3D For Absolute Beginners | Blender 4. 0

1. Intro: If you want to learn how to use Fred Graphics to make something cool, then this skillshare course is going to be perfect for you. I'm going to be approaching this from an absolute beginner's perspective. And the goal here is to learn the absolute fundamentals, the things that you really need to know without getting into much of the details. And then taking that and towards the end of the skillshare course, making a complete little character. Now the goal here isn't to rig or animated character. It's just to take the foundational things like how to download Blender, how to use the user interface, how to navigate, how to add and move objects, how to edit objects. Things like materials, textures, UV, unwrapping. The things that most people who are beginners or getting into fred want to learn before they move on to more advanced concepts like animation or rigging or geometry nodes and things like that. More math based type stuff, so definitely keep watching. And all the resources that you want for this are going to be in a resources folder. There's going to be a starter file towards the end. And I'll even include some of the final results of our project so you guys can see what it is. If you get stuck, you can open things up, have a look around. So if you get stuck on anything, feel free to slow it down, Go back. And I just want to quickly mention that Blender is also available for Mac and Windows and Linux. So there are a few different operating choices when it comes to what you want to run, so what version you want to run, so let's jump in, get started with the first part and get you on your way with your blender journey. 2. Download Blender: Just in case you may not have Blender already installed on your computer, what you can do is go to Blender.org It's all you have to type in in your search browser. In the main page somewhere, it should say download. But just in case, you can go over here to the download option at the top, which I'd recommend. Then you're going to see here as a download option for Blender. Now this will download it to the top one here. We'll download it as an EC, an executable file that you can install on your computer like a software. But I prefer to work with Blender as a portable package. You come down to this little gray tab here, you see these are the portable options. In other words, in my case, I'm using Window. So if I download this portable zip, it is going to download a zip folder and then I can extract that zip folder somewhere in my computer and access blender. I've already done that. And I'll quickly show you. I just found a location on my computer and you can choose any location you want. For me, it's just a folder that I called builds. Here you can see are different older versions of blender that I've extracted. But in this case, I have blender four and I've extracted a zip file, and this is everything that is inside of that zip file. And then you're going to just simply click on Blender. Then once Blender is running, you can just go to your task bar, right click, and then go Pin. Now, I've already pinned this to my task bar, so I don't need to do that. But there you now have a portable version of Blender ready to use if you want to follow along with this series. I'll see you guys in the next part, we'll start getting into some of the basics. 3. User Interface: When you launch blender for the first time, you're going to see this little box here. What I mean, the first time when you just start it up, it's going to happen every time you launch it. But it's essentially just a little panel that shows you some setups that you can start with. Most people don't bother with this really because you can just go to file and then get the layouts as well. The thing here is that the one you're seeing here is just a general layout and then you got a two D animation sculpting. These are just the same things just arranged in different ways. But you can even come into your general scene here and just set things up in your own custom way. But that's not something you have to worry about at first now, just not that's what this box is. Then over here you can just see recent files. Now if you haven't done anything in blender yet, you probably won't see anything here. Then there is some resources like the website where you can donate and some really cool stuff. If you want to check that out, check it out. But if you don't just click somewhere in the scene, then this box goes away. If you need to start, you can just go file and start any of those ones up here where it says new. I think one thing that intimidates people is they see blender at all of these different windows here. And I think, oh, I have to learn all of these different things. The end of the day, what's really going on here is that these are a lot of the same tools and things that you already see in your main scene. But the things up here are just specific layouts that are more set up for what you're trying to do. Don't get intimidated at all by a lot of these things up here. In fact, we're not even going to be focusing on that too much for now. Just focus on the layout here. That's just your main basic scene. It doesn't matter really which one of these you're in. They all have more or less the same thing going on. That is this big window that you see over here, right? The big main window. This is your free D work space or your viewport. Most of what you're going to be doing, 90% of your work, especially as a beginner, is going to be in here. This is where you can move objects around. By the way, as I'm doing this, you don't have to follow along. I'm just explaining what the different interfaces are. But this is where you're going to be moving things around. This is where you're going to be adding in new objects. This is where you're going to be doing things like editing. Things like that are going to happen in this viewport over here, this big box over here, keeping it very simple. Then underneath there, you're going to see this thing here. This is called your timeline, because Blender is an animation software. If you were to do an animation, this is where you can come and play your animation and drag through your keyframes to different parts of your animation. Is also where we can do some basic rudimentary animation with key framing. But that's a topic for later on or another course altogether. Don't worry about that too much. Then up here, this little box up here is our scene collections. Essentially, this is just a way of showing you what is in your scene and how it's related to other objects in your scene. If I were to go ahead and add in a new object, I can simply see over here under my scene collection. On this thing here called the outliner, there is the new object. You can also physically click on objects over here in the fred viewport or you can go to your Scene collection and individually click on objects over here. It's just another way of seeing things and selecting them. You can also turn things on and off over here that you don't want to see, but we'll address that more later on anyway. Then over the last one we're going to be looking at, keeping it very simple. This thing here is called your properties area. All of these different things are just properties. Properties are just things that pertain to different things in our scene. For example, if I click on this cube, this cube has properties. For example, I might want to go to something like the object properties where I can see the location of this cube or it's rotation or its scale, how big it is. I can change things there if I wanted to. It's properties that pertain to this. One of the properties might be a material. I can add a material and change the color of the material. For example, in the Viewpo, that is a property pertaining to this cube. Even this camera over here has properties and it has its own unique tabs that deal with camera properties. Things like focal length and position, things like that. The clipping of the camera. It's not important that you understand what all of these things are at the moment. But I'm just trying to get you to see that this is what Blenter's user interfaces. 90% of what you're going to be doing is going to be in these four or five simple boxes. Mainly your big little box here which is going to be your Fred viewport where most of your stuff happens and then your scene collection here and your outliner that helps keep you organized. And then just the different properties that you can come back and forth to when dealing with things in your free scene. Then later on as you grow a little bit in your blender journey, you can come here to the timeline and do a bit of animation. Okay, I hope you guys have understood now the basic user interface of blender. And really don't get too hung up on all of this stuff and getting panicky about, oh, what is all these extra different things that I now have to learn? This is going to be so difficult, I'll never understand this really for now. Just forget about all of this. We are going to take each one of these things, these windows here, and we're going to do little bits of projects in them that are going to really help you to understand how to utilize them. I will be seeing you in the next part. We're going to be going a bit further with our blender journey. 4. Navigation: Now we're going to be looking at navigation in Blunder Blenders. Navigation is really simple. Let's start by grabbing our mouse. The first finger we're to look at is zooming in or out. The way you do that is you simply roll your middle mouse button forward or backwards to zoom in and out. Another thing you can do is hold in control or command, and then click on the middle mouse button and hold it in, and then actually move the mouse itself. Now most of the time I never use that second one. I just prefer to roll back and forth with the mouse as it's a lot simpler. Now I'm going to show you something else. If you want to pan side to side or up and down, you can simply hold in shift and then click your middle mouth button and hold it in. Now we can pan around, like if you want to rotate around, simply just hold in your middle mouth button and then move your mouse. And this is what we have. You can just rotate around. That's it. That's pretty much the main moves you can make in blender. Now, there are still a few more things we want to talk about. For example, what if you wanted to go to the front, or go to the side and you wanted a shortcut to help you do that. Well, there's something up here called the view. It's always very easy to find. Then you can go down to your view point over here, and then you can scrawl to any of these options. If we want to go to, for example, the front, we can click here and we go to the front. Can actually see at the moment it says front orthographic. Now, orthographic is something that we have where we don't rely on perspective. For example, I'm just going to quickly demonstrate this. I'm going to duplicate this cube and move it way back in the scene and off to the side. If I go back into my front orthographic, if you now look at the front, you can see these cubes look exactly the same size. That is because they are. But if we had perspective, it will look a lot smaller. Because it has perspective, it's further off into the distance. That is what we call orthographic view, and this is what we call perspective. Now if you go to your view, you can actually go here and go through all of these different views, but these ones will all be your orthographic. Let's quickly talk about some shortcuts you can use. I prefer to use my number pad. If you press one on your number pad, you can go to your front orthographic. If you press three on your number pad, you go into your right orthographic. And if you hold in control or command and you press free, then you'll guarantee your left or for graphic. If you forget, you can always go to viewport and you can actually see the number pad numbers right here and the different commands to make it much easier for you. Now if you don't have a number pad and you have a laptop, you can go to Edit, you can go to your Preferences, then you can go over to Input, and you can click here under Keyboard on Emulate Number Pad. Now the numbers on the top of your keyboard are going to become like a number pad. Now I have a computer with a normal keyboard, so I'm going to turn that off, but that's just something to keep in mind. Those are the basics of navigation in Blender. Now we're just talking here about movement itself. We haven't actually talked about moving the objects themselves because that's not navigation. That's a whole nother thing that has to do with object manipulation and editing. We'll be looking at that in some of the upcoming videos. So I'll see you guys in the rest of the course. 