Into the Ocean: Character Sculpting Essentials in Blender 3D

1. Introduction: 3D sculpting is both a fun and intuitive way to create characters in 3D. This class is designed to teach you all the essential 3D sculpting skills you'll need to get started. Hello, my name is John Knowles. I'm a character animator and animation director and I've been lucky enough to work in children's television for the last 15 years. Over the years, I've animated many characters, but I especially love bringing designs of my own to life. 3D sculpting offers a fast and intuitive way to translate a character design into 3D, either for use within an animation or as a standalone illustration. In this class, I'll be covering everything you need to know as a beginner taking your first steps in 3D sculpting. Then together we'll create this fancy horse character and underwater environment. Its most basic level, 3D sculpting is very accessible, but it also comes with a number of complexities which can create confusion for beginners. To start with, even the number of available brushes can be overwhelming. Then there are the technical elements such as dynamic topology, and remeshing to understand. I'll be covering everything in this class in a logical way, which gradually builds in complexity as you gain knowledge and confidence with various tools. We'll start out by sculpting a simple rock to get comfortable with the basic concepts. Once that's complete, we'll move on to sculpt two different types of coral, which will each introduce additional tools and techniques. You'll then be ready to put your new skills to use as we sculpt this cute sea horse character. Finally, we'll bring all the elements together to assemble our final scene and render the end result. This is a beginner-level class using the free 3D software application Blender. Now, if you're new to Blender, you may want to check out my Blender essentials class to teach you everything you need to know to get started. By the end of this class, you'll have all of the skills necessary to start sculpting simple characters of your own. If you're ready, let's get started. 2. Class Overview: Hello and welcome to the class. When it comes to character modeling, there are a number of different approaches that we can take. Traditional box modeling is great for simple characters, but if you're working on a more complex design, and that's when 3D sculpting really comes into it's own. When 3D sculpting, we don't really need to worry about many of the technical aspects often associated with other modeling methods. This makes it far more intuitive and approachable since it's very similar to pushing and pulling a lump of real clay. That said, there are plenty of things to learn. I've designed this class in a structured way to ensure that you are able to get sculpting straightaway, and gradually build up to work on more complex designs. We'll start out by sculpting a rock to learn the absolute essential tools, and cover some of the important principles which you'll need to be aware of. We can then move on to working on some coral. This is really fun and simple exercise which introduces number of additional tools and techniques, and provides plenty of practice. Once you're comfortable with all of the basics, we'll then put your new skills into practice by working on the seahorse character. I've provided my character design for it to work with if you're following along, or you can always make use of your own design instead. Finally, we'll bring everything together to create a finished illustration and render the end result. Since this class is focused on sculpting, I've also provided a file for you to download which includes the lighting setup to make things a little bit easier. Whilst it is technically possible to sculpt with a mouse, to really enjoy 3D sculpting and get the most out of this class, it would be very helpful to have some graphics tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus. This will enable you to vary the radius or intensity of your strokes as you're sculpting. Once, I do use a screen-based tablet, this is not a requirement at all and I very happily used regular graphics tablet for many years. Of course, if you're just starting out and don't have access to a tablet, by all means, give sculpting with the mouse a try. If you enjoy it, you can always invest in a graphics tablet later. If you're working with a mouse, I simply suggest reducing the strength of your brush, and then applying multiple strokes to build up volume. This will help you to better control the end result. For your class project, I'd love to see your finished rendered seahorse. Alternatively, if you created a scene based around your own design, I'd love to see that too. Also, if you're following along with me, please don't feel that you have to copy things exactly. Feel free to use your own imagination to put the techniques I'm teaching into practice with your own unique spin. Once you've finished, be sure to upload your project to the class project gallery, so that you can receive feedback and share your work with others in the class. Also, if you'd like to receive feedback along the way, feel free to upload work in progress through the class project gallery or alternatively, you can always ask questions in the class discussion section. Now, if you're ready to get started, let's jump into the first lesson. 3. Sculpting Basics: When we open up Blender with the intention of doing some sculpting, there are two different ways in which we can start. We can create a standard general file type, but we can also start with a sculpting file instead. If we click on "Sculpting" under the new file menu, that will then take us into this workspace. This is dedicated workspace designed to get started with sculpting as quickly as possible. You can see up at the top we have both the sculpting and shading tabs, but we're missing most of the other tabs that would normally be present in the general scene file type. If we click on the plus icon. We can still add in any of these other workspaces if we need to. Other things that you'll notice are, instead of having a default cube, we have this default sphere. We're also already in sculpt mode. We can still access our object and edit modes. But by being in sculpt mode already, we can get straight to work. Over on the left here you can see our toolbar, and this has all of our sculpting tools available. There are even more down at the bottom. Just by holding the middle mouse button and dragging up and down, we can see all of the tools that are available. Additionally, you can grab on the boundary here and drag that out. Then that will allow you to see more of the tools on screen at once. Additionally, if we drag this out even further, we'll get one long list again, but we'll have the names of all of the brushes, which can be really useful when you're just starting out and wondering what each of them does. By default, we have this draw brush enabled. If I just draw over the surface of the sphere here, you can see that we start to add some detail to it. As usual, I can hold down the middle mouse button here to rotate around this sphere. I can hold Shift to move my view, and then either use the mouse scroll wheel or hold down Control and middle mouse to move in and out. Now, up at the top here, you can see that we have some brush settings. For our draw brush, we can adjust our radius of our brush here and the strength. You'll notice next to each of them we have this little icon which indicates where the pressure sensitivity is enabled. At the moment, I have a fixed radius, but pressure sensitivity will affect the strength of my brush. This means that I can press gently or hard to affect the intensity of my brush stroke. Obviously, I can swap these around. Then I can create a brushstroke with a taper on it. Just going to swap those back. Rather than going up here and adjusting these radius and strength values up at the top, there's a better way to interact with your brush. If you hit the F key and then move your brush side-to-side, we can interactively adjust the size of our brush. By F, I can take that down to much smaller brush size, and then to adjust the strength of our brush, we just hit "Shift", "F". Again we have this interactive option. You can see up at the top of the viewport, that's suggesting the strength there as well. If I bring that up, I'm going to get a more intense stroke and then hit "Shift", "F", to bring it back down again. There are range of other different options here that we can play around with to affect how our brushes perform. This is much the same as adjusting brush parameters in an application such as Photoshop. In fact, we have some of the same parameters such as the spacing here. Another place to get access to any of these brush parameters is over here in the properties panel. We just click on this tool icon up at the top here. You can see our currently selected brush, and a representation of the effect that it will have on the mesh. Then we can access any of its parameters down below here. For example, if I roll out the stroke section here, we again get the spacing options that we had up at the top here. Just to show how this works, if for example, I was to adjust the spacing and drag this up. You can see as I drag over the surface, I actually end up with a number of individual dots. By reducing the spacing back down, we're actually creating those individual dots close together, which gives us the impression of a brush stroke. This can be useful if you want to get different effects as you're sculpting. Reset that back to 10 for now. So far we've been drawing on the surface of the mesh and it's been pushing the geometry up. Up at the top here you can see this plus and minus icon. If I hit on the minus icon and draw on the surface, we'll actually push the geometry down. That can be very useful, but there's an easier way of achieving the same result. If I change this back, so that as we draw on the surface we're pushing up the geometry, I can now hold down the Control key. Then as I draw on the surface, it will actually push the geometry back down again. The other modifier key which works with all of the brushes, which you need to be aware of, is holding down the Shift key. If I just increase my brush size a little bit here, using the F key, then I hold down Shift. I can actually smooth out an area. I can then redraw on the surface, maybe smooth over the one side of it, and that can be really useful. The other brush that I'm going to introduce in this introduction here is the grabbed brush. You can see it on the left-hand side here in yellow. If we enable that brush and I'm just going to increase my brush size again with the F key, we can actually make larger changes to our mesh. Just going to make it a bit bigger. Then we can make some global changes and push and pull parts around. This is really useful and we'll be using that a lot, when we're sculpting. Again, we can adjust its size if we want to make final adjustments to a shape, and we still have access to that smoothing option just by holding down the Shift key. So that we can polish up any parts of the mesh that we want to. If you're following along, I would suggest you just spend a little bit of time playing around with the drawer brush and the grab brush. Getting used to adjusting that brush size and strength, using the Control key to invert your brush and smoothing things out by holding down that Shift key. Moving around your mesh, getting used to seeing it from all angles. Then once you feel confident, you can move on into the next lesson, and we'll start to build the first elements of our scene. 4. Rock: Rough Sculpt: We're now ready to get started with building our scene and we're going to start out by building one of the rocks that will form part of the background. You'll notice that I've opened up Blender here. But instead of opening in sculpting mode, over opened it with a general scene unfold to start with. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, because we're going to be creating an entire scene with multiple elements, having access to all of these different workspaces will make our lives a lot easier as we progress with the rest of the scene. Additionally, allow me to highlight a number of elements you need to be aware of when you start out sculpting for the first time in Blender. Within the default sculpting file that we tried out in the previous lesson, we had a sphere already created for us. In this case, however, we're going to start out with the default cube that comes in with a general scene file. What I'm going to do is I'm going to jump over into the sculpting workspace. And you'll see that this looks very similar to what we just had when we created the sculpting seen fold to start with. But again, we have the benefit of all of these additional workspaces. What you'll notice though, is with my dry brush selected, if I now try to draw on the surface of this cube, nothing appears to happen. That is, until I go over any of the corners here, then I'm able to move that corner around with the draw brush, just going to hit Undo to get rid of that. Now the reason for this is by default, this cube doesn't have much geometry. We can see that if we head over into the modeling workspace, you can see we have vertices, or points on each of these corners. Whereas the sphere that existed for us in this sculpting workspace had already been subdivided, said that there was a lot more geometry to work with. What this highlights is the fact that within the sculpting mode, really all we're doing is moving points around, but we do that with the sculpting brushes rather than the other modeling tools within blender. So in order to sculpt on a surface, we need to increase the amount of geometry or the number of vertices within a particular mesh. Now, to do that here in the modeling mode here so that we're in edit mode. We can just right-click on the mesh and hits "Subdivide". I'm going to do a couple more times so that I have a bit more geometry to work with. Now if we jump over onto the sculpting workspace, you can see again, it's changed his back to sculpt mode automatically. But with this dry brush selected, if I draw on the side, you can see I'm now starting to move these points around. You can see where all of those points are because we have a relatively low-resolution mesh still. Again, I'm just going to hit Undo to return back to our default cube shape. Now, we're going to start sculpting the basic shape of our rock. I'm going to change my brush now over to the grabbed brush that we were using before. You can either click on it down here in the toolbar, or you can hit J on the keyboard to jump over into the grab tool. Now within blender, G is normally grab it to move an object in object mode, but the same shortcut can be used for this grab tool within the sculpting mode. I'm just going to increase the size of my brush here. I'm just going to start forming the basic shape of our rock. I'm going to pull this down a little bit. Maybe increase my brush size a bit, just so that I can change the overall shape a little bit. Trying to create something that looks like a long flat rock. Just getting the right basic shape to start with. It's going to be fairly stylized. Not going for something that's super detailed at all. That's a better overall shape to start with. I'm just going to reduce my brush size so that I can round out that shape just a little bit more. I still want to keep a little bit of this rectangular shape to it. I don't want it to be softened up too much. We can hold down the Shift key to smooth things out. You'll see that really rounds things out quite a bit down at the bottom. But the intensity of that smooth is just a little bit too much for me. Now, the strength value that we have up here at the top is for our grabbed mode. But if you look down in your tools down at the side here, the top tool in this section is the smooth tool. Now if we enable that, we can actually reduce the strength of the smooth tool. I'm just going to drop that down to 0.2. Then when we return to our grab brush here, if I tried to smooth by holding down the Shift key, you can see that the effect of that smoothing is far lower. I'm just softening the edges a little bit, but still keeping this overall shape. What you'll notice is as I'm smoothing, we can see how the geometry is being pulled around. Each of these points is being moved to smooth out the shape. I can always adjust things a little bit with my grabbed brush again, just to create pleasing overall shape to start with, flatten out the bottom a little bit. Let's move some of this down. Doesn't have to be exact. We want something that feels organic rather than too artificial. Soften that a little bit with a smooth tool. There we go. That's a good overall starting point I feel. Now, if we want to actually sharpen up some of these edges, we can do that with a different brush. Just here above the grab brush, we have the pinch brush. If I reduce my brush size a bit further, Let's zoom in a little bit to see what's going on. As I drag across one of the edges here, you can see it starts to pull our vertices together and this will have the effect of sharpening up this edge a little bit. We can do that around the top here as well. Maybe a little bit down. One of these sides. We don't have an awful lot of geometry to work with at the moment here. What we can do, is just jump back into the modeling mode here and then with all of our vertices selected, if they're not selected at all, you can just hit a to select everything and then right-click and hit Subdivide. That will give us a bit more geometry to play with. I'm going to jump back into sculpting mode here and as well as the pinch brush hair, what I often like to make use of is the crease brush, which you'll find in the bottom of this blue section. Now with the crease brush and just adjust my brush size a little bit. That will let us introduce creases where as we paint on the surface, it's pushing this geometry and a little bit. But in addition to that, we can actually invert the brush, so by holding down the Control key and dragging over the surface, like with the pinch tool, we're pulling things together so that can be really useful having the two functions in one brush. Now that we've defined the main shape of the rock, will go ahead and add more detail in the next lesson. 5. Rock: Detailed Sculpt: Another brush which is really useful with defining the shape of this rock is the scrape brush, and you'll find that just down here in this red section. This brush enables us to actually flatten out sections of our mesh, so we can start to create larger planes on the surface. You'll notice there's more if I start to work on one of these corners perhaps, so if I flatten out this section here, then you can see that we've created this nice shape in here as if a section of the rock has been chiseled away. I'm just going to use this in a few places just to get some different more interesting shapes into the rock, make it feel more like it's aged and weathered and broken up over time. Also to flatten out some of these sections and give us some more interesting planes to work with. Again, I can make use of this crease brush. Let's just reduce our size a little bit. I'm just again inverting it with the Control key to just create some edges here. Softening things as we go in places, sharpening up some edges, softening others to create a more interesting shape. Again, I'm going to get back to this scrape brush and just chisel away on some of these edges to create these more interesting shapes. Now, obviously, our view at the moment is very faceted. If we head back to the layout mode here so that we're back into object mode. We can actually right-click on a mesh here and select Shade Smooth. That will give us a better representation of what the end result is going to be. If we jump back in sculpting mode, then we can start looking at these shapes a bit more closely and flattening out sections to create these nice sharper edges. Again, if you feel that there's not enough geometry there, we can always subdivide this one step further. It's always best to work with lower geometry to start with, to get the overall shape in place, and then start refining it and adding the extra detail as it's required. You can see the top here is a little bit lumpy, so I'm just going to hold down my Shift key and smooth some of that out a little bit. I do want to create some of these obvious planes in here, so again, just by making use of this scrape brush moving around to different angles, I can start to harden up some of those edges and let's maybe make use of that crease brush again. Adjusting my brush size and inverting the brush so that I can create some sharper edges in here perhaps. Sharpen up that one and smooth out some of the bumps, and just move around the rock. I'm just trying to create something that feels interesting and organic. Let say it got some nice obvious phases to it, so it's got that stylized feel. But really it's up to you how realistic you want to take the end result. Smoothing out these lumpier bits that have been introduced as we added the extra geometry in there. Same underneath here, so I'm holding down Shift key, I'm smoothing over the surface. Now, this is looking a little bit too flat here, so I think again, I'm just going to maybe add in a little bit more of a shape here so I'm just holding down the Control key. Again with that crease tool, just create an edge there, and well, we've actually pushed the geometry up a little bit here, we can actually use another tool down here, which is the fill tool. I'm going to increase my brush size a little bit, that will actually add in some geometry to the sides here to help bulk out that shape, and that helps create these more obvious planes. I'm going to revert to the scrape tool again here, just to really harden up that shape, same here. I should allow the corner a little bit here, just for a bit more interest, and see going see if we can create something different here, moving around the mesh, let's create some of these more interesting shapes. I'm going to take the size of this brush down again still with this scrape tool and just chisel away at some of these corners again. I'll have to sharpen up the edges on that a little bit, so again, I'm going to use my crease tool, invert it just to give me some sharper shapes there. There we go. It's a little bit too even, so I'm just smoothing out some of it, to keep some a bit more creased, some a bit softer, so it feels like that edge tape is a little bit more naturally. I think I'm going to crease across here, I've been lost a little bit, and there we go. Smooth up and out a little, same over here, just moving around adding a little bit to detail where it feels appropriate until you're happy with the overall shape. This is it. A really good exercise for getting used to all of these brushes, because being able to create these defined planes will become very useful as we get forward into actually sculpting a character. That looks very good, I'm pretty happy with that, and I think there's just a little bit of housekeeping that we need to do now. First of all, I'm going to go up into the outliner here and change the name from Cube to Rock, and then I want to add a simple material to it. I'm going to head down to the Materials tab here in the properties panel. We have a default material here all ready, but I'm going to rename that to Rock, and I'm going to enable my material preview up at the top here so that we can see exactly what we're doing. This base color, I'd like to go in and change that. I'm just going to darken that right down to start with, and just push the color slightly into the blues, so we're getting a slightly more blue-gray color in here. At the moment, this rock is very shiny though, so I'm going to up the roughness as well, somewhere towards 0.85 there or thereabouts, and that just gives us a little bit of a flatter look. I think we can leave that there, and we're just going to save our scene file now. I'm just going to go Save As, and you can save this wherever you like. I'm going to call my file Seahorse Version 1. Obviously, it's just a rock at the moment, but we'll be adding all of the other elements within this same scene file. I'm just going to Save As, then whenever you're ready, we can jump into the next lesson, where we'll start sculpting our first piece of coral. 6. Dyntopo: For our first piece of coral, we're going to create a branching type of coral known as staghorn. Before we start, I'm just going to change my viewport shading back to solid. Then I'm going to jump into the layout tab. We can hide our rock here. I'm going to create some base geometry to work from. Now, I would like to work with a sphere as our base. If we hit Shift +A, we could add in a UV sphere here. But you'll notice at the top of the sphere, all of the edges converge to a single point. This can lead to some issues when you're sculpting. It's better to start with some cleaner geometry. In order to do that, I'm going to just hit X to delete this sphere. I'm going to add in a cube once again. This time, rather than heading into the modeling tab and subdividing the geometry there, I'm actually going to add a subdivision modifier. The quick way of doing that is to hold down the Control key and type one of the numbers up above the letter keys on your keyboard. I'm going to hit Control and 4 to add a subdivision modifier with four levels of subdivision. If we go into the Properties panel here and look at the modifier properties, you can see that we now have four levels of viewport subdivision. The problem is we can't sculpt on this as it is at the moment, because that geometry hasn't actually been committed to the mesh. You can see that if we head over into the modeling tab, we still only have these base points to work with. What we can do is actually apply this modifier. In order to do that, we actually need to head back into object mode. If we go back to our layout tab, that takes us automatically back to object mode. Now we should have this option available to apply the modifier. Equally, you can just roll over the top of this modifier and hit the Control +A keyboard shortcut. Now, if we head back into the modeling tab, you'll see that all of these points are now available to us. With that done, let's just head it into the sculpting tab. We can start to work with this mesh. First thing I'd like to do is pull out some branches from the sphere. Now there's very handy tool down here called the snake hook tool to allow us to do that. If I just increase my brush size a little bit here, you'll be able to see how this works. If I click on the geometry and start pulling up, you'll see that we can actually drag this all the way out. But as we do so we're actually stretching the geometry that was there originally. We don't have enough points in the mesh in order to stretch this out as far as we are trying to. Now, I could go back and subdivide the mesh further, but we don't actually want any additional subdivisions down at the bottom here. What we want is to subdivide locally where we're stretching out the geometry. There's a tool in Blender though that will allow us to do that. If I just hit Control+Z to undo, what we need to do is go up and enable this Dyntopo mode. That will dynamically add topology, additional points to the mesh, as we're working. First, you need to check this on and you'll probably get this warning. That's absolutely fine. Just click "Okay." Then we have a number of different options within this drop-down. By default, Dyntopo uses this relative detail mode. In order to show how this works, I'm just going to switch back to our draw brush. What this means is that Blender will add geometry as you're working on the mesh, but the amount of resolution of that geometry will change as we get closer or further away from the mesh. To illustrate that, if I start to paint here, you'll notice that the mesh has become triangulated and it become a lower resolution. If I just undo that and move in, and I paint here, you'll notice that we've got a lot more detail. If I were to zoom even further in, I can start painting smaller details over the top here, and additional geometry is added in exactly where it's required. Now the downside of this is if I now zoom out and try to make some changes here, I lose all of my detailed sculpting that I was doing when I zoomed in. If I zoom out even further, the problem gets worse. I'm just going to undo that again. Let's go back to our base mesh. There's a different way of working with this. This relative detail mode can be very useful, but when you're starting out, it's helpful to change to constant detail mode. That way doesn't matter how close we are to the mesh, we always add the same amount of detail. Now by default, you'll see that the actual resolution is very low. Instead, we're going to change this resolution value from three. I'm initially going to increase that to 20. Now, as we start to paint, you'll see that we're adding plenty of extra geometry there for our needs. But if we zoom in, we're simply adding at the same resolution, and the same, if we zoom out. Again, I'm just going to undo that. We can go back to our snake hook tool. We'll start to drag out some branches in the next lesson. 7. Staghorn Coral: So the best way to work with this snake hook tool is to drag out in small amounts and to keep moving around the mesh. Initially, I was just going to drag out a few lumps on the top of this mesh to indicate the base of the branches. We have another one coming out here and one up in the middle. Once we've got this base, we can start moving around and putting out each of these branches a little bit more. Just taking it slowly and moving around to make sure that we are pulling things out in the direction that we want. If for example I was to drag this out too quickly, we can see that it's getting very thin quite quickly. That can be useful sometimes, but for the moment, I want to try and keep these a little bit fatter, [NOISE] and have a bit more control over where they're going. That gives us,say, a good starting point. Now, you'll still see that we start to lose some of the thickness here, and I want to fatten up all of these a little bit, and we can do that with the in-flight brush. You'll find that over here, if we use that and just paint over the surface, you can see that's increasing the thickness of each of these branches. So I'm just going to go round and fast and everything up a little bit, so we've got some nice thick branches to work with as our base. I'm just pulling that down a little bit towards the base of this sphere as well, I want to create a more natural organic shape. I don't want it to appear as if these branches are sticking out the top of a sphere. We can also use our grabbed brush again and just increase the size of that to give us a more natural base to work from. I'll just squash up the bottom a little bit. Again, always moving around the mesh to make sure that things are looking good from all angles. Remember, we want something nice and organic, we don't want this to be symmetrical at all. I'm just putting these points in a little bit, roughly flattening things out to the bottom. It doesn't have to be exact, it's just that fit on some of the rocks later on. You can always, again, hold down the Shift key to smooth out areas if you want to, just to blend out some of these edges. [NOISE] Again, if that smooth is not sufficient for you, then we can jump over to our smooth tool and once again, increase that strength value, and that will allow us to smooth that a little bit more. Reduce for well, we're just trying to get this basic shape up and running here. I'm going to adjust that strength back down again and return to my snake hook tool, and let's start pulling these branches out even more. [NOISE] If it starts to lose volume, again, just head back to Inflate tool and you can just hit the I key. That's the shortcut for the inflate tool that you jump back there quickly and easily, and then if you want to return to your snake hook tool, the shortcut for that is K. Once you started to get these out to a reasonable length, we can think about bringing out some of the branches from them. I'm just going to reduce the size of my snake hook tool a bit and just drag out from the side here. Just flicking out to the side will give us these nice little spikes here. Again, try to do that in a random way if they're a little bit too thin, again. I head back to the inflate tool and you can thicken them up a little bit to pull it out a little bit further and keep moving around, smooth things out where you need to, maybe add a little bit thickness here, the inflate tool and K to head back and start pulling out some more of these branches. Just pulling them out in random directions, whatever feels good to you. [NOISE] So create something that's natural and organic feeling, something out in the middle here, and see, I've squashed this up a little bit here. So I'm just going to undo that, and I want to inflate this a little bit more from the icky so that I've got a better base to drag things out from. Just flight it a bit more down at the bottom here as well, to increase my brush size a bit. This feels a bit more natural, and all of these branches seem to grow out from the same area. Just going to smooth that slightly so that we don't start having the geometry overlapping there at all. I want to bridge these gaps, so that's all good. That's looking a little bit better. Again, ''K'' to get back to my snake hook tool, just going to ''F'' to reduce my size a bit, and again stop pulling out some branches here. It's a bit small, so let's inflate it. Again, ''K'', that's a bit bigger. Again, I inflate this a bit, there we are. And we can just keep going adding little spikes and branches until we're happy with the end result. Since I'm just repeating the same steps over and over, I'm just speeding up this section of the class slightly. [MUSIC] As you're creating your own coral, there's no need to follow along exactly with what I'm doing. It's really just a case of experimenting and having fun, constantly rotating the model so that you can see things from all angles and dragging out branches with that snake hook tool. Remember you can always jump between your snake hook inflate and grab brushes to refine the shapes, and you can also smooth things by holding down the Shift key as you're going. You see here that things are a little bit faster in the middle here, thinner down below, so I'm just going to inflate that just to even things out a little. Again, we're just pushing and pulling the general shape around with the grab brush. I'm not too happy with what's going on down at the bottom here, we've got this little point sticking out here, which is not smoothing out very well. What I'm going to do is head over to my scrape tool and see if that will help us flatten it out at the torso. There we are. I can still smooth now over the top of that and get a cleaner result. Did the same over here. Well, there are some other artifacts that I didn't like the look of. Moving around I'm just going to go to my grab tool again, forgotten this out a bit more. [MUSIC] Once again, I'm just going to time-lapse this section as I add the final few branches and make some general twist to the overall shape. I'm just trying to create a form which looks as good as possible from all angles so that we can then reuse the curve throughout our scene. Finally, I'm going to refine the base shape here just to make it feel a little bit more natural. I'm checking in one of the angles to make sure I'm happy with the direction of the branches so that this will look as good as possible from any angle in our final scene. Once you're happy with that, we can again rename this. I'm just going to go up to Outliner and call this CoralStaghorn as we did with the rock, I'm also going to add a material down here. Since there's nothing defined by default, I'm just going to hit "New". We'll this CoralStaghorn as well. For now, I'm just going to add a simple base color. We can always enable our material preview. They're just say we've got an idea of what we're adding in here. And I think for this CoralStaghorn, I'm going to go with something a bit more muted like this. That should do us for now, and we'll refine these materials a little bit later. We can just hit ''Control S'' to save our scene, and then we can move on and work on another type of coral in the next lesson. 8. Tubular Coral: Rough Sculpt: The second type of coral we're going to work on is a tubular variety. We're going to start out in a similar way to last time. Again, I'm just going to get back to my standard flat viewport shading, head into the Layout tab, we can hide this coral. And I'm going to hit "Shift", "A" to adding a cube as our base. Again, I'm going to hit "Control" and "4" to apply this subdivision modifier and roll other hand, hit "Control", "A" to apply it. With that done, we can head it back into our Sculpting tab. Again, I'm going to make use of this snake hook tool to allow us to pull out the base tubes that we're going to be working with. I'm just going to once again increase my brush size, and just start pulling things out a little bit to give us a base to work from. I'm actually going to broaden out the shape a little bit as a starting point so it gives a more natural base here right from the start. Again, just moving around so I can see things from all angles. Once we've done that, I'm just going to reduce my brush size a bit and start dragging things out. Again, let's just create some smaller lumps on the surface to act as our base. Again, before we start dragging these things out too far, we're going to have to enable our Dyntopo mode. Let's turn that on. Say okay to the warning and just double check our settings in here. Again, we're still at constant detail with the resolution of 20. When I start to drag these out, I've got that extra resolution in there to work with. Let's just bring these out a little bit, gives us a starting point. I'm just going to smooth that off a little bit here in the middle, inflate those joins, and I also want to inflate these a bit so hitting "I" to inflate. Because in this case, I really want to get some nice flat tubes almost bought up together with each other. I'm going to move between our snake hook tool and inflate tool as we're going on, just increase the size a little bit and start to pull this up. Checking around so that we don't have any of these strange shapes in here. Jump back to inflate again, I'm going to push things out. Again, use a few grep tool when you need to make some larger overall changes. Let's pull this up a bit further. I'm going to inflate. As before, I'm just going to inflate things a bit at the base to pull them together. Keep adjusting the brush size with the F key just to make sure you've got the optimal size for whatever you're working on at any point in time. Once again, grabbing and pushing things in. Let's go smoothing, I'm going to inflate the top of these quite a bit. Smoothing out that lump there which pulls it back towards the rest. Evening out the shape of these tubes here so inflate tool again. Inflate down to make it feel integrated with the base as well. I'm just smoothing up. [inaudible], putting this down a little bit higher than I wanted it to be. I'm trying to have these at a fairly even height, after all. I think that'll do us for the base mesh here. We'll go ahead and add the remaining details in the next lesson. 9. Tubular Coral: Masking: The next thing that I want to do is start working on the tops of these. We're going to use the masking tool for this. You need the M key to jump into the masking tool, you'll find it down at the bottom here. Then I'm just going to reduce my brush size a little bit. What I want to do is just paint a circle onto the top of each of these tubes. The masking tool just allows us to identify parts of the scope that we want to work on or not be able to work on. At the moment, these areas I wouldn't be able to sculpt on, whereas I could sculpt on the rest of the mesh. What I actually want to do is invert that now, and we can do that by hitting "Control", "I". See obviously we're now able to work just on these tips. Now what I'd like to do is to actually push these tips in. We're creating a dip in the top of it, each of these tubes here. Now I can start sculpting on each of these individually. But there's an easier way to do that. In order to do that, we're going to use what's called a mesh filter. You'll find that down the list here. It's actually this icon here. Right-click on that. That gives us a number of different things that we can do to affect the entire mesh. In this case, the areas of the mesh that are not masked out. In this case, what I actually want is this inflate option. Now, if I just click and drag on screen, you'll see we're pushing the ends of this out. But if I drag this back in the opposite direction, we can actually push those back inside. It's a quick way of having an effect on multiple areas all at once. The other thing we can do is adjust this mask slightly. I want to do is just hit the A key and that will bring up this point menu here. Now we can adjust the size of this mask. What I'm actually going to do is choose to shrink the mask, which will expand it away from that area that we've been working on. I'm going to do that one more time as well. Then I'm actually also going to choose to smooth this mask. That will just soften the edge slightly as well. Now with this inflate tool still active, I'm just going to click and drag again and just further round out the top there until I'm happy with it. Now you can see there's a little bit of pinching in the middle of each of these, but that's absolutely fine because I can just hold down the Shift key to smooth over the top, but I will need to be back in one of my other tools to do so. For now I'm just going to revert back to my grabber tool. I can just hold down the Shift key and smooth over the middle, just so that we're not getting that pinching right in the center. There we are. Now I'm going to invert the mask once again, just by hitting "Control", "I". Now I'm actually going to go to my inflate tool by hitting the I key which increase the size a little bit. Now I'm going to just paint around the top edge of this and inflate around these areas will give me a nice rounded, puffy top to the end of each of these tubes. Smooth it out where you need to as well. Just holding down the Shift key. Great, nice result and I'm just going to move around each of these. Now I'm not obviously using the mesh filter in this case for the inflate because that would inflate everything in the mesh and we just want a localized effect just around the top of each of these tubes. Just getting rid of that harsh edge and giving you a bit more thickness to the top of this tube. Just smoothing that out again. Thickness that one I think, smooth things out. When you're happy with that, we will need to clear that mask. Again, you do that just by hitting the A key to bring up this menu here. Then we have a clear mask option and click on that and get rid of the mask. I'm just going to take a second just to smooth out some of these areas at the bottom here that we're looking a bit lumpy. This area here that's got these lumps and bumps a little bit harder to smooth. Again, I'm just going to jump over into my scraped brush, size a little bit and that's just scraped down hand just smooth it out just to help even things out a little bit. Once again with my grabbed brush, just going to adjust the base slightly. Happier with how that's going to sit on the rocks. Since these changes are all very repetitive, I'm just going to add a short time-lapse and we'll return to real-time when we're done. All I'm really trying to do here is to adjust the shape of the base with the grep tool until I'm happy that it flows nicely into the tubes and feels like it's part of a natural form which might attach to the rocks below. I think that will do. Let's once again, just jump into my layout mode and I'm going to rename this CoralTubular and we'll add a material. Again just give that the same name and set a base color for it. Let's just have a look at how things look in material preview. I'm going to set brighter color here. Let's just drop that down a little bit. That will do is again, as a starting point. There we are. We have our base, rock and coral defined. Let's just save our scene and then we can move on and start sculpting our character in the next lesson. 10. Seahorse: Reference: Since we're now ready to start working on a seahorse, it seems like the perfect time to version up our scene file. This is something that I do from time to time, so that if ever a scene gets corrupted for any reason or we accidentally make any disruptive changes, we would always have a safe place to go back to. I'm just going to go up to File, Save As, and then I'm just going to click on this plus icon to increase my version number and hit "Save as." I can now hide my coral. Then it's time to bring in the reference images that we're going to work from. To do that, I'm going to hit the one key on my numpad to jump into front view. Alternatively, you can always use this gizmo up in the top right hand. Then simply navigate to wherever you saved your reference file and drag and drop it into the scene. I'm now going to reset its position. With the reference objects selected, I'm just going to hit Alt+G to reset. It's positioned to zero. Then in the properties panel, I'm going to go down to this object data properties tab and I'm going to enable the opacity and drop this value down to 0.1. This allow us to see through the image as we're working. Then I'm going to hit the G key to grab and X to constrain it to my x-axis and just center this up as best as possible. I'm now going to hit the 3 key on my numpad to jump over into the side view, hit "Shift+D", and right-click to cancel the move. Then I'm going to rotate this. So I'm going to hit R to rotate. We want to constrain the rotation to the z-axis so I'm going to hit Z and then type in 90 to rotate it 90 degrees and hit "Enter." I can then G and Y, to translate this along the y-axis, and I'm going to roughly center this up along this z-axis line here. Now as we rotate around, you'll see we have these two reference objects positioned. What I'm also going to do is select this one for the front view. I'm just going to translate it back along the y-axis now. So G and Y, let's just move it back a little bit. This one for the side view, let's move that a little bit further out so G at x, to move that back. That way they're not going to overlap with any object that we're working on here in the middle. But if we jump into either the front or the side views, you can see that everything is still aligned nicely. Finally, what I'd like to do is select both of these empty objects here up in the outliner. Then I'm going to hit the M key to create a new collection, which we're going to call reference. This allows us to easily toggle this on and off. Additionally, I'm just going to go up to the filters option up at the top here, enable this selection filters. That way I can turn off selection for this entire collection. That way we won't be able to accidentally select and move this reference as we're working. I'm going to hit "Control+S " to save and then we can start working on our seahorse in the next lesson. 11. Seahorse: Base Mesh - Head: In our past lessons, we started out sculpting from a primitive object such as a sphere, and we could easily do exactly the same thing here, as we're starting to sculpt our sea horse. But sometimes a simpler way to work, is to start out with a base mesh, and that's what we're going to do here. We're going to define the basic overall shape of the sea horse with simple modeling tools, and then we'll start to refine it with our sculpting tools afterwards. I'm just going to click on this collection up at the top here to make sure that any new object I add is added under this collection rather than under the reference collection. Then we're going to hit "Shift+A", and we're just going to add in a cube. I'm going to jump over into my Modeling tab here, and then I'm going to go into the right view with the "Numpad 3", and I'm going to enable X-Ray mode, which you can do from the top here, or use the "Alt+Z" shortcut key. This means that any selection that we do have points will select right away through the object, rather than just selecting the closest points to us. Now I'm just going to start moving these vertices around, to roughly position them around the head. Initially I'm just going to drag select over these points in the top corner here, just hit "G", and move them up to the top here. I'll do the same at the front, then at the bottom here. I'm initially just going to form this base shape here. I'm now going to jump into my front view with a wonky on the Numpad, and we're going to select all of these vertices here, and I'm going to scale them in, on the x-axis. We do that just by hitting "S", and "X", and scale them in to roughly the proportions of the head there. Now, I'm just going to select this front face here, so I'm going to hit "3" to Interface Selection Mode, de-select everything, and select that front face. I'm going to hit "E" to extrude it a short way, and "S" to scale it down. Now if I jump into my side view again, I'm just going to drag this down, and scale it further, that's roughly at the right size, and then we can hit "E" to extrude it once more. I'm just going to bring that out to the front here, scale it up again, and rotate it. I'm not going for detail at this point, I'm just going for the overall shape. Now I'm going to hit "Ctrl+R", to add an edge loop, and add it in the middle of this face here. Just hit right mouse button to cancel that move. One just to go back into our vertex select. I'm just going to move some of these points around again to better define the front of this face here. Remember we're just going for something that roughly follows the main shape of the head without going into too much detail at this point. I'm going to pull that back for now, and I'm going to select this face on the back, and again extrude this out. Extrude it a short way, we need to extrude, "S" to scale that down. Again, let's go into the side view, so that we can move that up, and into place. Just rotate it slightly as well there. The other thing I'd like to do, is just scale in the top ever so slightly here. I'm just going to select these top faces, "S", and "X", just to narrow it up a little bit at the top here, so we have a bit more form to the top of their head, and I think I'll do the same at the bottom here. Just select this one face on the bottom there, and hit S, and X to scale that in. There we are. That should do a base shape for our head. I'm just going to get back into the layout view. We can rename this cube here to head, and go back into our flat shaded mode there as well, then we'll start working on the body in the next lesson. 12. Seahorse: Base Mesh - Body: We're now going to add a new object to form our body. Again, "Shift A and we'll add in another cube. We can just rename this now to body. Once again, I was heading to the Modeling tab and start working on this base shape. Again to the side view though points selected here, I'm just going to scale this right down and move these points so that they are roughly the right shape for this central part of the torso. We can jump to the side and just scale this in slightly on the x-axis. Just do that for now. Then I'm just select this top face here. Let's extrude that out and move it back and scale it down. Just go into roughly form the shape of this neck here. I'm just going to rotate that slightly as well. Then we can extrude that again. I'm just going to rotate it, move it into position, use up the scale, and do the same once more, and rotate that and move it into place. I'm just going to grab these vertices at the Black Hand. That's just nudge them down a bit as well. We're getting a nicer edge flow here. I'll bring these ones up. These come out towards these spines on the back here in each case. I'm going to lift this up a little bit. There we are. Now I'm going to grab this bottom face again here, let's say three to go into face, select. Back to the side view and let's extrude that one out. Again, rotate and scale as we go. Extruding again and scaling that down. Let's just select all of these vertices, and move them back into place a bit. Scale this a little bit more. Let's extrude, rotate, and scale. We can continue this on down the rest of the tail as well. We don't have to be too exact but the closer we keep today reference here, the easier it will be when we go into the scope mode. Let's just have a look around from the front and scale, some of these in slightly on the x-axis. Just to make sure that we are keeping to that shape that's already been defined. Then I think we can scale that neck in a little bit further as well. To that tape is dial up towards the top. There we are. We've already got a good base shape to work with here. The next thing I'd like to do is just add a tiny bit more detail to this. I'm going to select the body. Let's go back into Modeling mode. I'm going to add another loop down the side here. I Control R and right-click to cancel the move. Then I'm going to select these back faces here. Let's go into the side view here and I'm just going to select all of these vertices down the back. We're going to just jump to the front view, and I'm going to scale these in slightly on the x-axis. We have a bit of a tapering effect towards the back there. Then we can also do a similar thing with some of these points at the front, and do the front of the neck there and leave the chest as it is, something that's quite square. I'm going to just scale it in slightly on the x-axis. It rounds out the neck and the tail a little bit. Let's jump back into layout mode and see what we've got. Then I think we can do a similar thing with the head. I'm just going to select that back into modeling. Again, let's add an edge loop around the middle here so that's hit "Control", "R", drop an edge like in there. This will just help us to define that volume just a little bit better. With that selected, I'm just going to hit "S" and "X", just scale it out a little bit on the x-axis to round out that former touch. If I just hit "Alt" and click on this edge up at the top here. Then hold Shift and Alt, I can select the edge on the other side as well. That's just scale them in again slightly on the x-axis. Very well. We'll go back into layout mode. I think that gives us enough definition as a starting point. I'm going to save my scene there and we can start working on the head in the next lesson. 13. Seahorse: Rough Sculpt - Head: With our base mesh now defined, we're going to start working on the head. We just need a little bit more resolution to work with because as we've already seen, trying to sculpt on something that's so low resolution is not going to work for us. I'm just going to jump quickly into the modeling tab here. Hit "A" to select all of the vertices and right-click to subdivide. We're going to do that one more time so that we have a lot more points here to work with. We can now jump over onto the sculpting tab. We can start to refine this shape here. To start with, we just edited the front hair, just going to hit "Alt" "Z". We can see through the mesh briefly. We need to start pushing some of these points around. What I don't want to do is work on one side of the mesh independently from the other. We're going to use the symmetry mode up at the top here. By clicking on that little X icon, it now means that we'll be working on both sides at the same time. I'm just going to increase my brush size a little, and start pushing and pulling on some of these vertices just to better get that overall shape working from the front here. Say to cancel the X-ray mode and we can start. I'm just going to smooth off this shape a little bit. Just referring to the reference as I go, and I'm just going to start pushing and pulling parts around to try and create that base shape. Lift this up a little bit here at the back. Put it in quite away. I'm going to pull the back of this head up and in a little bit here as well, where the neck attaches. I want to create the effect of these pieces coming out at the back here. I'm going to pull some of this back in. I'm not going to get too detailed just yet because we are still fairly low on the amount of geometry that we have. We can create the overall shape of the head as best as possible. Then we can add the details as we go. I'm going to need a little bit of space here for the eyes to keep the front of that quite rounded side view and see what we've got. Quite a way away from that references. Pull some of these bits up, my overall shape I pull it back a little bit to find those cheeks a bit better. My brush size a bit. I don't have quite enough geometry to work with at the back here. We'll refine that in a minute from the front. Again, let's pull some of this geometry out a little bit, just making little smaller tweaks trying to find that overall head shape. Now obviously we need to go out a bit towards the back here, pull that in create an overall shape. One thing you have to be careful of if you're working in front and side views is that things don't get off on the rest of the mesh. We need the shapes to work in three dimensions. It's important to keep moving around the rest of the sculpt. See seeing things got crushed in a bit at the front here. We actually want these central areas to come out a little bit more. It's actually rounded. We'll be pulling these areas back a little bit to create that correct form. We can always keep jumping back and side to check. If you want to see this reference over the top what we can actually do you can't just jump back into the layout mode, actually, we're in object mode and go into the reference. If we select either of these, we can adjust how they display. If we go up to the object properties here and down to the Viewport Display tab we can click on in front. That should allow it to display in front of everything else. We'll do that on the other one as well. That way, if we now head back into our sculpting mode, we can actually see this image laid over the top of our sculpt here. It just makes it a little bit easier to define this shape. One thing to be careful of actually there is I had the empty still selected rather than my head objects. I'm going to select my head object again here in object mode, jump back into sculpting mode here. You can see now our sculpt tools are once again available to help us to pull these points around and more accurately define this overall form here. Pull these points up a little bit. I kept wanting to pull up, front out a touch. Let's smooth some of these edges off a little bit remember just by holding down the shift key as we work in trying to create these full cheeks out to the side here. Be pushing out a space for where the eyes go as we add a little bit more detail and we keep the front of that nose quite rounded. Soften off the edges. Just double-check every now and again without reference these pieces to feel like they're rounded and moving back as we go back on the head, creating nice flow of the edges just there. Obviously, we don't have enough geometry at the back here. We're going to refine that in the next lesson. 14. Seahorse: Detailed Sculpt - Head: Now in order to add some additional geometry at the back here, there are a number of things that we can do. Obviously, we could jump back into modeling mode, we could further subdivide the entire head mesh. But that probably won't give us quite enough detail here without increasing the detail everywhere else a little bit too high. The easiest method in this instance is actually to enable the Dyntopo mode again. We're going to do that up at the top here. Again, don't worry about the warning, and let's just check our settings. Again, we have this constant detail and a resolution of 20, which should be fine. Now if we start to smooth out this area of the mesh here. Now what we want to do is just start actually painting in some extra detail. For that, what I would like to do is make use of the clay strips brush. If I just make this a little bit smaller, you'll be able to see as we start to paint here, we're adding in this extra detail. As we do that, we'll have a lot more geometry to work with. Once again, we can just go back to grab brush and start to shape this as we need it. Smooth things out where we need to better define that overall shape. Now in the reference, you can see that I've pulled out this shape at the top here and this one at the back here. We've already created this shape at the back that I could do with some extra refinement. Now we can add in a bit more geometry. I'm just going to shape that a little bit better, smooth that out, push this in and smooth it, so will help with that area of the mesh. But we want to pull these bits out of the top here. I think the snake hook tool would be the best way of doing that. I'm just going to grab up at the top here and pull this back a little bit. That quickly helps to create that shape. It's a little bit of smoothing. Again, we can check our shape from the front and the side. Obviously, this is getting pulled up too far, so I'm just going to hit my grab tool and just bring that down a little bit. I want to push this down and in underneath. Let's have a look from the side here, let's also come back a little bit too far. We can just move this around, smooth things out a bit as we go, and just pull this back into the position that we want it to be. There we are. Better defining the shape comes back here. I'm trying to create these overlapping forms to give the silhouette of the character interest from all angles. Again, adding them to the cheeks to run them out and constantly refining the silhouette to match the reference. You'll probably find yourself going back and forth quite a bit over the same areas as you sculpt and that's perfectly normal. As we make changes in one area, they impact the surrounding areas, and we'll gradually make smaller and smaller adjustments as we approach the final form. Then I'm just going to use the clay strips brush again on hand, I'm just going to reduce the size a little bit to better define that shape. Just building up a little bit of geometry on the top there and a little bit around the side here for the cheeks, just to puff them out. Smooth that touch and brush that end and smooth that a little. I think down at the bottom here, this needs pushing in quite a bit more, smoothing. Again, if you want to add any additional geometry, just quick pass with that clay strips brush will help to do that. Soften up those edges. I'm just going to add a little extra detail as well. Just cross the front here. Just alternating between adding little bit of geometry with the clay strips and smoothing it over with the smooth tool. I'm not worried about getting a very smooth result at the moment because we're still working on the overall shape of things. The build up the geometry here so that we get a nice rounded shape at the front and then it will taper off a bit as we go back on these two ridges here. Again, I think I'll pull this down on this a bit more in the middle here. Maybe again adding a little bit extra across the top here. Keep those shapes nice and rounded, but pushing that section there, I'm trying to create an interesting form as we go back here. Make sure that stays rounded and not too sharp. You can just double-checking all the time from the reference. We don't have to stay super close to the reference. If there are improvements that we can make as we go along, obviously we will do. But it's a good checkpoint so that we're not going too far away from it. Pull back right I think at the back there, getting him nice smooth shapes, the forms here. That feels better with it tucked back in under. I go for this being a bit more rounded on the inside and slightly square on the outside here. Obviously, our reference is only in two dimensions. We have to make some decisions about the overall three-dimensional form as we go. I just want to say it's very important to keep moving around the sculptor as we go, constantly aware of how it's shaping up from all sides. We can have just another quick check, which we're rounding out that nose nicely. We're not getting into the detail of things like the mouth at the moment, that will come a lot later because those are the smaller details we want the overall shapes to be working correctly first. Let's help pull this in quite a bit further than we had in the reference. Lower that tweet not about, so not pulled down quite so far. It can maybe coming out a bit more in the middle, but push back the sides here. From the side again, that's a bit better. Next thing, this has gone up a bit too far at the top here. Let's take that back down again as well. So far not too bad I think. There we are. That's a little bit closer. Try to make sure those cheeks are nice and full and round, tying to make the character look as appealing as possible. Pushing them down too far there. I can use this clay strips brush again and just add in a little bit more detail here to help preserve that volume nicely. I'm just going to pull this in again to help round out that shape. It feels like the cheeks are nice and round, coming back into these bits that come backwards. It looks a little bit better like that. I said we've pulled them so far in that we're now raising the silhouette from the front. Just nudge them back out again and see how that helps. I can go a lot further actually. There's some reference from the front getting there. Smoothen out there as well. I'm just tidying up the backs here, running them out a little. Let's do want to keep things, so this will show up on the outside. Having a variety of straights from more rounded forms really helps to give your character a sense of appeal. Here we are. I think that's a good initial scope pass on the head, we'll go into a bit more detail later on. But I think we're going to go and start bringing up the body to a similar level in the next lesson. Don't forget to save. 15. Seahorse: Rough Sculpt - Body: Once again, before we start on our body, we're going to have to increase the resolution a little bit. Let's jump back into layout and select our body. Then into the modeling Tab 8 select all, and then right-click to sub-divide. In this case, one thing I'm going to do is just increase the smoothness slightly. What you'll see is it will help to round out that form little bit. We're going to go too far with it. Let's just zoom in a little bit. But that will help make sure we don't have a hard, fasted body, and I'm going to increase the number of cuts to two without a bit of rounding. That should work quite nicely. Let's jump into our sculpting mode again. We have a lot more geometry here to work with. Again, let's have a look at this from the side here. With our grid brush I'm going to start defining this form that's a little bit better. To just work on the overall outer shape to start with. I'm not going to worry too much about this spikes that stick out. I want to work on the main body shape and then we'll pull some geometry out for this spikes a little while so I'm just going to actually tweak all of this in a little bit. First in front. Again, we just have to double-check and make sure that we've got symmetry turned on here on the x axis. If you actually ever make the mistake and perhaps end up with a mesh that's not symmetrical on both sides, you can actually fix that under this symmetry drop-down. In this case we have this direction minus x, to plus x. This will take anything that's on the negative side and move it over to the positive side when we hit the symmetrized button. If I hit that now, you can see we now have a symmetrical mesh. We can now re-enable our symmetry on x and everything should match. You have different options here, so you can change this to go in the opposite direction, plus x, to minus x, or on either of the other axis if you need to. Again, let's just start shaping that up, neck a little bit, fall of that. Better shaped that chest. Jump to the side again. l think that would look better, but this bit of a crease on the back here, which actually I quite like. I think I'm going to push that actually a little bit further so that our spikes are really sticking out the back and we're going to reassess a little bit along the spine here. Reinstate that in a bit [NOISE] I'm just tapering out that neck maybe a little wider at the very top where it meets the head. Again, it's where we're making these decisions that are not necessarily visible in the actual design, but we have to make them in 3D. Just trickle from the side again, pull them back a little bit. Make sure that's nicely rounded. That chest stick out quite a bit at the top there, a bit more form. It's good. Let me go making sure we've got a nice smooth fall off as we go back here. Again, checking from all sides. It's pretty good. Bottom here I'm going to smooth off some of this to round out that shape a little bit, losing a little bit of volume there. We might have to reinstate that. Some of those sharper edges that we had in the design. It gets rid of that crease that we had done the side. Side view again. Just trying to create a more stylized graphic shape to the tail here. Now we do, but now I think we need a bit more resolution here. Again, in this case, I'm just going to jump back to modeling, select everything, and right-click and sub-divide once more. We still have that smoothness setting enabled, so that will help to make sure that the new geometry we've added maintains the shape a little bit better. Let's just push that a little bit more, I think. Here we go, back and sculpt mode. Smooth out some of these shapes a bit. Some of that bumpiness that we had. Nice a taper on that shape. Smoothing up these edges at the back. Definitely around under that neck needed smoothing a bit. I said I don't want to lose too much of that shape at the front there, so was going to move that in. I want to make sure we've got this slightly more square shape. Obvious, angle change, at the front there. It's good. I think we can start pulling out some of those spikes in our next lesson, so just save it now. 16. Seahorse: Detailed Sculpt - Body: In order to help us drag out these shapes at the back here, for these spikes, I think we're going to once again enable this non topo mode. Double-check our settings. That's all good. Then just come to jump over into the side here. Reduce my brush size a bit and make use of the snake hook tool once again. I'm going to start just dragging that out. You'll see that we've got these couple of spikes appearing here. I'll do that. Again, let's get her up. I just brush size down a bit here. Do the same above, and just a little bit extra down the bottom here as well. Here we are. Now at the top here these are fused together which we don't really want. I'm actually going back to the side here with my grab brush and let's just pull in a little bit and smooth it out. Then into the three-quarter view, again with the snake hook brush, smaller size. We can start defining that shape, keeping them separate. Let's just have a look from the side again. It's a little bit low, but we can nudge that up a bit. There we are. That's more what I was after. Moving down the middle. Then what I want to do is take my clay strips brush and I'm actually going to build out the edges out into these spikes a little bit in this area at the back here. I'm just going to increase my brush size a little bit, start adding a little bit of volume in what's required. [NOISE] If we should go to the side view here, what I want is something that comes out hand goes into the spikes but fades into the front edge of the body. [NOISE] We can smooth out these edges a little bit. I think we can actually push this in a little bit as well. I'm actually going to still use this clay strips brush, but just increase my size a little bit, hold down the Control key and we can actually just resize that in a little bit. [NOISE] The effect of pushing out the spikes just that little bit more. Again, to smooth off that shape about. Push that even further. Control key. Can I reduce size my brush a bit. I'll do the same down the back in the middle here again. Just to get a bit more of that ridge down the middle that I was talking about earlier. [NOISE] Smooth things about, adding a bit of geometry where everything it's needed. Now I think the detail level is a little bit low. We can always adjust that here, so rounding up that resolution to 30 now, so that as I paint I get a little bit more detail and then better refine this form. [NOISE] Keep adding the geometry in so from the side pull this in a bit too far I think now. Spikes are a bit too prominent so I'm just adding a little bit more in there with the clay strips brush. See how that looks from the side, open to the cap. Smooth things out. That feels a bit nicer. [NOISE] I was just getting out, adding a little bit of geometry and then smoothing afterwards. [NOISE] We've got an issue here that you sometimes get when we're adding geometry to one side and it's making a mess of the other side with this clay strips brush. What I'm going to do is just to grab brush if we can pull some of this across that way without affecting the other side. Because the geometry is very low resolution and quite tight together, smooth that out a bit. There we go. That's achieved a better result. I didn't really want that to be joined together in the middle, so I'm just going to push that down in the middle here. We're getting the ridge back that we wanted. Smooth that out. [NOISE] Again, let's have that clay strips. Add a little bit of extra geometry. [NOISE] Smooth it out. [NOISE] Always double-checking the overall form is following the design as best as possible. Let me put down a little bit too far rather that was heading up. Smooth that out there. Run out that formula but as well. There we are. Here I'm just making some tiny adjustments to better define the shape of the back and the spikes. Just using the grab brush and smoothing with the Shift key. I'm just trying to match the silhouette to the design as closely as possible. Making some small adjustments at the tail as well to better define the shape. Now that we've got a better idea of how our form is looking it's matching up to our reference nicely. If you want to you can always disable the reference there to get a better view of your sculpt and start working on it without the reference there. We can always re-enable it if we want to. Say, seeing now that I need just a little bit more geometry here to better define that shape. I'm just reinforcing the shape of the spikes in the back a little bit up here. Then the other thing that I'd like to do is better define this line down the middle here. I'm actually going to use the clay strips brush just to rough in a line along this edge. Smooth it out here just to blend through to the back. Adding a little bit more on the inside edge. Again, smooth that around. [NOISE] We can make that maybe a bit more defined using this crease brush. You can actually crease this far side a little bit if we want to. Let me increase the brush size a bit. [NOISE] Let me see. Remember if we hold down the Control key, we're going to actually tighten up this edge as well. [NOISE] Let's define that a bit better. Do that along the edge of these ridges that come back as well. Just to give them a bit more form. I'm going to tighten up this edge a little bit too. We have a square front here. I'm rounding that out. Just tighten up this shape a little bit. Again, it really helps to have some sharp edges in your designs, so that everything is not all evenly rounded. Creates more contrast which in turn is more appealing to look at. A little bit back here on the tail. Better define that. Again, I'm just trying to fine-tune the shape of the tail, creasing the edges, but also trying to preserve the silhouette which we've already defined. I could have gone with a very smooth curved shape for the tail. Having these defined angle changes just helps to create a more interesting and eye-catching shape. Then still moving around the mesh to refine the edges of the tail still further. Just adding these little bits of definition throughout. Let's just sharpen up here with the grip brush. [NOISE] That overall shape, is looking pretty good for the body now. Let's save that and we'll go back and refine the head. [NOISE] 17. Seahorse: Eyes: The main feature that still needs to be defined for the head are the eyes. We're going to start working on that now and define the eye socket. At the moment, we've been working on the body. If I tried to sculpt on the head, you'll see that nothing happens. Now we could change back into object mode, select the head, and then come back and sculpt mode. But an easier way of achieving the same result is to go up into the outliner, we can see our body is selected and we have this little sculpt icon. If we look next to our head, we've got this little dot, and if we click on it, the sculptor icon moves down to there. Now if I start working on the head, I can now start sculpting on it. We're now going to start carving our eye socket here before we actually bring in a new mesh to act as the eye itself. Before we do that, I'm just going to re-enable Dyntopo, which is often disabled when you switch between meshes. That's something to be aware of. We're going to start carving out this eye socket and do that actually with this clay strips brush. The brush I usually use to build up volume, but we can also invert it by holding down the Control key and actually start carving away into the mesh. I'm just roughly placing the eye socket where I think it's likely to be. We can actually just re-enable our reference here. Then need to push this right back and up a little bit. Jump over to the front here, I need to push it back and up into this space a little bit as well. It looks like I've gotten a little bit lazy. We can just use this clay strips brush and just build some of that volume. Back up again for the cheek. Just smooth that out. That will do for now. Just come back in and smooth things out a little bit around the edge. Check in front and side, I think we need to go up a little bit obviously, just here. I'm just going to carve out this socket a little bit, and then we'll bring in a mesh for the eye and we can start working on the sculpt around that eye mesh. I will probably do as a starting point. We now need to bring in a new object. I'm going to jump over into the layout tab to do that. For now just continue again, turn off my reference for a minute and Shift A, and we'll add in a UV sphere. Obviously way too big at the moment. Let's just hit "S" and scale that down. A little bit further. Let's rename it Eye. If I turn my reference back on and go to front and side views, we can just hit "G" and move this up roughly into position scale and down a little bit further. From the side here, it's fairly good. What I'm also going to do is just rotate this. I'm going to rotate around the x-axis, 90 degrees, Enter, and that way that brings this pole to the front, and we have these nice edge loops which will make it easier to define where a pupil would be. I'm actually going to jump over into the modeling tab here. Let's go to a side view. What we're going to do is define some materials here. The first thing I'm going to do is select just these front points here, which I think will form our pupil, I should be reasonable. Let's jump back over to the side, go to our materials tab here, and we're going to hit "New", to create a new material. Let's call this pupil, enter base color down to pretty much black, and I'm going to increase its roughness as well. Then we also need to define a material for the rest of the eye, so I'm just going to hit "Control", "I" to invert my selection, and hit this little plus icon to create new material slot and hit "New", to drop the material into it. Let's just call it EyeWhite. It's base color is almost white anyway, so I'll just make that slightly brighter. In this case, I'm going to drop the roughness down a little bit, so it's a little bit more reflective. Refine that a bit later on. Let's just hit "Assign", just double-check that's assigned and Control I to invert the selection of pupil assign. Now when we go over into the Layout tab and change the material preview, you can see that we now have an eye with a pupil defined. Having done that, we can also mirror that over to the other side of the mesh. To do that, I'm just going to add a modifier. I'm going to go into the modifies tab, add modifier, and we're going to choose the mirror modifier. Once we've done that, we can use this little eyedropper icon to pick a mirror object, and I'm just going to click on the head, and that should mirror it over to the other side of the mesh. Once we've done that, we can select our head object again and we can jump back into sculpt mode, and we can refine this eye socket shape. I think if we jump to the side here, probably need to just use the grab tool. Move this up a little bit. Quite nice. Shape as it wraps around the eye there, cheap down a touch. From the front, lift up these browns a little bit, bring that in the middle and smooth that out and touch as well. Smooth off this edge to have a smoother fall off as we go further back. We can smooth off that whole area. Probably want to pull this in a little bit so it's not quite so pronounced as browse sticking up quite a bit. Pull that back and touch, smooth it out. On this front to be rounded. Let's just pull that out a little more, I was playing this brow back in. Smoothing that off. Lift these brows up a little bit here. We didn't have a angry looking expression, and properly sides in a little bit more as well, smooth out this shape, falls off a little bit more smoothly to the sides here. Flows around to the back. Smooth that out a bit. All of these changes might seem quite small and superficial, but paying attention to how the individual parts of the face relate to each other, blend together, can make a big difference in result. What we're going for as a form which has a sense of natural anatomy, but with a simplified appealing style. That's working fairly well from the front and the side. Lost a bit of volume in here, pull this back and touch in towards the nose, round out that bridge of the nose a little bit more. This little tweaks hair, smoothing perhaps round out that formula to get better. It comes a bit more natural. Again, you'll see some some the adjustments are making hair may seem tiny. But they will help to define the overall form. This is especially important around the eyes since small change can make a big difference to how friendly repealing the character looks. Lost a bit of volume out to the sides here. Pull that back out a bit. As I mentioned before, you'll constantly find yourself doing this, adding and removing volume in certain areas as we close in on the final form. Always double-check everything. I'm tweaking as we go. Nice rounded shape there of the cheeks again. That's a little bit better. There we are. That's our eyes defined. We'll save that there, and then we can start adding some more details in the next lesson. 18. Seahorse: Mouth: We're now ready to start defining our mouth and then refining our head shape. To start with, we're going to place this mouth in. No, Dyntopo is not enabled, so let's just check that on again. I'm actually going to increase this resolution a little bit further because I want some extra detail in around this mouth. I'll reduce my brush size a bit. Then what I'm going to do is make use of this crease brush to define where the mouth sits. Let's start with that, let's just go over into our side view here. Let's move in a little bit. Then just start drawing in where we want this mouth to sit. I'm pinching things together nicely there to define that. Let's just move around the mesh and then we can actually draw this in underneath. Let's take a look at this. Again here, we need to use our grab brush, just 96 inch pulling in a little bit further. Let's define that nose shape. Soften that up and then I want to make sure that we've got some clear definition to where that mouth sits. I want to pull this area back a little bit. I'm just going to go into three-quarter view here and just make sure that area is tucked back a little bit from the front of the nose. Again, I can just go back to my crease brush Shift C, that's the shortcut for that. Just again, for the define that creasing there. I'm just going to use my clay strips brush again and just now that we've gotten this extra detail. Bulk up the sides here a bit. Up, around my nose, smooth that. Just adding a few strokes here and there and moving them off. Just try to create some better definition to some of these edges. Leaving a sharper edge there and smoothing off the front. Do the same back here and just define the shape a little bit better. I'm actually going to just add in a little bit of geometry along the edge here, smooth this out, and then once we've got a little bit more in that work with, I'm going to sharpen up some of these edges a little bit with my crease brush. Again, I'm just going to invert that brush. Size down a bit. Hold down Control and just pinch that edge a little bit. More definition there. Smith off the back side, leaving a bit of volume there. Let's just pull them out a little bit as well. Let's make that three. Again, just back to my clay strips I'll add it at the back half. Arrow is a little bit low resolution. Shape wasn't all that well-defined. I'm just going to turn off that reference. It's not getting in the way. Sharpen up this edge a little bit here. Let's pay attention to that silhouette. Really bulging out there. A nice smooth line coming round. Again, just add in extra detail wherever we think that's required, whether resolution was quite low before to find things a bit better. Building up, or else would buy that too, where it's needed. I think we can define this brown area a little bit more as well. Smoothing off the top of it, adding in a bit more of an obvious edge to it there. Again, let's just use our crease brush. Just have inverted just to sharpen up the edge a little bit there. Now, I think that's getting pulled down a little bit too far. That's a bit too sharp as well. I was trying to maintain the appeal of the character, make it look friendly. Side of it a bit sharper in the middle, perhaps. I'm sure everything looks nice from all angles. I'm losing that bulge out in the front now. Let's have a look with our reference again just from the side. You can see it's got squashed in a bit. Nice, big round forehead. I think that's getting pretty good there. Then I think we'll do one final quick passive refinement in the next lesson, where we're actually going to remesh the head. Let's save that now. 19. Seahorse: Refine - Head: The Dyntopo mode is fantastic when you're working on the base of a mesh and you're pulling things around. It as it create geometry exactly where you need it. But because it works with a triangulated mesh, it does mean that sometimes you get some sharp edges and corners where you don't want them. It's less desirable in the final render. It's better to work with a mesh that's made up of quadrilateral shapes, four-sided shapes. We can convert this back into a mesh made up quads using the 3D mesh tool. So to do that, I'm going to disable Dyntopo mode. We have this re-brush menu up at the top here. Now we can set the resolution that we want up at the top here. But an easier way to work is to actually use the dynamic version of the tool. You can enable that by hitting "Shift", "R". This will show you dynamically the resolution that we're going to be creating. For example, if I choose quite a large size here and then I hit "Control", "R" which is the shortcut to re-mesh, you'll see that we retain our overall shape, but we've reduced the resolution drastically. So we've obviously lost all of our details. This can be useful sometimes when we do want to reduce the resolution of a mesh, but in this case, we actually want to keep all of the details that we've carefully sculpted in there. I'm just going to hit "Control", "Z" and hit "Shift", "R" again. Now we're going to reduce this down to somewhere a little bit lower. I think we can probably go down maybe to about to 0.15, something like that. Then hit "Control", "R". You can see now that all of those triangles have appeared and instead, the entire mesh has been converted to use these quadrilateral shapes instead. Now it's done a fairly good job because of the detail here of retaining for example our mouth crease there. The rest of the mesh, we've got more than enough detail for. What I'd like to do is just refine this slightly further. At the moment, everything is looking very faceted, and that's because we're still using flat-shaded mode. So if I jump into the layout mode and right-click, we have Shade Flat enabled. If we click on "Shade Smooth", smooth the overall look at the mesh, so if we come back into shaded mode, you can see already things are looking a lot smoother. All we need to do now is just finish off polishing up this mesh and refining the details. The first thing I want to do though, is check that we've got enough detail and go in and redefine the crease here around the mouth. I'm just going to hit "Shift", "C" to enable my crease tool. Adjust the size down a little bit and start working in to this mouth here. I'm going to smooth out the edges a little bit to try and create a nice sharp crease in there to define the mouth. I'm just going to jump into my side view here and re-enable my reference because I think things have got pulled around a bit, they have. The grab tool here, increase my size and start brushing this and nose back into place a little bit. It's done okay. Too far away from the reference there. You see again. Get back in and increase this up nicely. I'm just smoothing over the area around it. Let's turn off our reference now. Then if I increase my brush size, I'm just going to smooth out some of these rougher edges. We've got enough detail now that if I'm using the smooth brush, I'm not really affecting the overall shape of the geometry too much. I'm just getting rid of some of those rougher edges. Lumps and bumps up here. Just helps polish things up a little bit more. Get rid of any lumps like that. Stick out of the back. It's now just a case of taking your time moving around the mesh and adding that final level of polish to everything. It's here that we can really start to see the benefit of taking our time earlier to nicely define the forms using the lower resolution mesh. It gives our forms an overall simplicity, which might have been hard to achieve had we been working with a higher resolution mesh to start with. As always, don't be afraid to make small adjustments where you think that will enhance the final look. I know I keep mentioning it, but it's so important to view a mesh from all angles. It really helps you to define the volumes properly. I'm going to say our head shape is now looking fairly smooth overall. Just take the time to polish up those last little bits. I think we can also just crease up a few bits a little bit more so I'm just going to again use my crease to reduce the size a little bit and holding down the control key to invert it. Let's just sharpen up some of these edges. Let's create a bit more definition around the back here. Smooth out that point. That point isn't wanting to smooth out. I'm just going to use my scrape tool. There we are. That help with that. Let's just smooth it over a little bit. I'm actually going to use this scrape tool to help define these planes a bit more on the back here and up on the top. Too far. I don't want things to be too soft. Want to make it harder and softer shapes. Scrape towards really useful for doing that. I hoping to find some of these flatter shapes. Go back to my crease tool. Get a bit more definition on that edge. Did find it helps to crease it. Then just do quick pass on smoothing just to soften the end result. Some up here. We do some around the end of this nose as well. Let's try that script brush again across the front here if it helps us. It's running it up a bit more. I'm just defining some of these edges a bit more. These plane changes just makes things look a little bit more finished, not too mushy. I think we're almost there with the head now. If this is the first character that you've worked on, you might take a little while to get the result that you're happy with, but stick with it. I often find that model will go through an ugly face and just spending a little bit longer can really help to pull everything together. I'm just once again fine tuning cheeks. One of the elements that really helped to make the character look friendly, so we're worth spending a little bit of time on. I think that's looking pretty good. I think we can call our head done for now and we'll move on and just finish off the body in the next lesson. Get safe. 20. Seahorse: Refine - Body: We're now going to go through the same polishing process that we just applied to the head to our body. Once again, we need to switch over to our body mesh. I just click up here in the outliner, to switching sculpting mode on our body. We'll again try and remesh this. Once again, we can define our mesh resolution. Let's take that to maybe around 