VANILLA Modeling in Blender for Beginners (Tutorial)

what's up guys in this video we're going to be modeling a really simple piece here and blender I'm not going to be using any sort of paid add-ons I'm going to be using the vanilla tools here in blender so if you do have add-ons feel free to follow along with those but I like to switch it up from time to time what we're going to do is first of all make sure you have the Bold tool add-on enabled if you type in b o o l here in the panel you'll get a bullet tool you can turn that on and then we're also going to be using the Machine Tools add-on now this one you have to install alpha or download off gumroad it's free and it just helps you hop in and out of edit mode very quickly so I can just press tab go into vertex mode Edge mode face mode and object mode and it's a little bit quicker than you know pressing one two or three on the keyboard so the first thing I want to do is I want to scale this a bit s y and then two we're just going to double the length and then I also want to scale this a bit on the Z maybe to about here then we're going to press Ctrl a and apply this scale okay and now that we kind of have this shape we can go into top view and just kind of like you know make it a bit wider Maybe and then now what I want to do is go into Edge mode and control alt click on these vertical edges what this is going to do is select all the edges in the same direction then if I just press 7 on the numpad and go back into top view I can go ahead and bevel this scroll down so we have one segment and then what I want to do is I want to take this Edge right here as a matter of fact I want to take all of these edges and I want to scale them a bit on the Y just to kind of have this area a little bit more biased then we're also going to scale this a bit on the X and then I'm also going to take these faces and scale them a bit more on the Y I just want something a little bit you know wide kind of like this looks pretty good all right so one of my favorite things to do once I have a basic shape is I like to Bevel it and make it look a bit more you know soft and kind of dynamic so the way we do that is we just select the edges and bevel them now I don't want to Bevel all of these at the same size I don't want it to be that you know boring I want it to be a little bit varied so generally when you have these more you know kind of wide angles right here generally what I'll do is I'll use a much smaller bevel so not too big and then on the more you know acute angles I'll kind of go a little bit wider it just kind of makes a little bit more of a natural kind of transition into those different edges it's something that a lot of people don't discuss but the size of bevels really does matter depending on the angles on your mesh so now that I have that um actually we'll do these all at the same time we'll bevel these and then we'll take these as well we'll bevel these just like that and then what I want to do is I want to right click shade smooth and then we're going to go here and turn on auto smooth if you are using add-ons like hard Ops you could just press q and then sharpen it instead alright so this is a pretty cool shape and you can see it just looks a lot softer now that we've added the bevels and by the way I usually get this question a lot if you haven't seen my video on my super simple blender setup watch that I'll show you how my blender scans are set up but if you want to get this nice Edge highlight I'd recommend going here and turning on the cavity feature Okay cool so now what I want to do is I want to cut a hole straight through the mesh here now if we just try to you know cut a hole you know straight through it like with a cube or something we're not going to exactly have the same shape as this piece right here so what we're going to do instead is we're going to tap into face mode we're going to take this face and duplicate it with shift d and then if I right click and press P to separate by selection I'll have a separate piece as you can see here and then basically all we need to do is go into edit mode again select it with the a key and then inset this face a little bit so we're going to inset it to about I don't know right about here and then we're going to invert the selection and delete out the other portions so Ctrl I to invert X and then delete faces and now we're just going to have this shape which is a little bit smaller so you're going to see we kind of have this weird glitchy effect that's because it's sitting on the top so we're just going to move this up on the z-axis just a little bit like that and then we can press e to extrude this all the way down very easy now whenever you're extruding a two-dimensional object like this let me turn on face orientation real quick what will happen is depending on the you know Direction you're going is it'll either be you know red or it won't be red now you might see blue in yours I just have some custom settings enabled but basically if you see red that means the normals are inverted in the opposite direction and this can cause issues in the future like with bevels and things like that really easy fix if you have this just press shift n with everything selected and that will recalculate the normals for you and we'll be good to go so now all we need to do is tab into object mode and shift-click on the main piece and we can run a different spoolian so