Transcripts
1. Introduction : Ever seen those really
cool three D animations, scenes or models and
wondered how they made it. A good chance is that they've
probably used blender, which is an open source
and free platform, and that's exactly why
you're probably here today. The good news is that it's
super easy to use once you learn the fundamentals and
the basics. Hey, everyone. My name is Janice, and I'm super excited to be your
teacher today to help you get your first steps in
blender and even come out of this class with your very own model by the end of it. As an artist, I've used blunder to create 30 art for brands, such as Lenovo, and Vida, and Star bars, and many more. And really excited
to bring you along the journey with me and
get your first steps. And a lot of my content online focuses on educating learners, such as yourself on
other blunder tips, and tric and tutorials. A lot of people find blunder
very intimidating in the beginning because
it's not like the other softwares that
they might be used to. So my biggest piece
of advice has always been to go into
the software and get used to the keyboard shortcuts and the mass shortcuts to really develop that muscle
memory of yours. And that's exactly what
I've helped you prepare for in this course in the
next upcoming lessons. For the next few lessons, I'll teach you to comfortable with the blender fundamentals and also walk away with your
very own toy train model, which I would love to see in the project gallery
of this class. I'm really excited to see all of your work and get your
first steps in the system. So without further ado,
let's get started.
2. Downloading Blender: All right. Now, in order to
actually use blender, first, we have a couple
of requirements or things that you'll need in
order to use the system. You'll need a laptop or a PC
that's able to run blunder. The next thing you'll
need is a keyboard. Any keyboard will do, and a three button mouse or any mouse with
a scroll wheel. And lastly, you'll
need the Internet. So go ahead to any of your
search engines that you use and just type in,
download blender. You should be able to
click on the First link and it'll bring you to
the blender homepage. If you're using a MC or
a different type of OS, go ahead to the drop down menu and select the OS
that you're using. I am using a window, so
I'm just going to go ahead and click Download
Blunder 4.1 0.1, and you should see it pop up
in your download history. If you're using the older
version of blender, there shouldn't really
be much of a problem. Most of the updates
are fairly small, and you won't really notice a huge difference as
you're using it from a beginner standpoint anyway,
so don't worry about that. Once your MSI file has loaded
in, go ahead and open it, and you can just accept all
of the manual settings, agree to the terms
and conditions, and go ahead and finish
your installation. Then you can go
through your files or go down here to your search and look up blender
and you should be able to open up your
blender program. Our next lesson, we'll learn
how to navigate around blender and learn about
the different menu panels.
3. Navigating Blender: All right. Now that you've
downloaded blunder. Go ahead to your search
tab and type up blender. Create a new general file. Now that you've opened blunder, let's learn how to
navigate around and see what each of
the menu panels do. This is our main
three D viewport. This will be our main
workspace where you can add, edit, and move
around your objects. We will also primarily use our mouse to move around
in this viewport. Scrolling up and down, we'll
let you zoom in and out. Holding down the scroll wheel allows you to rotate
around your scene, and if you press shift plus your middle
scroll wheel button, then you can pan around and actually walk around
in the scene. Take a minute or so to get
used to the mouse controls. Your first weekend
blunder is all about developing your muscle memory with the mouse and the keyboard. In this viewport, you will
see the default cube, your camera, and your light. For now, we will keep these. Since we're in a three
D modeling software, you'll notice the
y and the x axis. The y is the green, and
the x axis is the red one. There's also an
invisible z axis line going up and down this cube, but you don't see that for now. If you click on any of
these three objects, you'll notice that there's an orange outline that appears. This means that it is
actively selected. If you look here
to the top right, you can see the outliner. Whatever is selected will
also be highlighted here. This shows your objects
and collections. It allows you to
view and organize your objects and rename them as well if you
double click on it. You can also right click to
create a new collection. To the right of these objects, you will see an eye
and camera button. Clicking the eye button makes it disappear from the viewport and clicking the camera button will make it disappear
from your render. If you just have the
camera button on, that means that you won't
see it in your viewport, but you will see
it in your render. Contrarily, if you have
the eye button on, you'll see it in your viewport, but you will not see
it in your render. On the left hand side, you
will see our tool bar, and if you press n, you'll
bring up the information bar. We'll get into the tool and
information bar in a bit, so you can go ahead and
hide those if you want. If you look at the
top, you'll see all these tabs that are used
for different purposes. Blunder is quite a
flexible software. There are tabs for sculpting,
for texture painting, and shading, but no need to overwhelm yourself with
any of these for now. For today, we'll stick only to layout tab throughout
the tutorial. On the lower right hand side, you'll see our properties panel. Again, you'll notice a
lot of these tiny tabs. Each of these tabs control a different
modification or changes that you can make to your
object or your scene, like the modifier tab, the particle tab, or
the material tab. We'll get into some
of these later, but just know that
you'll be using them quite frequently
in blunder. Also, if you do
not have a mouse, you can also use the gizmo here on the top right
to rotate around. You can also use the
magnifying glass button to press and hold
and zoom in and out, as well as his hand button
to pan around the scene. This is quite useful
if you don't have a mouse and you're on
a laptop or something. You can also use the Gizmo
to snap into these views. But the easier way
to snap around in your viewport is actually
by using your keypad. If you press one on your
keyboard right now, nothing will happen
and that's because we have to edit our preferences. With that, I'd like you
to go into your edit tab. Scroll down to where
it says preferences, and you should get
this pop up window. The first thing is if you
come down to this input tab, go ahead and check
Emulate numpad. Press save, but it should also
auto save your preference. I like to press
save just in case. Now when you press number
one on your keyboard, it should snap you
into the front view. If you press three, it should bring you to
the right hand view, and pressing seven will bring you to a bird's
eye top down view. These will make your life a bit more comfortable while
learning blender. Feel free to move around
the view poor and rewatch this lesson to get yourself
a little more comfortable. In the next lesson, we
will learn how to add an object and learn how to
move them around as well.
4. Learning Transform Operations: I Blunder, there's three
main ways to transform an object by moving,
scaling, and rotating. These are called
transform operations, and it's arguably one of the most important
fundamentals to learn. We'll begin by learning how
to move an object first. For now, let's just focus on transforming our cube
by clicking backslash, which we'll just get rid of
everything else in our scene. But don't worry, everything's
there. It's just hidden. Now, let's say you want
to move this cube. The way you can move
this cube is by pressing G. If you press G, you'll notice that
the cube turns white and now you're free to
move it anywhere you want. To let go, you can
simply right click, in order to place it, you can left click and that'll
place the movement. However, most of the time, you'll probably want to move it and control it in a
better direction. Which is why if you press
the cube, Go into move. You can also press x, y, or z to move it
along that direction. By pressing g and y, we can move it down the y axis, if you press g x, you can move it
along the x axis, and g z, to move it up or down. Now to scale an object, the keyboard function
is S. By pressing S, you can either scale
it big or smaller. Now we can also scale
along an axis as well. By pressing S y, you'll see that it
actually elongates along the y axis
creating a rectangle. We can also do the same for the x axis if we
press S and then y. Likewise, if we press S and z, it'll scale it along the z axis. If you just press S, it'll
just scale it unilaterally. Now to rotate an object, you can simply press r, which will rotate a free form. You can also press rx to
rotate on the x axis, Ry to move it along the y axis, and of course, r z to
move it along the z axis. Now there's another way
to move scale and rotate, and that is by using our
toolbar on the left. Let's say you want to
move using these buttons, you can manly move
using these arrows. And these arrows are
corresponding to their axes, so you can move along the y, x, or z axis. You can do the same thing
with the rotate tools, so you can rotate using this gizmo tool and even
scale it along the axis. It really depends on what
feels most comfortable to you. I would suggest
getting familiar with the keyboard functions, G, S, and Z, in order to make your blender work flow faster for the future and long term. Now, if you're a
visual or hands on learner like myself,
instead of watching, I've prepared a
downloadable blend file for you to try it yourself and really start developing
that muscle memory for transform operations. Go ahead and open up the lesson for blend file in the resources. I've prepared three
separate exercises for us to learn how to move, scale, and rotate and really try them out on
separate objects. Let's start with
our first exercise. You'll fet to sap
into front view. Let's start off with moving our cubes down to
their platform. To move this cube, we
can either press G, z, L eft click, or alternatively
if it's easier for you, you can use the move button on the tool menu and
drag it down like so. Now let's move on
to the next one. To select multiple objects, all you have to do is
simply click and drag and that'll let you
select multiple objects. Like before, let's press G, and we can either move them
to this platform like so, or if it makes you
comfortable to practice G, and then G. But when you
actually scroll out, you'll notice that it's not
actually on the platform. We'll have to move this
down the y axis by pressing G Y and place it
on the platform, and now they're on the platform. Now let's move on to scaling. Press the cube and press S to scale until it blocks
the cube in the back. Great. Now they're
the same size. For our second cube, you'll notice that this cube
is a lot smaller. How do we see what's behind it? Well, there's two ways that
we can go around this. We can either Alt Z in
order to toggle x ray, or up here on top, we can enter wire free mode, which will essentially give us the skeleton of the objects. Either works, I prefer Alt Z, but you can do whatever
works for you. Let's S and scale down.
These cubes match. Nice. Onto our third exercise, let's rotate the first
cube to match the second. I'm going to select
this cube and press R and tilt it around to match this diamond
shape in the back. For our second cube, you'll see that it's
actually rotated twice. The first thing
we're going to do is rotate 45 degrees
along the z axis. We're going to do
that by pressing r z and then 45 and hit Enter. Then we're going
to do r x and 45. Now you can see that our cube
is rotated along two axes. You can actually rotate it smaller increments
if you want. Congrats. Now you've gone
in and actually scaled, moved and rotated around
a couple of objects. Next s, we'll be
learning the difference between edit and object mode.
5. Object vs Edit Mode : Now, the next thing you need to learn is object
versus Edit mode. In object mode,
this allows you to move around objects,
apply modifiers, and effects, and in edit mode, you can actually sculpt or change the shape
of that object. You can change the mode
by going to the top left and clicking on the dropdown
menu and selecting Edit. We have all these other modes, but these are far more
complex uses for now. So let's just focus on
object mode ver Editde. You can also change between these two modes by pressing tab. So you'll notice
when you press tab, it'll change between
object and edit mode. Now, there are
three ways to edit an object, through its vertex, edge, and faces, and you can select using these three tiny buttons on the top left here. Now, you can apply any of the transform operations that we just learned from moving, scaling, and rotating to either of these elements
of your object. So you can move, scale, and rotate all the vertices, edges, and faces, just like we did with the objects in
our previous lesson. So go ahead and try it out. Now you can start to see how these very basic and
simple operations can be combined to make
some major edits to our objects and
collectively a scene. Now, to continue building
that muscle memory of yours, I've prepared another
practice blend file. So go ahead and download
it from the resources tab, and let's go in
there together and fix our friend Smiley Face. In this practice file, we're
going to fix our friend smiley face because there seems to be a couple
of malfunctions. First, we're going to adjust
the vertices of the eyes, then adjust the
edges of the nose, and finally, adjust the
faces of the mouth. Let's adjust this
right eye first. So click on the right eye. Let's tab into edit mode. First, let's adjust the
vertex of this eye, because it is spiking
out to the top. Go ahead a front view and G, Z to bring down the vertex. And now it's looking
like a perfect eye. Tap back into object mode, and go ahead and click
on the left eye now. Let's tap into edit mode again. Press the vertex, that's
sticking out over there, Press G and x, and let's bring it into
the right. And great. Now both of our eyes
are looking normal. And now let's move
on to the nose. Go ahead and select the nose. It's sticking out a bit to the right and it's
also scaled up, so let's go ahead and fix that. Let's tap into edit mode. Go ahead and select edge. Let's click the edge,
that's sticking out. G and x to bring it in. Now you can pan over to adjust the angle
of your viewport, and let's scale down the side of the nose to make it a little
bit more equal to the rest. Great. We're almost there. Now it's time to
adjust the mouth. For the mouth, it looks like it's sticking out a little bit, let's go ahead and
bring that in. Click on the mouth and
tap into edit mode. Select that one face
that's protruding out. Remember to click
on the face button. Let's first bring it in
by pressing G, then y. And this one face of the lip is a bit bigger
compared to the other. Let's go ahead and
make it equal. Let's select the face that's protruding and scale it down. Great, now our Smiley
face is looking happy. Go ahead and feel free to edit around with the Smiley face and get comfortable
with your transform operations and edit mode. Our next lesson, we'll begin modeling our toy train model.
6. Adding & Removing Objects: In this lesson, we'll begin
modeling our toy train. Now we'll start to
put together a lot of our fundamentals that we've been learning in our previous lesson. The first thing that
we want to do is actually delete everything
from our scene. It's nice to start
from scratch normally, so the way we can do
that is by clicking and dragging our mouse to select
everything in our scene. The way to simply delete
an object is by pressing, and it'll show a pop up. Go ahead and click delete. And now we have nothing over
here in our collection, so let's go ahead
and add a object. To add an object,
it's very simple, it's simply shift A, and that will pull
up this menu full of all these objects that
you can add to our scene. This includes meshes, curves, text, images, and lights. For beginners, most
of the time you can find everything you need
in the mesh section, which includes most of your basic three
dimensional shapes, like a cube sphere and cylinder. So go ahead and click cube, and you'll see that our
cube has spawn in to cine. Now, you'll notice
this tiny orange dot. This is called the origin, and this is where your
objects are spawned. If you press shift
and right click, it actually moves the origin. If you press mesh
and cube once again, it'll actually spawn
it in the second spot. That's good to know if you
ever want to add an object and you don't always want them
to spawn into the center. Now that we've learned how
to add and remove an object, let's continue building
out our toy train and learn how to use modifiers
in our next lesson.
7. Duplicating Objects & Using Modifiers: Now that we've
spawn in our cube, let's turn it into a rectangle to become the base
of our toy train. Let's start off in
object mode and skill it down on the z axis. Let's ongate it on the y axis, to turn it into a rectangle and stretch it out a bit
on the x axis as well. We'll adjust the
dimensions as we go, so don't worry about
making it perfect for now. To add in the base of our train, let's go ahead and add
in a cylinder mesh. In order to rotate it,
let's click the object, press rx and 90 to
rotate at 90 degrees. Press S Y to scale it
down on the y axis, and now we have a bit
more of a coin shape. Let's bring it upwards
a bit with G Z, and bring it to the front
of the train using G Y. This is going to be like
the face of our train. Now instead of copy pasting with your usual control C control V, we actually use
duplicate a lot more, which is essentially
the same thing. And to do that, select
your cylinder body, and what you want to
do is press shift D, and that will
duplicate our object. Now, you can right
click to let it go. It'll still be in
the same position, or you could left click
to set it in place. These are separate objects. So whatever changes you make to the original cylinder will
not apply to your new one. For this cylinder, I'm actually
going to shrink it down a little bit and elongate it
a bit more on the y axis. Let's bring it down, and
I'm going to duplicate this twice more so that we have
three sub cylinders in total. Great, now we have the
body of our train. Now let's add our side
supports by pressing shift A, go back into mesh, and let's
add in a cube to our scene. Let's bring it up to the side of our train body and
scale it down. Let's elongate it to match
the length of our train body. Now, to create a
symmetrical side support, we could shift d to duplicate
it to the other side. But instead, what we're
going to do is something different because if you
duplicate it and bring it over, it may not be
perfectly symmetrical. That's where I will
introduce the Mor modifier. So go ahead and delete this duplicated one if you've
already created it, press on your side support. And now come down here to the properties panel where
you see this wrench tab, and now we're in our
modifier properties panel. If you go to Add modifier, it'll bring up the
menu of all these different possible
modifiers that you can add. There's lots to explore
and many of which you probably won't touch in your
first few blender projects, but the Mirror modifier
is one of the modifiers you'll probably be using a
little more starting out. So go ahead and click on Mirror. You'll notice that nothing's
actually been mirrored yet, and that's because it needs
an object to mirror to. What we actually
want to do is make its metrical to the
base of our train. Click on the eye
dropper tool next to mirror object and click
on our base rectangle. Now you'll notice that it's
mirrored to the other side. If you move it
around, you'll notice that it follows its
mirror counterpart. Additionally, any
changes that you make to your original mirror object will also apply
to the other one. Congrats, now you've applied
your first modifier. Now let's move on to create
the cab for our train. So instead of creating a
new cube from scratch, sometimes it's just easier to duplicate the objects
you already have. So go ahead and
select your base. And press shift D to
duplicate our object. Now that it's been duplicated, let's scale it
down on the y axis and bring it up right on
the back of our train. I'm going to scale
it down so that it matches the height
of our side support. Now I'm going to
duplicate it again to create the main
body of our cab. Let's G Z to bring it up and scale it on the Z axis with S z. To create the roof or our cab, let's duplicate this
rectangle and bring it up, scale it down on the z axis, and scale it up to
create our roof. Our train is looking
a little bit short, so I'm going to bring
back the cab and alongate the body of our train to make it a little bit longer. Go ahead and select
everything and scale it on the y axis and bring
it back accordingly. Great. Now we can see the body of our train fully
coming together. Our next lesson, we'll add
the wheels to our train.
8. Array Modifier: Let's go ahead and
add our wheels by adding a cylinder
to our scene. L et's g x and bring it over to the right
side of our train. And R Y 90 to rotate at
90 degrees on the y axis. Let's scale it down to make
it more of a wheel shape. And bring it up to the
front of our train. Now, we could duplicate
twice and move the wheels to create the
wheels across the train. But again, we can
alternatively use a modifier. In the beginning, you'll
notice that it might seem much easier to simply
duplicate your objects. But the more blunder
projects that you do, your workflow will become easier when you have lots and
lots of object to create, and you use modifiers instead of manually
duplicating everything. Let's head on over to the
modifier t once more. Select our front wheel. It add modifier,
click array modifier. This allows us to create an
array of our selected object, and it also duplicates
however times we want. We can also control the direction that
they're duplicated in. Now, because we want
our train wheels to go horizontally and
not straight down, set the factor x to
zero and the y to one. Because we want three wheels, let's increase the
count to three, and we can use the arrows on the side to slightly increase the space between
the wheels instead of having them stick right
up next to each other. You can adjust the spacing depending on how large
your train base is. I am setting mine to 1.2. It's worth noting
that any changes you make to your original model for the array modifier will automatically apply
it to the others. Now, we can actually
stack our modifiers, meaning that we can use
more than one at a time. To create our wheels
on the other side, we can apply the
mirror modifier to automatically paste these to the other side of
the train as well. Let's repeat the
step from before, select the eye dropper tool for a mirror object and
select our train base. And now we have six wheels
completed on our train. Next step, we'll build
the smokestack and learn some of the most
common object edits.
9. Common Object Edits: Great, sir. Train's coming
together pretty neatly. Now let's add a smokestack
on top of our train. Start by adding a cylinder
and moving it up. Now, I want to introduce you
to some common object edits. It tab to enter Edit mode. If you press T, you
will see underneath our transform operations along with all of these
other functions. Some of the most common
edits include ext, loop cut, inset, and Bevel. Let's try them out while
making our smokestack. In Edit mode, let's hit the face button to edit the
face of our smokestack, and let's elect the top
face of our cylinder. Let's ext this face by
pressing E. Extruding basically extrudes a face or a part of an object outwards, and you can control which
direction it goes in. Once you've extruded
it up a little bit, let's press S to
scale our face up, and now extrude it once more
to create our smokestack. When you're extruding, it automatically does it
in a direction for you, but sometimes it
helps to give it a direction by pressing Z. Now to create the divot in our smokestack with
their selected face, press I to inset. Basically, this creates a smaller face on
your selected face. Now press E once more
to extrude it down. Now you can see
that we've created almost a pipe for
our smokestack, which is the shape
that we're going for. I'm slightly adjusting the
shape of my smokestack to give it a bit more
of a cartoonish effect for a toy train. You'll notice that our objects
have pretty sharp edges. In order to smoothen
it out a little bit, to give it more of a toy look, we can actually
bevel our objects. Now there's two ways to do this. The first way is
to do it manually. You can select the
entire rim of our model here by holding down ult
and selecting the edge. Now, if you hit Control B, it'll do what's called beveling, which means to soften out the edges by
subdividing our edge. You can increase or decrease the amount of beveling
by scrolling up or down, which will increase or decrease
the amount of loop cuts. You can do this to
any edge and you'll immediately notice how much
softer our model looks. Now, if you don't
have a mouse, you can always come
here to the left to our tool menu and use the
bevel button that it has here, and it'll basically
do the same thing. The second way to bevel is
by using a bevel modifier. Once again, you can come over
to the modifier properties. Click Ad modifier, and you'll see the bevel modifier
right underneath the array. And now you'll notice
it's actually been applied to all the edges
of our smoke stack. And with the modifier, you can actually control how much it's bevelled and how many
segments it'll include. Because this is a toy train, I don't want the bevels
to be too harsh, so I'm just doing a little bit just to round out
the sharp edge. Now the difference between
manually beveling and using our modifier is that it keeps the original
shape of our object, as you can see here when
we tap into edit mode. The original shape of
the object is there, but the bevel has been applied and it'll show
up in a render as so. Sometimes this is helpful
because it saves space on your computer so that you don't have a lot of faces
to work with. I'm going to undo this for now and come back to loop cuts. Now another common edit
is creating loop cuts. Let's enter edit mode
and hit Control R, and that will hover over the loop cuts that it
can create for you. You can also come down to
the tool panel and hit the loop cut button if you
want to use that instead. You can also control where you want to place the loop cut. By default, it'll always
loop cut to the center. With this, you can now
edit the vertices, edges, and faces with the loop
cut that you've added in. For aesthetic
purposes, we won't be needing a loop cut for a
train model right now, so you can go ahead
and undo that. Now let's go ahead
and apply some of these common object edits on
other parts of our train. I'm instting and
extruding the top of our roof to give it a little
bit more of that toysh look, and I'm doing the same thing
for the face of our train. I'd like the front of the train to extrude out a little bit, so I'm going to
create a loop cut in the middle of the body and extrude out some of the edges to create a V shape in the
front of our train. In our next lesson, we'll
learn how to linker modifiers, which is a very common
control and blender.
10. Linking Your Modifiers: Select all of your
objects and hit Control A and press
rotation and scale. This will usually ensure a more even application for
your modifiers and bevels. So go ahead and click
rotation and scale. So I'm going to go
back in, select our smokestack object and
apply the bevel modifier. I'm only doing a slight
bevel because I don't want to do anything too
exaggerated for a toy train. But if you want a bit
more of a cartoonish, you can definitely apply a
stronger bevel if you'd like. That we've beveled
our smoke stack, I actually want to apply
this to the rest of our train so that they
all have the toy train, soft aesthetic, and they don't
all have the sharp edges. Now, for me to go in and do
that to every single object, and the rest of the train
would take a lot of time. So there's actually
a way to apply this bevel modifier to
the rest of our train. The way we're basically going to do this is by copying over the modifier from
the smoke stack and applying it to all the
other objects in our seed. But if our other objects have different modifiers applied
to them, they'll be race, which is why we need
to go set and apply those modifiers first before we copy over our bevel modifier. If I don't save the modifiers, you'll notice that we
lose our array and mir modifier that we applied
on the wheels earlier. So let's click into the wheels, go into their
modifier properties, and apply the array
and mirror modifier. You can apply it by
clicking down on the down arrow and
hitting apply. Let's do the same thing for
the side support blocks. Now, select all of your objects. Be we've selected
all of our objects, you'll notice that
all of our objects are outlined in orange. However, we can select one active object by
clicking it again, and that will turn it yellow. This is our active object, and this is what
all of the rest of our orange outline
objects will copy from. Go ahead and click
your smokestack last. Now if you hit Control L, it'll bring up a
menu and you can scroll down to where it
says copy modifiers. Once you've clicked it,
you'll notice that all of our other objects now have the Bevel modifier
applied to them, and now it all
looks a little more cohesively smoother like they could actually be toy blocks. Can actually make
this model even more smoother if we select all of
our objects in the scene, hit right click and
click Shade Auto smooth. You'll notice that all
of our jagged faces from our objects are
now smoothed out, and it looks a lot more cleaner. Great. Now we're actually
done with our toy train. And the next lesson,
we'll be adding materials to our train
to give it some color.
11. Render Modes & Adding Material: Now that our train is modeled, it's time to give it
some color and texture. But we have one small problem. In this viewport, we actually can't see any of the colors, and that's because
we're in solid view. There's a total of four
different viewport modes. There's wire frame, solid view, material preview,
and render view. In wire frame mode, we get
an x ray of our object. It's good for when we're
initially modeling, or if you want to look
into your objects. Solid view just gives you one solid color
like a gray scale and it's best for
modeling and when you're first starting out
in your blender file. Next is material
preview where you get to see your
materials and textures. And lastly, we have render view where you can
actually see what your render is going to look like and calculate
some of the light. Here it's all dark because we haven't added any
light to our scene, hence, it's just a
dark environment. Now, to give our
train some texture, let's enter material previews. Right now, it's
all white because we haven't given it any texture. To create a new material let's hoad over to our
properties panel, and if you select one of your objects and scroll
all the way down, you'll see a sphere with the
checkered pattern on it. This is our material
properties tab. Once you're in here, go
ahead and click new, and that'll create a new
material for our object. You can rename it if you want. I'm just renaming
mine Mateial one. You'll see this pop up a here with lots of different options. I know there's a lot,
but we only need to make a few adjustments
to add our texture. The first thing
we're going to do is change the color by
going to base color. Now you can select any color you like by using
this color wheel, but you can also use the
RGB option or the Hex code. I'm going to give it this
reddish color for now. You can also increase the
metallic property here if you want to give it a more metal
like material to your train. Scroll down a bit until
you find roughness. Now, as the name suggests,
bring this down, we'll make it shinier,
while bringing it up, will make your object
more matt and rougher. Now, these are just
some of the basics of the materials that we're
going to start out with, but feel free to explore some of the other
properties as well. For my train, I'm going to
increase the roughness to around 0.8 and also
increase the clear coat. The clear coat is kind of like a shiny film that goes
around your object. So while this object
itself is rough, it has a clear coat
of plastic around it, which is the vibe that I'm
going for for our toy train. If you increase the
clear coat roughness, it'll make the
clear coat rougher, but I want mine to
be a bit shinier, so I'm going to bring down
the clear coat roughness. So now let's go ahead
and continue adding texture to all of the other
objects in our scene. Feel free to play around
and experiment with the different colors and set the textures to how you see fit. Feel free to use
this time to explore around with the material
properties to your liking. So as you're applying the
materials to your objects, let's say that you
want to copy over one of your colors from
one object to the other. In this instance, let's say we want to make the cab in the back of our train the same color as our purple
cylinder over here. So in blender, there's a really easy way to
link the materials. All you have to do is selecting the cab and then the
purple cylinder next. Whatever has the
yellow active outline is what's going to
be copied from. Once you have both
of those selected, press Control L, and that
will bring up a menu. Find where it says L link
materials and click on it. And now both of our materials are basically linked, and
they're one and the same. So any changes that you make to any of them will be
applied to the other. Now, when you go to apply
texture to your wheels, you'll see that they're
still joined together as one big object for when we applied our array
and mirror modifier. If we don't separate these, it'll basically
apply the same color for each of our wheels. We actually need to go into
edit mode and separate them, and thankfully this
is really easy. Go into Edit mode, L A to select everything
in our object, click P, and scroll
down to loose parts. This will automatically
separate all of our wheels into
their own objects. Now you can apply separate materials to each of the wheels. Now, I'm going to
continue adding the materials to the
rest of my train. I'm going for a bit of a
pastel color, but honestly, you can add whatever colors or materials and add any
textures that you want. In our next lesson, we'll add a backdrop and start
preparing it for render.
12. Rendering Your Scene: Congrats on making it this far. Now that we've added our colors and material to our toy train, now it's time to add
the finishing touches and render out our scene. Before we go ahead
and render our scene, let's add a backdrop so that our train is not just
floating in air. So go ahead and shift A, go over to Mesh and
hit at a plane, and this will act
like our ground. Let's scale up our plane using S. Let's tap into edit mode
and hit the edge button. Click on the edge that's
all the in the back, and we're actually
going to extrude this face upwards so
that we get a wall in the back and hit easy to extrude the back edge up so that we have a bit of a
wall in the back. Now, press that same edge, and we're going to go
ahead and bevel it out, so it gives us a
smooth backdrop. You can either hit
the bevel tool on the side using the menu
or you can control B and increase your
scroll wheel to increase the amount of bevels that we get in our backdrop. Now we have a much
smoother backdrop, and we can also go ahead
and right click to Shade Smooth to get rid
of those bumpy edges. Now we have a backdrop
for our model. Now let's go ahead and
enter render view. You'll notice it
looks dark because we haven't edit any
lights to our scene. Let's go ahead and
change that by shifting A and adding
in a point light. Let's move the point
light forward and up, and you'll notice
that it's pretty dim. So we can increase the power
on our properties panel, increase the power
of the light by increasing it to something
around 100 watts. When starting out,
a really simple but efficient lighting setup is
the three point lighting. Our three points of light
are key light, fill light, and our back light, and it basically looks like
a triangle setup. I'm going to duplicate one of the lights to add
one to the side, and then another
one to the back. You can already see how much of difference that's
made to our scene, and now we have much
better lighting in here. To give it some
extra brightness, I'm going to shift A
and add in a sun light. This just gives it a better
overall ambient lighting that lights up our
scene much more. By default, this light is very strong because it is a sun. You only have to
increase the strength of the sun by two or three. You can also control which direction the
sun is shining in by using that little ray and the yellow dot that
comes with the sun. Now let's add in the
camera to our scene. Let's shift A and scroll
down to where it's a camera. With the camera selected,
let's move back our camera so that it's
not underneath our train. Let's move it
forward and up with G. To look into our camera, we can go here on the right side and hit this little
camera button, which will let us see what our final render is
going to look like. Now, what does it
mean to render? In blender, it's like
taking a picture of a scene using our camera
and then saving it. But it's a bit more
complicated than just that because our
rendering edges that we use performs all sorts of
calculations to figure out how the light bounces
around in our scene. Looking through our
camera here shows us exactly what we're going to
see when we render our image. And rather than moving our camera around
in their viewport, there's a much easier way
to control our camera, and that's why pulling out this info menu on the
right hand side. Clicking into the view tab
and check camera to view. Now when you move around, it'll actually move the
camera around and you can see what your final
render is going to look like. You can move around
in your camera and to exit this camera view, you can just click
on the camera icon again and that will
leave the camera view. Let's bring the backdrop forward a little bit to get rid
of the awkward shadow. I'm just going in and adjusting some of
the lights to make the train lighting
look a little bit better in our camera view. You can also add a texture to the backdrop and give it
a color if you'd like, but I'm going to
keep mine white just because we have a lot of
colors on our toy train. I'm going to increase the strength of our
sunlight to two, and I think that's a good
angle for our cama view. Now we can just play around with which angle we want our toy
train to be in the vender. Now, if you want to change the
resolution of your vendor, you can head over to
the properties panel and go to output properties, which looks like
the printer icon. In this format section, you can see where it
says resolution x and y, and you can enter the format
tab and change around the resolutions if you want a different dimension
for your vender. I'm going to keep mine at
19:20 pixels by 180 pixels. Just above our output
properties tab, I'm going into our
camera and I'm hitting ambient occlusion and
screen space for fractions. That just makes our final
render a teeny bit better. I'm also going into
color management and changing the look
to high contrast, just to give it a
little bit more of a contrasty look in
our final render. Now we're super
close to being done. All that's left is to actually
render out our image, and we'll go over that in
our next and final lesson.
13. Render Engines, Finishing Touches, Saving your File: Now all that's left is to go
up to the Render tab on the top left and click
Render, it render image. And alla, here is
our final render. Remember to save
your render by going into image, it, save a copy. Name your PNG, select which folder you
want to save it in. We actually have more
than one render engine. Another one is called Cycles. This one takes a little
bit more computing powers. So if you're on a
laptop or a PC, make sure that it's okay with
rendering at this level. The difference between EV and cycles is the way that
they calculate light. EV is a little bit more similar to what you already
seen in your viewport, whereas cycles will
give you a little bit more of a calculated
lighting bouncing around. But this also takes
much longer to render. So if you do choose
to render in cycles, you can scroll down
here to the render, and I'm lowering my MC
sample size 1024-500. This will still give
me a quality render, but won't take as
long to render. I'm also de noising it, which means that it
basically won't have a grainy look when I'm
rendering out in cycles. I'm going ahead and
clicking Render Image. Now compared to EV, which took
almost a second to render. This one took us 2 minutes
to render out in cycles, but you can definitely notice
the difference between the cycles and the
EV rendering engine. Whatever you want to render
in is completely up to you. With our two render
images saved. I'm actually going to hop back into my scene and add
in a final touch, which is these
little bubbles that I want to add to our toy train. At this point, you're
also free to add in other objects for finishing touches to your
train if you'd like. I would love to see all
the different types of toy trains that
you all come up with. So don't be scared to
experiment if you'd like. I'm adding these
three tiny UV spheres to make it look like there's bubbles coming out of the train. Let's go ahead and give
them a little texture. I'm going to give them a
little light blue color to make it a little
bit more cartoonish. Link the other two bubbles
to the original material. And I'm going to make it a light blue color instead
of a grayish color. Great. Now I'm going to
rent it out in Evie, and this looks super cute. I like to change the
names of my files just so I know which is which and
that I don't get confused. I'm going to render it out
one more time in cycles. This one also took almost
2 minutes to render. I always like to render
out my scenes in both EVs and cycles because sometimes one just looks better
than the other, depending on what
aesthetic I'm going for. Now we really should have
done this in the beginning, but another important thing
is to save your render. If you closed out now, Blender thankfully has an
auto safe option, but it's always a
good idea to save. All you have to do to
save is hit Control S, and that'll bring up
an option to save your blend file in whatever
folder you'd like. Go ahead, hit Control S and
save your toy train model. Now if you close at this file, you can always re
open it and continue where you left off by clicking
into your blend file. And finally, give yourself a big pat on the
back because you've officially finished your first ever render Mad and blunder. Congrats and be super proud
of your toy train model, and congrats for making it
this far into the course. It was tons and
tons of learning, and you finally
made it to the end.
14. Final Thoughts: Congrats on making it
this far to the end of the course and completing your first ever render in blender. I would love to see
all of your hard work, so please upload it to the
project gallery so we can all see our variations of our
own toy train models. Now that you know some of
the blender fundamentals, my next pieces of advice
would just be to go out and learn and soak up as
many tutorials as you can. Continue developing
that muscle memory of your keyboard shortcuts or rewatch part of this
tutorial, if you have to. But blender is always a
constant learning journey, and there's always
updates being added. So keep your mind open and flexible to anything
that might happen. But taking your first step
is 50% of the journey, and I'm so proud of you
for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed this course,
and once again, congrats.
Janice Lee, 3D Artist
