now let's touch on precision movement using cad transforms 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
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is all about bringing together everything that we've learned within movement within mesh within
object mode and showing you how i go about and bring precision through an add-on called cad
transforms now cad transforms uses all the basics of blender movement but takes it that one step
further so here we are one last time for movement anyway on a nice fresh new blender file let's go
ahead and do exactly what we've just done on all the rest which is let's select everything
delete it create ourselves a new cube let's set this cube to exactly one millimeter and then let's
go ahead and reset the origin point down on that bottom left hand vertex and with that now done
you should be pretty damn fast at this too now let's go into some quite more advanced movement
now i'm saying this but i don't want it to scare you i have given you all the knowledge you need
to understand exactly what is going on here so first of all if this is the first time
with blender you've got to understand that what we're using here is an add-on that works a little
bit differently to what is normal of blender so normally an add-on just sort of sticks around
here on the side and that's how it lives its life well cad transforms which is the add-on we're going
to be using lives here and the way that you use it is by activating it you click it and that's
it now on you click out of it and that's it now off now what i do is i set a shortcut for this
so go over to it i'm going to go right click and assign a shortcut and for me i like to use alt c
and that is how i go in and then i go w to go back up here and then i use alt c to go in there
now just before we move on let's go into edit mode and you'll see if i type in alt c nothing's
going to happen we have to assign it in edit mode as well because it is its own environment
so now if i go alt c it works and that's that okay lastly before we start playing with CAD
transforms we need to change some preferences because if not you're not going to see this
so make sure you go here type in CAD you'll get this card transforms and toggle down this
drop down menu and you'll see that there's a whole bunch more information here i'm going to
set my font size to something really big like 70 this circle size i'm going to set it to 25
and then i want to set all of these here to 5. this is the settings that i personally like to use
and that's it if you're wanting to change the mountain of shortcuts that come with
cad transforms they're right here but personally i really think that the shortcuts are perfect
now i'm going to just save my preferences brilliant and now let's get to it so
CAD transforms let's turn it on and i want you to look up on the top left hand side what is here
this is very similar to something we've been playing about with for the last few episodes
it's our snapping menu so these are obviously snapping controls oh look and the tools it
tells you what they are right here so we've got g for movement r for rotation s for scale great
and what's this here this is x-ray oh so it's got its own way of selecting through geometry
okay now the reason why i'm saying is it's a lot nicer to see this there then going over to tools
and then seeing there's a mountain of shortcuts trust me this is so easy it's unreal what we have
at our disposal here it's incredible what has been created and completely for free but anyway first
of all let's go ahead and just do some normal moving so let's go ahead we select our object
hit g nothing's moving what on earth is going on take note this is a a from and too movement style
we're moving from here to there now that sounds something very similar to what we've been doing
so far we've been moving from the origin point to where that origin point is going to end up the
only thing that's different here is we are setting the origin point at the beginning of the movement
so right this minute we have vertex snapping and you'll see now that when i get close to a vertex
this round circle appears i click this now has set the from point from here i can constrain just like
normally let's go on the x-axis and let's put in a nice simple one so that's one millimeter
and then let's hit enter and that's a precision movement done that fundamentally is cad transforms
yes it might not look like much but let's go ahead and really explore this so first of all i want you
to take note that i have an entire video where i've gone really in depth of this and that there
is in the card or linked down below where i show you everything there is to do with this so with
that said let's go ahead and explore so we got our movement g click now here's something interesting
a thing that i absolutely love with cad transforms is you can now move around while you're doing a
movement zoom in zoom out just use your middle mouse to move around and pan okay something
else that i like about cloud transforms we can do something called stacked transforms so we can go
on the x direction move one millimeter and on the y direction move one millimeter brilliant
well move one millimeter in the other direction there we go now we hit enter and that's it done
that is stacked transforms so it's moved one millimeter and one millimeter
from the origin point that i set however the origin point is no longer needed
isn't that just amazing okay now i'm not really going to go into super in depth of all of this
here but i am going to go ahead and show you some things so if we go ahead and create a couple of
duplications of our cube here i just want you to see some amazing things that are possible now so
let's go ahead and do some snapping so let's go ahead and go g from this vertex we can snap to
that vertex great well we know here that is edges so how do i do that well first we're going g once
again i'm going to hit spacebar and that clears all snappings so nothing's going to snap here and
then i'm going to hit e and this will snap to any edge okay clear that and when we go shifty that
gives me edge centers brilliant well from this edge center i want to snap to that edge center
that's great in fact i want to snap to this bottom edge center from this edge center all of a sudden
movement has just become so intuitive in fact what we can do is do things like this
we can go ahead oops we can go ahead and hit g go from this vertex here
then we can go space shift f for face centers and we've just moved our vertex to that
face center now if you want to get really crazy we can go ahead and go g select
our vertex that we're wanting to work with here let's move over to this cube
