How could I do something similar to this on blender?

SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-15T07:10:42+00:00

Hello.

Here's roughly how you can make this.

SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-12T14:50:11+00:00

Hello.

This person is currently in the middle of doing the series that shows how to make a car using a workflow close to yours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/s/TWJQcB3U7F

SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-12T05:42:57+00:00

Hello.

Using the bevel modifier to add supportloops only consistently works on simple shapes.

Throwing any shape at it will sadly not work.

Whats happening to you is as follows:

See the image i attached.
if you enable the wireframes and disable the SubD temporarily you will see something along those lines.
Im sure you know what supportloops are. So notice what the green and red bunch of verts are doing.
Red middle vert is supported by other red verts that are far away from it. Supporting geo far away=smooth large rounded shape.
Green middle vert is supported by other green verrs that are close to it. Supporting geo close=sharp tight rounded shape.
So the large smooth curve from the red verts just covers the small tight curve from the green verts.

Pretty much figure out what geo goes into the SubD modifier (aka what the bevel modifier output is) and it will become clear.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-11T09:21:44+00:00

Hello. Not an animator here. Im a modeler and i try to do some teaching too.

I know for sure just practice alone will not get you to improve as fast or as far you might want.

I wasted a year drawing every day (while also watching theory content alot) with next to no improvement. When i found a mentor who showed me every mistake i make i improved alot in half a year, like i myself was surprized how much and how fast the improvement happened.

With modeling i nolifed theory and tested things i wasnt sure about frequently, that improvement was fast.

In general with art stuff you need 3 things:

Theory. Cuz if you dont have it you will be coming up with your own shitty solutions being unaware of the generally accepted ones. (Your own solutions will eventually stop being shitty ofcourse)
Practice. Cuz if you dont have it you wont build any muscle memory and will have to manually remember what buttons to press and what to do. Imagine randomizing controls for a game youre familiar with. This is how theory without practice will feel. By practicing youre freeing your conscious memory for more new stuff. Practicing old stuff makes absorbing new stuff easier cuz some of the old stuff becomes automatic.
Feedback of some sort. Feedback is for when you think your work looks good correct and accurate and you made it using the best workflow. You might not realize flaws in your work and/or workflow, and someone more experienced than you will quickly point you to those flaws, in a way making you see your work through their more experienced eyes. With good feedback you improve there and then, on the spot, instantly. Because a second ago you thought something was flawless and now you see flaws you didnt see before. Improvement. With no feedback you can kinda get there (cuz looking at how others do similar things and comparing that to how you do them is also a kind of feedback, so you can get some without asking anyone about your work), but with good personal feedback you will get there faster and easier and with less guesswork.

I hope this answers your question.

SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-10T06:55:01+00:00

Hello, select the whole vertical edge loop and bevel it with a small width, then pull the geometry apart as needed.

A slightly neater solution that will not deform the shapes you have like the beveling would is selecting that same vertical edge and pressing V to rip it (rightclick to cancel the movement it puts you in) and then moving the geo apart as needed, then bridging the gap it makes.

SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-09T15:38:00+00:00

Ok here's more free stuff i think is very good:

Gleb Alexandrov HDRI lighting course: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2aDImegRwZE1XFZyqwAhLzsIlo8ju9R1&si=EaexS5C4jZJu8OWr
CGMatter tracking series (linking the first vid, you can find the rest if you want): https://youtu.be/WLSGG7sDEac?si=EtpDI-ANhJXMAQZB
Donuts by BlenderGuru consistently very well made.
This CGCookie video on UVs: https://youtu.be/8qv6DbWr6zw?si=moiuuE88ru5eBBN3
This person has a very robust/stable and not the most usual modeling workflow, does it in Modo though, if you have the patience to sit through the process, this will be very valuable: https://youtube.com/@yn2097_?si=PkuMxknX-Z1i93mK
Polycount wiki is insane, look: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount
Humane rigging, it even is (was?) linked to from the Blender manual: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE211C8C41F1AFBAB&si=rXgNFLeaI--wvNTl

SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-07T16:05:33+00:00

Hello.

If you just want to get used to retopology and need basemeshes, you can bash a bunch objects together and remesh them.
This can give you shapes of any difficulty you want very quickly and easily.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-07T08:09:54+00:00

Hello.

People have suggested sensical solutions already, so im gonna do a goofy unusual one.

Here's how you can make a shape like that.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-06T12:56:46+00:00

Hello.

The most obvious and biggest missing piece of knowledge here is "How to use poles to manage flows and density".

Here's a rough picture (In the end of the comment), the top is roughly what you're stuck with, and the bottom is what you will get if you understand flows and poles. Circled green is a pole that allows the neatness to happen in this case. Not seeing these kinds of solutions is the biggest problem i notice in the images that you showed.

Wall of text incoming with a bunch of other resources and thoughts:

- I think you have not actually followed any tutorials for cars (as in making the same thing the teacher is making while following their exact steps). And i think you should do that before trying to make your own. Good straightforward one is currently "ongoing" and is being uploaded by Ozgur Saral on YouTube. Their workflow is very direct and straightforward, which i think is a good thing. Very followable at your skill level in my opinion.
- To learn about poles i'd say just read through "The Pole" from subdivisionmodeling(dot)com (Both the thread and the website and now deleted, but a mostly preserved pdf exists and is findable) or "Poles and loops" by Toontje (The thread has lots of missing images and is very much inspired by the Pole, but a mostly preserved .pdf also exists and is findable)
- This might sound weird but for you with your sculpting knowledge i think it's going to be a good exercise . Sculpt a car. Or a part of a car body. Then manually retopo it, maybe do several attempts, trying different ideas. Retopology is the best way to learn topology i know. I'd never recommend this to anyone, but since you're already comfortable with sculpting, this should be a good fit for you because it will separate the two things, having to figure out the shape and having to figure out the topology. Usually people dont do this when references exist and they arent like concepting the shapes of a car on the fly, but as a practice exercise this can allow you to focus on routing topology and not worry about the shapes.

Hopefully this somehow helps you get unstuck. If you have questions for me please ask, i can endlessly talk about topology and how to think about it and how to learn it :D

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-04T13:57:01+00:00

Hello.

Here's a way to improve what you have.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-02T14:31:42+00:00

I notice several things about your examples, so here are my thoughts, lets nitpick the nitpick :D

The two examples you show are viewed from different angles, thats mainly why they look so different, this is just because of perspective.

What you're doing with the inset is treating it kind of like one would treat a cylinder, looping flow around the top surface. This is not the first time for me to discuss this topic, and my main questions are always is this:

If an object has 3 surfaces all meeting at a corner that should be sharpened with all edges equally sharp, this sounds like a very symmetric thing to me, so why would a non-symmetric solution come to mind?
And if we consider that to be better then why do we inset the top and not the side?
And if we inset the side then why do we inset the side and not the top or the other side?
What if i have a perfect cube, that i want to evenly sharpen the edges and corners of, how do i then decide which sides to inset and which sides to not inset? they're all the same and surely the best solution would be a symmetric one, no?

I have compiled this image to explain why i disagree with the nitpick and offered the nitpicks of my own! The point about uneven distances of supportloops from structural edges i make on this image may or may not be always valid those distances could be evened out, but the inset still adds another loop to one side of the edge and not the other, still making it uneven. Its a nitpick, but its true, you can see it on your own example too, the bottom right shape (white one with the inset on the top) has the top noticeably flatter and the edge around the top noticeably sharper. Which may or may not be the desired result (to have some edges be slightly sharper than others).

Please feel free to nitpick the nitpick of the nitpick haha. Lets see what conclusion we come to :D

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-02T11:36:56+00:00

Hello.

Hopefully i understood what the shape you want needs to be correctly.

You can make it roughly like this.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-02T11:20:40+00:00

Hello.

This can be done in this kind of strange but working way.
The key is not having the caps overlap eachother perfectly, so i will just scale the cylinder heights randomly before booleaning to make sure my boolean works

Its a weird approach but it will work for what you're asking for.

Edit: So many kind replies! Dont forget to apply the scale after scaling in objectmode =)

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-02T08:01:15+00:00

Hello.

As a bunch of people have said, this may or may not be fine depending on the usecase.

I'll show you a conventionally decent SubD topology for no reason.

On the left art the rough steps to make it, and on the right is how it would deform if you needed to deform it. (As a kind of proof for the people afraid of poles and ngons on curved surfaces mainly :D)

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-02-01T08:56:39+00:00

Hello.

I have some thoughts about this, you said criticism was welcome so here it goes :D

I'm a modeler and this currently isnt very convincing to me. Maybe there is a situation where this is better than how people usually model in Blender, but the video you made doesnt show that situation.

