Smoothing - Meshmixer Tutorial

- [Narrator] This video is how to smooth things inside of Meshmixer. And there are quite a few ways to accomplish that. So let's get into it. The first way to smooth is actually not that intuitive, but things that I use quite a bit. It's actually just deleting things. So you see that we have some spires right here. I'm going to select. Hit the S key for select. Or click over here and say select. Make my brush a little bit smaller. And I want to smooth out this spire right here. What I can actually do is just select around this. I don't even need to select up it because there might be a lot of weird things up here. I can select around it, hit the delete key to get rid of it. Now if I just click once on here, to select a tiny bit of that. I can say modify, right here, under select and modify. And say expand to connected. Also, hotkey e. That will expand the selection out to everything that is touching that selection. But since I've selected all the way around it it's its' own island and I hit delete. And I have a hole. If you're not getting any blue boundaries right here you can also say view and say show boundaries. Which sometimes makes is easier to see. Now I can just double click on this blue line, very close to that line. And say edit, erase, and fill. And clear the selection. And I have smoothed that out, without having to use any sort of smoothing tools. So that's one, that's the leading. If we stay inside of select, I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger right here. Maybe select a couple of these, like this. Select everything in there, that's good. And you can say deform and smooth. Shape preserving, uniform triangles, there are different options in there. Max smoothness is pretty good, gets it really down there. But if you want to preserve the shape and just make it a little bit nicer you could do that. Max smoothness makes it very, very smooth. But sometimes you just want to preserve the shape, make it a little bit smoother. And you can go in and actually turn this negative and make it rougher, if you want. But sometimes you just want to make it a tiny bit smoother like that. Clear selection, little bit smoother. So that is another way. Now we can also go into the sculpting tools. If you go to sculpt. I'm up here on volume. We have some bubble, shrink, and robust smooth tools. Robust smooth is my favorite, click on that. Now I want you to hit the w key. W for wire frame. So what the robust smooth key option does is actually very, very nice. If you have a very dense part of your mesh and a very open part of your mesh, all underneath your brush, what the robust smooth will do, is it will take the least amount of density and apply that smoothing to your entire area. So you can see that the triangles were about this big. I clicked once, and now all of these triangles inside of here match the triangles that are outside of here. If I do the robust smooth inside of here, you can see that the effect is not as much. This one is only kind of shrinking inside of here. But if I do it outside, it actually has quite a much bigger effect. So kind of averages of all of the different smoothing. I use robust smooth quite a bit. It's one of my kind of more favorite tools. It doesn't go in. It doesn't go out. It takes the average between all of this, that's inside the brush and creates a smoothing that way. Sometimes with this you get these little lines, kind of these still connected, kind of filaments coming out. Even if you have refine and reduce all the way on, you can just delete these. Or you can run a make solid on these later to get rid of them. That's just something to kind of know, when you use those tools. Shrink smooth let's go over here and show you what that does. You can see that it's coming out towards me. It's actually shrinking towards me. You can see that it's building out. If you hold down the control key, which does the reverse, it'll actually smooth inwards. So you can kind of see that it's smoothing away from the user with the shrink. Now what this icon means is, it keeps the base where it is, but then shrinks the highest points inside. Bubble smooth actually goes in and out of the actual, kind of base plane, that the brush is looking at. Let's look at this one. So this is under here bubble smooth. You can see that it, that it's smoothing everything out, but it's doing so by making everything kind of a marshmallow and popping it out. Or if I hold in control, it's actually going into itself. This can be nice if you kind of want to carve a hole. It certainly is smoothing but smoothing by carving in a bubble. And sometimes that's very useful, sometimes not. Now if you have something like this. I'm going to turn off wire frame. If you have something like this with very hard edges. It just looks like this. You would generally want to use the robust smooth tool at a, kind of, a medium strength. And sometimes you can turn off flow if you don't want it to go very fast. But just going like this. Is a very nice thing. You see, it kind of carved it in a tiny bit. A tiny, tiny bit. But if you keep the tool on it. It will attempt to smooth to the rest of the sphere. And kind of bubble it out. So, robust smooth is a very, very nice tool that I use quite a bit. Now one thing over here. I'm going to go back to these little, these little points. And let me recenter my view on this. Now if you go to the robust smooth tool. Under sculpt, brushes, robust smooth. You make your mouse kind of large. And I click, maybe, on one of these pillars. You can see that all of these other pillars are also affected. Because they're inside the circumference of this sphere. I'm going to undo that. What you can also do is go to surface. So this little toggle up here. And you go to brushes, to robust smooth. Now you see that there is this kind of moving disk that goes around based on what are called the normals, which way the triangles are facing. So if I click on this, it's only going to affect this one little spire and not anything else. Because this is just a surface tool not a volume tool. So hopefully that gives you some good ideas on how to do smoothing, in general. With using the select tools. Either deleting and filling the select tools going to deform to smooth. Or using the sculpt tools and the various bubble, shrink, and robust smooth tools in here. Practice, it's a lot of fun. And actually something that you'll use quite a bit.