let's learn a little more on 2d precision what's up 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 carrying on
learning 2d precision and the pitfalls that are in it before we go ahead and jump into 3d precision
starting once again with a fresh blender file let's carry on our mastery of 2d precision so
let's go ahead let's select everything delete it and create ourselves that single vertex
once again as our starting point then i'm going to go into our top view zoom in a bit
and what i'm wanting to do is create a two millimeter by two millimeter square
now i'm going to show you something interesting here so let's go 2 on the y hit enter and now
this really doesn't have to do with precision modeling but it's something interesting to know
anyway when you have one vertex selected in edit mode if you hold down control and then you right
click you're going to get this sort of organic path way creation of extrusion that you can do
really quickly just something that i wanted to slip in there right now let's go into our edge
selection select this edge extrude it out by two millimeters and hit enter right so we have this
here we're not really wanting to deal with faces just yet so let's go ahead let's go face selection
and delete only faces so we're left with our verses and edges here so first let's
cover bevels and chamfers because within precision modeling we absolutely love them however i'm sorry
to say they're not quite as parametric and easy going in blender but i will show you a way of the
most parametric way there is but that's more in the 3d space but right this minute i want to show
you the destructive method as well as how to fix the destructive method so let's select a vertex
and let's go ahead and use the shortcut for beveling which is going to be control b
over here is the button but let's use ctrl b and you'll see nothing is happening now i want to
draw your attention down to the bottom tool tip bar you are going to see there's a whole bunch
of shortcuts here for right now there's only one really to know which is v this is to affect
vertices because right this minute without a face it doesn't know what a real edge is here so now
as you pull this you'll see you'll get a chamfer and if you want to turn this into a bevel you can
use the scroll wheel to add segments to it now we could also put in a number here so let's go with
0.35 let's hit enter and that's it done you'll also see that on the bottom left once we've done
our confirming we have the dialog box and here you have it 0.35 we've got our segments and all this
i'm going to change this now to 0.5 i'm going to go for 10 segments and i'll leave it at that
there's a lot more to cover here which i basically want you to go and explore you'll see that
this is what we did with our shortcut of v we went from here to there and there's even the
ability to create your own custom ones but i'm not going to cover this right here right let's
go ahead here and let's create a chamfer ctrl b v let's put down our segments down to almost nothing
and then let's go again with 0.5 hit enter and i'm happy with that so let's go about and reconstruct
this destructive method because we've just added a whole bunch of verses how do i go back to just
the square that we had well the easiest way that i found is going to active element select everything
create one of these as the active element and then from here we're going to scale in
the direction that we want all these other points to go in so i'm going to scale in the y direction
and you'll see as i go up to zero and you can see the number is right here as i go closer to
zero it pulls it up so let's just type in zero and that's it done now we can select all these extra
vertices that we don't need so let's go with those there let's hit x and let's dissolve vertices
now there is one extra vertex there that i didn't get let's dissolve that one too and now let's
go ahead and do it here i'll do it in the x this time so i'm going to turn this one into our active
vertex let's go scale on the x and let's hit zero great now i can go ahead and select this vertex
here and dissolve it with those covered let's go ahead and let's take a look at offsets now this is
something that we use quite a bit within precision modeling so i want to show you how we can do it
here in blender so with this selected we have a lovely add-on called mesh edit mesh tools or
something like that so if we go over to edge you will have offset edge offset and that's it right
there we have this dialog box right here where we can set our offset amount let's go with zero point
oh that's a bit small actually 0.3 and let's hit enter and that is now an offset of 0.3
all the way around this edge if we wanted we could have gone the other direction and gone with minus
0.3 and we've gone inward so that's offsets done okay it's now time to go ahead and explore some
faces so let's delete this what we've just created here and let's make a face so we know that if we
select everything hit f we've got a face let's undo that quickly and i want to put a hole in that
face so let's go ahead and let's put the 3d cursor in the center of this do you remember how to do
that well with everything already selected we're just going to go shift s for our snapping menu and
go cursor to selected and that's going to put it in the center of our selection so with that there
let's go shift a let's create a circle let's make this circle of a radius 0.5 that seems good to me
and now you'd expect that all you have to do is select everything and hit f i'm sorry to say that
just sort of creates a mess within blender and the main reason why is because blender needs to know
where the faces are to this hole so there's a quick way and a slow way of doing this i'm first
going to show you the slow way because this is the precision way and then i will show you the quick
way when precision doesn't matter and i'll also show you why we would go about doing the slow way
so you're going to select a vertex here i'm going to select a vertex over there then we're going to
fuse those select these two here and we're going to fuse those as well then i'm going to use my
circle selection and i'm going to select all the vertices or edges that are related to one of the
faces so all of those there then i'll hit f and then i'm going to select the rest of the edge loop
here so with all those selected i can now hit f once again and we have a face with a circle in it
fantastic okay so why on earth would i do that well first of all let's go ahead and make sure
we can see these edges nice and clearly because i've obviously made them just a little bit too
light so let's go over into edit preferences and then we're going to go into themes 3d view and
then on this edit wire i'm just going to make it just a touch darker so that it's easier for you
to see it you might not need to but just so that you can see it nice and clearly here so there we
have it we've done that and now what's the quicker way of doing it and why did i do it this way well
remember we have cad transforms and when we turn on cad transforms we can use edge centers as a
snapping so if we hold down g now you can see we could snap to any edges that we make on a surface
so just be aware that edges can be very useful if you're needing snapping points but if you're
not needing a snapping point and you're just wanting to quickly put in a hole somewhere
this is how to do it on a surface let's undo this that we've created here
and the quickest way to go about it is just going ahead and selecting everything and going alt f and
there we have it you're gonna see that it creates a whole bunch of geometry here now i'm not here
to talk about what's the right geometry if you're an animator or a modeler or a video game designer
we know that you need either triangles quads or some lovely perfect geometry here we're talking
about precision here so we're wanting to keep this as clean and as minimal as possible so
what we're going to do is just select everything hit x and we're going to go with limited dissolve
and with limited dissolve you'll see that it removes almost absolutely everything that we
don't need and there you have it that's how you go ahead and plop a hole very quickly so let's
go ahead and add another hole over here for instance all right so if i go um shift right
click we've got our 3d cursor over there let's go shift a let's add a circle let's make this circle
nice and small so that it fits there great and now we know that there we have two ways of going about
making this hole because that's not going to make a hole just like that we need to go ahead and
tell it where its faces are that make this hole and like i said it needs a minimum of two faces
so it could go ahead cut across here and join there if you're wanting some precision edges or
we can just go back into face selection select everything delete only faces then
let's go ahead and let's just delete these extra edges because we don't really need them for this
right now let's select everything go alt f then let's x limited dissolve and this can
be as low as 0.1 by the way it doesn't need to be so high and there we have it now of course
this is going to give you some strange results sometimes that you're not wanting so take that
with a pinch of salt we have this quick way but we also have the slow way when it comes to
absolute precision that you're wanting now i want to go back to the last video where i talked about
auto merge and how i was going to show you auto merge once we got into faces
okay well let's go ahead and do that right now so if we go to our tools and we have our options here
you have auto merge as we've already talked about but we also have this other option which is split
edge faces what exactly does this do well if we turn on auto merge and turn this on if we go into
our vertex selection hit this vertex here and we extrude this out keep in mind that we are in the
top view so this is very much a planar extrusion because it's not going to go up and down on the x
when we left click now you're going to see what happens it has automatically split this edge
and this face so if we go into face selection you can see that we now have two faces here
now there's a little caveat to this though if i undo this here and we were in the 3d space
and we go ahead and do this extrusion outwards and then we use my favorite add-on which is
cad transforms so let's go alt c let's go space oops sorry i forgot to hit g first got to make
sure you're in an operation before you change the shortcuts so hit g then you can go space
then we're going to go v for vertex so all i've done is change from edge centers to vertex let's
select this vertex let's hit space once again and let's go shift e for edge centers you would
expect that if i click this here to that edge center that it would automatically split that
face well i'm sorry to say that cad transforms does not have that functionality just yet
you will see that it is very much one face here and the edge is still here very much on its own
so if i go here and i hit g and i move this up that's not being connected so just be aware of
that if you're using cad transforms it's not going to be able to do this split edge faces however
with that already there what we could go ahead and do and just go g on the x direction and sorry
on the y direction let's go 0.1 and then we hit enter that has just split it and we already know
the distance that it's moved out of the way so we can go back to g y minus 0.1 and there we have it
now it has split it because we were using default blender movement so there is a little caveat that
i wanted to show you this can be useful for those that are working with a whole bunch of faces and
need to split a face very precisely like that but just be aware that that is how auto merge
works and how how split faces work as well so from what i'm aware the author of cad transfers
is going to try and implement this but it's not his top priority currently so let's go ahead and
let's go and sort of create ourselves a problem to solve here so i'm just going to very quickly
just sort of clean up that what we've got here so i'm just going to grab all the faces here i'm
going to delete only faces delete the edges that i don't really want here so all of these here let's
go ahead x let's go edges let's select everything once again let's do our alt f our x and then let's
do our limited dissolve right so we have this outcome once again so now let's make a mess
let's go one let's grab this vertex let's give it a great big chamfer so ctrl b v and now let's pull
this all the way there and right things are a real mess right this minute it's things like this that
if you don't really know how to deal it with it in a 2d space it can really throw you off in a 3d
space so let's go ahead and clean this up so what i think is the easiest way of doing it is let's go
ahead and remove the things that make it harder to see what's really going on and for me that's faces
so let's go three delete all the faces that are around a problem let's go ahead hit x and let's go
limited no only faces only faces all right already that looks so much cleaner to work with
so i'm sure you're seeing what i'm going with here so let's go see what we're wanting to do is sort
of cut out this area because the chamfer has gone all the way up into the hole so let's go ahead and
clean that so let's go edge selection let's go circle selection and select all the edges that
are not going to be part of this anymore so those obviously not going to be a part anymore so let's
go x and remove those edges now right here though these are intersecting do you remember the great
add-on that's used for intersecting we have our right-click and we have our tiny cad and let's go
right here intersect selected edges and now we will go into our vertex selection to just double
check that yup those intersections have now been created let's go into our edge selection select
these edges right here let's go ahead hit x and hit edges now we think that everything has been
done correctly here however let's go ahead and let's see what happens let's delete these edges
once again because i would like cleaning edges we could have just selected everything and hit
are f but let's go ahead let's clean it all up let's select everything let's go alt f and
what on earth is going on why has it filled that up this should have gone completely differently
let's go and investigate what's really happening here if we go into our edge selection as we are
right this minute and we do an edge loop select remember that is holding down alt
and doing a left click on an edge or a double left click that will select the whole edge loop now
this is strange why is it not selecting all the edges all the way around it should select it all
well obviously what's happening right here is these are not connected and you can see that as
well if we went into our box selection right this minute so if we go with our w oops we're already
in box selection and now we turn on our x-ray go into vertex selection and let's select these right
here and you can see that we have two vertices so obviously there's something not right here so
let's do the quickest fix here select everything go m and we're going to go merge by distance
at this point you can see that four vertices were removed and now we can go with our alt f our x
and our limited dissolve and that there is it you have just done your first mesh cleanup
and believe it or not a whole bunch of blender is mesh cleanup especially when you're getting meshes
from other sources well done for getting through this second 2d precision video yes there's so much
and it just keeps growing on it but you're going to be so surprised how much of all of this 2d
information relays perfectly into 3d stick to the end for a little something extra a huge thank you
to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it's the reason why i'm making these videos
and if you're enjoying what i'm making here and you think i'm worthy of your support i
would love to see you there too don't forget that we have a discord linked down in the description
thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue for the bold of you there is this
short little obstacle course to make sure you understand all the concepts that we've
covered in this video along with that there is a solution video in case you get stuck