Blender-School: Hard Ops on the menu

 The Hard Ops/Boxcutter course finally gets to Hard Ops itself. I was a bit surprised by how the lessons jump straight in without an overview. If you are watching a training course, you might not fully understand the big picture, and with Hard Ops, the picture is huge.

Before the lesson, the menus

Alt+V Viewport panel...cool!

Q Basic HardOps menu / Settings

MeshTools

Add Modifier

Operations

Array V2

Bevel

Sharpen

That's not even everything, just the top-level stuff.

Let's start with that last item:

Sharpen

This is an odd one as Hard Ops seems to work on the assumption that models are not auto-smoothed. Hard Ops does this smoothing itself and nicely handles the job by applying appropriate ordering on the modifier stack.

In Blender's Hard Ops, SSharpen (Shift+Q menu) simply marks sharp edges for shading based on an angle, while CSharpen (Ctrl+LMB on Sharpen or Ctrl+Shift+Q menu) is a more advanced, workflow-focused tool that applies Boolean modifiers, adds a Bevel modifier, marks new sharps, and sets up autosmoothing, creating a procedural, live workflow by keeping modifiers intact for quick iteration.

Think of SSharpen as basic marking, while CSharpen automates the entire setup after a boolean, making it essential for efficient hard surface modelling with booleans.

Think of SSharpen as basic marking, while CSharpen automates the entire setup after a boolean, making it essential for efficient hard surface modelling with booleans. 

SSharpen (Simple Sharpen)

• Function: Marks edges as sharp (using Blender's built-in mark sharp) and sets up autosmoothing based on an angle threshold.
• Workflow: Good for basic hard surface detailing, where you manually apply modifiers or work in a more traditional, less procedural way.
• Shortcut: Often accessed via Shift+Q (depending on settings) or within the Q menu. 

CSharpen (Complex Sharpen)

• Function: A procedural powerhouse that applies Boolean modifiers (from the Bool Tool), adds a bevel modifier, marks new sharp edges, and enables autosmoothing, all in one step.
• Workflow: Ideal for non-destructive, live modelling; you can keep booleans and bevels live, apply CSharpen, and continue working without manually cleaning up the modifier stack.
• Shortcut: Often Ctrl+LMB on the Sharpen button or via the Q menu. 

As you make changes to objects, you may need to rethink where sharpness is applied. Rather than manually selecting edges that no longer need to be marked sharp, you can recalculate sharpness.
Resharpen: Ctrl+Shift+S (Sharpen)

Bevel

H for the help menu. Yes, it's very expansive, and you need the help at least when you are getting started. It's otherwise straightforward in basic use.

Ever Scroll

If you are modelling with lots of Booleans, it can be tricky to find the one you need to make tweaks. Ever Scroll is a really effective way to go through and tweak Boolean operations.

Enable Ever Scroll, then use the mouse scroll wheel to fly through the Boolean cuts. 

Explore! There are just so many special functions and features that you can't learn them all at once. You need to time play.

Alt+Ever Scroll generates a Smart Apply!

Smart Apply

Hard Ops all-in-one apply/conversion tool!

After a complex build, you might end up with a lot of Boolean operations that you want to bake into the model by applying their modifiers. Hard Ops has the Smart Apply feature that automatically runs through the modifiers and applies them, but leaves the bevels and smoothing modifiers in place.

These modifiers are not included:

• last bevel
• weighted normal
• last mirror if more than 1 mirror mod is present

LMB - Complete a Smart Apply

Shift+Smart Apply - Create a duplicate of your Smart Apply
Ctrl +Smart Apply - Convert to curve (edge/face)

Alt+Smart Apply - Step

Josh never covers these cases. Here's the official Hard Ops Docs - Smart Apply

Add Modifier

This is a quick way of adding the basic modifiers. As simple as that!

The next lesson is an exercise that doesn't apply for me as it did for Josh. I'll investigate!

World detour

 I did some additional planet content -- testing a move from 16k to 21k resolution. It's a lot of painting, and the previous strategy of smudging Earth terrain textures together doesn't work as well as you get a visual sludge at the regular viewing distance, even if things look sharper and better when you get close-in.

Calantica with 16k textures and the procedural planet material node tree

An aside to the detour: Aurore, from 2300AD

Base colour map. Meh!

Close-up, you realise how big a 21k map actually is! The coastline is too strong. For the next iteration, I will look into whether it's possible to add noise that suggests undersea terrain.

Test renders. That material is far from finished, but it looks okay as a starting point.

Blender School: Hard Ops continued

 Snapping

During a Boxcutter operation, press "Ctrl" to activate the default grid-based snapping mode, which is pretty cool.

