Transcript:
Hey, there this is Josh here from wooden rain and in this video, I’m going to show you how to fuse two objects together inside of blender. Now, if you have experience in blender or a 3b you know, a decent amount. You probably know how to do this already, but if you’re a beginner or you just don’t know how to do this. I’d suggest watching the entirety of this video so the first thing. I’m going to do is just add in a plain. Obviously you can fuse together just about anything, but it’s just easier to demonstrate with a plain. I’ll rotate this 90 move it up a little bit and I’ll also add in a cylinder butt out. Let’s wait on that. Let’s first just work with the plane. I’m gonna also disable the floor and these axes. So you can see this a little bit better. So what we have here is just a basic plane and let’s say. I I don’t know I subdivided this. A few times? Let’s do three and let’s also turn these middle squares into a circular formation, so Ill. Just use the loop tools menu for that. Now, let’s say we want to diffuse a cylinder to this circle here, and it’s a very easy thing to do. There are two different ways we’re going to discuss the first one is by merging vertices and the second one is by using the boolean. Union tool. So let’s go with the first one, and that’s just the basic emerging vertices, so in this case, in case number one in order to fuse two objects together, you have to have the same amount of vertices on each object that you’re fusing. So what I mean by that is, for example, if I want to fuse a cylinder to this circle here. I need the cylinder to have the same amount of vertices as this circle so right now! It looks like we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven seven there seven down here and that’s 14 and then 15 16 to include the side areas. So we need 16 vertices on our cylinder in order to fuse it, so I’m just gonna add in a cylinder with just that many will change the vertex amount to 16 and let’s also rotate this in ninety degrees over the y-axis and I’ll just move this over scale it down a little bit and also join them together, just like that, so now our goal is essentially like an this a little bit closer. Our goal is to essentially merge this circle here on the cylinder to this circle here on the face, and it’s very easy to do. We basically just have to merge these vertices together. So let me drop on a mat cap, so we can see this a little bit better so there. I guess there are two different ways. You can merge these. The easiest one is just to merge, but some people for whatever reason like to, you know, just fill like this and then fill in a face, but filling in that extra face requires an extra step, which I don’t like doing so quite frankly, I just like to select two vertices. Press Alt M and then just merge them at the center. It just saves us that one single step, and then all you have to do is just merge all the rest of these at the center, so Alt M at Center L M at center and make sure you’re selecting the vertices that are across from each other. So that way you don’t mess it up and then? I’ll just use the shift. Our command for each of these other ones shift are just repeats the previous one in this case, it’s merge! Oops, as you can see. I messed that one up, So be careful with that. Well press alt m and I’ll just go around to all of the rest of these doing the same exact thing. I’m doing now, all right, awesome, so as you can see here, we have successively fused this plane here with the cylinder as you can see if we were to drop in any sort of cuts, it flows through very nicely now. I also uploaded a video. I think, like two days ago from the posting of this one on how to reroute edge loops and this would be a perfect situation in which you might want to reroute your edge loops. I’m not going to go into detail on this video, so I’ll link it in the description. You should definitely watch that video, but anyways we fuse this together. So why not add on a subdivision surface modifier? So we’ll take that on. We’ll increase it to a value of 2 for good measure and also smooth it out. So you know, ignoring these little shading issues in the front, which you could just easily fix by constraining it with a proximity loop and flattening it like that, you know, ignoring those basic issues which you can fix yourself. We have some kind of ugly shading issues here, and you can obviously use the bevel modifier, and just, you know, kind of bevel out that area or just adding some proximity loops to clean up that shading. This is a perfect time to watch my tutorial on rerouting edge loops. I’ll link it in the description, but another thing you want to look out for when you fuse meshes together? Besides of the shading issues, of course, is little issues like these, or you have like faces. That have been added that you. They were already there. I suppose, but just faces, you don’t actually need which you can still lead out like that. And as you can see, we also have a face inside of here, which is causing some of these weird issues. So if we delete that face out, you can see this fuses much better. There’s no more real big shading issues there, so that’s one way to fuse a mesh together, and that is by using the alt em merge command. So the next way we can merge objects together is by using the union, a boolean modifier that is in blender and the nice