5. Add & Move Objects: In the previous part, we were looking at navigation in blender. But now we're going to look at the actual objects in blender, how we add them in, and how we move them around in the free D space as you can observe here. If you open up blender for the first time or whenever you open up a new scene, you're going to see this set up here. More or less it's a camera, a default cube, and a light. The default cube here is what we call a mesh object, whereas in the camera here, if you left click on it, you can see it is a camera. If I left click, move my mouse and left click on the cube, I can see here it is labeled as cube. You can actually see that whenever you have a mesh object that has a little triangle like this, that's letting you know it's made out of polygons. It's a object that you can edit. It's made up of points in free space that are connected to edges and faces. We'll get to that in a little bit, But I'm just getting the point across here that when we're talking about objects here, some objects are things that we can use like a camera, a light. But most of the time when we're making something, we're going to be using these primitive objects most of the time. Let's get into it. Let's left click on the default cube. For now, let's look at some of the basics of moving an object in Blender. Before I show you how to add in terms objects, if you want to, you can left click on the cube. There are two ways you can move things. Number one, this panel on the side here. You can press, if you don't see that, press on your keyboard and you'll see it here on the side. You can see this is called move. If you just hover over something, it actually shows you what it is over here. It's rotate over here, it's scale. I think this is actually a really simple concept. Let's click on the Move over here, you're going to see we have this little arrow that pops up here and you can left click on the blue arrow and move it up. Then if you stop, you can come here and left click on this green one, move it to the side. Then maybe let's click on this red one and move it over like so. Now why are these the colors that they are? That is actually for very good reasons because if you come over here to the top, you're going to see there is this little gizmo here with a z, a y, and an x. These are our free spatial vectors. That's what gives us a three D scene, as opposed to a two D plane. We can move up in these directions. Now the thing that's really interesting, if you select your cube and you go over your properties by default, here I have it active, but you can see object properties. You can actually see here is a reading of these spatial locations. For example, if the Z is over here, I can come and increase this number to maybe like four. And now you can see it's higher because we've put it up on the four, we've put it up on the Z24. If I come here and I make it negative four by typing in minus and four, now it's negative, it's 4 meters down this way. This is all relative to this middle point here where all of these lines come together. Here you can see the X and the Y. Just so you know, by default the Z component here, the Z is turned off. So you can always go over to your overlays up here and you can enable that axis, but most people don't have that enabled. That just gives you an idea of how things work in Blender. Now that is just moving things as I've just shown you. You can either use this tool here or you can come here and manually slide things. Now another thing is rotation. It's the exact same thing. You can rotate around what it is axis. Let's say this Y axis. Here you can see the green. What if we want that to be the point where we rotate? We can come here to the Y and maybe type in something like 45. And now it's rotated 45 along that Y. And the same goes for all of these over here. You can also just click on the rotation tool and then do it that way by clicking on these and dragging them as you've probably already figured out, it's quite the same with the scale. You can also come and scale on these different axes, okay? Or you can just click in the middle here and do it all together at one time, okay? But let's for now just press A to select everything in the scene and press Delete. It's all gone. Let's go shift A. When we press shift A, we're going to see all of these different things we can add in. We're not going to focus on these for now, but the main one you're going to be working with whenever we want to model is the one at the very top, which is called mesh. These are things that are made out of points, edges, and faces. Let's click, for example, on the UV sphere. Now you can see up here in our outliner, we can see the UV sphere, just like before. We can come here to the move tool and maybe move it up a little bit on the Z. But I'm going to be honest with seldom, When I'm working in my own personal fred workflow, I will almost always use shortcuts to move ins and blender. You actually press G on the keyboard. Make sure to memorize if you want to make it go along any one of these axes, you can press and then you can press, for example, X, and then it goes along the X. Or you can press Y after pressing and go along the Y. Or you can press Z and restrict it to the Z. If you forget what they are, just come over here and have a look at these colors here and where. What the actual letter is on here is Z, Y, and X. It's very easy to remember it in that sense. The same goes with rotation. You can press R to rotate. If you double tap R, you can rotate around the middle, anywhere like that. Then if you want to scale, you just press to scale. Really, it's that simple to move and add objects in blunder. I think it's one of those things that once you learn it, it's like riding a bike. You really don't forget it. And it's very easy to start adding things in. You can go shift A again. You can go to your options, maybe add in a cylinder this time, and then go X and move it over. Now we have two objects here. You can click on them like or, you can come over here and select this way. As I've already pointed out before, there is something we'll be covering in the next part, which is if you go into edit mode, you can also add objects inside of the actual system, then this is technically one object even though it's made out of multiple meshes. But that's getting a little bit confusing now. I think I'll cover that more specifically in the next part where we get into how to edit our meshes. But hopefully now you have an idea of how to move objects and how to go shift a and add them in like so. I'll see you in the next part. 6. Edit Your Mesh: In the previous part we were looking at how to add objects and blender how to move them around. But now we're going to be looking at how to edit the objects. Let's just jump into a new scene and blender. If you still have the previous scene open from before, just go file new and just go general. That's a very easy thing to do. Now we're going to look at editing. Let's actually select the default cube. If it's not already active, just left click on it or selected up here in the scene outliner. There are two ways you can go into edit mode. Number one, you can go here to object at the top, it's always very easy to remember. Then just one under object mode is edit mode. It's that simple or as I'd like to do on your keyboard. You can press Tab on your keyboard and that's going to be the shortcut. Pressing tab takes you in and out. If you want to be sure, just have a look up here and you'll see what it says. But for now to be simple, we'll just go up here and do it manually. Going from object to edit mode, not much is going to look different once you're in edit mode, with the exception of these little points and lines. For now, if you want to deselect anything, you can just left click outside here, anywhere where the cube isn't, it deselects everything. If you want to select the whole mesh, you can press A that'll select everything. You can also left click and drag while you hold in the left mouse button and you can select this way. The only the downside is you're only going to select the faces that are visible. If you wanted to select all the way through, you have to come here to this option called the x ray. That way if you click and drag, you'll select all the way through like that. But for now let's just turn off the x ray. Let's left click out of here to deselect everything. What I'm going to show you how to select these things individually, that's going to be next to the edit mode. Here you're going to see these three little boxes that are always here are easy to remember. The first one is a little dot on a cube and that is your vertex select. If you select that, you can left click on one of these individual vertices that make up this cube. Just left click on any one of them. Just as we did in the previous video where we moved things in object mode. Likewise, inside of this edit mode, you can go and grab parts of a mesh. And you can come to your move tools here and move them. Just like you move objects in object mode, we can grab this vertex, move it down, move it like this. Like I said, you can go, which is a shortcut to move you go. Which isn't going to do anything in this case because it's just a point which is technically infinite. So you're not able to scale it or rotate it. But what we could do is we can go over here to next option, which is the edge select. Then you can click on an edge. Now if we go R to rotate, you can see we can actually rotate that if we go to scale, we can observe it scaling. If you go to move, it can move. Then the next one is probably what you've already figured out, the face select, because you can see in a little picture here. And that is just the face. You can just go left click and click on a whole face and move it that way. These three options here are just different ways of selecting parts of your mesh. You can also hold and shift and make them all available at the same time. That way you can go between, I can click on edge, I can click on a face, or I can click on a vertex all at once, but it gets a little bit confusing and I don't usually work like that. Just pick whichever one you want. Really depends on what you're trying to select and what you're trying to do. Now, before we get into some more things, I just want you to understand that you want to look at all of these different faces, and verts, and edges as a little package. Or being contained at least inside a package. That package is available. If you go to your object mode, you can go back to object mode, You can see we have this cube. And now there's no way you can select any of these faces or edges because this little package is contained. If we went shift A and we went to our mesh options and add it in a let for example, let's go down here to the monkey head and go to move it over to the side. I can now go into edit mode of the monkey and I can go ahead and move things around, edit them, and then I can go back into object mode. These two things are their own little packages. It's even possible to go into edit mode when you're inside of edit mode, you can go shift a and you can still go to your mesh options and add in a mesh object, move it around, just like you do in object mode. But the thing now is if you go back into object mode, you might think you have two objects here, but you don't really, this is still one object and you can see here it is still called cube because that's our little package of faces, Edges point. Look at these things as little packages, little bundles with mesh in them. Okay, let's just press like everything, Press Delete. Let's go shift a, let's maybe adding a cylinder then let's look at what we call the origin point. Now I don't know if you can observe it, but it's a little orange.in. The middle of the object, every object has it. And if you can't see it, go to your overlays and make sure that origins over here is enabled. This origin point is actually where we're scaling from S to scale. It scales from that point. But if we go in to edit mode and we press a to select all of the mesh and we go g and x and move it over. If we now go back into object mode and we go to scale, now it's all of a sudden going to the side and getting bigger because it's actually still scaling around that point. In fact, if we go back into edit mode and we select everything by pressing A and press delete, Delete all of these votes and go back into object mode. You can see our cylinders to here, because what we have here is a system, the object itself is actually this origin point, it's just a value in free space. And we can go into this little network here called edit mode and we can go shift a and add in mesh topology. That is really what's going on here. Whenever we're working in object mode, it's always going to be important that we are aware of where that is, that origin point. Because if you actually move an object in object mode, that origin point stays here. If I move it in object mode and I go R to rotate, it's still rotating around that origin point. But if I work to do that in edit mode, it might look like it works until I move it over to the side and go back into object mode. And now all of a sudden this happens, which is sometimes be what you want, but just keep that in mind, that's something that oftentimes gets to beginners. Let's just quickly get rid of that shift A, let's add in maybe a Taurus. I'll quickly demonstrate something here that has more to do with moving objects. But I think it's important if you ever move an object, to move an object or to rotate it, for example, if you want to reset it, you can go old and then go and then go or whatever you press. If I press to move, I can also go old with selected to undo that. Does that makes sense? However, inside of edit mode, if I were to go and move it and then I go old, that's not going to happen because that's not the same data structure, it's not the same way that it's working. So keep that in mind. You can always go control Z to do that, but it's not going to be unsettable later on if you make any of these changes. Now that we've looked at edit mode and how to select things, I've shown you guys how to select things, but I haven't actually shown you how to do actual editing, right? Once you select something here, you may be able to move it. I think I've shown you that. But what if you want to add more topology once you grab a face, And let's make sure we have face select here. Let's go into our front view. Let's go into x ray. And let's just click and drag and select maybe these top faces. Then let's turn off x ray. Let's say we wanted to not just move this up, but we wanted more topology. We can actually go to extrude and then go z. Now we're extruding up, now we've actually extruded it. We haven't just moved, but we've created more topology in between. If that's still confusing, I'll demonstrate by maybe selecting just two faces. I'm going to select this face here. By the way, if you want to select another face by just clicking, you can hold in shift. Then if you left click, you can go on selecting. But if I were to just click on a face and then click on another face, it's just going to go between the two. Make sure if you ever want to select multiples, you can either click and drag. If you want to click, you have to hold in shift. While you're doing it, they stay selected. Let's just select two faces, then let's press to extrude. Let's come here and left click to stop that. By the way, you can also see there are all these same tools and you can hover over them. Over here we can see there's the extrude tool, you can actually click on it and then extrude with the little gizmo. But as always, like I said, once you use blender, you really get used to just pressing the shortcut keys. In this case pressing to extrude. Then once you happy of that, for example, you can maybe click on this face over here. Then once again go to extrude. Your move tools are still here to move things around. You can still rotate like this and you can still scale. But once again, like I've been encouraging you guys, make sure to just go when you want to move, R, when you want to rotate and when you want to scale much easier, that's it. By using this, you can make as many things as you want with a piece of mesh. You can go and select things. And by the way, I just went into wire frame to do that, you can press Z on your keyboard and then just go to the wireframe option or click on solid wire frame is just another way you can select for everything and see what's going on. But I prefer to sometimes just stay in solid mode and just enable x ray. That way you can click and drag through everything. Otherwise, like I pointed out before, without x ray toggled on. If you click and drag, it might look like it's selected till you look at the back and you can see it's not selected. Okay, so it's kind of like a line of sight thing when you don't have that enabled. So I think this part is getting a little bit longer. I think I've covered the basics here. There's a lot more that could be said, but these are the fundamentals. Okay, so what we're going to do in the next part is we're going to add some materials to some mesh so you can see how