In this Blender tutorial I'm going to show you how you can quickly change planes into steel plates
or panels or any kind of hard surface geometry very quickly using a few modifiers. As we see,
there's going to be two different ways of doing this. One will use a stacked
sub-division modifier and the other will use a stacked bevel and sub-division modifier.
Each has their advantages and disadvantages so first let's just look at what we have.
So right here we have this panel and it's just a plane, so if I press tab I can go ahead and select
these edges by pressing 2 and then if I press e and then y I can just extend more. And as you
can see it just grows and has this nice angle. I can do the same thing with this one if I click tab
go to edit mode press 2 for edges, select these edges, press e, then y this moves over as well.
How is this working? Well let's go ahead and see this one and we'll put it into action. This is
the exact same form. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this by pressing shift d, clicking,
then pressing G, and X to move. So now these two forms are exactly the same but they don't have
those modifiers so let's go ahead and see what happens if I add a modifier. So I'm going to add a
modifier of Solidify. Now that I have the solidify modifier I want even thickness and I'll increase
the thickness a bit and I'll have it be “Only Rim” then I'm also going to add a subdivision
modifier and for this first one I'm going to change it to 3 and then make it simple. And as
you can see the more I change this the crisper those edges get so I'm going to leave it at 3.
And then I'm going to add one more subdivision modifier and this one I'll leave on Catmull-Clark
and this will round off the edges and I'll put this up to four so now I have
the exact same form and if I press tab I can select these edges and then I can press e, y
and extrude. So this works really great and what we can do is use the subdivision modifier that
is stacked above and you can increase this to have more crisp lines. The problem with this is
it starts to add a lot of geometry very quick so let's go ahead and look at an alternative method.
So here we once again we have the same form I'm going to add a modifier I'll add solidify we'll go
ahead and increase the thickness, even thickness, and only rim. Then we're going to add another
modifier, and we're going to add bevel, and then one more modifier. We'll add subdivision surface
and for the subdivision surface we'll go ahead, three or four should be good.
And then on the bevel this is where the magic happens. So on the bevel instead of angle as
the limit method we'll go ahead and select none, then under profile we'll change the shape to 1,
and then the segments to 2 and now we have a lot more control over the thickness and sharpness of
this bevel. So I can decrease this sharpness and it'll become much tighter or I can increase it
a lot. So I have the same control as I would over here but I don't have as much geometry.
So once again I can put this down to .04 for some real sharp, crisp edges. So let's look at
the difference in geometry we get from using the bevel method versus the stacked sub-D method. So
this stacked sub-D method, if I press tab, whoa, that is a lot of polygons. So this is just all
the modifiers on this same shape applied but if I click on the one where I used the bevel to create
these even creases, I can press tab, it's a lot of geometry but it's not near as much.
So you can get away with a lot less geometry by using the bevel and having it apply those
edges. So this way you can make plates, anything that is a rough geometric shape that you want to
extrude very easily, and remember this geometry is just a plane so these are just simple planes
with the edges extruded and a few modifiers applied. And it's nice because I can go ahead
and work non-destructively, so if I come in here and I select these edges I can press 2 and I can
move these edges around and it's non-destructive until I eventually apply the modifiers in Blender.
So hopefully stacking two sub-D modifiers or even better stacking a bevel modifier on top of sub-D
will allow you to make steel plates and other hard surface models in in Blender. Happy 3D modeling.