{
  "text": " Alright, let's begin. First I need to explain myself, what is a hybrid Boolean workflow? fancy term, right? Well, it's pretty simple. So what you're looking at right now is a 100% Boolean workflow, 100% live Boolean workflow. If I go into edit mode here, doesn't even do it justice. Let me take off all the modifiers. You can see this entire object is basically just a square with a skirt on it. And from top to bottom, everything is a modifier. So we've got a shell modifier, a bevel modifier, all modifiers that modify what you're looking at. And the issue with this is it's basically pretty uneditable. We can do a lot with the booleans to move it around, but we don't have any mesh editing capability. If I want to come in here and do a chamfer on this edge, I really can't do anything because one, this is a plane. And two, the curvature doesn't even exist. And so it's just like we're limited to only using Booleans. And that's the issue with a completely live workflow is that you might as well just use CAD because you can't really do all that much with the polys, which is kind of the advantage to using poly modeling is that you get the best of both worlds. And so this is 100% editable. And now I'm going to go to kind of what most people have used throughout the history of poly modeling, which is basically doing everything through mesh editing. So obviously, if you saw how I made this, you'd know that this is basically just a quad remesher add-on that I'm using to get it to look like this, because there's no way in hell that I'm going through the effort of making all this from mesh editing. Essentially everything you're seeing on screen would be sort of hand cut out and This is sort of standard of a subdivision workflow and the issue with this is obviously we can't edit anything very easily You know if I wanted to move this The cylinder it's basically impossible and so if your production maybe you can do this successfully But if your concept you have absolutely no flexibility on anything everything is 100% uneditable and applied. And so of course the hybrid workflow is a mix of both of these. So if I go over here to the hybrid workflow, you can see that this mesh, I've collapsed some things and I've done a little operation here to showcase exactly what you get with the advantage rather of using mesh editing, which is that we can do things like Chamfers. So I've applied the shell, I've applied the bevel modifier, and I've applied this boolean and this boolean. And that allows me to make this transition here. And everything else is live. So basically I can still come in here and edit everything else as I would normally with live booleans, except I also can come in and make these sorts of complicated operations through live mesh editing with chamfers and cut tool and you know applying booleans etc. And this workflow allows you to have both and that's why I use it that's why I think it's probably the most convenient it's because you get to choose which you want to use for the particular operation and you still have a lot of flexibility with the Booleans that are live. So that is the difference between the hybrid mesh editing exclusive and only Boolean workflows. And before we move on, I thought that it would probably be a good idea just to showcase exactly how I use this workflow. So I initially didn't think of doing this, but I have a perfect example just sitting on my hard drive and that is an unfinished weapon that I'm currently working on. And this I think perfectly showcases all of the benefits that I think Blender gives to modeling. And so if I zoom in here and I tab, you can see all of these are live Booleans. So everything here is totally editable. You can see the form changes, the Booleans, even some of this stuff. I mean, There's stuff that's even collapsed, like all of this. This was a cylinder. You can see it goes up here. It turns into another cylinder, more cylinders. There is about 50 different Booleans attached to here. And you might be saying, well, doesn't that, you know, kind of limit your editability? Sure, but look at the sort of Booleans that I am doing with it, right? These Booleans, I don't need to put a fillet on here. I don't need to come through here and do some fancy mesh editing. So I can keep these as live Booleans and I have full editability of everything. Another thing you can see is that, I'm breaking these up into separate sections. So not everything is attached. Like once it starts to get asymmetric, I can just apply a live Boolean on one side and collapse the modifier, et cetera. And so like this whole section is asymmetric. So I keep it separate from the symmetric section at the back. You can just see everything is a live Boolean. All of these little details. And if it's not a live Boolean, at one point, it was a live Boolean. Like, it's very much a CAD workflow that we're using inside of Blender. Except we get all of the advantages that Blender has to offer with live Boolean. So even stuff like this used to be a live Boolean. Once we need to do some mesh editing, we collapse it, and we get something that is hybrid. So this is more of kind of a complete Boolean workflow. Right? So there's almost none of this. Like look at this mesh, right? This is literally just a slot shape. And then everything on it is a Boolean. And that works for a piece like this, but maybe it doesn't work for a piece like this. And so it's separate. And then you can see that we keep stuff like this on top, just because we don't need to apply any of this. So a lot of what you see here is not completely finished, right? I could come in here and mesh edit this and make this perfect, but then we lose editability. So there is just a kind of mid poly blockout that you wanna keep everything in. Like if you look at these shapes, like none of this, none of this transition or any of this, these are all shapes that are kind of just sitting on top like floaters. And yeah, that's how I kind of handle it. This is this shape right here. A lot of his bullions, I have it right now inside of a group. So you can see just how many bullions I use for this. I mean, practically all of it is Booleans. But then there's that little element where I have the hybrid workflow that kicks in. So sometimes it's 70% Booleans, sometimes it's 70% mesh editing, but we keep it very editable. And the great thing about this being in Blender is that I literally can animate this entire thing, right? So this whole thing, I don't have to export it into another software. It is animated within Blender, and the whole thing is in Blender. so I can light it, I can put other high poly meshes in here, like if I want a hand or something, right? I can put hands in to see how that would look with the animation and whatnot. So it's just a very, very powerful tool that we have access to here. And it allows us to do a lot of stuff. Again, just look at all of these. These ridges are live Booleans. Over here, it's a live Boolean. All of this is totally editable. So don't listen to people who tell you that poly modeling is too rigid. You can be as rigid or as fluid as you like. And you just have to know how to use the tools. But yeah, I thought that I should show you this because it's kind of the perfect example of the workflow that we're about to engage in. So. All right. Before we get into some more of the complicated stuff, I'm gonna kind of throw a bunch of tips at you that are gonna speed up your workflow. And then we will get into the more complicated stuff. So first of all, set a hotkey for spawning objects. Just have one for the cube and then for the cylinder. This is gonna save you a lot of time. Secondly, when you are moving objects around, always keep the pivot central. Now, the way that I do this is I move in edit mode and then it keeps the pivot central so that I can then mirror it over. Versus if I spawn an object, I move it over to the side, and then I want to try and mirror it. It's not going to have the mirror central. So always spawn the object, and then move it over in edit mode if you're going to do that. And then you can keep the pivot central. Another tip is you see that I have this thing right here. This is a hard ops mirror. Just get hard ops. It is a very integral tool that I use for all of my mirrors, a lot of my other objects or tools rather that I have here like using the bevel modifier or shell modifier or you know array, whatever it is, it's just a very simple menu that they have and you got your smoothing and stuff so that's another tip. After that there's one draw tool, this is just a normal feature of Blender. I usually use this for Boolean, so I'll draw something out and I will Boolean it. And the reason why it's fine to use this and not have it be a center pivot is because it inherits the mirror from the object. So we can just very easily keep that on one side and not mirror all of our Booleans. But if we do need to mirror it, then my next tip is use these tools. They're called Max Ives interactive tools. I just use one tool basically from it, so I'm just going to put a slice down the center here for me to snap to. But essentially, the tool I use is I can move my pivot. So a lot of people in Blender have this very silly workflow where they use an empty in the center and they parent their mirrors to it or whatever. I don't do that. I think it's a huge waste of time coming from 3ds Max where you can just pick up your pivot naturally. It's in the tool set by default. I don't know if this is in the tool set. By default, I've always just used these tools to do it. But moving your pivot and snapping it is very useful. And I definitely recommend doing that over using empties and stuff. The next little trick that I have is sample objects. Now in this scene, it might not seem that important, but when you're trying to move fast in Blender, you constantly are like spawning things. You don't wanna have to like spawn it in the center, move it out to the side. And so, you know, like if you have a cylinder on one side and it's a bolt, don't spawn another cylinder. Like, you know, maybe you need to have it 32 sides instead of 64, you can spawn it, but just reuse the same objects that you already have because you're gonna inherit the modifiers, like let's say I have a bunch of modifiers that I wanna keep from one object to another. As soon as I spawn another one, I have to reapply that whole modifier stack. So I can keep a lot of the mods alive, I can keep things flowing a little bit faster. And so always duplicate objects and faces and stuff like that, it's just much easier. And then next, if you have objects that are similar, also just duplicate them inside of edit mode. Keep them in the same object. You know, like a lot of people don't do this and I'm not really sure why, but it just saves a lot of time. You know, if I have to go in and select each one of these bolts, it's just gonna be a pain in the ass. And so keeping them, keeping similar objects on the same layer, especially booleans. If you have booleans that are separate objects, just a pain in the ass, because you've got all of these separate things just laying around. Like this is just impossible to select. So always keep everything that is similar in a similar object. And lastly, get comfortable with having objects sit on top of each other and not be connected with the same, like not be unioned, right? There's a part in my main tutorial where we have the main cylinder and for a long period of time, let me actually just spawn a 64, because this is gonna annoy me, for a long period of time, it's just sitting with the other object right here. So it's a shape kind of like, I don't know, this, right? And a lot of people immediately, they just wanna boolean these two together. And as soon as we do that, we lose almost all editability, right? I want to, oh, let me just move this up slightly, topology, right? So there are constraints inside of poly modeling, right? There's a lot of constraints. And if we don't know how to manage those constraints and work around them, then we're going to just be subject to all of them and we don't want to do that. So a lot of the ways that I get around having to deal with topology is I just don't collapse stuff until it's absolutely necessary. So when you're doing stuff that has like compound shapes, just be comfortable with having objects sit on top of each other. You don't need to merge everything. You can keep things very editable. And there's even more parts in the main tutorial where, you know, I want to kind of Boolean shapes into this object, but they're not together. And so I'm even using objects that are like filler, you know, they just sort of sit on top and I, okay, I want to come in and do a Boolean. And, and we just roughly block everything out and we keep it like that for very prolonged periods of time. So just don't have this tendency to merge everything, keep it loose because then we can make all kinds of edits and it's not much of an issue. Okay now we're going to get into some more specific boolean related tips. So I'm going to demonstrate some stuff by making an object and let's just think here. So I'm going to start by using some of the tips where we're sampling objects. I'm going to sample this and just move it into place. And in order to do a Boolean in Blender, I'm obviously not going to explain the basics, but really the kind of Booleans that you need to use are accessible through, let's see, Boole. Through Boole tool, you need to enable this. This is going to allow you to do live Booleans. I'm pretty sure that's basically what allows you to do live bullions, at least make it incredibly convenient where you can just kind of click on objects and get them to bullion. So I recommend you set this to a hockey that is on your mouse because we're going to be using a lot of bullions. So continuing with this object, I'm going to just kind of make something a little bit simple. Again, another use of my speedy tools where I am sampling from a Boolean that already exists. There's no need to make a whole other object. Because they're Booleans, I can just mirror them over with the hard ops. And I want to do something with these Booleans. I want to make these edges curved. Now there's two ways to do this. I could either do a destructive workflow where I come in and I fill it in. And then it's just stuck like that. ways to actually get these gone faster. But for something like this, what I want to do is just add a bevel, and add a bevel through here. But again, I like to use my hard ops menu. So I come in and I always change the profile to 50%. This is more like how a fill it is or like a cylinder, some more curved, accurate representation of a curve. So that's That's how we can very simply get these in here. You can see once I scale this down, this is actually the whole thing looks like this. That's why I scale it above. That's just a quick way to do that. We could also just apply weights to each one of these corners. We'll cover that a little bit later. I'm going to spawn a box here and keeping with the theme of everything being editable, so that you guys know how to do that before we start getting a bit more hybrid-y with the workflow. I'm going to come in here, and I could again, just do this, but what we're going to do is add a modifier, and I suppose we will do weighted, so I'll just show you how to do weighted fillets. So we'll change this to weight, and the menu you do it in is up here. So you go to item and then you go mean bevel weight and you do that. Now, what you wanna do is always make the amount more than you would need so that you can kind of choose. You can fluctuate it. I want it more or less. So we're gonna increase these segments to, I don't know, something like maybe six for now. And so we'll come over here and just make sure that it covers the entire region. And I'm gonna come back over here and add a smooth to that. And so I wanna show something here. So I can't actually, let me just fix this. I can't, if I wanted to, put a fillet. Like right here, I can put a fillet. But I can't put a fillet over here because this is a live Boolean that is preventing me from doing that. So there's two ways that I can get around doing this. So the