by the end of this video you'll understand all the fundamentals of the array modifier and see
just how powerful it is on its own 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 forget to subscribe and hit
that little bell icon to never miss an opportunity to keep making this video is all about the array
modifier and just how powerful it is all on its own i am having to do just on its own as it's such
a powerful modifier with other modifiers that i want to show you just the modifier itself and then
how it does with other modifiers later on starting from a fresh blender file let's invert our
selection delete our camera light because we're about to explore the array modifier now before
i jump into this i need to say that i am going to be splitting this up into two videos one is very
much just the array modifier in itself what it does and everything about it the next video will
be things very similar to the array modifier as well as advanced use cases of the array modifier
because the array modifier is a behemoth it works so great with other modifiers so let's go ahead
and let's get started with this remember that if you haven't followed me on the other modifiers i
really suggest that you do at least the other modifiers if not the entire course because i
really have gone into a lot of detail so let's go ahead and let's apply this array now if you don't
know what an array is let's make this a little bit more visually sort of clear what's going on
so let's go ahead let's put on our wireframe so we can see the wireframe and let's take a look at
the modifier itself so right this minute we have a fit type of fixed count of two let's ignore this
offset for now but so one two there we go we have two cubes here one is the original the other one
is this copy keep this in mind though they are a copy they aren't mesh so you can't go ahead and
edit it but you can edit the root object which edits itself so this is so to speak an instance
of the array okay so that's that now let's talk about this whole relative offset thing we will
go into the fit type a little bit later so this relative offset right this minute is set to one so
why is this here what's exactly going on well the relative offset is based off the bounding box we
learned this over in the boolean modifier exactly what it means but basically it's a box that can
fit around your mesh as close as possible so that would mean that if we set this to two
you would have the space in between these two right now to have another one of those meshes
and just to illustrate this a little bit more visually let's just move this on the x and you
can see that there is enough space now to fit that there however if we were to move this on the y and
by the way this here is how you can do diagonal arrays so if we increase the count you'll see it
there we go a diagonal array and so just on the y you can see that the bounding box is
just as wide as the cube itself all right let's undo that i hope that explained the relative
offset now let's talk about the constant offset one thing to keep in mind while we're going over
there is that you can have two of them on at the same time i haven't really used this that much but
i have seen some people create some great things using multiple offsets on arrays all right so what
is this constant offset well the best way that i like to look at it is basically think of it as
you're duplicating it so doing a shift d and then moving it along so if we drop down here
you can see we're moving along one millimeter and that's exactly the result we would get here
so as you can imagine if we move this by three and our cube is two millimeters you can see that
up at the top we have one millimeter gap between these two all right i think that's pretty clear
on how that works and you can obviously set this on the y and the z however you're wanting
right so let's go ahead and let's increase our count to five for now i want to skip over this
object offset right now because it's going to be way too complicated to go straight into that
because we'll spend the rest of the video on there so let's talk about the merge and the caps i'm not
going to talk about uvs because we don't really use them in precision modeling so this constant
offset let's set this to two so they're touching right next to each other and we now already know
what a merge would do that's basically gone ahead and merged all of our meshes together here because
right this minute this is a real mesh but when you go ahead and apply it it would go ahead and merge
all of these together all right so we understand that from many other ones and now we have
this here caps what exactly is a cap well i'm pretty sure you can gather what a cap is but if
we create some mesh you will understand a little caveat to keep in mind here so we're going to move
that there do a shifty and we're going to do a strange edit to this one and apply the scale of it
so right here first things first before i put in any cap i want you to see that if we go ahead into
up here and we go to our tools and our origin point we can move our origin point wherever
we want it doesn't matter because the array is doing it off the mesh itself not the origin point
now let's do the same with caps once we show what that is so the start cap another little caveat
is it's before the beginning and this is after the end for the end cap it doesn't go ahead
and put the first one right at the beginning and right at the end these are like additional ones
and they will use the origin point for this and if we go ahead and move the origin point now
you will see how it affects the end and start okay so with that covered let's go into the more
complicated things now so to get more complicated let's start on the easier side of things i'm just
going to undo here and delete these here let's just quickly cover the fit type fit type isn't
that complicated but it can be a little bit weird so fit type we have fit length and curve i think
they're pretty self-explanatory here so first one fit length right this minute we have this set to
three millimeters the length is zero so if we set this to 30 we should basically get 10 of these
let's take a look we have 11 along here because basically it's taking it from the relativity
of the middle of the bounding box so it has just that little bit extra to be able to make 11.
but as you can see depending on the length is depending how many copies it's going to make along
that length type now you might have got quite excited seeing this little fit length saying fit
curve now it is quite interesting this fit curve so let's go ahead and let's create a bezier curve
so we've got this bezier curve i'm going to scale this up a bit i'm going to apply the scale i'm
going to move this over this way a little bit and then let's go ahead and tell our array to be that
bezier curve and let's take a look at this on the top so as you can see on the length of this curve
it has gone ahead and arrayed now if we go ahead and edit this curve you can see that it will
be less and more keep in mind that it does take into consideration the total of the curve so as
you can see as we stretch this curve out it gets longer because technically that's what's happening
so it's the curve full length of the curve what's happening here now you might be saying okay but i
want to array along that curve that's going to come in the next video we need to understand
the full modifier first okay so we've got that there we understand the length and we understand
the curve now let's go ahead and let's talk about this object offset so the object offset is very
similar to two other ones that we've already done which is the mirror modifier and the screw
modifier so you'll see a lot of similarities soon so we're going to just move this out we're going
to put our 3d cursor over on the world origin here and let's go ahead and create ourselves a null
because as we know this object is going to need something that's going to need an origin point
because that's usually what's going to happen when we're talking about other objects so let's click
this object offset onto our empty let's turn off this constant offset because we don't want
to double one so let's turn on this object offset and you'll see what happens right now boom we now
have five copies along the distance of the offset of this origin point to that origin point yes you
heard that right origin points are now important so if we move just the origin of this you can see
that it's the relationship between the origin point and this other object that controls this
now let's go ahead and explore that a little bit further so that means that our other object here
are empty if this empty goes about and i don't know starts to rotate what would happen oh that
means that it's going ahead and every single time it does an array it's rotating that amount
it also applies to scale and position so let's go and put that rotation on once again
then let's go ahead and scale this and then let's also do a little i don't know g z upwards
as you can see we're starting to get this step up effect now if you can truly understand the origin
and object relationship with the array modifier this is how we go ahead and do radial arrays
now how would we go about doing that well we need to go ahead and say your origin point of this is
where the origin point of your controlling object is so let's go ahead and do that all
we're going to do is right click set the origin point to the 3d cursor because the 3d cursor is
at the zero zero so with that done we now should understand that the distance of where this is
in relationship to this point here is the radius of our radial array
i hope that makes sense let's go ahead let's move our origin object here of this origin offset and
you'll see as we turn it it creates this radial effect now there is a mathematical way of figuring
out the perfect amount and blender makes this quite easy because remember blender inputs
are mathematical inputs as well so we can go right here to our rotation amount and let's just
go ahead we have 5 here so 360 degrees divided by 5 and there we go the perfect amount needed
so let's go ahead and let's make this a little bit more complicated let's go and set this to 12
and let's go and do a nice 360 divided by 12. and now we have this sort of like clock hand
you could imagine so there we go that's a nice radial ray and the distance set here is basically
the diameter or the radius whatever you're wanting to deal with perfect let's go ahead and move this
oh dear what's happening here it's all going crazy and not what i want
yes we are now bound by our origins you have to move these both collectively
and when you rotate them and do strange things with them they have to be done collectively as
well so how can we do this in such a way that we can then connect this all together to one operator
we're coming now to the a realm of something called rigging within blender but this is
i wouldn't even consider this really breaking but it technically is so we're going to create
another null here a single arrow and we're going to go ahead and make this nice and big
and this is very similar to the screw modifier in the sense that we're going to select both of these
and we're going to parent them to this now before i do that you might say well why don't you just
parent the cube to that and you'll be fine right okay well let's do that i'm going to
parent it to our original null there so it's got nothing to do with that arrow there and yeah
it works okay great moving it rotating it okay but you know what i'm really wanting to change
what's happening here so let's change the segments and now okay i'm wanting to go back
to my five now i'm wanting to rotate just this so that would be rotating oh wait what's how would
i how there's your problem you can no longer set the rotation in an easy way it can still be done
so how do we go about and fix this well we tell both of these objects
to be the child sorry the child of this parent so we select the children and bring it to the parent
and then we parent it and now we will still have our rotation
we can still go ahead and move this however we want and then we can select this big arrow that
we've created and this controls the whole radial array however we want we can go ahead and rotate
it we could even go ahead and scale it if we want you can do absolutely everything using that
now something else we can go ahead and do now that we have this whole thing it doesn't need this
you could have done it beforehand but we can go ahead and move this
and start to create a whole bunch of crazy things with it as you can see we can scale this in
start getting really creative i don't know how this really goes with precision modeling
but you can get some pretty crazy results very quickly with arrays and understanding
how they all work collectively well done for getting through the fundamentals of the
array modifier as you can see it is an extremely powerful modifier all on its own and just you wait
and see when you start adding other modifiers to it it explodes in functionality a huge thank you
to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it's the reason why i'm able to create all these
videos here completely for free and if you're enjoying what i'm making here you think i'm worthy
of your support i would love to see you there too don't forget that we have a discord and that's
linked down in the description thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue