Tout sur les courbes - Designs éblouissants dans Blender 3D

1. Welcome: Hi there. My name is Gesa Pickbrenner. I'm a 3D jewelry artist, educator, and by now a curve modeling enthusiast in Blender. Curves can seem intimidating at first. Is there a thing as curve anxiety? With the tips I share, you'll find they're actually really straightforward. So welcome to my class. We'll start with the fundamentals of curves, what they are, what makes them unique, and how to control those snaky dudes. You can use these techniques in jewelry and architectural design, but also for any project where you want lovely ornamental shapes, swirling wires, tentacles, hair, the list goes on. By the end of the class, you'll be able to confidently use curves for any basic modeling task in blender. You'll also have skills to create delightful ornamental designs that look pretty complex but are actually not that hard to make. Whether you're a beginner in Blender or you've already whipped up a few models, this class has something for you. All you need is Blender, a mouse with a scroll wheel, and ideally a numpad on your keyboard. By the end, you'll be confidently using curves to model beautiful designs and you'll have created a stunning ornamental ring to show for it. Share your project in the gallery and don't forget to leave a review. I'd love to know how it went for you. So let's jump right in and model something amazing together. 2. Give Away!: Giveaway Time! Peoples from all over the world. We are doing a giveaway again. Here's your chance to win a whole year of Skillshare for free. All you have to do is post your project in the class gallery and leave a review sharing your experience. It's really that simple. Incredible. Whether it's a finished ring design, a work in progress or even just some of your curve practice, I love to see what you did with my class and also hear what you thought of it. So jump into it headlong, share your work, leave a review, and you might be the lucky one to get a full year of Skillshare on me. Good luck. And I can't wait to see your beautiful designs. 3. Project Overview: Hello again. In this project, we are really getting into the magic of curves in blender. I'll guide you from the basics to building intricate ornamental shapes, and by the end, you'll feel right at home using curves in your own projects. We'll first explore how to tweak and shape curves to get smooth flowing lines. And afterwards, once we are a little bit more comfortable, we'll be creating our own ornamental ring, complete with diamond like stones and all the sparkle. For this class, you'll need blender, which is free and easy to download, a mouse with a scroll wheel, and if possible, a keyboard with a numpad. If you don't have a scroll wheel or numpad, check out my beginner's class for some workarounds. You'll walk away with a stunning ornamental ring, a full rendering, and the skills to turn your designs into 3D printable pieces. Once you're done, be sure to share your project in the gallery for feedback, and don't forget to leave a review to let me know what you think. Alright, let's beat curve anxiety in Blender once and for all and get you started on creative intricate designs in Blender right now. 4. Settings: A. Before we dive into all the fun stuff, let's tweak some blender settings for your convenience. Let's just quickly go into our preferences under Edit and preferences. Let's switch a few things around in here. First, if you like, you can bring up the resolution scale of the interface of blender. This might be easier for you to see if you have a big screen. I've set it to 1.5 so that you are all able to see something in the recording. So let's go to navigation and we can hear change to orbit around selection. This makes manipulating stuff a lot easier. Also, switch off outoperspective, because with jewelry, I have found it a little bit annoying if our view always changes back to perspective mode. I find orthographic mode a lot nicer for these small scale jewelry projects. So under key Map, set space bar action to search. Usually, you can press space to turn on the playback of the timeline. But in our case, since we don't do any animation today, searching will be much more useful. Also, down here, select tab for pie menu. Even though with curves, we don't need to switch between any other mode except object and edit mode. I find having the pie menu with Tap to be very comfortable in general when working with blender. So we might as well activate it now. The system, you can bring up the undo steps a little but if you want to go back for quite a few steps, 60 usually is enough. Also, if you want to render something today, you might want to check out the render device, which you can use for cycles, and you might choose your GPU if you have one to find the correct setting, you can just do a quick Google search for your GPU and then find out which of these work best. Also under safe and load, you can check if your safe versions are set to one, and this just means that for each safe file you create, Blender will keep the file before that one as a blend one file. There you will find an earlier state of your project, of course. Last but not least, let's go to add ons first. If you have it, enable it. And if not, make sure to download the JewelCraft add on. You will find all the links in the resources of this class. Once you have downloaded the add on file, you can just put it in some folder. I like to keep a designated add on folder, and you can click Install. And here on a blender add ons, you will find a zip file and just click Install add on. And then you can activate it, and then the Jewell Craft add on should be automatically installed. Preferences save automatically, by the way, this is this little setting here. And then if you go into the end menu, you should find the Jewel Craft add on here. If the units of your file are not yet correctly set, then up here, it would say set units automatically. And then you could click that and it would choose these settings for jewelry. For me, this would be metric millimeters and a unit scale of 0.001 for millimeters because 0.001 of a meter is 1 millimeter. Well, and that is everything you would need to do to be prepared for this class. 