maybe we might have the general idea of the outline of our shape that we need to
create but we don't know what options we've got to get that done cleanly. It's
actually pretty simple to do in blender but there are a few things we need to
keep in mind. For example first of all we need to make sure that all of our shapes
are in the same object. So for example here I have these two circles and this
little diamond in the middle but they are all one object. You can create them
separately but we're going to need to make sure they're all joined to be able
to do this operation and what we're going to do here is just go 'ctrl E' and
then 'Bridge edge loops' and it's really just as simple as that. Now notice that
blender does give it a really good go of reducing the poly count. So for example
here we had 16 edges on each of these and only four in the middle, as we can
see there. Now that's not really that ideal so I'm going to undo that but
notice that blender does do this fairly intelligently as well. So for example if
we just move our shapes around so I'm going to take this one and this time I'm
going to move this.. actually, let's go 'alt z' make sure I get all of those (selected) and
then I'm going to move that there. I'm going to rotate these and then we'll
take that. So I've switched the order around so let's see if just by selecting
everything with 'a' it can figure out in what order to loop from one shape to the
other and blender should be able to do this. So 'ctrl E' and 'bridge edge loops' and
it's done it again perfectly fine we do have other options here for example we
can change the number of cuts but notice for the area where it's trying to
drastically reduce down from 16 to 4 it's really just sort of slicing across.
It's not really keeping very nice geometry so if I was to right-click and
shade this smooth we can still see that it's kind of having a little bit of trouble
there. Especially here, and if we go 'Ctrl 2' to take a look with our
subdivision surface modifier at two levels, that's not really going away
that's (the problem) just getting it enhanced more than ever. So the other thing that we
have to bear in mind as we do this, is that we need to make sure that the
shapes that we're lofting through have the same amount of vertices which is
what I've set up on this basically. Each of these shapes has 16 sides I'm just
going to select them all. 'ctrl E' to bring up our edges menu and then
'bridge edge loops' and then from there that looks a lot cleaner. Let's right-click,
shade smooth, 'ctrl 2' to drop in our subdivision surface modifier maybe at
three levels this time. And this looks a lot more neat, a lot cleaner. From there
of course we can take this shape maybe and 'ctrl B' and bevel it. Tighten up
that central shape. But it really just depends on the kind of style, the kind
of look that we're going for. Here I've got those same shapes again and what
I'll do is just go 'ctrl E' and do that 'bridge edge loops' again but this time
let's take up the number of cuts, and we might say, well so what?! We could just
go 'ctrl R' after we're done here. But what we've got in this tool is we can
change things from linear to one of these more curving options so we can try
the blend surface for example and now we have this smoothing option or we could
try our blend path and I just tend to try both of these with different
smoothing amounts just to see what I like and personally I kind of quite like
that interpolation. So I'm going to just tab out of that tool, shade it smooth,
'ctrl 2' and then we can turn off the wireframe and everything just to get
a nice clean look at that. I think that's looking pretty good.
Let's try tackling a more practical and more complicated example. So here we've
got our general shapes that we know we want to transition through. We're going
to go from here into here and we're really gonna up the complexity by going
from one shape into two. The first step would be to just join everything
together which is what I've got here. I'm just going to turn off the subdivision
surface modifier for a moment though and what I've done is I've prepared the
geometry by just matching up the number of edges along our curved areas with
similar edges on the flat areas so on here for example we only had fourteen
edges to work with and on here we needed to be able to go into 32 so I've added
some extra edges along the top to make this loop have the same amount of edges
which is 32 so we're gonna go from 32 into 32. And then from 32 we're gonna
need to go to 32 again so extra edges were added to help work with that. Just
before we tackle this more simple cylindrical object i've created another
example just off to the side which is this still fairly simple
example but I've just stretched it out in the middle a little bit more of a
capsule shape and I just wanted to quickly discuss how we might go about
this kind of shape and we'll discuss another option with the more typical
cylinder which is probably easier and faster but with this kind of shape what
we're gonna need to do is we're going to need to stretch this out a little bit
and then I'm going to duplicate it and let's just come and find this actually
let's call this capsule one and the other one we're gonna name hmmm what could
it possibly be, 'capsule 2'. Let's tab into edit mode on
it and all I'm going to do is just shift the end vertices just off to the side
slightly and then we're going to join these together we're not gonna just join
them with ctrl J we're gonna go full on Union, boolean style. So let's turn off
these subdivision surface modifiers on both of them just to keep things simple
and then I'm going to make use of the boolean addon bool tool so make sure
that's enabled if you want to follow along with this bit and I'm gonna select
them both and go ctrl + on the numpad and that automatically creates what we
need for our boolean so with that done I'm going to apply it and if we move it
off to the side we can see what's happened there it's changed our other
object 'capsule 2' into just a wireframe display. I'm going to move that out of
the way though into my temporary collection if we really mess this up
then at least we can get it back from the dead in our temp collection. So
from here this is done but there's a lot of work that needs cleaning up in there
a lot of these faces we didn't really want it's not too much of a problem to