materials work. And if any of this is still confusing, don't worry. Because when we eventually get to our character creation part where we model a little guy, don't worry, that's going to be something. I'm still going to explain all the different steps as we're going. This is just some little things here at the moment that I want you guys to practice, especially with the editing. Just get comfortable. Don't worry about making anything specific. Just grab faces and edges and get yourself comfortable with extruding and scaling and just making some weird looking measures. Again, just have fun with it while you're learning. And I'll see you in the next part. 7. Add Materials: Part. We're going to be looking at how to add materials to an object in Blender. Let's start with a new scene and Blender 4.0 to simplify things, we're just going to use a default cube. For this example, left click on a default cube. Remember in one of the first videos, we discussed the properties over here. And you can see on the side, because we're going to be dealing with materials here, you want to go and hover over this one called Material Properties, and click on it. Now by default this comes with a Material because it's a default object. You can see here, it's just already has a material. But let's just go ahead and click Minus to get rid of it. Just to show you guys what to do when you want to add a material, you can come here and click. And it's going to call it Material 001 by default, because we already have the other material in the buffer. But let's come here and click, let's just call this maybe red. Let's say we're going to make it a red material. And then you're going to come here to the surface. Under the surface you're going to see something called base color. Now we'll get to some of these other things in a bit, but for now let's just focus on the color because it's really obvious and straightforward. We can click on this and we can change it. Let's change it to red here, because that's what we're trying to do, right? But the thing here is that you're noticing there is no red color on here. Because at the moment, what you're looking at is just a viewport display of the cube. Nothing is being rendered to see rendering real quick. And by the way, don't be baffled if you don't understand exactly what's going on here, because we will deal with this later on. But for now, just come up here to your render properties. And then you're going to see there something called the render engine. We want to set it to cycles, then we want to change the device to GPU. Now if you don't have a GPU, don't worry if you do have a GPU but you don't see that option, you can simply go to Edit Preferences, then go to System and then come here and change it to Uta or Optics, whichever one is compatible. And make sure to enable your Invidia G force, but I'm just going to leave it at T in this case. Then what you can do is you can go under your render here and you're going to see something called Mac samples. That's going to be higher quality, but it's going to take longer to render, let's just say something like 50 for now, lowering that amount. Doesn't matter if you don't understand all of this, we're more just focus on materials at the moment. Now if you press Z on your keyboard, you click here on Rendered. You can now see this is being rendered. It's actually being lit by this light that's up in the scene, the default light. But let's select that and press the Let. Let's go Shift A. Let's go to our light options. Add in an area light and then go Z and move it up. Let's go to our light settings and give it a strength of 120. Let's increase the size here to 4 meters. Then let's go r and rotate it to move it. You can place it wherever you want, but now you get the idea here of how this works. Now we have a render engine engaged, and simulated photons or particles are now bouncing off of here and creating reflections. And you can see the color and it looks really nice. Let's left click on this again. Let's go back to our material properties. Let's have a look at some of these other things. We're going to see something here called roughness. If you bring this down all the way to zero, you can see this cube is a lot more reflective. Now, it's a lot more shiny. And you can see if you move around, it's looking shiny. But if you bring up this roughness, you can see it becomes a lot more diffuse. And you can take it all the way up to one. It's going to look very rough. And you're going to see any reflections, let's just bring that down to something like 0.2 0.3 something like this. Just a little bit of reflectivity. Then you're going to see something here called metallic. And if you drag it up now, you're going to have this metallic look you can see over here. Let's just come and drag it back down to zero. Then there are some other things here, like transmission. If you drag that up, then it becomes transparent like glass. It now has transmission. Now you can see here we have a block of glass, maybe let's bring that roughness down a bit. Let's come here and change it to less saturated red under the base color. But you guys now get the idea. This is the basics of adding materials. Let's now press Z, and then let's go to Solid again. Now let's go Plus and Create another material. And come here and click New. Let's call this Metal. Now let's go back into edit mode. Now let's press Z and let's go Rendered. We're in edit mode this time instead of object mode. And let's go to our face select. How do we get this new material to be applied to other faces? The way we're going to do that is by selecting a face by left clicking on it, coming to the metal here. And then let's click a sign. Now this new material is assigned to that face. Let's go ahead and increase the metallic value and bring down the roughness. Now let's go back into object mode. Now we have our metal material on here. If you're not seeing it well, you can grab this light over here and go shift to duplicate a shift D will create a duplication. And you can go to move it, then you can press R to rotate it. Now we have not a light source here, but you now are understanding the basic idea. It's very easy. If you ever want to create a material, just go to your material properties. You can create as many materials as you want. You can call them whatever you want. And then in edit mode, you can just select the faces that you want to apply them to. You can go ahead and assign and then change the colors and the reflectivity and the metallic values. As a start, you can even add the refraction or transmission like we saw with the glass material here. This is the basics of materials. But later on we will be looking at a more advanced idea of this, where we have one material, but we rely on texture painting. We actually have a texture on here and we can paint onto it, and that's working a little bit differently. We'll be using something called an image texture, but that's going to be later on in upcoming things. This is more just talking about the basics of materials and how to understand the material properties in blender. By the way, back in object mode, you could at any time go shift a add in any other object, move it along, and you can go to the materials property, come to the dropdown, and you can share those materials. It doesn't have to be specific to any one object. And we'll address this later. But just in case you're curious, if you select an object like this, you can actually right click and go shade smooth, and then you can see it has smooth shading. If we were to select a cube, it would be no point since it already has sharp edges. In this case, I'm not going to give it smooth shading. But this is something to keep in mind, We'll talk about that later on as we continue. One more thing I'll quickly mention, If you were interested in seeing this in the viewport, you could always click on a material and then you can go down to the viewport display and then change the color here. You can get a rough idea of what's going on here. You can go down, you can change basic things like the value and color, make it look metallic, Maybe all these things you can try and change and match to your material. But a lot of people don't bother too much of this. It's just if you want to be organized and have a quick visual idea of what materials are applied in the viewport. But I'll see you guys in the next part where we'll be looking at UV unwrapping so we can prepare a surface for texture painting, which is going to be a very important skill as we progress with this skill share. Co. 8. UV Unwrapping: Go ahead and open up a new scene. In a blunder, we're going to be looking at UV unwrapping. Now, before we get into texture painting, we want to make sure any object we're working with has the mapping required to be able to do texture painting. If that doesn't make any sense at the moment, just keep watching and you'll understand for an easy demonstration. Let's just left click on the default cube, then let's go over here to our UV editing workspace. Very simple. In our UV editing workspace, it's already set up for us properly. You can see by default it's taken the object into edit mode. If it's in object mode, make sure it's in edit mode as we need to be in edit mode to do the UV unwrapping. Then over here you're going to see a window. This layout here is actually this box over here that is already unfolded. You can actually see it. If you go to your Face Select option, you can left click on one of these faces. And you can see here is the face hold in shift and then go to the next one and the next one and so on. And you can actually see that they're all mapped out over here. When you make a face active by clicking on it, it pops up over here. This box already comes UV unwrapped for us because it's a defold object. But let's go ahead and demonstrate this with something different. Let's go into object mode. Let's select our cube and press Delete. Let's shift A. Let's go to our measure options. Let's add in a Taurus. If we go into edit mode and we make sure everything is selected, If it isn't, press A, you're going to see this already comes UV unwrapped for us. But the way this is unwrapped, we could do it a lot better. Now one of the limitations with unwrapping something without adding in seams is that it can just fold onto itself. What we're going to do, we're going to go to our Edge select option here. We're going to double tap A to deselect everything over here in this edit mode. We're going to hold in Shift and we're going to hold in old. The reason we do that is so we can left click on an edge. Let's click on the middle edge here. And you're going to see it's going to loop selected all the way around in a continuous selection like that. Because it's a loop. Then what we're going to do is we're going to go control or command E, going to bring up all of these edge options. But we're going to go down to the one here called mark seam. Now you have a red seam going along here which indicates that is a place where this is going to unwrap. Let's press A to select everything, then let's press on a keyboard for umbrella. Then you're going to go ahead and click on the top option here called unwrap. Now you can see Blender is automatically done this for us. Now over here is where it is parting and the whole thing is folded out on itself. But this is causing a lot of stretching in the inside here, and it's a bit uneven. We can do this even better. Let's go double A to unselect over here. Let's go in here in the middle. And shift alt and left click on this edge to loop selected. Now let's go control or command E. Let's go to the Mark Sam option. Now these two bits are disconnected, in a sense, when it's going to UV. Unwrap this bit here at the top and this bit here at the bottom. If you want to test that, you can go to your face select option, just left click on a face on the top here and then go control L or command L. And it'll select everything within that selection. You can see that this is in a sense, no air tight, if you will. A selection can't jump over because it's stopping where this edge seam is over here like this. We can select a bottom face here and go control L. And we can see that's its own bit like this. Now let's press A over here to select everything with that new seam in here. Let's press, and let's click on the unwrap option. Now as expected, we have two pieces here. Remember, we were able to demonstrate that these were two pieces pressing as that are both active. Let's come over here and make sure these two are selected to better pack them into the square over here, which is going to be what's essentially going to be our texture. Eventually, Let's grab these two and then press over here, R, and rotate them roughly at 45. Then let's press to move them, let's press to scale them to fit them in here. But we don't want them going outside of this box. Just something like this. If they're touching even a little bit, let's just grab a vertex on here. Control L or command L, And we'll select the whole loose piece. Let's go and just move it up a bit so there's a bit of a gap. We don't have any texture issues where it's bleeding over or overlapping. Now we've essentially taken a Taurus and unwrapped it in a very nice way. Let's now go back into our layout that is now done. If you go over to your data properties here, front object properties, you can actually see something here called UV maps and that is the UV map here. Just so you know, we're not going to look at this now. You can't actually click on a plus here, just like you can do with materials. You can add in multiple UV maps. You can unwrap it in many different ways. When you have different materials and different textures, you can reference different UV layouts. But that's not something we're going to look at at the moment. Just getting rid of that. We only have this UV map and you can double click on it and call or whatever you want, but we'll just leave it as UV map. Now what we're going to do is we're going to save this file. And the reason we're saving it because in the next part we're going to continue by doing a texture and doing some texture painting for the Taurus. Let's go to file. Let's save As. And for simplicity's sake, let's just go to our desktop. Let's just call it something like texture paint set up because we know we're going to be doing some texture painting in the next bit. Let's go save As, and now that is saved. In the next part we'll create a texture and I'll show you how to connect it to this so we can get into our texture painting over here. 9. Texture Painting: Now we're in the part where we're going to do our texture painting. In the previous part we set all of this up for UV, unwrapping Our Taurus is ready to go. It's saved onto our desktop, which we did previously. Now what we're going to do with our Taurus selected. We're going to go over to our painting workspace here. Click on Texture Paint. At the moment here we can see it's all set up, ready to go. We have a brush, but