5. Curve Introduction: In the next lessons, we're going to overcome our potential curve anxiety with the basics. If curves have felt mysterious or tricky before, don't worry. By the end, you'll have a solid handle on what they are and how to shape them into basically anything that is wire shaped, I guess. So grab your mouse and let's get bending. Curves are ideal to make any kind of elongated smooth shape and blender, including hair, pipes, limbs, tentacles and nice jewelry wire and ornaments. Add curves like any other object with Shift A. I have a lot of objects here, which are part of the extra objects add on, which you can also enable, but they are not necessary for this class. So at curves like any other object with Shift A. There you have lots of options. However, the curves I like to use the most are busier curve and circle, as well as path. Let's first create a busier curve. All curves are different to measures as they initially don't have any geometry. They are like empty paths floating in the three D air. Since they don't have any geometry, they are not visible in the rendering at this stage. In all curves, we can switch from object to added mode with tab, and then you can move the control points around with G. The curve will follow. To add some geometry to this curve, you can go into the curve menu under geometry and give it some bevel depth. The standard profile is round, and we will explore the others later. Now, this geometry will be visible in the renderings. Let's switch to flat shading by right clicking on the curve and shade flat so that we can see the individual segments better. I also switch to mud cup in the three D shading settings and turn on cavity, which will make things even more accentuated and clear. This new geometry won't have super high resolution, and we can change that in two different ways. You can increase the resolution of the profile of the curve, which in this case, is just round, so a circle by going here and increase the resolution. You can just click and drag, and this will increase the overall roundness of the curve. You may notice that the resolution along the length is also a bit low, so we can see these individual joints here, and we can increase that under active spine. And if you increase the resolution here, the curvature will become much more smooth. And there we can also switch between flat and smooth shading directly. So in added mode, we can work a bit more with this curve. We can, for example, use E to extrude segments. You can also select a portion, duplicate it with Shift D, and then move it somewhere else. If you want to connect these two, select the endpoints and press F. Also, you can select two or more control points and subdivide them by right clicking and choosing subdivide. If you want to get rid of those extra subdivision points again, which you can also use to change the shape even more, then you can just press X and say dissolve vertices. The curve will stay connected, even if you choose delete vertices. If you delete a segment, the curve will get discontinued and you can connect it again with F. You can also scale the individual control points with S and rotate them with R. So since this is a busy curve, they have some handles on the individual vertices or control points. And you can select these handles and move them about. And this will make the curvature more dramatic or less so. Usually, they both move in alignment to each other like one straight stick. When hitting V, all right clicking, you can choose different versions of handles. Automatic will actually convert the handles into a tangent of the curve, which will always keep a constant curvature no matter how you move the control point. Vector will make the handles point towards the next control point even when moving this one, but it will not keep a curvature. It will just become a very pointy corner. Aligned is the standard. The handles are aligned to each other and do not change position when moving the control point. Using aligned, you are able to influence the shape and direction much more than with the first two options. Then there is free. If you want sharp or smooth corners and the most bit of control, you should use free, since this allows you to move the handles independently of each other, and they won't change their placement when you move the curve. Toggle free align lets you switch quickly between free and aligned. Another important feature of curves is to be found in the end menu. If you select a control point, you can scale the thickness of the control point under radius. You can also do this with the shortcut d S or options for Mcuses. Then another cool feature is the tilt value of the curve. The tilt value lets you turn the surface. For this, I will go back to shade flat so that you can see that better. And this is, of course, especially interesting if we would like to change the shape of the curve. For example, when going to geometry and set this to chute, and if you tilt it, it will just give it a very interesting shape. And you can do that with individual control points or all of them at once. You can also offset the curve from its placement if you need that at some point. I usually keep that at zero