Transcript:
On my instagram, I showed the general progress of the flash suit that I was working on for a client. The one thing that was the most complicated bit of the suit was to do the texture and it took me a while to figure out a decent method. But as you guys can see here. Even in the wireframe view, everything looks relatively simple, even though there is a lot of detail in all of these pieces. This is still very manageable. The file sizes are not too large for the individual pieces, and everything is still pretty workable. If I need to do some simple deformations. But I’m going to show you guys how to do this exact thing on this blank piece right here. So the first thing that I do is I go into edit mode. I click three for selecting faces and what I do. Is I start selecting the faces that I want to be displaced? So there isn’t an exact method to this madness, but you just want to make sure that you are selecting only the faces that you want to have the displacement because this workflow is fairly destructive at a certain point, so you won’t be able to go back unless you actually have a saved file so now that these have been selected, I’m going to do a preliminary subdivision, so I’m going to set my subdivision modifier to 3 and I’m going to hit apply now that that’s applied. I have a very general sort of look at how the area that my displacement is going to cover, and I’m not really liking how this is looking right here, so I’m just going to hit plus multiple times here, just so I have most of this area selected as well and everything here is looking relatively flat next up, I’m going to go ahead and click alt a to extrude and I’m going to extrude the faces along the normals just to raise it up, just a little bit kind of like the rest here. I’m going to go ahead and select this face and delete it same thing with this one, and I’m also going to delete some of these, or you can do this later. It generally is up to you because we’re going to be connecting this one to there, so we don’t want there to be a giant overlap once that’s done, I’m going to select one vertex here. Click L and then P by selection. And once you have this piece on its own, we can go ahead and click tab all to select all u and unwrap. Once this piece has been unwrapped. We are going to go ahead and bring in our texture, which looks like it’s already in so file open and then bring in your texture. This one, I set it to 6×6 and let’s go to the UV editing. I’m going to hit tab just to kind of see what it’s looking like, and I’m going to bring in my texture Just so I can see a preview. The hole is right here. So that is that right there, and I kind of want it to be a little bit more like this running along the forearm that way right in a way, okay so. I think that should be pretty okay. So this this edge right here. Is this one so we can kind of guesstimate how they’re all gonna go relatively like this, okay. Once that’s done, I’m going to go back into modeling mode after I’m done my preview and I’m going to add another subdivision surface Modifier. This is my second subdivision and we’re just going to leave it at roughly three. That’s what I’m going to do. If your computer is pretty weak, You might just want to do one or two. Then we’re going to go ahead and hit displace under the displacement modifier. We’re going to select our texture, mid level. We’re going to set this to zero and the strength. You want it to be like 0.05 so 5 percent, actually? Yeah, that’s still too much 0.005 all right, that’s what we want. However, there’s a bit of funkiness going on here, so there’s a lot of stretching and we don’t want that, and the way we’re going to fix. That is under coordinates under local. We’re gonna select UV because we uv unwrapped it, so we’re gonna set the UV as our coordinates next up the direction, so you can change the direction that these poke out. I’m gonna say normals because I do want it to actually stick out like a sticker. That’s been put onto the piece to like wrap around, but if you do decide to mess around with, for example, the X right, so what’s going to happen is it’s only going to offset them in the X direction so down that way and you can see, there’s quite a bit of distortion in this area, So I’m just going to go ahead and select the normals. Okay, once that’s done I. I know that I don’t want the honeycombs to poke out. I want them to poke in so under strength, we want to set this to a negative value and there we go, that’s looking good and what we’re going to do now is we are going to go ahead and do one more subdivision so at 3 I think that is going to be a pretty good level, which I think this is. This is pretty okay, but there’s a bit of a trick to it, And this is what I learned kind of the hard way. First of all, turn off the real-time preview for the subdivision and the displacement and add a decimate modifier. And I’m going to set this to about 1 and we’re going to turn off, preview there as well. So, Lastly, what we want to do is now start applying our modifiers, and this is the step where you actually want to save because this is where you have a pretty good chance of crashing if you over, subdivide it. So the four that we just saw we’re going to change it to a 5 an extra level of subdivision and we’re going to click apply. This is where you’re going to hear your computers fans ramp up, and you’re going to see your memory usage Spike up as well. I’ve noticed during this process, my memory goes up to about 30 gigs or so, but it also depends on the piece. Depends how much detail you’re putting into it, so be careful, The displays doesn’t actually take a whole lot of resources as you can see. It does bump up the memory just a little bit, but it’s it’s nothing crazy in my opinion. However, the processor is as you can see a little bit all over the place. It’s utilizing all 12 cores. And there we go, so that’s looking pretty nice. However, at this point, there’s way too much geometry and that’s what the decimate modifier is for, so we’re going to go ahead and hit apply. This one’s going to take a bit, and this is where your memory usage is really going to spike up. So this is the process where I’ve seen my memory. Go up to about 40 gigs or so again. It all depends on your initial layer level of subdivisions, so if you have lots of subdivisions, this is going to again be kind of kind of dependent on those subdivisions, so at this point. If you don’t have a very beefy computer, go take a shower, go for a walk, make a coffee, make some food turn on a TV show because this is gonna take a bit of time. Okay, so this process for me took maybe five minutes. Maybe a little bit less, but as you guys can see now if we go ahead and we isolate this piece and we look at the wireframe. It looks pretty, okay. It’s still fairly dense, so this is where I do my second layer of decimation, so we can try, for example half, and that’s actually looking quite a bit better as you can see again. Much simpler we can, for example. Oh, I just click Planar. Damn, this is gonna okay. That’s not bad, all right, We can now try, for example 0.2 and you want to keep going down until things start breaking kind of like this, so let’s try 0.3 This will bring back a little bit of detail and again. Just make sure that nothing is broken that that’s our main concern at this point because if we can have less vertices, but retain all of this detail, it’s a win. Okay, so let’s try 0.28 and let’s see if anything starts breaking then. Okay, still no wireframe as you can see. This wireframe is starting to look actually quite a bit better. I would say if you want to be on the safe side. You can just leave it at that. We can try 0.25 Yep, that’s so that’s starting to break 0.26 so there we go, So 0.26 appears to be the perfect ratio for this. Maybe even a little less, but yeah, once you’re done with that, go ahead and hit apply. So this one isn’t going to take as long and as you can see. We have a very, very smooth piece. However, at this point. You may be asking yourself okay, well. We did that. But how do we attach it back? So let’s go ahead and select our two pieces that we want joined and I’m just going to zero in on them. So first of all, there’s two things we want to do so number one. We just want to make sure that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between this. So yeah, so this right here looks fine. I would say there’s a bit of, um, there’s just a teeny tiny little gap here, which I think is good and we made this gap here as well, so that’s gonna be nice too. So let’s go ahead and select both of these pieces and click Ctrl J go into edit mode and select two for loops or for edges a to select all and then select loops boundary loops and we’re going to go ahead and deselect this. Okay, so once that’s done, right, Click bridge edge loops and you just want to make sure that this is looking relatively clean. So go ahead and go around your model. Make sure everything looks nice. This right here probably is just a little bit broken. I would go in and just fix something like this manually. If this on, like only happens once realistically, nobody’s gonna notice when you 3d print it, it probably won’t even come out that way so but you are again. Welcome to go in and fix things up As as you wish. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. A little bit of manual labor is still okay in blender as long as it’s a little bit so places like this, For example, these very sharp corners you’re gonna notice a little bit of destruction for the most part, it’s it’s good. I would say this is a borderline perfect perfect piece. Okay, and we still need to finish this up right here and again. Let’s select our edge loops, select or all select loops, boundary loops and bridge edge loops. This is where it’s going to get a little bit funky, and you can bring in something like a cylinder and just cut it around a little bit like, for example. Um, if you bring in a cylinder, for example, just scale it way down scale 0.1 I’m going to bring it over scale it down again and this is where me personally. I would just kind of grab this position. It relatively where I need it to be kind of like that. Make it just a little bit bigger and then bring it out kind of like this. So once it kind of covers majority of the area, like, of course, this gener genuinely doesn’t have to be perfect, but as long as it covers majority of the area, you can kind of go ahead and bring it back like that. And then if it will let you do a boolean, you can kind of make a nice little cut like this. If you position it properly, etc, etc, etc. Okay, all right, so now that that’s done, there’s a little imperfection here. So these little ones this is gonna happen, so there’s not a whole lot that you can do to prevent things like that from happening, but just make sure you go over your model once once you’ve done this. Make sure everything is looking good. You don’t have to fix every single little issue, and if you export this, this is going to print just fine. There’s another really cool add-on that you can do or you can use if you go under edit and then preferences, and we’re going to go ahead and find 3d print toolbox. This one right here. There’s some pretty handy. Little things that you can do. For example, make manifold. If you’re having issues with your models. Not being manifold. It will remove, For Example, 39 vertices, 77 edges, 46 faces. Okay, so that has cleaned our model up a little bit. If there’s any transforms you want to? Do you want to export this particular file this? This toolbox is actually very, very cool. All right, guys, so that is everything for this tutorial. You are now aware of how to do displacements. If you find a better way of doing this, please leave me a comment down below. I would love to improve this process, but that is it. Thanks so much for watching. Catch you guys in the next one peace.