Blender Geometry Essentials 01

0:00All right, welcome to Geometry Essentials in Blender, where we're gonna cover the whole foundation and all of the essentials for working with 3D geometry specifically within Blender. Now, 3D, like any art form, is an iterative or layering process. And what I mean by that is we start with one discipline, and we can layer on different elements to get to our ultimate result, which is our creation. Now, what you use 3D for is totally up to you, and there are so many avenues that you could take, and don't let anybody limit you by putting you on a specific track and saying you need to stay within it. For me, it's been a two decades-long process

0:46of exploring and adapting as new technologies come out, and changing paths multiple times, but I still have that foundation of working with them 3D, and for the most part, working within Blender, however, I've used all kinds of software and all kinds of tools. That said, where you decide to go with it is totally up to you, but these principles that I'm gonna be teaching you are a foundation that you can layer on top of, and get to wherever you wanna go with this. And Geometry is one of those absolutely crucial foundational principles that you're gonna need to learn, regardless of where you decide to take things. So that's what this course is all about. It's extremely important if you wanna work within Creative Software in general,

1:333D is very applicable today, even with new technology coming out, generative AI, that's gonna have a lot of strengths, and it's gonna be used in a lot of different ways. I don't wanna skirt around that. I don't wanna pretend like it's not gonna change things, or that it hasn't changed things already. Kind of ethical implications aside, even though I don't think you should just brush those aside, they're worth looking into, but that's not what this course is about. Even with those things aside, 3D is still a very applicable skill, and certainly understanding how 3D Geometry works is the foundation that's gonna unlock the door to so many different paths that you can take as it relates to creativity and your career,

2:20whatever you wanna use this for, let's get started.

0:00So when we are looking at Blender, we are primarily looking at what we call the 3D viewport. That's this big area in the middle, which is kind of our infinite stage where we can add various objects in Blender. For this next little while, you're either going to love me or hate me, because I'm going to get into some really nitty gritty stuff that you might consider really boring, but I promise the more effort you put towards grasping these simple concepts, the better you'll set yourself up for long-term success in 3D software in general. Once you understand these principles, you will be able to layer on all kinds of stuff. If you kind of glaze over and ignore these principles, you'll find yourself down the line

0:50struggling with really basic stuff because you didn't have the foundation first. So the first principle that I'm going to talk about is object mode versus edit mode. So in Blender at the top left here, you could see when we select our cube, we have this little drop-down that says object mode. And if we click that, we can go to all these different modes. And each of these have a specific set of tools that you can use to work with your various meshes or objects in Blender. Right now, we're going to change it to edit mode. The shortcut for that is just by pressing tab, which you'll see down in the bottom left of my screen. You can see when I press a button. So I press tab, I go into edit mode, which turns

1:36everything orange. And let's start to take a look at what's going on here. So in edit mode, things are made up and by things, I mean, mesh is made up of three specific components. And we can see those components up here. We have vertices, edges, and faces. And you can switch between these component modes up here by just pressing one, two, and three on your keyboard. One will go tovert selection, vertices selection, two goes to edge selection, and three goes to faces. Avert is the most fundamental single building block of a 3D object. Two verts makes up an edge. Right? So we have these two verts connected by this one edge.

2:27And three or more verts are connected by what's known as a face. So the shortcut again is one, two, three to switch between those component modes. One lets you select individual verts, two lets you select individual edges, and three lets you select individual faces. Now, a face can be made up of three or more verts. And that's just the nature of things. If I were to duplicate this vert right here by clicking shift D to duplicate, I'll move it off here for demonstration purposes. We can have an edge between two verts, right? That's an edge. But we can't have a face in between two verts. There's no way to connect these in a way that creates a face because it's

3:14just two points connected by one edge or one line. If we have three verts, don't worry about what I'm pressing to do this right now. We'll cover it. I'm just demonstrating. If we have three verts, we could fill those with a face. And the face is red for reasons we'll get into later. But for now, just know that you have to have at least three verts to make up a face. And this is called a try or a triangle for obvious reasons. If we had four verts, this is called a quad, right? This is made up of four verts or four points. If we had more than four, any number more than four,

3:59that simply referred to as an N-gon, N-gon, spelled N, sorry, spelled N-G-O-N, not a J. That is an N-gon, anything with more than four points making up a face. All right. That's just some quick terminology. So if I asked you, what's the difference between objects and edit mode? You should be able to tell me object mode is for selecting overall objects. And edit mode is for editing and changing around specific components. If I were to say, hey, what are the three components that make up any shape in 3D software? You should be able to tell me they are verts or vertices, edges,

4:49and faces. Edges connect vertices and faces connect various edges or vertices, at least three vertices or more. So if we were to put this in practical terms, a vert is kind of like a stake in the ground. An edge is kind of like a rope tied between two stakes, connecting two points together. And a face is kind of like a tarp that's stretched across everything to have a surface that you can actually have across everything. Hopefully that's clear. That is the difference between object and edit mode. And you can switch between those by simply pressing tab.

0:00All right, now let's cover the next principle, which is modeling. So in 3D software, when we edit things in edit mode, we don't call that editing in edit mode. The simple term for that is simply called modeling. So the process of manipulating our components in edit mode is called modeling. And this is how you shape new things in 3D software, create new objects. It's fun stuff. So let's go ahead and start to talk about how you can manipulate these components in 3D. And there are three basic ways that you will be able to manipulate these components.

0:45So let's select this face. And let's talk about the three basic ways you can manipulate this face. The shortcuts for these are G, S, and R. G is for grab. Now, you can grab or move around various components. So if I go to vertices select mode, I can grab press G. I can move around a vertices. If I go to edges, you see where this is going. I can press G and move around that edge. And in face mode, I can press G and move around this face. Now, there is this thing in Blender called an operation. An operation is a process that the computer

1:32is doing to your mesh. It's part of the modeling process. So anything you're doing to change your mesh as you're modeling is called an operation. Pressing G, that is an operation. And in Blender, when we start an operation, it often gives us a lot of options. And it gives us the ability to confirm or cancel an operation. So when we press G, it starts the move operation. If I were to right click, that is kind of the universal button for I changed my mind, cancel what I'm doing. So when I press G, it hasn't finished that move

2:18or grab operation. It's just started it. And to confirm it, I have to left click. So once I left click, you'll see a little pop up. And this is called the operator panel. And as you could see, we simply just did the move operation. And this tells you exactly what we did. We moved that face exactly 0.56545 meters on the x-axis. We moved it exactly 1.0502 meters on the y-axis. And actually, it's more than that. You can get down to the most precise measurements. And we moved it on the z-axis as well. So after you complete an operation,

3:04you often get this operator panel. And you can come here after the fact. And you can decide to change things. So let's say, if you want to change the operator, let's say I can click and drag. And I can type in anything I want. Let's say I want to move 0 on the y and the z-axis. And I only wanted to move this on the x-axis. And let's say I wanted to move it exactly 1 meter on the x-axis. So after the fact, you can come back and change the previous operation with the operator panel. The options that exist in this operator panel are going to change dynamically based

3:53on the operation that you executed. If for whatever reason, you clicked away on accident and you lost that operation panel, you could just press F9. And that will bring up your last operation that you did in Blender. So this is useful. F9, very useful for bringing up things, previous operations that you've done. However, this only survives for one operation. So if I were to move this again in a different axis, a different orientation, and I click away and I press F9, this is only showing me the very last operation that I did.

4:41So just be aware of that. If you make a mistake, you can kind of recover and change whatever settings you have with the last operation you did. But pressing F9 will only bring up the very latest operation that you executed. OK, so that's G. All right, that's to grab. That's the move operation. Left click is to confirm. And right click is to back out of it. You don't actually want to move. All right. The next one is shortcut S. And S is for scale. So if I click S, again, it's asking me kind of, OK, do I want to confirm? I can left click. And that brings up the operator panel.

5:27I scaled this 0.303. So it's basically 30% scale of what it was before. And I could tweak this however I want. So if I set this to 2, this would be 2 times the scale of what it was before. And so on and so forth. So the operator panel, very useful. If you notice, I'm scaling an individual face here that has no depth on the Z axis. That's why this operator or this function isn't doing anything. But yeah, the operator panel, very useful for bringing up and tweaking certain operations. Now, there are a million and one way ways to do things in Blender. So we looked at scale with S. You could confirm it

6:15and then fine tune the operator panel settings here. Or you could use some other shortcuts. So let's try pressing G for grab. And now let's lock it to a specific axis. So in Blender, if I click this little button up here, this brings up the gizmo, the 3D gizmo over here. This shows us the 3D space. We have three axes or three dimensions go figure that make up 3D. We have the Z dimension, which is up and down. We have the Y dimension, which is kind of forward and backwards.

7:02And then we have the X axis or the X dimension, which is, I see it as left and right. So we have these various XI axes. I never know how to say that. We have these three dimensions. So let me turn this off because I want to teach you the shortcuts because it's good muscle memory and you can work a lot faster. But let's say we want to press G to grab this face. And we want to only move it on the X axis. So to do that, we simply press X, right? So we press G. We press X. And that's locking it to the X axis. We could also press Y. And that's locking it to the Y axis.

7:48We could press Z. And now it's just going up and down. It's not getting skewed in any other direction. If we press Shift Z, that will move only on the X and Y axis. And it will never move up and down infinitely out into space. We are only moving side to side and back and forth because we pressed Shift Z to ignore the Z axis. So that works with scale as well. We could only scale on the X axis. We could scale on everything except for the Z axis, which in this case, it's a flat face. It's never going to scale on the Z axis. And the last one is R for rotate. So right now, we press R. And it's just rotating from wherever

8:36we're looking at this, whatever our 3D view is set at. If we were to press Z, it will only rotate on the Z axis, which is kind of twisting this cube around until it snaps and breaks because it can't be twisted anymore. We could only rotate this on the Y axis or the Z axis. We could only rotate this by pressing Shift Y on everything except for the Y axis. So you get the idea. These are the foundational ways in which you manipulate different geometry in edit mode. All right? So a little test here. If I were to ask you, what are the three ways

9:21in which you can, what are the three basic ways in which you manipulate geometry in edit mode? And what are their shortcuts? You would be able to tell me G for grab or move R for rotate and S for scale. And my next question would be, what are these actions called? What's it called when you perform these actions in Blender? And you could tell me these are operations, which bring up the operator panel. So if I rotate, I confirm that with left click. It brings up the operator panel. Sometimes it's collapsed. You just have to expand it. And then we can fine tune the rotation angle,

10:09the axis that we're rotating on, and the orientation of our rotation. So by default, rotation is always set to the view orientation, which is just whatever view we happen to be looking at this face from when we started rotated. We're going to get into these in a future chapter. But just so you know, there are different ways of thinking about how you manipulate objects in 3D space. The two big ones are a global orientation. So remember this gizmo that I brought up before, this is never going to change. This is the global orientation of a scene. The y-axis is always straight back and forth.

10:54x-axis is always perfectly left to right. And the z-axis is always perfectly up and down. We can't change the global orientation. It's kind of the foundation of our scene. So if we were to rotate on the global orientation of the x-axis, we are rotating on that global x-axis. If I change that to y, you could see now we're rotating on the y-axis. And again, this is just in the operator panel for that rotation I did. We also have this thing called the local axis. In this case, it's going to be the exact same thing as the global axis because this object has not been rotated in object mode.

11:41So let me just demonstrate that really quickly. And hopefully I don't lose you. But if I do, don't worry. We're going to cover this later as well. If I were to rotate this in object mode, so rotating and scaling and moving is not just specific to edit mode. You can grab whole objects and move them around or rotate objects. So let's say I rotate this object on its y-axis in object mode. And then I go back to edit mode. Let me move this up. So let me grab this face. And I will grab and move it on the z-axis. And when I click, the operator panel comes up. And it says, I moved this 2.68 meters on the global z-axis.

12:33See what happens when I change this to the local z-axis. Now, it's moving on its own local axis. It's not conforming to the global axis, which is always straight up and down. Because this object was rotated, now the local axis is different from the global one. So that's all I'm going to say on that. We're going to cover this in a lot more detail when we actually come up here and look at this transform orientation menu. But for now, let's just call it there. Those are the basic operations that you could do to objects and components with an edit mode.

13:20Again, it's g for grab, s for scale, r for rotate. And you can lock those on all kinds of different axes or directions. And each one of those brings up an operator panel where you can get really, really specific with all of the options that come with that specific operator. The operator panel is a really handy thing to be able to grasp right now, because everything you do in Blender, everything you do is going to have an operator panel. Anything you do to manipulate or change the scene or your objects is typically going to come with this operator panel, which is just going to have a lot of extra options

14:06that you can go back through time and change things after the fact. So those are the basic operations. We're going to build on top of this. Take your time, really grasp these concepts before we move on to the next.

0:00All right, let's spend some time talking about this menu right up at the top right up here. And all of this has to do typically with how things are displayed in the viewport, which is really important since recovering geometry and modeling and blender, because we want to be able to control how things appear as we work to make things more useful. So right off the bat, this menu, the selectability and visibility, this isn't something I typically use a whole lot, but you can turn off selectability for certain items. So let's say we turn off selectability for mesh items. Now I can no longer select that cube. Of course, I wouldn't want to do that in this case, but this could be a good way to kind of clean things up. So if you have a really busy scene with a lot going on, you can turn off selectability.

0:45So you don't end up selecting stuff you don't want to. And of course, you can turn off visibility as well, which again can just be really useful if you want to focus on one area of your pipeline that you're working on and you don't want to accidentally select or see things that are in the way. So that's not a menu. I use a whole lot of, but I just wanted to cover it. The next one is also one that I tend to keep off just because the way I work, but this is the gizmos menu. So you can turn on and off all kinds of viewport gizmos. These tend to do with the tools that you're currently using. So if we click T for the T panel or the tool panel, you can see all of the different tools that we have here. For example, the move tool, you can come over to the gizmo panel and you could turn on the move

1:30gizmo, which isn't showing up because we didn't have the object selected, but you can turn those on and off here. You can also turn on and off all kinds of gizmos for the different tools that you'll come across as you work and blender because I teach towards using shortcuts and blender. The gizmos menu isn't something I typically keep on. I just tend to turn this off and keep it off because I find it gets in the way a little bit. But you can keep it on if you're just getting started and you want a few helpful buttons to help you navigate around. You can do things like turn from perspective view to orthographic view. Orthographic view gets rid of perspective distortion. So if we are on perspective view, you could see that things are bigger as I zoom in towards them, but orthographic view keeps

2:18the scale really consistent, which isn't how we're used to seeing the world as humans. But it could be useful when you're doing some technical modeling and you want to be really precise. Sometimes you can turn on orthographic view. You could also quickly jump into your camera, which I don't have one in the scene right now, but let me just quickly create one. You could jump into the camera view in and out. However, what I like to do is I like to use the shortcut for that, which is the pie menu. Let me just turn off my gizmos. The pie menu is if you hold down tilde, which is right below the escape key, you get all of these helpful snap to views. This is your view pie menu. And the bottom kind of kitty corner bottom left is the view camera. And you can jump in and out of your camera

3:06very quickly, which is a quick gesture. You can also go to views like the top view, the right view, the left view front back. You get the idea. The shortcut for these happen to be on the number pad, which sometimes you're using a computer or a keyboard that doesn't have a number pad, but seven goes to top view, one goes to front view, three goes to right view, and alt seven or actually control seven goes to bottom, control one goes to back view. This is how I used to work. I used to use the number pad all the time. However, I like keeping my hand on the mouse, my right hand. So I just use the tilde menu. And that is also a quick way to jump in and out of the camera. If we're you were to use the number pad for that, that would just be the zero button on the number pad to jump in and out

3:53of your camera. But just talking about some of those gizmos. And then we have navigation over here as well, if you're using like a laptop with a trackpad, which I definitely don't recommend. If you wanted to be able to navigate in your scene, you could click and drag this gizmo up here to kind of orbit. You can click and drag the hand to to pan around the scene and then click and drag and move your mouse on the zoom icon to zoom in and out of your scene. Of course, we just use middle mouse button to orbit control, middle mouse button to zoom in and out or the scroll wheel to zoom in and out and then shift middle mouse button to actually pan. So again, gizmos, not something I really use, but now at least you're aware that they're there and you know some of the options. Let's talk about this

4:38next menu, which is viewport overlays. This one right here. The shortcut to turn on and off view port overlays is just shift alt Z. And the reason it's that combination is because your left hand tends to sit over at the bottom corner of your keyboard as you work. And this is just a really quick way to turn off and on your viewport overlays. And this is really useful for kind of decluttering the viewports. You're not seeing any of the working overlays and you could just see your geometry or if you're rendered in rendered view, you can just see your rendered scene and you don't have to have all of this other stuff. Of course, you could have more control over your viewport overlays. You can turn it off, turn off and on individual things like the floor or the access lines there.

5:26We usually have X and Y turned on by default. And you can play around with things like showing the 3D cursor or not. The 3D cursor is kind of like a portal where new objects enter into with your scene. And it's just a useful little object that you can move around your scene with shift right click and place it wherever you want. So if I were to add a new cube in the scene, I could shift right click the top surface of that cube. And now the new cubes origin was placed right at the top of there, which is helpful. We'll get into snapping and all that stuff soon. To reset your 3D cursor, you can just hold down Shift S, which opens up a pi menu and go to cursor to world origin. It's just a quick gesture once you get used to it. So again, shift right click to move 3D cursor

6:14and then shift S and gesture in the pi menu to send it back to the origin. So you could turn it on and off the 3D cursor and notations. A lot of these things we're not going to see in this scene right now, but I'm just going to go over what they are. General info and performance. Typically, I have this off, but if you're worried about the performance in your scene, you can kind of debug with turning on performance. General info isn't really hugely useful for me. I typically have that off. The one text overlay that I do like is the statistics, especially as you're modeling. Sometimes it's really good to see at a glance how many vertices are in this particular object that we have. So this cube has eight vertices, which is really useful information. We can see we have

7:00four objects in the scene. One, two, three, four. A few light objects, the camera and the geometry. We could see what's selected out of what we have. So this is something I tend to turn on and off as I model just because it's useful to have that kind of information, how many triangles, edges, all the components that we went over in previous lessons. Then I encourage you to play around with these. We have extra viewport overlays. This is really useful. This is showing things like your lights and your camera. You can turn on light colors, which is why I have these lights here. Add a glance without going into the properties over here, which is this panel right here. We could just quickly see, hey, this light is red. This light is white without needing to go into those light

7:46properties. It could be useful. You can turn it on and off relationship lines. That's the lines that show up when you parent things to certain objects. So I'm going to show you how to do this later, but I'm just going to parent this camera to this cube. You can see this little dotted line appeared, which is a relationship line in the viewport overlays. Letting me know that that camera is going to move along as a child of this cube. So that can be really useful. You can turn that on and off bones when you get into rigging for animation. Outline selected, which is obviously very useful to see what you have selected. Origins, you can turn on and off. That's that little orange dot that we're going to talk a lot about in future chapters, but you can turn that on and off as well. And then we have a few more really useful things like the wireframe display. If I deselect this cube,

8:36you can see what's going on. Let me add an actual monkey. Her name is Suzanne, by the way. So you can really see what wireframe does for you. You can add a glance, kind of see the wireframe of your mesh, which is very useful. You can turn up and down the opacity, which is an awesome feature. And then the last one here that I'm going to talk about is face orientation. Now, so in a future chapter, we'll talk about something called normals, which at a glance, it's the direction in which your face is facing. So face orientation is really good to know what the outside face is versus what the inside face is. So to demonstrate that, let me just add a plane into the scene. And this is as simple as it gets. This is a single face connected by four

9:25verts. And as you can see on the underside there, when I viewed it, we could see this is red. This is letting us know this is a back face. This is not the front face. This is not the way or the direction the normal is facing. So when you have normals, they'll typically shoot out from a particular angle. So in this case, this normal would be going out from this top face, the front face. And it is not coming out the back face. So you could turn on face orientation so that at a glance, you can quickly see kind of which normals are facing inward or outward. And which ones are in the wrong direction. The reason you want to keep an eye on this is if, for example, this monkey had inward facing normals. And we were looking at the back face of all these normals.

10:15The textures on top of this aren't going to show up quite right. We might have rendering artifacts. We can run into all kinds of issues. So this is just a really good debugging visual tool face orientation to see which way your normals are facing. I'll get into how to work with normals and flip them and all of that stuff in a future video. But that kind of sums up the viewport overlays. And we can move on to some other really helpful tools while you're modeling. All right. So next, we have what's called X-ray view. That's this little button right here. Now this is very useful to toggle on and off as you're working. And this is just like it says, it's an X-ray view. So you could see through your mesh. This is particularly useful if you're in edit mode. And you're trying to select something maybe on the other side of the mesh or you're trying to select all of the mesh at

11:05once in this whole object. You could see some of these vertices are behind other parts of the mesh. So I can't actually select them. So this is where I would turn on X-ray mode or X-ray view. And then I can quickly select things on the other side of the mesh without having to go around. And this is just a really nice way to keep organized as you model and as you work in edit mode and in object mode. The shortcut for X-ray mode, which is what I'll use going forward, is just alt Z. And again, the reason it's alt Z is because it's a shortcut you're going to use all the time. And that's really comfortable for your left hand that's kind of hanging out at the bottom left corner of your keyboard. You could just quickly press that. The next one is wireframe view, which is different from X-ray

11:50mode. Wireframe view actually gets rid of all of the shaded faces. So really it's nothing in the way. It's kind of an extreme version of X-ray view where you can kind of still see the shading on the faces. Wireframe view just sees straight through everything. And you can notice it especially in object mode, if we jump out of edit mode, if you press shift Z to enter wireframe mode, then you can see straight through the mesh. And this can be really useful if you're trying to keep organized in a really complex scene. Let's say I had a lot of objects and I was trying to select a specific cube that's maybe inside of this mesh. And there's a lot of other stuff going on. Let me just get it a little bit messy. We might go to X-ray mode and we try to select the cube, but it's

12:38kind of hard to see what we're selecting. And we might get it if we click enough times. But we could just jump to wireframe mode. And very easily as we orbit around, we can quickly see what's the cube, what's this cone. And we can select things that would be hard to select in a more complicated environment where we have a lot of objects. All right, so alt Z is X-ray mode, shift Z is wire frame mode. We're going to use those all the time as we model. And then I'll just very, very briefly cover these last ones. This is something we can go more in depth with. But we have solid view, which is the default view as you model. That's where you could see the solid faces. You're already familiar with wireframe view. Then we have material preview, which comes into handy when we start to

13:25have textures and materials. And it's not quite a rendered view of the scene. It's kind of in between shaded view and rendered view, which is this last one, where you can just preview the materials without all the computation heavy things like the lighting and all of the camera effects. So the last one is the actual rendered view. I just have a few lights in this scene, this red light and this white point light that we had, where I was showing you the light colors. And as you could see, this is actually rendering in my viewport. And that's the last view there. So we could get into the viewport shading. And there's some other stuff we have here that we can get into. Those aren't going to be particularly useful for modeling right now. I do however want to cover

14:13one more. If we go to solid view, we could do this drop down and we could turn on what's called a mat cap. And what this is is this is some material previews without the need to add materials to your scene. So sometimes you're modeling and you want to quickly preview some things. So let's say this is a really smooth surface we're working on and we'll get into how I just did that in later chapters. But if we go to mat cap and we click on this, you can see we have all kinds of useful preset materials that we could use to just quickly preview the material on our mesh without actually texturing and adding materials. And this is just really useful for previewing different lighting setups on your actual mesh. That would be hard to see otherwise. We have some more extreme ones

15:02like these vertical lines, which really help you see when things are smooth and when things are interrupted or when the direction of the mesh changes. So I'm going to set this to the default mat cap and then just cover a few more little things here. We have the outline, which is going to show the outline around your objects, which could be useful for identifying different objects in your scene. Of course, when you select objects, they'll always be outlined. But this is just a quick way to see the outline on non selected objects and you can even change the color there. This is just to help you see what's going on similar with these next ones where you have shadow mode. You could turn on and off to see shadows in your scene. If we go back to the studio light, which is the default

15:51solid mode, you could see we have this option of cavity, which we can turn on and we can turn on these procedural ridges, which is kind of the raised points of your mesh or valleys, which is the crevices in between two parts of the mesh. And this is just really useful for seeing what's going on with the actual shape of things as you model and as you work. So to recap very quickly, we have our selectability and visibility settings here. I don't use these a whole lot, but you can turn on and off selectability and visibility for different types of objects in your scene. We have the viewport gizmos. Again, this is something I tend to keep off. But if you're a beginner and you need some helpful tools, then you could turn on viewport gizmos as you learn the shortcuts. But I

16:37encourage you just to use and learn the shortcuts from the get go. So I typically have that off. Then we have the viewport overlays. Again, this is where you can change things like what's showing up in your viewport, helpful things like light colors, face orientation, wireframe view, all of that good stuff. The shortcut to turn on and off viewport overlays is just shift alt Z and you can toggle those on and off to get stuff out of the way as you work. Next one is x-ray view. We went over especially in edit mode, how that's really useful for selecting geometry that's on the other side of your mesh. A more extreme version of that is wireframe view, which especially in object mode, you can see how much that gets rid of. So you could really see straight through all

17:24the shading in your objects and you're only worried about the actual wireframe. Then we have solid view, which is default. If you open up the viewport shading menu, we have all kinds of other options here, like this material preview where you can choose from all these materials. We have flat shading, which really just assigns one color to each mesh. If we turn off cavity, you could see that this just becomes a straight silhouette. So flat shading is useful for just that. You can quickly view the silhouettes of your objects without viewing all the shading. I encourage you to play around with all these other ones. But those are kind of the main things that I use for modeling and the visibility tools that are all contained right up here in this corner that are very useful to be aware of

18:13as you start to model in Blender. So again, that's everything up here. I hope you found this useful. Join me in the next video.

0:00When we're working with geometry in Blender, we need to be able to stay organized and we should be aware of all of the selection tools that we have at our disposal. So this is an example of a slightly more complex scene. This is just a block out for a project I'm working on. I have some finalized mesh in here, but for the most part, this is just block out geometry or placeholder geometry. So for example, this fridge is not the final fridge geometry. This is just basic shapes in the shape of the fridge and the size that it'll eventually be. But let's talk about how we can stay organized in our scene. One of the main things I want to cover in this video is what we call the outliner, which is this section at the top right of the screen

0:45by default. If you go to the area type drop down, which is this little drop down, you could see this is set to the outliner area type. And what is the outliner? Basically, you could think of it as a spreadsheet or a table view that lists all of your various objects in your scene. In addition to objects, we also have these very useful containers called collections, which are visualized by this little box icon here. Naming your objects is great practice. So for example, floor kitchen is the floor of the kitchen, as expected here. To name an object, there are a few ways you could do it. You could press F2 in your 3D viewport and you can rename your object here.

1:32You could select it in the outliner, which if you notice, as you select objects in your 3D viewport, the counterpart gets selected in the outliner and vice versa. If I select things over here in the outliner, they get selected in the 3D viewport. You can simply press F2 over here to rename or you can double click and rename your objects as well. If you want to batch rename multiple objects, it's really easy. You could select those objects and you can hit Ctrl F2 and that brings up the batch rename function or operator. And there are some helpful options here. You can rename the selected objects. You can rename every object in the scene and it's gonna let you know how many objects

2:18this is impacting. Let's just rename the selected objects and you could filter by type. So in this case, we're renaming objects. You could select everything and just rename all of the cameras or all of the materials and so forth. Let's keep it to objects and then we have the type of renaming that we're gonna use. We could find and replace. So if these objects had a specific prefix, for example, or a suffix, we could find those by typing that in and replacing that specific string of characters with a new string of characters that we want to name it with. We could set a name and we have a few methods. We could set a new name for these objects. We could set a prefix for these objects or a new suffix.

3:03We could strip characters so we could identify a specific characters, spaces, digits, punctuation that we want to strip from this particular group of objects or we can simply change the case. So uppercase, lowercase or titlecase. In this specific scene, I already have everything pretty much named already. So I'm not gonna go through with this batch rename, but I want to talk about a few more selection tools and tools for staying organized. If you want to create a new collection, this little group of objects in your scene, there are a few ways we could do that. Number one is we could press M while we have objects selected and we can move these to a new collection or an existing collection.

3:52So let's move these to a new collection and let's call this collection Kitchen Dining. And click Create. As you can see, that new collection was created in the Outliner and we have our two chairs and our table in there. Now, collections could be nested within other collections. So let's say we want this Kitchen Dining to be nested within Kitchen fixtures or Kitchen props. So we just drop it in there and now Kitchen Dining sits within Kitchen props. We could do the opposite by dragging it out and moving it outside of the collection and now it's no longer nested within that. There are some useful tools once you have things in a collection.

4:38First, we just have this checkbox and that turns on and off all of the items within that collection. So as you can see, our kitchen table and chairs are disappearing. We can also just turn off the visibility in the viewport which is separate from the visibility at actual render time. So this little eyeball is just viewport visibility. We could turn things off to kind of stay out of the way but when it comes to render time, those will not be invisible because the render time camera icon is on. We could turn them off in both areas or simply just uncheck them which will completely remove them from the scene. But this is in all of the tools that we have to state organized. These are just some of the default ones that appear. If we click this little drop down up here, we find some more restriction toggles.

5:25We have a selection toggle, disable in viewports, a holdout and indirect only. So I'm gonna go through each of these and kind of tell you what they each do. So now that we close that drop down up here, you'll notice we have all kinds of options for our new collections. So let's focus again on the kitchen dining and let's play around with this selection toggle. So if I turn this off, suddenly I can't select anything within that collection. Even if I click directly on them, I'll never be able to select that table. And this is really useful if you just want to turn off selection. So you don't accidentally keep selecting something that's getting in the way of your scene. Let's go back to kitchen dining. Let's turn on selection again. We talked about visibility in viewports.

6:12That's simply just a way to turn off the visibility. So you don't see them in the viewport. Maybe things are obstructing your view and you want to turn them off. That's different from disabling them completely in the viewport, which is going to stop them from being computed in the viewport at all. Then of course, we can toggle on and off the render time visibility, which is whether or not they show up in the render. And the last two options are for render time as well. This one right here is called a holdout. And what that means, if I just set up a camera real quick, let's set this camera up to be looking at this little kitchen area with the table and chairs. And if I render this, these objects are simply transparent. So anywhere where these objects exist,

7:00they're now held out, which just makes them basically transparent. It's kind of a compositing tool, not really for keeping organized with geometry, but it's just something that's useful to know since we're going over these. The last one is indirect only, which is a similar effect. It's just going to make them completely disappear. And the only thing that's going to show up is their influence on the scene. So in this case, we don't see the chairs or the table. We just see the shadow that they're casting in the scene. So that's a look at renaming objects. That's a look at creating collections and nesting collections within other collections and just trying to keep organized in your scene. You can also keep things color coded. So if you right click a collection, you can change the color of that collection,

7:47which can be very useful for keeping things visually organized. But let's get into some more selection specific functions. So working with geometry, again, it's really important that we can keep organized, not just in our outliner, but that we can find things quickly in our scene. And if we lose things, we know how to find them. So what do I mean by losing objects? Well, sometimes you're working way off somewhere else. And for whatever reason, you can't find a specific object. So this is where it comes in really handy to have organized collections and organized object names. Because then we can simply select this dining chair within the kitchen dining collection. We know this is what we're after. And if we hold down the Tilda Pi menu,

8:32which is something we went over in the last video or a few videos ago, we can simply come down to View Selected. And that is going to frame our view around that specific object. So it doesn't matter where we are in the scene, we could be way, way off in the distance here where everything isn't even visible anymore, which is a common thing that happens to beginners. And we could hold down the Tilda Pi menu, go to View Selected after we find it in the outliner. And that's just a quick way to get reoriented in your scene and to find missing objects. But let's say it's the other way around. Let's say we select an object here. And for whatever reason, we can't find it in our outliner. We've been looking and we can't find it. There are a few things that we could do.

9:19The first thing is it's the same exact shortcut as the Tilda menu in the 3D viewport. But the nice thing about Blender Shortcuts is their context sensitive, meaning it matters what window your mouse is hovering over. So if we hold down the Tilda menu here, we can just simply go to Show Active. And it'll jump to wherever that is in the outliner, just as it jumped to wherever it was in the 3D view. Last thing we could do is we could come up here and we can actually just search. So, Dynet, Share, and it's gonna show everything with that name, which is another really useful way to filter out things and stay organized. So that's all the tools that have to do with object level selecting and object level organization. But what about edit mode level?