if I press Ctrl shift B I'm going to use the brush Boolean here and go to difference and the brush pull in basically means I can just move this around and make adjustments if needed so I only use the brush Boolean option the auto Boolean is going to apply this modifier so I just I don't like applying my modifiers if I don't need to because sometimes I might want to move things around so right now this is a piece that we call the cutter because it's cutting through the object the only thing I don't like is that it kind of has this box shape to it so let's go here go to viewport display and we're going to change this over to wire instead all right just like that and let me just turn off this face orientation I don't need that awesome now I can just press the H key to hide this and now we have this really simple shape going on awesome so now we can just keep stacking detail on this so I think what I'll do is press shift a and then add in a cube we'll scale this or move this up Rather scale this a bit on the Y and then scale this a bit on the X and then what we can do is we can I have an idea let's go into Edge mode and take these two edges and scale them on the y-axis what this is going to do is kind of give us this nice angle right here and then if I just go back into object mode I can run another Boolean so Ctrl shift B and then difference like that and now we kind of have this shape I'm going to scale it just a little bit this piece just a little bit on the Y and then maybe scale these a bit more on the Y in edit mode yeah it looks pretty good I like that then I'm just going to go ahead and press h to hide that and I'm just going to go ahead and apply both this Boolean and this one as well so at this point what I want to do is I just want to take these edges here and bevel them now we want to do this for all of them so I could you know select all these edges here but I want to show you how you can do a symmetry so if I just take since this is you know completely symmetrical on all these axes what I can do is bevel this give it a few segments like that and then what I can actually do is I can go into side view and I can go to mesh symmetrize now in this case I want to symmetrize over the Y but there's going to be two options here we have positive y to negative y or negative y to positive Y and this is why I just prefer to use add-ons it's way quicker like with mesh machine I'd usually just be able to do something like this and I'd be done but um just to show you the vanilla tools basically this axis right here whatever one has the line you might have a bigger axis than I do but whatever one you see the line that's the positive and whatever's empty behind it is the negative so in this case we're going to be going from negative y to positive Y and we can do it again symmetries and this time we're going to go from it looks like this would be positive X where we have the bevels over to the negative X or we don't have the bevels so now we'll go positive X to Negative X and make sure everything's selected or you might get some weird issues and there we go now we have a nice symmetry on all the sides here this is why guys I really don't recommend using vanilla tools because they're just annoying you have to you know select through different menus and things and it just it's it's uh not a good use of your time but I do want to show you just in case um so you know how things work right so now what I want to do is I want to add a nice chamfer around the edge here so I'm going to alt click on these edges here and you're going to see it actually doesn't know what to select again another reason to use add-ons because then it knows what to select but um what I'm going to do instead of just control click around and we're just going to control click until we have all these outer edges selected and then bevel them with Ctrl B and I'm just going to add a chamfer here nothing crazy we'll just add a small chamfer around that side and now it just kind of looks a lot cleaner and a little bit more you know mechanical now awesome so I like how this looks and now what I want to do is I want to add in a cube I'm just going to scale down the cube and put it right about here maybe scale it a bit more on the Y and then scale it on the X kind of like that and then I'm just going to press Ctrl a and then apply the scale and now what I can do is basically select these edges here and we'll just bevel them and if you get this overlapping issue just press the c key what that's going to do is clamp it now the issue with this is when I bevel these two edges eventually if the C Keys pressed those edges are going to meet right in the middle which means we have two edges on top of each other you can see you can kind of see that we have two edges on top of each other so to avoid issues we can dissolve out the extra one with control X just like that we'll do the same thing on the other side you can kind of see it looks a bit different we have these two edges on top of each other control X to dissolve it and now we should be able to just you know run the Boolean so shift click on here Ctrl shift and B difference just like that and then we're just going to go ahead and hide this piece now make sure you shade smooth your cutter otherwise you'll get this faceting effect so right click and then shade smooth the cutter that'll fix it and we can press the H key to hide that awesome so now what