Welcome to the boolean modifier in this video.
We're going to experiment with a boolean modifier understanding how it works.
We're going to understand how to apply it to our model learn that it can be used constructively and
destructively.
It can and will work in edit mode if you choose.
And also is real time and alive which is exciting.
Not all modifiers are.
So let's hop over straight into blender.
Hello everybody and welcome to this lecture on the boolean operator.
And we're going to talk specifically about the boolean modifier in this case.
There are a couple of things we need to do a bit of housekeeping to make sure that the boolean modifier
works as we expect it to.
If you forget these two items you will end up at some point scratching your head wondering what has
gone on.
So firstly let's just hide the properties panel and the tall shelf and have a look at our lovely bishop
and how it's coming together.
Okay so the first thing that we need to look for is any inverted Normal's.
So in order to make sure we've got that all sorted I'm going to hop into edit mode select all of my
mesh and go control and n never had tall shelf still open we can see that the operator panel make normal
consistent.
There we go.
Now we didn't have any normal flips going on there but if you did that should have fixed those.
The next thing to do is whilst you're in object mode we can see that there is a scale applied to our
model.
Fair enough we scaled a top in order to make sure that the boolean operators going to work as we would
expect it to.
I'm going to go to object apply and apply that scale.
Right there we go.
I'm really happy with how that is all set up now and I'm ready and happy to add in the bouley a modifier.
So go ahead and do that.
Let's go ahead to the modifiers tab add a modifier and go to a Boolean which is on the Generate were
generating new geometry and boolean.
We can see once this opens up it's got a series of operations intersect Union and difference.
We'll see what those two in a moment.
And it's got an option for selecting another object so I'm going to need something for it to have a
difference with too.
It's a unified two or it intersects with.
Let's go ahead and do that.
Now I'm going to turn off snapping before I do anything else and then place my thrilly cursor over here
and add in a new mesh.
It doesn't really matter what we add in I'm going to add in an eco sphere because it's this kind of
cool.
Now for this to really work.
We need these two models to intersect one another so let's just put them close enough together that
they eat into one and have an enormous scale that one up ever so slightly and push out.
It's just cheap taking a chunk out of our model.
There we go.
Okay let's go back to our low poly bishop and under the object and the boolean modifier select the IKO
sphere rule when it's disappeared straight away.
This is what I mean by it's interactive.
It has changed itself.
And as we can see if we move our model it's changing what's going on.
If we go to wireframe mode we can see that even more.
I'm lifting the low poly Bishop up and down and we can see the base of it there.
So what it is doing at this point is it's intersecting the low polybe ship with the Ika sphere and it's
keeping the low poly bishop any part of the load poly bishop that intersects with this sphere and if
we were to go ahead and apply that and have a look after hiding the eicas sphere we can see that this
is a chunk of the bottom of that model.
And on this side it's going to look like an outer spear because that's that's that's the the where it
was terminated where it had been cut off before.
Now before we go any further.
One thing to mention whenever you use the boolean modifier is is very messy.
It will destroy a nice apology.
So whereas we had edged loops running up and down our model before and face loops for that matter they're
now pretty much destroyed where ever this is intersected now there is going to be one I think just here
when we go we've got a face loop that extends three faces.
So what that really means is going to be much more difficult to modify your geometry if you've gone
ahead and destroyed it like that and we'll cover read topology later on in the course where it comes
to taking the mess you got in front of us here and making it better in terms of animation and for editing
later on.
Now I'm going to undo a couple of steps here until it all comes back.
Excellent.
And I'm going to unhide the like asrar again and labrie my bishop back down to about here and let's
have a look at the other options so boolean objects intersecting with the IKEA sphere.
Well soak it so it's intersecting.
We know what that does.
Now what about Union.
Okay so we can see both of our models here and the sphere itself has this horrible hashing over it.
Now if you ever see this horrible hashing of a mesh object going on that's called.
Said fighting.
Basically there are two objects on top of one another and blender literally does not know which one
to display.
So it kind of displays a mess of both of them and you can end up with some horrible rendering artefacts
if we go into rendering mode here.
Yes.
Look at this absolutely horrible in terms of what's going on there that doesn't look like a decent surface.
However if we go ahead and hide our ecosphere it's nice and clean again if we hide hid our Ike.
Our probably Bishop It would also be nice and clean but the two together because they're exactly the
same they're intersecting with one another and causing this horrible geometry.
However if we have a look at the wireframe mode we can see that whilst it's all together we've now got
a chunk being taken out of ah ah or what looks like a chunk being taken out of our bishop.
But it's not if we go ahead and hide our low poly Bisha OK sorry if we go ahead and hide our ecosphere
we can see what's happened.
There is these two mesh objects have been joined together perfectly and we go into solid mode and not
rendered mode but solid mode and then we see that it has joined them together perfectly.
And it's one mesh object one continuous mesh object so if we were to go in and apply vats and go into
edit mode we grab this vertex here we can see it's manipulating the surface of that face.
Now once again it has destroyed our geometry whereas we did have some face loops going up and down and
we had them going round while they still do go round.
But they dont continue round our our ecosphere in this case.
And again thats not useful for this notch that we want to put in the top.
But it is useful when youre joining things together.
So that of course we come back out and.
Have a look at our boolean modifier again.
That leaves one option left which is this difference and our ha.
Weve taken a chunk out of it and because the eicas is hidden I can go ahead and select it and move it
about if it was not hidden and take out different chunks of our model.
There we go.
So there's lots of options there lots of cool things you could see that potentially if you were to acclimate
the movement of the Ika sphere and make it transparent in your scene or not render it and then have
the low poly bishop there you could probably eat away at the surface of a model.
Very exciting perhaps thats something you want to try later on in the course when we learn a bit more
about animation.
But that should give you all you need to do to go ahead and make the notch in the top of our bishop.
So its time for a challenge.
I would like you to cut a notch in the bishop so using an boolean modifier cut a notch from the bishop's
hat in the top.
If you need to have a look at reference material to make sure its placement is good then go ahead and
do that.
And before you get into the challenge just another reminder I did mention it earlier but I've seen so
many people fall short on this.
Remember you've got your Normal's to look out make sure they're outward facing and also make sure you
have the scale of your model.
If you don't do that you may have some interesting effects happening Paul's video now and give that
a go.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
Let's go cut and notch in the bishop's hat.
Okay so we need a notch rather than a big chunk of ecosphere taken out.
So let's go ahead here and I'm going to delete my ecosphere from the scene all together.
Making sure I can see it before I do that.
And then it's just a matter of going ahead and giving this a new mesh object.
Now I think at this point in time we're looking at let's look at it from the front to begin with.
So we start setting things up as read expect so and I'm going to look at it in orthographic perspective.
Okay so that looks like it's gone a bit funny.
Looks like he's got really small.
I swear I scaled that up before.
So looks like I've made it much smaller than it should have been.
Whoops.
Okay well let's go ahead here and scale this up.
By one point three three four three.
Ah ha.
Relative to the cursor at the bottom of its shift.
An S cursor to centre.
So then we can scale around that amazing the things you pick up as you're going through to scale by
one point three three three three.
There we go.
Let's look at it from the front again.
Yeah that's much better.
So let's go ahead and apply that scale that's now done and dusted apart from it look like it was slightly
above the floor as well.
Did I.
I think I must have saved the porn as a bishop before I got round to actually lowering that back to
housing and I have to do that as well.
Whoops.
Whoops indeed.
Okay so I know the value of this by selecting its face cursor to selected origin to the cursor.
And then in the properties panel we can bring that back down to zero.
Okay that looks good.
And then I'm going to move the origin back to the geometry itself.
Okay so let's have a look at that and we're going to have to scale this slightly with the pivot point
being the 3D cursor on the z axis and there we go.
And that's pretty much in that part all sorted out.
There are some additional things we can modify there.
So we've got a shape here and it comes down it's like a wedge but it's got a curve in it.
So I think I'm going to move the 3D cursor up here and start with the cube and scale the cube in ever
so slightly so that's roughly the right shape.
Apply the scale on that Q and hop into edit mode and select this top face move background to the front.
And I can just move it up in this case in roughly the right direction and I'm going to intersect all
the parts all the bits of geometry of what I wanted to.
I think it's going to be narrower at the bottom.
In fact I'm going to add a loop going round this model so I can have it pointy at the very bottom.
I'm not sure if this is going to work.
Always always up for an experimentation and I'm going to move that edge down so it's pointy.
Okay so that's the basic shape there.
There's a few tweaks I need to do here this this face here can come in ever so slightly and that's pretty
good.
It needs to be extended this way so I'm going to select both of those faces and extrude through and
the other thing to bear in mind is this model itself and look at it from the side now so the image won't
be correct and we can see here that the notch itself goes sideways through our model with the bottom
of its being at the front and the top being at the back.
So I should be able to line this up if I select my entire mesh and then go for the pivot point here
and select roughly around there.
The middle point of this notch and then we rotate its wall and then probably have to shift it up as
well.
We can get it to roughly the right area.
That looks good to me.
The only thing I don't like at the moment is how much of this sphere at the top is being cut off.
So no grab the edge here and push it in ever so slightly so as more of that sphere.
And you know what I think I'm ready to do a cut.
So back into object mode I'm going to select my bishop.
So the object that is currently called Cube.
I'm going to call it a notch.
So we know what's going on and then make the notch a child of the bishop by clicking and dragging it
up to low poly bishop.
And that means if we move the bishop around the notch follows whiff and then we need to go ahead and
selects that as ARM boolean operator has a difference.
And then we can hide it from our scene and excellent book that has come across really well.
Now I would quite like to have a bit more of a better kirven it's I can go back into my notch this is
the great thing about a modifier This is why we use modifiers.
It enables us to be creative and experiment without risk of damaging our model essentially suck and
add another loop cuts in roughly there and one on the other side as well.
And what that will enable me to do is grab the edge that runs down here and down here and whizz back
around to the beginning and move and down slightly on the z axis to give it a more rounded appearance
rather than it just jutting out.
And again now we've done that we can remove the notch or hide the notch from our scene with the low
poly bishop there we've got the notch in and there we go we have tab in an hour of edit mode that does
happen sometimes that's a much better notch and it's not quite smooth on this side.
Again now we're starting to get a bit picky and criticizing our own work but that's essentially the
challenge done now.
One final thing because I know someone's going to do this if we have a look at the outliner itself even
though we've hidden it from view.
If we go ahead and render an image to show with everybody and the camera is not in the right place.
So let's go and sort that out.
If we go ahead and render that what we'll find is that notch is still in the render So let's go back
to the 3D view.
Don't select the camera go to the view itself go to cameras and go to the active camera.
We can see why that can't be seen at the moment.
Now I'm going to use shift and F to go into first person mode to lift this upsets roughly in the right
place you could of course move around for cameras propertys itself.
And now we go to far off file and render render and render image.
We see that notch is still in there.
Now in order to make sure the notch is not rendered in the outline you need to turn off the camera icon
as well.
And then you go to render and render image.
It's not in the scene.
Brilliant.
Okay.
Well that's almost ready to share apart from.
It's not got light on this side we can go ahead and add that later on.
But I'm happy with how that turned out.
Let's go into a 3D view and you know what the only thing that I want to fix is this back bit here and
again I can show the notch again find the bits that I want to edit which will be this bit here in fact
I could probably grab that Vertex and go Gee Z on that Vertex and just bring it down.
So it's got more of a curve coming through in fact I could move in 3-d space here and not worry too
much about everything else hide it again.
Tab in and out of edit mode.
And there we go.
Excellent.
That's all sorted.
How are you guys getting on.
What do your bishops look like.
Did you go for this type of watch.
Did you do something else.
Looking forward to seeing your work over in the discussions and I'll see you all in the next lecture.