truly understanding the complexity and power of the mirror modifier 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
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making this video is all about a powerhouse modifier that is the mirror modifier it is
usually said that it is extremely simple but in my book i would say it's deceptively simple
as it can get quite complicated starting from a fresh blender file let's go ahead
invert our selection as we go and explore the mirror modifier so with our default cube here
i'm going to take it into edit mode and i'm going to subdivide it once
i'm then going to grab this side of the vertices and i'm going to go ahead and delete them as you
can imagine the mirror modifier mirrors our mesh so let's go straight to it modifier shelf
here it is mirror done it has just mirrored our mesh now it might confuse you a little bit
how exactly this mirroring is going on because the way that i saw this when i first
joined into blender was going okay well it's just mirrored it on the y direction but here it says
x so what's going on that's the key it is mirrored on the x-axis direction it hasn't used the x-axis
as a mirror i hope that makes sense because if you were to use the y axis as the mirror
you would get this result so to speak okay so now what's going to happen if i move this
nothing why is that well the reason why is fundamentally the origin point is what controls
the mirroring it is the axis of the origin point that deals with that so if we were to go ahead
into our options and we go to our tools we've got options transforms origins
if we were to move our origin point you can see that moves our mirroring point
now just for the sake of this example i want to bring something that's a little bit more
visual to see this whole idea of mirroring so what i'm going to do is we're going to go ahead and
bring in a circle let's bring in a mesh circle let's make this circle nice and big
so let's add some nice and big great and then going to grab the circle i'm going to rotate it
on the y by 90 degrees but very important here is that i need to make sure that my y is set
back down to zero so i'm going to go ahead and apply my rotation okay so now with that set
i can actually set an object to be my actual mirror so let's go here mirror my circle
so the circle has an origin point and by the way here's a quick tip 3d cursor out remember this is
the origin of creation you can create these things called empties they're basically just sort of the
same as this circle but def different they're not mesh and they have an origin point too so
you could use these as your mirror location as well but anyway with this circle we now know
that this is our mirror so let's go into edit mode and the whole idea of mirroring is that it
speeds up your workflow when you have to do the same thing on the other side so we could go here
we could extrude this and as you can see it's working on the other side okay fantastic now
what's going on if i go here into my vertex selection and i select this vertex and then
i move it that way okay that's a little bit broken that shouldn't be able to do that
because technically this is my mirror my mirror is very much a physical thing and i don't want to
break the mirroring unless this is the result that you're wanting
now there is something for that and that is called clipping so let's go ahead let's turn on clipping
now keep in mind that clipping has a few weird little tricks so first of all if we
go ahead and try and move this right this minute you're not going to be able to this is because
this vertex is perfectly in the center of our axis of mirroring so if we turn off our clipping now
we'll be able to move this and then if we turn our clipping back on you will see the real thing that
clipping does so if i go ahead and move it now you can't go to the other side of the mirror now
another thing to be careful of is that if you have clipping off and you move to the other side
and then you turn clipping back on you will not be able to get past the mirror you can think of
it as if you're stuck in the mirror dimensions so to speak so there's something to keep in mind
now something a long to go with clipping is this whole idea of this merge now what exactly is this
merge this merge as you can imagine it's pretty much the same as our auto merge so any vertices
that are close enough to each other so right here 0.001 millimeters they are going to merge and how
they merging because is this mesh over here yes it is because if you go into wireframe mode there is
wireframe there so there is technically mesh there but you can't interact with it it's just being
mirrored okay so now with that said let's go ahead and figure out this idea that there's more axes
to mirror on so let's go here and let's delete this half of our mesh so with this half deleted
you can see that we're missing half our mesh now what direction do we need to mirror on to go ahead
and create that mesh on the other side that's right it would be on the y-axis
and believe it or not there is exactly the same for the z-axis so i'll just turn on the z-axis
here so we've got our z-axis here so if we want we could even delete this face says right here
and we can turn on our Z mirroring as well so that means you can do work on just one
corner and it will do the exact same on all the rest so let's go ahead let's do that let's do a
nice little inset here and an extrusion upwards and you can see what's happening right this minute
now in all honesty that there is pretty much everything there is to do with the mirror tool
there's this thing called bisect and flip i have tried for the life of me to figure out how to use
these but i have no idea really no idea so if anybody knows please leave me a comment down
below because i would love to understand these so let's undo this just a little bit to the point
that we have this right here because i want to get a concept across to you as well just be aware that
when you're mirroring it might not be the same sort of idea that you're thinking you're now
speaking about mirrors so if we go ahead and we move this and let's move this on the x down this
way let's also make sure that i'm not mirroring on all these axes i just want to do it on the x
if you wanted to mirror like a 90 degree you can do that using this whole concept of a mirror
but do keep in mind that the way that this is done is not your usual way of thinking oh i
want to move something 90 degrees i'll move it 90 degrees no this works very much like a real world
mirror so if you go ahead and you do a rotation on the zed you can see that if you did 90 degrees
it's going to go all the way back round it's got to be 45 degrees because 45 degrees if
you think about it right there that would be and considered a 90 degrees from the location
of mirroring so that's just something to point out anyway so from here let's go take a look at
mirroring in a real world situation so here we are in the real world example and as you
can see we need to recreate this vive controller holder so let's hide this and you can see okay
this is what we're trying to create oh look there's some extra little things here looks
like there's some booleans going on so let's go and sort that out our beginning mesh is
here and by the way by no means is this mesh any good whatsoever this is quite frankly can happen
very often if you go and do limited dissolves and you forget how things are put together and it just
gets messy there's a lot of work here to create this mesh to be absolutely perfect but at the
same time is probably also 3d printable still all right then so from here let's go and talk
about this mirror so go and try it out the link is down in the description for this file and let's
get on with the solution right now so here we go let's first add a loop cut right here because this
is actually the very center if you take a look from the top you will see that that is dead on
the y-axis so this is how i've created it to make life a little bit easier for you
so now we're going to go and do some face selecting we're going to select these faces right
there and then we're going to delete the versities associated with that face so then we have this
open mesh here and remember it's open mesh because we can see that red and we never want to really be
able to see red so with that there it's as simple as going ahead we can see that our origin point
is already in the right place so let's just go ahead and add a mirror modifier we add that mirror
modifier and there you have it it's that powerful now if we really want we can go ahead and go here
and apply it but you know what let's go and talk about the mirroring that's going on down here so
we need to mirror this object around because i don't feel like copying this three times over
and then oh god it's going to be a real pain so let's go ahead and let's see we need a middle
point for the base well right up here there isn't one because there's all that mesh there and the
real reason why i need this middle point is to go ahead and use my 3d cursor to create some geometry
now right here there is an edge that goes in the middle and all the way across i'm going to
use that i'm going to move my 3d cursor to the selected which brings it to the middle of that
great and now i'm going to go and create my first empty so let's go here out of edit mode
let's create an empty a planes empty a nice big one here we're gonna move it up on the Z
be careful not to move it on the y or the x all right there we go that's exactly where i want it
great so this is going to be our mirroring origin point so i'm going to go to our little cut cube
here and i'm going to go add a modifier to it and let's go hey i'm wanting to put a mirror
and you're going to mirror from this right here that empty okay so it's mirroring across to there
well technically i don't need that i only need it to mirror
on the y direction so let's remove that there and then we are going to go from here to this one here
we're going to use our control minus our bool tool hey but what's going on why hasn't that
mirrored over there once again remember we're working with modifiers now our stack
is incredibly important so right this minute we have our mirroring and then we have our bool
well technically i don't want that that way i want to mirror my boolean as well so let's go
ahead and just change the stack order and you'll see that the holes now appear over on the mirror
now of course once this is all done we can go over to our mesh here we can just say apply all
and there we have now this lovely mesh not so lovely as well but it's there and it's made and
that's the key element of it well done for getting through the mirror modifier as you can see it can
be very simple but also quite complicated if you don't quite understand the terminology and the way
that it's referring to itself a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome
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linked down in the description thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue