3D Modelling & Animations in Blender for Absolute Beginners

1. WELCOME: Hey everyone, I hope you're having a fantastic day. In this course, you're going to learn the absolute basics of how to use blender. No, not that blender, I mean blender, the open source, powerful, and completely free three D application, whether you just want to create your own custom three D models or do photorealistic architectural visualizations, create assets for video games, or get into three D printing, or even do full blown feature length movies. Blender is a fantastic program for all of that, so it is absolutely worth getting into. By the end of this course, you will be comfortable using Blender. You'll know how to set up your own three D scenes, create your own three D models and animations, and how to render them out either into still images or animation movie files that you can then share with friends or family, or them judged by random strangers on the Internet. The course is broken down into a number of different sections, each with individual small byte sized lessons. First, we're going to cover the absolute basics, how to get blender, get it set up, how to create three D scenes, move objects around, set up cameras, and how to render that out into a simple still image. Once you're comfortable with all of that, we're going to then dive into the three D modeling part and talk about how you can create your own custom three D models in blender. After that, to make our models look a little bit less naked, we're going to talk about materials and how to assign materials to different parts of your model to give them some color and make them look a little bit more interesting. Then we're going to take it one step further and talk about how you can use texture maps, texture images, to apply to your three D models to make them look a whole lot more realistic. And then we're going to talk about how to add animations to R3d scenes and your three D models and how to render those animations out into movie files that you can then chair around or upload to the Internet. Now, as you go through the course, I highly recommend that after each section or every lesson, you try these things out for yourself using your own little side projects or tinkering around. It's the experimentation that's kind of solidifying that knowledge in your brain. Just watching the course without doing anything. It's kind of like going to a presentation, but not actually taking any notes. It's the practicing and doing it yourself that will actually make all of that knowledge stick and make you feel much more comfortable using Blender. Now in order to follow along with this course, you will need Blender version 2.8 or later as of the recording of this video. We're up to 3.6 by now and you should have no problem following along with any of the newer versions as well. It's just that from version 2.79 to 2.8 there was a big UI change to blender that made the interface much more intuitive, much more fun to use, and unlocked a lot of cool features in blender. So 2.8 or later is what you'll need. And you'll also see that throughout this course, I've recorded different lessons with different versions. And you can always tell the version of blender that I'm using in the bottom right hand corner of the interface. But as I said, you shouldn't have any problems following along even with newer versions of blender. If you do get stuck though, do leave me a comment so I can jump in and help you out and unblock you. And I can also then update the lesson to whatever the new UI might look like in later versions of Blender. Just a quick note about me, my name is Tobias, and I've been learning and teaching filmmaking visual effects in Re B for over a decade. Now. I run the surfaced studio Youtube channel that is now incredibly slowly creeping up to half 1 million subscribers. I'm entirely self taught from online resources. I've found from experimenting from doing short film projects and all sorts of other little creative ventures along the line. I've started using Glenda about six years ago. I really loved the program. I think it's fantastic, super powerful, and a lot of fun to use. And I'm just really glad to have you along for the journey, But that was really enough. Waffles. Let's finally jump into the course. 2. How to Download Blender: In order to download Blender, simply visit the official Blender website at Blend.org Then in the top menu, click on Download. And then you can simply click on the big blue button to download the latest version of Blender for your operating system at the time of recording this video. That is version 3.6 0.2 LTS, where LTS stands for Long Term Support. And I highly recommend downloading an LTS version because they are the most stable and the most well supported. Just below that, you can download Blender in different flavors, like as a standalone zip file that you can unpack and don't need to install. You can get versions for other operating systems, and you can actually get Blender on Steam as well if you prefer. If you scroll a little bit further to the bottom, there's an option to go experimental and download any yet unreleased version of Blender. If you want to get access to the latest features before they're officially released, just be aware that the experimental versions can be a little bit unstable as they're still actively in development. If for some reason you prefer to use an older version of Blender, you can come up to the top and click on previous versions. In here you will be able to download any version of Blender ever released, all the way back to version 1.0 But for the purpose of this course, all you really need to do is hit the big blue button to download Blender, then install it, and then you're ready to get started with the course. 3. THE BASICS - SECTION OVERVIEW: Now that we've got blender installed and ready to go, let's jump into actually using it. In this section, we will go over the absolute basics. Going to talk about how to set up and configure blender, how the interface works, how the different panels operate. We're going to create some three D objects in our scene. Learn how to move them around, assign some basic materials, set up lights and cameras, and how to render all of that out into a final image. Now in all of my lessons, at the very bottom, you will see all of the shortcut keys and all of the keyboard keys that I press blended into to make that hopefully nice and easy for you to follow along in case you can't understand my weird accent. Also, be sure to download the course materials to which I'll drop your link, just down below, which will contain all of the files that you need throughout the entire duration of this course. So make sure you download that, save it to your local hard drive so you've got everything ready to go. And again, just a reminder if you get stuck, if you have questions, if something doesn't work, get in contact with me, just leave me a comment on the lesson or hit me up on social media. I'm always happy to help out and I really want to make sure that you have the best and most enjoyable learning experience. So be sure to make use of that and get in contact with me. But now let's shut up and finally jump into blender. 4. Setting up Blender: Whenever you launch Blender, the first thing you will see is the splash screen. Up on the top right hand corner, you can see the version that you're running. It's version 3.1 0.2 for me. You can also see it in the bottom right hand side of the user interface down there. If you're ever curious on the splash screen, you can create a new file for a general three D scene two D animation, sculpting, visual effects, video editing. And you've got quick access to all of your previously opened files. However, I'm going to ignore all of that. Click anywhere, close the splash screen. Before we get our hands dirty, I highly recommend you jump to the settings first to make sure that blender is set up as best as it can for your system in your set up. So let's come up into the main menu under Edit. Come into the Preferences, let me just make that just a little bit bigger. On the left hand side, come into the System tab at the top here, Under Cycles Render Devices, you have a number of different options. This might be set to non, which means that all rendering in cycles, and we talk about cycles a little bit later, will happen on your CPU. That is not very efficient. I don't really recommend that. If you have an video graphics card, you will have an option to enable cut that I highly recommend. This is going to use my G four GTX cards. I have two in my systems at the moment, so they're both showing. And I want to use both of my GPUs to help with rendering. If you have an RTX card, you can also enable optics, which will be even faster. However, my graphics card don't have RTX, so that is not supported. If you've got an MD card or your Linux or Macos HIP is available for you, I highly recommend just don't use non use Da optics or HIP depending on your graphics card, I'm going to set it back to Cuda because that is the optimal setting for me. Now the other things that may be different to your set up is you may have a mouse that doesn't have a middle mouse button. Or you may be using a trackpad, because you're on a laptop. For that, come into the input category on the left hand side and under mouse you can enable the option to emulate a three button mouse. Which means that holding down the old key or the option key if you're on a Mac and left clicking will be the same as clicking with your middle mouse button. Because Blender uses the middle mouse button a fair bit. This can be really useful if your mouse does not have a middle mouse button or you're on a track pad. Similarly, if you're on a laptop with a small keyboard, or you've got an external keyboard that doesn't have a numb pad. Again, because the numpad is super useful under the keyboard options, you have an option to enable to emulate the numb pad. If you enable that, then the normal keys, one to zero will act the same way as the one to zero keys would on the numpad. Again, super useful to have that enabled if you don't have a numpad. However, I do have a numpad, so I don't need that option. I also have a three button mouse. I don't need this option either. Highly recommend. You do have a computer with a numpad and a three button mouse, but those options are available there for you. Then there's a ton of other options here. You can go into the interface and change color style sizing. You can select from different themes and apply them to different elements on the interface. Have a look through, there's a ton of option, I'm not going to go through all of them in detail. The one in system for your GPU acceleration are really the most important ones. Now let's close the preferences and let's talk about the basic interface for blender in the next lesson. 5. The User Interface: The blender user interface is broken up into a number of different panels. At the top, like in most programs, you have the main menu bar file added, render window help. Over on the right hand side, you have a number of different tabs which are different work ****** within blender that you can customize and set up for. Now we're just going to remain on the default layout right here in the middle. Very obviously you have your three D view and we'll talk about how to navigate and work with this in just a moment. The top right hand side, you will find the outliner, which is essentially a list, a tree view of all of the objects and items in your scene. Right now you can tell we have a camera, you have a cube, and you have a light in your scene. And as I click through these, you can see them being selected in the three D view. Over on the left hand side. Down below that you will find the properties panel which is where you can control all of the settings where you're seeing, you're rendering your objects, your materials, your physics, your particles, your lighting and much, much more. Again, very detailed and we'll get into that in just a little bit. Underneath the three D view, you will find your timeline where you can play keyframes and play back your animations, and underneath that you'll just find a foot bar. This is actually really useful. If you have a look here, there's little icons indicating in the current mode, what would happen if I pressed the left mouse button, or the middle mouse button, or the right mouse button, as I'm navigating around and you can see this change, there's a context menu down here. Super useful if you're just getting started, just keep an eye out down here below. It's super useful, very helpful. Getting used to the shortcut keys and what the different controls do within Blender. Now besides the main menu at the very top and the footer down at the bottom, every single panel is structurally, actually the same at the top left hand corner of every panel in this properties window, the outliner, the three D view, and even in the timeline in the top left hand side here. Let's go back to the three D view. You'll find this little dropdown. And if you pop this open, you can change this particular panel which right now is the three view. If you pop this open again again, top left hand side in your three view panel's, pop this open, you can change the view of what you're seeing in this panel. For example, let's say I want to change this to my video sequencer. This panel has now changed to be my video sequencer. Let's come over into the top right hand side into the outliner. Let's pop this open. Right now, this is set to be the outliner, but we can change this over to select the three view. Now our three view is in this panel. Let's come to the bottom where we've got our properties panel again. Let's pop this open. Let's change this to be our image editor. Now again, I'm not going to go through all of the panels, but we will talk about all of the important ones. I just want to show you that you can change what's inside all of these panels in any way that you like. You can also click these thick bars between the panels and your cursor will change to this little sideway errors either left and right or up and down. And you can click and drag down, Or click and drag left to re arrange your interface if you want some panels to be bigger and smaller. The other cool thing you can do, you can actually right click on any of these lines between two panels. Let's click this and you can then determine to add a vertical or horizontal split to that panel. Let's select to do a horizontal split. Now I can place a split in this panel on the left hand side. Let's click that's going to split this panel into two. Now I can change one of them to be something totally different. Let's leave the top one to being the sequencer, but let's pop open the top left hand side dropdown on this bottom panel that we've just created. Let's change this over to, let's say the shader editor again. Don't worry about what this panel does right now. I'm just showing you how to essentially deal with the interface and work with the different panels. Let's right click onto this top bar on top of our shader editor and select to do a vertical split. You can place it at the top panel or on the bottom panel, or you can go over to the right inside, split any of these other panels in half. Let's to split our shader editor in a half. Again, let's change the right one over to maybe the graph editor. And once you've got yourself in a pickle and you've got too many panels and you're like, oh, I don't know what to do anymore. This has gotten all really messy. You can also right click on any of these lines and select to join the areas. And then Javier cursor over the panel on either side of the line that you clicked that's going to display this arrow here. This is going to collapse the panel on the left hand side and make the one on the right side the only one that sits within the space. So let's click that. That has collapsed our shader editor. Now the graph editor is taking up this panel. Let's right click this line at the top here, select two join areas. By the way, you can also swap if you just want to swap the two panels. Let's select join eras, drag up, let's collapse this upwards. Now all of this is taken up by the graph editor. Now, once you've messed everything up near workspace and you want to reset it to the default, you can come up into the main menu bar on these tabs here for all of the different workspaces. Right now we're on the layout tab, you can right click, but in here there isn't yet an option to reset. It's being looked at, at being added pretty soon. Maybe it'll be available in Blend at 2.93 Right now there is no option right here. The easiest thing you can do is come over to the right hand side of all these tabs with the workspaces plus select General. Let's just create a new workspace, a new layout workspace. Let's select that. That's going to add a new tab called Layout One. Because we already have a layout, this is essentially the layout workspace that we started with. We're now reset to default. If it bothers you that you have a layout workspace here and a layout one, we can right click this one to re order to the front. That's going to push this workspace panel to the left hand side. You can right click the old layout. If you click into that, you'll see this is the one we messed up. Right click that. Delete that. And let's just double click onto this workspace name here. Let's just rename this to Layout, and we're back to where we started. Now if you just want to reset everything, including any work that you may already have done, you can simply close down Blender and start it up again. Or you can come up into the main menu, select File. And under file you'll find a default option and then select to load factory settings. That'll reset the Blender interface. It'll also lose you any unsaved changes. It'll simply reload this basic start up file and it resets all of your work ****** and the interface to the default. But now that I've talked way too much about the overall interface, let's finally talk about arguably the most important panel in Blender, the three D view in the next lesson. 6. The 3D View: Arguably, one of the most useful panels when you're getting started with blender is the three D view, which will shows you a three D view of your scene. Right now we have a cube here. Over on the left hand side we have a camera by the way, left click to select because that's what we said to be at default. So now we've selected the camera, it's highlighted in yellow. That's left click on the cube to select it. Up here, over on the top right hand side is a light. If you left click that to select it, it'll turn orange again. You'll notice in the outliner over on the top right inside. In our scene collection, which is a collection of everything that is in our scene, you have a basic collection. It's just a default collection and it contains a camera, a cube, and a light. As you select these ones, you can see them being highlighted within the three view. Now in order to rotate around in your three view, simply hold down the middle mouse button or Alt left click if you're emulating a three button mouse. And then there's drag to rotate around your scene. You can scroll up and down on your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the scene. You can hold down shift, then press and hold down the middle mouse button and drag pan up and down. So it's really nice and easy to navigate around the three D view if you don't have a three button mouse or you just don't like using the middle mouse button or on the top right hand side. In the three, you'll find this little axis gizmo. And you can click on any of these and kind of rotate around. There's also a plus, you can click and hold and then move your mouse forward or backwards to zoom in and out. There's also hand tool again, this click and drag to pan around your scene. But personally I prefer just using the middle mouse button and the mouse wheel to do that. This is essentially the three view of everything we have in our scene right now. The next most important thing within your three D view are the shading modes. And you will find all of them on the top right hand corner of your three dew, these four little spheres over on the right hand side. The left most one is wire frame shading and if you click on that, all of your objects are going to be displayed in wire frame. It's just going to show the outline and the geometric structure of them without showing the faces. So you can just see right through. The second one is solid view, which won't use any lighting, but you'll be able to see the actual surfaces of your three objects in the scene. One over to the right inside is Material Preview. Again, it won't use any lighting, but it actually show you materials that are applied to any of your objects. And again, we'll get to those a little bit later in this tutorial. And the one over on the very right is rendered shading view. If we click that, that will essentially give you a rendered preview of your scene. So you can see this light is now being applied to that cube. And what this rendered preview will look like depends a little bit on the render engine that you have selected. And we'll get to that in just a second. Let's return to the solid view. And by the way, blender is filled, like filled with shortcuts for everything. And I highly recommend that you start using some wherever you encounter them. They're super useful then make your workflow so much quicker. For example, you can switch between the shady modes by pressing Z. While you cursors over the three D view, this is going to bring up a radial menu. And then you can select rendered wire frame, Material Preview, or Solid view. So you can really quickly switch to rendered view. You can also just press that and then press the number that is displayed. So for example, six will get us back into solid view again. It just makes life so much easier. Now in order to select objects in your three D view, simply click on them. You can also click and drag to box select a whole bunch of them. So let's select the camera as well as the cubes. So you can select multiple objects as one. You can also press A to select everything in your scene. Or A in quick succession to unselect everything. The last thing I want to talk about is this little circle here. This little red and white circle. Now this is the three D cursor in blender. And it's really important because this is essentially the point at which any new objects you create in your scene will be created. You can move this cursor around by holding down shift and right clicking anywhere within your three D view is going to move the three de cursor to that position. If we were to create a new object right now, it would get created in this position here where the three cursor is. Again, hold on Shift and right click to navigate and move this cursor around to anywhere that you want. You can also shift and C to reset the three de cursor right to the origin of your world. But we'll deal with the three de cursor a little bit more when we start to create some objects. Now over on the left hand side within your three D view, you have a number of different controls. Right now we're on the selection mode. You can also go into cursor mode, and then whenever you click left, you're just going to move that cursor without having to hold on shift. You also have options to move, rotate, and scale your objects. There's also a general transform object, and we'll get to that. You can annotate, measure, and add different objects to your scene via these controls. We'll get to some of these a little bit later. Now with a cursor over the three view, let's press shift and see again to reset that three de cursor to the origin of our world. Before we move on to talking about the outliner, let's very quickly talk on render engines and the different render engines that are available within Blender. Let's do that in the next lesson. 7. Render Engines: Now the render engine in Blender will determine how the final rendered image or animation will look blend. As of Version 2.92 has three internal render engine that you can choose between. For that, over on the right hand side within the property panel, you'll find a number of different vertical tabs. And there's one with this little camera icon here, which is your render properties for your project. Let's click into that. Over on the right hand side, at the very top, you should see a drop down for your render engine. Right now this is set to V. V is blenders, high performance Viewport rendering engine. And is mainly used to render Blender within the three D view, but you can also use it for your final renders. They come out looking really nice. However, in order to understand the difference between these three engines, we actually need to change our shading mode because right now our shading mode is set to solid. Neither wireframe solid nor material preview will use the actual render engine. The render engine is only used for render shading mode or for rendering out the actual image or animation that you've created in Blender. Let's click onto the rendered shading mode. This is going to take a second. Now our Viewport is going to get rendered out using V, Easily move around because V renders in real time into the three DV within Blender using your graphics card. Now this is what V looks like. Let's come back into the properties panel, into this render engine dropdown. Let's change this over to cycles. Now that was really quick, but you may have noticed that as we're moving around, everything looks a little bit blocky for a moment and then it becomes sharp. And that is because the scene is now being rendered with cycles. And the difference with cycles is that cycles is an actual ray tracing engine. It would actually simulate the light bouncing around your scene. It will render a lot slower than V, especially if you have a complex scene. But the final result will look much more realistic, especially because they can deal much better with reflections and refraction like transparent materials like glass and other things. Just to give you that really realistic look, I recommend go with cycles, but it will render a fair bit slower than EV. Obviously, there's tons and tons of different settings for every single render engine. We might get into some of them a little bit later in this tutorial. For now, let's switch from cycles over to the third render engine within Blender, which is called the work bench engine. Now this engine is simpler than V. It doesn't have somewhat fancy features and it doesn't give you a realistic result. It's mainly used for modeling or while you're setting up your scene or animations to get a good view for what that scene will look like in the end. And then I recommend switch over either to V if you want to render it really nice and fast auto cycles if you really need that absolute precision and that more realistic look in the end. For now, go to switch back to V, because V is nice and fast. We can use it while we work and run through the rest of the tutorial. But now that I've bought you enough for the render engines, let's look at another super useful panel and blender, the Outliner, in the next lesson. 8. The Outliner: You will find the outliner and blender by the fault in the top right hand corner of the interface. Let's just click on this little vertical bar on the left side of the panel directed over to the left just to make this a little bit bigger. And the outliner essentially shows you all of the objects that you have within your three D scene. There's the lightning, just click on them to select them here. And that selects them in the three D view as well. There's the cube and there's the camera. By the way, you can double click on any of these objects in the outliner. Let's double click on this light and rename them to anything that makes sense to you. And this can be very useful, especially if you create a bazillion cubes for different walls or elements of a building, or arms and body parts of your characters. It makes much more sense to give them useful names. By default, Ed, just be called cube or sphere, or triangle, or monkey head. Very useful to name these ones. Right next to the name, you'll get a little icon indicating what type of object this is in your scene. For example, our bright light is a light object. Camera is a camera. Our cube is a mesh or a three dimensional object made up of vertices, points, edges, which are the lines connecting those points and faces which then give you that solid outer exterior of your object. But back in the Outliner, the other thing Blender now has are collections. Collections are simply groups for your objects. In the default scene, you will have a collection which contains your bright light, the camera, and the cube. All of these have little triangles that you can collapse and expand. And if you expand the bright light, you'll actually just find that light object under there. If you expand the camera, you'll find the camera under there. And underneath the cube, you'll actually just find the mesh for the cube. And you can dig further into that. And you'll find the material in here. And we'll get to materials. And just a little bit, let's just collapse these ones again, and collections you can rename as well. So let's double click the name collection. I was going to call this one my stuff. And you may notice that this collection sits in another collection called the Scene Collection. You can actually drag and drop all of the objects around in this hierarchy on this tree within your outliners. For example, I get grab the camera and drag it out of the my stuff collection and drop it onto the scene collection. And not just part of the scene collection is no longer in this. My stuff can do the same with the bright light right here and then collapse them. So now I have the my stuff collection which only contains the cube, bright light and camera sit outside in the scene collection. And I highly recommend stay as organized as you can within Blender. It just makes your life a whole lot easier now if you have too many objects in your scene and you don't actually want to see them at any point in time. In the outliner over on the right hand side, you have this little icon. Click on any of these to hide the objects within your three D view. You can also click one of them and drag down to enable all of them or click to untick and then drag up to untick all of them. Let's just show all of them again. Now this visibility switch, if you hover over it saying hide in Viewport, doesn't actually impact whether this object is going to get rendered into the final image. When you do render it just hides it temporarily in the Viewport. However, Blender in the outline actually has tons of additional switches and options for all of the objects and all of the elements in your scene. But by default they're all hidden because they were getting a bit too confusing in some of the earlier versions of Blender. In order to add them back in, simply come up to this little filter, can hear pop that open. At the very top, you actually have a whole bunch of toggles. The blue ones are enabled, the gray ones are disabled. So you can enable the selectability toggle as well as the disabled in Viewports option as well as the disable in renders. And there's a few other ones. By default this is how you should start out. I would recommend enable the selectable one because it's really useful as well as the disabled in viewports and disabled in renders flag. And if we now collapse this filter again, you can see all of these new switches, options available on every single element within your scene in the Outliner. Right now, if I clicked on my Cube in my three D view, I would select it. Let's click anywhere else to unselect it in the Outliner. Let's disable this selectable switch here. If you click on it, it's going to get graded out. And now I can no longer select my cube. And this is great. If you've done working on parts of your scene, just make them all unselectiblef. Click it, decrease the metallic property again. If you click so that you can't accidentally select those objects anymore, I can obviously still hide and show my cube. I can also hide it in all viewports or show it on all viewports. This actually is a global option. It does it for all viewports because he may have multiple three D views and other things this can be really useful as well. The much more interesting one is this little disable and render switch here. If I take this, you can see the cube is still visible in my three D view. But now if I rendered this scene, this cube would not show up in my final renders. This is really useful if you want to temporarily disable individual elements or entire collections from being rendered into that final image that comes out of Blender. But now I'm just going to leave all of them enabled, other great things. In the Outliner, at the very top, you have a search and you can simply search for any object by name. And the outliner will filter all of those down so you can find exactly what you're looking for, assuming you've named them properly. Let's clear that search over on the right hand side, you'll find this little plus I can hear this is to add a new collection into your scene. Right now we have a scene collection which is the base of everything within this project. Inside that we have this my stuff collection, but let's say I wanted to add a new one. I have new stuff over the top right hand side in the outliners. Click a little plus to add a new collection. We now have a new collection in our scene, White light, but let's call this one my new stuff. Let's select the bright light, Hold down, Shift. Click on the camera, select both of those objects, drag and drop them into the my new stuff collection. And now we've got them organized just a little bit better. There's a ton of stuff you can do in the Outliner. I haven't touched on everything yet, especially under the filter. There's lots of different options here. There's also a drop down here where you can see different parts of this Blender project. Not going to worry about that too much for now. When you're starting out the Outliner, just the basic switches and naming and organizing your stuff is probably the main thing you need to know about the Outliner. Next, let's move on to the properties panel in Blender. And again, do that in the next lesson. 9. The Properties Panel: Now let's look at another panel you will likely be spending a lot of time with while working in Blender. And that is the properties panel, which you will find by the fault in the bottom right hand corner of the interface. This is where you can control all of the settings for your scene, your output, your materials, your objects, your physics, your lighting, your textures, and much, much more. Now, you may have noticed that this panel actually changed as I selected the different objects in my scene. Let's click on the Cube, and we're now seeing some vertex groups and shape keys and other in depth three D stuff. Don't have to worry about that. If you select the camera three D view, you're now seeing the camera settings. If you select the light, you now see the light settings each time A different tab in this properties panel here has been highlighted. You can also click through these. The difference between the gray icons at the top and the colored ones at the bottom is that the ones at the bottom may change depending on what object you have selected in your scene. The context specific, the ones that are gray are if you hover over them, the scene properties which impact the entire three D vault above that. You've got your view layers and this is a bit too technical for this tutorial. You can set up different render passes and you know, render out different colors or different objects into different images at the same time gets pretty fancy here. The things you probably want to know about are the output properties where you define the resolution, like the width and height of your final render image. The aspect ratio frames, if you're doing animations. As well as the output files, like whether it's a PNG or it's a movie file or other things. Just above that, we were here just a minute before, are the render properties where you define your render engine. And then depending on which engine you have selected, you've got a ton of different options for those render engines that you can control in here. Again, we might touch on some of these throughout this tutorial, but don't worry about them too much for now. Just leave everything on default. Just above that you have your active tool settings. And these ones do change, but not based on which object you have selected, but which tool you have selected as you're working. We don't need to worry about that too much for now. Let's just select the cube. And you may notice that some of these taps have changed again, and we will get to them in just a little bit. But for the time being, let's leave the properties panel behind. And let's look at the timeline panel, where you can control key frames and animations in the next lesson. 10. How to Create Objects: Let's finally start creating some three D objects in blender. Now, right now, all we have our seen is a simple cube, a light, and a camera. But let's add a few more things in here to make it look a little bit more interesting. Remember this little white red circle here is our three cursor. And any new object we create will get created at that three cursor. We can move this cursor by holding down Shift. And you can see the little context menu at the bottom of the screen. Change right clicking. Now we'll move that three D cursor. So let's just move it over to the side right there. Let's add a new object right here. For that you can either come to the top of the three D view in here, you'll find an option to add. And if you pop that open, there's tons of different options to add different meshes like three D objects, curves, surfaces, metabots, which are like liquid shapes that melt together. Text You can add volume for like smoke and fog, grease pencil, which is all for two D animations. Amateur for animations. Empty objects which are helpers, images, lights, cameras, speakers for sound force fields when you're dealing with particles and a whole bunch of other stuff. Again, blender is full of shortcuts. The shortcut for that menu is actually shift, and that's going to pop that up wherever your mouse cursor is. Let's just add something pretty simple. Let's come into mesh. Let's to add a UV sphere. This has now added a sphere into our three D C, that's also appeared in the outline. And here's our new sphere. And again, you could double click it and rename it or move it to a different collection. Maybe this is part of my stuff right there. If he did that, you may have missed an option that you actually have in Blender. Let's delete this object again by selecting it, Pressing X on your keyboard, and then confirming yes, delete, please. Let's press Shift and A again, come into Mesh. Let's add a UV sphere again, as you add objects into your scene and blender at the bottom of the three DV, you actually have this little pop up here that shows you the last operation, but also gives you some options for that. Let's pop that up in here. You now actually have options for what you want that UV sphere to look like. There's segments in order to change the hell, you can either use the errors on the left and right side a. See there's more or less segments being added to the sphere. You can just click and drag right or left, maybe. Let's not go too crazy. Let's add a few, maybe 60 or so. You can also change the number of rings on it. You can change the radius. You can modify the object right here. You can move it around. Yeah, if you accidentally click somewhere else or if you move some stuff around, that option disappears in tint. That highlight will start to turn green because that is the base color of our material there. We now have a sphere. Let's move the three cursor down here to the right hand side shift and right click some at the bottom of this light. Yeah, maybe there this time. Let's come into the top of the three devi under at, let's select mesh and maybe let's add a monkey head or Suzanne monkey head into our scene. And again it has popped up this option here because we had it expanded already. You can collapse that or expand it again. We can make this head just a little bit bigger. Maybe I'll move it back a little bit so it gets hit by the light. And I'll move it up just a little bit as well. Again, set this up in any way you want. You don't need to follow along exactly more, just showing you the basics of how it all hangs together. Now we have a little scene set up and we've added a sphere in the monkey into our scene. However, after you created your object and you start working with the rest of Blender, those pop up options for where that object is positioned, how it looks, the scale, the rotation will disappear. Chances are that you will want to keep modifying the position, scale rotation of your objects. Let's talk about how to modify any existing objects in your three D scene in the next lesson. 11. Transforming Objects - Move, Scale & Rotate: Let's talk about how you can modify existing objects in your three D scene. In particular, modifying their position, scale and rotation so you can place them anywhere you want. For that, there's actually quite a number of different options available in Blender. Now the most obvious one is the tuba On the left side of your three D view below the selection tool and the cursor tool, which when selected, allows you to simply click to move your three D cursor around. You will find an option for move, rotate, scale, and transform with the monkey head selected. By the way, you can't select objects while you're on the cursor tool. Return to the selection tool. Make sure the monkey is selected if it isn't already. Now with the monkey head selected. Let's come over to the left hand side of the three D view and change to the move tool. This will now display a move gizmo on our monkey head. And you can click and drag on any of these errors to move the monkey up, left, forward, backwards. Let's move it down a little bit. If you zoom in just a little bit more on this monkey head, you can see there's these little planes here as well. This allows you to freely move. Let me just zoom in a little bit more clear. Clear essentially essentially adds an additional with the monkey still selected. Let's come over to the left hand side, select the rotate tool that will show the rotate gizmo, so you can now rotate the monkey in place. Let's go over to the scale tool again. Simply click and drag to scale the monkey out in any one direction. So you can really distort them in anywhere that you want. Let's just control or command and z that to undo all of that. By the way, you can actually select this white ring here. Click and drag. If you want to scale the entire monkey heads. You're not swishing it, you're scaling it uniformly across all of these axes. Or if you don't want to use either of those individual tools, you can come over to the left hand side and simply select the transform tool which shows all of those Gizmos at the same time. So you can now move the monkey, you can rotate, and you can scale him in anywhere that you want. Again, let's undo all of that. Let's return to the selection tool. And let's talk about another way you can modify all of those properties for your objects in the properties panel, which by default will be on the bottom right hand side of the blend interface. Come to this tab with this bracketed rec angle here, which is the object properties. Select that in here. Under the transform. By the way, you collapse and expand all of these within the transform panel, you will have a location, rotation, and a scale. You can literally just click into these type in any number. 2 meters, 2 meters by 2 meters. Let's position our monkey at 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters away from the origin point in your three D world. Let's just under that a little bit. Maybe I'll select the monkey head. Come to the move tool. Let's just move the monkey a little bit more where we can see him again or again. You can just move the camera around if you wanted to. By the way, by default, the camera will rotate from the point that it's sitting in your three D world. If instead you wanted to rotate around your currently selected objects, like let's say we wanted this camera to rotate around the monkey head. You can select the monkey head and hit the delete key on your numpad. That is going to focus the camera on the monkey. And now if I rotate in my three D view, my movements will be around that monkey head. That's super useful if you just want to focus in on an object no matter where it's in your three D scene. But anyway, back into the properties panel. Into the object properties, you have a location just like with any sliders in Blender. You can simply click on this value and drag it right and left. Or again, click into it and give it a number. You can now rotate your monkey head in here, or you can scale it up. Let's just set the scale to one by one by one to make sure our monkey head is not distorted in any way. Let's come back into the three view. Scroll down on the mouse, peel to zoom out a little bit. Let's talk about the easiest way and the way I would recommend you get used to modifying things in blender. And that is using your shortcut keys. It just makes life so much easier. You don't have to deal with the tools on the left side. You don't have to dig into the object properties. You can do all of that straight in your three D view. Simply select your object. Let me just return to the selection tool. Select the monkey head and press to grab it. And now you can simply drag it around in your three D view. Click to place it anywhere that you want. You can rotate around, say well that's not where I wanted it Again, press just grab it and drag it into position. The problem is that this move will move the monkey from the perspective of the camera. If you want to move it specifically in the Xy or Z Xis, press G to grab the monkey head, and then press X to constrain the movement to the X axis. Press Z for the Z axis, or Y for the Y axis. Now if you want to constrain the movement of this monkey head to a plane like let's say just the Xy plane, you can press shift and Z. So that means move the monkey in anything but the z directions. Not up and down, but I can now move it within the Xy plane. If I go shift in X, I can move it into the z and y direction, but I can't move it on the X axis. So this gives you a really nice way to control exactly how and where you want to place your objects. I like to do one axis at the time, so let's bring the monkey forward on the X axis a bit. And then Z to constrain the movement to the Z axis or the vertical axis. Let's bring it up a little bit, press and then Y to just bring the monkey head forward a little bit bit dark, let's just rotate around maybe. And X again. Move it a bit closer to that light. Maybe it is somewhere there. While the camera is now rotating around the point where the monkey head used to be, the monkey still selected. Press delete on the numpad and the camera will zoom right back in on. That is for grab. Super easy. With the monkey selected, press R for rotate. Now you can rotate the monkey again. You're doing this in relation to the view of the camera. If you rotate around the monkey, press R again. Now you're rotating the head in a different axes. And again, similar to the grabbing, you can now press X to lock the rotation around the X axis no matter where your camera is position. So let's face them from the front, press R X. Now if you move, you can only rotate them around the X, X, Y for the Y, X, Z for the Z, X. You can also use shift and X, or shift z and shift and Y to rotate within a plane. But I find those ones less useful, so I don't generally use that now. Left click will always confirm if you're canceled simply right click with your mouse or hit Escape on your keyboard and it's back to where it was. Finally, let's talk about scaling. You may have guessed it, with your object or objects selected press to scale and then you can simply drag out or in to scale your object. Now I recommend try to avoid having your mouse directly on the center of the object. Because if press, it's actually really hard to control because the distance or the multiply that is used to figure out how much the scale is based on how far my mouse was from the center of the object to begin with, I recommend have your mouse a little bit further away. Then press S. You can see that line there to scale in and out. Same thing again. X for the X, X, Y, Z for the Xs. Or shift X, Y and Z constrain the scaling to two planes, so I can squish my monkey in or blow them up on just parts of the axis. Now we know how to create and modify objects within blender. By the way, let's just reset the camera back to the center of the world, as well as the three decursor by pressing Shift and C to move the three decursor back to the origin, cameras focus back on the origin. So we've got an overview over our entire scene. Now let's talk about how to add materials to your objects to actually give them some color and make them look different. Because right now, everything we have in the scene is the same, boring, dull gray again. Let's look at that in the next lesson. 12. How to Add Materials to Objects: Let's look at how you can create and assign materials, 23d objects in blender. Now in blender you can easily create any sort of material that you can think of, from plain plastic color objects to really intricate color textures, bump mapping, distortion, glass refraction. And then you can also create volumetric materials for smoke and fire. All of that is pretty advanced and I'll like to get to that later in this course. Let's just start with something really simple. Let's just say I want these three objects to have different colors. So let's select the monkey. Yet in the properties panel, let's come all the way down to this little soccer ball looking thing right here. That's the Material Properties. Let's click on that. We're now in the Material Properties panel. It's pretty empty right now because the monkey itself does not yet have a material assigned to it In order to create a new material to assign to our boring gray monkey, Depress, that is going to create a new material called Material 001 by default. By the way, you can simply click into this and I highly recommend naming your materials. Let's call this one Monkey underscore Matt for material. Hit Enter to confirm. Don't borrow too much about the fact that it's replicated up at the top. Single objects can have multiple materials assigned to them because you can assign them to parts of the objects like the s, the eyes and the rest of the head might have different materials. For now, there's just the one material called monkey mat that's selected right here as well. Don't worry too much about the use nodes and all of the other fancy stuff. There's tons of settings in here, play around for them, have fun, and just see what happens. For now, let's simply come down a little bit. Need to use your mouse, will. You can also click and hold the middle mouse button and drag down or up to scroll through the contents of these panels. And that's super useful. I use that all the time. Let's simply come to the base color, click on this, that's going to bring up a color pick up. Let's change this to maybe a bluish color. And you'll notice that in the viewport, the monkey is now blue. Now do note that this blue, this material will only show if you're rendered Material Preview mode. Both of those will show the actual material. If you go into solid shading mode or wire frame, that will not show any material. So make sure you're either in material preview or in rendered shading mode, otherwise these materials will not show. Let's select the sphere, but keep an eye out on what happens in this material properties panel right here. If I select the sphere, will, this object has no materials. And again, it's all blank. If you reselect the monkey head, you can see your monkey and your monkey material back in here. Let's select the sphere. You can either now click on you to create a new material for the sphere, or over on the left hand side you actually have this drop down here. If you pop this open, you will see there is a monkey mat, our monkey material that we created. There's also a blank material which is the default material that Blender creates in assigns to the cube, and you'll see that in just a second. In here, you could now select to assign the monkey material to this sphere. Now do note that this material is now shared between the sphere and the monkey head. And that's indicated in blender with this little box here saying there's now two objects referencing this material. That means that if you were to change this base color or any of the other properties in this material, let's change this to green. You will change both the sphere and the monkey head because they're both using the same material. Let's just change this back to a sky blue sphere and monkey are now blue again with the sphere selected. Come into the materials properties. Let's click this little x to unassign that material from our sphere. Now it has no material, it's blank and gray again. Let's hit New to create a new material again, Let's rename this one to Sphere Mat. Let's change the base color of this two. Maybe a bred with the Sphere selected press. Delete on your numpad to zoom in on it. You can see that's what this material looks like. Let's just come down and change a few other properties. For example, let's jack up this metallic property right here. And you can see how that's affecting the look and feel of this material. It now feels well more metallic because we brought up the metallic value of that material. You can also increase, decrease the specular highlight. And you can see that getting a little bit brighter right there. And you can bring down the roughness. Right now, the light that hits this material is getting diffused just a little bit, which is making that look a little bit soft. But you can bring down the roughness to essentially make the material closer to something like glass that is very reflective. Let's bring down the roughness, and you can see how that's suddenly getting much, much shinier. I may also right click this sphere and select to shape this one smooth. And you can see this really nice highlight there. If you bring up the roughness, again, you're diffusing that and making it a much softer material. Again, there's tons of properties and I'm not going to go through all of them, Just have a play around. There's so many cool things you can do. So now we have a sphere material and one for our monkey head. If I click middle mouse button or to scroll up in here, this is now the monkey material selected. Again, Sphere has the sphere material which is red. Let's select the cube. And this one already has a material sign called Material, because by default in the default scene that Blender created for us, you already had this cube and you already had a default material on it. Now you can either delete this and create a new one, or I'm just going to rename it to Cube Map. Come down, Let's change the base color. Maybe this one I'll make bright yellow again with the cube selected to delete on the numpad, To zoom in on that so you can check out what that looks like. Come down a little bit, I want it to be a little bit more specular, a little bit less rough, so it just gets a little bit more shiny. And you'll see the effect of all of these changes as well when we start dealing with lights a little bit better. Now I actually want my scene to have a plane underneath it that reflects these objects. A bit nicer just to make the scene look a little bit more interesting for that. That creates, again, if it is not, because you've moved it with holding down shift and clicking right. Or because you were on the cursor tool and you were clicking that three de cursor around press Shift and C to reset the three de cursor to the center of the origin. Now let's press Shift and A to add an object, I'm going to add a mesh. I'm going to add a plane. Now added a plane, and you can neither scale it up in here, maybe let's make this 12 meters in size. Let's make sure you're on the selection tool. Let's click anywhere that pop up box will disappear. So let's select the plane, press for scale. Let's just drag this out a scale, this plane up quite a bit more. You can see these really nice shadows here now, as well being cast by this light. And we'll get to more lights in just a second. Let me just grab this cube, press G to grab it. Move it up, and you can see how the shadows update in real time. That's working. V is an amazing tool since that's been introduced in Blender 2.8 It makes working with Blender so much more fun just because you can see all of these updates live in your viewport. Let me grab the monkey had press to move it and we're going to move it over to the right hand side there, the sphere. Move that over a little bit. I want to push it back, so I'm going to press Y to lock the, move in to the Y. X, strike that down. And move that over there. Maybe move this forward just a little bit. So I've got the three objects lined up right there. And what I might do as well, select the plane, press G and Y, just push the plane back maybe. And X again, just do whatever you want in here. I'm just just going with a very simple setup, but obviously feel free to just tweak this in any way that you want. I might also rotate my monkey around, the Z. X is just faces the camera a little bit better and then I'm going to move the camera in, This is kind of where I want to be. Grab the plane X. Move that over to the right hand side. Just so we've got a little bit of a nicer set up right here with the plane selected. Let's also give this material in the Material Properties tab, press New to add a new material. Let's call this one plane Underscore Matt. Let's come down a little bit. I actually want to make this very non rough, so it actually, I want this to be reflective and bring up the specula and the metallic base color. White, maybe not. Maybe I'll make this a bit darker. It's almost like a black reflective surface. Maybe just a dark gray will do that. Looks all right, but there's no actual reflections and that's because we're using V right now. Let's talk about how we can enable reflections and tweak some of the other render settings and blender in the next lesson. 13. Render Settings: Let's look at enabling reflections and glow in V. Now I'm not going to go into all of the nitty gritty here, but I do want to give you a quick overview of how you can easily tweak your render settings in Blender. If you return to the render properties and change your render engine from V over to cycles, you can see you now have reflections. Because cycles is a ray tracing engine, it deals really well with reflections and refractions. You have a bit of noise, don't worry about that too much for now. You can fix that just with sampling and denoising. Now in the Ando settings, if you are using cycles, do make sure that your device is set on GPU compute. So you're actually utilizing your graphics card. That might take a moment just to switch those drivers over, but then rendering should be a whole lot faster. However, let's switch this back from cycles over to EV, because you can actually will fake reflections in EV by using something called screen space reflections with the EV render engine selected. You can come a bit further down. There's actually a whole bunch of different options of things that are turned off by default, but they make your scene look a whole lot nicer. They're just a little bit slower to compute. There's ambit occlusion, which will add a little bit of shadow into the dark corners of your three D objects. There's bloom, which will make bright parts of your image bloom if you overdo that. Can look a little bit cheap, but if you just come into the settings and tweak this a little bit, maybe let's make this a little bit less intense and just a little bit smaller so it just doesn't look quite so. Gaudy, Just a bit more subtle. That actually looks quite nice. You can also control things like depth of field, subsurface scattering, a whole bunch of other things that, again, topics for other tutors. The one thing I want to enable is screen space reflections. Let's stick this on. You now have reflections in B. Now these ones are faked. They're not real light bouncing around the scene. And they have some limitations, but they actually work really well to previewing and rendering a lot of scenes and just making them look nice. Let's just go with that for now. Also because it makes rendering really nice and fast in the viewport. Now the one big thing to note is that V is a little bit more limited than cycles in terms of what it can render and how well it can do that, especially if you come to transparent and translucent materials like glass or water liquids. Cycles does a much better job. V doesn't properly support that just yet, but it might come in a future release of blender. Maybe by the time you're watching it, you may as well use V. But if you want a fully realistic render, do go with cycles. You just get a much more realistic result, especially once you jack up the render quality settings. But again, it's just going to take a little bit longer. Let's stay on V. Let's talk about how to add more and more interesting lights into your scene. And as always, let's do that in the next lesson. 14. Working with Cameras: In this lesson, we will cover how to create and modify cameras and blender so that you can specify from which viewpoints your final images will be rendered. So let's pretend we're happy with our scene set up and we now want to render out this image. The most natural thing to do would be to simply come up into the main menu. There's a big render tab in here. Click on Render, and then simply select to render image of just hit F 12. So let's do that. Now that popped up outside of the screen, let me just drag that in and, well, let's zoom out by scrolling down on the mouse wheel. Well, it looks like it's part of our scene, but it's certainly not what we're seeing in the three D view. Let's close this render window again. And the reason for that is that any time you render a scene within Blender, Blender will use the camera that is set up in your scene. Now if I rotate around and zoom out a little bit, there's a camera in our scene already. And if you look at where it's pointing at, it's just pointing down here at the floor. It's not actually pointing at our objects. And you can easily jump into the view of this camera by hitting zero on your numpad. That is going to transition you into the camera's view and this is what we're seeing And if you hit F 12 again or again come to render image, but again, I'm a fan of shortcuts F 12 to render this out. Again, it's off screen. Let me just shrink this window down just a little bit and zoom out so we can see the whole thing. Yes, this is exactly what we're looking at through the camera within our scene. In order to get the view that we want in the three D view, we need to make sure this camera view matches what we want. Let's close this out. Right now we're in the camera's view, by the way. If he had zero on the numpad, again, to jump right back out of the camera for anyone who's saying or I don't have a numpad, I'm using a laptop or some other keyboard that doesn't have a numpad. You can always come up into Preferences under Edit. Go into Preferences again, let me bring that into the screen. Go into input at the top here. You have an option to emulate numpad. If you enable that, then your normal number keys on the keyboard act as if they were the numpad zero on your keyboard will then jump you in and out of camera view. Let's just leave that disabled for a second. Let's close this out. And by the way, remember how when you selected an object and you press delete on the numpad, it frames on that object. Again, you don't have a numpad, you can select the object, so let's select the camera, for example, come up into view. And in here will become again, super useful. Again, super useful. Again, super useful for extremely. You can resign all these keyboard shortcuts as well if you select that. That's essentially the same thing you can work around if you don't have a numpad. So let's hit zero on the numpad again to re enter camera view. And let's say I want to adjust the position, the most natural thing would be to, let's just move around. I just left that camera view right there. I didn't change the camera, I broke out of the camera view. Let's hit zero again, but this time before we start moving around, let's lock the position of the camera to this three D view. And you can do that via the view tab. Now that ones a little bit hidden on the right hand side in the three D view, there's this little arrow pointing left. You can either click on that to pop out this menu, or you can press on your keyboard with the cursor over the three view to collapse or expand that. In here you'll find a number of different taps. And we want to navigate to the view tab because in here you have an option to lock camera to view. Make sure this is enabled. By the way, in I think Blended 2.93 and some of the newer releases, there's an option for that up here just because it's used so much. With the camera locked to your view, I can now move around my three D view. And you may notice I'm no longer breaking out of that camera. Let's just press to hide that panel For now. I can now move around my three D view, zoom in and out, just as I normally would. This actually changes the position of the camera. So let's just navigate forward a little bit. Position that camera as best as we can. Zoom out just a little bit. Let's press N to bring up the view tab again. In here. Let's disable, lock camera to view. Let's press N again to hide the panel. And if you now move around again, now I've broken out of that camera view. But you can see I've repositioned the camera up here. If I now hit 12, let me just drag that in and mouse wheel down to zoom out just a little bit. And this now rendered out much more of what I was expecting. Let's close this again, and this is now the view of the camera off our scene. Now this is a great way to position your camera, but there's actually one option that I prefer. Let's again enter camera view by pressing zero on the numpad. And this time rather than locking the three D view to the camera, let's just use navigation mode. Like you can literally pretend to be walking the camera around your scene. In order to do that, while in camera perspective, you can hold shift and press the Tilda key, the little squiggly line on the left side of your numbers at the top of your keyboard. That is going to enable walk navigation. So now I can use my mouse to look around. And WASD, just like a first person shooter, to essentially move and navigate my camera around. Q moves me down, E moves me up. And I can now slide the camera right into position of frame up my objects right the way I want them to. Maybe just like that. Left click to confirm. Again, let's move around and you can see the camera has now been repositioned. Press F 12 to render that out again. Let me drag that in, that is looking pretty nice. Let's close this out again. Hit zero again to enter that camera view. And by the way, if you have accidentally deleted your camera or you don't have a camera in the scene, you can simply add one by pressing Shift and A or coming into the object menu. And in here you'll find cameras. You can simply add another camera into your scene. Let me just drag that up a little bit. And now I have two cameras. Blender wouldn't know which one to use, however, you can simply select any camera in your scene, then come up into view cameras and then tell Blender to use this active object, this actively selected camera as the actual camera for rendering. Now I'm not going to change any of that here, I'm just going to select that other camera, press X and confirm to delete that because I already have a camera on machine, but I've found some people who accidentally deleted the camera. And then Blender will say, well, I can't render this because I don't know which camera to use. Now let's go back into the camera view by pressing zero on the Numpad rather than pressing shift in Tilda. Again, if that's a bit too difficult, you can also come up into the header in the three D view and under view you'll find a sub menu for navigation in here. You can then enable fly navigation, which is more steering an airplane. Or walk navigation which we had on just before. So you can frame up your objects. I'm actually quite happy with the framing. What I might do, so I might grab this monkey, press then X just to move it a bit closer to the cube. Select that sphere, grab it. Move it around a little bit. Maybe I'll grab it and press X just to move it a bit closer to that cube as well. Maybe I'll just move it down a little bit. Move the monkey down a little bit as well. Press Shift. Until then, because I'm still in camera perspective to enable walk navigation, just go in a little bit closer. Right then what I might do as well as might select the ground press and Y is push the ground back a little bit. So there's a bit more background behind this object. Maybe also press S, scale that up. Now I've got my camera set up nicely, plenty of space behind my objects. And if I now hit 122, render this out. Let's bring this in. And this is a nicely set up scene. Now, while we've technically already been rendering our images and Blender, I do want to cover rendering, how to use cycles for higher quality renders, and how to save your files to your hard drive in the next lesson. 15. Rendering & Saving Your Images: In this lesson, let's talk about rendering your images. And, well, we've kind of been doing that already because we've been rendering our scene via the render menu. And by the way, the easiest way to save these images is simply in this render window that you'll get when you render your scene. Come into Image Select Safe. That is going to bring up a blender file browser and then you can simply give your file a name. Let's call this my first render it safe image. And then if you navigate to where we save that image, here it is my first rendering. And that is the file that we've just saved out. Now just very quickly, before we conclude this tutorial, let's close down the render window. And let's just move this out of this screen again. Let's just quickly talk on a few of the render and output settings that may be relevant as you're getting set up to render your first project. In the properties panel, bottom right hand side, by default in your blender workspace. Come into the output properties. In here, you can define the resolution, like the width and height of your final output image. By the way up here, if you click on that, you've got a bunch of presets. Very easy to select. 16. MODELLING - SECTION OVERVIEW: Welcome to the next section. Hopefully by now, you understand the basics of how to work with blender. And you're at a point where you can start experimenting and exploring a little bit on your own. But in this section I want to talk very specifically about how to do three D modeling in blender. Which essentially allows you to create any three dimensional object that you can think of. Now for that, what we will do is we'll take the default cube that comes with Blender and turn it into a little pirate treasure chest. And along the way we will explore all of the editing tools that are available to you in blender. From adding loop cuts to beveling to in setting using different views or proportional editing or x ray mode to really control how that final three D object comes together. I will also touch on a few common pitfalls and things to watch out for along the way. But again, enough waffling, let's jump into it. 17. Object Mode vs Edit Mode: Let's finally look at how we can modify the geometry of your three D objects and blender. Now in order to learn about three D modeling, we are going to transform this default cube into a pirate treasure test. Since for that I don't need to see the camera or the light. Let's come into the outliner in the top right hand corner of the interface and disable the visibility for those. Then let's zoom in on the cube just a little bit. Now in order to modify the actual geometry of the three D objects within your scene, you need to go into edit mode in the top left hand side of the three D vehicle, You'll find this little drop down here. Right now you can see we are on object mode and with the cube selected. If you pop this open, you can see there's quite a few different modes that we can switch into. The one we're interested in right now is added mode. Let's select Added Mode. And in the three D, you can now see the actual geometry that makes up the default cue. You may have noticed that on the left hand side you now also have a whole bunch of different tools. And we'll touch on some of them throughout this tutorial. Now another way to go in and out of edit mode is simply to press the tap key. So let's press Tab. You can see we're back in object mode. The geometry of the cube has vanished, and when the cube still selected, press Tab to go back to edit mode. And let's look at how we can actually modify the geometry of our default cube in the next lesson. 18. Editing Vertices, Edges & Faces: Now before we get to create a pirate treasure test, let's first talk about how you can use added mode to modify the actual geometry of your three D objects. Now, all three D geometry within blender and pretty much any other three D program that I know of consists of vertices, edges, and faces. The vertices are all of the corner points on your three D object. The edges are the lines that connect them and the faces are visual surfaces that fill in between these edges. Now in order to select, modify, and work with vertices, edges of faces in the top left inside on the three DV port. While in added mode you have three switches. One is vertex selection mode selection mode, and face selection mode. As you toggle through these, you can see that blender highlights either the vertices, the edges, or the faces. While in face select mode, you can click on any of the faces, you can rotate around to select them. However, you can't select edges or vertices themselves, you can only select faces. Let's switch this over to Edge select. Now if you click on an edge, you can now select individual edges. You can't, however, select faces or vertices. If you switch over to vertex select mode, as you may have noticed, you can now select individual vertices. Now to make it really easy to switch between these modes, you can press key 12 or three unit keyboard to switch from vertex to H to face selection modes. And we will toggle between these modes a whole lot. So I highly recommend you do get used to the shortcut keys. They make your life so much easier. Let's press one on your keyboard to return to vertex select mode. Let's click on any of the vertices on your cube. You can see it's highlighted and selected. And if you can press now for grab, remember from part one of this total series. You can now move this vertex S before you can constrain its movement. By pressing X to constrain its movement on the X, X, Y for the Y Xs or for the Xs you can also hold Shift, and let's select a couple of other vertices. Let's select these three here. Press G, and you can move all of them together. You can press and scale them out. You can create some really funky stuff, synonyms to scaling out those vertices. Control or command and Z will always undo, just like it did before. Let's press two to enter edge select mode. Again, the little edge select icon is highlighted in the top of the three D view. You can now select an edge, press grab it and move it again. Hold shift to select a whole bunch of them. Press and just move them around in any way that you want. You can also rotate them once you have edges, you can just rotate edges. You can do all sorts of crazy stuff to create essentially any three D object that you can think of. Let's undo that. Let's press three to enter face select mode. And again, you can select any of the phases of the cube that you want. Hold on, shift, select multiple ones. Then you can move scale and rotate them in any way that you want. Now this should give you the power to modify existing geometry. However, let's talk about how you can actually create new vertices, edges, and phases in the next lesson. 19. Creating & Deleting Vertices, Edges & Faces: In this lesson, we will look at how you can create and delete vertices, edges, and faces using added Mode and Blender. To demonstrate this while still in added mode, let's select the top of our cube. Press X on your keyboard to bring up the delete menu. And let's select faces. So we're going to delete this top face. Now this cube is essentially open. Let's fill this back in. Let's return to vertex select mode again, either via the icon in the top of the three DV or by pressing one on your keyboard. Let's select two vertices diagonally across that default cube. And let's press to fill. And then it's going to create a new edge. Right in the middle here you can see there's now a new edge. If you go to edge select mode, you can select it, so that's our new edge. You can grab it and move it around, but there's no faces yet, so you can still see through it. In order to create a phase, select all of the edges that you want to encompass that face and press to fill in that face. So now we've got half a phase filled back. Let's select the middle edge, and the ones on the outer sides, press F again to fill that in. And now we're almost back to the original cube. However, we've added this additional edge into the middle. Let's get rid of that. Let's select this edge, make sure you're in edge select mode. Let's press Extra Deleted. But now rather than just deleting it, we actually want to dissolve it. And dissolving essentially removes a vertex edge or face from your three D model. But it then joins the surrounding geometry back together. So if Oset dissolve edges, that edge is going to get deleted, but the phases have been joined, so now we're essentially back to where we started. That's all well and good, but chances are you don't want to rely only on these really basic tools to create your three D models. Let's talk about a slightly more advanced tool that allows you to inset or extrude faces in the next lesson. 20. Insetting & Extruding Faces: In this lesson, we will look at how to extrude an inset faces to make our default cube look a little bit more like a pity treasure chest. First of though, let's stretch the cube out a little bit so it looks a little bit more like a chest than a cube. For that interface, select mode by pressing three on your keyboard. Select two opposite side on your cube by holding down shift. And I'm going to do that along the x axis. Press S to scale. Want scale. The whole thing though. So press X to constrain the movement of those faces to the X axis. And that's pushed this out about there looks good to me. And let's create a bit of space to actually put all our treasure in. So let's select the top face of this cube. Do make sure that cursor is not directly over the face, but a little bit off to the side press to inset the face. And now if you move Uka towards the center of that face, you can see we're going to create a little inst, not just bring this out maybe round, but there left click to confirm and we have now essentially created four new faces in. Insert the one in the center. If you press, you can see this is a new face that got created right click to cancel that operation. So now I want to push this down to essentially make this cube hollow. For that we're going to extrude this face. Now do note that all of the operations I show you here, you can actually find in the menu bar on the left if you come into round about the middle here, there's the Inst faces tool that be activated via I. Just above that is the extrude region tool which we're going to do next. But I'm using shortcut keys because I really want you getting used to shortcut keys because they make your luck so much easier. Going into the toolbar can be a whole lot more complicated. Make sure the face that we insert is selected, press to extrude it, and now we can pull this up to extrude this face. You can also push it down into this cube to create a bit of hollow space. And I don't want to push it too far, otherwise it's going to penetrate the bottom of our treasure chest. Maybe roundabout there. Let's left click to confirm. Now we've created plenty of space for our treasure. However, sometimes when you're inserting faces, it can be hard to tell where they sit in relation to the rest of the geometry because, well, you can't see through them. However, to solve that problem, Blender has a really useful feature called x ray mode. And let's look at how to use that in the next lesson. 21. X-Ray Mode: In this lesson, we will look at how to use x ray mode in blender. Now I have a feeling that the floor of this chest is still a little bit high. But it is a bit hard to see because, well, I don't have x ray vision however Blender does. In the top right hand side, on the three D view, you'll find these two little overlapping squares. This is to enable x ray mode. Let's click this. Blender is now going to show you an x ray version of your three D model. And this is super helpful by the way. The shortcut key for that is Alt or option and Z to toggle that on or off with this face still selected. Let's press G to grab it. And we can now move it around. Press Z to lock it in the Z direction, so we can now bring it down. We can now pull it down and match it up to exactly where we want it to sit. Maybe right about there. Let's come out of x ray mode with all option z. And that looks like plenty of space for our bounty. Now one thing that is not ideal with the way we created this insert in this hollow space within our treasure test is that the edges on the corner of our treasure chest are diagonally cutting across. And that's going to trip us off a little bit when we're building out the edges and embellishing them and they need some detail to the chest. Let's undo that and do that slightly differently. Press control or command and Z a couple of times to undo all of our hard work. And let's do this a little bit differently. Now, another way to add more detail geometry to your three object within blender is to use the Loop cut tool. And let's look at that in the next lesson. 22. Creating Loop Cuts: Now let's look at how you can easily add more geometry and more detail to your three D model. Then blender using the Loop cut tool, again, you will find it in the menu bound on the left hand side. Down here it's called loop cut. However, again, shortcut keys. So a cura over your treasure test, press control or command, and R for loop cut. And as you have a cura close to an edge off of that treasure test, you can see the blender now shows you where it would create a new edge cut around this treasure chest. If you have a the cursor over on the right hand side, closer to the long edge, you can see that that cut would go the other way. Make sure that the indicated cut goes round our treasure chest. Click this is going to insert a new edge that wraps around this treasure chest into our three D object. And we can now place it. Let's drag this over to the right hand side and say maybe roundabout. Here is where I want to cut around my treasure chest. Let's left click to confirm if you now rotate around. This has inserted a new edge into our three D model. If you go to edge mode, you can select the edges and you can move them around. You can come into face select mode and you can see these ones are now new faces. We now have more detail in our cube to work with. Let's do the same thing on the left hand side. Control or command and R to create another loop, cut, click. And then drag this edge over to the left hand side. I want it about equal distance as I have it on the right hand side. Right about there looks good to me. Let's left click to confirm that that looks pretty good. By the way, you can always move these edges. Right now it's actually still selected. So you can press and then X, and then we can slide that around so I can move this a little bit further out. If I think it's gotten a little bit too close, that looks about right. Let's create two loop cuts going the other way. Let's rotate our cube a little bit. Press Control and R. Let's make sure that three cursor is on the shorter edge for the treasure chest. So the loop cut will go the long way. And now before you place this loop cut, roll up on your mouse wheel to add another loop cut to it. And you can roll up as much as you want to add lots and lots of loop cuts, but I really just want the two. So let's left click, you can slide them around. If you right click, you're actually just going to place them in the default position. So simply right click and they'll both be centered and equally offset from the middle. And now with both of these edges still selected, let's press, and I don't want to scale them out that way, let's press Y to lock in the movement to the y axes. And now push them out, and I can push them out equally to both sides of my treasure chest. And again, I was going to make sure that the corners are kind of square. So that looks pretty good. By the way, let's click outside of the cube to unselect everything. And let's say you wanted to re select this entire edge cutting around this cube. Now in order to select any edge loops, or even face loops, or your three D objects, Blender has some really nifty features that make that nice and easy. And let's look at how to use those in the next lesson. 23. Selecting Edge & Face Loops: In this lesson, we will look at how you can easily select edge and face loops on your three D models. Now, while we're still in edge select mode, you could select the pieces of this edge and hold on, shifting calf, go around, just re select all of that. And it's going to take a little bit, but it's not too horrible. But Blender actually gives you a way to really easily select edge loops as well as face loops within your three D model. Let's click outside of the cube to unselect everything. And if you now hold down all option on your keyboard and you click an edge that is part of an edge loop. You can see that Blender immediately selects the entire loop. Let's hold Shift and Alt option and click on the edge on the opposing side. And now I have re selected both of my edge loops going around our treasure chest. Let's press three to go to face select mode. And we can do the exact same thing with face loops. Again, you could select all of the faces individually. And if you hold down shift, you can actually select all of them together. Or you can hold down alter an option on your keyboard and click closer to the edge that runs along with the face loop that you want to select. So at this point here, and I'm now going to select this entire loop of faces going around the Queen shift and Alt. Let's click on the other edge here to select this face loop. Going that way, the first figure is simply going to unselect the element you have selected. Let's click again and re select that whole face loop. Now I've got those two face loops selected. And it makes it really easy to select larger parts of your model, and there's different ways to do this as well, but just something that is super useful, selecting edge loops as well as face loops. And we will be using this a little bit throughout the rest of the tutor. Now, before we move on, I want to quickly touch on a couple of common pitfalls. In particular, when working with the inset and extrude features in blender. And again, let's do that in the next lesson. 24. Common Pitfalls & Problems: In this lesson, I want to talk about a few common beginner pitfalls that you might run into when you're first starting out to model your three D objects and blender. These often come from the way you handle extrude and inset operations. So let's walk into one of those issues together and then figure out how to fix them and how to avoid them. Now that we've essentially just recut our cube, let's create the space for our treasure to sit in. Let's re select the top face of our cube. Press key to extrude it. And by the way, if you right click to cancel this operation that will still have extruded that face, it will have created additional faces and edges. However, there is no distance between them. If you press to move this face, you can see there's actually additional geometry been created. It's you didn't move this face. This can lead to duplicated edges and can make things really confusing. If you now go into edge select mode. Select this edge here. I don't know which of the two I selected press to move that a little bit, I selected the outer one first, but there's another one that lies on top of it. Do make sure that if you undo an extrude operation by right clicking, do make sure that you undo until you actually undid that extrude. So there you go. Now undid the extrude itself. However, I do actually want to extrude. So let's press, and let's move this face down again. I don't quite know how fast, let's just drop it in here. Come to the site, press Old option and Z to enter x ray mode. Let's press G and Z. With that face still, select and bring it down just a little bit more to create our little opening for all of our gold and treasure old option to exit x ray mode. Let's make this look a little bit more interesting. It's still really, really boring. For that, we will need to extrude a few more faces. But rather than doing all of them one by one, let's look at how you can extrude multiple faces simultaneously in the next lesson. 25. Extruding Multiple Faces at Once: In this lesson, let's look at how you can extrude multiple faces on your three D objects simultaneously to add some more detail to our treasure chest. Right now, this chest is still pretty boring, so let's add a little bit of beveling to all of the corners. For that, make sure you're in phase, select mode. And let's select all of the corner pieces. Bolt shift to select all of them. Just the faces on the outer corners. Our treasure test. Cool. With all of those selected, let's extrude them. Let's push them outwards a little bit. Let's press to extrude. This will not work at all. Let's right click to aboard this extrude operation. And again, control or command Z to undo the actual extrude operation. I always like to press to make sure that, yeah, there's no additional geometry that got created. Right click to undo that because I don't actually want to move. Now hold down Alt or Option on your keyboard and press to bring up the Extrude menu. And in here, you now have different options for how you actually want to extrude. The option I want to pick is I want to pick extrude faces along normals. Let's choose this option and let's drag. You can now see that all of the faces are pushing forward in the direction that they are facing. However, if you push this really far, you can see it's still slanted in diagonal and that's because we're not using even thickness. However, while you're doing this extrude operation, you can press Kevo to enable even thickness or press Sigin to disable it, but I want it enabled the thickness of the extrude all around is going to be even. Let's just bring this out a little bit, maybe roundabout there. Let's left click to confirm. We've now added just a little bit of bevel all around the treasure chestnuts looking just a little bit less plain. By the way, if you're wondering what normals even are, don't worry. Let's talk about them in a bit more detail in the next lesson. 26. Understanding Normals: In this lesson, I want to talk about what normals are and why they are so important to three D modeling. Normals are vectors in three D space like errors or directions that face outwards from the faces, but they also face outwards from the vertices of your three D model. And quite a lot of operations do take the direction of your normals into account. It's useful to know what they are. You can also visualize them in the three D, come up to the top right hand corner into this little overlays and drop down. Let's pop this open and down here on the bottom you can enable the normals and show them on the model. So let's enable the vertex normals. You can see all of these little lines coming out of the vertices of your model, that those are the normals, the directions in which that geometry is facing. Let's bring the overlays panel back up. You can enable split vertices, which is kind of the combination of the joining point between different edges where the vertex meet. So you can see all of the individual parts that make up that combined direction or you can enable the normals for the pass. You can see the direction those phases are while facing. So if you press Alt option and E, and you say extrude along normals, those are the normals that those operations are talking about and that's the direction that those operations will be effective in. Let's come back into the overlays and let's disable all of the normals. But, you know, it's just useful to know in case something goes really weird and you don't know what's going on. It may be that your normals are just a little bit weird and something new model needs fixing up first. But for now, let's add a little bit more detail to our treasure test using the tools that we've talked about in this section so far. But again, let's do all of that together in the next lesson. 27. Selecting Hidden Geometry: In this lesson, let's look at how we can select hidden geometry while modeling. So you can more easily tweak your three D models for that. Let's give the center column of our treasure chest a little bit more of a stylized angled look For that, let's return to vertex select mode. You can actually box select vertices and edges. You can just click and drag to box select vertices, shift to select a whole bunch of them. And I want to select these ones, but I didn't select the one down here because I can only vertices I can actually see. However, what you can do is you can enable x ray mode. And in x ray mode you will select through the geometry. Right. Now, for example, let's unselect everything. Let's on one side of the scheme, Dragon selected the vertices at the top of that center panel. Hold on, shift, drag, select the ones at the bottom of the panel. If you now rotate around, you can see really only selected the front ones, the ones I could actually see. Let's do that again. But let's press Alt option and Z to enable x ray mode. And I can now see through this object again. Let's box select the ones at the top. Let's rotate around a little bit to align this a little bit better if you're finding it challenging to select the same geometry on both sides of your three D models. You can switch your three D view to be orthographic rather than perspective. Let's go over what that even means and how to use this feature in the next lesson. 28. Orthographic Views: Let's talk about orthographic views in blender and how to change what you see in the three D view so you can more easily work with your three D models. Right now, our three D view is showing us a perspective view similar to how your eyes work, where objects that are further away appear smaller. However, sometimes when working in three D, it's nice to see a flat to the projection of our objects so that we can work with them a little bit more easily. In Blender, it's actually really easy to switch between those different views. For that, you can press five on your numpad as looks a little bit funny by the way. You can also toggle it with this little switch on the right hand side of the three D view. Then let's press on E to come into front view of this cube. And again, you can also click onto these little circles here, rotate around your cube. Can't just want to have a front on view. Do make sure that you have x ray mode enabled. Let's just click to unselect everything. Let's click and make select everything at the top. Hold Shift, click and make select all of the vertices at the bottom of that center panel. I'm going to select a few more. If I now click and drag around, I'm going to return to perspective view, and you can see all of the vertices I've selected and I've selected through my geometry. Let's press to scale this down and X to constrain the movement. And let's just bring that in. May be round about there. If you now exit x ray mode, see that we've added this much more interesting looking slant to the panel. Now I'm finding it not quite extreme enough. And x again, let's bring this in just a little bit more and actually might add a bit of an extra slant to the ones at the very bottom. Again, press five to go into orthographic view. Press one to enter front view. Let's unselect everything and it's old option and Z to make sure we're X remote, box select the very bottom and X, let's just bring that in just a little bit more. Let's just come out of X remote and check this out. Yeah, I think that looks a whole lot more interesting. Next, let's add a little bit more detail to these columns on the corner just to make them look a little bit more interesting. For that, we are going to talk about the Bevel tool and blender in the next lesson. 29. Bevelling Edges: Let's talk about how you can easily add bevels to the edges of your three D objects and blender. Let's return to edge, Select mode by pressing two on your keyboard. And let's select the very corner edges along our treasure chest. Hold on shift to select all of them. Let's just rotate around. Let's select those ones as well. And again, those ones, let's add a bit of a bevel. Again, you will find the Bevel tool in the tool by itself, but control or command and B will give you the same effect. Let's drag out and this is going to create a bevel. Again, you can roll your mouse wheel up to add more detail into that bevel itself. I'm going to keep it fairly low fi. I want to make sure that the bevel is quite even as well. Left click to confirm and let's just add it a little bit of a rounded bevel, those columns. Let's return to face select mode. I'm going to now select the faces on the outer edge of those columns as well as the one on the inner edge right there. Let's make sure I select the same faces for all columns all around my treasure chest with all of these edges selected Alt or option. And to extrude the faces along the normals. And I'm going to bring this in just a little bit. Again, press for even thickness. It just looks a little bit nicer. Let's left click to confirm that looks pretty cool. Now the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in the bottom vertices. This. Pull them in a little bit so it feels like there's a bit of a bend at the bottom of this treasure chest. Again, let's return to orthographic view by pressing five. You numpad or again using the switch in the three D view, one for front view, old option and Z to return to x ray mote and as box like adjust the vertices at the bottom press and let's scale them in just a little bit. Let's come out of orthographic view, old option Z to reto off x ray mote. That actually looks pretty cool. Now the last thing that's missing is really just a logo or something that's cut into the front of the treasure chest to make sure that nobody else touches our bounty. For that, we can use the knife tool to essentially cut any shape we want into any part of our geometry that we wish. Let's look at that in the next lesson. 30. The Knife Tool: In this lesson, we're going to look at how to use the knife tool to cut new edges into our three D objects at will, In our case, to cut a three D logo into the front of our treasure chest. What I'm going to do is I'm going to return to orthographic view by pressing five on the numpad one to go into front view. Let's zoom in just a little bit. Let's selected the knife tool by pressing K on the keyboard. And you can now click and drag to essentially cut a shape of any form in any way you want into this face. Make sure you close to shape at the very end and then press Enter to confirm. If you now come out what has happened. We've now essentially sliced our face and cut this shape into it. You can use the knife tool to cut all sorts of geometry across your cube in any way that you want it entered to confirm and blender is going to essentially cut up your object the way you've defined it. Now let's undo that. It's pretty messy. It's not quite what I wanted and this logo ain't great either, even if it's a nice phase that we could now extrude or do all sorts of other things with. Let's undo all of that and let's talk about how you can use reference images and blender to overlay onto our treasure test so that we can carve a much nicer looking logo into our model. And it's always. Let's do that in the next lesson. 31. 3.17 Using Reference Images: Let's talk about how you can easily import and use reference images and blender to assist you with your three D modeling tasks. Again, let's return to orthographic view by pressing five on the Numpad. Press one on the Numpad for front view. Let's press tab to exit edit mode. And we're not going to bring in an Explorer window or a finder window with an image of a skull. I'm going to drag and drop that into my three D view. I'm not going to drop it on the cube itself. Just going to drop it slightly left off the treasure chest. That's going to bring that image directly into blender. Let me just get rid of that finder window. You can click it to the middle and drag it over the chest, but it's way too bigger. It's also sitting behind everything in the outliner that just get imported as an empty. Just double click that and call this one skull in the Properties panel. Coming to the little image tab here under the Properties for this placeholder image, I want to change the depth to front. It's going to sit in front of my treasure chest. I'm going to enable opacity and lower that to maybe 50% so I can actually see through it with the skull selected press S. And that's the scale, this down, maybe, right about there. Press G to place it. We're just going to use this as a placeholder so we know how to cut with our knife tool. Let's re select our treasure chest. Might actually rename this as well to be Treasure Chest. Press Tab to return to edit mode. Press for the knife tool. Now more essentially cut around the skull. Make sure you close that loops to confirm, let's use the knife tool again and let's cut out the press for the knife tool again. And let's just cut the eyes out as well. Just roughly. I reckon it look cool enough. Let's do that for the left eye as well. Let's exit orthographic view to hide the skull image as well. Now essentially cut a skull face into the front of our treasure chest. Let's come to select mode. Like all of the pieces of the skull we want to extrude, press E. Let's just push the skull in. I'm just going to insert that just a little bit. We now have a really cool skull I can cut into the front of our treasure chest. Let's press tab to exit Edit mode. And the base of our treasure chest is now completed. However, right now we have no lid. Let's talk about how we can create a lid for our pirate treasure chest in the next lesson. 32. Adding Additional Objects: In this lesson, let's add a lid to our treasure chest. Now we could model out and add the geometry for the Lit for treasure chest to the very same object in blender. But because you may want to animate the lid separately, let's create it as a separate object. Let's add another cube into our scene by pressing Shift and A and under Mesh. Let's simply select Cube, press G and Z. Let's drag this up. The lid car sits on top of the treasure chest right there in our outliner. Let's rename this one to Lit with the lidsteelectedressap To go into added mode, first select both sides of the lid press and X, and let's scale this out so that the lid matches the size of the treasure chest underneath. And I wanted to just cover the opening in the chest underneath it. I'm actually going to select both sides as well. Press and y scale them in a little bit because we're going to add some levels around the edges of the lid. I don't want it to be poking over the treasure chest, but we can always scale it down a little bit later. Anyways, that looks pretty good. Let's go into edge selection mode by pressing two knee keyboard control or command and R to add an edge loop. And I want to cut around the long side of the lid. Left click to confirm and then simply right click to not slide the edge and place it right down the center. With the edge still selected, let's level it out by pressing control or command. And let's move our cursor away from the edge to create the actual level. Let's roll up on the mouse wheel to add a whole bunch of faces to that. I want a fair amount, Maybe 2030 ad as many as you want to. And I'm going to place them so that they're evenly spaced on the lid itself. That looks pretty good, but it's still just the box on a box. I now want to add some shape to the lid, so it comes up, curves around and it comes back down on the other side. For that we're going to have to move the vertices on the top of this lid. And for that you can use a really useful feature blender called proportional editing. And let's talk about how that works in the next lesson. 33. Proportional Editing: In this lesson, I want to talk about a super useful feature in Blender called proportional editing. Now we've created some geometry for our lid, but we still have to shape it by moving all of these vertices in place to create the actual shape of the lid. Let's press one to go into vertex select mode. And here are now all the vertices. And you can select them individually and move them down into position and it's going to be really horrible. What I really want to do is I want to evenly shift them down on the right side and the left side from the center vertex here. And for that we're going to use something called proportional editing. Let's jump into side on orthographic view by pressing three on the numpad. Again, if you don't have an ipad, simply use the navigation gizmo here on the right hand side and the little toggle here to switch between perspective and orthographic views, press Alt or Option and Z. So we can select through our geometry and then box select the center vertices or the center vertex if you have a single one at the top of the lid. If you now press and Z, you can move this down but we're not moving any of the other vertices. Let's right click to cancel that operation. At the top of your three D view, you have this little target bull's eye in here which enables proportional editing. Let's enable proportional editing. And what this will do is that any operation that you perform on a vertex edge or face affect vertices, edges and faces that are nearby. It's like a fall off effect, like light falling off surrounding geometry will be affected by that operation. With those vertices still selected, press G. You will now see a wide circle, and this is the circle of influence. You can make the circle bigger by rolling down on mouse, will you can make it smaller by rolling up. And if you can't see the circle, maybe it's just too big. So make sure you can actually see it. Now as I move my vertices, you can see how I'm affecting neighboring vertices. Now what I'm actually going to do is actually going to cancel this operation. I'm going to box the vertex on the top left hand side. Hold on shift box, select the top right hand side. And the reason I'm box selecting is so that I'm selecting the vertex on the opposite side of the lid as well. Let's press G again to grab press Z to lock the movement to the z axes and now pull down. You can now see how I'm influencing these vertices. Let's roll our mouse wheel up or down to give the lid a different shape. I want it a little bit round it here again. Just give it any shape that you want. I think that actually looks pretty cool. Left click to confirm that looks pretty good but the lid is still pretty tall. Sum is going to box select all of the vertices at the top and let's just bring that down a little bit. Let's return to orthographic and check this out. That actually looks pretty cool with all of these vertices still selected, let's press and Z to scale this up. While now I'm affecting the bottom as well, I don't want to proportionally edit this anymore. Right click disabled proportional editing. Press S and Z. I going to scale off the top of that lid, just make it a little bit steeper. Give it a little bit more for dramatic feeling. Maybe G and C. Just move it up a little bit. This kind like a really spiky, you can make it fatter and do whatever you want with this. Let's exit x ray mode and let's add some levels in detail around the edges of the lid. However, since we place the lid on top of our base, it's actually really hard to see the edges. Fortunately, Blender has a feature called Local View that allows us to focus on the object that we actually working with. Let's talk about how to use Local view in the next lesson. 34. Local View: Now right now, I can't actually see the bottom of the lid because the base of the treasure test is still visible. However, blender has a really cool feature called local view, which will essentially hide everything except the currently selected object. For that, simply press the forward slash on your numpad. Blender will zoom in on that object and hide everything else. We're now in local view. You can see in the top left corner here, it says user perspective in local view. By the way, to toggle in and out of this, just press that forward slash on the num pad again. You can also come into view and then select Local view. Just go to local view. Does the exact same thing. Now I can work with the lid separately and once I'm done just it, local view just makes it nice and easy. Let's go into H select mode. Press control or command R, and let's place some more edge loops. I want two edge loops, equally spaced, left click and then just right click to leave them in that default position. Let's press and X, and let's push these edges out towards the corner. I want fairly thick bezels, but again, just do this however you like. Let's just place them right about there. I'm imagining two additional lines of metal running around the center of the lit here. Let's control R one more time. I'm going to add four edges this time, left click, right click to just leave them where they are. Let's press and X and scale them in just a little bit. Maybe down until there. And I'm going to push the ones on the right hand side over. I only want to select the loops on the right hand side. Again, remember how to select edge loops. Hold Alt or Option, and click on the edge to select the whole loop. Shift and click on the other one. Now selected both of these edge loops. Four, Grab and X to move it along the X, X seasons. Just push this out a little bit to make it a bit easier to evenly align these ones. Let's go into top down view. And you can press seven on the Numpad or just click the little gizmo here. Let's go to Top View. That looks pretty good. So now I can clearly see how I'm moving them. And X, just move them out just a little bit. Let's select the other two edges alton option and click on the Edge Shift. Click on the other one. We now selected those two this time let's press seven on the Numpad to return into the top view and X and let's move them out. Let's just make sure they're equal distance from the center as the other one. And that looks pretty good. Let's level all of these phases out. Let's return to Face Select mode. You know how to do this already. Hold down Alt option and click closer to the edge. Running the long side of these faces. We select that phase loop around. Let's do the same with the other ones. Holding down Shift to select all of them. Press Alt to extrude, and let's select extrude faces along normals. And let's just push them out a little bit to add a bit of a bezel right there. That looks pretty cool. I'm also going to add a little bit of extrude around these loops here. Let's hold down Alt or Option on keyboard, and let's click on this face here to select that face loop around the outer edge of that lid. Hold down Shift and let's do the same on the other side. It looks pretty good. Old option and extrude faces along normals. Let's just push that out again just a little bit. That's coming together pretty nicely. While local view is awesome for focusing in on a single object while you're working on it, sometimes you may have to dig even deeper and hide parts of a model temporarily. Let's look at how you can hide and of course unhide parts of your Three D model in the next lesson. 35. Hiding & Unhiding Parts of Your Model: In this lesson, let's go over how you can hide and unhide parts of your three D models while you're working on them. Now if you rotate around this lid and look at the bottom, you'll notice that while the lid is solid, there's no hollow shape underneath it. While that could be okay for some treasure chest, I just want to make some extra space for our gold and our treasure. And you can now select all of these faces if you wanted to. You can also box select them if you wanted to, and they extrude them in to make some space there. But there's a slightly easier way by proportionally editing only the parts that we actually want to insert upwards. However, because right now if you proportionally edit any part of this geometry, if were to enable proportional edit, select just a couple of phases. Press G and C to move them up and down. The whole box, including the metal framing, will bulge up and down and it's not quite what I want. Let's disable proportional editing. Again, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to box select all of the pass that we're going to insert. Make sure you're not accidently selecting any on the side. Hold on shift. Do the same on this side. Let's do the same, let's rotate around a little bit on that side. So these are all of the faces except for that one that I want to insert and push up. The other thing I want to do is I actually want to select a few on the top just so that we can see the boundary of how far we can push them up. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to select a couple here at the top, maybe just the top four on either side and the one at the very top. We're not going to modify them, but when I'm pushing up the bottom, I want to see the faces at the top. And we're not going to hide everything that is not selected. Now if you select an object or any part of your geometry and press H on the keyboard, you're going to hide those elements. That's not what we want. You can unhide anything you've accidentally or deliberately hidden by pressing Alt or Option and H, that's going to bring that back. You can hide everything that is not selected by pressing Shift and H. So let's do that. And that's what I want. I just want to see the faces that I want to insert and push up, but I also want to see the boundary of how far I can push those up to now. With the set up, let's return to sit on orthographic view, either by pressing three on the numpad or by clicking on the little X icon in the gizmo right here. So now we're in the site on view. Let's press one to show all of the vertices. Now I want to box select again the center two vertices or the single vertex. If that's how you created your geometry. Let's re enable proportional editing and rotate around a little bit. I only selected the front two because I didn't have x ray mode enabled, but I can actually just select them all here. Let's make sure we selected all of the center vertices there. Let's come out a little bit. Press and Z. Let's push this up now. Don't actually want to affect the top of the Lit. Let's roll down the circle of influence and push this up right here. That looks pretty good. And I can push this up as far as I want to without penetrating through the top of the Lit. And that's why I'm showing the top geometry, so I can just see how far that goes. If you can't quite see what's happening here, let's just click press three on the Numpad to go to site on autographic view. That actually looks pretty good. And Z, again, I don't want to effect too much, so let's make range of influence even smaller. I'm just really affecting those last two vertices. Let's push that up to almost the top. Let's come back out and that looks pretty good. Now let's press Alt or Option H to unhide all of the geometry, and let's check out the bottom of our treasure chest. Now all of the areas between the metal framing has been Insert, and none of the other ones were affected. And that's because we hit all of the other geometry. Blender only affected the geometry that we could actually see. Let's zoom out a little bit. Press tab to exit edit mode. And we can't see the bottom of our chest because we're still in local view. Either come into view local view and toggle local view, or press numpad forward slash and again, shortcut keys, everyone. And with that we're done. We created this really interesting looking treasure test out of nothing but two basic cubes in Blender. Once you add some light, set up your camera and render this out, this actually looks pretty cool. I hope this part of the course gave you a good overview of the basic modeling tools that are available to you in Blender. There's a ton more that I encourage you to explore and experiment with, but hopefully this was enough to get you started and excited about creating your own three D models. If you stay around over the next few lessons, we're going to look at how you can add materials to your three D models to make them look a little bit less naked. 36. MATERIALS - SECTION OVERVIEW: Oh, you made it this far and see what you had to put up with. Now, hopefully you're comfortable with creating a modifying three D objects in blender, but they still look pretty plain. Because we haven't really touched too much on how to work the materials other than a little bit in the very first section of this course. So in this section, I really want to talk about how to create modified work, the materials in blender. That means customizing them to have a certain metallic or wooden, or marble, or semi transparent look. How to assign them to your models or share them between models or how to assign different materials to the same three D model. We'll also quickly touch on how to enable screen space for reflections in EV, which will really allow you to take your three D models to the next level. But again, enough talking. Let's jump into it. 37. The Material Properties Panel: Here we are back in Blender, and this is where we ended up at the end of the last part of this course. We modeled this pity looking treasure chest complete with Lit on top from scratch using the basic modeling tools available in Blender. If you do want to start from here, you can also find this project filed in the course materials, so you don't have to model this yourself. Now in this scene, I've just done a couple of clean ups. For one, I've created this references collection that now contains the image of the skull stencil that we used to create that skull logo on the front of the treasure chest. And I've added a scene collection that just contains a ground plane and a couple of lights. Now obviously you can set this up yourself, but if you do want to start out exactly where I am, you will be able to download this file from our website. So simply go to Surface Studio.com forward slash downloads and you will be able to grab this very file and follow along. Now if you come up into the top right, inside of your three view and switch this over to rendered shading mode, you can see this is quite a nice little set up. However, our treasure test is really storing dull default gray. And that's because we haven't really added any materials to make this look any more interesting. So let's look at how you can work with the materials and blender and assign them to all or parts of your models. For that, make sure that the base of your treasure test is selected. Then come over to the right insider to the properties panel and come to this little sphere icon down here, which is the material tap. Let me just make that a little bit bigger for you. And there's quite a lot of stuff in the material tap, don't worry about it. We're going to go through quite a lot of this in this tutorial, but don't worry, you'll learn the rest as you go along. Now let's look at how you can modify existing materials and blender in the next lesson. 38. Modifying Existing Materials: In this lesson, we will look at how we can modify existing materials in blender. For now, let's come to the top of the material tab. Either by using your mouse wheel or clicking and holding the middle mouse button, you can just drag around. And at the very top, you should be able to see that there is a material assigned to this box. The material is actually literally called material. In contrast, if we select the lid in our three D scene, suddenly the material panel is all empty. And that's because on the lid, we don't have a material assigned yet. And the reason for that difference is that we crafted the base of our treasure test out of the default cube that came in our default scene in blender. And that had a default material material already assigned to it. If you reselect the lid, there's nothing there because we don't have a material on it yet. But don't worry, we'll deal with that later. Let's reselect the base of our treasure chest. There's this material assigned. It's gray. You can see a little preview here. A little gray circle icon. It is called Material. You can actually come into this name field right here. You can click on that and you can actually change the name of this material. Let's call this one Default Underscore Matt, and you can see the name changed. Now the material that is assigned to this box is called Default Mat. On the left hand side here you have pop up this little material browser in Blender. This will show you all of the materials that you have in your senior that you can select from. Right now, we only have our default mat in the scene, so let's click on that. This is going to reselect it, and nothing will change. But let's actually make some changes to this material to alter the way it looks. Let's come down in here, You'll find tons of property for how this material looks and how it interacts with light. And there's a bunch of other stuff we can do in here. For now, let's simply change this base color here from white. Let's just click on this, brings up a color picker. Let's just change this to maybe a yellow or orange or green or whatever you like. You can immediately see that being reflected in the three D viewport on the left. So now the base of our chest is that particular color. It is yellow, which is what we've selected as the base color. Now if you can see this change in your three D view where you're expecting it, make sure that your three D view is set to render shading mode or potentially to preview mode. Let's click on that. You can also see materials in here. Now the lighting is all different because you're getting default seen lighting to make it easy to see materials. However, if you are in solid shading mode or in wireframe mode, you will not be able to even see that material if nothing changes. Make sure you're in rendered shading mode for this tutorial just so that you can see the change being reflected immediately there. Now that you know about how to modify materials, how do you go about actually assigning them to different three D models in your scene? Let's check out how that works in the next lesson. 39. Assigning Materials: Let's have a look at how you can assign materials to the three D objects in your scene. And don't worry, this is actually super easy now. I don't like that. My lid is still gray. Let's select the lid. Over in the Material tab on the right hand side in the properties browser. There's nothing here right now. We have no material assigned to it. And we can now either click the big new button to create a new material and assign it to the lid. Or let's come to the left hand side to the material browser. Let's pop that open In. Here we have our default mat. It indicates it's now a yellow material because we changed the color. Let's select that. Now we also have the default mat assigned to the lid of our box, and that's yellow as well. Now, it is important to know that if you now come down in here and change this base color from yellow to anything else, let's change it to maybe like a light green. That will change the color of the lid and the base. You're changing the material itself and that material is assigned to both of these models in our scene. Changes you make to the material will be applied to all instances of that material within your three D scene. Now before we get to creating new materials from scratch, I do want to quickly go over some of the most important material properties that you have available within lender so you have a better idea of how you can tweak materials to look exactly the way you want them to. It's always, let's get into that in the next lesson. 40. Material Properties Explained: In this lesson, we will go over the key material properties in Blender so you get a better understanding of how they affect the way your material looks. And you can more easily tweak them to get the look that you're after. Now let's zoom in on our chest just a little bit more. And let's talk about some of these properties here that you can tweak to change the look and field of your material. We talked about base color already, which really is just the primary color for your material. Now underneath that, you will find subsurface, subsurface radius and subsurface color. Let's just skip over them for just a few minutes. We'll come back to them in just a little bit. Let's just move on to the metallic property. And as the name suggests, this controls how metallic your material will look. Now you can either just click into this field and type a value, or I actually prefer to simply left click and hold into it and then just drag what's the right to increase this value. And you can see on the left hand side how this changed the look and feel of material. It now actually looks like a piece of metal. Now it's a little bit hard to see. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the lid right click, and select a shade smooth. And that's going to essentially render all of the corners round. And it doesn't look realistic right now, don't worry about it. I just want to be able to show you these highlights and how this material really responds to us changing these properties. So you can see this is now a metallic version of this material. If you click and decrease the metallic property, again, just looks more plastic. The next property underneath metallic is specular, which controls the amount of specular reflection in that material. And that's just the highlights. Right now you can see these white highlights here. If you increase the specularity, you'll see that those highlights get stronger. If you reduce that to zero, all of these little shiny highlights will vanish. Let's just jack that up to maybe 0.8 or so. Now we've got this really nice reflective highlights here. Obviously you need some strong lights and you've seen as well to see these highlights, Otherwise there's no light to really reflect underneath specular, you have the specular tint. This value controls right now. All of these reflection have the color of the light that they reflect. However, if you increase the speculate tint, these highlights will change the color towards the base color that we have assigned to our material. If I reject the speculate tint all the way up to one, you can see that now the color of all these highlights actually matches our base color and is not controlled by the lights that it reflects. Let's bring the speculate tint back down to zero. Just a really nice way for you to control the color of your highlights. The next property is roughness, which well controls the roughness of your material. What happens if you lower the roughness? So have a look at all of these specular highlights here. If I lower the roughness down to zero, you can see how now the material looks like. It's like squeaky clean, super flat. There is super smooth and reflective. It's almost like glass or like a mirror. As I bring up this roughness value, you can see that all of these highlights get more and more diffuse and softened out. And it now feels like a more rough material, there's less reflections in it, it's just a whole lot more diffuse. Let's just lower the roughness back down to maybe 0.3 or 0.4 Actually, maybe I'll lower it down just a little bit more to 0.2 I want strong highlights because next let's talk about anisotropy or anisotropic. I don't know how to say this properly. The anisotropic property controls how elongated your specular highlights in the material are. Right now they're pretty round ish, right? So let's bring the anisotropy up to one and nothing at all happens and I think EV doesn't properly support this, so let's lower that right back down to zero. Come into the render properties in our properties panel. Let's change the render engine from V over to cycles for just a little bit. I also going to change my device from P to GPU Compute to make the most of my computer's hardware. Let's come back into the material tab once again. Let's increase this anisotropic property from zero to maybe 0.4 or five. Can you see how these specular highlights now get longer? Let's just check this up all the way to one. You can see how you're now getting these really long streaks rather than round specular highlights. And that is what anisotropy controls. The anisotropic rotation then controls how much rotation is in this elongation. Let's jack this up to maybe 0.5, 0.6 And you can see how they are being twisted around. And you can play with this to get whatever look and feel you want, but let's bring the rotation back down to zero and the isotropic property down to zero as well. Let's come back into the render properties and switch our engine back to V. Let's again return into the materials properties. Next let's talk about Sheen. This property adds like a soft, velvety like reflection, particularly to the edges of your three geometry. And it's really good for cloth which has like those really soft and velvety edges. Keep your eyes on these edges here along the trim of our treasure chest lid. Let's bring up the sheen. And there might be a little bit hard to see because our material is quite bright. So I'm going to come up into the base color, make sure this is a little bit darker just for the purpose of showing this particular property. Again, just keep an eye on the edge right here as I bring up the sheen. Can you see how that just adds a little bit of high light to these edges here? And this is much better for cloth. It doesn't really make sense in this particular scenario, but it just adds that sheen and velvety reflections to the edges of your model. Again, mainly used for cloth. And underneath the sheen you have a sheen tint which similar to the specular tints, tints those highlights in the base color of our material. If you lower this, there should become a bit more white because it's reflecting mainly white light. But if you bring the sheen tint up all the way to one, it turns green because that is the base color of our material. But for now, let's reduce the sheen back to zero. And the sheen tint back to zero as well because we won't really be needing it for this scenario. Might also come back into the base color. Let's bring up the brightness a little bit more. Again, just looks a little bit more friendly. Not so drab. Let's come down a little bit further and underneath the sheen tint, you will find the clear code property for that. Again, have a look at these reflective areas here along the edge of the lid. Let's increase the clear code property. I'm not sure that you can see this. Let me just zoom in a little bit more. Can you see how there's now a small additional highlight on top of the base specular highlight? Clear code essentially adds an additional specular layer on top of your material. And this is great for things such as car materials that have a layer of lacquer or wax on top that creates additional shininess and reflections. Clear code roughness then controls the roughness of that additional shiny layer. So keep an eye on this small, additional high light here. The more you jack this value up, the more diffuse. These additional specular highlights in your clear code layer will become, again, super useful for extremely shiny materials. But for now, let's bring the clear code as well as the clear code roughness properties back down to zero. Ior is index of refraction, which is only relevant once you start working with translucent materials, which is something we might touch on a little bit later. Transmission and transmission roughness, again, let's skip over. Emission allows you to add light emission or glow to your materials. Alpha is for transparency. Again, don't worry about all of this too much. For now though, I do encourage you to just play around an experiment. Now one property I've skipped over that I actually do want to touch on a little bit more detail is subsurface scattering again. Let's look at that in the next lesson. 41. Subsurface Scattering: In this lesson, we will look at subsurface scattering, which is a super useful material property that allows you to create translucent materials for things such as skin or marble, Which is likely also why this property is so high up in the material properties list. Now let's zoom out just a little bit more. Right now, our treasure chest is pretty green. But in particular, the surface feels really hard and solid. It feels like a solid material. Subsurface scattering, as the name suggests, simulates the behavior of light to penetrate into object with a soft surface like skin or marble, and then scatter within that object and create this translucent effect like the material isn't fully solid. With our green lid selected. Then do make sure that it is green, like maybe the color of jade. Let's come to the subsurface property and let's increase that just a little bit to maybe 0.2 Now this actually looks much more like jade because light now penetrates into the surface and you're getting scattering of light happening just underneath the top layer of that surface. And it's starting to look translucent. The more you jack up subsurface scattering, the more the light essentially penetrates into this object and scatters underneath its surface. The subsurface radius controls how far the red, green, and blue components of that light scatter. Right now, my red channel. The red light travels further, which is why the subsurface scattering kind of has a bit of a reddish tint. If I lower this red value here to maybe 0.2 0.1 suddenly the color of that subsurface highlight has changed, because maybe I'll change them all to 0.1 Now it's gray because red, green, and blue travel the same distance. If I wanted that subsurface highlight to be a bit bluish, I could bring this last one, red green, the blue one, up to maybe 0.5 now got this bluish subsurface scattering highlight happening. You also have an additional property called subsurface color. If you change this to maybe like a pinkish or maybe a yellowish color, that's the general color that light will take on by penetrating through the surface of your object. The stronger you make this, the more of that color will come through. And if you reduce the subsurface again so you can still see a little bit of it again, it's just more visible along the edges. But that's what subsurface scattering does and you can play with this. You can create some really cool and trippy effects, all sorts of semi transparent and translucent marble skin flash materials. It's pretty exciting and I'm really happy that EV does support that, as well as cycles. Next, let's actually leverage our new knowledge on material properties to start creating materials for our treasure chest, for metal and for wood. Let's get into that in the next lesson. 42. Designing a Metallic Material: In this lesson, we will tweak our current weird greenish material to look like metal or steel so that we can use it for the metal parts of our treasure chest. Let's select the lid and the bottom of the box and press Delete or Full Stop on your Numpad key to frame the selected objects. We can assume out and rotate around them. If you don't have a numpad, don't press the wrong delete key. Simply come up to view. Frame selected does the exact same thing, it just focuses in on the selected objects. Let's come back out. Let's select the bottom of our treasure test. Make sure you're in the Material tab in the Properties Editor. Let's come to the very top and let's rename this material from default mat to metal. Matt is going to give my treasure test a metallic base. Let's go through the process base color. I certainly do not want this to be green in here. I'm actually going to lower this S the saturation value down to zero. I'm back to grains, going to make this just a little bit darker, maybe somewhere there. I'm also going to bring the subsurface back down to zero because I want this to be nice and solid and that looks a whole lot better already. Next let's jack up the metallic property to maybe 0.6 0.7 specular around the 0.8 specular tint, I'm actually going to leave on zero. I'm quite happy with the color of the light being reflected in the highlights on that material. Come down a little bit, make sure your roughness is quite low. Maybe 0.2 I want that to be fairly shiny, so you can see the reflection of the lights in the edges of that material. Everything else is pretty much just down to zero. So that looks pretty good to me, but it doesn't make sense that the entire box is made from metal. So let's actually create a new material that we can use for the wooden parts of our treasure chest. And let's do that in the next lesson. 43. Creating New Materials: In this lesson, let's finally talk about how you can actually create new materials on blender. You've already learned how to modify existing materials and assign them to your three the models. But it'd be pretty silly if you were stuck with just one material for your entire seam. Let's create a new material that we can use for the wooden parts of our treasure chest. Let's select the lid in the material tab. Let's come to the very top. I don't want to make any changes to this material because otherwise I will also make changes to how the base of my treasure chest looks. Instead, I want to assign a new material to the lid that I can make independent changes to. For that in the material properties on the right hand side of the name, you'll find this little duplicate icon here. And that's actually new material. If you click this kin, we're going to create a new material. You'll see the name has changed to Metal matt 001. Metal matt 001 is now assigned to our lid. And if you pop open the material browser, you now have two materials. One called metal mat which is the one assigned to the base of our chest, and metal matt 001 assigned to the lid. Now let's just rename this as well from metal mat, wood underscore mat. Now if you pop this open, you've got wood mat and metal mat, and the one on the lid is wood mat. If you reselect the base, that's metal mats. Now they both have separate materials assigned, which means we can make changes to wood mat and we won't affect the base. Let's simply come down here into the base color. Let's change that from gray over to like a fairly neutralish brown kind of like a wooden kind of color color wise. That's not too bad, but let's actually right click the lid again and let's select the shade flat again just to get rid of that rounding. It just really didn't look great. I just needed it to show you all the properties of the materials. So that looks a little bit better. Now let's come down. Shouldn't really be metallic, let's lower metallic to zero. Shouldn't really have much specularity either. Let's bring that down to maybe 0.2 just a little bit of a shine along the edges, but maybe even 0.1 just very little. I'm also going to jack up the roughness because I imagine wood being a little bit more rough in texture. It's just a bit more of a matt, diffuse sort of material. That actually looks pretty nice. However, right now, the entire base of our chest is metallic and the entire lid is wooden, and it doesn't really look very realistic. So how do we now assign multiple materials to the same object, to the same mesh within our blender seam? Unfortunately, that's actually not too difficult. And let's have a look at how that works in the next lesson. 44. Assigning Multiple Materials to the Same Model: In this lesson, we will look at how you can assign multiple materials to the same three D model, which is something you'll be doing a lot since it's pretty uncommon for anything in the real world really to be made entirely from a single material. For that we can use material slots. Let's reselect at the base of our treasure chests. Again, make sure you're in the material table. Let's come back to the very top. At the very top here, you actually see material slots. And every mesh can have multiple material slots. Because a single mesh can have any number of materials assigned to it. Because different materials may be assigned to different parts of your model, which is what we're going to do right now. However, we only have a single material slot and that's taken up by this metal matt. However, in order to now add some the panels of this treasure chest, we need to add another slot for that. In the top of the materials panel over on the right hand side. There's a little plus I can here to add a material slot. Let's press that. That now added a new empty slot into the slot. We can now either create a brand new material, or we can come to the material browser, pop this open, and select the wood material. Let's do that. Let's now assigned the wood material into the second slot on our treasure chest base. However, it's not showing anywhere. And that's because we haven't assigned it to any part of this mesh just yet. In order to do that, we need to go back to edit mode with the base of the chest selected press tab to go into edit mode, make sure you're in face selection mode here or press three on your keyboard to enter face selection mode. Hold on shift and let's select the faces that we want to assign this wooden material to. With all of the faces selected in the material panel selected the wood material. And then at the bottom, simply press Assign to assign that material to the currently selected geometry. If you now tap out of edit mode, we now have a mesh that has multiple textures. Our base treasure chest now has both the metal material and the wooden material assigned to different parts. That looks a whole lot nicer. Let's do the same with the lid. Let's select the treasure chest lid. Right now, we only have a single material slot which already contains the wood mat material. Let's add yet another slot into that in the material browser. Let's select the metal material press tab to go into edit mode. I want all of these frames here to be metallic and all of the inner panels to be wood. To make that a little bit easier, I might actually actually press A to select everything, select the metal material it assigned to assign metal to everything. Then simply select the face loops here by holding down Alt and Shift and clicking on the edge of the face running along this loop. Let's do the same with this panel. That panel here, come around the side. Let's hold down Shift, click and drag to marquee, Select around all of these faces on the side. That looks pretty good and I still got the ring selected. Come to the other side, hold down shift click and marquee. Select all of these faces, go. That looks pretty good. These ones are now want to be wooden. Let's select the wooden material and hit a sign. Let's tap out of added mode that looks a whole lot better than what we started with. Now let's take everything we've learned and create, assign some materials to the skull carving on the front of the treasure chest to make it stand out a little bit better. You guessed it. Let's do that in the next lesson. 45. Assigning Additional Materials: In this lesson we will create some new materials and assign them to the skull face cut out to run up the look of our pirate treasure chest. Let's re select the base of the treasure chest. Let's add yet another material slot. Over on the right inside here on the top of the material prop these tap, let's hit plus to add another material slot. This time I don't want to use the metal or the wood material, they're already on this mesh anyway. Instead I'm just going to press new to create a brand new material. This is going to add a new material again. You can then see it in the material browser here as well. But let's rename this one Skull Matt. It tapped. Go into edit mode. Let's select the inside faces of the skull. Select our skull material and press a sign to assign that material to the inside of the skull. Press tab to exit added, but doesn't look too exciting right now. Let's change this material just a little bit. Come down, let's change the base color to maybe almost black. Let's also make it metallic. Bring up the specula, maybe tweak the roughness. Just a little bit of this really dark black material on the inside there. That looks pretty good. Let's just add another one just for the eyes, just so they stand out in nice, bright and angry red. Again, let's come to the top of the material properties, make sure the base of your chest is still selected. Let's add yet another material slot to this mesh. Again, let's create a new material. We want to call this red mat. Very creative, and this time before even Asylum is going to change the base color over to red. Let's come back into edit mode and unselect everything by pressing A twice quickly in a row A. To unselect everything, let's select the pass on the eyes and the nose of the skull. I want to select the edge around as well, and I could go through and reselect them all. But you can also just expand the current selection by one more piece of geometry to push them out to include the next level of connected faces. To do that, you can simply hold uncontrol and press plus on the numpad to select more, press minus by holding down control to select less. Plus. Really useful by the way, if you don't have numpad again, just come to select more or less and then more or less or just assign them to different shortcut keys. With that selected, let's select the red material and hit a sign. Tap out Pretty good. I think I'd like the edges to be black. Again, back into edit mode. Let's select the phases on the front control or command. And plus on the numpad, select more. Let's select the skull mat. Hit a sign to assign that. Now let's just select the phases on the front of the eyes and the nose again. And assign the red material to just that Hit tab. Yeah, that I think looks much, much nicer. Finally, let's just quickly select if the ground plane again, doesn't actually have any material, so let's just assign a material to it. Let's rename this one round underscore Matt. Let's change the base color to like a darkish gray. Come down a little bit, bring up the specula and lower the roughness. So it's nice and reflective. And that looks pretty good. Now we're pretty much wrapped up with the basics on how to create, modify, and assign materials, but let's quickly talk about how you can enable reflections in the EV, render engine to get your scene to look just a little bit more exciting. And let's do that in the next lesson. 46. Screen Space Reflections in EEVEE: If you're working with V, you can easily enable reflections called screen space reflections, to make your entire scene look a whole lot more interesting. The Cycles render engine will give you reflections out of the box as it's a traced render engine. But in V, reflections are essentially being faked with a little bit of graphics trickery. But it's super easy to enable and just use even without understanding all of the technical details simply come into the render properties. And with the EV render engine selected, come down a little bit and enable this checkbox here for screen space reflections. Immediately you should see some nice reflections in your three D scene on the ground. Just make sure that the material assigned to the ground object has a very low roughness, so you can actually get some really nice reflections there. And I think that actually looks pretty cool and just adds a little bit more excitement to the three D scene. We've really scratched the surface of all of the cool stuff that you can do with materials and blender. But hopefully these lessons gave you a good understanding of how to create, modify, and assign your own materials and blender. And if you stick around in the next part we will cover how you can add a whole other level of realism to your materials by adding image textures. 47. TEXTURE MAPPING - SECTION OVERVIEW: Awesome. We've now created a fully custom three D model and assign some materials to it to kind of give it a bit of a, you know, less than boring look. However, the way to now take this to the next little bit is to apply image textures to materials to add realistic looking materials for wood metal, gold, gemstones, forest trees, grass sand, anything that you can think of. And while that might seem really straightforward, there is one more thing you do need to do for that to work properly, and that is UV mapping. Uv mapping is essentially the process of taking your three D model and unwrapping it like a piece of paper to flatten it out. And lay it out on a flat surface on which you actually have your two dimensional flat texture. This tells blender how to map a two dimensional texture to the three dimensional shape of your objects. The xy coordinates that are used for that mapping are actually referred to as U and V, which is why this whole thing is called UV mapping. And if that sounds complicated, don't worry, it really isn't all that bad once you understand the basics. But again, let's get our hands dirty and jump right into it. 48. How to Get Free Seamless Textures: Welcome back to Blender, and this is where we ended up after the last part of this course. We modeled a pity treasure test and asigned some basic materials to it so it doesn't look quite so naked as before. If you want to jump in at this part of the course, you will find the project file in the course materials. So you can just start from here. Now, while we have some basic materials set up already, they all look rather plain. And this is where adding image textures to materials can add a whole new level of realism. Now there's tons of great places online where you can find free textures to use. The one that I really like is three D textures dot me, it's run by a guy called Paolo just of patron and you know, just donations of people. He creates absolutely free textures, the public domain, so you can use them for anything that you want. Just don't claim that you made them. And there's some really great stuff in here, so highly recommend, Go check that out, Drop you the links to that down in the video description. Now from his website, I have downloaded three textures. One called Gold Nugget 001, metal scratched 008, and stylized wood Planks 001. We're going to use these textures to assign to our model and make our Pi chess look a whole lot more interesting. Now, all of these files are included in the course materials as well, but I encourage you to have a look around online. There's tons of great places to get free textures for your three D models, But now that we have some suitable image textures ready, let's talk about how you can actually use them within your materials in the next lesson. 49. Using Image Textures in Materials: In this lesson, let's talk about how to add image textures to your materials to make them look a whole lot more interesting and realistic. Now let's start out by making our wood material look a little more interesting. And actually like wood, if you select the base of the treasure chest, we have four materials on there. Red mat, skull mat, wood mat, and metal mat. Let's select the wood mat material. Come down in the material properties. Right now, the base color here is set to brown. That's why all we have is brown color. But let's make this look actually like wood by using an image texture for that in the metal properties next to the base color on the left hand side, you'll find this yellow dot here If you click on this, this is going to bring up a window allowing you to connect all sorts of inputs into your base color. And the color will then be defined by what comes from that input rather than by the solid color we've selected. You can assign things like brick or checker textures, image textures, gradients, voronoi, all sorts of different calculations and other functions into this to drive that base color from something else. The one we want to pick is called image texture. And by the way, if you can't see that in here, scroll up on your mouse will Sometimes it's hidden at the top of this pop up window. It doesn't work perfectly, so let's select image texture. All of the wood has gone black because we haven't actually assigned any texture to that yet. Back in the material properties, now you'll have this little drop down here. So base color is now an image texture rather than a solid color in here. You can now either create a new texture to assign or open an existing one. Let's click on Open. Let's go into open the file browser. Let's navigate to where we downloaded all of our textures. Two, I'm going to jump into the Stylized wood planks 001 folder in here, over on the top right hand side. Let's switch this over to Ken Moto. See what this is. Most textures that you download online for a three D program contain more than a single image. And that is because there's usually one that defines the base color, which is just the basic color of your material. But on top of that, there's often additional textures used to define the areas of roughness or the heights or the normals. We'll get to that in a bit. This is how the material reacts and interacts with light. So there's lots of different options to make this look a whole lot better. For now, I just want to select the stylized wood planks base color. Hit open to connect that into our base color input. Give that just a second. Now we have the actual texture appear on our material because we've assigned that to be the base color for our material. Now it doesn't sit quite right, it's weirdly distorted on the side. The scaling is all off. And we'll fix that in just a minute. But for now, let's also assign an image texture for the metal parts of this treasure test in the material browser. Let's come all the way to the top. Make sure you select the metal mat material. Here you can see the base color is still just a solid color. Again, let's click on this yellow input icon here. Find the image texture in the pop up. Let's select that. It'll go black because we haven't assigned anything again in the image texture properties. Let's click on Open Image. Navigate to where you downloaded the textures, and I'm going to select this metal scratch 008 texture here. And again, quite a few different images in this folder for different parts of the material. For now I really just want to select this metal scratch 008, base color J pack here. Double click that or hit open image. Now you have actual metal texture on the metal parts of this treasure chest. Again, it doesn't really look great just yet. And that is actually due to the way that we haven't told Blender just yet how to map these flat two D image sects to the three D geometry of our model. And that is done via UV mapping. And let's talk about UV mapping and how to use the UV editor in blender in the next lesson. 50. UV Mapping & The UV Editor: In this lesson, we will look at how to set up UV mapping for three D models to make sure that the image textures are aligned correctly with the geometry of our treasure chest. For that we will have to use the UV editor and we can bring up a new panel just by coming to the bottom of the three D viewport just until your Us changes to this double error. Right click select to create a models, make a vertical split. Split our three viewport in two on the left inside. Let's change this one from the three D viewport over to the UV editor. And let's zoom in just by scrolling up on the mouse wheel. By the way you can click and hold your middle mouse button and drag around, and right now we see nothing at all. However, we can display an image or an image texture in the UV editor by coming to the top drop down here. You can also create an open new images directly in here. However, we've already imported two images into our project. So let's pop open this image browser. And in here you now have your metal scratched base color and your stylized wood planks base color. By the way, you also have this confused skull that we imported in an earlier part of the series. But let's select this stylized wood planks base color here that's a bit bigger. Let's zoom right back out. This is the texture that we actually assigned to all of the wooden parts of our treasure chest. However, Blender doesn't quite know yet how to map this two D texture to the three D geometry. And that's what we need to do now with the base of the treasure chest. Selected press tab to go into edit mode. Let's rotate around a little bit and select just the side of the treasure chest because that's where we can more easily see how this UV mapping works with that face selected. In the UV editor. You can see this wide wrecked angle here, and this is actually the face that we have selected. It has four corner points and you can click on these to select them or hold down shift to select multiple ones. This angle is exactly the geometry of our face and it shows how the texture underneath it is mapped to that face. The cool thing is you can actually select your geometry in the UV editor press to move that around. And can you see how on the right hand side the mapping for that texture changes to show exactly what is underneath the angle on the left. And this is how we tell Blender how to map our geometry to the textures. The cool thing is you can now let's simply click and drag marquee around all of them. Press to scale. Let's drag out to scale, this texture on the three DV. On the right hand side, you can see how that changes, how that texture is mapped. Now it's faded out a little bit because you have the selection highlight here. Let's unselect everything for a second. That looks much better now, it's still not perfect. Also, I'm noticing that I have these edges here on the side, these really thin strips that actually do also have that same image texture. Let's do this properly. Let's select the face in the middle. Let's select these two strips on the side here that also have that wood material assigned. In the UV editor you can see how the strips are. Nothing is really mapped properly and you can go through manually and move all of these points around to lay them out exactly the way you want to. Fortunately, Blender includes quite a few nifty tools to generate the UV coordinates automatically. Let's look at some of them in the next lesson. 51. UV Mapping for Additional Geometry: In this lesson, we will go over UV mapping and using Smart UV Project a few more times to fix up the texture mapping for the lid of our treasure chest. So let's select the lid of our treasure chest. Press tab to go into edit mode. Let's fix the metal parts first. And for that again, let's select the metal mat. Hit select, Select all of the faces on our three D model that have that material assigned to them Also, that works well because we still have the metal texture selected in our UV editor. So we can see that straight away, again, coming in to UV. And by the way, besides smart UV project, there's actually tons of other ways to project and generate those UV's. And the way the geometries map to your textures play around for them. Have fun. There's some cool stuff in here. You can also do things like marking and clearing seams, which tells blender how to slice and unwrap that three D model into a flat packed surface. But again, that might be a topic for another tutorial. So again, let's just simply select Smart UV Project. Here it, okay. Click back into the UV editor, press eight, select everything. S, again, scale that up a fair bit. The scale of that matches about the scale we have on the base. Let's just tap back out and check that out. Not too bad. Let's just go back. Maybe I'll scale it up just a little bit more. That looks pretty good and now let's fix the wood as well. Let's return into added mode in the UV editor. Let's just change the texture from metal, scratched back over to our stylized wood planks. Just to get us started, let's select the wood mat. Hit Select to select all of those faces. We still have all of the metal ones selected. So let's press AA to unselect everything with the wood material selected. Hit Select to select only those faces. Uv, Smart, UV Project. Hit Okay to lay them out, just to give them some initial layout. Let's just tap back out. The sides are not bad. The sides are a little bit too big though. Back into added mode, let's select only the faces on the sides. I just want to select the two sides of this treasure chair. So I can scale those ones up just a little bit. You can press a or box marquee. Select the whole thing. Let's press to scale that up a little bit. Again, I'm just trying to match the scaling of that up about to the scaling of the wood on the base. Again, to move these around, that might look quite okay. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Let's deal with the wooden panels running around the lid. Again, back to edit mode. Press to unselect everything. Hold down Alt option on your keyboard Shift and click near the rim running around alongside, so we can select those face loops of all of the three pieces along the lid. With the cursor over the UV editor, press A select everything. And let's just scale that up again just a little bit just to make the wood planks just a little bit more detailed and smaller. Come back into the three DV press A to unselect everything, and that looks pretty good. I just don't like how the panels here along this side are going vertical instead of horizontal. Let's select the faces just around the edge of that lid. Come back into the UV editor. Press R for rotate and then enter 90 on your keyboard to rotate that exactly 90 degrees. Left click to confirm to grab and you can move them around and just place them exactly where you want them to be. Actually do, make sure you're in phase select mode, select one of them might actually drag them so that the upper edge aligns with the dark corner of the piece of wood. So all of them have that dark edge at the top. So that runs along the upper edge on our three D model as well. That already looks okay. But again, feel free to play with this and do whatever seems to make sense to you. Let's check that out. Yeah, see that, That makes much more sense. That now looks really nice. Let me just shrink down the UV editor on the left hand side. We'll get to it in just a minute. Again, let's just tap out of edit mode and just check out our treasure chest. Doesn't that look so much better just by assigning some basic textures to the base color of our materials? Now let's take this one step further and add some normal maps to our materials. Again, let's go over what normal maps are and how to use them in the next lesson. 52. Using Normal Maps to Add Realism: In this lesson, we will cover how to use normal maps for you materials in blender. And we will go over what they are and why they are so useful for creating realistic looking materials in the first place. If you kind of look at an angle at these wood panels here now, they're much nicer than they were before. But they are very flat, right? They're kind of equally shiny. It looks pretty flat. And I'd like the wood to feel like it actually has some structure, some actual texture to the wood. And for that, some of the additional image files that you get when you download textures from the Internet are really, really useful. Now there's different things for, you know, adding variable roughness, specularity, displacement, bump maps. The one I'm going to use is a normal map. But before we start applying it, I want to explain very quickly what that does. Now let's select the base of our pirate treasure test. Select the wood material. If you come down a little bit right now, the base color of this material is driven by this image texture, which is why we see the wooden color. However, all of the other properties like metallic, specular, tint, roughness, sheen, clear code, all of them are still driven just by a fixed value. Now all of them have inputs. You can drive them all with images, with calculation, with mathematical functions, whatever you want to. The one that I want to modify is this normal property here. Now if you remember from the editing tutorial part two in this series, the normals are essentially vectors in three D space that define the direction of your vertices and faces on your three D model. They're super important because they're actually getting used to calculate things such as specularity, roughness, and how the light interacts with the surface. But let's have a quick look at the normals. Again with the base selected press tab to go into edit mode. Come to the top right hand side of your three D and pop open this overlays. Drop down here, come down to the bottom, and in here you'll find your normal. Let's enable the normal displays for the vertices but also for the faces. These are now essentially the directions in which the normals are facing. This is what Blender and all three D programs used to calculate how light interacts with that surface. The problem is that, for example, this whole face here on the side only has a single normal. So every single pixel on the surface, we'll get the same interaction with light. And that's why it all looks flat and uniform except for the base color. What we really want to do is we want to drive this normal on a per pixel basis so that the way the light interacts with this surface changes from pixel to pixel. And you can then add texture into your material so they don't seem so flat. If that didn't make sense, don't stress out, we'll go through the process now. For now, let's come back to the overlays and enable our normal display. Don't really need to see it, I just wanted to give a little bit of detailed context. Let's tap back into object mode with the base of the treasure chest still selected. Let's make sure we have the wood material selected. Let's come down past the base color, which we've already signed. Let's come all the way down to normal. Let's click on this. In this pop up again, I don't quite like this. You can see this little error at the top hover over that Oscar. Upon the Maas bring up all the other options in here. I now want to select an option called Normal Map, because we're going to use an image texture to drive all of the normals across the surfaces so they don't look so uniform. Let's select that, nothing has happened as of yet. Come down under normal. You now have additional options. Leave most of them on the fold. This one here that doesn't have a label, click into that. That's where you select the UV map. So the select UV map, which is this normal map, will use the same UV mapping that we've already set up for the base color. The surface texture we're about to add will match the actual image color, so it'll match the look and feel of the wood underneath. And again, nothing has changed. The color is still consistent. But now this color, I want to click onto this little yellow dot here. And this I want to be an image texture. Let's select the image texture as an input into the color for our normal map. Come down. Let's click Open. Let's navigate into the same folder where we downloaded that stylized wood texture here. In here, you will find an image that's called Stylized Wood Planks 01 Underscore Normal, and this is the normal map that we want to assign. Now it looks really weird. If you actually open this up in detail, it's this purplish, weird texture. It looks like the wood, but this is really weirdly colored. And that's because the red, green and blue components of this texture don't represent color. They actually represent the x, y, and z direction of the normal vectors. At this point of the texture, it's essentially just defining the way all of these different parts of this texture should interact with light. To then give it a bit more of a three dimensional and textured feeling, let's select the UV map to be assigned. Let's hit open, and we're not quite done yet. The last thing I want to do is I want to change this color space from S RGB. Let's pop this open to non color because the normal map doesn't represent color. It's data for three vectors with XYZ components. Change this over to non color. That is important. And now if you check out the texture and look at it from the side when it reflects light, you can see this now feels like it's three dimensional. The cool thing is you can also, in this normal map, now jack up the strength. You can literally see how that texture seems transformed from something boring, a flat, to something that actually has genuine texture, that interacts differently with the light and starts to look really three dimensional. This really helps to make your textures look so much better. Now you can come up and you can play with things like the roughness and the specularity to control how shiny that wood is, just to tweak whatever else you want. Now if that was a bit confusing, let's repeat this process for the metal material. Let's come up and select the metal material in the material settings. Let's come all the way down to normal. Click onto this little default pop up here again. Let's come to the very top until we find that the normal map option for that, let's be sure to select the UV map, so the material for the metal will map the color that we've already assigned. Let's click on the yellow dot next to the color To input our normal map. Into that, let's select the image texture. Let's hit open. Let's navigate to where we got that metal scratched from. Again, in here you'll have a normal map. So let's select that, double click it to assign it. Again, very important to change the color space from SRGB over to non color. Again, let's come in a little bit so we can see how the light now interacts with that metal material. You can see the dense and scratches here, you can jack up the strength if you want that to be a little bit stronger. But I actually just want a little bit of scratches. What I might do though, I might lower the roughness a little bit more just to get some of those shiny rough corners here. You can see that, especially here on the front where the skull sits on the edges, that now actually looks like metal because the different parts of the textures interact differently with light. And that just looks so much better. Now let's take everything we've learned so far in this part to create a much better looking gemstone material for the little skull carving on the front of our treasure chest. And let's do that in the next lesson. 53. Creating a Gemstone Material: In this lesson, we will use normal maps, as well as subsurface scattering to turn the red parts of our little skull low into something that looks a little bit more like gemstones. First off, however though, I want to have the edges of these eyes now to be red as well, because I'm imagining the nose and the eyes being just made from crystal Ruby material. So let's press Tab to go into edit mode, press AA to make sure we've unselected everything all done old or option and shift and click around the edge, running along or around the outside of the eye there. Select that. Select the other one as well, and the one on the nose. Let's come up and make sure we assign the red material to that as well. So select the red material. It a sign, so now the eyes are nice and red. The base color, I'm actually going to leave on red. I like red, but also it allows us then to just change the color later on. I really just want to add some texture. So all I'm going to do is add a normal map with the red material selected. Come to the bottom, click on normal. Let's go through the process again. Come to the top. Let's select normal map, change the EV map to UV map, and we still have to set that up. We haven't gone through that yet for the eyes specifically, but let's just add an input into the color property, select an image texture, I'm going to hit open on that. Come into textures, got to come into this gold nugget 001. Didn't like the yellow too much but I do like the texture of that. I'm going to select the gold nugget z one normal map. Hit open to apply that. Again, nothing much has happened. So let's come down, change the color space from SRGB over to non color. Let's check up the strength a little bit. You can kind of see it happening there, but the granularity, the scale isn't quite right. So let's make the UV editor again a little bit bigger and switch the texture that we're seeing from stylized wood over to my gold nugget normals. Make sure you have all of the faces selected that have that red material assigned. And again, you can also just come up here, red material, hit select to select all of those. Let's come to V Smart EV project here. Okay. Yeah, that's maybe a bit too rough, so let's just select everything. Press the scale. Just want to scale it down a little bit of, want them to be chunky but not too crazy. Also press G and just move that around until you find a pattern that looks good, maybe. Right about that. Let's recllapse the UV editor. Let's just come out press tap and that's not too bad. Looks a bit aldo. And that's because it still looks pretty flat and boring. So let's add some subsurface scattering to make these gemstones look a little bit more translucent. So in the material properties, let's jack up the subsurface right here, but not too much. Maybe 0.05 just a little bit, just to add a little bit of that gemstone feeling to it. Might also lower the roughness just to make them look a whole lot more shiny and add some more specularity. And I'm also going to bring up the metal just a little bit to give it kind of that crystal metal feeling. And there you go, you got like these really nice shimmering gemstones sitting in there. Now, because we left the base color on default, you can change that to blue or green or any other color that you like. Let's zoom back out. Let me just quickly add a light just so that you can see how this light is now interacting with the textures that we've assigned to our pirate treasure chest. At least in my opinion, this looks so much better than what our treasure chest looked like at the start of this part of the course. Again, there's a ton of stuff we haven't even touched on yet, from transparent materials, light refraction, to using the shader editor. But hopefully this is enough to get you started and excited about creating your own materials in blender as always. Just as a reminder, leave me comments below if there's something you'd like me to add to this course. For now, if you stick around, let's finally look at how you can add animations to the three D objects in your scene to bring everything to life. 54. ANIMATIONS - SECTION OVERVIEW: Now it's finally time to get fancy by adding a whole other dimension into our three D scene. And that is time. Working with time and adding key frames allows you to add animation to your three D objects and your three D scenes. You can animate anything that you can think of. And once you're happy with that final animation in Blender, you can export it out into a video file that you can then share with friends with family. Upload to the Internet use for your intro on Youtube or for a product commercial or anything else that you want. In this section, we will talk about the timeline panel. How to create keyframes. How to create keyframes automatically. How to animate your three D objects, work with keyframe interpolation modes. Or how to animate multiple objects together and join things together. So it just makes it a bit easier to manage and animate your three D scene again. By now you're probably familiar with my style and you know that I'll go through everything in quite a bit of detail and explain everything step by step. So everything should hopefully be fairly straightforward. But again, if you have any questions, just just drop them down below and I'll get back to you. But again enough waffling, let's jump right into it. 55. The Timeline Panel: Welcome back to Blender, and this is where we left off at the end of the last part of this course. We modeled our little pirate treasure chest from scratch. And then assigned materials and image textures to it to make it look a whole lot more realistic. Again, if you do want to follow along from here, you will find this project fired in the course materials that you can download. Now let's finally talk about how to add key frames and animations. And for that, you will first need to get familiar with the timeline panel. If you now press zero on your num pad to go into camera view. Now this looks pretty good, but it is just a static image. Even if you were to render this scene into a video file, it would just be this one image for the duration of your video. Let's make this a little bit more exciting and start adding some animations. In order to manage animations and blender, you will need to work with the timeline panel. In the default blender layout, you will find the timeline panel just underneath the three D view down here at the bottom, its squished together, so let's click on this horizontal bar at the top of the timeline panel. Drag that up to make it a little bit bigger. By the way, if you can't find this panel, you can convert any panel and blender, just like I showed you in the very beginning total. Just click onto the icon in the top left hand side of any panel. Make sure you changed that over to the timeline view. Now this is your blender timeline. It's essentially the frames one to 250 laid out left to right. The little timeline indicator shows you which frame you're looking at right now. I'm looking at frame one. You can simply left click on that and drag it to the right to scrub through your animation. And you may notice that nothing changes because while we haven't added any animation just yet, you can also press space to start playing back your animation, and space again to stop. There's also playback controls here. If you prefer, you can just start playback. You can rewind. By the way, the shortcut key for wind, a shift and left arrow, or shift and right arrow to jump to the end of your animation makes it just nice and easy to navigate around with the mouse cursor over the timeline. If you scroll your wheel down, you're going to zoom out scrolling up, we'll zoom in. And you can click and hold your middle mouse button to drag the timeline left and right. And if you don't have a middle mouse button, or you just don't like using it, you also have this little scroll bar down here at the bottom that you can shrink in and navigate around with however you want to. Let me just zoom out a little bit so we can see our entire timeline, 1-250 frames. By the way, you can adjust the start and end frame of your animation up here. Simply type in while I want to go, maybe want to only 150 frames. So now my animation, if I exported this project, would simply go 150 frames seeking control the length of your video this way. However, unless you have some key frames in your scene or other ways to control animations, nothing is going to move and it's going to be a very boring video. So let's talk about how to create keyframes, and therefore animations, in the next lesson. 56. Creating Keyframes & Animations: In this lesson, let's talk about how to create key frames and therefore, add animations to the three D objects in Blender. Now if you play back your animation again, press space on the keyboard. Nothing happens because we haven't added any animation to any object in our scenes yet. So let's rewind our time line Shift left arrow. Let's select the light in our scene. If you press G in drag, you can move this light around. If you press X, you're going to confine the movement to the X, X. Let's animate this light to move from down here on the left side of the treasure chest, all the way over to the right with the light on the left hand side of the treasure chest. Let's place it right there. We now need to create a key frame. A key frame records the current properties, the position, the scale, the rotation, and anything else of an object at that point in time. Right now we're on frame one and we want to record the position of the light at that point in time. In order to do that, go over to the right hand side into the properties panel and select this little orange square here, which is the object properties. This shows you that right now we have a point light selected. And that has a transform on it, which is a location rotation and a scale. This changes as you move the light around. So if I move this light, you can see how the values over here on the right hand side update. Because they're just the coordinates and the values for those properties of the light. Now I want to create a keyframe. And you can do that simply by right clicking on any property or any property group in your properties panels, or right click and select to insert keyframe. The shortcut key for that is you also have the option to insert a single keyframe, and we can ignore that for now. But what it essentially means is that your location is an x, y, and z value. If you insert a single key frame, you may only add a key frame to the y position, but not the x and Z position. We'll get to that a little bit later. Let's simply right click on that, Click on Insert Keyframes, and you can see that all of these values have now turned orange. The other thing you will notice is that on your timeline now also have this little yellow diamond. This represents a keyframe on your timeline. You may have noticed that as I moved this timeline indicator away from that key frame over on the right hand side, the values turned green. It just indicates that there is a key frame on this property, but you're not right now on a key frame. If you move this timeline indicator back to frame one, where we place that key frame, you can see the color goes yellow, just indicating that you are currently over a key frame. You can also see that here with this little diamond that's indicated over on the right hand side. If you now scrub forward to maybe frame 100 or so, let's again make sure you have the light selected and X again to lock that movement. And let's move the light over to the right hand side of the treasure test. You can now in the properties panel, see that the location x, which is the value we change, is now indicated as R. And saying we've changed this value, but we haven't yet created a key frame. What that means is that this value is not yet locked in. If I now change my timeline indicator, let's just grab it and drag it back. My light just snap back. It's because, well, we didn't record it, so Blender reverted to using the value that we actually keyframed Again, let's go to frame 100 and X. Let's move the light over to the right hand side. Now let's lock this value in for that. Again, just right click and select to insert keyframe. But I'm not going to do that because I'm a big fan of shortcut key. Simply hover your mouse over the properties you want to insert a keyframe for press. To insert the keyframe, also click the little diamond icon over on the right hand side. It does the same thing. Now we have another key frame in our time line. Now if you scrub in your timeline, you can see the light move from its initial keyframe, its initial position, to its final position. Blender automatically interpolates. It blends the value from the start to the end to give you a smooth animation. If you now rewind this animation, press space to play it back, you can see the light animate and swing across from the left to the right. Next, let's look at how you can preview keyframes in your timeline panel. And let's do that in the next lesson. 57. Viewing Keyframes: In this lesson, we will cover how the time line panel displays keyframes. And how you can look at what values you have actually recorded on your three D objects for these keyframes. Now down in the timeline right now, you can see two yellow diamonds representing the two key frames we added on the light. The timeline will only show you the key frames for the objects you actually have selected. So if I unselect the light, the key frames are going to vanish because while on the scene, or if I select the treasure test, there are no keyframes on these objects. It's only when I select the light that I can actually see the keyframes because that's the object that I've added keyframes to in the timeline panel over on the left hand side, I don't know whether you can see it here. There's a tiny, tiny arrow pointing to the right. If you click on that, you're going to expand a little window that can show you which objects near scene actually are key framed right now you can see summary here. If you click on this little twirly on the left hand side, you're going to expand that point point action. You can all that for now object transform. If you expand that, you can see the key frames are sitting on the x, Y, and Z property of the object. So this can sometimes be very useful to show you exactly which properties are animated on an object. Because you may animate lots of different properties on the same object. So at the top level, all you're going to see is to key frames, but you may want to dig into that to see what's the x position. And you can change the keyframes and the values and the interpolation modes. Stuff we get to a little bit later in this tutorial individually. So this can be super useful. Let me collapse that back up to the summary level, and if you don't want to see this panel anymore, you can just click on the right hand side of it and drag it over to the left. No collapse right back down again. Next, let's look at how you can adjust the timing of your key frames to tweak your animations. And let's do that in the next lesson. 58. Adjusting Keyframe Timing: In this lesson, we'll talk about how you can tweak the timing of your existing keyframes on your time line to just tweak your animations. Now our light animates from frame one to frame 100 over to the right hand side. The keyframes are orange right now because they're actually selected. If you click anywhere in the timeline, you can see them go gray. They're now unselected and you can actually just left click on any of them and just drag them around to change the timing. So let's just drag these in a little bit. For example, to have the light move from frame 30 to frame 90. You can tweak this in any way you want. You can add more keyframes to it to move your light around in any crazy way. Just going to reset my keyframes to go from frame one, frame 100, and I'm going to come to frame 50. I'm going to grab the light, let's press Z to move it up a little bit. I'm going to move the light up just a little bit because I want it animating from the bottom left swinging up and then back down on the right hand side again. If I now moved my timeline indicator, my light would return back to its normal position because I haven't keyframed that property. And Z again, with the light selected, let's drag it up. Come over to the right hand side either right click, insert key frame, press orders, press that little diamond over on the right hand side here. You may have noticed that this only added a key frame to the Z property. Let's just also just add them to the X and Y just to keep it consistent. You don't need to. We can animate thing in blender in any way you want. But now we've added a new keyframe at frame 15. The light now moves up and then back down. Let's rewind play this animation, and let's have a look at the path and the movement of the light. Cool, that looks pretty good. Now, another way to create keyframes more automatically, so you don't have to manually insert them all the time, is to enable automatic keying. Let's look at how you can do that in the next lesson. 59. Recording Keyframes Automatically: In this lesson, we will learn how to enable auto keying in Blender. Auto keying enables you to automatically record keyframes for the changes that you make to your three D objects so that you don't have to create all of your key frames manually. In Blender on the timeline panel, there's a little record button here. If you click this, you're going to enable auto keying. That means that the moment you change a property, it will automatically record a keyframe against that. So if I now grab the light at maybe frame 80, let's just grab it and move it over to the right inside here, Left stick to place it. You can see that who on the right inside? All of these properties have now been keyframed automatically. And there's a keyframe on my timeline because Blender automatically created keyframes. So now you've got another keyframe in your animation. But it does look a little bit weird. So let's select just that one keyframe at frame eight, press X to delete it. Yep, delete key frames, and now we're back to our three keyframe animation. Now we still have auto keying enabled. And by the way, in Blender, there's actually a way to control exactly which properties of the objects are automatically keyframed by Blender. And if you pop up in this, let it drop down here for keying, you can create things called keying sets, which are groups of properties that blender will then automatically key. But it's probably a topic for another tutorial. Let's not do anything with that. Let's disable auto keying. Make sure you're at the beginning of your animation. Press space to play it back and just have a look at the path of the light. That looks pretty nice. Next, let's look at key frame interpolation and blender. And let's do that in the next lesson. 60. Keyframe Interpolation Modes: In this lesson, we will look at key frame interpolation, what it is, how it works, and how to change it. This allows you to fine tune the way your animations are played back in blender. If you play back your animation right now, you may notice that the light doesn't actually move consistently. It starts slow, it gets a little bit faster, and then it slows back down at the end. And that has to do with interpolation modes. Interpolation modes essentially tell blender how to blend between different values. Because we only have three key frames, blender has to decide how do I slowly transition from this keyframe over to the values in this keyframe, and over to the values in this keyframe. Right now, blender is using something called Bezier interpolation, which is a fancy way of saying it's like every point has a curve handle, and so it gives you smooth curve so it more naturally ramps up and then slows down. However, you can change all of these interpolation modes. Let's click drag and box select all three key frames in our timeline. Right click any one of them. In here you have a whole bunch of different options for key frame type, handle types, easing modes, all sorts of stuff. The one I want to look at is interpolation mode. Right now it's set to bezier, which is the default. However, you can also set it to linear, which means that blender won't ease in and out. So it won't speed up or slow down. It just consistently changes blends between those values. If you now come back and play this animation back again, just have a look at the movement of the light. Can you see how much more robotic that feels? Because it is really just very linear. It doesn't try to do anything organic or natural. It just goes blend very straight up until I hit this keyframe. And then from that value transition over into that keyframe value and everything is very straight, and this is great for more robotic animations. The cool thing is you can pick and choose between different keyframes. So let's select only the first keyframe. Click that, select Interpolation Mode, and choose Bezier. Now, only the first key frame will actually do this whole speed up and slow down the other two key frames. These two here will still use linear interpolation. If you now rewind and play this back, and again, keep an eye on the light, it speeds up. Then from the second key frame to the third. It's fully straightened, robotic. Again, let's click in our timeline. To unselect everything, click in box select the last two key frames. Right click Interpolation mode. Let's try something completely different. Again, play around with this, there's lots of different options. Let's select bounce. Let's rewind our animation and play this back. That's kind of cool. We have like a dropping down and bouncing animation created in blender. Without really adding any additional keyframes, Blender does that automatically, just by us choosing the appropriate interpolation vote. Now again, in blender you can get much more fine grain control over all of this stuff if you use something called the graph editor, which shows you the animation and the path that values take and gives you all sorts of advanced features. Again, probably something for a future tutorial. If you're interested, drop me a comment down below. For now, what I'm going to do is in the timeline panel, click anyway to unselect everything with the cursor still over the timeline. And press A to select everything. And usually most shortcuts actually work across all of the different panels, but they then relative to the context. So A within the timeline selects all keyframes. In three D view it would select all objects, et cetera, et cetera, with all keyframes selected. Right click, interpolation mode, select Sia, resetting our light to just have this nice, smooth, more organic animation. With the cursor over the three D view, press zero on your numpad to return to camera view again. And let's just play this back and that's what our animation would now look like if we rented this out into a video file. Next, let's talk about how you can animate the movement of the camera in blender to add a little bit more energy into your three D scenes. Again, let's do that in the next lesson. 61. Animating the Camera: In this lesson, we will learn how to add key frames and animations to the camera and lender so that you can create dynamic three D videos where the video isn't just stuck in one place. Let's remind our animation again. And let's have the camera kind of swing from the left to the right hand side, just as the light moves. For that, go into camera view by pressing zero on your numpad. And if you now move the camera, you got to break out of that camera view. So again, back to camera view with the cursor over the three view press end to bring up the properties panel on the right hand side go into view and enable lock camera to view. So now as we move the camera we're not going to break out of it, we're actually going to change the position of the camera in the outliner over on the right hand side. Expand the seam collection and make sure you have the camera selected so that the properties here actually represent the camera. If you still have the light selected, the properties are for the light. So make sure you're on the camera now with our timeline indicator at frame one. Again, shift and left arrow. If you want to remind, let's rotate the camera a little bit and you can see because we're locked to the view, our camera remains in the view. Let's say we want to start here in the object properties. Again, I have no keyframes. I'm going to slide markers over the location press to insert the key frame, but I'm also going to do it for the rotation because we're actually rotating our camera as well. Those values are changing as well. Again, in the timeline view, I can now see a keyframe here. If I was to expand that little panel over here, I can now see this is now on the key frame object transforms x location and the rotation property. Again, let's just collapse that away. Don't really need to see that for now. Let's come to maybe frame 100 as well. Let's rotate our camera around to maybe here Do make sure that you still have the camera selected in the outliner. And you should see all of these orange highlights indicating the values that have changed. Again, press with the cursor over location and over rotation to create new key frames for that. And if you now rewind and play this back, you can see that the camera now swings around the pirate treasure chest. Let's not forget to press again to bring out the properties panel and unlock the camera from the view. If you now rotate your camera and break out of that, you can see there's the camera there. If you wind and play this back, you can see that's the camera moving. We've now animated the location and rotation of the camera. Now so far, we've only ever animated a single object. However, sometimes you may want to animate multiple objects together. While there's many different ways to do that in Blender, let's look at one of them in detail in the next lesson. 62. Animating Multiple Objects Together: In this lesson, we will look at how you can link objects together by parenting them. So you can animate multiple objects together. Now as this plays back, it'd be really cool if the chest just dropped down from the top. It just dropped into the scene right in the middle of this camera move and then just ended up right in the middle. Let's select the base of the treasure chest and move it. The treasure chest and the lid are two separate objects, and you can animate them completely separate in any way you want. But it would be really nice if the lid was moving along with anything we did to the base right now. You can move the base independently, and you can move the lid independently. One cool thing in blender that you can use, and we haven't really talked too much about that, is parenting. You can link one object to another. So as the parent moves around or gets scaled and rotated, that also gets applied to the child. So they're joined together and that's super easy to do. Make sure you have nothing selected. First, select the Lit hold on shift. Then select the base of the treasure test. By the way, let's come into the outline as well and expand the chest collection. You can see right now there are two separate objects, one for the lid and one for the treasure Test itself. Make sure that the treasure chest is the one highlighted in the brighter color because that is your primary selection and that's what's going to become the parent of all of the other objects you have selected. With this particular set up and the cursor over the three D view, press control or command. And to bring up the parent object in here, you now have a number of different options. But I'm simply going to select sec, parent two objects. I'm just going to parent these objects together in the outliner. You may have noticed that my lid has disappeared, but I can now expand the treasure chest. And under the treasure chest, I now have the lid. The lid is now a child of the treasure chest. And the great thing with this setup is now that I can grab the treasure chest, press G. As I move it, the lid moves around. Even cooler thing is that I can grab the lid individually, press G, and move that independently off the base. However, if I now again the base, the parent, press G and move that the lid stays in its relative position to that base because they're linked together. Let's undo that with control or command and Z until we're back to where we started. But make sure the lid is still a child of the treasure test. Let's add some animation. Let's come back to frame one. Let's jump into camera view by pressing zero on the numpad press and Z. Let's move this treasure test out of the U to the top. Just a little bit above, maybe two, About there in the properties panel with the treasure chest selected press over the location property to insert that keyframe. Let's come forward, and you can see the camera animates the light animates maybe round about frame 60. So when I want this treasure chest to be on the bottom, G and C, Let's move the treasure chest back down. And you can see the lid follows along. Let's place this right on the ground there. Again, over on the right hand side press to insert that keyframe. Again, you can just enable auto keying if you don't want to worry too much about it. It creates a few additional key frames that you may not need. But that's not the end of the world either. Now if you rewind and play this back cool. The tress drops down from the top and into the shot, but it looks like it's being beam down by four. Looks really unnatural, with all our key frames still selected. Let's simply right click interpolation mode and change that over to bounce again, rewind and play this back. Cool, that actually looks really nice. Now, I might adjust the timing a little bit. So let's click into our timeline. To unselect everything, click and drag around the initial ones. Want to drag these over to maybe frame 30 or so. The box won't start dropping. Maybe around frame 2030 is a bit late there the box drops right in. Then it comes to rest. Let's rewind and play the spec. Cool, that looks really nice. Finally, let's add a little bit of an animation of the lid opening at the end to reveal whatever is inside your treasure chest. However, there's one challenge with doing that, and that has to do with the placement of the object origin. Let's talk about why that is an issue and how to fix it in the next lesson. 63. Changing the Object Origin: In this lesson, we will go over how to modify the origin of an object in blender to allow you to control the center of rotation when you're trying to add animations to your three D objects. If you select the lid off the Treasure test and press R to rotate the lid, maybe press X to lock the rotation to the X. X, well, that doesn't work. Let's just break out of camera view and have a look at that. Every object in Blender rotates in scales around its origin. And the origin is represented by this little orange dot here, shift. And right click anyway to move that three D cursor out of the way, you can see that the little orange dot is in the center of the lid. If you press forward slash on your numpad or come into view local view, Toggle local view to just show the lid itself. Maybe we'll go back to material previous. Well, so you can see that. You can see that the origin of the lid is right in the middle. And therefore, any rotation you do, any scaling you do happens around this origin. However, you can actually change the position of this origin for every object. Let's press control or command and Z a couple of times to make sure we reset our lid. Not to press forward slash on numpad again to go back into local view. So I can see what I am doing now. I want to move the origin alone. Now there are quite a number of different options and I can tell that right now blender has a bit of a buck and you can see my tools are overlapping my main head out here. And I've noticed this inversion 2.9 and inversion 3.0 and there's actually quite an easy fix for that. You can simply come in to edit preferences. Let me bring this in in interface, make sure you disabled region overlap and the moment I do that, you'll see my options and everything else. Come back here. I do not know why this is happening. It's a buck in blend that's been reported. So hopefully they'll get to fix that soon. Now with my object selected, if I press and move, I'm moving the entire object. However, if you pop open these options, there's an option here to say, Transform Effects Origins only. And you can tick that in here. Now if you press, you're actually only moving that origin point. And that's exactly what we want. Now if you don't have this enabled, you're moving the entire object and this option is actually available in another spot as well. You can also press N to bring up the properties panel under tool. The options are also in here. If you don't have this options dropped down for whatever reason you don't want to go through the interface fix, You also have that exact same option down in here in the properties panel if you wanted to. Let's press three on your Numpad to come into side view. Let's press to move that origin points. Move it over to the right hand side, just onto that hinge point right there. Actually, let's press seven to go into top view as well. X, make sure that's centered right on the treasure chest, right where you would expect the hinge to sit. That looks pretty good. Come into options. Disable affects only origins. If you now press R X, you can now rotate the lid around that hinge because again, it always rotates around that origin point. Cool. Let's exit local view by pressing Ford on the num pad. Again, if you don't have a numpad, you can come into view local view, tal local view back out. Make sure that that origin point is at the back side of your treasure chest. If you moved it to the other side accidentally, you can always again just enable move the origin and move it around in there. And you don't need to be local view for that, even if I now effects only origin and y, I can now move the origin point for that treasure chest around freely. But let's undo that with control or command and I'm happy where it is. Options, make sure you have effects only Origin disabled. And let's actually just go back into Render View because it just looks a bit nicer like that in B. Now we're in a position where we can animate this lid to open up. Let's come back, maybe let's go into camera view again with zero on the numpad about frame 60, maybe 65, with the lid selected. Come over to the right inside, press over the rotation to insert a key frame. Let's come to maybe frame 110, our X. And let's open up that lid as far as we want to, maybe to round about there again, to create a new keyframe. And by default, this will be a Psi interpolation. So it'll open slowly, and then it slows down towards the end, which looks nice. Let's rewind and play this back one more time without anything selected. Cool, that looks really nice. Now one thing we haven't actually touched on yet is how to adjust the value of an existing key frame if you want to further refine your animations. Let's talk about that in the next lesson. 64. Adjusting Existing Keyframes & Animations: In this lesson, we will learn how you can adjust the value of an existing keyframe to further tweak your animations. Now noticing that the treasure chest sits a little bit high up in the camera view, especially once the lid is opened all the way. And I'd love this to be a little bit more centered. So let's re select our camera. I must going to fix that last keyframe. Make sure you are on the last keyframe right here, you're not next to it, you're on that key frame. And the properties are indicated as orange. Let's press n come to view. And again, lock the camera to view because I want to modify the position and rotation of the camera for this particular frame right here. And I'm just going to rotate up a little bit and maybe down just so that we can make sure that the entire treasure test is in view. Maybe around about there. Again, don't forget to press with the cursor over those properties to insert new keyframes and update them again. You can also right click and select replace key frame because there's an existing one already in blended recognizes that. But just make sure that this is all back to yellow so it's baked in with the new position. Now if you remind, let's unlock the camera again, recommend you don't forget that press to hide that property panel again. And let's play our animation back again. Yeah, that looks much better. But again, feel free to animate and add anything to the scene that you want. But now let's finally talk about how you can export your animations into video files in the next lesson. 65. Exporting Animations & Videos: In this lesson you will learn how to export your animations from Blender. Individual files that you can then share with friends or family, or random people all across the Internet. Now one thing I always like to do, especially if you have some fast animations, like a chest dropping down here, come into the render properties and in EV, or whether using cycles enable motion blur. Just as a little bit of that motion blur to any moving objects makes them look a little bit more organic. But now let's come to the output properties. At the top here, you can define the resolution. So right now it's set to ten ADP, which is 1920 by 1080. You also have a dropdown of presets here for four K or different in our NTSC versus Pal or whatever you want to. It's going to leave all of that as per normal. You also have your frame, start and end time in here. These ones just replicate what you see in the timeline. So as you adjust these values, you'll see them here as well. Maybe. Let's make sure. Okay, let's leave this at 150. You can adjust your frame rate as well, but I'd like to use 24 frames per second, which is most common used for movies. Then a little bit further down, you'll find the output settings right now. It will write to my C drive on a temp folder. Again, you can just pop this open and browse a file location where you want to save your file into. So let's just jump into the tutorial folder here. Let's go into Render. And maybe let's call this treasure chest. You don't need to add a file extension at all. That's going to happen when we export the video. Anyway, let's hit except, so that's now our output file. We want to add file extensions. And now we want to change the file format from a PNG unless you want to export this as a PNG image sequence. Let's just pop this open. The one you most likely want is Mpc video, which is the most standard way. Now I do recommend pop open the encoding options down here, and I recommend set your video codec to H 20064 unless you have some special requirements. It's the most common one for high definition video. It gives you good compression so the files won't get too big and it retains pretty good quality. You can also tweak the output quality here. You can either go lossless or say low quality, medium, maybe let's go high quality, It's just a couple of seconds of video. And you can tweak some additional advanced parameters here if you want to, Again, play with the quality of that output video with all of that set up in order to render the file coming to render in Select to render animation. Blender is now going to render all of these frames out and package them into a single video file. Then on your hard drive you should find a file. This one's called Treasure Chest 00120150 because that was frame, it's about 2 megabytes in size which is in Tibet. And if you double click that, here's the final animation that we created and exported from blender. Now if you don't like that, this is an MKV file in blender itself. In the output settings, you can change the container from Metrosca, which gives you the MK four file, to MP four, or a quick time MOV file or AVI or any other format that you want. So feel free to play with this if you don't like the MKV format. Now, I hope that this gives you enough to get started using Blender. As I mentioned, there's so many things we haven't touched on yet. And if there's anything in particular you'd like me to cover and add to this course, just let me know down below. But hopefully this got you excited about the possibilities of Blender and pass the initial learning curve to start creating your own three D models and animations. 66. Class Project: So how did you go? Did you practice your skills along the way? If not, this is the perfect opportunity to practice and solidify all of your new found skills with a little bit of a project. What I would love you to do is create your own three D scene, your own three D model, or your own animation. Anything you'd want with the stuff you've learned in this course. And then render that out as a still image or an animation. And share it if you're comfortable. If you're not comfortable sharing it, totally fine. You still get to practice. You still get to apply the knowledge and hopefully it'll make it stick better in your brain. I can't tell you often enough how important it is to practice, experiment, tinker. It makes a world of a difference and it'll make you feel so much more comfortable using blender that I think we're slowly coming to the end of the course. And I'll see you in the very last lesson. 67. Thank You!: And that's all there is to it. I really hope you enjoyed this course and hopefully now you're comfortable creating your own the D scenes and animations in blender. Including the modeling the materials, the texture mapping, the key framing, and exporting all of that either into a nice still image or into an actual movie file. And hopefully now you feel confident enough to move on to some of the more advanced topics and all of the other cool stuff. And the cool learning materials and projects that you can find out there for Blender. If you enjoyed this course, check out some of the other courses I'm teaching as well. I would love to see your faces again. And of course, whether you like it or not, I would love to hear your feedback. Please leave me a comment rate the course, let me know what you liked and didn't like about it. Obviously, I love to hear good stuff, but I also like to hear the things that didn't work for you. Stuff that you think I missed, or other things you would like to have included just so that I can improve this course, make it better, and make it a more fun and complete learning experience. If you'd like to stay in touch, you can find me out there in most of the popular Internet platforms. It'd be great to hear from you. I'd really like to stay connected to all of you for now. I wish you all the best on your future creative journey. And with that, thank you very much for watching, and until next time, I will see you later.