ah modeling
some people love it
some people hate it
and some people use it to get millions
of followers on instagram
but regardless of your personal views on
modeling
every single 3d artist needs to have at
least a basic understanding of modeling
why
well because it's the foundation for
which everything else is built on
texturing lighting animating they all
require you to at least have a basic
mesh to start with and if you can't
model then you're always going to be
reliant on somebody else's work which is
not very good so there's no excuse
everybody needs to have that basic
understanding of modeling so that's what
this video series is going to be about
and we are going to be modeling not a
car not a character but an anvil yes
that old medieval blacksmith tool they
hit with a hammer that's what we're
going to be modeling now you might be
thinking come on why can't we do
something more fun
like a car or a character and a lot of
people they jump to that stuff first i
see a lot of beginners they start
modeling a face as like the first thing
they make the trouble with that is that
those are very complex you know the pro
level stuff and if you don't understand
the basics of topology
how to you know get edge loops and flow
and all that sort of thing
then you end up with all these problems
and these users they get to the end of
their project it's got all sorts of
problems going on they can't fix it and
they never finish it and then they give
up and that sucks so that's what we're
trying to avoid so i'm giving you a
basic introduction to modeling in
blender
if you haven't watched it already please
watch my donut beginner tutorial series
if you're totally new to blender that's
where you should start this is what you
can complete after that
so without further ado let's get into it
all right so the first thing i'm going
to do is set up my workspace so i'm
going to collapse all the panels that i
don't need
and i'll just squish that over to the
right so that i can grab it again if i
need to
but i am going to load in a reference
image so i'm going to split this view
here
and load in the uv image editor which is
normally where you would see your render
when you render something but you can
also
load in a
image any image
so i've got a bunch of different
reference photos here one thing to note
with anvils is that you can see that
they come in all different shapes and
sizes little tiny stubby ones and really
long ones there's not really a standard
you know this is an anvil
but i certainly like the look of this
one at the top so i'll load that in and
since we have room here for another one
i'm going to split the view again
making sure my head's not in the way and
i'm going to load in another image
i like the texturing on this one
so load that one in
and
you can sort of see it yeah you don't
really need to see that one anyway
yeah okay we're all set up ready to go
so i'm going to delete everything in the
scene
and yeah we can finally get started
so
when you start modeling something the
first thing you want to ask yourself is
which one of my primitive shapes and by
primitive i mean these shapes here which
one of these shapes best resembles the
object which i'm modeling and for a lot
of objects this is quite clear if you're
making a world it's a
sphere if you're making a cup or a you
know drink bottle it's a cylinder
but in our case what what which one of
these shapes actually matches this and
there's not really a clear answer
because you've got a whole range of
different things you've got a sort of a
cone shape at the front here you've got
i don't know some sort of stretched side
some curve shape up there you've got
this cylinder shape that's sort of
cutting into it
so there's not really a clear
shape to start with so you could really
start anywhere but what i'm going to do
is start with somewhere that i know for
sure and that is that this here if i go
from there
to there ignoring everything else i know
that that is a square so that means i
can start with a
plane
drop that in okay so up from the floor
drawing up i can see that there's a
little step that it's on so in edit mode
i'm just going to extrude that up
very slightly
just like that
okay so that's good so we've got the
first step baby steps
now what we're going to do is focus on
this tapered
i don't know if you could hear that some
guy blowing their nose really hard uh
this tapered edge here
right so ignoring this bit
right
that whole cylinder cut in shape just
imagine that that wasn't there so you
would have what a cube that essentially
sort of you know yeah tapers into itself
so how could we do that well a lot of
artists would go like this they would
take this uh bottom bit that would
extrude it up they would scale it in
extrude it up again scale it in
and they would do this and you know that
that's fine the problem with this though
is for one it's it's fiddly which we
like to avoid
uh but two
you're it's not very exact and so you've
got varying
distances like between this loop cut and
that loop cut sorry by the noise
and
yeah it's not exact and the computer is
far better at doing these curved shapes
so we can actually do it in blender so
i'll show you how we do it all right ah
by the way i like to leave this turned
off the limit selection to visible so i
turn that off and then that way when you
select something you know that it's
selecting everything right like
both sides of the mesh so i'll leave
that turned off anyway so i'll create a
new face there let's just do this again
so what i'm going to do instead of going
up one step scaling it in i'm going to
go all the way up
to wherever i want it to end so let's
say it's yeah it's about that so it's
basically the cube that we had at the
start
and i'm now going to create some loop
cuts which we do by hitting ctrl r
and then here using the scroll wheel on
my mouse
i can choose how many cuts to give it
and if you look in the bottom left hand
corner you'll see a number of cuts and
i'm going to increase that until it says
12
okay which is
just a nice amount
and then i clicked and then right
clicked to put it right in its spot
okay so now once we have this what i can
actually do
is if i was to scale this one you know
as you would predict it would do that
but if i turn on proportional editing
which i do by hitting o or just turning
it on down here in the base
now when i scale it in you can see that
i'm grabbing everything around it and
i'm scaling it inwards
and you can see that that now is with
with my scroll wheel here i have some
control over how it looks
um
now as this is
it's you can see that it it's creating a
pinched effect where it's actually sort
of
shrinking the distance between all the
lines as it pulls it inwards which isn't
actually what we want
i want to maintain it so that i get you
know a nice looking mesh
but i still want that shape so what we
can do is we can choose to scale it on
every axis except the vertical axes and
we do that
if whilst you're scaling like this if
you hit shift and zed
that's telling blender scale it on every
axis except the z-axis and it's at it's
hard to actually see it from this angle
but if i do it here you'll see this is
how it looks normally and then with
shift z
that's what it's doing so it's now only
scaling on the x and the y axis not the
z and that is how we're going to create
our beautiful curved shape there
what's more as you can see that in this
case we're getting this um
this smoothed off bit at the base there
so if you don't want that you've
actually got control over what the
actual curve shape is like if you was to
use linear
it would be a straight line
if you were to use random
it would be like a piece of weird art
um and there's a whole bunch of them
like sphere is good for some objects
that's pretty cool the one that we're
going to use is inverse square
which
is really good um in this particular
instance because what i'm going to do is
uh yeah not taking the top piece i'm
taking the you know sort of somewhere up
near the top and i'm just going to scale
it in
shift z
and you'll see very quickly that we can
create
the basic frame of our anvil
like so
cool and the other thing i'm going to do
is i'm going to select the base here
and i'm going to set this proportional
editing falloff to sharp and then what
i'm going to do is hit scale and scale
it again shift z
and just extrude that out a little bit
and that's going to going to allow me to
sort of exaggerate the base
to be however thick i want it just you
know if that's what we want
which in my case i do
so that's looking pretty good okay
wonderful so we've we've done this
ignoring you know the cylinder
shape cut out that we've we've got here
with all this
spaghetti mess
we've now got the basics of our mesh
this whole
whole bit up here what i'm going to do
now is you might have noticed looking at
our picture here that it and actually
it's probably easier to see it on this
side above where my head is
but it extrudes out a little bit further
like that so what i'm going to do
is take this and first of all let's
let's extrude so let's create this part
extruding that upwards okay so that's
basically a cube on top here so that i i
know
if i extrude
pull it upwards
until that looks like about a cube about
a nice square on top
right
now
if i select this
section here i'm going to extrude this
out and this is just going to be the
part that's overhanging
this like the part under here right it's
hard to see i'm talking about this part
right so i'm just extruding that out and
now this part needs to be slightly
raised the bot the base of this so just
like before i'm adding in loop cuts to
give us more geometry so i'll just do
one loop cut
right click to cancel its movement
and then i'll just you don't need
proportional editing for this you can
just move it up
very slightly because there's only one
that you're dealing with really
like so that's pretty good and now i'll
create this really long bit that
overhangs the back here
this part
okay and the way i'm going to do that
just like what i did before
extruding it but extruding it this way
i'm extruding it a lot further in this
case because it's obviously a lot
further out
and then as you can probably guess we
want to create a smooth curve effect
there so first thing we do
is add a loop cut so i'm scrolling up
until i get to let's say five cuts
click
right click to cancel its movement
and now i'm going to select
this part of it making sure that you've
made sure you've got that turned off
when you do these selections otherwise
you'll only be selecting half your mesh
it'll look all weird
so turn on proportional editing
now if i pull this up
you can see that well first of all
you can see that i'm moving the top part
of this that i don't want to move so i
want if you want part of your mesh to be
unaffected by the proportional editing
easy way to change that is to hide it so
you select that part of the mesh you
just hit h
now when i select this i can pull that
up and it won't affect the other part
that's hidden
but you can see that the falloff here is
the wrong type
it's going the wrong direction i want it
to be
um
yeah i wanted to sort of like taper
there downwards
so easiest way to do it is by setting it
to sphere
so with sphere now when i pull this up
you can see the effect that it's having
just pretty well perfect
like so so i'll just click right there
and now if i hit alt h it will bring
back the part of the mesh that i i i
almost said hoed
the part that i had hidden
and um
yeah that is looking pretty good um
cool so we are going to leave part one
here but just before i close i'm just
going to scale this down just squash it
a little bit because i can see in this
example here i mean as i mentioned every
anvil is different but in the one down
here at the bottom i sort of like this
stumpy sort of base if it's if this
middle part here is too long like it is
in our case it could sort of look like
top heavy the anvil
like it's sort of on its tiptoes or
something so i'm just squashing it down
if you hold down control
might do it until it's point seven it's
pretty good
then i'll bring that up to there
lovely and then if i want to make sure
i bring it back down to its origin point
i'll just drag it down
and there we go
all right so in part two we're going to
be doing that cut out
shape making that that cylinder
inbred
in
shape in cut
whatever
um in part two if you like this video if
you found it helpful please give it a
thumbs up so that other people can find
it otherwise please click on part two
and i will see you there bye