0.2. We don't need quite so much detail here as we did in the head. Let's hit Control R and that looks like it's probably going to be good enough for us to give us enough definition along these edges here. Again, I'm going to go into Layout mode and just right-click and Shade Smooth. Let's see how that's looking when we're back in Sculp mode. That's already a lot better. We just need to polish things up a bit and sharpen up some of these edges. Actually, I'm just going to increase my brush size and just smooth out some of these areas here and get rid of those obvious facets. Reduce my brush size a little bit. I'll just to give it a little polish all over. Anywhere we're seeing all these issues. Again, we've got this little lump here that I don't really like the look of, so I'm going to just go in with my scrap brush and see if we can sort that out. That's a little bit better. I'm going to do that elsewhere as well just to help refine those edges. I'm now going to switch over again to my crease brush, increase my size a bit and let's redefine these edges here. A little bit bigger. I'm holding down Control just to try and create that edge in here. Smooth that out. Now that's perhaps not got quite enough resolution in here. I think I am going to just remesh this once again and just increase the resolution slightly. Let's do, so Shift R, and that's, again, like with the head, drop it to about 1.5, there or thereabouts and hit "Control", "R". That should just give me a little bit more resolution to work with here. Adding a little bit of definition in there, smooth that section. This nice, big flat front to the chest here and defining these creases. Have that coming down towards the bottom of the tail as well. Adding these sharp edges really does help to create that finished look to the sculpt and avoids everything ending up looking too soft and mushy. Its one of the stages, which I find really satisfying, since a few strokes can really add an awful lot to the end result. I'm going to mix it by creasing these edges and just a slight soften when I'm done. These creases need to be sharp towards the back here. Soften out towards the middle. Running on these edges as well. I want to crease that in the middle to get some separation in there. Crease down there. Just reduce the brush size a bit, a little bit going into the tail as well. It just gives that extra little bit of detail. Making sure that shape's still flow nicely and smoothly. Again, let's just crease this section is a bit more. That's looking very good there. I just want to really define this edge here so that it feels nice and crisp. I was looking from all of the angles so that we could make sure that we've got a nice smooth form. Again, making subtle tweaks to the silhouette here. I want to remove all of the obvious lumps and bumps. I'm trying to get nice smooth flowing edges. I'm just rounding this out a little bit more on the front here so we've got some contrast between our sharper edges and our more rounded ones. Generally, a bit sharp towards the back. Then softer around at the front except for this chess panel, I don't like that big square shape that we've got there. I think I'm about ready to call it a day. I actually just want to just quickly adjust that tail. A bit too much there. An obvious bulge that I didn't want. There we are. I'm happy with that. Let's save our file there and then we can go ahead and model some fins in the next lesson. 21. Seahorse: Fins: To act as a base to model our fins, we're going to start out once again with a cube. I'm going to head over to the layout tab. Just go back to my flat shading there and will hit "Shift A" to add in a cube. I'm just going to scale that down to start with to roughly the right size. Then I'm just going to hit "Control A" to apply the scale. We'll then jump over into our Modeling tab and I'm going to re-enable my references here. We can start moving things roughly into place. To start with though, I'd like to reposition this cube, so it's in roughly the right place. I'm just going to head back into my object mode here. I'm just going to hit "Tab" and "G" to move that roughly into place. I'm happy with that. Let's hit "Tab" again to get back into edit mode, I'm going to start moving these points into place. I'm just going to place them roughly at the extremities of this fin protruding into the body a little way. Now we need to add some subdivisions. Initially, I'm going to hit "Control R" to add a loop cut here in the middle. Just right-click to cancel the move and drag those points out. Do the same down the center here like that and I think we need another couple of cuts here. Let's move all of these vertices out slightly just to round out the shape. Do the same down here and I'll add in one more cut here just to keep things reasonably uniform. I'm now going to just select all of the vertices by hitting "A" and then we'll jump into our front view. Wonky on the Numpad and that just scale all of this down on the x-axis. We've got a nice narrow fin here. Once we've done that, I'm just going to jump back into the layout tab for a minute. We've got quite a low-resolution mesh at the moment. What I want to do is just add a subdivision modifier to it. I can just hit "Control 2" to add in a modifier with two levels of subdivision here and I'm just going to jump back into my Modeling tab to the side view and let's just check our shape here. Because once we add the subdivision modifier, our mesh gets slightly smaller. I think we can just adjust some of these points a little bit to better match up with our reference. I'm going to lift these vertices slightly just to tighten up that corner there. Let me drop that down a little bit. That will probably do us. Jump me back into layout here to see how things look. We can right-click and shade smooth. I think that will do as nicely. Now I just need to rename our object here. I'm just going to call that a FinDorsal. Actually, you can reuse this fin for the pectoral fins that you see up at the back of the neck there. I'm going to jump into my side view here, still in object mode, and just hit "Shift D". Let's move this up, rotate it, and just scale it down, that's roughly matched up. That's fitting fairly closely there. Once again, because we've scaled this object, I'm just going to hit "Control A" so that we can apply our scale. Then I'm going to rename this FinPectoral. Now we just need to move this off to the one side. I'm just going to hit "G" and "X". Let me out to one side and I'm going to give it a little bit of rotation as well here. I'm just going to rotate it slightly out after the one side I think it's all right and then we're going to mirror it back over, across to the other side. Here in the properties panel we're just going to add a mirror modifier and for the mirror object will pick the head. There we go. The other thing that we need to do for these fins is just to add a material. I'm going to select that. Dorsal fin again, right down to the bottom here, create new material call it fins and then I'm going to select pectoral fin up here and I'm going to make use of the same material. I'm just going to select it from this list here. We can now turn off our reference once again. I'm just going to select our eyes, right-click and shade smooth there as well. With the modeling all complete, we'll now move ahead and do some shading in the next lesson. 22. Shading: Start working on our shaders. We're now going to jump across into the shading workspace. Say, here by default, we have our material previews on. I'm going to start out by selecting the head hair of my seahorse and at the moment, we don't have any material applied to the seahorse so I'm going to add a new one here, seahorse and we'll set a base color. I want this to be somewhere down here. A little bit orange. That was very good and then I'm going to make use of the same material for the body so let's just pick seahorse. I think I'm just going to increase the roughness over so slightly. Drop the spec here a little bit as well. Now for the fins, if I select those, we actually want these to be somewhat transparent. For now, I'm going to leave the base color as is, but what I want to do is adjust this Alpha value so that we can actually see through the fins and so just move it into the back here. Now if we drop this Alpha value right down, you'll see at the moment it's having no effect at all and that's because we also need to change these modes down at the bottom here. We're going to change this blend mode here to Alpha blend and I'm actually just going to disable the shadow casting at the moment and I'm going to turn off this show-back face option so you can see that gives us a far cleaner, transparent look there. I think I'm going to drop this down quite a bit so that I only just about visible. Let's see how that looks once we've got it in the seam with the rest of the objects. For now, I'm happy with the base colors of the seahorse. To make life a little bit easier, I'm just going to tidy up our outliner here. I'm just going to select all of the elements here, for my seahorse and then I'm going to hit "M" and create a new collection. Once again, just makes it easy to show and hide different elements within our scene. We can now enable one of our corals so there's tubular coral. I think it's a good place to start. If I select that what we're actually going to do is add a gradient effect across this to give it a bit more interest. In order to do that, we need to add some nodes down at the bottom here. First node that I'm going to add by hitting "Shift", "A" here is a texture coordinate node. If we just start typing coordinate, we can then drop that in. We want to take the output from this and drop it into what's called a mapping node. Again, let's just add that one in, type in mapping and drop that into place and we're going to take the generated coordinates and drop that into the vector. The next node we'll need is a gradient node so take this gradient texture, I'm going to take this vector and drop it in there, and then finally, we need to add in a color ramp. I'm just going to move these off to one side bring in our color ramp. I'm just going to take this value that we have here and just copy it, so Control C, I'm going to paste it in the top here. Now, I can take my color output and drop it into the base color. You can see straight away that this isn't doing quite what we need it to. We have a color ramp that's going from one side to the other, we want to be able to rotate this around and that's why we've added in these controls here. This mapping node allows us to take positions on the object and remap them so that we get control over this forming effect. Now, if we go into the rotation value here, you'll see as I rotate this around, that's changing whether its effect lies. What I want to do is just rotate that 90 degrees on the y-axis, and you can see now that our color ramp is moving up. I'm going to change this transition on the color ramp from linear to be spline and that gives us a smoother fall-off, but we actually want to bring this right the way up so that we've got color at the bottom and it's fading out as we get up towards the top here. We can bring that down slightly and then I'm just going to adjust this a little bit, darken it slightly. Then for our lighter color. I don't want this to be fully white so let's drop that down a little bit. Give it a bit more color. Around there will probably do so we just have a slightly lighter top. Now that we've created this node set up allowed us to remap our color ramp effect. I want to reuse that on the other coral so I'm just going to select all of these noted here and just hit "Control", "C" and swap over to our staghorn coral and just select that and then we can just paste those nodes back in here. For now, I'm going to copy this base color and just drop it in here, but I'm going to drop it over the lighter color and for the darker color. Let's drop it in there, but I'm going to take this and darken it down quite a bit. We need to connect that up. Now we can adjust our color ramp. I want to have a really dark base that's fading out towards lighter tips here so I'm just going to select this darker color. I think I'm going to make that quite a bit darker, maybe a bit less saturated and then desaturate that one a little bit as well. Very happy with that. Now I think what we need to do is start working on the lighting in the next lesson. Don't forget to save your scene. 23. Lighting: When we use the material preview mode, our objects are lit using some built-in lighting within Blender. If we switch over to the render view, you can see that our lighting looks very different. We can fix that by making use of similar lighting to that which is found within the material preview. To do that, I'm going to jump over into my layout tab here. For now, I'm just going to split this viewport. I'm going to go into my camera here, which we can do by clicking on the icon or by hitting zero on the Numpad. We can hit the ''End'' key and go to my view settings. Select camera to view so that we can move around and frame up our object properly. N to get rid of that and T to lose the toolbar at the side. In fact, if we go up to the top here and use the middle mouse to scroll across, we can disable all of these overlays as well. You can hit "See here", if we enable our material preview, things look different to what we get in our render. The first thing I'd like to do is head across to the world tab this over here. The moment we just have this flat color in here. I'm going to click on this little colored dot next to it and then we can drop in an environment texture. We now need to open a file. I'm going to navigate to the location of my Blender install directory within here, we can find data files. In there, we find studio lights. If we go into the world section, these are all the default lighting setups the Blender ships with. I'm going to pick the sunset file here and open image. You can see we get much nicer lighting now on our curl but unfortunately, we have this background image which we don't want. Now to fix that, we need to head back over into the shading tab. I'm going to change to my render views so we get the same result up at the top here. I'm going to change to world. Here we can see the image that we just dropped in. We want to use that for lighting the object but we don't want to use it for the background. In order to fix that, I'm just going to drag this out to one side and hit Shift A and search for a mix node. You just type in "Mix" and enter. I'm going to drop that on top of this line here so it will be connected up. Now the other node we need to find. Again, we hit Shift A and search and we're looking for the light path node. I'm going to drop that in and make use of this is camera ray and drop that into the factor of our mix node. What that means is that we'll make use of the lighting from this image to light all of the objects in our scene but anything that's displayed directly to the camera will make use of this color here. I can change it up into the blue somewhere. I'm going to drop that right down so it's quite dark. Now we have a dark background but we have the nice lighting on our objects. Now if we head back into the layout tab here. Now what I'd like to do is create an underwater effect here by adding some lights and volume objects in order to get the sense of being underwater. Now I went through how to set this up within my character modeling class. We're not going to recreate everything directly here. Instead, we're going to load in the setup from one of the files from the class resources. We can do that by heading up to file and append. If you navigate to wherever you saved your class resources files. We're going to load this underwater lighting dot blend. Once we hit "Append", you get a breakdown of everything that's within that file. We want to look at the collections. We want to select that environment collection and hit "Append". Once we do that, you can see we brought in this volume object and these lights. You can see straight away, we've got something more interesting happening here in the viewport. Now in order to get this working exactly as we want it, we need to change some of the render settings. I'm going to go over to the render tab here. I'm going to, first of all, enable ambient occlusion. Turn on bloom, which makes a big difference to the lighting there, or enable screen space reflections under the volume metrics tab here. We need to turn on our volumetric shadows. It sounds great. For more interesting depth in the lighting now. Under the shadows, I'm just going to increase this cube size up to 1024 pixels. Now with all of that loaded in, we're ready to start creating our scene. Let's save our file there and will allow all of the different scene elements within the next lesson. 24. Layout: Rocks: Before we can really start laying out our scene elements, I'd like to really define where our camera's going to be. We have this volume objects setup, but obviously we don't want to see any of these helper objects that we've got in here. I'm going to take this camera and to start with what I'm going to do is just hit "Alt" and "G" to reset its position. Then I'm going to move it back along the x-axis here. I'm just going to hit the N key to open up this side panel here, and I'm just going to set my rotation to 90 so that we're just pointing straight away down to start with. If I select this coral, you'll see at the moment our units are in meters, and because we're dealing with a seahorse, which is really quite small, I want to change our overall scene units. If we go into our scene properties, we have a unit section here, and by default, or length is in meters. I'm going to change this to centimeters. I'm going to adjust our unit scale as well down to 0.1. That means now our objects are 10 times smaller than they were originally. Say for example if I re-enable my seahorse, so hide the coral for now. We select it. You can see our height is now 30 centimeters, and that's still pretty large for a seahorse. What I'm actually going to do is scale this whole seahorse down. Because we've got separate body parts, what I'm going to do is hit "Shift", "A" and add in an empty object, just picking this plane axes. I'm going to rename that to seahorse control. Now I'm just going to drag and drop that into the seahorse collection here. Then I'm going to select all of the different elements for my seahorse. Then finally I'm going to select that seahorse control as well, so I'm control clicking on this seahorse control. That's the final object selected, and then I'm going to hit "Control" and "P", and select object, keep transform. That will parent all of those objects underneath this seahorse control object. With that done, I can now select just my seahorse control, and I can scale this down. I'm going to select all of those scale controls there. Just by dragging, selecting across them, and I scale this down to 0.3. Now our seahorse is much smaller. Now, setting my camera here, I think I'm going to pull this back quite a bit further. G and X once again, I'm going to pull it back to seeing most of that volume without showing this whole project up at the top here. Now I also want to rotate this slightly so that the seahorse is sitting slightly more over towards the right of frame. I'm just going to use my Z rotation here. Rotate it till it's sitting somewhere around there with the seahorse, roughly over to the right-hand third of the image here. The other thing I think I'll do with this seahorse is just select that control object and then rotate that also around the z-axis. It's facing more towards camera, more three-quarter angle to camera there. I'm quite happy with that. To help us see exactly what's going on here in the camera view though, what I'm going to do is select my camera object. Go down to the camera properties tab and Viewport Display. Then this passport too option, I'm going to dial it right up to one. Just type that in. Now that's blacked out, everything that's outside the view of our camera. Because I'm happy with my camera position as well. I'm just going to hit the N key here and disable this camera to view option. That way, we can't accidentally move our camera in this Viewport. Again to hide that. Now you can use the scroll wheel to scroll in and out to get a closer view of what's going on, but without affecting our overall camera position. Next thing I'm going to do is just turn on rock back on. We're going to use this rock as the basis of our environment. I think initially we're going to just rotate this around. Move it back a little bit. Turn it again to my top view here, and I want to drag this off too towards the corner over here. Rotate it a little bit more. I think we can scale that up a little bit. I'm just going to turn off the render view for now just while we're roughly positioning some objects. I'm going to create a bit of a stack of rocks here, so I'm just going to duplicate this up a few times and move things and rotate them around a little bit. Scaling them. I'm just trying to create something that looks fairly natural is if these boulders have been piled up over time. Now since this process can take quite a while, I think I'm going to time-lapse this section. As I just move rocks around to try and get something that feels like it's a natural rock shelf. Nothing I'm doing here is especially complicated. I'm simply duplicating the rock over and over. But by varying its position, rotation, and scale, I can create an environment that feels natural. Obviously, you could also take the time to sculpt additional rocks that would help to create even more variation. In this case, however, I feel that we can create a sufficiently varied result with the one rock, so we'll do the job nicely. Also, as we start to add color into our scene, it will give us even more variation to break up any obvious repetition. Just take your time to pile up the rocks in any way which feels good to you. I'm trying to create the effect of a tower of rock on the edge of the shelf, which might lead to deeper water to the right of the image. That way, I can keep the seahorse framed in the shaft of light on the right-hand side without any visual clutter behind it. But also create a balanced composition with an interesting focal point over on the left. By building a large tower and keeping the seahorse quite small in frame, it also emphasizes just how small and delicate the seahorse is within its environment. Once I've roughly positioned my boulders, I'm just going to re-enable my lighting and see how that's looking. I really liked the way that it's picking out the corner of these rocks here. But I think I can perhaps adjust the angle of some of these boulders down at the bottom to better catch some of the light as well. I'm now a little bit happier about the way the light spilling out onto the rock down at the bottom here. Things feel it a little bit nicer. I think we'll save that there, and then we can start adding some of our coral in the next lesson. 25. Layout: Coral: Now, I really liked the way the light is catching on the edge of these rocks here. I think that'd be great place to put some of our coral, so we can turn this tubular coral back home, which is obviously enormous at the moment. I'm just going to scale that down. Let's move it, back into place. Now, a single piece on its own it's going to look a little bit lonely. I'm just going to rotate that a little bit. Let's get down a little bit more as well. I'm going to add some more in here as well to make it look a bit more interesting. I just hit "Shift+D" to duplicate and what I want to do is rotate it so it doesn't look too uniform. Maybe scale this one down a little bit further as well. Catching the light quite nicely. Let's have one more. Again, rotating it to a different angle. Maybe scale this one up a little bit in the back here. Just keep tweaking things until you're happy with how everything looks. I think we can add a little bit more of this coral elsewhere on some of the rocks. Again, we're going to duplicate that. Bring it maybe over to this side. We're going to rotate things slightly. Let's put some up above here on these rocks as well. Again, let's rotate that a bit so it's not looking the same everywhere and adjust the scale as well. Just going to duplicate that again. So we might go a little bit more up here. Always rotating and scaling and I'm always checking how things look up here in the rendered view as well. Maybe just one more piece down at the bottom. Let's bring this right down here somewhere. That's good. Then I want to introduce some of the other variety of coral that we've got, the staghorn. Again, let's select that. I think I'm going to try and introduce piece down in the bottom left here. Let's move that down into the side. Looks very big so let's scale it down. Perhaps rotation a little find we find an angle that looks good. Just tucking that back into the rocks a little bit there. I think that will do for now with that one. Then I'm going to duplicate it up again. Let's move it back into this gap over here. Scale it down quite a bit. Let's maybe move it under these rocks somewhere. That will do. I'm going to add some more light at the back here. Maybe some larger ones just off in the distance. We're going to have to make sure we rotate them so it doesn't look repeated at all. [NOISE] Let's put another one back here too. A little bit close to camera. Let's just move that down a little bit and rotate it. I think I'm happy with all of that. Now, we'll go ahead and make some final tweaks in the next lesson ahead of creating our final render. 26. Render: Once again, I'd just like to do a little bit of tidy up now that we've got all of these extra pieces of coral in here and I'll rocks in here. I just want to make it a little bit easier to move around and find the elements that we need. To start with, I'm going to select all of my coral objects here and create a new collection for the coral. Let's do the same with our rocks. I'm going to collapse those down, and this environment collection, I'm just going to move back out under the scene collection. Now we have a default light in here that we don't really need. We can just hit X on that to delete it and then things are lot tidier. Now, something that will really enhance the look of our final image is to add some depth of field. This simulates the effect of a real camera where not everything is all in focus at the same time. By selecting our camera object and going down to our camera properties here, we can enable depth of field. If I roll this out, what we can then do is set a focus distance or in this case, what we're actually going to do is focus on a specific object, which is the head of our seahorse. We want to ensure that our seahorse is always in focus. We can just use this little eyedropper tool here and click on our seahorse head. Now see at the moment, there's not much that's out of focus there and that's because we need to adjust this F-Stop value because we're dealing with quite small objects and a quite small scene, we're going to have to take this down very low. I think I'm going to try something like F1 to start with. Still everything is very unfocused, so we might have to drop down quite a bit further so let's try 0.5, maybe even go as far as 0.2. That's looking pretty good. I'm really getting a lot of fall off in the background there now. I think this boulder at the back here is catching just a bit too much light now. I'm just going to rotate that and see if we can reduce the amount of light that it's catching. I'm just going to move it a little bit further back. You can see now the lighting is not so pronounced on it. Another thing I noticed now is that this staghorn coral is standing out a little bit too much and taking a bit too much focus. I want to just adjust the shader on that a little bit so it's a bit more muted. Let's jump over into our shading view. I'm going to change this to object and then we can adjust our colors. I'm just going to desaturate things a little bit, darken that down even more. Do the same here. Again, let's desaturate it a touch and darken it down. That's working on layout view and I think I'm happy with that. One final thing I'd like to do is look at the eyes of the character. I'm just going to frame them up using Numpad zero. If we turn on our material preview, then we can look at the direction the eyes are pointing. I'm just going to zoom in here. I just want to rotate this slightly so that it doesn't look like it's looking at its default direction. I'm just going to rotate it slightly out and down till I get something that I feels a bit more natural. I think that will probably do. I think I'm happy with that and I'm ready to do a Render. I'm just going to save my scene and then we can hit "F12" to Render. There we are. If you're happy with your final result, what you need to do is head up to the Image menu, click "Save As", and give it a name. Then we'll just click "Save As". Once you're happy with your render, join me in the next lesson where I'll recap some of the things that we've learned and share some final thoughts. 27. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed following along as I share my process. I just want to briefly recap a few key points which will hopefully be helpful as you move forward to create new projects of your own. First of all, don't be afraid to start with a relatively low resolution mesh. This can actually make it easier to quickly define your forms and you can always add more detail later. The mesh that you start out with could be a simple primitive object. But equally, you can use basic modeling tools to define a base mesh to work from. When it comes time to increase the detail in your mesh, think about whether you need a localized detail or a general increase in resolution. Dyntopo is great for adding localized detail and is especially useful in the early stages of sculpting. Remeshing will often be your best option for increasingly the detail globally and is useful once the main volumes have been defined and you're moving towards a final polished sculpt. Finally, don't forget to always view what you're sculpting from multiple angles to ensure that you're building up the volumes correctly. If you've been following along with the class, either using my character design or one of your own, I'd love to see your work. If you're happy to share, then please do upload it to the class project gallery. I really look forward to seeing all of the class projects. I can't wait to see what you create. If you've enjoyed the class, then do also consider leaving a review. Not only does it help other students to know what to expect, but each review also helps me to know if the classes I'm making are having a positive impact. Finally, you may want to check out my profile page, where you'll be able to find my other classes and learn a bit more about me. If you'd like to, you can also follow me to be notified of every new class that I publish. I really hope that this class has given you the skills and knowledge that you need to start bringing your own projects to life. Thanks again for taking this class. I really hope to see you again soon.