10:05What about the actual mesh level? Let's talk about that. Let's select this table and let's go into edit mode. And let's just look at a few simple selection tools. So the first one, if we press T to bring up our T menu, we've been using this one. This is the select box tool. And this is the one that should be selected by default. And just to get there, you can click and drag this icon, whatever it's on, and go to box select. And this is exactly what it sounds like. You can just drag and drop a box selection and it'll select your mesh. Again, remember X-ray mode in the previous video if you need to select things that are occluded or behind other objects or wireframe mode,

10:51which is also useful for that. So we have box selection. We also have circle select and select lasso. So lasso isn't something I use a whole lot. I typically just use box selection. However, circle select is something I use, but I want to teach you the shortcut. So for the most part, I keep this on box select. And if I ever want to go to circle select, you just simply press C for circle in edit mode. If you scroll up and down with your scroll wheel, you can change the size of that circle select. And then you just click and drag and anything within this kind of brush stroke. It's going to be selected as you go around. So circle select is also very, very useful. Now I want to talk about just a few shortcuts that you can use to select everything

11:38and deselect everything in edit mode or in object mode for that matter. So to select all, it's simply just a, force select all and to deselect everything, it's simply all to deselect. And that works in edit mode. It also works if we jump back out to object mode, we could press A and that's going to select every single object in our entire scene, which is really useful. For example, if you want to select everything and then you want to come down here in the timeline and let's say there was some animation and you just want to clear all the animation in the whole scene, you can select all, you can right click down here and you can delete keyframes. So that's really useful. And then of course, you can hit Alt A to deselect everything.

12:26Let's say you're working on an area in your scene and things are kind of cluttered in the 3D viewport and you just want to focus on one object. So we already talked about the tilde menu to view selected, but let's say that's not enough. Let's say it's still just too cluttered and you can't see what's going on. You could simply come over to your number pad and click the forward slash on your number pad and that is going to isolate the selected object or objects so that's all you see in the scene. And to get out of that mode, you just press the forward slash on your number pad again and that's going to bring back all of the other objects. If you don't have a number pad that's fine, you could just select your object or multiple objects, come up here to view,

13:13go to local view and toggle local view and that's just going to do the exact same thing. If you don't want to dig through the menu every time and this is something that you do a lot, then you can simply go to that option, right click and say add to quick favorites, which in my case it's already added to the quick favorites. So it just says remove from quick favorites and to get to your quick favorites menu, you just press queue for quick favorites and I can just simply toggle that local view, which is a nice way to add kind of any operation in your blender interface to the quick favorites menu and you can quickly jump in and out of whatever tools that you want to use. All right, so that's a look at naming objects, keeping them organized within collection,

13:58finding objects when you lose objects both in the 3D viewport and in the outliner as well as some edit mode specific selection tools and finally a way to isolate objects with just the forward slash on the numpad or come up here to view, local view and toggle local view. With all of those tools, you should be able to stay a little bit more organized as we move forward in this course and start to look at some actual modeling tools and how to start manipulating and creating geometry in blender. Thanks for sticking around for this kind of foundation of everything. I know it was very technical, it wasn't very hands on, it's just learning a lot of shortcuts, but I promise this is the foundation that's gonna help us going forward and help you to learn and pick things up a lot faster.

14:46If you wanna challenge yourself with what you're learning, take a look at the next chapter, which is a quiz chapter where you can take a quiz, you can do things like type in the various shortcuts that I've taught you to see if you got them right and you remember them, as well as answers some multiple choice questions, which are gonna help you lock in some of the knowledge that you're learning and put yourself to the test to see how much you're actually retaining. All right, see you in the next chapter.

0:00All right, we've covered a lot of technical and some background kind of user interface stuff for modeling. But let's actually start working with geometry and modeling something new. I thought a good one to start with would be a bookcase because that helps us exercise some of the most fundamental modeling tools. So the first thing we need to do is we need to start with a primitive shape. And to do that, we just hit Shift A for add. And then we're going to add a mesh. And honestly, we could either start with a plane or a cube. It really doesn't matter. In this case, I think I'll start with a plane. And we have this square plane that's come into the scene and it looks like it's two meters by two meters big. We'll get the scale figured out soon enough. But for now, I do want to make it wider than it is kind of depth wise.

0:47So let's go ahead and hit S to scale this. And then I want to scale this on the y axis. So I'm clicking Y. And I'm just going to eyeball this maybe about there looks right. And then we're going to introduce our first modeling tool, which is probably the most common and most used one, which is the extrude tool. So let's go into edit mode with tab. And to extrude, it's just the shortcut E. So press the E key. And that's going to start the extrusion process. Now, by default, it's locked to the Z axis, which in this case is actually what we want. You could click a different axis or you could middle click and just stop this snapping altogether. Let's go ahead and press Z again because we do want to snap to that vertical axis.

1:33And again, I'm just eyeballing it maybe about that big. One of the things about working in 3D is sometimes it's easy to lose track of scale. Like we might technically know that this is two meters wide, but sometimes it's hard to actually envision how big that is. So what I use is human scale reference. You can grab these over on my site, which is Riley be 3D dot com. If you download them on my site, they're completely free. However, if you'd like, you can subscribe to the remote asset library, which is really useful. You could just get the assets straight within Blender. So I'm going to right click the border on the bottom here, and I'm going to do a vertical split of my viewport and left click to split it right there.

2:22And then up here, I'm going to choose the editor type, which is this dropdown. And I'm going to change this to the asset browser right here. And then I'm going to go to my remote library, the Riley be 3D dot com library. And this holds all of the assets on my site. There's some setup instructions if you decide to go this route on my website. But like I said, you could just go to the site and download this from the web. It's only if you want this in the asset browser that you pay a couple bucks. OK, so let's search. And I'm just going to search for human for human scale reference. And you could see I've provided you with all of these nice default scale references that are quote unquote average human size if there is such a thing.

3:07So I'm going to grab this standing human and we could just drag and drop it into the scene. And right away, we can see this bookcase is absolutely massive. So that's why we use this. It's really handy to kind of at a glance get a feel for how things how big things should be in your scene. So I just press S and I've scaled it down to about there. Then I can right click on this border and I'm just going to join left. OK, there are many ways we can make this bookcase and I'm going to show you a few of them. For this approach, I'm going to go into edit mode and I'm going to show you the next major modeling tools. We covered extrusion, which was the key. Now I'm going to go to face select mode by pressing three and I'm going to select this front face.

3:53And now I'm going to show you the inset tool, which is conveniently the I key. So click I and you see we get this inset action going on. Now if this is a little squirrely, you move your mouse a little bit and it's moving too much. You can always hold down shift and that will just slow down whatever action you're taking that works all across Blender. So I'm going to go about that big and then just left click to confirm and then we could just use the extrusion key over again with E to extrude this in to kind of give space for our shelves. So that's one way we could do things. I'm going to press control Z and I'm going to duplicate this object. So I went back to object mode and I'm pressing shift D. That's another one shift D to duplicate

4:45and I'm going to move this along the X axis and confirm by left clicking. So I want to show you two ways to make this bookcase and each one will show some different modeling tools. So let's go to the first one. Let's press tab to go back into edit mode. And this time instead of extruding this face in, I'm going to add what's called a loop cut. A loop cut is something you're going to use all the time and it's control R. And what that does, as you could see, if you put your mouse along one of the edges on your mesh, it's going to put a little yellow line that's suggesting where this loop cut is going to go. And this is a multi-part tool. So the first step is you suggest which loop you want to place this on.

5:30So let's go ahead and place it on this loop because this is where we're going to have the shelves. But before we do, we're going to scroll the scroll wheel up. And as you could see, that's slowly adding more loops. So let's go about that much. That looks good. And I'm just going to left click and that's going to choose that loop. And then it's going to go into the final stage of this tool, which is deciding where specifically to place these loops. If I left click, it'll place it wherever my mouse is at that time, or I can simply right click and it'll place it at the dead center. So I've right clicked and now those are completely evenly spaced with each of those. Remember in a previous lesson, I talked about the operator panel.

6:17You could open this up and after the fact, you could change the number of cuts if you're not totally happy with what you have. And you have some other options as well, which we're not going to look at right now. I think six is going to be pretty good. So I can just go ahead and click anywhere on the scene and that's going to confirm that. But one thing, I don't know if you notice this, if you select a loop cut. So to select a loop cut, you just hold alt and left click. So if I just click, it selects a single edge. But if I hold alt and left click, you could see that it selects this whole loop. Then I could select multiple loops by holding shift alt left click. So that's a bit of muscle memory that you can get used to.

7:03But that's how you select loop cuts and how you select multiple loop cuts. All right. So as I was saying, sorry, this isn't perfectly flat. We have this flat edge here and then it kind of goes up at an angle and then this edge on the side is higher than what it is over here. And this angle is coming from this angle that we have from the inset operation that we did earlier. This middle one is almost perfectly flat. But as you can see, as we get closer to this angle, these kind of go out of proportion. So there are a million ways to fix this. One is we go individually one by one, select this loop cut. We could scale on the Z axis and then we could just press zero on our keyboard to scale that

7:49down to a perfect zero. But the problem with that is we would have to do that for every single individual loop cut. And I'd rather just do them all at once. So again, let's hold all shift and select the remaining loop cuts. Now if I hit S, Z and zero, that would scale all six loop cuts into one in the middle, which is definitely not what we want. So let's right click to cancel that. And instead we're going to look up here at this menu, which is the first time we've touched this. This is the transform pivot point. So this is basically the point which is considered the center of whatever operation we're doing. So in this case, it is set to median point. So that means all of these edge loops are, they have a median point right here in the

8:39center. So if I scale on Z zero, all of them has have scaled to the middle point or the median point for everything that's selected. So that's definitely not what we want. Instead, we could change this to individual origins. And now it's treating every loop cut as its own origin. And it's just going to scale to the middle of each one individually. So now if we press S, Z, zero, enter, you could see it's flattened out all of those loop cuts. And that might seem like a big long process, but let me just show you what that would look like at speed for an experienced modeler. You would grab all the loops, you would come up here to individual origins. And just like that, you've scaled all of those on their own origin to zero.

9:28So they're perfectly flat. Okay, now if we went to face select mode, we have a problem. If we tried to extrude all of these together, what would happen is basically just what we did before. Everything goes back by itself, and we don't have any shelves. So now we're going to introduce you to the third tool in this video. So we've looked at extrusion, we've looked at inset. Actually, we've looked at loop cuts as well. So this is the fourth one. Now we're going to look at a tool called bevel. So I'm going to select all of these loops again. And bevel is control B. So once I hit control B, you can see it's taken each edge or each loop cut, and it's beveled it and turned it into two separate edges.