first way that I can get around doing this is I can actually just make a boolean fillet. So the way that I craft that is I make a boolean and I essentially just get it to wedge around the corner and then I fillet the corner on the boolean and then I make it a boolean. Okay, so that's kind of the manual way to do it and we can just duplicate that over here, change a few things. Again, I don't really care about precision So I'm a little bit off on that. It doesn't matter too much to me. So that's the first way to do it. The more advanced way to do it is that you get hyperbevel. And this is by machine. So you can come in here and just select your edge and do a hyperbevel. You can change the width. You can also change the tolerance to a lot of this stuff. So I'm just gonna come in here and do a hyperbevel. And again, over here as well, just do a hyperbevel. So Iver bevels the fastest way to do this, but you don't have to do it. You could also just do it the manual way. You don't have to use the plug-in for that. Moving on here, so I want to showcase something. So we have very low geometry right here. So I'm going to put some cylinders, and these are 64-sided cylinders. And we want to be mindful when we're doing poly modeling of the density of a lot of stuff like cylinders because it can very quickly get out of hand with managing the shading. So I'm gonna make these booleans and immediately the issue that you'll see is that there's this stretching. I don't know if you can see that. Pretty drastic. And we're not trying to mess with topology. My whole sort of thing is that I really don't wanna have to mess with topology. And so we kind of just contain these shading issues. We never fix it, but let me show you how I contain it. So because we made this top slant here, a bevel modifier, I can increase the amount of segments after I've done this. And you see how close these come right here? So this is what I'm talking about with containment, right? They aren't perfect. If they were perfect, there'd be absolutely no issues. But when you make things extra dense for Booleans, look at this, you can't even tell. And if you start cross hatching, like if we put loops that go this way, then it'll become completely undetectable. But I mean, you honestly, there's no point. I mean, maybe if we put a reflective material, you could see something maybe, but like really, you can't see a whole lot. It is matching quite consistently around here. That's 68 segments, right? So we've given ourselves the ability here to really modularly fix the shading over here. So you can see once again, stretching all over, change it back, boom, shading totally fixed. Now there's another way we can do this. So let's say we have already applied, let's take this off. So let's say that we've done this and it's just a few sides like this and it's not applied, still a Boolean, but we come here and I'm going to increase the density of this by adding a subdivision. And of course, once we add the subdivision, there's probably going to be some issues. So we need to then add a shell. So right there, I just added a shell because right now this is just a plane. One thing additionally that I just want to say, so once we add the subdivision, you can see that the edges as soon as we apply are the first to go. So I'm just going to come in here, select each one of these edges, right click, and go Edge Crease. And actually that fixes the issue, so I can keep this as a plane, but I just creased the edges. So now when I apply it, you can see it's not folding in on itself. So, and then I'm going to add a shell. Generally, I think you should make your Boolean objects all have a, or sorry, a solidify different lingo with different programs. But yeah, we're going to out a solidify and that makes the Boolean water tight. So, but you can see with this, we subdivided it and we increased it. Oh, we didn't increase it enough. Let's go back. We subdivided it again. Apply. Boom. You know, fixes the issue. So there's multiple ways to skin a cat. We can do this a couple different ways. And the application, like why you do one over the other is just going to be context dependent. So there's certain circumstances where maybe one would fit better than the other. And so you'd want to make that alteration. And, you know, it's similar with stuff like these fillets and whatnot. Like we could, if we wanted to, um, keep a Boolean object and then subdivide it later once we want to make it more dense. So you just have to pre-plan a lot of this stuff, but that's, those are a few tips that I have for this section. All right. Now I'm going to attempt to make something with this, because I think it's important that we continuously put our tools to the test. And I encourage you to also try to make something with each of the tools, each of the demonstrations that I give at each stage, just to put yourself in the tools a little bit more. So I'm just going to make a Boolean object. And sticking with what we just did before with the Bevel modifier, we are going to put a Bevel on this. And we're going to change the profile to 50% and the angle to weight, and we'll come in and give a nice bevel weight, increase the segments. Over here, we'll put another weight, mirror it over and do a shell. So you can see we can dynamically scale this area just like we did the last. And I think what I also wanna do is give the actual mesh a bevel as well. So we'll do the same thing. And I'll do weight, increase the segments, and do a ring selection and give this a thickness. I wanna increase this a lot and then decrease it in the mean bevel weights that I have flexibility with it. And we can see kind of what we create there. Now, I showed you previously how to do a hyper bevel. If you have this plugin, then you can do this. But did you know that you can do a ring selection, or sorry, a loop selection with the hyperbevel, and get something like this? Now, if you're unfamiliar with how insane this is in poly modeling, then let me just explain. So essentially what's happening is we can do bevels now on booleaned areas. So previously, let me just disable this. If I wanna, for instance, bevel something down here, it's very easy, I can just select the edge and bevel it. I can't select this edge because it's a boolean. So what HyperBowl does is you can see it literally creates a boolean object that is shaped like a bevel. So do you remember in the previous section when we made that little corner piece? It's doing that basically. It's making a skirt for this entire area. So pretty crazy stuff. But I'm going to revert this. Let me just delete that. And I'm going to make a smaller one. So we'll come in here. when you're doing it. And we'll put a little bevel right there and you can of course increase or decrease the segments. Then what I'm going to do is duplicate this top face, extrude it up. Actually, I'm going to inset it because I want to make this whole thing an inset. So we'll take this, invert selection by doing Ctrl I, bring that up. And now from the top I'm just going to try and mimic what the internal side of this would be. So something like that should be fine. I don't have to be too specific with this. We're going to get rid of all the other bullions that were on that. Move that down. There we go. We kind of get the shape that I'm looking for here. And then I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to also make a bullion on the side. So I'll take this face. And I do this quite often where I do, we'll see right here, I can, I'll fill it this. So I basically, I make a right angle right here so that I can fill it it. And this is going to allow me to create the effect that there is a smooth transition. So let me actually get rid of all those Booleans, mirror that over, collapse. And then we can move this into place and do a Boolean right here so we get this shape. And I think what I'm going to do, make it a little bit skinnier, just like this. And we're going to use the hyperbevel again. So I'm going to come in, shift select, do the hyperbevel. And it just works perfectly. Now I think what I want to do is, what should I do? Just put some bolts on it. I'll show you a method for how I get fillets on my bolts. I suppose you could also use hyperbevel, but what I'm going to do is place the bolt. I'm going to get it to snap right here. Then I'm going to put an edge loop through it, take the last face on it, and increase it. And you can see we've just made a chamfer, basically. So now if I do a boolean, you'll see it looks like a chamfered edge. Like if I applied this cylinder and then I did a chamfer, that's what it would look like. So now I'm gonna duplicate it inside the mesh of course, because we always wanna do that. And that's what that looks like. And I always of course have to have the mirror on top. So it looks like this. And I think I'm gonna take the hyperbevel off the main one. So we'll take that off. And instead, I'm going to opt to make something else. So I'm going to take a half cylinder, or a full cylinder, make it a half cylinder, extrude it up and into place. And you'll see, just like I did at the bottom here, I'm going to do the same thing at the top. So essentially what I'm doing is I'm making it seem like I'm actually doing mesh editing, but I have all the flexibility of keeping things as live Booleans. As long as something's a live Boolean, we have a lot of flexibility over it, provided we don't need to do integration, but these are methods for integrating. So I did sub-object pivot. It's basically up here. You just press the plus, gives you a pivot from the face that you select. And we're gonna create the same shape we created down here, as you can see. Doesn't need to be symmetrical, but we need to fillet it. And you'll see that, I'll also extend this down a little bit so it's more, it's taller. Extrude, put it in place, boom. Then we will drag the mirror to the bottom and you can see we kind of have a cool shape. And I think also what I'm going to do is just put some shapes on the inside, why not? We have got the time, so we'll put maybe this one over here and we'll just shrink that tiny bit. Yeah, maybe something like this and we'll give it a fillet. I'm fine with filleting stuff like this. It's no problem. So we'll do that. And we'll put one over here. There we go. Then we will drag the mirror all the way to the bottom again. You can see it echoes it over there. And I think lastly I do just want to get a shape in the bottom here. So a lot of times it's like you want to be able to sample these faces, it's a mirror or sorry it's it's a Boolean rather and so what you have to do is you duplicate the mesh press zero so it goes back to the same spot so this is now a duplicated mesh and what I do is I will take off first the hyperbevel and I just collapse everything because I just need the faces so I'll come in here select the faces don't even need it from the other side make sure everything looks good. Maybe what I'll do is I'll mirror it over like this just so that I can do an inset. So now I do an inset like so. And actually no I don't want to do an inset. What I want to do is make this whole thing its own object that protrudes out. See what I mean? So we're gonna drag this down, drag this across, mirror this, and we need to check it is flipped. So I'm gonna flip the normal. So So I have a hockey for it. And then I'm going to fill these faces and cap the bottom. You can see kind of what I have here. And actually what I can do is immediately just apply a bevel modifier on this and have a similar effect. And because this isn't a Boolean, I can just apply the bevel modifier. Unlike over here, this is a Boolean. So we needed to use hyper cursor. And there we go. we kind of get something like that. So yeah, not too crazy, but maybe we can put this actually a little bit further in. But those are some of the tools. And of course, you know, when we take off these modifiers, I'm just gonna click Remove. You can see that it is super editable. Like the whole thing is totally editable. And of course, the area at the top here, remember it was done with a bevel modifier. So we have complete editability over each of the weighted bevels. So if we want this to be sharp at the top or we wanted this to be way fatter at the bottom, of course, within reason, it can break at any time if you do something that's too drastic. So you just kind of have to know exactly what you're getting yourself into so that you can manage the constraints. But yeah, we can move all the bolts around wherever we'd like. we can make more of them, less of them. We have complete control over our mesh. And that's what I'm trying to communicate to you guys with this workflow is that if we are going to be using poly modeling instead of something like CAD or something like ZBrush, we need to know how to use it. And when things are this editable, it just is honestly really easy. Like you can see, I can already start to make alterations here and of course some stuff breaks, but we know how to fix it. So I can come in, delete the hyperbevel, come back over here, you know, redo the hyperbevel. Let me see if this works. And it does, oh my gosh. Yeah, we can just make it look totally different. That's how we do concept design. We want to be flexible. So I hope this was helpful and I'll see you in the next section. Okay, back to mesh editing. We've done a bit of Boolean stuff. Now I want to get back to the other aspect of this workflow. So right here, I'm going to show you something that I kind of coined called rails. And you have a top and a bottom rail. And essentially, this just catches your fillet. And if we extend it over here, you can see that it pierces the fillet. So we have to go to width type and percentage. Now, this might not seem like anything special, but I'm going to show you an example here. So if I extend this cube, and maybe I just draw some taper out like this, and then I do a fillet, you can see it catches it. And we now have a tapered fillet. And maybe I want to change this a little bit. We can bring this up and snap, snap, and then give it a fillet. Now we've got this tapering smooth fillet. And this can be used for all sorts of things. So I've prepared another example here. So this is a block out of a weapon grip. And if I turn the wireframe on, you can see that we have some constraints that make up where the fillet area is going to be. And this is exactly how I do my weapon grips if I'm doing them inside of Blender. is that I'll come in here, select both, and then fill it. You can see it's super easy. Let me just put some smoothing on here. Obviously this is a very simple looking weapon grip, but any kind of weapon grip you can imagine this system would come in handy with because you can do these variable widths. And the great thing is that it's super simple to set up. You just draw it on a side view, put a line through the side, you know, whatever sort of drawing you want to make on the side for the width over there. And then you put a fillet with a percent on it. And there you go, super easy. And now jumping to something that's not super easy. This is kind of the final boss, I think, of this sort of rail system idea that I have here. It's really a different way of thinking about it, but we do have a top and a bottom rail, top, bottom rail. And we want to use booleans to transition these. And at first you might think it's easy, but the issue is that we're dealing with two separate types of geometry, right? This is a fillet and then this is a bevel or a chamfer. So it's a bit complicated, but I'm gonna show you guys exactly how I would tackle this. And in the main tutorial, I have a section where I tackle this on the body of the mesh that I'm working on. So if you wanna see that, then you can go ahead and watch that. But here I'm just going to show you exactly what I do to achieve this sort of a transition. So first of all, I've inserted a cylinder in the very center and I've snapped it so that it makes up both sides. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select all of it and extrude it outwards. In fact, what I'm going to do first is actually not collapse the bottom half because I want to have a straight line right here. right here. So I'm going to try to eye it out and yeah that looks good. So we've got the bottom rail and the top rail up here and then I'm just going to come over here, snap it and take this face and move it all the way up to this face. So we're actually going to, I believe, just move this up. So we're going to move this face up, and we're going to move this one into its position, which is right here. And then when we do a Boolean, you'll see that this is not exactly what we want. So we have to split this in half and put a segment here to split this in half. And you can see how this can get very complicated very quickly, but you need to know what you're doing in order to have a successful operation. So you can see right now we're kind of getting it, but we have this issue right here and obviously the mesh up top. So we'll just handle the mesh up top first. And this actually really illustrates the hybrid nature of this workflow because in order to get this done, we need to collapse this Boolean. This Boolean needs to be collapsed. So I'm gonna extrude, press zero, and then move this all the way up. And that's gonna make it to where this top section has been deleted. So I'm going to collapse the Boolean. You can see what we're left with right here looks like this. So there's a bit of an issue. I just want to undo that, come back, snap this one last time over here. Have to make sure that it's part of the object still. It is. OK. We're going to snap it. Looks good on both sides. Collapse. OK. So what we're left with now is the base blocks for making this transition. We've got a fillet on this side and a chamfer on this side. And our job is over the course of this 180 degree cylindrical angle to transition the two. So first of all, what we need to do is define the starting point for this side. So I'm just going to draw a line down there, merge this. And I think what I'm going to do is just get rid of some of this topology. It doesn't actually matter. And we'll get started on this side. So deleting all of this, we're going to recover the circumference, or I guess the, what would I call it, the chamfer of this area. So we're just going to bridge these one by one. You can see I'm just recovering the area that we had lost to the Boolean over here. This seems to be one poly, so I'm going to make sure that's all fine. You don't have to be extremely clean about everything. This is going to have a big fillet over it, so it's not really going to be such an issue. So there we go. got something like this, and we can cap that off. So we have recovered this section, and you could just stop the curvature over here to begin with and probably save yourself some time. And now our job is to transition these two. So I'm going to put a line through the center here, and I'm gonna decide the endpoint is gonna be right here for the curvature to end. So by the time it gets here, I want the chamfer to be totally intact. So I'll come here and now I'm gonna move this up and push it down. And what I'm attempting to do is, actually I'm gonna get rid of this face, I'm attempting to basically get this angle because this is the starting angle that I made the fillet on. So I'm gonna move this all the way down until we roughly get the same angle. And then I'm gonna do a fillet just to see what it looks like and you can see it's not quite there. It's not quite in the right position so I'll G slide it up and I'll move it back down and then I'll see okay is this good maybe it needs to go further down so I'm gonna G slide it back down move this up into place. It's a little bit off so we have to do a bit of tinkering to kind of understand where this is gonna look the best, but again we don't have to be super precise on this. We just need to roughly guesstimate kind of where it is. So I'm just going to continue to move it around until I can figure it out. Alright so this looks pretty good. I'm not going to do it. What I am going to do is now actually start to make a bend on this. So I'm just going to try something first. So if I go to hard ops you can see that I have a lattice. So I'm going to spawn the lattice, and it's going to allow me to actually move these edges up like this. Now you don't need to do this, you could just manually do it, or use proportional editing. But we're going to move the edges up manually like this, and my goal is to make sure that the last edge is perfectly straight. So if I look at that, it looks pretty good. You can see there is a bend to this, right? There is a bend to the whole thing. So I'm going to collapse the lattice and then I can come in and start to do the fillet. Now you can see that it has altered the way that this actually looks on this side. So I'm going to come back to the lattice, make sure that it's applied again, move this back down, make sure it's in alignment again just like we had before. And then this side over here also probably got misaligned a little bit. So it's just a lot of back and forth. But eventually I think that we get it pretty good. That's fine. We can always edit it afterwards within range, within reason. And then we'll do this. You can see this goes over a little bit. So I think what I need to do is get some constraints in here. So just like before with the, with what we've been doing with the rail system, I'm going to get my first constraint in here. And this constraint, basically what I'm doing is I put a line through and then I champ for it. And that's gonna allow me to get the bottom rail. And then we just come in and I want to put this on percentage. You can see I come here, pull it up, and it perfectly aligns. Maybe not perfect, but it's pretty close. So we're gonna match the amount of sides. So you can see if we do six, what does it look like? Maybe five, something like that. One, two, three, four, five, six, yeah. So this doesn't totally line up, but it's actually good enough. And so we'll just do that. And then we're going to start to weld these edges in here. And to get this to kind of line up better, what I'm gonna do is just manually start moving these around. And this is fine within reason. So we're going to move them up. Maybe move the next ones a little bit and just start making this transition. You can see how you can't even tell once I put smoothing on here. Let me just get this to look proper. We'll put a 15, there we go. So I'll define the edges on this side so that we don't see that. That's how you do it. That's how you make that transition, and it seems pretty complicated, but when you've done it about 10,000 times, it's pretty manageable each step of the way. But that's how it looks. I do this transition in the pistol tutorial, and it's kind of for this bottom swirl area, and it looks pretty interesting. But that's how you do it. Yeah, pretty interesting. So one aspect of poly modeling that is a huge downside versus CAD is once we do a Boolean, it's very hard to fillet it. And that's due to obvious reasons, topology, etc. But other than that, we have all the flexibility and more when it comes to doing live Booleans. But let's say you do want to fillet something. Well, there is actually a workflow and a plugin that is perfect for that. So here I've got my grenade and it's looking a little bit bland. So I'm going to add some balls to the outside. And once I add my balls, I think you can guess where we're going with this. Doing this Boolean operation with this topology is the worst thing on planet Earth, my God. So you can see the issue here is that the topology just gets totally messed up. And this is a nightmare to deal with. are plugins though that we can use to make this nightmare into a dream. And those plugins, or that plugin rather, is Mesh Machine. So Mesh Machine has this experimental add-on called Offset Cut. You might have heard of it. It's magical. So what we're going to do here is apply our Boolean. And first I actually need to apply the Solidify. And this is really the biggest downside is that obviously you need to apply these things. You lose editability once this is done. But just to show you the functionality, we're going to do S select, or sorry, L select. And then we're going to do offset cut. And that's going to give us an offset that we can immediately fill it. And yeah, I mean, that's basically the functionality of it. It is like magic. And essentially, when we're doing this, if I come back to offset cut, we can change the factor. And this is going to alter the amount of segments that are on the edge. So we can kind of make this line up with the topology on the outside. Again, we're just containing it. And as you can see, there's really no visible issues. Like at least once you do it, you know, you're not really going to be able to see visible issues with the fillet. So that's really great. And what I'm going to do is just go around to each one and do that. So this is a symmetrical model, so I really only have to do it in a few places. So I just select one edge from each, nice and easy. I'll leave one down here. Come back over here. I'll select, do our offset cut, and then give it a big fillet. but mirror them over. And there you can see, an otherwise incredibly hard operation is now made very, very easy. And like I've been saying, the only downside to this is that we do not have the editability, I can't come in here and then start moving stuff around because everything is already applied. But what if we had the opportunity to revert the mesh whenever we liked? Well, that's what another feature does within this plug-in, which is called View Stashes. Well, it's just called Stashes. But essentially, if I come in here and press R, you see that now I actually have retained the mesh that I initially have. Because before I did this, you didn't see it, but I stashed my object. So I can even come over to this Boolean, and I have a stash for the Booleans as well. And so I basically just have a duplicate. So you can just duplicate the mesh, and it would basically act the exact same, or you can put it in a stash, which is just like a very convenient menu that the plugin has where you have, you know, swap, edit, retrieve, all these different features. You can delete them very easily, and they're just kind of in the menu to the side. So now that we've got this back, I'm gonna show another method. And if you couldn't tell what that other method is by now, It's kind of just been sitting right in front of your face. It's called Quad Remesher. And Quad Remesher is a gift from the heavens. I don't use it actually all that much, but it is just another magical plug. And you can think of it as Z-remesher, essentially from ZBrush, but we're gonna set this mesh up and I can show you what it does. So first of all, I'm gonna do this Boolean. Once again, I have to collapse the solidify. And this is a pretty dense mesh that we have here. So I'm first going to put a sharpen on it and we'll probably have to increase the sides quite a bit. Normally what I'd do is I'd make this a shell first and then I would kind of solidify it inwards. Or sorry, I'd make it a plane first and then solidify it inwards. So I'm going to come up here and we're just going to maybe do, let's just try 20,000 because I don't know, maybe that's not enough, but we'll put it at 20,000. We're going to use normal splitting first And then if it doesn't work, we'll try the other one. And there you can see it has remeshed everything. Now, there is kind of variable success to this. There are methods that you can use to make this more successful. Like one of them that I kind of mentioned is that if we wanted to just take the outside part of this entire cylinder and then remesh it, that would probably work better because it's not trying to do the inside and the outside at the same time. But you can see that basically we have like perfect apology. And while it's not as nice as having a perfect rung around the edges, this is still quite nice. And we can even throw probably a subdivision on here. And I imagine that it's not the best, but this is a clean mesh. And oftentimes what I'll do when things get really messy is I'll just throw one of these on here and it'll solve a lot of issues. But what we could even do is this and then come in, make these selections once again. And we just have a far cleaner model. So I'm gonna come in and once again select all of these. In fact, I could even do, I don't really have to do L select anymore because everything is so clean. I can just do a normal selection. So we'll select all of these. And then I'll come in and do another offset cut. And look at that. and it's, this is much cleaner, I think. Again, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, you're messing up the topology, but let's say we just came in and did this, you know, it kind of be a similar result. It's that maybe it's more oriented. You can see the topology is actually like swarming around. It's echoing the cylindrical booleans that are coming out. So yeah, maybe that's another way that you can do it. but I use this a lot for smaller things like switches and stuff that have a lot of booleans punctured into it, but that's another method. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to throw about a thousand different add-ons at you, so get ready. First of all, this is Hyper Cut with Hyper Cursor. And essentially, it's kind of like the cut tool in ZBrush. we can use it to create all kinds of interesting forms. And this is something I don't use too often, but you can imagine how you can get some kind of creative forms and stuff in the block out pretty easily. So that's that. I'm going to come over here and use something called punch it. So punch it is basically extrude with a Boolean. So if I extrude in poly modeling, I'm extruding faces onto faces. If I use punch it, then it punches right through. And the issue with a lot of these plug-ins is that as soon as you get some complicated geometry, it starts to break. So I kind of typically use it for stuff that is more boxy, more blockout primitive, but every now and then it'll let you do something that's a bit more complicated, but there's just some limitations that you can clean up if it doesn't work for you. Next is probably my most used tool. So part of Mesh Machine is Flatten. And Flatten will essentially flatten anything to the last selected surface. So if this is the last selected surface, then it's gonna make every other object that's selected aligned to it. And it just works like all the time separate there. I don't know what just happened, but seems to be working. Okay, perfect. Yeah, so flatten is I think the best tool out of probably any add-on that I've ever gotten. Like just look at that. I mean, it is just so powerful. So mesh machine, very good. Another thing that we can use as mesh machine is, let's say I start premature filleting everything, like a noob. And I don't know, I wanna extrude this face, but I no longer have this face because this is curving around, well, I can come in here and I can unfuse, and then I can unchampfer. And so I can do that to all of them. And the issue with this is, as soon as you start getting some complicated geometry, doesn't really work. And I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that, but I've never managed to get it to work without anything other than a single fillet. So if you have something that's very simple, it's incredibly easy for you just to simply put it back to normal, but more complicated than that, it becomes a bit of a problem. So now I'm gonna show you another little tip, little add-on here is, okay, so if I want to, let's say make this a cut line, and I want to do it with geometry the natural way. I would do something like this where I have an edge in the center and I dissolve it and it makes a cut line. The issue is pretty obvious with this. When you, once you do this, you have geometry and geometry is always going to limit what you can do with your mesh. So instead, what I'm going to do is use decal machine and an E-Panel with decal machine. So before I do this, actually, let me just go into EV and go into this mode, because it is actually a texture that we're looking at. So I can adjust these decals. I can make them fatter. I can make them skinnier always. It's super editable at all times. And