Using Curves to create simple and complex horns

greetings hobbies this is art sans of all and in this tutorial we're going to have a look at how to create horns or other pointed objects and we're also going to look at some clever tricks to make more complicated horns so whenever making something like an object like a horn i find the easiest thing to do is to start with the curve so i'm going to go to edit and preferences and i'm just going to type in extra and i'm going to get this extra curves or add curve extra objects and from now on when i press ctrl a i now have many more curve options including the very exciting curved spirals and i just want an archimedean one so i'm going to click on that and the moment this looks particularly boring until i bring this out and then what we've got is our number of turns and we can start changing things around this so the first thing that i want to do is change my height i want this going something like that so i want it moving out and actually the other thing i want to do is rotate this round on the y-axis so i'm just going to set that to 90. so at the moment we've got this more interesting curved shape i think i want this a bit smoother than this so i'm going to up the steps let's go with 36 for this i could do it more and we've got the radius growth here which essentially means how much the spiral goes out further and further we can also turn this to a minus number and turn it in so that suddenly my horn curves in like this i think that looks like a pretty good start so i'm going to stick with that for now so now we've got that so how we're going to make this into a horn well there's several options we've got here the first thing we need to do is we need to add some size to this some thickness so i can do that over here by coming to the object data properties and just scrolling down to where it says geometry and i can change this bevel to have a thickness to it but this doesn't look particularly horn-like it doesn't get any thicker or thinner and i'm a bit limited on things like the shape but let's deal with one thing at a time so i'm going to bring this up this depth to make it relatively thick i'm going to click fill end caps and i don't like this resolution i'm going to up that so it's a bit smoother let's go for something like 12 let's go 16. so we need this to get more pointy and this is definitely causing some problems here so let's fix that first of all so we do actually have an option here where it says taper objects and this is really easy to do it just revolves around using another curve so let's shift an a and i just want a bezier curve i'm going to g and x that over to the side so let's go through how this is going to work now first of all we're going to apply this and then we'll talk about what it's doing so i'm going to click on this object i want to taper it and i'm going to taper it to that and you'll notice that this is turned into a more interesting spiral so let's talk about what's happened here looking at both at the same time let's move that over slightly so effectively if i come into the z-axis what this is doing is that this is setting the thickness of this bevel so if i come here the bevel is well 0.35 units this is down as meters but what's happening is this is being modified by this curve and what this is doing if i go into edit mode is actually it's probably easier not in edit mode is it's using the origin point which is there as zero and we can see this if i go to options and origin and then press g and y and start moving the origin away you'll notice that it starts thickening everything up or if i don't do that and start moving the vertices in edit mode so a g and y again it's going to start thickening everything up so what it's doing is blender is focusing on this point of the origin on the y axis is zero so if i just control here to add an extra point if i don't want this going to a point all i need to do is move this up and that's going to thicken it and actually if i just flex this round here we're going to have that now what i want is something a little bit more well i mean this would be okay for something like a tail but let's make it a bit more like a horn so i want it relatively thick let's smooth that round off there and i probably don't want this like that i want this to curve to something like there so now i've got this working we've got this pretty good pointed shape something pretty like a horn and again if i want to thicken the whole thing up i'm just going to press a g and y and move those a bit that way but importantly if i want that tip to go to a point i do need this equal or close to equal to the origin on the y-axis notice if i go further this is going to cause a problem over here you can see that it's trying to go or invert so let's not do that let's get something to there and i normally leave just a little bit of a gap so it's slightly off so that i can fiddle around with that later because there's a slight problem with curves in the way they fill their end caps it doesn't go to a perfect point so that's really cool for a pretty nice looking horn but what if we want to do more to this what if this isn't good enough for us what if i want something more in an interesting shape so let's start creating this interesting shape so at the moment we are using this bevel option and we're just using the information in the curve itself so this is the curve for the horn object but i can set this to do it via an object so i'm going to come on to object and i'm going to bring in an object and this again should be a curve so i'm going to bring a circle g and x just to move that to the side so we've got the curve thickness over here and we've got the shape that it's going to be over there i'm actually just going to s and scale that down because it's probably a little bigger and then ctrl a and apply the scale we always apply the scale so let's come back to our horn and let's set this curve as the object that's going to act as our thickness or our shape so just use the pipette click on that and we've got a curve which is following this trend of being thick and then getting thinner now this looks exactly the same as what i did with the round bevel so what's the point well what's really cool about this is because this is a curve i can come into edit mode and again using my curve pen or whatever thing that you want to we can start modifying this so in this instance this is going to use my x-axis as the bottom so you'll notice that if i come into top-down view i can just move this one here and it's going to flatten out that bottom and you can see that that's the bottom of my curve or my corn being