From the course: Blender 2.83 Essential Training

Basic Blender modifiers - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 2.83 Essential Training

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Basic Blender modifiers

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- [Instructor] Making a great model inside of Blender is one thing but modifying it and adding a whole bunch of cool stuff on top of it is a totally separate, but equally awesome process. Now to take full advantage of this, we should actually model something really fast. So with this cube, I'm going to hit tab, control R. Control R. I'm going to hit three, select these faces, control B to inset them, I'm going to grab this one down here in the middle, hit S. Make it a little bit bigger. E, bring it down a little bit, and then finally, I'm going to hit control R again. And I'm going to scale this in a little bit, control R, leave that there. And let's just go down to face, let's just grab these down here and scale them in. And we have now, a rudimentary pot. All right so, hit tab and then hit control three and you'll get this kind of weird shape happening. Let's go ahead and go to modifiers and you can see the first modifier is subdivision. So what that's doing is it's changing what the view port sees. Control one, two, or three on my modifiers. Now modifiers, when you click on here are broken up into multiple categories. The first is modify and what that's going to do is modify the actual data of your object, that is the UVs or if you have normalcy want to enhance here et cetera, the modify category modifies object data. It's a little complex for this video so we're going to move on to the next few, like generate. Generate will take your mesh or object and generate more geometry or less geometry. And we can play with that here in a little bit but generate effectively works on your geometry. Deform however takes you current geometry and without adding any more or less, deforms it and reshapes it into other things. And then finally simulate, well simulate talks to the physics table inside of Blender and the particle tab inside of Blender and while you can't necessarily modify particles or physics what it's doing is it's giving those physics properties a place in the modifier stack. Now this is really important, for example, let's say you had a simulation of particles flying around and you had collision going on, so whenever the particles hit this object, they would collide with it. Well, if I put that collision here, the particles are going to collide with this smooth surface, however if I move this up, the particles would then collide, not with the smooth surface, but instead with this block here, harder surface, right? So it's like order of operations. So that's why this simulation tab is here even though it has no options, is it's just to give physics a place in the modifier stack. So let's click here and we can kill physics for now. All right, now let's go to add modifier, let's play with a few of my favorites. Like aray. Aray does exactly what you think. It arrays an object in, let's you quickly duplicate them. And because it's an array, if I hit tab, I can go to one, I can move one of these, it affects all of them, check that out. You can hit tab and get out of that. And another cool thing I can do, is click on copy, close this here. This is my second array now that's been copied, I can hit zero here, I can type in 1.2 over here, and look at that, I have a whole bunch of pots to smash if I really wanted to. So array is really handy. Next is Boolean. Boolean is really handy if you have another object so let's just go ahead and hit shift A, and let's just add my favorite, the monkey. Let's move him over here, scale him up a little bit, move him over here, click on here, I'm going to click my little eye dropper, click on the monkey. Now I'm going to grab this monkey and I'm going to turn off its visibility really fast in the outlier and I can see here that my monkey is cutting into my pots. And turn on that monkey really fast and move him down a little bit, it will slow down your system a little bit so be careful about that. Turn off the monkey and you can see that Boolean is effectively cutting into the pots. There's a whole bunch of options with Boolean that you can play with. Next is decimate. Now this may slow your system down so be a little bit careful but decimate is how you take an object and reduce the polygons on it. Now again, as I mentioned earlier, it may slow your system down and you can see I brought the faces down quite dramatically and in the process of that, it does kind of mess with the general topology that is the way the face and edges and vertices are laid out but it does reduce them by a big, big amount. In this case about 13% or so. There is another algorithm called, unsubdivide that you can play with that's pretty good, especially if you have models made with quads or planer, that's also really handy that looks for flattish surfaces given a certain angle. You'll like decimate quite a bit, especially after sculpting. If you have something really flat, solidify is a way to make flat things like text, thicker. Once you start rigging you're going to be using the armature modifier quite a bit and another cool one, just to play with, is simple deform. Now just by enabling it you get some really weird stuff here and you can just play around with the angles and well, simply deform your object. It's pretty cool and on top of that you can hit shift A and say go to empty, just move this empty anywhere, click back on our pots. Click this little eyedropper, click here and wherever I move this, a simple deform happens and note because simple deform is at the bottom of the stack you can see that the Boolean that the monkey is doing, is happening before it, thus it translates with it. So watch what happens if I put the Boolean below it. Now, the Boolean is below it and it only cuts the bottom part, that's because the monkey is down here at the bottom. So that's why the modifier stack is really important, because it's an order of operations. Depending on where you have the modifiers in the stack, could drastically change the way your object looks. Now I recommend you go ahead and play with a lot of these modifiers because you're going to be using a lot of them throughout your Blender journey.

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