Transcripts
1. Introduction: I don't think there's
any other tool in the world that's as able to allow you to take something that's in your
head and, you know, create it and put it in
front of someone else to share with them everyone. I'm Derek Elliott and I'm a three D designer and animator. My background is in
industrial design. Working with brands
and businesses to help them visualize products, bring advertisements
into the world. In today's class, we're going
to keep it really basic. I'm going to get you up to speed on the fundamentals of using blender and all the real basic stuff that
you need to know. Before you get started,
we're just getting you a little bit used
to the interface and we'll start
building out some of your first few objects
and maybe even doing a little lighting
and rendering as well so that you've got
something you can show your mom. So the potential with
blender truly is limitless. Maybe you come
from an industrial design background like me, or maybe you're a
graphic designer, or maybe you're an architectural
designer and you want to start rendering out your
architecture projects. Those are all things
you can do in blender. So even though we're
going to just end with one simple render of some
pots in the sunlighting. You can take those same
skills that will cover in this class and start making many other objects of your home. Because the skills
we cover here today are so base level
and so important, You can create all sorts of
artwork that you're proud of, that you can show your friends, and you can even start to potentially get
some work for them. Thanks so much for
being here today. I'm excited you've decided
to take this class and start your blender journey.
Let's get started.
2. Getting Started: Welcome to the class. Thank
you so much for being here. I'm excited to get started and we're just going
to take a little bit of time going over your
workspace things you might need. Blender is an open source
three D creation tool for rendering, animating,
lighting modeling. Doing basically
anything you might need to bring a three
D scene to life. Blender has that capability. Beyond that, you can even do video editing, two D animation. The possibilities are
really almost endless. So in this class, we're
going to go beyond the basic cube
that you start off with in Blender and
start editing it. Being able to control how rough a material is
or how shining it is. Being able to
adjust the color of that object and being able
to duplicate that object. Modify it so you can really
start to fill a shelf out. And then at the end, we'll also add some
lighting and you'll have a realistic image
that you can start sharing around as your
first blender project. So when you're ready to
get started going over to Blender.org and
download Blender. It's free to download,
fully, open source. You'll get the latest
version and then you can install on your computer
and start playing around. You don't have to be working on a desktop computer with a
separate mouse and keyboard, but that's typically how I work. It's nice to have
the extra space. The keyboard in particular, it's really nice to have
this numpad over here. There's a few hoc
keys that will be covering in this
class today that are a little bit more easily accessible when you do
have the number pad, but more importantly
would be a mouse. I'm using a little bit of
a funny looking one here, but it's a pretty normal mouse. It's just got the two
left and right buttons, and then it's also
got a mouse wheel. The mouse wel is probably the
most important part there. So when we're navigating
our viewport around, we'll be pressing down on this middle mouse
button quite a bit. And we can also zoom in and
out with the scroll wheel. So that's very handy to
have if you have it. If you don't have
a mouse, I would definitely recommend
picking one up. So now that you've
got everything you need to get started, let's go ahead and move into the next lesson where I'm going
to be walking you through some of those very fundamental
hot keys so you can start working your way around the interface, knowing
where to click. And again, not being scared.
3. Walk Through the UI and UX: In this lesson, I'm
going to walk you through the Blender
user interface and how to navigate the viewport and what all these
crazy windows are. So as soon as you
download Blender, you're met with the
famous default cube. This is going to be in the beginning of
every Blender scene. You start, a lot of
people start off by deleting it, the poor guy. But the other
objects we have here are a camera and a lamp. You can left click
to select those, but this is the beginning
of any blender scene. No matter what you're doing, these objects are
going to be in there. Besides this big window in the middle which we call
the Three D viewport, there's a few other
things around the outside where you can control other things around rendering your
lighting, for example. You can add materials
in this area, but we'll get to all
those in a little bit. The biggest area you want to be focused on is this middle area, and that's called the
three D Viewport. Now you may have
figured it already, especially if you have a mouse, but pressing down on your middle mouse button will allow you to spin
the view around. And this was the thing
that was very exciting for me when I first started
using Three D software, was just being able to spin
the view around like that. So pressing down on your middle mouse is how
you're going to do that. Now if you do not have a mouse, then what you can do
to navigate around the viewport is just
in this area up here. You can click and drag, and that will allow you to
spin the viewpoint around. So you might see all these different menus and
things up here, but we really don't spend
a lot of time in most of them because Blender relies
so heavily on hot keys. And hockeys are basically just commands on your
keyboard that you'd be pressing together sometimes in combination to
complete a command. And using those
hockeys will help you work a lot
faster and blender. Now sometimes you want to look
in a particular direction, so this is where having a
number pad comes in handy. You press one to go
into your front view, three to go into the side view, seven to go into the top view. Again, those are on
your number pad. But if you don't have a number
pad, same thing up here. You can click on these
little buttons and that will take you to those
orthographic views. Now on the screen you're going to see all sorts
of different buttons. This area up here is
called the Outliner, and that's where Blender
is going to basically be, keeping track of everything
that's in your scene. And when you add new objects, those will all appear here.
You'll see in the scene. We do also have a light, which is this little thing, and then this triangle
shaped object is our camera. And that's what we use
to render our image. If we render an image, it's going to be looking
through that perspective. Now sometimes you might need to change the appearance
of your viewport, so you can click and drag
on any kind of area here. These are all customizable
to be different things. If we really wanted to,
we could change them all to be three D
viewports, for example. That's really all these are, they're just different
windows within Blender. And another thing to know is if you ever get stuck or you get your interface in a place where you're not feeling
comfortable with it, then just press File New General and don't worry about saving and you'll be right back
to where you started. If you made changes in
your preferences like to interface scale,
that will all be there. You may have seen me rotating the viewport like this with
the middle mouse button. But another thing you might
want to do sometimes, like if you want to
look in another area, is to pan the viewport. And you can do that without
a mouse or a keyboard, just by clicking
in this area here. This little hand icon will
allow you to pan the viewport. If you just click and drag. That's particularly useful if you're using a track
pad on a laptop. But the hockey for that is just going to be
holding shift on your keyboard and then
the middle mouse that will allow you to pan
your view around. So that's really
helpful when you're moving kind of between objects, but sometimes you want
to be rotating around a specific object and there's a really handy tool in the preferences that will
allow you to do that. And that's one thing
that I do recommend changing when you're
getting started. So if you go into
the preferences up here in the top left, you can change in the
navigation options. You can go to orbit
around selection. And that will allow you to
orbit around what is selected. So if you actually
put your finger on the screen and moved around,
it would stay right there. And that's really handy
when you're moving around in blender is
using that option. Now another thing
that I like to do when navigating is I want to be zooming into the direction where my mouse is
actually located. So rather than just zooming into the middle of the screen, I want to zoom to
where my mouse is. Another thing that's handy for jumping around your
three D scenes. So that's another option we can change here in
the preferences, and as you might
have guessed it, it's the zoom to mouse position. Now you can see when
I zoom in and out, that it'll go to
wherever my mouse is. Those are just a couple of
things that I think are important to make your
life a little bit easier. This button is to look
into the camera view. So if we click that, you'll see actually what the
camera is seeing. So if we were to
render our image, it would be from this
exact perspective. And the hockey for that,
if you hover over here, you'll see the shortcut
is Numpad zero. So if you press zero
on your numpad, that will go into
your camera view. And that's really
convenient when you're working on your scene
and then moving into. Actually looking
through the camera. If you're not interested
in learning the hot keys. Most things in Blender can be accessed a number
of different ways. Just like with the
navigation tools over here. You can also go
into the View menu. And then you can look
in your viewpoint and see that these are the
commands reviewing top, bottom, front, back,
right, and left. And it actually has the
hot key listed out there. So if you ever forget
it, don't worry. You can just go in the menu
and you'll see it there. So we've covered navigating
the view and blender. Once you figure out
your way to kind of get around blender and how to see different sides
of your object, you might be interested
to start moving, rotating and scaling objects. And as you might have
guessed, there's hot keys for those things too, as well as commands over
here on the sidebar. Now if you don't
see this sidebar, you can press on your keyboard and that will
bring up that sideboard. There's also a little arrow right there that
will pop it out. In here you can see we have
the move command which will bring up these arrows and allow you to move objects around. The blue axis is the z axis, the green one is y, and
the red is the x axis. That's an easy way to move things around using this gizmo. But as you might have guessed, there is a hot key for that. And the hot key is G, actually. So if you press G, we'll say
that that stands for grab. That will allow you to move an object around
inside the viewport. It will just, no matter
where your mouse is, if you press and then
move the object around, it will just stick to it
until you press again. Now if you had your object here and then maybe
moved it accidentally, but you didn't want to
actually place it over there, rather than left clicking
to place it there, you could press and then just right click and it
will cancel that option. And that goes for a lot of
things in Blender if you're in the middle of a command but then you don't want to
go through with it, you can right click
and it will cancel that command we've
covered to grab. Now if you do want to
move it on specific axes, then you can combine hockeys. We're going to
press in X and that will move it along the X axis. Sometimes that's important
if you want to move things, especially in
architectural renderings or something like that, you want to be moving
at very defined axes, knowing those hockeys is handy. Similarly, G, Y will move
it along the y axis. And you guessed it, Z is going to help you
move up and down. Now moving on from that, the other commands you
might want to know to change objects in the viewpoint would
be rotating them. And similarly to moving them, we have a little gizmo. Here is what this is called. This will allow us to
rotate objects using this little tool that
appears right on the object. And you can see in
the top left corner, it appears up here. If you look while I'm doing it, you'll see exactly how much that's rotating
in the exact angle. Now just like moving, we can rotate objects
using a hot key as well. R is going to be
the hot key there. You may have guessed
that one as well. They're very conveniently named, but if you press R and Z, we'll be rotating on the Z axis, R and X on the X axis, and R and Y will
rotate on the Y axis. Now, another thing
I haven't mentioned yet but that you might find useful sometimes you want to
rotate at a specific angle. Or for example, it'd be common
that you want to rotate something exactly 90 degrees rather than having
to eyeball that. There's a way we can do
that easily in blunder by holding the control
key real quickly. I'm just going to reset the
rotation and location of this object representing Alt and which just like
moves an object. Alt and G will reset
the location of it. And then Alt and R will
reset the rotation just so that you can
see a little bit easier What I'm doing
in this next step, if we press R and Z for example, and I want to rotate
this exactly 90 degrees, you could look in
the top left there and try to get it
right on the money, but it's a little bit difficult. If you hold control,
it'll snap to five degree increments and you can make sure you're
right at 90 degrees. That's another thing
that goes for a lot of stuff in blender is if
you're holding control, it will incrementally
move whatever you're adjusting
on The flip side, sometimes you want to
do very small movements and you want to do even smaller than you can move
with your mouse. If you hold shift while
you're doing a command, it will make that a more
fine tuned approach. So you can see I'm
spinning around multiple times here and
it's going very slowly. We covered moving, rotating, and then the last
thing you might be interested in doing is scaling. And that's just as simple we're going to press to do that. And then dragging out will
make your object bigger. Then if you press a defined
axis like and then z, it will flatten
it on the z axis, and x will extend
it on the x axis, and Y will extend
it on the y axis. And those are really some of the basic hot keys that
you need to know. Sometimes if you're like me, you might accidentally hit the H key and your
object will disappear. And you can probably start to imagine what that
hot key might be, it's the hide hot key. If your object just goes out of the screen
completely disappears, you might have
accidentally press H. One way you can
get it back is Alt H. Just like we reset
the location with alt G, we can press Alt H and that
will reset what's hidden. But you'll also see
that that actually checked off this little
marker right here. If you look up here, that's
another way to hide objects. Then lastly, if you want
to delete an object, like for example, sometimes
when I'm getting started, I just want this
cube in the middle. You can delete
objects by selecting them with left click and
then press X to delete them. Now I'll undo that real
quick to also show you that if you want to select multiple
objects, for example, if you wanted the
camera and the lamp, you can hold down shift
and then left click on it. And that will select
two objects at once, which then you can
press X to delete them. Now we just have our
cube in the scene. What we just covered
was the very fundamentals of moving around the three D Viewport and doing some very basic commands to control objects
within your scene. Join me in the next
lesson where we'll add more objects to the scene
and start to edit them.
4. Add Objects to a Scene: In this lesson, we're going to go ahead and start actually building out a little bit of a scene in our three D viewport. We're going to create
a wall with a shelf on it and we'll eventually be putting some things
on the shelf. So what we'll want to
do is look through our camera view and take
a picture of that scene. But first of course, we
need to build the scene. In this lesson, we're
going to start adding some objects into our
scene using some of what we did in the previous
lesson to modify them so that we have that shelf
start to come to life. In our three D viewport. Here we have our cube
that we started with, and we can actually
use this as a wall. For example, I'm going
to press and Y to just move this back on
the y axis a little bit. This is going to be
what will be my wall. So what I want to do is press S to scale that
up a little bit, then I want it to be
thin like a wall, so I'm going to do and y, if you remember that hot key
from before, don't forget. If you're not familiar
with the hot keys, you can use the commands over
here to control the scale. For example, what we have
there is our wall background. Now what I want to do is
add a shelf onto this wall. What I could do
is press shift A, and that could add
in another cube, but I already want it
to be this thickness. So what I'm going to
do is press shift D to duplicate that wall. Then what I'll do,
I'll right click. I still actually have
that duplicate there, but I didn't want to
move it anywhere else. I wanted to stay
right where it was. So I'll just right click. Like I said before, that
cancels the command. We actually did do
the duplication, but we did not move it. If I press R and X, and then I'm going
to hold control so that we snap at
defined increments. And then looking in the
top left in my screen, I can see that now we're
rotated right at 90 degrees. I'll left click and
complete that action again. If I do that process
one more time, shift D to duplicate the wall. Right click so that
it stays where it is. And then R X and then holding
control will rotate on the x axis 90 degrees until
we see that in the top left. Now let's scale this down to be a little bit more shelf
size, one to press, and Y to scale this in a little bit until it's something like that and
then I'll just move it over. I know I stressed the hot keys, but sometimes I do like to have this gizmo up just because it is convenient
When you're working. I'm going to move that shelf
into a place where it's just a little bit
away from our plane. Now, we covered zooming in and out with the scroll
wheel earlier. But sometimes if you want to smooth scroll in and out,
you can hold control. And then just with
your middle mouse, go in and out moving your
mouse and that'll zoom in. Now that we have our
basic shelf scene here, you might want to
add an object to it. The way we can add objects you saw before was by
pressing Shift A, and that will bring
up the ad menu. Now of course, like
many things in blunder, that menu is also up here. And you can see if
you hover over it, you'll see the
shortcut is Shift A. Shift A will bring up
this menu to add things. Now you could add
whatever you want here. You can see that there's all
sorts of different objects. But what I'm going
to do first is just add in a cylinder object. That's going to
add in a cylinder wherever our three D cursor is. And that's what this little
candy cane shaped thing is. If you'll notice if we
move this out of the way, that's our three de cursor. Anytime we press shift A
and add in a UV sphere, for example, that's
going to add it right where that
three D cursor is. Now there's a number of ways to move your three D cursor around, but right now we like it right in the
middle of the scene. So I'm going to delete
these two objects. Well actually we'll
hold onto the cylinder. I'm going to move
that onto the shelf. Let's just press S to
scale that down so that it is the size of a
cup or something like that. And just move it
into place that now we have our object there. Now along the lines of
moving these objects, we're also going to want
to move the camera. To do that, I'm going
to select the camera. Then you might think that you
just move it this way and then rotate it a little bit and try to tell
where it's looking. But that obviously
is very difficult. I'm going to use this
button over here again. Remember the hot
key is Numpad zero. If I click that, I'll go into my camera view and then I can just rotate the camera in this view and
then just pressing, move it around until I have it looking the
direction I want. Now maybe you've played
some video games before where you control
things with the W, S and D keys. We can actually do that
in Blender as well. If I press Shift and Tilda, which tildes that
little squiggly button around the tab button
on your keyboard, we can actually just pan around
using our mouse this way. And then we can use the WS
and D keys to fly around. Now if you scroll in and out on your mouse control how
fast you're moving. Now one thing I'm noticing
is that my view is a little bit off here
when I was rotating it. So I want to make sure my camera was looking straight ahead. So I'm going to
press on my keyboard and that will bring up
this side bar over here. So you might have
seen this previously as I think it's there right
when you open blunder. But this transform
menu over here shows whichever object you have selected exactly
the rotation of it, the scale of it, and kind of tells you all the information you need to know
about the object. So our camera, we can see, if we go into the view again, is rotated on the x
axis 83.3 degrees. But I want it to be
looking straight ahead. So I'm just going to drag in this field and holding control, I can snap that to 90 degrees. Similarly, this Y axis is a little bit off
holding control, I'll just snap that to zero. And then the Z would be where it's looking
left and right. So I'm going to hold control and make sure that's at zero. And then let's just in
this field here and I'm holding shift to make this a
very fine tuned adjustment. I can control where it is on the z axis just until that
is nice and framed up. Have a little more
fun playing in the three D Viewport,
adding objects, moving them around,
adjust your camera, find a nice angle that
you think you might like. But join me in the next
lesson where we're going to dive into edit mode, which is where we
can actually start making some changes
to these objects.
5. Use Edit Mode: In this lesson, we're going to take the objects that are in our scene and begin modifying
them or editing them. And there's two main
ways to do that. One is by actually entering
edit mode on the object, which will allow us to modify
its individual vertices. And another way to modify the objects is by
actually adding modifiers which
will allow us to do all sorts of
different things that we'll get into in this lesson. We're back in our
scene here with our self cylinder
and our wall object, but we want to start making some changes to these objects. For example, maybe we want the shelf to be a little thinner. What we could do is something
called entering edit mode. So the way we'll do that by pressing tab to enter edit mode. Now what you'll see is we have vertices all
around our object. Now vertices are these
little tiny points. Basically, any model
in Blender is made up of a series of vertices. Now you sometimes might
want to select vertices, but other times you might want
to select faces or edges. The way that you
could do that is up here in the top
of your screen. You can see this little dot
is the vertex select mode. This little line is
the edge select mode, which will allow us
to select edges. You can move these
using the same commands we did in object mode. By pressing and then remember again that you right click will cancel the command. Then in face select mode, we can select entire
faces at once. Now faces would be at
least three vertices together making up a face. In this case though, you
can see we have four. Now I can quickly switch between vertex edge and
face select mode by pressing either 12 or three
along the top of my keyboard. One is vertex select, two is edge select, and three is face select mode. Now let's say that we want to
maybe bring this shelf out a little bit so we could press and y to bring it out a tad. Then maybe we wanted to bring
this edge in a little bit. We could select this
face and then and X. Remember, just like
an object mode, we can pull up our move tools here if you'd prefer to
move things that way, But getting used to the hockeys will help
you quite a bit. Now, with this object here, the wall object, I'd like
to extend the wall out, but I'm also going to have
it come around a corner rather than trying to mess
with a whole bunch of faces. This is really all
just one object. It would be much easier if the thickness was
automatically applied, and I only had to work
with one face at a time. And we can do that
with modifiers. I'm actually going to tab out of edit mode and
delete this object. And we'll show you
how we can add a more flexible model by using a solidify modifier
to add that thickness back. I'm pressing shift
A to add a plane. And then remember R x and 90 will rotate on the
x axis 90 degrees. Then we can move it
back into place. Then in edit mode, I'm going
to press to scale this up. Then just like we did with the shelf in our edge
select mode here. By pressing two, I can select this and then press
to extrude it. Now we have a little bit of
a wall to the side there. Now to get that thickness back, I can go into my
modifiers properties, which is this wrench icon here. And there's a whole bunch of modifiers to work
with in blender, but one that I like to use a lot is the solidify modifier. If we add that to our object, then you can see we can control the thickness of this plane. Now rather than having to
mess with individual faces, I can just mess
with these edges. And they'll be dynamically updated and the whole
thing will stay nice and thick with some
realistic dimension to it. I wanted to add a window to
this plane and that's one of the reasons why we added
the solidify modifier. Is so that instead of having to fill faces in in the middle, we can just cut holes
into our mesh and then use that more easily create
something like a window. I'm going to press control R, which is a new hot key, which will add an edge loop. If we press control R, we'll see this yellow part highlight. If I click, I can then
scroll up and down. And this is basically just
going to slice our mesh. I'm going to put
that right about where I want the
bottom of my window, which is maybe in line with the shelf and then left click. And now we have another, basically we've got more
definition to our mesh. Now we have this line
here that we can control individually to
make an actual window. I'll press control
R one more time. Pull this over to
about right there. Press control R on
this one right here. And then control R one more time to create a few more edges. Now what I can do in face select mode by just clicking
up here or pressing three. You can select this face,
press X and delete it. That's how we can quickly
start building things out. This was not obviously an object we can add, but we
added the plane, added the modifier to
give it thickness, and now we have a
nice wall object. You could repeat that process again by adding another plane, moving this down, scaling
this out to create a floor. And then press Shift D to duplicate that,
create a ceiling. And you can see quickly we have started to build out a
little bit of a scene here. I'm going to keep doing some
of the same hot keys I was doing before to build out the scene just a
little bit more. I'm going to press shift D to duplicate this shelf object. Bring that down a
tad, we'll go into edit mode on it and
bring this down. Then maybe we want to have a another shelf object so we can press Shift D
to duplicate that. Then let's say we want that
to be a little bit thinner. We could scale it down,
but maybe we want these two shelves to
have the same thickness. What I could do is just make
them the same object and instead use a solidify modifier to control their thickness. Let's press X to delete that old shelf and then
tab into edit mode. Then what I want to
do is basically just, I want this top plane
only because I'm going to add a solidify modifier
to give it its thickness. A key we can use to basically everything we don't
have selected is control I. Then once we do that, we can
press X and delete faces. Now we just basically have this singular plane which then I can add the same solidify modifier to give
it some thickness. Then now in edit mode I can press Tab to
go into edit mode. And we just have this one
plane we're working with. We can press A to
select everything, and then press Shift D and
then Z just to move that down. And now we have two shelves here that we can
control independently. But now if we want to
address the thickness, they'll both change at the same time with the
solidify modifier. We didn't cover
this on the wall, but you can control the direction that the
modifier is going. With this offset option will basically just control
which side things are on, then the thickness obviously is a little bit more
self explanatory, but the shelves are
looking pretty good. I just want to add in a
few more objects here. We've got our one cylinder, let's move that
down a little bit, then let's press Shift
D to duplicate it. Maybe we make this
one a little bit more of a pot like shape, we can tab into edit mode. And then adding a loop cut, just like we did on
the wall press control R. And then right click
to complete that action. And then to scale that
out a little bit. Now we have a little bit
of a different shape. Now if we wanted to give
some thickness to this, just like we did before, we
could tap into edit mode. Select that top face,
press X to delete it. And then add in our
same solidify modifier. And then just bring this up until we have a nice
thickness there. Now one more modifier that
will get a lot into in the next class is the
subdivision service modifier. And that's the best way to
really smooth out mesh. If we add in that modifier, you'll see what it does that will smooth out our
mesh a lot more by basically taking the average of the points we have now
smoothing between them. Now in the subdivision
surface modifier, there's a few controls here. The viewpoint levels is what
you see in the Viewport for a little bit faster
performance then the render levels is what
will actually get rendered. Now usually I'd like to
leave those the same, but if your computer is
a little bit slower, you can turn the
viewpoint levels down a little bit lower. Now, one thing you'll notice
that when we're working with these smooth objects is they don't actually
appear smooth. You can see all the
individual faces. One way that you
can fix that is by right clicking and
shading them smooth. This isn't actually adding
more geometry to our object, but it is making it so
that they appear smooth. You can see if we look
at the silhouette here, you can actually still
see all the vertices. Now, down here on the bottom, we have a, it's coming to
a little bit of a point. And I want to make that a little bit more
flat on the bottom. So what I'm going to do is just looking down into that pot, I'm going to go into
my face Select mode. And then select that bottom
face. And then press. And that's a new hot
key we're learning. And that's going to
inset that face, that will actually
add an edge loop. And it's a little bit
difficult to see that I'm going to go into
my x ray mode here. And that is this command
up here in the top. And the hot key is alt Z. Now we can actually see all of our geometry a
little bit better. And that's something I do
often when I'm in edit mode, is switching back and forth
between x ray mode and regular mode to C
geometry easier. Let's do the same
thing over here. Let's delete this top face with X and then let's add in
our solidify modifier. Then we can add in the
subdivision surface here as well, but if we want to
maintain that shape, we'll just press control R
to add an edge loop there, just like we did with the wall. And then this bottom face, we'll press to inset it, then we can right click
and shade that smooth. Now this has a little
bit of a problem where it's trying to round
over this top part. We could add in just a
little bit more geometry here and then drag
that up so that, that holds that edge
a little bit better. Now we've got a
nice little scene with two pots there
and our shelves. Now one last modifier, let's take a real
quick look at is another one of my favorites,
the bevel modifier. These shelves right now
obviously have very sharp edges, and really nothing
in the real world has an edge that's
quite that sharp. So we have a way that
we can break that, and that's with a
Bevel modifier. So if we go back into
our wrench tab here, we can add in a Bevel
modifier and that will change the amount of, it'll add an edge to it, but something's really
weird happening where the edge over here seems
to be really elongated. And then this other one is
basically doing weird things. And that's because when we
were scaling this object, did it in object mode
instead of edit mode. If I was to add a new cube, for example, just for reference
the scale on this object. And again, if you
can't see this window, you can press to
bring that up is 111. If I added a bevel
modifier to this object, you can see that it's nice. And even if I were to
scale that object on the x axis in object mode, it's going to start
to stretch that out and that's what's
happening on our shelf. In most cases when we're
working with modifiers especially want the scale
of our object to be 111. I'll just delete this cube. And then on this
shelf object uppers control A and apply the scale. That's also going to throw off our solidify because we had
scaled it down on the Z axis. We can make some
slight adjustments there to get that back
to the right place. And now our bevel is
also working better. Now, we'll work more with the bevel modifier
in the future, but the quick things
to know about that is you can change
the amount of bevel here. And then the
segments is going to add more segments to
how round that is. So we could write click and shade that smooth and we'd have a nice round bevel
on our object. In this lesson, we
talked a little bit about going in and out of object and edit mode
with the tab key. We also touched a little bit on some of my
favorite modifiers, The Solidify modifier,
for example, as well as the bevel and the subdivision
surface modifier. What I would employ
you to do now is play a little bit more
around with your scene. Think about adding
maybe more walls or another window or
something like that. More shelves, more pots. Meet me in the next lesson
where we will finalize our scene a little bit more by adding some lighting into it. Viewing the scene
in rendered mode, adding some materials, and
actually rendering the image.
6. Add Lighting, Color and Materials: Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to
finalize our scene by adding some light into it
and some simple materials. And I'll also go over some of our camera
settings so that we can actually render this image so that you've got something
that's ready to share. So in our last lesson,
we've got everything set up here where we've
got our two pots, our shelves, our
floor and ceiling, and a wall with a window that we can bring
some light into. We also have our camera
set up right around here. Now if you remember, I
mentioned in this panel here, we can kind of control what's
happening with that camera. And I wanted to be
looking straight ahead, so the rotation 90 is great. I don't want it to be off
kilter either way. Right here. So let's make sure
that's at zero and the z rotation is
looking straight ahead. Now it can be a little bit
difficult to go between your camera view and
your three D view. So one thing I like to
do in this instance is actually open up a new window. So the way I'll do that
is just up here in the top right hand
corner of my screen, I can click and drag out, and that will make a new window, and that's where I can sort of maybe be viewing
through my camera. So that I can do things
in two places at once. I'm going to press my
hot key over here, zero to go into my camera view. And then in this view, I don't need to see all these things. I'm going to press to hide
that sidebar to hide that. Now I'm just looking through my camera right
here and I can make adjustments over here to get my shot framed
exactly how I like. Let's just move this back a
little bit until we've got a nice frame here and maybe we even want this to
be a square image. The way you can change
your aspect ratio is in this little
printer tab here. Right now by default it's
set to 1920 by 1080, which is a common
widescreen format. But let's just change
that to something square. So I'm going to type in 1,500
by 1,500 and this would be something that looks great on for like Instagram for example. Let's move our camera in and just get this
framed about how we like something like that I
think looks pretty nice. And we'll be able to tell
exactly how we want this framed once we start adding
some light into the scene. Our scene, if you recall, came with this light up here, which is just a point lamp. And you can't really
see much of what that's doing, even if
we move it around. You could see obviously our shading isn't changing at all. That's because this is still just a regular three
D viewport view. Basically, It's not actually showing us what's
going to be rendered. To see what's going
to be rendered, we need to play with these
four little balls across the top of our screen if
you try clicking on this, one is the wire frame view. This one is our solid view, which is what we've been
doing most of our work in this one is called the
Viewport shading mode, which is going to give you a little bit of lighting detail
and material information, but really where we want to
be is the rendered view. Now you can see we're actually getting information
happening with that light. So if we move that light around, you can actually see that it
is showing a rendered view. But for me, I want
things to look a little bit more realistic
than they are right now. One of the reasons
they don't look super realistic right now is because we're rendering
the V render engine, which is a somewhat new
render engine for Blender. It's, it's real
time render engine, very similar to what Unity or Unreal Engine
would look like. So if I change this
from V to cycles, you'll see that for one
it gets a lot slower. But it does look quite
a bit more realistic. It's going particularly
slow for me because I'm rendering
on the CPU, but instead I want to be
rendering on the GPU. So you may not have a graphics card in your
computer, but if you do, you want to go up to Edit
and then Preferences, and then in system you can enable your graphics
card if you have one. So make sure that that's
shown right there. Mine is this G force RTX 40 90 and then you should be
able to select GPU compute. And for most people, if you have a GPU that's going to be
rendering a lot faster. Now all these little
things around the scene, this kind of graininess
is called noise. And what that is, is light
bouncing around the scene. You know, it's not
completely accurate, but when you render with
more samples that will start to go away the way I
want to light this scene, it can be a little bit
difficult to light it with just regular
lamps like this. So there's a really
cool way and blender, we can get really
realistic sunlighting without using an
actual lamp object. Some press X to delete
this object and you'll notice that our scene
still has some color to it. It's just this plain gray world. But I want to have
that be not gray. I want it to be a little bit
more like a realistic sky. This is where the
gray is coming from. We could change the color
of the background here, of course, but this isn't
looking very real either. Instead of just
using a color input, I'm going to actually
use a sky texture. If we click this little
yellow dot here, we'll bring up the menu where
we can select Sky Texture. Now once we add that,
you can see that we have a very realistic looking sky here in this particular view. I don't actually need
to see this floor plane in my three D cursor and
the camera and everything. So I can turn off
those overlays with this option up here in
the top right there, it will turn off the overlays. Now I just have a clean, sort of unobstructed view of what
I'm seeing in my render. So if I go into my
camera view here, that's exactly what
I would get if I rendered and if you wanted
to render an image, the hockey for that is
12 and that will just immediately start
rendering your image with exactly how
you have it set up. So you can see that
we're looking through this camera and it's rendering
from that point of view. Now back to the sky
texture really quick. If we zoom out here, we
can see what's going on. For one, this is very
strong. It's way too bright. So we're going to
bring the strength down to something much lower. I might bring it down to
something even as low as like a 0.2 These values aren't particularly important
exactly what they are, but this sky, we'll cover
it more in detail later. But you can see we've
got a few options here. The most important ones
would be the sun elevation. So you can see
we've got a shadow. Let me just actually
add in another plane, just for the point
of reference here. If we add in another plane, and then let's put a
monkey head on the plane, which we didn't do that earlier, but this is just a object that comes in blender that's great
for testing things out. You can see if we control
the elevation of the sun. If it's at 90 degrees, it's basically straight ahead. And we can actually
zoom out and look up. And we can see that the
sun is right there. And then if we pull it down, the sun elevation to
something like that, you can see we start to
get a longer shadow and we start to get some
realistic colors happening around the horizon. Now if you wanted
a softer shadow, you could change the
size of the sun. And now we start to give
you a softer shadow. These are really
fun to play with, we'll go into more
detail with those later. But the sky texture is a really great way for
getting a realistic sky, as the name would suggest. So let's go into our
render view here. Now, rendering can be a very
computer intensive process, so I'm actually rendering all around where this camera is. I don't really need
to render what's outside the frame so I can set a render border in
my camera view here. That will tell
Blender basically, I only want to render
what's in here just so that my computer performs
a little bit faster. This is especially
important for people with lower powered laptops or if you're not used to
rendering in cycles. So you can press
control B to add a render border and then
just click and drag. And now we're only rendering
what's in the view in our computer ship port
form a little bit faster. Now if we were to press on our middle mouse
and spin the view, go back into seeing
everything rendered. But now anytime we go
into our camera view, again zero is the hockey. We'll be looking
straight through that. Let's go into the sky texture. Let's just move it around. Let's rotate our sun
all the way around. Okay, it's actually facing
the right way there, but it's a little bit
too high in the sky. Let's bring the elevation of
that sun down a little bit. And now we're getting
some nice shadows. If I actually go into
my camera view now, you can see that we have those shadows we were looking for. Again, the size of
the sun is going to control how sharp or
soft those shadows are. We can just play with this
until we have a nice look. I just want to highlight
pots and create some interesting shapes
in the foreground here with the way
that sun is oriented. So this is a very basic render. It's kind of ready to go here, but if we wanted
to add some simple materials to these objects, just to spice it
up a little bit, but with a mesh object selected. We've got this little
materials property tab, this little red ball, and that will bring up a whole
bunch of commands. The only one we're going
to really mess with right now is the base color and
then maybe the roughness. Let's take this pot for example. Let's say we wanted that to be, I don't know, a black material. We can press new and they'll add a new material so you can
name it whatever you want. It doesn't matter and you don't need to name your materials, but obviously it helps keep things a little
bit organized. If you do but pot one, let's have that a black color. You can change the color in blender with either RGB values, hue saturation value,
which is my favorite, or you could actually type
in a specific hex code. But let's just bring the value down until that's a black color. And then maybe we
want it to be shiny, so we could control the
roughness value down here. Now there's a lot of
sliders to mess with. At least with this lesson where we're just working
with basic things, we'll just focus on the
roughness and the color for now. We could do another
material here, we could call this pot two. Then maybe this pot is
like a orangish red color. Then we could change
the roughness on that, that it's nice and shiny too. And you can see
we have some very realistic reflections
happening now. Maybe so that this all stands
out a little bit better. Maybe our walls become
a black material too. Let's press new to
create a new material. We call that wall. And then you could change that to
whatever color you like. I'm just going to bring the
value down just so it's a little bit of a gray so that our shelf stands
out against it. Now with this set up, I'm
liking the way my scene feels. Maybe we frame our camera shot a little bit better,
or even quickly. You could go back
into edit mode. And maybe the shelf comes over a little bit to get a little bit more of an interesting shadow. Maybe this window needs to be a bit smaller so that we're not getting quite
so much light in. I'm really just looking
in my rendered view while I'm editing things in my view over here just until
I have a really nice look. This is common
practice in Blender to go between checking
your rendered view. I'm getting some really
interesting shapes here, and then making changes
in the view over here.
7. Render Your Final Image: So with this all set up, I'm feeling pretty
good about it. I'm ready to render my image. What I'll do is go
into this render tab and then make sure you've got the resolution set to
something you like. So I've got mine at
1,500 pixels square. And then the next
tap you want to take a quick look at
is these samples. I think I mentioned earlier
that there's all this kind of graininess and that's basically the more samples you have, the less grain there will be. With the viewport right now, we have basically two
distinctions here. We have the viewport amount of samples and then we also have the render amount of samples. Basically, the more
samples you have, the more light beams
are being shot and the more accurate
your reflections will be. Also, with that, higher accuracy
means more render time. I actually don't usually like to leave this at the 1,024.40, 96 settings, but I actually
pull this down quite a bit. In my viewport, I
usually would maybe only look at let's say
100 samples or so. And then in the render,
I usually only like to render with maybe 600 or so. Because for a scene like
this that's going to be just plain with more
complicated scenes, like if you have transmissive
materials or glasses, metals, or there's a lot
of lights in your scene, you might need to use more. But something small, like 600
usually works pretty good. If we render this image
using our 12 hot key, you'll see that it
starts to calculate. And it's rendering pretty fast on my computer because this is a relatively simple scene and I have a nice graphics card. One thing you might notice is that even though
our sample value isn't that high when it rendered the image,
it's very smooth. But in this viewport,
for example, we can still see all the grain. And that's because
by default and blender, there's
denoising happening. So usually with a low
number of samples, your image is going
to be pretty grainy. So if I turn off this
denoising and let's set the render samples
to something that matches the viewport, like 100. We should be getting basically an identical image to what
we see in the viewport. When that finishes, you see that we still have
some graininess here. And that's okay if you're
just doing a preview render, but for a final render, we want to get rid
of that graininess. The way that that is happening
is with this noise option, you can actually turn on
noise in the viewport two, which will keep everything very smooth in your viewport view. But usually that can be a
little bit slow to work with. It's usually best to only use denoising when you're
rendering an image. I'll uncheck that
for the viewport, but turn it on for the render
even with only 100 samples, which in the Viewport
is pretty grainy. If we have denoising on
you press 12 to render. You'll see that once it finishes rendering
all those samples, it'll add the layer
of denoising on top and we get an actually
pretty smooth image. You can save your image
by going up here, pressing Image, Save As, and then you can save
that wherever you like. And you could save that
as my first render, or whatever the heck you
want that as an image. And that will be in the
folder you saved it on. In this lesson, we
took all the models we built. We took the wall. We took those little
pots on the shelves. We actually turned
them into something that feels a little
bit more real. We added materials to them, We added some realistic
lighting into our scene. And now we have something
that really sets the basis for your next
portion of exploration. You could play with the camera
angle, the sun lighting. You could try doing a
nighttime or a mid day render. And really, there's a lot of
places you can go with this. If you were following
along for the first time, your scene might look
a lot like mine. But I encourage you to
play around some more, try doing something else
using the same tools. There's really a lot of flexibility in what
we've learned so far.
8. Final Thoughts: Well, congratulations to you
if you've made it this far. I know Blender was a very daunting software
when you opened it, and it's probably
still quite daunting. But everything we
did today and in this class was a lot of the first things I did in my
first years using Blender. And I still do all those
things almost every day today. Even creating professional work. We started with our
measly default, cube, floating and nothingness, and now we actually have a sunlit shelf with some pots and realistic
materials on them. We covered navigating
the viewport. To get to this point,
we covered adding walls using edit mode
and object mode. We've been added a
few modifiers like the subdivision surface
to smooth things out, to solidify, to give
things thickness. And what we have now is
a really great basis for moving forward and adding
more objects to our scene. Learning new things and continuing to build
out scenes in blender. Whatever you might have in
your head, you can create it, use your own ideas,
Use my work as inspiration and share below
in the project gallery. I'd love to see what
you come up with. Thanks for following
along so far. There's a lot left to learn. I've got a whole series on
blender tips and tricks. We're going to be
covering a lot of other things like
materials and animation. Feel free to stick around. I can't wait to see
it in my next class.
Derek Elliott, Product Designer + Animator