thing about this one is you don’t need to have the same exact amount of vertices to actually fuse these together, and there’s gonna be so many times and you’re doing hard surface models and you won’t actually have anywhere near the same amount of vertices. So this is a very popular option, so in this case. I just put 24 vertices so I could actually demonstrate, so this one has 24 vertices the cylinder. And if I move this, you can see that this plane here had to reroute this to a circle for a second, but as you can see, this circle here has the same amount as before 16 vertices around it. So this is a pretty good to be pretty cool because we can actually fuse these two together, regardless of the amount of vertices, so the first thing worth mentioning is that whenever you’re using the boolean tool on anything, the two objects have to be separated, so as you can see, these are not joined together and another thing that I do need to mention is that the boolean tool is not clean. You’re gonna have to do a lot of manual cleanup, but oftentimes, that’s the only thing you can do. That’s the only option, so don’t get too discouraged. It’s actually kind of fun and therapeutic in some ways, so the first thing we’re going to do is lets. Pull this over a little bit, lets. Maybe even give it a little bit of an angle. Just, you know, for good measure to make it a little bit fun. Do it from this way. We’ll grab it on the local z-axis and kind of pull it in just like that, and I guess we could solidify this, but it doesn’t really matter so what I’m going to do is first select this plane here, and then we can drop on the boolean modifier. We’re gonna change the operation from difference over to Union, and then we’ll choose the object to be the cylinder here and just real quick. I’m gonna smooth this out and turn on Auto smooth, just so that way. We don’t see those ugly flat shaded faces, so lets. Make sure this is selected. We’ll use the picker tool, and now we’ve essentially. Union these two together, so what we need to do is click apply, and if you have this weird shading issue, that’s because the original cylinder that we boolean stays, it doesn’t actually get deleted. So what you can do is just hide this one go to the one causing the issues. Delete it and then if you press alt. H to bring this back. We have just the original boolean mesh here now. If we tab into edit mode, you can see that we have something that has went ballistic. All this geometry is super messed up. If we were to add on a Subsurf modifier, we’re just having a bad day altogether, so we have a lot of manual cleanup work to do here, but it shouldn’t be too bad now, the only thing. I want you to keep in mind. Is the word quad based mesh? I want everything to be just four vertices per face or as close to that as you can get if you have a few triangles here and there it shouldn’t be too bad, but try to get everything turned into a quad so generally what we need to do is just start kind of fusing things together, and if we were to select this vertex and double, grab it or double press. G rather to slide it and move it on top of that vertex. What we need to do is actually make sure it merges together so before we do that go to this little workspace panel go to options and then turn on Auto merge. So now when we press double G, it’ll actually automatically merge that vertex there. So what I just did there was? I essentially got rid of that. Stray vertex over there and just merge it together for that one. But as you can see this face right here has five vertices, so lets. Take care of this one. Let’s select this vertex double. G move it up and we can also do the same to this little edge right here, just to make it a little bit more consistent. We’ll do the same with this one. This one is luckily, very close, so we’ll just double tap. Gee, that one’s moved. We can go down to this one right here. Double grab! G and just kind of move. These make it like as spaced out evenly as possible. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but just get it as close as you can for this one. We could double tap. Move it over! You know, this isn’t anything super exciting, but I do want to show the process. So that way you can fully see what you’re supposed to do. This one is still straight. We can worry about that later. We’ll, come back to these, lets. Just worry about the ones that are easily fixed at first. Go to this one. Move them this one! I guess we’ll pull it. Here looks like this. Vertex is gonna have the same issue as this one over here, which we can fix later on well. Go up to this one double tap. G this one right here. We have three right here. It’s kind of hard to see well. Go back to these for this one. We’ll move those like that same here. Sorry, if I’m boring you. I just want to make sure, you know everyone’s getting as much information from this as possible because it is pretty important as you can see some of the circle that I originally put is showing up, so I don’t know, maybe that wasn’t the best idea, but once again, we can still fix it. I just went back to check some of these recordings, and for some reason, my cursor doesn’t always show up, so I hope you. Can you know still follow along? I don’t know why it’s doing that with Camtasia, But it’s still simple enough to follow. I suppose we’ll grab these. I’m almost done here as you can see. This One shouldn’t be too bad, and you know what? I don’t even want this circular area up here to even be here, so lets. Just pull these all down all together. We don’t need those. It’s looking pretty good so already. Our mesh is getting fixed. So if we were to try to drop on a subsurf modifier, it’s still bad, but it’s not causing as many shading issues as it was before so another thing. I’d like to do back here is just completely. Remove this part of the cylinder. So we’ll get this done real quick. We can just use the circle select tool select all these phases here like so, and when you get up in this part, you have to be really careful to make sure you actually get everything, so we’ll do that. We’ll delete those phases there, and we can worry about this back side again later for now. I’m just going to go select all around this like so and just fill that in and we can fix it later on and lets. Get back to this side. You have to start fixing up. Some of these stray vertices we still have and remember we’re looking for quad based geometry, which we’ve mostly gotten out just by moving those vertices, but some areas just don’t have that like right here. We don’t have a quad face. We have one two three, four, five six vertices, so what? I’m thinking we could do is just merge these two together at the center just like that. Maybe that didn’t well. We have some triangles here now. So you know what I might do? It might be easier to just use the knife tool in this case. So I think I’ll do is press. K use the knife tool for this part. Put it right to there, press. Enter so now we’ve given ourselves a quad here and a quad here. The only downside is, we’ve created a pole here, but in this case, it’s not going to make a difference at all plus. This is a five edged pole and generally those and you don’t even give you issues, so lets. Go back up to this one. This one has a triangle and that one has a triangle. Should it be a huge deal? But let’s just keep it consistent, lets. Go ahead and lets. Move this over a little bit on the wax. It’s just a little bit, so we can kind of see what’s going on here and then what we can do is select this with the knife tool by pressing K will cut all the way over to here press. Enter so now we have two very tiny quads. They almost look like triangles, but as you can see if we zoom in here, they’re actually not triangles, So we have clods there. This one right here. It doesn’t look like we have a quad for this part so once again. I think we could just use the knife tool on this. Well press K move it up in a consistent manner and then pull it all the way over press. Enter, it’s looking pretty good. Go back around to these. We have the same issue for this one, so let’s press. K cut it all the way around and really all this is doing is just creating quads for us. We’re just kind of getting rid of those triangle and n-gon issues. It’s super simple. This one right here. It’s really hard to see, so let’s lets. Be very careful what we do. I think we should just merge all these together at the center just like that. It looks like we have a triangle here. So what I’m going to do at this point is select this vertex will press V to rip the vertex. So that way we have two separate vertices now, and then we can go back to the other one. That’s part of the cylinder. So maybe if I pull this over a little bit will slightly pull that over and slightly pull this one over and now if we delete the phases for these triangles, we can make ourselves a very nice quad, so we’ll select all these vertices, make it into a quad and then just one last one last N gone right here. We have to fix use the knife tool for that, so pull it over enter, and it looks like well. We have one more right here, so let’s use the knife tool and cut it to here and there we go. It looks like we have quads all over this entire mesh and all we did was we use the edge slide tool and the knife tool. It’s super simple and now we’re basically completely done, but it’s always good to go around and just double check for anything weird going on. Sometimes we have that right here. It looks like we have a weird shading issue and that’s probably because we have a duplicate vertex. So let me go ahead and just snap that vertex right on there to get rid of that, and it looks like everything is looking pretty good. So now if we were to try to put on a subdivision surface modifier, well, press ctrl three, look at that. We have a very nice fusion here. The only downside is that we have this. You know, weird issue. But that’s just because of the end gone at the side. We’ll just pull that in and set these faces. You just get rid of that. You don’t have to worry too much about it. And now if we add some smooth shading, this mesh is very nicely fused into the plane, and you know you could, of course, add in your constraining edge loops to make this look a little bit nicer as you go around it, you know? Do whatever you want to change up the topology. That’s all up to you, but this is how you do it. This is how you fuse together with the boolean tool. I think this way is a lot more powerful because you don’t have to have the same amount of vertices, but I figured I’d show both ways just you could see, and once again, go to the link in the description. Watch the video on rerouting edge loops That I made and super important. And hopefully this helped you out.