Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session we're gonna be talking about
soften edges, how to smooth them, how to unsmooth them,
and everything in between.
Alright, so you can see this fruit bowl here has a bunch of really smooth shapes
and when I double-click on them, there's a bunch of hidden edges that are inside
of there. You can unsmooth that pretty easily. If I
do this you can see all the lines that make up that geometry, but what I'm going
to show you is how you can unsmooth that's kind of stuff if you want, but
also if you construct a fruit of these kind of lines how you can then soften
them so that they look just like this model.
So we're using a sphere ,as
sort of the inspiration for moving forward, I've constructed this using the
follow me tool and I have a video, I'll post in the description below if you
want to know how to do that. But what we're gonna do is we're just gonna take
this, and we're gonna copy it off to the side, so I'm pressing M here for them
move key or the move tool, and just then hitting ctrl to make a copy. What I'm gonna do
is I'm going to unsoftened this, so that I see all of those edges, so I just want
to soften edges if you don't have this tray open you want to go to window
default tray and make sure it says show tray or click that show tray button and
it'll show up. Over here. Now you want to make sure that you have the soften edges
tab open, and then if this is growing out like it is now you want to make sure
that you have your edges and faces selected. So just like this, I have zero
degree angle between normals for my softening and that basically unsoftened
my shape. Now what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna make a few more copies, so
just copy to here, multiplication simple the asterisks times three, said I have a
few different instances and we're just gonna go through what the different
options of soften edges are. So if I select all of these edges and I go all
the way to 180 degrees, you can see I get a really nice shape. Actually
maybe this will be a little bit more clear. I'm gonna uncheck these two and go
all the way up. So you can see I get a smooth shape, all the edges are smooth,
but I still have faceting. Basically what's happening there is I get sort of
like a disco ball. So the edges are hidden, but the shapes aren't, or the
edges aren't blending between each other. So if I select this and I do the 180
degrees, but I check smooth normals, you can see I get that smoothing between the
edges, which helps give that more fluid feel. It feels less fasted. Now if I
select this last one, and I do the same thing but hit soft and go planar it
doesn't look like it did anything. So what I'm gonna do is actually come back
down, and I'm gonna hit L for the line tool, and I'm just gonna draw some random
lines on this face here. Now this is basically just make sure that I connect
to the edges so that I'm 100% sure that I'm making coplanar lines. So these lines
are all coplanar, these I don't know however many lines are in here these are
all drawn on that face. So what happens if I have lines like this and I
select all of them and I smooth, hit smooth normals, I get up those lines that
I just drew they don't get hidden, so if you want to hide something like that if
for whatever reason you have those extra straight lines, you just hit soften, go
cleaner, and that will get rid of them there.
So hopefully this video helped, if you liked it,
please don't forget to like, subscribe and share this video with your friends.
And as always, happy hacking!
All right, designers! Just because this episode of designer hacks is over,
doesn't mean we're leaving you out in the cold!
Tony's got tons of great content available at designerhacks.com,
so join design nation right now and we'll see you on the next episode of designer hacks!