Live mode

Press Tab during operation to make Boxcutter "live". In the live mode the operation doesn't complete and can be manipulated. The Blue dot is for bevel control. Press Return to complete.

Lock Mode

Click on the arrow/chevron to make shape selection a two-step process.

View Align

Boxcutter aligns with the detected surface. If you want Boxcutter projected from your view, select Align to View. This lets you make off-angle cuts into a model. In a normal operation, the start of a cut can be deep inside a model because of which face you are clicking to start. To avoid the problem of a cut starting instead of a model, use View Align when viewing from a side-on view, then the cut will not consider how deep the selected face is.

Destructive Mode

Fast operations that automatically apply each Boolean operation. Instead of making a post-operation adjustment, you would instead use Blender's undo.

Optional Stuff

Not critical stuff but might help you occasionally

Grid Mode

You can use a grid as a cutter. Niche but nice!

Taper

Make your cutter shape taper into the cut. From the menu, select the taper amount for the shape.

Note: Instead of selecting the Taper mode, you can press Shift+T during an operation to enable a taper.

Lazercut/Autodepth

Lazercut is the function that cuts all the way through, while the toggled Autodepth can set a fixed cut distance, which is really useful if you make a series of cuts that need to all go to a fixed depth.

So endeth the Boxcutter section of the course.

Aerial Shot - A new direction

 The director provided feedback on my last concept. He's come up with a new sequence, as follows:

Shot 1: Planet (Low Orbit) showing the local region

Shot 2: Aerial shot showing the rugged location of the up-and-coming service road scenes with a mountain range backdrop and, further back, a coastline and an island that features a city from which plumes of smoke are visible.

This seems to flow better, but it's going to be a challenge to smoothly segue from a very high altitude to a lower one. Do I need to create a planetary texture that features the landforms that are visible in the follow-on shot? Yes, I think I do.

What first?

What does the planet look like?

Draw it!

Calantica is a young world with a single major continent and a tectonic system that runs straight along the equator. The main human settlement, New Caligari, is located just north of the equator, surrounded by numerous resource-gathering settlements.

The area of interest is located on the coast of a small northern sea with a more moderate climate.

I tried to sketch the regional area but found it very hard to project accurately. 

What next?

Build it!

1. Grab a big Earth texture map. I used a 16k map.

2. Clone the sea and make that the top layer. 

3. Import the sketched planet map, and use your image editor's tools to cut away the background. 

4. Create another layer and use it to trace the coastline in a black outline. This is where you can create the fine detail that will make the most of your 16k resolution. Once you have the coastline outline, fill it with black. It's a mask!

5. The sea around coastlines is lighter because continental shelves are shallow. One way to get that light-blue coastal sea is to create a copy of the landmass mask, paint it light blue, and apply a strong blur. Once you're happy, you can merge the deep-sea and coastal shallows layers.

6. Now use the landmass mask to cut a hole in the sea layer through which the familiar terrain of planet Earth will show through.

7. This part is fun/therapeutic. Use your image editor's powerful clone / infill brush  to paint into the big gaps using Earth's biomes. Careful brushing can create appropriate biomes such as mountain ranges, dry and temperate zones. Start by getting the land filled in without worrying too much about the details.

8. Once your land is filled in, start blending and cloning away the harsh borders.

9. You'll need a specularity map that will make the seas more reflective than the land. This is easy to create using a white layer and your land mask. There's an extra step, though! While creating the land textures, you should include big rivers and lakes, which also need to be selected, copied on top of the spec mask, and set as white patches, so they catch the light just like the oceans.

10. You might need a displacement map, although this can be fudged using Blender nodes. In True SKY 3, the Earth shader already does this.

Well, that's the easy part done. There will be fine-tuning required once you are happy with your staging, so you will understand which areas need the most attention to detail.

Blender School: Hard OPs and Boxcutter Restarted

 Let's finally complete the Hard OPs course and see if adopting these powerful hard-surface modelling workflows is worth the effort.

001 Boxcutter Configuration

Josh tells you how to open Boxcutter: "D" or, if it's not turned on, Alt+W, then "D".

Josh turned off the full menu because he favours the simple pie menu. As a rank beginner, I'll benefit from the full menu at this stage.

002 Box Helper Menu

Hard Ops has a help menu that provides an in-viewport pop-up that copies all the main interaction points. These mirror what's going on in your properties panel. Josh doesn't use them, but they are available if you like.

Help Panel: Ctrl+tilde

Workflow and Sharp Options are worth looking at.

Keep workflow NonDestructive, Leave the Sort Modifiers in place, these order modifiers appropriately as ordering of some modifiers is important -- such as weighted normals being the last in the stack.