I want to do is I want to add in a little bit of a you know more Dynamic effect on this side as well and generally guys when it comes to balancing your models and making them look aesthetically pleasing I do have a tutorial on this I have a few but the one I want you guys to watch is by Ryu it's on detail balancing visual design things like that and he'll discuss exactly how you should be placing your details to make the model look more powerful so I'll have a card on the screen for you guys to check out that video it's on reuse Channel now what I want to do here is I want to make kind of like a set of contrasting elements on this side as well so what I'm going to do is add another Cube we're just going to move this Cube over here and scale it down and just rotate it a bit I'll just press R and then 45 to rotate at 45 degrees that way it actually matches this chamfer right here this is what we call echoing where we have one detail and we kind of echo the same detail somewhere else very powerful way to enhance your uh the visuals in your model your form rather so we're going to do is shift click on the mesh and then Ctrl shift to B again should be getting used to it then we can run another difference Boolean like that and you can scale this down you know just make sure you select the cutter you can always scale this down or make it wider but I actually like the position it's in here if you wanted to add in a little bit more you know dynamicism to this what you could do is take these edges here kind of like we did on this one and just kind of scale this a bit on the X and it just kind of makes it a little bit you know wider kind of like that and then we could even you know add a bevel right here and we just kind of have that cool looking effect on the model and maybe what I'll do and press Ctrl Z to undo that let me move this back a little bit on the Y just so it's not so close to the edge like that looks kind of weird right and then I'll just go ahead and we're going to apply we can apply both booleans why not and at this point I should be able to just take these edges as well and bevel those looks pretty good now if the faceting effect comes back just right click shade smooth the model again it'll fix it and then just like we did before I want to symmetrize that effect to the other side so in this case we're going to symmetrize over the green axis the y-axis and in this case it looks like this side would be the negative side as you can see and this side would be the positive side because we have the green line so we're going to do is we're going to symmetrize from negative y to positive y and now we're going to have that effect on the on this side here looks pretty good it's a very basic shape and also looks a lot cleaner than what we have before so now we have is a very basic structure here we have a nice shape we have some nice details added to it but what we don't have are what we call tertiary elements now tertiary elements are really small elements that kind of enhance the overall look of your shape and the way you can do this is you can use very small tiny details you can either model them or use like pre-made models if you prefer I usually just model my own and what you want to do is you want to place these in such a way that they kind of Echo and balance nicely on the model so for example if I were to go into top view here you can kind of see the different shapes we have we have more or less like a like a 30 degree angle right here and then you know a completely straight one here and we have you know kind of a wider like 60 degree angle here so usually what you can do in these cases you can use elements that kind of echo those angles so for example what I could do is like right here if I press R and then hold Ctrl I can kind of rotate this and snap it until it's kind of parallel in this case I'm just going to kind of have to eyeball it not really that big of a deal usually I'd be using like box cutter for this because it would be exact but you know as long as you're pretty much parallel to that line um you know you're going to be fine so now what I can do is I can press s and then z z or maybe YY scale it up a bit move that up move that over a bit and then what I can do is maybe let's bevel these edges so Ctrl alt click these edges here and you're going to see the bevels kind of skewed so make sure whenever you scale the model you also apply it so Ctrl a apply the scale and now when I try to Bevel these edges it'll work you can see it's nice and even so we'll do that and then we're going to shift click on this piece control shift B and then difference again and we're just going to right click and shade smooth to make sure that's nice and smooth so now I kind of have that clean looking you know tertiary detail right there now in some cases guys if you're making like you know this is a random piece but say you're making like a functional design um a really powerful way to do this is to use these tertiary elements you know kind of using it towards a particular function on the model so I'll keep that in mind it's just things you have to practice with but in this case these are just kind of some arbitrary elements I'm throwing on the model so now what I want to do is I want to add them over here and then over here so what I'm going to do is add a mirror modifier gonna do that and what we're going to do is we're going to mirror over the Y and I need the mirror object to be where that 3D cursor is so what I'm actually going to do is right click and set the origin to the 3D cursor and what that's going to do is um it should allow us to mirror over the y-axis now in this case we're going to need to apply our rotation so Ctrl a rotation because right now the rotation is set to looks like negative 22 so that can kind of affect the way the mirror is going so if you ever get these weird problems Ctrl a apply the rotation and I also want to mirror this over the x-axis as well and you can see how easy this is guys you just use mirror modifiers and symmetries and um pretty easy now if you are brand new to blender you might be asking at this point why didn't I just use symmetry why did I use a mirror here instead and I actually want to show you that real quick so right now if I go into edit mode for this piece the main piece here you're going to see I don't actually see that cutter and that's because this Boolean modifier has not been applied symmetry only works on Geometry that exists currently and as you can see that geometry does not exist currently so even if I try to run a symmetry looks like in this case from negative y to positive y let's give it a try you're going to see it doesn't actually symmetrize that cut now if I did apply the Boolean now about geometry would be real and the Symmetry would actually work so that's one way you could do it you could just apply the Boolean but if you want to stay non-destructive and you know have the ability to move that cutter around what you can do is just mirror the actual cutter instead so your options are to use a symmetry with the Boolean applied or to use a mirror with the Boolean unapplied so we just go to the cutter and we'd use the mirror so hopefully that kind of made sense I know it's a bit confusing but hopefully that made sense I get those questions a lot so there we go either way is perfectly fine just keep in mind that in this situation I still have the ability to kind of you know move around these cuts and things like that so this is what we call a more non-destructive workflow because we're not destroying the mesh by applying that Boolean and sometimes the cavity turns off I don't know if this is the bug or what the deal is but I'll just turn that back on there we go so now you can kind of see these really small tertiary elements what these do is they enhance the form in the feel of the entire model they're very small they're not meant to be distracting they're meant to be actually you know non-distracting the complete opposite but they're meant to kind of you know reinforce the design and make it more visually appealing kind of subconsciously and this is a really powerful way to do it now what I could also do here I'm just kind of thinking like you know what types of different shapes and things I could use to kind of enhance this and sometimes it'll just kind of come to you and sometimes you'll have to think about it but what I'm going to do in this case is add in a plane move the plane right about here and then go into edit mode and extrude this up just a little bit let's scale this a bit on the X and I'm just going to run a difference Boolean on this one so shift click Ctrl shift B and then difference then we kind of have that and I think it looks kind of cool I could always move this you know to the left a little bit and then what I'm going to do in this case is I'm just going to run a mirror we'll set the origin to that 3D cursor which is in the middle and we're going to mirror over the y-axis just like that looks pretty good then I can press the H key to hide it and now we have this really clean you know small line right here it doesn't necessarily have a function but it does enhance the overall shape of these designs which is pretty important so I kind of like how that looks now I'm going to stop here I think this is a good stopping point but what I want you guys to do is add in at least two to three more elements to this design in your model okay so don't stop here I want you guys to do this you know after the video ends make a few of your own designs on this one I think you'll really enjoy the process and kind of practice this type of workflow a little bit more and if you guys are completely new to hard surface modeling and want something a little bit more practical where we actually make a more functional design something that you know looks like it could exist in the real world check out our hard surface jumpstart course over on our website it's completely free it'll get you started get you jump started that's hence the name and uh you really begin to enjoy blender after taking that one so there's a link to that in the description option I think you really enjoy it and that's it for this video guys if it helped you out just let me know drop me a like comment and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 12,163

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling, 3d modeling, hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling tutorial blender, blender 3d, hard surface blender, blender beginner tutorial, blender, blender donut, vanilla modeling in blender, blender hard ops, blender boxcutter, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, blender bros, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, masterxeon1001

Id: qlTFvlMOuGw

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022