Blender 3D for Beginners: Create a Cartoon Bumblebee Animation

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Harry and I'm a professional 3D artist with over a decade of experience. In this class, I'll be showing you how to make this little fella. [NOISE] I'll walk you through the simple and beginner friendly process of creating a cartoon style bumblebee animation in Blender. We'll be going through the entire process of creating this bumblebee animation from a beginner's perspective to avoid as much confusion as possible. That means I won't be skipping any steps or going too fast for you to keep up with me. We're using Blender for this tutorial, which is an amazing and totally free 3D software. The only barrier to entry is having a computer to run the software on. In this class, you can expect to learn the Blender interface and its tools. We'll learn about the many basic tools and interface elements within Blender, while creating our cartoon bumblebee. We'll learn modeling. To create our bumblebee and environment, we'll use basic modeling tools and modifiers such as mirroring and subdivision. Up next is lighting. We'll set up a simple sunlight lighting scheme to accentuate our cartoon shaders. Then we'll move on to shading. I'll show you how to create a colorful and stylized cartoon material for our bumblebee in an environment. Up next is animation. I'll walk you through animating your bumblebee by using simple keyframing and modifiers like cycles. Lastly, rendering. We'll render our final image in Blender, so you can share it with your friends and family on social media. When we're done, you'll have all the skills you need to create a looping cartoon animation of your very own. For our class project, you'll be doing just that. I'd like you to create a new looping cartoon animation with a unique design and share it with the class. I'll personally review every single project, upload it to the gallery, and give you feedback on anything you've done fantastic, as well as anything that could use a little bit of adjustment. I hope you'll join me on this fun beginners journey through Blender, by making your very own cartoon bumblebee animation. 2. Opt: Blender Crash Course (Part 1): In this lesson, we'll be going over a few of the most useful key binds and tools within Blender. This lesson is optional if you already have a basic understanding of Blender. However, I strongly recommend beginners watch this entire lesson to have a functional knowledge of the tools we'll be using throughout this class. The first thing you'll be greeted with when you opened Blender is the splash screen. The splash screen up here will have the version number that you're currently working on. It'll have some artwork that's unique to the version that you're working in. It'll also show you a few different general file types down here. These are just basic opening file types. We can open up a specific file that we know where it is on our computer, and we can also open any recent files that we've recently had open. To start with, most of the time you're going to choose General as your new file type, at least when you're beginning a brand new project. If you're opening up Blender and you want to go back to a file you were recently working on, you'll notice that it's listed over here on the right. For this project, let's just open up a general file type. The general file type will start you in the layout workspace, which is the default workspace, and it will also start you with a light, a cube, and a camera in your scene already. This large window here that we're looking at is called your viewport. This will be where we're doing most of our modeling and as well as some of our texturing and lighting. Over here on the left side, we'll notice some of our tools are listed and this will depend on the mode that we're in or in the workspace that we're in. This menu over here will change. However, this is where you can usually find your tools. On the right side here, this is our scene collection. This will list all of the objects in our scene that I mentioned before. We can see here my camera, my cube, and my light, as well as any new objects we create will go in here as well. We can also see these little white file boxes here. These are essentially folders like say on your computer, so this will store objects within them just to make organization a little bit easier. We can also double-click on any of these things to give them a new name. Down on the bottom right, we have all of these different tabs that we can click through and each of these have different parameters that we can adjust that will affect either our world or our render settings or even the model or modifiers that we apply to it. Lastly, up at the top, each of these tabs is a different workspace meant for a different operation while you're modeling or texturing or lighting. In this case, like I said, the layout is the default catch-all workspace, but there are specific ones for just modeling, just sculpting, UV editing, texture painting, and so on. Now that we know a little bit about what we're looking at, let's learn how to actually interact with this viewport. The first thing I'd like to make note of is down here at the bottom center, during this class, you're going to notice little key binds pop up here. This is to show you what buttons I'm clicking while I'm working on the class. This little left dark square here is the equivalent of my left-click. When I click on my left-click, you'll see it lights up green and it shows you that I left-click. If I click my mouse button or my middle mouse button in the mouse wheel, you'll see the little middle one pops up and it says middle, and then same thing for the right if I don't cover it up there. Now you can see I clicked the right button. It'll also below it tell you what keyboard key I'm hitting. If I hit N, you'll see N pops up. About 99% of the time down here, when you see a key pop up, if you push that same exact key, you should have the same exact thing happen. There's only a few instances where I've changed my keys to match my preferences as well as my needs because my keyboard doesn't actually have a numpad. A lot of the default key binds within Blender utilize the numpad. Most default keyboards have numpads, so you really shouldn't have an issue. But if you notice something down here that doesn't match what I'm telling you, that's because I've changed it to like I said either match my own preferences from working in other 3D software or because I simply don't have the button that it's asking me to press. During this lesson, I'll make note of the buttons that you're seeing down here that are not accurate to what I'm telling you. In those cases, you'll have to listen to what I'm telling you to press rather than what you're seeing down here. As I mentioned before, these are pretty uncommon and they're really not super consequential so in most cases, anytime you look down here, it'll be accurate. Let's start with our first key bind, which is to rotate around our viewport. This will let us rotate around our scene to say maybe see the backside of this cube. To do this, you're going to click in your middle mouse button, which is the mouse wheel. If you click that in and then you move your mouse, it will rotate around the scene. Now, in my case, this is one of the ones that I've changed. For you, you only need to click in your middle mouse button. Just click in the middle mouse wheel and then move your mouse left and right it'll rotate around your scene. I've added a modifier to mine to make it a little bit better for my preferences. Again, click in your middle mouse button, and then you'll rotate around your scene. Disregard what you saw down there at the bottom. This will just allow us to orbit around the object. In this case, you can see it's focusing on the center of our screen, which is the cube. This lets us see around our object. Now rather than rotating around an object, we can also pan our viewport left or right or up and down, which will allow us to move our view as well as rotate our view later with the other click. To do this, you're going to hold down Shift and click in your middle mouse button. You'll hold down Shift and then click in your middle mouse button like you can see there at the bottom. That will allow you to pan left and right as you move your mouse while holding those keys down. In my case, I've changed this, so what you see down here will not be accurate in this case. When you hold down Shift and your middle mouse button, that'll allow you to move your camera from left or left and right and up and down. We can combine these so we can move our camera over here, and then we can rotate it to see around the other side. This is the basis of navigating around inside your viewport. This allow us to see any part of our object that we want to. It's just a matter of switching back and forth between either panning or rotating your camera to get a better view of the area you want to see. Now we can zoom in and out of our object using the mouse wheel and just by scrolling in up or down. If we scroll up rather, it'll move into the object, it'll zoom in. If we scroll down on the mouse wheel, it'll zoom out. It'll allow us to be a little bit further from object, or if we zoom in it'll allow us to be a little closer. Now you notice as you use your mouse wheel, it moves in a little bit of a jump. It moves in small increments in and out. It doesn't remove very smoothly. There is a way to change that, and that's by holding down your control button on your keyboard and then clicking it in your middle mouse button at the same time. Now as you move your mouse so it's similar to the way panning works. If you hold down Control and click in your middle mouse wheel, now you can move your mouse and it'll move nice and smooth and you can get exactly the zoom level that you want without it clicking in and out like that. The mouse wheel just scrolling it is a good way to just quickly zoom in and out. But then if you want to be really precise on how close you are to the object, then you can hold down Control and middle mouse button at the same time and move it much slower so that you don't have to move so fast. Now after all this zooming and panning and rotating, you might find that your object is a little off-center or you zoomed a little bit too far out and now it's a little bit tedious to have to zoom back into it. If that's the case, all you have to do is select your object by left-clicking on it. You can see it has this little orange highlight around it to let you know that you have the object selected and then you're going to hit numpad, period. On your numpad, hit the period key, and that will zoom you into that object and it'll focus it and put it nicely right in the center of your screen so you don't have to manually zoom in and pan and rotate your camera to get it there. Now, in this case, like I said, I don't actually have a numpad on my keyboard, so I've changed my key bind. What you see down here will not be accurate in this case. In your case, you need to hit the period on your numpad, which is on the far right side of your keyboard. If you hit that, you can see it quickly zooms right into your object and it puts it right in the center of your screen. Now, it typically puts it a little too close, but that's simple to just zoom out and now it's nice and centered again. That last key bind was the last one that I've changed. Anything else that you see within this lesson or this class going forward, those are the only three that I've changed. I've only changed the focus button to zoom into the object and I've changed the rotate and I've changed my pan. Other than that, nothing else is different. Now that we know how to move around inside our scene and get a better look at it, let's actually discuss how to interact with the objects. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. The first thing we can do is to move the object. There's a few different ways for us to do this. The first way is to just select the move tool up here at the left, which is the four-direction arrows here. If I select this and I have my box selected, so I have the little orange highlight around it, then I'll see this thing here called a gizmo pop-up. A gizmo essentially is just a controller. It's a set of arrows or circles or handles or whatever it may be, depending on the tool, that allows you to interact with that object. In this case, if I just click and drag on one of these little handles here on the gizmo, so if I grab this blue handle here, it will allow me to move it just in the blue direction, which in this case is the z-direction. I can move it wherever I like and you can see that it's bound to this z-direction because it has this little blue line shooting out of it. That's letting me know that I can't move it left or right because I only grabbed the blue handle, so it can only move in the blue direction. To get a better idea of which of these axes is which, you can look up here at the top right. We can see that the blue corresponds to the z-axis, which is up and down. Then we have x, which is left and right, which is also the red axis, and then the green is the y, which is forward and backwards. For any one of these handles on the gizmo, we can just grab it and it will move it just in that direction. In this case, only the red direction or only the green direction. We also have the option to grab one of these floating squares between the handles and that will allow us to move it in the two directions that it lines up with. In this case this green box here will allow me to move it on the x-direction and the z-direction at the same time and that's because it's floating between those two handles. If I grab just this little green box here, now you can see I have both a red and a blue line, which means I'm allowed to move it in any of these directions, but I cannot move it in the green direction. Then that's the same with all of these handles here. This red box here is going to be the blue and the green, which is the z and the y. Move it that way and then same with this just in the x and y. These little squares here are useful when you want to combine directions that you're moving it in. Now that we know how to use the tool with the gizmo on it. There is actually a fast way to move. However, you need to know the key binds to do it. At any point in your project regardless of which tool you have on. Just for this purpose of this example here, I'm just going to switch to the rotate tool you don't need to do that. But regardless of what tool I'm on, if I hit "G" on my keyboard, it will allow me to start moving it regardless of the tool that I have on. Now you'll notice it's moving at in a weird direction and what it's doing is it's moving a base relative on your screen. As I move it up in my screen, it's actually moving it up in space and backwards and then if I move it down on my screen, it's moving it down and forward a little bit. Now, typically this isn't the way you want to use this tool but if you just need to make a really quick small adjustment and you have your camera at the right position, then you can just hit "G" with any objects selected and it will allow it to move. If I rotate my camera say down here, and I hit "G" again, you can see now that it's rotating it based on this camera position. It always just looks at the direction that you're facing and moves it relative to that. Now if we don't want to move it relative based on our screen direction, we can hit "G" to start moving it and then we can define which axis we want to move it on just by hitting that corresponding letter on the keyboard. If I only want to move it in the x after hitting G, I can just hit "X" and now its balanced to the x-direction. Alternatively, you could just hit "Y" and it'll bind it to y or z and it'll bind with z. Now, all of these cases first you need to hit "G" first. You tell Blender, hey, I want to move this object so you can start moving it and then you bind it to a direction by hitting the corresponding axis letter on your keyboard. Now, I've bound it to the z-axis, I can move it up to here ad now I can click to confirm that movement and it's placed it. Using the quick movement with g and then binding it to an axis is definitely faster than going over here, switching to your gizmo and then grabbing your gizmo to move it. However, it can be a little bit more fraught with the possibility of moving it in the wrong direction or not realizing you're moving it in screen space. A lot of times throughout this class, I'm going to be using these tools just because it makes it obvious which direction I'm moving in. If you prefer using the quick method by just hitting "G" and then binding it to a direction by all means go ahead and do that. However, in this case, most likely, unless it's going to be a really small movement or a very specific movement I'm making. I'll usually be using the tool with the gizmo in order to move objects within this class. Now that we've gone through all of these different constraints that the move tool has, we can quickly go through the other two tools that we'll be using. Because they function very similarly, they just do different things to the model so I won't be spending quite so much time on each of these. We've discussed movement, now let's discuss rotate. Rotate is exactly what it sounds like, it allows you to rotate the model. In this case, you can see here our gizmo has changed and we have a few different other handles here to grab. By default, you can just click and drag over one of these colored rings and it will move it, it'll rotate it rather only on that ring. We can see here it's rotating it only on the x and then only on the z if we grab the blue, and then only on the y if we grab the green. Now we also have the option here to grab the white circle. We'll notice as we rotate around the model, the white circle will just always follow this r direction. However, the colored ones, they seem to always stay exactly true to where they are. They always match up with the world up here and that's because the white one is only going to be using our screen direction. This is similar to how the quick G key to move things was working. It will only look at just basically the direction you're looking at and it'll use that for your rotation. Now sometimes this is useful. This is probably a little bit more useful than the quick movement where it moves it on your screen space. The rotating on your screen space, I find a little bit more useful, so we'll be using that one a little bit more often. But in general, I tend to use the gizmo for most of the tools for my classes just so it's clear what we're doing. As I mentioned, this tool is very similar to the move tool and that we can just hit "R" on our keyboard for rotate, to quickly rotate. In this case it's only going to rotate it based on the screen direction so we can rotate it that way. Like I said, this will rotate it based on screen so it's going to rotate at this direction now and then we can also hit "R" and then any one of our axes so we'll try z. Now it will only rotate it based on the z or x to rotate it on the x or y to rotate it on the y. Then to confirm the movement, we just click "Left-click", and then we'll confirm the movement. Now before I explain the last tool, let's bring up our side menu by hitting "N" on our keyboard and then over here and we can see all of the adjustments we've made to this model. We can see its location within the world, so this is the exact coordinates within the world that it's sitting in so that's the movement. Then we can also see the rotation that we've done. In this case, I've rotated a whole bunch of different directions here so it's rotated a little bit off of kilter here. Let's adjust this and set it back to zero. We're going to click on each one of these and we can hit "Zero" to zero out the rotation. That's nice and flat again. We can also do that up here for the location. Instead of clicking each one of these individually and typing in zero, we also have the option to click and hold on the top one and then quickly drag down to highlight all three of the fields. Now when we over click, we can type in zero once and it'll change all three of them because we highlighted all three of them and now we can hit "Enter". With our box setback to default we can hit "N" to hide this menu. Now let's discuss our last tool, which is scale. To switch to your scale tool, we can go over here to the left and choose this small box growing into the larger box. Now we can see our gizmo's changed and it looks pretty similar to how the move tool gizmo looked. However, there are just slight adjustments here and we have boxes at the ends instead of arrows and we also have this circle here around it. The most obvious parts of this gizmo are the different handles we have here. If we just grab the blue handle, it will only scale it in the z-direction. If we grab the red only in the red and then same thing with the green only in the green. We can also grab these floating little boxes and that will scale it only in these two directions that it floats between. Only this way, this way or this way. Then the last option we have here is the ability to scale it all in the same direction. It's going to scale up uniformly. It won't change the shape of it all, it'll just get larger. If I zoom out a little bit and I grab this little white ring that goes around it and I scale it, it'll scale it up just uniformly, either much bigger or we can make it much smaller. Now I can zoom in here and we can see we just have the exact same shape it's just a little bit smaller now. Just like all the other tools there are quick key binds for this. These are ones that I do actually use pretty often to scale. I won't always use the scale gizmo to scale objects but, well, I always cut that out when I don't. The quick way to scale an object is just to hit "S" on your keyboard for scale. If we hit "S", it just scales it up uniformly. This is the one that I use the most often. This will just make things either uniformly bigger or uniformly smaller. Then again, we can just click to confirm the change. As I'm sure you've guessed already it works the exact same way as the others so we can add s and then x to scale only in the x, or y to scale only in the y or z to scale only in the z. Then again, just click to confirm the change. Now that we've discussed the three main tools, let's discuss how to undo the changes we just did. To undo these changes, so in this case, it's just going to go back one step for each change that we've committed. We're going to hold down "Control" and then hit "Z" on our keyboard. Down here, Control and z, and it'll go back one time, so one time from each confirmed change that we made. In this case every one of our scales was a confirmed change so every time we hit "Control Z", it's going back in time and going back to before that change was made. If we just keep hitting "Control Z" here, we'll see that we've now Control Z it enough that it's actually hopped up into the air here. If you actually go back too far with your Control Z, you can hit "Control, Shift, and Z" to jump it forward one space and time. In this case, I went back to the point before I moved it down to the 0,0 the center of the world here. I want to go back to after I've done that change so I can hit "Control, Shift and Z" at the same time to jump it forward one space and time rather than back. That was the last tip I have for you in this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll be finishing our crash course on Blender. I'll see you there. 3. Opt: Blender Crash Course (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll be finishing our crash course on Blender. Let's begin. You can start by opening up a brand new Blender file using the general file type, or you can use the same exact file from the last lesson if you're watching them in order. Now let's discuss how we delete and add new objects to our scene. To delete an object, you simply need to have it selected and then you can hit the Delete key on your keyboard and that will just delete it right away. Or if I Control Z to bring it back, so I undo that delete. You can also hit X on your keyboard, and that will also delete. However, it'll bring up an option box and it'll ask you if you'd like to delete. In most cases, the Delete key and X are pretty much the same thing. However, X is a little bit closer to where your left hand naturally sits. Some people prefer X because they don't like having to move their hand and other people prefer the delete key because it's a little bit more natural, more used to hitting Delete, to delete things rather than X. In this case, if you hit X, it'll just ask you, is it okay to delete this and then you choose Delete to delete it. Now we've deleted that object and let's add a new one. We're going to hit Shift and A the same time to bring up an Add menu. I'll move that off to the side so you can see this. Shift and then A, to bring that up. This will have all the different objects that you can add within your scene. Most of the time, if you're adding something, it's going to be a mesh or maybe a light but there's all these other options here as well. We'll start with mesh and then we can just add back in that cube. If we choose Cube, that'll just pop back in a brand new cube for us. You'll notice down here at the bottom left that this little option box popped up and it might be close to you or it might be open. If it's closed like mine is, just click this little arrow and it'll twirl it open so you can see all these options. Now that you see the options, you can adjust them. In this case, maybe we can make it by default a little bit bigger. If I know exactly that I want my object to be say five meters, I just type in five and then hit Enter and now my object is exactly five meters and then I can begin from there. You can also change the initial position and rotation of it down here, however, I don't find this to be super useful, so you'll rarely see me adjust this parameter. I'll usually just be adjusting the actual size of the object or maybe the amount of cuts that it has, but I rarely will change the location or the rotation before we actually start editing that object. Now that we have the size set, if we click off of this object, we'll notice that the option box has disappeared. If we click back onto it, it won't come back up. That's the thing you have to remember when you're making brand new objects is that the very beginning when you first make them, you're allowed to change the parameters for the object. But the second you click off of them, it bakes those parameters right into the object and you can adjust them again. You can actually scale the object if I wanted to make it smaller, I could do that, but I can't just type in the exact size for the object anymore. I have to do that at the initial creation of that object. Now we have our cube made, we can move this off to the side. Then let's make another object, we can hit Shift and A, we'll go to Mesh and this time let's make a UV sphere. We'll click that, and then we'll see an object here that has a few more options so we can adjust. We can change the radius, which will just make the object bigger by adjusting the radius of the sphere. We can also change the segments and the rings as well. If we increase the segments, we'll see that there are more cuts on this sphere, and the more cuts we add, the smoother it will look, and that's going around the horizontal space of the sphere. Then we can adjust the rings, which will add more cuts going vertically, which will also make the sphere a little bit smoother. Now you don't typically want to start with parameters quite so high here, usually the defaults for these are fine. I'll just type back in some lower numbers here and hit Enter. It's because there's ways to smooth out an object that don't involve adding a ton of cuts to begin with to make it smoother. We'll discuss those later, possibly in the class if we need to. However, in this case, if you need to make the object either more or less smooth right away, you can do that by adjusting the ring count. With our parameter set up, we can just click off the object and it will commit these changes. Now it's baked into the model. Lets now let's quickly discuss the way we select objects within our scene. We already know that we can just left-click on an object and it will select it, but it will only select that one object obviously. However, we can also drag select over a bunch of objects and it will select all of them. In this case, I can see here I have four objects selected because they're all orange now. We can also see that over here on the right side, so when I click on an object, it highlights it in blue and if I have multiple objects selected, it'll highlight all of them in blue as well as make their names orange. Now if I wanted to be a little bit more precise in the objects I'm selecting and I want to select multiple objects, I can first select the first object that I want to select and then I can hold down Shift while I'm selecting the next one, and that will add to the selection. Now I've selected both of these. If I didn't hold down Shift, so I just selected this and then left-clicked on this camera back here, it would de-select the first one and now select the new one, but by holding shift, we're adding to our selection. I can hold down Shift and select the sphere here and now it's selected both, and if I just keep holding Shift while I select the next one, it will just keep adding to the selection until eventually I can select everything in the scene or alternatively, I can just drag select over everything. The last way to select everything in the scene is to just hit A on your keyboard for all, so we'll select all. In this case it will select literally everything in our scene. If I had 1,000 things in my scene, if I hit A, it will select all 1,000 things. That's one thing to be mindful of is if you have a really complicated scene and you hit A on your keyboard, it's going to select literally everything inside your scene. Now lastly, to finish off this lesson, let's discuss some really simple modeling. To start with, I'm just going to select these other objects in my scene. I'm going to select the cube, the camera, and the light and then I'm going to delete them. Again, you can hit Delete on the keyboard or you can hit X to delete it. Now select the sphere that you have leftover. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to visually smooth this sphere out. The way we do that is just by selecting the object. Then we're going to right-click, we're going to choose Shade Smooth. When we choose Shade Smooth, we haven't actually added any additional cuts, so segments, or rings to this sphere, all we've done is told Blender to visually smooth out all the areas between these faces that we have on the model. As you see around the edges, it's still kind of jagged. It still has some of these flat spots in these corners, however, the center of it, the general look of the sphere is much smoother. This is a way to visually smooth out an object without actually adding all of those different cuts and rings and segments to an object that really bog down the model, make it hard to edit. Now for some reason you prefer the look of the last way, we can just right-click on it and we can choose Shade Flat and that will shade each one of these faces individually flat so you can see each individual face on the model. I'm going to right-click, and then switch it back to Shade Smooth. Now to begin actually editing the vertex, the faces and the edges of our model, we need to hit Tab with the sphere selected. I'm going to hit my Tab key and that will bring us into our edit mode. Then at the top left up here, we can see the different modes that we can adjust. By default, right now, we're in face mode, which is actually selecting each individual face of the object, which are these squares that the object is made of. We can also switch to our edge mode by either clicking on this symbol up here, or you can hit 2 on your keyboard. The vertex mode is here on the left, that's one. That'll switch this into that. We can hit 2 to switch into edge mode and we can hit 3 to switch into face mode. Again, let's switch back to edge. We're going to hit 2 on our keyboard, or you can click this little icon up here. This allows us to select the lines that make up each of these faces. We can select each of these lines on this model and we can adjust the model that way. Then lastly, if we hit 1 on our keyboard we'll switch to vertex mode, which allows us to adjust the little points in-between each of these lines. Essentially anywhere a line makes an intersection, we have a vertex. The vertexes are the corners of the squares that make up the model. The edges are the lines on the edges of the square here. Then the faces are the actual squares themselves. To make edits to your model, we can use any of these tools that we discussed earlier. There are also more, however, these are the most basic ones. if we choose the move tool, we can see here, now with this single face selected, we can move this face to adjust the shape of the sphere, Like that. We can also switch to our Rotate tool and rotate this face. We can do this in any of the ways that we discussed earlier. We can just hit R to rotate it based on our screen. We can add R and X may be to rotate it just on the X, or we can use any parts of the gizmo. Then lastly, we can switch to our scale tool here. We can scale this down to make it smaller, scale it up to make it bigger. Or we can squish it in different directions to change the shape of it. Selection works the same way as it did before as well. If we just click on a single face here, it's only going to select one face and then the same thing if we just click on another one, it'll de-select the last one and select the new one. However, if we hold Shift and click, we can see we can add to our selection to select a larger part of our model. Then we can adjust this part of the model from here. Alternatively, we can just click and drag over our model to select a large portion of these things for wherever we've clicked and dragged. Now I'm going to hit Control and Z to undo a lot of these changes that I've made to the sphere. It's a little bit closer back to the original shape. We can see as every time I hit Control Z, it just goes back each of the steps that I made back to the default. Now you might have noticed when I clicked and dragged across this sphere, that it only selected the faces that I could actually see. In this case, if I drag across, say, the middle here, it'll select all these faces and it looks like I selected the entire. 4. Setting Up Our File: In this lesson, we'll be going over some settings to prepare a file for future rendering. Let's begin. Let's start by choosing the general file type here on our splash screen. We'll choose "General." Now we're going to go to the render properties tab over here on the right side. This is the tab here that looks like the back side of a little DSLR camera. At the very top we'll click this and then you should see a similar screen to this. We'll be using the EV real-time render engine for this tutorial. This will ensure that we get the look that we want and keep our render times really short. This is important because we will be creating an animation at the end of this class and we don't want to be waiting around for hours for it to finish. Now let's go further down this list, we're going to look for Motion Blur. We can click "Motion Blur" to turn this one. We're going to click this little arrow here to twirl this open so we can see more of the settings. The only two settings we're going to change here are the shutter and the steps. Let's change the shutter first. We can just click on this number here and then type in 1.5 and then hit "Enter". Then we'll go down here to steps. We're going to change this from one all the way up to 64. Essentially the two settings that we just changed here, the shutter speed is just how motion blurred will our animation be, so how much motion blur will be present within the motion? Then the steps is just basically how high quality is this motion blur effect. The more steps you have, the more smooth it'll look. Now let's scroll down in this list even further. We're going to go down to where it says color management, then we can open that up. By default, it should be set to filmic for the view transform. We're actually going to change this from filmic to standard instead. Filmic works really well for photorealistic renders however, standard usually does a better job with more stylized things. In our case, the cartoon effect will be a little bit more saturated, so it's a little more colorful and it'll have a little bit better contrast with the standard view transform than it would with filmic. We're just going to leave the look set to none we won't need to change that. That's the last setting we need to change in the render properties tab so now let's go to the output properties, which is the tab just below that. It's the one that looks a little printer printing out a photo. We can click on this and that will switch us to the output properties. The first thing we're going to change this up here, it's the resolution of our final product. Right now it's set to 1920 by 1080, which is the standard HD size. We're actually going to make this 1080 by 1080. Let's just click on the top number here and just type in 1080, hit "Enter" and then we'll see here 1080 by 1080, which gives us a nice square image here we can see that the camera, it used to be a rectangle, and now it's showing as a square because that's the output that we're creating. Then one last thing here in the output, we want to switch the frame rate from 24 FPS, we're going to make this a little bit higher and set it to 30 FPS. With our resolution changed from 1080 by 1080 and our frame rate set to 30 FPS we're ready to save the file. It's important that we save the file we're working on right now and changing all these settings in, because the settings are based on a per-file basis, we're not changing the settings for all of blender. If you just open up a brand new file, the settings we've changed won't be present. Save our file, we're going to go up here to file and then choose Save as. You can also hit "Shift Control and S" at the same time to do this, so we'll click this. Now when the save Windows pops up, you'll be able to choose the location that you save your file. You'll want to navigate using the folders here on the left side, or typing in an address bar here at the top and navigate to a place that you know, you'll be able to find this file later. You don't really want to be moving the file around too often and you want to have it saved in a place that you're not going to accidentally delete it so I wouldn't suggest saving it into your downloads folder or something, I'd maybe save it on your desktop or in your documents, or maybe make a new folder and place it in there. With your location chosen, now we can go down here and give it a name. We're just going to call this Bumblebee all one-word underscore animation and then I'm going do underscore 01 at the end of it. The reason I added a underscore 01 at the end of this is in case we need to branch this file or I'm afraid I'm about to do something that might cause an issue in the file later on, I can always save this out as a Version 2 or Version 3. That way I don't lose any of the previous progress. I'm not constantly just overwriting the same file so if I mess up, I'll still have an older file to come back to. Again, Bumblebee_Animation_01 and then we can just choose "Save As." With these settings changed and the file saved we're ready to proceed with the project. In the next lesson, we'll start modeling the body of our Bumblebee I'll see you there. 5. Modeling the Bumblebee Body: In this lesson, we'll be modeling the body of our bumblebee. Let's begin. We'll start by enabling a simple built-in add-on to make our life a bit easier. We 're going to go up here to Edit, Preferences, and then we'll go to the add-ons tab here on the left side and then in the search bar, we're going to search add mesh and then we'll see here Add Mesh Extra Objects. You want to make sure that you have this checkbox turned on. So you wouldn't have turned on Add Mesh Extra Objects and then we can close this down. We won't need this anymore. Now that's enable. This add-on simply adds extra primitive objects that we can start our model with. Let's select this cube here that started in the file by default, we're going to delete that and now we can hit "Shift and A" at the same time to bring up the Add menu. We're going to go to Mesh and then we want to go down here to round cube. Now, this is one of those things that was added in with that add on we just enabled. By default, you wouldn't have access to this. So we'll choose a round cube. Now, down here at the bottom left, we can twirl this open to see the options for this round cube. We'll start by going up here to the top where it says operator presets and we're going to choose the quad sphere preset. We can click this and now we can see that we have essentially a sphere, but it's made up as if it was a rounded over a cube. So it has all these different square faces. It doesn't have the normal triangular faces you would see in a typical sphere, and that'll make our life a bit easier when we get into the modeling for the bumblebee. And then we just want to make sure that we have our arc divisions here set to eight. And that's essentially just how many cuts this has. So if I turn it up, it gets more cuts, if I turn it down, it has less cuts. We want to have our set to eight which should be the default, but if it isn't, just set yours to eight. With those settings changed, we can now go over here to our list. We can double-click one where it says Round Cube, and we're going to name this body, so B-O-D-Y and then hit Enter. That way we know that this object is later. Let's use our mouse wheel to scroll in a little bit, and then we're going to right-click and then choose Shade Smooth so that our rounded cube, which is basically a sphere in our case is nice and smooth looking. Now, we'll switch to our move tool over here on the left. We're just going to move this up a little bit and then we're going to type in a number so we know the exact height. So just move it up just a little bit on the z-axis, the blue axis, and then down here, when it pops up this option box, we can actually just manually type in two meters. So meters is the default in this case, so two meters, and then we'll have it floating two meters above the surface. This is essentially just how high off the ground our bumblebee body will end up being. We're giving it this much space for us to fill in with the legs and then any other environmental details that'll go below it. Now, let's begin shaping this sphere into the body of our bumblebee. Start by hitting Tab on your keyboard here to switch into Edit mode. Make sure you have the body is still selected. So select it first and then hit "Tab." Now hit "Two" to enter your edge mode, and then hit "Alt and Z" at the same time to enter your x-ray mode. You can tell that we're in x-ray mode now because we're actually able to see through the model here. So we can see through them or seeing all the lines of this model through itself. Also just another quick way to make sure you're in x-ray mode is this little button here. This is essentially the x-ray mode button. So if you would rather click the button on the interface, you can. It's this little button here with the two overlapping squares. Although, I think it's a little bit better if you get into the habit of holding down Alt and then hitting the Z, so switch back and forth. It's a lot faster and you don't have to find this button each time. Now, let's go into the front view for this viewport. So there's two ways we can do this. We can either click on this little negative y bubble, this negative y side here. This is considered the front side of your viewport. So this side here is the front, so facing this direction is front or I guess I can just show you this. So we'll just click on this and that'll pop us into the front view. We can see up here it tells us front orthographic view. Alternatively, if I rotate my camera here, we can hit the Tilde key, which is the key to the left of the one and above the tab button. So it's the accent or the Tilde. So if you hit that, it'll pop up a radial menu, and then we can just choose the front view. It also has the other views here that are easily accessible. So we'll just choose front. Again, you can either hit the Tilde to bring up this radial menu and then choose it or just click the little bubble based on the direction that you'd like to face. And that works for any one of these bubbles here. So if I click this, you can see that's the right view. The negative y again is the front view, z is top, and so on. So now that we're in our front view, we can actually begin editing the shape of this. So we'll start by just clicking off the model to make sure we don't have anything selected, and again, we're in the edge mode, which is two on your keyboard and then we're going to hold down Alt and then click this middle line here. So this middle edge, when we click this while we're holding Alt, it'll select that entire loop all the way around the model. So it's not, you're going to just select a single edge. It'll select all the way around every contiguous edge attached to it. Now, we're going to hit "Control and B" at the same time, and that will bring up the bevel menu. First of all, we can start moving our mouse to just bevel it a little bit. So it's going to split that edge into two edges. So we'll split it out to about here. You don't want it to go so far that it starts overlapping. You can see the model starts acting a little funny when you do that. Just go to about here. It doesn't need to be exact. So just a little bit before it starts overlapping. With that done, we can now switch to our vertex mode by hitting 1 on our keyboard, and now we can drag select over this entire left side. So what we're going to be doing is making this sphere, it's more of an oblong shape, more of a capsule or a pill or whatever you want to refer to that shape is, but it is very important that we are in x-ray mode because we just drag select over top of this and we're not an x-ray, it's only going to select the visible vertex. So if you're not an x-ray, it won't select through the model. So make sure this little button here is highlighted or you can tell like here, if I zoom in, I can actually see the grid through my model here. And that's another indication that this model is x-rayed. Let's zoom out. So I have my left side selected. So every vertex here on the left side, I just clicked and dragged and highlighted all of them. Now I'm going to switch into my move tool, and I'm going to move these in the negative x-direction. So this direction to the left, we'll just move them a little bit at first and then when we let go, we'll get this little option box here. Again, we can just type in the exact number we want, which is -0.5 and then hit "Enter." So -0.5 meters, and then we're going to do the opposite on the other side. So we're just going to drag select over the right side, move it slightly to the right and then here instead of -0.5, we're just going to type in 0.5 and then hit Enter. Now, we can see instead of being a circle, we have this oblong shape. With our right-side moved, we can now hit "Control and R" and we want to hover over in the middle here of the model here where it's these long uninterrupted phases. We're going to hit "Control and R" and that will bring up a little yellow line, but before we do anything, we want to scroll up on our mouse wheel. We're just going to scroll up a few times, and then you can see down here at the very bottom left. So when I move my mouse, it's going to go a little all over the place here, but down here at the very bottom left, it says number of cut is five, and it says smooth zero, but we're more interested in the number of cuts. So in this case we want to slide it up until it says six cuts. So number of cuts, six, and then we're going to click and then without moving your mouse at all, just click again one more time because if you move your mouse after clicking the first time, you actually be shifting the lines left or right. It doesn't need to be exactly perfect. If you shift them a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, it's fine. You just don't want to shift them all the way to the right or all the way to the left by accident. So down here we get this little option box, and this is another situation where we can change the number of cuts but we can tell down here at the bottom left when we were adding them that we had six cuts to begin with. Again, you use your mouse wheel so you scroll up or down on your mouse wheel to add or remove cuts while it's still a yellow line. So we have all of our cuts placed. Now we can hit "A" to select all vertices. So just hit "A" and that'll select all, and this works in face or edge or vertices mode. Doesn't matter. If you hit "A" it's just going to select everything. Now, we have everything selected, and then we're going to right-click, and then more going to go down here to smooth vertices. We can see right now our shape. It's relatively round, but it has this flat spot and then it gets almost like a little bit of a corner here where it starts to round. We're going to try to smooth that out. The whole thing is just a little bit more organic. Then where we are going to do that is with this smooth vertices function. This is just going to average out all the distances the vertices and try to calculate the most relaxed position of all of these vertices is going to smooth them out and try to get rid of as many hard edges as possible. Our settings down here is how we're going to adjust the amount of smoothing we're getting. We can turn the smoothing up from zero, which is no smoothing at all, all the way up to one, which is maximum smoothing, at least for this slider. We can see what it does as we slide this. It pulls some of these edges apart. It moves things in, just softens the shape. But we can actually smooth it and even more than that. If we add more repeats, it will just do this exact same smoothing operation multiple times. Every time we add a repeat, it just gets smoother and smoother. Now in our case, we don't need to smooth it out entirely. We are only going to do two repeats. Set your smoothing to one and then set your repeats to two. Again, as I said, this just makes the shape a little bit more organic, a little bit less hard edged. With that done, we can now click off of the model to confirm those changes. Then we're going to rotate our camera around just so we can just rotate our view port so we can see this side. We're going to be working on the negative X side of this. If you look up here, you should be working on the negative X side and we're going be adding the mouth to the side of the model. First let's turn off this x-ray mode. That's actually making it a little bit hard to see what we're doing now, we won't need it. We're going to hold down Alt and then hit" Z" to turn off x-ray mode. Then we can hit "3" to go into our face mode. Now with our body shape completed, let's move on to adding the mouth for our bumble bee. A real bumble bee wouldn't have a big toothy grin like we're about to add. But I think for the cartoon aesthetic that we're going for, it'll look just fine. Again, rotate your view-port here to the left side of the model. The side here, the negative X side, this side is going to be the face of our bee. We can zoom in here and now we're going to start selecting some of these faces. Again, make sure you're in face mode with three. Then hold down Shift as you click each of these faces to add to your selection. We're going to start here just below the halfway point. We can tell that this line here is perfectly flat, which means that's the midpoint of the model. This is the exact half point. I'm going to click these two. We want to have four across. This is the width of the mouth. Then we're going to select the ones just below it as well while holding Shift. Holding Shift the whole time selecting each of these. That's essentially the general shape and size of our mouth. Now with these faces selected, we can hit "E" on our keyboard to start extruding these backwards. We can see if we extrude forward, it just adds faces on the sides to make this come out. However we want it to go back into the model. It'll just do the reverse of that. It's going to add faces on the side to allow it to be pushed further into the model. It doesn't have to be an exact distance because we're going to be covering this with teeth. But you want it about that far. In my case, it was about 0.5 meters. If we want to be exact, I can just type in negative actually negative 0.5 because they went backwards. If you'd like to match exactly negative 0.5 for the Z. Now we need to pull this down because right now it extruded it backwards at an angle we can see it's going up a little bit. We just want to pull this down so it flattens it out. It doesn't need to be perfect. We just want it a little bit flatter than it was. Something around there. Now let's add a modifier to smooth out the body in the mouth so we can begin shaping it into a smile. To do this, we're going to go over here to the Modifier Tab, which is this little blue wrench. Now we can click Add Modifier. Then we'll go down here to subdivision surface. It's in the second column and it's near the bottom subdivision surface and click that. We can see right away, the hard edges that we had along the corners of the mouth are now rounded. It's also slightly smooths out the silhouette of our model here as well. Let's go into the settings over here and we're going to turn up the levels in the view-port up to two. Essentially the higher these numbers are, the more smoother the model is. We'll notice if I click back to one, it's pretty smooth, but there's still some jagged edges. If I turn it up to two, it gets even smoother. Then if I wanted to, you don't have to, I wouldn't suggest this actually, so don't follow me here. But if I turn this up to three, it gets even smoother. Then four smoother still, eventually it gets so smoothly that you can't tell the difference between the levels. In our case, we're just going to set these both to two. We have both of these set to two now. Now we can tell that our model is much smoother than it was. Also notice on the corners here of the mouth that it's actually cutting into the model and smoothing it out rather than the model coming all the way out to here and then going back. It's actually easing that corner, knocking the hard edges off of it. Well, actually, it's going to make our job a little bit easier and making this more organic shape for the smile of the bumble bee, it's going to make our life a little bit easier because it's already doing a lot of this organic shaping for us. Now we just need to work with the low poly model underneath, which is this floating cage we're seeing. Right here, this transparent model. That's the actual polygons of the model and then the really smooth surface we're seeing is the result of this modifier on top of it. Let's begin shaping the mouth now. We're going to do that in the edge mode. We'll hit "2" switch into Edge and then we're going to select the corners of the mouth. Now in this case, it's a little bit hard to see what we can still see the edge here. We just click this little line here, you know exactly where it's at. It's only a single edge that goes back to this face here. We're going to do that on the other side too. Hold "Shift" down when you do this, so that we select both of them. If you just clicked it, it would de-select the first one and only select the new one. You need to make sure you hold down Shift when you're selecting multiple objects at the same time, multiple vertices, edges, faces, and so on. Let's start by moving these up. We're going to give it the corners of the mouth a little bit of a lift here on the side. Lift these up to somewhere around here and again, this is all just eyeing it up. We're not going to be using exact measurements for this. Just try to visually follow what I'm doing here is all pretty small movements, so it shouldn't be too hard to replicate. We have it about here and that looks good. Then we're going to scale this up, but only in the Y direction. Right now our mouth is a little bit too narrow. At the top at least it's still has this square shape. I want to give it a little bit of a wider shape at the top and then narrower at the bottom with these two edges still selected. I still have the corner edges selected. I'm going to hit "S ""on my keyboard, and then I'm going to hit "Y "on my keyboard next. That's started the scaling process and then when I hit "Y", it binds it only to the y-axis. You can tell that because of the green line we're seeing on the screen. Now if I move this, it's only going to scale it just along that green line. Let's scale this up just a little bit here. It's widen the top of the mouth out a bit. We'll move it to around here. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect. We're just trying to give this a little bit more of a smile shape. The top of the mouth is done. Now, let's go down to the bottom corners. We're going to do a similar process down here. First, just click on this left one because we don't want to hold "Shift" in this case because we actually want to de-select the top. Just click on the bottom left side and then hold "Shift" and click on the bottom right side to add to this original selection here. We're going to move this up to round off the bottom of the mountain a little bit. Right about here. Then again, we'll hit "S "and then Y. We're going to scale these inward a little bit too round the bottom off. Were doing the opposite of what we did at the top. We'll scale it into about there. Now we can switch back to our face mode. We'll hit "3" on our keyboard to switch back to face. Then we're going to select just these two top faces here. Basically the top lip of the mouth will hold "Shift." We have both of these selected, just these top two center faces. We're going to go to the side here. Then we're going to pull them out using this red handle, moving them in the X direction, pull them out just a little bit to give the top of the mouth a little bit of a protrusion. It almost mimics either a top lip or a bit of a nose or something. We're just giving it a little bit of a snout or a top lip and nose, whenever you want to think of it as for me know, in terms of a cartoon bumble bee. We pulled that out a little bit. Now we're going to do a similar thing here on the bottom. We're just going to start by just clicking this one here so that it deselects the top. Then we can hold Shift and select the other one and we're going to pull this out as well. We don't want to pull this one out quite as far as the top one because of the bottom lip, in this case wouldn't stick out quite as far. We'll pull it up just shy of that one. Now we have a protrusion for the bottom lip and the top lip. Then one last change, we're going to switch to the vertex mode. We hit "1" on our keyboard to switched the vertex. Well notice here that this, this vertex here juts out, so the bottom lip comes out. Then this center line here, which should be the corners of the mouth poke out and then it goes straight up. I'm going to select both of these here. I'm going to first just click this, just so it deselects the original and then only select that. Now I'm going to hold "Shift" and select this corner. Now I have both sides of the mouth selected. We're going to pull these back so that it looks a little bit more like a corner of a mouth. Should have been more of a round shape here rather than coming back and then protruding out again. We'll pull back to about here. We can see this is a little bit more of a round shape. I think that looks pretty good for our mouth shape. In the next lesson, we'll be modeling the teeth and the stinger for our bumblebee. I'll see you there. 6. Modeling the Teeth and Stinger: In this lesson, we'll be modeling the teeth and the stinger for a bumblebee. Let's begin. With the mouth done, let's add some teeth inside of it so it's not just this big hole in the front of our model. First, we'll hit Tab to exit our edit mode because we're done editing the actual body shape at this point. Now we can hit Shift and A. Then we're going to go to Add Mesh. We want to add a cylinder, so we'll choose Cylinder. Then we can see down here this cylinder that have popped up. But we do actually want to change some of these settings potentially. I think by default the vertices is probably fine and the radius is fine we are going to scale that down. But we know for a fact that our teeth do not need to be this tall so we're just going to set this back down to one meter as well. That's a little bit easier to scale. We should have 32 vertices, one for the radius, which is essentially just how wide it is. Then the depth is how tall it is. We just made it a little bit shorter so it's all set to one meter. Now we can go up here in our list. We're going to double-click the word cylinder and we're going to call this Teeth, T-E-E-T-H and then hit Enter. Now we can right-click on this model and then choose Shade Smooth. We'll notice the shading here goes a little bit wonky. But we'll be doing some things to the model that will get rid of this and we won't notice it once it's actually inside the mouth. Let's start positioning these teeth inside this hole that we made for the mouth. We'll start by moving it up in the z-direction, roughly about the height that the teeth would be. We're going to center this so around there. Then we're going to move it forward. Let's zoom in a little bit so we can see. Now we're starting to see the teeth fill this mouth cavity. However, the teeth are way too large right now. Let's start scaling this down by hitting S. We just hit S, then we can move our mouse and just scale them down. Scale them down to about here. In this case, it's about 0.7, 0.65. A lot of this is just eyeing it up. We won't really need to follow exact measurements for this. We're just going to move this forward. It's about the right width. It's still a little bit too tall so we can hit S and then Z to bind it just to the z-axis, which is the blue up-and-down axis. We can scale this down a little bit so they're not quite so tall because they were poking through the chin here. Then we can move it up. We need to make sure that it fills the entire mouth here so you don't want to have like a flat spot here where there's no teeth in the side of the mouth here. You'll need to make sure that it fills up this entire hole that we made for the mouth. We can push it forward a little bit. We want it to stop a little bit before the end of the lip because we want to have the lip protrude out a little bit further than the teeth do. Now if you're concerned that your teeth might not be close to mine, or you're having trouble fitting them into the mouth as well as I have here, I can show you the side menu here. If you hit N on your keyboard, it'll bring up this little side menu. We can go to Item, which is the top tab on the side menu. Then down here, you can see the scale that I have. Right now, if you actually just hand-type these numbers in here. I'll make my numbers a little bit nicer so I'll do 0.67 for both of these. Then we'll just do 0.5 for this. If you type in these numbers here for your scale, your cylinder will be the exact same size as mine. Then for the location, we can actually change this as well. We'll just do -0.67 and then 1.86 for the z location. Now like I said, if you type in these exact numbers for the x location, the z location, and then all three of the scales, your teeth will be at the exact same position and size as mine. I'm going to hide my side menu now. Now we can begin editing these teeth to make them look a little bit more like teeth. We'll start by hitting Tab to go into our edit mode. Then we'll hit 3 to enter our face mode. Then we'll do Alt and Z to go into our X-ray mode so we can actually see the model that we're working with, because most of it is hidden now inside the body of the bumblebee. The first thing we'll do is spin around to the top of the model. Then we want to select this top face of our cylinder. We're just going to select near the middle. When you're working in X-ray mode and specifically in face mode, you need to select near these dots in the center of each face. If you select past them so if select too far away from this dot, you're actually going to select the next face behind it. You have to remember it's a little bit finicky, it takes some time to get used to. But anytime you're selecting a face within X-ray mode, just make sure you're selecting near these tiny little black dots. Now we have the top face selected and we want to rotate our camera around so we're looking at the side of the model. If you really want to, you can go into your front view by clicking in the little -y bubble up here, or again Tilda and then Front. But we're only going to be doing this for a quick second here and it might not be useful. We'll just move this forward. We're going to move this forward towards the front of the head. We want to slap these teeth a little bit because right now the teeth were perfectly vertical and I made a really large top lip and a really small bottom lip. Let's try to get rid of some of that so they're a little bit more even. We're going to move this forward so that the teeth slant in the front of the mouth. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect, just try to get a little bit of an angle here on the front of your teeth. Now that they're angled, we can rotate around, and with your top face still selected, hold Shift, and then select near the little dot here at the bottom so we have both the top and the bottom selected. Then we're actually going to delete these so we can hit X or Delete on the keyboard. Then we went to delete faces. We've now deleted the top and the bottom of this because our teeth don't really need to be a completed cylinder. Now let's go back into our front view. Again, the little -y bubble or Tilda and then Front. We can zoom in here. Then we're going to select most of the backside of the cylinder. We're going to drag Select over the backside here and we're going to select pretty far up actually. We're going to select to about here basically where the backside of your mouth stops. Select all of these faces back here. Basically the back 2/3 of your cylinder. Then we're also going to delete those so we can hit X or delete and then choose delete faces. The reason we did that is because we really don't need all those phases here. The faces we have are already probably too much. We don't need to delete any further than this, but we could actually delete probably all the way, at least these last two on each side if you really wanted to. But what we deleted now has gotten rid of the bulk of the cylinder and basically just left behind the parts that make the teeth. Now rotate around to the front so you can see the front side of the mouth. Then we're going to hit Control and R and that'll bring up our little yellow line, which is essentially where we are going to be placing a cut in the model. We're just going to click once right away. We're just going to place a single cut and again, this is where we can tell that we're sliding it. We want to place it right around the center of the mouth again. Now we have a single cut placed along the center of the teeth. This is going to be the break for the top and the bottom of the teeth. Now let's bevel this line so we add a little bit of a separation here between the top and the bottom. We'll hit Control and B to begin beveling. We're just going to move this out and essentially, the size that you make this bevel is the amount of gap between your top and your bottom teeth. I'm going to make mine not really large, just a little bit of a gap so there's some separation between the top and the bottom. We'll set it to roughly here. It doesn't need to be exactly that, but just a little bit of a gap between them because we're actually going to be deleting these faces here. Once you have your line beveled you've determined how far apart you want your teeth, we can now hit X or Delete and then choose Delete faces. Now hit 2 to make sure you're still in edge mode so up here, you should be in edge mode. Then we're going to hold down Alt and click on this top edge of the bottom teeth so essentially the top of the bottom and then we're going to hold down Alt and Shift at the same time, and we're going to select the bottom of the top teeth. We're selecting essentially these two lines here that make up the gap between the teeth. Now we have both selected because we used Shift to hold down and select them. Now we can hit E and then X to extrude them only in the x-direction. We're going to extrude them all the way back to the back of the mouth. Just make sure you go past this interior cavity of the mouth. You don't have to go quite as far as that. We can pull it back to here. You just need to make sure that you clear this line here. It's now with those extruded back, we can hit Alt and Z to exit our X-ray mode, and then Tab to temporarily exit our edit mode. Now we have teeth, but they look weird, they're somewhat sharp edge here and there also the shading is a little odd as well. We're going to be fixing that, but before we do, we need to apply all of these changes that we made to the scale of this object. Now that we're back in object mode, we're no longer in edit, we can hit control and A, and that'll bring up our Apply menu. In this case, we want to apply the scale of this because we change the scale from the original object, so if I just hit N here to bring up my side menu. Now I have my side menu up, you can see the actual scale of this object. It's been scaled down, so it's set to 0.67, and 0.5 for each of these different values. If I do anything further that's going to take into account that scale, it's actually going to scale that operation down as well because it's using these as the basis for that. Before we start beveling the front of these teeth and making them round, we need to apply the scale so that set all back to one. To do this again, we're going to hit Control A with the teeth selected. Then we're going to apply the scale and we'll see right away soon as we apply the scale, it's all set to one now. Now if we switch back into our edit mode, hitting Tab, and then switch to our edge mode by hitting 2. We can now start beveling the front of these teeth and making them nice and round so that the shading everything looks more correct and it's a little bit more appealing. Let's click off the model to de-select anything. Then we can hold down Alt and click the bottom here of the top teeth, like what we did before. We're essentially selecting the edges that make up the gap. Then we're going to hold down Shift and Alt at the same time, and then click the bottom of the top teeth. If both of these edges selected. We can hit "Control and B" to start beveling, and then as we move this we notice that our bevel here is nice and even it looks like it's basically cutting it off at a 45-degree angle. Had we not applied our scale it actually would have squished this down, so rather than being a nice perfectly cut bevel on the edges of these teeth. It would have actually squished it down and it would have been a little bit off-kilter and it would have changed the look of what we're doing here. It was important that we applied our scale before we started beveling, so that the bevel is using the nice one, one, and one for all the scale values to create the bevel width. As you're beveling you can actually scroll up on your mouse; mouse wheel rather, and it'll add more cuts here to round these out. We're going to add a little bit more cuts. In this case it looks like about five segments, and then we can choose how round the front of these teeth are. We'll set it to around here. We're going for a pretty cartoony look, so we'll give them pretty nice rounded teeth at the front. Again, my value is here about 0.035 and then five segments. I can now hit "Tab" to exit our edit mode and we have nice rounded teeth. Adding the bevel to the edges of the teeth also got rid of that dark shading we were getting along the top as well. If we look at our animation here; our bumblebee, which will eventually be in the animation from the general angle that will be taking our animation from these teeth look pretty convincing. Now that we're done with the teeth, the last part we're making for this lesson is the stinger for our bumblebee. Let's start by hitting "Shift and A", let's bring up our Add menu. We're going to go to Mesh, and then we'll go up here to Cone. Let's choose our cone shape, and then we are going to change some of the settings here. In the main one what we're going to switch is the Radius 2 it. It's set to zero which means the top of the cone is a perfect point when it comes to a sharp edge at the top. It'll actually make it a little bit easier for us if this came to a flat point at the end, so we're going to set this to 0.2 meters. We'll give it the top of the cone a flattened shape, but that'll be a lot easier for us to round this off and make it a little bit more cartoony. Just make sure your values here are set to 32 for vertices, one for the radius. Our radius 1 with one meter, radius 2 with 0.2 meters, and then the depth we can just leave that at two. Let's go over here to our list and rename this stinger. Double-click on the word Cone, and then we'll type in Stinger and then hit "Enter". We can right-click and then choose "Shade Smooth", so it smoothed this out. Again, this looks [inaudible] now but we'll be fixing that once we edit the shape. The first thing we wan to do is rotate this one its side so that the point at the narrower end is facing this direction. We want to essentially rotate it over 90 degrees, and there's a quick way to do this, so we can just hit "R" and then "Y" to bind it to the y-direction, and then we can just type in the number we want. Rather than trying to tie it up or hold down Control to snap it we can just type in 90, and now we've rotated it at exactly 90 degrees and that works with any value type in here. If I typed in 180, it would rotate it 180. In my case, I'm just going to type in 90 and then hit "Enter". Again, it's R, then y, and then type in the value 90. Let's move this up in the z-axis, so the blue up arrow. We're just going to move it up pretty much in the middle, and then when once we let it go we can actually type in the value and we're going type in two meters because we know that's exactly in the middle of where our body is and we want the stinger to also be directly in the middle for the back-end of the bumblebee. Now we can slide it back. We're going to slide it back to the back of the bumblebee here, roughly there, and then we can just start scaling this down hitting "S" on the keyboard. We hit "S". We're going to scale it down to approximately the size that the stinger would be on a cartoon bumblebee of this size. This doesn't need to be exact. If your one here is a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, that doesn't matter. The only important thing here is that it is intersecting with this. We wanted to make sure it looks like it's popping out of this and not just paste it on the edge, so just intersect it just a little bit here like we have it. Let's hit "Tab". Turn to our edit mode, and then we're going to hit "1" to go into our vertex mode, and then "Alt and Z" to go into our x-ray mode so that we can just simply click and drag over the end here and select everything through the model. We have all of these vertex here on the very end selected. We're just going to pull this out a little bit to make the cone a little bit more sharp, a little bit more pointy. We'll pull it out to about here. If you want to see roughly how big one is from this distance, the stinger is about that long. Again, this is purely personal preference. If you'd rather have a shorter stinger or a longer one, that's fine. We can hit "3" on our keyboard to go into our face mode and we're going to turn around here. On the inside we're going to select this face on the very end of the stinger, the one that's currently hidden inside the body, and we're just going to delete that. We can hit "Delete" or "X" and then choose delete faces. Let's switch back to our edge mode. We'll hit "2" to switch to edge, and then we're going to hit "Alt and Z" to exit our x-ray mode because it's actually makes this a little bit easier to see if we're not in x-ray. We now zoom in down here to the point of your stinger. We have it in view, we can hold down "Alt" and then we're going to click this edge that goes around this flat part of the stinger. We'll hold down "Alt" and then click right on this edge here, and it'll select the entire loop all the way around. We can hit "Control and B" to begin beveling this. We're going to start beveling this and we'll try to round it out. As you move the mouse further away from the stinger, so wherever you started you have to move your mouse outward. We can start moving it until this. We don't want to totally overlap this because then again you get some weird shading, so just stop, just shy. It's okay that it has a little bit of a flat point at the end. We can use our mouse wheel here to determine how round this point is, so as we scroll our mouse wheel up it'll add more cuts. We don't need a ton of cuts here because this is a pretty small detail on the back, but roughly five or so cuts should be fine. I'm going to move mine to about here and then click to confirm the change. If I zoom out we can see we have a stinger here, but it has a cartoony pointed end. We can now hit "Tab" to exit our edit mode and we can zoom out, and now we have our stinger done. With the stinger completed, the only thing left to do is organize our file quickly. We're going to start by drag selecting over all three parts of our bumblebee body right now. We can just click and drag over all three parts. You'll see that it highlights all three. If by accident you select too large and you get your light in here, you can see that I have my light selected here. You can just hold Control down and then drag select over an object and it will deselect it, so now it's no longer part of the selection. I have just my stinger, my teeth, and my body selected. I'm going to hit "M" on my keyboard for move to collection, and I want to choose "New Collection". Then once I choose "New Collection" it asked me what name I would like for this collection, and I'm going to type in bumblebee because all the pieces that are going into this new collection are bumblebee parts. What that typed in, I can hit "Okay". I can see right away over here that it's moved all three of these objects into the bumblebee collection, and it's moved them out of the default collection. With them moved I want to click on this little tiny white folder box next to the word Bumblebee, and that will place a little tiny highlight around it. It's very subtle. Hopefully you can see it on your screen a little bit better than the video. That just lets you know that, that is the default collection, which means any new object that you create is going to by default go directly into that collection. It's just a way to not have to create something and then move it into that collection. You can just determine which one is the default, and then any brand new object will just be generated directly into that collection. You might be thinking, what exactly is a collection? A collection essentially is just like a folder, so it's similar to your computer. If you make a folder and then you drag files into it, then that collection holds all those files inside of it, and just is an easy way to organize things, we can rename these collections, we can move them around, we can take objects in and out of the collection. They're just a way to keep your file a little bit more organized and not quite so cluttered. We can also rename this original collection. If we just double-click on the word Collection here at the top, let's rename this Camera and Lights and then hit "Enter". That just lets us know that the only thing that's in this collection or that should be in that collection are the camera and the lights, and then anything that's inside this collection should be related to the bumblebee in some way. After renaming a collection it is going to make that your default, so just make sure you click back on the Bumblebee collection again to give it that little tiny faint highlight around it to let you know that that is now the default collection. With that done and all of these models made, don't forget to save your file. Again, you can just go up here and choose "Save" or you can hit" Control S" to save the file. When we click this, it will now save our file and it will let us know at the bottom that it's been saved. You want to get into the habit of saving your file pretty frequently. Just in case something goes wrong, your computer turns off, your cat yanks the plug out of the wall, the file crashes. Whatever happens as long as you're saving frequently, you won't have to worry about having to redo a bunch of work. In the next lesson, we'll be finishing modeling our bumblebee by modeling the eyes, the legs, and the wings. I'll see you there. 7. Modeling the Eyes: In this lesson, we'll be modeling the eyes for our bumblebee. Let's begin. We hit "Shift" and "A", and then go to Mesh. Then we want to make a UV sphere, which is up here at the top. We'll click "UV sphere", and we shouldn't really need to change any of these settings here because we're just going to scale it down and rotate it later. But by default it should be set to 32 segments, 16 rings, and then one meter for the radius. I would switch to these settings here if it's not already, but otherwise we can just leave them as default. Now, let's go over here to our list. We're going to double-click on the word that says "Sphere" and we're going to type in eyes, then hit "Enter". In this case, we're not actually going to set this to shade smooth right away, we're going to leave this with the shade flat as it is. If you already did do shade smooth, you can switch it back to shade flat by just right-clicking, and then choosing shade flat, and that'll set it back to the default. I'll make it a little bit easier for us to rotate and scale this by being able to see the individual faces we're essentially seeing the wireframe this way. Let's start by rotating this eye. We're going to do it the quick way like I mentioned before. We will hit "R", then we're going to hit "Y", then we'll type in 90 and hit "Enter". Now we've rotated at 90 degrees, and we can tell it's been rotated here because this almost looks like essentially the pupil of this eye has been rotated over on its side Now. Now let's move this up to roughly where the eyes would be on this head. That's a little bit hard to tell because it's scaled up so large, so now let's scale it down. We're just going to hit "S", scale it down. We'll scale it roughly here. If we look down here at the sizes here, it's roughly 0.4. If you want to make yours is exactly like mine, I'll change mine to 0.4, so I'll just type in 0.4 and then hit "Enter". Just to explain how I was able to change all three of these values at once, if you click and hold, and you have to do this quickly so it's a little bit hard to explain slowly. But if you click and hold on the top value here and then quickly drag down to the bottom and then let go, it'll highlight all three of those values and then you can type in a number and it will change all three. If I just click and hold, drag down, it'll highlight all three of them and then if I just type in whatever number I want here, say 0.4, it'll switch all of them to 0.4. The eye is the right size, however, right now is a cyclops, which maybe is what you want, but in our case, we're going to move this off to the side. We're going to move it over here so that the front side here, essentially the camera front side of our B is where we'll work on first. We'll place it roughly where the eye would be, right about there. Now we need to scale this and we're going to flatten this out a little bit. We're going to scale it just in the x direction. We're going to squish it front to back here. I'm going to hit "S", and then I'll hit "X" to make sure it's only moving it in the x direction or scaling it in the x-direction. I'm going to scale it down roughly about 0.5, so about half the size. Then again, I can just type it in here. Now in this case, I don't want to adjust these values, I only want to scale the x value. I'm going to type in 0.5. Now, it's been squished about half the width that it used to be, just in the x direction. We have the eye about the size that it needs to be and it's roughly the placement that it needs to be, but the rotation is off. It's poking outside the head. It's not really following the curve of the body. Now luckily, there's a pretty easy way for us to get it to follow this exact curve. We're going to use a tool called snapping. First we need to turn snapping on. We'll just click this little tiny U-shaped magnet here. When we click it on we can see it turns on the magnet essentially, and then we can click this little drop-down here next to it, which will give us the options for it. We want to choose it or switch it to face project. It's essentially it's going to be snapping to the faces of another object, so we'll choose face and then we're going to choose center because we want the object that is being snapped to the model to snap to its center rather than the closest matching face. Essentially it's going to snap our eye like halfway into the body because the center of our eye is in the middle of that volume. We'll choose center for the snap width. Then we also, this is probably the most important part, we want it to align the rotation to the target. In this case, it's going to align the rotation of the eyeball to the rotation of the face that we're snapping it to on the body. So we'll check that box as well. With all three of these settings changed, we can now go back to our model. With your eyeball selected, now you need to hit "G" in this case. We're just going to hit "G" for grab. It's like the quick keyboard for the move tool. We'll hit "G" and then we can see now as we move the eyeball around, it's actually snapping to the surface of the body. It follows that rotation or at least pretty closely matches it a lot closer than we would've been able to just eyeing it up. We're going to place it roughly back where we had it, about where the eye should be on this face. Somewhere around there. I'm not going to give you the exact measurements here because this is really personal preference or just eyeing it up. No pun intended. Now we have the eye. It seems to be roughly rotated about matching the body. It doesn't need to be perfect. I can tell it's not quite perfect here, because this line here, this dark line we're seeing is a little bit wider at the top and then it thins out and it disappears because it's rotated down into the body. That's really not a huge issue. I'm just going to leave mine as is. Now that our eye is rotated into place and we have it placed exactly where we want, at least for this eyeball here, we can go up here and turn off our snapping. We don't want it snapping anymore now that we've done all this snapping that we need to do. Now we'll notice that our eyes in place, but it's still bugging out of the body here. We want our eyeball to basically be pushed in all the way up to the mid point. It only rounds out of the body, but there's no inward turn as it gets towards it. The easiest way for us to do that is to just push it into the body. But will notice right now that our gizmo doesn't really make sense for just pushing it directly into the body. We can either push it back and then over or down, but it doesn't really line up with the way that the eye is currently rotated. That's because of the transform orientation we're currently using. Right now we have it set to global, which means it's just looking at basically what this little gizmo up here is showing us. Z is up, y is this way, x is that way. Nothing that we do to the model will change that. However, if we go up here, click this drop-down and we choose Local, we'll see right away it's now rotated. Now it matches the actual rotation of this eye. The easiest way for us to push this back into the body is to make it round into the body rather than jut out of it, let's just select this little blue handle here, and we're just going to push it back into the body. Like I said, it doesn't have that kind of turning back into the body look where you have the little cavity underneath it. Okay, so Now we have our eye pushed back in, it looks better. That's because we're using this local movement. It just looks at the rotation of the object and then rotates the gizmo based on the rotation of the object. Okay, now we can switch it back to global because in most cases you want to be working in global. But there are some situations where the local is very, very useful, and it saves you a lot of time. We're going to go back up here where it says local, and we're going to switch it back to global. Now that the eyeball is placed and pushed back into the body, we can right-click and then choose "Shade Smooth". Now let's add a couple of little details to this eyeball, which we're going to kind of add sort of 3D highlights to this eye. So we're going to give it little spots here on the surface of the eye up in the corner and make it look a little bit more buggy and also shiny, and it just adds a little bit of detail, so these aren't just like big black eyes on this. It just makes them look a little bit more cartoony. The easiest way to do this is actually going back up to our snapping tool. We're going to turn snapping back on. Now, with our eye selected, we can hit "Shift" and "D" to start making a duplicate. And because we have snapping on, it's going to immediately start making that duplicates snapped to whatever surface we're hovering over. So let's start by snapping it right up to the top corner of this eye. It's a little bit hard to tell exactly where it's at. But just take your best guess and just place it right here. Once we click, then it will actually place that duplicate. Now let's scale this down, so we can hit "S" to scale it down. I'm going to make it a bit smaller. We'll make it this first highlight, probably the largest one, so we'll put it somewhere around that size. Now, let's hit "Shift D" again with this highlight selected, so "Shift D". I'm going to place another one a little bit smaller down here. First, we need to choose the position. We're going to choose right about here. Now we can hit "S" to scale this one down. And then if it seems like there's a little bit too much gap here, we can just hit "G" to move this again, so it'll just keep snapping it and then move it a little bit closer. Now let's hit "Shift D" one more time. We're going to place a duplicate right here, so in the sort of top corner here. And then we're going to scale this one down even smaller than the other ones, so right about that size. And then we can hit "G" and nestle it in here between the gap of these two, so right about there. Again, we have a similar issue to what we did with the eyeball. They poke out and then turn back in, so we want to fix that. And the way to fix that, again, is to go up here, switch it to local. Then we're just going to select each one of these. And we want to do this individually because each one is going to need a little bit of a different movement backwards. We're just going to move this back so that it just barely pokes out the surface here. We'll select this one, push it back, and then select the larger one, and push that back. Okay. Now we can switch back to global again. Go up here and then choose Global. Now, we have the three little highlights, sort of affixed to the top corner of this eye here. We can see how it gives it a little bit more of a buggy kind of compound eye. Hopefully, it's not too creepy. It's kind of a cute version of that. We're also going to be later on making these look like highlights on the eyes, so these will be a different color than the eye, to make it look like the eyes is a little bit shiny. Now let's turn off our snapping again. We won't need that. We just click this little tiny magnet up here to turn off the snapping. Now let's combine all these little pieces of the eye that we made into one, essentially eye mesh. Start by just clicking off of your model to make sure you don't have anything selected. Then hold down, "Shift" on your keyboard. We're going to click each one of these highlights. So we select all three of these highlights first, and then, select the eyeball last. We want to make sure we select the eyeball last because when we collapse these together into a single object, whatever the last object you selected, it's going to use the pivot point of that object for the combined object. Now we can hit "Control J" to join them together. We'll see here now that it's just a single object. If we look at our list, it just says Eyes, and it has these highlights here attached to the main eyeball object. And it's used the pivot point of the eyeball for this connected group because we selected it last. With our eye collapsed down into one object, now let's mirror it over to the other side of the body so that our bumblebee has two eyes. We'll be doing that with a modifier called Mirror. So first switch to your Modifier tab, the little blue wrench icon, and make sure you have your eyeball selected. Then go to Add Modifier. We're going to go down here to Mirror. And it kind of looks like a little butterfly, maybe next to it. We'll choose Mirror. We'll see right away, it just mirrors it on top of itself, which isn't what we want. We're going to first need to switch it to the axis, which is Y, because we want it to mirror it on the Y-axis, not the X-axis. Switch is, Y and we need to uncheck the X-axis because you can actually have it mirror on multiple axes. Now we want to choose the object that it's mirroring across. In this case, we can go to our mirror object, we're going to click this little eyedropper here which allows us to pick an object in the scene. We're going to choose our body. It's going to use the body as the mirror pivot or the mirror origin for these eyes. The center of the body, it will mirror it all across directly to the mirrored position on the other side of the body. Okay, so now we have two eyes, and then the last thing we want to do, we can just uncheck this merge down here. If these were touching, it would merge them together, and it will try to weld the vertices. They aren't touching, so it really doesn't matter, but it won't hurt to uncheck that. With our Mirror modifier set up, we now have two eyes for our bumblebee. It's not just rocking one eye on one side. In the next lesson, we'll be modeling the legs and the wings for our bumblebee. I'll see you there. 8. Modeling the Legs and Wings: In this lesson, we'll be modeling the legs and the wings for a bumblebee. Let's begin. Now, let's move on to making the legs for the bumblebee. We'll start by hitting Shift and A. Let's bring up the Add menu and then we'll go to Mesh. We're going to choose an Ico Sphere which is essentially a sphere made up of a bunch of little triangles. We'll choose Ico Sphere. Then we get our settings here on the left. We can leave the radius set to one. However, we do want to increase the subdivisions, which just makes more triangles, thus making the sphere a little bit smoother. We're going to set this to four. We get a relatively smooth sphere and it's made up of a bunch more triangles so it'll be easier to shape. With it set of four and one over here on the left, we can go to the right in the list here, and we can double-click on Ico Sphere. We're going to call this Legs and then hit Enter. Now we can right-click and then choose Shade Smooth to make sure that the legs become much more smooth once we shape them. Let's start by scaling this sphere down so that it's more appropriate for the size of the leg on a bumblebee of this scale. We're going to hit S. Then we can actually just type in 0.1 and then hit Enter. It's going to make it down to a 10th of the size that it was before. We can see over here, 0.1. Now, let's begin editing the shape of this. We're going to hit Tab to enter edit mode, then one, to enter our vertex mode, Alt and Z to enter our X-ray mode. Then now let's go into our front view. We can either click this little -Y bubble up here, or we can hit Tilda and then choose our front view. Now, let's zoom in down here on the leg. We're going to be using something called proportional editing to make the movements of these vertices a little bit more organic and we would have already explained this in the crash course at the beginning of this class. But essentially it's just going to allow us to move a single vertice and move every other vertices near it based on a fall-off amount. Just allows you to move something around as if it's made of clay, rather than pulling a single individual vertice. Let's start by enabling this. We can click this little tiny bulls-eye icon up here. We're going to turn that blue so that we know proportional editing is turned on. Now, let's zoom in and we're going to select the very top vertice here of the sphere, so very top one there. Then we're going to hold Shift and then select the very bottom one here, so the very top and the very bottom. Let's zoom out a little bit because we're going to be scaling this up and making it more oblong. First, we'll start by hitting S and then Z to make sure we're only scaling it in the Z-direction. Now, it seems like it's scaling correctly. However, that's because our fall-off is huge. Right now it's scaling the entire object rather than just the ends of it, so we need to scroll up on our mouse wheel to make this fall-off much smaller. As we make this fall-off smaller, you can see that it's moving less and less vertices. You want to scale it so that it's moving most of the leg. I would say, you can actually see the proportional size up the top there. We'll set it to 0.26 or around 0.26, so up at the top left here. Now, disregard what the sphere is doing. It's going to go crazy as I move this. But up here at the top left where it says 0.26, you want yours roughly that size. It might not be exactly 0.26, but just in that general area. Now we're going to scale this up. We're going to start scaling it. Then we can just scale it to an arbitrary amount. Then we're just going to click. Then down here, it might actually turn inside out because my mouse moved off the side of the screen. But we're going to type in five for the Z. We wanted to scale it up roughly five times the height here. We're making this long teardrop shape. Once you have your Z set to five and it's scaled up to roughly this shape here, we should be good. We can now go up here and turn off proportional editing. We won't need it right away, so we have that turned off. Now we're going to just select the bottom half of this leg shape. We'll drag select over the bottom half here, selecting all of these vertices on the bottom. Then we're going to hit R to start rotating. We're going to hold down Control to start snapping that rotation to five-degree increments. We want to rotate this about 30, maybe 35 degrees. We'll start with 35 degrees. For the top-left corner, you can see where it says rotation -35. I'm going to rotate mine in this direction so -35 degrees. Now we can slide this over using the move tool and make the leg look a little bit more natural so it's not quite such a harsh break there in the middle. Now that we have the bottom half placed, we're going to do a similar process to what we did on the body earlier on. We're going to hit A to select all of these vertices. Then right-click. Then we're going to choose Smooth Vertices. We'll turn the smoothing all the way up to one and then we can adjust the repeats to make the leg look as smooth as we'd like it to. I'm just going to turn mine up until it starts to look like a round pudgy bee leg [LAUGHTER] if you can imagine that in your mind. I think right here looks good. If I set my smoothing to one, and then my repeat to five, that looks pretty good for the shape for me. Now that we're done with that, we can hit Tab to exit our edit mode, and then Alt and Z to exit our X-ray mode. Now, let's move our leg up to roughly where it should be on the body. We're going to put our first leg around here. We're going eventually going to have three going back and then there'll be another three on the other side, so it'll be a total of six. But our first leg we'll put about here in terms of the distance from the front to back. Now, let's rotate our viewport and we're going to move this leg all the way over here to the side. We want it to intersect a little bit at the top. But before we do that, we also want to rotate it a little bit so we can tuck the leg up underneath the body. Right now, the leg just hang straight down. Well, first actually, we need to go into our rotate tool. This makes this a little bit easier. I'm going to switch to my rotate tool and then I'm going to grab just this red loop here and that'll move it just on this X rotation. I'm going to rotate it by holding Control down so it continues to snap it. I'm going to rotate mine about 10 degrees. Ten degrees so that the bottom of the leg is rotated a little bit further underneath the body. Now I can go back to my move tool. I'm going to slide this in the y-direction, sliding it into the body so that it intersects just a little bit. We wanted it to have a little bit of connection here and then have a little bit of a round pop out at the top, the shoulder of the bee, if you want to think of it that way. That looks pretty good to me. Now I'm going to go back into my front view by either clicking negative y bubble at the top or tilde front. Then I'm going to hit "Shift and D" to start making another duplicate. I'm going to hit "X" to make sure it only moves on the x-direction. I'm going to move that somewhere around the mid point of the body. We can use that little blue line, that's the middle of the world. We're going to set it right around there. Then we're going to do that one more time. Shift and D to make a duplicate. Hit "X" to make sure it only moves in the x-direction. We're going to try to make it about the same distance between each of these legs. But before we settle on an exact position, we want to scale this leg up a little bit. Because a lot actual bees, their back legs are a little bit longer and a little bit larger than their front too. We're just going to scale this up slightly. I'm going to scale this up around here. About 30 percent larger, it looks like. I'm just going to type in 1.3. Hit "Enter." It's about 30 percent bigger than the front two. Now that I've done that, I can pull it down. It's about the same height as the other legs. Also going to pull it back a little bit more, and I think I'm going to rotate this leg, so it doesn't hang quite so far down. I can just hit "R" not hold down Control so it snaps a little bit. It's a little bit easier to get an exact measurement. I'm going to rotate it about negative 20. Then again, I'm just going to pull this back so it's mounted about the same spot. Now we have a slightly larger leg and it's rotated a little bit more of an extreme angle. Then I'm going to rotate my viewport here, so that I can see a little bit better. Then just make sure all of these legs are contacting the body about as much as the other ones were. I'll slide it in. About half of this point at the top is inside the body. It looks pretty good. All the legs are intersecting the body. There are about evenly spaced and they're placed where I'd like them. Now let's begin attaching all of these legs together into one leg object, and then we're going to mirror them just like we did the eyes. With our back leg selected we're going to click this and then hold shift and click the other two legs. Now we have all three legs selected. I can now hit "Control and J" to combine them together. In this case, it doesn't really matter that it shows the front leg. We're going to eventually be attaching all these together into one leg object. This is fine for now. All the legs are attached. Now we can again add another mirror modifier. We go to our Modifier Tab with our legs selected. Go over here to add modifier mirror. We're going to switch it to y for the axis and then uncheck x. Then we can choose the mirror object as the body. You could see right away it pops it right over to the other side of the body. Then we can uncheck Merge. Now we have legs that are perfectly intersecting on both sides, and they're also placed the exact same spot. Before we move on to the last part of the bee, the wings. Let's clean up the body pieces and get them all attached together. First with your legs selected, we can go over to the modifier panel. We can click this little drop-down here. We can choose "Apply." When we choose "Apply", we can see the modifier disappears. However, the legs are still mirrored. That means we've collapsed all these changes down directly into the model itself. We can do that with each of these pieces here. We can collapse and the mayor modifier for the eyes, and then the subdivision surface for the body. However, there is a slightly easier way to do this with multiple objects. If we just drag select over all the pieces of our bee. We have all of them selected. Make sure you don't have anything else selected. I don't have my light or my cameras selected by accident. We can go up here to object. Let me go down to convert. We can convert them all into mesh. When we click this, the model here doesn't change. Nothing looks any different. But now if we select the eyes, they no longer have the mirror modifier. By using the convert method, we don't have to go through each individual object and apply each of the different modifiers. Now, in our case, that wouldn't have been that much more tedious to do that. But if you had a lot of objects, or you had a lot of different modifiers. Then it can get pretty tedious having to apply all of them one in the right order, and to just having to apply multiple modifiers per object. Just by selecting everything and then going up to object convert mesh. We boil all that down into one single button press and it'll just collapse everything for every model we have selected. The reason that was important is because as we're about to connect all of these together into one solid object, just called bumblebee. We want to make sure that it's not duplicating all of these different mirror modifiers and subdivisions and anything else that we had applied. If we didn't apply them first and then we connected the models, each model would take on the different modifiers that the other models have, which might potentially cause a crash if it's too many of them. But at the end of the day it's probably going to mess up the model as well. We want to make sure we apply all those different modifiers to just get it right back down to just regular models and then we can attach them. Let's start by de-selecting everything. Make sure we don't have anything selected. Now we can just start selecting individual pieces of the model, but we want to select the body last. Maybe let's go with the stinger first. We'll select stinger and we can hold down Shift, we'll select the legs. With holding down shift we can select the teeth and then the eyes. Then lastly, we'll select the body. Now we can hit "Control and J" to bind all that stuff together into one single mesh. Now it's called body because that was what the original object was called, the thing we selected last. We're just going to rename it from body to bumblebee. Because in reality now it's more than just the body. It's the entire bumblebee. Now we're ready to make the last piece of the bumblebee, which is the wings. We're going to hit "Shift and A" to create an ecosphere again. Shift A mesh and then ecosphere. Then we're going to set the radius a little bit smaller this time. We can leave it at four subdivisions, but we're going to set the radius to 0.65 and then hit "Enter." It's a little bit more of the right size for the size of the wing that we're going to create. We can go up here to our list. We can rename it wings. Then we can right-click, and then choose Shade Smooth. Now let's move this above the B. We're just moving it just in the z-direction, so just the blue handle here. Move it up above the B, doesn't need to contact the right now. We'll place it later. Then we're going to start by scaling it just on the y-direction. We're going to flatten it out really thin, almost like a disk or a pancake or something. We'll start by hitting "S", then "Y" We're going to type in 0.08, and then hit "Enter." Again, right down here, it'll pop up the option box regardless of what you type in. We want to set the y scale to 0.08, and then hit "Enter." Now let's begin shaping the actual wing. Start with, we're going to hit "Tab", to enter our Edit mode, then "1" to make sure that we're in our Vertex mode, then "Alt Z" to make sure that we can select through the model with our X-ray mode. Then we're going to turn on proportional editing up here at the top, by clicking this little bullseye, and turning it blue. Now let's go into our side view here. We're not actually going to the front. We're going to go into a view that's more like this direction. We can easily just do that by choosing the -x bubble up here, which is also equivalent to the left view. The edge tilder, and then choose left. That's the same view. Now let's zoom in down here to the very bottom, this wing. We want to select this very bottom verticy. Just these vertices down here. What we're going to be doing is scaling this verticy. We're going to scale it just in the y-direction with the proportional editing turned on. We want to thin out the bottom of the wing. We want the top of the wing and the middle of the wing to be fat and thick up here. We want it to really thin out as it gets down to the bottom. We're going to hit "S," and then "Y" to begin scaling it just in the y-direction. Then we're going to turn up, so we're going to scroll down on our mouse wheel to make this proportional editing even bigger. Then we can probably go on this, basically, the entire length of the wing here. It's set to 1.33 up here at the top. Right up there, 1.33. We're just going to scale this down, and we want to thin this out. I'm going to scale it down to about here, which ended up being about, I will say, 0.35. If you type in for your y, 0.35, with your proportional editing turned on roughly as big as mine, it'll thin the bottom of this wing out, and then it tapers and turns into a teardrop shape at the top. Now let's go into our front view, so we can see the wing a little bit better. We can just click this little -y bubble. Then we're going to start shaping this. We're going to start by selecting the top vertex here. We're just going to select this one here. We're going to pull it up a little bit, so we're going to make it a little bit longer. I'm going to scale this down just a little bit, so I'm going to scale down my proportional editing to fall off for that. We want to shape something around here. It's again, another teardrop shape, almost like an egg in this case. Now, with just this vertex still selected at the top, we're going to hit "S" and then "X" to make sure it's only scaling in the x direction. I'm going to scale this up a little bit. The proportional editing, and making it a little bit larger. I want to scale this out, so it's flat at the top, giving it two distinct corners of the wing at the top. Let's scale it up to about here. We squared off the top of that egg shape. Now we're going to go down here to the bottom. We're going to click off the model to make sure we don't have anything selected. Now, we're going to select just the bottom-most verticy. We can zoom out. We're going to scale this down a little bit by hitting "S" and then "X" to make sure it's only going in the x direction. We're going to taper this down almost into , at this point, it's an upside-down egg or maybe a guitar pick if you're familiar with that shape. About there. Now it's smaller at the bottom, and then wider and a little bit more square here at the top. Let's turn off proportional editing. We won't need that anymore. Then we can hit "Tab" to exit our Edit mode, and then "Alt Z" to exit are X-ray mode. Then I'll rotate around here in our viewport, so we can see a little bit better. Now let's rotate this wing perfectly flat. We're going to hit "R" then "X", and then "90", so 9, 0 hit "Enter". That will rotate the wing nice and flat. Then we can move it down here, and we want to intersect it on the body just a little bit. I'm using this little red square here to move it in both the y and the z. I was able to quickly move it down there. Now, I just want to position it here, so just a little bit of this wing is intersecting the body. You can actually move it up a little bit on the body as well. Yours doesn't need to be exactly where mine is at, but it's basically, at the height of the top of the eyes, and then I just moved it in until it started intersecting with the body slightly. Now let's move this pivot point, which is currently in the middle of the wing, all the way to where actually the wing would hinge on the body. There's an easy way to do this. We're going to go up here to where it says Options, twirl that down by clicking on it. We're going to turn on Origins, which means we can now move the origins of objects, and not the objects themselves. That checked one, we can use the little green handle here, and we're going to move it right to the edge of the wing. Basically, right where it starts intersecting, I'm going to move mine right to about there, just a little bit inside of that. Just on the inside of this orange line. With that placed, make sure you're only moving that on the y-direction as well because we just want to slide it right along where it was all the way to the end, so little green handle. Once you have it placed, we can go up here to Options, and then uncheck origins. Now let's zoom out, and make sure that it's still in the right spot. It's still right in the middle of the wing, it's just at the end now. Just be doubly sure that you've turned off the origins, because you don't want to be moving around the pivots of objects, not actually moving them. Just make sure that's turned off. Now we can apply our mirror modifier to add the second wing on the other side. With the wings selected, we go to our Modifier tab, the little blue wrench icon. Go over here to Add Modifier, choose mirror, set it to just the y. Click "Y", uncheck x, click the little eyedropper, click our bumblebee, so the mirror is directly across the bumblebee. Then we can uncheck Merge as well. We'll be leaving this mirror modifier applied to our wings as it is now. We won't be collapsing it in using the Apply setting here. We'll just be leaving it as is, because it'll allow us, later on, to animate just one of the wings, and it'll mirror those exact same motions over here to the other side. It's actually going to be pretty useful to us later on, so just leave it as it is. With the wings created, our bumblebee model is complete. In the next lesson, we'll be modeling the environment for our animation. I'll see you there. 9. Modeling the Background and Grass: In this lesson, we'll be starting our environment by modeling the background playing in the grass. Let's begin. We'll start by creating a simple curved backdrop for our animation. To start, we're going to hit Shift and A to bring up the Add menu, and go to Mesh and choose plane. Over here, in our option box, we want to change the size of this plane. We're going to set it to 40 meters, so 40 meters, and then hit Enter. We need to make the plane 40 meters wide for this animation. We'll see why in a later lesson. After you have your plane made, and set to 40 meters, we can go over here. We're going to double-click on the word plane, and name this Background. Background, and then hit Enter. With our plane selected, we can hit M on our keyboard for a move to collection, and we'll choose new collection. Then we're going to name this Background as well. Background and then hit Okay. Over here on our list we can see it has moved the background plane to the background collection, and we also want to click this little white folder here next to the background collection to make sure any new objects we create go right into here. Now let's select our plane again, and we can zoom out so we can see the whole thing. Then we can hit Tab to enter edit mode, and then 2 to enter our edge mode. Then we're going to be extruding up this back wall. The wall we want to select, in this case the edge we want to select is the side on the Y side here. It's this edge on the backside of the bee. Our animation is going to be taken from this view, so we need to extend this wall up so that it has a full background. Make sure you're selecting the edge on the Y side. Then with that selected we can hit E to start extruding, and then we want to hit Z to make sure it only extrudes it upward in the Z-axis. We can just extrude this up pretty tall it doesn't really matter as long as it's out of our camera view eventually, it'll be fine. I'm going to extrude mine up to here. If you want to follow along it was roughly 28.5 meters, but basically anywhere up in this direction roughly this tall is fine. Now, let's select this little corner we made here at the bottom where the wall was extruded up. We're going to select this edge, hit Control and B for bevel. Now let's begin beveling this out. I'm going to bevel mine to about here. We want to make sure it doesn't go so far that it starts going up underneath the bee. We need to make sure we leave some room here for the grass blades that we're going to be adding. In my case, once we've picked a general arbitrary measurement here we can go through here and start changing them exactly. Let's make this a nice 10. We're going to set the width to 10. Then our segments we'll set this to 10 as well. Ten for the width and then 10 for the segments. Now we can hit Tab to exit our edit mode, and then we're going to right-click and choose Shade Smooth. Now we have a nice smooth backdrop. Now let's move on to making the grass for our scene. Because the focal point of our animation is a bumblebee, we'll be making our grass pretty large so that it gets context to the actual size of our bumblebee. This will also further add to the cartoony look of our scene. Let's start by creating another plane. We're going to hit Shift and A, go to Mesh and then choose plane. Now, we won't need it to be 40 meters wide this time, so we're going to make it a lot smaller. We're going to set this to 0.75, and then hit Enter. We have a 0.75 meter wide plane. Now go over to your collection list. We're going to double-click on the word plane and name this grass and then hit Enter. Now we can zoom in here on our plane. We're going to start by rotating this on the X-axis. First we'll hit R to start rotating and now X to bind it to the X-axis, and then we'll type in 90, so 9, 0 and then hit Enter. Now, let's move it out in front of our bee here. On this side, the negative Y side. That way we're not modeling it directly inside the bee. Right about here is good. We'll be moving into a better location later we just need to make sure it's not intersecting with the bee for now. Let's zoom in. Then we're going to hit Tab to enter our Edit Mode, then 2 to enter our Edge Mode, which you may or may not already be in. It might be your default from the last selection we did. We can hit Alt and Z to enter our X-ray mode. Now we're going to hit A to select all the edges. Sorry, I know this is a lot of little steps in a row. You've now selected all edges by hitting A. Then we're going to lift these up so that the bottom side here is basically just below this orange dot. We're going to move all these edges up. Removing basically all the geometry without moving the pivot point and we want it just below this little orange dot. That way when we start scaling and rotating this, the dot is in the correct position which means it'll scale and rotate from this dot, which is basically touching the ground at this point. We'll move it about here. It's just below. It doesn't need to be perfect just make sure that the edge here is a little bit below the orange dot. Now, let's select our top edge. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, and then we're just going to pull this up and make it about as twice as tall as it was. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just roughly twice as tall as it used to be. Maybe a little bit more. Right about there. Now we're going to hit E and then Z to extrude it in the Z-axis. We're going to make this roughly as tall as the bottom segment. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect. Just visually about as tall. Then we're going to do this one more time. E to extrude and then Z to move it in the Z-axis, and then we'll move it up to about here. Now it's about three times taller than it was before. Now let's hit one to go into our vertex mode, and we want to select the top two vertices here. They may or not already be selected, but if they're not just drag select over the top two, and then we're going to hit M for Merge. Then we're going to choose at center. It's going to take both of those vertex and merge them at one central point turning it into one single vertex. It's just combining these two into one giving us a nice point for the grass blade. Now that we have a really simple base for our grass blade, let's start adding some modifiers to make it look a little bit more cartoony. We're going to start by adding a solidify modifier. We're going to make sure we're in our Modifier tab over here, the little blue wrench, choose Add Modifier, and then we're going to choose solidify. Down here. Now we have solidify. Essentially what solidify is doing is it's going to add thickness to an object that doesn't currently have thickness. In this case, our single plane, as we increase the thickness here, we're essentially giving this really thin one-sided polygon thickness now making it into almost as if we had started with a box. The values we're going to be using here for our thickness are 0.2. Hit Enter. Then we're going to leave our offset and negative one. The offset basically is just determining which side the thickness comes on to. We're just going to leave it at negative one so it goes towards the backside of it. With our solidify added, we can now add another modifier. We're going to be adding a subdivision surface modifier. We can add this. This is going to smooth out the model, but it's going to take into account the thickness that we added. Now it made it into this blobby shape. Let's increase the levels here so it's a little bit smoother than it is. We're going to set both of these to three. You can see it's much smoother now it's quite so fascinated. Now we can begin the shaping process and making this look a little bit more like a blade of grass and a little less almost like a surf board right now. To start with, let's make a cut down here at the bottom to make sure that this doesn't get so round at the bottom. Hover over the bottom segment here, and then hit Control and R to begin placing a cut. We will see this yellow line, and we can click to start placing it and now we can actually slide this down. This is a situation where being able to slide this edge is actually really useful. We can see as we slide it further down towards the bottom, it makes it more and more square. That's because we're giving it more and more geometry down here to determine the shape of it. We're not allowing it to crush this model quite as much. We're giving it a little bit more support down here by giving it more cuts. We're going to slide it down right near the bottom. We don't want to go all the way to the bottom because then you can see the model gets a little odd. We're going to stop right before the bottom, right about here. Just a little bit off the bottom so it's pretty square but still a little bit rounded on the edges. This cut placed, we're not going to select the bottom four vertices down here. Select across the entire bottom. Then we're going to scale this in just on the X-direction. We hit S and then X. We're just going to scale this in so that we taper the bottom of this grass, giving it a little bit more of a cartoony shape. We're going to scale it into about here. In this case, a little over half, so we'll say it's just 0.6 if you'd like an actual number for this. 0.6 in the X scale. Now let's go to the top. We're going to drag slipped over this singular point here, and we can see that while the point is all the way up here, the smoothing is actually crushing it all the way down to here. Our grass has gotten a lot shorter than it started out as. Let's fix that by just pulling this up, and we're just going to look at where it's smoothing it down to at this point we don't really care where the point is, only where the end result is at. Let's pull this up right about here. Now individually about the same as these segments, maybe a little bit taller. Right about there. Then if you think your grass blade still seems a little bit short, we can just drag select over top of a little bit more, and maybe we stretch these out a little bit further as well. I'm pretty happy with that height for the grass blade at this point. Now let's curve this grass blade so it's not just this straight stick. We're just going to go roughly to the side view here. Doesn't need to be actually the side view in this case. We're going to drag select over this very top vertices and then we're going to click on this little red square here and that'll allow us to move it at both in the Y as well as the Z. Our goal here is to bend this grass blade and we can see it bends pretty nicely because it's using this smoothing and it's averaging all of these vertices out. It's going to be naturally smooth either way. We're going to just push and pull these vertices here, moving them over to make this grass blades slightly curved. Maybe we'll push this one over just a tiny bit as well. If you want you can pull this down a little bit so it curves a little harsher at the top than it does at the bottom. That's really up to you. Just add a little bit of curve to it so it's not perfectly straight. Now if we spin around, I'd say this looks pretty good for a singular cartoony grass blade at this point. Now let's hit Tab to exit our edit mode, and then Alt and Z to exit our X-ray mode and then we can right-click and choose Shade Smooth so that our grass is nice and smooth. Now let's form the single grass blade into a small grouping so that's easy to fill our scene with. We're going to start by applying all of the modifiers we put on the grass blade. Each of these modifiers here needs to be collapsed into the model and we'll remember, we can either do it by clicking the little drop-down and then choosing Apply. We want to do them from the top to the bottom if we do it that way. You'd have to do Apply and then Apply. If we don't do them in that order, it will actually break the rounding and smoothing that we have because it really matters in terms of the order of the modifiers. If you apply one before the other one, then it's going to make the last modifier view the model differently. You want to apply them from top-down. We'll also remember from a previous lesson that if I want to Control Z to undo that, we can also, instead of just doing it Apply and then going from the top-down, which if we had 5, 6, 7 modifiers on here, that would be tedious. We can instead go up to Object, Convert, and then choose Mesh. That will also just apply all of them top-down for us automatically. At this point, everything is collapsed and now we can create a grouping with a single grass blade here. Let's go into our top, you just start doing that. We can either click the little z button here, the little z bubble, or we can hit Tilda and then choose our top view. Now we're going to be cloning this around into a triangular shape here. We're going to hit Shift and D to make a duplicate. We'll make one duplicate and then we're just going to hit Shift and D right away to make another one. Now we have both the duplicates that we need and then we're going to use our move tool to just move this around. Now we can rotate it. We're going to form this into a star or maybe a triangular shape. Some of this over here and then also rotate this one. This don't need to be perfect snapped rotations or anything. It's actually better if they're not exactly perfect. It'll make it look a little bit more organic if they're not mathematically perfect here. Give them a little bit of variation if you want. Now they're roughly into a triangular shape here, a little triangle here, or maybe a star shape. Now let's rotate our viewport again so we're back into the perspective view. Then we're going to select two of these grass blades and we're going to scale one of them up a little bit and then one of them down a little bit so we have a little bit of a variation in height. Right now they're all perfectly the same height. Let's scale this front one. We're going to select this and then just hit S and start scaling it down a little bit so it's a bit shorter than the others. Then maybe we'll select this left one here. We're going to scale this one up just a little bit. Now we can see here that they're all three just slightly different heights. It will give it a little bit more variation. Now we can drag select over these grass blades. We're going to select all three of them. It doesn't matter which one we select first or last in this case because we're going to have to center our origin anyway so we're going to select all three of them just by drag, selecting and then hit Control J to join them. Now they're a singular mesh over here we can see, Grass 001, and then we're going to go back into our top view. We're in top view again and then we're going to go up here to where it says Options and then choose Origins again. We're going to move this origin for the object right towards the center. Again, this doesn't need to be perfect. We just need it to be mostly centered between these. That way when we rotate this or scale this, it's scaling and rotating roughly from the center rather than all the way off to the one side. I'm pretty happy with that, and it looks relatively centered. We can go back up here to Options and then uncheck Origins. Now I can rotate my perspective view and everything looks nice and centered. At this point, we're ready to start duplicating this grass grouping around our scene to make a little path for our bumblebee to fly through. We're going to have grass on the left side and the right side. The grass on this side will be in front of the camera because our camera angle is going to be roughly from this direction eventually. Any grass we put here, we want to make sure it's a little bit thinner. There's not quite as much grass on this side. Then we can have a little bit taller and a little bit more dense grass behind it because it won't be obscuring the bumblebee. We'll be using Shift and D to make duplicates of our grass and cloning it around the space. However, we are going to want to do this in our top view. The reason we want to do that is if we just start hitting Shift and D from this view so just some arbitrary angle here that we might be looking at, if we hit Shift and D, we'll make a duplicate but we'll notice as we move it further and further to the left or the right, it's actually going down underneath the plane. It's no longer at the exact height that we wanted it at. We want these to be touching the plane as they are now. The reason it's doing that is when we just hit Shift and D from an arbitrary view angle here, it's just moving it based on the screen space. You can see that it stays roughly the same size on the screen even though it's moving it up and down in actual space. To avoid this, I'm going to delete these copies that I just made. I'm going to select the original one again. To avoid this, we can just go into our top view up here, and now if I hit Shift and D and make a duplicate, if I rotate my camera now, I can see that it stayed exactly where it was because it was only looking in this orthographic view, it's only cloning it on the X and the Y and it was completely disregarding the Z angle or the axis rather. It stayed nice and connected to the ground as the other one was. I'm going to delete the duplicate, go back into my top view. We're going to be using the top view like I said to make two different paths here. We need to make sure that we've plenty of room for our bumblebee to fly from left to right going this direction. We don't want to have any grass blades here because in this case, the bumblebee will run into the grass. We need to make sure we leave them plenty of room here on the top and the bottom so I wouldn't have it any closer than maybe this, that might even be a little bit too close. We want to leave them plenty of breathing room here because we're going to have a little bit of side-to-side motion for our bumblebee and it's also going to be bobbing up and down. Another important consideration is we're going to be making this a seamless looping animation and this plane that we made is the bounds of this looping environment that we're going to create. It's going to be this same environment looping over and over again seamlessly. Make sure that the seamlessness is as seamless as possible, so the loop looks as good as possible, we need to make sure that we have our grass go all the way to the edge. We don't want it to go over top of the edge, but we need to make sure we fill it out the entire way from edge to edge. We need to go basically from here to here, and then again from here to here. That way when these edges meet up, so if we imagine this environment here being duplicated and sit next to each other, so we had an exact copy of this sitting next to itself, we don't want to have this weird gap where they're about to touch, where there's just all of a sudden no grass. We did that and we stopped our grass here, there'd be this tiny little gap and then it would be another gap here, essentially, and then we would start grass again. It'd be really obvious where the seam is in this animation. Make sure when we're placing our grass, we need to fill this up entirely. I'll be speeding up this part of the video as I place my grass, but feel free to watch what I do and try to match the placements roughly. You don't need to copy me exactly. Just try to match the width of the path that I make for the bumblebee, as well as the general amounts of grass that I'm placing. You also want to scale the grass up and down as you're placing them so it has a little bit of randomness. You don't need to worry about the rotation for now. We'll be using a tool later to help randomize all the rotation of the grass. Only worry about the placement and the randomized scale that you can do yourself. I'll see you in just a moment when I finish placing all my grass using Shift D to make the duplicates. I've placed all my grass roughly where I want it, and I've tried to vary the scale a little bit to make it a little bit more interesting. I made sure I left a wide enough path through the middle so our bumblebee doesn't hit any grass as it flies. I also ran my grass from end to end so there aren't any obvious gaps. However, I still have an issue with the scale that's really only visible when we rotate our view back to perspective. Let's rotate our view now. We'll see here that this grass on the front, while it is smaller, it does visually block this bumblebee by a pretty large amount. If we zoom in our camera roughly to where the camera angle is going to be, that's a pretty large overlap with our grass on top of our bumblebee. Luckily, this is relatively easy to fix. Let's zoom out a little bit, and then we're going to go into a side view here. Now, we'll notice our camera's in the grass right now, so we need to make sure that we don't select that. We're just going to go to a side view here where we can drag select over top of just the grass that's in front of the bumblebee here. I'm pretty sure I have it all selected. I spin around, doesn't look like I select my camera and I just have the grass selected. Now, normally,we would just hit "S" and start scaling this down. However, we will notice if we just hit "S", and scale it, it all scales towards the middle. It does make the grass smaller, but I don't really like how it's moving the grass towards the center. I'm going to right-click to undo that. We can go up here and change that so that it's scaling from the center of each grass blade individually. We're going to go up to the center here, click this little drop-down, and we're going to change the transform pivot point, which currently it's on median point, which means it's scaling it all to the middle of the selected objects. We're going to switch that to individual origins. We've changed it now, the symbol has changed up here, and now if we start scaling it, we'll see that it scales each grass individually down towards its own center, rather than the center of the selection. Let's scale this down a bit. We can rotate our camera a little bit here. I think I need to go a little bit smaller still. I want it to be basically about the same height as the bumblebee. In this case here, I'm looking where the wings stop. That looks okay to me. Now, we'll notice that as we scaled this down, it actually made the path wider on this side. We can move it a little bit closer, we don't need to have quite so much room. Then we'll see it's a little bit more gappy here. If you find any areas that you have some really large gaps in, we can fix those just by cloning them in, again, from the top view. Before we fill in any of these gaps though, let's make sure we go back and switch this from individual origins back to median point. In most cases, median point is what you want to use. We're going to switch this back just so it's defaulted back to this, but now you know that individual origins can help with a situation like we just had. Let's switch it back to median point. I'm going to go back into my top view. If there's any areas here where there's just a really large area with no grass in it, I can just choose some of these grass blades here, and then just add some more copies. I'll just use Shift, D to help fill in some of this. Maybe I'll move some of these around, and just re-space them slightly. If there's any areas that seem like they're [inaudible] or the grass is just going straight in a line, we can also fix that as well. Remember, we still need to fill these all the way out to the edge. You don't really want it overlapping, but you need it to be pretty close. I'm pretty happy with this. For the grass placement on the bottom. In the top, we didn't really adjust, so whatever we had before is probably fine still. Now, lastly, let's randomize all the rotations for our grass blades. First, we're going to need to select all of the grass. Rather than do it in the view port where it's really hard to not select things that aren't grass, like the bumblebee or this light that's here or the camera, we're going to do it from the list instead. Go over to your list. We're going to first select the very top grass, so the very first one in the list here, scroll all the way down. Might be a pretty long list depending on how much grass you've added. Now we can hold Shift and select the very last one and it will select every object in between those two points. In this case, all of the grass. Now, we can go up here to where it says objects, and then we'll go to transform, and we're going to choose Randomize Transform. The first thing we'll want to change is the randomize rotation for the Z. Down here in the Z, we're going to type in 180, so 1, 8, 0. We can see soon as we hit that, all of these grass blades now have random rotations. We can change the amount of randomness that it is, but if we set it to 180, that's the max value. It's going to give us essentially the max amount of rotation. It's going to pick any value in-between those. That works well for that. We can also rotate our view port here. We're not need to be in the top view for this. We can also randomize the scale. Now, in this case, I think I'm only going to randomize the Z-scale, which is just the up and down. Some of these will be stretched a little taller and thinner and other ones will be a little bit shorter and fatter. The Z in this case is actually this value here in the middle. We're going to set this to 1.5 and then hit "Enter". We can see here soon as we did that, our grass, some of it got taller and some of it got shorter, but overall it's the same width in the X and the Y. Now we have a fair bit of randomization to our grass, so it looks a lot better. With that done, let's attach all of this grass together into a single object so it's easier to animate later. With all of our grass still selected, we can just hit "Control" and "J" at the same time to join them together into one object. Now, we'll see that our pivot point is all the way over here in the corner. We have also done a fair bit of scaling to this. We're going to center everything out here and apply all these scales by hitting "Control" and "A" to bring up our apply menu. We're going to choose Apply all transformations. When we do this, it'll apply both the scale, as well as the rotation and the location of it, which will center this origin out right below or bumblebee. Now it's all centered out perfectly. It's one object and it centered right in the origin. In the next lesson, we'll be finishing our environment by placing small rocks along the path. I'll see you there. 10. Modeling the Rocks: In this lesson, we'll be finishing our environment by modeling and placing small rocks along the path. Let's begin. We'll be using one of the new objects added by the add on we enabled at the beginning of this class to make our rocks. Funnily enough, it's called Rock Generator. Let's hit "Shift and A." Go to "Mesh" and then choose "Rock Generator." Again, this came from the extra mesh add one that we added way at the beginning of this class. We added things like the round cube, some of these other ones down here, the single vert. But we're going to be using Rock Generator. Essentially, this is just using a bunch of random parameters as well as modifiers to create a number of random rocks for us. We can determine the number of rocks it's creating right here with the number of rocks. We're going to set ours here to 10, that way will create 10 random unique rocks. We'll notice here that it stacks all these rocks directly on top of each other, which is fine it's just a little bit annoying. The last thing we want to change is go down here to where it says default. We can change the type of rock that it's generating. There's fake ocean rocks. We can make Ice, sandstone asteroids. We're going to choose a river rock. River Rock it tends to be a little bit smoother, a little bit more blobby, and that'll work a little bit better for this cartoon animation we're creating. We'll choose River Rock. Again, we still have it set to 10 and we can see the shape of the rocks are a little bit smoother and they're a little bit smaller down here. As we go through the process of placing these rocks, don't worry if your rocks look different than mine. Your add one is likely creating rocks using a different seed for randomization, so your rocks might look different than the ones I'm using. Either way, as long as you set it to 10 and you've set the preset to river rock, they'll be very similar so just do similar things with your rocks even though they look a little bit different. Now before we start placing these rocks, well notice over here it has a whole bunch of different modifiers on it, which essentially gives it this rocky shape. Now we want to apply all these modifiers so they're not working with 10 modifiers per 10 rocks. Again, we can go up here to Object, and then go down to Convert, then choose "Mesh." Since we had all 10 rock selected, they all now have all of their modifiers collapsed into them. Now let's begin the process of placing each of these 10 rocks along the sides of our path. You can keep these rocks somewhat large as they won't impede the path of the bumblebee really. A good place to put them is at the base of the grass clumps and in larger open areas. Feel free to adjust the scale of your rocks to make them larger if you'd like, just make sure that they stay out of the path. I'm going to speed up this part of the video as I place my original 10 rocks along the edges of the path. I'll see you in just a moment. Now I have all of my larger rocks placed along path. You can see I tuck them in here in these natural gaps that were formed between the grass. Such as here and here, then I also stuck some behind the grass and then some in front of the grass like these. You might have noticed as I was placing these that I was using something to rotate them. We'll use this object as an example. Normally when you just hit R to rotate it, it's going to rotate it based on your screen space. It just rotates it in a circle based on whichever direction you're currently facing. However, if you double-tap R, now you can roll the object based on wherever you move your mouse. It's not an easy way to flip over a rock if you need to, to see maybe a better side, maybe one side smoother, one side it's a little bit more rough. You can hit "R" twice and then roll the rock over so you see the side that you'd like. It's a little bit easier than getting the camera into the exact position you want and then rotating it. Again, that's just a little bit at a tip here. But otherwise, as long as you have your rocks placed similarly to mine, you can see some of them are a little bit bigger as well I kept some small. You should be fine for now. Now let's work on placing some small rocks actually in the path itself. We can consider these rocks essentially at this scale. These are tiny boulders in comparison to the bumblebee. But now we want to add some pebbles essentially along the path. We're going to have a whole bunch of rocks here along the path that are really tiny, so even smaller than this one here. I would say probably half the size of this rock would be the size of the rock we want on this path. Because again, we have to remember that we don't want to impede the path of this bumblebee. You can see there's very little space underneath this bumblebee here. We need to make sure the rocks probably aren't even as maybe half as tall as this gap here. The first thing we want to do is select all of our rocks again from the list. We can select the first one here, hold "Shift" and then select the last one. Now we can hit "Shift and D" to make duplicates of all of these. We're just going to place them here. I know that they're going underneath the surface here, but I'm going to have to move them anyway so I'm just going to hit "Shift and D" to make duplicates. I can click once to confirm that duplicate and now I'm going to hit "S" to scale these down, and I'm going to scale them down. It doesn't matter that they're all scaling to the center because we're going to replace these anyway. I'm going to scale these down really tiny. Probably about here. In this case, down to probably, we'll say 0.15 of its original scale. They're roughly about that large. Now I can zoom in here. I'm going to move them all up so that they're poking back through the surface again. Then before I start placing these, I'm actually going to flip all of these over on the other side. Right now they're showing the exact same side that's visible for all the larger rocks. Instead, I'd like to flip these over. I'm going to hit "R" then "X" and now type in 180, so 180, and then hit "Enter". Now I have essentially taken all of these and you don't have to do this it's just a quick visualization here. I've essentially just flip them from this side over, I'm going a little fast to this side. Now that I've done that, we can go through here and just start placing these rocks. Now we don't need to make any more duplicates. We'll call these pebbles. Ten pebbles is plenty for this path here. We don't need to have a ton of rocks here. I'm going to go up into my top view. This will be a little bit faster to place them that way. Now, I'm in my top view, we can just start placing these around. I'm going to speed this portion up again as well. But just try to follow along with the rough placement and rotation in size that I'm doing for my pebbles. I'll see you in a second. I have all of my pebbles placed now along my path. You'll notice that I kept them pretty small and made sure to space them out as random as I could. You probably noticed me moving some around, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. I just wanted to make sure that the spacing of them was as generally equal. So it filled up the entire length of this path. But also not so obvious that it was just up, down, up, down, up, down. You also want to make sure that you don't forget to put some near the bumblebee itself. Because otherwise they'll be this gap that's in the middle of your path if you don't put any close to the bumblebee like this one is. Again, I made sure that they ran from edge to edge as close as I could. Now, these are pretty spaced out, so I don't need to have them touching at the edges here. I just need to make sure that the gap between this edge and this edge is roughly the same. The last thing we need to do is attach all of these rocks together so that they're easier to animate later. We're going to be doing pretty much the exact same process as we did for the grass so we'll go over here, select the very first rock, go down to the very bottom, and select the last. I have all of these selected. Now we can hit "Control and J" to attach them all together. Then we're going to hit "Control and A" at the same time for the Apply menu, and we'll choose "All Transforms." Now if we rotate our view, you can see they're all attached and our origin is right in the center, just like the grass was. If we rotate down, we can just make sure that the height of these rocks, none of them impede the movement here of our bumblebee. At this point, we're officially done with all of the modeling we will be doing for this entire class. In the next lesson, we'll be placing our sunlight and our camera. I'll see you there. 11. Placing Our Sun and Camera: In this lesson, we'll be placing our sunlight and our camera in our scene. Let's begin. Let's start by getting our camera in place. You should still have a camera in your scene from when we first made the file. However, if you deleted it, that's no problem, we can make another one. Again, if you still have your camera in your scene from when we started, it should be roughly here, then you won't need to follow this step. But if you've accidentally deleted your camera, we can hit Shift and A and then go down here to where it says camera and then it'll create a brand new camera and it places it directly underneath your bumblebee. That's how you would make a new one if you needed to. I'm going to delete this camera since I already have mine in here. Now let's select our camera. Then we can go down here to the object data properties, which is this little green button here that looks like a little camera and then we can see the settings. By default, there are two types for our camera here that we're going to have the option to use. We can either use a perspective or we can use an orthographic camera. Now let's explain a little bit of between the differences of the perspective and the orthographic camera. For this class, we're actually going to be using a perspective type camera for this render. However, we'll be giving it settings to make it almost look like it's an orthographic camera. The main difference between a perspective and an orthographic camera is how it handles focal length. The perspective camera, which is the most common type of camera as well as the closest thing to real life, has a typical focal length of roughly 18-150 millimeters. The lower the number, the more obvious the distance between objects is. As the focal length gets higher, the image gets flatter, so to speak. It's harder to tell how far apart two objects are in distance. An orthographic camera takes in all the visual information from the camera and displays it with an infinitely large focal length, which essentially means that every single object you see in the camera appears as though it was the same distance from the camera, making the visual very flat and stylized. Now, in our case, I actually prefer the look of the orthographic camera for our animation. However, there are some things you can't do with an orthographic camera, specifically depth of field. Without a true focal length, you can't do depth of field effectively with an orthographic camera. We'll be changing settings within our perspective camera to almost mimic the look of an orthographic camera while still keeping it perspective type, allowing us to use depth of field. Let's start by creating a view port devoted to our camera view. We're going to go up here to the top left of our viewport. Just up in this top rounded corner area, we can see that if we hover over it, our mouse changes into a little plus sign. Once it's turned into a little plus sign, we just click and hold and then we can start dragging it over to the right side. You can see we can drag out a brand new viewport. Now, on this viewport we can devote this to seeing what the camera sees. To do this, we can just click this little tiny camera icon and that will pop this view directly into what this camera is actually seeing. Now if I go over here to the right side and I move this camera, you can see it actually changes the view on the left. We're also able to resize this window so we can make it a little bit smaller. Then we can also on this side, we can pan around and we can also zoom in. Let's zoom in so we can see a little bit more of our camera. This orange line here is the bounding box of our camera. This is actually what would be in frame. Anything outside of this and this darker shaded area is not actually in view. We're also going to switch this left side of our camera view into the render viewport mode. To do this, we're going to go up here to this top bar and then we're going to click in our middle mouse button and that will allow us to pan this bar. The reason we need to do this is because this bar used to run all the way from the left side all the way to the right side. But now that we have two smaller viewports, we can't see the entire bar, so we have to pan across it, scroll it across. Again, click in your middle mouse button on this top bar. Then we can pan it over. Then here are our viewport modes. We're going to be switching to rendered, which is the furthest right one. Now that we've clicked this, it switched our viewport here to the rendered mode, which is giving us an approximation of what the actual final render would look like. It's not quite the exact same, but it's really close. It helps us get a better an idea of what our render will look like. The lighting we're seeing here is being produced by this light right here. Again, if I move this, we can see what it looks like from our camera view. If for some reason you've deleted your light by accident, much like the camera, we can hit Shift and A and then instead of going up to mesh or anything like that, we're going to go down to Light and then you can make it brand new point light and then move that. This point right here is just the same thing as what was already in the scene, although it is a little bit dimmer. If you have deleted your light and you're noticing now that your camera viewport, the left side is really dim because either you didn't have a light or now you just added a brand new one, but it's really dark. You can just change the power on this to 1,000 and then hit Enter. Now you have the exact same brightness as the default light that used to be there. Now, if you already have your light, don't worry about creating a second one. We won't need this. This is just for people that might have deleted theirs by accident. Now let's get into the process of actually placing this camera. You'll notice our camera doesn't have a very good view of our bumblebee, but that's not a problem. We can move it to get a better camera angle. To make this process a bit simpler, I'll be walking you through the exact values you need to type in to get your camera placed correctly. However, feel free to experiment after this lesson to find a look you might prefer. We should have our camera selected. We should be in our Object Data Properties tab here, which is this little, tiny green camera. Now we're going to start adjusting some of these settings. First let's set the focal length really high. This is how we're going to make it look more like an orthographic camera. First, type in 300 for the focal length and then hit Enter. Now, you'll notice here our camera gets really long and then it looks really zoomed in essentially. Not because of this type of focal length that we're using. The higher the number, the more zoomed in your image is going to be, and the flatter your image is going to look, which is actually what we're going for. Now hit N on your side menu here to bring up the side menu. We've had it on the right viewport. Wherever you hit N, it'll pop up the side menu there, so we'll be doing it on the right side. Now we're going to type in specific values for all of these settings here. This will place your camera exactly where you need it to be. Starting from the top, we're going to go from the x location. We'll type in negative 24 and then hit Enter. Then for the y, negative 31.5, hit Enter. For the z, 16.5 and then hit Enter. Now we can adjust the rotation so that it's actually looking at the bumblebee. For the x rotation, we'll type in 70, we'll leave the y at zero. Then we're going to set our z rotation to negative 37 and then hit Enter. You'll see that this was actually the main one that was the issue here and that's because our camera was placed in the correct spot. It was actually facing out in space over here. Now that we've rotated it towards the bumblebee, we can now see the bumblebee is nicely centered in the frame. We can see a little bit of grass in the background and a rock, as well as some grass peaking up through the bottom as well. You might notice that parts of your scene seem to be clipped off. That's because of something called viewport clipping. On our side menu here, we're going to go to our view tab, and then we're going to change these clip values. Your clip value here might be a little bit larger than mine. Same thing with the n value as well. We're just, for the clip start, just going to set it to 0.01 meters. Then for the clip end, which is most likely causing your issues, you're probably not seeing the backside of your render here. We're going to type in 1,000 and then hit "Enter", with those changed. Now everything in your viewport should look like mine with our camera in place. Let's start working on our sun. We're going to select the light that was either left in the scene or the one that you just created if you had accidentally deleted in the past, and we'll make sure that we're still in the object data properties, which now looks like a little green light bulb because it's changed for the light settings rather than the camera settings. We're going to switch this to the sun type. Every single light that you create can just be turned into any of the other types, so by default, it started out as a point light. But if we click sun, now it's a sunlight, or we can change it into a spotlight or an area light. For this time, we're going to be using sun. Now we need to change our strength because it's using the 1,000 that was already typed in before, we're going to set this down to 6 and then hit "Enter." Now right now the cameras seems really blown out and really bright with our sunset to six, but I wouldn't worry about it once we get to the texturing phase in further lessons, they won't look so bright and we'll be setting the colors and everything will look nice and balanced. Now that we're using the sun type light, a few things I want you to understand. A sunlight is directional, so all the light comes from a specific determine direction, and we can see that direction here with this orange line on our light. However, it isn't like a typical spotlight because it doesn't matter how close it is to your object. We'll notice that if I move this light closer to my B, or further away, it doesn't change the brightness of the scene. This is meant to mimic the real-life distance of the sun. There's not really any way for you in real life to move the sun closer or further away, it's essentially, for our purposes, it's essentially infinitely far away and it's just casting light at a certain brightness value, so the only way for us to make our sun brighter or dimmer would just be to change the strength value, moving it closer or further from the subject does nothing. It's now on our right-view port here. Let's just move our sun over here towards this front corner so it stays out of the way. Again, it doesn't really matter how high or how close it is just move it up out of the way that it's not interfering and overlapping with our bumblebee. Now again, on our side menu, which again is brought up with n, We can go to item and then we're going to adjust the rotation. Let's set the x rotation to zero, the y rotation to negative 35. Then the z rotation to 30. This will give us a nice light direction where we still see some shadows, and it has a mid-day, maybe 2:00 or 03:00 sunlight value. Now the last thing we need to do is set up our depth of field on our camera. Again, this is the reason why we used a perspective camera rather than an orthographic, we're tricking the viewer into thinking it's an orthographic camera while using perspective settings, so we'll go back over to our list and select our camera. Then make sure that we're still in the object data properties, this little green camera. Now we can check on depth of field. We'll see right away our camera got really blurry because we haven't really changed any of these settings. However, before we change the settings, we do want to change something over here. We're going to go back to the regular gray shaded view, so we're just going to click this and we'll see all that blurriness goes away. But we're going to go up here to this little drop-down and then go down to the bottom and enable depth of field and turn that on. Working in this view is a lot easier to tell when things are in or out-of-focus when we're working in this rendered view, it's all really bright right now. It's going to be hard to tell when things are in or out of focus because everything's blown out at the moment. We're going to be doing this in the shaded view, just this nice gray view, which is really easy to see. But in order to see the depth of field, you just have to make sure that you open up this drop-down and then enable depth of field. Now let's go over here into our settings. We can twirl open the "Depth of Field" settings, and there's basically two things we're going to be adjusting the focus distance as well as the F-stop value. F-stop basically just determines how blurry is this going to be, so the lower this number, the blurrier it'll be, the higher the number, the less blurry it will be. The focus distance determines what is blurry and what isn't blurry based on this F-stop value. We'll have to find an exact measurement for the focal point of our objects. In our case, we're going to be using this front i. Let's start by adjusting the F-stop value. We're going to set it really low because we want to stylize looked for this render. We'll set it to 0.20, 0.2 for our F-stop value, which right now it looks insanely blurry. It's almost completely invisible at this point, that's because we haven't adjusted the focal distance yet. We're going to start by setting this focal distance to 40.85 and then hit "Enter." It seems like a really specific value and it is, and that's because we're using such a small focal distance, we need to have a very particular area that we're focusing on. Now on this left side here, if I zoom in, we'll notice that these little tiny highlights on our eyes are nice and sharp. We can still see sharp edges on them, and then as it gets further and further away, even just parts of this I like this I here is already starting to get blurry. That's because we're using such a shallow depth of field, won't use a really small number. There's a very small sliver of area of your render that's actually going to be in focus. If this number was bigger and we wouldn't have to be quite so I described in the focal distance. But because we're using a very small number to get this really dramatic depth of field on the background and in the foreground, we need to be very specific with this number. Now this number that we typed in, again, 40.85 for the focal distance, that should be the perfect number, assuming you're using the exact same camera's position and angle as me. If you decided to go with a different camera angle, you'll need to adjust the focal distance value until it looks correct for you. If yours is still a little bit blurry here, again, use these little highlights on the eye as your focal distance. If we zoom in here and we want to be pretty close so we can tell whether it's in view or not or whether it's in focus rather. You can click and hold on this number here, and again, this only matters if you've used a different camera. If yours still looks good like mine does. Don't change this number, but if it's out-of-focus for you, click and hold on this number down here and that'll let you use it as if it was a slider. Now if you hold "Shift" while you move that slider, it'll move it even slower so you can really fine-tune it and get it exactly where you need it to be. If it's really out-of-focus, you'll have to move it pretty fast first, then let go of the slider, then click on it again, and then hold "Shift" to really fine-tune it. But I'm going to set mine back to what it was because I think it looks good before, so 40.85, with our depth of field setup, we can now zoom back out so we can see the whole camera, and then we can set it back to our rendered view, and now we can see the rendered view. It has this nice depth of field back here, and it's lit again. It's a little blown out, but that won't be an issue for very long. In the next lesson, we'll be texturing our scene with cartoon-style materials to add a bit of color. I'll see you there. 12. Texturing the Bumblebee's Body: In this lesson, we'll be texturing our bumblebee's body with cartoon style materials to add a bit of color. Let's begin. Let's start by making sure that our left viewport is set to the rendered mode like this. Up at the top bar, you can use your middle mouse button to pin this all the way to the right so that you can see the viewport modes, and then make sure you have the rightmost view port mode selected, which is the rendered mode. Now we can begin adding textures to our scene. Let's switch to the shading workspace here at the top. We can do that by just clicking on the word ''Shading'' here at the top center, and that'll switch us through the shading workspace. Now let's remove the leftmost viewports here. We won't need either of these and they're just taking up space. Let's go up to the top left corner, right here of this larger view port on the top. We're going to wait until our mouse turns into a plus sign by hovering over the corner. Once it's a plus sign, we can click and then drag it to the left, it'll turn into an arrow, and then we can let it go and it will delete that view port on the left. Let's do the same process here down the bottom, so hover over this little corner here until it turns into a plus sign, click and hold, and then drag to the left until it turns into an arrow, and then let go. Now backup on the top view port, we can go over here and click on this little tiny camera icon, and that'll switch us into our camera view. Then we're going to switch back into our rendered view as well. Right now we're in the material preview view, but we're going to get a better preview of what our actual render looks like if we use the full rendered view. We're going to click this little right button here so that we can see all of our actual lighting, and then let's zoom out a little bit on this using our mouse wheel so we can see the full camera. With all of that setup out of the way, we can move on to our first texture. Let's start with the yellow for our bumblebee's body. First, select the bumblebee in this viewport at the top, so we want to select the body that includes the eyes, the legs, the mouth, everything like that. Now down here on the bottom center, we're going to click the ''New'' button, and that'll create a new material. Where it says material 001, we're just going to click on this and then rename this yellow, so we know what this material is in the future. Over here on the right side, we're going to go to the material properties tab, which is this little red circle with the checker pattern on it, so we can click this. This will just give us a simplified view of all the textures that we have applied currently to our bumblebee. Right now it's just this default material renamed yellow. Down here in the bottom viewport, we're going to be using these nodes to create the look for our texture. Because this is the very first time you're seeing the node system within Blender, let me give you a very brief rundown. First, I'm just going to make this window a little bit larger so that you can see it. You don't have to make yours larger, this is just so it's a little bit easier for you to see during the explanation. Again, we can zoom in and out on this with our mouse wheel, and then we can click in our middle mouse button, click in the mouse wheel, and then that'll allow us to pan around. Within the shader editor down here, each of these squares is called a node. So right now we have two nodes, this one and this one. Nodes pass their attributes from the left side to the right side. Each node has colored dots on it called sockets. You can pass the properties of a node on the left to a node on the right by connecting its sockets together with wires, so this node right now is passing all of its properties via this wire to this node on the right. To add more complex effects, you simply add the appropriate node and then connect it together with the nodes in the system using wires. We're going to keep most of our textures very simple and stylized for this project, so we won't be using too many nodes. Now let's begin editing our yellow material. As I'm sure you remember from the thumbnail and then introduction video for this class, we're going to be making cartoon style materials for this render. That means we'll be going through a process that is pretty different from typical renders. Rather than letting the properties of material, such as reflectivity and glossiness dictate the look of the material, we'll be using a node that allows us to flatten all of the shading and colors into simple blocks of color. This will help us mimic the look and feel of the sharp shading breaks you see in some cartoon styles. I'm going to start by resizing this window again, so it's a little bit larger on the top. Now the first thing we're going to do is change the base color on this principled BSDF node, by clicking on this, so we're going to click on this little white square here at the very top called base color, and then we're going to change the value of this to 0.5. All we need to do is click on this and then type in 0.5, which essentially means that it is currently half black and half white, so it's a perfect 50% gray. You might have been expecting us to make this a yellow color, but for this process, only the brightness of this color matters to us. The color will come from a different node later on. This 50% gray will provide a nice neutral base for us to work from. Now let's add our first brand new node. To do this, let's zoom out a little bit, and then we're going to hit ''Shift'' and ''A'' just like we were before, and this will bring up an add menu. We're going to type up here in the search bar, so we can first just click on this, and then we're going to type in shader, and this will show every option here that has the word shader in it. In this case, we want shader to RGB. We will click this, it will create a brand new node, and before we click to place this, we actually want to hover over top of this wire. As we hover over top of it, you can see it highlights it in white. Now when we click to place this node, it will actually automatically link it for us, so it'll start out by linking up the correct wires for the outputs. The shader to RGB node by itself won't do too much, but it's actually the key to the cartoon look. Very simply it takes all of the complex data the principled be SDF node is generating to the left and flattens it all down into simple color data. This is how we'll achieve that simple blocky shading that we're looking for. Now we need to add another node right away to start adjusting, the color. We'll hit ''Shift'' and ''A'' again to bring up the add menu, and then in the search bar, we're going to type in color, and then we'll see color ramp. We'll choose color ramp, and then again, we're going to highlight over top of one of these wires, in this case, we're going to highlight to the right. We'll drop this down between these two outputs, and that will automatically link it for us. This color ramp node is how we'll adjust the color of our material, as well as determine how much of the shadow is present on the model. Before we begin changing the colors, however, we need to change what type of gradient we're using. On this top rate drop down, we can see right now it's set to linear. We want to click this and then switch it to constant. Soon as we switch it to constant, you'll see it turns all black, and that's because we haven't moved these sliders yet. If we move this slider further to the left, you'll notice on our model now we're actually getting that cartoony comic book look. The further to the left we move it, the more and more white is present on our model, so we're actually getting less and less of this black shadow color. This constant gradient mode is also how we're going to get those nice hard, sharp differences between the colors on our model. Now let's begin actually changing the colors here. So first, select this slider, and then down here where it says POS, which stands for position, we're going to set this to 0.5. So essentially we're setting it exactly right in the middle. With that slider set, we can now change the color down here. So we're going to click on this little white box, and then we can type in the exact values we want for the color. Before I tell you the exact value is we're going to use for this yellow, I want you to know that you can just click and drag these little dots on here, and then just free form, pick the color and those sliders at the bottom will update. If you didn't want to follow along and make it exactly yellow, or if you wanted to use this trick in a different project or a future class, know that you can just click on these little dots up here and be a little less rigid with your colors. You don't need to know the exact number for every color you want, you can just click this to change the hue, as well as the saturation by moving it closer to the center and you can also change the value over here by clicking and dragging this dot to make the color darker or brighter. In this case though, I'd like to just type in a specific color. For our hue, we can just click into this value and we're going to type in 0.11, hit ''Enter'', and then for all three of these sliders, we're just going to turn them all the way up to one, so 100% for all of these. We can see now that that gave us a nice warm yellow color for our bumblebee. Now, down here on the color ramp with the sliders still selected, so we can see here it's highlighted the little white triangle above the slider is highlighted, which means we have it currently selected, we're going to click the little plus sign here, and that'll add another slider here to the middle between these two. So it's always going to add your slider to the left. We click the plus sign, it'll just add one to the left between the last two. Now with this new slider selected, we're going to set the position for this 2.12 and then hit ''Enter'', and now we can begin changing this color as well. We're going to click on this little black box down here, and now for the color, we're going to again type in 0.11. Because we want the same color, yellow, we're going to set the saturation all the way up to 100%, and then for the value, we're going to set this to 0.5. It's the exact same color as the last yellow, but we can see it's just a bit darker now. That's a nice transition between these colors without making it too smooth. Now let's select the last slider here, which is currently set to black. We can leave this position at zero because we want it to be the very last color, which is our shadow color. We can click on this black box down here , and now for our hue, we're not going to type in 0.11 this time, we're going to type in 0.085, which will give us a slightly warmer color. We'll set our saturation to 100% and then our value we're going to make it pretty dark by setting it to 0.115 and then hit ''Enter''. We've made our shadows a little bit more red. It's still just as saturated, but it's even darker than the last color. We can see over here on our model that we have this nice bright yellow color that slowly transitions down into a slightly maybe more brown color for the shadow. With that last color set, we've officially completed our first cartoon material. Let's go through the process now of applying a similar material to the rest of our scene one at a time. The first thing we need to do is with our bee still selected we're going to hit "Tab" to enter edit mode, then we'll hit "three" tensor, our face mode, then "Alt" and "Z", to enter our x-ray mode. We're going to be determining the areas where we'd like the black for the bumblebee. We're going to be making black stripes as well as the black head. Let's start by switching into our front view, see get a nice even look at our model. We can do this just by clicking the little negative y bubble or hitting "Tilda" and then choosing "Front". Let's zoom in on the bee, so we can see the entirety of the body. We don't really care if the legs are cut off right now. Let's start by clicking off of the model. We don't want to have anything selected to begin with. Hover over the middle of the body and then hit "L" on your keyboard to select all linked faces. In this case it's selected every piece of the body but it didn't select things like the teeth or the stinger or the eyes because they're actually separate pieces of this model. It's only selected faces that are actually attached. What we're going to do is deselect the areas we want to stay yellow. In this case we're going to pick out the areas that we want to keep yellow, and then anything that remains selected we're going to be applying a black material too. Let's start by picking out a stripe here that's basically about as wide as the distance between these legs. We're going to hold down Control and then we're going to drag select over the model, roughly the width of this stripe that we want to remain yellow. We've done that. It's de-selected all of of these. You can see that this has turned black and these remain orange, which means they're selected. I can zoom in here and see that it's selected all the way through the model and just make sure when you drag-select, you drag-select from the very top of the model all the way down to the very bottom of the model. Now let's do a similar process here on the back. Again, we want to zoom out just enough that we can see the top and the bottom. Now hold down Control and then we're going to click- and-drag all the way out here because it doesn't really matter where we start on the outside. I'm going to click and drag all the way out here, move our mouse down and now we're determining where the rest of the yellow is going to be. In my case, I think right about here a little bit ahead of this back leg is where the rest of the yellow is going to be. In this case, these two orange areas in our head and then the single stripe here are going to be black. We can go over here to the list of materials we have and we can add a brand new material to this object. We're going to click this little plus button here on the right. This will add a brand new material slot an we can click the New button to apply a new material to that slot. Let's start by renaming this. We're going to call this black and then hit "Enter". Then we're going to click the Assign button, but make sure you have this black material selected. I know right now it's white, but that's because we haven't changed anything yet but just make sure you have the material named black selected and then hit "Assign". What Assign is doing, is it's applying this specific material just to the assigned faces. We can click off of the model over here in the corner and then we'll de-select this model here and then we can hit "Alt" and "Z" to exit our x-ray mode. We can see the texture a little bit better. Rather than go through the hassle of doing all of those same steps we did on the yellow of creating the new nodes, changing the positions on the slider and then changing the color, we're actually going to copy some of that hard work we've done already and just apply it directly into this new material. First, let's click on the yellow material here over on the right side. This will show us the yellow material that we made previously. We can click and drag to highlight over these three nodes, so everything but the one called Material Output. We'll highlight over all three of these. We can hit "Control and C" at the same time, so copy. We're going to copy these with control and C and we can go back to our black material. Click on this over here on the right side, and then we can hit "Control and V" to paste these new nodes. We'll notice that it pastes them directly on top of the other ones, but that's okay because they're still selected. We can just click on any one of them and move it over here and that will move that out of the way. At this point we have two principled be BSDF nodes, but this one is set to the 50% gray that we wanted. We're actually just going to delete this one so select it and then hit 'Delete" to remove it. All we need to do is drag this color socket. This little yellow dot here on the end of the color ramp, we're going to click and drag that over to the word Surface on this socket here and that will reconnect the material for us. All we need to do is just change these colors to the block that we want and all the other work that we needed to do is done. Let's zoom in down here on the color ramps so we can start changing the color. We'll start by selecting the very first node which is the highlight color, the brightest part of the material. We can tell we have it selected because one, the color down here matches the color we want to change. As well as this little tiny triangle above this is highlighted in white. We can click on this color and then we can begin adjusting it. Let's change our hue to.05, hit "Enter". We'll set our saturation to 0.3. We're leaving a little bit of saturation here, but overall it's mostly desaturated. Set the value to 0.1 and then hit "Enter". We can see right away that this material is starting out much darker than the yellow was. Our highest value on this is only 0.1. Let's adjust the middle color. We'll select the middle slider by clicking up near the top of it, click on this color down here. We'll change the hue to 0.05 again. We'll set the saturation to 0.6 this time. We're actually making it slightly more saturated, but we're going to make it overall a bit darker. We'll type in 0.03 and then hit "Enter" to set the new value. Lastly let's change the last color here. Click on this slider to highlight it and click on the color bar at the bottom. We'll set it to 0.05 for the hue, 0.5 for the saturation. Then our value, we're going to set really low 2.01 and then hit "Enter". At this point it's almost entirely black, but it's still just a little bit saturated. You can see rather than a pure black color, we're really going more with a dark, dark brown, almost like a chocolate colored brown. Let's apply his black material to the legs and stinger of our bee. First, we're going to go up here into our top view port. We're just going to hover over the stinger and then hit "L" to select linked. Remember we're still in edit mode if you hit "Enter" or tab to exit your edit mode make sure you go back into edit mode and then select faces hitting three on your keyboard to go b into the face mode. We've now hovered over top of our stinger. We can go over to the black material and make sure it's still selected on the right side and then hit "Assign". Our stinger is the same exact black color. Let's apply the same material to our legs as well. To see your legs, we are going to have to rotate our view port at the top. I'm just going to rotate around my viewport to go back into our perspective mode. I'm going to click off the model to de-select the stinger and then I'm going to hover over each one of these legs and just hit "L" for linked. I'll hover over this one, hit "L", hit "L". I'm just hovering over each one of them and hitting "L" to select all the linked faces. I have all six legs highlighted in selected. Make sure I still have the black material selected and then hit "Assign". All of our legs are black as well With that material assigned to the legs, we can click off the model to de-select them. Let's go through a very similar process of adding white on the rear end of the bumblebee. We're just going to rotate around in our viewport here. We don't need to be in our front view for this. We can zoom in a little bit on the back-end. Then we're going to choose the very first phase here that we want to start for the white on the back-end. Bumblebees typically have black, yellow, black, a little bit more yellow, and then the rear-end of them and their butt is a white color. It'll be white and fuzzy on the back-end. Let's mimic that on ours. I'm going to start mine. If we zoom in on our model here, we actually can see where this model used to be a rounded cube. You'll see this face right here where it has all three of these lines coming to a point. We're going to select a little bit past that. It doesn't matter exactly where you select. Just know that the first line that we select here is going to be the start of the white and then everything to the right side is going to be white as well. Let's just try to make sure that this last yellow stripe isn't too much smaller than the previous, so we're going to start about here. In this case about four or five rows in. I'm going to start by holding down "Alt" and then I'm going to click on the line between these two phases. Right on this black line here. I'm going to click. We can see that that's selected all the way around the model. That's selected, that whole loop going all the way around We're actually going to do a trick to select the rest of these faces over here, because it's not particularly easy to select these due to the fact that this is curved here. We wouldn't be able to just click and drag and select through these. We would end up getting a little bits and parts of other rows, but not the entire row here. To start, we're actually going to hit "H" to hide this row of selected faces. We'll hit "H" and that will hide it. It looks like it's deleted it, but they're just hidden for right now. We can hover over the back end here, the part on the right side of this hidden face. We're going to have over that and hit L to select it. That will select all of these linked faces, but it will take into account the little gap that we made. We want to select the rest of the body. Now we can hit Alt and H at the same time to unhide that first selected row of faces that we made. Now we've successfully selected all of this backside here without having to do a drag selection. Now we can go over here to the right side. We're going to add a brand new material slot by clicking this little plus button here. We'll click the New button to add a material into that slot. Then we'll name this white. Make sure I spell it correctly. There we go, hit white, or hit Enter for white. Now we're going to click Assign with this new white material selected. I will assign it just to the selected faces, just like before. Now we can click off the model to dis-select these faces. Now let's begin editing this white material. Down here on the bottom, we're going to do the exact same process as we did for the black. Now we don't need to copy these yellow nodes again because they're still in our clipboard. We can just start up by clicking on this principled BSDF node that is in our white material and delete it because we know we won't need it. Now we can hit Control and V to paste in these yellow nodes. Then again, just reconnect them by connecting the color socket to the surface socket here. Now let's zoom in down here on the color. We'll select the first one, click on the color bar. We'll set our hue all the way down to 0. Our saturation also all the way down to 0. Then leave our value and Alpha set to 1. This will make our highlight completely pure white. Now let's select the middle slider. We'll click on here. Click on the color bar. Set the hue down to 0, saturation down to 0. Then our value, we're going to set to 0.65 and then hit Enter. Now the last color, you click on the last slider. Click on the color bar. Again, hue to 0, saturation is 0 and then set the value to 0.32 and then hit Enter. Now that the colors are set up. Let's apply this white material to a few more pieces of the model. In our top view port here, we're going to rotate around, click off of our middle to make sure we don't have anything selected. Then we can hover over the teeth and then hit the L key to highlight the top and then the bottom. Now we're going to go over to the side with the white material selected and then click Assign. Now again, click off your model to make sure you have nothing selected. I'm going to zoom in to the eyes. We're going to hover over these three little highlights that we added on both sides. Not the actual eyeball itself, just the little highlights on them. I'm going to hover over each of these highlights and hit L to select them. Rotate around to the other side. Again, just hit L. Select each side. Now, assign this white material. Now let's apply a material to the actual eyeball. Start by de-selecting everything, by clicking off the model, hover over the each eyeball, which are currently yellow. We're going to hit L to select each one. Now we have just the I selected. We're going to go to the right side, click the Plus button to add a new slot, new data, new material. We'll rename it here. We're going to call this eyes and then hit Enter. Now the same as before, we're going to again delete this node here and we won't need it. We can hit Control and V to paste this. Move it over here, and then reconnect the color socket to the surface socket, and now we can begin adjusting these colors. Let's zoom in here. Well, just the brightest color here on the right side. Select the slider. Click the color bar. Then we're going to set our hue all the way down to zero or saturation also down to zero. Then our value to 0.16 and then hit Enter. Now let's change the middle. Select the middle slider, click the color bar, hue to zero, saturation is zero. Then the value to 0.02, and then hit Enter. Then one last time, we'll select the last slider. Select the color bar. Hue to zero. Saturation is zero. Then the value 0.05. Then the value we're going to set really low to 0.005. Almost entirely black, just a shy bit off of it. Now if you're more astute than I was, you might have realized that I have forgotten to apply this material with our eyes selected. We're just going to hit Assign, making sure that we still had just the eyeball selected. Now we can click off the model to see what it actually looks like. Good job if you've caught that and have already applied them. Now before we call this material done, we're actually going to adjust some of the slider positions so that it looks a little bit more shiny as if it's actually the eye material. We're going to select the rightmost slider. We're going to set the position to 0.63 and then hit Enter. We're making the highlight a little bit smaller. Then we're going to select this middle one to the middle slider. We're going to set this all the way up to 0.5 and then hit Enter. It's now we're getting a lot more of this shadow color present, a little bit of the middle color, and then a bunch of the highlight color as well. All we have left the texture now is just the wings of our bumblebee. We'll need to hit Tab to exit our edit mode because the wings are actually a separate object. Now we can select on the wings themselves. We can click the new button here to add a brand new material. Then again, we're going to rename it. We can name it here in the middle. We're just going to call this wings and then hit Enter. Now we can zoom out, click on this leftmost node and delete it, and then hit Control and V to paste in the yellow nodes. Then reconnect the colors socket to surface. Now let's begin changing the colors. Can select the rightmost slider, click the color bar, set the hue to 0.5, the saturation to 0.3, then leave the value set to one as well as the Alpha. Now we can do the middle slider. Select the middle slider, click the color bar, hue to 0.5, saturation to 0.5, and then the value to 0.35 and then hit Enter. Then lastly, the shadow color. Select the last slider, click the color bar, set the hue to 0.5, saturation to 0.5. Then the value pretty dark. We're going to set it to 0.05 and then hit Enter. Now we can click off and we can see the color for our wings. Now in our top view port here, we can click on this little camera icon so that we can see our bumblebee from the actual camera view. That's it. At this point, our bumblebees fully texture. In the next lesson, we'll be finishing up the texturing of our environment. I'll see you there. 13. Texturing the Environment: In this lesson, we'll be finishing the texturing of our environment. Let's begin. To start with, make sure you're in the shading workspace, just like last lesson. To do that, just click on the word Shading here at the top. Make sure your top viewport is set to the rendered viewport mode using this little far-right dot here. Then also click the little camera button here to make sure that you're reviewing your camera view. Let's start with the background plain texture. Start with selecting your wings, drag selecting over top of all three of these furthest left nodes. Then hitting "Control" and "C" to copy them just like we were doing in the last lesson. Now select the background plane by basically just clicking anywhere here on the floor. Now we can click the new button to create a new material. We're going to select the principled BSDF node and delete it just like we were before. We can hit "Control" and V and then link the color socket to the surface socket here on the material output. Then lastly, let's not forget to rename the material. We're going to call this background and then hit "Enter." This material will be just a little bit different than the rest, as we'll only need two colors, the lit areas and the shadow areas. We're going to go down here to the color ramp we're going to select the furthest light slider and we're going to hit the little minus button here to delete it. Select this middle slider here, at least the old middle slider and we're going to set the position here to 0.18 and then hit "Enter." Now we can change the colors. This is ultimately your choice, but I'll be using a blue-green color for this demonstration. It matches the other colors in our scene and gives the impression of maybe a little bit more grass. We can zoom in here, select the furthest right slider, click on the color bar and I'll set the hue to 0.4, the saturation to 0.75, the value to 0.55, and then hit "Enter." Now this is the color that the light in our scene is going to create for the background. We can change the shadow color as well. I'm going to select this slider here, click on the color bar, set the hue to 0.4, saturation to 0.65, and then our value to 0.25, and then hit "Enter." Just two more materials left now so let's move on to the grass. Select any one of these grass blades it doesn't matter which one so I'm just going to select here. Now I can click the new button to make a new material. I'm going to start out right away by renaming this grass. It denser now we can zoom out, delete the left most node, hit "Control" and V to paste in those old wing nodes that we had before. Re-link the color to the surface and now we can change the colors as well. This material will also be a little bit different than the rest, will remain given colors split a little bit more even for the rest of the grass. Let's select the right most slider. We're going to set the position here to 0.6, and then we're going to select the middle slider here and set this to 0.3. That way we have a little bit more of an even distribution of these colors. Now we can begin affecting the colors, will select the furthest right, click the color bar, set the hue to 0.3, the saturation to 0.9, then the value to 0.65 and hit "Enter." Now we'll go to the middle slider, select the color bar, hue to 0.3, saturation to 0.9, and then the value to 0.25. Just a little bit darker and now the last color, we'll select the last slider, select the color bar 0.3 for the hue, 0.9 for the saturation, and then value 0.15 in the editor. We can see you in the background our grass has some nice shading and a few different color shades of green. Then lastly, we just have the rocks left in our scene. Let's select any one of these rocks they're pretty easy to pick out now because they're pretty much the only thing left in the scene. We can click "New", rename the material, Rocks, hit "Enter". We'll zoom out, delete this principle, BSDF node Control V, and then re-link the color to the surface. For the rocks, these sliders are fine where they're at, so we're just going to change the colors. Select the right most slider, click the color bar, hue to 0.12, saturation to 0.6, and then value to 0.9. Now we'll do the middle color, click the color bar, 0.12 for the hue, saturation 0.6, and then the value we're going to sit down to 0.5, so it's a little bit darker. Now the last color, click on the last slider color bar, and then 0.12 for the hue, 0.6 for the saturation, and then the value down to 0.25 and then hit "Enter." We can click off of this, zoom out and now we can see over here on our top view port that our rocks have this nice sandy color. That's it our entire scene is fully textured. In the next lesson, we'll begin the fun process of animating our little bumblebee. I'll see you there. 14. Animating the Wings: In this lesson, we'll be starting our animation by making the wings flap up and down. Let's begin. To start, let's make sure that we're in the layout workspace. This is the workspace that you're seeing here. This is where we did much of our camera placement as well as our modeling. To get back to the layout workspace, simply go up here to the word layout and then click on this tab. We also need to determine the length of our animation. In this case, we're going to be making a six second loop at 30 FPS. That means that we're going to need 180 frames total. We come down here to the bottom right where it says 250, on the end and we're going to set this to 180, that way our animation starts at Frame 1 and then ends at 180. The first thing that we need to do is parent the wings to the body of our bumblebee. This will ensure that when we eventually animate the body moving around, the wings will remain attached to the bumblebee. To do this, we're going to start by selecting the wings and then we're going to hold Shift and then select the body of the bumblebee. You want to make sure that you select the body last and the wings first. Now hit Control and P at the same time to bring up the Parent menu. We want to choose Object keep transform. Now if we select just the body of our bumblebee and we move it around, we can see that the wings are attached to it as well. So anything we do to the body we'll bring the wings along with it. I'm going to Control Z those movements. Now if we try the same thing with the wings by selecting them and then moving those, we'll notice that the wings move independently of the body. That's because the wings are the child object and the body is the parent object. Which means that wherever the parent goes, the child will follow. However, you can move just the child by itself. That's important for animating our wings. We want to make sure we can freely animate the wings without actually animating the body with them. Now we can begin placing key-frames for our wings. The first thing we need to do, we're going to go down here to the bottom where our timeline is, and we're just going to click and drag on this border between these two viewports here and move it up so we can see a little bit more of the timeline. Now that we can see more of the timeline, I'm going to hover over top of that and then hit the Home key and that will re-center this timeline so that it centers it out. I can see it right in the middle. You can find the Home key on your keyboard above the arrow keys towards the right side. It's near where delete and page up, page down. You'll see home there as well. So that's the key you can hit to re-center this timeline. Now on our right viewport, we're going to hit the N key to bring up our side menu. We're going to be changing some of the rotation here for these wings. Now we won't be keyframing this rotation. This is just getting the wings in a better starting place than they are now. Under our rotation, we're going to change our Y rotation to -9, then hit Enter. Then we're going to change the Z rotation to 15 then hit Enter. Notice now if we zoom in on our bee, our wings are just tilted a little bit. It looks a little bit more natural having the wings go back in space this way and not having them perfectly flat. You can hit N again to hide the side menu. We won't need it for right now. Now turn on the bottom timeline, we're going to move our play head here, this little blue line icon. We're going to move it up to Frame 1. Now over on the right side, we're going to go to the object properties. That's this little orange square here with the brackets around it. Let's click this. The object properties shows similar information to what the side menu was showing us. There are just a little bit more options down here, but overall it's pretty much the same thing. I'm going to hide the side menu again, and now we can begin actually placing keyframes. So again, make sure you're on Frame 1. Then we're going to go over here to where it says X rotation. Then this value, we're going to type in 20 degrees. So just 2,0, we can see it's rotated our wings up. Now we actually need to place this keyframe. Because all we've done at this point, it's just changed the default position. To place the keyframe. We can go over here to this little tiny dot, next to it, and we're going to click that. We can see here it's turned the number yellow, it's changed this dot into a diamond shape. If we look down here at the bottom, we now see that there is a little yellow keyframe placed on Frame 1. Now let's move this play head, this blue icon, up to Frame 4 and then we're going to change this number. Here we can see that the number is now green and it has a diamond here, but it's not filled in like it was before. So green is just letting you know that this value has been key framed in the past but currently it is not key-framed. That's what this little open diamond is telling you as well. What we're going to do is change this value. We're going to set it to 100, so 1, 0, 0. Hit Enter. Now we can see again a different color. So in this case instead of yellow like it was before, it's orange. So it's letting you know that you've changed the value, but you have yet to place a keyframe. Just warning you that, hey, I understand that you've changed the number, but if you move the play head, or you do anything else without placing a keyframe, I'm going to forget what this number was because it already has a previous keyframe. To fix that, we're just going to click this little tiny diamond icon next to it. Now we can see it's back to being yellow. If we look down here on the timeline, there's now another little yellow keyframe. So it's a really quick explainer of what exactly a keyframe is. If you're unfamiliar, a keyframe is just essentially a value noted on a timeline. Then you animate between them. If I go to Frame 1 over here, it says 20 and then if my next keyframe is set to 100, in this case on Frame 4, over those four frames, so this distance of time between these, it's going to animate between those two values. So you can see if I move one frame, it's now at around 40. If I move up to Frame 3, it's at 79. Basically right as it hits framed for, it's now at 100, which is what we told it to be. This is really a really simple basis of animation. You're basically just placing keyframes at different values on the timeline and then giving them different, either rotations, or placements of a myriad of other different parameters. It's just animating between those values based on where you place those keyframes on the timeline. We're almost done placing keyframes. Now let's move up to Frame 7 over here. We can see again, number is green, letting us know that it has been key framed in the past, just not right now. We're going to type in 20 again, which was our first value that we typed in. It turns it orange, letting us know that we've changed the number, but we haven't placed the keyframe. Then we can click this little diamond here to actually place the keyframe. Now down here, if we drag back-and-forth across these three keyframes, we can see that we have a nice, really simple flat animation for our wings. However, we'll also notice that we only keyframed a really small portion of time on this timeline, so basically the animation only happens where these three little keyframe dots are and as soon as we get past that, the wings just remains stationary, it would be pretty tedious if we had to do this over and over again along the timeline until we fill up the entire wing-flapping animation. Luckily, blenders already thought of that and made a tool that helps us easily repeat portions of our animation across the entire timeline. To get to this tool, we're going to need to switch to the animation workspace up at the top of the interface. So if we go up here to where it says animation here at the top, when we click on that, it now switches to a different workspace. Let's quickly make some adjustments to this workspace. First we're going to move this over on the right side and then we're going to click the little camera button here so we can see our camera. Now on the left we're actually going to change this. We don't have to have two cameras here. We're going to switch this to something called the graph editor, which is where we can actually get to this tool that's going to allow us to repeat this animation. So to get to that, we're going to go up here to the top left and we're going to click on this little icon here with the grid and then the ball sitting on top of it. Then we're going to go over here underneath the animation column. We're going to choose Graph Editor. Now that we have our graph editor up, we're again going to hit the Home key, which will remember is above our arrow keys and near the Delete and the page up and page down button. So will hover over this left side, hit Home, and then that'll re-center it so we can actually see the animation. This red line that we're seeing represents the keyframes that we've placed on our animation. The high point is our keyframe at 100 degrees. We can see that correlates here to 100. Then the low point is the keyframes we placed at 20 degrees. Now that we can see our keyframes over here, let's just click off the line and then select a single keyframe here at the top. You can do that just by clicking on one of these little tiny dots on this line. Now we're going to go over here to this little side window. This is brought up by hitting N, just like any other side window. If I hit N again to bring it back up, we're going to go over here to the Modifiers tab. Then we're going to choose the cycles modifier. So be sure not to confuse the cycles modifier that we just applied to the Cycles Render Engine that you might have heard about in Blender, it's unfortunate that they have the exact same name. However, they are completely different things, 90% of the time if you hear somebody referred to cycles when talking about Blender, they're actually talking about the render engine, not this modifier we just applied. On the left side here, and you'll notice after we applied this cycles modifier, if we zoom out using our mouse wheel, this red line now continues over and over again, essentially for infinity in both directions. So what this modifier is done is, it has cycled this animation over and over again. So now if we go down here and hit our play button at the bottom sensor, we can see that our wings just continuously flap over and over again. All it's doing is repeating these first three keyframes we placed over and over. The cycles modifier is a great way to repeat simple mechanical animations such as wings flapping on a bumblebee. In the next lesson, we'll be animating the body movements for our bumblebee. I'll see you there. 15. Animating the Body: In this lesson, we'll be animating the body movements of our Bumblebee. Let's begin. First, make sure that you're in the animation workspace that we used last lesson. If you're not in there yet, you can go up to this top tab where it says animation and just click that button. Now let's begin animating the body movements up and down. We're going to go down here to the bottom where it says Dope Sheet and we're going to move this all the way over to frame zero in this case. The Dope Sheet is essentially the same thing as the timeline we animated the wings on. It just has a little bit more detail shown about our animation. Now over on the right side, make sure you select the body of your Bumblebee and then go to the Object Properties tab like we were in before, this little orange square with the brackets around it. Double-check that you're still on frame zero. Now we can place our first keyframe. We're going to be animating the Z value at first. Let's place a keyframe here at two meters for the Z value, and we can do that just by clicking this little tiny dot next to Z and we're animating the location as well. Now let's go down to the Dope Sheet and we're going to move this up to frame 30. Here we are frame 30. Now we can go over to the Z value. We're going to type in 1.6, hit Enter and then place another keyframe by clicking this little diamond. Then one last keyframe, we're going to go up to frame 60 and then change the Z value to two meters, hit Enter, and then click this little keyframe value. Just like the wings, we're going to be adding the cycles modifier to this movement, so we're going to repeat it by hand. Go over here to your graph editor and then hit your home key so that it re-centers your view. Now click off and then select just a single keyframe here, we can just select this bottom one. We can go over here to our Modifiers tab and then click the drop-down for add modifier and then choose cycles. Some will notice just like last time, it's repeated this animation over and over again, infinitely in both directions. Now if we hit the Play button, we can see that this wing or this body movement we added now goes up and down forever. Now let's add a little bit of a horizontal movement side-to-side. We're going to go back to frame zero again. We'll go over to our location again, and we're going to be adjusting the Y location this time. Let's set this to begin with to -0.25 and hit Enter, and now let's place our first keyframe. Now we can go down to frame 30 again. We're going to go back to the Y location, and we're going to set this to positive 0.25, and now place our keyframe. Then one last time go down here to frame 60 and we're going to set it back to negative 0.25. Hit Enter, and then place our keyframe. Now again, let's apply this cycles modifier. Let's go back over here to our graph editor. Hit the Home key to center it out. This time we're going to be adjusting this little green line at the bottom. Let's de-select. We'll select just a single point on this line here. Make sure you're in your Modifiers tab. Add Modifier, Cycles. Again, just like last time, if we hit Play, we can see that that motion now repeats over and over again. Now let's add a little bit more complexity to this body movement instead of just moving it up and down and left and right, so we're actually going to be changing the rotation now. Again, we're going to go over here to frame 0. Now we're going to be animating the Y rotation. Let's start by setting the neck or Y to negative 2, hit Enter, and then place your keyframe by clicking this little tiny dot down here. Now go to frame 30. We're going to set this to positive 2, so we just hit 2 hit Enter, place our keyframe. Then one last time, go to 60. Change the Y rotation to negative 2, hit Enter, and then place our keyframe. Just like the last few motions here we're going to be changing or adding the cycles modifier. We can hit Home to re-center this over here on the left. Now this line we need to select here is actually this really steep one here. We'll select just one point on this vertices on this line here, go to the Modifiers tab, and then choose Add Modifier, Cycles. If we go down here and play, we can see now that it rotates back and forth as it's moving. The motion is getting a little bit more complex now. Let's add one last set of keyframes here. I'm going to go back to zero on our Dope Sheet. Now we're going to be animating the X rotation, so we'll go over here to the right rotation X. We're going to start this one out at two, so positive 2, hit Enter, place a keyframe by clicking the little dot, turning it into a diamond. We'll go over to frame 30. We'll set this to negative 2. We basically just reversed to these values here. Whenever this one is two, this one will be set to negative 2. Don't forget to place your keyframe by clicking this little diamond. Then go to frame 60. Make sure you're actually on 60. There we go. Then set the X rotation back to positive 2, hit Enter and then place your keyframe. Just like always, we're going to go over here. I'm going to click off the de-select. We actually want to select this really steep red line we're seeing here. Select just any one point on this red line. Go to Modifiers, Add Modifier, and then Cycles. Now let's hit our play button here and see what our animation looks like. We can see here the body pops around, rotates left and right, up and down, pops around moves left and right. However, you will notice that the animation looks a little bit robotic right now. It's because all of these keyframes we placed, while it was easy, we placed them all directly on top of each other, so there's no offset at all in this movement. Every movement happens at exact intervals along this timeline, either at 0, 30, or 60. It's actually relatively easy to offset these and make this animation look a little bit more organic. I'm going to pause the animation down here. We're going to start by going down here to the Dope Sheet and we're going to twirl open object transforms. We twirl this open now, we can see all of the four different types of movement both the rotations as well as both the location movements. We can see all of their actual keyframes now. Now we can see all the keyframes down here, let's begin the process of offsetting their movements. Let's start with the Y location. We're going to horizontally drag over top of just this row here that has the Y location keyframes. We'll drag over just these. You can see here just these ones on the bottom are yellow and don't worry about the ones at the top being yellow, that's because this set down here is part of every one of these other sets. Now that we have our Y location selected, we're going to move our play head here to Frame 8. Then we're going to click and drag on one of these three yellow dots, we're just going to drag this up to eight so that it lines up with this blue line. Now let's do the same thing here to the Y rotation. We're going to horizontally drag over top of the Y rotation. This time we're only going to move them 4, so I'm going to move my playhead back to four. I'm going to drag this over, moving it over to frame 4. Then lastly, we're going to move the X rotation. I might actually need to make this a little bit taller here so that this little option box doesn't hide it. You might need to do the same. To do that, you can just click on this little border between these, and we can move it up to make it a bit taller. Now I'm going to select over top of just the X rotations. I have all three of these and these we're going to move up to frame 8 as well. I'm going to move my playhead to eight and then just drag this over to frame 8. Now let's give our animation a play to see how it's improved. We can go down here and hit the Play button and we'll see that the animation now is very similar to what it was before, but it's a lot less robotic and that was just by the simple offsetting of these movements. That way everything doesn't happen all at the exact same time along the timeline. The movement now is a lot more fluid, a little bit more organic, little more floaty and I think overall it's just an improvement. What you see on screen now is an example between your original unshifted keyframes and then the after where we actually shifted the keyframes around and offset the animation. You can see how robotic the original one was versus how relatively smooth and floaty the second one is. By this point, I'm sure you've noticed that the Bumblebee is flying in place. We'll be faking the forward motion of our bumblebee by animating the background instead. In the next lesson, we'll be animating the background, so it looks like our bumblebee is flying forward. I'll see you there. 16. Animating the Background: In this lesson, we'll be animating the background so that our bumblebee looks like it's flying forward. Let's begin. Start by making sure that you're in your animation workspace, just like the last two lessons. If you're not there, you can go up here to the top, click on the word Animation, and then you'll be in this workspace. Now on the left side where our graph editor is, we can hit N to hide the side menu, we will need the cycles modifier for this. We can also drag this over to make our graph editor a little bit smaller, and the side here a little bit larger. We're actually going have to do a little bit of work over here on the right. Now over on our right side, let's select the grass object. We can zoom out and then we're also going to rotate so we can see our entire view port here. With our grass selected, we can go over here to our Modifier tab, this little blue wrench icon. We're going to click "Add Modifier", and we're going to choose the array modifier. It's up here at the very top of the second list. Essentially this array modifier just duplicates an object a certain amount of times based on the count, and then a certain amount of distance between each of these objects based on some of these values here. We're going to be using this array modifier to make basically what I would consider to be a runway for our bumblebee to fly through. We need to make sure that it's long enough that as it goes to the end, the animation path can loop back and then still be a seamless loop between the ends of the beginning of the animation and the end of the animation. Let's start by adjusting some of these parameters over here. We can leave our count set to two, so make sure you have two set for your count, that'll make two different objects, and then we're going to change the type of offset that it's using. I'm going to uncheck Relative Offset. I can collapse that by clicking this little tiny arrow, I'm going to turn on Constant Offset, and then I can click the little arrow to twirl that open so I can see these, and then for our distance, we're going to be typing in -40, hit "Enter". Now we can see here that it's duplicated one copy directly in front of our bumblebee and that's because we did a -40. If we just did +40, it would go behind our bumblebee, which is actually the opposite direction of what we want. Make sure you have -40 typed in for the X distance. The reason that I knew 40 was the measurement we needed, or be at -40, is because we specifically made this plane earlier on 40 wide. That's why we specifically made that 40. That way this calculation here would be very obvious and easy for us. Now let's select one of our rocks. Anyone, it doesn't matter within our scene because they're already all attached. We're going to do this exact same process. Go to your Modifier tab with your rock selected, go to Add Modifier, Array, make sure your account is set to two, uncheck Relative Offset, collapse that, turn on Constant Offset, twirl that open and then set your distance to -40, and then hit "Enter". With these modifiers added, we now essentially have a runway made for our bumblebee. However, instead of moving our bumblebee through the environment, we're going to trick the viewer by moving the environment past the bumblebee. This is an easy way to replicate the movement of the bumblebee without the hassle of actually animating it through space and tracking a camera to its movements. With these two modifiers applied, we can now go back to our camera view by clicking this little camera icon right here. We can zoom in a little bit so we can see the whole camera frame. Now let's start by animating the grass. We're just going to select any one of these grass blades here. We'll go to the object properties over here, this little orange box with the brackets around it. Now let's place our first keyframe. Make sure your playhead is set down to Frame 0 at the bottom or you dope sheet, go over to our location for the X value, and then we're just going to click to place a keyframe. We're going to keep framing right where it's at, at zero. Now take your playhead and move it all the way to the very end. We're going to take it right to 180, the very end of our animation, and we're going to set this to frame our 240 meters for the X value, 40, hit "Enter", and then don't forget to place the keyframe. Now let's do the same exact process here for the rocks. We're going to select any one of these rocks. Go to Frame 0, you might have gotten a little bit of a preview of the animation there, and then for the X value, we're going to set it to zero, which it already was I didn't need to type that. We can click this little tiny dot here to place our first keyframe on Frame 0, go to Frame 180, and then we're going to type in 40 meters, hit "Enter", and then click the Keyframe button. Now let's hit our Play button here to preview our animation. We click this "Play" button and might get to see the animation in motion. We can see here that our animation looks like it's moving forward, however, it has this weird stop and start here at the end. The animation goes really fast and then it slows down almost like our bumblebee is pausing and flying in place, and that speeds back up again really quickly and it slows down again. This ruins the looping animation illusion that we're going for. Luckily, this is really easy to fix within the graph editor. Let's start by pausing the animation and we're going to go over here to our graph editor, and then we can hit the Home button to re-frame this so that we can see it. Let's start by drag selecting over both of these keyframes here. Right now we have our rock selected but this is going to look pretty much the same for both. Start by having your rock selected and then just drag select over both of the keyframes on this line, the start and the end. We'll notice that this line has an S-shape to it. It starts out with a shallow slope at the bottom and quickly gets a little bit more steep here before flattening out again at the top. This is due to the type of keyframe we placed. By default, Blender places Bezier keyframes which have a nice ease-in and ease-out to each motion. Normally this is a good thing when you're animating something and you want it to have a little bit of weight to it behind the movement. Unfortunately, when you're making a seamless loop, those slowdowns make the beginning and the end of the animation really noticeable. To fix this, we need to make these Bezier keyframes into linear keyframes. Linear keyframes have consistent acceleration between Point A and Point B with no slowdowns to ease the animation. With both of your keyframes selected, hit V on your keyboard and that'll bring up your set keyframe handle type. The one that we need, we don't see the word linear here, but we do see vector, and we can see here that it's a nice straight line with no curvature to it. We're going to choose vector. Now when we choose vector, we can see that these lines here, it's perfectly straight from top to bottom, there's no more S curve to it. That'll get rid of the slowdown at the beginning and at the end. Now before we preview the animation, let's do this again to the grass because it's going to be disorienting having one object move linearly and then the other one move with a Bezier. Now let's select our grass. Make sure we have both keyframes selected, so we're just going to drag select over both, hit V to bring up the handle type menu. We're going to again choose vector. Now we can hit the Play button here at the bottom, and we'll see that there is no more slow down and speed up at the beginning and the end of the animation. It's a perfectly seamless consistent movement. We can't even really tell where the animation begins or ends unless you watch this bar at the bottom and that's the point. We wanted to make an animation that you can't tell when it begins or ends. With that last change made, we're finally finished with the animation. In the next lesson, we'll be rendering out our final animation. I'll see you then. 17. Rendering Our Final Animation: In this lesson, we'll be rendering our final animation. Let's begin. Let's start by switching to our rendering work-space here at the top. We can do that just by clicking on the word "Rendering" here at the top center. Now, down at the bottom on your timeline, make sure you're set to Frame 0 and then we're going to render a test frame. There's two ways we can do this, we can either go up here and hit "Render" and then choose render image, or you can just hit "F12" on your keyboard. We're going to choose render image, and then we'll see here basically in a matter of 0.95 seconds, in my case, yours might vary, but it should be very short. We have our render. Our render is looking pretty cool at this point and we can even see the motion blur we enabled it in the first lessons. The wings are getting an obvious motion blur because they're moving so fast. We can also see it here on the background for the grass and the rocks as well. There are a couple of things we can add to this render before we render out the full animation to make it a little bit more interesting, Let's head over to the compositing tab to start working on that. We're going to click "Compositing" up here next to the rendering tab and that'll switch us to our compositing workspace. First on our top viewport here we can hit "N" to hide the side menu, and now we're going to drag out a brand new viewport. We're going to do that by going up here to the very top left corner, waiting until our mouse turns into a plus sign, and we're just going to click and drag over. We're going to drag it out to roughly the middle. Now on this right side here, we're going to go up to this drop-down, and then we're going to choose image editor. After we've chosen an image editor, now we're going to go up here to this drop-down next to the word new, and then we're going to choose viewer node. Now, down here at the bottom, we can make this dope sheet a good bit smaller and we won't need this, so we'll just drag it down to it's a small bar at the bottom. On our left viewport, we're going to go up here to where it says use nodes, and we're going to check that one and now we can again see a familiar node system. Now, this isn't the material editor we were working in earlier, this is the compositor, but it's still using the same exact node system with sockets, wires, and nodes. Now let's add our first node over here. We're going to hit "Shift" and A, and in the search bar we're going to type in view and we're going to make a viewer node. We'll choose viewer, our screen is going to go black here for a second, but don't worry about that for now. Now we can click and drag from the image socket on the render layers node. I'm going to click and drag that over here to the image socket on the viewer node. Now we can actually see our render. We're actually seeing it twice and that's because by default, most people might work with the backdrop setting, which allows us to see our render underneath the nodes. I find that pretty distracting. We're going to turn off backdrop. And then that's why we made this additional viewport over here with the image editor viewing the viewer node. It's showing the exact same thing that the backdrop would have been showing, it's just in a different window and it's a little bit easier to zoom in and out on. Now let's add our next new node over here on the left. We can hit "Shift" and A, go to our search bar and we're going to type in glare, so G-L-A-R, and then we can see here glare. We have this made. Now we're going to drop this in-between the viewer and the image node over here. Just click that to place it. Then before we do anything over here, just click and drag this socket to the composite node above it, that way we have the render being routed through the glare and then into both of these sockets over here. Now let's adjust the glare properties. We're going to zoom in down here, and there's a whole bunch of different types of glare, but the one we're going to use right now is probably the most simple and probably also the most common is fog glow. We'll choose fog glow. We can leave this set to medium. We are going to lower the threshold. The threshold is essentially the value at which the glare will start being applied. Right now it's set to one, which is the default. But as you lower this value, more and more things will start getting glow, so we can start seeing it here on the wings. We're going to lower this all the way down to 0.6. Overall, the glow that we're applying to the render is really subtle. But it is just a hint of glow around things like the wings, maybe in the brightest parts of the yellow around the white for the eyes. It's just a really subtle effect. If you're not seeing enough glow on your render, feel free to lower the threshold down just by one click at a time. We don't want to go so far that the entire image starts getting glow over top of it. In my case here, maybe we'll stop at say, 0.6 or 0.5. I'll set mine to 0.5. We can also adjust the size of this glow down here with the size slider. By default, this actually stops at six and it goes up to nine. It's a weird slider. I'm going to lower mine down to seven. Now with a little bit of glow added, let's add one more effect to increase the distortion around the edges of our frame. If you've taken any of my classes previously, you might know what I'm about to add, it's called the lens distortion node. It's going to add a rounding distortion around the edges of our frame, as well as this rainbowy fringe. Now this is purely optional if you don't like the look of it. I would first set it up and then if you don't like it, we can just delete it and you can just use just the glare node. I think it adds a little bit of interest to these small one-off projects that we create. On the left side here, we're going to zoom out. I'm going to drag select over these two furthest right nodes and move them over so that there's room for the lens distortion node. Now I can hit "Shift" and A, go to search, then type in lens, so L-E-N-S and then lens distortion. Now again, just drag on top of either one of these lines, it doesn't really matter, I'm going to drag it on the bottom one and then click and drag from this socket to the socket as well. That way it's running through both of them and outputting into both. Now we'll notice nothing has changed and that's because we haven't adjusted any of these settings. Let's zoom in down here. The only setting we're going to adjust is this dispersion. We're going to type in 0.2 and then hit "Enter". Now we'll notice over here on the right side, the render actually zooms in just a little bit, and that's because it's distorting it towards us. But we're also noticing a little tiny bit of rainbowing around the edges. We can see here we're getting a little bit of a blue hue, very slim amount of a pinky red color. We're seeing it a little bit here. It's a really subtle effect overall, but it has just a little bit of, I keep saying interest, but I think it just makes the renders look cool personally. Again, if you don't like this, by all means you can lower it, so you could set it to 0.1. and that'll make the effect a little less strong, or if you think it looks really cool and you want to go a little heavier on it, you can do like 0.3 or 0.5, just to remember that as you increase this one, the distortion is going up. It's also zooming in further on your render. It's giving this almost like a central motion blur, rainbow distortion effect. It's a complicated effect, but overall, I think it looks pretty nice. For our animation. I'm just going to set mine back down to 0.2 and then we can leave it there. If you decided you didn't like the look of this, you can just delete this and then run this image back into both of the top and the bottom nodes over here on the right side. With these effects added, let's go back to our rendering tab, up here at the top. Now let's just go to a different part of the animation. In this case, let's go to 80 and do one more test render to see what it looks like at that point. We'll go to render, and then render image, or you can just hit "F12". Now we can see it a different point in our render here, it's actually right where the grass starts overlapping in my case. That's good we get to see roughly how much of the grass is going to be overlapping the bee, I think that looks fine. I think everything looks great. Now we can actually move on to rendering the full animation. To do this, we're going to go over here to our output tab. We'll go to this tab here and it looks like the little printer printing out a photo, and now we can adjust our output settings. Let's start by changing the file format. Right now it's set to an image format, so we're going to change it to a video format instead. We're going to choose FFmpeg Video. We'll choose this one. Now we can throw down encoding and we'll see more settings down here. We're going to switch the container from Metroska to MPEG-4 which is one that you've probably heard of. We're going to leave the video codec set to H.264. Then the output quality, we're going to switch from medium quality to perceptually lossless, which is going to give us the highest quality without making the file really large. We can leave the encoding here set to good. Lastly, let's go up here to this little folder icon and this will be determining where we actually save this animation out once it's done. Go ahead and click this little white folder and now choose the location you'd like to save out this video file. In my case, I'm just going to save it where I saved the actual blender file as well. We can go down here and we can give it a name. I'm going to call mine bumblebee_animation_01. This is basically the exact same name as what I named the blender file and it's for the same reasons. I know what it is, what kind of file it is, and also I'm giving it a version number. If I wanted to say about a second version of this, maybe from a different camera angle or a different lighting or a different object in it, I can just give it a different number. The only difference to this name, and as I'm going to add an additional underscore at the end of this, the reason being is this is going to give us the frame numbers here listed at the end of our animation. It'll tell us that it started at frame one and ended at frame 180. If I don't add an underscore here to give it a space between these, it's going to attack that number directly onto the O1 at the end of it. I don't really want that. It looks a little messy. I'm going to add an additional underscore here at the bottom. With that setup, now I can hit "Accept" and now it's ready to render. Now when you're ready, we can go up here to render, and then we're going to choose render animation. This should be a relatively fast process because we're using the EB render engine, hopefully no more than a few minutes for you. If it seems like blender isn't applying the compositing effects to each frame, you don't have to worry. Your final render will still look correct. I'm going to hit the Render Animation button here, and then I'll see you in a few moments when my animation is finished. The render is done and it looks great. This video file is ready to be shared with all your friends and family on social media. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to easily convert this video file into an animated GIF by using a free online converter. I'll see you there. 18. Creating an Animated GIF: In this lesson, I'll show you how to create an animated GIF file using a free online converter. Let's begin. The reason an animated GIF version of your video file is so useful is it's much easier to post your class project as a GIF rather than a video. Skillshare doesn't allow you to upload a video directly to the platform yet. However, we can upload animated GIFS with no issue at all. The first thing we need to do is go to the free video converter website. We'll be using a website called ezgif.com/maker to make our GIF today. It's a really simple and free way to convert our animation into an animated GIF. We'll start by clicking this choose files button here at the top. Now navigate to wherever you saved out your animation from the last lesson. In my case, it's right here. I'm just going to select my video file here. Then I can choose Open. Now we're ready to click this little blue button down here that says upload and make a GIF. We can click this. Now we're led here to this option screen. This is where we can determine the options and the output for the GIF file. We're going to change our size from original all way down to 500 by AUTO, which means it's going to choose 500 for the largest dimension and then it'll set the other dimension to whatever it would be scaled down proportionally. In our case, it's just going to be 500 by 500 because it's a square. Let's choose 500 by AUTO. We're going to set our frame rate to 25, which means we'll have a little bit less frame rate here, but that's okay. An animated GIF is usually a little less quality than a video would be. Then lastly, we're going to choose convert to GIF. Now we can scroll down this page here and we'll see this little cat here dancing, that's just their loading bar, which is nice. Then we can wait for our GIF to pop-up. Here we go. We can see that we have an animated GIF playing now. We also see the size of this GIF, which is really important. Right here we can see it's about 14 and 1/2 megabytes. We need to make sure that our GIF is under eight megabyte so that we can actually upload it to Skillshare. Skillshare won't allow you to upload any image file, including GIFS, that are larger than eight megabytes. Luckily, this site also has a really easy optimize feature. We can use that now. Let's go down here to this little cogwheel with the broom next to it that says optimize. We can click that, that will lead us to the optimize page. Now we can scroll down, and then we can adjust the compression level. To start with, let's just use the original 35 compression level. We can see here that it says 30 is a very light compression and 200 is very heavy. Let's click optimize GIF. We'll see down here same thing, little dancing cat, and then it'll pop out the optimized GIF once it's ready. Our optimized GIF is ready and now we can scroll down and see the size. In my case, 35 was enough to take it from almost 15 megabyte down below eight megabytes. In this case 7.93, and that's pretty close to eight. I'm just going to optimize it just a little bit more. I'm going to set this up to 40 from my compression level and then hit optimized GIF. Now everyone's GIF might be a little bit different based on the amount of colors. If you added more grass or if he chose a different color, it's going to change the file size. You're going to have to play with your compression level here. I won't be able to give you an exact number that works exactly for your GIF, especially if you're optimizing an image that is, say, your class project, that is completely different than this bumblebee. Your goal should be to use the lowest compression level possible. I would just slowly inch it up, maybe 10-15 at a time until you've managed to get your image file size down here below eight megabytes. Now that our GIF is successfully optimized, we can just right-click on this image here and then choose save image as. Now you can navigate to wherever you'd like to save this GIF file. In my case, the same place I saved my animation as well as my blender file and I'm going to rename this bumblebee_GIF. Then I can do _01 if I want at the end just so it has a version number and then I can hit Save, and we're done. Now you can upload this animated GIF as though it were a regular image file in Skillshare. When you go to upload your class project, choose the image upload rather than the video upload and then you can choose your GIF file as if it was a regular image, but it will still show the animated GIF instead. In the next and final lesson, we'll be discussing our class project. I'll see you there. 19. Our Class Project!: You made it to the end of the class. Congratulations. Now that you've learned how to make a cartoon bumblebee animation with me, I'd like you to create a new one of your very own and share it with the class. To make your animation unique, you can try things like changing the color of your bumblebee to make it look like a different insect, changing the shape or adding new parts to make your insect unique, or modeling new background elements like flowers, sticks, or leaves, or another small bug like an ant. If you would rather not create another insect, try your hand at creating another flying animal like a bird or a bat. For my class project, I made this cartoon fly based on the Pixar movie, A Bug's Life. I created it utilizing many of the same techniques we learned during this class. After you've finished your unique cartoon animation, post the render to the project gallery to share it with me and all of the other students. I'll personally review each project posted to the gallery, and let you know what I love about your project, as well as anything that could use a little bit of adjustment. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Thank you all so much for taking my class. I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed this class and want to know when I release a new one, click the follow button here on Skillshare. Please consider leaving an honest review on the class, so you can let other students know if it's worth their valuable time. If you liked this class, check out my teacher profile. You might find another class of mine that interests you, such as my low-poly fantasy sword modeling tutorial. Thanks again, and I hope to see you in another class soon.