Hey welcome back, it's Ben here! Remember you can
always slow the video down, because I talk a little bit faster than Mikey. So
I'm going to be introducing what are Bezier Curves. We'll be telling you why
we're using them for our pin, and then, you'll be drawing your first Bezier Curve!
So what are Bezier Curves? They are perfect mathematical vector
curves. They can be scaled infinitely with no loss of detail,
and that means that you can create a very simple, smooth, and elegant look
but only if you use as few as possible. Let's just
click on to this Wikipedia article in your notes, to show you. A couple of
examples of Bezier Curves, there's one on the right there. If I scroll past all the math,
you can see some others moving here. They're defined, basically, by a start point,
an end point, and then, these blue control handles in
this diagram. And between those start points, end points, and control handles, you've got
fantastic control over the shape of your curve, so let's go
and see how we do this in Blender. Here's where Mikey left you, looking
at the front view of your pin, with a cube there in the scene at
the origin, and what I want to do, firstly, is just scale that cube!
In the X direction, we want the cube 1.2 units
like that. So now we have two forms of reference, we have a bounding
box of the cube sitting there in the scene, and then, we have, of course, this background
image that we've setup. Fantastic! I'm just going to move
this 3D View over the top of the Timeline View, like that,
dragging downwards just to give myself some more screen space. So
without further ado, let's add a Bezier Curve so you can see what it does! There's three ways
of doing that. One is from the Create menu, you can click here
Curve, Bezier. Or you could do the Shift A for add and that would bring
up your Add menu and you''ll find a Curve menu, or you could go to the
Add menu, down at the bottom here and that's actually the same menu upside down for some reason.
Fantastic! So let's add ourselves a Bezier Curve,
but before you click away anywhere else, remember when you first create things in Blender you want to
be a little bit careful down on the bottom-left here. And remember, if this pane's not showing you
can make it show with the little plus sign. So if you've pulled that
all the way down, like I do all the time, that little plus sign will bring it back up. So
before you submit this curve to having been created, make sure you
Align with View. The reason for that is, in our case, we want to make a
curve purely in the X, Z plane, we don't want it
extending in Y at all. OK, we want a 2 dimensional Bezier Curve, they
can be 3D in Blender. So there you go, you have this squiggly thing here which
you can drag around with the Right Mouse Button. When you do, you'll notice it
goes right through, in 3 dimenstions, the middle of that reference cube.
So we can sort that out by just moving the reference cube backwards.
Click on your cube up here in your top-right in
the outline, and then, just push it in Y
until it's behind the Bezier Curve. Fantastic! Now, let's select the Bezier Curve
again! Here it is, there's your curve! Now, I want you to make sure that your Bezier
Curve, when you first crete it, is at Y equals 0. This is very important!
Once it's selected and created at Y equals 0, push Tab
or go to Edit mode, both do the same thing. Now,
you have control over those things you saw on Wikipedia! You can right-click
the end point and drag and move it around. Now you see that it's moving
in X and Y. It looks like it's moving in X and Y,
that is because we have Local coordinates selected, you need to be in Global coordinates.
Blender is very confusing in a 2D view, because it actually changes this X,
Y to X, Z. Sorry, this X, Z to X, Y! That's very
confusing. So let's be in Global coordinates! Now, when you drag
around your end point, you'll see the Y is not changing or as good as not changing, the last decimal
place moves a little bit. So sue me, that's OK! Let's also
click on there with the Right Button, on the start point, and move it around and see how it works!
If you missed the start point you may grab a control handle like I did. That's fine! So
the things that you can control are the start and end points here, by dragging with
the Right Mouse Button, Left Button to place and the same
with the handles. You right-click and drag to move the handle, and then, you left-click to
place. The final thing you're going to need to know about this curve is how to
add new vertex control points. How do you do that? Well
you click on the last one, like here, the end one,
and then, you hold down Control and left-click the Mouse Button.
So you hold down Control and left-click with the final end point selected,
and that will create another point afterwards. And again, you can go in and
grab and drag these handles. Again, keep an eye, up at the Transform, that this is all
in the Y equals 0. So what we're going to do is we're going to outline
the right-hand side of the pin. I'm going to start it for you, and then, I'm going to challenge you to finish it.
Let's put the first control point up at the top here, place
it roughly, that's fine. Roughly drag the control points
around to where we want them, something like that, and now let's
go place that first point precisely. I want it at X equals
0, right in the middle of the pin. I want it at Y equals 0, in the plane of the screen, and at
Z equals 1.9, precisely at the top of the pin.
Now, here comes the art of drawing Bezier Curves! Where do you place the next node?