so that the control points are directly below the curve. Now, of course, the ornaments shouldn't be all around. You already know that you can use the extrude function to give this stretched look, but you can also go to the bevel option, and there we have some more potential profile shapes that we can give our curve. The standard setting is the round setting, and you can change the depth and the resolution. Can also select full caps to close the end caps. You can also switch to profile. This way, you can influence the shape a bit more. I will just increase the resolution like I did before under active spine like that. Think of this straight line as one quarter of the cross section of the curve here. So that is this line here. You can only see this part here. If you know just that, you can see that you can influence the whole shape in this way. And that, of course, gives us interesting options to play with the shape of the curve. You can add some more points. Also, you can change the control points here just as you can with a curve. So you can choose a line or free or just this pointy vector. And, of course, you can always tilt and twist and turn or give this another radius. The third option for bevel shapes is object. If you select this, first, everything vanishes because we don't yet have an object plugged in here, but this is where it can really be the most creative. So we can use another object as the profile for the curve. So let's do that. In object mode, create a new circle. I get a bit smaller, bring it over here. And now we will call this bevel object. And then we can plug this into bevel for curve. And already here, this is a little bit too huge, so we can scale down the circle. Then if we change the circle in edit mode like that, for example, we can influence the whole shape of our curve. And, of course, we can play around with this a lot. We can make the handles free so that we can, for example, give this little drop shape. This can be quite useful for hair because you can even duplicate some areas and put them on top of each other, remember with Shift D. And then this could look like strands of hair if you make that small enough. Like that. So you don't only have to have one curve. You can create multiple curves as part as this one, and then they can float next to each other, and it will look like that. And here, of course, you can always change the tilt and the radius and just play around with all these options. Okay? So that would be another way of playing with this profile of the curve. And you can already see that this differs quite a bit from the standard round boring thing that you get in the beginning. Besides the Bezier curve, there are some other curve options. So you could go to Shift A and choose curve, and we could, for example, choose a nerves curve. Let's move that a little bit out of the way. So nerves curve it's a little bit different to BZ curve, since you can see, when you move these control points, there is this little curve. Let's give this a little bevel so that we can see it better. So if you move these control points, the curve approximates the placement, and you can press E, and then the curve will follow, and you can make it follow these control points. So you don't control the curve as directly as with the handles, but the advantages here that it is pretty much guaranteed that you always get a nice curvy shape, whereas with a Bzier you can sometimes if you talk a little free, of course, you can mess up your nice curve. Okay, so this is the nerve's curve, and you may notice that the end of the curve does not align with this last endpoint. So then we have the path. And let's move that here, go to Edit mode, and also give it some depth. The path is very similar to the nerves curve. You can see that it also follows the control points. I approximates the position between them, but the endpoints align with the curve. So you directly influence where the endpoint is placed. However, you can go to the nerves curve and go to active spine, and then you can go to endpoint, and this will basically make the nerves curve into a path because now the endpoints are aligned with the control points. So the path and the nerves curve are very similar in functionality, and really it is up to you which one you prefer and which one you want to use. So these are the three basic curve types. So you have the nerves curve, the path, which basically also interchange with each other if you turn on endpoints, and you have the Bzercurve which behaves a little bit differently, and you have a little bit more control over the overall shape through these handles. And of course, you can also give these different profiles which works just the same as with the Bzier curve. So you can also use the same Bbo object. And it will have the same effect, which is pretty neat, so you can influence the shape of multiple curves with one bevel object without having to create a new one each time. Just make sure that your bubble object is a nice curve that you can just park somewhere around here. One final thing about curves, you can change the start and end point mapping of them here. This is a neat little function often used in animation to grow all kinds of wires, tentacles and such stuff. You can catch a glimpse of it in action in my intro slide. And that's it as an introduction to curves. That's basically all you need to know, to be able to successfully follow along with this whole class. 6. Curves (Bonus): Taper Object: As a little bonus for the curve introduction, let's talk about the taper object. We already have the profile object or bevel object. Now we can also add a taper object. For this, I will switch back to round because it will make it more clear. If we add a Bezier curve, and let's put that into this curve. So now you can see this here becomes more or less like a graph. And if you look at it as if there was a coordinate cross next to it like that, you can see, this is the start of the curve, and this is the end of the curve, and in the center, it becomes bigger. So you can directly influence the radius of the curve in different locations. Can you see how now it kind of has a dent in the center, and we can move that around. So this is kind of like as if you had a graph and you're drawing the radius of the curve along the path of the curve. So that would be another way you can influence the thickness of your ornaments without having to use the weight function. What you can do is you can choose multiply or add, and then it will interact with the weight that you already gave these individual control points. So that's an interesting way of playing around with all these values. So I encourage you to try that out so that you get a good feel for how to use a taper object on a curve. I find this a neat little feature, although I won't use this in this particular project because for me, the mean radius, the scaling with old S is more than sufficient to build nice geometry. But it's good to know that you have the option to influence the radius of your curve like that as well. Also, the taper object is interesting to combine with the offset and extrude function because now the geometry behaves a little bit different. 7. Ring Band(s): Alright. Now that we are a little bit more familiar with these snaky dudes, as I like to call them, it's time to get hands on and start crafting our ring band. In this lesson, we'll take our newfound curve knowledge and apply it to build a solid base for our design. It's the foundation for all the Bling that's coming up. So if you start a new file, usually you have a cube and the camera and the light, and for now, we can just delete these or at least the cube by selecting it and hitting X. And I have created a new collection where I put my camera and my light, just a surrendering base, we can turn that collection off, and I will add all my models in a new collection called model. And if you want to create new collection, you can just right click in here and create new collection. This is basically like a folder in your finder or explorer or like a layer in Photoshop. It is there to keep everything organized and enable you to hide and unhide multiple objects at once. Okay, so I will create my curves in my model collection. And if you download the basic file, you will have the three collection setup that I do here as well. This has served me very well with multiple projects. Okay, for now, let's press seven on your numpad to go into top view. Or, no, go to one on your numpad to go into front view, hide all the render setup. And let's press Shift A and give this file a new circle, the one here at the top. And then align it with a view. That's why I wanted to go into front view with one on your numpad, to just have it aligned to view not having it skewed somewhere. And then we can scale this up a little bit, depending on how big we want to have it. And then you have another option. Let me just hide this here for a second. If you included the Jewel kraft add on, you can just go to the Jew Kraft addon in the end menu and go to Curve and you can choose size curve. Here, you will have a lot of options to choose your preferred ring size. In Germany, usually, we use the circumference as a reference, so I use 52, which would be six in USA and L and a half in Britain. So let's create 52 se circle. I was a little bit too big here. But that's the ring size circle. I would just call it ring band. Because I promise you that this would be a class about curves, and we will do as much of the modeling purely with curves. So I will delete the other circle I create and just continue with this ring band. Let's hide the end menu. Let's go into the curve functions. Let's go to geometry, give it some round beveling, and also give this some extrusion. Now, we could use this right away as a basis for a flat ring band, but I would like to build bends to the left and right of my ornaments so that the ornaments float in the middle between them. For this, of course, we can use the tilt value of the curve in the end menu. So go into Addit mode with Tub, go to item and make sure that all the control points are selected. You can just do this with A and then set the mean til 290. This will give us this flat space disk here. Of course, we can make the extrusion a little bit less dramatic and just give it some shape that you initially like, and you can always change that later, of course. So now, since we want two of those circles, we want to have a mirrored version on the other side. So first, I would move it in object mode with G and Y a little bit along Y. And then I would give it a mirror modifier. So initially, nothing happens because this thing mirrors across itself, which is the origin. Okay? So that's why we don't see anything happen when we turn on the mirror in any excess. So it would be helpful if we want to mirror it across the center to create a helper object. And I pretty much always just do that with Shift A and creating an empty. And an empty is a helper object that does not show in any render. It is just there to assist you with any modeling or animation or stuff like that to make things follow along it, or to just use it as a mirror object for our mirror modifier. So let's just call that thing mirror. Let's now plug it in here. And maybe still there's nothing happening, and this is why it is still mirroring across X. And since it is metrical across X, you won't see anything. But if you now turn on Y, you will see that it appears on the other side. You can turn off X, so that we just mirror it across Y. And if we now move it across Y, you can make your ring broader or narrower. You could in theory also use the offset settings in the curve properties here, and this would move the ring bend as well. But if you go to Edit mode, you will see that this moves the curve away from the original handles, and this can get sometimes a little bit confusing. By the way, if you want to stop trying out some values, you can just right click out of there and it will snap back to its original value. So I would just suggest to move this object mode. And it will just mirror across the mirror object in the center. Awesome. So that's our basic ring band. Let's save this. Save us and super nice. Congratulations. 