by the end of this video you'll understand the pros and cons of the solidify modifier and an
alternative operation to get the same results with more precision what's up i'm jonathan and
welcome to maker tales where i'm sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours so don't
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video is all about the solidify modifier i frankly wasn't going to cover it but i know that it's used
so widely within blender and i just wanted to make sure you understood why i don't personally
use it in my builds and how you could use it if you want to starting from a fresh blender
file let's go ahead select everything and delete it and bring in a plane because we're about to
take a look at the solidify modifier this is a modifier that can be very useful in the correct
instances however i personally don't use it that much and i want to show you why i wasn't going
to cover this one because i feel like it doesn't really deserve to be in precision but i know that
some people feel like they can swear by this so i'm going to go ahead and show you it and show you
my alternative and then you can make your decision from it so ultimately we know that in edit mode if
we go into our face orientation we have a 2d bit of mesh here which has an outside and an inside
this is the normal positive this is the normal negative the reason why i'm going through this
basics is because quite frankly we now go ahead and select it in our face we're going to extrude
it by one millimeter and it goes up one millimeter on the normal the positive now let's go ahead and
do the solidify modifier now remember that if you haven't done modifiers before i really think you
should go to the first video and then jump into this all right so here we're going to go solidify
you might not see it because we're working with our millimeter precision so let's go ahead and
give it some thickness let's go one millimeter okay it's gone ahead and done that whole idea
of extrusion that i explained but it's done it on the minus why is that well like i just said
it's going off by the normal and it's gone on the negative of the normal so if we set this offset
to a 1 it goes on the positive of the normal so if we want we can set this to 0 and then it uses the
normal the center point of the normal as sort of the point where to go 0.5 on each direction
all right so that fundamentally is the solidify modifier now let's go ahead let's step this up
again let's go ahead let's bring in a cube and let's go ahead and delete these two faces right
here now with these two here let's go in bring in our solidify once again i'm gonna go offset
on the positive by one millimeter and let's see what's happening right that's not quite how we're
wanting it is it it's going a little bit weird funny off shape what's happening here is basically
it is averaging the normals it takes the normals of everything in this shape and tries to average
out this dimensionality well for that we've got this thing called even thickness you take this on
and it's going to go ahead and say yeah i can go one millimeter every direction from the normal
you got it i've got that well let's just double check that quickly i'm going to use cad transforms
i'm going to go g i'm going to go from the vertex from here on the x to the edge okay great that's
one millimeter on the y that's great that's one millimeter however does this apply to more complex
geometry let's take a look so that there is again fundamentally what the solidify modifier is doing
so now let's get a little bit more complicated let's get an ico sphere let's go ahead select
this face use our numpad plus with control to select more delete that remember all these
crazy ways that i'm doing selection all part of the whole course there's a video for selection
so here we go we have this right here let's go ahead let's add the solidify to it this could
be a pencil part for 3d printing whatever you want we're going to go on the positive because i wanted
to make it bigger let's say one millimeter for now all right let's just go over some of the other
settings we know that we're wanting to go even thicknesses now what's this whole rim thing well
the rim is this this is the rim so if we turn this off it won't fill the rim it will be like this
and if you want you can say hey i only want that well then it will remove your original geometry
okay let's go back let's turn off this fill because i do want to be able to see it let's once
again double check the measurements that we're getting here because we're on simple so let's
see we've got g we're going to go from vertex to vertex because i think that's the easiest way
that's not correct there let's check once again and that's not correct there right that's not how
it should be now do keep in mind there is a more intensive way to let this modifier work which is
using the mode of complex and again here we're going to go even setting it to one millimeter as
it was set before and there's a whole bunch of other stuff here but i'm talking purely
in the terms of precision here so you would expect if this was one millimeter from here to there it
would be one millimeter so let's go ahead let's check that so g we're gonna go from here to there
that is not one millimeter from this point over here to there that is not one millimeter maybe
it's doing it from face centers so let's go ahead and check that so doing g face centers from this
face center there to that face center there it's closer it definitely is and if this is enough
precision for you by all means use it but for me i like to know for sure that something from one
point to another is going to be what i expect and unfortunately right this minute we are at a point
with the solidify tool i haven't found a way that it works for this but there is a way of doing this
unfortunately it is not a modifier but i will show you it now so we're going to delete the modifier
and we go into edit mode so select the object go into edit mode we're going to select it all and we
go shift d to duplicate it right click to cancel a move and here we have it now i'm going to tell you
we're going to be doing a scaling to get the thing that we're wanting now you might be going hey but
you never the way that you taught me scaling is that it's very much set by this origin point or
the point that is snapped here yes but there's one more that i didn't tell you about because it very
much needs the whole context of normals and all the rest so let's go ahead and do that and that is
normal scaling so when you talk about a scale a default scale is you hit s and it goes like that
if you hit 1 nothing is going to happen because the way that scaling works
is one is original scale correct okay well undoing that let's go ahead let's go alt s and now we have
just turned on normal scaling we're scaling along the normals so now if you go ahead and type in one
it is going to scale one millimeter because that is our unit that is set in the scene along the
normal so with that in place let's go ahead and let's double check what we're getting here so
with our cad transforms g you can see we're snapping from this vertex here over to that vertex
exactly one millimeter once again we'll go from here from this point here to that point there
exactly one millimeter now do keep in mind we're talking with triangles right this minute so there
is no way that you would actually be able to go ahead get one millimeter from each of these points
and also have one millimeter from face centers because you need to also keep one millimeter
from all the other points we're getting into a little bit of geometry math theory here but
in essence at least we have one number that we can fully confirm and understand
what is going on which is every vertex of vertex normal is going to be exactly one millimeter and
that there is how i go ahead and do the operation of a solidify on more complicated geometry by all
means feel free to use the solidify in your own models for whatever you want but i personally
go ahead and do it like this there are times that i do use the solidify modifier
to go ahead and just do a little bit of tolerance work which you can see over in this video right
here but at the end of the day nothing beats your hand editing of mesh to know exactly what
is going on well done for getting through the solidify modifier video as you can tell it's
very much up to you if it works within your precision workflow and those little margins
of error aren't much of a problem for you by all means use it it can be a very powerful modifier
but i just needed to explain why i don't use it and how i need to know between point to point my
exact precision distance even if it means that i have to do it manually there are other ways using
shape keys and a whole bunch of other stuff that i will cover in the future but it's very complicated
and i just want to show you the fundamentals right this minute of how to get the same operation
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