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.