{
  "text": " And we are off to the races. We are going to be making the scope using some of the methods that you've seen here. Now the actual creation of the scope was done before this. This is just a recreation because when you're designing, obviously things take a lot longer. And so some of the methods that you're going to see here where I collapse things are a bit too soon. I'd really like to be able to capture what it's actually like when you're concepting, but it's just simply not a good viewer experience. If I make something and then I do 10 revisions under no circumstances, is anybody going to sit through that? And you might get something out of that, but it's just not interesting. So this is a relatively short time lapse. And I made this scope in about six, five hours of recreation. And then the actual creation time was like, I think around two days on and off. But yeah, generally for something like this size, it shouldn't take you more than two days unless you really want to push it. I did push it a little bit with the design, but this is still fairly rough. So you can see what I'm doing is just getting the basic block out in and when I make the pistol I get everything absolutely blocked out before I even put a single detail. This creation process is a little bit more messy again when you know exactly what you're supposed to put on the design because you have reference, your brain sort of jumps ahead and does details and that's actually kind of why I think a lot of production artists have a hard time I'm switching to concept because you can totally get away with just doing tiny tertiary details all over the place before you get everything blocked out if you're production. But if you're concept and someone wants you to move just one thing and you've got all these applied booleans everywhere, it becomes a real issue. So, I mean, realistically, you don't have to apply anything. You can see that I have tertiary blockout details. So for those bolts, you saw I just inserted cylinders and I do that because they are representations of noise, right? A tertiary detail is nothing more than noise. So when I put the cylinder in there, there's no reason for me to go further than that. I've already established that there will be something there. It's gonna be cylinder coal. That's all I need. This isn't a design tutorial, but I always feel like everybody is lacking the Blockout Department, including myself. Everybody's going too far into detail. And the more that you can visualize your design without having to apply geometry and doing the thing prematurely, the better result you're going to have. And that's just hard to do. It's just a very hard skill to learn. And it comes with time. So as you can see, just with what's going on in the video. I am constantly moving around. You don't want to spend too much time on any given area, especially in the early stages. I think psychologically it locks your brain down. There is definitely a component of time to making a design. If you spend way too much time on a design, then your ability to be impartial and make changes goes down the toilet. I've spent maybe three months on a design before, And if you're not taking breaks and reevaluating your decisions, then you could have something that doesn't work and your brain actually just can't see it. You're looking at it all the time and it's so familiar that you cannot objectively assess it. So this is a two day design. There's not so much of that, but let's say I got stuck up on, uh, you know, the outer shell to this and I tried different sort of bevels and I wanted to make it, you know, slant up instead of down. And I have all these ideas that I want to do. If I spend too much time tinkering, then it causes me to kind of lock in. And really, the solution to that is to kill your babies, which is a morbid way of suggesting that you need to eventually get rid of what you like if you want the design to progress. You're going to get to a point where it does not work. And you know, it doesn't work, but you want to keep it there because you're kind of married to the progress that you've made. You're married to a few decisions like you made one or two that you really like. And you might have to get rid of them for everything to progress. So you got to learn how to detach from the design, learn how to see it objectively. And honestly, I think that your maturity in being able to design is directly linked to how you take feedback and criticism because, you know, when you start out, you're so married to all your bad decisions and slowly people pick and chip away. And if you can develop the maturity to sit there and go, yeah, I've made the objective evaluation, they're totally right. Then, you know, the next time you make a bad decision, you're just going to think about it a little more. And you're going to say, yeah, well, it's probably not that great. You know, it took me a long time to be able to to actually just destroy like sections of my design that I spent days on, but going, okay, well, this is very clearly bottlenecking future progress to the design. So you just have to really get used to destroying what you value in order to progress. So speaking a bit more about what's going on in the design, as you can see, it's just a very simple Boolean workflow I'm using here. One thing I do want to point out is the outer shell to this scope, when you do a shell modifier, if you twist it in a certain way, then the way it's never, it's not going to be flat on the shelled out part. And so I did use a boolean, and you'll see I'll do it again on the front. I used a boolean to basically make it flat. And so it's not so much about, like I see tutorials where people think that, oh, I taught them how to use 600 different tools. I'm really good at my job. But it's how you use the tool. It's how you, if you can only use a solidify modifier to just make a shelled out version of a mesh, then you're not using the full potential. Like you see what I'm doing here. I'm shelling it out because I'm getting a boolean here. I'm duplicating the cylinder and then I'm deleting half of it and then I'm making a boolean out of that and then I'm getting a curvature Okay, so it's like how creative are you? Are you someone who needs a a chamfer button for you to do a chamfer? Or can you can you use a boolean to do a chamfer? Can you use? hyper Cut or whatever. It's called to do chamfer, you know like how many different ways can you? Cut the sandwich, you know how many different ways can you? get it to work because there is a scenario for everything that I do. It might seem like it's not useful to do something this very specific and esoteric way, but there's going to come a period where you do need to do it a certain way that's sort of non-standard and then you can do it. So here you can actually see this what I was talking about. I flatten it out. So if you rewind you'll see that it kind of the shell or the solidify makes it trail a bit like it kind of warps in on itself but then I move it out more and then I use a boolean to flatten it and you might say well why not just flatten the solidify and for obvious reasons you're you're then trading off all your editability so we are being smart about these sorts of things we can keep the solidify, you know, we just have to make sure that we use a Boolean. And that obviously comes with some downsides too, but not as much as collapsing it would. I'm not some assessment that you constantly have to make and I can't really teach you. I can give you a blueprint of like keep it editable, but everybody can go about making stuff in different ways and probably will. So you have to make your own assessment for every decision. And I usually err on the side of editability. You can see here what I'm going to do is get a bit tricky with it and use a fillet modifier or a bevel modifier. Initially I don't, but I do come back and give it a bevel modifier just because I'm not sure how, like I want to do a lot of adjusting here. Does it need to be a small bevel or a big bevel. So I use the modifier and that allows me to make edits in the future. You can see here I've spawned a cylinder and this is going to be for the form change that I have over here. And I think that when it comes to modeling and blender, the one thing that I think people undervalue the most is form changes with booleans. Because there's a lot of people where they want to put a bolt in, obviously you're going to use a Boolean, you know, you want to do, I don't know, a cut line, maybe you'll use a Boolean, not really sure how people do that, but form changes with Booleans are really where it's at because it's so editable and you get so much out of it. If you're just using it for bolts, then it's all surface level detail, you know, it's kind of like what I was saying at the beginning, the silhouette needs to be the first thing that's defined because it's so important. And if you can use booleans to do that, then you can have a lot of flexibility. It's kind of like in the earlier section at the beginning actually when I was showcasing the slingshot pistol thing, I don't really know what to call it, but so much of that design, even though it's collapsed now, was initially a boolean. Like literally just extruding out a shape as a silhouette and and then using it as a boolean. For obvious reasons, you have to collapse that eventually because it's one of those things that is very high on the meter of like, we need to do a fillet, we can't do a fillet unless we collapse it. Some things you don't have that, some things are just sort of like on top of a mesh and they can stay there basically till the end of your modeling process. But silhouette, eventually you do have to collapse. But I guess my point is that for that window opportunity you can get so much mileage out of it if you do it properly. And certainly when I was concepting this you would have seen me using it a lot. So I don't know maybe in the future I'll try to just record my concepting process because although it is I think a bit annoying to see someone do 10 revisions and constantly adjusting, it definitely will sort of give an insight into really the process that I think I'm trying to get you to understand. So yeah, maybe I should have just recorded the original creation, but you know this is an hour and 45 minutes, so you want me to talk on a six hour time lapse? I mean I don't think anybody is particularly interested in that, but perhaps I can record clips of it and just kind of, you know, at a later stage go over my thought process because it is so specific to the original creation, not the production creation where I have a reference of a 3D model, but like the actual inception of the model and how that goes about being created. You can see here I'm doing a bevel modifier and the bevel modifier at the bottom is a bit stretched and this doesn't really matter to me. You'll notice that I have a lot of aspects to my model that are not perfect. There's topology, stretching, there's shading errors. It really does not matter at all. Like the final result, if you cannot visualize the final result and if you need like mesh editing errors to look good, then you need to fix that inside yourself because it is the least of your problems. You should be able to see the design is complete. If you need the mesh to be complete and not have errors, then that's a problem because just block it out. Figure out a way, get it out your mind. It's not important. stuff like that into people I talked to is so obvious, but I don't know the full extent. Like something that's hard about releasing a tutorial is that the guy who just downloaded Blender yesterday and the guy who's been using it for 10 years are going to be watching the same thing. And so I'm trying to figure out exactly what advice is actually pertinent to this video. So I don't know. I'm kind of just spanning the gambit here, but I imagine that the split is probably more towards like, I don't know, six months of progress to maybe three years, which is still a pretty big gap, honestly. And I'd say one of the most relevant topics to any category of people, whether you started yesterday, you've been doing this for five years even, is that everybody goes way too far into detail. So I think there's no going wrong if you're harping on something like staying in a blockout state because that will always be where progress is made. When you first start off, you've got like shiny object syndrome. You want to go into detail and you make it a part of your personality. Oh my gosh, I just love putting details everywhere and you think you're really good because you You just litter bolts on every single surface, but the real progress will always be made in a primitive form. That's where all the juice is. And no matter if you just started yesterday or you've been doing this for a long time, you constantly need to be reminded of that. I know I do, because I still get myself into situations where I'm going into too much detail and I have to be reminded not to. So it is important information no matter where you are. I suppose I could talk about what I'm doing here. I've done it a few times. This is like a recent addition to my workflow, but you can see that I was using proportional editing. I use some of this in the main tutorial as well, but it is, I kind of almost use it as a lattice. I think the lattice is horrible in Blender. It's really like a hard ops add on that I use for it. But compared to Max, I haven't used Max in years, but Max's was really good and this is really bad. So I'll sometimes substitute it by just using proportional editing. And you can kind of scroll with proportional editing and it will change the amount of vertices that are affected by the gradient area. And you can also affect the gradient area by clicking next to the proportional editing sign and it'll make it sharper or smoother. Yeah, but it is useful, and I did use it a few times already on this. I like, very nice, I approve. This detail is interesting. So this detail, it takes a while for me to recreate it. Obviously when you're concepting, you don't have to follow reference, so it's a bit harder actually for stuff like this where you're trying to get like a non-standard, non-planar form out of something. So yeah, I use a cylinder and I just warp it down and into place and then I get it to kind of go from a thick to a thin bevel across the cylinder. And I think it looks pretty good. I like doing details like this. You usually have to do these in later stages, like once you've done some collapsing, because trying to get this to work without doing mesh editing, at least to look final, you definitely have to collapse it. But yeah, once I start getting into doing weird strange babbles like this, I think that's really what puts my style or puts a nice finishing touch on it, because it is such a non-standard form change. And you'll see, I do a lot of alteration with where it's positioned, because you have to line up two bullions. And each time you move one of the bullions, The other one doesn't line up, so it's just a bit hard. These are forms that I do in ZBrush, honestly. And being able to find a way to do that in Blender is really nice, and it's so loose. Like I can kind of do it to a 90% accuracy, like vertices won't be matching, and then I collapse it. And then in mesh editing, I'll just go in and merge vertices by the time it's done, at all. Look pretty neat, pretty clean. It's kind of funny because me doing this detail right now is completely the opposite of what you should be doing if you were designing. It is the perfect example of going into detail too quickly. So don't do that, but like I said, when you're making something that already exists, it is tempting to just go straight into the juicy bits because it doesn't really matter all that much. I mean, it does matter. It's, you know, if you're making something that's big, like a weapon, then you need to ensure that all the proportions are correct. You need to make sure that, you know, the animation and whatnot is adequately tested, but for something that is this small and insignificant, if you're doing this as a production artist, doesn't really matter if you go super far into detail. But yeah, don't not do this. If you are a concept, bad idea, you will come to regret it. I'm trying to think of things to talk about. I think everybody's probably gonna be curious if I still use ZBrush. I said previously I do. I'm kind of working on a workflow that could potentially integrate both of these. I mean, I've already done it before. I haven't really posted about it, but the issue is obviously that ZBrush, as soon as you import it, you're always going to have like a 10 trillion poly model. And while I do think it is still the best if you are trying to get complex forms on hard surface, you know, you're trying to explore, there is definitely a lot of potential there. I think that, I don't know, there's something to be said about having constraints that is important. And I think that there is a time for constraints and there's a time to not have constraints. And when you're dealing with a software like Blender, There's just so many advantages that are beyond the actual designing aspect. Like me being able to apply the final materials, like as soon as I start modeling, I could just have a block, I could have two blocks and I could put on a final set of materials that I saved from a previous file and have final lighting and have animation in place as soon as I get, you know, the building blocks there. There's just something to be said about having that as a convenience. And I think that obviously the more niche you are with what you're doing, especially as a like just making weapons or hard surface props, people have a tendency to just get the software that is the best at that one thing. And I think that's what Zbrush is to me for other people. It's a CAD software, but I think making the compromise slightly, like it is a, to me, it's not that big of a compromise once you get over it, but the benefits that you get in every other sector dealing with polys specifically in blender is just immense and it can't be discounted. And I think once you really start working with clients, it's, you can't really do it any other way. You know, I know that plasticity has a bridge and everything and so it's totally possible. I know people who do that, but with ZBrush it is very inconvenient to constantly, because really you can only render in key shot. You take it into blender, you're gonna be dynamishing it. And that's like a, if it's a big enough model, you're spending way too much time worrying about something that is just should be completely not on your mind in order to get something to a client. So yeah, I don't know. If I did do a hybrid workflow, I think I'd kind of be sacrificing a lot still just because of the nature of Dynamesh, you're always going to be destroying your performance in any render engine. And just say goodbye to animation completely. Of course you can find workarounds, but we're just talking generally, it is very inconvenient. But yeah, for anything that's not a gun, I still use it. Like if I'm making like a mech foot or something, or I want to make like a bike frame, anything where there is a large, like you'd use sub D for, ZBrush is just amazing, you know? It's just really good at doing non-planar forms. And I still think that there's been a lot of people who have adopted it in recent years. Obviously I didn't create the workflow, But yeah, a lot of people are starting to switch over to ZBrush and I'm curious to see if they stay with it because I think that they obviously understand the downsides but yeah, the upsides with the actual aesthetic and the form and the speed at which you can do things is pretty crazy still. And I don't know why this is not bully ending. I think I just symmetrized it again and then it did it fine But Blender rarely does this when a model is so simple. Usually it has to be a little bit more complex, like a lot of vertices that are isolated or something and not connected to edges. But yeah, Blender's very good surprisingly at handling Booleans. There's a point in time, not even that long ago. I think not even three or four years ago, you couldn't do coplanar Booleans inside of Blender. Meaning like, if I wanted to have two surfaces on top of each other without any sort of gap in between, it would not allow me to do that. And that was the main reason why I didn't switch because even in max, I would use Booleans and often there would be a coplanar aspect to it. You know, coplanar Booleans are really when you start getting complicated with Booleans. A bolt, for example, is a very simple cylindrical Boolean. Everybody could do it in any software. But once you start trying to do like form changes with Booleans, like actually using Booleans in the CAD sense, where it's like everything you do, then there is, I don't know, I think Blender is probably the best software, the best poly modeling software that handles Booleans. And yeah, I mean, very, very rarely will I have a Boolean not work. And usually it doesn't work because there's like 30 other Booleans. So it's kind of understandable. But once you've done a lot of Booleans, you understand how it works and you can fix them pretty easily. Here, sort of towards the end, I do a lot of topology cleanup, but you could theoretically just not do any of that and be sort of fine. Depends how far you want to push it. This is, I guess, the upper limit of Blender is that if you make stuff dirty, you can do it quickly, but in the later stages you might have to clean it up in order to do fillets and stuff. So there