Why THIS is my Favorite Modeling Technique

there's a bunch of methods when it comes to 3D modeling now I don't know which one of these is best however I do know which one of these is my favorite and that is sub D modeling so in this video I'm going to show you what it is and how to use it for your blender project subdivision modeling is probably the most popular way to create 3D shapes it's used to create things with scalable detail and perfect for rendering smooth shapes such as products the technique focuses on defining the overall form first then adding detail and more subdivision to create whatever shape you need it's not dissimilar to real life painting where you also start by defining the larger shapes before adding in the finer detail since it's best explained by doing we're going to create a die now when sub demodeling is usually a good idea to start with either a plane or a cube or another primitive but in this case a die already resembles a cube so it makes sense to start off with that add in a cube and add in a subdivision surface which is obviously the basis of this entire workflow let's set it to three levels for now which will be plenty for this object and let's hop into edit mode by hitting tab the mesh is actually shown to us in two ways so when in edit mode the first thing you'll see is we get the original mesh shown to us as a wireframe now this is the mesh that you can still alter and we can change the shape here to change the overall subdivided shape as well the second is the subdivided and smooth shape which is created by our modifier you can see that in this case our Cube has effectively turned into a spherical shape warning when doing sub D modeling it is important to never create n-gons these are phases with more than four vertices and will break the subdivision smoothness and ruin your objects now in this case we want a rather sharp rounded cube with rounded corners and semi-round edges in setting the faces is probably a good choice here why well that's just experience talking I find subdue modeling to be pretty intuitive but when you start out it might not just be so it requires you to think ahead and sort of make sense in your mind what a certain effect will be on your mesh once you add in the geometry so in this case let's select all of our faces and hit I to insert them I'm going to hit I again to make sure that the inset is individual per face and I'll just give it a slight inset such as this this will give us our basic shape which is already very similar to our actual die shape now I want to sharpen the edges basically the overall shape which we can do by adding in more geometry and in this case I'm not gonna inset in another time instead I'm going to use Loop Cuts so I'm going to hit Ctrl R and add two Loop cuts on each axis which is three times so once here here once here and once here as you can tell this made our object sharper and it now really resembles a Dye shape another amazing thing that we just did by adding in these Loop Cuts is that we created faces which some of you might have already noticed on the inside of each side of our die so we now have nine perfectly spaced faces in the middle of each side of the die which we can use to create our Pips and yeah the holes inside of a die are called hips apparently I mean the more you know right um so yeah so let's start with our number one side select the middle face hit I to inset it and just take it in ever so slightly now we can hit e to extrude and extrude our face Inward and this is where you get to see some sub D magic because the face that we just inset even though it was Square in the original mesh it is now round and that's one thing that subdivision modeling is perfect for it rounds out these shapes so we now have a perfect hip I guess it's called on one side of our die now let's repeat all of these steps for each side of our die with the appropriate amount of Pips on each side of course and there you have it a perfect die super easy and perfectly done with subdivision modeling all right so subdivision modeling was the perfect way for creating a die but what if we want to create a more complex shape in this case I have this image over here which is a very Sleek design of a UV sterilizer no idea what that is but it looked kind of cool and I thought it was perfect for this tutorial so yeah let's create this shape now we are working with a very rounded rectangular shape and these kinds of shapes are way harder to do with subdivision modeling as it's not easy to create perfectly round shapes and it usually involves a lot of trial and error and besides that there's a big chance you'll create n-gons when trying to round things off using for example a bevel a rounded rectangle is easier to create starting from a plane so let's add one in tap into edit mode and let's scale this guy up to sort of match the overall shape lengthwise of this UV sterilizer so I'm gonna hit s and Y and six just to scale it up on UI all right so let's select all four vertices of our plane and let's bevel these now you can bevel vertices by hitting Ctrl shift B which is the vertex bevel command I'm going to use two segments to keep the base mesh as low poly as possible which is also again another rule when doing sub D modeling you don't want to add unnecessary geometry until you need it so this way the modifier can do most of the work instead of you having to add in everything manually while we're at it I'm also going to enable clamp on the bevel here just to make sure that we don't get any overlap on these vertices alright so let's confirm our bevel here and let's add in our subdivision modifier and in this case I'm going to hit Ctrl 2 to add in a subdivision modifier with two levels due to overlapping vertices it was necessary to merge these so I went into mesh cleanup merge by distance to clean up these overlapping vertices remember this it is important to never create n-gons yeah so let's fix that for this phase let's hit Ctrl R to add in Loop cuts on each side here in this case these will just be vertices but I'm going to add in enough to sort of match up the grid of our blender view right here and also make sure to do this on both sides because these vertices don't automatically cross our object here so with all of these vertices added in we can now select the entire face and hit I to inset it now let's insert this phase to basically create one face loop around our object which is made