When Hard Ops was first made I was very into the booltool. This particular tool in my opinion made modelling fun again and opened the door to many possibilities. However over the course of modelling you can sometimes find yourself doing as much work to surface a model as you do to model it.

The goal of Hard Ops is to keep the user creating isolated from menus and panel and tweaking things. To make modelling fluid and fast without compromising quality. Hard Ops is a toolset wrapped into a workflow thats accessible from 3 different locations. Q , Shift Q and the T panel of Hard Ops.

I’m hoping at least everyone understands the booltool basic behavior. Since this is part of how I use it.

The first cube I duplicated and used ctrl + (numpad minus) to subtract.

Second ctrl + (numpad plus) to add. And finally ctrl + (numpad minus) to get the reverse. This is the main part of the booltool that I use. Theres many other cool things about the booltool. I mean in this state where they are just setup and not applied I can still move them around and scale them. If needed. I usually intend to put things where I put them so you hardly see me moving stuff pre apply.  Unless needed.

Sometimes you have things set to boolean on areas of troublesome geometry or poles. Or doubles. I refer to this as hotlining and is the main reason IMO people hate booleans besides the lack of subsurf capabilites and bad topology.

But to me the surface matters first… Then the topo. Why perfect topology on surfaces that look bad? Why retopo a character if it’s hideous and not working anyways? Show me the money first.

So after booling an object what next? This is where Hard Ops comes in.

Csharp is intended for the booltool specifically. It’s intention is to apply the booleans and add a bevel modifier and more importantly. Calculate the sharps.

Calculating sharp edges and marking them is also an important part of Hard Ops. If you’re the manual type sharpening is done as follows.

CSharpen

Mesh smooth >> Edit mode >> Select Sharp Edges >> Mark Sharp >> Mark Bevel >> Mark Seam >> Enable Autosmooth >> Set Angle to 60 >> Add Bevel Modifier >> Set to Weight >>

SSharpen

Mesh smooth >> Edit mode >> Select Sharp Edges >> Mark Sharp >> Mark Bevel >> Mark Seam >> Enable Autosmooth >> Set Angle to 60 >>

As you can see the ssharpen is almost like the csharpen. Except for the bevelling stuff. Understanding this stuff makes Hard Ops easier to use and understand.

While Csharp does these things, it also does more. It also applies modifiers while keeping existing modifier information. This is essential for working quick because you can do rather unique things.

For example.

Booltool >> Csharp >> Booltool

This is the most basic workflow of Hard Ops.

As you can see I am booling in shapes. Using csharp to apply the booleans while keeping the bevels and also while calculating the new sharps. This allows me to work forward without having to stop and tweak settings.

The goal of Hard Ops is speed and workflow. While the tools cater to Hard Surface creation the applications  and workflow extends into organic working as well. While this covers just the most basic of basic tools and the ideas behind it it shows the type of workflow to expect from the rest of the tools as well.

If you still don’t get it. There is also a 3 hour video showing the toolset in action.

 

There also are many videos on how to use the plugin.