in this video we'll explore a whole bunch of modifiers just so you know what they do so you can
bring them into your precision workflow what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales where i'm
sharing my maker journey to help you go further on 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 a quick
fire round through a whole bunch of modifiers that i really think you should know about as
you'll see just how much power they have not necessarily within precision modeling
but how to add an arty flare into your precision models starting from a fresh blender file let's go
ahead and do a quick fire round of a whole bunch of modifiers some that are going to
be more utilitarian some of them that are very much arty and also one operation that i haven't
told you about so let's go ahead and start with that operation i'm going to invert our selection
delete the camera light and then we're going to start with our default cube here
and we're going to go ahead and straight away do it and the operation is alt d now what exactly has
that gone and done because it looks like it would just be a normal duplication so shift d like this
but it's not we've just done something called a linked duplicate now before i show you exactly
what this does let's go ahead let's open up these drop downs so you just see what's happening right
here so here we've got our cube which is the first original default cube this cube here which is our
linked duplicate and this cube here which is our normal duplication have you seen both of these
have the same cube and this one has a different one what exactly is this thing well this thing
here you can see it right here this is our object data properties remember in the last
video of the operator of the organization i said objects are very much like their own collections
holding mesh data well that's exactly what's going on here and what's so powerful about this
is if we go into edit mode they are both in edit mode now even though they are separate objects
and that means you can go ahead and edit both of these at the same time now to unlink these you
go into whatever you're wanting to unlink go into our object data properties and you can click this
little button here this will create a new thing for it and there you go now it's got cube 002
now let's say this one here i don't know there's some sort of modification i absolutely
love this modification and i want this to be a link duplicate and be the same as that
one well to manually do link duplicates go up over to the object data properties
and you can select it from the drop down you can say i want this to be like the cube and there you
go it's going to be like the cube and this will completely and utterly change the mesh just be
aware of that so if we were to go ahead and bring in a sphere now so we'll go for a uv sphere there
we go uv sphere now the uv sphere itself has a uv sphere object data properties so we could go to
this one here and say hey i want this cube never wanted it to be a cube i wanted it to be a sphere
there we go now you can see that the object data the mesh information that that object was holding
is changed to this here and this is how you can sort of share it along now what's so powerful
about this is that you could use this as an object for instance for boolean cutting
for instance you have a hole that's all over your precision model that set for m3 bolts or something
and then all of a sudden you decided you know what i want to use m4 or m5 you could make sure that
all of these were all linked duplicates and then that way you can just edit one of them and it's
gone ahead and changed all of them at the same time so that's the power of linked duplicates but
due to this feature right here that they are all so hidden away and you can't really tell
that they're linked duplicates i didn't feel comfortable showing you until right this point
where we're almost at the end of understanding how to do precision modeling within blender
all right with that now covered let's go on to a modifier so i'm going to bring in a cube
and we're going to go and do a little edit to it oh i want this actually to be over on the world
origin instead of up there because i like working on the world origin and here we go we're going to
take this into edit mode i'm going to do a little loop cut right here we're going to grab these here
and bring it down now we already know what's going on here because we know that if we try to send
this to a 3d printer it's going to triangulate this because these are not defined faces
if you can't remember this we did an entire video for your first 3d print from blender
so here we need to basically say hey i actually want this to be connected in that way or i want it
to be connected in this way because you can see here it's cutting it in this direction however
over here it's cutting it across so we can define it with edges or if you don't really care how it
looks or how it's being cut you can go ahead and just see how your 3d printer is going to see this
by going to add a modifier and add a triangulate modifier and straight away you can see it's going
to try and keep things sort of symmetrical so to speak now i'm not going to be going through all
the settings here you can go and play with these modifiers to your heart constant but that there
that is the triangulate modifier now let's talk about another modifier that's quite utilitarian
i'm going to bring in a uv sphere that has a whole bunch of faces on it and i'm going to go and bring
up these rings so that they're quite close to each other and bring up the segments now we've talked a
lot about merging and we know that if we take all this and we hit m and we can go merge by distance
we can then go ahead and change this to 0.1 and all of a sudden things are just like randomly
sort of merging to each other now wouldn't it be interesting if this was a modifier well it is
it doesn't have the name merge though the name that it goes by is weld so you click this weld and
now we will set this by that 0.1 of last time and you can see it's gone ahead and randomly merged a
whole bunch of things now this weld modifier very much is a powerful modifier when you're doing a
whole bunch of things within the modifier stack because sometimes between modifiers it might not
have a merge operation in it or you might want to mix two modifiers together and then make sure that
you're merging the outcome of those together and that's where this weld modifier comes in
okay so that there is all the utilitarian stuff now let's go into the arty things so
i'm going to go ahead and we're going to bring in a cube once again because i'm about to show you
something that goes very much into the realm of organic modeling which is called
subdivision surface now don't get confused with this here which is right click subdivide
yes we know about subdivision in this sense but subdividing a surface is different because when
you go over to the modifier right here subdivision surface what on earth has just happened there
well in simplest terms what it's done it's gone ahead and subdivided and then if we go
into edit mode it becomes a little bit clearer and it uses all these creases all these edges
sort of to give the weight to this subdivision blob that it makes so if i go into face selection
select face i go ahead and extrude this you can see what's happened here right so
i just said all these edges have a weight so the closer these edges are to each other
the more weight it has thus the tighter the seam begins to be you see it's a very tight seam and
then the more we pull this out the more organic it becomes so this is sort of in a weird way called
box modeling but not really this is subdivision modeling there you're going into the realm of
organic modeling now but what i'm wanting to show you is that you can create some pretty
crazy things here and then you could go ahead and use precision modeling to go and give this a flat
base and then you can go ahead and put in your own pen holder or whatever you want into this
but the key thing that i want you to understand is that all of these edges have a weight to them
so if we were to go ahead and do a loop cut now around here and we pull this down
you will see that we've just now added a whole bunch of weight around this here so this is now
a nice sharp corner undoing that there is a different way of doing this and go into edge
selection let's select this edge loop all the way around here let's open up our properties menu here
and we can see there's this crease amount edge data crease you can increase this crease amount
and you can see we get about the same result again because what we've basically done is said hey this
crease has a lot of weight behind it make sure that it applies onto the subdivision surface
okay so how would we go about flattening this face well we could go ahead and add a whole bunch of
loop cuts up or if you want you can also do an inset right here and you can see the more insets
the more it's going to be flattened out at the top here so we'll do another inset and there it is so
we've just done a double inset make sure i'm going the right direction here and now we have a nice
flat top to this okay so that is the sub division modifier now let's go ahead and let's talk about
quite a fun modifier called the wireframe modifier i'm going to bring in an ico sphere for this i'm
going to simplify it down a little bit to just this okay so we have this ico sphere now what is
this wireframe modifier well what it does is it grabs all of our edges and then gives them mesh
so here we go all the way down here we have our wire frame modifier we'll click this on
and there you have it it's gone and turned this into a wireframe now you might want to change
the settings here a bit usually i quite like the idea of even i'm going to make this a little bit
thicker and there you go i'm going to do an offset outwards or inwards of the shape you can keep the
original shape you can do a whole bunch of stuff feel free to play around with this but that
there is the wire frame modifier in a nutshell okay now let's go on to something a little bit
different which is something called a remesh now remesh is sort of
a weird way to call it because it doesn't really do a rematch remember we talked a little bit about
topography which is where all these edges are in the definition of it well this is sort of trying
to fix that for people that want to do organic modeling but it doesn't really do a great job
but it is fun to play with so let's go ahead and let's click this remesh right here as you can see
it's gone ahead and remeshed this in some capacity see it's got a whole bunch i'm going to turn off
our x-ray so we can see all the faces that is created and all this mesh that's come in here
now i warn you changing this number is going to give you a bit of lag especially if you
go really low but what i want to show you is we've got this sort of box look
very much pixelated you can increase the octree depth here so that the boxes get smaller you can
also make the boxes smaller this way instead or we can make this a smoothness so it's doing a smooth
remeshing or there's a very sharp way of doing this as well and then we've got this voxel way
of doing it as well just be aware all of this very powerful stuff is interesting to play around with
okay now let's go into another strange realm which is the displacement realm
now i'm going to go ahead we're going to bring in a plane here and with this plane we're going
to go into edit mode and i'm going to go ahead and subdivide this so right click subdivide i'm
going to whack this right the way up to 50 a whole bunch of information there right okay
so we have all this mesh here and i just said displacement so over here on the deform we
have displace let's click this see what happens okay it's just popped up why did it just pop up
because it's displacing on nothing let's go ahead and give this something to displace with so
right here we're going to hit new now you can see it's gone all the way down there why is it
going all the way down there let's take a look at what it's displacing right this minute so
we're going to click this here which shows you the texture that's being displaced with
yes it's being displaced with the texture and it's all black well what we're actually looking
at is displacement through a depth map which is from black to white is the height of what's
going to be displaced here now you could go ahead and use a depth map that you could find online
for instance a couple of things that look like this as you can see very much black to white
or we can go ahead and create our own sort of texture and that's what we're going to go and do
so here instead of image type i'm going to go ahead and set this to clouds so
straight away you can see how it's being displaced with this noise of clouds now we can go ahead and
change the size of this and straight away you can see the crazy stuff that we can get on to do with
this we can change the depth of it how much detail there is to it the nebula size of it or you can go
ahead and change this to a color which gives us some softer colors grayscale and go ahead
and turn this to hard or if you really want you can go ahead and completely change the way that
we're doing the noise so here we can go ahead and turn this into cell noise there you go some very
abstract things going on here or we can change it to voronoi crackle probably a little bit too
much on that one let's just make the size a lot bigger or softer let's go with that there we're
gonna go back to our modifier instead of saying the strength is one we can just bring down the
strength here to something like that and you're starting to get the idea of what's happening here
it lets you displace your mesh and it's very powerful now if you want to go ahead and
take a look at this i've done how to create your own depth maps from 3d mesh the link is
down in the description or in the cards but i really suggest that if you're looking into this
there's a whole bunch of videos there to show to show you just quite how powerful it is okay
but with that said let's go back to our texture here i'm going to turn this back to that cloud
one because i quite liked it i'm gonna go back to here and let's make the power of this quite high
now because we have this strange shape going on here now i'm gonna just go ahead take this into
edit mode subdivide it one more time so we have a whole bunch of faces there you go a whole bunch of
faces now why am i doing this well it's because i want to show you one of the last ones here so
let's go ahead i'm going to apply this down so now we have all this mesh here like this but if this
isn't quite what i'm wanting how would i go ahead and simplify this well there's this lovely thing
called decimate we know already that we could select everything go merge by distance and we get
sort of this decimation look like that or if you want you can make it just a little bit more random
by going over to our modifiers going down here to our decimate and then we can play around with this
let's go with 0.1 and all of a sudden you can see that simplified our mesh all the way down
let's take this look like that and it's very random this so we're going to go as well with
0.01 even lower still and this is how you start to get that sort of low poly effect well done for
getting through that quick fire round of a whole bunch of modifiers yes there is a lot of them
but i'm sure you can see just the power that they have when they work together a huge thanks to my
patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it's the reason why i'm able to make all these videos
here completely for free and if you're enjoying what i'm making here you think i am 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