we need to create a texture that's really simple to do. So we're going to come here to the top and want to click on New. And by the way, if you already had textures in here, you come to the drop down and select them. But for now we're just going to click on New. You're going to see all these options pop up here. It's not really that complicated, the width and the height, it's just the dimensions of your texture. I recommend that we're going to give it a bit more resolution. What you can do, I'm going to show you a neat little trick. You can left click, then click next to the four, and then just type in an Asterix. And then type in two, and then press Enter. Now you've multiplied that by two, it's now 2048. If you're lazy or usually want to do it a different way, you can just come to the next one and just type in 2048. But sometimes it can be handy to know that little extra tip there for doing sums and things in blender. But it's going to be 2048 by 2040, 82k resolution. You can come here to the name. Let's call it, let's just call it Taurus Test. Honestly, you can be more creative than that. It's fine then. The color could just be the starting color. It doesn't really matter since we're going to paint over it. But what we could do if you didn't want to just go over solid color, you can go to the generator type, instead of having a blank, you can go to UV grid. Then you're going to click, okay. Now we have this UV grid over here. The finger is, you can't really see it, but we can see the outline of our UV coordinate here. But if you actually want to see this mapped onto the Taurus, we need to go to our material properties. Let's create a new material. Let's click on it, and let's call it Taurus. And press Enter. Now we're going to come here to the base color. Remember in the part where we learned about materials, we could just give this a base color and then render it. But now we have the option of coming to the base color and clicking on this little yellow button. We can come now and go to Image Texture. Now we can come to the drop down, and let's select that Taurus test. Now you should be able to see it displayed over here, which is really cool. We need to also make sure to come over here on this side and image save As. And then let's go to our desktop as well and just save that Taurus Test PNG and save As image. That's also really important. If you're not seeing the texture, you may have to go Z and then go Material preview. But one way or another, it should already be set up for you, like that in the texture painting set up here, that is it. Now we have this set up, in fact, I'm going to press Z and just go into solid view because this is already displaying the texture regardless. Because it's set up that way for us because we're in our texture painting workspace. But what we can do now is we can come because you can see here we have the draw brush. If you're not seeing this, just press to bring up this. And you should see the draw brush here, the top. By default, the color is set to white. If I now come here and I paint on here, you can see it's white. And you can actually see here, now it's updating on this side here as well. You can also come here and paint. I can paint here. Now, all of a sudden you see it pops up somewhere. All right, this is really fun is have fun for now. I don't want you guys to worry at all about painting, anything specific. If you want to grow your brush, you can press to grow your brush, you can shift. If you want to mess around with the strength, we're just going to leave it at one make, whatever color you want. This is completely up to you. Go ahead, have fun. Just paint. All I want you guys to do now is just paint. Don't worry about following what I'm doing, my color choices. This is just about you guys having a bit of fun painting some colors onto your Taurus. I don't want you guys at all to worry about following me right now. Just go ahead, Grab whatever colors you want. Press, shrink your brush to whatever size you want. Just go crazy. Make it whatever you want. This is just about getting a feel for paintings. I'm just grabbing all these random colors here and painting them all over my Taurus like this. Just having fun here. Painting up all these places where there's a grid, you can see. The nice thing about having this UV grid is we can actually see this texture that's underneath here. We can actually see where we haven't painted yet. Sometimes you going to fill in inside here, around here. Now, I think I'm quite satisfied with my painting over here. It's quite colorful and I enjoy it. Let's go image, let's make sure to save again by it the way. Let's quickly go back to our Laut. Let's grab the Taurus, right click, and go shade Smooth. If you wanted to see this, like I said, you can go Z and go Material Preview. Or you can just stay in solid. Press go back to solid, then come here to the top, to this little dropdown, and then go to your options here. And you should be able to go down to color and change it to texture. Now you can see the texture in your viewport. This is nothing specific, this just look silly. It's just a bunch of random colors. But the idea here was just to demonstrate to you guys how we can texture paint once we've UV unwrap. This has been making the little Taurus. This has been officially part eight, I think it is, since we've done part one of introducing you to some of the basics of blender. And from here on now, we're going to use everything we've learned to make a complete little character. He's not going to be rigged or animated, but he is going to be looking good and he's going to be rendered. In the next part, I'll let you know how to do that. We're going to start by using the provided resources. If you haven't already downloaded the resources file that comes with this skillshare course, make sure to do so. They're going to be resources in there we're going to use as we continue. I'll see you in that. And I'm looking really forward to it. 10. Model a 3D Character Part A : Welcome to the first part of where we're going to be modeling our character. If you haven't already done so, make sure to download the resource file, Blender 4.0 course. It's going to be a zip file that comes with this course. You're going to download it, extract the zip inside of there. You're going to see this Acute Mushroom Character Starter File. Now the thing is, by the time you actually download this, you're going to see some other files in here as well. Because I'm going to progressively add things to this, but just make sure this is the one you get. It'll say starter file in the name. You're going to go ahead and run that. Inside of the blend file, I have set up everything we need. There is a reference from the front, from the right or graphic. There's also a reference. This is going to help us model. We're not just guessing where to place things, it's going to make things easier. I've also gone ahead and taken these two references. I've put them on their own collection and I've disabled them so they can't be selected. And that's just going to make things easy when we're trying to select and I'm not going to get in our way too much, which is really good. You can see we have a default cube in the scene which is active. It's on its own collection here. This is where we're going to be starting, believe it or not, when it comes to modeling our little character. But don't worry, we're going to take some very easy step by step approaches here. It's worth noting a few things when we're going to be modeling this from the orthographic view. To get started, make sure you're in your front orthographic view. Remember when we discussed views? You can go to view viewport and then go to the front orthographic. We're going to be mirroring this cube. The way we do that is with a modifier. The reason we're doing this is because in this case, if we press Z and we quickly go into wire frame, we can see that this character is symmetrical on the X axis. We can model on one side and automatically have it mirror on the other side. How do we do that? First of all, we're going to go over with our cube selected to this little spanner. It's called the modifiers and you're going to click on it. Then you're going to go to this little button called Ad Modifier, And you're going to click Search. And you're going to type in double R. You should see mirror appears. You're going to click on that. Now by default it's actually mirrored on the x axis. I'm going to press Z and go back into solid. But to really understand this, we need to go in to edit mode with our cube selected. What we're going to do is we're going to go to our face select option. We're going to select the face on our left, on your left as you're facing the screen. Select it and then go into your front orthographic view. Then you're going to go and you're going to just drag with your move tool up here, make sure it's selected. You're just going to drag this on the X and keep dragging it. And you can see now that it's actually mirror, this is a mirror on this side, across the X axis. You can see here makes total sense if we were to enable it in the Y. And by the way, don't do this bit, I'm just demonstrating if we enable it in the Y. And you can see this green line as the Y axis, we can now grab this, and I can grab it like this. And you can see it's mirrored on the Y. Okay, just want you guys to understand it. So I'm going to turn it off for the Y. We only want the X, but at the moment, if we move it, it just comes apart. So what we're going to do, we're going enable this thing called clipping. Now if we grab this and move it, it's going to clip together, right like that. Now, I can't pull it apart, but we still have this face in the middle which shouldn't be there. If that's face active, press X and then go to the delete phase option. Now there's no face in the middle and these two are bond together. So if I press eight to select everything and I go, you can see this is what we have. The reason it knows where the middle is is because of that little orange.in. The middle, the origin point, once again, going back into your object mode. If you can't see the origin point, you can come to your overlays and make sure Origins is enabled. I think for now let's just go back into our edit mode. We're going to make sure everything is selected. And once again, if it's not, just press a in edit mode with our move tool, we're just going to go and drag everything up. I think from here on I know the move tool might be something you're used to, but we're going to try as much as possible to use shortcuts for now so we can actually see fruit is enable our x ray to toggle on the x ray. With all of this active, we're going to go to scale it. Let's scale and scale to have it about this big. Then we're going to go and move it in. Let's place it over here. The bottom of our cube is touching the bottom over here of the character. Not the legs, but just the bottom of the body. Let's grab the top face by clicking and dragging. So the top face is active and we're going to go z and move it down to about here. You can see this is what we have. Try and match these proportions as much as you can. Then we're going to go into our right orthographic view by pressing free on a number pad. Then we're going to come here and select our vertex select option. We're going to click and drag and select these top faces and press Y and scale along the Y. Till we have it touching the sides of our character here. So we can see this is where it goes and that's where this vertex goes. But we might have to select this one here. Just go y and move it forward a little bit till it matches. Now if you press A, you can see this is what we have in the side, and this is what we have in the front. We're now going to turn off the x ray. For now, we're going to come like so, and hovering over this front edge, if you press control R or command R, you're going to see if you hold it just right, there's a yellow line that appears. This is a loop. If you roll your middle mouse button up, you can add in more, and if you roll down you can add in less. For now, we're just going to roll two times to add in two, and then we're just going to left click twice. Now that's added in, then we're going to come here to our side hovering over this edge and control R or command R. You're going to see the yellow line again. This time you're going to roll twice 12 and you should see free of these yellow lines. And you're going to double click. Now you see this, okay? But the problem is, even though at the front it looks more or less, okay, And at the side from the top it looks way to square. I just press seven on the number pad by the way to go to the top orographic, let's make sure. And by the way, if you struggle with that, just go to viewports and just go top. We're going to enable our X ray toggle again. We're going to grab this corner here at the front and we're in x rays. We can select all the way through. When it comes to this thing here called proportional editing, we're going to enable it. What we're going to do from a top Fe, we're going to go to move and we're going to move it in. But if you roll your middle mouse button up, you can create more influence. If you roll your middle mouth button down, you create less influence. This is a way for you to drag everything along. So what we're going to do, we're going to roll it about this big. Just bring it in a little bit to soften that corner. Then we're going to grab this corner over here. We're going to go G and just bring it in a little bit like to soften that corner. Then let's go into our front orthographic view. Let's toggle off the x ray. Let's come over here hovering over this edge, over here, control R, double click and adding in edge. Now what we're going to do is we're going to pre go into wire frame, select all of these bottom votes. Then in our front fiel, let's just go rolling out down on mile mouse button of that influence, just to turn it down a bit and move it in. So I think what we should do is toggle on our x ray over here. Let's select this front vertex. These two front Tes over here. All of these along this row. In our front few, we're going to go and just drag them down with proportional editing, rolling it bigger to create more influence. Then let's grab this corner over here and just go and move that up till this lines up with this profile over here like this. Hope you guys are able to see what's going on. We've just made this shape over here. Let's go to our right view, right orographic view. Let's grab this sharp corner here. Let's just go with proportional editing. Move it up a bit. Let's grab this one here. Move it up. Let's grab this here, and just tuck it in a little bit. Let's grab these here. And just go and tuck them a little bit. Just making a very simple shape like this. So far, I'm going toggle off x ray. Now we want to start extruding the legs out. Let's get our face select option. Let's come here to the bottom. In the bottom you're going to see we have these two faces right in the middle. In fact, let's press control seven or command seven so we can go to our bottom. If you struggle with that, just go to View Viewport and go bottom. We actually want to go from the middle here and we want to go two up. So we want to skip these two. Holding shift select these two, while you're still holding shift select these two, we're going to press and scale it a little bit. In fact, let's turn off proportional editing for now. So we're going to go and scale it up a bit, then we're going to go into our front view and we're going to go to extrude and Z, and extrude down, we're going to go to scale. Then we're going to go back to our bottom orthographic view again by pressing control or command. And seven on the number of head. Then we're going to go to our edge select option. We're going to go to our proportional editing. Enable it again. Let's select this edge with our edge select and go and move it in. Let's grab this edge here and go and move it forward. Let's grab this one back here and go move it back. This one here, we're going to go and extend it out a little bit, just rounding out the leg shape at the bottom. Now we're going to go to our face select option and we're going to select these four faces down to bottom by holding and shift. Now we have that active and in our front view it's a little bit bigger. Now we're just going to go just scale it down a little bit to match. Let's go to extrude to scale, let's go r to rotate, then let's go just to move it in a bit. I still have proportional editing enabled. I'm going to go to extrude again, r to rotate a little bit to scale. I've rolled my influence down under proportional editing quite a lot, so it doesn't influence too much. Let's place it right here. And then we're going to extrude and Z again, bring it down to scale. Then we still have a little bit of leg left. We're extrude it down to scale and we're rolling down influence a lot, so it doesn't influence too much. Let's just make it something like that for now. We're going to go into a right orthographic view. Then we're going to go over here to a vertex select option. We're going to go into x ray mode quickly. Let's select some verts here, we're proportional editing. Let's just go and pull it over just so this lines up a little bit. Grab it here at the front and move it. I'm going to maybe turn off X ray just if it makes it easier. Just so you can see what we're doing here. We're just grabbing these were proportional editing, Just making them line up a little bit better with the reference here, but it doesn't have to be perfect, like I'm being very picky over here at the moment. Specific. But just something like, this looks good, now from the side it looks good, and from the front it looks pretty good. We might have a little bit sticking out here too much. So let's just grab this corner in the front and just move it and grab some verts here. And just slide them over till this looks a bit better, a bit neater at the front like this. Now you can see that's looking much better at this point. You can also press a to select everything. You can go over here to your smooth tool and just click on this little gizmo and just lightly smooth it out to neat things up. Let's go back to our move tool now We've done a tricky part making the bottom, but let's go, let's go wire frame. Let's click and drag and select all of these top faces like that are all active. Let's go solid. Going to our front graphic. And now we're going to go to extrude about this much, to move it in a bit, let's go to our right orthographic view. We're going to go Y and scale it a little bit on the y till it matches the side. Let's go back to the front orthographic. Let's go to extrude up to about here, just to move it in a little bit. Let's go to our right orthographic view. Now we're going to go y and scale it smaller a little bit on the Y it matches the side. Let's go back into a front orthographic to extrude. Let's go all the way up to the neck here. And let's go just to move it in a bit, but if we go too far, you're going to see over here, it gets too close. What we're actually going to do is leave it as it is, but we're going to go z, go into wire frame, select these verts on the end, and then with proportional editing, just go and roll your middle mouse button up to create more influence. And just bring it so it's right at the corner of the neck. The spacing on these edges here or more or less even, you can see the gaps between these edges over here. Or more or less even like that. Then let's get a right orthographic view. And we can see that is way too wide, so make sure everything at the top is selected. And then go S, y and just flatten it on the y a little bit. Go back to the front orthographic Z, let's go solid. And then we're going to hover over this edge here because it's really long face over here. We're going to go control R. Roll the middle mouse button up once and double click to add in two segments. So far we're doing really well. I'm just going to see over here, this edge here looks quite sharp. I'm just going to grab proportional editing and just go and just tuck it in just a little bit like that. If you ever see anything like that, you can just grab it and fix it up like that. But no big issues at the moment. So far, we're doing really well. If you've made it this far, you're doing really good. Let's just quickly, in a front view, just go into wire frame and select all of these top faces and go z and roll up proportional editing down a lot so it's not too much influence. Let's just flatten that and Z. Just move your mouse and just flatten that. Now that's looking a little bit better. For now, I'm going to turn off proportional editing. Let's quickly go back into object mode for now. With everything active, I'm going to write click and go shade smooth. Now we're already starting to see some smooth shading on our character. I hope you guys are able to follow along so far. Remember I am going to provide the finished result as well in the resources file, so you can always open it up and see how I've done things, but I hope you guys are able to follow along. Let's go back into edit mode. Now that we have to smooth shading, We're now going to make sure that our proportional editing is enabled if it's not already. And we want to make sure that the very top bunch of faces are right over here, where the arm ends up here at the top and the head starts. Let's just quickly go into our x ray mode just so we can select these top faces. You can see they're all active. Make sure that you do move them so they're right on there. And then we want to see that there's one edge coming down, so we can click and drag to select this edge. Then we can count another edge down here. Right, the edge that is down to. We've got the top, then we've got one edge and two edge. We want to just go ahead and select that edge. If it's too hard to click and drag, just go shift old and left click on the edge and it'll select it as a loop. Then you can go and move it. And we have proportional editing enable so we can create the influence. We're going to go and move it. Just move out like this. And then grab these votes here at the corner. Go and drag them down a little bit and shrink the proportion. I'll quickly turn off the x rays so you can see a bit better. So something like this. Now we just have an edge running here in the middle. If you now go into our right orthographic view, we're pressing free on a number pad, should see four faces here on the side. If you go to our face select option, we can see 1234. I'm holding in shift as selecting. And you can see that they're in the middle. They're not too much to the side and they're not too much to the front. The right in the middle. These are the four faces we're going to extrude to become the arm. Let's turn off proportional editing. Let's go into our front or graphic view of those selected. Let's go to extrude and it's left click and let's go R to rotate it, it's straight and then go to scale it. Let's go and move it down. Now I'm going to show you a little trick. If we go control plus or command plus to grow this election, we can go over to our little smooth tool. Now a little yellow gizmo. We going to click on it and drag. And it's going to smooth this out. And round it out for us like that. Now let's go back to our front view to scale this whole thing up a bit. Just to move it up, just to correct it again. Let's go to our Facelect option. Once again, unless you select the four faces here, I'm holding in shift and the side, you can see these four faces that are surrounded by this loop. In fact, if you hold and control R over one of these edges, you should see it forms a perfect loop around here. We've got some nice edge flow. Then what we're going to do in a front view is we're going to scale that up to extrude, to move it, R to rotate, to scale. And just line it up like like that. Now maybe we can go to our edge select, let's just select this edge over here and holding and shift, select this edge over here and in our right orthographic view enable proportional editing. And let's just go and move it up a bit, then let's select this edge over here at the corner. Let's go and tuck it in a bit and do the same thing of this one over here at the bottom. We'll do the same thing, but not quite as much because the bottom of the RM tends to be a little bit more flat. We have this order shape. Now let's go to face select and select the four faces again. Now let's just finish off by going to extrude again to scale. And I have proportional editing, I'm just going to shrink it. And then to move it down, I think we can go two more times. E to extrude to scale, let's go one more time. And then to scale, move it over here. Now let's go to our face sect option. Let's go to our top view. What we're going to do, we're going to click and drag. And just select these faces here, so you can count 123, 456-789-1011 12. We've got 12 faces. And we're going to take these 12 faces, and we're going to go to extrude and Z. And extrude them up on a Z, like we're going to go into a right orthographic view. We're going to S Y and scale them on the Y just a bit, then Z and just flatten them a bit. I'm rolling down my proportional editing as much as possible. Then let's get to the front view. Let's make sure that this is right underneath the mouth. Let's go to extrude and move it up. I'm going to go to my move tool. Just sat down and see that little gizmo from the smooth tool. We're going to go in our front view and just move this thing over. And we've just extruded it, so it's sitting above the mouth. Let's go to extrude. Let's extrude this one until it goes underneath the eye. Let's go into our right orthographic view. Let's go Y and roll our middle mouse button just to create more influence. And let's scale it so it matches to reference a bit more. Let's go into a front orthographic view and go to extrude. Extrude up so it's just sitting above the eye. Let's get a right orthographic view this time we're going to go R in a right orthographic view and slightly rotate it like to scale it. And we're going to shrink up a portion of editing quite a bit just so it matches our reference. And you can see over here, remember we just rotated with R and went to scale. And we roll out proportional editing to create more or less fall off, now it's at a bit of a slant. Now in the front view, we're going to go to extrude and go up. Let's go to the right view. Let's go and scale it. Let's go in the right view one more time, to extrude just a little bit and to scale, let's go in like so. Then we're going to go control plus, or command plus just once. Go to our smooth tool and let's click and drag on a gizmo just to smooth it out. So now we have to head here. But what we're going to do now is we're going to turn off proportional editing. We're going to go back into object mode. We're going to make sure to save now, we're going to get to add modifier under our little spanner here, Add modifier. Let's click on Search and type in Sub. Let's get a subdivision surface which is going to smooth everything out by subdividing it. If you actually press Z and you go wire frame, you can see if you actually come here to this optimal display and turn it off. There's no more topology. We're going to make sure it's at a viewport level of one. And we're to come to the drop down here and apply that. Now that it's applied, if we actually go back into edit mode, you can see this topology looks a lot smoother and a lot denser. Now we've got some more topology to work with with the face, but for now, let's just turn on our proportional editing. Go to our vertexect option, and then let's just grab some of these votes and go, let's just adjust them in the different views till they match our reference a bit better. Very little adjustment since we've already done it. But you guys get the idea, just slightly matching it all up, making it look good. Okay, that's good. Now we're going to go to our edge select option, and we have a bit more topology in some places than we want. We're going to start here at the bottom shift alt, left click on this edge and then skip one. Then skip an edge. I'm still holding a shift, an old skip an edge. Let's go up to just under the arm and go X. This time we're going to dissolve the edges like so that's looking really good. Also here with the legs shift Alt, left click here, here and here. Just skipping every other one. And go X and dissolve those edges. You can do the same thing with the arms, but you don't have to do that. If you don't want to, I just prefer to have it a little bit less with the topology where possible something like that is okay. Now we're going to go over here and start extruding some of our face holes like the mouth and the eye. Let's turn off proportional editing. Let's enable our x ray. Let's get to our face option and we want to find roughly where the eyes are and I don't worry if you can't get this 100% where the eyes are, but more or less just mark out where the eyes are, turn off the x ray. The thing is because we had x ray enabled, it's probably selected at the back as well. Holding and shift, just left click on the two at the back just to deselect them, so we only have it at the front. The holding and shift, we're just going to left click on the two above it. Let's turn on X ray. Now with proportional editing, we can just go and just move this down roughly over the, the square. And then let's turn off the x ray. Now we're going to go shift Alt and shift Alt and roll our middle mouse button down for the fall off. And let's just round out shift Olt, and let's round it out. Then we're going to go and I is going to inset insets like this, then we're going to go z and just flatten it a little bit. Then we're going to go control plus twice to grow a selection. Let's get our little smooth gizmo here. And just click on it and smooth it out slightly. Now we have this now, but from the side, it's not going to look too good. What