so it's really useful to do that. And I can get creative with it. So if I wanted to do an inset, I can select it, E-Panel. And then boom. I can very quickly get complicated cut lines all over the place without having to commit to geometry. So another aspect to this that is probably the most useful is that we can use booleans to also create those cut lines. So I'm gonna come over here and just do the same thing except I'm gonna do a slice. And there we go. This is extremely powerful. You can see we can do another one. I'm just gonna draw it on here and always fill it everything that you do with this because it's going to kind of wedge in a strange way if you don't, but I'll do it right here. You can see slice and it allows us to very quickly break up our mesh and get cut lines in. So those are a few tools that I use to get results faster. Okay, we're gonna make another object here and I'm gonna try and use some of the stuff that I just taught you. So we will start with a cylinder and a rectangle and I'm gonna put a line through both of them, move it down to the bottom. And we're gonna be a little bit less clean with this one I think. So immediately, let me taper this actually. How much do I wanna taper this? Something like this perhaps. We're immediately going to boolean these together. And something else I don't know if I've mentioned, but sometimes when I do booleans, I will, so I'll select the top face here, and I'll go boolean clean up on my mesh machine menu. And if I move this to the right, it will clean up like 90% of the boolean mess. And that happens, that works for some surfaces, others not so much, but you can see it just really quickly does it. Now it's not super hard to do. I could just dissolve them, but there are certain circumstances where I come in. I just go over here, Boolean Cleanup. And this is definitely not one of them. So yeah, you just scroll, and then it will isolate some of them and fix them. So this looks pretty good. Again, this is more of a destructive workflow. So I'm going to come in now, and maybe how should I do this? Let me do a hyper cut. So I'm gonna deselect the mesh and then just do this. I think that looks good. And with hyper cut, I made it to where this just immediately applies. So this is more of a destructive workflow. And then I'll do hyper bevel and I'll make this really dense. If you're gonna do a destructive workflow, make sure that you make everything very dense because then you'll not have to worry about doing cleanup clean up and stuff like that, it'll just automatically smooth. So, all right, so we have that. I think actually before we make that adjustment, I want to transition these first. So I'm gonna come in here and delete all these edges up until they reach the top side. So maybe right there, that's quite a bit, but you'll see what I'm gonna do. So I will move this up over here. And then I'm gonna draw. Do you remember from a previous section when we were doing the rails? So I'm gonna draw my rail there and I'm gonna draw my rail over here. It's gonna taper in a little bit, but that looks decent. And then I'll actually merge these to this one. We'll take away that. And then do a percentage fillet. Boom. Then we will mirror all of those around. And now I can come over here and do this operation. And again, usually I wouldn't do this destructive because it's gonna cause a bit of issues when you do it destructive. But we are doing it now, just so I can show you. Do both of these edges, so I'll hold Shift, click them. them and we have to overshoot it slightly. That looks good. And of course, the hyper bevel is totally editable. Over here, we'll just do a fillet. Make sure that you take percentage off. Something like that looks good. And of course, because this is just a single face, we can always come back with mesh machine and do an unfuse and an unchampfer. So this looks pretty good. Then I'm gonna come in with another cylinder. And I think I'll just do a boolean like so. And maybe I wanna give this more form. So I'm gonna come in here, move this out like this. Yeah, that looks interesting. I'll give it a smooth sharpen this edge. I'll even come in with a ring selection and then I'm gonna do an E-panel. And I'll adjust that, move my mouse out a little bit. Usually when I do use this plugin, I will do very simple panel cuts. In fact, what I'm gonna do is just collapse the mirror so that this works properly. E-panel, adjust it. That looks pretty good. And then I'll do a Boolean slice cut with the same plugins. So I'm going to get this in place and move this down a little bit. In fact, maybe I want to elongate this a little bit. So I'm going to do a sub-object pivot, which, again, you just come up here and you press the plus. So we have sub-object pivot enabled. And then I'm going to move this down first, change my pivot back to normal, and then move this again so we end up with something that's a little bit longer and maybe this is a bit too long but you can see we'll have to adjust some of the things we've done before like the panel cut if we want this to work. So that looks good. We'll come back, redo the panel cut. Again, I want to make sure that I collapse my symmetry first. Looks pretty good. onto the slice. So the slice kind of works like a boolean if the boolean was just going to be a cut. Now I'll give it a fillet and I want to be mindful of keeping the radius on both sides proper, meaning this distance and this distance is correct. Alright, decent. Click on your slice first and then the other object, hit slice, that looks pretty good. Mirror it over, perfect. And I don't want to do too many crazy things. So you see how dense this is? This is because I do want to do a boolean here. So we're going to get a box in, and we'll scale it into place. And I want to put a fillet on it. So we'll put a fillet, not too dense. You want to line it up whenever you do fillets to the amount of geometry you have there and this is pretty low so it should be fine. I'm going to spawn a, what should it be, 64 sides because we have a lot of density. And I'm going to contribute to this detail that I have down here by lining it up and cutting it into the side like this. So I'll do the cut first, move this back a little bit. And then I will start to line it up slightly. You don't have to be perfect, but just try to get it to be good enough. And my goal is to have this taper down just like you see it doing and go perfectly in there. So that seems like it's good enough for the concept that I'm going for. Now I'm going to spawn another cylinder. We'll make this 224 like I had before. Get it in here. You can see there is a bit of a dip down here. So what I'm going to do is first make the main mesh, which is going to have this fill it on it. It does not need to be that deep. And then I'm going to have an exterior solidified mesh. So I detached this, and then I'm going to come over here, have a solidify that goes out like this. the material. And then I'm going to use proportional editing to slightly move things around. So I'm going to set it at the bottom. Then I'm going to select over here, go to proportional editing, and you can see if I scroll it's going to change the amount that's affected. So I've just done this. I've just pushed it up slightly. Do it on all sides. Then I will add, oops, fill it to it, a bevel modifier rather, and smooth this. And then I think maybe should I do this? I'll just add it for detail sake, but I get a 64-sided cylinder and I'm just gonna disable proportional editing. I don't want that. Maybe I'll just put it in here. Insert it right there. There we go. And the shading does not look too bad. Again, if I really wanna contain this, I could just do horizontal cuts like this. And they don't even have to be clean. They could just be, like I usually put a horizontal cut and then I'll literally just do something like this. And it kind of fixes a lot of the shading error because what you're doing is you're lining up all of the edges over here as well. So I'm going to move that down slightly, something like this. And I think I'm going to adjust this again, because I don't like the way that this looks, honestly. I think it needs to be more up, and this needs to be more like this. So it mirrors over there. I can do the same for this. I can just adjust this on the fly. And I could even just adjust this on the fly as well. but I'd have to mirror it. And usually there's an error here. But again, you're just using the panel cut as a substitute. Eventually you're gonna come in and you're gonna do a real cut and it will not have issues like this, but there are ways that you can fix that. And yeah, this is my little dinky object. So I wanted to show you guys another one of my models and this is a little bit earlier in development. And the reason I wanted to show you this is just to give you an idea of how rough things are actually supposed to be with this workflow. So there's a lot of shapes where they're just overlapping each other. You can see right here, I have a fillet that is a fake fillet. Like it's not even actually attached to anything. There's geometry intersecting, you know, polys are having issues all over the place. And you really have to think about this like 3D sketching, you know. You don't need to make things clean. We're designers. We're just trying to get an idea of how these things look. So you can see there's even booleans on the outside here. This is a boolean. This is a separate piece. If I take the booleans off of this, it's just nothing. This is also a fillet that we have here with a modifier. So we're keeping things very loose, very editable. And yeah, another thing I wanted to show is a lot of people when they look at stuff like this, they say, well, how do you keep track of all the modifiers? Cause there's just so many modifiers on all of these pieces. And so one of the ways that I do that is if I go to my hard ops menu, you can see right here in scroll settings, we have this thing called ever scroll. And I haven't been using this for that long, but it's super helpful for getting easy selection with Boolean. So we can just scroll through the whole stack and let's say I wanna get the Boolean that's over here. Scroll to it and then I have an instant selection and then I can start to edit this Boolean however I'd like. And so that helps us organize it a little bit, but yeah, so the point of me in showing you this is just to show how primitive everything is, how simple it is. There are just pieces that are wedged into one another And we do not make anything clean for a very long period of time. The juice of the design, the most that you're going to get out of a design, is going to be in this stage where everything is totally kind of screwed. You know, there's nothing that's really applied and we are just trying to get the basic idea and forms in on a design. So yeah. All right. So everything that I've shown you guys thus far has been related to mesh editing or Booleans, but I thought it would be really helpful to showcase something that I use when I'm finished modeling, uh, which really helps the rendering process. So basically when you're done making something in poly, it's custom to actually like bevel and subdivide and get soft edges. Like right here, you can see all these edges are very hard. And so it's customary that when you start to finish a model, everything kind of gets smooth. So what people do is they'll come in and they will apply something like a bevel modifier. And as you can already see, the issue with applying a bevel modifier or manually coming in and doing edge loops is that once again, you are bound by topology. And so I thought that this actually would be perfect because what about to show you does not need, it does not require good topology. So if I show you the topology, you can see that this is just, no wonder it's not smoothing correctly, right? There's certain parts that smooth fine, but then there are others that really don't. And that would require a lot of mesh editing and moving edge loops around. and we do not want to do any of that. So you might have seen before, I have this thing called Zen Barbecue. And if you haven't heard of Zen Barbecue, essentially what it is is an edge shader. So how you use it is it only works in cycles, which is fine because we're gonna render in cycles regardless, but I have this menu here and you can see these are essentially edge thicknesses. So I'm gonna apply a five and you can immediately see what it does. It gives it the illusion that this is a smooth mesh. I'm gonna revert it and go back here and show you to get the same result, how much work do you think we'd have to do? Right? In some cases it would actually be impossible because at least for like over here, this stuff is pinching and so you'd kind of need to flow it in a different way. So what I actually like to do is I'll come in, whoops, I'll come in and I'll put this on the bevel modifier and I will turn it to a weight. And what that's gonna allow me to do, I actually have weights already applied here, so I'll undo the weight limit. But I'll come in and I can manually put weights on stuff where I want to have a physical edge, because you have to remember, if it's a shader, you're not going to have the silhouette change. So for big edges, I might do something like this, right? So I'll come in here, obviously this is a good edge, I can apply it here. Maybe I want it to be thicker or thinner. And then what I can do for stuff like this is I can just come in and apply a thickness to it. And that allows me to do both at the same time. Now, the issue with the traditional edge shader and blender is that there's no control over the thickness. So with Zen Barbecue, what I can actually do is come in here and I can say to it, Hey, I want this particular edge right here to be a certain thickness. So I'm just going to select this whole edge. It's a bit hard with the topology being so terrible, but I'm gonna select these edges. And then I'm gonna come up here and say, I actually want this to be a two. So if I come in here, you can see that this is now harder edged than these ones over here. And then vice versa, I can come in and say, Oh, actually I want this whole edge to be a 10, right? So you have an amazing amount of control. And so I do this whenever I finish a model, I will come in and define some edges with a bevel modifier like these, some edges with a lower fillet on Zen barbecue on the bevel shader. And then some I will go really big. And I of course can come in here and actually change and add new ones. So I can add new ones if I want to. And then it will show up in the menu and I can go, instead of 10, maybe I want it to be 20. So I'll punch in 20 and I can come in and put a 20 on it. And you can see if I go up here, I can enable the highlight bevel toggle And it will tell me which edges are highlighted with what. So if I put a 2 here, it'll tell me that this is a 2. If I put, you know, a 7 here, it'll tell me this is a 7. So it's a very robust tool, and I recommend, especially if you're doing concept meshes, meaning you're not making it perfect topology. There is no point in doing all the extra effort just to have something smooth properly. Of course, you can voxel remesh it or you can take it into ZBrush. But again, the whole point of this tutorial is everything needs to be done inside of one software for the convenience, you know, for everything to be seamless and to really get the mileage that I think Blender can give. So yeah, this is Zen Barbecue and I would absolutely recommend getting this because it is super useful for rendering. Congratulations, you've made it to the end of this tutorial section, but it's not over. You have one more video and it is an hour and 45 minute time lapse with commentary over the entire thing. I think I just about cover every topic under the sun, so hopefully you're going to enjoy that. And of course, after that, you have the full tutorial where we go through the entire creation process of the Gecko cylindrical pistol, where I put everything you just learned into context in the process of creating the pistol. So you have a lot more content to get through. This is just the beginning.",
  "segments": [
    {
      "text": " Alright, let's begin. First I need to explain myself, what is a hybrid Boolean workflow? fancy term, right? Well, it's pretty simple. So what you're looking at right now is a 100% Boolean workflow, 100% live Boolean workflow. If I go into edit mode here, doesn't even do it justice. Let me take off all the modifiers. You can see this entire object is basically just a square with a skirt on it. And from top to bottom, everything is a modifier. So we've got a shell modifier, a bevel modifier, all modifiers that modify what you're looking at. And the issue with this is it's basically pretty uneditable. We can do a lot with the booleans to move it around, but we don't have any mesh editing capability. If I want to come in here and do a chamfer on this edge, I really can't do anything because one, this is a plane. And two, the curvature doesn't even exist. And so it's just like we're limited to only using Booleans. And that's the issue with a completely live workflow is that you might as well just use CAD because you can't really do all that much with the polys, which is kind of the advantage to using poly modeling is that you get the best of both worlds. And so this is 100% editable. And now I'm going to go to kind of what most people have used throughout the history of poly modeling, which is basically doing everything through mesh editing. So obviously, if you saw how I made this, you'd know that this is basically just a quad remesher add-on that I'm using to get it to look like this, because there's no way in hell that I'm going through the effort of making all this from mesh editing. Essentially everything you're seeing on screen would be sort of hand cut out and This is sort of standard of a subdivision workflow and the issue with this is obviously we can't edit anything very easily You know if I wanted to move this The cylinder it's basically impossible and so if your production maybe you can do this successfully But if your concept you have absolutely no flexibility on anything everything is 100% uneditable and applied. And so of course the hybrid workflow is a mix of both of these. So if I go over here to the hybrid workflow, you can see that this mesh, I've collapsed some things and I've done a little operation here to showcase exactly what you get with the advantage rather of using mesh editing, which is that we can do things like Chamfers. So I've applied the shell, I've applied the bevel modifier, and I've applied this boolean and this boolean. And that allows me to make this transition here. And everything else is live. So basically I can still come in here and edit everything else as I would normally with live booleans, except I also can come in and make these sorts of complicated operations through live mesh editing with chamfers and cut tool and you know applying booleans etc. And this workflow allows you to have both and that's why I use it that's why I think it's probably the most convenient it's because you get to choose which you want to use for the particular operation and you still have a lot of flexibility with the Booleans that are live. So that is the difference between the hybrid mesh editing exclusive and only Boolean workflows. And before we move on, I thought that it would probably be a good idea just to showcase exactly how I use this workflow. So I initially didn't think of doing this, but I have a perfect example just sitting on my hard drive and that is an unfinished weapon that I'm currently working on. And this I think perfectly showcases all of the benefits that I think Blender gives to modeling. And so if I zoom in here and I tab, you can see all of these are live Booleans. So everything here is totally editable. You can see the form changes, the Booleans, even some of this stuff. I mean, There's stuff that's even collapsed, like all of this. This was a cylinder. You can see it goes up here. It turns into another cylinder, more cylinders. There is about 50 different Booleans attached to here. And you might be saying, well, doesn't that, you know, kind of limit your editability? Sure, but look at the sort of Booleans that I am doing with it, right? These Booleans, I don't need to put a fillet on here. I don't need to come through here and do some fancy mesh editing. So I can keep these as live Booleans and I have full editability of everything. Another thing you can see is that, I'm breaking these up into separate sections. So not everything is attached. Like once it starts to get asymmetric, I can just apply a live Boolean on one side and collapse the modifier, et cetera. And so like this whole section is asymmetric. So I keep it separate from the symmetric section at the back. You can just see everything is a live Boolean. All of these little details. And if it's not a live Boolean, at one point, it was a live Boolean. Like, it's very much a CAD workflow that we're using inside of Blender. Except we get all of the advantages that Blender has to offer with live Boolean. So even stuff like this used to be a live Boolean. Once we need to do some mesh editing, we collapse it, and we get something that is hybrid. So this is more of kind of a complete Boolean workflow. Right? So there's almost none of this. Like look at this mesh, right? This is literally just a slot shape. And then everything on it is a Boolean. And that works for a piece like this, but maybe it doesn't work for a piece like this. And so it's separate. And then you can see that we keep stuff like this on top, just because we don't need to apply any of this. So a lot of what you see here is not completely finished, right? I could come in here and mesh edit this and make this perfect, but then we lose editability. So there is just a kind of mid poly blockout that you wanna keep everything in. Like if you look at these shapes, like none of this, none of this transition or any of this, these are all shapes that are kind of just sitting on top like floaters. And yeah, that's how I kind of handle it. This is this shape right here. A lot of his bullions, I have it right now inside of a group. So you can see just how many bullions I use for this. I mean, practically all of it is Booleans. But then there's that little element where I have the hybrid workflow that kicks in. So sometimes it's 70% Booleans, sometimes it's 70% mesh editing, but we keep it very editable. And the great thing about this being in Blender is that I literally can animate this entire thing, right? So this whole thing, I don't have to export it into another software. It is animated within Blender, and the whole thing is in Blender. so I can light it, I can put other high poly meshes in here, like if I want a hand or something, right? I can put hands in to see how that would look with the animation and whatnot. So it's just a very, very powerful tool that we have access to here. And it allows us to do a lot of stuff. Again, just look at all of these. These ridges are live Booleans. Over here, it's a live Boolean. All of this is totally editable. So don't listen to people who tell you that poly modeling is too rigid. You can be as rigid or as fluid as you like. And you just have to know how to use the tools. But yeah, I thought that I should show you this because it's kind of the perfect example of the workflow that we're about to engage in. So. All right. Before we get into some more of the complicated stuff, I'm gonna kind of throw a bunch of tips at you that are gonna speed up your workflow. And then we will get into the more complicated stuff. So first of all, set a hotkey for spawning objects. Just have one for the cube and then for the cylinder. This is gonna save you a lot of time. Secondly, when you are moving objects around, always keep the pivot central. Now, the way that I do this is I move in edit mode and then it keeps the pivot central so that I can then mirror it over. Versus if I spawn an object, I move it over to the side, and then I want to try and mirror it. It's not going to have the mirror central. So always spawn the object, and then move it over in edit mode if you're going to do that. And then you can keep the pivot central. Another tip is you see that I have this thing right here. This is a hard ops mirror. Just get hard ops. It is a very integral tool that I use for all of my mirrors, a lot of my other objects or tools rather that I have here like using the bevel modifier or shell modifier or you know array, whatever it is, it's just a very simple menu that they have and you got your smoothing and stuff so that's another tip. After that there's one draw tool, this is just a normal feature of Blender. I usually use this for Boolean, so I'll draw something out and I will Boolean it. And the reason why it's fine to use this and not have it be a center pivot is because it inherits the mirror from the object. So we can just very easily keep that on one side and not mirror all of our Booleans. But if we do need to mirror it, then my next tip is use these tools. They're called Max Ives interactive tools. I just use one tool basically from it, so I'm just going to put a slice down the center here for me to snap to. But essentially, the tool I use is I can move my pivot. So a lot of people in Blender have this very silly workflow where they use an empty in the center and they parent their mirrors to it or whatever. I don't do that. I think it's a huge waste of time coming from 3ds Max where you can just pick up your pivot naturally. It's in the tool set by default. I don't know if this is in the tool set. By default, I've always just used these tools to do it. But moving your pivot and snapping it is very useful. And I definitely recommend doing that over using empties and stuff. The next little trick that I have is sample objects. Now in this scene, it might not seem that important, but when you're trying to move fast in Blender, you constantly are like spawning things. You don't wanna have to like spawn it in the center, move it out to the side. And so, you know, like if you have a cylinder on one side and it's a bolt, don't spawn another cylinder. Like, you know, maybe you need to have it 32 sides instead of 64, you can spawn it, but just reuse the same objects that you already have because you're gonna inherit the modifiers, like let's say I have a bunch of modifiers that I wanna keep from one object to another. As soon as I spawn another one, I have to reapply that whole modifier stack. So I can keep a lot of the mods alive, I can keep things flowing a little bit faster. And so always duplicate objects and faces and stuff like that, it's just much easier. And then next, if you have objects that are similar, also just duplicate them inside of edit mode. Keep them in the same object. You know, like a lot of people don't do this and I'm not really sure why, but it just saves a lot of time. You know, if I have to go in and select each one of these bolts, it's just gonna be a pain in the ass. And so keeping them, keeping similar objects on the same layer, especially booleans. If you have booleans that are separate objects, just a pain in the ass, because you've got all of these separate things just laying around. Like this is just impossible to select. So always keep everything that is similar in a similar object. And lastly, get comfortable with having objects sit on top of each other and not be connected with the same, like not be unioned, right? There's a part in my main tutorial where we have the main cylinder and for a long period of time, let me actually just spawn a 64, because this is gonna annoy me, for a long period of time, it's just sitting with the other object right here. So it's a shape kind of like, I don't know, this, right? And a lot of people immediately, they just wanna boolean these two together. And as soon as we do that, we lose almost all editability, right? I want to, oh, let me just move this up slightly, topology, right? So there are constraints inside of poly modeling, right? There's a lot of constraints. And if we don't know how to manage those constraints and work around them, then we're going to just be subject to all of them and we don't want to do that. So a lot of the ways that I get around having to deal with topology is I just don't collapse stuff until it's absolutely necessary. So when you're doing stuff that has like compound shapes, just be comfortable with having objects sit on top of each other. You don't need to merge everything. You can keep things very editable. And there's even more parts in the main tutorial where, you know, I want to kind of Boolean shapes into this object, but they're not together. And so I'm even using objects that are like filler, you know, they just sort of sit on top and I, okay, I want to come in and do a Boolean. And, and we just roughly block everything out and we keep it like that for very prolonged periods of time. So just don't have this tendency to merge everything, keep it loose because then we can make all kinds of edits and it's not much of an issue. Okay now we're going to get into some more specific boolean related tips. So I'm going to demonstrate some stuff by making an object and let's just think here. So I'm going to start by using some of the tips where we're sampling objects. I'm going to sample this and just move it into place. And in order to do a Boolean in Blender, I'm obviously not going to explain the basics, but really the kind of Booleans that you need to use are accessible through, let's see, Boole. Through Boole tool, you need to enable this. This is going to allow you to do live Booleans. I'm pretty sure that's basically what allows you to do live bullions, at least make it incredibly convenient where you can just kind of click on objects and get them to bullion. So I recommend you set this to a hockey that is on your mouse because we're going to be using a lot of bullions. So continuing with this object, I'm going to just kind of make something a little bit simple. Again, another use of my speedy tools where I am sampling from a Boolean that already exists. There's no need to make a whole other object. Because they're Booleans, I can just mirror them over with the hard ops. And I want to do something with these Booleans. I want to make these edges curved. Now there's two ways to do this. I could either do a destructive workflow where I come in and I fill it in. And then it's just stuck like that. ways to actually get these gone faster. But for something like this, what I want to do is just add a bevel, and add a bevel through here. But again, I like to use my hard ops menu. So I come in and I always change the profile to 50%. This is more like how a fill it is or like a cylinder, some more curved, accurate representation of a curve. So that's That's how we can very simply get these in here. You can see once I scale this down, this is actually the whole thing looks like this. That's why I scale it above. That's just a quick way to do that. We could also just apply weights to each one of these corners. We'll cover that a little bit later. I'm going to spawn a box here and keeping with the theme of everything being editable, so that you guys know how to do that before we start getting a bit more hybrid-y with the workflow. I'm going to come in here, and I could again, just do this, but what we're going to do is add a modifier, and I suppose we will do weighted, so I'll just show you how to do weighted fillets. So we'll change this to weight, and the menu you do it in is up here. So you go to item and then you go mean bevel weight and you do that. Now, what you wanna do is always make the amount more than you would need so that you can kind of choose. You can fluctuate it. I want it more or less. So we're gonna increase these segments to, I don't know, something like maybe six for now. And so we'll come over here and just make sure that it covers the entire region. And I'm gonna come back over here and add a smooth to that. And so I wanna show something here. So I can't actually, let me just fix this. I can't, if I wanted to, put a fillet. Like right here, I can put a fillet. But I can't put a fillet over here because this is a live Boolean that is preventing me from doing that. So there's two ways that I can get around doing this. So