3D Modeling for Beginners with Blender: Create a Chess Set using Professional 3D Modeling Techniques

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this three D modeling course using Blender for beginners. My name is Monica, and I'm a professional three D artist. I have been working with Blender for over nine years, and I have experience working on TV productions and commercials alongside the VFX and animation industry. This course is directed for anyone who wants to learn the basics of three D modeling and the different techniques using professional workflows. In this case, we're going to be using lender as our main software, which is a very powerful program that is also free and open sourced. It has a great variety of tools made for all the three D pipeline, but especially it is a great tool when it comes to creating three D models. I will be giving you a broad overview of the different methods used in three D modeling, and I will cover the basic tools that you need to know specific to blender for you to create hard surface and organic models. And after we've touched on all of these techniques and tools, we will work on a project. You will create a complete chess set by using most if not all of the methods learned throughout the lessons, such as box modeling, edge modeling, the proper use of booleans, the use of curves to create three shapes with volume, sculpting, as well as a plethora of tools that are the principle for building models. You will also be creating some basic materials and textures and learn the basics of lighting to generate a final render of your project that you can later display as a result of your hard work with a final image. So if you're starting in the world of 30 and are excited about knowing more about 30 modeling, especially using Blender as your main tool. This is the perfect course for you. I hope you follow me along this fun journey as you start your process of mastering the creation of 30 models. I look forward to seeing your final chess set or even some different objects that you might come up with by using the methods learned here. Without further ado, let's get into it. 2. Blender Settings: All right, guys. So to start off this scores, we're going to open blender. I'm currently working with the 4.0 0.2 version, but that's not really relevant. If you have a previous version or a newer one, it's going to be completely fine as long as you're working with a version that is higher than the 2.8. Other than that, you're going to be good to go. So the first thing I want you to do is that we're going to set up some preferences that I like having when working with lender. So to do that, we're going to go to edit, and then we're going to open the preferences window. And here, first, we're going to go to input. If your keyboard doesn't have a num pad, I recommend that you check this box that says emulate numpad, and this will allow you to use the numbers that are at the top of your keyboard as your num pad. The reason why this is important is because we use the numbers on the num pad to move around in our viewpard and it's very useful to have them. So if you don't happen to have a numpad, you can just emulate it with your normal numbers in your keyboard. Then if you don't have a three button mouse, you can also emulate it here. But I highly recommend that you get a three button mouse when working for three D. And if you really want to be serious about it, it is really important that you have a good three button mouse because we're going to be using it a lot for moving around different software, not just splendor. So it is really important that you have a good three button mouse. But if you don't happen to have one at the moment, you can always emulate it by checking this box. Then the last thing I want you to do is that we're going to go to the add tab, and here we're going to look up in the search bar for AM. And here, there's one particularly that I like having on, and it is the Amish extra objects. There are a few objects in there that are pretty cool, and I always like having it on just in case you can activate all of them. They're completely free, but they're not activated by default. So here we're just going to be using the Amish extra objects. And that's it for now. We're going to close this window, and now we are ready to go. 3. Disclaimer: Okay, so the purpose of this course is that you're going to be able to understand some of the different techniques that you can use when creating 30 models. So the way that we're going to do that is that we're going to create a chest set. And then for each piece, I'm going to be showing you a different way or a different method to create that particular piece. But before we start learning about the modeling techniques, I do want to do a little disclaimer. And it is that if you see me moving around too fast or do not explaining everything that I'm doing, it's because I expect you to know the very, very basics of blender. And if you don't happen to know them, then I suggest you check my other course introduction to blender, write to everything you need to know about the basics of blender, how to move around, how to navigate the viewport, everything about the interface, how to manipulate objects, how to transform them. All of that is going to be on that course. And I suggest you watch that before this. Because here I want to focus mostly on modeling and the techniques that we use for that, not the viewport, not the interface. Also, if you happen to get a little lost, I will always have the keys showing up here. So everything that I'm doing will always be at the bottom. If I press a key, you will be able to see it here. So that's a good way that you can follow along. 4. Box Modeling: So the first technique that I want to talk about is box modeling. But first, I want to get rid of this camera in the light. We won't be needing those, and I want to focus only on this cube. So what is box modeling? Basically, it means that we will be using a primitive shape, such a cube or a sphere or a cylinder. And then from there, we're going to start adding or modifying the geometry to create different shapes. The way we modify them is by extruding or beveling or creating loop cuts or subdividing the surface. There are many things that we can do to the base models, base shapes. So that we can transform them into something different, right? So here we're going to start with cube. The idea is that you start with a very low polish shape. It only has six phases. And then from there, we're going to start adding more geometry and modifying it. So remember that to modify geometry in blender, we have to do it through edit mode. And to go to edit mode, you press stop on your keyboard, and that way we can start manipulating the faces, the edges, and the vertices. Usually, for box modeling, it's common to use modify only faces or edges, not so much vertices. You can do that, but it's mostly just manipulating the faces. So we're going to go to the face selection mode up here, and that way we can select only one of the faces. And then here maybe I want to bring it up. So that I create a longer cube. And then here I could probably add a loop cut in the middle. So to do that, we are going to press control R on our keyboard, and then you have to be hovering your mouse in one of the edges so that you can see that yellow line. If you stand on one of the faces, you might not get it. So it's better that you stand on the edge that's going to get the cut. If I do it here in this edge, then it's going to go around a different way. But I want it right here in the middle. So I'm just going to click. And then it turns orange. What that means is that now I can drag this cut wherever I want to. I can put it up here, or put it down here. If I just click, then it's going to create that loop cut. But what if I wanted it just right in the middle? Go to go back. I will create a loop cut again. I'm going to click. And if I move it, no matter where I am, if I click, it's going to snap it right in the middle. So that way, I create a look right in the middle of my surface. Then here we can do things to this such as like scaling it, for example, and then I start creating a more interesting shape. That's what box modeling is all about. It's all about manipulating and changing the pre existing shape into new shapes into new models. So basically here I'm just scaling that scaling that down. I'm sorry. And then I can do other things. So for example, I can select this phase up here and I can extrude it. So extrusions are usually just extending a phase on its This is a longer concept, but basically along it's normal. So basically what it's doing is that if I extrude it by pressing, It will go up just like straight up straight for where it's facing. So I'm creating new geometry this way, and that way, I'm creating new phases that I can manipulate as well. So for example, I can now use this phase over here and extrude it again. And that way, I'm creating more and more geometry. I could create a another loop cut, move it here, and then I could probably maybe scale this up, move, move it up, you know, do different things to the object. Now, here, I'm just creating a very random shape. I'm not following or trying to do something in particular. Another thing that you can do is beveling. So for beveling, basically, you can select the edges, that you want to bevel, and it means that you will create a softer edge. So it doesn't look as hard and sharp. You want to soften it out and to do that, you create a bevel. To create a bevel, you can press Control P and then drag down your mouth, and then you will see that it creates a bevel. You can add loop cuts before finishing your bevel before clicking again. I'm just dragging my mouse. I can add more loopcuts in the middle by scrolling up. So if I scroll up, then that way, I'm creating more and more and more loop cuts in between. If I scroll down, then I can go back to zero loop cut. Right here, I maybe want maybe two loopcut and then you can drag up and down to change how much you want the beble to be. Something like that when you click, that's when you finish doing your bevel. So that's a very useful tool that we use a lot for softening the edge, so it doesn't look as sharp. Another thing that you can do is inset faces. To do that, I'm going to select this phase over here, and then I'm going to press and that will create an inset. So basically I'm just adding an internal phase, and maybe now I can extrude this, and then I get something like that. Now, another way to do an inset, maybe let's use this phase over here is to extrude it and then immediately scaling it down. This also creates an inset. This method, it's a little more you have to be very concentrated because if you extrude it by mistake, and then you don't scale it down, you will be adding errors to your geometry. So I always recommend doing insets with the shortcut instead of just like a normal extrusion. But yeah, you can do as many things as you want. You can now maybe drag this to somewhere over here, create more loop cuts, and then you can scale them up, maybe even rotate them. That's very weird. I don't like it. But yeah, you can do many different things that's how box modeling works. It's just from a cube or a sphere or a cylinder or a cone. From that very basic shape, you can start adding more and more geometry and start creating different things that will give you a different shape. So that's it for this lesson. 5. Edge Modeling: So the second technique I want to talk about is H modeling. Edge modeling is another type of polygonal modeling like box modeling. But instead of starting from a cube or a sphere or a three D primitive, we're actually going to start from a single polygon. And the reason why is because from a single polygon, we can start creating more by extending the edges, creating more faces, and we have a little bit more control about the phases that we're creating. Since we start from a single one, we know exactly what are the faces and the edges and the elements that we are manipulating. This can be a little harder to do than box modeling. You have to be more careful when you're working with edge modeling. Since creating, you need to really know about the topology that you're doing, about the phases that you're creating, that it makes sense that you don't create errors in the geometry. But it's actually very useful because you have more control about what you're doing. You can get more details, you can be more accurate when you're creating a surface the way you want. Now, this is mostly used when you're creating characters or automotive models like vehicles and things like that because you have a better control of the polygons that you're creating. I'm going to explain exactly how that would work. Right now, we have a quebe but we don't really need a quebe this time. We're going to actually be using a plane. So I'm going to get rid of this cube at a plane. Then I want this to face to the front. So I'm going to rotate it on the x axis 90 degrees. And that way, when I press one, I can go to the front view. And right here, I do want to create a very random shape, but I do want to explain a couple of tools that are mostly used when working with edge modeling. So right now I'm going to go to edit mode. And right here, so the basic concept of edge modeling is working with edges. And so right now, I'm going to select this edge at the top, and I'm actually going to extrude it. So just like we can extrude phases, we can also extrude edges. By pressing, I can create a new phase. Basically, I'm extending that edge. If I want it to be completely going up, I can just press Z so that it goes exactly on the C axis. But then the theory here is that we are going to move these edges and vertices around to create a new shape. So I can drag this, move it, rotate it, scale it down. And if I want to, I can also modify single vertices to create a different shape, right? So basically, what this is doing is that we're creating more topology based on a single polygon. That way I have some sort of like more control over the edges that I'm the faces that I'm creating with the edges, with the extension of those edges. So I can create some sort of, I don't know, very random shape. I'm kind of doing like an arc right here. Extrude it one more time, rotate it, scaling down. You know, I can just create a random shape. Ideally, when you're doing this, you have a reference that you really know what you're aiming for. Just doing it out of like with no reference at all. It's kind of hard to create an accurate shape. So it's recommended that you have a reference when you're doing this type of modeling. Right now, I just want to show you the tools. So I'm actually going to Move this a little more, maybe create one more. Then I want to rotate this one like that. Let's say this is the shape that I've got. If I go to my perspective view, you will see that this is a flat surface. From here, we have to start moving the vertices in other axis like different axes to actually give it volume so that it looks three D. So one thing we can do is maybe grab all of these edges right here and move them to the front. So if I just grab them and move them to the front. Now I start getting a three d kind of shape. It's not completely flat. I could maybe even grab all of this line. By the way, I selected all of them by selecting the first one and then pressing Shift, double click to wait. I think it's just If you just double click my bad with you're going to select the edge loop like that, and I can probably extrude this as well. So it's not only extruding one edge at a time. I can extrude a couple at a time. If I extrude it and just bring it to the back. Now I start creating a more interesting shape. Now, what's another thing that you can do when doing edge modeling? You can you can connect all these different edges with other tools. So I'm actually going to grab the edge right here. I'm going to extrude it down. And I'm going to create a cut. So just because we have a phase, just like what we did with box modeling. You could create a cut by pressing Control R, and then it's basically works the same. I'm just doing it for one single phase instead of going around different phases because this is not connected to anything else. So it'll be creating a loop like a cut for one phase only. So I'm going to maybe create a cut over there. Let's say I want to create a phase that's connecting from this side over the side. What I'm going to do is I'm with shift, I'm going to select both edges. And then I'm going to go up here to where it says edge and there's an option called bridge edge loops. By click on that. I'm creating a bridge between this phase and this phase by joining it with one single phase. So then we start closing that gap. Now, what can we do here? It's important that when you're doing edge modeling, you are aware of the geometry, right topology, because you can start generating a lot of errors and that's not good. The ideal situation is that all of our faces are made of four edges, four vertices. You can also have faces that are that only have three vertices or three edges. But it's ideal to have it as just like a quad. That's what we call it a quad. It's basically four edges, four vertices that create a face. If you have a phase that has more than four vertices, that's an error in topology and we don't want that. Let's say if I want to close this gap over here and just create a single phase that would generate an error because I would have one, two, three, four, and five edges, and we want it to only have four. What can we do here? We can probably just create a loop cut underneath. If we want to finish closing this gap here. And then we're going to repeat the same process, bridge it, and then bridge it here as well. Just like that, you can start creating that three D shape. Now, you could probably grab these edges right here and maybe push them to the front to create more like a circle kind of like shape circular shape. And then just like with box modeling, now that we have these joint faces, I can create a loop cut here, maybe scale that as well, you start doing different things. So basically, that's what edge modeling is about. It's about from one single py, start creating a three shape. Now, we will be using a combination of box modeling and edge modeling. Sometimes when we're creating different models. It's not like you can only use one particular method. You can join them, but this is the main idea that when you're doing edge modeling, you are modifying the geometry with the edges instead of a whole shape. I hope this was all clear and I'll see you on the next lesson. Okay. 6. Booleans: So the third method I want to talk about is boolean modeling. Boons are basically operations between two or more meshes to create more complex three D models. It is actually one of the easiest ways to create these complex shapes that otherwise would take us hours to achieve and it's very beginner friendly. It's a very easy method to do. Now, there are three main bulon operations that we can do. They are difference union and intersection. Now, I will go through each one and I will show you how we can create boons within blender. Right now, I'm going to get rid of the cube again. Because I want to start with a sphere. So I'm going to add a U V sphere, and this is the main shape that we're going to be working with. Now, to add bullions, we need to add what is called a modifier to our three model. A modifier can be added in the right panel of our window. Right now we are in the object in the property stab. We want to go down to the modifier stab, which is like this tool icon right here. So I'm going to click on there. And here we can add a modifier to this particular object. Modifiers are applied to one object in particular. So you have the object selected and then you can add the modifier. I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to the generate tab, and here I'm going to look for bullion, it's over here. So I'm going to click there. And now we need another object to do the operation with because remember that these operations are between two different meshes. I'm going to go back to my viewport, and I'm going to add a cube. Now, I'm going to go to the front view, and I'm going to place this cube somewhere where I want the operation to happen. So let's say I want to remove a corner of the sphere. I'm just going to place my cube over here. Maybe I want to scale it down so that is not as big. Go back to the front and maybe place it over here. Now, we have two objects. They have to be touching each other somehow so that it's actually a bulon. Otherwise, you can still do the operation, but it's not going to be doing anything really. They need to be touching each other. And now here, I'm going to start, let's see. So I'm going to grab the sphere, and this actually start with the difference that is right here. You can see the three operations that I was talking about, intersect union and difference. So right here, this is the object that has the modifier. The sphere has the modifier, not the cube, the sphere. And I'm going to select the cube as my object to the operation with. So one way you can do it is that you can click here and look for the mesh. Now, if you have a lot of other objects, it might be easy to just type here the name and find it. But you can also select this y drop. And select the object on the scene that you want to use. So in this case, I'm going to select the cube, and you will see it here. So right now, the operation is basically substracting the cube, the shape of the cube onto our sphere. Now, to be able to see the operation, And you can still modify this and move this around, and the operation will be wherever I set my cube. But if I definitely am sure about it, and I know this is the right spot where I want to do the operation, I'm going to apply the modifier. So to apply the modifier, you go to this arrow over here next to the camera icon, and then you're going to say, apply. You can also press Control A to do it. And nothing has changed apparently, but it actually has because now if I move this cube somewhere else, you will see I have created a hole with the exact shape of where the cube was setting. So I'm creating that I'm like substracting that geometry from my sphere. So that's one way to substract. Now, I'm going to move the sphere to the left, and I'm going to add a new sphere so we see another operation. I'm going to again add a bullion modifier. I'm going to place my cube in a similar position. But now I want to use the union operation. Again, I'm going to select the cube. That's the one I want to be using, and I'm going to apply it. So again, nothing seems to have changed. But now, if I see it, if I move the cube around, I'm going to select the cube, and I'm going to move it. I have a new cube, but not really. It's just new geometry that I have added to the sphere. So as you can see, this is now a single object. If I go to edit mode and I check, you'll see this is a single object and all of these vertices are attached to the new faces. So I'm going to move this to the left again, and we're going to do the last operation, which is the intersection. So I'm going to add a new sphere again, grab the cube, similar position. And then I'm going to add the modifier, and I'm going to select the intersect operation. I'm going to select the cube as my object. And now the sphere seems to have disappeared. But the reality is that now I'm creating an object that intersects perfectly with my cube. If I apply it and I move the cube, you will see that I'm basically having the only part of the geometry that was intersecting with the cube. So these are the three different operations that you can do with bullions Now, this is amazing to create holes. Sometimes you need a very sharp, you know, border like this cube. Sometimes you need a round it, a very circular surface, and sometimes doing it from the main sphere and trying to move the vertices around is just a pain in the head. So this is a great way to achieve those results. I do want you to be mindful though about the geometry that this is generating. If I go on edit mode and check how this topology is, it's actually pretty messed up. This phase over here has way way more than four vertices. And remember that we don't like that. We don't want it to have more than four vertices. So if you are planning on doing something for animation or something that you want to maybe have a very clean topology, this is a very bad way of having topology, and you would probably have to go back and try to fix this topology so that it's accurate and it's better than what it is here. But for the main part, this is actually useful for Um, other things. If you don't really care about having a clean topology and you just need the shape for whatever reason, it is very easy to achieve. You can do this with as many objects as you want. They don't have to be just primitives. They can be any model that you have, but it's always going to be through the ban modifier. So that's it for Bolons. I will see you on the next video. Okay. 7. Curves Part 1: So now that we've covered some of the polygonal modeling techniques that we can use to create a three D shape. I now want to go through a very different method that we can also use to create 30 models that does not use polygons at all. It doesn't use faces or edges or vertices because it works pretty differently. What I'm talking about is creating three D models with curves. So with curves, there are so many things we can do to create a three D model. We start with a curve, and then we can create different modifiers or do different things to our curve so that we can generate a three d model. So there are different types of curves that we can use. I'll try to show you a few of them and how they are different. But basically, they work the same when creating curves for the purpose of three D modeling. It's just that they're built differently mathematically. And so the way that we are going to modify them is going to be a little different one to each other. But in general, these are pretty useful tools to create simple models and to create surfaces that don't require much detail. So let's get into it. So we're going to get rid of this cube because we don't need it. And now I want to go to the top view, and from here, I'm going to start creating the curves. So to do that, we're going to press shift A. And instead of adding a mesh, just like what we've been doing so far, we're actually going to create a curve. So there are different kinds. That's what I was talking about. Besier and nerve curve are basically the two kinds that we can use here. Nerves, by the way, means non uniform rational basis plan if you are curious to learn more about it. Um, but basically they differ in that they're mathematically built differently. So I'm first going to create a baser curve to show you how it works. Okay. So when I click on B here, I get this curve right here. Now, if I go into edit mode, you will see that this curve has two handles this one and this one right here. We can add basically there's going to be a handle for each control point for each they're similar to vertices in that they're like a single point, but they're not really vertices. They are points that will construct our curve. Basically each point will have a controller, a handle that will allow us to manipulate the curve. So right here, if I select this point right here and I move it. The curve is going to move with it. If I rotate it, then the curve is going to change direction, and then you can also scale it and see how that affects the curve. Now we can also modify this one and rotate it and do things to it. But it's basically that we are going to have points, and for each point, we're going to have a handle that would allow us to modify the curve. Now, there are some things that you can do for a bezier curve. One is that you can extrude the each point to create more points. Just like when we were doing polygonal modeling, you extrude with. If I press and I move it, now I'm creating an extension of the curve. Now, you might not want this to go this way and that's when the handles come handy because you are going to change them to change the direction of the curve. Another thing you can do to base your curves is that you can select two and then or all of it if you want to. But you can select a portion as well and subdivide it. So if I right click and hit subdivide, now this is going to generate a point in between those two other points that I had selected. And this will allow me to maybe manipulate it even further to get a different shape. One last thing that I want to show you with the sire curve is that you can change how the handles are being modified. The way to do it is by pressing V on your keyboard. If I press V, I get a menu for changing the handle type. Right now, we are on I think it's I'm sorry. Is the aligned version. That's the one that comes by default. Now, if I go to automatic, what this is going to do is that it's going to flatten the Kind of like the handle so that it's a little easier to manipulate from there. But again, it works similar to what we had before. The one that it's important to notice here is, again, I'm going to press V, and there's one called free vector or free work pretty similar. So I like working with free, and this will allow me to manipulate the handles individually. That means that if I move this handle by itself, it's not going to move the other handle. Now, if you compare it to maybe the one that we had here, if I chose to move just one of the handles, it will always move the other one as well. So having a free manipulator, will allow us to create sharper corner so that it's not super smooth. So I'm going to show you maybe here. I'm going to make it free. Then if I want this to be a very sharp thing, I could probably just do something like this. And then I can have that corner that's very sharp instead of having a very rounded and smooth curve. Now, curves are a big world. I'm not really going to go much into detail here because they're there are so many things that you can do with them and there are so many things that go into understanding how this works. But you can play around a little bit with them, be more familiar with how working with these curves works. Because you can do so many things. All right. So now that we know how baser works, how baser curves are manipulated. I'm going to leave that one there. I'm going to move it up. And now I'm going to add a nerve curve. So a nerve curve, this is the one that we get by default. But when I go into Em, you will see that it's pretty different. Our control points are not on the curve itself, but they are like Yeah, they're very offset it, and it can be a little tricky to manipulate this. But basically, you can see if I move a control point manipulating the curve. And then I can also I can extrude this just like we did with the sire curve to create more of around the shape there and you can start creating that, start manipulating them. I will say this is a little harder sometimes to create the shape that you really want. But it's another method and it's another option that we have here. All right. So this is the nerve curve. Now, there are two other things that are useful here. You got the circle, and this basically it's similar to a baser curve, but it's a circle, it's closed. And this is also useful. If I go to edit mode, you will see that we have the handles, I can manipulate it, change this a little bit, you start creating funny shapes. I can also change the the handle type. So to make it maybe sharper or something, you can start doing things like that. So this is pretty useful. And then we have the path. So the path is basically going to be a straight line that works as a nerves curve. But what's cool about it is that initially it's already a line. And sometimes it can be easier to change when you're starting from this point instead of starting from a curve. So if we go into it, you will see these control points over here. And they look as if they are right on the curve. But in reality, they work just like nerves. If I move it up, see how this is very sharp. This is creating a triangle, but the curve is actually happening down here. So this is another method that you can start a curve from. And then you have this. So I'm creating a random amount of curves, but you might be wondering, Okay, where's the three d model? How does this work? Well, there are a few things that we can do here to use the curves as a starting point, and then from there we can create different three D models. I'm actually going to get rid of all of this. Oh, by the way, there's another thing that I want to show you that you can do when creating a curve. I'm actually going to subdivide this and move this up. Let's say I extrude this here, rotate it. And what if I want to close this curve, you can actually do it by selecting the first and the last points. And then just hitting F. And that will close that curve. Now, you need to manipulate the handle so that they are the shape is something more like you want. But you can close a shape curve by pressing F on your keyboard. All right, so I'm going to get rid of this one. And now I actually want to go into the creating of the curve. Now, of the three D model. I feel like this video is being a little long, so I think I'll leave it for the next lesson. 8. Curves Part 2: Okay, so now we're going to actually start creating 30 models with our curves. Now I'm going to create a baser curve just like we did before. And then one useful thing that we can do here is create wires or create stylized hair from a curve, and it's actually pretty easy to do. So right now, I'm going to maybe modify this curve a little. So I'm going to move this here, extrude it, do a very random shape. That it is a little a little more fun. Let's do something here. Okay. So I'm going to go into the perspective view. As you can see to have a flat curve. If you just want it like standing on the floor, you have to be in one of the orthographic views. So like either the front or the top or the side, whatever it is, if you want it flat. If you want it to have different heights, you can just move into perspective mode. And then you can just move it around if you want to create another vertice another control point, I'm sorry. Um, and you move it, you might think you're doing it on the ground, but not really. You are doing it above. So yeah, you got to be careful with that. But let's say we have this cool curve over here and we want to make this a wire. We can do that by going into our properties, window over here on the right, and then we're going to go to this curve icon right here that says data. That's where we want to go. If we hit there, and then we go to geometry. Here we're going to be able to give this some thickness. To give it a thickness, you go to geometry, and then you go to Bevel, and here you can increase the depth, and then we start creating a tube. Look at that. It's pretty awesome. You can make it thinner or really, really thick. But basically, you're going to modify it with the theft. Now, another thing you can do is to change the resolution of our ends, and not just the ends basically going around the whole curve. But as you can see, this looks very blocky and we can change that with growing the resolution. If we add more resolution here, we're going to get a smoother circle. As well as just bring it down to make it even just like a square, so you can do it however you like. And then another thing that you can do is that if you feel like this is very blocky. So let's say this curve over here, you can see that it's very, very blocky. You can change that if you go to active spline, and then here you change this resolution instead. So if you add more resolution here, you're going to start adding more divisions along the curve. So it's different from the one that we had here. Now, another thing you can do is that you can fill in these caps because right now they're whole, and we don't want that. Or maybe you do, but in this case, you can also just cover them by feeling the caps over here. If you click that, now we have a and So that's one thing that you can do with curves. Basically, you can create thickness from that curve. Now, what's the cool thing about it is that if I want to modify it, this is not geometry. This is not a polygonal model yet. I can still just modify the curve and the thickness is going to go with it. All right. So it's not just this is not geometry at all. I can modify the curve and it's going to modify my fake geometry with it. So that's actually really, really helpful. Another thing you can do is that, let's say you want this part to be thinner. To do that, you're going to select the point where you want it to be thinner, and then you're going to press alt and drag your mouse and you can make it thinner or make it even thicker. But if you want the individual sections to have a different thickness, you're going to do it with pressing alt on your keyboard. You can have things like that. Make this very very thick, and you can start being really creative with this kind of thing. Um, okay, so I'm going to create a new curve. I'm going to move this a little bit away. I'm going to create another besar curve. And then here, let's say, I'm just going to extract it a little bit, that it's a little different. Okay. Something like that. Cool. So another thing you can do is that instead of having a bevel like we just did, is that you can have a round. You can have a particular shape following the curve. So for this, we are going to need another curve. In this case, I'm going to use the circle, to make it a little smaller. And I'm going to select the curve that I want to generate, and then I'm going to go to bevel again, but go to object this time. And when I hit that, I'm going to select the circle. As you can see, what this is doing is that it's kind like putting the circle across the whole curve, and that way it's creating the thickness. Now, this is very large, so you can scale it down, that is not as big. And then I'm actually going to move this a little to the side so we can see how this can be really useful. And it is that you can get a circular shape just with a normal level. So the cool thing about it is that we can manipulate this curve, and this is going to change. So if I select this and then I start changing it a little bit. I can start creating some different shapes that will go along my curve. So again, you can create the shape that you want, and that's going to be going along the curve. That's another method that you can use to change the bling. Then lastly, I'm actually going to move this over here and I'm going to create another version. Again, I'm going to use a base your curve. Let's change it a little bit. Cool. And so with this one, I'm going to be using the other type of beveling, which is the profile. So if I go to profile, and then I start adding some that. You will get that. But you can manipulate this curve to change that profile. So if I start doing things like that, and maybe like this, you can start getting really nice results, you can play a little bit with it and it's basically doing it for quarters. So it's like a square, and then it's mirroring that. So whatever is going up here is going to be repeated four times. You can use and create as many points as you want to change to change that curve, and we can have something like that, which is really, really cool. That's one way to use curves to generate 30 models. It's useful again when creating wires or tubes or pipes or hair. There are many uses for this particular method. Now in the next video, I want to teach you another thing you can do using curves, and that's actually what we might be using for our project. So stay around. 9. Curves Part 3: All right. So I'm going to show you another cool thing you can do starting from curves to create your three D models. And this method is used a lot when you're creating glasses or vases, or, you know, like wine glasses or cups, anything that's like a similar shape to that. This method is really, really useful. So I'm going to show you by creating, again, a baser curve. And actually, I'm going to rotate this so that it's facing up. So I'm going to rotate it on the y axis 90 degrees. And then, actually, I wanted it the other way. So rotate it on the y axis eight and 180. And I'm going to go to the side view. So here, without moving the points that are right in the middle. I'm going to subdivide this to create a point in between, and then I'm going to subdivide it again to create more points every time. And what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to move this a little bit to the side. What I want to do here is like the profile of a glass or a bottle, something like that. So I actually want to move this, rotate it like that. And I create some sort of like vase something like that. You can imagine the profile of a vase. And what we're going to do is that we're now going to spin it around to create our three d model. You might be wondering, how are we going to do that? I'm actually I am happy with this very basic shape, and I'm going to select it, go to modifiers, and then here I'm going to generate a screw modifier. Once I do that, this is going to be a little crazy. What this is doing is that it's rotating that curve, 360 degrees to generate a surface. Right now, it is doing it on the wrong axis, and so we get this kind of disc, and that's not what we want. We're actually going to do it on the x axis. And then sometimes I don't know exactly which one it is, so I always try it. But look at that. We've got a base by just spinning that curve around. Now, the cool thing about this is that again, you can go back to your curve and manipulate it from there. So you can make it maybe a little more like that. You can create a new point and maybe make this a little bit like that. It seems like o is working with pottery or something like that. It's really, really cool and it's very useful for when you're creating trad models that are similar to this. So again, wine glasses or bottles or whatever it is that you can spin around. This is the way to do it. And it's very, very cool because it's creating that surface for you. Now, when you're done, and this is also valid for the previous exercise that we did of creating the wires kind of. Here you can convert this to an actual three D mesh. So how do we do that? We right click on object mode. And then we say convert two, and since this is a curve, we can convert it to a mesh. Once I do that, you're going to see that if I go to edit mode, Suddenly, I do have geometry instead of having a curve, and I can manipulate these vertices just as we were doing before. Now we're not manipulating a curve. We are manipulating vertices and faces and edges and all of the things that we've seen before. And so from here, you can even do more changes to it. So let's say I want to extrude this loop right here. So I Go like that, by double clicking, select the curve, the loop, I'm sorry. I could maybe extrude this, and I'm going to extrude it and scale it away, and then I have a cool thing over there. There are so many things that you can do starting from a curve. So this is another useful tool that we might be using for a project, and I hope you understood how curves work and how they're so useful for creating 30 models as well. 10. Sculpting: All right, so the last method I want to talk about is sculpting. So sculpting is kind of similar to the previous methods that we saw, where we work with a mesh, we're modifying a mesh instead of modifying a curve. But the difference is that we sculpting, we are modeling in a more organic way. And in order to do that, we need to have more geometry than normal. So instead of having a low poly object like what we're working with, We actually need a lot of vertices and a lot of faces in order to manipulate them and create our details. Sculpting is mostly used when creating characters. You can create faces, we can create creatures. There are so many things we can do with sculpting, but it's mostly used when you need a lot of detail or when you're creating more organic shapes. So I'm going to show you a little bit how sculpting works. I'm not really going to go in too much detail. I just want you to notice the difference between working with low poly models and doing that type of modeling like box modeling or edge modeling compared to how you would do it with sculpting. So like I said, we need a lot of geometry in order to be able to sculpt and give detail. So right now, we have a cube that only has six faces, and this is not enough for sculpting. So I'm going to add more divisions to it. And the way I'm going to do it is that I'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier, which you can find right here. And this will convert our cube into a sphere. Now, the reason why this happens is because the subdivision surface is always going to smooth our surface. So actually, if I go back to the edit mode, you will see that my cube is still there, but it's not looking as a sphere because what it's doing is that it's dividing into all of the faces. So it's kind of like creating a loop around here, like around all of the axis. And that's why it's dividing each phase into four. Now, if I add a new level, it's going to again divide each phase into four. So now we're going to have more phase. And I'm actually going to go a little high, something like that because I want a lot of vertices to work with. And if we leave it like this, we're not going to be able to sculpt because if you see the real topology, It's still my cube. If I move this verdict, you'll see that I'm moving the whole thing, and I do want the topology to be applied into my object. So the way to do that is that we're going to go to the modifier, and we are going to apply it. That way, now, if I go into edit mode, you'll see that I have a lot of vertices, and now that's my real topology. Now, with this amount of polygons, I can actually start sculpting. Maybe this is a bit too much, but I do want to show you the tools. So there's more to sculpting where you start with a lower version, less polygons, less dense, and then you start adding up as you go as you start adding more detail. But for now, I think this is good to show you how sculpting works. So from here, I'm going to go into sculpt mode. Up here, we're currently in object mode, and I'm going to go back to I'm going to go into sculpt mode. When I do that, you will see that my cursor suddenly changes into this radio cursor kind of where I have two circles. That means that now I'm working with brushes. So brushes modify our topology in an easier way where I'm not selecting a single verdict or a single phase. Instead, I'm modifying a lot of phases at one time. So you can change the radius up here to make it bigger, you can change the string. There are many things that you can change for your cursor and so many things that I'm not really going to go into, but basically, you have the cursor as a brush now. Now, all of the things that you see on your left are going to be the different types of brushes that you can use. There are many things you can do. You can add to I'm using a clay brush, and that means that I'm adding more. Imagine this is clay. Digital sculpting is basically like sculpting in real life with clay. But instead we're doing it with a digital software. Basically, it's just like if I was adding some clay into my sphere, there are many other things that you can add. This has a bigger effect. Now you can go really small and do something like that. There are different methods that you can use. There's this brush that creates a dent almost and see how the topology starts being modified. But I'm doing it a very organic way. I'm not moving one single vertice or one single edge. I'm doing a lot of them at once. Now, I do recommend that if you are serious about learning more about sculpting, that you get a graphics tablet so that you can do more organic shapes because you're using your hands like as if you were painting of as if you were drawing instead of just using it with your mouse. But basically, sculpting is really good to create more organic shapes. You can do more you can create faces, it's really easy to do that here, which sometimes with just topology with box modeling, I'm sorry. Okay. It's a little harder to achieve. It's still possible, but it's going to take you more time. There are different things that you can do here. You can smooth the surface. You can grab some points and move them somewhere else and smooth that out. There are cool brushes like this one where you can start creating like adding limbs to your surface, and then smoothing them out. You can create blobs. So I start doing this, it's going to inflaate that part. There are so so many things that you can do with sculpting. It's really fun. If you want to play around with this, it's like a really nice tool. You can check all of the projects. I'm not really going to go into them. But basically, sculpting is about moving the topology in a more organic way. Now, for the project that we're going to do, we're not going to be really sculpting much. Um, but sometimes it can be useful if you want to move some vertices at once, instead of just moving one at a time, even if you have a low poly model, sometimes it can be useful, but it's mostly used when you have a really dense topology and you can start creating a lot of detail. So that's it for sculpting. 11. Chess Project: Reference Images: All right, so we're finally going to start working with our project. As I mentioned before, we are going to be building a chess set. And for each piece, we'll try to use a different method from the ones we just learned. But we're also going to be combining some of the methods for each individual piece depending on what's more convenient. So for starters, I want you to start a new file. Open a new file, and we're going to get rid of everything that's in the scene because we didn't need any of that. And the first thing we're going to do is that we're going to import our reference images into blender so that we can work better when creating the pieces. And it's important that when you create your reference images that you do it not from the perspective view, but from one of the ortographic views. In this case, we're going to do it from the front view, so we're going to press one and we're going to go to the front view. And the reason why is because if you do it from the perspective, your image your reference is going to be like facing the camera at the moment, so it's going to be rotated and we want it to be perfectly straight on our C axis. So that's why you need to be on the front view. And then from here we can add our images into the scene. To do that, we are going to press Shift A to open the ad menu, and we're going to go down to image and then reference. Here, we're going to be able to open up the folders where we've saved our images. You have access to the images that we're going to be using now. So I'm just going to open one of them. First one right here is B shop. So I'm going to be opening that image, only that. And I'm going to load it in my viewpoart. So once I do that, I finally have this image here. The first thing is that I'm going to rename it in our outliner. Right now, its name is empty, and we're going to have a few of them, so I do want to change this so that it's easier to recognize. So I'm going to name this Ref underscored Bishop. And then this is going to be the reference image for the Bishop. And the reason why I put RF is because then we're going to probably have a mesh for the Bishop and for the other pieces, and it's easier if you have a different name for each one. So now that we're here, we're going to actually change some properties. So to change the image properties, you have to go down to this red box right here, which is the data of the image. And then there's a couple of things that we're going to do. The first one is that we're going to change the opacity. I'm going to bring it down because I like to be able to see through. So I'm going to put like maybe 0.5, or something like that. Oh, I forgot to put on my keys, you're able to see. Cool. So see what I'm doing. I lower the opacity. And then the other thing that I want to do is to place this, place the bottom right where the x axis is so that it's like touching the ground kind There are two ways to do that. We can either move the image just with grab, z and then move it upwards, or the method that I prefer is changing the offset. To move it up. So the offset, I'm going to move it in the y axis, and then move it up so that it's touching the ground. I can come a little closer and see it doesn't have to be completely perfect, but that it is touching the ground. Then from here, we also want to make sure if you have something that is facing front and you really want it that way, you don't want it to see it from the backside. You can change that here so that you can only see it from the front. But actually here I want to have it on both sides. And then this will mess with this later when we start building some geometry. So for now, that's all you need to do. And now, what I want to do is that I want to duplicate this because we want to import all of the images at once. So I'm going to duplicate it by pressing Shift D and then enter so that it stays at the same place. I'm going to rename this one, and this is going to be wait, first, we're going to load the image because I don't know which ones next. So to load the image, first, I'm going to Block the view from the previous one. So to hide it, I'm just going to press the little eye here on the outliner, and I'm only going to be seeing the duplication. So here, I'm going to go into the properties again and I'm going to change the file path. Now, be very careful because you need to do it from this folder over here, not the one that's underneath. The one that's at the bottom, it's going to change the path for this image in particular, but it's going to do it for all our duplicates, and we don't want that. So I'm going to select this folder here to change the path. And I'm going to select the next image, which is the king. So I opened that image. And we don't have to move anything else because I made the images so that they stay in the same place and we don't have to move them around. They need to be centered and they are. So just like that, you changed the image, and now we're going to rename this to be King. Now, you have the bishop and you have the king. You are going to repeat this process for all of the other images. So that's your homework. You're going to import all of the other images. And when you're done, I do want you to first rename this collection to reference images or something that makes sense. Reference images. And then the last thing you need to do is that you want to be unable to select it because we don't want to mess with it when we're modeling. So we can just do that for the whole collection, and to do it, we're going to go to this filter on top. And then we are going to select this icon right here, which is like a cursor, and we're going to click on it. That means that now we activate that toggle here on the outliner and we can disable it. So if I disable that, I'm not going to be able to click on any of the reference images. So when you have all of the reference images here, you are going to do that. And we can now start with our first model in the next video. Okay. 12. Chess Project: Pawn: So right now, you should have something like this on your scene where you have imported all of the reference images. But right now, we only want to have one showing, and it's the one that we will be working on. First one will be the paw. This is the first thing we're going to do. So I want you to disable the visibility of the other images. That way, we're only looking at the paw. And now we can start working here. First, I want to add a new collection on my outliner by right clicking and adding a new collection, and I'm going to name these objects so that all of my messes will go into this folder instead of the reference image one. So over here, we can start. I do want to model this with box modeling mostly. And as you can see, this is it has a sphere has a circular shape. Aon usually is very circular. Starting from a cube wouldn't make sense. In this case, starting from a sphere would make more sense. So I'm going to press Shift A, and I'm going to add a UV sphere. Now, before I click away or I do anything else, you'll see that there's a tiny menu popping up on the left corner and that it says add UV sphere. Here I can change the initial properties of the sphere much easily than if I do it later because it's going to be much much more difficult if I do it later. Here I'm going to add more segments, which are the lines going around the sphere. So I'm going to bring it up to maybe 40, and then the rings are going to be the lines going across. And I want to bring it up to maybe 24 so that we have a little bit more geometry to work with, and it's a little more smooth. Now, these numbers that I chose here. I try to make them multiples of four, but it depends on each scenario. So now that we have this sphere, I'm going to go into edit mode, and I'm going to make sure that everything is selected, but if you're not sure, you can just press A to select everything, and I'm going to scale it down. Now, I will bring it up. Somewhere close our reference image, and then I'm going to scale it up so that we see that it matches our reference. Now as you can see, it's not completely symmetrical on one side to the other. So we can just focus on one. I think I'm going to focus on the side for now on the left side. I'll try to make one of the rings match where the bottom of the sphere is. I'm going to put it somewhere over there. I think that works pretty okay for us. Now, I do want to grab all of these faces down here, and I want to make them flat so that we can strew that down and we can put that at the bottom. So in order to do that, I'm going to select the faces. And you might think that by just cooking and dragging, you will be selecting all of them. But in reality, when we go to perspective mode, you will see that the back was not selected. And the reason why is because vendor only selects by default what the camera is seeing. So anything on the back will not be selected. So in order to change that, we need to toggle our x ray mode that you can see up here if this little icon. And if I do that, the shortcut is A Z, you will be able to make the object kind of like transparent so that now you can drag again and you will be selecting all of the faces that are also in the back. So now I'm going to go back to the normal mode, and I'm going to scale this down in the C axis to zero. So basically, what I'm doing is I'm flattening all of those faces, as you can see there. Now, I'm going to bring this up so that it matches our reference again. So more there. I think that's okay. That's where we had it. And now from here, I'm going to extrude this down all the way to the bottom. So I'm going to hit to extrude, and I'm just going to bring it all the way to the bottom. Cool. Now, from here, I want to start modifying this cylinder over here and create a lot of loop cuts to match our reference. But first, I want to without selecting anything, I want to scale all of these faces so that it matches the width of the bottom. So just by hitting S, I'm going to scale it up. Somewhere around there, I think would be fine. And now from here, we're going to start creating the loop cuts. So I'm going to go back to X ray mode, so I'm able to see my reference better. And now here, I'm going to start adding loop cuts, depending on where the reference is telling me to. So remember that you create a loop cut, we press control R, and then we're going to add a cut on all of our divisions here. Now, you might see that the image has some sort of perspective because we wanted to make sure to portray that it's round. But we are going to focus maybe on just the one at the distance in the center to know where things should be. So I'm going to focus on these points over here and I'm going to create all of the loop cuts that I need. Also over here, I'm going to create one loop. Starting from the bottom, I'm going to select by double clicking the full loop, and then I'm going to make it as wide as I needed to be. Somewhere around here. Same for this one, I'm going to make it smaller. Maybe somewhere there. This one, I'm going to make it bigger. A little hard to see, but you get the idea of where things should be more or less. Then for this one, we're going to make it bigger somewhere there. Then since we need another one here, I'm going to create another very close to the one that we just created, and I'm going to scale that down. Maybe I'm going to bring it up so that we have a more flat surface. There we go. And it's kind of hidden over there, as you can see. So we have a very basic shape right now of our pond, but we still need more detail. As you can see, this is not really matching. It should be more round. There are a couple of things that we can improve. So we're going to create more lopcutsGa start with one over here to create the whitest part. So somewhere around there. Okay. Same here. I'm going to make this bigger. Then I'm going to add one here at the center to make this thinner. I think that's a good start to see how our pond is looking. Now, there are some things that I want to change. One of it is that there are some parts that look very sharp and ones that should be more smooth. So I'm going to change that on by adding more loop cuts or beveling the edges. So for example, with this one, I want to bevel it so it's not as sharp. So I'm going to say control B to bevel, and I'm going to create a Small pebble. Maybe with one loop cut. Yeah. Something like that would be nice. So that's a little more rounded. Now, I also want to add another loop cut over here to have a better shape. Something like that. I want to bevel this outer edge. So Control B and then something like that. And this one over here, I feel like it needs to have more geometry at the top. So I'm going to create another loop cut and just scale it up so that it has a more round surfaces this is looking good. Maybe this one could be a little smaller. And then here I want to bevel this one as well. That is more round, like that. Cool. Now, this looks much better. Now if we go back to our object mode, you'll see that it looks like we can see all of the polygons. One way that we can change it so that it looks smooth is to change how it's shaded. So by pressing the right click, you're going to say shade smooth, and that's going to make our surface look smoother. Now, there are some things that don't look quite right, and it's because there are some things that are still pretty sharp over here. So one way we can improve that is by adding a subdivision surface modifier without applying it. So I'm going to go into our modifier step. Generate a subdivision surface modifier. And just by adding one more level, you'll see that things look smoother and a little bit nicer. If I go into my edit mode, you will see that there are some things that needed to be sharp, like the bottom or this part right here, that it's getting way to smooth way to curvy. So to change that we need to sharpen those edges. And the way to sharpen those edges is by adding more loop cuts. So the closer a loop cut is to the bottom, the more sharp is going to be when using subdivision surface. Now, we don't want to apply it because we don't really want to add all of that geometry because this is dividing every phase by four, and we don't want to have as many polygons because then we can kill our computer and we don't want that. But the subdivision surface helps to visualize things more smooth without really having to apply having those that amount of faces. And it's really cool because then this works when you're rendering things or when you're doing things, they're going to look pretty nice. Now I want to add a little more sharpness here maybe a sharpness over here and also over here. So I'm just adding more and more lopcuts to make things a little sharper. This one right here, I might want to maybe create make it a little more sharp. And then over here, I want to make it sharp as well. And on this sphere on the bottom of this sphere as well. I think that's good also here. I want to create one to make this a sharp. Look at that. It looks already so good. So that's it, I don't think we need to add more levels of subdivision. This should be fine. And it already looks so good, so smooth, is very close to our reference. So yeah, I think we are done with our pun. The last thing I want you to do is to rename it. So I'm going to make this Be is an object, and then P and we are. P is done. So in the next video, we will be starting with our next piece. I'll see you there. 13. Chess Project: Rook: All right, now that we have our pond done. We are going to disable it pacifility because we don't need it anymore. I'm going to change the reference of the pond to the reference of the root because that's our next piece. I'm going to go into front view and then here we're going to decide which shape to use to start. I feel like using a cylinder would be the best option if we start from the bottom up, and that's what we're going to do. For this model, we will be using a mix of edge modeling and box modeling. Mostly box modeling, but we're going to be modifying more edges in this. And this figure, the first thing is that we are going to add that cylinder. And before we do anything else, we are going to change some parameters here on this menu of the cylinder. Right now, we have 32 vertices, which equals to 32 phases going around the cylinder. But this is very low poly for what we need. I would like a higher number that will give us more smoothness on our model. But I also need to keep in mind that at the top, we have these rectangles that are equally spaced. So you need to have a number in mind that helps you create those evenly spaces. I've done the math, and I know that 48 is the right number to use in this case. But I will show you why later. But it is something that you need to always think in advance when you're creating your models. Sometimes I would do a quick test or something because it's something that you need to do like on the first step. So you don't have to add geometry later. That is going to be harder to make it into a circle, make them even. So if you start from the beginning with the right amount of polygons, that's going to be the best thing to do. Now, the other thing I want to do is that if you see right now, the CAP field type is set to Engon. So what does that mean? That means that if I go into Edit mode, you will see that these caps are just one single phase that is component of 48 vertices, and that's not good. Remember that I told you that phases should only have four vertices or less ideally, so this is an eg basically an engon is any phase that has more than four vertices. It's not recommended to have it like that. Instead, I'm going to add the cylinder again, So I get this menu. The vertices it remembers, which one I said before, so it's going to be 48, and then I'm going to change the CP field type to triangle fan. And what that means is that if I go to edit mode now, you will see that it created all of these edges connecting all of these vertices to a verdicx in the middle. Now, this verdict in the middle is also not the best topology, but it's way better having little triangles of phases of three edges instead of one big phase of 48 edges, and that's not good. So this is a better topology to have. So now that we have that, I'm going to go back into the front view. I'm going to select everything and I want to scale it down, and I want it to be like full the width at the base. That's what I'm aiming for. G to make it small, bring it up, and I'm going to put it right at the base. Okay. Because that's what I want to do. Now, if you want to accommodate this a little better, you can select all of these vertices. Remember to be on X ray mode, so you select the front and the back, and then you can move it up however you need it. So somewhere around here would be nice. Cool. I'm actually going to bring this down a little bit to there. Cool. So now, what I want to do go back to the normal mode, and I want to select all of these faces. So again, I'm going to select back to X ray mode. Select the faces at the top. Like that, and then I actually want to delete them. I'm going to press X, and then you will have a couple of options here, or now, I only want you to focus on the first three, which is that you can delete vertices, edges or faces. You can delete individual components, and this is a little more advanced, but basically now we just want to delete the entire pace. I'm going to say delete faces. And now I have a hole at the top of my cylinder. From here, I want to select the loop that goes around by double clicking, and then I'm going to start extruding up To do the shape. So instead of creating loop cuts, I'm actually going to start ex strooting up. I press E Z to lock it on the axis. I will look for the next point where the shape is changing, and then I'm going to scale it accordingly. Something like that. Now, we could also add another one here, but that's something that we will do later. For now, I just want you to focus on the bigger spots, like the wider or narrower spots. I'm going to go up again, scale it down. Go up. Scale it up, go up, Sal it down. Just a very basic shape. I'm going to go towards the middle, scale it down. Go up. I am following the left side instead of the right side because it's not completely equal. But that's okay. Now I'm going to scale it up again. Go. Go up more wide. Again, here. Scale. Go up, scale. The process is just very repetitive, like extrude, go up, and then scale. Now, I'm going to stop right here at the base of the rectangles, and I will do a little pause. So right now, we have the very basic shape of the root And then we're going to start adding more loops because there are some things that we need to start doing. Here, we are going to extrude this one more time. But this time, we are going to extrude inwards. So what that will give us is the thickness of these rectangles. So if I press and I press to scale, I can scale this down. So I'm scaling the extrusion instead of moving it. And then I will see how thick I want them to be I feel like something like that would be okay. Now, here I want to extrude one more time. And I want to scale it. Oops. Something did not work. Okay. Extrude scale, a very tiny tiny extrusion. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I wanted to go down, but I don't want it to go down right where the little tower thing is start. So I'm creating that little edge. And then I'm going to Here. Yes. Here, I'm going to close I'm actually going to go down first, I wanted to have a a little thing going down. So I'm going to go into the X ray mode and I'm going to extrude down. Somewhere around there. And then if I go back, now I want to close that gap, right? I don't want it to be open. So to do that, since we have all I'm going to disable the reference for a second, so you can see it better. Um, from here, I want to close that gap, and to do that, we are going to press F. Since we have all the loop selected. What it will do is that it will create an engon creating an phase with all the edges that I had selected. And now, again, just like we did it with the bottom, we don't want it to have an engon. We want it to be triangle like this one. So how do we do it from here? With the phase selected, you are going to go at the top to the phase menu. And then here there is an option called poke faces. And what this would do that it creates a verdix in the middle connecting all of the other vertices. So that's what poking means is that from an engun it creates a verdix in the middle, connecting all of the vertices. Great. So now that we have that, I actually want to create the rectangle. So I'm going to bring my reference back. And then you will see that we have a reference says, this is half of a like the one of the top at the front, I'm sorry, because it's like looking from the side kind of. So that means that we would have one, two, three, four, but in the back, there's going to be another two of those. So we need six of these. So in order to do that, we are going to select the faces accordingly. Now, that means that we will select four Phases. Then we're going to leave four phases without selecting them, and I'm going to press shift and select the other four phases. And just like that, I'm going to go around. One, two, three, four, I leave empty, and then I select the next four. One, two, three, four, empty, and I select the next four. And we're going to repeat it until we finish. Going around our tower. Let's do that here. And then we have the four as you can see they're evenly spaced. So as you can see, the 48 polygons allowed us to have evenly spaced like the rectangles being evenly spaced. So that's something that you need to be mindful of when you're creating this. Now, this will not be exactly as a reference, but that's okay because the reference is not really accurate. So from here, I'm going to go up. And I'm going to put them over there. Cool. So now we have our basic shape of the rook. Now, I'm going to shade smooth this. And as you can see, it looks really weird, and that's because we don't have enough topology so that it smooths out. I'm going to add the subdivision surface modifier. And as you will see, the tangles become very smooth. Very rounded, and we don't want that. So we're going to make sure to fix all of these issues because it's too smooth. So here, I'm going to start I'm actually going to disable it for a bit. So by pressing on this little computer, that means the display. So I don't see it right now. And I want to start adding loop cuts where I want it to be sharper. So first, I'm going to select the one over here, and I'm actually going to bevel it. Let's see. Something like that. So it's a little more smooth. Okay. Ally to two, like that. Now, I want to create a loop cut here because I want that to be sharper. And then same here. We want those to be sharp. Actually, that one, I don't want it. Keep that one. And then here, I'm going to bevel it again so that it's a little smoother Something like that, maybe even scale it up that it matches our thing better. Here, I want to start adding another one. Something like that. Then at the bottom, it's always going to give us struggle because we want that to be super sharp. I'm going to create another one. Now here, maybe let's add a new one. I'm going to activate the x ray mode to see how thin it should be. And one over here as well, so that it's a little more evenly space. Here, I want to bevel this one. Not that much, one. Because I want it to be really smooth. And then this one, I also want to pebble. So let's add something like that. That's cool. Nice. So now I'm going to activate it again. And this part is almost fixed. It looks pretty nice. Maybe the one over here should be a little more sharp. So I'm going to add that like a little edge over there because I want it to be way sharper. But that looks pretty nice. Now, the rectangles are still not great. So that's what we are going to fix. So first thing, I want you to one thing we can do is, for example, add a lot here and bring it up so that the top is sharp. Now, what happens with that is that we would need to do it with all of them, and that's not ideal. So what can we do instead? I'm going to select the faces at the top. Oh, okay, I need to go into x rate mode. I wasn't in X ray mode. I'm going to select the faces at the top. I'm going to actually bring them down just a tiny bit, and then I'm going to extrude all of them at once. So that they match our reference. Now, you can see that made it better. But what happened? The bottom is still in rough. We're actually going to go a few steps back. I'm going to select all of this, and I'm going to bring them down. That's the amount that I want at the bottom. Now, I select the ones at the top. If this is really hard for you, you can select the vertices instead, and I'm going to bring them up a not yet to the top. Then again, I'm going to extrude them up. Right? So what I'm doing is that I'm creating a loop cut here, and then a loop cut at the top by extruding by doing them all at the same time. And then let's see how that's looking. That's looking so much better. Now, another thing that we can fix is how rounded this is. I don't like it. So what we can do is that we can create another subdivision that goes around. See how it does it. So I'm going to bring it closer to the edge and then closer to the edge here as well. And it will do it for all of them because they are connected. And look at that. It looks so much better, so so much better. And I feel like a rook might be done, guys. It looks very smooth. It looks nice. Maybe we can sharpen this a little bit. Here, I'm going to add one here and scale it down. I want it to be a little more sharp. That looks fine. And yeah, basically, the roof is done. I don't feel like there's anything else we should do. This is very smooth if you want it to be more sharp, which would actually be a good idea. I'm going to create another loop cut and try to bring it all the way down as much as I can. So that we get that little sharpness over here. And I think we are done. Again, you need to rename this. This is going to be our object brook here. That's it. It is done. I'll see you in the next listen to do our next piece. Okay. 14. Chess Project: Bishop: All right, so our next piece is going to be the Bishop. So for the bishop, we are going to be doing something similar than what we did with the pond because the top of it is a little it looks like a sphere kind of, and that's going to be a more complex shape. So we're going to start from there and then go all the way to the bottom. Now, this piece right here has this hole, and we are going to be doing that with bullions So since we are doing booleans, we are going to be needing a little more topology than usual, and I'll explain why. Let's add that UV sphere, and here we're going to change the amount of segments and rings that we have. To something bigger. Now, we don't want it to be super dense, but it definitely needs more topology than this. And it's because when we do bullions the shapes can get a little tricky and sometimes they need more topology than usual. In the end, the topology that it creates is not going to be the best because we're going to end up with faces that have more than four vertices or cuts that are kind of weird. And we're not really going to worry about that. But we definitely need more topology at the start for our sphere. I'm going to add something like maybe 48 segments around, and then the rings, I can do something like 24. I like to see that the center is a little squared. I feel like I could add maybe a few more. Let's do 60 and then let's do 32 here. Yeah, I like that. That's enough topology for what we need. Now I'm going to go into edit mode, scale this down and bring it up closer to our head, and then I'm going to try to make the whitst part of my sphere close to the widest part of the head. Then there are a few things that we can do here. The easiest one would be to scale it on the z axis so that we try to match the shape, and it actually works quite well. Something like that. And there's another thing that we could use that I want to explain right now, and it is the proportional editing tool. So with proportional editing, we'll be able to modify not only our current selection, but it's going to have some sort of like a range that is sort of like a gradient for how it is affected. So let me show you, I'm going to go into X ray mode. I'm going to select a few vertices down here. If I try to scale this now, it's only going to scale the selection. But if I instead choose to have the proportional editing tool activated, which, by the way, the shortcut is. Now I try to scale, see how I have this ring around my cursor. That ring represents how much the proportional editing is going to be affecting the range. If I scroll down, I'm making the circle bigger and it means that it's going to be affecting more topology. If I bring it closer, then the range is going to be a little smaller. So that's something that you can do. To manipulate more faces and vertices at once. I'm going to make it rather small, something like that. I'm going to see how can I make this line match the bottom, so I'm going to bring it down a little bit that it matches. Yeah. That's good. So great. We have that now. And I actually want to get rid of all of these faces because I won't be needing them. I'm going to delete the faces. And now from here, I also want to delete the ones that are at the top. I don't want these ones. And I'm going to actually wait. Only the two at the top, I'm going to get rid of those. So let's start from the bottom. I'm going to select that loop over there. And I'm going to extrude down. So similar to how we did the root, we are going to be extruding down. I'm going to disable proportional editing, and then I'm going to start creating that silhouette. I'm also going to be using some cuts instead of just extrusions. So it's like a mix of both things. I'm going to go here, extrude, scale, and then create that loop cut and scale up loops was too much. Again, I'm going to extrude down somewhere here, scale up. That's good. W one more time, scale down to here, and then I want to create a loop cut to create this shape over here. That's good. Again, I'm going to select the ones at the bottom and extrude down over here, scale up, and then create a few cuts in the middle. Over there and over here. Nice. Now, I will keep doing this process until I finish the. Until I finish all the way to the bottom. I'm going to extrude again here, and then scale down. Tre again, scale up. Sometimes I like to bring it up if it didn't match exactly, and then I'm going to create another loc bring it. Like that, and then I think I'm going to do two more. So one extrusion all the way to the bottom, to scale that up, and then I'm going to create another lopcut here and scale that up as well. Nice. So we have that shape. And I'm going to do now at the top. So we're going to do this over here. I'm going to bring it up a little, but it matches this a little better. Stre up, scale down, Stre up, scale up. Extrude one more time. Here, I don't want to go all the way to the top. You'll see why. Here I'll create another lip cut and try to do this. Then here, we have a gap at the top and a gap at the bottom. So remember that to close them, we press F, and then we poke it. We're going to do the same at the bottom. We're going to select the whole thing. Press F to create a phase and then poke. Cool. So we've got our basic shape, which is looking like this. Now, I want to shade smooth to see how it's looking. It definitely needs more topology down here. Just like as if we were having a subdivision surface, the sharper things need more geometry close to them. So things like this. And then these things I want to bevel I'm creating a bevel there and scaling up. Something like that, I'm going to do it again. I didn't love it. So, something like that and scale up. I'm actually going to scale this down to it manually a little. Nice. That's nice. And then this one I also want to medal. And I want to scale it up a little. Nice. That's good enough. There are other things that should be sharper, like this over here, and the I also want to bevel it with not too many cuts. That's nice. There are other things that we can do, T one over here. We can bevel this as well. I want to bevel that Okay. Let's leave it like that for now and we can go through the details later. But now I want to do the Bolan. To do the Bolan, I actually want to go into X ray mode to be able to see it, and I'm going to add a cube. Now, this cube, I'm going to scale it down and bring it closer to where it should be. And here I'm going to notice a few things. So at the front, you see that this cube, it's a little thinner. I'm going to scale this in the x axis. Trying to match it. Don't worry if it's not perfect. Then I'm going to go to the side, and here on the side, the width should be higher than the farthest part of this sphere. Just because it needs to go across the whole thing. So I'm going to scale that in the y axis farther away. It doesn't need to be exact. It just needs to be a little farther. And then here I can go and move it closer to where it should be and rotate it. Now, it doesn't match. We need to shape this a little. So we're going to create some lopcuts. I think having four loop cuts would be nice. Yeah. I'm going to keep them in the middle. And then I'm going to select these vertices right here, and then with proportional editing, I can start moving them around a little. So I can move this one. I'll move this one, and then I can tuggle it on and off to create a better shape, something like that. Now, these ones, I do want to try to match them right where they should be. And I'm just going to move. These ones that are kind of like extruding them. They don't really matter. I'm going to move the ones a little bit, creating a better shape. That's I think good enough. Cool. So now we've got that. And now we are going to do the bullion. Now, you can see this is kind of a little squared. It doesn't really matter for now. We are going to add the bullion here. And we're going to say, go to the modifiers add a bullion modifier, and we're going to select this. Now, as you can see, we start having these issues right here, and they don't look too nice, but we will be able to change them and I'll show you how. So I'm going to apply this bon, and now I can move this object away. And now, the reason why this is showing up like that is because of how we're shading this object. Shade flat basically shows every single polygon and shade smooth makes it smooth, the way this is working underneath the hood, basically that it compares the angle between each polygon, and then if the angle is higher or lower that uncertain number, it starts smoothing it. So the shade smooths everything, no matter how the angle is, how big the angle is, it's going to smooth everything. Flat doesn't smooth anything at all. But then we have this option called shade out to smooth, and that will smooth depending on the angle. I don't know exactly what's the degree. But basically, when I do that, see how the sharper edges now look better, and the reason is because this is very angled, and so it doesn't smooth it and just keeps it flat. But the ones that need to be smooth, it does. So it's a great tool that we have there. Now, the downside of it. By the way, I did not change something here. We forgot to do the little top here. I'm going to do that now. I'm just going to select these verdicts at the top, and I'm going to bring it up so that we create a tiny top. Now, the downside of these bullions if we look at the topology, it's very weird, right? We have an amount of, these faces are huge, and then we have a bunch of vertices that are not the best. A way to modify this would be to since this is equally made, we can cut them so that they are going from this point, from this point, we can create a cut from this point to this point, and that would be the easiest way to fix the topology, but we're not going to worry about that in this video because that's not really relevant. What I do want you to do now is go and add more details to this because we are not going to be able to use subdivision modifier, and I'll show you why. If I try adding subdivision surface, Look what happens. This is getting really messed up, and the reason why is because our topology is not great. These are the types of things that happen when we don't have a good topology. So we're not going to be using subdivision surface for this one. But instead, we are going to be adding more topology wherever we need it. So if I want to make this smoother, I'm going to add more loops until I get a smoother shape. That work, I'm going to actually level this one until we create a smooer surface, right? So that's what we are going to do now. We want to make this smoother all the way. So maybe bring this down, and then do the same here. The sphere is quite right. This over here is not the best. I feel like we can level this a little with less cuts. I'm going to do the same here, bring it down. To sharpen it, then level this, maybe scale it up. So just like that, I'm going to start adding more and more detail wherever I need it. I think I'm just going to bring this down, create a look here, make it smaller. Same for this one. You know, start adding more cuts to make it a little nicer. And we can we can do as many details as we want. But especially the ones that should be more curvy, those are the ones that we should be doing. I think that's quite good. Now, let's see how this is looking. Yeah, I like it. I like how it's looking. So yeah, that's it. Now we can delete this object. We don't really need it. And we've got our bishop. We are not really going to worry about the topology right now. That's a little bit more advanced, but this works perfectly for now. So we're going to rename it. This is going to be our bishop, and we are done. Nice. Now we can move on onto our next piece. See you then. 15. Chess Project: Queen: All right, so our next piece is going to be the queen. For the queen, we're not going to be use any of the methods we use before. Here we're going to start from a curve. So we're going to add a baser curve to start with. And then here you will see a line, an orange line. And you might think that this is flat, but in reality, if you go to the top view, you will see that there's actually a curve. So we don't want it facing the top view. We want it facing the front. So we're going to rotate it on the x axis, 90 degrees. And now that curve is facing the front. So from here, since we're only going to do like one side of our silhouette, because we're going to use we're going to spin it later. We need to change these points. So right now, we have only two points, but we want one of them to be exactly in the middle. So you could probably move this in the x axis and try to figure out where the center is, and you can get pretty close, but it's never going to be right in the center of our world. So what can you do? There is an option, which is the snapping tool and it's this magnet over here at the top. If I click on that, now what this will do is that it will snap whatever I'm moving, it can be an object, it can be a vertex, it could be a control point like here, and it's going to snap it in increments. So it's basically going to snap it like one unit or ten units or whatever it is. If I click on the properties here on the snapping properties, you will see that you have different options. But the option that you need to activate right now is the absolute grid snap because right now this is right at one, at minus one. So it wouldn't really matter. But then if you have you move it, let's say, without the snapping, if you move it somewhere here. Now the increment is not going to be perfect. So to avoid that, you need to check this box right here. That's it's absolute grid snap. And what this will do is it will snap our elements to the points of our grid in the viewport. So now if I move it, you will see that it's exactly snapping to the grid. So I want to snap it to the center of the world. And then this one, maybe I don't need a snapping, but I can just move it on the x axis somewhere close to where I want it to start. Now, with basic curves, it is kind of tricky to manipulate them because they are a little hard, but don't worry here, we are going to take our time to build the right curve. So first, I'm going to move this verdict, this control point. I'm going to change the handles, and I'm going to rotate them so that they're rather flat. And I want to scale them down. They're too big to meet to control at this point. So the bigger the handle is the longer, like, the wider the curve is going to be, if that makes sense. For this one, it is already flat, but I want to scale it down as well. Now, remember that we can extrude points, just like we can extrude faces or edges or other things. So here I'm going to press, and I'm going to extrude it to the next sharpest point, which I feel is this one. Now, here we're not going to add as many points as we did when we were creating cuts. Here we're actually going to look for when the curves are kind of changing quite a bit. So this would be a good point to start, and then I need to change the handles. Now, from this point on, I do want to change the handles with V to a free type. That allows me to change each handle individually instead of moving both at the same time. So here I can grab this one, for example, and bring it here. I'm just pressing G, like selecting it and pressing G to create those curves. Now, I'm going to select the main point and extrude it one more time. Here on the next point that I feel that it changes a lot. I'm going to do this, and then I can change the handle so that we have a nice curve over there. Now, you can take as much time as you need because this is actually quite a lot of work. But I'm trying to go a little faster so we don't take that much time just building the curve. I'm going to extrude it one more time. They should go here, and then this one should go somewhere like that. Let's extrude this one all the way to the top and let's change it. See how I can do a big curve by just extending the handles a bit more, and then I have a perfect curve. Now, you want to do this. You don't want to add too many points. Because the more points you add the less smooth is going to be. You got to be careful with that. Now I'm going to do this one, make this one smaller, same as this one. You know, start building those curves very nicely. I'm going to extrude it one more time. Something like that. And then the one should be, something like that. C. That's good. Surely one more time. Here. So if they are kind of like aligned with the curve, that's going to make them flat. So that's a good thing to know. So the more aligned they are to where it needs to be, the more flat and less curvy is going to be. So let's extrude it one more time. So here, it's almost straight. So this is what I mean. The closest they are to the curve, the flatter the curve is going to be. Okay. Let's do it one more time. This is way too long, so I'm going to shorten it and try to make it match. Cool. Now, this point all the way up here. Let's try to make this work. Look, it's perfect. I don't need too many points. Just with two points, I can create a nice curve. That's a good thing about curves. I'm going to do this here. Move it somewhere there. Now, this one should go all the way here. I'm going to move this one so that it's flat facing the right way. There, and then extrude it one more time. This one is super long, so it needs to go a little down and manipulate those. And lastly, we're going to bring this one here and remember that we can snap it to the grid. So I'm going to hit that snap button and make sure that it's snaps. Now, from here, I can just bring it down on the Z axis, but I know it's centered rightly. And I'm just going to move this one, change this one as well. Modify a bit. And I think that's good. So we've got our curve. Now, you can make it a little more detail, but I think this works well for us. Make sure that when you rotate it, rotate the viewport is perfectly aligned. I think it is. So now from here, we can add a modifier, the screw modifier that we saw before. And right now, it's not at the right direction, but don't worry. We just need to change the axis and see which one works. In this case, it's going to be the y axis. The reason why is because we rotated the object in the first place. And so it's not going to be along the C axis. Is going to be along the y axis. And then from here, right now it looks nice. But when you look at it from the top, you'll see that it's very squared, not very circular, like smooth and round. So that is because of these steps. I want to bring it up. I'm going to choose 48, and now it's way more smooth. But make sure to also do it on the render version because yeah, we want both. If you want to render this out as a curve, you need it also here. Otherwise, it's just going to be a little blocky, like you just saw. Cool. So now we've got the queen. It looks really nice. And what can we do now? Now, we can change the curve if there's something that you don't like. This is your chance to modify the curve. But if you're good with it, you feel like that's nice. We are going to convert this into a mesh. So we are going to right click and then we're going to convert it to mesh. That way, our modifier disappears. And now we have a normal mesh like we did before. Now, the downside of this is that you're going to have way more loops that you might not want. But that's okay. It's still pretty low poly and it works fine for us right now. Now, the last thing I want to do is that if you notice our reference, you'll see that it has this type of indent in this part to make it look like a little hat. And we don't have that right here. So we can change that by going into edit mode, and I will select all these lines like a line. Let's see. Is it here. Okay. So I'm going to select it from here probably all the way here. Now, to select a portion, you can just press control shift, and then you will select the little portion that you need. Yeah, I think that's good. And now I want to go around every quarter, so I'm going to count from the line that I did. I'm going to count one, two, three, four, and then there, I'm going to hit shift to select the next line and then control shift to select like the whole section. And I'm going to do that all the way. I'm going to go around. So one, two, three, four, select, and then here tricky to know exactly which one to select. So take your time while doing this. One, two, three, four, select, and then where you should go somewhere like there. Now, there's an easier way to do this with a symmetry option, but here, we're just going to do it manually. One, two, three, four, select, and then we're going to check, it's going to be all the way here. One, two, three, select, and then here. One, two, three select, and then it goes here, one, two, three select. This is why I like having the amount of polygons to be a multiple of four because it's easier to understand how many you should do? I'm going to go this one all the way here. Now, this one, here, and then I think I need one, one, two, three, four, here you can see they're exactly separated. And then from here, I want to scale them down. But I'm going to scale them down with proportional editing so that it is a little smoother and a little nicer. I'm going to activate proportional editing, and then I'm going to scale them down. Now you can see this might be too much. I don't need it that much. So just a little bit. Something like that. Maybe that's too much. I wanted a little bigger. Yeah. Something like that. Now you can see we're doing it. Cool. I like it. That looks pretty neat. I think I want to do it a little bit more intense. There. Nice. We have a little hat. And then if you wanted to make it a little bit more smooth, you can always add the subdivision surface modifier as long as you don't apply it, it's going to look nice. And that's it. That's our queen. Looks nice. So yeah. That's how you do it with curves. It's a different method. Sometimes it can be a little easier, sometimes it can be a little more challenging. It depends on the silhouette that you have. But basically, that's how this works. So that's it for the queen. Let's rename it as always. So this is an object. Object Queen. And that's it. In the next video, we are going to do the king. Okay. 16. Chess Project: King: All right, people. So the next piece we are going to build is the king. For this one, we're going to be using similar methods that we used before. But I also want to show you other tools that I want you to learn that we haven't really used before. But I do feel like it's important that you know them because they can be very helpful when you are modeling. So for this one, we are going to start with a cylinder. And make it 48 vertices, and then we want the CAP field type to be a triangle fan. And then now we can start from here. Now, I'm going to be using the same method that we used for the paw. But you can use any of the other methods that can get you up to the base of the cross. So don't worry about the cross now. We want to just have the base ready. So I'm going to just bring this up to that base. And then from here, similar to the paw, I'm just going to be creating cuts along the oops, something like that. I'm just going to be creating all these loop cuts that I need to have and scaling them down. I will try to go a little faster here because we've seen this before, and this is a good practice exercise that you can do to just use whatever method you prefer and practice. So I'm just going to be creating a couple of cuts to generate the basic like the general shape. But I'm not trying to be super accurate to this because I do want to explain you the other tools. So I will try to go a little faster here. Okay. Almost there. Remember that for Curvy place curvy things, you need more loop cuts and normal. And then I'm going to create these ones right here. Almost there. Most almost there. And we're missing one over here. That is we don't want that one here. If that happens to you by just pressing Control Z, you can just go back to the previous step. Cool. So now we have a base. Nice. Now, I do want to forget about this object for a second. I'm going to hide it. To hide an object. You can either like we've done it, you can press on the eye in the outliner, or you can select the object on the scene and press H that will hide it. As you can see, the eye is not disabled. Now I do want to focus on the cross. I'm going to create a new mesh this time I'm going to be using a cube, and I'm going to scale it down and bring it up. It has to be centered. That's important. Usually, I just move it around in edit mode. And I'm going to select the x ray mode so that I can see what I'm doing. Cool. Now, here, let's just bring this up a little. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're going to take care of this later. And then maybe I can just grab. What I want to do now before moving forward is that I want to create a cut right in the middle. So that I can only do half of the cross, and then we'll just mirror it so that we have equal sides. So I'm going to create a loop cut. Remember that if you move it by just right clicking, you can snap it to the center of the face. Now with the phase selection, I'm going to select that half and I'm going to get rid of it. So delete phase. Now, I want to select this space over here, and I want to bring it in so that it is closer to the top reference. Now, from here, I want to create a couple of loop cuts to extrude this part. So I'm just going to create a lo cut here and a cut over here. Now again, I want to select this face and extrude it. But before I do that, I'm going to select the whole thing by pressing A. I'm going to go into the side view, and this is like wide for the object that we have. I'm going to bring back that cylinder that we just hit, and here I do want to scale it in the y axis so that is not as thick. I'm going to go somewhere here, maybe that's good. I don't want it to be super thin either. Maybe a little more. There. And then I'm going to go back into the front view, and now I'm going to select that single face, and I'm going to extrude it. Cool. We have the base of the cross. Now we need to change this, so I'm just going to be adding a couple of loop cuts. Actually, before I do that, I want to add them with scrolling. Maybe that's fine. And now, I don't want to select the whole thing and scale it because if I do that, that would change the center of the verdicts, and I don't want that. I want all of these to be right in the middle. So I'm going to only select the ones that are towards the edge and just move them. So I'm going to move them to the right. Same this one, move it a little. Like that. Okay. And then this one as well. Nice. So I have that this a little too much. Something like that. So from here, let's see if I can bring this in a little more there. We have half a cross, as you can see there. What do we want to do now? What we want to do is combine these two objects so that it can be a single one and I don't want to have two different pieces. Since this cross has only half of it, I'm going to do the same thing for the cylinder. I'm going to going to edit mode into face selection X ray mode so that I can select the pack as well, and I'm going to select all the faces that are on the left side. I try to go as close as I can to the blue line, which means that's the center of the world. And then I go closer to check that I'm actually selecting all of them. See how we didn't select all of them. So I'm just going to go back and select those by pressing shift. And that way, I selected the whole left side. Now I'm going to press X and faces to delete all of that. Make sure that you don't have any other faces at the top or at the bottom and your set. So now what we want to do? We want to connect both the cross and the cylinder, the base. But before we do that, I actually also want to delete See how we didn't select this one, so I'm going to get rid of that. You got to make sure that you are selecting the whole thing. Cool. So I also want to delete all of the top cap. So there are a couple of ways you can do it. You can select the first phase and then press control and select the last one, and that will select the whole thing. Another thing you can use is if you press C on your keyboard, You see how my cursor is now like a circle. Now with my click holding my click. I can start painting over what I want to select. And if there's something that I don't want by pressing the middle click, you can get rid of the selection. So this is another pretty useful tool. And then when you are good to go, you just press Enter, and then you've selected the whole thing. So two different methods for selecting. And I also I'm going to get rid of those faces. Now that we're there, let's see the cross. For the cross, I also want to get rid of the bottom phase. I'm going to go into the edit mode, select that single phase at the bottom and delete it. And then what I want to do is that I do want to select these vertices right here and I want to attach them to the top of my cylinder. So to do that, I'm going to select both objects and press Control J to combine them to join them. Now, I'm going to select these four vertices. And I want to snap them to these vertices right here. So remember that we can do the snapping tool. Now I want to select verdicts instead of increments. And I'm going to press G and then. That should snap it if you see how it in creates that square over here, you can select the verdicts where you want to snap. But any of them will do because I want to level them. So by just clicking, you will see that now they are aligned. Kind hard to tell, but they are aligned. And now what we want to do is that we want to connect all of these faces with the cross. To do that, we need to create a lot of cuts on our cross Because right now, we only have three edges. But over here, since this is half, it means that we have 24 edges that need to be attached. What I will do now is that I want to create maybe maybe even more, maybe six faces over here. In the middle. And then I want to connect them to the ones over here. The ones that are in the middle, I'm going to connect to the ones that are in the middle. So I select that edge and the edge that's outside, and I'm going to press F. Now, from here, you can repeat that process, select both and press F, or you can just select the line that should continue the next phase and press F. That will connect it with the edges that are attached to it. So I'm going to do that one more time. And I'm I'm going to do the same over here. Cool. So now we have we need more pass to attach. We can count them. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine phases. So that means we got to create a cuts on our cross to attach all of them. So let's do that. Since this is looping, it will do the same for the back. So that's two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and I'm going to keep them in the middle. Now I can do the same, select these two or just keep doing the border like we were doing it by just pressing this edge and going around. Now, if I did the math right, this should be connected nicely. And we're going to do the same to the other side. Pressing F until we reach the end. Cool. That way we have connected two objects as one. Now that we're here, there's a couple of things we need to do. First, I want to mirror it. So you can add a modifier, go to generate and then say mirror. That way, it just creates the other half. Now, if you for some reason rotated the object, you might need to change the axis of the mirroring. So this is attaching it from the bottom and so on. So right now, the x axis is working for us. And there's one thing that you definitely need to do, and it is activate clipping. So clipping means that the verdict that's right in the center is going to be converted into one. If we don't activate that, then we're just going to have two vertices placed in the same position, and that can create a lot of errors later. So you want to be clipping this object. Now that we have that, we are going to add a subdivision surface modifier, and this is where we're going to know that we need more detail on our model. So for example, as we always do, this is snapping, so I want to deactivate this napping. And I want to bring this closer to the bottom. There are these things that should be leveled. Something like that. Same as this one. We should have a little eval Like that. Another thing that you want to do is to shade smooth. Like that. And then on X ray mode, I like to see where I need more geometry. So let's say something here, something at the bottom, just like what we've been doing with the other models. Whenever you want a sharper edge, you will create a lot cut over there, and if you don't, then it should be fine. So let's say this one I want to bevel it a little. Something like that, and then create a lop cut so that it's more sharp. I try to do this also fast. To see how much we need it. Cool. Another vevel over here. Here as well. Then another loop cut over here, another one over here. Then this one there. We want it here. Want it really close to there, and then the same applies here. We want these loop cuts to be really nice. Okay. We're almost there. This one needs a big cut over here. For this one, we're also going to be creating a sharp edge there. And then for the cross, we need a couple of a couple of cuts, usually close to to the corners, something like that, and then one over here. Let's say we also need one of them here. I think that's pretty good. Now, these ones right here. Instead of adding, we can actually do to one here. I think that's what is great. That's good. Now, instead of creating another loop cut here, if you want it to be sharper. If you do that, you will be creating a loop cut all over our cylinder and we definitely don't want that. If I do that, then I'm going to be creating the sharp edge there, and that's not fun. We are going to get rid of that. Instead, we can simply move these cuts. So I select this and move it in the y axis a little closer, can do that. Nice. That's a little cross. Now I need another lip cut here. I think that's quite all right. Let's see. Oh, maybe we need one over here to make it a little sharper down here and one over here. But that's pretty neat. It's connected to our object. We have the subdivision surface, we have the mirror. It's pretty much done. If you want to apply the mirror, you definitely can. I actually suggest that you do, but only do it when you are sure that you are done with modeling, like the whole thing. If you are completely sure that it looks fine, then you can just app on your mirror modifier. And now we would have geometry on both sides. That's it. That looks pretty nice. We have the subdivision surface and that should be our king. We only have one extra piece and we're going to be done, so I'll see you in the next video. 17. Chess Project: Knight Part 1: All right, so we're down to our last piece, which is the night, since this is a more complex shape, we might take a little longer to finish it. But I will ensure that I show you every single step that you need to do in order to achieve a shape like this. Now, for this model, in particular, we are going to be using the edge modeling method. And then for the base, we are going to be using other methods that we use before for other pieces. Since we want to do the horse with edge modeling, the first thing we've got to do is to add a plane as our main shape. Now, here, I'm going to go into edit mode. I'm going to rotate this in the x axis, 90 degrees, and I'll scale it down and put it over here. Now there are some things that you need to think about. Generally, for complex shapes, you want to start from the bigger shapes into the smaller detail. So we could start from doing the belly, doing the general shape of the body up to the head and then start creating more detail from there. But We could also start from the detail, and then that would allow us to know exactly how many faces we need to get to that detail. And then from there we can start creating the rest of the body. Now, ideally, for the majority of detail objects like this, you want to start with the bigger shapes. But in this case, in particular, I actually want to do it the other way around because I want to show you how topology works and how important it is to think about the amount of polygons that you're using, where you're cutting, where you're doing things. I want to do an inverse engineering kind of thing where I show you where do we want to get? Where do we want to get and then from there, start creating the bigger shapes. So that means that we are going to start with the eye and with the nose. And then from there we can start building up the rest. So I'm actually going to activate the x ray mode so that I'm able to see better. I want to bring the square up and then scale it down to a B about the size of the eye, and I want to rotate it facing the eye a little bit. Now here, I want to create two cuts, so one going this way right in the middle and one going this way in the middle. Then from there, I'm going to start moving these vertices around to the closest pot in the eye. So again, I'm not adding too much topology. I just want to generate the general shape. Then from here, I'm going to select these two edges at the top, and I'm going to extrude them up and move them somewhere close to the part of the head to create that shape. I'll do the same for the ones at the bottom. I'll extrude them down and try to place them somewhere on the jaw. So, something like that, it's good enough for now. Now, I'm going to select these two edges at the front of the eye, and I want to extrude them all the way to the front of the whole head. So I'm going to extrude this over here. And then I'm going to move them. So that they kind of fit the size of the nostril doesn't have to be perfect, but somewhere close to it. And then here I want to create other lopcuts to create the nose. So I'm going to frame it. Frame the nose, and then I want to have that single vertice in the middle. So I'm going to create another loc right in the middle. And then here I'm going to shape the nostril with the vertices that are around. Something like that is good. We have the nostril and we have the eye. Now, from here, we are going to extrude the top edges like we did with the eye. I'm going to extrude these up. And again, I'm going to shape them. It doesn't have to be perfect, but somewhere there, and I'm going to do the same for the bottom ones. I'm going to extrude them down. Actually, you're going to move this somewhere over here. I want it to be the corner of my mouth, and then I can move it over here. Now, to complete these faces, to complete these holes, I'm going to ex And then I'm going to move verdx over here. But this one over here. I don't want to have this triangle in the middle. I actually want to combine these two vertices into a single one. That's called merging. And to merge our vertices, we can select both press on our keyboard and then say merge at center. That way, sing those two vertices and converting them into a single one. I'm going to do the same for this one. I'm going to extrude Move this vertice where it needs to go. Yeah. Somewhere shaping them out a little. And then I'm going to select both vertices, press M, and say at center and then just move that around as well. Okay. Cool. So we have this part done, and now I want to connect these two parts. So I'm going to show you another thing that you can do. I'm going to add some loop cuts here because this face is really, really long like these faces over here. I want to add a couple of loop cuts. I think about four should be nice. Then instead of doing extruding all of these four and merging the vertices, I actually only want to extrude the three in the middle. The three edges in the middle. I'm going to extrude them up. I'm going to shape them. And then I'll select this edge and this edge and press F to create a phase. Select the two and press F to create a phase. We're going to repeat that process for the bottom. I'm going to extrude them down, move the vertices. Then I'll select these two, press, select the two and press. Now, I do want to shape these lines a little better. The one that's right in the middle, I think it's okay. Maybe I can make it more organic because this angle here is not as good and that's because it came from the eye, but it's not as good. Then from here, I actually want to shape this a little closer to the bottom. Doesn't have to be perfect, but somewhere closer to that. I'm going to do the same for the top one. The idea is that the faces should have a similar size. It doesn't have to be perfect, but that's closer to what we want. Now, here I want to create the mouth, and I'm going to select these two, extrude them. Move the vertices all the way down, and then I want to create a couple of fluke cuts, I think with two, it's enough and shape the rest of the mouth. Shape them a little bit like that. And that's good enough. Now, we need to finish the rest of the head. So I'm going to select these four edges, and then I'm going to extrude them to where the ear starts. I'm going to select these verdicts at the bottom, and I actually want to create a little corner there. And then I'm going to move this as well a little bit so that they are a more organic. Then again, I'm going to select the four edges and I'm going to extrude them one more time somewhere over here. I want to move them closer to the back. So it doesn't have to be perfect, but something like that, I think works fine. This one I can probably bring down a little more kind of following that shape. So that's good. I feel like that's good enough. All right. So now I want to create more loop cuts over here because I feel like these ones are too big, so I'm going to create two loop cuts in the center and then I'm going to create one over here. Again, I'm going to shape those in the back. To whatever gives you a better shape. I feel like that's good enough. Now, from here, my that. Now, I want to create the base of the ear, so I'm going to create another loop cut and then I'm going to move this up to shape that back in the start of the ear. Again, I just move this a little bit. Now, from here, I'm going to select these two edges, and I'm going to ex down all the way to the bottom. Now, here I want to place them. Somewhere close to how that shape should be. And now we can create a couple of loop cuts to shape the belly. So I think I'm going to create maybe four loop cuts. Yeah. And then I'm going to move them and then shape them individually. Where they should go. Now, I feel that I need a little bit extra topology, so I'm going to add a Lubeca I think in the middle of each one. Again, you want to have those nice curves in your topology. You don't want those sharp angles. So this is very sharp. You want to, you know, change those so that it's a little more organic. So something like air. Yeah. You want that nice curve. Then we can shape these ones as well. Just a little bit like that. Cool. So that's basically the main shape of our horse. Now, we might want to add a little bit more geometry. But for now, I feel like this is good enough. I'm actually going to select all of these urgics in the middle. And I'm going to move them a little bit so that they are right in the middle. I'm to move this like that. Just you arrange them a little better. This angle right here, I don't like it, so I'm going to get rid of that. You know, and just have a nice curve. So now that we have the shape of the horse, we can continue with the rest of the details. I'll see you in the next lesson. Okay. 18. Chess Project: Knight Part 2: Okay, so we're going to continue building our night. So the next thing we want to do is that as you can see now, we have a plane, basically, a very flat plane with the shape of a horse. And this needs to be a three d object, right? It needs to have some sort of volume. So what can we do now? We can select all of our faces. Go to the side view, and as you can see, it's a single line because it's really flat. And I'm going to extrude it to the front. Now, what you need to keep in mind is that we don't want to create the whole thickness of our horse. Instead, we want to do half because we're going to mirror this, and we're going to not mirror it on the x axis, but we're going to mirror it on the y axis. So here, I'm going to do something like that. I feel like that's a good thickness. Maybe about two spaces in the grid. I feel like that's good enough. Now here, I actually want to create that mirror modifier. But before I do that, I want to select all the faces and vertices that are right in the center and where the blue line is, and I'm going to delete those. So I'm going to get rid of those faces. Now we have I disabled the night. You can see that we have a how volume kind of thing. And now from here, I want to add a modifier going to go into mirror modifier. Now, I don't want it in the x axis. I want to change that to the y axis and alla. We have that little horse being duplicated on the y axis. Now, again, as I told you before, you need to activate clipping. I'm going to show you y. Maybe I didn't explain that before. If I move this forward, can you see that they are separating. If I activate clipping and now I try to move them, now they're going to be sticking together in that middle point. So that's why clipping is super important. Unless you do want to have separate pieces, but generally, you want them together. So clipping should be activated. Now, from here, we have a horse. Now, this needs much more improvement than what we have now. The first thing that I want to do is that I want the front of the face to be a little more thin than the back of it. I actually also want to make it a little more thick. I'm going to select all of these vertices with X ray mode and just move them a little farther. That's a little better. Now, I do want to select these vertices in the front of the face and I want to bring them together. So if I just select them and press G and y and bring them together, I'm going to get this sharp, weird shape and I don't want that. So what can we use? We can use proportional editing. Remember that we can activate that button, and then if I bring them closer and scale that thing up, the radius up, it's going to modify a bigger surface more organically. Now, as you can see now, the vertices in the body, like in the belly are also changing, and I don't want that. I'm going to go into the properties of the proportional editing. And I want to select connected only. That means that only the vertices that are closest to the are somehow connected within that radius, those are the ones that are going to be affected. So I'm just going to select that and do it one more time. So I'm driving in the y axis and see how that's not moving anymore. That's what I wanted. Now, that I think that's good. Now I want to select only these ones at the front. Maybe even the one like this one over here, and again, I'm going to scale them, but with a smaller influence. Now, you can also go to the top view and change them without proportional editing, you can change them a little so they are more organic, but I feel like overall, this is a good shape. I'm going to go back to that front view. I feel like that's good enough for our horse. Now, I do want to at this point, add a subdivision surface modifier just to check the general shape and how that's looking. No, I know that I need to add more geometry and that's going to affect it. But in general, I want to see how that's looking and maybe smooth it better. Feel like the size of the mouth is pretty good. Yeah, I like it overall, and it's good to check this before you start doing more things. It looks okay. Now I can disable it to keep working with the shape that we had, and I actually want to shade out too smooth so that it's not affecting me so much. Then here, we can extrude two things. So we can extrude our. So I'm actually going to select these faces, go to the X ray mode, activate my reference again because I disable it. I'm actually going to scale this a little bit. Then what I want to do now from here, actually, I want to do that with proportional editing. Not so much so that the faces and the other vertices move as well. Just about there, I want to create some sort of thickness around the eye, and then here I'm going to inset it. So remember that by pressing, you can create an inset and just bring that down to the regular size of the eye. That way, I got this little frame that will help us to have a more defined. And then from here, I want to extrude that inwards. I'm going to press and extrude it in. Now, if I check this again with the subdivision surface, you will see that our eye is pretty round. So and very smooth here at the end, I don't want that. I actually want to create a loop cuts to that edge, so that it's a sharp. I'm going to create another one over here, and then check it again. I think that's better closer to what we want. Now, again, with the subdivision surface modifier, you can still go back and select those edges and move them up so that it has a closer closer shape to the eye. Can be a little difficult. And if you need more topology, you can always go ahead and add more. We are going to do the same thing for the nostril. So I'm going to select these four phases. Again, I'm going to make them a bigger with proportional editing. So we don't want to be modified too much. Something like that, and then do an inset around the shape of the nostril. Then here again, we are going to extrude them in. I'm going to do a big extrusion over there. Again, I want it sharper, I'm going to create those cuts near the edges and see how that's looking Cool. Is a little strange, but I think it will work for us. I'm going to smooth this one more time. That's looking pretty good. Now, I think we might need to add another subdivision to have that sharper eye, but don't worry much about it. Okay. Now from here, there's two more things that we need to do to finish the horse, which would be the ears and the back. So for the ears, I'm going to disable subdivision right now. And I actually want to create some cuts over here. So the first cut I'm going to do is going to be the ears. So the size of the ears, they're not exactly like the whole width that we have right now. So I want to create actually. Let's add two loop cuts see if that's enough. Yeah. Maybe I want to move them a little bit, to make the ear at more wide. I think that's good enough. Then I will select that single phase, and I'm going to extrude it up to create the ear. Now, with the X ray on, I'm going to move I'm going to disable proportional editing and just move these tic where I need them to be. I'm going to create two loop cuts and then shape them. And now, I'm going to activate subdivision surface to kind of check how that's looking so I can bring them up if I need it. I'm just going to collect both of them and make it a little more. Wide. Nice. So, we have the two ears. You can also modify these vertices at the bottom, bring them a little closer to make them wider, and then this ones at the top. I do want to be at this one. I want to make them a little smaller. I think that's good enough. So we have the ears. And now, what we can do is that we can generate the back. So we can select these spaces, all the way till the end, the bottom, and I am going to extrude them. Now, this might be a little more tricky. But let's see. We can start shaping this. So let's go into the verdicts mode and then just start shaping those vertices as we need to. I'm just going to do it very quickly and then see if I need to add any more topology somewhere. Sometimes that's the case. Sometimes with the ones that we have right now, they're good enough. I think they will be good enough for what we need. Perfect. So now if I go back, it's not perfect. There are some things that you could probably change make this a little more. Let's see. Did I select both? Okay. So you make that angle on without the subdivision surface, and then you can shape this a. A little more. Now, it's not going to be perfect, but it's close enough to what we need. Good. Okay, that's good enough for the back. Now, another thing you can do is that you can select all of this edge right here and make it a little wider. I'm just going to move that like that. Move them in that axis. So that it has more of a point pointy thing. Maybe that was too much, bring it back again. Now I'm going to select these faces. Oops that here. Oh, I think it's selecting more than I need. I'm just going to do it. Try to do it manually. This is better. Then these ones, I want to scale them in the y axis a little bit. So that they are a little more sharp right there. Nice. So we basically have our horse ready. Now the next thing we need to do is to create the base and we should be done. So I'll see you guys in the next video. Okay. 19. Chess Project: Knight Part 3: Okay. So now that we have the horse part ready, we can work on the base. The first thing we got to see is that you see the bottom of the horse, it's very flat and almost like a rectangle. But we want it to resemble more of a cylinder or like a circle so that for our c or cylindrical base, we can join them so that it's easier and it looks more organic. So what can we do to change that? First here, I want you to delete These faces these six faces over here. We don't want them. We want it to be whole. So we're going to get rid of them. And now we have kind of like that hole at the bottom. Now, from here, I want to create more topology, because right now, as you can see, we have three faces on the side, which means we have six faces at the top, like at the front. And then on the side, we only have two. And so I think we should have at least the same amount. I'm going to create two loop cuts on this side, and then two loop cuts on this side as well. And that way, We can have six faces on the side. Now, what this will allow us to do is that we can modify this a little bit more. So you're going to go into the X ray mode. You can start creating a better shape here. You can actually modify this a little bit more. I have to be perfect, but closer to what we want. The more topology we have, the better results we can get. The more detail it is, but also the more difficulty becomes to manipulate somehow because we have more topology to work with. This is good for now. And now that we are ready. Hopefully, you feel good with your overall shape, and when you are ready, we are going to apply our mirror modifier. I'm going to go into the mirror and just say, apply. That way, we now have a single shape it doesn't have the mirror on. Cool. So now what we want to do is that we want to select this loop at the bottom, and we want to convert that into a circle. How can we do that? There is a tool in blender that allows us to transform this shape into a more circular shape. It's not perfect, but it does a good job. So I'm going to go up here into the mesh menu. Transform then you see here that it says to sphere. Now, when I do that, if I drag up and down my mouse, you will see how that's changing. Now, I can't really see here because of the perspective that I have. So I want to go down. And actually see it, so I'm going to select two sphere and see how that's becoming a circle. I'm going to do that. I'm going to make it the most circular I can. There's like a limit that where it snaps, I'm going to click. And as you can see our shape, it's a little screwed. We don't want that we want it to be over here, so I'm going to scale it up until I have something more similar to what we had. Now, it's not perfect. As you can see, it's a little more like an oval instead of a circle. We can change that by scaling it a little bit on the y axis, making it more circular. We can look at it from the top. It looks pretty circular to me. But now this shape here, it's kind of weird. Now, we could have used proportional editing to change it, but it actually creates a very weird thing. I've tried it before and it's not perfect. Another thing that you will notice is that this is not straight. We want it to be as straight as possible. So I'm going to scale that in the C axis, that it's a little more straight. Not going to be perfect, but the more straight, the better. Now, I'm going to select the next loop, and I'm going to repeat this process. I'm going to go to mesh, transform to sphere, and then make it as spherical as I can. I'm going to go all the way to where it's snaps and then go back a little. Because I don't want it to be completely circular. I want it to be a circular. Something like that. Then here I'm going to scale this as well as I need to and then scale it in the C axis. I want it to be more straight. Something like that. Now, we're getting a better shape, and we're going to do it one more time. Over here, just one more. We're going to transform it to sphere, make it a little spherical not so much, and then just change that on scale it evenly. Cool. I think that's better. That's a better shape. It's pretty organic. I like it a lot. And I think we are good to go to create the base. So, to create the base, we got to see how many polygons we have on our bottom. So I'm going to select that loop code at the end at the bottom. And instead of going and counting manually. That's very tedious. So there's an easier way if I go up here on the viewport overlays, is this arrow right here, and then I check the statistics, you will see that I can see how many edges I have selected, and that's 24 at the moment. I think that's pretty good because now we can create the base. So we might want to We might want to change to have the same topology at the bottom. So I'm actually going to create a cylinder. And then on the properties, I want this to be 48. The reason why I'm choosing 48 is because we have 24, and I can easily double that. And 48 is the next is the most obvious choice to make our cylinder right now. 24, I can double that to 48, and then I would have a pretty smooth surface. Why not 24? I feel like 24 is too low for what we need. So I think 48 is the right number. And then it depends, if you have, I don't know. 32 at the end, that's how you did it, then you would have maybe to add this up to 64 and then just something that makes sense. So now I want to change the cap field type to a triangle fan, and now we're good to go. So I'm going to scale this down, and just like what we've done before, I'm going to bring it up. Actually, I'm going to do this, scale it down. Somewhere there, and then select this and just how we've done how we've done things before. Now, actually, let's do the easiest way, which is to do the whole thing and then add lopcuts. Feel like that's the faster way to do stuff? I'm going to bring this there, create another lopcut here. Maybe here, scale it down. Doesn't have to be super perfect. But let's see if I can create another one here. I think that's good enough. And then we are going to join the two things. So as you can see, we have the base and we have the horse. So to join them, remember how we did that the other time where we combined. So we also need more geometry here to like here at the bottom, and the normal things that we do. Right now, I want to join them. Now, if I do it at this very moment, you will see that we don't have enough topology at the bottom. We need to convert this into 48. Now, the easiest way we can do it. Especially this is some more organic shape. It's valid to do something like this. I'm going to go to the subdivision surface modifier, and I'm going to bring the levels down to one on both. Then here it's basically adding doubling the amount of faces that I've have. So I'm actually going to apply this subdivision. And this will create a lot of faces to work with. Right? So now, what can I do? First, having this more topology allows me to give more detail on the eye and the certain places where we might be lacking a lot of detail. You can also sculpt when you have the amount of faces. And then the other thing that will allow us to do is that we can join these two and we will have the same amount of vertices to join up and down. So here on this base model. I'm going to select on X ray mode, the top faces and I want to delete them. I want it to be whole. Now I'm going to select the horse and I'm going to select the base, and I'm going to press Control J to join them. Now, here's going to be a tricky part, and it is that these faces might be too close, and these ones might be too separate. So I want to start with the ones that are right in the center. I'm going to select this one right here and I'm going to press F. Then from that point on, I'm just going to press F. Until I finish, see how that's doing a weird shape. Don't worry about that. Until I finish the horse, we are going to keep pressing F until we close the gap. Cool. We have joined two things, and it's not that bad. I feel like this is working pretty good. Now here, I actually want to smooth that a little The best way we can do that is by going to scope mode. And then we're going to select the smooth brush, which is this one over here, and very slightly, going to bring the string down. I don't want it to be too much. I want to also do it at the same time on both sides. I by clicking this over here, I can have symmetry on both sides. Since this is symmetrical on the y axis. That's what I'm going to select. And I'm going to smooth that out a little bit. Just so that my vertices are a little more defined. Were like equally separated. That's what I want to do. See how that did it? It's pretty pretty nice. And I'm going to do the same a little ear. Okay. Now, I'm doing this with a mouse, which is not ideal. It's probably what you guys have, so it's okay. But just smoothing that out a little bit so that it has a more organic shape. Now, when I look at it, you move the vertices a little to have a better shape when it is connecting. Now, you can go back to your reference and try to change that a little see how we lost the edge over here. So I want to scale that scale that in actually again. Scale it on the C axis so that it's more straight. Like that, and then maybe bring it up. And I will actually create a new lip cut here and scale that down so that it's a little more smooth. Okay. I think we got it. Let's go back to the object mode. See how that's looking. I think I want to add another subdivision to avoid the faceting happening here. But we can also go and change those faces. Change the shape a little bit of the. I'm actually going to activate proportional editing and try to make it. I'm going to make it smaller. A little bit more defined. Doesn't have to be perfect, but you know, Just trying to move this so that is a little sharper. Okay. And a little nicer. Okay. Okay, I think that's good enough I think this one is pretty good. And I think we are ready. So I'm going to add that other subdivision surface modifier to have a surface in general. And I think that's it. Let's see if we can maybe add some definition at the bottom, especially here. And let's add a pebble over here. That's acting a little weird. Since we have more geometry that can happen. Something like that. That's good. And let's see this one, I think looks pretty good. Maybe I want a little more definition over here where it is connecting. But I feel like that's it. We have the horse. Now, you can also go and change this now that we have more geometry. You can change these vertices to make them a little sharp just go in there and create a better shape. Again, having that proportional editing on really helps with the top with moving topology. So I can create that definition that I wanted. Yeah, I think that's good. I bring this in a little. You know, just do a couple more extra. Extra detailing, but that's it. That's our horse. That's our knight. Here we have it. And with that, we end the pieces. Make sure to rename it. So again, this is going to be objects Object and this is going to be the knight. And we can add it to our collection. And that's it. We have all of our pieces ready. So the next video, we're going to focus on how to, you know, put this in a scene and make it a little nicer. We're also going to be building the board so that we have a place to put this on to put these pieces on. So I'll see you then. Okay. 20. Chess Project: Chessboard: Since we have built all of the pieces of the chest, now there are a couple of other things that we need to do in order to finish our project. The first thing we're going to do is that we're going to build the board where the pieces are going to be standing on. So in order to do that, first, I'm going to bring back any of the object that we have already built. And in this case, I'm going to bring back the knight. This is the last piece that we just built. And here, I'm going to bring it back for reference so that I know how big our board should be. All of the pieces should have a similar base size. So they should fit within the same size of square, and that's what we're going to we're just going to bring one piece to have it as reference. So now here, I'm going to add a plane And as you can see the square that we have by default. At least in my case, it is fitting pretty well with the base. I think it's a good size for the size of the night and our pieces. And you can check under here in this corner, you can check the properties of that plane, and it says that the size of the plane is 2 meters. The meter situation is not really relevant right now. It could be 2 ", 2 centimeters, Blender by default works with meters. So that's why we see the M right there. But it does it's not really important unless you are working in architecture where you need real measurements or if you're going to print this out, it might become relevant. But if you're just working digitally and you just need it for a render or an animation, the size is not really relevant. So you can just see that this is two units, no matter what it is, it's going to be two unit. And that means that each edge is equal to two units. So usually a chess board has eight squares on each side, so that in total, it has 64 squares. As this is 2 meters long. That means that we need eight of these ones, and since each one is two, that means that the size should be 16 meters long for each edge. And that would be a good size for our board, 16 meters, 16 units, whatever it is that you're working with. Right now, I'm going to disable the visibility of the night because I don't need it anymore. And here, I'm going to go into the edit mode. As you can see, this is a single phase, and I actually want to divide this into the squares that we need for the