let's get a little bit more precise with a few more add-ons 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 subscribe and hit that little
bell icon to never miss an opportunity keep making just before we go any
further into blender and really start to explore the 3d space I just want to
share with you a couple more blender precision add-ons the first add-on is
measure it I have shown you how to measure things within blender however
measure it has something that we're looking for
it has parametric measuring so this is again within blender we're gonna go
preferences and the add-ons and we're gonna look up measure it turn it on and
what this gives you is inside of you you have measure it tools just collapsing
things down so we're gonna go into edit mode by hitting tab and we're on vertex
select so that's number one I'm just zooming in and what measure it has is
brilliant especially if you come from a CAD based modeling so we're gonna select
two vertices here and we wanted to know the distance of here this we know that
the measure tool works in the sense that you can click and then hold down control
and will snap to there and we know that's exactly ten millimeters however
when we go and do any edits it disappears however these two measure
these two vertices now selected we're going to hit segment now you won't see
anything because we have to turn on the show here you can see very faintly some
text that's because by default it's set to blue so let's go and change this here
this is our new little measurement that's been added so just to show you if
I delete this here the measurement is gone and if I go in segments its back so
let's change this let's make it a nice bright yellow let's go into this little
cog scroll down let's change the font size let me just move this out the font
size up a bit let's Center align it and there you have it
now if I go and make anymore again it's going to come in blue and
small text so let's sort that out so here it has a configuration this
configuration lets you change the text color so let's go for a nice bright cyan
and let's go for central line nice large text of let's say 34 now we can go very
easily and add some more vertices here come on select them and select these two
and goodness let's go for this one too and now we go and segment you can see
right here it has given us our vertices now there is a problem here everything is in
meters I'm sure the those keen eyes have seen
there's units and these units can be changed to anything you want even two
millimeters and not only that but there's a precision value so you can
move this all the way up to five decimal places so that's all the precision
really that you need to know so I'm going to put this down to three for now
but the main reason why I like measure it is this we go into the Edit which we
are in select the vertices G X and now when I move things it parametrically
gives me a ruler that moves with my model unfortunately I can't click into
this and set a dimension but it's--how is the best we're gonna get within this
right this minute having said that our next add-on lets
you do something along those lines just before we jump into that I want to
just show you once again you can close them here keep in mind that there's also
an angle version so for angle we select one vertex select another vertex and
select another one hit angle that gives you your angle here and just quickly
showing you that it's parametric once again there is your angle so let's undo
that quickly
and let's just go up here and hide everything the addon i'm speaking of
that lets you do that movement of verses by a little box is something called
exact edit it's still a work in progress and it does have quite a few bugs in my
opinion but for two things and two very strong reasons I feel like fits in great
a little niche for us CAD based modelers so here they're gonna go into your edit
preferences hit install the link is down in the description to the blog post to
get the most recent download link usually you have to just scroll down to
see the most recent link so here once you install it it will come in as exact
edit turn it on this gives you a little tools tab here on the right-hand side
and now with in edit mode oops stay in the top view now with in edit
mode I'm gonna select these two verses now we know that we can move this by
hitting G constraining it to the X and move it out by it looks like this is a
minus X so let's go minus 0.45 and we have that we know we can do that however
what exact edit lets us do is if we hit set measure now this is why I'm saying
that this still needs some work there's some very small text up here there's
some text that's been hidden by this move operations let me just move this
out the way so select our vertices once again hit set measure very small text up
here and very small text down there this will be sorted out by the devas I'm
currently trying to get in contact with him to tell him to just sort this out
cuz it would be great to have but it gives you this little green dot this is
called the freeform dot so we're gonna freeform place it here and now this red
one is our anchor point so I'm going to put the anchor point over here and it
gives us this box so we've got eleven point seven
four which is the exact dimension that this is set to I want this to be exactly
10 once again so I want to click in there set this to 10 and there you have
it that for me is brilliant now one other thing that exact that it does
really great is scaling to the length of one edge to do this we're gonna select
everything we're gonna hit the set measure once again and be aware that
when you place this freeform so I'm going to place it down here and place
that anchor down there this little text up here says move and scale it's quite
hard to see and this will get fixed I'm sure of it but wanting to move this down
to scale now the reason why is if this is 10 millimeters and let's say we knew
that this edge was supposed to be I don't know exactly 25 millimeters and
this comes in quite handy especially when you're importing SVG's or DXF sand
things like that you're able to just change this very quickly by knowing the
length of one edge so we're gonna go here I'm gonna set this to 25 hit OK and
that is scaled our entire object by this one edge without having to deal with
anything else which in blender you actually have to do quite a few other
actions to be able to do something like this so that there is the best of exact
edit so I'm gonna hit escape to get out of it I'm gonna undo a couple of times
to get us back to where we were so last but not least I need to cover the very
basics of something called origins so I'm gonna go into the 3d pivoting here
so I'm using the middle mouse button and the shift to move around and you might
have seen this orange dot just floating about the place going into object mode
you can see that everything has this orange dot and when you move things in
object mode this little dot moves along with you now if you go
into edit mode you will see that when we select everything and move it the origin
doesn't move the best way of thinking of origin is the origin is the control
point the center of mass the pivot point of an object so right this minute the
easiest way to show this is if I select this hit R for rotation constrain it to
the Z so the line that's going up and down you'll see that it will rotate
around this point but let's say we wanted it to rotate in the middle of
this surface so let's go and undo this we can go right click set origin where
you can move the geometry down to the origin which would do something like
that or undoing that you can go right click
set origin origin to geometry and there it is the origin point is up to the
geometry now when we hit rotate once again constrain it to the Z and you can
see it now rotates along that point now the reason why I'm telling you this is
because the next two add-ons work with the origin point now we're going to
select everything right click set origin origin to geometry so now you can see
all the origin points have been set to the geometry so let's first start with a
line so the alignment tool is one that is within blender if you go into
preferences and we look in align align tools
turn that one on and this is underneath our item settings there is a now a
new little one called aligned tools aligned tools is very
similar to maybe Inkscape or illustrator of aligning objects so we're gonna
select everything and just something that I want you to keep in
mind is this active object so right this minute as you see this has a brighter
highlight than all the rest if we were to select this one you can see it now
has a bright highlight here so it's whichever is the last object selected is
set to the active object let me see that so fantastic so let's go and I'm gonna
select this one shift select shift select shift select so our purple one
here is the active object and the reason why I'm saying this is because all these
little settings and operations are talking about this origin point so we're
going to align the y axis so this green axis so these will come down and this
one will come up so we're going to align the location Y axis and there you have
it that is now aligned everything to the y
axis you can obviously this can be done to all so plop them all on top of each
other let's undo that you can do this by the Z as well so now everything is
nice and flat so just keep in mind the align tool is very powerful so last but
not least there's a little bit more of an obscure tool that you might be
looking for which is how would you go about doing this alignment move but
having things evenly distributed so the only way I've been able to find to do
this is within preferences there's this add-on called Oscurart tools and what
this does is it gives us a new option so I'm just going to select this
one hit G and move it out to the distance a bit and then I'm gonna go and
shift select all the rest that I want or I could have just selected all of these
and then shift select one and now what I'm going to do is hit space put in
distribute objects and distribute them on up say in all axes hit OK and now
it's distributed my objects here now the reason why it's done that is because the
selection order was a little bit off so I'm gonna undo that and this time round
I'm going to select this one first then select that one then
select this one then select that one and now when I go and distribute my objects
you'll see that it does it like this so the order of selection matters so one
more example let's go ahead and select this one this one this one and this one
I want them to stay on the z flat plane here but I want them to go out towards
the X so let's go and do that one more time distribute objects so ignore the
z-axis and there you have it that's it being distributed last but definitely
not least is probably one of my most used add-ons and this is CAD transforms
it's installed like all the add-ons that come outside of blender so the link is
down in the description to install it you install it and you activate it keep
in mind that there's a lot of settings here to go through and definitely take a
look at font size and font color to make the work go a little bit easier now to
show you how this works I think I'm first going to show you the
hard point and the hard point is for instance if we wanted to get all these
stacked on this vertex here with that vertex up there it would be quite hard
we currently have vertex snapping on so let's go and do a G hold down control
and that will snap oh and we got lucky it snapped on the right vertex so now go
G hold down ctrl it's no longer snapping on the right vertex and that's the main
problem we get with blender and if we did want that to snap on the right
vertex we would have to go inside of edit mode select everything turn this
into the active vertex so that's done by unselecting it Andry selecting it so
it's white and now when we go into G to move everything I didn't select
everything oh well then you see I would have to go into our snapping okay I'm
making a real dogs ear out of this into our snapping turn it into active
snapping so then when we go into everything
unselect that re select it and then we go and do that you would see that it
would snap properly then however this add-on fixes all of that so undoing all
these moves a couple of times let's go and show off this add-on so to show off
this add-on its works a little bit differently it doesn't have a tool shelf
option so to speak the way you do it is by turning it on so you click it and
this now gives you this inside of the tool shelf there is an active tool and
all of these here are the snapping options now if you want to know a lot
more about this add-on which I really think you should you can go into the
card right this minute that has my most recent video covering this exact add-on
and just how powerful it is but I'm just going to show you it the very basics
right now so we have vertex snapping which means now as we have it enabled
when we hit G nothing's going to move this is because it's asking where you're
going to be moving it from so the origin of the movement so right this minute
because we have vertex I'm going to select the vertex and that means we're
moving from that vertex and because we have vertex currently selected is going
to snap to any other vertex I could hit E and this would turn on edge and then
that way it's going to snap to edges too but let's turn off E and just keep it
with vertex for now if you want to know more go and check out that video so now
we can just quickly just select all of these hit G select the vertex were
wanting to move and go onwards like that now one other thing about this great
add-on is all of these moves work in edit mode as well so it's very close to
exact edit but it doesn't have a text box so if we selected everything were
wanted to move here turn on the add-on once again select the vertex we're
wanting to move after we hit G of course so make sure that I've selected our
vertices hit g nothing's going to move i select the vertex where we're doing the
origin of our movement and we can constrain it on the X we have
this lovely little measuring tape however let's say I wanted to go 1.4
millimeters I hit enter and that's it done so that's how this works in
conjunction and it's by far one of the add-ons that I used the most and those
there are just a few more of my must-haves blender precision add-ons now
I really encourage you to play about with them see where they break see where
they work within your workflow and if they don't work get rid of them I also
encourage you to go and check out the wiki pages their links will be down in
the description and really just go to town sometimes you have to find that one
niche time that you're stuck with something and that's when that add-on
comes into use so it doesn't mean that you have to always have it there and it
doesn't mean you always have to use it but when it's there it makes your life
so much easier a big thank you to my patrons you guys
are awesome and I love your support so incredibly
much and if you're enjoying this course I would love it if you would support me
there too thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue