Video transcript
Hi guys and girls, my name is Rick I’m a motion graphic designer and audio producer, and today i want to take you on a little journey into modeling with BoxCutter for Blender.
It’s a plug-in which you should definitely buy right away if you don’t have it. It’s fantastic, and I’m gonna show you a little bit of my texturing process in Quixel Mixer which is a free piece of software as well as well as Blender. So let’s get into it! So yeah I’m doing this part as a time lapse and part as a tutorial, you will hear my voice going in and out during this video and I’ll do some commentary on how i made this model
So I’m using Boxcutter as I said, it’s a great way to make Boolean shapes in Blender very quickly. Part of the allure of Boxcutter is that it’s also super fun to make these models, because it’s so easy to make these. I basically started off with a Smart Cube which is a pretty simple shape with some modifiers attached to it, that keep everything in check while you cut away with the with the Boolean shapes, which is kind of like the Pathfinder in Adobe Illustrator. You cut, slice or union objects to make other objects, and it’s basically – for this model i cut out cubes with other cubes to make this shape. You can make other shapes, draw your own with N-gons or circles, cylinders – but for this shape i primarily used boxes to cut out other boxes.
So right now I’m already going to Quixel Mixer to test some textures. What you want to remember is that when you want to achieve complexity in a model, or textures, you basically want to stack layers. Complexity is nothing more than multiple simple things stacked on top of each other.
So i start with multiple materials and then subtract them through masking, so that with every edit you make, the layers underneath get revealed or disappear – depending on the way you mask it. And these masks of course work with black or white color information, so black usually means to hide a certain part of the texture and when you paint white on it, you reveal stuff underneath.
I wanted to give this create a more damaged look, to make it seem as if it’s been used multiple times over a period of a few years, which makes it just seem more realistic than this perfect crate that that looks like it just came out of the factory.
So the downside of this Boolean modeling is that stuff like displacement won’t work that well, since there are a couple of N-Gons on this model. That’s just the nature of cutting shapes and shapes into shapes – you’re gonna mess up the topology a bit. But as long as you don’t use displacement you should be fine. You could always re-topologize the mesh and fix the topology, but that goes against the nature of Boolean modeling in my opinion.
I like it quick and dirty, that’s the beauty of it – and this way you can make lots of assets in a small number of time.
So if you’re interested in this model – if you like it and don’t want to make something like this yourself – I have good news for you. You can buy it on my website, it’s available in the shop at studiospeets.com You can buy it over there if don’t feel like making something like this. All the textures are included as well, so you get the albedo, the specular, the roughness, the normal map, the ambient occlusion – all in 4K.
So right now I’m trying to make it look a bit more damaged. It’s got rust around the edges, but I felt like it needed some scratches – especially when it’s a crate that’s been used for years. As I said it just needs more damage, so I loaded up this texture as a paint layer. The texture is an imperfections texture from Quixel.
I highly recommend getting Quixel if you like just great materials and objects for a decent price. I mean, Quixel is only a couple bucks a month and in return you get points which you can spend in the shop, on fantastic materials, amazing 3d assets (mega scans) which are just incredibly realistic, so definitely recommend that! I’ll put the link in the description below as well.
And that’s it – again – if you like the model and don’t want to make it yourself, head over to my website. I’ll put the link in the description as well – you can buy the model if you like it. And maybe I’ll see it around in your renders! Take care I’ll see you in the next video.
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