat is due to the location of your bullying objects so easiest solution just to move this in a different location all right so now that we've got that sorted out what we can go ahead and do is get a little bit chopped off on the upper portion here now this is a common mistake I see a lot of people do either they add in a brand new cube or whatever you might be using hard hops or box cutter I don't even need a cube but yeah they'll usually bring in a new cutter and then cut it that way which is fine or some people also duplicate the boolean object an object mode and then when they try to use it again nothing's happening that's because the easiest solution just to make everything quicker just go into edit mode and duplicate it it'll keep the boolean information and it just kind of saves you some time so gonna duplicate that in edit mode and once again we want to avoid the hot lining issues where we start hitting those parallel edges there so let's just find a nice and practical location maybe right about here or we're not really intersecting with any of those parallel regions and then I'm also going to press the L key on this bottom one and move this up a little bit right to about here so now what we have is this little cutout and maybe just to get some more curvature we can pull this up some more and then once again the L key will select that link geometry we can use this area and you know you can go to the next set of faces that are above the horizontal loops you just want to make sure you're not hitting any vertices or any of those flat edges really like this position is completely fine so yeah now that we have this we can just kind of build on top of this we do have a little bit of shading issues here but I'd be willing to bet once we use our bevel modifier we can kind of adjust these things more manually so yeah for now this should be completely fine and if this shading does bother you at all you can just go over to the all-new smooth panel and turn that on it'll kind of balance out the shading a bit nicer but yeah really we don't have to worry too much about those shading shoes until we add our bevel the bevel is where everything's gonna kind of destroy itself if something's wrong so and I'm also a really big fan of just doing bevels right off the bat just because the sooner you add a bevel the sooner you'll see any potential issues with your mesh so what I'm gonna do we'll just drop this collapse out a little bit go to add modifier and then bevel and you're gonna see we have all these really bad jagged edges now I changed over from Studio to matte cap just to kind of emphasize the view you can see the jagged edges there and to fix that we just change 11th method here to angle and it's only gonna be beveled based off of the 30-degree angle or up if it's within that 30-degree threshold then it will be beveled if it's not then it won't be beveled that's what I'm trying to say so we're gonna turn the segment's up to about three or five usually I don't have to go too much higher than that because the curvature is not gonna really be noticed by the human eye so maybe about five is okay and then if we go into our wire frame and kind of see how this bevel is affecting everything looks pretty good now we can adjust the offset however we want but you're gonna see eventually it hits kind of a cab where it doesn't bevel anymore and that's where the clamp overlap comes in so clamp overlap essentially kicks in whenever the bevel would start intersecting with the geometry so the clamp overlap is what prevents that if I were to turn this off you're gonna see it kind of goes crazy and that's because if we carefully analyze this the more I adjust the offset of the bevel eventually right about now it starts intersecting with the geometry and I'm just gonna turn the clipping distance down so I can see this a bit nicer so right about here this is right before the clamp overlap would have kicked in and then it starts intersecting these edges start intersecting with the geometry so basically the clamp overlap just prevents that from happening so most of the time I keep this off because really minor artifacts here and there are not really an issue at all they're not gonna really be noticed in your renders or anything crazy if anything it'll just look more like surface imperfections but for really noticeable ones like this rather than just ignoring it it's best to kind of fix these by either adjusting the boolean or using things like the weld modifier now I like to just use weld really sparingly and basically what the weld does if I make this a really really slight area here so if I were to go to add modifier and then weld basically it's a merge by distance or remove doubles in the form of a modifier basically you can kind of see exactly what's happening it's just emerging all of those really near-miss vertices together and I use that sometimes but more often than not I just prefer to make some manual adjustments like in this case if I wanted more of a bevel my main option here would be to go to this guy and then just move them up a little bit so now I can get away with adding more of a bevel here before it starts giving those artifacts so that's the solution I'm gonna go with here but just keep in mind you can also use a well if you'd like and just for good measure I'll keep the clamp overlap on just because it's not really hurting us right now and sometimes just for fun and to kind of give more of an intuition behind how exactly the clamp overlap works it's always nice to go into object mode select your main boolean here and if you start moving the boolean up or down on the z-axis you can kind of see how the clamp overlap kind of adjust to the geometry once we hit areas where it almost immediately intersects with the bevel it kind of kicks in and gets really tight but in areas where we have more freedom for the bevel it kind of allows us more of a more of a bigger bevel really so sometimes it's nice to just move this around and see some of the different designs you can get really just up to you another thing you've probably noticed is right about here it's not like anything crazy but the bevels flowing really nicely up until about this point or we have that close intersection it's kind of like an uneven bevel and same over here the reason it's happening in this case is just because the higher up you go on the sphere more kind of condense the curvature gets like it's not as straight look in the middle the middle is way more straight and then the upper portion it's way more wavy so it's harder to reach that nice balance of boolean locations on this specific figure and honestly it gets to a point where you have to balance the topological acuity with just the efficiency of your workflow and just make sacrifices and this is the case where I could really dig deep in here and try to do some fancy boolean and weld magic to kind of fix it but the easiest solution in this case is just to adjust the adjusts the boolean literally just move this guy until we're in a better location now you'll see the clamp overlap kind of kicks in tightly here so obviously put it in a location where you still have some bevel but you know there's not really a huge need to stress about those minor things just find a better location for it really just like that you can kind of see we have a very nice bevel here and it's flowing a lot nicer in this specific location and all I really did just moved it up on the z-axis and you know people ask me all the time like Oh what about n-gons what about the triangles what about this what about that and I always tell them with this specific type of boolean workflow and since I'm mailing just going for renders and not any sort of deformation or a game a set design I'm not trying to completely eradicate the big topology issues like n-gons I'm trying to manage them to make it look good and this is precisely a situation in which I'm doing just that like it's unrealistic for me to go and just completely eradicate all the topology issues it's much easier for me to just adjust it and manage it which is what I did here by just moving the boolean into a more practical location anyway is enough with that Chet now what I want to do is make a nice cut through the middle here so what I'm going to do is add in a cube shift a mesh and then cube scale this guy down once again box-cutter is way better for this but I want to make this completely in vanilla blender so we'll go to the top here yep we'll go to the top and then scale us on the Y until it is passed like so and remember we want to make sure we're applying these cuts in a location where we're not gonna run into any sort of hot lining or artifacting issues and this is a pretty good location because we're not really intersecting or hitting any edges completely parallel with an edge so so yeah at this point we can select the cube or the extend cube and then shift select the piece here and press ctrl - on the number pad and this gives us a nice little cut through the middle and this is why I prefer hard opps just because it automatically sorts your modifier stack obviously we don't have a bevel applied here so we have to make sure the boolean is before the bevel to get that nice effect so at this point we can just go ahead and press H to hide that and get out of wireframe and you'll see that it looks pretty good but now we have an issue here where it's really jagged and that is simply because we did not smooth out our boolean objects so we'll just right-click shade smooth and then if we hide that again you'll see that just completely eradicate the issue there and and while we're on that topic this guy here isn't smoothed out either so we'll right-click shade smooth and that should clean up those areas as well so always make sure you smooth out your boolean cutters as well so now we basically have like the top of a screw or something so if you're trying to design a screw I mean here you go you can thank me in the comments for showing you how to make a screw anyways yeah so we have this little nice design and it's also worth mentioning at any point since we're working non-destructively you can adjust things whenever you want you can adjust for these cuts are placed you can adjust where this guy is or how deep it is by just scaling it up once again you just want to be careful and always always always pay attention to how adjusting your cutters is affecting the topology and you'll see that it goes from bevel to no bevel right when it starts hot lining then it kind of fixes itself once we get to a more practical location so yeah with all this knowledge in mind you should be able to use your cutters and go back and fix things really efficiently so at this point let's go ahead and add another design in here to something simple maybe what we could do is add in a little bit of a cut here on the bottom maybe a slice I don't know so I'm gonna go into wireframe for this object once again it's in this orange box I just have the semicolon key for quick access and what I'm gonna do is add in a mesh plane maybe move the sky up into a good location make sure we're not getting any sort of hot lining or it's intersecting with any parallel edges or roughly parallel edges that is so now what I'm going to do is maybe add in two loop cuts here in edit mode with ctrl R we could move these edges down let's move them until they're in a good location right here would be bad because we're hitting that vertex it's kind of gonna give us shading issues or artifacts but right about here should be completely fine and then what I could do is maybe add in two more loop cuts on the top and then just one on each side