A lot of hard surface shapes have repeating details and some of those
shapes have repeating details in some circular way. so how do we get that set
up so that we don't have to repeat the work we do on one portion multiple times.
plus what if we quickly change the rotational symmetry so that instead of
3 sides we want 5 for example? when we first go to add a cylinder into
Blender we might choose a vertex count, the amount of vertices value that we
have here to be divisible by 4, so that our resolution, the amount of
segments that make up this cylinder can easily be rotated around and symmetrical
in quite a few ways. here I've got a cap fill of nothing so there's no polygons
at the top or bottom there and if we take a look from Top Orthographic with
7 on the numpad and I'm gonna go Alt Z so that I can easily select
through the mesh here, because we have a value divisible by 4 it's really easy
to just select a quarter or a half. actually let's take just a quarter and
Ctrl I to invert the selection there and X to delete all those vertices and then
we could just create any basic bit of detail. let's say that's the sort of
thing we were looking for, it's really easy at this point since the Object
Origin for this object is still going to be at the center, in fact let's make that a
little clearer and turn on our Origins and a 3d cursor...
instead of going Shift D to Duplicate I'm going to instead go Alt D to
Duplicate which will create a Linked Instance where the objects share the exact same
mesh information and then go R and then 90 and Enter to confirm that. and then I
got to go Shift R a couple of times to get the last two corners there and then
at this point I can just take this one, take this bit of detail for example and
we'll see that it's actually as we edit one quarter of it, all the quarters are
getting updated at the same time. if we wanted a cylinder which repeated around
more like 5 times, we might need to choose something which is more divisible
by 5, so maybe something like 30 and then for every 6 faces let's get 6
of these and Invert the Selection, delete those and then now what we do is come to
Alt D and then R to rotate and it would be somewhere around here. now
drop it into about there, because we don't have to be perfectly precise with
the maths on this, we can actually figure this out by just going 360 divided by
5 and we know that's 72, so at that point we just gonna go Shift R until we
complete the circle. and at that point when we edit one, all the others get
edited. we don't actually have to think about the maths of it whatsoever, though
since we can actually just model our detail where it might be simpler on a
flat plane and then use our modifiers to get what we need. so let's take a look
at that. let's take this flat plane which I've
Subdivided and just convert this into a cylinder. so I'm going to Tab back out
into Object mode and let's add a modifier, Simple Deform and then I want
the Bend option and now if we set the Axis to be any one of these three, we're
not really getting that cylinder, so what I'm going to need to do is go Shift A
and add in an Empty (for which to control that with) so I'm gonna switch back to
the plane and then choose that empty. now the basic idea here is that we want this
Empty to have the Y axis of it shooting out perpendicular from this geometry, so
we're going to need to see that a little bit better. so I'm going to come back
over to the empty settings and display that actually as arrows, so we can see Y
is shooting off down that way so let's rotate all around X, I'm gonna need to
rotate 90 degrees, so I'm just going to type in 90 in the numpad and press
Enter and now we can see the plane is beginning to actually rotate around and
resemble a little bit more of a cylinder. so let's come over to the modifier
settings and take the angle here all the way to a full circle, 360, now when we do
that it's basically rotated it round the wrong way, so I'm going to set this
actually to -360. I'm gonna grab both of these actually
and rotate them so this cylinder is standing up, rotate X 90 and then if
we take this and Tab into Edit mode again we can see we still have access to
that flat plane and we don't need to be able to see this Empty anymore, so I'm
just going to switch off the visibility of that in the viewport. so we have
access to this flat plane and that might make certain modeling objectives a
little bit easier, we could easily just take a part of this and move that over
there like this, maybe we might like to take a few of these faces, Inset them in
and just Extrude them back, something just
super simple like that for now. now it's all very flat shaded, so let's
Right-click and shade that as Smooth and if we take a look around the back we can
still clearly see a very flat hard edge, so to help with this let's use the Weld
modifier and now that goes away. and then let's add a Subdivision Surface modifier.
take that up to 2 levels of Subdivision in the viewport and then
from there we could continue to work. now we can work flat like this or we could
come over to the deform and click this last button that we have on our modifier
settings here which is just going to allow us to actually edit with the
modifications in place, so there for example we might want to go Ctrl R and
reinforce this edge on the other side and it feels very much like just working
on a regular model. maybe let's just add another loop in here and another one there.