10:16So I'm going to hold down shift again to fine tune that movement. And I'm just going to eyeball this for the thickness of the shelves that I want. So maybe about there and left click. Again, you can fine tune in the operator pop up for these settings. That looks good to me. And now what we could do is we could select and face mode each of these blank spaces in between the shelves. You could go through and select these individually. But let's say you had hundreds of these and you want to find a faster way to select an easy way to do that is select one, select the second, and then just hit control shift plus on your number pad. And that will keep selecting whatever pattern you selected.

11:02So all I needed to do was select the first two, and then I could just click that and it selects the rest of them, which is really handy. All right, now we can press E to extrude. And those are going to extrude on each of those origins. And let's go back. Actually, let's let's go to x-ray mode. So we could see how far back we want this to be. Let's grab those on the y axis, G and Y. And I'm going to move those back. So there's just a little bit of thickness back there. So out of x-ray mode with Alt Z, go into object mode and you can see we have our bookcase. Sometimes it's hard to see what's going on. So that's where the chapter came in on the viewport overlays. We could come down here. Sorry, not viewport overlays, the viewport shading.

11:49We can come down here like we did in the last video and turn on cavity. We could even turn on shadow if we want. And that just helps us. We can fine tune it. That helps us see the shape of our objects a lot better. All right, so that's one way you can make the bookcase. Let's look at a second way just for good measure. So we've already inset this one. Now let's just extrude. We'll extrude it back on the y axis. It's already snapping to that for us. And we'll take it to about there. That looks good. And now let's add some individual shelves. So there are a few ways you could do this. Number one is you could just add another plane to your scene and you can move it over here and you could try to position it and scale it and make it fit.

12:37But a good lesson in modeling is to reuse geometry wherever you can, because oftentimes the geometry in your scene that you're already using as part of an object is the correct side or the correct size for whatever you're trying to duplicate. So in this case, if we go into edit mode and face select mode, if we select this bottom face, you could see this is already the perfect size for a shelf. So now all we need to do is press shift D to duplicate, which is what we did earlier in object mode works in edit mode too. And then we can lock this to the Z axis. And let's just eyeball how high we want this shelf to be. Maybe about there. And then let's extrude and we can extrude it up maybe to a thickness of about right

13:25there. Now we want to duplicate this shelf. We could do that in edit mode by selecting all of the faces. However, some of the faces are kind of hidden back here and it's not terrible to select all of these, but it is a little bit tricky. One quick way to select everything connected to this object is just to press L for linked geometry and that's just going to select linked. There are a few options here. You could select linked by a few different attributes. What we did is find it selected the whole shelf and now we can simply press shift D to duplicate and let's duplicate on the Z axis again. And we could continue building out these shelves.

14:10If you ever want to repeat the last operation. So the last operation is we duplicated and place that shelf. You could just press shift R to repeat and we could create a few new shelves. Remember L is to select linked and we could kind of position these wherever we want. There you go. If we go back into object mode, that was two ways to basically do the same thing. However, there is a difference between this object and this one. Not just the spacing of the shelves, but if we go into edit mode, when we select linked on this object, you notice that it's just selecting each individual shelf. And the reason it's doing that is because each of these is its own whole object and

14:57it's not connected to this outer shell in any way. If we try to do the same thing over here and select linked, it's just going to select the whole entire bookcase. And the reason for that is because this shelf, if we duplicate it out, doesn't have the side faces or the back faces because these are actually connected to the outer shell. If we select this edge, you could see it's sharing the edge from the outer shell and the actual shelf itself. One of the reasons you might create it this way is you could save on what's called UV space. So UVs are something we'll get into in a different course, but basically they're a surface which you can add textures to on your object.

15:43And especially if you're working within like a game engine and you're creating game assets, you want to be able to use optimized UV islands. And this is one way where you can optimize your use. And the reason for that is because let's just go back here, select this and delete it so it's out of the way. With this method over here, again, there are these surfaces on the side and the back as well. And so this is actually using UV space. It's using resolution in your textures for some areas that you're never going to see. Like unless we remove these shelves, you're never going to see the sides or the back. So the reason that I'm doing this in a few different ways is just to show you there are

16:29lots of different ways to approach things with modeling. There are some instances where technically you should do things one way. But for the most part, a lot of rules are just suggestions and it's up to you as the artist how you want to build something and how it's going to fit your specific needs. I want to end off with one more little trick that you can learn. And that is what if we wanted to bring these shelves in a little bit. So there's just a little bit of space, a little bit of a gap between this surface and this surface. We could select each of the front faces for each shelf and we could go ahead and extrude. However, you'll notice extruding in this direction is fine.

17:16But when we start extruding in this direction, things get a little bit messy. And what's going on there is it's keeping the existing faces that were there, even though we've extruded backwards. And to fix that, we just go to our operator panel and we can simply just click dissolve orthogonal edges. And once we do that, all of those have been cleaned up. All right, just to be annoyingly thorough, let me show you a third way to model this bookcase. This time we just have the solid cube here, the plane that we extruded up. And let's hit control R for loop cut as we did before. And let's scroll up to add a few more cuts, maybe about that many left click to confirm how many cuts and then right click to send that to the center.

18:04And now let's select all of these front faces so we could hold down shift and select each of them one at a time. Or we can select the first one and then hold down control shift and select the last one. And that will select everything in between. And now let's press I for inset as we did before. But this time, instead of insetting everything together as we're doing here, let's press I again, which will inset on individual faces. So now we have our shelves kind of pre built out and we can simply extrude these back with E and there you go. That is yet another way to do the same bookshelf. Of course, with this way, we wouldn't be able to do the clean kind of extruding back in

18:53because the shape of this is different. And that is just one more demonstration about how you know how you choose to model something is going to choose your own limitations and strengths for whatever you're doing. So as you approach modeling a bookshelf, your first bookshelf ever, you may only really be able to grasp one way of doing things with the tools that you know. But as you learn more tools and techniques, you might learn another way to do things. And eventually, you have three ways to make essentially the same bookshelf. But each one has kind of unique geometry. And each one is better for specific use cases. So if you're using something like AI generation to make a bookshelf, you're not going to have

19:41the control for all of the kind of fine, minute details that are going to be useful for using your particular bookcase in various scenarios. So I just wanted to show you there are a million ways to do things and to accomplish essentially the same thing in Blender. But as you work and as you learn more, you're going to have more tools at your disposal and you're going to understand which techniques should be employed in different scenarios to get the results that you want. All right, hang in there. Take the quiz after this if you want to test your knowledge of the shortcut keys that we covered and some of the key principles. If not, I'll see you in the next training after that.

0:00All right, for this next one, we're going to be modeling this barrel. And this is going to be our first step into what's called procedural modeling. Up until now, we've gone over some basic modeling tools where you can customize your mesh with one step at a time. For example, you can bevel something with one operation. You can add loop cuts with one operation. Procedural modeling is less about taking one step at a time. And it's more about setting up overall procedures or rules that impact your mesh and you create things that way. So we're going to be doing this through something called modifiers. This is our first step into proceduralism. Later in the course, we're going to go into advanced proceduralism

0:45using something called geometry nodes. But this is going to be a great first step. And I'll introduce you to some modifiers that you can start using in your own projects. Let's get started. All right, I've got our scale reference in here already. I showed you how to do that in our last video. It's good to start with reference. I should say we would be able to pull this off just with textures alone just by getting like a wooden plank texture. But since this is a modeling course and we're learning how to do it with geometry, let's go ahead and do it with geometry. So a few things we want to get in here. We want to start with some wooden planks. They need to bulge at the center of the barrel. We want to get these wooden rings in here. And then the top caps and the bottom cap just made of wood. So let's get started with the wooden plank itself.

1:30We can hit shift A and go to mesh and let's start with a plane again. And then I'm just going to scale this down and scale it down on the x axis, just eyeballing with my scale reference here to see how big I want that to be. Then I'm going to rotate on the x axis and type in nine zero for 90 degrees and then hit enter. All right, I'm just going to move this up so it's not intersecting with the grid floor. And now let's look at our first modifier. So the modifiers tab is right over here. It's this blue wrench icon. If you click on that with your object selected, we can add our first modifier. Let's go ahead and search for the solidify modifier. All right. So the solidify modifier, just like it sounds, it's going to solidify our mesh.

2:16So if we increase this, it's going to get more depth and become more solid. One thing to take into account is when you are scaling objects in Blender, like we scaled this down and then we scaled it down on x, that is going to keep some history as part of that object. What I mean by that is if you press the end panel and you go up here to the item tab, you could see under scale, none of these are set to one. And we could see the history that I'm talking about. We scale this on x and we scale this down overall. So if I set all of these back to one, this will be, let me try that again. This will be the plane that we started with. But as you could see, we did some scaling on x and overall on y and z.

3:05And this is a different scale than what it started. And the reason that that's important is because this solidify modifier is now affected by these scale principles. So what we need to do is essentially delete this history. We don't want Blender to remember everything that we've done to this. This is also called applying the scale. So basically, if you ever are adding a modifier and you're getting unexpected results, for whatever reason, go ahead and apply scale and object mode by pressing control A and go down to scale. And as you could see, that immediately changed the solidify modifiers effect because all of these are now set to one, essentially removing Blender's memory of the operations that we've already done to this object.

3:52So control A, apply scale. This is really important. You're going to do it all the time. All right. So we definitely don't want this to be quite that thick. So I'm going to bring it back a little bit, maybe about there. So we have a plank that's now solid. We go into edit mode. You could see we just have four points still, but we're letting the modifier do the heavy lifting here by turning this into a solid plank. Let's continue this and let's use what's called a simple deform modifier to give it that kind of bulge or that curve that we're looking for. So add modifier and let's search for simple deform right here. And right away, this is going to go crazy. We can't really see what's going on. Let's collapse the solidify modifier. It's still there. It's just out of the way so we can look at our simple deform.

4:40Instead of twisting this plank, we want to bend it. So let's change this to bend. So let's go into edit mode with tab and we can't really see what's going on with our mesh anymore because this simple deform modifier is in the way. So this little button here, this disables the modifier just in edit mode so we can see what's going on in edit mode. And let's actually turn this solidify modifier off as well in edit mode. So this is really the mesh that we're dealing with. There's nothing else to it. And then if we go back to object mode, we can see everything that the modifiers are doing. One of the reasons this simple deform modifier is so messed up right now is because if we go to edit mode, you can see there's no way we could actually bend this mesh because there is not enough loop cuts.

5:27So if we added a few loop cuts, let's do control R and scroll up. We'll add, I don't know what's that, nine. Nine sounds good. If we go back to object mode, still something seems off about this. So it's bending, but it could be bending on the wrong axis. So if we try these other axis, no, still not the effect we're looking for. So remember when we hit control A to apply the scale of this object? Well, I don't know if you remember, we also rotated this object. So if we go to the end panel and go up to item, sure enough, under rotation, you could see that we rotated this on the X axis, 90 degrees. And Blender is trying to remember that history of what we've done to this object, which is affecting how this simple deform modifier is being applied.

6:16So just like we applied the scale of the object to fix the solidify modifier, we can press control A and apply the rotation. And now if we open up the end panel, you could see that rotation is zeroed out and scale is all set to one, which is exactly what we want to see. And now this is starting to bend just like we want it to do for the barrel. So we've got two modifiers solidify simple deform. Another one we're going to add is the array modifier. So just come over here to search and search for a R R and this is the array modifier. Now the array modifier basically creates an array of your objects. So by default, it's shaped in a line and you can change the offset, how far apart they're spaced. You can change the count, how many objects you want to be arrayed.

7:06But instead of a line, let's change this to a circle. And now these are being arrayed in a circle. However, we should increase the radius. And now these are getting spread out a little bit more, which is perfect. But these are bending the wrong way, which is easy to fix. Let's just go to our simple deform modifier. And instead of 45 degrees, let's just come in here and type in negative 45. And press enter. There you go. We can also increase the count. How many planks are being arrayed? I'm just going to increase the radius a little bit and let's increase the count. Now, one thing you'll notice is these aren't meeting. And if we increase the count, they start to overlap on the top

7:52and they still have a little bit of gap on the bottom. So what I want to do is I want to try to get this kind of where they're just starting to meet together on the top. And then if we go into edit mode with tab, what we can start to do is let's bring back each modifier. So we see essentially this mesh in the middle. This is the mesh. And then what we see on the outside, this is the effect of all of the modifiers that we're using. So let's go into edge select mode. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the top and the bottom here. And I'm just going to scale these and kind of eyeball the effect here. And I'm going to do that for each of these. So then I'm going to select this one and this one.

8:38And then scale these and try to get these just right. You'll notice what I'm having to do here, though, is select the top and the bottom. What if there is a modifier that basically duplicates what I'm doing up here and copies the same thing down here? Well, luckily for us, there is one and it's called the mirror modifier. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete by pressing X on all of those edges. I'm going to delete all those vertices. So essentially, we've cut our plank in half and now we just have the top half. Then in object mode, I'm going to add another modifier. And this is the mirror modifier. Scroll down to that. I want this to mirror on the Z axis, not the X axis.

9:24And one quick note, let's collapse these modifiers. It matters what order you do for these modifiers. If I change up the order and I take the mirror modifier before the array modifier, it won't do anything. But if I take it before the simple deform modifier, it has a huge effect because essentially, it's going to execute these modifiers from top to bottom. So it's going to solidify it. It's going to apply the mirror modifier. Then it's going to do it simple deform and then it's going to array this in the circle. So now if we go to edit mode, we only have to work on the top half of this since it's going to be mirrored to the bottom half. So let's continue selecting our edges and I'm just going to scale these until they look right.

10:10Go to the next one, scale it. Go to the next one and scale it. So the nice thing about working with modifiers is you can kind of do this hybrid approach of modeling things by hand. So this is still a bit of mesh and we're moving around the components, the edges and the vertices and scaling them. But then it's also doing a procedural setup where it's taking that mesh that we're creating. It's solidifying it. It's doing a mirror modifier. It's doing a deformation where it's bending the planks and then it's doing an array where it's putting them in the circle. So we do a lot of heavy lifting with just a little bit of manual work. All right. One thing we haven't really talked about yet is something called shade smooth. So you'll notice as we look around this barrel, you could see each individual face

10:59and it's kind of really harsh with harsh edges. If we right click, we can just go to shade smooth and that smooths out that transition. But we have a problem because now it's trying to average out the distance between all of our edges. And this is smooth and this edge is smooth and everything just starts to look kind of weird and it doesn't look quite right. So there are a few ways we could fix this. One is we can right click and we can shade auto smooth. So that's going to try its best to smooth out these faces based on this angle that we have right here. I'm noticing though, we do have one seam right along the middle here. And the reason that that's happening is again because the order of our modifiers. So right now it's taking this shape and it's solidifying it,

11:47which means it's creating another face at the bottom here right at the middle of our mesh. And then it's doing the mirror modifier. So if we went to x-ray mode with alt Z, we could see there's a layer of faces going through the middle here, which is why we're getting that sharp edge right there. So to fix that, all we need to do is to take this mirror modifier and put it right above the solidify modifier and that fixes it so we don't see that anymore. So that's one way of doing it. Just right clicking and going to shade auto smooth. Let's go back to shade smooth though, because I want to show you another modifier. So let's go here. Remember in back in the last video, we could do a bevel with control B and that kind of split one edge or one edge loop into multiple edges.

12:32We could do the same thing in modifier mode. So it's just the bevel modifier. And let's think about the order that we want to do this in. We could put this probably right after the solidify modifier. So it's beveling that before it gets curved, which is going to be helpful. Let's open up this bevel modifier and we can adjust the amount of the bevel so we could see what it's doing there. Basically, if we go to wireframe mode here, we can see what's going on. It's taking what was once this single edge and it's splitting it into two. And that helps this smooth modifier because now instead of averaging from this edge all the way to this edge and smoothing all of that out. Try to draw this for you.

13:18Instead of smoothing this whole surface, which is very round, what it does with the bevel modifier is now we have an extra group of edges there. And now it really only needs to average between here and here or here and here. It's not perfectly flat, though. There is one option. Let me just turn off wireframe here. There is one option within the bevel modifier that we could use to really get the look we're going for. If we go to shading, we can turn on harden normals and that's going to get rid of that averaging even more. And this is more of the effect we're going for. Now I'm going to go down to the array modifier and I'm just going to tweak the radius to make sure we have really tight barrel shape here. Awesome. Now let's move on to the actual metal rings.

14:06So I'm going to hit shift A and I'm going to start with a circle. And I'm just going to move this and kind of scale it, put it roughly in the center here, maybe about there. And then I'm going to go into edit mode and just extrude this up so we have a band here that goes all the way around. Then I'm going to continue using modifiers. I'm going to show you another modifier. This one is called shrink wrap. And this basically takes this surface and conforms it to another surface. So it's going to conform it to whatever we set as the target. Let's take this little eyedropper here and we can click on our actual barrel here. And that is going to hug the ring surface to the barrel.

14:52We can stack modifiers. So let's go ahead and add a solidify modifier and grow the solidify just a little bit. I'm going to apply the scale and rotation just to make sure these are nice and predictable, what they're doing. And let's go ahead and shade smooth on this as well and add a bevel modifier that will place right after the solidify modifier. And I'm going to turn the amount way down. And in shading, I'm going to also harden the normals. Sorry, this bevel should be below the solidify modifier. There we go. All right, cool. And the reason we did it this way is now if we move this around on the barrel, you can see it automatically hugs whatever part we're looking at.

15:39So we can move it down here and let's go ahead and add an array modifier. We're going to have to change the order in which this one is placed. Let's array on the Z axis so it goes up and not on the X axis. We'll set that to zero and let's instead of increasing the count, let's increase that spacing on the Z axis to maybe something like five. There we go. And again, the order matters. So we're shrink wrapping, we're solidifying, we're beveling. All of this happens after the array. So let's go ahead and drag the array. So it's first. And that's awesome. We could move this down. We could go to the array. We could add another count.

16:24We could change the Z offset and it's super easy to add more rings if we want them. Now to finish this off, let's add another circle. This time instead of the fill type being nothing, let's set it to an Ngon, which is just going to fill it with a single face. Let's just scale that into place. And instead of duplicating this, let's add the mirror modifier. So I'm going to search for the mirror modifier and we can mirror on the Z axis, but it's not really doing anything. And that's because it's using this object's origin as the mirroring point. So because this is perfectly flat, it has actually created two discs here, but they're just perfectly on top of each other. So instead of using its own origin, this little orange dot for the mirror operation,

17:13let's set the mirror object and let's set it to this barrel. And now it's using that barrels middle point, which is in the middle of the barrel. And that's what it's using as the mirror point to mirror this disc. All right. That's looking pretty good. If we turn on wireframe mode, you can see that's pretty clean. Go ahead and share this with your friends posted online. That's a barrel to be proud of. Now, what happens when we're happy with our barrel and maybe we want to make some more changes and we don't want this procedural setup anymore? Because remember, all this is is a single little plank and we want to apply all of these modifiers so that they no longer affect this object. And we can move on to future steps like texturing and UV unwrapping and some other things.

18:04So to apply modifiers, it's important that you apply them in the order that they're shown here. If you want the same effect as you get here. So to apply, just hit control a and let's apply these from top to bottom. And now if you go to edit mode, you could see we have all of these planks. Instead of just the single one we were working with, we can also apply the modifiers for our rings here and at the top and the bottom, those little discs. And now we could select everything and scale it all down and put it into place. Maybe that's a good scale and scaling it won't mess up everything because the modifiers are no longer affecting this as a final step. We have everything selected. We can go ahead and press control J, which will join all of these separate objects as one object.

18:53And now this is our barrel object that you should be super proud of. Hopefully that's taught you some things about procedural modeling using modifiers. Modifiers are kind of a basic approach to procedural modeling. In future chapters, we're going to do some really advanced procedural modeling, which is going to be using something called geometry nodes, which I'm really excited to show you. But for now, pat yourself in the back because you've done a great job. Go ahead and take the quiz that follows this chapter to test your knowledge on everything you just learned and make sure you're solidifying those shortcuts that I'm teaching you and you're getting plenty of repetition. So take the quiz and I'll see you in the next video.

0:00Today, I'll show you every step in modeling this folding chair. Instead of getting stuck early on tiny details, I'll show you what the professionals do, which is to first focus on primary shapes. We'll refine those shapes until we have this final result. It's a great object to practice on since it shows off so many modeling tools in Blender. Let's get started. When you model anything in Blender, I want you to think in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary details. When you're looking at an object, instead of focusing in on all the tiny little details, it's good to first start with a rough block out in your mind. And there are two main reasons for doing that. Number one, it's going to help you approach this in a much more manageable way.

0:45And number two, it's going to help you thrash out errors and little mistakes early to get the overall proportions correct. So when I look at this chair and I look for primary shapes, basically break it down to the most basic level, I actually see three planes. One here, it's kind of at a backwards tilt. One here, which is just the plane of this flat seat. And then a third one right here, which is kind of this forward tilt that makes up this back leg of the chair. So if I can keep these primary planes in mind as I model, this is just going to be much more manageable. So let's start with that first backwards tilting plane. I'm just going to scale on X, maybe on Y, and we can fine tune these dimensions a little bit later.

1:31I'm just trying to get this roughly into place. Then I'm going to add the second plane, which will be the seat, maybe something like that, and the third plane. And actually, instead of adding a new plane here, I'm just going to duplicate this one so we have the correct width already. And I'm just going to rotate it the opposite direction and place it back here. Then I'm going to go to edge mode, double tap G to slide these down. And now as we could see, this gap here in my chair is much wider than the gap here in the reference. So now we can start to work on that. Maybe overall, I think if I select all of my pieces, they could be a little bit more narrow. These are the kind of fixes we want to get out early and get correct now before we move on.

2:17All right, so believe it or not, we're done with the primary shape phase. Let's just select everything, hit control A to apply the scale, and let's move on to the secondary shapes. Now we can start looking at things in a little bit more detail. We can pay attention to how these legs curve at the bottom. We can pay attention to this overarching curve at the top, and we can start to work on converting these shapes into the actual metal pipes that make up the frame of this chair. So let's tackle this top curve first. I'm going to go into edit mode, and I can select these two top vertices. And instead of clicking control B on the keyboard, which would just be our standard bevel tool, we can actually click control shift B, and that's going to bring up our bevel vertices option. And we can scroll up just to have a nice number here.

3:04And I'm thinking something like that looks nice. Then in object mode, let's select both of these objects, go into edit mode, and now we're going to go to these bottom vertices, control shift B. So maybe something like this. Finally, let's select everything on our bottom part here, and let's do the same thing. There we go. And we don't have to bevel these top corners because this is actually open. So let's go into edit mode, select this top edge and delete that edge. There we go. We've already created most of the secondary shapes, but now let's turn these into a curve object. So if we just select everything, I'm going to right click and go to convert to curve. And that's just going to convert everything to a curve. Pretty straightforward. Now, if we come over here to our object properties,

3:51this little green area here that indicates the curve, we can scroll down to where it says bevel, and we can start to add depth. Now you'll notice when I start to add depth, it's only going to apply the active object, which is this yellow selected object. Whichever object you selected last is considered your active object. So if I increase this, you can see it's just working on that one. The shortcut to apply it to everything is just to hold down alt before you change something in your properties panel. And that's going to apply it to all three objects, everything that's selected. If it's squirrely and kind of finicky, it's moving too fast, you can also hold down shift. So right now I'm holding down alt, shift, and I'm increasing the depth of all of my selected objects at once. Something like that looks good to me.

4:37If you ever want to turn off your overlays, just hit shift, alt, Z, and that's going to get rid of the distracting lines. So you can really just focus on the overall shape of things. And one thing I want you to pay attention to is the amount of topology or the amount of edge rings we have compared to the amount of edge loops. Just to be clear, these are edge rings. They're going the length around this curve, and these are edge loops, which are going around kind of the radius of it. Now you'll notice with the current configuration, these polygons are pretty stretched out. They're really long rectangles. We want to get these closer to a square shape. So that's easy. We just come over to resolution, again, hold alt, so it applies it to everything. And we don't want to go quite as low as zero,

5:22because if we apply the subdivision surface modifier, we're going to lose a lot of volume. So I think something like a resolution of one is to my eye kind of a happy medium of everything. Then we can right click and shade smooth. Again, we can turn off our overlays, and that's looking pretty good. All right, that is almost it for the secondary shapes. We could add this actual seat cushion. So one thing I want to talk about is, when do you want to add a new primitive versus working with geometry that's already in the scene? So what I mean by that is we could hit shift S and send the 3D cursor to the selected object, and then we can add a plane, and we could try to scale it into place and do the bevels all over again,

6:08and try to match this shape here, which not too much work, but whenever possible, I like to use existing geometry in the scene. So we could just go into edit mode, and actually I forgot one step. Let's select everything. Since we're happy with the shape of this curve, we can right click and convert to mesh. Now everything is a mesh in edit mode again. So select this bottom piping for the seat, and let's go into edit mode. And now let's go to edge selection mode, and let's see. We could add, let's just see where the seat cushion starts. Seems like this edge loop is good. I just held down alt and left click to select that whole loop. Then we can shift D to duplicate, right click to cancel the movement of that duplicate, then press P and separate by selection. Now in object mode,

6:54we can select that newly created mesh here, and this can be the basis of our seat cushion. Just select everything in edit mode, and let's extrude up and scale that out. Extrude up again, and I'm just taking a look at the profile here just to get this shape right. There we go, that looks pretty good. Maybe I'll scale this out just a little bit. And it looks pretty flat here, so I'm just gonna follow that. I'm just gonna fill with one single face. Select everything to recalculate these normals. You'll see some of these normals are backwards. Just hit shift N to recalculate those. And we can shade smooth as well, and we can turn off the overlays to take a look at this. Now I want you to take a look at what's going on here. I filled this with one single face,

7:39which is creating some shading artifacts. And the reason for that is this is essentially one giant and gone. Actually, it's more than that. And I want you to understand this. The reason this has a shading artifact is because basically it's trying to average between three edges. Whenever you shade smooth, it's grabbing three edges. So right now, it's taking the distance from here and here, and averaging with the next closest edge that's over here. It's doing the same thing over here. It's taking this and this, and averaging all the way over here, and trying to make this a smooth calculation. Now the problem with this is because these are so far apart, it's basically trying to draw this shape,

8:26like a sphere shading. And of course, because this is a flat surface, that sphere shading isn't gonna cut it. We're going all the way around here, and it just looks really weird. When we turn off overlays again, you could see, it just doesn't look right. You can't really make out what's going on here. So the easiest way to fix this is to inset with eye, and we can do what's called bracing that edge. Now we still have a giant end gone here, and this is what's confusing. Some people will say, well, the end gone is the problem. You have an end gone. That's why you have shading issues. But actually, as you could see, if we turn off the overlays, that issue is gone. Because what's happening is now, it just has to average, remember, it's three. It's going from here to here to here.

9:13So now it's just drawing this shape. And now that it's been protected with three edges, this is free to look completely flat. We don't have to worry about this anymore. So that's why that's fixed. So really, it's tempting just to say, all right, the reason that this is broken is because you have a giant end gone. But it's a little more nuanced than that. That's not the reason it's broken. We could still have a giant end gone, which by the way, will just be triangulated in the game engine or in the render engine. So really, it's gonna look more like this, right? This is really what we're looking at. Just keep that in mind. So the problem isn't that we have an end gone. The problem is that we don't have enough bracing edge information to allow this end gone to be flat.

9:59So once we inset that, it's totally fine. So that's one way we could fix this. Another way we could fix it is we could just select that same edge loop and we can hit control F and grid fill. And then you can change the span and the offset to try to get something that looks nice. And this is essentially doing the same thing. If we turn off the overlays, you could see it's allowing this surface to be flat again because we have enough bracing edge information. Now it's averaging from here to here and here. So we have enough information to allow this area to be completely flat. Up to you on which option you wanna take. Since we're just having a flat surface that's not gonna deform, the inset option with the end gone is totally acceptable.

10:47If you did want this to be a deforming surface, I would just add a few more edge loops in here so that you have square topology. And now we could do something like, oh, I don't know. Let's add a simple deform modifier just to preview it. So if we wanted this to be a deforming surface, meaning we're going to animate it and deform it somehow, then we could go with this option and this looks fine. This looks great. We have enough information to be able to bend that. But yeah, going all the way back here, if you wanna take this approach, just fill it with one big end gone and then inset it, that's totally fine. We've braced the edge loops and this is acceptable for a game engine as long as you're not planning on deforming this and animating it, like bending it.

11:32The end gone is not the problem. The problem is you didn't have enough bracing edges. Remember, whenever you're shading smooth, think about three edges, which three edges are closest together and that's what it's gonna try to average. Okay, this was a little aside. I wanted to add in after I was editing it back to my previous take. A third way you could do it, believe it or not, is let's do it for this bottom one. Let's select this bottom edge loop and let's do the same thing. Let's fill it with a single face. For this one, however, we have this outer edge ring selected as you could see here. This time, let's just hit Control E and let's Mark Sharp. Now that's completely flattened out the issue because this is now a perfectly flat surface. And if we solo this object

12:18by pressing forward slash on the numpad and we turn off overlays, you could see it appears to have a very sharp edge right here. Looks like you could cut yourself on that, which isn't great for a cushion, but because this is on the underside of the chair and we're never gonna see that edge, this is perfectly acceptable. All right, let's tackle this cushion up here. Again, let's use existing geometry wherever we can. I'm just gonna select one, two, three. Yeah, that seems good. Let's select the three edges on each side and I'm just gonna duplicate with Shift D, P to separate by selection, go into object mode and we can select that new object. Now in edit mode, I'm going to select these two, hit F to connect those or to fill those together.

13:05Then I'm just gonna select everything, press E, right click to cancel the movement of this extrude and then scale in. And I'm just gonna eyeball to make this an even edge loop around, select everything, Shift N to recalculate normals to get rid of those flipped normals down there. Now we do want some geometry in the middle here because you'll notice we have this curved shape on both the top and the bottom. So I'll just add maybe three edge loops on each of these. And now you'll notice if I were just to grab on the Z axis and move this down, it's not only moving down in relation to this shape, but it's also moving back because we've just moved down on the global Z axis. The global axis never changes with the orientation of an object.

13:51If you look up here, you could see the Z axis is always straight up and down, the Y axis is perfectly forward and back and the X axis is gonna be left to right. And no matter what we're doing with this object, the global axis will never change. So instead of moving this on the global Z axis, we should move it on the local Y axis, which is gonna be moving up and down in relation to the rotation that's happened on this object. If that doesn't make sense, just take a look at the effect. So if we press G to grab again and we press Y once, that will move on the global Y axis. But if we press Y a second time, now we're moving on that local Y axis, which in relation to this object is gonna keep in line

14:37with its current orientation. We're gonna do the same thing here, grab Y, Y to go on the local axis. And again, I'm gonna turn off overlays. I could see we're pinching here. So I'm just gonna grab these, maybe scale them out. Just trying to even everything out. That looks pretty good. I might add an extra bevel here eventually, maybe something like that. But for now, let's just go ahead and get the bottom working. Again, on the local Y axis actually goes down and I'll just cheat these a little bit as well. And yeah, sometimes I turn off those overlays just so I can focus on the silhouette and not be distracted. Cool, that's looking pretty good. Let's select this inside and hit Control F to do another grid fill and the span and the offset are already perfect.

15:24Sweet. Now let's use a modifier. So come over here to modifiers and let's add a solidify modifier. And we can increase the thickness here and we have the same issue. If we move up on the Z axis, it's gonna move up and forward and it's just a big mess. So now we can simply press grab, Z and Z again, because we're now moving on the local Z axis. We could go to side view just to get this perfect, increase the thickness. There we go. All right, now if we were to shade smooth, turn off overlays, it looks good, but we still have kind of a sharp edge here. So I'd like to add another modifier, just a bevel modifier. And let's change the amount for this bevel modifier, maybe something like that.

16:09Just trying to keep these kind of equidistant from each other the best I can. And actually, even with this being a game asset, I think we just don't have quite enough geometry up here. So ideally, this is something you figure out in the primary phase of your primary modeling, but I wanna show you how you could realistically go back and kind of fix this or cheat this a little bit. So let's select these edge loops all the way around here. So let's do a bevel with control B, and then I'm gonna scroll down just so we're adding one segment for each existing segment. And then I'm just gonna try to roughly space these. So I'm just looking to see if the distance from here to here is roughly the same. Now, if we go back to object mode,

16:55that to me is a much more reasonable amount of stepping, and we haven't really ruined the shape of the overall curve. We might come in here and do the same here, but I'm just gonna delete these faces first. And by the way, if you ever get confused at what's going on, you can turn off certain modifiers in edit mode so they don't cloud your view and you can see what's going on. So now we can select all of these edges again that we wanna add more curvature to. Let's just do all of them. Control B, and let's just eyeball that. There we go. Let's do the grid fill again with control F, grid fill, perfect. When in doubt, turn off the overlays so you can really see what's going on. Okay, this is feeling pretty good. I think that's it for secondary details. Now let's move on to the tertiary or the third level of detail.

17:44We'll add this little hinge here. We'll add the little caps on the end of these pieces, and we'll add the little extruded grippy parts at the bottom here. All right, so let's start with these caps. Instead of doing our work twice, let's go into edit mode and add a loop cut at the bottom here. And in vertex mode, let's select everything on one side and delete those vertices because we can simply add a mirror modifier. And now we only have to work on one side. So first things first, let's select this edge loop, double tap G to slide this down to give us a little bit more room to work with. And let's just do a control F grid fill just to fill that in. Now you've probably heard of inset. You just press I, but did you know about outset? After you press I, you press O for outset. And now we can add an extra edge loop

18:30on the outside of this face instead of on the inside. A lot of people don't know about that one. Let's press control plus on our number pad, select the next active element. Then let's press alt E to bring up the whole extrude menu. And instead of just extruding, let's extrude faces along their normals. So we can kind of bump those out for the caps. Now in object mode, if we turn off overlays, we could see the shading is all kinds of messed up. We have two options. If we're going for a very detailed closeup look here, we could just hit control B and add a bevel there. And that's gonna take care of that strange shading we had. However, because this is a game asset, I think we can get away just with control E and adding a mark sharp. We can mark those edges as sharp rather.

19:15Now that takes care of the shading. It does make a very sharp edge, but we could actually just come in through here when we texture this thing and add a texture level bevel instead of a geometry level bevel. Geometry level bevel, try saying that five times fast. All right, so that's looking pretty good. That's our first tertiary detail. Now let's add these down here. So I'm actually gonna apply this mirror modifier and in edit mode, I can go ahead and dissolve this extra edge loop with control X. Classic modeling, I'm just gonna add another one back in. Anyway, I'll show you why. Let's select both of these objects in edit mode. Let's add an edge loop here with control R and add another one back there. Let's select both of these with shift alt left click to select multiple edge loops, then control B to bevel, scroll down,

20:03and I'm just kind of placing these equidistant from each other, maybe about right there. Then we can select the resulting edge loops and we're gonna bevel these one more time. Control B, these will be the grippy parts at the bottom. Again, alt E to bring up the extrude menu, extrude faces along normals, and I'm holding down shift to kind of fine tune this movement and we're gonna have the same shading artifacts that we had up top. If you come in here, you can see it kind of gets darker towards the edge because it's averaging out between quite a few vertices here. So now in edit mode, let's just select all of these edge loops that we wanna mark as sharp and control E, mark sharp, cool, that's looking great. All right, this chair is coming together. Remember where we started just with three planes.

20:48You'll be surprised at what you can pull off with your own modeling skills once you focus on just very basic shapes. So for this last one, let's add a plane. I'm just rotating this around into place, go to side view, and this is gonna be kind of tilted forward just a little bit. And I'm actually gonna pass this chair off when we're done here to my friend over at the DemNicoArt YouTube channel because he's gonna show us how to rake things. And this is gonna be really important for him, the placement of this hinge. I'm gonna kind of leave that to him to fine tune. I'm just going to do the best I can to kind of get this into what looks like a good place, but he might have to tweak the position of things just a little bit to make sure this actually folds up. Let's go ahead and go into edit mode and let's go ahead and control shift B again

21:37to bevel vertices. Now you'll notice these are extending much further along this axis than they are on this axis. We see this gap here is a lot bigger than this gap, and this one's kind of in the middle. That to me is an indication, go back to object mode, press control Z. That's an indication that the scale wasn't applied before we did that. So basically, Blender keeps a history of all of the transformations you did to an object. So if I set all of these back to one, this will be just the straight plane that we added in, perfectly square. But we made all of these scales to it, and as you could see, it's keeping track of that history to essentially delete that history and start from scratch for clean operations, we can hit control A and apply the scale. So I do that a lot, but sometimes I don't,

22:23I kind of neglect to explain why we do that. Applying the scale is essentially deleting the history so that future operations are unhindered by the changes we've made. Now you know. So now if we hit control shift B to bevel, we're gonna get much more clean spacing, as you could see, the distance between here and here is now all equal. Sweet. Let's go ahead and bring out our knife tool, and we're gonna add a new vertice along this edge. We could eyeball the center, but if we hold down shift, it'll take us exactly to the center of this edge. We'll add one there, keep holding down shift, and we'll add one to the middle of that one. Then you can hit space bar to confirm your knife tool operation. Now select this new edge, and we're just gonna bevel with control B and scroll down

23:09so that we don't have more than we need. And we'll bevel these one more time. And the reason I'm doing that is I'm just creating this face that we can now move over on the X axis. Because as you could see, this is raised just a little bit brought forward. Then I can scale it on its local, let's see, local Y axis just by double tapping Y. And that's looking pretty good. Let's shade smooth. If you wanted, you could come through here and you could bevel, let's see, these two edges, maybe one more time. And that's gonna smooth it out even more. However, I think with the level of detail we have with this mesh, I don't think that's totally necessary. Let's go ahead and add a solidify modifier. And that's gonna screw up our shading. Let's make sure we mark even thickness. It's a very, very subtle difference,

23:55but in this case, we want the thickness from here to here to be the same as from here to here in all of these, even though they're at different angles. So that's what even thickness is for. But again, things don't look great. We have some shading artifacts to fix that. It's really easy. Let's just select everything. Actually not everything. We're just gonna select this outer edge loop here. And now we have the outside. Let's hit control E and mark sharp. There you go. If we turn off the overlays, that looks good. It's maybe just a little bit thick. So I'm just gonna fine tune this number 0.003 meters. There you go. Now let's go to the side view again, and I'm just gonna further tweak the placement of this. Maybe about there. This is just a little bit big.

24:42I'm gonna scale it down on its local X axis. Now we just need to add these little rivets or screws here, whatever they're called. We're gonna add a few here, here, and then to attach, it looks like we have one. We won't worry about this one. We'll just do one here and one here. All right, so with our 3D cursor there, let's hit shift A and let's add a circle. We definitely don't need 32 vertices because this is a tiny little detail. Let's maybe do like eight or something and scale this into place. And let's rotate on the Y axis 90 degrees and bring it out on X. There we go. Let's go to the side view and I'm just gonna place this right here. Now in edit mode, let's extrude on X, extrude again on X, scale this one down. And I think we could probably just do a grid fill,

25:29control F and grid fill right there. Then let's just shade smooth and that looks pretty good. So now we could take this screw, go to the left side and let's just hit shift D and might as well just eyeball where it's gonna go here. And then again, we had smaller ones down here. So let's just shift D again, scale this one down, shift D one more time, bring it back. Select both of these, grab on the X axis, hold down control to snap. And if you're getting really close up, you might notice, you know, we have a little bit of gap here. If that bothers you, it's an easy fix. Let's just select this border edge loop. And instead of manually placing these, we could just kind of snap these one at a time. Instead of doing that, just select the whole thing, come over here and under vertex group, create a new one.

26:16You can call it whatever you want. I'm just gonna call mine pin and make sure you assign that vertex group to that edge loop there. Then in the modifiers tab, let's add a shrink wrap modifier and choose the target object as that pole. And that's gonna shrink wrap just the whole shape to that pole. But instead we can only use our pin group. And there you go. Now as you scale this or move it around, it's going to continue to bring those vertices back to where you want them to be. Small detail, really doesn't matter in the end, but this is about showing you new tools. So now let's duplicate that one again. And of course this is targeting the wrong pole. So just get rid of that target and now target the correct one. That's looking pretty good. Let's take a step back, turn off overlays and just see how things are looking.

27:02I'm pretty happy with that. However, we do wanna bring this hinge over to the other side as well as these screws. So let's go ahead and apply each modifier before we join anything. We need to apply modifiers. So just hit control A to do that, apply our shrink wrap. Then let's select everything and press control J. And now let's just add a mirror modifier. And instead of mirroring along its own axis, which isn't gonna get us very far, let's use a target mirror object and select the seat. And that's gonna send it perfectly to the other side. All right, there you go. Now I was explaining things as we went and obviously that takes a little bit more time and we went kind of slow. If we were to go full speed on this, it really doesn't take that much time to model this whole chair. And just remember our approach was really important.

27:48We started with primary shapes. That was the overall kind of planes that we identified before we got into any of the secondary details. And then we got to the secondary shapes, which was getting the curvature right. And we kind of backtracked. We added more details a little bit later on, but we got these seat cushions and we got the overall pipes set up by converting things to curves and then back to geometry. And then we have the tertiary shapes, the fine details. We had the caps, we had the hinges here, we had the screws, we had the little grippy parts at the bottom here. If we open up our asset browser right here, I'm subscribed to my own Riley B3D asset library. You can get it over at RileyB3D.com.

28:35This is a completely free asset library. You can get all of my assets for free. However, if you want the asset browser in Blender, where you could just bring things over straight within Blender, then you'll have to pay for it. But if not, you could just go to the website and just search for, let's see, sit, and you'll get a little scale reference guy that's sitting down. Now, the benefit of this is this character is created to real world kind of average human scale, if there is such a thing. Sitting at an average seat height level. So we could select our chair, go to side view, and we could scale this down kind of until it's roughly where we need it to be. I also noticed that our little bar here is hanging out too low. That's an easy fix.

29:21You just grab everything and grab along the Y local axis. There you go, perfect. And with this average human scale, we could take a look at the overall proportions, see if this feels correct for a chair. Gonna get rid of him. Okay, before we go any further, I have to do one thing because it's been driving me absolutely crazy. One of the proportions on this is just a little bit off. I'm just gonna select these two areas on the seat, and I'm gonna go to X-ray mode with Alt Z and make sure we select all of the front edges here and vertices, and I'm just gonna bring these back on Y, and then I might take the overall seat and bring it forward on the Y axis. Something I should have caught in the early phases, but luckily it's not too big of a deal to fix now.

30:07The model is done, but if you wanna take it a step further and learn how to rig this for animation, check out the video in the description. It'll take you to my friend's channel, DemNicoArt, where he has some serious expertise on how to set up your very own folding chair rig. If you wanna take your Blender learning even further, check out my free courses on rileyb3d.com. Most recently in my career, I've been contracted making some of the highest trafficked paid Blender courses ever created, but now I'm taking all my knowledge and experience and giving it away for free over on my site. Go download free assets, watch free courses, and even test your knowledge and keyboard shortcut muscle memory with my course quizzes.

30:52Hopefully I'll see you over there. ["The