Transcripts
1. Blender Intro 01 Course Trailer: Blender is hot stuff. Long, a powerful if quirky suite of 3D tools. Recent short films have proven to the 3D world that it is a seriously heavy hitter. In the past couple of years, it's development pace has been astronomical and only seems to be accelerating. Whatever you're interested in. 3d blender will enable you to tackle it. But all this power comes with depth and complexity. Using blender to recreate a crisp, relatively simple image such as this fantastic designed by new Real Madrid and Christianity polygon Garcia, who get you equipped with the solid toolkit and you'll need in order to start working as a 3D artist.
2. Blender Intro 02 Navigation: This is the screen you'll be greeted with when you launch blender. You have the minimum three ingredients here in the 3D view port to create a render, which is in effect a finished 2D photograph or whatever we build in 3D. Those three elements are some geometry. This cube here, a light without which nothing would be visible in a render. And finally, a camera which is required to control, among other things, the aspect ratio and focal length of the render. You can quickly look through that camera by oppressing the 0 key on your number pad. Speaking of jumping to different viewpoints, let's figure out how to navigate around our scene in blender. The middle mouse button is your friend here. Middle mouse drag to orbit around. Shift, middle mouse drag to Gibb up and down, or truck left and right. Control middle mouse drag to Dolly in and out. You can also simply use your scroll wheel for this. I'll customize how the orbits and zoom works by hopping into Preferences under the Edit menu. I'll assign a shortcut here by pausing over preferences, right-clicking and selecting, Assign shortcuts and force of habit. I'll use the old blender preferences, shortcut Control, Alt you. Now under navigation, I'll check orbit around and selection. And further down, zoom to mouse position. This will result in an intuitive way of navigating this scene because we'll move to or around what's most relevant to us. Press a to select all, and then delete everything. Now open the Add menu, press shift a, go into the mesh menu and scroll down to monkey. I'm just using this preset so that we'll be able to distinguish the different viewpoints as we cycle through them. By pressing number pad five, you can toggle quickly between ordinary perspective, which mimics to a degree, the way we see the world. And orthographic, which is how technical drawings are presented, devoid of any sense of depth, very useful during the modelling process. Similarly, we can use NumPy had 74 top view, control seven for bottom. And once again, I can toggle in and out of orthographic with the five key on the NOPAT in any of these views. Num pad one for front and control, one for back, NUM pad 34, right, and control three for left. Unlike in some other 3D packages, the orthographic views are not locked. So you can simply start navigating around your scene again by using your middle mouse. You'll notice that if you were in orthographic modes, by default, blender will automatically switch back to the more natural perspective mode. As soon as you middle mouse drag to orbit. I prefer not to have this behavior as it can be a little confusing. Again, control alt you to open preferences. And under navigation, uncheck auto perspective. Now if I'm in say, top orthographic view, so NUM pad 75 to toggle orthographic. Then navigate away. I stay in orthographic mode with an object selected. If you find that you're zoomed too far in or maybe too far away from that object. Tap NUM pad dot to home in on it. If you really get lost in your scene, you can always use this navigation gizmo at the top right to reorient yourself, as well as click on any of these little axis names to pick an orthographic view. If you need to see all three defaults, orthographic views simultaneously use the shortcut Control Alt Q to toggle.
3. Blender Intro 03 Layout & Pie Menus: Another handy feature is blenders, extensive range of heads-up displays or pie menus, which give access to heaps of tools really easily. Once again, control alt you to open preferences and find add-ons. Search for pi, then tick to enable the 3D viewport pie menus. As you can see, there's quite a list here and quite a lot of shortcuts to memorize. I've included a screenshot of this as an ad memoir. Let's change our layout so that we can have it onscreen as we work. If I hover over the top right corner of this window, my cursor will become across. This indicates that I can now split this window. If I now drag to the left, you can see another window is being formed. When it comes to layout, blender is very flexible, but it takes some getting used to. If I wanted to get rid of this new pain at start in the same way up in the corner with the crosshairs. But now instead of dragging left as I did before, I drag into the pain, I want rid of. It goes dark and an arrow appears to indicate which window is about to vanish. But this point, by dragging the mouse, you can choose which of the two panes will go. I can now simply open this editor type drop-down and select image editor. Click on this file icon and navigate to the Image. Blender pie menu shortcuts, dot PNG. We don't necessarily need all of these pie shortcuts. I'll disable this, select one for a start, since I like to have select all map to a, which is the standard shortcut. Save those preferences and close. Now I can call up all manner of tools without having to fiddle around with menus and so on. You will soon see how useful this is as we progress through the course. To cancel a pie menu, just tap escape. Now, remember the a shortcut I disabled because I find the standard a select all shortcut is quicker for me. If I tap a in a 3D viewport, selects all, double-tap a to de-select all alt a also de-select.
4. Blender Intro 04 Transforming Objects: If I want to move an object, I click to select it and tap G for grab. Blender works in a modal way, meaning that once an operator such as Grab has been invoked, blenders switches into grab mode. You temporarily don't need your mouse buttons. And instead all you need to do is move your mouse, then click to confirm when your ready. By default, blender will use my current viewpoint and constrain the movement to a plane perpendicular to it. If I toggle to quad view with Control Alt Q, then use this top view appear on the left and hit g to grab the monkey. Watched the lower two viewports, you will see that the monkey is constrained to the x and y axes, which are perpendicular to the top view. This, by the way, is one of the idiosyncrasies of blender. The zed axis is the up axis as opposed to the why, which it is in the majority of other 3D packages. You can easily constrained movement to a set of axes by invoking a tool. So g for grab, then hit the axis name, say x. The object snaps back to the axis, which lights up. Let's try y and zed. Hold down control to move in snapping increments. Hit escape to cancel. You can also constrain movement to a plane defined by two axes. By locking up the axis, you don't want to move in. I'll hit G shifts Zed, for example, to lock the zed axis, the x and y-axis light up. Now I can only move across the ground plane. Of course, the same goes for any other plane. To rotate an object tap, our rotation will be constrained to your viewpoint. If you want to freely rotate. Double-tap are. Once again, if you need to constrain movement to an access, tap the axis name after invoking the tool to scale tap s. And the same constraint options can be used here too. Notice that the further away from the selected object the cursor is on starting the Transform tool. The finer grained control you'll have. The opposite holds true the closer you are to an object when you start a tool. You can also get more precision during a transform by holding down the Shift key. And for total precision, you can simply tap in a numeric value on the number pad. For example, g x for x axis 0.35. If I open the properties panel by tapping n. I can verify that this object has indeed moved not 0.35 units on the x axis. Now if I transform this object in all sorts of ways and then decide it's gone wrong. And I want to start again. Alt G will clear all my location operations. Olds are, will clear all rotations, and old S will clear any scaling. You can also clear all transforms in one hit via the control a apply transforms pi, clear transform menu. Clear or I'll delete that monkey end, use shift a to add a cube again. I'll also come up here to the gizmo menu and switch them on. Move, rotate, scale. Now what if I want to rotate this cube, say on the y-axis? Well, I could use the shortcut are then tap y or use the gizmo here. When I let go, you'll notice that the move and scale axis still reflect the world or global axes. But what if I now want to scale the cube along one of its own or local axes. Right now, I won't be able to. You can display these axes if you like. I'll need to change the transform orientation appear at the top. Watch how the object gizmo changes as I do. Now I'm free to scale this rotated object along its own zed axis. For example. Personally, I find it easier to use shortcuts. So generally I have the gizmos switched off. I'll clear the transforms once again, control a clear transforms, clear all. Switch to transform orientation back to global. You can also access this through the comma pie menu. If I once again rotate the cube on the y-axis are y, and let's say 30. And I once again want to scale along this object's local z-axis. Then I can simply tap as to scale, then double-tap zed to constrain to the objects locals at access. Of course it works the same way with the other tools. Rotate and holding Shift as you double-tap the axis name locks the local axis.