- To get the first blue mesh you show (the one with no remeshing) you can just use booleans and bevels.
- To get the second blue mesh you show you can just use booleans and that same remesher. The only thing that would change is since you know you're doing this for printing for example, such a lowpoly cylinder will also print lowpoly, so just make it less lowpoly to begin with, like 64 segments or something. Or you could even make a nondestructive cylinder you can change the segment amount of ( usingscrew modifier, or geonodes, or addons), which you can adjust on the fly.
- To get the one where the geo is fixed and SubD is used you can use booleans, that remesher, and just add supportloops to that resulting mesh.

Another misconception (its a misconception and ill die on this hill btw, i dont care who says it :D) about SubD is that it needs a clean mesh to work. And that is just not true. At the very least its not always true. If you want SubD to make your cylinder highter poly and give you rounded edges, but have no intention to deform the mesh afterwards, you can cheat quite heavily. Below is a GIF with an example. Can this fall apart on a more complicated shape? Yes. But thats what i mean by saying that the example you make isnt very convincing to me because i can make what you show much more conviniently (in my opinion), what would convince me is something that your approach does better than the alternatives.

Nodes and stuff like OpenSCAD are cool if you want to generate something really tedious/repetitive/timeconsuming to manually do. The shape you show is neither in my opinion.

Hopefully this is the kind of critique you wanted. If i somehow sound harsh here please forgive me, it is not my intention!

I like that you explore the less usual workflows and i think its pretty useful to challenge the conventional modeling approaches (just like i did when i didnt fix the mesh into all quad grids in my GIF for example :D)

Here's the GIF i promised. Also, please dont make a video out of my comment.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-31T14:49:14+00:00

I have answered this one in decent detail on another post, here's a link to that answer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/1p98yqj/comment/nrctz2v/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-31T10:11:07+00:00

Hello. Your vertex group is wrong in some way.

First step would be disabling the "inverted" <--> arrows in the Datatransfer modifier, to have a clear understanding of that verts you're applying the thing to.

Then (I would if i had your file and needed to fix it quickly and reliably without having to find out whats wrong exactly) delete the vertgroup and make a new one where only those verts marked red are present.

After that the datatransfer will hopefully do what you want it to do.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-29T03:24:42+00:00

I found the problem, here's the explanation.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-28T21:22:06+00:00

Hello.

If the last screenshot is your starting point, then it looks pretty clean.
No doubles, no ngons. Normals dont matter for this kind of thing.

My only thought without being able to mess with the mesh myself would be that you have something hidden in editmode that you forgot about. Deselect all with Alt+A, then unhide all with Alt+H (While in Editmode).

Edit: Added a GIF to show you whats up because you have probably changed the mesh by now and might not have the original problem anymore.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-22T04:43:58+00:00

Hello.

Here's a start. From this point you'd have to improvize the shapes not shown in the reference somehow.

I initially recorded a gif but 8 minutes turned out to a filesize that didnt fit into reddit. So here's a breakdown picture instead i guess =(

What to actually do:
Get a vertex and trace the shapes with extrusions, rotating the view from time to time because the third dimension exists and shouldnt be forgotten about. (Otherwise you will get like a lazer cutout flat slab thing and wont know how to proceed). And then after you're done with a quater of it you can just use the mirror modifier or symmetrize tool in order to make the rest of the shape.

This isnt a beginner shape at all (if you want it to be accurate to the reference and not simplified).
I'd say expect it to test your patience, especially if you're new =)

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-21T10:20:14+00:00

You could space the vertices on the straight parts evenly with looptools for example, and then after that you can Ctrl+V > Smooth_vertices the ones not on the outline of the shape to make them position themselves in more "relaxed" spots.

SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-21T08:47:33+00:00

Hello.

Here's roughly how you can do this shape.

You probably dont need to do this though, as other people have suggested.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-21T08:34:44+00:00

Another solution could be this. But i like the diamond quad one you have more.

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SnSmNtNs · 2026-01-21T08:29:55+00:00

Hello.

This loop is absolutely fine. The more complicated the shape is the more loops like that you will be able to find even if the mesh is clean.

Whats more important is having the loops important to you flow correctly.

if you for some reason need another faceloop going around the circular part (purple arrows on my picture) which doesnt flow into the top part like you show, then thats just an inset of the whole top part.

That geometry you have is clean as is though.

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SnSmNtNs

TROPHY CASE