is definitely a downside to it, but I personally just really like the fact that everything is integrated into one software. And honestly, it's not super often that you have geometry like this. I mean, in my main pistol tutorial, I think that most things are fairly simple, you know, like this workflow is actually very specific to the subject matter that you're making. You could not use this if you were designing a car, obviously, right? But if you're making a radio, if you're making a gun, a scope, anything that is fairly planar, that would probably be pretty easy to do in a CAD software, this workflow would do you well for. So it's specific. And the great thing about this is you can do sub D in the same software. We can sculpt in the same software. It's all here. I can import a set of hands. I can animate it with a gun that I'm making. And yeah, there's no continuity. There's just, OK, I made something. I'd like to animate it. I don't have to re-import it into another software. I don't have to think about logistically how I'm going to get that into a different render engine because it's 15 billion polys. It's just very convenient. And yeah, I don't know. I think for me, I've always had a very hard relationship with Poly because it is so constrained, but I feel like I'm just now getting to the point where I can really manipulate the forms and feel confident that I can get the best design because so much of what a good design is, I found from switching softwares is dependent on the constraints of the software. And it's definitely not a majority. I'd say it's like maybe 25%, like it's definitely fundamentals are the driving factor as to whether or not you have a successful design, but coming from softwares that are incredibly rigid and then going to something as smooth as ZBrush, I feel like I gained a perspective on just how, how software can impact your performance with a design, depending on how you design. I have a very iterative process where I don't necessarily know where I'm going from the start, but I put a foundation down, I get a couple layers in there and then all of a sudden I find my way through. And when the software is very rigid, I find it hard to build layers. I find it hard to really build a good foundation. So I think at least with the methods that I'm using here I have been able to get a good base in, a good foundation that allows me to build on top of it fairly easily. All right, I know you can't tell because this is so seamless. I've just done some movie magic here, but I've actually gone to bed and I've woken up again. So my voice sounds like pop smoke or something. It's because I am a well rested man. So I have no idea what I was talking about and I don't really know what to talk about for the rest of this. We have a lot to get through. I think maybe I can talk about joining objects because this is a struggle that I have. So you can see right here I'm boolean, I'm unioning two different objects together. And basically at some point when you're designing in Poly, in order for you to progress, you have to start to make things less editable. And just generally this is how it is with any software you use. Once you get to a certain level of progression, you have to like collapse everything, whether that's modifiers or it's just like you're adding fillets to things that are gonna make it less editable, you need to build on top of your base and that often causes stuff to become less editable. And that's a hard decision to make because if you make the wrong decision, then you're left with something that is incredibly difficult to work with. What I've found is I procrastinate on this a lot and it's super easy to procrastinate on it because you can infinitely increase the potential of your design if you just keep it super editable. But if you do that, then you just never progress a design. So you have to at some point commit to collapsing everything. And yeah, it's hard, because I can't just tell people, you know, okay, there you go, you can start collapsing it. It's very similar to when I'm watching someone model and they're going into detail and you're like, okay, don't, you're going into detail, you need to stay in the block out. And then they ask, okay, well, when do I go into detail? And I have to tell them like, you know, Well, when you have a good base, well, what is a good base? You will have a very hard time seeing it because you need to do it a thousand times before you know exactly when to progress. And it is sort of the same conversation about, you know, block out. Basically my view of the block out is that you're always in block out. Block out is really just a mindset. It is, is this editable? Is this easy to move around? And there are kind of stages. There's primary block out, the secondary, and then the tertiary, throughout those stages, you've got subcategories where you're just trying to keep things incredibly editable. And eventually you have to get to that stage where you just throw that out the window and you say, okay, we're finalizing this. We're putting fillets on stuff. We're merging stuff together. We're collapsing modifiers and we're just going to try to make this a final model. And yeah, so that's a hard thing to do. In fact, I think it's so important that probably deserves an entire tutorial on its own. So if that's something that you're interested in, then let me know. So you can see I'm making this little switch thing here. A lot of times when I'm concepting, I'll make stuff and I don't really know what it is. And then I figure it out as I go. Like I said, I'm not super big into planning absolutely everything, but at least for designs that start in 3D, there's a lot of me putting down, especially text. Like I think text is a super underrated design element. I usually just use like 3D text and I'll put it on top as a floater. But I find as soon as I put down text, it gives meaning to things. And so in other designs in the block ad, I'll just scour it throughout and it will give me ideas as to what I'm doing. But that switch that I have down there, you know, initially you place it down and you don't really know what it does. And then I put those two pieces of text and it's like, okay, well it's a rotational dial or something. And what that rotational dial does, you can come up with all sorts of ideas. But the more sophisticated your design is gonna be, the more you have to figure out the function of the design because it really is at the highest level, a dance between form and function. And I'm not gonna get super into design fundamentals and talking design, because I think that at least for this tutorial, we're more focused on the software aspect of this and how to remain loose and keep things editable. But it should inform all the decisions that you're making and most importantly, what to prioritize when you are designing. You can see in the video right here, I'm still using that Boolean for each rung of this piece because the solidify modifier is going to warp everything. So I have to constantly be pushing it out a little more than it should be to get it to hit the Boolean that I have on the front and back slant. Yeah, it's about how you use the tools. I have a lot of ways that I do things and it's more about how creative you can get with because a lot of people, I think what they do is they'd literally just collapse it. And it's a shame because then they would probably lose a lot of editability. Like I said, I know what's going to happen here because I've already made this, but still, if I want to do anything, I need to retain the editability of having a shell modifier because as soon as you collapse that, even if you want to redo it by deleting all the backfaces, backfaces, like making that selection is just annoying. So you have to learn how the software works and you have to kind of mold yourself into it a little bit. And that can be a bit of a learning curve, but I think that you just have to do it a lot. And yeah, that's why I think the pistol tutorial is so pivotal is because like I'm giving you guys a, like provided if you've never done like this Boolean Workflow and Blender you're just starting, you're kind of getting the tools, and then you just need to do it like a hundred times. You know, you need to make your own stuff, you need to follow along with tutorials, and so I recommend that everybody goes all the way through on the pistol tutorial, follows everything. It might be hard, you know, but even just pick out a piece, be like, okay, I wanna do the, you know, the grip area, or I wanna do the top slide. There's enough content in there for each scenario that you'd probably have on any design that you're doing there and here, you know, because you can also make this probably if you want a bit of a challenge and I don't walk through every step in the creation process of this, it's just a time lapse, but I don't know, maybe at some point I'll release it as a five hour standalone thing. Perhaps I'll do commentary on it, But yeah, it is a hard thing to talk for five hours, but at least when you're describing what you're doing with the tools as you're doing it, there's something to talk about. So yeah, I recommend everybody, whether it's making your own things or it's following along with a tutorial, you just have to get reps in. You have to do it a lot because a lot of this stuff might be unintuitive if you come from a traditional poly modeling workflow, but even if you just integrate 10% of what I'm doing here, like if you don't use live Booleans or Booleans at all, which some people are crazy enough to actually still not use, believe it or not, just learning how someone else does that workflow and then putting that in just 10% of maybe something you're making can have a pretty positive effect, I think. So get your reps in, do what's needed to become comfortable with this unorthodox workflow, and you will see results, trust me. If you pay really close attention, you'll notice that the back end over here kind of looks like a furby. There is the eyes and then you get the beak. That's the button at the bottom. Yeah, it looks like a demonic Furby of some sort just staring at you as you adopt this workflow. A bit terrifying to be honest, but listen, I didn't say it was going to be easy. All right, this is this is your hell week right now. You have to look at a Furby in the eyes as you boolean into his soul with a six-sided pentagon. Is that a pentagon? I don't know. I'm a 3D artist that doesn't know his primitives. What can I say? All right, I think I'm going to get a cheeseburger. I will be back in 10 minutes. This is not a tactic to have less work on my plate. Okay, this is not a tactic to To do that, I'm just hungry. I'm gonna let the video play, all right? you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you You're still there? Yeah, so that was a good cheeseburger. It was a big Mac meal. So I had a burger, I had fries, and I had a drink. And you're like, why'd you have that in the morning? Because I am a machine, okay? I'm a machine. I need my fuel. I got my fuel. Everything's perfect. Are you enjoying yourself? Are you learning something? That's good. That's good. Well, I'm going to go to the toilet, so I'll be back in another, no, I'm just kidding. What are we doing? Yes, modeling. Okay, so right now I'm doing some topology work. I think it's kind of interesting because I, that you can really decide how much topology work you want to do with this. I'm doing a little bit more right now just because the shape of this particular mesh is very strange. Some meshes don't require any. If it's totally planar, then you can basically totally use bullions and you don't have to worry about it at all. But this shape has this weird curvature and it's two curvatures in one. I kind of talked about that a little bit before where that's just going to be a a complicated shape that poly modeling is going to suffer with. But if you only get most shapes that are on weapons or sites or radios or really anything that is hard surface, there's not too many shapes that are like this. And because you're in poly, you can do it properly if you want. You know, you can make it low poly, do it sub D. And that's sort of the great thing. I don't know if I'm going to show this other workflow because I haven't really figured it out myself, but But there is a workflow where you basically, inside of Blender, do a voxel remesh. It's basically like a dinomesh. And then you can sculpt on top of it. And I've seen some people kind of floating this workflow around the place. And it sounds super exciting, but I've used Blender's sculpting tools. And any excitement that I had is completely out the window because they are not particularly really intuitive as of now. But who knows in the future maybe. I mean having the ability to do that inside of the same software would be crazy. Yeah, because there's some instances like I said, I think before in a previous section, like when I'm doing grips, I like to do them in ZBrush because especially if I'm going really crazy with them, I can do a lot. I can, you know, really push the design on a grip. It's pretty, it's, yeah, it's pretty impossible to do iteration at least with poly modeling on a grip just because of the soft surface nature of it. You'd have to use sub D and then you're drawing with a topo gun the whole time. It's just not very fun. But yeah, I could probably do that inside of Blender in the sculpting mode with a voxel remesh. So maybe I might look into that, but definitely not for this tutorial because it is too inconsistent. These are at least my most consistent methods that I have to date. And honestly, half of them I don't use all the time. Like you see right here, I'm using basic Booleans. There's not a lot of crazy add-ons. I'd say the one add-on that I use the most is mesh machine and probably hard ops, but you don't need to have a whole bunch of plugins. Like I'd say, you know, maybe three or four plugins, honestly, just pick the best ones, like mesh machine, hard ops, Zen barbecue is really good. You'll see me use Zen barbecue at the end just to get soft edges without having to change my topology. Cause so much of like, if I wanted to use a bevel modifier, I'd have to clean up all my topology, but with Zen barbecue, you don't have to. The only issue with Zen barbecue is that you have to collapse your Booleans because it doesn't recognize them as geometry until you collapse them. There might be a workaround for that, but yeah. So Zen barbecue, super important, hard ops mesh machine, and then, you know, maybe some miscellaneous one. I think that I don't really use quadramechor all that much, but yeah, you can see from the work I'm doing here, I'm not even using a lot of the add-ons. It is mostly base tools, base bullions, and how you go about using them. If you are someone who's very creative, you can get a ton done with just the base tools, the base bullions, set of blender, and everything else is just like sort of quality of life, you know, trying to do a flatten operation by, I don't even know what you'd do. to get the same sort of effect. You know, you'd probably have to align your pivot with sub-object pivot, and then you'd have to make sure that your gizmo is placed in a certain area, and then you'd have to do like a z scale. But then things would warp, and I don't even know if you know what I'm talking about, but there's just a whole bunch of considerations that a single button on a tool could do. So why wouldn't you go ahead and get that? You know, Blender's a free software, if you're someone who pays for 3D software, you're paying, I don't know what it even is now, like every month or every year. If you just buy four add-ons, you spend like $150, that is so cheap. And it's a one-time purchase and you get access to some of the best tools on the market. So yeah, I would get those add-ons regardless. They are going to help you with modeling in all aspects, even beyond this workflow. They're just good tools that really should be standard in every poly modeling software on the market at this point. but you know, E.D.s, what E.D.s. Going back to our design here, because we haven't talked about it in a while, I think really at least this part of the design is kind of like I'm separating a bunch of pieces. Like I haven't really gotten to it yet, quite yet, but there are sections where I've just had to basically make a base mesh and then it's about separating them. And I think when you're in the design process, it's not necessarily that easy. It's not like you're just splitting up a puzzle from a box into a thousand pieces. But here you can see it is kind of like that. And I'm doing some complicated union bullions here. You can see I'm doing some cleanup. I don't even think you necessarily have to clean up something like this, especially if it's not directly visible, like there is a piece that goes in front of it. So there is some considerations that you could make depending on what you wanna clean up and what you wanna leave bare. But yeah, I usually, if I can clean it up, I will, but you don't have to. If you're super allergic to topology, there are ways that you can get around it. And but yeah, it is just clean up at least. It's not like I have to worry about topology for getting forms and stuff that is usually quite rare. And yeah, you can see with the front piece here, this is more of what I was meaning with splitting things up like a puzzle. Basically everything is slanted and has a cut line separating it. And there's something to be said about having depth, like making sure that not everything is on the same exact sort of plane, you know, there's some that go further in and some that protrude out. But I found that I quite like this look of having these simple separations. It immediately gives you some hierarchy to work with and it's very easy to get. Now you could use what is it called decal machine to do a lot of this. And definitely in the concept stages, I did use decal machine. So you shouldn't discount using the cut lines or especially the slice function. So I showed you guys what the slice function was with decal machine where essentially it works like a Boolean. And the only reason that I don't use that here is because I already know what this is gonna look like. But if I was just concepting and I wasn't sure, I would probably very quickly use that. But it is almost equally as fast to just use geometry. The only time I'd say it is not fast when using geometry is if you're trying to do something that's a little bit more complicated than a one surface insertion. Like right now you see this is just a plane that it's cutting into. And so it's really not that complicated, but you can get very complicated very quickly with decal machine. And there's a few, a few hiccups. I just, I constantly find myself forgetting how to use a lot of the features in decal machine. It is kind of buggy with some stuff, but for cut lines in particular, it's, I don't see a lot of inconsistencies. The only thing that I think is annoying is it does make duplicates of your materials sometimes, but Blender generally does that with a lot of stuff. So it's just another variable. that's a bit annoying, but you do get a lot of mileage out of it. And so I would probably use that for some stuff, but eventually you do have to actually make insertions. It's kind of like what I was saying about, uh, when to progress. Like if everything is decal machine and nothing is broken up, then you're going to be limited in the operations you can do, you know, like you need to kind of progress by collapsing stuff eventually. And so, yeah, it's good for the beginning stages and so much of what I'm talking about. And this tutorial is just the beginning stages. It's nothing more than sort of an advanced blockout. And for most clients, they're totally fine with that because that's where 99% of the problems are. If you can solve 99% of the problems and a production artist has to come in and put fillets on things or has to come in and weld things together, et cetera, I think that they are more than happy. You know, it's far easier to interpret a 3D concept design than a 2D one. Even if it's a scrappy 3D one, it is just, you get information from all angles. You can light it, you can put different materials on it. It is a far more, it's a higher resolution piece of information for a production artist to work off of. So, I mean, it's up to you how far you wanna take it. Obviously, you could take it as far as you want. you could make it a high poly for them to bake down. And some clients will specifically ask for that. They'll be like, yes, we want this to directly be baked down to a high poly. And so you have to put in a lot more work. But most of the time it is a concept. And they have a production artist that's going to come in and they're going to optimize it. And a consideration that clients have to make as well is like, if you have, let's say, I don't know, a 500 day rate and they want you to put in an extra week of effort just to make things clean with the topology. They are paying a substantially higher rate for something that is as simple as topology reworking. Like if they got a production artist to do it, it would be two times less the cost versus a concept artist. You're paying me to solve very complicated artistic problems. You know, the rate that you get paid is correlated to the problem that you solve. And if you're just doing topology reworking, then the amount of people in the marketplace that can do topology working is substantially higher than that of someone who can do complex aesthetic hard surface props that fit your brief. And so yeah, it's just, it's a waste of money in my opinion. I've never gotten it to the point where they want something that is bakeable. You know, they might ask for it to be close to it, but they've never suggested that I need to, I don't know, have fillets on all the edges and make it to where you know I do the UVs or something, that's just out of the question. But it is something I recommend bringing up with your client in the call because I have had people reach out even for stuff that you just think okay but that's a AAA studio, I would they even suggest that the people that you're talking to are not hard surface concept designers, right? They might know the production pipeline, they might be a 2D artist, art director, but a lot of people are still not familiar with exactly this sort of workflow, this sort of label, position, whatever you want to call it. And so you have to make it clear, look, I just do the concept, I make it in 3D, you're not going to be able to bake with it, but you give it to a production artist and they will be 95% of the way there. And I still communicate that every time, just in case. And if you're If you're someone who wants to do the high poly, then go for it. I mean, there's people who do the high poly, they do the concept, the high poly, the low poly, they bake everything, make it into a game res mesh. They do all of that. And it depends what you want to do with your time. I think that for me, I'm just very focused on design. And I know the production pipeline, I've done the production pipeline. I was a production artist for a year and a half before I ever did concept design. But to me, concept design is far more interesting. And in terms of like bang for your buck, I think with a client, if you do both, and somewhere along the line, I kind of think that you're gonna get paid a little bit less than if you just did the one, right? Because the skill set of one piece of it, concept design versus production, is just, it's far more rare, right? Like your value to the market is based off of scarcity. And so if you take the two aspects of your workflow, right, you have the concept and then you have the production. You've got one aspect, the concept, the first aspect, which is very scarce. It's hard to find people that are good at doing this at a high level. That's why they get paid more. And then you take the other side, which is the production. And there's production artists everywhere, and they get paid substantially less. And so when you combine those two, it's just, I feel like it's a confusing proposition. It might seem like, I think, to an indie developer, it's very useful, but again, if we're talking about AAA clients, they hire specialists because they want the best of everything. And so, I don't know. I know there are people who do that and they get paid a lot of money. I just think that they could probably get paid more money if they put all of their eggs into one basket, but that's just me. I'm a very specialist kind of person. I'm like, there are people who are horizontal, and then there are people who are vertical, and people who are horizontal have this very generalist attitude. And generalists are great. I mean, generalists run studios, but the time horizon for a generalist to make the kind of money that a specialist would make is just far, it exceeds my time horizon. I don't wanna wait 20 years before I, you know, can use all my skills as like a studio head or something like that. So if you're starting off, I always recommend that you hyper specialize. Some people might disagree with that, but I think that you're definitely gonna get paid the most if you're the best at something. And I think that if you just commit to being the best at something, it's far more achievable than, you know, like broadly saying, I'm just gonna kind of do everything because eventually you'll get that horizontal skill set. Like maybe you'll get five of them to the same height of one vertical skill set, but that's gonna take you five times longer. So I don't know, maybe you disagree, but that's kinda how I think about things. And that's the way that I've built my career is I just focus on guns and small props. Recently I've done environment stuff, but I think that my main proposition is like weapons, props, things that are kind of all in the same bucket. But yeah, those are my thoughts. back to what we're actually here for, which is the scope. I think that something maybe I haven't touched on is, you know, this scope, there's a aspect of asymmetry to it. And I touch on this in the main pistol tutorial because the main pistol is asymmetrical. And a lot of people don't know how to go about doing asymmetry because so much of what you make in 3D is symmetrized. But I think you'll see kind of what I do here and what I do in the main pistol tutorial is you have to do a lot of detaching. It is not a good idea to keep two parts of a mesh, like the asymmetrical part and the, I guess they're both asymmetrical parts, but it's not a good idea to keep them on the same mesh because there is a tendency to instinctually symmetrize something. And as soon as you do that, you just lose all your progress. You're gonna symmetrize it, you're gonna collapse it without even knowing, and it causes a lot of problems. And so what I kind of do to tackle things that are asymmetrical is you build it up as much as you can with symmetry because it shares like 90% of its characteristics, presumably, right? At least in this case, the case of the pistol, 90% symmetrical. But then there's those parts that are asymmetrical and you want to try and build those out of other meshes as much as possible. But if it needs to do like an intersect, you need to use booleans, you need to detach the one side from the other. And you're just trying to get as much mileage with the symmetrical parts as possible before you jump ship and take it completely into its own bespoke mesh. So we're not quite there yet. I'll talk more about the asymmetrical aspect of this once we're there, but I just kind of remember that both of those, you know, my pistol and this do have asymmetrical aspects. And I think it's good to know how to tackle that, how to manage that, because if you're going to make a design, asymmetry is just always going to stand out in a design. So many things are completely symmetrical, and it's boring. And if you can even make like a really bespoke element, for example, with the pistol I have a cylinder in the center of it that is asymmetrical. That's just really interesting. That's going to catch a lot of people's attention. And I guarantee you if that pistol didn't have that asymmetrical element, it would not be, nobody would think that it's interesting, but because it does, it's kind of quirky and unique and it draws people's eyes. So you can integrate those elements into your design. I think you could make something pretty cool. thing you'll notice here is, um, yeah, right here, I scroll through my Booleans. It's kind of funny because I honestly did not use this scroll method when I was making my pistol and I had never used it. And I finally got around because I knew it existed. I know people who use it. I finally got around to using it. And I'm like, why did I not know about this? Because for me, I always have too many Booleans. and it's just so convenient. It's called EverScroll. I mentioned it before. So you guys already know about it, but EverScroll with, I believe it's hard ops, is just so convenient. You know, there's a lot of things that I think that I don't use. Like one thing that I know people use that they're just infatuated with it, which I personally, I just could never get into it, was BoxCutter. I don't use BoxCutter. I don't like BoxCutter. I don't know. It's just a personal thing. I prefer to spawn boxes like you saw, I just did. Maybe it's inconvenient, but for me, I don't know, I just, I could never get into it. And so sometimes I write things off, but ever scroll is actually just really, really good. And you'll find a lot of these tiny quality of life things. Like I wouldn't think that an organization tool would be so impactful, but even something like stash, stashes with mesh machine, that's really good as well. Like just not even so that you can do the operations that I was showing you guys where you can, you know, commit to a Boolean and then go back and revert the mesh, but just in general, being able to save pieces without having to constantly make other folders, you know, just a quick menu essentially, it's really useful. So there's a lot of little things like that that are important to learn And maybe you don't initially do it because it doesn't seem like it's that important, but over time I think I've optimized my workflow into a much faster place based off all these little tiny quality of life tools that I've started to use. You can see on the video right now, I am applying the Bevel modifier to quite a few things. And you'll see I start to do this usually around the end of a model. And I'm not super anal about it. I don't do it to everything. If something looks like it has good topology and I'm closing in on finishing, I'll just start to apply it. But it's really not a big deal, it's a modifier. So I can literally just take it off at any point. But I use this method where I have, sometimes for instance, you will need to have a thicker edge and a thinner edge. And you can do that with a bevel modifier. You can have weights, which I use all the time. And I've used throughout my pistol concepting tutorial as well. But sometimes you'll have an edge that cannot be filleted to the diameter that you want because of topology. And so you can mix the bevel modifier with Zen Barbecue, which is a bevel shader that has weights. It's effectively the same thing. It's a weighted bevel shader. And you get the best of both worlds. So that is something that I do often. So when I come around here and I just apply a bevel modifier to some stuff, I don't care if some of it doesn't work and others do. For instance, the shell. The shell is not going to work with a bevel modifier. There's just too many vertices that are overlapping with edges in weird ways. It's not going to have a consistent edge bevel. And that doesn't matter to me because if that's the case, then I make sure that everything is collapsed, I can go in with Zen barbecue at a later stage and get the thicker bevels. So thinner bevels I can sometimes get away with using the bevel modifier and then thicker ones. I can do Zen barbecue or I could just do all Zen barbecue. It's really sort of up to you, but usually if it's like big geometry or like it's silhouette changing stuff, then I'll have to use a bevel modifier because that actually changes the geometry. and jumping back to the topic of asymmetry. So you'll see what I'm doing here is I'm trying to get this shape from the shape I already have here. I'm pretty certain I, in the end, actually just remake it because it's too messy and it was just easier to completely remake it. So sometimes I'll do that and not have to, because if I delve into the topology and try to fix it, sometimes a mesh is too messed up. Like it's not worth saving. and especially with such a simple profile, it's better to completely remake it. It's one thing if it's the entire white shell piece, then you probably need to make it work, but sometimes rebuilding things is honestly the fastest solution. So we're still working with Polys, there's still a downside to it, but we can stretch that as far as humanly possible and get a good workflow from it. There's always a solution to any problem And your creativity is the only limit. So some problems are bigger than others, but if you think through it and pre-plan things, a lot of the time you can totally escape the annoyingness of having to do a retopology and whatever. But yeah, I mean, I don't like that aspect. I think that when you're designing, you should have the freedom to do whatever you want. And most of the time you do. So again, it's totally subject matter dependent. Some things are just gonna cause more problems than others, but out of this entire mesh, that's really the only thing that I've actually had to rebuild. You know, I actually didn't even, I don't think I even rebuilt it when I was doing the original concept. So sometimes I don't even put that much effort into it. I get something that is passable and get it to where it needs to be. And then at the very end, if I wanna remake it for cleanness sake, I'll do that, you don't have to. In a second here, I'm going to start to do an operation that's a bit complicated. And I haven't done a lot of complicated operations honestly with geometry, sorry, with Booleans on geometry in this particular model that I'm making. The pistol I do, geometry Booleans all over the place. But this is basically one of the geometry Booleans that that I'm gonna do. So you see, I just extended that fillet and this is already detached. So this is an asymmetrical piece. This isn't gonna affect the other side and vice versa. But I take the cylinder here and I line it up with the top and bottom rails. And I'm gonna use it to make a form change. And the reason I do this versus editing the geometry is because it's just so much simpler. Like it might seem originally or initially that this is convoluted, But when you see how much control, like if I wanna push it back, if I wanna move it up, if I wanna delete it, extremely easy. And so that right there was an example of a geometry Boolean where I am getting a form edit out of a piece of a Boolean. So I do that all over the place on the Pistol tutorial. There's sections where you press the, I think it's tabbed to go in and out of edit mode. The fact that I don't know that scares me. But I press Tab and the before and after, if there's a different silhouette, there's different details, different form changes, everything is different just because of the live Boolean stack that I have on it. And if I do this on this model, I don't think there's a single piece that really has a crazy amount of any of that going on. So, you know, we're doing another one right here. This is me remaking this. So I think what I do here is I just shell it out and I delete half of it and then I shell it out. No, I don't, right? So that's the issue with shelling is that it tapers it. So I just do an extrude, basically. I extrude to zero and then I pull it out and that makes it to where it is a consistent line throughout. So you can see that's what I do right there. And yeah, I still have a lot to merge on the asymmetrical side. So you can see I'm just setting this one up and boy, do I want a cheeseburger. guys, I know for you, I just had a cheeseburger, but I'm on a three cheeseburger diet a day, honestly, honest to God, I'm 700 pounds, ask Hubert. But this cylinder on this side, I also remake. I think what I do is I do symmetry on the bullion, I collapse the symmetry and then I detach the left side of the bullion to put it. Yeah, you can see it. There we go. To make another bullion on this side. And that just makes it to where it's a lot easier. Because again, you could keep the asymmetrical aspect within one object, but I'm always uncomfortable because it just takes me mindlessly pressing the hard ops mirror, and then all of a sudden it's, you know, I collapse it and it's gone. So I like to ensure that they are detached, they're on a different mesh, and I'm not confusing things. And to me, this piece that I'm also doing here is a bit complicated because it's weird the asymmetrical aspect of the piece I'm working on right now, when it goes to the other side you'll see, it has a difference but the difference is under a mesh, right? So like you wouldn't even be able to tell if it was asymmetrical or not, but I do it anyways because I don't know. You probably shouldn't. I mean if you're a concept artist like you know especially for games and stuff, it's if it's not seen then you know it doesn't really matter, but every now and then I get carried away and so I'll make something that is hard and you won't even see it. But yeah, I mean you can choose whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. The more effort you put into something the better you're going to get. So even if someone doesn't see it you're still getting some mileage out of the endeavor. You can see here I do the method again where I'm using proportional editing and I just have a big brush on it so that it does the gradation, how I'd like it. And then I do the extrude to zero, push out just like I did the side piece of the asymmetrical bit here. And this is going to be an inset. Now the reason I'm making this a boolean is because the geometry is just totally messed up on the inside of the other one. So normally if this was a planar surface you just do an inset. I don't know if the cylinder is totally cylindrical on this, I imagine I haven't applied the booleans yet, but you would just keep it within the geometry. You know, you don't have to make everything a bully. And if it can be done as a normal operation, then it's better to have good topology than bad topology. It gives you more opportunity. So we do what we can, and we can what we do. But in the end, it has to be done. So it does. And if you think we're gonna merge this or not, because if we merge that, than I would be set here for 12 hours doing topology. So we're just gonna put it on top of the mesh, which is totally fine. You don't even really see the transition, so it's okay. A lot of these transitions, especially if you're just doing rendered images, you can paint the bevel transition in Photoshop. I don't like to do that, but there are certain things where it's just like, okay, so I'm gonna spend 12 hours doing topology or I can do one brush stroke in Photoshop. So some things are like that. I usually use Photoshop if I want to emphasize bespoke roughness details. So for instance, a lot of times when you do materials, you will have a noise texture that is projected onto your mesh. This is for concept. This isn't like a substance painter workflow or anything. And the issue with that is a lot of times you'll want a specific piece of dirt or grunge roughness, reflectivity in one area, and so Photoshop is pretty easy to do that. Of course when you do that you have to be mindful if you wanted to get an animation out of your mesh then it's not going to show up in the animation. Also you'll have to do it consistently throughout every angle. So if I take a you know a render of my pistol from a side view and then a front view if it's showing the same side of the mesh then you'll have to paint it in the same area. So there are some downsides to that workflow, but it is there are just a few things that you can get out of Photoshop that would take a lot longer to do inside of Blender. And as you can see I'm now getting the cut lines in here. So you'll see right now what I just did was I collapsed this mesh. So I duplicate it, I collapse it so that I can get this line from it. it. And then what I'm going to do is clean up the topology, move the line all the way down, and then I'll shell it out like I've done for many of the front and back pieces where I get the cut line in, and simply use it as a cut line. Now, again, you could, if you wanted to, if you were trying to maybe do a bunch of iterations, use decal machine, but I knew that this was the kind of look that I'm going for is like a deep cut, you know, it's not like a cut line, there's sort of a difference. And so, yeah, I use this all the time. I just sampled the object. It's maybe hard to follow because a lot of times I think maybe you're watching and you think, oh, did he just delete the whole, you know, just nuke the whole mesh to get a line. But what I do is I duplicate everything, collapse everything, get what I need from it, delete the rest. And then I have that piece of geometry there. And sometimes, I think the places where I use it are areas that are live Boolean. So I don't want to collapse a live Boolean to get an edge from the live Boolean. And so what I do is I duplicate the mesh, collapse the Boolean, sample the faces, and then use the faces. And I do that probably even on this detail that I'm making right here. So you'll see me do that a bunch of times now, because I mentioned it, and that's how your brain works. And with this detail that I'm making here, it's a good example of a mesh that needs to at some point be collapsed in order to progress. I think I have this inset detail basically where the cylinder, you know, pierces through the center here. And then it transitions into a mesh edited element that goes along the circumference of the cylinder. You'll see what I mean here in a second. But would not be possible if I only relied on doing Booleans. There needs to be an aspect of mesh editing in there. So collapsing it at some point is required to get that sort of integrated detail but don't know if I do that right now. There's a few other things that I have to do. You can see, yeah, actually I do. See, I do the bullion and then I see this part so I think I'm just going to inset and and do it that way. I might even use punch it for this part. Yeah, I get the circumference in and then I will use punch it once everything is in place to establish the the inset of that cylinder. And there's just a bunch of parts that I have to fix up. So I think this part is gonna be a Boolean. So I just want it to overlap so that eventually when I do the Boolean, there's enough geometry to subtract to get the full form there. And I can't really emphasize enough how like you need to be loose about this stuff. I don't care if stuff isn't snapped perfectly. I don't care if a cylinder, like the alignment of this boolean that I'm doing to the cylinder that's in the middle does not matter. No one is gonna notice. And if you think they will, then at the end you can change it. You can center things, you can realign them, make sure that everything is perfect. But it's like a, it's just a plague when you're designing. You think of it like a painter. You just wanna be free. You don't wanna think of all the slight misalignments that go on all the time. Because even if you think you're being perfect, you're not. There's always going to be something that's messed up. So if you're someone who maybe comes from production, you have this fixation on everything being perfectly aligned. When you're doing concept, just drop it. You can always fix everything up later. You don't need to make sure everything is perfect the first time you do it. It's very strange because production is such a, it's like as technical as it is artistic, maybe even more technical because you are just like recreating stuff that exists and there's its own art in that. But it's, yeah, it is such a different mindset. So I would focus on not getting everything perfect, even if it's not hard to do that, because it is not hard to simply snap things. It puts you in a mind space that is not conducive to exploration. So be loose, try things out. And I think that you'll probably find you become more creative when you can let go and just experiment with things. So you can see here I'm raising this piece of geometry because I need to have enough geometry to subtract from. If I did the subtraction without pulling that up, then there would be a piece missing just because it didn't, you know, there was nothing there, if that makes sense. But here I'm going to do the punch it. So you saw I punched in there. You don't have to do a punch it. could just do the normal way where you cut and then cut in, but that's annoying to me. So if a bunch of works, then use it because it will save you time. And essentially my job now is to figure out how to transition these two elements. So this is what I mean by like, if I just did Booleans, then I'd be locked here. I have to collapse it in order to continue this operation. So I'm trying to get it in place before I collapse it because as soon as I collapse it, this is not going to become editable. So I move it into place and I'm not sure if I do it right now, but yeah, I think right now I'm actually moving on to a different piece. So you see right here, I do the same thing that I was talking about before where I collapse, I duplicate and then I collapse everything. Now I can take this piece and move it over. And this is a bit of a cheap trick I'm doing here by covering this up. You know, ideally your design is robust enough to account for stuff like this, but I just use a floater and then move my stuff back in so it looks solid from the bottom. Not my best design ever, but I think it illustrates some of the workflows that I'm trying to teach you. So, it does the trick well enough. I'm going to do here is I want this to have two materials and so I just apply the materials to both. Now the trick with applying materials on booleans is you have to have those materials applied to your base mesh. So on this mesh previously I just clicked a random poly and applied both of those materials so that when it's applied to the boolean it will project those materials onto the final mesh. Just making this solid so that the booleans don't go skinny on me, because it is a very thin surface. Again, you can make it as functional as you want. This is a bit of a cheap tactic to make it look like it's a certain way when it's not, but yeah. Right here is a little bit of an alteration that I'm doing. I'm going to make this chamfer basically sweep all the way up. So you can see I did an inset, immediately got all the faces perfect. And then it's just a matter of putting in the top and bottom rails. This method in particular, you hear me in the pistol tutorial talk about top and bottom rails all the time because it's a very sort of bevel-y, like sweeping custom bevel design where there's a lot of complicated forms all over the place. And I did that on purpose because I think that it's important to be able to capture the full range of what you're doing. You know, if I just show you the easiest methods, then sure it can look like it's a really robust method for doing hard surface. But it's really when you start getting into doing really hard stuff that you can test how robust your methods are. are. And here is the one time that I actually do use one of the complicated methods from the earlier videos. So what I'm doing here is I'm just isolating this piece and then I'm going to do an offset cut and I want to line it up properly. There is some resolution issue at the bottom so I'm just going to make sure that I do have a center face there and then I will increase the resolution a little bit by doing a fillet. Yeah, probably could have increased the edges. It doesn't really matter if the edges aren't perfectly aligned. If we can isolate it with those two edges on the side, then, and do some cross-hatching, then it'll clear up some of the issues. You see, I do have a little bit more padding there with that edge, that V-edges made at the bottom. You do have to understand some topology stuff. I definitely don't think that this is a 100% topology free workflow, but it certainly makes it an afterthought, something that is less of a concern when designing and more of a clean up to be able to continue iterating thing. I don't really care what it's like on the inside, so I cleaned it up a little bit, but it applied this material and I think I changed it, but I don't really care. Now, I think I actually took it off of the entire mesh, so I might have to reapply that later. Getting this Boolean in, there's about three Booleans. I still need to transfer from the other side so you can see that I mirror, I detach the Boolean, and then I apply it. That's just to make sure that there's no point in time where I accidentally apply something and it screws up the other side. That's just the worst. That would just be the worst. As you can see, we apply it, and then I put the other materials, and now I get my materials back. You just have to apply it to a random face, basically. You just, whatever material you want, you apply it, then you can take it off, but your mesh will inherit it, so it's fine. Now we gotta do this detail. And I think it's fine to do 64. I was thinking of doing 32 sides for this because it does overlap into curved geometry up there, but it is not significant enough on the curvature for it to actually affect it. So, yeah, you have to understand topology to be able to know how to not do it. If you don't understand it, then you're going to get yourself into all sorts of scenarios where it forces you to play its game. But I'm smart. I know how to avoid its game. I know all the tricks on the blocks. So it can't pull me in. I've worked very hard to not have to deal with its stuff. It's BS. Just increasing the size of that a little bit. Some of the proportions are probably better on my first concept, just because I paid way more attention to it. But again, this little section is not to illustrate how good at design I am. it's to just showcase how I use the tools. So again, coming over here with the bent shape, it's just going to be a floater. This is also an asymmetrical detail. It doesn't really matter. Just placing it wherever. And here what I do, you can see, I actually, I don't know what it's called. It's like my X form or whatever. That's how you say it in ZBrush. But I made it to where the object orientation goes back to a flat box so that I could mirror it over. Because if your object orientation is tilted, then your mirror is gonna be tilted as well. So I made sure that that was back to a normal X form before I mirrored it over. And I'm not really sure why I'm doing this. It's just a small detail. Again, if this wasn't supposed to be part of a tutorial, I would probably spend five times as much time on it, trying to make it into some portfolio piece that really pushes my skills, but some things you just have to go fast and loose on. Remember the purpose of it and everything. Here I'm actually gonna use a lattice. Don't use lattices all that often, but where I have to I will. So I just select all of these vertices, push it up, looks good, doesn't need to be perfect, but I'm just trying to recreate that shape a little bit more accurately. I don't know why, but I stay on this for a pretty long period of time. Sometimes there's stuff that is super intricate and I one shot it, and then other times there's little things where, especially if there's like shading involved, like it's a curvature and you can't really see what the form looks like, You just spend way too long doing these little things. Yeah, so just G-sliding all over the place. Like it's Black Ops 3, am I right guys? I think it's called G-sliding. When you move an edge on a constrained axis, constrained to the edge. This is where I believe I start to, yeah, so I detach that side and this is where I make the asymmetrical piece that is not even going to be seen, but you can see the cylinder needs to just be pushed up, so I move it into place, topology gets all messed up, but we go in there and we move it around. Make sure it looks good. just dissolving all these edges and then giving it a fillet. You don't have to do all this topology cleanup, but it is just kind of nice to do. It is behind the mesh, so whether you care to do any of that or not is totally up to you. I don't really advise doing it because it's so, it's just not gonna be seen, you know? If you're making something for a client and they're like, oh yeah, that piece is gonna fall off when it gets hit by a rocket or something, then obviously you have to make those considerations and it's generally a good habit to be very thorough with how you make things, but you know, I'm just impatient and I'm like, I'm impatient, but I still do it, but not always. Sometimes I don't. Here, I'm just making the decal out of 3D. I'm sure that I can do this faster. There's little things that I just completely neglect to learn. Here, I am manually selecting every other face. Fun, fun, fun. If this was a real client job, you'd obviously have to make a real decal for that. And that'd be done in Photoshop, and you'd use decal machine to implement it. And it would look much better, but for a quick concept, doesn't really matter. And I think for the rest of this tutorial, it is just a lot of topology and putting like bevel modifiers on stuff. So not super important, but for the most part, all of the content of me doing booleans and stuff has concluded. So you can see at some point I'll start to use Zen barbecue for more things. And I think that's probably the last thing that is important to show off. And you know, again, you wanna make sure that before you start collapsing stuff, you're totally comfortable with the direction. Like, I don't know, I don't even like to collapse stuff a lot of times when I'm doing client work just because I want to ensure that I can get as far as possible. And sometimes the client will be happy with something, and the next day they'll come back and say, oh, we just talked to animation, and that's not going to work. And then you have to be like, OK, well, I just collapsed every single Boolean I had that was making this process possible, and now I want to go and jump off a bridge. So I try not to collapse them. And honestly, for client work, at least the renders that I would send them, I do a lot of stuff just with Zen barbecue. And I would try to also use Photoshop to get a fillet effect or something, but you don't have to produce perfect renders for clients. If it really is the final pass, then obviously go all out. But yeah, I think that keeping things editable even till like the last 1%, still pretty important in my eyes. So segment your process, do a lot of saves, stash stuff. stash stuff, just give yourself a nice hefty insurance policy against any kind of stupidity or miscommunication that could come from someone saying, yeah sure go ahead finish it off do the renders you know because people think they know what they want and then they don't and you're left with fixing that so make sure you you make all the considerations that you have to before you commit to finalizing anything that is very important. Here, some topology work. If I wanted to do Zen barbecue, would not have to worry about this, provided the geometry is dense enough. I think that there are some shading errors that would show because that's not super dense, but it is like a 10 second cleanup. Not a big deal. And we apply our bevel modifier. Again, if there's little issues with it, it's not totally seen, so it doesn't particularly matter. But you'll see here is probably the first instance, I think, where I use Zen Barbecue. Yeah, so you can see basically you have a wheel where you can select any of the widths and you can change the widths inside of the end menu that's at the top there. And so you can see I'm starting to set up some lights here just so I can assess what it is going to look like. And it's not too bad, But really, I think the reason I chose Zen barbecue for that one is because there is an overhang where there's kind of like a wedge shape. And usually anytime you use fillets, it's gonna be, or sorry, a bevel modifier, it's gonna be a problem because the consideration for an overhang that has a wedge shape needs to, I don't know, like the radius of the fillet needs to be different. So I think Zen barbecue just kind of handles it a little bit better. And now I'm putting in the rungs that I missed the inside. I neglected it for a pretty long time, so I'm just going to come in here. And the way that I do this is I have a piece of geometry. I solidify it, and then I just duplicated a bunch. And one of the duplicates I basically will put an edge through. I'll chamfer it, as you'll see here. Put another edge through, and then bridge that, fill it this, and I'll have this effect that goes on. And in In order to fix that piece of geometry that is warping there, or at least the shading error, you just put another piece of geometry in its place and it contains it well enough. Here I'm using flatten, so I just changed one of the faces and then flattened it to the face that was warped. Then I made all of those have geometries so that I can curve it like this with a proportional edit. So I'm just gonna curve it to be roughly around the same sort of curvature as the base that we're gonna be bullying this into. And you'll see in a second, I'm going to manually insert a chamfer. So you see, I G-slid that up, and then I normally brought it down with my gizmo, and then I scaled it inwards. And so what it does when you G-slide it up is it adopts the curvature. You stop it at the top, then when you bring it down, it will have that same curvature. So it's a trick that I've used for a long time and it just works. But yeah, I mean, this is basically finished. There's just a few more things that I have to do. I think I do clean up some of the details that I had not finished on the asymmetrical portion of this. But yeah, and there's obviously some stuff, I think, below that I just never did, but it's out of sight. So again, this is more of a concept model a finish model and it's okay to not finish everything. It is about the aesthetic, it's about making something that looks cool, and obviously if you want to make this you can take it as far as you want. But for me it's just more interesting to get the ideas out. And yeah, I mean, you know, some people like to make paintings where every single detail is 100% visible and some people just like to do brushstrokes and so I'm more of a brushstroke kind of guy. I like to get the main theme in, the main ideas, and if it's not totally completed at the end, at least for personal work, you know, it's not a super big deal. But the client usually dictates a lot of that and at least for this I'm comfortable with where it is. I've already had to to make this twice so it is good enough. Yeah, just fixing some of the topology. Again, I throw on a bevel modifier there and if that didn't work then I just use Zen barbecue so you can, you just fluctuate on them until you get something that works. And even this detail, that one that I just put down, If I want Zen barbecue to register it as having actual edges, I do have to collapse that. So that's kind of an example of what I was meaning with collapsing, eventually having to collapse everything and commit to a final decision. So you'll see actually here I do that. I have to collapse the solidify modifier that I have on here and start to make sure that all of these Booleans are collapsed. because I want Zen barbecue to register the edges. And in order to do that, like I said, you have to collapse it. So gradually collapsing all these things, you'll see as soon as I turn on Zen barbecue and apply the smoothing amount, it starts to actually work there. And yeah, you just have to be mindful of the topology. And obviously you don't want to make a decision and then have to go back on it. So basically here, I'm just trying to find exactly what modifiers these are. You can see that there's all sorts of weird stuff that happens when you have multiple materials applied to one object. I usually don't like to do that. Like I'll parse it out after the fact, if I'm actually completing something. But yeah, just fixing up some of the topology because I just collapsed these and ensuring that we're containing the smoothing errors that are inevitably going to come with bad topology on a curved surface. So touching this up a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it's, if there is a method of doing this without having to collapse it, then I'd love to hear it because it's kind of a pain in the ass to collapse things, but I just think it's the nature of these shaders is that you do have to eventually collapse them. And I could always stash the model, but once you collapse it, then progress is made and it's just gonna be hard. And we are approaching the end here. This is basically the last part where I collapse these booleans and make it to where there is a smooth transition. And I do that not just for a Zen barbecue, but in general, that's just how the design looks. So I have to try and make that happen. You can see I'm repairing this because I need the boolean to have geometry to subtract from. And then I collapse it and merge the top half as well with a Union Boolean to make sure that everything is looking proper. And for stuff like this, it is just a topology workflow, honestly. There's not much you can do to get around it, especially if there's shading errors. Yeah, but I mean, that's why you need to have some knowledge of topology, because when you do get into these sections, then it's not such an issue. I just, it's super janky, but on transitional areas that aren't particularly important, you can kind of fudge the topology a little bit. You'll see, because it's, when I say fudge the topology, some people really have no concept of how quads work, and their definition of doing that is very different than mine, but you can see, I'm basically just trying to make it to where there is a skirt between the transition that I can use for an accurate fillet operation. And if you don't know anything about topology, then you're probably gonna do it in a way that causes all sorts of issues and you're not gonna know why, but yeah. So again, just trying to get a smooth transition here and then giving sharp edges all around. And eventually I think I also have to collapse the booleans that are on the top and union this one. and union this one. But yeah, I mean that's basically a short representation of a part of the workflow. I don't think I have done every aspect of the workflow, because honestly, I think that this scope is a, it's just a really easy thing to make, you know. There's not a lot of super complicated forms, so if you are looking for something that's more comprehensive, the pistol tutorial is about nine hours. You can completely follow along or just watch and get information from it. But this is designed as a two-part tutorial. So that is the main section and you'll get the most out of it. Now it is designed as an intermediate tutorial. So just like this, I wasn't describing every single hot key and what everything did precisely. But it is a very creative workflow. Every tool can be used 20 different ways. So it's going to put all of that into context. It's going to guide you through the entire creation process. And if you do end up making it, please post it to ArtStation, send it to me. I will like it. I want to see a bunch of these pistols made. I think it's super good to implement the process as soon as possible. You need to get out there and actually do this just a bunch of times. So I'd make the pistol and then I'd get started on your own concepts and really try to embrace the creativity of the workflow. Some stuff might seem unorthodox to poly modeling, but if you are doing hard surface concepting or you just want to get into it and you feel like your current workflow with poly modeling is limiting you, then this is going to turbocharge your creativity and I think it's going to give you the power to really express your ideas in a way that is more succinct with your imagination and creativity. So it is coming to an end guys, but I hope you got something out of this time lapse and the previous section in the tutorial. And I'll see you in part two where we make the full Gecko cylindrical pistol.",
  "segments": [
    {
      "text": " And we are off to the races. We are going to be making the scope using some of the methods that you've seen here. Now the actual creation of the scope was done before this. This is just a recreation because when you're designing, obviously things take a lot longer. And so some of the methods that you're going to see here where I collapse things are a bit too soon. I'd really like to be able to capture what it's actually like when you're concepting, but it's just simply not a good viewer experience. If I make something and then I do 10 revisions under no circumstances, is anybody going to sit through that? And you might get something out of that, but it's just not interesting. So this is a relatively short time lapse. And I made this scope in about six, five hours of recreation. And then the actual creation time was like, I think around two days on and off. But yeah, generally for something like this size, it shouldn't take you more than two days unless you really want to push it. I did push it a little bit with the design, but this is still fairly rough. So you can see what I'm doing is just getting the basic block out in and when I make the pistol I get everything absolutely blocked out before I even put a single detail. This creation process is a little bit more messy again when you know exactly what you're supposed to put on the design because you have reference, your brain sort of jumps ahead and does details and that's actually kind of why I think a lot of production artists have a hard time I'm switching to concept because you can totally get away with just doing tiny tertiary details all over the place before you get everything blocked out if you're production. But if you're concept and someone wants you to move just one thing and you've got all these applied booleans everywhere, it becomes a real issue. So, I mean, realistically, you don't have to apply anything. You can see that I have tertiary blockout details. So for those bolts, you saw I just inserted cylinders and I do that because they are representations of noise, right? A tertiary detail is nothing more than noise. So when I put the cylinder in there, there's no reason for me to go further than that. I've already established that there will be something there. It's gonna be cylinder coal. That's all I need. This isn't a design tutorial, but I always feel like everybody is lacking the Blockout Department, including myself. Everybody's going too far into detail. And the more that you can visualize your design without having to apply geometry and doing the thing prematurely, the better result you're going to have. And that's just hard to do. It's just a very hard skill to learn. And it comes with time. So as you can see, just with what's going on in the video. I am constantly moving around. You don't want to spend too much time on any given area, especially in the early stages. I think psychologically it locks your brain down. There is definitely a component of time to making a design. If you spend way too much time on a design, then your ability to be impartial and make changes goes down the toilet. I've spent maybe three months on a design before, And if you're not taking breaks and reevaluating your decisions, then you could have something that doesn't work and your brain actually just can't see it. You're looking at it all the time and it's so familiar that you cannot objectively assess it. So this is a two day design. There's not so much of that, but let's say I got stuck up on, uh, you know, the outer shell to this and I tried different sort of bevels and I wanted to make it, you know, slant up instead of down. And I have all these ideas that I want to do. If I spend too much time tinkering, then it causes me to kind of lock in. And really, the solution to that is to kill your babies, which is a morbid way of suggesting that you need to eventually get rid of what you like if you want the design to progress. You're going to get to a point where it does not work. And you know, it doesn't work, but you want to keep it there because you're kind of married to the progress that you've made. You're married to a few decisions like you made one or two that you really like. And you might have to get rid of them for everything to progress. So you got to learn how to detach from the design, learn how to see it objectively. And honestly, I think that your maturity in being able to design is directly linked to how you take feedback and criticism because, you know, when you start out, you're so married to all your bad decisions and slowly people pick and chip away. And if you can develop the maturity to sit there and go, yeah, I've made the objective evaluation, they're totally right. Then, you know, the next time you make a bad decision, you're just going to think about it a little more. And you're going to say, yeah, well, it's probably not that great. You know, it took me a long time to be able to to actually just destroy like sections of my design that I spent days on, but going, okay, well, this is very clearly bottlenecking future progress to the design. So you just have to really get used to destroying what you value in order to progress. So speaking a bit more about what's going on in the design, as you can see, it's just a very simple Boolean workflow I'm using here. One thing I do want to point out is the outer shell to this scope, when you do a shell modifier, if you twist it in a certain way, then the way it's never, it's not going to be flat on the shelled out part. And so I did use a boolean, and you'll see I'll do it again on the front. I used a boolean to basically make it flat. And so it's not so much about, like I see tutorials where people think that, oh, I taught them how to use 600 different tools. I'm really good at my job. But it's how you use the tool. It's how you, if you can only use a solidify modifier to just make a shelled out version of a mesh, then you're not using the full potential. Like you see what I'm doing here. I'm shelling it out because I'm getting a boolean here. I'm duplicating the cylinder and then I'm deleting half of it and then I'm making a boolean out of that and then I'm getting a curvature Okay, so it's like how creative are you? Are you someone who needs a a chamfer button for you to do a chamfer? Or can you can you use a boolean to do a chamfer? Can you use? hyper Cut or whatever. It's called to do chamfer, you know like how many different ways can you? Cut the sandwich, you know how many different ways can you? get it to work because there is a scenario for everything that I do. It might seem like it's not useful to do something this very specific and esoteric way, but there's going to come a period where you do need to do it a certain way that's sort of non-standard and then you can do it. So here you can actually see this what I was talking about. I flatten it out. So if you rewind you'll see that it kind of the shell or the solidify makes it trail a bit like it kind of warps in on itself but then I move it out more and then I use a boolean to flatten it and you might say well why not just flatten the solidify and for obvious reasons you're you're then trading off all your editability so we are being smart about these sorts of things we can keep the solidify, you know, we just have to make sure that we use a Boolean. And that obviously comes with some downsides too, but not as much as collapsing it would. I'm not some assessment that you constantly have to make and I can't really teach you. I can give you a blueprint of like keep it editable, but everybody can go about making stuff in different ways and probably will. So you have to make your own assessment for every decision. And I usually err on the side of editability. You can see here what I'm going to do is get a bit tricky with it and use a fillet modifier or a bevel modifier. Initially I don't, but I do come back and give it a bevel modifier just because I'm not sure how, like I want to do a lot of adjusting here. Does it need to be a small bevel or a big bevel. So I use the modifier and that allows me to make edits in the future. You can see here I've spawned a cylinder and this is going to be for the form change that I have over here. And I think that when it comes to modeling and blender, the one thing that I think people undervalue the most is form changes with booleans. Because there's a lot of people where they want to put a bolt in, obviously you're going to use a Boolean, you know, you want to do, I don't know, a cut line, maybe you'll use a Boolean, not really sure how people do that, but form changes with Booleans are really where it's at because it's so editable and you get so much out of it. If you're just using it for bolts, then it's all surface level detail, you know, it's kind of like what I was saying at the beginning, the silhouette needs to be the first thing that's defined because it's so important. And if you can use booleans to do that, then you can have a lot of flexibility. It's kind of like in the earlier section at the beginning actually when I was showcasing the slingshot pistol thing, I don't really know what to call it, but so much of that design, even though it's collapsed now, was initially a boolean. Like literally just extruding out a shape as a silhouette and and then using it as a boolean. For obvious reasons, you have to collapse that eventually because it's one of those things that is very high on the meter of like, we need to do a fillet, we can't do a fillet unless we collapse it. Some things you don't have that, some things are just sort of like on top of a mesh and they can stay there basically till the end of your modeling process. But silhouette, eventually you do have to collapse. But I guess my point is that for that window opportunity you can get so much mileage out of it if you do it properly. And certainly when I was concepting this you would have seen me using it a lot. So I don't know maybe in the future I'll try to just record my concepting process because although it is I think a bit annoying to see someone do 10 revisions and constantly adjusting, it definitely will sort of give an insight into really the process that I think I'm trying to get you to understand. So yeah, maybe I should have just recorded the original creation, but you know this is an hour and 45 minutes, so you want me to talk on a six hour time lapse? I mean I don't think anybody is particularly interested in that, but perhaps I can record clips of it and just kind of, you know, at a later stage go over my thought process because it is so specific to the original creation, not the production creation where I have a reference of a 3D model, but like the actual inception of the model and how that goes about being created. You can see here I'm doing a bevel modifier and the bevel modifier at the bottom is a bit stretched and this doesn't really matter to me. You'll notice that I have a lot of aspects to my model that are not perfect. There's topology, stretching, there's shading errors. It really does not matter at all. Like the final result, if you cannot visualize the final result and if you need like mesh editing errors to look good, then you need to fix that inside yourself because it is the least of your problems. You should be able to see the design is complete. If you need the mesh to be complete and not have errors, then that's a problem because just block it out. Figure out a way, get it out your mind. It's not important. stuff like that into people I talked to is so obvious, but I don't know the full extent. Like something that's hard about releasing a tutorial is that the guy who just downloaded Blender yesterday and the guy who's been using it for 10 years are going to be watching the same thing. And so I'm trying to figure out exactly what advice is actually pertinent to this video. So I don't know. I'm kind of just spanning the gambit here, but I imagine that the split is probably more towards like, I don't know, six months of progress to maybe three years, which is still a pretty big gap, honestly. And I'd say one of the most relevant topics to any category of people, whether you started yesterday, you've been doing this for five years even, is that everybody goes way too far into detail. So I think there's no going wrong if you're harping on something like staying in a blockout state because that will always be where progress is made. When you first start off, you've got like shiny object syndrome. You want to go into detail and you make it a part of your personality. Oh my gosh, I just love putting details everywhere and you think you're really good because you You just litter bolts on every single surface, but the real progress will always be made in a primitive form. That's where all the juice is. And no matter if you just started yesterday or you've been doing this for a long time, you constantly need to be reminded of that. I know I do, because I still get myself into situations where I'm going into too much detail and I have to be reminded not to. So it is important information no matter where you are. I suppose I could talk about what I'm doing here. I've done it a few times. This is like a recent addition to my workflow, but you can see that I was using proportional editing. I use some of this in the main tutorial as well, but it is, I kind of almost use it as a lattice. I think the lattice is horrible in Blender. It's really like a hard ops add on that I use for it. But compared to Max, I haven't used Max in years, but Max's was really good and this is really bad. So I'll sometimes substitute it by just using proportional editing. And you can kind of scroll with proportional editing and it will change the amount of vertices that are affected by the gradient area. And you can also affect the gradient area by clicking next to the proportional editing sign and it'll make it sharper or smoother. Yeah, but it is useful, and I did use it a few times already on this. I like, very nice, I approve. This detail is interesting. So this detail, it takes a while for me to recreate it. Obviously when you're concepting, you don't have to follow reference, so it's a bit harder actually for stuff like this where you're trying to get like a non-standard, non-planar form out of something. So yeah, I use a cylinder and I just warp it down and into place and then I get it to kind of go from a thick to a thin bevel across the cylinder. And I think it looks pretty good. I like doing details like this. You usually have to do these in later stages, like once you've done some collapsing, because trying to get this to work without doing mesh editing, at least to look final, you definitely have to collapse it. But yeah, once I start getting into doing weird strange babbles like this, I think that's really what puts my style or puts a nice finishing touch on it, because it is such a non-standard form change. And you'll see, I do a lot of alteration with where it's positioned, because you have to line up two bullions. And each time you move one of the bullions, The other one doesn't line up, so it's just a bit hard. These are forms that I do in ZBrush, honestly. And being able to find a way to do that in Blender is really nice, and it's so loose. Like I can kind of do it to a 90% accuracy, like vertices won't be matching, and then I collapse it. And then in mesh editing, I'll just go in and merge vertices by the time it's done, at all. Look pretty neat, pretty clean. It's kind of funny because me doing this detail right now is completely the opposite of what you should be doing if you were designing. It is the perfect example of going into detail too quickly. So don't do that, but like I said, when you're making something that already exists, it is tempting to just go straight into the juicy bits because it doesn't really matter all that much. I mean, it does matter. It's, you know, if you're making something that's big, like a weapon, then you need to ensure that all the proportions are correct. You need to make sure that, you know, the animation and whatnot is adequately tested, but for something that is this small and insignificant, if you're doing this as a production artist, doesn't really matter if you go super far into detail. But yeah, don't not do this. If you are a concept, bad idea, you will come to regret it. I'm trying to think of things to talk about. I think everybody's probably gonna be curious if I still use ZBrush. I said previously I do. I'm kind of working on a workflow that could potentially integrate both of these. I mean, I've already done it before. I haven't really posted about it, but the issue is obviously that ZBrush, as soon as you import it, you're always going to have like a 10 trillion poly model. And while I do think it is still the best if you are trying to get complex forms on hard surface, you know, you're trying to explore, there is definitely a lot of potential there. I think that, I don't know, there's something to be said about having constraints that is important. And I think that there is a time for constraints and there's a time to not have constraints. And when you're dealing with a software like Blender, There's just so many advantages that are beyond the actual designing aspect. Like me being able to apply the final materials, like as soon as I start modeling, I could just have a block, I could have two blocks and I could put on a final set of materials that I saved from a previous file and have final lighting and have animation in place as soon as I get, you know, the building blocks there. There's just something to be said about having that as a convenience. And I think that obviously the more niche you are with what you're doing, especially as a like just making weapons or hard surface props, people have a tendency to just get the software that is the best at that one thing. And I think that's what Zbrush is to me for other people. It's a CAD software, but I think making the compromise slightly, like it is a, to me, it's not that big of a compromise once you get over it, but the benefits that you get in every other sector dealing with polys specifically in blender is just immense and it can't be discounted. And I think once you really start working with clients, it's, you can't really do it any other way. You know, I know that plasticity has a bridge and everything and so it's totally possible. I know people who do that, but with ZBrush it is very inconvenient to constantly, because really you can only render in key shot. You take it into blender, you're gonna be dynamishing it. And that's like a, if it's a big enough model, you're spending way too much time worrying about something that is just should be completely not on your mind in order to get something to a client. So yeah, I don't know. If I did do a hybrid workflow, I think I'd kind of be sacrificing a lot still just because of the nature of Dynamesh, you're always going to be destroying your performance in any render engine. And just say goodbye to animation completely. Of course you can find workarounds, but we're just talking generally, it is very inconvenient. But yeah, for anything that's not a gun, I still use it. Like if I'm making like a mech foot or something, or I want to make like a bike frame, anything where there is a large, like you'd use sub D for, ZBrush is just amazing, you know? It's just really good at doing non-planar forms. And I still think that there's been a lot of people who have adopted it in recent years. Obviously I didn't create the workflow, But yeah, a lot of people are starting to switch over to ZBrush and I'm curious to see if they stay with it because I think that they obviously understand the downsides but yeah, the upsides with the actual aesthetic and the form and the speed at which you can do things is pretty crazy still. And I don't know why this is not bully ending. I think I just symmetrized it again and then it did it fine But Blender rarely does this when a model is so simple. Usually it has to be a little bit more complex, like a lot of vertices that are isolated or something and not connected to edges. But yeah, Blender's very good surprisingly at handling Booleans. There's a point in time, not even that long ago. I think not even three or four years ago, you couldn't do coplanar Booleans inside of Blender. Meaning like, if I wanted to have two surfaces on top of each other without any sort of gap in between, it would not allow me to do that. And that was the main reason why I didn't switch because even in max, I would use Booleans and often there would be a coplanar aspect to it. You know, coplanar Booleans are really when you start getting complicated with Booleans. A bolt, for example, is a very simple cylindrical Boolean. Everybody could do it in any software. But once you start trying to do like form changes with Booleans, like actually using Booleans in the CAD sense, where it's like everything you do, then there is, I don't know, I think Blender is probably the best software, the best poly modeling software that handles Booleans. And yeah, I mean, very, very rarely will I have a Boolean not work. And usually it doesn't work because there's like 30 other Booleans. So it's kind of understandable. But once you've done a lot of Booleans, you understand how it works and you can fix them pretty easily. Here, sort of towards the end, I do a lot of topology cleanup, but you could theoretically just not do any of that and be sort of fine. Depends how far you want to push it. This is, I guess, the upper limit of Blender is that if you make stuff dirty, you can do it quickly, but in the later stages you might have to clean it up in order to do fillets and stuff. So there is definitely a downside to it, but I personally just really like the fact that everything is integrated into one software. And honestly, it's not super often that you have geometry like this. I mean, in my main pistol tutorial, I think that most things are fairly simple, you know, like this workflow is actually very specific to the subject matter that you're making. You could not use this if you were designing a car, obviously, right? But if you're making a radio, if you're making a gun, a scope, anything that is fairly planar, that would probably be pretty easy to do in a CAD software, this workflow would do you well for. So it's specific. And the great thing about this is you can do sub D in the same software. We can sculpt in the same software. It's all here. I can import a set of hands. I can animate it with a gun that I'm making. And yeah, there's no continuity. There's just, OK, I made something. I'd like to animate it. I don't have to re-import it into another software. I don't have to think about logistically how I'm going to get that into a different render engine because it's 15 billion polys. It's just very convenient. And yeah, I don't know. I think for me, I've always had a very hard relationship with Poly because it is so constrained, but I feel like I'm just now getting to the point where I can really manipulate the forms and feel confident that I can get the best design because so much of what a good design is, I found from switching softwares is dependent on the constraints of the software. And it's definitely not a majority. I'd say it's like maybe 25%, like it's definitely fundamentals are the driving factor as to whether or not you have a successful design, but coming from softwares that are incredibly rigid and then going to something as smooth as ZBrush, I feel like I gained a perspective on just how, how software can impact your performance with a design, depending on how you design. I have a very iterative process where I don't necessarily know where I'm going from the start, but I put a foundation down, I get a couple layers in there and then all of a sudden I find my way through. And when the software is very rigid, I find it hard to build layers. I find it hard to really build a good foundation. So I think at least with the methods that I'm using here I have been able to get a good base in, a good foundation that allows me to build on top of it fairly easily. All right, I know you can't tell because this is so seamless. I've just done some movie magic here, but I've actually gone to bed and I've woken up again. So my voice sounds like pop smoke or something. It's because I am a well rested man. So I have no idea what I was talking about and I don't really know what to talk about for the rest of this. We have a lot to get through. I think maybe I can talk about joining objects because this is a struggle that I have. So you can see right here I'm boolean, I'm unioning two different objects together. And basically at some point when you're designing in Poly, in order for you to progress, you have to start to make things less editable. And just generally this is how it is with any software you use. Once you get to a certain level of progression, you have to like collapse everything, whether that's modifiers or it's just like you're adding fillets to things that are gonna make it less editable, you need to build on top of your base and that often causes stuff to become less editable. And that's a hard decision to make because if you make the wrong decision, then you're left with something that is incredibly difficult to work with. What I've found is I procrastinate on this a lot and it's super easy to procrastinate on it because you can infinitely increase the potential of your design if you just keep it super editable. But if you do that, then you just never progress a design. So you have to at some point commit to collapsing everything. And yeah, it's hard, because I can't just tell people, you know, okay, there you go, you can start collapsing it. It's very similar to when I'm watching someone model and they're going into detail and you're like, okay, don't, you're going into detail, you need to stay in the block out. And then they ask, okay, well, when do I go into detail? And I have to tell them like, you know, Well, when you have a good base, well, what is a good base? You will have a very hard time seeing it because you need to do it a thousand times before you know exactly when to progress. And it is sort of the same conversation about, you know, block out. Basically my view of the block out is that you're always in block out. Block out is really just a mindset. It is, is this editable? Is this easy to move around? And there are kind of stages. There's primary block out, the secondary, and then the tertiary, throughout those stages, you've got subcategories where you're just trying to keep things incredibly editable. And eventually you have to get to that stage where you just throw that out the window and you say, okay, we're finalizing this. We're putting fillets on stuff. We're merging stuff together. We're collapsing modifiers and we're just going to try to make this a final model. And yeah, so that's a hard thing to do. In fact, I think it's so important that probably deserves an entire tutorial on its own. So if that's something that you're interested in, then let me know. So you can see I'm making this little switch thing here. A lot of times when I'm concepting, I'll make stuff and I don't really know what it is. And then I figure it out as I go. Like I said, I'm not super big into planning absolutely everything, but at least for designs that start in 3D, there's a lot of me putting down, especially text. Like I think text is a super underrated design element. I usually just use like 3D text and I'll put it on top as a floater. But I find as soon as I put down text, it gives meaning to things. And so in other designs in the block ad, I'll just scour it throughout and it will give me ideas as to what I'm doing. But that switch that I have down there, you know, initially you place it down and you don't really know what it does. And then I put those two pieces of text and it's like, okay, well it's a rotational dial or something. And what that rotational dial does, you can come up with all sorts of ideas. But the more sophisticated your design is gonna be, the more you have to figure out the function of the design because it really is at the highest level, a dance between form and function. And I'm not gonna get super into design fundamentals and talking design, because I think that at least for this tutorial, we're more focused on the software aspect of this and how to remain loose and keep things editable. But it should inform all the decisions that you're making and most importantly, what to prioritize when you are designing. You can see in the video right here, I'm still using that Boolean for each rung of this piece because the solidify modifier is going to warp everything. So I have to constantly be pushing it out a little more than it should be to get it to hit the Boolean that I have on the front and back slant. Yeah, it's about how you use the tools. I have a lot of ways that I do things and it's more about how creative you can get with because a lot of people, I think what they do is they'd literally just collapse it. And it's a shame because then they would probably lose a lot of editability. Like I said, I know what's going to happen here because I've already made this, but still, if I want to do anything, I need to retain the editability of having a shell modifier because as soon as you collapse that, even if you want to redo it by deleting all the backfaces, backfaces, like making that selection is just annoying. So you have to learn how the software works and you have to kind of mold yourself into it a little bit. And that can be a bit of a learning curve, but I think that you just have to do it a lot. And yeah, that's why I think the pistol tutorial is so pivotal is because like I'm giving you guys a, like provided if you've never done like this Boolean Workflow and Blender you're just starting, you're kind of getting the tools, and then you just need to do it like a hundred times. You know, you need to make your own stuff, you need to follow along with tutorials, and so I recommend that everybody goes all the way through on the pistol tutorial, follows everything. It might be hard, you know, but even just pick out a piece, be like, okay, I wanna do the, you know, the grip area, or I wanna do the top slide. There's enough content in there for each scenario that you'd probably have on any design that you're doing there and here, you know, because you can also make this probably if you want a bit of a challenge and I don't walk through every step in the creation process of this, it's just a time lapse, but I don't know, maybe at some point I'll release it as a five hour standalone thing. Perhaps I'll do commentary on it, But yeah, it is a hard thing to talk for five hours, but at least when you're describing what you're doing with the tools as you're doing it, there's something to talk about. So yeah, I recommend everybody, whether it's making your own things or it's following along with a tutorial, you just have to get reps in. You have to do it a lot because a lot of this stuff might be unintuitive if you come from a traditional poly modeling workflow, but even if you just integrate 10% of what I'm doing here, like if you don't use live Booleans or Booleans at all, which some people are crazy enough to actually still not use, believe it or not, just learning how someone else does that workflow and then putting that in just 10% of maybe something you're making can have a pretty positive effect, I think. So get your reps in, do what's needed to become comfortable with this unorthodox workflow, and you will see results, trust me. If you pay really close attention, you'll notice that the back end over here kind of looks like a furby. There is the eyes and then you get the beak. That's the button at the bottom. Yeah, it looks like a demonic Furby of some sort just staring at you as you adopt this workflow. A bit terrifying to be honest, but listen, I didn't say it was going to be easy. All right, this is this is your hell week right now. You have to look at a Furby in the eyes as you boolean into his soul with a six-sided pentagon. Is that a pentagon? I don't know. I'm a 3D artist that doesn't know his primitives. What can I say? All right, I think I'm going to get a cheeseburger. I will be back in 10 minutes. This is not a tactic to have less work on my plate. Okay, this is not a tactic to To do that, I'm just hungry. I'm gonna let the video play, all right? you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you You're still there? Yeah, so that was a good cheeseburger. It was a big Mac meal. So I had a burger, I had fries, and I had a drink. And you're like, why'd you have that in the morning? Because I am a machine, okay? I'm a machine. I need my fuel. I got my fuel. Everything's perfect. Are you enjoying yourself? Are you learning something? That's good. That's good. Well, I'm going to go to the toilet, so I'll be back in another, no, I'm just kidding. What are we doing? Yes, modeling. Okay, so right now I'm doing some topology work. I think it's kind of interesting because I, that you can really decide how much topology work you want to do with this. I'm doing a little bit more right now just because the shape of this particular mesh is very strange. Some meshes don't require any. If it's totally planar, then you can basically totally use bullions and you don't have to worry about it at all. But this shape has this weird curvature and it's two curvatures in one. I kind of talked about that a little bit before where that's just going to be a a complicated shape that poly modeling is going to suffer with. But if you only get most shapes that are on weapons or sites or radios or really anything that is hard surface, there's not too many shapes that are like this. And because you're in poly, you can do it properly if you want. You know, you can make it low poly, do it sub D. And that's sort of the great thing. I don't know if I'm going to show this other workflow because I haven't really figured it out myself, but But there is a workflow where you basically, inside of Blender, do a voxel remesh. It's basically like a dinomesh. And then you can sculpt on top of it. And I've seen some people kind of floating this workflow around the place. And it sounds super exciting, but I've used Blender's sculpting tools. And any excitement that I had is completely out the window because they are not particularly really intuitive as of now. But who knows in the future maybe. I mean having the ability to do that inside of the same software would be crazy. Yeah, because there's some instances like I said, I think before in a previous section, like when I'm doing grips, I like to do them in ZBrush because especially if I'm going really crazy with them, I can do a lot. I can, you know, really push the design on a grip. It's pretty, it's, yeah, it's pretty impossible to do iteration at least with poly modeling on a grip just because of the soft surface nature of it. You'd have to use sub D and then you're drawing with a topo gun the whole time. It's just not very fun. But yeah, I could probably do that inside of Blender in the sculpting mode with a voxel remesh. So maybe I might look into that, but definitely not for this tutorial because it is too inconsistent. These are at least my most consistent methods that I have to date. And honestly, half of them I don't use all the time. Like you see right here, I'm using basic Booleans. There's not a lot of crazy add-ons. I'd say the one add-on that I use the most is mesh machine and probably hard ops, but you don't need to have a whole bunch of plugins. Like I'd say, you know, maybe three or four plugins, honestly, just pick the best ones, like mesh machine, hard ops, Zen barbecue is really good. You'll see me use Zen barbecue at the end just to get soft edges without having to change my topology. Cause so much of like, if I wanted to use a bevel modifier, I'd have to clean up all my topology, but with Zen barbecue, you don't have to. The only issue with Zen barbecue is that you have to collapse your Booleans because it doesn't recognize them as geometry until you collapse them. There might be a workaround for that, but yeah. So Zen barbecue, super important, hard ops mesh machine, and then, you know, maybe some miscellaneous one. I think that I don't really use quadramechor all that much, but yeah, you can see from the work I'm doing here, I'm not even using a lot of the add-ons. It is mostly base tools, base bullions, and how you go about using them. If you are someone who's very creative, you can get a ton done with just the base tools, the base bullions, set of blender, and everything else is just like sort of quality of life, you know, trying to do a flatten operation by, I don't even know what you'd do. to get the same sort of effect. You know, you'd probably have to align your pivot with sub-object pivot, and then you'd have to make sure that your gizmo is placed in a certain area, and then you'd have to do like a z scale. But then things would warp, and I don't even know if you know what I'm talking about, but there's just a whole bunch of considerations that a single button on a tool could do. So why wouldn't you go ahead and get that? You know, Blender's a free software, if you're someone who pays for 3D software, you're paying, I don't know what it even is now, like every month or every year. If you just buy four add-ons, you spend like $150, that is so cheap. And it's a one-time purchase and you get access to some of the best tools on the market. So yeah, I would get those add-ons regardless. They are going to help you with modeling in all aspects, even beyond this workflow. They're just good tools that really should be standard in every poly modeling software on the market at this point. but you know, E.D.s, what E.D.s. Going back to our design here, because we haven't talked about it in a while, I think really at least this part of the design is kind of like I'm separating a bunch of pieces. Like I haven't really gotten to it yet, quite yet, but there are sections where I've just had to basically make a base mesh and then it's about separating them. And I think when you're in the design process, it's not necessarily that easy. It's not like you're just splitting up a puzzle from a box into a thousand pieces. But here you can see it is kind of like that. And I'm doing some complicated union bullions here. You can see I'm doing some cleanup. I don't even think you necessarily have to clean up something like this, especially if it's not directly visible, like there is a piece that goes in front of it. So there is some considerations that you could make depending on what you wanna clean up and what you wanna leave bare. But yeah, I usually, if I can clean it up, I will, but you don't have to. If you're super allergic to topology, there are ways that you can get around it. And but yeah, it is just clean up at least. It's not like I have to worry about topology for getting forms and stuff that is usually quite rare. And yeah, you can see with the front piece here, this is more of what I was meaning with splitting things up like a puzzle. Basically everything is slanted and has a cut line separating it. And there's something to be said about having depth, like making sure that not everything is on the same exact sort of plane, you know, there's some that go further in and some that protrude out. But I found that I quite like this look of having these simple separations. It immediately gives you some hierarchy to work with and it's very easy to get. Now you could use what is it called decal machine to do a lot of this. And definitely in the concept stages, I did use decal machine. So you shouldn't discount using the cut lines or especially the slice function. So I showed you guys what the slice function was with decal machine where essentially it works like a Boolean. And the only reason that I don't use that here is because I already know what this is gonna look like. But if I was just concepting and I wasn't sure, I would probably very quickly use that. But it is almost equally as fast to just use geometry. The only time I'd say it is not fast when using geometry is if you're trying to do something that's a little bit more complicated than a one surface insertion. Like right now you see this is just a plane that it's cutting into. And so it's really not that complicated, but you can get very complicated very quickly with decal machine. And there's a few, a few hiccups. I just, I constantly find myself forgetting how to use a lot of the features in decal machine. It is kind of buggy with some stuff, but for cut lines in particular, it's, I don't see a lot of inconsistencies. The only thing that I think is annoying is it does make duplicates of your materials sometimes, but Blender generally does that with a lot of stuff. So it's just another variable. that's a bit annoying, but you do get a lot of mileage out of it. And so I would probably use that for some stuff, but eventually you do have to actually make insertions. It's kind of like what I was saying about, uh, when to progress. Like if everything is decal machine and nothing is broken up, then you're going to be limited in the operations you can do, you know, like you need to kind of progress by collapsing stuff eventually. And so, yeah, it's good for the beginning stages and so much of what I'm talking about. And this tutorial is just the beginning stages. It's nothing more than sort of an advanced blockout. And for most clients, they're totally fine with that because that's where 99% of the problems are. If you can solve 99% of the problems and a production artist has to come in and put fillets on things or has to come in and weld things together, et cetera, I think that they are more than happy. You know, it's far easier to interpret a 3D concept design than a 2D one. Even if it's a scrappy 3D one, it is just, you get information from all angles. You can light it, you can put different materials on it. It is a far more, it's a higher resolution piece of information for a production artist to work off of. So, I mean, it's up to you how far you wanna take it. Obviously, you could take it as far as you want. you could make it a high poly for them to bake down. And some clients will specifically ask for that. They'll be like, yes, we want this to directly be baked down to a high poly. And so you have to put in a lot more work. But most of the time it is a concept. And they have a production artist that's going to come in and they're going to optimize it. And a consideration that clients have to make as well is like, if you have, let's say, I don't know, a 500 day rate and they want you to put in an extra week of effort just to make things clean with the topology. They are paying a substantially higher rate for something that is as simple as topology reworking. Like if they got a production artist to do it, it would be two times less the cost versus a concept artist. You're paying me to solve very complicated artistic problems. You know, the rate that you get paid is correlated to the problem that you solve. And if you're just doing topology reworking, then the amount of people in the marketplace that can do topology working is substantially higher than that of someone who can do complex aesthetic hard surface props that fit your brief. And so yeah, it's just, it's a waste of money in my opinion. I've never gotten it to the point where they want something that is bakeable. You know, they might ask for it to be close to it, but they've never suggested that I need to, I don't know, have fillets on all the edges and make it to where you know I do the UVs or something, that's just out of the question. But it is something I recommend bringing up with your client in the call because I have had people reach out even for stuff that you just think okay but that's a AAA studio, I would they even suggest that the people that you're talking to are not hard surface concept designers, right? They might know the production pipeline, they might be a 2D artist, art director, but a lot of people are still not familiar with exactly this sort of workflow, this sort of label, position, whatever you want to call it. And so you have to make it clear, look, I just do the concept, I make it in 3D, you're not going to be able to bake with it, but you give it to a production artist and they will be 95% of the way there. And I still communicate that every time, just in case. And if you're If you're someone who wants to do the high poly, then go for it. I mean, there's people who do the high poly, they do the concept, the high poly, the low poly, they bake everything, make it into a game res mesh. They do all of that. And it depends what you want to do with your time. I think that for me, I'm just very focused on design. And I know the production pipeline, I've done the production pipeline. I was a production artist for a year and a half before I ever did concept design. But to me, concept design is far more interesting. And in terms of like bang for your buck, I think with a client, if you do both, and somewhere along the line, I kind of think that you're gonna get paid a little bit less than if you just did the one, right? Because the skill set of one piece of it, concept design versus production, is just, it's far more rare, right? Like your value to the market is based off of scarcity. And so if you take the two aspects of your workflow, right, you have the concept and then you have the production. You've got one aspect, the concept, the first aspect, which is very scarce. It's hard to find people that are good at doing this at a high level. That's why they get paid more. And then you take the other side, which is the production. And there's production artists everywhere, and they get paid substantially less. And so when you combine those two, it's just, I feel like it's a confusing proposition. It might seem like, I think, to an indie developer, it's very useful, but again, if we're talking about AAA clients, they hire specialists because they want the best of everything. And so, I don't know. I know there are people who do that and they get paid a lot of money. I just think that they could probably get paid more money if they put all of their eggs into one basket, but that's just me. I'm a very specialist kind of person. I'm like, there are people who are horizontal, and then there are people who are vertical, and people who are horizontal have this very generalist attitude. And generalists are great. I mean, generalists run studios, but the time horizon for a generalist to make the kind of money that a specialist would make is just far, it exceeds my time horizon. I don't wanna wait 20 years before I, you know, can use all my skills as like a studio head or something like that. So if you're starting off, I always recommend that you hyper specialize. Some people might disagree with that, but I think that you're definitely gonna get paid the most if you're the best at something. And I think that if you just commit to being the best at something, it's far more achievable than, you know, like broadly saying, I'm just gonna kind of do everything because eventually you'll get that horizontal skill set. Like maybe you'll get five of them to the same height of one vertical skill set, but that's gonna take you five times longer. So I don't know, maybe you disagree, but that's kinda how I think about things. And that's the way that I've built my career is I just focus on guns and small props. Recently I've done environment stuff, but I think that my main proposition is like weapons, props, things that are kind of all in the same bucket. But yeah, those are my thoughts. back to what we're actually here for, which is the scope. I think that something maybe I haven't touched on is, you know, this scope, there's a aspect of asymmetry to it. And I touch on this in the main pistol tutorial because the main pistol is asymmetrical. And a lot of people don't know how to go about doing asymmetry because so much of what you make in 3D is symmetrized. But I think you'll see kind of what I do here and what I do in the main pistol tutorial is you have to do a lot of detaching. It is not a good idea to keep two parts of a mesh, like the asymmetrical part and the, I guess they're both asymmetrical parts, but it's not a good idea to keep them on the same mesh because there is a tendency to instinctually symmetrize something. And as soon as you do that, you just lose all your progress. You're gonna symmetrize it, you're gonna collapse it without even knowing, and it causes a lot of problems. And so what I kind of do to tackle things that are asymmetrical is you build it up as much as you can with symmetry because it shares like 90% of its characteristics, presumably, right? At least in this case, the case of the pistol, 90% symmetrical. But then there's those parts that are asymmetrical and you want to try and build those out of other meshes as much as possible. But if it needs to do like an intersect, you need to use booleans, you need to detach the one side from the other. And you're just trying to get as much mileage with the symmetrical parts as possible before you jump ship and take it completely into its own bespoke mesh. So we're not quite there yet. I'll talk more about the asymmetrical aspect of this once we're there, but I just kind of remember that both of those, you know, my pistol and this do have asymmetrical aspects. And I think it's good to know how to tackle that, how to manage that, because if you're going to make a design, asymmetry is just always going to stand out in a design. So many things are completely symmetrical, and it's boring. And if you can even make like a really bespoke element, for example, with the pistol I have a cylinder in the center of it that is asymmetrical. That's just really interesting. That's going to catch a lot of people's attention. And I guarantee you if that pistol didn't have that asymmetrical element, it would not be, nobody would think that it's interesting, but because it does, it's kind of quirky and unique and it draws people's eyes. So you can integrate those elements into your design. I think you could make something pretty cool. thing you'll notice here is, um, yeah, right here, I scroll through my Booleans. It's kind of funny because I honestly did not use this scroll method when I was making my pistol and I had never used it. And I finally got around because I knew it existed. I know people who use it. I finally got around to using it. And I'm like, why did I not know about this? Because for me, I always have too many Booleans. and it's just so convenient. It's called EverScroll. I mentioned it before. So you guys already know about it, but EverScroll with, I believe it's hard ops, is just so convenient. You know, there's a lot of things that I think that I don't use. Like one thing that I know people use that they're just infatuated with it, which I personally, I just could never get into it, was BoxCutter. I don't use BoxCutter. I don't like BoxCutter. I don't know. It's just a personal thing. I prefer to spawn boxes like you saw, I just did. Maybe it's inconvenient, but for me, I don't know, I just, I could never get into it. And so sometimes I write things off, but ever scroll is actually just really, really good. And you'll find a lot of these tiny quality of life things. Like I wouldn't think that an organization tool would be so impactful, but even something like stash, stashes with mesh machine, that's really good as well. Like just not even so that you can do the operations that I was showing you guys where you can, you know, commit to a Boolean and then go back and revert the mesh, but just in general, being able to save pieces without having to constantly make other folders, you know, just a quick menu essentially, it's really useful. So there's a lot of little things like that that are important to learn And maybe you don't initially do it because it doesn't seem like it's that important, but over time I think I've optimized my workflow into a much faster place based off all these little tiny quality of life tools that I've started to use. You can see on the video right now, I am applying the Bevel modifier to quite a few things. And you'll see I start to do this usually around the end of a model. And I'm not super anal about it. I don't do it to everything. If something looks like it has good topology and I'm closing in on finishing, I'll just start to apply it. But it's really not a big deal, it's a modifier. So I can literally just take it off at any point. But I use this method where I have, sometimes for instance, you will need to have a thicker edge and a thinner edge. And you can do that with a bevel modifier. You can have weights, which I use all the time. And I've used throughout my pistol concepting tutorial as well. But sometimes you'll have an edge that cannot be filleted to the diameter that you want because of topology. And so you can mix the bevel modifier with Zen Barbecue, which is a bevel shader that has weights. It's effectively the same thing. It's a weighted bevel shader. And you get the best of both worlds. So that is something that I do often. So when I come around here and I just apply a bevel modifier to some stuff, I don't care if some of it doesn't work and others do. For instance, the shell. The shell is not going to work with a bevel modifier. There's just too many vertices that are overlapping with edges in weird ways. It's not going to have a consistent edge bevel. And that doesn't matter to me because if that's the case, then I make sure that everything is collapsed, I can go in with Zen barbecue at a later stage and get the thicker bevels. So thinner bevels I can sometimes get away with using the bevel modifier and then thicker ones. I can do Zen barbecue or I could just do all Zen barbecue. It's really sort of up to you, but usually if it's like big geometry or like it's silhouette changing stuff, then I'll have to use a bevel modifier because that actually changes the geometry. and jumping back to the topic of asymmetry. So you'll see what I'm doing here is I'm trying to get this shape from the shape I already have here. I'm pretty certain I, in the end, actually just remake it because it's too messy and it was just easier to completely remake it. So sometimes I'll do that and not have to, because if I delve into the topology and try to fix it, sometimes a mesh is too messed up. Like it's not worth saving. and especially with such a simple profile, it's better to completely remake it. It's one thing if it's the entire white shell piece, then you probably need to make it work, but sometimes rebuilding things is honestly the fastest solution. So we're still working with Polys, there's still a downside to it, but we can stretch that as far as humanly possible and get a good workflow from it. There's always a solution to any problem And your creativity is the only limit. So some problems are bigger than others, but if you think through it and pre-plan things, a lot of the time you can totally escape the annoyingness of having to do a retopology and whatever. But yeah, I mean, I don't like that aspect. I think that when you're designing, you should have the freedom to do whatever you want. And most of the time you do. So again, it's totally subject matter dependent. Some things are just gonna cause more problems than others, but out of this entire mesh, that's really the only thing that I've actually had to rebuild. You know, I actually didn't even, I don't think I even rebuilt it when I was doing the original concept. So sometimes I don't even put that much effort into it. I get something that is passable and get it to where it needs to be. And then at the very end, if I wanna remake it for cleanness sake, I'll do that, you don't have to. In a second here, I'm going to start to do an operation that's a bit complicated. And I haven't done a lot of complicated operations honestly with geometry, sorry, with Booleans on geometry in this particular model that I'm making. The pistol I do, geometry Booleans all over the place. But this is basically one of the geometry Booleans that that I'm gonna do. So you see, I just extended that fillet and this is already detached. So this is an asymmetrical piece. This isn't gonna affect the other side and vice versa. But I take the cylinder here and I line it up with the top and bottom rails. And I'm gonna use it to make a form change. And the reason I do this versus editing the geometry is because it's just so much simpler. Like it might seem originally or initially that this is convoluted, But when you see how much control, like if I wanna push it back, if I wanna move it up, if I wanna delete it, extremely easy. And so that right there was an example of a geometry Boolean where I am getting a form edit out of a piece of a Boolean. So I do that all over the place on the Pistol tutorial. There's sections where you press the, I think it's tabbed to go in and out of edit mode. The fact that I don't know that scares me. But I press Tab and the before and after, if there's a different silhouette, there's different details, different form changes, everything is different just because of the live Boolean stack that I have on it. And if I do this on this model, I don't think there's a single piece that really has a crazy amount of any of that going on. So, you know, we're doing another one right here. This is me remaking this. So I think what I do here is I just shell it out and I delete half of it and then I shell it out. No, I don't, right? So that's the issue with shelling is that it tapers it. So I just do an extrude, basically. I extrude to zero and then I pull it out and that makes it to where it is a consistent line throughout. So you can see that's what I do right there. And yeah, I still have a lot to merge on the asymmetrical side. So you can see I'm just setting this one up and boy, do I want a cheeseburger. guys, I know for you, I just had a cheeseburger, but I'm on a three cheeseburger diet a day, honestly, honest to God, I'm 700 pounds, ask Hubert. But this cylinder on this side, I also remake. I think what I do is I do symmetry on the bullion, I collapse the symmetry and then I detach the left side of the bullion to put it. Yeah, you can see it. There we go. To make another bullion on this side. And that just makes it to where it's a lot easier. Because again, you could keep the asymmetrical aspect within one object, but I'm always uncomfortable because it just takes me mindlessly pressing the hard ops mirror, and then all of a sudden it's, you know, I collapse it and it's gone. So I like to ensure that they are detached, they're on a different mesh, and I'm not confusing things. And to me, this piece that I'm also doing here is a bit complicated because it's weird the asymmetrical aspect of the piece I'm working on right now, when it goes to the other side you'll see, it has a difference but the difference is under a mesh, right? So like you wouldn't even be able to tell if it was asymmetrical or not, but I do it anyways because I don't know. You probably shouldn't. I mean if you're a concept artist like you know especially for games and stuff, it's if it's not seen then you know it doesn't really matter, but every now and then I get carried away and so I'll make something that is hard and you won't even see it. But yeah, I mean you can choose whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. The more effort you put into something the better you're going to get. So even if someone doesn't see it you're still getting some mileage out of the endeavor. You can see here I do the method again where I'm using proportional editing and I just have a big brush on it so that it does the gradation, how I'd like it. And then I do the extrude to zero, push out just like I did the side piece of the asymmetrical bit here. And this is going to be an inset. Now the reason I'm making this a boolean is because the geometry is just totally messed up on the inside of the other one. So normally if this was a planar surface you just do an inset. I don't know if the cylinder is totally cylindrical on this, I imagine I haven't applied the booleans yet, but you would just keep it within the geometry. You know, you don't have to make everything a bully. And if it can be done as a normal operation, then it's better to have good topology than bad topology. It gives you more opportunity. So we do what we can, and we can what we do. But in the end, it has to be done. So it does. And if you think we're gonna merge this or not, because if we merge that, than I would be set here for 12 hours doing topology. So we're just gonna put it on top of the mesh, which is totally fine. You don't even really see the transition, so it's okay. A lot of these transitions, especially if you're just doing rendered images, you can paint the bevel transition in Photoshop. I don't like to do that, but there are certain things where it's just like, okay, so I'm gonna spend 12 hours doing topology or I can do one brush stroke in Photoshop. So some things are like that. I usually use Photoshop if I want to emphasize bespoke roughness details. So for instance, a lot of times when you do materials, you will have a noise texture that is projected onto your mesh. This is for concept. This isn't like a substance painter workflow or anything. And the issue with that is a lot of times you'll want a specific piece of dirt or grunge roughness, reflectivity in one area, and so Photoshop is pretty easy to do that. Of course when you do that you have to be mindful if you wanted to get an animation out of your mesh then it's not going to show up in the animation. Also you'll have to do it consistently throughout every angle. So if I take a you know a render of my pistol from a side view and then a front view if it's showing the same side of the mesh then you'll have to paint it in the same area. So there are some downsides to that workflow, but it is there are just a few things that you can get out of Photoshop that would take a lot longer to do inside of Blender. And as you can see I'm now getting the cut lines in here. So you'll see right now what I just did was I collapsed this mesh. So I duplicate it, I collapse it so that I can get this line from it. it. And then what I'm going to do is clean up the topology, move the line all the way down, and then I'll shell it out like I've done for many of the front and back pieces where I get the cut line in, and simply use it as a cut line. Now, again, you could, if you wanted to, if you were trying to maybe do a bunch of iterations, use decal machine, but I knew that this was the kind of look that I'm going for is like a deep cut, you know, it's not like a cut line, there's sort of a difference. And so, yeah, I use this all the time. I just sampled the object. It's maybe hard to follow because a lot of times I think maybe you're watching and you think, oh, did he just delete the whole, you know, just nuke the whole mesh to get a line. But what I do is I duplicate everything, collapse everything, get what I need from it, delete the rest. And then I have that piece of geometry there. And sometimes, I think the places where I use it are areas that are live Boolean. So I don't want to collapse a live Boolean to get an edge from the live Boolean. And so what I do is I duplicate the mesh, collapse the Boolean, sample the faces, and then use the faces. And I do that probably even on this detail that I'm making right here. So you'll see me do that a bunch of times now, because I mentioned it, and that's how your brain works. And with this detail that I'm making here, it's a good example of a mesh that needs to at some point be collapsed in order to progress. I think I have this inset detail basically where the cylinder, you know, pierces through the center here. And then it transitions into a mesh edited element that goes along the circumference of the cylinder. You'll see what I mean here in a second. But would not be possible if I only relied on doing Booleans. There needs to be an aspect of mesh editing in there. So collapsing it at some point is required to get that sort of integrated detail but don't know if I do that right now. There's a few other things that I have to do. You can see, yeah, actually I do. See, I do the bullion and then I see this part so I think I'm just going to inset and and do it that way. I might even use punch it for this part. Yeah, I get the circumference in and then I will use punch it once everything is in place to establish the the inset of that cylinder. And there's just a bunch of parts that I have to fix up. So I think this part is gonna be a Boolean. So I just want it to overlap so that eventually when I do the Boolean, there's enough geometry to subtract to get the full form there. And I can't really emphasize enough how like you need to be loose about this stuff. I don't care if stuff isn't snapped perfectly. I don't care if a cylinder, like the alignment of this boolean that I'm doing to the cylinder that's in the middle does not matter. No one is gonna notice. And if you think they will, then at the end you can change it. You can center things, you can realign them, make sure that everything is perfect. But it's like a, it's just a plague when you're designing. You think of it like a painter. You just wanna be free. You don't wanna think of all the slight misalignments that go on all the time. Because even if you think you're being perfect, you're not. There's always going to be something that's messed up. So if you're someone who maybe comes from production, you have this fixation on everything being perfectly aligned. When you're doing concept, just drop it. You can always fix everything up later. You don't need to make sure everything is perfect the first time you do it. It's very strange because production is such a, it's like as technical as it is artistic, maybe even more technical because you are just like recreating stuff that exists and there's its own art in that. But it's, yeah, it is such a different mindset. So I would focus on not getting everything perfect, even if it's not hard to do that, because it is not hard to simply snap things. It puts you in a mind space that is not conducive to exploration. So be loose, try things out. And I think that you'll probably find you become more creative when you can let go and just experiment with things. So you can see here I'm raising this piece of geometry because I need to have enough geometry to subtract from. If I did the subtraction without pulling that up, then there would be a piece missing just because it didn't, you know, there was nothing there, if that makes sense. But here I'm going to do the punch it. So you saw I punched in there. You don't have to do a punch it. could just do the normal way where you cut and then cut in, but that's annoying to me. So if a bunch of works, then use it because it will save you time. And essentially my job now is to figure out how to transition these two elements. So this is what I mean by like, if I just did Booleans, then I'd be locked here. I have to collapse it in order to continue this operation. So I'm trying to get it in place before I collapse it because as soon as I collapse it, this is not going to become editable. So I move it into place and I'm not sure if I do it right now, but yeah, I think right now I'm actually moving on to a different piece. So you see right here, I do the same thing that I was talking about before where I collapse, I duplicate and then I collapse everything. Now I can take this piece and move it over. And this is a bit of a cheap trick I'm doing here by covering this up. You know, ideally your design is robust enough to account for stuff like this, but I just use a floater and then move my stuff back in so it looks solid from the bottom. Not my best design ever, but I think it illustrates some of the workflows that I'm trying to teach you. So, it does the trick well enough. I'm going to do here is I want this to have two materials and so I just apply the materials to both. Now the trick with applying materials on booleans is you have to have those materials applied to your base mesh. So on this mesh previously I just clicked a random poly and applied both of those materials so that when it's applied to the boolean it will project those materials onto the final mesh. Just making this solid so that the booleans don't go skinny on me, because it is a very thin surface. Again, you can make it as functional as you want. This is a bit of a cheap tactic to make it look like it's a certain way when it's not, but yeah. Right here is a little bit of an alteration that I'm doing. I'm going to make this chamfer basically sweep all the way up. So you can see I did an inset, immediately got all the faces perfect. And then it's just a matter of putting in the top and bottom rails. This method in particular, you hear me in the pistol tutorial talk about top and bottom rails all the time because it's a very sort of bevel-y, like sweeping custom bevel design where there's a lot of complicated forms all over the place. And I did that on purpose because I think that it's important to be able to capture the full range of what you're doing. You know, if I just show you the easiest methods, then sure it can look like it's a really robust method for doing hard surface. But it's really when you start getting into doing really hard stuff that you can test how robust your methods are. are. And here is the one time that I actually do use one of the complicated methods from the earlier videos. So what I'm doing here is I'm just isolating this piece and then I'm going to do an offset cut and I want to line it up properly. There is some resolution issue at the bottom so I'm just going to make sure that I do have a center face there and then I will increase the resolution a little bit by doing a fillet. Yeah, probably could have increased the edges. It doesn't really matter if the edges aren't perfectly aligned. If we can isolate it with those two edges on the side, then, and do some cross-hatching, then it'll clear up some of the issues. You see, I do have a little bit more padding there with that edge, that V-edges made at the bottom. You do have to understand some topology stuff. I definitely don't think that this is a 100% topology free workflow, but it certainly makes it an afterthought, something that is less of a concern when designing and more of a clean up to be able to continue iterating thing. I don't really care what it's like on the inside, so I cleaned it up a little bit, but it applied this material and I think I changed it, but I don't really care. Now, I think I actually took it off of the entire mesh, so I might have to reapply that later. Getting this Boolean in, there's about three Booleans. I still need to transfer from the other side so you can see that I mirror, I detach the Boolean, and then I apply it. That's just to make sure that there's no point in time where I accidentally apply something and it screws up the other side. That's just the worst. That would just be the worst. As you can see, we apply it, and then I put the other materials, and now I get my materials back. You just have to apply it to a random face, basically. You just, whatever material you want, you apply it, then you can take it off, but your mesh will inherit it, so it's fine. Now we gotta do this detail. And I think it's fine to do 64. I was thinking of doing 32 sides for this because it does overlap into curved geometry up there, but it is not significant enough on the curvature for it to actually affect it. So, yeah, you have to understand topology to be able to know how to not do it. If you don't understand it, then you're going to get yourself into all sorts of scenarios where it forces you to play its game. But I'm smart. I know how to avoid its game. I know all the tricks on the blocks. So it can't pull me in. I've worked very hard to not have to deal with its stuff. It's BS. Just increasing the size of that a little bit. Some of the proportions are probably better on my first concept, just because I paid way more attention to it. But again, this little section is not to illustrate how good at design I am. it's to just showcase how I use the tools. So again, coming over here with the bent shape, it's just going to be a floater. This is also an asymmetrical detail. It doesn't really matter. Just placing it wherever. And here what I do, you can see, I actually, I don't know what it's called. It's like my X form or whatever. That's how you say it in ZBrush. But I made it to where the object orientation goes back to a flat box so that I could mirror it over. Because if your object orientation is tilted, then your mirror is gonna be tilted as well. So I made sure that that was back to a normal X form before I mirrored it over. And I'm not really sure why I'm doing this. It's just a small detail. Again, if this wasn't supposed to be part of a tutorial, I would probably spend five times as much time on it, trying to make it into some portfolio piece that really pushes my skills, but some things you just have to go fast and loose on. Remember the purpose of it and everything. Here I'm actually gonna use a lattice. Don't use lattices all that often, but where I have to I will. So I just select all of these vertices, push it up, looks good, doesn't need to be perfect, but I'm just trying to recreate that shape a little bit more accurately. I don't know why, but I stay on this for a pretty long period of time. Sometimes there's stuff that is super intricate and I one shot it, and then other times there's little things where, especially if there's like shading involved, like it's a curvature and you can't really see what the form looks like, You just spend way too long doing these little things. Yeah, so just G-sliding all over the place. Like it's Black Ops 3, am I right guys? I think it's called G-sliding. When you move an edge on a constrained axis, constrained to the edge. This is where I believe I start to, yeah, so I detach that side and this is where I make the asymmetrical piece that is not even going to be seen, but you can see the cylinder needs to just be pushed up, so I move it into place, topology gets all messed up, but we go in there and we move it around. Make sure it looks good. just dissolving all these edges and then giving it a fillet. You don't have to do all this topology cleanup, but it is just kind of nice to do. It is behind the mesh, so whether you care to do any of that or not is totally up to you. I don't really advise doing it because it's so, it's just not gonna be seen, you know? If you're making something for a client and they're like, oh yeah, that piece is gonna fall off when it gets hit by a rocket or something, then obviously you have to make those considerations and it's generally a good habit to be very thorough with how you make things, but you know, I'm just impatient and I'm like, I'm impatient, but I still do it, but not always. Sometimes I don't. Here, I'm just making the decal out of 3D. I'm sure that I can do this faster. There's little things that I just completely neglect to learn. Here, I am manually selecting every other face. Fun, fun, fun. If this was a real client job, you'd obviously have to make a real decal for that. And that'd be done in Photoshop, and you'd use decal machine to implement it. And it would look much better, but for a quick concept, doesn't really matter. And I think for the rest of this tutorial, it is just a lot of topology and putting like bevel modifiers on stuff. So not super important, but for the most part, all of the content of me doing booleans and stuff has concluded. So you can see at some point I'll start to use Zen barbecue for more things. And I think that's probably the last thing that is important to show off. And you know, again, you wanna make sure that before you start collapsing stuff, you're totally comfortable with the direction. Like, I don't know, I don't even like to collapse stuff a lot of times when I'm doing client work just because I want to ensure that I can get as far as possible. And sometimes the client will be happy with something, and the next day they'll come back and say, oh, we just talked to animation, and that's not going to work. And then you have to be like, OK, well, I just collapsed every single Boolean I had that was making this process possible, and now I want to go and jump off a bridge. So I try not to collapse them. And honestly, for client work, at least the renders that I would send them, I do a lot of stuff just with Zen barbecue. And I would try to also use Photoshop to get a fillet effect or something, but you don't have to produce perfect renders for clients. If it really is the final pass, then obviously go all out. But yeah, I think that keeping things editable even till like the last 1%, still pretty important in my eyes. So segment your process, do a lot of saves, stash stuff. stash stuff, just give yourself a nice hefty insurance policy against any kind of stupidity or miscommunication that could come from someone saying, yeah sure go ahead finish it off do the renders you know because people think they know what they want and then they don't and you're left with fixing that so make sure you you make all the considerations that you have to before you commit to finalizing anything that is very important. Here, some topology work. If I wanted to do Zen barbecue, would not have to worry about this, provided the geometry is dense enough. I think that there are some shading errors that would show because that's not super dense, but it is like a 10 second cleanup. Not a big deal. And we apply our bevel modifier. Again, if there's little issues with it, it's not totally seen, so it doesn't particularly matter. But you'll see here is probably the first instance, I think, where I use Zen Barbecue. Yeah, so you can see basically you have a wheel where you can select any of the widths and you can change the widths inside of the end menu that's at the top there. And so you can see I'm starting to set up some lights here just so I can assess what it is going to look like. And it's not too bad, But really, I think the reason I chose Zen barbecue for that one is because there is an overhang where there's kind of like a wedge shape. And usually anytime you use fillets, it's gonna be, or sorry, a bevel modifier, it's gonna be a problem because the consideration for an overhang that has a wedge shape needs to, I don't know, like the radius of the fillet needs to be different. So I think Zen barbecue just kind of handles it a little bit better. And now I'm putting in the rungs that I missed the inside. I neglected it for a pretty long time, so I'm just going to come in here. And the way that I do this is I have a piece of geometry. I solidify it, and then I just duplicated a bunch. And one of the duplicates I basically will put an edge through. I'll chamfer it, as you'll see here. Put another edge through, and then bridge that, fill it this, and I'll have this effect that goes on. And in In order to fix that piece of geometry that is warping there, or at least the shading error, you just put another piece of geometry in its place and it contains it well enough. Here I'm using flatten, so I just changed one of the faces and then flattened it to the face that was warped. Then I made all of those have geometries so that I can curve it like this with a proportional edit. So I'm just gonna curve it to be roughly around the same sort of curvature as the base that we're gonna be bullying this into. And you'll see in a second, I'm going to manually insert a chamfer. So you see, I G-slid that up, and then I normally brought it down with my gizmo, and then I scaled it inwards. And so what it does when you G-slide it up is it adopts the curvature. You stop it at the top, then when you bring it down, it will have that same curvature. So it's a trick that I've used for a long time and it just works. But yeah, I mean, this is basically finished. There's just a few more things that I have to do. I think I do clean up some of the details that I had not finished on the asymmetrical portion of this. But yeah, and there's obviously some stuff, I think, below that I just never did, but it's out of sight. So again, this is more of a concept model a finish model and it's okay to not finish everything. It is about the aesthetic, it's about making something that looks cool, and obviously if you want to make this you can take it as far as you want. But for me it's just more interesting to get the ideas out. And yeah, I mean, you know, some people like to make paintings where every single detail is 100% visible and some people just like to do brushstrokes and so I'm more of a brushstroke kind of guy. I like to get the main theme in, the main ideas, and if it's not totally completed at the end, at least for personal work, you know, it's not a super big deal. But the client usually dictates a lot of that and at least for this I'm comfortable with where it is. I've already had to to make this twice so it is good enough. Yeah, just fixing some of the topology. Again, I throw on a bevel modifier there and if that didn't work then I just use Zen barbecue so you can, you just fluctuate on them until you get something that works. And even this detail, that one that I just put down, If I want Zen barbecue to register it as having actual edges, I do have to collapse that. So that's kind of an example of what I was meaning with collapsing, eventually having to collapse everything and commit to a final decision. So you'll see actually here I do that. I have to collapse the solidify modifier that I have on here and start to make sure that all of these Booleans are collapsed. because I want Zen barbecue to register the edges. And in order to do that, like I said, you have to collapse it. So gradually collapsing all these things, you'll see as soon as I turn on Zen barbecue and apply the smoothing amount, it starts to actually work there. And yeah, you just have to be mindful of the topology. And obviously you don't want to make a decision and then have to go back on it. So basically here, I'm just trying to find exactly what modifiers these are. You can see that there's all sorts of weird stuff that happens when you have multiple materials applied to one object. I usually don't like to do that. Like I'll parse it out after the fact, if I'm actually completing something. But yeah, just fixing up some of the topology because I just collapsed these and ensuring that we're containing the smoothing errors that are inevitably going to come with bad topology on a curved surface. So touching this up a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it's, if there is a method of doing this without having to collapse it, then I'd love to hear it because it's kind of a pain in the ass to collapse things, but I just think it's the nature of these shaders is that you do have to eventually collapse them. And I could always stash the model, but once you collapse it, then progress is made and it's just gonna be hard. And we are approaching the end here. This is basically the last part where I collapse these booleans and make it to where there is a smooth transition. And I do that not just for a Zen barbecue, but in general, that's just how the design looks. So I have to try and make that happen. You can see I'm repairing this because I need the boolean to have geometry to subtract from. And then I collapse it and merge the top half as well with a Union Boolean to make sure that everything is looking proper. And for stuff like this, it is just a topology workflow, honestly. There's not much you can do to get around it, especially if there's shading errors. Yeah, but I mean, that's why you need to have some knowledge of topology, because when you do get into these sections, then it's not such an issue. I just, it's super janky, but on transitional areas that aren't particularly important, you can kind of fudge the topology a little bit. You'll see, because it's, when I say fudge the topology, some people really have no concept of how quads work, and their definition of doing that is very different than mine, but you can see, I'm basically just trying to make it to where there is a skirt between the transition that I can use for an accurate fillet operation. And if you don't know anything about topology, then you're probably gonna do it in a way that causes all sorts of issues and you're not gonna know why, but yeah. So again, just trying to get a smooth transition here and then giving sharp edges all around. And eventually I think I also have to collapse the booleans that are on the top and union this one. and union this one. But yeah, I mean that's basically a short representation of a part of the workflow. I don't think I have done every aspect of the workflow, because honestly, I think that this scope is a, it's just a really easy thing to make, you know. There's not a lot of super complicated forms, so if you are looking for something that's more comprehensive, the pistol tutorial is about nine hours. You can completely follow along or just watch and get information from it. But this is designed as a two-part tutorial. So that is the main section and you'll get the most out of it. Now it is designed as an intermediate tutorial. So just like this, I wasn't describing every single hot key and what everything did precisely. But it is a very creative workflow. Every tool can be used 20 different ways. So it's going to put all of that into context. It's going to guide you through the entire creation process. And if you do end up making it, please post it to ArtStation, send it to me. I will like it. I want to see a bunch of these pistols made. I think it's super good to implement the process as soon as possible. You need to get out there and actually do this just a bunch of times. So I'd make the pistol and then I'd get started on your own concepts and really try to embrace the creativity of the workflow. Some stuff might seem unorthodox to poly modeling, but if you are doing hard surface concepting or you just want to get into it and you feel like your current workflow with poly modeling is limiting you, then this is going to turbocharge your creativity and I think it's going to give you the power to really express your ideas in a way that is more succinct with your imagination and creativity. So it is coming to an end guys, but I hope you got something out of this time lapse and the previous section in the tutorial. And I'll see you in part two where we make the full Gecko cylindrical pistol."
    }
  ]
}