clean this up though I'm just gonna press n to open our sidebar and come
down to the 3d print tab and we're gonna need our 3d print toolbox add-on enabled
as well for this so with this object what I'm going to do is 'check all' and
we'll find that there's a few problems so we've got a whole load of non
manifold edges the ones at the very ends here are perfectly fine but we don't
really want these on the inside a good place to start is probably with these
intersect faces and that's going to select a lot of what we want to get rid
of so I'm going to press C to enter into our circle paint selection tool and I'm
gonna middle click around a load of this because I don't mind this these are
pretty much fine and let's check the rest and that's probably where we want
to X and delete so that's gotten rid of a lot of the problems. There's still some
issues that we might want to just quickly come in and correct X to delete that
I'm gonna select everything and go M to bring up our merge by distance and
that's helped clean it up even further this edge coming down here we don't want
so I'm going to.. in fact, it's actually two edges so I'm gonna X and dissolve
those down here is appears to be a little bit of a problem
we've lost the face here so I'm gonna press F to create that and this clearly
looks like some strange shading so I'm going to go X and delete this face and
I'll start again with this bit F to fill that then i'll go ctrl R to
add in an edge loop here and then let's just join those up let's go '/' on the
numpad to isolate this and then we're almost there so I'm gonna select these
two and press J to join those and then let's check all again and I'm liking the
look of all these zeros from here we don't need that tool anymore I'm gonna
come out of isolation with slash on the numpad and then what we can just do is
select both of these join them together with ctrl J. That's put the subdivision
surface modifier that the other object had back on and then I'm going to select
both of these ctrl e bridge the edge loops let's turn off the modifier just
so that we can see that and you can see by all this triangulation that I've
forgotten to make sure that the end of this has the same amount of edges so
this one has 32 and this side had 34 so I'm going to need another two edges on
this side so let's just select both of these and go ctrl B and where there
was one there is now two so that should now be 34 so I can select both of these
ctrl e and bridge loops that's looking a lot better I'm going to create some
extra cuts something around two or three usually helps us to see what's going on
with our curving the smoothness of this and we can see that that's not looking
very good so I'm going to try blend surface and take the amount down I'm not
too concerned with this because we're asking quite a lot with this very short
distance that we've got I think in all reality we would probably push that back
but I'm liking the majority of that now what I'll do is come over to this side
this amount of edges is 34 and down here is 32 so we need to do the same kind of
idea on these just gonna give these an extra two edges each so I'm just going
to bevel those should now be 34 which we can go ctrl e
and bridge edge loops increase the number of cuts to say four and I'm
liking the general shape of that so I'm going to repeat that again I'm just
gonna round that off just in case I need to remember it so ctrl e Bridge edge
loops and now we need to set the number of cuts again so 4 but it's remembered
our smoothness and let's take a look with the modifier on shift alt Z to turn
off all the gadgetry the on-screen widgetry and I think that's looking
pretty good alright so what I'd like to do is come
back to this more simple version and really the only thing that I wanted to
discuss on this is the fact that we have another add-on that can help us with
this so if I just come over to preferences with f4 and we want to
filter by just showing our add mesh options and we're going to add some
extra objects so I'm just going to enable that and now when we go to use
shift a and go to mesh we'll notice a whole load of extra stuff going on down
here and what I want is the pipe joints now going from one cylinder into two is
basically just the same as a pipe joint a Y pipe joint like this and we've got
lots of options here so we can change exactly what we need in fact I'm just
going to come to this area and just double check again so we had 32 edges
and we can come to this and we can right click and change the Y joint and get
our presets back up so we have our 32 divisions I'm not sure
exactly what the radius is we need but I'll set that up in a moment and the
angle for both of these I think I'd like to keep them quite straight in fact one
of them is almost right in front of the other so that means that one of these
angles should probably be 0 and this one should come off just a little bit like
that and that's all there is to it from there I'm going to take this and move it
into position R X 90, R Z 90 minus 90 that is. Scale that down until it's sort of more
or less fits and that's good to go so I'm going to tab into edit mode on
this one L to select this piece and just X to delete it
because we have this piece instead now I'm going to tab into edit mode on there
now I want to bring all that in a little bit further like this and on the ends
here I'm gonna take these loops and double tap G to slide and I don't want
them to be taking the shape of the inner join so
I'm going to press e for even and then F to flip that I'm going to just bring
them in just a slight bit closer there so double tap G, E (for even) F to flip and then
just bring them in then I'm going to join them with these ctrl J right click
to make sure that's smooth. Come over to here take this loop and this loop
Ctrl E to bridge the edge loops give it about three and come over to here and
here 'Ctrl E' bridge edge loops give that
about four cuts and the same on this one to finish up Ctrl E bridge edge loops
4 cuts let's take a look turn our subdivision modifier back on shift
Alt and Z to get a nice clear look at this and there's no real artifacts there
it's joined that all pretty nicely if we wanted to we could actually come through
and add any additional edges just to tighten it up
or we could slide things around but that's just a personal choice