Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

- [Instructor] When you're working inside a Blender and you use Auto Smooth, you sometimes get results that don't look as good as you want it. And, although you get some control, you really don't get a lot of control. Let me show you. Hit X to delete this cube. Shift + A, let's add a monkey, Tab + Control + F, shade smooth, tab out and look at that. We got ourselves a smooth monkey, sort of. Come down to object data, normals, and turn on Auto Smooth. And there ya go, that's the best you could do with Blender, out of the box. And you can mess around with this angle, and sort of get something that looks good. You could also Tab, go into Edge Mode and then hit Control + E, to mark things as sharp, and that sort of starts to help. But, admittedly, that is a really long process. Well, in Blender 2.8 there's a brand new Modifier, called Weighted Normal, that simplifies your life. Let me show you. With a Weighted Normal Modifier on, you have a few options. Face area, corner angle or face area and angle. The face area will depend on this weight, that's down here at the bottom. The more face area, literally, the more area that this face covers, compared to, say, other faces like these, the more smoothing you'll get. The less area, the less smoothing. So, if you start to drag this Weight Slider you can see how you, instantly, get way more control over the smoothness in your object. You can also switch that to corner angle. Corner angle depends on how the angles of each face meet the vertex. It's the default method that you're used to, from before, and, of course, dragging it gives you just a little bit more control. But the cool thing is you can do face area and angle, and bring those two together to have even more control. Now my personal favorite is, actually, just face area. Leaving it at just a good part, and you can also click on Keep Sharp, if you really want to keep some of those sharp edges. And, finally, the other cool thing about the Weighted Normal is the inclusion of a vertex group. So if you wanted to smooth only the eyes or ears, you could do that just by creating a quick vertex group, selecting it here and then setting your weight and threshold to whatever you'd like. The Weighted Normal Modifier is going to be a huge addition to your modeling work flow. So I recommend you start experimenting in finding ways how to make your meshes look even better.