8. Ornaments: Now, we're adding some flare. In this section, we'll finally create the ornament to sit on top of our ring. The cool thing is that with curves, we stay very flexible pun intended. Right until the end, you can develop your design organically, improvising and adjusting throughout the whole process. So let's get ready to add some beautiful twirly shapes. Let's hide the ring circle for now to focus on the ornament. Let's go to seven on the numpad to look at everything in top view, and let's press Shift A and give ourselves on your curve. I think for now, I will go with a path. Of course, you're welcome to use any other version that you like. Let's bevel it like before. Let's fill the caps, that shaded flat so that we can see a little bit better. Give it enough resolution so that it looks nice and curvy, and then you can turn it back to smooth. So let us build our first nice ornament for our rgment. And for that, let's start with a simple spiral shape. So just to recap, use G to move the points, use E to extrude them, R to rotate them. Well, if there were handles, you could rotate them, d S to scale individual pieces down. You can also do that in the menu under item. And of course, Control T to tilt, which will be useful if we have a different profile. For example, we could use such profile for our first curve. So I would just use a basic spire shape where the curve kind of intersects with itself where it becomes a little bit thicker towards the end and then kind of tapers off and becomes smaller again. And of course, you can always still change during the course of this class and you don't have to worry about making it perfect right away. I also think about maybe putting a stone into the hole here at some point. So keep that in mind if you want to work with stones or with other decorations, you can incorporate these as well. And we will talk about this in this class. And just to show you the difference, if I wanted to build this with a Bzier curve, we could just add a Bse curve, scatter it up in added mode. Increase the resolution a little bit to keep it smooth. Let's see what kind of profile we gave it like this little wave here. We can also til this, of course, until it looks nice, as we want it. So you see with the busy curve, this is absolutely also possible to build. You just have to be a little bit more careful with the alignment of the handles and to see that everything looks smooth because it's pretty easy to get some jagged places like here. So that just takes a little bit more trial and error. And busy curves are generally a little bit more tricky than the three D space, but that's why we first start in two D so that we don't have to worry about the three D space version of these curves. If you feel you have too little control, of course, you can always subdivide here so that you can adjust it in finer increments and just make the shape exactly as you want it. But as you can see, it is a little bit more tricky to get it to be completely smooth. So that would be my quick attempt at the same shape. So you can maybe see why I choose the path because it automatically just creates a very smooth curvature along the whole curve here. Exactly. So let's hide that or get rid of it if you build along, and let's bring that back into the center. Let's start with our nerves per, and you can call that ornament. And you can save once more. I create another safe file so that I can keep track of the lessons, but you can just save over the basic ring band. All right. Well done. 9. Curving Ornaments: Alright, time to take our ornament and give it the perfect curve to fit our ring. This is where we really bring the design together, bending our detailed piece to wrap beautifully around the ring bend. It's a very satisfying step, and it'll really make the ring come together. So let's dive in. Now we will be using a curve to curve or curve. Ha. Unhide the ringmen. So we could just use Shift D, make copy, delete the mural, and to bring it back into the absolute center, we can do Shift S and selection to cursor. Now this curve is back in the center and we can use it to wrap our ornament around it. If you go to the curve data, let's get rid of the extrusion and let's get rid of the depth profile so that it is just a naked curve again, let's call it ornament, ring curve. Now, let's go to the modifier tab on our ornament. We can hide the end menu for now. Let's now give our ornament a curve modifier. We can just go into the Modifier tab, click on Modifier and search for curve, and that should bring it right up. And then you can select the ornament ring curve with eyedropper or you can just click in here as well and select the ornament. And that should curve our ornament around the curve. If this looks kind of awkward and not the way you want it, you can also change the deformation axis. And in this case, we can try it out a little bit until we find a variant that we