so now if I pull this face up we kind of get a little bit of this almost like some sort of Star Wars or Star Trek type of ship formation I don't know but I think this would look pretty cool now this is definitely gonna give us an issue because there's a vertex right there so I'm just gonna select everything with the a key just kind of slide it down make sure we have a pretty good location which doesn't look like we're gonna run into any sort of issues here so yeah and then at this point to get ourselves a nice little cut through here I'm just going to add a solidify modifier which you can adjust to your liking I'll just leave it at point zero one the default and that might give us problems I don't know we can see we'll shift select the little piece here and press ctrl - and just like that we have a cool little cut here on the bottom and then of course we just have to put the boolean above the bevel and it doesn't look like we really have any sort of issues here and if we did the clamp overlap would have automatically kicked in and we probably wouldn't have had any bevel here to begin with case in point if I were to move this and intentionally try to get hot lining the bevel is just not gonna work so usually the clamp overlap can be used to your advantage just to know if you're in a good location or not so whenever you have a good amount of bevel you know you're in a good location if you have like no bevel then you're probably hitting a vertex or edge or you don't want to hit it so I'm gonna just move this to a better location maybe right about here that looks pretty good to me and then of course we need to right-click in shade smooth our cutter so that way our base object is also smooth so there we go we have this cool-looking design here now I like it now what I want to do is simply add in another cube and since we're done with these cutters you're also more than welcome to just press the H key to hide them we don't need them anymore so I'm gonna add in a cube scale down and put it right about here and then scale on the X and also scale on the Y so around this area roughly that looks pretty good and then we can just quickly preview our wireframe to see where this is placed should be good enough here so I'm gonna go ahead and add a boolean cut with control - on the number pad to get this effect so let's move the boolean above the bevel and you're gonna see that once we do that no sort of bevels kicking in so like I said before that's usually a clear indication that somewhere the bevel is unable to kick in simply because the the clamp overlaps just kicking in almost immediately you can see that we do indeed have a bevel it's just so tiny because the clamp overlap is preventing the intersections so in this case I'm just gonna really just adjust this maybe move out on the X and just find a little bit of a better location so now we have the boolean really beginning to kick in so yeah not too bad I'm just gonna quickly find a better position for this one and right about here looks like it's not too bad we can always fix it later if we don't like it so now I'm just gonna right click and shade smooth that area that looks pretty good and I hope I'm not like I hope I'm explaining everything at a good pace I'm not going too slow or too fast I'm really any feedback you have on this type of tutorial and if it's helping you out just leave it in the comments so I know like how I could make this type of thing better okay yeah now we have this cool little cut here let's mirror it to the other side so what I'm gonna do is simply well move the origin to the 3d cursor and then just mirror like so we can apply the mirror right as well and then that's just going to mirror the cut to the other side so we don't have to do any sort of guesswork and one other thing I'd like to do is go back to this plane here and just adjust the solidification I don't really want that much oh they uh of a thickness in the gap there may be something more around there will fit my needs better so now they can just get into more simple design so what I'm gonna do is add in a cube and scale this guy down maybe a little bit more and move it down scale this on the y-axis move this down a bit and then begin us of course use another boolean cut to get that sort of effect going I just think sometimes the smaller the detour the more intricate details you have the cooler it looks so move that above the bevel shade smooth our cutter as always and this is why I like hard ops because it does all of this automatically but our box cutter rather so now we have this cool-looking design and you can see all of this had just built on really basic shapes and that's why I really like this type of workflow because you can get really really creative without having to worry too much about the detail topology or just manually adjusting things so yeah it looks pretty good so now I want to get a little bit of a cut here on the planar surface on the top so I mean I could adding a cylinder and try to make some manual adjustments to make this fit properly I just think the easier way is to duplicate this guy shift D and then right-click we can apply all for the modifiers and then we just are left with this right it's this but the modifiers are applied so we want destructive the reason we're doing that is so we can select these two phases here well press I to inset and we're not worried about how this is affecting the geometry there we're just doing this so that way we can just duplicate these and then once we have those two pieces we can press L on these pieces here and then just delete out the geometry so now we can use these guys as a cutter for the planar surface on the top here so what I'm going to do is yeah these are separate objects so at this point we can just press e to extrude extrude it in this direction so that way the normals are oriented correctly we do have some near-miss edges here and just to kind of clean that up I'm gonna turn on auto merge up here in the top right and then just double tap g2 edge slide we can just kind of clean up this color no need to have like these are really close areas I doubt it will cause us any problems but when they're this close usually a good idea to just move them or merge them so we don't run into any issues in the future so yeah now we can just move this down and use this as a cutter so ctrl - with the selected and we can just adjust this however we want I don't really want it to be too large but if you do you can just scale it set ordered in 2d geometry and just scale it on the z-axis but right about here should be okay and then I'm just going to move the boolean above that bevel and just make sure it affected it pretty well you can kind of see that we are getting a bevel there so no sort of issues which is good and then we can just hide this cutter or make sure you smooth out the cutter and then you can go ahead and hide it so now we have this cool looking sci-fi piece whatever it is so now what I'm going to do is just add in a cube we'll go to mesh and then cube move this guy up and really just comes down to essentially just building on top of your already existing details like you can get really basic designs really quickly just using bull tool or fusing box cutter of course with box cutter so like I just have this simple thing on the top kind of encapsulating the whole thing I could just shift select the base object and press control /u get rid of that control /to get us a slice and i accidentally had to duplicate there so let me delete the duplicate let's try that again control /u can get really basic details like the slice operation is one of my personal favorite so you can get these nice little little tiny gap cuts they look pretty cool we'll put that above the bevel and it doesn't look like we have any sort of issues going on there and if you do you can always just reposition like right here doesn't work but in this case I kind of got lucky with where I place that so yeah looks pretty good with where that's play so I'm just gonna go ahead and hide that so now we have this cool looking a little gap there the slice operation not too bad so this guy's looking pretty cool and what I do want to do I'm not really a fan of this thing right down here so instead I'm just gonna bring the plane cutter back it would also be nice if I organize these into a collection but it should be okay for now now if I remove these solidify any 2d plane but the no thickness is just gonna automatically convert into a cut whatever is below it basically so since this has no thickness everything below it's just gonna be removed so that's a something cool to keep in mind for that design and I actually think that looks quite nicer so I'm going to do that instead just for some extra detail not too bad and then another thing I want to do is get some sort of glass panel around where this gap is so I think the easiest solution to kind of adapt to the curvature would be to add in another cube we'll press ctrl for for a subsurf with four cuts right click to smooth it out and then of course we can drop on a cast with a sphere factor of 1 to make that topologically accurate and I can kind of see that's conforming a lot better we're just going going to basically scale this down and you can kind of see this is going to be the glass panel area now obviously I only want the sphere to apply to the area where this hole is so instead of you know applying the modifiers and then manually just deleting out areas until we get the intended effect like it's just gonna be annoying deleting everything until we get this the easier way is to go back to our base mesh here I want to select it shift D to duplicate right-click to leave it where it is and also to get this menu to apply all the modifiers I'm using the modifier tools add-on you can just take that on it's included with the blender and then you're going to click on apply all so now what we have is this separate guy with everything applied I'm going to select what that's selected hold shift on the sphere and then /to take us on the number pad to take us into isolated view so it's just these two things and we can basically use a slice operation to cut out the difference or I think I meant that the other way around different operation to slice out that whatever just just follow along don't sometimes I mess up the terminology but it's fine so we'll select the sphere here shift select the base object and if we press ctrl + - that'll add in a difference cut now it's actually the reverse selection I didn't want this to be cut out I wanted the it to be the other way so instead of doing the sphere first I'll do this piece first shift select the sphere ctrl - that's going to kind of cut out the difference from the base object to get this we're not worried about anything except this little piece here so I'm gonna apply the boolean and then literally after we do that we just press the L key in edit mode on both of these objects here and then we can just press P to separate that selection and then we don't need anything else in here we can delete everything else out and then we're just left with this and basically this piece here can be used as our little window frame now obviously the shading is really bad so obviously if it's shaded smooth you can turn on your auto smooth to clean that up a little bit but while we're here we might as well clean up the topology a little bit there is and clean up the geometry there's not a lot of stuff to really clean up so it should be an easy process usually when I go destructive I like to clean up what I can so I'm gonna select the top face ctrl click to the bottom face and X to delete out the faces to kind of get this effect and then make sure your auto merge is turned on so now what we can do is just start selecting these other beveled areas here just on each corner and then we don't need any of those beveled areas they're just gonna be hidden in that object anyways so what I'm gonna do is f3 and then search for merge by distance I think it might be in the right hand panel either way merge by distance to combine those into one vertex and at this point we can just work on making some quads just because why not by just sliding some of these vertices we'll slide those and then dissolve this one slide these guys and then dissolve this one x and then dissolve vertices we'll pull this one up here and then this one down there and also we have some extra ones down here we can just double tap G and then slide down looks like we still have some duplicates so we can hit that merge by distance again looks like that took care of that problem and what else are we missing let's undo a few steps oh ok somehow I think the merge by distance kicked in a little bit too hard so now what I'll do instead is just edge slot or a vertex slide and that should fix that problem we want to make sure these are completely straight on the top so that way there's no gaps in here ok so it's looking pretty good I mean if we really wanted to we could like keep cleaning up this area just becomes a matter of do we care enough you know this should be fine so I'm not gonna worry too much about it and then instead of just fixing up this one we'll just delete out the vertices and simply use a mirror modifier to mirror to the other side on the x-axis just make sure your origin point is on the 3d cursor in the center and then you can apply that mirror and voila look what we have this little like little windowpane thing I don't know what you want to call it and just for good measure we can also scale up maybe do we want to scale up I don't know I mean you could if you want to be a little bit safe but it's probably gonna match the walls perfectly so we could probably leave it where it is so now I'm just gonna make a few circular cuts just because that's always a nice design to put in so I'm going to add in a cylinder sixty-four vertices is probably okay what we'll do is rotate 90 degrees over the x-axis and also turn on the wireframe for this guy so we can see where to position this cylinder so I want the cut to be in this corner somewhere so we could probably get away with this location I'll just have to see how it affects our bevel and then just scale on the y-axis until it is out like that well smooth out the cylinder and then shift select the base object press ctrl - and also move that boolean above the bevel looks like we did not have a very good connection point there so what I'm gonna do is just simply move this around and just see how the bevel is being affected so it looks like blender is happy with this position which you know I'm willing to take that position it's close enough and then what I'm going to do is simply mirror to the other side so origin to 3d cursor will mirror that guy and look at that we have ourself if I hide this and turn off wireframe a cool-looking whole design not too bad and now at this point I'm gonna mess with the clamp overlap a little bit I usually use it as a tool more than I do an actual like like its intended use I just use it to visualize things so right now we do have a bevel as you can see the bevels are really tiny and if I increase it nothing happens because the clamp overlap is stopping that so instead of what I'm going to do is turn off the clamp overlap and just observe where most of these problems are coming now first of all this bevel is way too big no need for that maybe around here is where I want that bevel that looks good we can kind of see that that clamp overlap is no longer wanted so we have these issues so what I could do is just adjust where the slice is place so let's just go ahead and go back to this cutter and just move it up and you'll see that's a much more practical location know sort of intersecting there go ahead and hide that this is why I love the wireframe tool because you can see exactly where to place things now these cups are a little bit too close for comfort so I'm going to go back to the cylinder go into edit mode for them and also wireframe here and I definitely am going to need to put this in a different location so it looks like if I put it up here blenders okay with it but still not the best connection points that I'm finding here you can kind of see that it just starts going crazy so sometimes what I like to do in cases like this where you have circular cuts you can get all this sort of crazy intersecting on the bevel is I like to steal the curvature on our base object what I mean by that is get a more practical connection point rather than having it connect to these poles here I can just move this over and kind of steal this line now we still get a little bit of artifacting but it's not anywhere near as bad as it was over here so I'm just gonna move this on top of the line and if you've seen my fixing artifacts video this should be making sense right now try to find a more practical location looks like the only artifact is kicking in right here in this case we can try a weld modifier so out of weld that's way too much for distance just increase it ever so slightly from zero until that collapses and we can go ahead and take a look at this still a little bit ugly so we can just try to reposition this into a better location and quite honestly since these holes are such a tiny piece of detail I really don't think I needed to even add in 64 vertices for that cylinder 32 would have been way more convenient so I'm just gonna re add a cylinder with 32 vertices and try again you know I could edit all this stuff out but this is why I think it's important to really see the truth behind these workflows it's a lot of trial and error it's not just like instant gratification so maybe we can go back in here first of all smooth shade this right-click shade smooth boolean difference control - we'll move this boolean above the bevel and look at that yeah 32 vertices worked way better you can already see it's it's looking a lot more convenient so what I'm gonna do is just really let that weld kick in and do the work for me so you can kind of see how look on the top there for that cut the weld modifier is automatically kind of converging those vertices and look at that way better I mean there's a little bit of shading I could try to clean up if I really wanted to it just becomes a matter of how much is that really slight line noticeable in the grand scheme of things and the answer is it's not so I'm not gonna worry too much about it so we'll reposition this to the 3d cursor in the center of the world use a mirror and already this is looking way better so we don't have to apply the mirror we can always just leave it unless we have to apply it which we don't so we'll go ahead and hide that and this thing is looking pretty good and you're gonna notice we do have quite a bit of shading issues here this doesn't look very good we can even use a different matte cap to kind of emphasize that bad shading so what we can do is simply add in a weighted normal and that's just going to clean up the shading a little bit more I mean not perfectly in this case but it did a better job I think you could have also ticked on hearted normals on the bevel just that weighted normal gives you a little bit more control but they for all intents and purposes to do the same thing so turn on weighted normal there and I'm just going to go around to this mesh and just see how everything is lining up so everything's pretty smooth in this matte cap until we kind of hit these corners on the top here and before we do our render we're gonna be cleaning up all of these really ugly issues on the top here at some point so don't worry too much about that either way it's looking good - a little bit around the holes which is completely normal and yeah these little shaded and artifacts here on the top are precisely why non-destructive workflows do have their limitations because at some point you have to go in there and just really tackle the issue so before I choose to go destructive which I'll do later I always like to make a duplicate backup so that way I can always go back to the the pre destructive workflow so yeah usually in cases like this this is when I use hard ops because if I were to demonstrate I could literally just go to a see sharpen on hard ops and just merge these together and literally that shading is infinitely better with like three clicks so but yeah we'll do all of that shortly here let's not worry too much about it right now we just want to work on getting that detail into our mesh now what I want to do is get a little bit of a cut here in the front just because it's looking kind of boring here in the front so I'm gonna add in another cube will scale it down move it up and scale it down some more I could have just stolen the boolean cube from these cuts here but it doesn't really matter go ahead and pull this guy scale em on the Z a little bit and I guess this general area is a good location for that so we'll just scale on the Y until this thing is intersecting through the mesh and then of course ctrl - for that and put the boolean right above the bevel to get this a nice little effect here and then maybe let's scale this the cutter oops scale the cutter on the X a little bit I don't really know how far I want this to go so we can place it right around here that should be enough and then an extra little design we could do if we selected these four edges on the outer side we can press control B and just adjust the bevel amount so maybe I'll give this what is that four segments and then just kind of adjust this looks like that beveled pretty well we can see how it looks not too bad and then hide this so there's just an extra little design there you know you can do all sorts of things with these boolean which is why I really love this workflow it just adds in really nice effects in just a short amount of time so yep that looks pretty good now one other thing I want to discuss is okay say for example I wanted to add in like a plank through the middle here and I mean what I could do is I could add in a cube right adding a cube and then scale it across and then move it up and then just kind of try to get it just right and you know that gets the design down we have that little plant going through the middle like we want but a few issues one its intersecting with the geometry and it's just kind of the extra area just sitting in there which is kind of a waste of space doesn't matter too much but a little bit annoying another thing we have to apply a bevel because the bevel is not applied to this and yeah it just it takes longer than doing it by this method it's just more it's more accurate to do the method I'm about to show you rather than manually placing in cuts like this so you'll notice that we already have these half cylinder cuts here in the middle so we can actually do is with these cuts that's the wrong one these guys right here what we can actually do is cut the cutter so what this is doing is obviously this is working as a boolean for the area that's moving but if I remove part of the area that's being cut then obviously the original geometry from the base mesh is going to come back because there's nothing to cut out if part of this cutter is missing it's it's hard for me to explain hopefully that makes sense but yeah basically what we can do how does it duplicate this will scale it on the Y here and we're just going to make this roughly the size we want that plank to be we can scale it on the Z for good measure and then what we can do is select this guy shift select our cutter if we press ctrl also we're gonna get some hot lining issues make sure this is way bigger than the actual cutter so we'll shift select the cutter press ctrl - and then look what that does it basically brings back the original area because that that cutter is no longer affecting it and the reason it's stopping here not just continuing through is basically because we have this cylindrical topology so the way it's affecting it is a little bit different than just a basic cube would be affected so I mean you could kind of adjust the scale and get these cool little designs you could also do it manually on each side but off-camera I found that if I just scale this on the y-axis we get this a really really cool effect I don't know what in the world this is but it looks cool so I don't know I thought I would just leave it it looks good and it also gives you that nice little fusion bevel there on the bottom so yeah I'm gonna go ahead and leave it like that I thought it looked pretty cool and I guess we can just add a few more tiny things and wrap up the video because hopefully I've gotten like most of the points across by now so pretty basic little design here nothing crazy but just enough to get you a nice easy intro to this type of workflow because I know a lot of people wanted like a comprehensive guide anyways not we need to do is clean up some of the shading up here and this is where I usually go destructive but before I go destructive what I always do is I make a duplicate so what I'm gonna go ahead and do is make a duplicate file I guess you could also duplicate the mesh if you wanted to but it's just easier for me to make a duplicate file so I'm going to go to save copy up here and just add it to to the end of it that and now we already have an extra file to go back to if we need to at this point we can go ahead and start applying our stuff so that way we can fix up the shading issues cool so now we need to do is apply our modifiers let me screencast keys is a great add-on but it always turns off randomly for some reason okay anyway sometimes you'll notice that your boolean czar grayed out and you can't apply them usually this has to do with multi-user data issues all you have to do is go to the green triangle panel and click on this little number here that'll fix it then you can apply everything now this is why I particularly like hard ops as well usually I just want to apply the boolean to go destructive I don't want to apply the bevel or well modifiers or weighted normals usually I just want to apply the boolean x' now if you don't have hard ops I don't know if there's an easy way to do that without just doing it all manually if there is let me know in the comments but for now with the modifiers tools add-on I'm going to click on toggle stack and then just manually start applying these boolean it doesn't take too long but if you had hundreds of boolean as I assume that would be a little bit tedious but yeah anyways so now we have the bevel of the weld and the weighted normal but we have access to all of the topology here now so we just have to clean up these really ugly shading issues so I'm going to turn to a different matte cap just one that kind of captures these ugly shading issues a bit more this is kind of a little bit hard on the eyes let's try the green one so what I'm gonna do here is tap into edit mode and then to start kind of merging these guys together really just the areas where we have artifacts so I have to clean that part up you can already see how much of a difference this makes it's just these really near-miss vertices give us a ton of problems so yeah I'm just going to go around this whole entire cylinder not going to do it all on video and basically for these near-miss vertices I'm just going to work on kind of cleaning them up and same for these like excess loops here I don't need them I can just pull them down like that so uh yeah what I'm gonna do is just kind of go through here manually and clean up some of the some of the shading so yeah I did a pretty good cleanup job I could really get in there and make everything as geometrically perfect as I could but if we really take a look now you can see that basically all of those bad shading issues are gone if we take a very careful look at our matte cap you know right here maybe this triangles giving us a little bit of warping like very minor nothing super crazy to worry about which you could fix if you wanted to but you're probably not gonna see it in the render at all so yeah and also that's that's the thing with spheres is it's it's always a curved surface so you can't get like the most accurate matte cab view anyways okay so now that this one's looking pretty good we can go up to this one and apply all of our boolean x' once again make sure you keep the bevel otherwise you're gonna have to deal with a bunch of bevels on this so we'll leave it and then we're just gonna start sliding vertices really it's just the near-miss ones that are giving us the shading issues so those are the only ones that we really need to deal with on the top and bottom so we'll just grab these near-miss ones super easy stuff it's kind of boring though especially to get into more complex models and you're doing like hundreds of different vertex slides and that's why I don't really like going destructive but sometimes you just have to especially on spheres most of the time I end up having to go destructive so just keep sliding these up wrong one keep sliding these guys almost done we'll do one here one here one here and one here and then just these really close ones on the ends which I think I got most of so now if we look in