flattened out and then i can start maybe control and add a point in there and let's add a point in there and i can start moving those around something i don't know a bit like that does that look interesting let's have a look something a bit like that and let's see what that does so we've got a nice flat horn with a slight ridge that's going to follow the curve round and create this quite interesting or i'd say more interesting looking horn now we could do this with a mirror modifier i'm not going to bother with that because i like there being some slight errors would be the wrong word but variations because well it's a horn it's a natural shape but this should be pretty good we've got a nice interesting looking shape here for this horn so this is the real benefit of using an additional curve for the bevel so let's start having a look at a little bit more of a complex object here or a more complex horn so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to shift and d this and move it along the x-axis so i've got another version of this and i'm going to try and make a more complex horn and this time i'm going to use this object as well so i'm going to shift in d again i'll move that on the x-axis and let's start working out what we want to do so first thing i'm going to do is get rid of this and i'm going to get rid of the taper and this time for my more complex horn what i want to do is go to object mode and i'm going to convert this to a mesh and then i'm going to go into vertex mode a to select all the vertices i'm going to press f to fill it and i'm going to go into face mode select that and i'm going to e to extrude that up somewhere about there so i've got the beginnings of my horn but i want to make this a bit more interesting so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just shrink that bit in a little bit maybe a little bit more and then i'm going to control an r to bring in an edge loop i'm going to s to scale that in as well and then i'm going to bevel this so ctrl b i'm going to bring that bevel up and i'm going to add in some edge loops to make this nice and interesting now the other thing i think i'm going to do is i'm going to bevel this bottom one here just so that bits nice and rounded on the bottom and let's start having a look at how this looks because what we're going to do is we're going to array this so i'm going to come here add modifier array i don't want this on the x-axis i want this on the z-axis but importantly i'm not going to have it going all the way to the top i want it slightly less than one and let's start fiddling around with these vertices so i'm going to select all of those i'm going to go into proportional editing actually i'm going to press s to scale those i'm going to press shift and z because i don't want this moving on the z axis and let's do something like that so that looks quite interesting as our horn shape effectively giving us these sort of quite sharp ridges so now what we're going to do is we're going to transfer this onto this curve so we're going to use this slightly differently we're not actually using the curve itself we're going to use the curve as a modifier so what i need to do is firstly bring this over i need my origin point here to be the same as the origin point of the curve so all i'm going to do is press shift and s your options might look slightly different to this because i'm using machine tools it's a free add-on for these pie menus it's really useful i would strongly recommend you get it and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to select to the selection for the cursor and i'm just going to press shift and s and move this object to the cursor so now the origin of this object and this object are on top of each other then after the array i'm just going to add another modifier and i'm going to add a curve modifier and i'm going to select this curve now i always find there's a bit of fiddling to go on here i don't know why but at the moment it's on x let's try minus x that looks right that's got the curve going the right way don't know why always have to fiddle with this maybe i'm just not thinking about it the right way but either way we want this array to be a bit longer so i can up the count if i choose to or the other option is that i can just change it from fixed count to fit curve and then select the curve and it'll be the right length awesome really quick and easy now the problem is this isn't getting any thinner so let's just shift and zed to go into x-ray mode i'm going to select this curve here and again i'm going to taper it so i'm going to come here i'm going to come to the geometry and i'm going to taper via this object and it's not doing anything well it's not doing anything for a reason and it's important that we understand this and understand how some of these modifiers work this works over here because it is tapering the curve and everything is being applied to the curve the bevel is being applied to the curve and this taper is being applied to the curve whereas in this instance we are applying i get this we are applying the curve to the shape as opposed to this one where the shape is being applied to the curve so this tapering doesn't work for this because in essence in this one the taper or what's being said is apply this taper to this object whereas in this one the curve doesn't have an object to apply that to the curve is being applied to the horn shape array but there's a way around it and this is because if i go to shift and z and select the curve and go to edit mode there's a bit of a secret about these curves and most specifically about the vertex is that isn't actually shown in any way so i'm just going to go to normal select mode and i'm going to select this point now the secret is if i go out of x-ray mode is that this vertex has a i can only refer to it as a thickness we can't see this thickness but blender knows it's there and that thickness at the moment is one effectively what it's saying is as i curve this round using the curve modifier i want you to keep the thickness as one that's what blender is doing but i can actually scale the thickness of this vertex i can just press alt and s and you can see that this is scaling this vertex and therefore the object that's being curved around it and what's cool about this if i just stop doing that is i can do this with proportional editing now if i press alt s you'll see i get my wheel bigger it's going to affect everything now there's one problem with this and that is at the moment if i press alt and s again you can see this circle and all the vertices within the circle are being affected now what i