here because we can move down let's go ahead and turn on face centers and n for normals
hold it right there this is editing jonathan here and i haven't explained what a normal is
now don't worry about it too much but in a nutshell just think of it as the facing
direction of a face so if a face is at a 45 degree angle the normal is a 45 degree line off that face
and don't worry we're gonna go a lot more into normals but that's in a few episodes time
and let's go to this face center and go 0.1 millimeters up on the normal
isn't that just crazy the precision we can have now and all of this is also possible within
our edit mode so let's go ahead let's select all of these cubes let's go into edit mode
let's select this let's go control l and now with cad transforms active let's go g so we're snapping
now we can remember we can always clear this with space and then set a new snapping let's go v for
vertex let's go from this vertex let's go to this edge center over here so let's go space shift e and
there we go edge center now what on earth why is this so cool well the real reason why is because
we can do all types of snapping here you can see in this shortcut that we have snapping to vertices
edges edge centers faces face centers our grid perpendicular all the rest
it's all here and it's incredible how amazing this is on top of that there's things such as
averages so let's go ahead let's select this once again let's go g for movement let's select
this vertex here i'm wanting to move between these two points exactly in the middle from with this
vertex well i go to this one i hit a and then i go to this one over here and that's now the center
in fact what you can do is hit a once again and that's now one third
so that easily you can go ahead and do some incredible snapping now that's movement let's go
ahead and take a look at the rest because there's a lot more to movement than just moving there's
also rotation and scale now that's going to be a little bit trickier isn't it because we know
that rotation and scale work a little bit differently when it comes to origin points okay
okay let's go ahead and take a look at what's going to happen so turning on cad transforms
selecting our object let's go r for rotation brilliant now what's going to happen let's click
ho this strange thing has popped up i am currently setting our own axis of rotation so let's say
this axis right here or using the same point here i go shift z so now i'm just moving
our one axis down here so let's say i'm wanting to go in this general direction so now we've got
this axis set up or we can go r and let's say i wanted to go from here to there and now i'm
rotating on this axis and of course i've set up our own plane here our own custom plane
so we can go on the x we can go also on the y of this plane that is being set up
okay so how does that work with scaling then well scale is the same you have to set up
you're from and two and now you're scaling now here's something really interesting we know that
if we do scale we're going to be breaking our cube right so if we go here select our cube go scale
from here to there let's set this to 3.2 millimeters let's hit enter
our scale is automatically applied do keep in mind that this teeny tiny bit of rotation
does come every now and then when you do scaling so just be aware to go here and just set these to
zero and that's going to sort you out that is the teeny tiny bit of miss precision that you can get
but when i say misprecision we are working for objects of 10 millimeters which is
0.00001 millimeters of precision and for things that are about
one meter in size this is going to be about zero point zero zero zero zero six
millimeters this is exactly the same for most 3d mesh programs from things like 3ds max and maya
of course it's not absolute precision but in my eyes i've never needed six decimal
places of precision and i know that i've had all the precision that i need from this but it's just
something to be aware of and i do know that things are being worked on to try and fix this but just
be aware of it and it does not break precision modeling at all within bret blender for this
okay now let's go into scaling and let's take a look at one other thing so we scale this here
what happens if i wanted to do two-dimensional scaling well for that i'm going to hit tab that
gives me two-dimensional scaling what if i wanted three-dimensional scaling well three-dimensional
scaling is just with tab once again and like all of these if we were to go ahead and click one of
these and we go ahead and add a rotation so let's set this rotation there let's hit g now we're
moving well we can go ahead and constrain it on the y and it has its local axis first and then if
we go y once again it's going to go to its global axis from there now if you wanted to create your
own axis you can go ahead and hit c and now it's asking you okay well where do you want to go well
we really shouldn't have set a point first we should really set our own axis first and then it's
going to say okay well from there you've now set that's going to be your x from this point there
so there's a very powerful way of doing your own movement now if you want to learn a lot more about
CAD transforms i advise you to go and check my video that i did going through absolutely
every single one but you don't have to for this series i will be showing you every single control
that i do of CAD transforms within our precision series well done for getting through that video
yes it's probably way too much information but that's totally fine don't worry about it
cad transforms is something that you're going to be learning through the entirety of this series
because it fundamentally is the way that i do precision movement within blender yes blender
movement can do all of this but cad transforms just makes it so much easier now remember i've
mentioned it once in this video actually a few times but there is a link down in the description
to see a very long version of the cad transforms sort of breakdown of everything you can do with it
if you want to learn more about CAD transforms go down there but you don't have to because the rest
of the series will be learning it anyway stick to the end for a little something extra a huge
thank you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it is the real reason i can do things
like this and if you think i'm worthy of your support and enjoying what i'm making here i would
love to see you there too thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue down in
the description is this small obstacle course to make sure you've understood all the fundamentals
of CAD transforms and along with that is also a solution video down there in case you get stuck