matte cap and just do a nice pan around mostly good shading few little triangle issues here and there which is your choice if you'd like to go in and really start cleaning up for the most part I am pretty happy with how this looks so not gonna worry too much about it could slide these down a bit and just I don't know yeah but anyway it's looking pretty good and now we just have to kind of add some more materials to make it look look a little bit better and real quick if you look at the top of this one a little bit of shading issues so I'm gonna go ahead and drop on a weighted normal weighted normals are gonna clean up those planar surfaces or really well maybe for a little bit of an emphasis that's with out the way to normal really really bad shading you can see it but planar surfaces get along with a weighted normal super well so if you ever have a planar surface of bad shading just take that guy on and you are good to go beautiful matte cat views so it looks good to me so now we can go ahead and get to the fun part which is just materials this shouldn't take too long at all so I'm always a fan of getting a little bit of a glow effect in evey so what I'm gonna do is put a cube of some sort extended in here to get some lighting from so we're gonna add in a mesh cube just grab this guy up scale it down and then scale it on the X for these types of emissive materials I don't worry too much about how they're placed in the mesh I just want to get them in there so now depending on how hard you want the lighting to seep out is gonna depend on how far you extend this guy I'm gonna extend it too far let's pull it back it's gonna be cool when you kind of have the light leaking from it rather than just coming straight from that source so I'm gonna leave it to about there and yeah we can just go ahead and go into evey here we'll select that cube on the inside let's give it an emissive material type in emission principle we'll change that over to emission and give it whatever color you want maybe like a cyan color knock the strength out to around 10 and of course you're going to need your ambient occlusion on to get those nice shadows kind of see the difference screen space reflection it's always a good idea and then the best one is a bloom you can already see a difference that makes so it's always a good idea to really ramp up the lighting dependent depending on how harsh you want it to be and now for these sides we just want these to be little windows so we'll call this material windows and this parts really easy you put the transmission to one roughness to zero tick on screen space refraction and then here in the screen space reflection setting just make sure refractions actually turned on so now this will kind of act as a window almost as you can see so now to get a little bit of light inside of the windows here I'm just going to duplicate the windows will change the origin point to the geometry and scale them a little bit like that and then what we can do is just add in or give it that emission material so we have that cool little effect I don't know it looks decent I don't know how much the windows are really helping I guess they're picking up some of the light it looks ok I could really go deep in the detail but I really wanted this to just be a modeling tutorial so yeah pretty good progress for the top maybe we can just give this a a new material give it whatever color you want really maybe some sort of bluish color cyan color and I'm always a fan of knocking the roughness and ow I'm pretty low and how do you some clear coat is always nice just a little bit of clear coat usually looks pretty good on the mesh so now we have that effect try point one and then just for a little bit of extra detail I always love the noise texture combined with a bump nude so not image so if we go into the shader editor and we add a noise give this a scale of around 500 and a bump node you just connect these guys up drop the strength to around point one and you have yourself a nice little bumpy surface kind of reminiscent of a real life so it looks good and then maybe for our final base material we could just drop the roughness down a bit I'll give it some clear coat and then we could always just go in here and steal the noise and bump by control seeing and then selecting this material control Veen or maybe maybe I can't do that I don't know I'll just put them in manually get 500 with a bump probably did something wrong I'm sure there's a way to duplicate it but yeah I'll put that on there and there we go we have a pretty cool looking object he can do all sorts of designs to this but I just want to end the video we were already pretty deep in here so yeah hopefully you enjoy the process the modeling I'll leave the artistic side to you just because it's a whole different ball game in and of itself but hopefully you understand more about non-destructive the general workflow topological considerations and just how to go from non-destructive to destructive to clean up some of the shading and when necessary so if the video helped you I'd really appreciate a comment or just to like to let me know and if this video was too long then definitely let me know as well so I can might try to make a more condensed tutorial in the future anyways thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one also follow me on Instagram I post a lot of sneak peeks on my story

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 163,089

Rating: 4.9379954 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, hard, surface, modeling, boolean, workflow, topology, quads, ngons, tris, proper, josh, gambrell, operation, recreate, slice, cut, holes, 3d, cg, beginners, tutorial, tips, tricks, guru, wooden, rain

Id: Mc4iyztAoPw

Length: 56min 29sec (3389 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020