Hard Ops Helper - Workflow 

Video 1 Cutters

Box Cutter is nothing if not good for cutting. 

The full-fat menu gives you a lot of information. Maybe Josh is right, and this is too much, but it's a good learning tool for beginners.

The top line shows the current set of default properties. Cut - Box - Object

Cut (X) is the default, but you could select:

• Slice (Slices mesh selection)
• Intersect (Intersect the mesh)
• Inset (Inset into the mesh during an intersect slice using a solidify modifier)
• Join (Union boolean to join meshes together)
• Knife (Cuts into  real meshes)
• Make (Create neutral forms without applying any booleans)
  
  

Cutter forms:

Circle, Box, Ngon, Custom (default is HardOPs logo)

Collection: Select a Blender collection. HardOPs creates a Cutters collection.

Solvers:

• Float (Fast but not super-accurate
• Exact (Slower than Float but handles co-planar faces)
• Fastest solver, but only works with manifold meshes

Modifiers:

Solidy (Add a solidify modifier) Makes your cutter solid.

Mirror (Mirrors your cutter. Select Axis X,Y,Z)
Array (Arrays your cutter. Axis, degree, Set float, instance count)

Bevel (Bevels your cutter. Width, Segments)

Example cut

I play with the tool and ....

 <Shouts> "Limitless POWER!!!"

It clicks, but in that way that a leaves you feeling a bit shaken and overwhelmed because there's too many moving parts for your brain to follow.

When Boxcutter is enabled, you only need to drag out the shape, then extrude (don't immediately click unless you want to extrude all the way through). Once you extrude to your preferred length, they click (once).

During the operation:

 Press "B" to enable bevel. You can cycle through B types and use the mouse wheel to change segmentation. One of the modes enables grab points (blue circles), which can be moved to change the shape of your cutter.

Press "W" to enable wedge mode. Press W again to flip and again to remove wedge mode.

Wedge turns the cutter into an angled edge.

Press "S" to scale the cutter and press "R" to rotate the cutter.

All together now: Scale, rotate and bevel

Josh says he doesn't use these adjustments; instead, he does everything manually — presumably postoperatively.

Post-operation adjustment

I usually don't get my cutter exactly where I wanted it. If you need to adjust the cutter, just enable its visibility in the Cutters collection.

Cutters Collection gets cluttered..

First play. I'm impressed!

Booleans

Back to the Boolean types.

The default is Cut, but you can press "X" during the operation to toggle between each boolean type. The cutter area will show a different colour for each boolean type.

Phew! There area some important points I'm sure I failed to capture, but that was a great first lesson.

On the seventh day...

Take a rest from those terrains, already!

Yesterday I scratched that constant itch. I made me some landscape renders using World Creator and Blender with True Terrain 5.

Horrah!!! A giant terrain under True SKY 3, with a large Geo-Scatter-based scatter! In this case, the scatter is "fake" trees. Alpha scatter uses cards (flat planes) that align with the camera to produce the impression of a vast forest. It gives me confidence about ramping up scatters in scenes.

The next test will be with proper scatter objects, probably on a much smaller terrain.

The latest batch consists of 8x8km terrains. That's big enough for a city. It's the terrain size for a moderate mountain range, as you need about 4km for a mountain.

16x16k resolution gives you a 1GB EXR displacement file and a single mask weighing in at 100+ MB. These are unwieldy and probably too large for most users. You do get lovely detailing, though.

Today?

I need to answer the question of the aerial scene, but that will wait until tomorrow. So...

Shamrayev project: I need to pick it up and move it forward. We're still doing detail modelling, fixing and optimising. I am thinking of using MatPlus, which was just updated to 1.1 for the project. 

Blender School

I need to complete some training -- I'm far behind on this! 

 A new course, purchased on sale. It includes a massive amount of build, UV unwrapping and rigging footage. It has to be a bit less instructive and more like a follow-along YouTube video, but the end results speak for themselves - some very impressive elements! I'm sure I'll learn something.

I need to complete this course by Cov Philips. I was making good progress when I purchased it. 

I will need to start this course again as it's been gathering dust since May 2024. I stopped because I kept getting Blender crashes while following the first few lessons. Hopefully, this issue will no longer apply. HardOPs is still considered the "go to" workflow for serious (seriously sci-fi) hard surface modellers.


Cableator 1.6 is out! (Docs)

Cableator is such a good tool, but I've never fully understood its feature set. I need to read and watch a full run-through. I particularly want to see how the simulation aspect works. 

There's a really good tutorial from Blender Bros, although this is now three years old!