Blender - Boolean Sphere Hard Surface - #18 Subdivision Surface Modelling in Blender

Learn more about Sub-D modelling www.hardvertex...
Cutting a sphere out of an edge or a corner in blender can be tricky if you rely on just the Boolean operators to create your geometry. This tutorial shows you a great way to cut spheres out of objects while leaving you with a flexible and light topology to continue working with.
This video also introduces the Laplacian Smooth modifier which is an essential tool in more advanced subdivision surface modelling.
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[@chopagames5184]

This is the university of Blender - your tutorials are way higher than just muddy basic solutions and this helps me a lot in terms of improving my topology skills. Thank you very much!!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks so much Chopa Games. That is really kind.

[@yannickbonnaz5784]

I'm binging this channel like never before.

[@nirmansarkar]

You're so thorough with Blender. Watching your videos is almost like going to a Blender University.

[@ianmcglasham]

That is really kind nirman. Really glad you like them.

[@syaani]

Amazing content, the best modelling advice I've seen.

[@HowlYeYe]

This is an incredible video. I appreciate that you don't assume much prior knowledge, and are taking the viewer through each step and explaining exactly why you are doing it. I got a lot more information out of this than an hour-long video that does a bunch of flashy tricks without any actual teaching.

[@aliensoup2420]

Thanks for the demonstration of the Laplacian Smooth deformer. That seems better and more parametric than the previous method of fixing those misplaced verts.

[@ianmcglasham]

It does seem better and it is certainly more parametric but it is not quite as accurate as moving vertices as often it is not just the poles that cause the problem but the next row of vertices out from the poles. On a sphere the manual method is better. There are times when it is the best way to do it though. This is one of them!

[@Chm1eLu_NGTG]

I'm really amazed by Your expirience and the way You make those tutorials. I can only imagine how much there is to learn in Blender to improve your skills of modeling. I hope You won't stop teaching us, because it's a gem one in a milion. Thank You very much for the effort You put to make this videos and sharing Your knowledge. You are the master of Blender!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thank you Chm!eLu. Hopefully I can keep the standard high!

[@MetsuNoShin]

I have never felt compelled to sub this fast. I started blender a week ago and been watching tutorials and actually found this in my recommendations by random chance, but this is exactly what I needed yesterday! I had seen another one of your videos yesterday, and I’m so impressed with your grasp of blender and alike, as well as the amazing easy-to-understand explanation. Absolutely superb!

[@joe_fabricator]

Really enjoyed this tutorial. Fully explained and very understandable. Great job Ian, thank you. Truly a professional. Keepem' coming sir.

[@ianmcglasham]

Cheers Joe. I'm trying g to make some at the moment. Unfortunately I'm not well at the moment so it is taking longer than it should but the next one is really interesting!

[@joe_fabricator]

@@ianmcglasham Hope you're feeling better soon. Looking forward to it :-). Take care Ian.

[@PieterHanja]

Your techniques are so solid! Thank you!

[@tendividedbysix4835]

The hardops modellers fear this man.

[@rijaharijaona4674]

I ended up finding the best KZbin channel for subdivision surface .. Very helpful! thanks a lot!!!! one more subscriber

[@anissar7301]

you deserve more support. thank you so much

[@manart6506]

I like how pro this tips are while also it all comes to very simple steps and topology, yet very flexible.

[@ianmcglasham]

That's it MAN art. It is all much simpler than everyone thinks! Glad you like them.

[@BMX-Bandit]

Your videos are invaluable. Thank you so much for creating these fantastic tutorials. You're right to the point and have a great sense of humor. Please, keep them coming.

[@ianmcglasham]

Cheers BMXBandit! I used to have a Burner GS then a Mongoose. Always wanted a Diamondback but they were so expensive!

[@markushjelt366]

Thank you sir for making these incredible tutorials!🙏 I have been watching quite a lot different kinds of tutorials over the years, but your workflow and techniques are really something. For example, the way you used Vertex Group and Smooth Laplacian to do the final "polish" was Great!🤩 Magicians like you, really deserve a lot more subscribers!🤟

[@ianmcglasham]

Cheers Markus.

[@markokovacevic3225]

If I could like all your videos a thousand times, I would! Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us! I hope you get so many more subscribers! You honestly deserve them all. Keep it up, sir Ian!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thank you Marko. I've got a few interesting ones coming up!

[@markokovacevic3225]

@@ianmcglasham That sounds wonderful! Honestly can't wait! Thank you again!

[@patricenegros3982]

Going through your videos over the last few days have been a treat but this one is the cherry on the cake! (pardon my french!). Your laplacian modifier explanation is the best I ever encountered. Thanks a million for sharing your knowledge like this... as stated before, you deserve way more subs!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks Patrice!

[@gabe2252]

This is one of the best hard surface tutorials I've seen! Thank you!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thank you so much gabe2252!

[@sudipto30]

Beautiful tutorial Ian. Learned a lot

[@ianmcglasham]

Cheers sudipto!

[@demondays]

I entered out of curiosity and ended up watching it until the end, I never thought I would learn that much in just 18 minutes. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge to all!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks you Valentin! I love to hear that.

[@SlingshotNinja007]

I am new to blender and modeling. I watched bunch of tutorials; I don't usually write any comments. But I'm just wanting to say I really appreciate your videos. Really top notch. You're a genius.

[@ianmcglasham]

And I really appreciate your support! Cheers!

[@ElveraViljoen]

A fascinating and excellent video. Thank you!

[@ianmcglasham]

Cheers Elvera. Glad you enjoyed it!

[@erlendrobaye2909]

Incredible as always! Hats off to you Ian.

[@ianmcglasham]

Thansk Erlend!

[@manart6506]

14:15 oh. I was confused by laplacian smooth use. Cool.

[@ianmcglasham]

No one ever knows what to do with it!

[@christopherboyle5916]

Excellent stuff. Thank you!

[@ianmcglasham]

Cheers Christopher!

[@Muzy-eb6zp]

Another great tutorial you explain very clear by simple way I hope you continue post tutorials and I'm sure this channel will grow fast.

[@ianmcglasham]

It is certainly a moumtain to climb! Thanks Big Muzy.

[@andli]

This was so educational!

[@ruuii3d]

I love that purple thing

[@eskilloftsson5714]

This is gold!

[@kammm1203]

Very educational and funny video! Learned so much from it. Thank you!

[@hdblender8569]

thank you so much, very detail

[@short-circut2262]

You should make a dedicated video on the smooth laplacian, i think it would be very neat to see the extent it can be used

[@ianmcglasham]

I will put it on the list!

[@maurofuentes8076]

Oh! So epic! We've got Laplacianed!

[@Andy_Shust]

Your techniques are something! Thaks for sharing!

[@numesmat]

Thx for the awesome tutorial, lots of great techniques

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks Артем Кожемякин!

[@manart6506]

Super cool. I had ignored to use active vertex to align and I am really gonna use it now.

[@ianmcglasham]

Yeah it is a really useful method.

[@juliam1502]

Awesome tutorial, amazing presentation! You deserve much more subscribers, views and likes! Thanks a lot and keep up the good work!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thank you Julia M. Means a lot to hear it!

[@_f_]

loving it

[@mariayiannikkou4279]

Another fantastic video! Thank you Ian 🙏

[@ianmcglasham]

Thank you Maria. We should probably talk about it over a cup of tea! X

[@AnatomyAcademy]

Incredible!

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks Anatomy Academy. Love your channel too.

[@AnatomyAcademy]

@@ianmcglasham I'm honoured to hear this!

[@mhc19881010]

wow thank you

[@mooonroe]

awesome , ty very much

[@fullyleaded]

I just tried both methods of smoothing the sphere and the zebras are noticeably better on the other method. The geometry is obviously more dense on the other method. Just an observation really.. thought I'd mention it. Who would have thought there would be so much discussion to a simple sphere!

[@buppington]

This technique is great, but one should always think ahead when planning to use booleans because oftentimes you'll be connecting to other complex objects and you can totally bog down your mesh with unneeded loops. Redirecting edges, reductions, and judging the minimal amount of subD detail needed really is something you have to learn, but luckily over time, you get a feeling for it.

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks mescalero. I rarely use booleans and I always plan ahead!

[@Dampfnudel]

Interesting take on the Smooth Laplacian! However, I would argue that for this goal you would have achieved the same with the normal Smooth operator: Select it instead of the Laplacian and set it to the vertex group. You can leave "Repeat" at the initial value of 1 and eyeball the "Factor" value --- something like 1.721 worked nicely for me. Is there another hidden benefit of using Laplacian Smooth?

[@ianmcglasham]

Hi Dampfnudel. There is indeed an additional benefit to the smooth laplacian. It makes efforts to equalise the relative sizes of the surrounding polygons which a regular smooth does not. I will be making more advanced videos explaining it soon(ish!).

[@fullyleaded]

These videos are like the recommended reading towards a university course in Blender. I’m in the middle of building a Lamborghini Wheel which consists of cylinders inside a circle and it’s a bit of a head scratcher but this tutorials has helped me to concoct a much more logical strategy so thank you. I was wondering, the method that you use here to fix the three spoke pole pinch, does this supersede the method in the ‘#4 Building a better sphere’ video? Or would there be situations where you would use one method over the other?

[@ianmcglasham]

The lamborghini wheel sounds interesting. The higher-end the car, the crazier the curvature used in their designs. They like to make them hard to copy! Regarding the pole position(sic) fix - moving the vertices manually is a better option when the vertices to be moved are on a sphere or anything derived from a cube which still retains symmetry. You will usually want to move the vertices on the surrounding row as well as the problem pole vertices so it is a more accurate solution. The laplacian smooth is a great quick fix for most things, though, and is great for any surface where those poles can't be moved onto a flat area. It does have other uses, but I haven't got around to making a video about them yet!!

[@Markoz87]

Thank you for this tutorial :) Like always amazing portion of knowledge and good habbits. It's amazing how smooth you movin around this program. Do you know every single modifier and every other proporties tab for 100%? It's look like yes :) How long you work with blender, and do you think blender can be use to make for example commercial for TV? Or for that kind of work should be use some else program? 👍

[@ianmcglasham]

Hi Markoz. I have been using blender for around 15 years. Maya for 22 years and some 3d software which you probably haven't heard of for a few years before that - i started on something called pixelputty solo! I have worked in vfx for many years and have used blender on several TV commercials. Hundreds of TV programmes and a couple of feature films. It is exactly the right tool to use for all of these things although adoption by the film sector has had a bit of a setback recently.

[@bamberghh1691]

Hello. In a couple of tutorials (at least this and the cloth softbody) you said to always put the subdiv after all other modifiers. But why? Wouldn't the cloth or wave modifiers work better with the subdivided mesh instead of the original, non-subdivided mesh which has much less vertices for them to work with?

[@ianmcglasham]

Good question Bambergg. There are situations where you would have the subdivision before other modifiers but as soon as you do that, the subdivision surface modifier becomes a modelling tool rather than surfacing tool and you have multiplied the base geometry by a large factor. When using cloth as actual cloth (as opposed to a soft body) then you would want the sub-d modifier before the cloth modifier for example. it is mostly about portability of a lightweight geometry which makes animation, deformation and simulation much easier for the software to calculate efficiently. A sub-d surface should ideally be as light as is possible to accurately describe a shape and having the modifier anywhere but at the end of the stack is not optimal. This is why GPU acceleration of the sub-d modifier only works when it is the last thing in a modifier stack. Because that is where it is supposed to go. Put it anywhere else and it has become a modelling tool. You will often see objects created with more than one sub-d modifier to get a balance between these ideas. I'll put it on my list of videos to make so I can describe and demonstrate it better.

[@friedrichhayek4862]

13:06 Maybe if you study the math behind the modifier you may understand why.

[@cr4723]

Very good!, but a lot of effort. In CAD you do it in seconds

[@ianmcglasham]

Thanks. The model you get out of Cad is only good for... Well... Looking at. Or if you happen to have a CNC machine you can make it as a real object out of metal. With this method you can use it to do a thousand things. It could be squashed under a foot. Squeezed through an hourglass. Blown up like a balloon. Melted Into goo. Stretched to ba an elastic band. Pulse like an alien living organism. Something inside it could look like it was trying to break out. It can be smashed into like a car - with dents that look as they would in real life. It can be twisted and morphed into homeomorphicaly similar shapes. It can do anything I want it to. CAD models are good for - well. Like I said... looking at.