Where are we going to move this guy to? There's lots of places you could put it,
but I'm going to choose to put it right here, where the next of the pin becomes vertical.
And let me explain the rule of thumb that I've got for
why I'm putting that point here. We want as few
points as possible in a Bezier Curve, to keep it as simple as possible.
Every point we add to the curve introduces complexity
and takes away from the mathematical purity and elegance of that curve,
so you want to use as few as possible. Now, if you were driving a car around this
pin, around the outside of this pin, let's start on the left-hand neck here.
Here we are steering right, steering right, steering right, and at the top, our steering wheel goes
vertical. Imagine you've got a piece of white tape on a rally car steering wheel, this is an indication
you need to put a new control vertex in. Now, we're steering right, steering right,
steering right, and at this point, our steering wheel's gone vertical again
and now the control point. Alright, now as I scroll down
I am now steering left, steering left, steering left from the
car's point of view, and at this point, I inflect and I go
through and I start steering right. So you might want to put yourself another control point
here and then get the handles
where you want them. OK.
Or you might decide, I don't need one there. I can go all the way down
to here, because this is the first time that the
curve changes direction, because actually here, all of the time we're steering
right, steering right, steering right, steering right. You see? So this is a really subtle point,
it's very tempting to put a control point here, so that we can precisely
define the width of the curve, but the disadvantage of doing that is, it's actually
one more than we need. We only actually need a control point
here, because this is the next time the steering wheel goes vertical, and by dragging these
handles, you can get around that curve. OK, so I've
nearly done that for you now. Now, if you accidentally do what I've just done and go into
3D View, not a problem, check that your curve is flat in 3D, and then, just come back to
Front view. So I've shown you most of it, but I want you to finish this off and
get it to spec, to specifications. So let's show you the spec slide!
Finish the pin outline, only one half of the pin is needed. The top control
vertex should be at precisely (0, 0, 1.9).
The bottom one should be at 0, so it's in the middle of the pin, 0 in
Y so it's in the plane of the screen, and -1.9
so it's precisely at the bottom of the pin. I want you to add
just one more control vertex, actually,
for a total of four, and then, make sure that
all the vertices have a Y = 0 and see if you can get a good outline from
that. So pause the video, see if you can outline the pin in four vertices total!
OK welcome back! So
adding in these final vertices! We firstly need to select, carefully,
our end point. So make sure you're selected on the Bezier Curve, then you come in here,
and right-click on the actual final control point.
And then, these handles are really long, so I'm actually going to pull this
handle in a bit, before I even add another point. Then, we
hold down Control and left-click at the bottom, and there's my final point! Now, it all looks a bit funny
in there right now, but that's OK, let's sort it out, let's grab the handles, and take control of this curve.
So there's one, click, and then,
here's the other handle, click. Now, you need to mess around a little
bit, because Bezier Curves are very holistic, when you make a change to one part of the curve
it changes the rest. But here are the things that are important! Number one, this bottom
control point needs to be at precisely at 0, 0,
-1.9 for when Mikey spins it around in 3D with you.
This may be a good time to check your top control point is at precisely 0,
0, +1.9. Fantastic! Next thing I want you to check is that
the top of the pin is going to be actually flat, and the way to check that is that this
right-hand handle here also needs to have a Z value. Whatever
you choose for X is up to you, that's by eye, but it must have a Z
value of precisely 1.9. OK, so then it's completely
flat at the top. Coming down the curve it looks OK for now, we'll modify it in
a minute. And we have a change of direction here, so we need
to grab this control point and make this curve how we want it. It doesn't have
to perfectly match this reference pin, by the way. And then,
this handle here will adjust the curvature at the bottom. Remember the pin needs to be able to stand up,
so you actually want quite a flat bottom, so I'm going to make this handle quite long,
watching the entire curve as I do it. And the same treatment
at the bottom. This bottom control vertex must be at 0, 0, -1.9,
but importantly, it's right-hand handle must also be
at -1.9 in the Z, then you have a
completely flat curve at the bottom. So I'm leaving my pin different
to the reference pin, because I want a squarer bottom on it OK, because I
want it to be able to stand up a little bit better. So the final thing that I'm going to adjust here is
the handles on this one at the neck. And
look at that, that's pretty cool! When you're satisfied with your pin, then
you can come out of Edit Mode, back into Object Mode, and I'm actually going to
turn off the Background Image now, because it's kind of distracting
me. There you go that's my pin outline, and
I think it looks pretty good! So what we're going to do next with Michael is
rotate that around 360 degrees and create you a full
three dimensional pin, from this pretty curve. So congratulations, and I'll
see you soon!