the first way that I can get around doing this is I can actually just make a boolean fillet. So the way that I craft that is I make a boolean and I essentially just get it to wedge around the corner and then I fillet the corner on the boolean and then I make it a boolean. Okay, so that's kind of the manual way to do it and we can just duplicate that over here, change a few things. Again, I don't really care about precision So I'm a little bit off on that. It doesn't matter too much to me. So that's the first way to do it. The more advanced way to do it is that you get hyperbevel. And this is by machine. So you can come in here and just select your edge and do a hyperbevel. You can change the width. You can also change the tolerance to a lot of this stuff. So I'm just gonna come in here and do a hyperbevel. And again, over here as well, just do a hyperbevel. So Iver bevels the fastest way to do this, but you don't have to do it. You could also just do it the manual way. You don't have to use the plug-in for that. Moving on here, so I want to showcase something. So we have very low geometry right here. So I'm going to put some cylinders, and these are 64-sided cylinders. And we want to be mindful when we're doing poly modeling of the density of a lot of stuff like cylinders because it can very quickly get out of hand with managing the shading. So I'm gonna make these booleans and immediately the issue that you'll see is that there's this stretching. I don't know if you can see that. Pretty drastic. And we're not trying to mess with topology. My whole sort of thing is that I really don't wanna have to mess with topology. And so we kind of just contain these shading issues. We never fix it, but let me show you how I contain it. So because we made this top slant here, a bevel modifier, I can increase the amount of segments after I've done this. And you see how close these come right here? So this is what I'm talking about with containment, right? They aren't perfect. If they were perfect, there'd be absolutely no issues. But when you make things extra dense for Booleans, look at this, you can't even tell. And if you start cross hatching, like if we put loops that go this way, then it'll become completely undetectable. But I mean, you honestly, there's no point. I mean, maybe if we put a reflective material, you could see something maybe, but like really, you can't see a whole lot. It is matching quite consistently around here. That's 68 segments, right? So we've given ourselves the ability here to really modularly fix the shading over here. So you can see once again, stretching all over, change it back, boom, shading totally fixed. Now there's another way we can do this. So let's say we have already applied, let's take this off. So let's say that we've done this and it's just a few sides like this and it's not applied, still a Boolean, but we come here and I'm going to increase the density of this by adding a subdivision. And of course, once we add the subdivision, there's probably going to be some issues. So we need to then add a shell. So right there, I just added a shell because right now this is just a plane. One thing additionally that I just want to say, so once we add the subdivision, you can see that the edges as soon as we apply are the first to go. So I'm just going to come in here, select each one of these edges, right click, and go Edge Crease. And actually that fixes the issue, so I can keep this as a plane, but I just creased the edges. So now when I apply it, you can see it's not folding in on itself. So, and then I'm going to add a shell. Generally, I think you should make your Boolean objects all have a, or sorry, a solidify different lingo with different programs. But yeah, we're going to out a solidify and that makes the Boolean water tight. So, but you can see with this, we subdivided it and we increased it. Oh, we didn't increase it enough. Let's go back. We subdivided it again. Apply. Boom. You know, fixes the issue. So there's multiple ways to skin a cat. We can do this a couple different ways. And the application, like why you do one over the other is just going to be context dependent. So there's certain circumstances where maybe one would fit better than the other. And so you'd want to make that alteration. And, you know, it's similar with stuff like these fillets and whatnot. Like we could, if we wanted to, um, keep a Boolean object and then subdivide it later once we want to make it more dense. So you just have to pre-plan a lot of this stuff, but that's, those are a few tips that I have for this section. All right. Now I'm going to attempt to make something with this, because I think it's important that we continuously put our tools to the test. And I encourage you to also try to make something with each of the tools, each of the demonstrations that I give at each stage, just to put yourself in the tools a little bit more. So I'm just going to make a Boolean object. And sticking with what we just did before with the Bevel modifier, we are going to put a Bevel on this. And we're going to change the profile to 50% and the angle to weight, and we'll come in and give a nice bevel weight, increase the segments. Over here, we'll put another weight, mirror it over and do a shell. So you can see we can dynamically scale this area just like we did the last. And I think what I also wanna do is give the actual mesh a bevel as well. So we'll do the same thing. And I'll do weight, increase the segments, and do a ring selection and give this a thickness. I wanna increase this a lot and then decrease it in the mean bevel weights that I have flexibility with it. And we can see kind of what we create there. Now, I showed you previously how to do a hyper bevel. If you have this plugin, then you can do this. But did you know that you can do a ring selection, or sorry, a loop selection with the hyperbevel, and get something like this? Now, if you're unfamiliar with how insane this is in poly modeling, then let me just explain. So essentially what's happening is we can do bevels now on booleaned areas. So previously, let me just disable this. If I wanna, for instance, bevel something down here, it's very easy, I can just select the edge and bevel it. I can't select this edge because it's a boolean. So what HyperBowl does is you can see it literally creates a boolean object that is shaped like a bevel. So do you remember in the previous section when we made that little corner piece? It's doing that basically. It's making a skirt for this entire area. So pretty crazy stuff. But I'm going to revert this. Let me just delete that. And I'm going to make a smaller one. So we'll come in here. when you're doing it. And we'll put a little bevel right there and you can of course increase or decrease the segments. Then what I'm going to do is duplicate this top face, extrude it up. Actually, I'm going to inset it because I want to make this whole thing an inset. So we'll take this, invert selection by doing Ctrl I, bring that up. And now from the top I'm just going to try and mimic what the internal side of this would be. So something like that should be fine. I don't have to be too specific with this. We're going to get rid of all the other bullions that were on that. Move that down. There we go. We kind of get the shape that I'm looking for here. And then I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to also make a bullion on the side. So I'll take this face. And I do this quite often where I do, we'll see right here, I can, I'll fill it this. So I basically, I make a right angle right here so that I can fill it it. And this is going to allow me to create the effect that there is a smooth transition. So let me actually get rid of all those Booleans, mirror that over, collapse. And then we can move this into place and do a Boolean right here so we get this shape. And I think what I'm going to do, make it a little bit skinnier, just like this. And we're going to use the hyperbevel again. So I'm going to come in, shift select, do the hyperbevel. And it just works perfectly. Now I think what I want to do is, what should I do? Just put some bolts on it. I'll show you a method for how I get fillets on my bolts. I suppose you could also use hyperbevel, but what I'm going to do is place the bolt. I'm going to get it to snap right here. Then I'm going to put an edge loop through it, take the last face on it, and increase it. And you can see we've just made a chamfer, basically. So now if I do a boolean, you'll see it looks like a chamfered edge. Like if I applied this cylinder and then I did a chamfer, that's what it would look like. So now I'm gonna duplicate it inside the mesh of course, because we always wanna do that. And that's what that looks like. And I always of course have to have the mirror on top. So it looks like this. And I think I'm gonna take the hyperbevel off the main one. So we'll take that off. And instead, I'm going to opt to make something else. So I'm going to take a half cylinder, or a full cylinder, make it a half cylinder, extrude it up and into place. And you'll see, just like I did at the bottom here, I'm going to do the same thing at the top. So essentially what I'm doing is I'm making it seem like I'm actually doing mesh editing, but I have all the flexibility of keeping things as live Booleans. As long as something's a live Boolean, we have a lot of flexibility over it, provided we don't need to do integration, but these are methods for integrating. So I did sub-object pivot. It's basically up here. You just press the plus, gives you a pivot from the face that you select. And we're gonna create the same shape we created down here, as you can see. Doesn't need to be symmetrical, but we need to fillet it. And you'll see that, I'll also extend this down a little bit so it's more, it's taller. Extrude, put it in place, boom. Then we will drag the mirror to the bottom and you can see we kind of have a cool shape. And I think also what I'm going to do is just put some shapes on the inside, why not? We have got the time, so we'll put maybe this one over here and we'll just shrink that tiny bit. Yeah, maybe something like this and we'll give it a fillet. I'm fine with filleting stuff like this. It's no problem. So we'll do that. And we'll put one over here. There we go. Then we will drag the mirror all the way to the bottom again. You can see it echoes it over there. And I think lastly I do just want to get a shape in the bottom here. So a lot of times it's like you want to be able to sample these faces, it's a mirror or sorry it's it's a Boolean rather and so what you have to do is you duplicate the mesh press zero so it goes back to the same spot so this is now a duplicated mesh and what I do is I will take off first the hyperbevel and I just collapse everything because I just need the faces so I'll come in here select the faces don't even need it from the other side make sure everything looks good. Maybe what I'll do is I'll mirror it over like this just so that I can do an inset. So now I do an inset like so. And actually no I don't want to do an inset. What I want to do is make this whole thing its own object that protrudes out. See what I mean? So we're gonna drag this down, drag this across, mirror this, and we need to check it is flipped. So I'm gonna flip the normal. So So I have a hockey for it. And then I'm going to fill these faces and cap the bottom. You can see kind of what I have here. And actually what I can do is immediately just apply a bevel modifier on this and have a similar effect. And because this isn't a Boolean, I can just apply the bevel modifier. Unlike over here, this is a Boolean. So we needed to use hyper cursor. And there we go. we kind of get something like that. So yeah, not too crazy, but maybe we can put this actually a little bit further in. But those are some of the tools. And of course, you know, when we take off these modifiers, I'm just gonna click Remove. You can see that it is super editable. Like the whole thing is totally editable. And of course, the area at the top here, remember it was done with a bevel modifier. So we have complete editability over each of the weighted bevels. So if we want this to be sharp at the top or we wanted this to be way fatter at the bottom, of course, within reason, it can break at any time if you do something that's too drastic. So you just kind of have to know exactly what you're getting yourself into so that you can manage the constraints. But yeah, we can move all the bolts around wherever we'd like. we can make more of them, less of them. We have complete control over our mesh. And that's what I'm trying to communicate to you guys with this workflow is that if we are going to be using poly modeling instead of something like CAD or something like ZBrush, we need to know how to use it. And when things are this editable, it just is honestly really easy. Like you can see, I can already start to make alterations here and of course some stuff breaks, but we know how to fix it. So I can come in, delete the hyperbevel, come back over here, you know, redo the hyperbevel. Let me see if this works. And it does, oh my gosh. Yeah, we can just make it look totally different. That's how we do concept design. We want to be flexible. So I hope this was helpful and I'll see you in the next section. Okay, back to mesh editing. We've done a bit of Boolean stuff. Now I want to get back to the other aspect of this workflow. So right here, I'm going to show you something that I kind of coined called rails. And you have a top and a bottom rail. And essentially, this just catches your fillet. And if we extend it over here, you can see that it pierces the fillet. So we have to go to width type and percentage. Now, this might not seem like anything special, but I'm going to show you an example here. So if I extend this cube, and maybe I just draw some taper out like this, and then I do a fillet, you can see it catches it. And we now have a tapered fillet. And maybe I want to change this a little bit. We can bring this up and snap, snap, and then give it a fillet. Now we've got this tapering smooth fillet. And this can be used for all sorts of things. So I've prepared another example here. So this is a block out of a weapon grip. And if I turn the wireframe on, you can see that we have some constraints that make up where the fillet area is going to be. And this is exactly how I do my weapon grips if I'm doing them inside of Blender. is that I'll come in here, select both, and then fill it. You can see it's super easy. Let me just put some smoothing on here. Obviously this is a very simple looking weapon grip, but any kind of weapon grip you can imagine this system would come in handy with because you can do these variable widths. And the great thing is that it's super simple to set up. You just draw it on a side view, put a line through the side, you know, whatever sort of drawing you want to make on the side for the width over there. And then you put a fillet with a percent on it. And there you go, super easy. And now jumping to something that's not super easy. This is kind of the final boss, I think, of this sort of rail system idea that I have here. It's really a different way of thinking about it, but we do have a top and a bottom rail, top, bottom rail. And we want to use booleans to transition these. And at first you might think it's easy, but the issue is that we're dealing with two separate types of geometry, right? This is a fillet and then this is a bevel or a chamfer. So it's a bit complicated, but I'm gonna show you guys exactly how I would tackle this. And in the main tutorial, I have a section where I tackle this on the body of the mesh that I'm working on. So if you wanna see that, then you can go ahead and watch that. But here I'm just going to show you exactly what I do to achieve this sort of a transition. So first of all, I've inserted a cylinder in the very center and I've snapped it so that it makes up both sides. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select all of it and extrude it outwards. In fact, what I'm going to do first is actually not collapse the bottom half because I want to have a straight line right here. right here. So I'm going to try to eye it out and yeah that looks good. So we've got the bottom rail and the top rail up here and then I'm just going to come over here, snap it and take this face and move it all the way up to this face. So we're actually going to, I believe, just move this up. So we're going to move this face up, and we're going to move this one into its position, which is right here. And then when we do a Boolean, you'll see that this is not exactly what we want. So we have to split this in half and put a segment here to split this in half. And you can see how this can get very complicated very quickly, but you need to know what you're doing in order to have a successful operation. So you can see right now we're kind of getting it, but we have this issue right here and obviously the mesh up top. So we'll just handle the mesh up top first. And this actually really illustrates the hybrid nature of this workflow because in order to get this done, we need to collapse this Boolean. This Boolean needs to be collapsed. So I'm gonna extrude, press zero, and then move this all the way up. And that's gonna make it to where this top section has been deleted. So I'm going to collapse the Boolean. You can see what we're left with right here looks like this. So there's a bit of an issue. I just want to undo that, come back, snap this one last time over here. Have to make sure that it's part of the object still. It is. OK. We're going to snap it. Looks good on both sides. Collapse. OK. So what we're left with now is the base blocks for making this transition. We've got a fillet on this side and a chamfer on this side. And our job is over the course of this 180 degree cylindrical angle to transition the two. So first of all, what we need to do is define the starting point for this side. So I'm just going to draw a line down there, merge this. And I think what I'm going to do is just get rid of some of this topology. It doesn't actually matter. And we'll get started on this side. So deleting all of this, we're going to recover the circumference, or I guess the, what would I call it, the chamfer of this area. So we're just going to bridge these one by one. You can see I'm just recovering the area that we had lost to the Boolean over here. This seems to be one poly, so I'm going to make sure that's all fine. You don't have to be extremely clean about everything. This is going to have a big fillet over it, so it's not really going to be such an issue. So there we go. got something like this, and we can cap that off. So we have recovered this section, and you could just stop the curvature over here to begin with and probably save yourself some time. And now our job is to transition these two. So I'm going to put a line through the center here, and I'm gonna decide the endpoint is gonna be right here for the curvature to end. So by the time it gets here, I want the chamfer to be totally intact. So I'll come here and now I'm gonna move this up and push it down. And what I'm attempting to do is, actually I'm gonna get rid of this face, I'm attempting to basically get this angle because this is the starting angle that I made the fillet on. So I'm gonna move this all the way down until we roughly get the same angle. And then I'm gonna do a fillet just to see what it looks like and you can see it's not quite there. It's not quite in the right position so I'll G slide it up and I'll move it back down and then I'll see okay is this good maybe it needs to go further down so I'm gonna G slide it back down move this up into place. It's a little bit off so we have to do a bit of tinkering to kind of understand where this is gonna look the best, but again we don't have to be super precise on this. We just need to roughly guesstimate kind of where it is. So I'm just going to continue to move it around until I can figure it out. Alright so this looks pretty good. I'm not going to do it. What I am going to do is now actually start to make a bend on this. So I'm just going to try something first. So if I go to hard ops you can see that I have a lattice. So I'm going to spawn the lattice, and it's going to allow me to actually move these edges up like this. Now you don't need to do this, you could just manually do it, or use proportional editing. But we're going to move the edges up manually like this, and my goal is to make sure that the last edge is perfectly straight. So if I look at that, it looks pretty good. You can see there is a bend to this, right? There is a bend to the whole thing. So I'm going to collapse the lattice and then I can come in and start to do the fillet. Now you can see that it has altered the way that this actually looks on this side. So I'm going to come back to the lattice, make sure that it's applied again, move this back down, make sure it's in alignment again just like we had before. And then this side over here also probably got misaligned a little bit. So it's just a lot of back and forth. But eventually I think that we get it pretty good. That's fine. We can always edit it afterwards within range, within reason. And then we'll do this. You can see this goes over a little bit. So I think what I need to do is get some constraints in here. So just like before with the, with what we've been doing with the rail system, I'm going to get my first constraint in here. And this constraint, basically what I'm doing is I put a line through and then I champ for it. And that's gonna allow me to get the bottom rail. And then we just come in and I want to put this on percentage. You can see I come here, pull it up, and it perfectly aligns. Maybe not perfect, but it's pretty close. So we're gonna match the amount of sides. So you can see if we do six, what does it look like? Maybe five, something like that. One, two, three, four, five, six, yeah. So this doesn't totally line up, but it's actually good enough. And so we'll just do that. And then we're going to start to weld these edges in here. And to get this to kind of line up better, what I'm gonna do is just manually start moving these around. And this is fine within reason. So we're going to move them up. Maybe move the next ones a little bit and just start making this transition. You can see how you can't even tell once I put smoothing on here. Let me just get this to look proper. We'll put a 15, there we go. So I'll define the edges on this side so that we don't see that. That's how you do it. That's how you make that transition, and it seems pretty complicated, but when you've done it about 10,000 times, it's pretty manageable each step of the way. But that's how it looks. I do this transition in the pistol tutorial, and it's kind of for this bottom swirl area, and it looks pretty interesting. But that's how you do it. Yeah, pretty interesting. So one aspect of poly modeling that is a huge downside versus CAD is once we do a Boolean, it's very hard to fillet it. And that's due to obvious reasons, topology, etc. But other than that, we have all the flexibility and more when it comes to doing live Booleans. But let's say you do want to fillet something. Well, there is actually a workflow and a plugin that is perfect for that. So here I've got my grenade and it's looking a little bit bland. So I'm going to add some balls to the outside. And once I add my balls, I think you can guess where we're going with this. Doing this Boolean operation with this topology is the worst thing on planet Earth, my God. So you can see the issue here is that the topology just gets totally messed up. And this is a nightmare to deal with. are plugins though that we can use to make this nightmare into a dream. And those plugins, or that plugin rather, is Mesh Machine. So Mesh Machine has this experimental add-on called Offset Cut. You might have heard of it. It's magical. So what we're going to do here is apply our Boolean. And first I actually need to apply the Solidify. And this is really the biggest downside is that obviously you need to apply these things. You lose editability once this is done. But just to show you the functionality, we're going to do S select, or sorry, L select. And then we're going to do offset cut. And that's going to give us an offset that we can immediately fill it. And yeah, I mean, that's basically the functionality of it. It is like magic. And essentially, when we're doing this, if I come back to offset cut, we can change the factor. And this is going to alter the amount of segments that are on the edge. So we can kind of make this line up with the topology on the outside. Again, we're just containing it. And as you can see, there's really no visible issues. Like at least once you do it, you know, you're not really going to be able to see visible issues with the fillet. So that's really great. And what I'm going to do is just go around to each one and do that. So this is a symmetrical model, so I really only have to do it in a few places. So I just select one edge from each, nice and easy. I'll leave one down here. Come back over here. I'll select, do our offset cut, and then give it a big fillet. but mirror them over. And there you can see, an otherwise incredibly hard operation is now made very, very easy. And like I've been saying, the only downside to this is that we do not have the editability, I can't come in here and then start moving stuff around because everything is already applied. But what if we had the opportunity to revert the mesh whenever we liked? Well, that's what another feature does within this plug-in, which is called View Stashes. Well, it's just called Stashes. But essentially, if I come in here and press R, you see that now I actually have retained the mesh that I initially have. Because before I did this, you didn't see it, but I stashed my object. So I can even come over to this Boolean, and I have a stash for the Booleans as well. And so I basically just have a duplicate. So you can just duplicate the mesh, and it would basically act the exact same, or you can put it in a stash, which is just like a very convenient menu that the plugin has where you have, you know, swap, edit, retrieve, all these different features. You can delete them very easily, and they're just kind of in the menu to the side. So now that we've got this back, I'm gonna show another method. And if you couldn't tell what that other method is by now, It's kind of just been sitting right in front of your face. It's called Quad Remesher. And Quad Remesher is a gift from the heavens. I don't use it actually all that much, but it is just another magical plug. And you can think of it as Z-remesher, essentially from ZBrush, but we're gonna set this mesh up and I can show you what it does. So first of all, I'm gonna do this Boolean. Once again, I have to collapse the solidify. And this is a pretty dense mesh that we have here. So I'm first going to put a sharpen on it and we'll probably have to increase the sides quite a bit. Normally what I'd do is I'd make this a shell first and then I would kind of solidify it inwards. Or sorry, I'd make it a plane first and then solidify it inwards. So I'm going to come up here and we're just going to maybe do, let's just try 20,000 because I don't know, maybe that's not enough, but we'll put it at 20,000. We're going to use normal splitting first And then if it doesn't work, we'll try the other one. And there you can see it has remeshed everything. Now, there is kind of variable success to this. There are methods that you can use to make this more successful. Like one of them that I kind of mentioned is that if we wanted to just take the outside part of this entire cylinder and then remesh it, that would probably work better because it's not trying to do the inside and the outside at the same time. But you can see that basically we have like perfect apology. And while it's not as nice as having a perfect rung around the edges, this is still quite nice. And we can even throw probably a subdivision on here. And I imagine that it's not the best, but this is a clean mesh. And oftentimes what I'll do when things get really messy is I'll just throw one of these on here and it'll solve a lot of issues. But what we could even do is this and then come in, make these selections once again. And we just have a far cleaner model. So I'm gonna come in and once again select all of these. In fact, I could even do, I don't really have to do L select anymore because everything is so clean. I can just do a normal selection. So we'll select all of these. And then I'll come in and do another offset cut. And look at that. and it's, this is much cleaner, I think. Again, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, you're messing up the topology, but let's say we just came in and did this, you know, it kind of be a similar result. It's that maybe it's more oriented. You can see the topology is actually like swarming around. It's echoing the cylindrical booleans that are coming out. So yeah, maybe that's another way that you can do it. but I use this a lot for smaller things like switches and stuff that have a lot of booleans punctured into it, but that's another method. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to throw about a thousand different add-ons at you, so get ready. First of all, this is Hyper Cut with Hyper Cursor. And essentially, it's kind of like the cut tool in ZBrush. we can use it to create all kinds of interesting forms. And this is something I don't use too often, but you can imagine how you can get some kind of creative forms and stuff in the block out pretty easily. So that's that. I'm going to come over here and use something called punch it. So punch it is basically extrude with a Boolean. So if I extrude in poly modeling, I'm extruding faces onto faces. If I use punch it, then it punches right through. And the issue with a lot of these plug-ins is that as soon as you get some complicated geometry, it starts to break. So I kind of typically use it for stuff that is more boxy, more blockout primitive, but every now and then it'll let you do something that's a bit more complicated, but there's just some limitations that you can clean up if it doesn't work for you. Next is probably my most used tool. So part of Mesh Machine is Flatten. And Flatten will essentially flatten anything to the last selected surface. So if this is the last selected surface, then it's gonna make every other object that's selected aligned to it. And it just works like all the time separate there. I don't know what just happened, but seems to be working. Okay, perfect. Yeah, so flatten is I think the best tool out of probably any add-on that I've ever gotten. Like just look at that. I mean, it is just so powerful. So mesh machine, very good. Another thing that we can use as mesh machine is, let's say I start premature filleting everything, like a noob. And I don't know, I wanna extrude this face, but I no longer have this face because this is curving around, well, I can come in here and I can unfuse, and then I can unchampfer. And so I can do that to all of them. And the issue with this is, as soon as you start getting some complicated geometry, doesn't really work. And I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that, but I've never managed to get it to work without anything other than a single fillet. So if you have something that's very simple, it's incredibly easy for you just to simply put it back to normal, but more complicated than that, it becomes a bit of a problem. So now I'm gonna show you another little tip, little add-on here is, okay, so if I want to, let's say make this a cut line, and I want to do it with geometry the natural way. I would do something like this where I have an edge in the center and I dissolve it and it makes a cut line. The issue is pretty obvious with this. When you, once you do this, you have geometry and geometry is always going to limit what you can do with your mesh. So instead, what I'm going to do is use decal machine and an E-Panel with decal machine. So before I do this, actually, let me just go into EV and go into this mode, because it is actually a texture that we're looking at. So I can adjust these decals. I can make them fatter. I can make them skinnier always. It's super editable at all times. And so it's really useful to do that. And I can get creative with it. So if I wanted to do an inset, I can select it, E-Panel. And then boom. I can very quickly get complicated cut lines all over the place without having to commit to geometry. So another aspect to this that is probably the most useful is that we can use booleans to also create those cut lines. So I'm gonna come over here and just do the same thing except I'm gonna do a slice. And there we go. This is extremely powerful. You can see we can do another one. I'm just gonna draw it on here and always fill it everything that you do with this because it's going to kind of wedge in a strange way if you don't, but I'll do it right here. You can see slice and it allows us to very quickly break up our mesh and get cut lines in. So those are a few tools that I use to get results faster. Okay, we're gonna make another object here and I'm gonna try and use some of the stuff that I just taught you. So we will start with a cylinder and a rectangle and I'm gonna put a line through both of them, move it down to the bottom. And we're gonna be a little bit less clean with this one I think. So immediately, let me taper this actually. How much do I wanna taper this? Something like this perhaps. We're immediately going to boolean these together. And something else I don't know if I've mentioned, but sometimes when I do booleans, I will, so I'll select the top face here, and I'll go boolean clean up on my mesh machine menu. And if I move this to the right, it will clean up like 90% of the boolean mess. And that happens, that works for some surfaces, others not so much, but you can see it just really quickly does it. Now it's not super hard to do. I could just dissolve them, but there are certain circumstances where I come in. I just go over here, Boolean Cleanup. And this is definitely not one of them. So yeah, you just scroll, and then it will isolate some of them and fix them. So this looks pretty good. Again, this is more of a destructive workflow. So I'm going to come in now, and maybe how should I do this? Let me do a hyper cut. So I'm gonna deselect the mesh and then just do this. I think that looks good. And with hyper cut, I made it to where this just immediately applies. So this is more of a destructive workflow. And then I'll do hyper bevel and I'll make this really dense. If you're gonna do a destructive workflow, make sure that you make everything very dense because then you'll not have to worry about doing cleanup clean up and stuff like that, it'll just automatically smooth. So, all right, so we have that. I think actually before we make that adjustment, I want to transition these first. So I'm gonna come in here and delete all these edges up until they reach the top side. So maybe right there, that's quite a bit, but you'll see what I'm gonna do. So I will move this up over here. And then I'm gonna draw. Do you remember from a previous section when we were doing the rails? So I'm gonna draw my rail there and I'm gonna draw my rail over here. It's gonna taper in a little bit, but that looks decent. And then I'll actually merge these to this one. We'll take away that. And then do a percentage fillet. Boom. Then we will mirror all of those around. And now I can come over here and do this operation. And again, usually I wouldn't do this destructive because it's gonna cause a bit of issues when you do it destructive. But we are doing it now, just so I can show you. Do both of these edges, so I'll hold Shift, click them. them and we have to overshoot it slightly. That looks good. And of course, the hyper bevel is totally editable. Over here, we'll just do a fillet. Make sure that you take percentage off. Something like that looks good. And of course, because this is just a single face, we can always come back with mesh machine and do an unfuse and an unchampfer. So this looks pretty good. Then I'm gonna come in with another cylinder. And I think I'll just do a boolean like so. And maybe I wanna give this more form. So I'm gonna come in here, move this out like this. Yeah, that looks interesting. I'll give it a smooth sharpen this edge. I'll even come in with a ring selection and then I'm gonna do an E-panel. And I'll adjust that, move my mouse out a little bit. Usually when I do use this plugin, I will do very simple panel cuts. In fact, what I'm gonna do is just collapse the mirror so that this works properly. E-panel, adjust it. That looks pretty good. And then I'll do a Boolean slice cut with the same plugins. So I'm going to get this in place and move this down a little bit. In fact, maybe I want to elongate this a little bit. So I'm going to do a sub-object pivot, which, again, you just come up here and you press the plus. So we have sub-object pivot enabled. And then I'm going to move this down first, change my pivot back to normal, and then move this again so we end up with something that's a little bit longer and maybe this is a bit too long but you can see we'll have to adjust some of the things we've done before like the panel cut if we want this to work. So that looks good. We'll come back, redo the panel cut. Again, I want to make sure that I collapse my symmetry first. Looks pretty good. onto the slice. So the slice kind of works like a boolean if the boolean was just going to be a cut. Now I'll give it a fillet and I want to be mindful of keeping the radius on both sides proper, meaning this distance and this distance is correct. Alright, decent. Click on your slice first and then the other object, hit slice, that looks pretty good. Mirror it over, perfect. And I don't want to do too many crazy things. So you see how dense this is? This is because I do want to do a boolean here. So we're going to get a box in, and we'll scale it into place. And I want to put a fillet on it. So we'll put a fillet, not too dense. You want to line it up whenever you do fillets to the amount of geometry you have there and this is pretty low so it should be fine. I'm going to spawn a, what should it be, 64 sides because we have a lot of density. And I'm going to contribute to this detail that I have down here by lining it up and cutting it into the side like this. So I'll do the cut first, move this back a little bit. And then I will start to line it up slightly. You don't have to be perfect, but just try to get it to be good enough. And my goal is to have this taper down just like you see it doing and go perfectly in there. So that seems like it's good enough for the concept that I'm going for. Now I'm going to spawn another cylinder. We'll make this 224 like I had before. Get it in here. You can see there is a bit of a dip down here. So what I'm going to do is first make the main mesh, which is going to have this fill it on it. It does not need to be that deep. And then I'm going to have an exterior solidified mesh. So I detached this, and then I'm going to come over here, have a solidify that goes out like this. the material. And then I'm going to use proportional editing to slightly move things around. So I'm going to set it at the bottom. Then I'm going to select over here, go to proportional editing, and you can see if I scroll it's going to change the amount that's affected. So I've just done this. I've just pushed it up slightly. Do it on all sides. Then I will add, oops, fill it to it, a bevel modifier rather, and smooth this. And then I think maybe should I do this? I'll just add it for detail sake, but I get a 64-sided cylinder and I'm just gonna disable proportional editing. I don't want that. Maybe I'll just put it in here. Insert it right there. There we go. And the shading does not look too bad. Again, if I really wanna contain this, I could just do horizontal cuts like this. And they don't even have to be clean. They could just be, like I usually put a horizontal cut and then I'll literally just do something like this. And it kind of fixes a lot of the shading error because what you're doing is you're lining up all of the edges over here as well. So I'm going to move that down slightly, something like this. And I think I'm going to adjust this again, because I don't like the way that this looks, honestly. I think it needs to be more up, and this needs to be more like this. So it mirrors over there. I can do the same for this. I can just adjust this on the fly. And I could even just adjust this on the fly as well. but I'd have to mirror it. And usually there's an error here. But again, you're just using the panel cut as a substitute. Eventually you're gonna come in and you're gonna do a real cut and it will not have issues like this, but there are ways that you can fix that. And yeah, this is my little dinky object. So I wanted to show you guys another one of my models and this is a little bit earlier in development. And the reason I wanted to show you this is just to give you an idea of how rough things are actually supposed to be with this workflow. So there's a lot of shapes where they're just overlapping each other. You can see right here, I have a fillet that is a fake fillet. Like it's not even actually attached to anything. There's geometry intersecting, you know, polys are having issues all over the place. And you really have to think about this like 3D sketching, you know. You don't need to make things clean. We're designers. We're just trying to get an idea of how these things look. So you can see there's even booleans on the outside here. This is a boolean. This is a separate piece. If I take the booleans off of this, it's just nothing. This is also a fillet that we have here with a modifier. So we're keeping things very loose, very editable. And yeah, another thing I wanted to show is a lot of people when they look at stuff like this, they say, well, how do you keep track of all the modifiers? Cause there's just so many modifiers on all of these pieces. And so one of the ways that I do that is if I go to my hard ops menu, you can see right here in scroll settings, we have this thing called ever scroll. And I haven't been using this for that long, but it's super helpful for getting easy selection with Boolean. So we can just scroll through the whole stack and let's say I wanna get the Boolean that's over here. Scroll to it and then I have an instant selection and then I can start to edit this Boolean however I'd like. And so that helps us organize it a little bit, but yeah, so the point of me in showing you this is just to show how primitive everything is, how simple it is. There are just pieces that are wedged into one another And we do not make anything clean for a very long period of time. The juice of the design, the most that you're going to get out of a design, is going to be in this stage where everything is totally kind of screwed. You know, there's nothing that's really applied and we are just trying to get the basic idea and forms in on a design. So yeah. All right. So everything that I've shown you guys thus far has been related to mesh editing or Booleans, but I thought it would be really helpful to showcase something that I use when I'm finished modeling, uh, which really helps the rendering process. So basically when you're done making something in poly, it's custom to actually like bevel and subdivide and get soft edges. Like right here, you can see all these edges are very hard. And so it's customary that when you start to finish a model, everything kind of gets smooth. So what people do is they'll come in and they will apply something like a bevel modifier. And as you can already see, the issue with applying a bevel modifier or manually coming in and doing edge loops is that once again, you are bound by topology. And so I thought that this actually would be perfect because what about to show you does not need, it does not require good topology. So if I show you the topology, you can see that this is just, no wonder it's not smoothing correctly, right? There's certain parts that smooth fine, but then there are others that really don't. And that would require a lot of mesh editing and moving edge loops around. and we do not want to do any of that. So you might have seen before, I have this thing called Zen Barbecue. And if you haven't heard of Zen Barbecue, essentially what it is is an edge shader. So how you use it is it only works in cycles, which is fine because we're gonna render in cycles regardless, but I have this menu here and you can see these are essentially edge thicknesses. So I'm gonna apply a five and you can immediately see what it does. It gives it the illusion that this is a smooth mesh. I'm gonna revert it and go back here and show you to get the same result, how much work do you think we'd have to do? Right? In some cases it would actually be impossible because at least for like over here, this stuff is pinching and so you'd kind of need to flow it in a different way. So what I actually like to do is I'll come in, whoops, I'll come in and I'll put this on the bevel modifier and I will turn it to a weight. And what that's gonna allow me to do, I actually have weights already applied here, so I'll undo the weight limit. But I'll come in and I can manually put weights on stuff where I want to have a physical edge, because you have to remember, if it's a shader, you're not going to have the silhouette change. So for big edges, I might do something like this, right? So I'll come in here, obviously this is a good edge, I can apply it here. Maybe I want it to be thicker or thinner. And then what I can do for stuff like this is I can just come in and apply a thickness to it. And that allows me to do both at the same time. Now, the issue with the traditional edge shader and blender is that there's no control over the thickness. So with Zen Barbecue, what I can actually do is come in here and I can say to it, Hey, I want this particular edge right here to be a certain thickness. So I'm just going to select this whole edge. It's a bit hard with the topology being so terrible, but I'm gonna select these edges. And then I'm gonna come up here and say, I actually want this to be a two. So if I come in here, you can see that this is now harder edged than these ones over here. And then vice versa, I can come in and say, Oh, actually I want this whole edge to be a 10, right? So you have an amazing amount of control. And so I do this whenever I finish a model, I will come in and define some edges with a bevel modifier like these, some edges with a lower fillet on Zen barbecue on the bevel shader. And then some I will go really big. And I of course can come in here and actually change and add new ones. So I can add new ones if I want to. And then it will show up in the menu and I can go, instead of 10, maybe I want it to be 20. So I'll punch in 20 and I can come in and put a 20 on it. And you can see if I go up here, I can enable the highlight bevel toggle And it will tell me which edges are highlighted with what. So if I put a 2 here, it'll tell me that this is a 2. If I put, you know, a 7 here, it'll tell me this is a 7. So it's a very robust tool, and I recommend, especially if you're doing concept meshes, meaning you're not making it perfect topology. There is no point in doing all the extra effort just to have something smooth properly. Of course, you can voxel remesh it or you can take it into ZBrush. But again, the whole point of this tutorial is everything needs to be done inside of one software for the convenience, you know, for everything to be seamless and to really get the mileage that I think Blender can give. So yeah, this is Zen Barbecue and I would absolutely recommend getting this because it is super useful for rendering. Congratulations, you've made it to the end of this tutorial section, but it's not over. You have one more video and it is an hour and 45 minute time lapse with commentary over the entire thing. I think I just about cover every topic under the sun, so hopefully you're going to enjoy that. And of course, after that, you have the full tutorial where we go through the entire creation process of the Gecko cylindrical pistol, where I put everything you just learned into context in the process of creating the pistol. So you have a lot more content to get through. This is just the beginning."
    }
  ]
}