board. So if I click and hit subdivide, you will see that each edge will be divided in two. That way we will have now four squares ses. Each edge is being divided on two pieces. If I hit subdivide one more time, it's going to create the same thing. For each edge is going to be it's going to be splitting that into two. So if I hit subdivide, now I have four squares within each of the other squares that we had making four squares on each side. If I subdivide one more time, remember that I'm right clicking and hitting subdivide. Now I will have eight squares on each side, having a total of 64 phases. As you can see over here, you can check that on the statistics that we have 64 phase. So that's what we're going to need for our board. Now, I'm going to make a very simple board. You can go as crazy here as you'd like. I know there's people who like to bring it up, you having different heights for the squares. You can do crazy things here. I'm just going to do a simple board. And the way I'm going to do it is that I'm going to select all of it. I'm going to give it some thickness, I'm going to press and scale it down. Doesn't have to be too thick. And then I want to select the border. So that I can extrude that outwards. I'm going to go into the top. I'm going to press and scale it. So by double clicking, I select the whole loop, and then I press and to scale it. And I'm going to just do a very little extrusion there because I wanted to give some sort of frame to the board. That's flat. But now I want to extrude again because I want to create a bigger frame that has some sort of wall so that it's more like enclosed. And I think that's a pretty good size, maybe or something like that. And now I'm going to select that loop that we just created. So I'm going to double click and so I can select the whole loop, and I'm going to go into the front view and extrude that upwards. It doesn't have to be much. Something like that would be good. Great. So now that we have that, as you can see, we have this loop cot going around. But this loop cod is not really doing much. If you see the places are pretty flat on the side, which means that if this was scaled up, I would be needing that edge because it's giving me the shape. Since this is completely flat, I can easily get rid of it because the less geometry you have, the better, the more efficient the model is going to be. It's going to be easier to render better for your computer, less memory has a lot of benefits. So I always tried to keep the less amount of faces possible without affecting my shape. So we can delete this by pressing X and you might think that we just hit edges since we are getting rid of edges. If I do that, you will see that suddenly my faces disappear, and it's because the computer thinks that we need that edge in order to create the face. And the reason why is because if you see these edges are still split into. The vertice already is also there, like it didn't get rid of the vertices that we're in the middle. And we don't want that. So the real way to do this, I'm going to go back. And I'm going to press X, but instead of saying edges, I'm going to say the solve edges. This will get rid of the edge without affecting my faces. As you can see, this is a single face with four vertices. I got rid of all the vertices that was splitting the faces before. So that's the right way to do it. Now from here, This is the very basic board that you need. I do want to add a couple of things, and it is that usually in real life, our sharpest objects are never like 90 90 degree sharp, like you see here. There's always some sort of beveling going on. And this is important because when you're shading, you're creating materials, and you're lighting it, you will see a difference when things are more smooth and not completely sharp. So I'm going to select the top and bottom loop, and I want to bevel that a little bit. So I'm going to press Control B and just create a pebble with a couple of loop cuts. Doesn't have to be super big, something just like that, so that it has a nice curve going on. I'm going to do the same for the inner ones. So this one and this one over here, I'm going to create a little pebble. So something, something like that. Would be good. So that is not super sharp. And that's it. That's all we're going to be doing now, and we have our model ready. In the next video, I will show you how can we do the actual chest texture that we usually have on the boards. So I'll see you then. 21. Chess Project: Intro to Materials: All right, so now that we have our board ready, we want to give some materials to this thing so that we can actually have something that resembles a chess board. Right now, this is just a simple board. We don't have the checker texture that we usually have on the board, and we can only do that with a material. So I'm going to do a very, very simple introduction to materials. I really don't want to go deep into it. But the first thing you've got to do to see your materials, is that right now we are looking at our view per shading that's solid, which means that it's always going to be a simple plain plain color. And I want to change that to the material preview, which is the next sphere, like the next circle that you see over here, that's going to be our different shading view. So I'm going to click there. As you can see this is very wide, and it is because we don't currently have any material applied to it. So how can we add materials to our objects? If you go under the properties nel over here, You will see this red sphere over there. That's the material properties. We're going to go there, and here we are going to create a new material that we are going to assign to the object. Since I'm on this object already, if I create a new material, that's going to be assigned immediately to the object. How can you know if this is assigned, if I change the base color to anything, you will see that it change. So you know that this material is being applied to the whole board. I want to make this actually put this in RGB, let's see. I want to bring closer to a gray color. So let's just the same on each one, so that we go back to the center. And I'm going I don't want it to be completely black. Maybe I do. Let's see. Yeah, no. Actually, I'm going to keep it completely black. And as you will see this material is being applied to the whole thing. Now, what are some things that we can check with our material? We can change the base color of it. We can change how metallic it is. The roughness means how shiny it is. So basically the lower the roughness, the more shiny it is going to be. The bigger the roughness, the more mat is going to look. So I want to bring the roughness at more down. Maybe 0.2, it's good. I want to make it a little metallic. Not so much. And then I'm not going to explain what the IOR in the alpha is. It doesn't really matter for us right now. So we're just going to focus on the base color, the metallic, and the rob. So now we want to create the pattern that we have, usually, the white and black pattern. So I'm going to an this material black. Actually, I'm going to give it a prefix mat that I know this is a material, black. So now that we have that, we can create a new material. One way we can do it is that we can add a new material here. And then we can select the same one that we just created. Um and create a copy of it. So this will create a copy. If I click on two sheets of paper over here, that's going to duplicate the material that I'm using. I'm going to name this Matt white. So I duplicate it because I don't want to change the metallic and the roughness. I want it to be exactly the same. But now I'm going to change this base color to white. As you can see, nothing's changed, and the reason why is because the whole object has these material applied. We need to apply this white material to specific phases. So if we go into edit mode and I select the faces that are going to have the white material, I'm just going to go and select them very quickly. So I select all of the faces that should have that white material. So we go like that. And now I'm going to say Mt white. I'm going to stand on the mat white and say assign. Once I do that, you will see that we have the checkerboard right there. We have the pattern that we needed. And that's why I created the faces because I needed to select each face individually and assign a different material to each face. And that's it. We have our board, which is pretty nice. That's pretty much, can you can add as many materials as you want if you want the frame to have a different material than the black and white that you had there. You can also do that, make it any color that you want, doesn't have to be black and white. But this is basically how it works. Now, this is a very simple way of creating materials. We're not really going into the details. But actually, in the next video, I want to show you how this could be achieved differently. To not have all these spaces that are just creating a plane. And instead of assigning the each material, we can actually have a texture, and I want to show you how that would be done. So I'll see you in the next video. Okay. 22. Chess Project: Intro to Texturing: All right. So we have our board ready with materials, but I actually want to show you a different way to achieve this checker texture here. So what we did was that we assigned we had different faces, and then we assigned a different color for each face. There is a different way that we can achieve this. So I actually duplicated this board, have it right here without any materials. And what I did to the model was that I got rid of all of the intersections that were creating the squares. We needed that amount of faces because we were assigning a different material to each phase. In this case, I'm actually going to keep just one single phase at the center and that's going to be my board. I left the details similar to what we had before. But I got rid of all of these intersections that they weren't really modifying my topology at all. We just had those because we needed different materials for each phase. What I want to do now is instead of assigning a different material for each individual phase, I actually want to add a texture to the board instead. So I'm going to show you For the whole thing for the border, we're going to keep the same material that we had before. So to reuse one material that you have already created. Under the material properties, you can go underneath here, the arrow and just search for it. If you have a lot of materials, you can actually type them here. And that's why I'm telling you that it's important to name things accordingly because sometimes it's easier to just find it through the search bar. But right here, we only have two, so I'm going to select the mat black. And that's the same material that we were using before. Now I want to create another material. So I'm going to click on this plus, but on the right, I'm going to create that new material, that new space to assign a material, and then I'm going to create a new material. This one, I'm going to call it check Texture you'll see why. Actually, this is a material, so again, checker texture, what I'm going to do now is that I'm going to select the face, the single face, and I'm going to assign that material so that we're able to see. Right now, it's just an empty white color. But what we can do now is that we can connect a texture to our base color. So instead of having just like a solid color, we can actually have a texture. Right now, I'm going to show you just a very easy way to do that. I'm not going to go into details. But when you click on the yellow dot, you will see that you have a lot of things that you can connect to the base color. Right now, I want to go under texture, and under texture, there's something called the checker texture. There are plenty, you can add an image if you had an external image that you wanted to apply but for now, we're only going to be using the checker texture. As you can see, we have a similar pattern to what we had before. Now, the color so you can change two colors here by the fold it has it is white and gray. So I want to bring the gray to be completely black. But as you can see the amount of squares is not the amount that we need. Because of how we build the object and we haven't really scaled it up or anything. We knew that this is 16 meters by 16 units by 16 units by 16 units. So the scale here is actually going to be eight, and I know this because I've tried it. I don't want to go into detail for the how these things work because it's a very complex subject, and that's not the purpose of this tutorial, but as you can see, we have more squares now, but they're not really in place. And the reason why is because there's something called mapping, which is how our textures are applied to the object. And right now that mapping is not correct. To make it correct. It's like it is a little offset it. And we don't want that, so I'm going to go to vector to that purple dot. And then here I want to go under texture coordinates and select the UVs. So maybe you don't know what UVs are. UVs are basically the way to map three D objects into two D spaces. So basically, it's like converting a three D object into a two D image kind of. I'm not going to go into details about UV coordinates if you want to you know, learn more about it. You can always do your own research. But basically, what this is doing is that it's grabbing those UV coordinates that the plane had, our cube had the fold, and then using that to map the texture. As you can see now, we do have the amount of squares that we needed. It is eight on each side. And by total, we have 64 squares. So what's the cool thing about this? It's nicer to have textures because that way, you don't have to have as much topology as much geometry to have the desired texture, right? So it's just a single plane that has the texture on it. Now, we can change the material properties again. I think we had the roughness down and then the metallic a little bit up, and then we have something similar to what we had before. If you want to do it this way, you totally can or you can just stick to the other version where we just assign a material to each square, but I just wanted you to be aware because this is a little bit more advance, but something that is used a lot when working on like in three D and when we're texturing and when we're creating the look development of the objects. So I just wanted to show you that there's another way to achieve the same result. But yeah, that's basically it. So now we need to assign materials to our objects to our pieces. So I'll see you guys then. 23. Chess Project: Pieces Materials: All right. So now we are going to add materials to our pieces. I'm going to bring the first one on the list, which is the Bishop, so I'm going to enable the visibility. And then we are going to be creating two different materials. Remember that a chest set usually has two sides, so it's one light and one dark, and we want to create those two materials. And then once we create the materials, we will be able to duplicate our objects and just focus on the layout of the chest. So Here, I'm going to grab the object, and I'm going to create a new material. Now, this one, I'm going to call it material. Let's say piece, and then I'm going to say light. So I want to bring actually the board just to compare how it's looking. And then I don't want this to be completely white. I actually wanted to have a more Like, more yellowy color, not super yellow, but more like a cream color. Let's see. Something like that. And then I want this to be not that rough, so I want it to be more shiny. Something like that. So you have to think about what's the material of the piece. Like, it could be completely metallic, it could be plastic, it could be wood. It could be, you know. And depending on the material that you choose, the properties are going to change. So let's say if I want this to be some sort of like metal, I'm going to bring this all the way to metallic. And then from there, I'm going to change the roughness to make it maybe not that rough. And then these would be, I don't know, like gold. And it depends on the color, it could be copper, it could be silver, it could be another thing. I actually don't want them to be metallic. I'm going to bring the metallic maybe up to that, just so it's a little bit metallic, and then I want it to be more like plastic key. So the roughness needs to be yet high. Yeah, something like that. Then the easiest way to create the other material that I'm actually going to grab another piece. I'm going to bring the king, disable the bishop. I'm going to select the king, assign the material that we just created, which is the piece slight. Then I'm going to duplicate it. Remember that to duplicate the same material we're going to hit on the sheets of paper over here. I'm going to rename this to dark And now I want this to be more black. Then again, you can change the properties to make it more appealing for that particular color. That looks pretty nice, maybe a little more less rough, so it's more plasticy. Let's see. Yeah, something like that. And that's it. We have our the color of our pieces. Maybe the color I want it to be not as yellowy, more blue on the blue side on the blue spectrum and make it a little darker. Thing like that. Cool. So I'm going to bring the ta and just compare the two, so I'm going to move this over here and just see if that looks good. I think it does. Looks pretty okay. So yeah, that's basically it. Now we can assign the materials to all of it, but I think that initially, we have the two materials created. But now we got to focus on duplicating these objects as many times as we need and then assigning the materials to one. So I'll see you guys then. 24. Chess Project: Layout: All right, guys. So this is where we left. We created two materials for our pieces. But now we got to put them in place. We got to do the layout for our chest. So right now, I'm going to actually disable the visibility of the bishop and the king, and I actually want to start with the rook. So we haven't applied any material to this. I'm going to start with the light section, so I'm going to select the material, assign the material to the object. And then I want to go on the top view by pressing seven. Then here, you can move this to where this should be. Rooks are usually on the corners. I'm just going to select G to move it and put it in place. Now, from here, you can put them make sure that they are kind of in a good spot. So you can look at the properties here to see the location of it. I actually want to do this evenly, so minus seven and then minus seven here. Just so that I have like just a number without any decimals or something easier for me to control. And then now I'm going to duplicate this. So I'm going to select it press shift to duplicate it. I'm going to right click to leave it at the same spot, and now I'm going to press G and move it on the x axis to the side. Now here, you can see that the location, we can just press seven, and that will be equally distance. Now we can select the two, and we're going to duplicate it one more time. Press right click to leave them at the same spot, and now I'm going to press G and y to move them to the other side. Now, as you can see, they are not in place. You can say here how much you want to move them. In this case, it would be 14 so that they're equally distanced. Now for the two, we are going to select them and we want to change the material. It's going to be Park. I'll do it for each one. And there we have it. We have our rooks in place. Now, we are going to rename this. These two are the light, I'm going to be object, light, rook, and then 01. I'm going to copy of this and do the same for the second one. The light rook two. Then for these others, they would be dark 01, copy that, and then this would be our 02. We could also do left and right if that's easier for you. But it's good to keep them separate and knowing what you have. Also, we can create new collections. I'm actually going to do that. Under these objects collection, I'm going to create a new collection, and these are going to be my dark pieces, and I'm going to create a new collection. And these are going to be the light pieces. Super important that you keep everything organized. And I'm going to grab the dark pieces and bring them into the dark folder, and then the same for the light ones under the light pieces folder. Great. So now we have that and we can start putting the other things. I'm going to keep doing it with the night. So the night we would need to rotate it, but before we do that, let's assign the material. So the light material, go to the top view. I want to place it here. We know that they should be at minus seven. That's not what I wanted. Let's do it from here minus seven. There we go, and then I guess minus five would be pretty accurate. Now I actually want to rotate this on the C axis, 90 degrees. It was actually the other way. I'm going to rotate it one more time on the C axis, 180 degrees so that it is facing forward. Now I'm going to duplicate, do the same process that we did before, move it on the x axis, where it should be on five, and then we can grab the two, duplicate, move it on the y axis. And here, I'm actually going to rotate it individually. So first, I want to change the location to be seven and then I'm going to rotate this on the axis 180 degrees and the same for this one. Oh, I didn't rotate. Okay. There we go. I'm going to assign the material for each one. So this is the dark this is the dark as well. I'll select the two, bring them to the dark pieces and then select these two and put them in the light pieces. I'm actually not going to keep renaming them just because I don't want this video to be too long, but you should be renaming all of them. The next one that we have is the bishop, we're going to bring that and this one has already the light color. I just want to move it in place. So they should be at minus seven. And then the location at minus three. Now I'm going to move this, sorry, duplicate it. Move them on the x axis, and then this is going to be a three positive three. Then I'll select the two, duplicate them, bring them on the y axis. The process is very repetitive, as you can see. This is going to be at seven. And You could probably rotate this, but I don't feel like it's necessary, with the nights. But we're going to change the color, so it's going to be the dark it's going to be the dark. Then again, I'm going to bring them into the folder where it belongs. That's it. All right. Now we have the queen. So for the queen, we only need one on each side, and it should go I'm not wrong, it should be on this spot over here. So let's see, it has to be at minus seven and then at minus one. I'm going to duplicate that and move it on the y axis, but here it actually has to be at seven, but this is going to be on the other side. So it should be at one. And then I can assign the color and we will have the queen like that. Now I will bring them into the corresponding folder like that. Now we need to put the king, so I'm going to bring that here. Now we have the dark version here, let's actually move it where it belongs. Then here, let's see, it should be at minus one and at seven. Now I'll duplicate it and then bring it into the right and it should be at one and minus seven. I'm going to change the material one more time, over here. The light one. There we go. That looks pretty nice. Again, we're going to move them into the corresponding folder. Now we're missing the pawns. I'm going to bring one pwm going to start with the light pieces. This might be a longer process. I'm going to bring it here on this pot it's at minus seven, and then at minus five. Then I'm going to start duplicating that and I'm going to move it two digits every time. I'm going to duplicate that, move it on the x axis, two times. I'm going to do that one more time, move it on the x axis, two units. Then what I can do now is select all of them, duplicate