5. Blender Intro 05 Object vs Edit Mode: In the last video, we were transforming an object as a whole. But what if we wanted to add more detail to something? For this, we need to switch modes from working on, on object as a whole to editing the inner structure of that object. Now if isolated, Of course I select the whole queue. Now watch this mode dropdown at the top left change as I hit the tab key. We've switched to edit mode in the 3D view port, the display also changes. I can now see edges and vertices at the corners. You can switch back out again to object mode by tapping tab again. I'll tap back into edit mode and tap AA to de-select all. By default, you'll be in vertex select mode. That's indicated by this vertex icon here next to the mode drop-down. I can now select vertices and transform them. If I want to select edges, I click this edge icon. Or faces. I can switch between selection modes with the 123 keys above the keyboard. One for vertex, two for edges, three for faces. What if I needed more detail in this model? A really handy tool here is the loop cut and slide shortcut Control R. I simply hover over my model in edit mode, hit Control R, and a yellow loop appears around the model. Click once to enter slide mode, then click again to confirm the cut. If you don't want to slide the cut, just tap Enter twice. Once to enter slide mode and wants to confirm the position. I'll undo that. You can also interactively add more cuts in the first step by scrolling or mouse wheel. So control our scroll mouse. You can also increase or decrease the number of cuts using the NUM pad plus and minus keys. Or by typing in a value on the NUM pad. Let's practice using this by subdividing all the XYZ, say by ten. Right now I can really start customizing this default cube.
6. Blender Intro 06 Extrude and Inset: Let's say I wanted a raised section on the top here. Tap NumPy adds seven for top view, three for face select. Now, if I just grab these, I'll make a sort of tapered shape and do that. What I want is a shoulder here and a platform raised up. For this. I'll use the extrude tool shortcut e. By default, it will extrude perpendicular to the selected faces. If I select some polygons in a different plane, you'll see it extrudes along the perpendicular to that axis. Again, as with many operations in Blender, whilst in extrude mode, you can tap in a precise value if you need. Even more useful. Tapping the function key F9 will open the parameters for the current operation, giving you even more options. Now, what if we wanted to extrude a ring of these faces outwards to select a loop, hold Alt whilst clicking a face. Now if I try to extrude using the standard E extrude shortcut, it won't let me do what I want. However, tapping ALT E instead gives us a few more options. What I'm after is extrude faces along normals or perpendiculars. As I hover, you'll see the tool tip extrude region together along local normals. If I select that option and move the mouse, it almost gives me what I'm after. A slight tweak is needed because as you can see, the corner faces have started sloping. Use F9 to open the parameters of the last operation. Check offset. Even. Next, I want to show you a close relative of extrude the inset tool. I'll start with a fresh cube tab into edit mode. De-select all with AAA, and select this top face. Try and get in the habit of moving away from your model a little before invoking a tool to give you more control. Now tap I for inset. We get this parallel inner edge. If we wanted, we could now extrude this as we did before. Then repeat the process. A handy option with the inset tool is once you're in insert mode, hold the control key. This lets you move the inset in or out along the normal on the fly by moving the mouse. When you're happy with the position of it, release control. And if you wish, continue scaling the inset again by moving the mouse. With a combination of inset and extrude, you can quickly move away from the default cube.
7. Blender Intro 07 Text Object: It's time to make a start on this project. So let's bring in our reference image over in the image editor window. Again, just click the File Icon and navigate to the reference image to reference. Over in the 3D viewport. Let's delete everything and open the Add menu with Chef de select text. To be able to make changes to this object will have to jump into edit mode, press tab to do so. Control a to select all and type two tab to go back to object mode. Now, I don't know for sure which font the artists use to create this image. And with accessibility in mind, I found that a fair approximation is our key VO black, which has an open font license and is available here. Get that font installed on your system. Then over in the Properties window, under the text data properties tab, find the Font tab and toilet open. Wherever you see this type of menu and blender control clicking should close all other 12 downs and focus on the one you clicked. I noticed a bug here earlier and it wasn't doing that. But anyway, that's the intended behavior. Click on the folder icon and navigate to your system font folder, which on Windows is C, forward slash Windows, forward slash fonts. Once you've got it installed, you should be able to search for our Kiva black. Or you could use the thumbnail view here and select whichever fun you prefer. Let's scale this two up, say five times. So S five. Let's look in the item transform tab. Scale is five on all axes. Now to avoid any unintended consequences, I'll apply that scale. Watch this scale values as I tap control a select Apply Scale. Now any subsequent operations we perform on the to get a nice clean starting point with a scale of one along all axes. Now under the text geometry tab, Let's add some thickness to this two by increasing the extrude value. Again, holding shift will give you a bit more control here. I think I'll just enter a value of 9.4 here.
8. Blender Intro 08 Camera Setup: Let's try and mimic the camera setup of the reference. Just roughly try and match it. Shift a for the add menu select camera. Now, we can tell that camera to junk to our current point of view using the shortcut Control Alt, NUM pad 0. Toggle in and out of camera view using NumPy hasZero. Once you're looking through the camera, if you middle mouseDragged to orbit the scene, you'll automatically pop out of the camera view. To prevent this and shift the camera whilst looking through it. Get the properties or n panel open in the 3D viewport. Under View, check view lock, camera to view. Now when we use the middle mouse to navigate the viewport, we're shifting the camera. Don't forget to uncheck this when you've got the cameras set up the way you want. By comparison with the reference, our two looks to have way more of a vanishing point to it. The reference is almost an isometric view. If I press the T key for the reference image pane and switch to the annotate line tool. You'll see what I mean. This shape is almost a parallelogram. It's almost as if there's no vanishing point. We can make our camera mimic this. Click on the camera properties tab and under lens select orthographic as the type. Now our camera no longer reads depth. So if you find you're not zoomed in enough or too much, then use this orthographic scale to zoom in and out. Ok, that's more similar to the reference, which obviously is square. And we can make sure our render comes out square to the third tab down on the properties editor is output properties. Under dimensions, we have the standard HD 1920 by 1080 or 16 by nine ratio. Let's have the X resolution match the Y, so 1080 by 1080. Now I can use a trick to help match the alignment of this camera with the reference by bringing a copy of the reference directly into the 3D view port. Shift a image reference, make sure aligned to view is checked. And again, select the reference image. Now under the object data properties for the image, this little red picture icon here, select transparency and turn down the opacity so that you can make out both the 3D model and the image. Let's rename it href image 3D. Now scale a reference so it matches the bounds of the camera view. Next will make the camera the parents of the image plane by dragging ref image 3D in the outliner, holding Shift and dropping it on top of the camera. Now it's as if the camera is a container holding that image. So whichever way we move it, the href image will move with it and so will remain facing it. I'll give myself a bit more room to work here by hovering over the 3D viewport and pressing controls space to toggle Full screen and panel, lot camera to view and orbit to match the angle as best you can. We can also scale the ref and focus on getting the two in the right position. Now to get some extra control over the camera movement in a similar way to when we parented the ref to the camera. We can go a step further and bring in a null or empty object as a container for the camera, which we can use as a sort of on-screen camera control. Shift a empty sphere. Let's rename it. Camera control. Are reduce its size. Two naught 0.5. Now I'll do the same trick as I did with the ref image, but this time with the camera in the outliner. Drag the camera holding Shift and drop it onto the camera control object. Select the camera control and rotated as you need using R, then whichever axis. Remember to hold shift for fine control. Now I'll turn the opacity of rough image 3D backup and in the outliner, toggle the visibility to check. Once the angle is aligned to your liking. Switch off raffinate 3D and go back to eyeballing the position against the reference in the 2D editor.
9. Blender Intro 09 Collections Organising the Scene: So far we've been in the process known as blocking out. We're positioning blocks of geometry and the camera about where they should be in the scene. Soon, we'll get a bit deeper into the building process and make this two into a pool. First though, let's give ourselves a backup. Blender has a grouping system called collections, which can help keep Racine organized. At the top of the outliner, you will see there is already a collection. The startup scene has one in it. By default. I'm going to copy this two and put it into a new collection for safekeeping. Let's duplicate this two by selecting it and using the shortcut shift D. Then right-click to leave the duplicate in exactly the same position as the original. Appear in the outliner. You will see the duplicate with a dot 001 suffix with it selected in the viewport. Let's put it into a new collection by tapping m four, moved to collection and selecting New Collection. I'll name it build because that's where I'll keep the original objects I build the scene from. I can now hide the collection and its contents by clicking It's eyeball here. Have a few collections to help us keep track of things. I'll rename this original 12 crew. This one are used to keep my lights and cameras n. I'll also select the original two and pop it into a new collection. This one will be for the geometry that will appear in our render. I'll call it GEO for short. At the top right of the outline and there is this funnel or filter drop-down. My preference is to uncheck, sort alphabetically. That way I can drag items around in the outliner and organize them in ways that suit me. I prefer to have the build and crew collections at the bottom of this list. If I want to focus on a particular collection, I can just control click it and it'll hide everything else. I can also force all items in a collection to be visible or not by shift clicking It's eyeball. You may find you want to dig down into a collection and you can progressively Open or collapse a hierarchy using the NUM pad plus and minus keys. Whilst we hear in the outliner, Take a look at the restriction toggles again under this filter drop-down. You know about the Haydn viewport one. Let's check a few more that will come in handy as we progress. Selectable, useful if we wanted to prevent an object from getting accidentally nudged, for example, the camera control would be a candidate for this. I'll search for it by name in this field. Select it, and click the cursor icon to lock it in the viewport. Now, I won't mess up my camera angle. I could shift, click it a couple of times to apply that to the hierarchy and protect the camera itself to. Another option we'll need is this disabling renders. As things stand, this build collection is invisible in the viewport. If I have that collection selected and in the viewport, add say a sphere, we won't see it. But there is a sphere there. As we can see in the hierarchy. I'll test how this scene renders. I'll need some light. So shift a, say a sunlight. Let's give it a bit more power. And move and rotate it so that something renders. Then under render, select render image. And there's the sphere. The build collection is just for the workings of arsine, not for the final render. So shift click the camera icon to prevent any of the collection from rendering.
10. Blender Intro 10 Making The Pool Part 1: Now let's start digging into the geometry of this two. In the reference, the pool edge is flush with a ground plane. So let's add in our own plane scattered up so that the camera view is filled. Once again, it's good practice to apply the scale, resetting it to one. Now, I want to try to get the top surface of the GO TO snap to the plane we just brought in. At the top of the viewport is this little magnet or snapping icon. Switch it on. Then in the dropdown next to it, select face, select the two, and tap G to grab it. Then zed, and it should snap to the plane. Check that in orthographic view. Now you can see from the hatching that the geometry of the two is intersecting with the plane and that won't render well. So let's give it a tiny nudge in the Z axis. Select the two, Hit G, sad 0.001, just to raise it up a tiny amount. If you find you want to change that value whilst you're in and grabbed mode, you can just hit backspace. And in the top left of the viewport, you can see the value change. Now that hatching effect has gone, whereas the top face of the to no longer intersects with the plane. Let's turn this 2x into polygon geometry so we can mess with it more. First, let's select the plane and hide it. You can use the shortcut H for that. Up to now, the surfaces of the two have been generated from a few mathematical curves. In other words, we couldn't really customize it all that much. By turning it into polygonal geometry, we would lose the text functionality such as being able to change what it says. Along with the extrude depth and other geometry options. But what we gain is the ability to push and pull the resulting geometry Anyway, we like, so like the two, right-click and select Convert to mesh. Over here in the properties, the text icon has now been replaced with a geometry one tab to go into edit mode, tap number three to go into face select mode, and select any of these top paces. Then in the Select menu, scroll to similar. And select coplanar. Blender will now select all of these top faces because they're all in the same plane. Hit delete and choose faces. Switched to edge mode. And again use the edge loop selection shortcut, hold Alt, and click one of these top edges. Now, let's fill this edge loop with a single polygon or n gone. By using the shortcut f. From here, will cut an inset edge using the shortcut ie, dragging inwards. What we're looking to do here is matched the widths of the white pool edge in the reference. When you think it's about right click to confirm. You'll have seen some nasty looking shading is we made that inset. Let's zoom in on this corner and see why. In edit mode, you can see is because of all this overlapping geometry. That's the result of all these tightly packed edges, all being extruded inwards or inset right next to this perpendicular edge. We need to create a bit more space here before we do that inset. And we'll do that in the next video.
11. Blender Intro 11 Making The Pool Part 2 Geo Cleanup: Let's tackle this overlapping geometry and do a couple of steps and go back to before when we feel the edge loop. Select these underside faces, tap, delete and choose faces. Select these parallel edges, and tap F to fill with a single polygon. It's a similar operation on these vertical faces. Select delete, but this time, select all three of the remaining edges and tap F to fill them. Now, just to be sure that this geometry is all connected together and there are no overlapping vertices. In other words, to ensure that the new edges we've made are indeed connected to the existing geometry. I'll drag a box to select the point or points at the top where the new geometry joins the old and tap em for merge and choose at center. I'll do the same at the bottom. Now again, select that top edge loop as we did before and fill it. I for inset, drag. And look, it seems that the overlapping problem has been fixed. Let's see how this renders, because that's where faults in our geometry will really show up. In the top right of the viewport or the viewport shading options. By default, you'll be in this solid mode. Switch over to rendered. Then let's check which render engine is being used. Second tab down and the properties manager is for Render Settings. Select cycles, AAA to de-select all to get rid of that highlight. Well, that's okay, ish. But the shading of the edges is looking at bit suspect. To fix that will tell bender not to try and blend the shading between certain surfaces. We want nice crisp delineation of horizontal and vertical surfaces, but smooth shading of curved surfaces, such as on the sides of this platform. The setting we need for this is under the object data properties tab. Under normals. The normal is the perpendicular to a given surface. 3d programs use them, among other things. So calculate how to bounce light off an object. In edit mode. You have the option to display normals under this overlays tab at top right, down here at the bottom. Under object data properties, normals Enable Auto smooth. Now edges where an angle between the normals is smaller than that specified in this angle value here will be smoothed out. Otherwise, it'll just render the face is flat. The normal on this top edge is of course, at 90 degrees to the one on this vertical side, way more than the 30 degree threshold. Auto smooth settings. So blender won't attempt to blend the shading between the two. This is a great way to combine smooth and sharp edges because we can see here, the top surface renders dead flat. Whilst this curve on the back of the two has this nice graduated shading. Now we can delete the inset face to form empty pool.
12. Blender Intro 12 Diving Platforms Part 1: We now have the empty pool. Looking at the reference, we can see that the bottom of this curved edge on the right of this orange platform is approximately level with the flattened on the left. I'll quickly maximize this 3D view port with control space. Select the pool tapped to edit. Then in edge select mode, again, select that top edge loop. Now we need to make a new object from this edge loop. So first of all, shift D to duplicate it. Right-click to confirm with it's still selected. Tap P to bring up the separate menu. Choose by selection. And you'll see here in the outliner, then you object, which will rename to orange platform. Tap forward slash to go into local view, allowing us to focus on the selected object. Numpy adds seven to go into top view. Tab to edit mode. With the box select tool active, select the upper section of that edge loop. Control i to invert the selection. Tap X for the delete pi vertices. Tab back to object mode and under the object menu scroll to, convert to and select curve from mesh or text. We've converted this polygonal edge loop into a different kind of geometry, which now consists of mathematical curves instead of polygons, much like our original two text object. Now take a look at the reference. The curve of the inner edge of this right-hand side of the platform starts somewhere up here before the curve in the original two starts turning down and to the left. Something roughly like this. With this in mind, let's delete some of these lower points. Now, I'll select this inner point, hit ie to extrude out a new point. And as I'm still in top orthographic view here, I can be sure that I'm only moving in the XY plane. Place it somewhere in the middle of the two end points. Then under active spline, select cyclic U, which is a fancy way of saying close the curve. You'll see a black line connect the newly extruded point to the open end point. We can select these three points by selecting this one on the left than holding control and clicking the one on the right. And blender should use the shortest path to select all points in between. Now, obviously, we want a nice rounded curve here rather than this sharp point. So the last setting we need to change is under the curve menu above the viewport set spline type Beziers. This converts the curve from a series of points connected by straight lines to points connected by something called Beziers curves, which have handles in order to control the shape of the curve. Now select this new middle point and change its type using the V Shortcut, set it to automatic. Finally, click in turn on each of the former endpoints and then click on the handle projecting out from it G to grab and adjust the curve to your liking. Now under the geometry tab at some thickness using the extrude setting back under shape again, specify how to fill the curve to make a solid shape. There are a few options here. I'll select both. Zoomed in like this. We can see that the segments of the curve of visible. So I think I'll increase the resolution of the curve here. Finally, in object mode, go into aside orthographic view and move it up to the ground plane. If you want to change the shape of this curve here, tap into edit mode and move, rotate, and scale appoints as you need.
13. Blender Intro 13 Diving Platforms Part 2: Well that's the tricky platform out the way. Now let's make this wedge at a cube and rename it wedge. In top view, position, its upper-right corner level with the corner of the horizontal. If the two tab into edit mode, select this nearest phase. Then again in top view and eyeball it level with the bottom of the to checking the reference. It looks like this point of the wedge protrudes into the pool a bit further than the inner corner of this two would grab this left-hand polygon and move it to a point a little to the left of that in a corner. Now in edge mode, select that lower left edge, Top X to delete, unselect, dissolve edges. I think the tops of these two platforms are about level. So I'll go into right view and scale it on the z-axis. Move it and get the tops of them about level.
14. Blender Intro 14 Booleans Cutting A Hole In The Ground: Things are taking shape, but we currently have the ground plane covering up our pool. We need a way of cutting the two shape out of it. Before then though, a bit of housekeeping rename plane to ground underscore plane. And the to, to, to underscore pool. If you have a sunlight from an earlier lesson as I do, then drag that into the crew collection. To make this pool cutout, we'll start with a quick and dirty method known as a Boolean operation. In brief, booleans use one piece of geometry to add to or subtract from another. I'll quickly demonstrate in a new scene. Click on the document icon up in the top rate seen menu. Select new ADA Q. Duplicate it, and move the mouse to offset it like this. Zoom in a little. Open preferences, add-ons, search for bool, activate bool tool. Under shortcuts, we can see a list of things. This tool can do. This shortcut Control Shift B will give us a viewport menu. So let's remember that one, control shift B. What we're interested in at the moment are these brush operators. Now in blender, The most recently selected thing is known as the active object. So here in this scene, if I select this lower cube first, then shifts select the upper one. You'll notice that the last one to be selected has a paler highlight than the first. This is the active object. Bool tool will now change this active upper cube by using whatever other selected geometry is intersecting with it. Control shift B for the menu. Scroll down to brush booleans and select difference. The lower cube has been used as a cutter or in bool2int speak, a brush to subtract from the upper. As you can see, the brush remains visible in wireframe mode, so you can easily edit it if you wish. Let's undo and reverse the selection order. First select the cutter or brush, then select what you want to remain. This time, let's use the shortcut Control NUM pad minus. Finally, the auto booleans do the same job, but permanently apply the brush so it's no longer editable. We can now delete this scene and jump back into our main one. With this knowledge, let's make a cutter or brush out of a duplicate to pool and bullet out of the ground plane. Select t2 bool duplicates. Right-click to confirm, rename it to underscore cutter. Recall that we select the Kata first, then the active geometry. So now shift select ground plane, run a difference Boolean. Pop. We can now see through the ground plane into the pool. I'll just hide to Cutter. Now, Booleans are notorious for creating messy geometry. So let's just check our render. Zed for the viewport shading pie menu. Select rendered, switch off overlays. Right? Because ground plane is such a simple piece of geometry. We've got away with it. Great.
15. Blender Intro 15 Modelling A Parasol Part 1: Let's make this scene a little easier to see. In the viewport shading drop-down under color, select random. Let's also enable shadow and cavity. Now let's tackle this parasol. I want to add a cylinder to make this pole, but I want to try and add it in approximately the right place atop this platform. Using the Add menu shift a will just plunk a cylinder in the center of our scene. That's because of this crosshair thing known as the 3D cursor. The center of this cylinder, its origin, represented by this yellow dot, is bang in the middle of a cursor. So far, we've left it where it is, but by shift right-clicking, I can reposition it. I want it about here. So shift right-click. And if we orbit around, we'll see it's now sitting on a platform. Now, we could tell this cylinder to jump to the 3D cursor using the snapping menu Shift S and choosing selection to Cursor. However, we need to be able to edit this cylinder a bit first. So we'll delete this one and bring in a new one. F9, to open the parameters for this new object. 16 vertices are probably plenty. Let's reduce the radius way down. About naught point naught two. Let's take the depth down to about 0.8, will give us enough to play with. Now in the reference, the poll pokes up a good way over the back edge of the platform. If I transform this lower Timeline window control alt S into a 3D viewport, make it a bit bigger. Up into right orthographic view. You can see that this poles origin, which is at its center, is right on the surface of the platform where the 3D cursor was. Raise it up, keeping an eye on it in the original 3D viewport. Now, it still looks a bit fat to me, so I'll scale it in the x, y plane. Toggled local view. Once again, I'll apply that scale control a in the reference image, the tip of the poll books ever so slightly flared. So let's model that. And it mode. Control our for loop cut. Slided up, click to confirm. Now let's repeat that in this top area, but this time make say three loop cuts by scrolling your mouse wheel. Leaving this top loop of Pauli's desolated in face select mode, select a loop, then the one below it, and scale them up in x, y. In edge mode, select the top edge loop and scale that down a little. Toggle out of local mode and check it against the reference.
16. Blender Intro 16 Modelling A Ladder: This parasol pole looks very similar to these latter uprights, so I'll duplicate it. Right-click to confirm local view. Now, I want to change how it will be positioned by changing the position of its origin is little yellow dot. There is an origin pie menu control alt X. And one of the options is this handy origin to bottom. Move the 3D cursor with shift right to just in front of this low wall here. Shift S or the snapping pi selection to cursor. Now we need to tidy up the top of it. In right view, dissolve a couple of these edges. Scale this top edge ring. If it's looking a bit short or tall, you could adjust the geo in edit mode. Next to the viewport options there is this x-ray mode, which lets you select geometry on the far side of a model. Let's make a linked duplicate of this ladder pole with the shortcut Alt D. If you tap an axis name now, you can go straight into a constrained move of the duplicate. Now being linked duplicates, these poles will update simultaneously if I add it, either one of them. Next, I think I'll make a normal duplicate shift D and use this as the basis for the rungs. Let's rename these new objects. Now in local view, get rid of some of this unnecessary detail on the rung. Remove these top edge loops, rotate it 90 degrees in front view, move it up in the zed. Obviously, it needs scaling in the x axis and a little in the ways that plane. It's useful having the origin at one end of the rung as it makes it easier to change the length if need be. If I change its length, I only need adjust the position of one of the poles, apply that scale. Now let's group these latter parts in a collection, select them and hit em in the viewport. And let's drag the ladder collection into the geo collection. Now, collections are an organizational tool. They're not physical things we can grab in the viewports. In order to transform a collection of objects as a group, you have to go into the outliner, right-click the collection and choose, select objects and just want to move them a touch. We need more rungs, of course. And blender has a huge tool set for performing this kind of operation. Select the Run and click on the little wrench icon, the Modifiers tab. From the dropdown under generate select array. This will make clones of the rung. By default, we have a count of two. In the reference. You can see there are four. Under relative offset, the default value is one in the x axis. You may well find that your array behaves a little strangely. In Blender, we'd expect the zed axis to be up-down. If yours is skew, if is because the objects transforms haven't been applied, opened the end panel and under item check it's transforms. If they're all over the place, control a to open the apply transforms pie and select Apply rotation scale. Now the array modifier should behave more predictably. Finally, in the reference from the shadow of the ladder, it seems that it's leaning against the platform, which makes sense. Let's make it so that our ladder pivots from the bottom. We'll find the latter a bit easier to manipulate If we further group it under a null or empty, as we did with the camera earlier. Select the poles. You'll recall that we place the origin right at the bottom. Shift S cursor selected. Now at an empty, again, a sphere will do. Let's reduce its size under this empty icon. Now in the outliner, select the latter components and holding shift, drag them onto the EMT to parent them to it. Rename it and t underscore ladder. Now we can easily control the whole ladder.
17. Blender Intro 17 Modelling A Parasol Part 2: Let's get back to making this parasol. Select the poll tab to edit. Select an edge loop near the top. Shift S. Snap cursor to selected, rename it to parasol, poll. Tab to object mode at a cylinder. Now, look closely at the reference. Judging from the six books I can count on this side, I'm going to guess that there's parasol has 12 spokes altogether. I'll put 12 vertices in the cylinder parameters. Obviously it's massive at the moment. So let's tweak some values here. Get it looking approximately the right size. I'll scale this top radius down to and temporarily hide the 3D cursor. Under the overlay settings. In real life, the parasol wouldn't intersect with the poll itself. So let's make the top of the cylinder just slightly bigger than it. Will just use this cylinder as a guide. Because in the next course, we'll animate this scene. So we'll build this in such a way that we can set up a control system or Reg for it and have the parasol open and close. That said, let's rename it parasol underscore guide and set it to display as wire. Next, select one of these radial edges duplicated in place. P to separate by selection, hide the guide, and rename this single edge to parasol cloth. Here again, we can use a modifier to generate some geometry. Set the display to solid. Under modifiers. Generate screw. By default, it will rotate the parent geometry through 360 degrees. If we increase the screw and iteration values, it'll start spiraling upwards like a screw. The steps value controls the resolution. That's once again, set this to 12 to match the number of spokes. We want it to render with 12 to the next components we need other spokes themselves. We can duplicate parasol cloth, but use different modifiers to make them. Rename the duplicates to parasol spokes. Delete the screw modifier. Instead, add a skin modifier to create some geometry. Set, display to wire, tap to edit, a, to select all points. And whilst in skin mode, control a is the shortcut to scale points. Scale them down, reducing the diameter of the skin modifier. We need to have the spokes jutting out just a little beyond the edge of the shade. Let's scale this edge ever so slightly. Hide the skin modifier in edit mode by clicking this Edit icon. Select the top point, and snap the 3D cursor to it. Now will get blender to use this as the pivot point to scale from full stop or periods. To open the pivot menu, select 3D cursor, show the skin modifier again and scale up a little. That's one spoke. Let's make another 11. For this, we need another empty object. Will use the position and rotation data from it to drive an array modifier. Let's make sure it starts off in exactly the same position as the parent geometry is origin. Once again, shift S cursor to select it at an empty, rename it empty spokes, array. And an array to parasol spokes. This time, instead of relative offset, check object offset. Click the eyedropper and go up to the outliner to select a new empty spokes array object. Now, we want this to be a radial array of 12 spokes. So put 12 into the array count. And nothing. That's because this empty is in precisely the same spot as the spokes origin. There is no offset. So this object offset returns a value of 0. If I move the empty, it becomes apparent. Of course, what we need is rotation around the parasol. Each copy of the spoke has to be a certain angle away from its neighbor. That angle would be 360 degrees divided by the number of spokes, 12, that is 30 degrees around the vertical or z axis. Finally, I'll shift, drag the EMT over the spokes to group them together and nudge them down a touch.
18. Blender Intro 18 Curves Modelling Handrails: We've used both polygonal and curve based geometry to build our scene. Text itself IS curve based. We fashioned this platform out of curves. These handrails or another a perfect place for curve or spline modelling. I'll quickly demonstrate more of the basics in a new scene to show how this can be useful for making tubes like these. And a bell curve. Under the curve object properties, geometry. Bevel, increase the depth. Immediately, the curve generates a pipe. Zooming in. You'll see faceting along the length of the curve. Under Object Properties. Viewport, display, tick, wireframe to see the geometry that's being generated. Back under the curve tab shape. Increase the resolution. Preview you to say 32. Tab to edit. Now, I happen to know that by default, this control point is rotated Forty-five degrees are just straighten that out. As I mentioned with the orange platform, we can also constrain any deformation of this curve to a single plane. At the moment, it's possible to deform this curve in all three dimensions. Our handrails, on the other hand, only curve in one plane. That's where there's 2D versus 3D setting comes in handy. Checking 2D, snaps it to a single plane, in this case, the XY. Back in object mode, if I double tap bar, I can of course, rotate it in three dimensions. But back in edit mode. No matter how the curve is oriented in 3D space, my points remain constrained to their local x-y plane. Tab back to object mode. I'll clear all transforms and toggle x-ray mode. So you can see the curve inside here. Tapped to edit. A quick way of clearing out any rotation of a control point is to change the point type with the V menu. If I swap two vector, the point will snap into alignment with the other. And when I swap back to automatic, it remains aligned. But I'm back to having familiar BCA controls. To bring in more control points. I can right-click sub-divide. Obviously, I can subdivide just a certain section if need be. Control 34 left view. Now, here's our wedge platform. In the reference, we can see the handrails are not as tall as this. And of course, they go down into the water right next to the pool wall. I'll get it in the ballpark. Positioning the cursor about where I want the rail ADA BCA curve. Of course, it comes in on the x, y plane, so I'll rotate it under viewport Display, check in front so we can see it easily. Jackets a 2D curve. Increase the resolution, a little. Edit, sub-divide. Now, make sure with the full stop menu that you have your pivot point set to median point rather than 3D cursor as it was when we were modelling the parasol spokes. And will nudge these points around so that along the lines of the reference. If you find that you need to move a control handle along its own length, open the orientation pi with the comma. Select Normal to get access to the local coordinates of the point. And then you can move it along its own zed axis. Hop in and out of pivot modes as you need. You may find you need to subdivide again. Perhaps this point on the ground should be a vector point so that it's oriented directly in line with the next point along. Now let's make it into a tube. A whole shift as I dial up this value. To give me plenty of control. I can now switch off display in front and now just eyeball it into position. If you find that you need to scale your rail, it's probably best to hop into edit mode and select all that way. The generated geometry won't go screwy. When you're happy, I'll D To make a linked duplicate and move it along.
19. Blender Intro 19 Pool and Toys: The final thing is we need to model are the pool surface and the toys. Given the stylized nature of this image, we have a lot of leeway with the water and can make it from the simplest of geometry. Move the cursor to somewhere near the middle of the scene and bring in a plane scale and move it so that it encompasses where the water will be. Apply the scale. Now, it's necessarily lower than the pool edge, so move it down a touch. I notice on the reference that there's a slight thickness to the lip of the pool. So I'll hide the plane, select to pool and add a solidify modifier to give a little thickness. Switched the plane back on. And let's do a little housekeeping. Rename this to water surface. And these Bessie curves we can rename to up in the Edit menu, select batch rename. In the dropdown 2s set name, method new. And in the name field type handrail. We can also move this guide into the build collection. Now let's get water surface subdivided. Tab to edit, right-click sub-divide. Opened the parameters with F9 and crank this to about 30. This way, when we come to deforming the surface with ripples, Blender has got plenty of geometry to play with. I see you in the reference that the orange platform projects down ever so slightly into the pool is most apparent in this inner corner here. What I'll do is place the 3D cursor as a marker for the height of the platform as it is. Then under curve geometry, give it a touch more thickness. And in Right View, move it back down level with where it was against the 3D cursor. Next up this rubber ring here. Place the cursor, then simply add a torus. It comes in at about the right proportions though I think I'll make the tube itself a touch fatter. F9 minor radius, right-click shade smooth. And finally, the ball. Paradoxically, I'll add a cube here. Then add a subdivision modifier. Turn these up to say four, and once again, shade smooth. In this way, the ball is pretty much guaranteed to render nicely scaled down. Say No.1.
20. Blender Intro 20 Materials and lighting Part 1: That brings us to the end of the modelling phase. So it's time to get on with the lighting and materials. Most of the objects in the reference have very flat, simple, diffuse column Materials Applied. Whilst it's quite quick to make these getting the interplay of materials and lights just right, is an art in itself and can be really time consuming. Let's start with a ground plane. Go to its material tab and hit New. We'll call it ground plain yellow. Now, if I click this base color, we get access to a color wheel and a dropper. Select from the reference. We're going to complete this render in cycles. So under render properties, render engine check cycles. And if you have a decent graphics card, check GPU, select rendered for the viewport shading. And this brings home the interdependence of materials and lighting. It's obvious that we need more light here. So let's find our son. Under the light tab, increase the strength. Five is looking about right? But these shadows are off. So let's rotate the Sun. It can actually be easiest to do this using its transforms under the end panel. I'm just trying to get the shadows falling in about the right way. And we can see that because the sun is beating down from pretty much directly overhead, casting these short shadows. A setting of five is now way too powerful and the color is all bleached out. So I'll adjust that strength. Now back to the ground plane material. Currently, it's reflecting a lot less sunlight and looking bleached out. And that's partly controlled by this specular setting. So let's remove that. You can also balance the hue and saturation of the base color to bring it more into line. I also see a touch of yellow in the white atop this platform so we could tent the sunlight a touch. Give it more power. Say four. Back to the ground plane. Let's bring up this saturation again. Okay, overall, this image is a bit dark. There is an ambient or world light setting we can use to help with this. Click the world tab. Surface color. For now, set this to white. Strength to one. This behaves like a perfectly white sky all around. So the scene gets brighter globally, including our shadows. Back in our material, again, balanced the hue and saturation of the base color. As I said, it's a balancing act between the two light sources and the materials. Maybe a touch of yellow in the ambient light too.
21. Blender Intro 21 Materials and lighting Part 2: That's the hardest part done. I think we've set a sort of baseline for the scene lighting. We can now make duplicates of this ground plane material and tweet them to suit the other objects. In blender, the material system is quite cumbersome, so bear with me. Let's start with this platform. Make a new material slot, then a new material, let's call it orange platform. Now let's make a second material slot. This time though, we'll pick our old ground plain yellow material from this dropdown to the right in the dropdown under the little arrow, select copy material, then select the new orange platform material and select paste material. Now, we can delete the ground plain yellow slot. I know it's bonkers. Now, simply at the base color. We can repeat this process for the other objects. During this time labs, I'm creating and applying materials called parasol cloth, wedge, rubber ring, bowl, and wooden pole. If isolate all parts of the ladder, I can apply the wooden pole material I've made to one component. Then use the little drop down on the right and copy material to selected. The pool is a step more complicated in that it will need to materials the weight of the edge and the blue interior hide the water surface for now. Switch to material preview shading for now, and switch to local view tab to edit. And let's hide the solidified modifier. In face mode. Select a polygon from the pool edge, then go to Select similar coplanar to select the entire edge. Let's save that selection now. Click on the geometry tab and under vertex groups, make a new one and rename it to pool edge. Click, assign to test. If that worked, select and deselect it. Now in the viewport, select the inverse control ie. Repeat the vertex groups process this time naming it Pool interior. Assign the new selection to this group. In the materials tab, make three new slots. And in one of them used, say, the wedge material as a starting point. Copy that to the new materials, naming them edge and interior. Now make the edge one pure white. And pick something like a turquoise for the interior. I'll do a to de-select all in the viewport. Now find the pool edge vertex group selected. Now select the edge material and click assign. Repeat that with the pool interior vertex group. Again, de-select all to be on the safe side. Select the pool interior vertex group. Find the interior material and hit assign. Let's see how that looks in rendered view.
22. Blender Intro 22 Materials and lighting Part 3: The final piece of the puzzle then is the pool surface for this job will alter our layout a bit because we need a shader editor open, drag up this bottom window and switch it accordingly. Unhide water surface. This will have a completely different kind of material on it. So down in the material tab, simply click new and rename it water surface. You'll see it appear in the shader editor. We can delete this principle shader. Now let's enable another add-on to help us work here in preferences. Search for node, switch on node wrangler. Now we're after a transparent basis for our water. So back in the shader editor, shift a and search for glass. It can be fiddly to grab these little dots and connect them together. But node or angular makes it easy. Simply hover near the node you want to connect. Hold Alt and right mouse drag. Simply release. When you see the node you want to connect to, highlighted to cut a connection, hold control and right mouse drag over the noodle. So that gives us a glossy transparent surface. Now, we want to get these ripples. This is known as displacement. Here in the material output, we have a slot for that. We can use grayscale values, black, white, and everything in between to drive how high at any given point is displaced. A useful texture here to emulate the chaotic pattern of these ripples is the noise texture. Node wrangler lets us preview textures quickly. Holding Shift and control, click the noise node. Wrangler will create a viewer node. So you can see the texture in the viewport. Noise appears as a cloudy pattern used as a displacement texture. The brighter parts would be raised up more than the darker ones. Control shift, click the glass shader. Now, add in a vector displacement node. Connect the color output of the noise to the vector input for the displacement node. I'll just shrink that Shader window down again now. And as you can see, we're now getting pretty close to completion.
23. Blender Intro 23 Final Touches and Rendering: Almost there. It's just the finishing touches now, Adam material to the handrails tweak some geometry here in there as well as the cameras and lighting. And then we'll be ready to render our image. First off, I've tried to get the 3D view port about the same size as the reference. We can see that our two sits up higher in frame when we compare them like this. So that's remedy that enable selection of the camera. Let's hide this empty atop the parasol and actually maybe reduce its display size. Now select the camera, check, Lock, camera to view, g to move. Hold shift for a better control, and eyeball it to match the reference better. I also feel that in the reference, we're looking down over the top of the scene a little more. So I'll enable selection of the camera control EMT, and just tweak the rotation a hair. Remember to uncheck, lock camera to view. Now I'll tackle the handrails, hide overlays so I can see what I'm doing better. Under the curve tab, I'll just reduce that bevel depth a tiny amount. They also seem to rounded to me. Left view. Num pad decimal point to home in on the object. Edit mode. And that's just tighten this top radius up and get that downward slope straightened out a bit. But you also need a material. These rails probably do need some specular, shiny highlights on them and not much roughness. Next, I think the bowl could be smaller. The rubber ring to right, I'm calling that done for now. Now let's check our Render Settings wherein cycles GPU compute. Now since we'll probably need to run a few tests renders to get everything working right under output dimensions. Let's save ourselves some time and make this half resolution for now. Scrolling down to output, we don't need an alpha channel, so RGB will do us, right. Let's pause our viewport render. Go to render, render image or hit 12. Right? The water is really noisy. Let's see if we can improve that. But once we have this render window open, let's select a new slot, a location where the next image will render to. Now for that noisy water, again, under Render Settings, find, sampling, de-noising, and try open image de-noise. F 12 to render and compare slot one with slot to much better. The last big issue I have with our image is the lightness of the shadows on the sides of the platforms. We could improve this a bit by knocking back the ambient lighting a touch. Say nought, 0.3. It's interesting though that the shadow in the reference, the shadow from the parasol, for example, is much lighter than the one on the side of the platform right below it. I'm going to call that artistic license f 11, to open a render window, open another render slot, and tap F 12. Here's where we were compared with. Now. I think I'll just increase the power of that sun a touch. Let's try 7.5. Okay. Pause the viewport again. F 11, new render slot. And render. Compare that with three. Then two. Yes, you see in slot to the shadows are two washed out. We've got much more contrast now. I'm happy with that. But let's just move this ball and rubber ring out of the shadows. Let's now set this to render at full resolution a 100% and hit F 12. If you're happy with that render and want to keep it, go to image, Save As, and choose a location.
24. Blender Intro 24 Conclusion: That about wrap things up for this introduction to Blender. We've covered quite a lot of ground over the past hour and law. Just to quickly review what you've learned, viewport navigation, blenders interface, and how to customize it. Object manipulation, local versus global coordinates. Basic poly modeling techniques like loop cut and slide, extrude, inset. How to clean up geometry by dissolving overlapping faces, and how to fill the resulting gap. Curve modelling techniques, what normals are, and how Blender uses them to calculate how to bounce light off objects. Procedural modeling techniques using a few of blenders, huge assortment of modifier tools including the Boolean, screw, skin, array, subdivision surface, and solidify how to make some basic materials and apply multiple materials to a single object using vertex groups, a simple lighting setup, and how to balance lights to give rich colors and contrast. And finally, the render process and how to use this last phase of a 3D project to get the best image you can. With all this good stuff on the belt. You're ready for the next phase animation. I look forward to seeing you over in that course soon.
25. BONUS - Script Font Boolean: This lesson has been prompted by a student of mine, Julie, who asked how to make them more complex looking swimming pool using a script type font. Let's tackle that now. I'll just clear this scene out. Thank you by the way, Julie, for the question. And let's add in a text object. Shift a text. Let's scale it up, let's say three times, and look at it from top view. All right, now under the Object Properties tab, this little green one here. We can change the font. The font tab. I'm just going to click this first etl file icon under the regular tab. This is my systems font directory on Windows C, Windows fonts. I'm going to search for a script type font. And I like the look of this one, Bukhara, sorry. I'll select that one. Tab to change what I want it to say. Control a once you're in text editing mode, unusually for Blender. And I'll type curly cURL. Why? Tab out of that. And again, over in the text object data properties, we've got a bunch of options here which are going to be useful to us. Starting at the top, this resolution is important. If I start turning that down, you can see how Jagger does making the text. I think we're going to be well advised to turn it up to say 32, just to be sure that we've got some nice smooth geometry, 64 would be better actually. So that's that for shape. Next, we have our geometry options. Let's give this some thickness. Say no point 1, 0, making a school boy era here actually, let's just make sure that I have applied the scale control, a applies scale. Right now, this should work in a more predictable way as more like it. So let's give it a thickness of say, nought, 0.5.25 perhaps. And of course at the moment we just have this perfectly sharp edge. There's no bevel on it, but we do have an option down here. Again, under this Object Data Properties tab, the resolution is equivalent to the number of segments of the curve. At the moment the depth is set to 0. Let's try nought 0.1 and see what that looks like. Way too big. So let's divide that by say five. Okay, Getting closer. Maybe a touch too big still. So let's divide that by two. Okay, I'm happier with that. I might just turn that down a little, a little bit more. I can see a bit of a problem up here. Well, we have some intersecting geometry. Because of what we're gonna do in the next step. That shouldn't matter too much, but I'm going to just turn that down here. So let's say naught point, naught, naught 75. Okay, we've still got a bit, but that's something of an improvement. Now let's turn the resolution of this bevel down. Let's make it a sharp flat bevel. So now it's just got one facet really. In fact, I tell a lie, that's not true at all. Let's go into profiles. We've got presets here, straight line. So now we just have a straight bevel, as you can see from this angle here. So now we've got this nice, pleasing piece of chunky geometry. But if we want to make a Boolean with it, we've got to turn it into polygonal geometry. And blender does make this relatively easy for us. With the F3 search key, I can simply type in Convert and I have an option there, mesh convert to mesh. You can see that the object data tab has changed shape. It's no longer. A text objects. So we now have this polygon here reflecting the fact that this is now polygonal geometry. If I go into edit mode, we can see some pretty hairy geometry there, but not to worry, we're going to fix that in a moment. We've got these individual points which we can now move around if we want. But we're not going to, we're going to use a different tool to turn this into more reasonable, useful geometry for us. Tab out of edit mode back into object mode. And under the modifiers tab, I'm going to select Ramesh. So of course at first, that looks pretty scary. What the 3D mesh modifier is doing behind the scenes is building an approximation of the geometry out of little invisible cubes called voxels. It then wraps a skin around the outside of the voxels to make a surface. The advantage of this is that the resulting surface is made of neat rows and columns of quads with no overlapping surfaces or points. Obviously, the view of the voxels, the rougher, the approximation of the model, and the coarser it looks. Progressively. Reducing the size of the voxels enables a higher and higher definition voxel model. The only gotcha with this is that each time you reduce the size of each voxel, you are increasing the calculations that Blender has to make in a cubic way. So if I reduce this by half, the size of each voxel reduced by half, well, I'm doubling the number of voxels in each dimension, x, y, and zed. So I'm getting eight times the amount of data. So it's very easy to make this crash. So I'm going in baby steps, reducing it by half each time. You can still see I've got some artifacts here along those bevels. I don't know if I dare go down by two. Again. One thing that I can do to help myself out though, first of all, I will switch on Wireframe. And you can see now the size of the polygons that we're dealing with. Absolutely tiny. This adaptivity setting here gives blend it a bit of a hand. It tells it if you've got big flat areas like the tops of the letters, you don't need all these squares to describe such a simple flat area. Use adaptivity to reduce these number, this number of squares, whilst keeping detail where we need it. So let's try that. Let's start off high nor 0.1. And straight away you can see we've got far fewer squares here and almost the same number on the edge here. So now I think I can quite safely divide that by two. Again. He says, I'm going to smooth that shading as well. Never harms. Now I'll switch off wireframe and see where we're at. Perhaps I will switch that off. In fact. Yeah, I'm not so keen on that effect there, so I'm going to take my life in my own hands and switch adaptivity backoff. And luckily, the computer lives to see another moment that's worked. Okay, so now we have a piece of polygonal geometry, which I can use to create a Boolean. I think first of all though, I will apply this. Before I do, I will make myself a little collection, select what we've got, Shift D to duplicate. Then they won't like that because it's an enormous amount of information. And I will move that into a new collection. I'm going to call that build. This is something which I sometimes do. It's like a collection which I can come back to if I make a mistake or I ruin something and I've still got a reasonable starting point. So I'm gonna put it in there, but then I'm going to switch that off. Now, I'm going to apply this. And it will chug for a moment. And there we are Now we've got just a piece of polygonal geometry. I'll move it back into the center of the scene a little bit and add a cube, which will form the basis of how pool scale it in X and in Y a bit. And see where we're at. Go into wireframe mode. Okay, now I'll simply use the Bowl Tool, which we've seen before in this course. We'll just remind you of whether it is. For those of you who haven't seen it. I'll go into my preferences. Add-ons. I'll search for bool. This is one of the standard add ons blender ships with, or you need to do is enable it here. And you'll recall that I select the cutoff first. Then isolate the objects that I want to make a cut out of. Take a chunk out of. And then I use the Bowl Tool, shortcut Control, numpad minus. Then it will have a good think about that. In my case, that took 30 seconds or so. There you are. There is your boot out swimming pool or whatever it might be. You can, if you want now, apply this bool and then get in there and color this texture it. As you will.
Matt Lloyd