this is just that one version of the geometry just being rotated round. a good
way to get some rotational symmetry here is simply have at the start of all this
an Array modifier. I'm gonna put that right to the top using this little arrow
here and let's take our Fixed Count up to 3. now notice that it was getting
wider, but also notice that we're now getting 3 of those little indents that
we made. taking a look in the wireframes maybe a
little bit easier - that's super quick and easy to just choose the amount of
rotational symmetry we want there, so for example let's just quickly take that to
5 and it's done! if we want to change the overall size of it, the overall
radius of it, we could just scale it, in this case of that would be S and then
Shift Z just to eliminate the Z axis from being scaled. now we've made it a
little bit of a narrow diameter now. but, maybe we might want to go back to this
detail and maybe scale that down, square that out a little bit more or whatever
we like. so that was the cylinder, let's take a look at making a more of a disc
with rotational symmetry, so I'm going to go Shift A and add in a mesh plane, let's
move that off to the side, Tab into Edit mode, Right click to Subdivide. can I
take that all the way up to 10 and then I'm gonna come over to the modifier,
bring in our trusty Simple Deform, change that to Bend, change the Axis to Z so
it's rotating as we look at it down here from the Z axis and let's take that all
the way up to 360. now you can probably tell that
that's overlapping *quite badly* there so all we need to do is just press G and in
this case I've Middle Clicked and gestured towards the left and right just
to lock it down on the Y-axis there and I can just drop it in about there. we
don't need to be particularly precise about it, we can scale right where we are
to change the thickness of this and depending on how far we move it down the
Y-axis in this case, we'll depend on its general overall radius. now at this point
we're already able to just Tab into Edit mode, find our flat plane and then maybe
just drag down this edge loop, G and then Z to create some inner detail there and
for the outer detail here maybe I'll just go E to Extrude, Z to lock it on
the Z axis and drop it to about there. and we can already see some kind of disk
starting to take shape. I think we're going to need to
Right-click and Shade this Smooth though. let's give it some Subdivision Surface
levels, so maybe about 2 and notice where it's wrapped all the way around on
itself, we need to weld that. so I'm gonna add
the Weld modifier and make that above the Subdivision Surface modifier, just
collapse that a little bit and I'll also collapse this and then we're ready to
just continue editing. so I can use Ctrl R to reinforce this edge loop and
tighten this up if we want or I'll Alt Left select this one, just go control
Shift R instead and that way will automatically create our offset loops
required to tighten that edge up. I think I'll take this internal loop and just
slide it to the left a little bit more, so if I take a look from an orthographic
view we can see the actual profile of what it is that we've created there. as
we had before we have the option to instead of modeling in a flat plane like
this, we could just enable this feature to edit on the cage, to edit in place
where it's gonna feel a lot more like just working with a regular geometry and
any changes that we make potentially a little bit more intuitive. now notice
that this isn't really creating any rotational symmetry, it's just that one
bit of geometry being bent all around, so as again as we did before, we just create
this array and put that to the very top. I notice with a fixed count of 2 we
have 2 of those little details now and we could just choose
how many times we want to see that rotational symmetry. I'm gonna choose
3. and after doing that it changes its overall size so we might want to go
in and change the general scale of it. alright so I'm going to collapse this
bit and for the Simple Deform itself I'm going to turn off that Edit on the Cage
option and just edit as we see it here and take those faces that we just
lowered. let's just check we're on Vertex mode though. so G, Z, hold Ctrl
indicate that vertex, Alt A to deselect everything and then we have a
nice clean disk ready for some more deliberate rotational symmetry.
then just take these 5 polygons there, I to Inset them, E to extrude them down,
and let's take a look at that, that's looking pretty good. I think I'm going to
grab the edges just there and just slide them in, double tap G, somewhere around
there. now you can see in the top left, just around this kind of area, that it's
around 0.8 that I want it, so I'm going to type that in exactly and when it
comes to the other edge that we have on the opposite side, I'm gonna do basically
the same thing. so this time instead of - I'm just gonna go for the +. let's take a
look at that. I'm getting this nice little fading-in detail and something
that would be trickier to do is just sort of fading it in from these sides as
well, but with it flat like this it's way easier. you just select these edge loops
and scale them towards each other on the Y-axis, so S and then Y, let's check that
out and that's working pretty well. something else that we could do and I'm
gonna use the cage in this case, is just take some of these areas in between the
notches, so maybe that amount and I'm gonna take a look from Top Orthographic,
take a look in wireframe, 1 for vertex select, I'm gonna Shift select over more
of the vertices that I want just to make sure we get them all, from there I'm
gonna turn off the Edit on the cage actually and what I'm going to do is
just squish them in. so I'm gonna press G and then Y and we can see what's happening.
very very slightly parts of it are being flattened out, but
I think this edge loop is in the way, so I'm going to select it an X to Dissolve
it and this edge loop... I'm going to slide further in as well and then I'm going to
go back to Vertex Select and take these vertices
that we have squished in a little bit and do that a little bit more and
then we can see the effect of that, so let's just take a look at how far we
want that to go. and I think I'm happy with that.
and here I've jumped forward to show the result of just a few more very basic
modeling ideas. at this point we could just go on forever really, adding
whatever details we like, safe in the knowledge that all of this is neatly
getting in automatically duplicated and rotated around.