them, moving on the x axis. I guess that's too much. Okay. Here they are. Let's scrap them. I think I love them. Oh, look, where they are. I'm like, where are they? Okay. So they should be let's see minus 57, I did not work how I wanted it to, but it's okay. Should be at five minus five. Three and minus five. And then one and minus five. So now we're going to select all of them and duplicate them not the board. Let's do that one more time. Move it on the y axis, and then it should be ten that we move them. They should be fine. Let's check. Yes, they are perfect. Now let's change, I actually have to do this individually, so we're going to assign the material for each one of them. Let's see. This is a very long process. I can take a while. But we are ready. Again, we're going to select all of these pieces and move them into the right folder. Let's just bring this up. Into the dark pieces and then let's select the other ones into the other folder. All right. That's it. We have our chest set in place. Now you can always arrange the scene to be different. You can move them so that it's more dynamic for note, I'm just going to keep it like this as the starting position. That's it. We have our layout done, and now we need to render this out, so we actually have a cool image to show. I'll see you then. 25. Chess Project: Camera: Okay, so now that we have our layout ready and our pieces are in order, we would like to maybe grab an image from this, right? Because we can maybe grab a screenshot from here, but it doesn't look very nice and we could actually improve this quite a lot with some camera position and some lighting so that we get a nicer result. Now, by default, when we are looking at materials with this render option over here, this is the model, and this is the shading. But with the shading, we are looking at a general lighting that Blender has. You can change the visualization by changing these are called HDRIs a little bit more complex. But basically, all of these little spheres will have different lighting. As you can see, the things will look a little different depending on the ones that you're choosing. So it depends, but the fault one is like this one over here, the third option, and we want to make the lighting from our own. First, we got to do the camera. To add a camera, we're going to hit a shift A, and then we are going to select camera. Now, you can barely see it. It's over here. I'm going to bring it up so that you can see what the icon looks like. You can't really tell what are we looking at. To look at what the camera is viewing right now, we're going to hit zero And this is basically what the camera is looking at at the moment. It's very strange to just kind of go back and forth. So I'd like to have a split screen where I'm going to make this smaller, and I'm going to create a new screen so that I can look at both things at the same time. So to add a new kind of window here. If you go to the right corner, you will see of this viewport, you're going to see that my cursor changes into like a cross kind of By doing that and you drag, you are able to create a second window and you can create as many windows as you like. Whenever you approach any corner of your windows, you can add more windows. But just two would work well for our camera. And what I'd like to do is keep one where I'm looking at what the camera is viewing, and then just the normal perspective so that I can move this around. So I actually want to do like a quick setup here of how I want this to be looking at. So maybe something like over here. Let's see. If I rotate it, something like that and bring it down. I like to play around until I have a nice view of what I want. So it really depends on what you want to what you want to portray with the scene. Just like a general idea. I don't want it to be too far away. I want it to be rather close because I don't really want to worry much about the background. So those are the things that you have to keep in mind when you are setting up a scene. Let's see this looks a little bit. I'm going to change that. I think something like that would be nice. And that's pretty much it. You are going to set up the camera like that by just moving this with your normal transformations and then setting up the view of the camera. Once you have that, as you can see, this is in the wrong place. I'm actually going to bring it out even out of this collection. Because it's not an object. Yeah. It should be just outside. And that's it. You can lock this object if you want to to not move the camera if you're happy. I think I'm pretty happy with this setup right here. But again, you can do anything you want, you don't have to do this exactly. You can change the position, you can change the places of the pieces, anything you want, just do like a cool scene with a nice composition and think what looks better and what works better for your scene. That's it. That's the camera set up on the next video, we're going to start with lighting. 26. Chess Project: Intro to Lighting: All right. So now that we have the camera set, we are going to start working on our lighting. So there are a couple of things that you need to keep in mind when working with the lighting, and it is that Blender has two types of renderers. As you can see, if you open up here. If you open up this menu over here on the right, and you go to the camera icon, which is the render properties. You're going to see that you have a render engine here. Now, by default, Blender works with EV, which is a real time renderer. It's faster. Real time is what usually video games work with to make things easier. And the good thing about it is that it is very efficient and it optimizes how the computer does all the calculations and all the things for the lighting. But there is a downside to it and it's not as realistic as other renders that are not real time, but that they use rate tracing instead. So if we have a list over here, we're not going to worry about workbench for now, but you see the third option is called cycles. Now cycles is the rate tracing render that Blender uses to make things a little bit more realistic and a little bit prettier. Now you can choose to work with EV or with cycles and actually, Before I do anything, I'm actually going to show you the difference. So I'm going to go into the render option over here. Right now, you can see the scene looks very bland, and that is because we don't have any real lighting in here. So I'm actually going to add a light. So we're going to hit S A and create a sun light. Now, don't worry much about where it is located or anything, but now we can see the lighting here. Now, if I change this to cycles, you will see that it takes a little long to compute. And it looks a little prettier, right? It has a more nicer effect, and I haven't really modified the light at all. This is just a straight light coming from above. It's a sun. And What happens here is that it takes longer to compute. If you don't have a very strong computer that can handle this type of rendering, I suggest you just work with EV, which is going to be faster and more efficient for your computer. But if you have a nicer computer with a good GPU and a good CPU and that it can handle the stress of rendering, Iggest you work with cycles because it's going to look a lot nicer. But it also depends on what your necessities are. So what I do recommend, though, is that you never work in cycles. Like you don't modify the objects on the rendering option when you're working with cycles because it can really slow down your computer, and you don't really want that. Just for looking how things are being lighted, you can do that. But generally, I would work on this option. Instead, I'm going to change this to not have the HDRI, this image right here as the lighting, but instead, I want to choose the scene lights and the scene. And you're going to see what this does. Basically, this would be the same option as having activated on our rendering option, as you can see, is pretty much the same. But that's what I like to work with. Now I'm going to grab that light that I added before, and we are going to change it now. As you can see, because this is a sun light. If if I change the location of the light, it's really not going to affect anything. The reason why is because the light also it's only affected by the rotation. And not the location. So no matter where I have it, it's going to be the same. What matters is how I'm rotating it. So one thing that you have to keep in mind is that usually you don't want the light coming at the same, like, I'm going to do this and show you what you shouldn't do, and it's have it like in the same direction as the camera. And that's because that would look very flat. That would flat our image and not give us the three dimension feeling that we like. So that's something that you should always avoid. But other than that, you can just rotate it however you want it and put it somewhere that you feel like it's going to be nice and do it from here. You know, you can just try different options. Of how the light is looking. I think something like that would be nice. And then we can change the light property. So if you go on this panel on this light bulb over here is a green icon, you can change the color of the light and the strength of the light. Usually, there's a system called the three point lighting, and it is that you have three different lights to light any scene. Now, this is just a general rule. You don't always have to follow it, but it actually gives great results. So one of the lights that you always want to have is your key light, and that's what we are creating here. So the key light usually is the main light that is going to give us the direction of kind of like where the main light is coming. So you want that to be a little strong. I'm going to put this at 1.5. And then I actually want to change the color. Usually, lights are never completely white. They can be, but kind of rare. I want it to be a little yellow but closer to orange kind of so that I get a warmer color. And I think that's pretty much it. What I want to do with the key light. Now, the second light that you always have to have, it's a feel light. The feel light is going to basically feel all the parts that are not being lit by the keelight. Now, I'm going to check how this is looking on cycles. Just to I didn't change the engine. Just to see how that kelight is looking. I think it looks pretty nice. I like the warm color of it. So the flight, it's going to feel the lighting over here of places that is not receiving much light. That's what the felt is going to do. And a cool trick that I like to do is that our felt is not an actual light but an HDRI. Now, this is a complex topic that I really don't want to get much in depth about. But it's basically creating a dome that brings light from an image that's surrounding the whole environment. To do that, we are going to go under the world properties, which is over here, this red icon with a world over there, and we are going to change the surface. So under the color yellow dot, we're going to click on that and we actually want to have an environment texture. What this will do is that it will create a dome with an image around now because we don't have an image right now it looks pink, so don't worry if this happens to you. We just want to add an image. Now, this image, I'm going to be giving it to you. But if you open an image over here, I'm actually going to go under this folder, and I'm going to select this image now so you can see this is HDRI format, which means it's meant to be an image that surrounds the world. You can find this easily on Google, if you look for free HDRI. But this is what we have now. And as you can see, now, we have an image on the background that's giving us some light on the objects, basically. If you cannot see here because I don't have the render activator. Actually, I think you can only see through the camera. So you can't really see what this is looking like. But basically if I go a little farther, you will see that this is the image that is grabbing. And this will help us create more light coming from the image. Now, if I go into the render option, We can actually disable the background. I actually don't want that, so in the world, I'm going to go into ray visibility, and I'm going to disable the camera. So I don't want to see the background on the camera. I only want the lighting to be affecting the diffuse and the glossiness of our objects, but not the background. So this is how that's looking now. It's looking a little nicer. Now, I don't want it to be as strong. I'm actually going to bring this down to maybe 0.5. Just because I don't want it to be super strong on my scene. And that's it, that's our feel light. Now, another light that you need to add is the rim light. So for the rim light, I'm going to go back to the option over here. The rim light is what's going to give us the edges. The nice edges, usually you would see rim lights on portraits where you see the strengths of hair being like looking like very angelic or something like that. It basically is the light that's coming from behind. And that's usually our strongest light. But the thing is that since it's coming from behind, it's only going to illuminate certain edges of the object. So we are going to add a spotlight for this, and I'm going to see usually I like it to be opposite to the kilight or opposite to the camera. That's how it should be usually. I'm going to rotate this, trying to see where it is, something like that. Bring it all the way here. Something like that. And then I want to see how this is looking. The power it's right now ten watts, but for spotlights, they need to be way way up high, and that's because it computes it different than sunlight. I'm actually going to do it like 100,000 or something like that. And that's when you can start seeing the rim light coming here. Now, if you really want to see what you're doing, actually the lights are in the wrong place. I'm going to bring them out. I'm actually going to disable the sunlight for now. So I don't see that. And I'm going to bring the world strength to zero. So I just focus on that rim light, and I can see where it's coming from and what it's doing. I'm actually going to rotate this a little bit, like that. I like that, and you see how we're getting that nice rim on these edges. It's pretty nice. That's what we want to achieve. Now you can change the properties of the spot light by changing the size of the spot. So bigger or smaller. You can change the radius of where it's starting. And that's going to affect certain things. You can see how much is like diffusing that cone. Yeah, there are different things that you can play around with the spotlight. I'm not going to go into details. And then I'm going to check it on my render option and just kind of check how that room light is affecting my object. Feel like I want the radius to be a little sharper. So the smaller the radius, the sharper is going to be. Usually, And then the spot size, I think that's pretty good. Now, the bland, I don't want it to be too soft, and then let's check it out. Yeah, I like that a little better. I like how we get, like edges over here. Looks pretty nice. So now we're going to activate the sun again and the environment. And we're going to check it one more time. And yeah, that's pretty much the lighting. I feel like this might be to pride, maybe. So we can try to make it a little farther or change the keelit to be less intense. So we can do that. Let's go to the sun and check the properties. Let's just keep it at one and see how that's looking. Yeah, I like that better. It's a little less intense over here. You can always change this again. You can change the location of your spotlight. So I'm going to bring it a little farther away because that is not as close to this object. Let's see how that's looking. Yeah. I like that. I like how it's looking. And that's pretty much it. Now, you can add a floor if you want to or just render this as it is and maybe just add a plain color on the background. But yeah, this is pretty much what you have to do. Looks pretty nice. Look how nice the shadows are looking, and this glossiness. It's looking pretty nice with the reflections. So yeah, that's pretty much how lighting works. Now in the next video, I'm going to show you how to render this out so that you can actually have an image. So I'll see you then. 27. Chess Project: Rendering: All right. So now that the lighting is ready, we are going to start rendering. So for the render, I do actually want to create some sort of background, I don't like I don't want this to be empty. So let's do that by adding a plane. I'm going to scale that up. Make sure that is pretty big. Something like that would work. And then I do want to select these edges over here in the back, and I want to extrude them up to create some sort of wall. I want to extrude them up. Something like that. Now I'm going to select these edges at the border and I'm going to level them so that I can actually create a smooth surface. Something like that. Okay. And then I'm going to go on object mode and say shade smooth. So that's actually a smooth background. I know for like a photo session or something. Nice. Now I'm going to add a material to it. I'm going to create a new material. It's going to be the material for the background. And then I'm going to check the object to see where it's at. Right now it's under the light pieces and we don't want it to be there. I'm actually going to bring it up just outside on the objects folder right there and I'm going to call this object background. Nice. And then here, we can check how this is looking. And let's see. You can see we have the background pretty nice. I do want it to be a little darker though, and I do want to get rid of that high, very bright spot that's being created because of our rim light. So let's work on that. I'm going to go into the material. I'm going to make it a, something like that. Not too dark. And then to avoid having that bright spot, what we can do is that we can tell splendor so that the slide doesn't affect my object like my background. I can just kind of trick this. This is something that you cannot really do in real life. That's why 30 is so cool. Because you can trick the lighting and be like, Oh, I don't want this light to affect this object, and you can actually disable that. So to do that, I'm going to select the light. I'm going to go under object and then go under shading under the light linking. And here you're going to click on this icon and select the objects because this is where my background is, and I'm going to disable that background. By doing that, if I go under the render again, you will see that the rim light is not really affecting my background. I don't really like and then we have an issue. See how we have this dark spot, and we don't really see the checkerboard. That's because I personally had two boards, one with the faces assigned with different materials, and one with the texture. And it is rendering both. So it's kind of creating an error. So I want to disable the camera for the one that I'm not using, and then we'll see how that's looking. Oh, I see what's happening. So another thing is that this is not under the board, so I need to bring it down so that it matches and it goes down. Let's see if that makes it. Yeah. That was our issue. Now that we have that, it looks much better. I like the background. I might want it a little lighter, maybe. Now that I think about it, I think lighter would look maybe better. I'm going to just change the material, bring it a little. I'm actually going to go into a it looks a little more blue. See how that looks. Yeah, that's pretty nice. So you can change this color to be anything. It could be pink, it could be green, blue, anything. So this looks pretty nice. And when you feel confident about your picture and how this is how it is looking, you can go. I actually want the material to be a little not that. That's another thing I want to. Let's see if I can change the roughness. Okay. Actually, no, I don't think it really matters, so I'm going to make it more rough. All right. So once you are ready and you feel confident with your picture, you can actually change the settings of the render and make sure that everything is okay. So we're going to go under the camera. You're going to make sure that the render engine that you're using is the one that you want to, if it's either EV or cycles. If you have a better CPU, choose that, but if your GPU is stronger, maybe you have a laptop, Rendering with your GPU might be better. But it depends. Then here's where you're going to create the samples. The more samples you have, the longer it's going to take, but more neat the picture is going to be the more defined and with less noise. By default blender uses 1024, like 1024 samples for the viewport. So when I'm doing it here, that's going to do it compute basically 1024 times until it reaches that and that's all. But when you actually do the render, by default is 4,096 samples. That means that it's going to be better. You're going to have less noise, as you can see, right now, this is computer and it is up to 40 44. It goes pretty slow and since I'm recording, it goes a little slower, but it's basically getting rid of the noise that we see here. Doing 40 96 could be worth it, but it might take longer and sometimes some computers might not be able to do that, or maybe they just crash if you try to do it that high. J keep in mind, how the rendering is done, and this is 1024, so it's not really much. You can bring it higher or lower, and this is more about testing what your computer can handle and how much samples your scene needs, depending on the materials, the lighting. When you have shinier materials that's going to create more noise, you got to keep those things in mind. And then the other thing that you have to look for is underneath the output here, you're going to check the format. Right now, I'm rendering an image that's 920 by 1080 pixels. That's the default. You can make this smaller by bringing it to 50% that's going to be half of the resolution, or you can make this four k if you want to, there are different things that you can do. Then here's where you're going to tell Blender where you want to save your image. You can also This is important if you're doing an animation. But personally, I enjoy just doing the render if it's just an image and then saving it myself instead of telling it where to do it beforehand. So now that I'm happy with this, I'm going to render it. So to render it, you can go to the render tab up here on the menu and say render image, or as you can see, you can just press F 12 on your keyboard and that will do it. Let's do that and then you'll get a new window, and I'm going to fast forward this because this might take a while, but you will see all the time that is taking the samples, and when this is ready, you will see that you would say 40 96 out of 40 96. I'll see you in a bit. All right. The render took about 21 minutes and the image is now ready. Now we can just save it by going here under image on the render window, and here we're just going to say save or save as, and then you're just going to choose a folder where you're going to save it. I'm going to go and do it just out here. I'm going to say ch render. Now you can change the file format. Right now I'm saving a PNG, but you can change it to JP or a Targa or whatever it is that you need or a ti. So I'm just going to keep it as PNG. Then you can change this as well, but I recommend you don't do that, choose the file format that you prefer, and then just say save as image, and that's it. We have our vendor ready. You can create as many different images as you want. You can create different cameras or just move the camera to have maybe some close ups or something. But yeah, that's pretty much it. We're done with the project. I hope you learned a lot. Thank you for following me throughout this journey. Yeah, we have our chess ready. I hope you enjoyed it.