up completely out of quads or faces with four vertices as we want to fix the inside we first of all need to connect the beveled part here so we can use a knife tool for this which is a very convenient tool so hit K click on both the vertices and a line will be drawn in between them and when you apply the knife tool it will automatically create a new face do this on both sides and we now have the beveled Parts done we have one big Center face right now which we want to delete so go ahead and delete it and select the edges on both sides of our object here we can now right click and choose Bridge Edge Loops to automatically fill in these gaps now let's also use the knife tool again to draw a line across the entire thing just so we can cut up the top and bottom face and done we now have a perfectly quieted up face for the bottom of our object here so let's extrude it select the entire face hit e to extrude and let's extrude this guy up now let's select one half of the top faces and extrude it once more to create the actual UV light part which makes it sort of look like this the new Extrusion is not rounded on one side it's only rounded on the top side here so we want to fix that and we are doing this by selecting the outer edge here and let's make sure to move it on the y-axis just to smooth this out and here you can also see that the subdivision modifier is actually doing all of the work for us to flatten the bottom of this object we can simply add in one more Loop cut here and just drag it all the way down don't drag it it all the way down exactly but just get slightly above it to get a nice crisp Edge on the bottom there we can do the same for the top part so we flatten out the top part as well to make the handle a rounder we're going to move the center edge up and the outer edges down like so now when doing all of this try to keep all of the edges as flat as possible on their respective axes you can easily do this by selecting The Edge hitting s to skill choosing the proper axis X Y or Z and hitting zero to scale it down to zero so now we have a flat Edge which is perfect for subdivision modeling alright so we now have our general shape done and it's starting to resemble the actual product the top face however is not looking too good so let's quickly fix that by just selecting all of the faces and hitting Ctrl X to dissolve them together basically merging them into one big and gone remember again no handguns in subdivision modeling so insert the face again with I and applied the same techniques as before so knife tool between some vertices to create faces here and Bridge The Edge Loops for the other ones just to fill in the shape with nice quads everywhere now while we're at it we can also select these inside faces and extrude them down just to create this slightly elevated Edge as you see in the photo now we can finalize the shape by further sharpening the edges by adding in more Loop Cuts sharpen the product wherever you need it to be sharper and voila you now are done with the overall shape and let's say this shape is now 100 done obviously it's not but we want more detail so how can we do this well let's duplicate our object and leave the first one as a safe backup basically and we are going to apply the subdivision modifier for this newly duplicated object so hover over the modifier and hit Ctrl a and this will apply your subdivision modifier you will now get a wave denser mesh which is good because we can now add in smaller details such as these crevices or creases I don't know what to call them in English so let's go back into edit mode and select the edges that we want to inset or crease whatever and in this case because we applied the subdivision modifier you will see that some of these edges are again smooth or sort of rounded and curved which is a good thing that's why our overall shape is looking so smooth but we don't want that so again select the edges that you need make sure to flatten them out using the skill technique I showed you before and when you're all done and have all the edges selected that you need we are going to Bevel these now this sounds kind of strange maybe but it works so follow along hit Ctrl B and give it one segment and make it a very very very small bevel effectively what this does is it takes the edge and it turns it into a face Loop and in this case a very small face Loop which we can now hit e to extrude because we still have all of these faces selected and then cancel out of the Extrusion by hitting escape and now we want to scale these inwards so hit alt s and skill these inward along the normals we now have these perfect inset creases along our model if you want to make these things a little bit sharper and the entire mesh a little bit sharper you can add in another subdivision modifier so hit Ctrl 2 again just to make everything better to look at now obviously this shape is not done yet however that's not the intent of this tutorial it's just to Showcase sub D modeling and how you can use it to create stuff so what are the main takeouts for this video sub D modeling is perfect for creating object curved and smooth shapes you can start off using most of the Primitive shapes to begin with sub D modeling however the cube and plane are good choices because none of these contain triangles or n-gons talking about angons avoid angons at all costs as these create weird artifacts in the modifier and make your end result look significantly worse try to keep a decent Edge flow within your model you can check this by adding in Loop cuts and seeing if they visit go around your entire mesh the more evenly you spread your faces on your mesh the better your result will be there's an alternative way of sharpening edges using crease you can do this by hitting shift e with an edge selected however use this parsley as it can lead to some strange results as well and can be a bit of a trial and error to get right so you've just seen how you can create amazing 3D objects using sub D modeling but these objects wouldn't be complete without some good looking textures so how about you check out this video right here and learn how to create professional materials in blender a big thank you to all of these amazing people for supporting the channel [Music]

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 398,765

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Id: DkA0A8tmbqE

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022