Hardops/Boxcutter Addon

Hello All,

I have just purchased the HardOps/Boxcutter addon and will play around with over teh next few weeks and give my thoughts. Please note I am only basic skilled

Attached are some pictures of my first play. With box cutter enabled your able to just draw in your cutting shapes using, square, circle or ngon.

you can bevel your cutter and also array the cutter.

It can be either non-destructive (applying modifiers) or you can set it to take effect in a destructive way (immediately apply the modifier) more thoughts and screen shots to come

I’ve recently purchased the HO/BC combo as well and am hoping to get into it. Haven’t gotten into HardOps yet, but Boxcutter is fun to play with. :slight_smile:

Sweet! Share with us your experience with it man :slight_smile:

Just wanted to revisit this. I’ve been looking for a decent learning path for Boxcutter and HardOps, but right now things are pretty scattered. In my old age I’ve grown lazy and used to complete video courses and such… which is not going to serve me well as I get deeper into coding and if I ever develop anything. :slight_smile:

I’ll spend some time as always just playing around with options, since that’s pretty much how I learned the Adobe Suite back before fancy book-learning stuff was available, but also here’s what I’ve found:

HardOps Documentation

https://hardops-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

BoxCutter Documentation

Whoever’s writing this hasn’t published anything yet, but here’s a link:

https://boxcutter-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Here’s a two and a half hour livestream/tutorial about the two:

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/21/hardops-and-boxcutter-everything-you-need-to-know-with-jerry-perkins-masterxeon1001/

 

There’s other stuff of course, snippets around the web and myriad videos on YouTube in many languages, but I’m starting with these and my own poking around this weekend.

Well, after playing around with BoxCutter for a couple of hours I think I have a handle on it. It’s a nice add-on. A little crashy on my rig at the moment, but if I save often it’s no big deal. The intro that one of the creators wrote is useful:

https://blendermarket.com/products/boxcutter/docs

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot out there about BoxCutter for Blender 2.8 that doesn’t ALSO include tutorials about HardOps, so I’ll have to get into HardOps next.

One question that I have is, are there situations like for animation or shading or whatever that would make things like this problematic (see attachment)?

As you can see, those are some really big non-quad polys that get left behind!

Starting to get the idea behind the HardOps ssharp workflow. They’re just shortcuts. Still too early in my learning to be of much use to me… probably better that I set Booleans, Bevels, and Auto Smooth manually for now, but before today I didn’t know anything but the Edge Split method, so that’s something anyway.

 

Hey Mark!

Very nice that you are getting a handle on it :slight_smile: as far as animation, it will work fine as long as it’s not being deformed. For deformation you may have some issues. Also just make sure that there aren’t additional vertices or double vertices which it looks like there are

Very nice that you are getting a handle on it ? as far as animation, it will work fine as long as it’s not being deformed. For deformation you may have some issues. Also just make sure that there aren’t additional vertices or double vertices which it looks like there are
Did some homework about Ngons as they relate to hard surface modeling. For anyone who visits this thread in the future, (all the way… to the Year 2000), I found this 20-minute video to be useful:
3D Modeling - Are Ngons Really That Evil?

To summarize his lecture:

  1. Flat and non-deformed: Use Ngons. Curved and deformed: Use Quads.
  2. Do your Subdivisions before your Boolean ops.
  3. Pay attention to the Angle setting for Auto Smooth. Use Mark Sharp if you need to.
  4. Triangulate your mesh before exporting.
  5. Retopology may be required.