we're going to do, we're going to go to a vertex select option. Let's actually select this middle vertex in the very middle. You can follow the circle around like this. Just grab this one right in the middle. Let's go x and delete that. Now we have this, then we're going to go shift old and left. Click on this edge over here. Let's go into a right orthographic view. Let's enable the x ray. Let's now go and move this edge with it active till it roughly lines up where I is. I'm going to turn this off now. This is go R to rotate it to scale it and we're just roughly matching it up. We have our reference here. We can just select the edges of the circle and just grab them. We have proportional editing and just roughly round them out till they match what we see here. But don't be too panicky about getting it exact, we just want it where our reference says it should be. Then let's get to our front view. If you want to, it's easier just enable your x ray. If the faces in the back distract you, you can just click and drag them and just press H to temporarily hide them. And then in the front, this should be a lot simpler to line up, so I'm just going to grab these edges, turn off x ray, just match them up, like say, there we go. But like I said, you don't have to be dispedantic. I'm just being very finicky with the details. Then I'm going to go old H to unhide that topology. Turn off proportional editing. Let's go to our edge. Select here and then shift left click on this edge. Now we're going to go to our right view. We're going to go to extrude that edge a little bit. Then let's come to the front and go to scale Just a little bit to extrude and to scale just a little bit like this. Then let's roughly go into a right view. You don't have to be in right or graphic, but just hover to the right. Then go z and go wire frame. And then just go and extrude it into the body about this much and go to scale just a little bit, then let's go z and go solid. Now we have this like that, now we're going to tab back out or just go into object mode in your front orthographic view, you're going to go shift A, you're going to go to a Measure options. This time we're going to add in a UV sphere with it. Active, right click, negotiates, move. And then we're going to press to scale this down for now, about this big. And let's go to move it up. Move it right here to where the I is. And then you have to go into your right orthographic view and go and y and move it forward. And we want to place it right here where Y is going to be. Go back to the front, maybe move it up, something like that. We might have to go S and scale it down just a bit, but roughly placing it just inside of here like that. But that's all good. Now we have one, but what about the other one? That is where you can now come with that I selected and come to your modifiers, add modifier search, and get a mirror modifier by typing in mirror. But the problem is, it's mirroring where the origin point is. If you actually come here to the mirror object and click an eye dropper, we can click on the character, and that becomes a center point for this mirror. Now it's mirroring on the other side as well. Now all we have to do is grab this eye on this side and adjust that. And the other one will automatically as well. We have some eyes in place. Let's select our character. Go back into edit mode. Go to our vertex select option. Now we can actually go to proportional editing. We can come in here and just select some of these verts and adjust them a little bit. But at this point, really, this is already looking quite cute. I wouldn't worry too much about all of this. Just grab some of these, just round them out around the eye. Really don't have to go too crazy with anything, Just something like this. In the right view, I might grab the corner of the eye and just take it back just a little bit. And same over here, but like I said, we don't want to go too crazy. Something like this is fine and looks very cute. In edit mode, we're going to go turn off proportional editing. Let's go to a face select option. Let's go into wire frame. Let's just come roughly here where the mouth is. I said wire frame but I meant to say X ray. We're going to go into our x ray. We're going to go into solid. We already are. We want to roughly just select some faces where the mouth is roughly over here. I'm just going to click and select the face, but it selected at the back. I'll try that again. I'll just maybe click and drag just to select some faces. Then turn off the x ray, roughly where the mouth is. If it's selected anything at the back, hold and shift and just deselect. Then in the front view, let's just go back into x ray enable proportional editing. We're just going to go and just roughly move it over where the mouth is and go r to rotate it at a bit of an angle. Let's go ahead and turn off the x ray. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go to extrude to scale. Then we're going to press and Z and roll out proportional editing. Way down it's a little bit of influence, just flatten that. And then go R to rotate it slightly. Then let's go to our edge Select Option and select this edge over here. And go to Scale to move it up. Just edge that comes over here, you should be able to hover over here to the bottom and go control. And you should see that there's a loop that would go around here showing us that we've got good edge flow. Just this corner of the mouth here, we're grabbing, scaling it down. Then we're going to our right orthographic view and we're going to go with proportional editing, growing really big. We're just going to move that back like so and then grab the front of the mouth. Just move it forward a bit. Now in our front view, we can go to our face select, select this face and holding shift select this face. Turn off proportional editing. Then in our right orthographic view, we can go z and go to wireframe. Let's go to extrude into the body. So let's go Y and flatten it a little bit on the Y. And then we're going to go to extrude and Y, take it into the body. Let's go z and scale it up on the Z, like so. Now we have the inside of the mouth, but it's looking a bit weird. If it's too hard to get in there in wire frame, just select all of these back faces and press H to hide them. Then let's go Z back into solid. And now you can see what's going on in here. Let's go to a vertex like option. And then just select some of these votes and just move them up, the one to the top. And then grab these corner ones and just move them down. And we just opening up the mouth space over here like this. If you find the whole mouthing a little bit tricky, you can skip it altogether and just have one slit that is extruded in, but I like to see the inside. I'm just going to grab these two faces here and go eat to extrude a bit more. Now we have a rough inside of the mouth. Now we can go old H just to bring everything back. Now we have a mouth. Now let's go to our vertex elect option. And in our front view let's just go enable proportional editing. Make sure it says over here, connected only, then let's go grab a vertex here at the front. Let's go and move it down. And I'm going to go into wire frame. And I'm just going to try and match that as much as possible to my reference. But don't worry if yours looks good and you're happy with it, just keep it as it is. You don't have to match it 100% to the reference at all. I'm just trying to. You can make it unique. You can make it smile. You can give it whatever facial expression you want. It's completely up to you. There we go. And then in a right orthographic view, if you want, you can come and adjust it. But once again, like I said, if you're happy with it, just stick to where it is. It doesn't have to be matched 100% every time to the reference. Just as long as it makes sense to me, the way this looks right now makes a lot of sense. I'm happy with it, and I think I'm going to leave it where it is. We now have the mouth. And I think that was one of the more harder things to do with the eyes here. Like I said, you can adjust them all you want. You can always go back into object mode and just move the eyes themselves by pressing, if you want to space them differently. But at this point, I think we're doing pretty good. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select a little dude and I want to get to, in object mode, add modifier, click on search and type in sub. Let's get a subdivision surface modifier again. And now he's got some nice smooth shading again. But we're not going to apply it this time, we're just going to leave it as a modifier. Just one thing I want to do is just quickly go into edit mode and just select the edge or a face at the top, then just go with portion of editing. Just bulge it up just a little bit more. But at the moment, I think we are looking really good. Now we have the actual what I would call the hard part. Done by all means you guys can come in here and refine the shapes all you want to. You think it works for you. But I think we've made it pretty far off this. I'm pretty happy with the shape is cute and plump. I'm really happy of that. In the next part, we are actually going to be modeling the little mushroom at the top of his head. That is, believe it or not, a lot, a lot simpler than modeling the actual characters. If you've made it this far, you've done really well. And like I said, the finished version of this is available in the resources folder. If you got stuck at any point, make sure to reference that and just see how things look if it makes it easier for you. I'll see you guys in the second part where we continue modeling the Mushroom Head. And that's going to be a lot of fun. 11. Model A 3D Character Part B: Now we're in the second part of modeling our little character. Previously we modeled our body, and now we're going to be modeling the top of the mushroom. The way we're going to do this, we're going to make sure we're in object mode. I think there might be something I haven't mentioned before, but I'll quickly mention it. You see this little circle in the middle here? If you go to your overlays, you can see there's something here called Freedcursor. That is just where blender knows where to place things this whole time. The Freedcursor's been in the center, here, in the middle. If you've accidentally clicked on this thing here, the precursor, at any point and click somewhere, it's moved to freedcursor. If you were to go shift a now and add in an object, it's going to add it in the wrong place. If you ever want to reset this freedcursor, you can go shift, you can go cursor to world origin and it goes to the original position here in the center. Always make sure about that. We're going to go shift A, we're going to go to our measure options, we're going to add in a circle. We're going to go to our add circle settings here. Let's come here and let's double this amount. It's 62. We want to go exactly to 64. The reason this matters is because we want to be able to divide it exactly in half to mirror it. Go ahead, make it 64 and go Enter, then close this. Then we're going to go into edit mode. Let's go to our vertex select option and press A, Make sure everything is selected. With everything selected, we're going to turn off proportional editing. If it is enabled, we're go to extrude to scale. We're going to scale it in this much, just having a hole in inside about that big, just smaller than the top of the head. Then we're going to go to our edge select option. We're going to press A to select everything. And then holding in Shift and Alt, we're going to left click and select this edge, and it's going to deselect the whole edge. And while we're still holding in Shift and Alt, we're going to come here and left click in this middle edge. One of these edges running inside, you can see all we have selected are just these little spokes running across like so. But not the two outside edges, the one here and the one there. We don't want those ones active. And with that done, what we're going to do is we're going to press free and we're going to go check her. And we're going to check or de select one more time. Yes, now we've made the selection even smaller, but it's done every second one again. Now what we can do is we can go to our move tool. Let's just quickly grab it, and let's come here and grab this blue arrow. And just go and move it up. Let's give it a nice height like so while we have that active, we're going to go control B to create a Bbl. And we're going to roll our middle mouse button up once to add in a segment, and then we're going to left click. We're then going to hover over one of these edges and go control R. And once you see the yellow line, you're going to roll your middle mouse button 123 times and then double click to add in some segments. Then we're going to deselect and go shift and Alt and left click on the outer edge loop, select all the way around. Then we're going to go Z and slowly flatten out a little bit about this much. Then deselect. Let's grab this inside edge here. If you have to just come to the bottom shift, old left click and it's going to select a whole inside edge. And then we're going to go Z and just flatten it on the Z. Now we're going to tab out into object mode. We're going to right click negotiates, Move. At this point we're going to right or graphic view and we're going to go Z and move it up till the middle of the head. And we're going to go R. And we're going to rotate it. We're going to go and bring it in just roughly here where the head is here. Okay. And then we're going to tap into edit mode. We're going to come to one of these middle edges. We're going to shift Alt and left click on it just to select it. Let's go to our right orthographic view. Let's go enable proportional editing in our right orthographic view. We're going to go and we're going to roll up a proportion just to fall off. And we're just going to pull this out, just create more of a bulge like that. Now we're going to tap back out to make this look even cooler. We're going to go to our modifiers, add modifier, and we're going to go search. I guess first of all we'll probably mirror it's, let's just type in mirror M, I double R and click on mirror. Then go to your front orthographic view. Turn off proportional editing, let's go to our facet. Let's enable x ray and then let's just click and drag and select only half of this. We don't want to go past this blue line in the middle. In our front orthographic view, you can see the origin point is right here in the middle. Make sure you only select half of it and then go X and delete the faces only over here. And then press X and delete just to faces. Now we can see it's mirrors. Let's turn off our x ray tuggle. Let's make sure to enable clipping as well. Now if we grab this and move it edit mode, you can see it doesn't pull apart. Now let's go add modifier and go search and also type in sub and get a subdivision surface. And that's going to smooth things out. Now we can go back into object mode. Now we have this, we've created this gill structure for the mushroom. But what can we do next to make the dome? So what we're going to do, we're going to go shift A, We're going to go to our mesh options. Come down and add in a circle. Let's go to add circle here and just make it 32. That's really important. Go okay, and then we're going to go Z and move it up roughly to where the head is like. So then we're going to go into our right or graphic view and we're going to place it right about here. Then we're going to go into edit mode and go to our vertex like option with all of this active in edit mode in the right view. We're going to go r to rotate it and we're going to match it up to the reference. We're going to go just to scale it up a bit to make it a bit bigger. Then just to move it back, just matches the reference, more or less like this. You can see it's encompassing this. If you go to the top view, you should be able to see that as well like this. And then we're going to go with everything selected in the right orthographic to extrude just a little bit, to extrude out, just like so. And then to scale to match reference. Let's go to extrude out just a bit to scale. If you have to, you might have to go and just move it a little bit along with the scaling just to make it work. Let's go to extrude one more time to scale. Maybe bring it over here, scale it up a bit, then to extrude to scale, let's place it over here to extrude, to scale, to move, maybe let's go one more time. Let's go to Extrude. And with all of these active, we're going to press free', going to go merge at center, so now we have to dome over here. Let's tab back out. Let's right goo siad smooth in object mode. Let's go into our front view. Let's go back into edit mode for the top dome. And let's just go to our face select, enable the x ray and in our front feel, let's just select half of this, it's all perfectly selected In the middle. Let's press X and delete the faces instead of adding a modifier. Again, what we're going to do, we're going to go back into object mode. We're going to turn off the x ray with this half selected. We're going to hold and shift and select the bottom gill of the mushroom and go control J or command J. It's now going to join it together. Now it's going to share that modifier as well. Now we have our mushroom here modeled and it's perfectly mirrored, and it has a subdivision surface modifier. So that's all really good. Let's just grab a vertex select option and enable proportional editing. And in the front view, let's just lightly just edit this here just to match the reference a little bit better. That I think that's looking much better. Now we have the top of the mushroom made which is looking really good. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to select the body again, this a few tweaks I want to make ' go into edit mode and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go shift old left click and select the loop running around the eye. Go control plus a few times just to grow the whole selection so we have the whole selected. With proportional editing, I'm just going to go and scale it up, make it bigger. And then I'm just going to deselect and go shift old left click on this loop out here. And by the way, you don't have to do this, I just want my eyes a bit bigger in my right view. I'm just going to go and move that back a little bit. Like tab back out and I'm going to grab the eye and I'm going to go to scale that up in the front view. I'm just going to go and move that like I'm just adjusting the eye a little bit. Like I said, you don't have to do this. I'm just making it like that because I wanted to look a little bit bigger personally. But this is an optional step for you guys. It's just like the last second decision here to do something like this, which I think will look a bit cuter. Okay, so that's really nice. Now we're going to make sure to save as we've been working. I'd like to congratulate you at this point. As you've now modeled a little Fred character. I'm looking really forward to getting this guy painted and rendered out. But first of all we're going to have to UV unwrap it so we can map the UV coordinates for texture painting. That's going to be in the next part. If you've gotten stuck with any of this modeling. Remember the finished file is also in the resources folder so you guys can look at and see how everything is set up should something have been confusing. So I'll see you in the next part for UV editing. 12. UV unwrapping: Now we're going to be UV unwrapping our little character so we can get onto texture painting in the part after that. It's quite simple and I think at this point we could probably come here to our Ref collection. You can see over here it says Ref. We can go ahead and just turn it off for the V port display as we don't need to see it. Now we've got our little character. You can see under our main collection here we've got circle cube sphere. If any of these have been accidentally placed into the other collection here, like the reference, and you turn this off and it disappears. All you have to do is just take that object left, click on it, and drag it into the main collection. If you see this reference collection, the only two things that should be in there are these two empties. Again, just make sure everything is in this main collection over here. This is all just hidden. Now we've turned it off for the Viewport display. Now we're going take a little character and we're going to join everything to one mesh. If you actually press a to select everything and you go in to edit mode, you can see everything has been mirrored onto this one side. We've done that deliberately. All we have to do now in object mode is just select the head, holding in shift select the I, they're both selected. And then holding in shift select the body. The body is the last thing selected. And if we go control J or command J, it's going to all join together. And it should have the mirror and the subdivision surface modifier by default. Now if we're going to edit mode, this is what we have here is our little character. He is perfectly mirrored. In fact, if we turn the mirror off here, we can see into him for some reason. I find it very funny. I don't know why seeing the character like that. Anyway, that's not the point. I think we can turn that back on and go back into object mode. Now we can get into our UV editing. We have our little character selected. Go into your UV editing window over here. By default you can see it has all of this stuff here because we used default primitive objects to get started with. It's still got that coordinate here, but it's all really messed up. There are two things we can do here with unwrapping this. You can come over here in this window and press eight, just like everything. Then you can press U on your keyboard, so U four umbrella. Then you can come here and click on the option here called Smart UV Project. That Smart UV Project option will automatically unwrap things, you can click on, Okay. And it'll do its best job to break this into pieces and place it everywhere, as efficiently as possible. And this one is good for quick and dirty results. We should actually be able to do this and then create a texture and come over here and paint. It should look okay. But the problem is if we want to come and paint over here, which is also an option, then we can't because we don't really know what, what, because this is really quick and efficient, but it's not very neat. If you want to go ahead and you find UV unwrapping hard, you can just go with this and go ahead and create a texture, right? But if you want to learn how to actually do some proper unwrapping, you can keep watching. And I'll show you another method. It's a little bit harder, but it's not that hard and it does a much nicer job. Let's start by going to our Edge Select Option and deselect everything over here. And let's select a edge on the character body and go control L. Then let's press U and go Wrap. You can see it's now unwrapped it as one piece. But the problem with this is it's really stretched in some places. What we can do, we can relieve that by adding in some seams in some places. If you think back to the beginning of this course, we talked about UV unwrapping. We're going to be using that at the moment. One of the things we can make this arm a separate object. Let's go over town modifiers just to make things easier and turn off the subdivision surface for the Viewport by clicking on a little screen. Let's come over here and holding in shift. Let's just go all the way around the arm like so you follow this loop going around to get to the other side. Then you're going to go control or command and you're going to go and give this a seam. Going to mark seam. Then we're going to come here to the mouth because this is a cavity and it's not going to work very well. You can see over here. Yeah, it's just folding out like that. What we can do as we can come in here and hold and shift and start here in the end. And go all the way around selecting this loop until you get back to the side over here. You can see this is now touching the edge where our mirror ends and it starts mirroring onto the other side. Then that loop, we're going to go control, and we're going to go Mark Seen. Now the mouth will be unwrapped as a separate bit. The inside, we're going to do the same thing with the eye. Just go shift O and left click on one of these loops, we'll select all the way around. We're going to go control and go Mark Sam, I think we can do the same thing with the leg shift. Old left click on one of these loops. Make sure it goes all the way around. Control and mark seam. Then to stop stretching down here, we're just going to go take an edge and go all the way up. Selecting until it touches this red line over here like so. And they're going to go control and go mark Seen. If we were to actually unwrap this thing here as a separate object, the problem is it's going to get stretched out towards the end. If we come here to where the red line starts in the inside here, we're just going to hold and shift and select these edges up all the way to here, this thing unfolds. Let's go to about the tip here, go control and go Mark Seen. Now this will fold open over here. Look at this thing here. If we actually go to our face elect click a face on here and go control L. It'll select only this because it'll stop where the red border is. We now go and we go on wrap. You can see that this thing unfolds like this. It's unfolding over here at this point because we added a seam here as well. If we didn't have that bit there, it would unfold like a cone, but it would be very stretched. If that's all done, let's go to our edge. Let just select any edge and then go control L. So the whole thing is selected. Then let's go, let's go to the Unwrap. Now you can see it's done things a lot nicer now. Things aren't going to be a stretched. If that done, let's just go H over here to hide it. Then let's go ahead and grab the eyeball. Shift Alt, left click in the middle. It's going to loop. Let's go control markem, control L, and then let's go U and unwrap. Okay, let's go H over here to hide it. Let's move to this bit over here. These bits are both really easy. We can just press eight everything with them and just go and go on wrap and unwrap them as well. Here we can see they're not too bad but the mushroom sees the gills here seem to be wrapping over themselves a bit. What we might have to do is just come in here and go shift old left click and just select an edge running all the way along to the end control and go Mark. Now let's press eight, these two items, and let's go on wrap. Now they're looking better. Now let's come over here and go H to hide it. And we can see we've unwrapped everything, now let's go old H to bring it all back. We know that everything can unwrap nicely. One last time, we're going to press Select all of it, and then we're going to press and go Unwrap. Now it's all unwrapped, and we can see that nothing is stretching too badly. Now all we have to do is come over here and grab some of these smaller bits. Just drag over them, control L them. This is optional, but you can just space them a little bit better. I'm just going to grab the control L. If you want to select, just select the vertex control L and it just select the separate bits. Let's grab the body, maybe control L. Let's go to rotate to scale a little bit. Yours might be packed a little bit differently, but just try and get it as efficient as possible. Just moving bits so they don't overlap. Something like this, Yours might be different, but just pack it as efficiently as possible. Now to test it, let's go over here to New to credit texture. Let's go ahead and call it Mushroom Guy or girl, whatever you want. Then when we come to the Generate type and let's make it color grid, let's come over to the width here, let's make it 2048 by 2048. Let's go ahead okay and generate this. Now we're going to go image save As, and let's go to our desktop and just save that Mushroom Guy PNG. Now let's go to our materials. We're going to go ahead and create a new material. Let's call this Mushroom Guy. Now we're going to go to the base color. And let's go and get an image texture. Come to the dropdown, and then click on Mushroom Guy. Now if we go Z over here and go Material Preview, we're going to see this is everything over here. Right now. It is unwrapped and we can see nothing looks to stretch. We can actually read these numbers. No numbers look too big, and no numbers look too small. Now we know we are ready to start texture painting. In the next video, I'll see guys for that as always. Make sure to save and let's just go back to our layout. The next bit will be painting. 