actually want to do is change this and first i don't it's smooth i want it linear and i want this to have connection only now what that means is instead of going so if i press shift s the distance that's the thickness of this circle in every direction what this now does is it tries to move that thickness of the circle but it travels along so this point to this point at this point to this point to this point to this point to this point to this point all along these vertices in order so now if i alterness you'll notice that it scales everything in order and if i make that bigger or smaller it travels along the point so i want something that probably looks a bit like that now i will say this does always cause a problem for me with this as soon as you've got an object that goes beyond this curve it starts to look pretty rubbish so in this instance i do actually go back to my object and i change my array off of fit curve to fix count and i just click that along until it gets to the point where it looks decent so i'm quite happy with that and then i'm going to fix this press s and start scaling this until it gets closer to that point so i'm going to go to about there so all i've done is just scaled this along it and now we've got a much more interesting segmented horn shape so now once we've got that all we need to do is apply this now there is a slight issue with this if we're going to 3d print it and there's one for this one as well let's go through these in order i'm gonna start with the simple one the first one is that when i convert this to a mesh so object convert to mesh if i go into vertex mode while this looks like it's all good there's a few things to deal with first this point looks pretty horrible so i'm just going to select those all at the end and i'm just going to press m at center and that's going to create a nicer point because that looks much better and the other thing is that if i press n and go to my 3d print toolbox if you don't have this it's what we use to check our 3d prints if you just go to edit and preferences and come down here and type in 3d dash you'll come up with 3d print toolbox and if i click check all we're going to find out there's a lot of non-manifold edges and that is because the fill cap option which is what's made this cap here if i go into vertex mode and click this you can see this isn't actually filled this i'm going to say correctly but what it's done is it's made separate vertices so there's one vertex there another vertex that's separate to i'll just turn proportional editing off and you can see that so that's quite an easy fix i'm just going to press a m and merge by distance and now everything's going to be connected i'm going to shade that flat check all and that's all good to go zero faces is something we can totally ignore what that means is that some faces are smaller than a preset amount which i don't care about that preset amount it's probably these tiny faces there so now that is 3d printable now this one's a bit more complex because we've got an array so let's deal with that so the first thing we're going to do is apply all of these and importantly i'm not going to click the merge option it's not doing anything for me here i've got no points on top of each other so i'm just going to click apply all and now i've got all of these bits i'm just going to go into vertex mode and we've got all of these separate parts now the first thing to do is same thing we need to fix this end bit just go there make sure all those selected and then m merge center and if that looks too pointy i could always g and move that out a bit that's looking better and then what we've got at the moment is a lot of if i go into x-ray mode a lot of bits that are sort of going inside other parts so see we can see here that we've got this object going inside this object and what we effectively want to do is merge this together into one so all i'm going to do is separate these parts out into separate components and then merge them together the other way we could do this which is perfectly acceptable is i could go into sculpt mode but to do that that will involve remeshing this which is going to make the geometry a little bit more complicated now if i was going to sculpt on this for example start doing scratch marks i could actually do that in fact let's shift and d and move that along we can have a look at both options so the first one is i'm going to go into vertex mode i'm going to press a to select everything i'm going to press p and then i'm going to separate by loose parts and now we've got lots of different objects and then what i'm going to do is select all of them and i'm going to select this last one to be the point that i want it to connect to and i'm going to use ball tools if you don't have ball tools edit preferences type in ball and activate that what that allows me to do is just press control and plus and that's going to make one large object that's all connected to this point so you can see it's got all of them joined together and then i can just hide these and then we can just because we discovered it was faster in a previous video go to control a and i'm going to convert visual geometry to mesh now we did also discover that hard offs has an even quicker way of doing this but some people won't have hard ops so we're just gonna do it that way now the other option we can do is if i just come to this notice i'm not separating it out is that i can just go in and remesh this using the sculpt options so if we're going to sculpt mode here all i need to do is press shift and r and it will allow me to select the size i'm going to want something pretty fine let's go to something like 0.04 and once i've done that i can either click remesh and then remesh or just press ctrl r and that's going to remesh this into one object and you'll notice now that if i go into vertex mode you'll see that we've got a lot of very small vertices and this does create a bit more of a let's say complex object whereas this one has got well larger faces that we can do things with and we could always for example subdivision surface this to make this smoother if we wanted to so there's some options there so there we have it some different ways to make some horns okay something relatively simple but still having a bit of interesting shape to it and then something that's much more complex that could be used to create a bit more of a ornate looking horn you

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 145,933

Keywords: blender, curves, horns, curve pen, 3d design, 3d printing, fantasy, organic

Id: 5BXvwqVyCQw

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022