13. Texture Painting: In the previous part, we were able to do our UV unwrapping, and we even saved out a starting texture here, just a map here with some colors on it so we can see the layout of our UV's. Now we're going to do a little bit of painting with our little character selected. We're going to go over to our texture paint window over here. Everything is set up for us. If you can't see over here, just go Z and go Material preview. And you should see it just fine over here. We're going to go to this window. Let's just roll back with a middle mouse button to see everything. There's two options like we learned earlier. You can actually paint here on this side and it updates over here. Or you can paint directly onto the character. We're going to paint directly onto the character. Now, one thing we need to actually do real quick is just quickly come up here and go into edit mode. We didn't talk too much about this, but if you scroll over by rolling a middle mouse button all the way to side, you're going to see something here, Mesh Edit Mode. And you're going to come down, this is an option called Normals. And click on this little tab over here with a little line pointing out from a face. And you're going to see these things called normals. And some of them are facing inwards, which is not what we want. So if everything active, we're going to press Alt, Alt. And press, we're going to go and recalculate outside. And it should fix any normal issues we're having. Blender will know where to paint. It doesn't paint inside faces, but the outside, it's just like a directional thing, which we didn't really touch on much because this is a very beginner's thing. But normals are something you can learn more about as you get more advanced of blender. But for now, let's come here to the mesh edit mode, and let's just go turn off the normals. Let's roll our middle mouse button up here just to move over. Let us go back to our texture paint mode. Let's come over here to the top where our color is. Let's come here and change it to like a nice creamy color. You can also come over here under your active tools or workspace. Scroll down and you can go to the brush settings. And under the color picker, you can do the same thing over here. Now let's start painting on the belly of our little mushroom guy over here. You can see it's updating over here. But one of the things we're going to run into is we start painting upwards. We're going to accidentally paint some of the other parts. What can we do to stop that? What we're going to do, we're going to quickly go into edit mode. Just click with our edge, select select any part of the character body and go control L. The whole thing should then be active. And then you're going to go control or command I to inverse the selection. It selects all the other parts and then just press H to hide it. We've pressed H to hide. Now let's go back into our texture paint. Press Z and go Material Preview. Let's go to grow our brush. Now we're just going to go ahead and paint our characters. We're just going to go all the way around and paint like painting the body of our little character underneath as well. All the way around underneath. Then what we're going to do to come over here and we're going to bring down the value a little bit. And we're going to come here to his belly and just paint on his belly a little bit. Let's bring the value down even a little bit more. And then paint here in the middle just to create like this nice belly pattern. Then we're going to take the value and drag it up to make it lighter again. Then we're going to press to shrink our brush quite small. And then we're just going to come here and click and just make little dots. You can vary the size of your brush by pressing, and it's going to be mirroring on both sides. But for now, I don't think it looks too bad. You can see it's symmetrical on both sides. But we're just going to go ahead and make all these little random dots, just like, that's very simple, on the belly like that and it looks very cute. Less, come here to image so far and just make sure to save it. We can make sure we're saving our texture as we're working. Now We have that done, let's go back to our edit mode. Let's press old H to unhide everything over here. Then let's actually just select the mushroom gills. Just select an edge and go control L. Then go control I to select everything else and then press H. Then let's go back into our texture painting. Let's come over here and let's change this to a nice reddish pink color, make it a little bit darker in value. Let's press to grow a brush, and let's just come over here. And we might have to come from the top because of the normal directions. Let's just come here and paint all along here. So we're just going to come here and paint. Let's come and take this value over here a little bit darker. And then come here and paint in the middle like that, just to make it a bit darker. Let's save that image. Let's go back into edit mode. All H to hide, bring everything back. Then let's select the top edge of this dome. Control L. And then let's go control I to inverse selection. Press how. Let's go back into texture paint. Let's go ahead, bring up the value here, let's make it a little bit more red. Let's come here and just paint the top of a dome. Just coming in here, painting the top of a mushroom like that. Then when to come here and make this value a lot lighter, like a bit rosy. Let's go to shrink the brush. Now let's come over here and paint by pressing, just make a few little dots on a mushroom. Very simple. You can make some big ones, some little ones. Just place them randomly around. Just by clicking. Yeah, something like this looks really good. Then let's go back into edit mode. Old H to bring the rest of the stuff back. Let's now just go ahead and select the eyes over here. Selecting edge control L, and then control I to inverse selection and press H. Now we only have the eyes and we're going to quickly go back into our texture paint. Let's make this black. We're dragging down to value. Let's press to grow our brush. And let's just paint the, there we go now are nice and black. Now let's come here image and then let's just go save, Then let's go back into edit mode. Let's go, oh, to bring everything back, the inside of the mouth still needs to be painted. What we're going to do, we're going to go back into texture paint over here. We should be able to find the bit that is our mouth. We can see here, it's not fully painted. In here is going to be this little bit here and yours might be positioned in a different place. You're going to do is you're going to get to your color slot and let's get a pinkish color. You should be able to see here, if you paint the right thing, which is the inside of the mouth, it's right over here just a little bit. Or you could just come in here and try and paint it by coming into the inside here and painting, but we're just making the inside of the mouth pink. Then we're going to come here, image and save. Then from here, you can touch up as much as you want. You can always click on this tab here and then go to the little eye dropper and then sample another color. And then just paint in the rest. You can come in here and actually paint onto the texture surface here, or you can paint directly on to the actual character measure. But whatever you do, just make sure to always go image and then go save as you're working to save that texture. But this is our little mushroom painted. He is looking really cute. So let's go over to our layout. Let's make sure to save. I'm presing control S just to save. If you're ever working in Blender, you can go file and you can go to external data and enable automatically pack resources. Now I've already done this because of the reference that I had in here. But without doing that, if you were to move the blender file, Blender could lose where it is and not be able to reference it, and therefore you would lose the texture. Always make sure to either pack it in or to make sure you don't move where you've saved your texture. Otherwise, blender will lose the location of your texture. But with that all done, now we do have our little character. He's looking really cute now that he's painted. What we're going to do in the next part is we're going to set up some lights, a nice little stage, and we're going to render this guy out and it's going to look really awesome. 14. Lights & Rendering: Now we are finally able to finish off our little character. We've already done our texture painting in the previous part. Now it's just a matter of adding some lights and making a awesome looking render. We're going to go shift A and we're going to add in a plane. Now this plane is sitting right underneath our character here. I'm going to press Z for the time being and just go into the solid view with this plane selected. Let's just go to scale that up, let's make it about this big. Then we're going to go X and scale it a little bit wider. Now we have that done, let's go into edit mode. Let's go ahead and select the edge mode. And select the back edge behind our character. Then you're going to go into your right orthographic view. We have this edge selected. You're going to go to extrude. And you're just going to extrude a few times up just to create this curve like this. Then go to extrude and Z and just extrude it up. Just a very simple shape. Let's go back into object mode and we have this plane selected when the right click and gotides move. Now we can go into our front view. We're going to go shift a, Let's add in a camera, let's go into a right orthographic view of this camera active. We're going to go and move it over here, it's at the front. Whenever you have a camera selected, you can press zero on your number pad and it'll take you into camera view. Now with our camera selected, we're going to press on our keyboard. And then just press your middle mouse button and hold it in. And move your mouse to zoom back. And then just let go and left click. Now let's go over to our render properties. Let's just go to the render engine and let's make it cycles. If you have a GPU, you can use it, if you don't, you can just stick to CPU. It's just going to render a little bit slower. Then you're going to go down to your render options. Let's go here to the Mac samples. Let's set that to 55. This is just the amount of samples or the quality of the render, but because Blender now comes with denoising, even with a relatively low sample rate like this, with the noising, it's worth it. And it'll still look really good. But you'll learn more about what all of the stuff is as you get more into blender. Now we're just going to keep things really basic. As a goal here is just to render our little character now in our front orthographic view. Let's go shift A. Let's go to our light options to add in an area light. And we're going to go move that guy over to the side. And then R to rotate in towards our character. Let's go to our light properties and let's make this 350 under strength. Let's come here to the size and make it 3 meters. Now if we're going to a camera view, we can press Z and we can go to Rendered. Now we can see our character. What we're going to have to do is go control. Well, we're in camera view control or command B. And then just click and drag over the camera just to limit the rendering to our camera. Now it's a little bit more efficient and not as distracting in the view here, but with this light here. We can now come to our light properties, make sure the area light is selected, maybe. Let's bump this up to 450. I think that's looking really good. Let's go to our top or graphic view. By pressing seven. With this light here, we're going to go shift to duplicate, move it over to the side. And then let's go R and rotate it around to face in like so back in our camera view by pressing zero on the number pad, this is what we're going to see. You can now duplicate a slight as many times as you want. You can go shift D again, have it coming from the front at a bit of an angle. Whatever you want to do, it's your character, but generally, a three point lighting system works well with the light we've got currently selected. Let's just maybe take the strength to 300, and I think that's looking pretty good. You can also select your actual backdrop, The plane that we have over here that we created. We can go to our materials. Properties go new, it's called floor. You can come here to the base color and you can change it to any matching color that you think would complement the style and the feel of your character. It's completely up to you how much you want to saturate it, how much you want to take the value down. These are going to be your personal choices with your styling. But I think a nice blue complements the red in our little mushroom guy here. That's what I'm going to go with. Another thing I'm going to do is just select the Mushroom Guy and I'm going to go into edit mode. Going to go to Edge select and just go Shift Alt and left click on this rim here and just go alt S and just scale it in along the normals a little bit. And then double G just to slide it up a bit just so it's folding around a little bit. Like, Let's go back into object mode now. Make sure to save. Let's quickly now go Render. And let's give this a test render by clicking on Render Image. Here we have our little mushroom guy. You can see he's looking really cute with that texture painting. It's really added a bit more complexity to the shape, a little bit more depth versus just using a plane material without doing texture painting. This is our little mushroom guy, I've really enjoyed making this. I hope you guys have too. If you've gotten stuck on anything, make sure to look at the finished file. That's also going to be provided in the resources. But this has been making this at this point I encourage you guys to take this little character. My challenge to you would be to stylize him in a way that works for you. I've shown you the basic concept here, but make it unique. Make them unique. Change the shape a little bit. Go ahead and do the whole thing again, but this time add your own flare. Maybe add some leaves or some fungus. Add them holding a stick. I'd like to see what you guys are able to do with this, and that is really going to be your challenge. On top of what you've learned is taking what you've learned and making it your own. I'll be seeing you guys in the outro where I'll just say goodbye and thank you. That's going to be the next bit. 15. Outro : You've now completed this skillshare course for Absolute Beginners in Blunder 4.0 From here, what you want to do is make your project in, submit it, and share it with other people. Share it with me, I can have a look at it, give you some advice, maybe you can ask some questions. The question you might have if your new skillshare especially is, how do you do that? Once you have completed your course and you've gone through all of the different subject matters here, you're going to go down to this little section here and you're going to see there's about a project resources, a review discussion, and a transcript. The one you want to click on is the project resources if it isn't already active and open. And then you're going to just go over here to your right side and you're going to see something called My Project. Then all you have to do is click here on Submit Project, and you can drag all of the different media into there, like your screenshots, your renders. You can put in some text, give people some information about your work, what your thinking process is. This is always a really important part of learning and working with skill shares. Go ahead, make sure to utilize that. My project section. I'm really glad you guys were able to follow along. There's anything I can improve. Definitely let me know if there's anything in here that you get stuck on. You can always ask for help or even have discussions with other people about what you've learned. I'll see you guys hopefully next time for a Nutter skillshare course. Blender is always developing really quickly. You never know. In the future, I might have to do something for Blender 5.0 I'll see you guys next time. Thank you.