like. For me, it's minus X because this gives me the shape that I wanted curves around the ring band in the right way. We can just scale the ornament down in object mode a little bit and can look at it from here and we can move it. And if you now go into Edit mode, you will see that it flips back around and now lays back on the floor again. Toggle this little button here in the curve modifier, which says Edit mode, and then you will see both the deformed geometry as well as your original curve. Because it can be confusing to look at the curve in three D and work on it in two D, you can turn off a curve modifier visibility at any time to have a look at the original, then make your changes and then turn the modifier back on to see it on the ring. Another useful thing to do is to open up a second viewport. You can do this while holding plus here and then pulling out another viewport. And then get into a nice three quarter view here. Let's had the end menu and the T menu as well. Also, you can scroll down to the right here a little bit, and you can turn off the overlays. And in this way, you get a nice unobstructed view directly towards your curve. To alter the ornament shape, you can then switch back visually into the first viewport, press seven, and then just move this a little bit away maybe so that you have it a little bit easier, and this is not in the way. You can follow this here, and then you see the result of your work as well as the original curve on the left. What you can also do, you can hit slash on your numpad to isolate the curve if you want to and both viewports separately. This can maybe help you to find the perfect shape. If you move the curve along the z axis at some point accidentally and it lost its nice curved shape around the ring, then there's an easy way to fix. You can just select all. You can scale around the three D cursor. If you now use a Z and zero, it will become flat at the height of the three dcursor In this way, you will ensure that this just follows the flow of the curved ring band very nicely. Now, feel free to alter your first ornament in any way you want. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. It will still be possible to change the geometry later. 10. Arrays: Alright, here's a little blender trick that's going to make life a lot easier arrays. Maybe you know them, maybe you don't. You see how easy it is to create repeating patterns that add complexity and detail without extra work. Hey, so let's jump in and get this ornament looking lush. Now, if you want the next ornamental curves on the ring to have a different shape and only use this specific one once, you can just select it in edit mode and use Shift D to make a copy. Then move it along X with G and X. To put it next to the original on the ring band. And now you can just change the shape into any other shape that you want, or you can also first turn off proportional editing if the stuff moves together, which it shouldn't right now, and then you can just move this a little bit out of the way and you can alter it and scale it with old S and make it smaller. So these two correspond to each other, and maybe you want to alter this one a little bit, make this a little bit smaller here and give it another shape or if you want to only select one of those, you can press L and R and X and 180, and this will just rotate at 180 degrees. Of course, to make this into its own object because right now these are two curves inside one ornament object. You can just by having one of these completely selected, can do that by hovering over it and pressing L, and then you press P and separate it. And now you have two of these and they are completely separate. You can select them here or in your outliner, then we can go into Edit and then we see it stand alone because now we have turned it into its own curve object. In this way, you are very free to just alter the shapes in anyway you like and make them correspond to each other and maybe make the smaller and so on. But that would be the way if you wanted to adjust them all individually. I will just make a quick copy that I have this one. The other way you can do that, I will just delete those again or maybe just hide them. These kinds of designs of ornamental designs often look very interesting if they have some kind of repetition. This creates a certain rhythm along the whole ring. Okay? So this is why we will now create an array of these along the ring bend so that there's an identical copy repeating four times along the ring. First, select the curve. Collapse this curve modifier. And we are object mode, but it doesn't really matter where you add modifiers, you can just add them and you can add an array. And this will already create a copy right next to this one here. And now you might notice that the array modifier got added after the curve modifier. So that means that first the ring curve object here gets applied to this ornament and after that, the array gets created. But we can reverse the order by taking this array modifier and dragging and dropping it before the curve modifier. And you will instantly see that this changes a lot. You can also turn off the curve modifier for a moment to see the result without any other modifier. So right now it looks like that, and we could, for example, increase the count to four. Right now, we have the relative offset, which always calculates the offset relative to the first object. So 0.6 would mean they overlap somewhat, and 1.1, for example, they would have 10% distance of the original object between them. So let's overlap them a little bit so that it looks nice, like that. And now, of course, we can turn the curve modifier back on, and you'll see that it wraps very nicely around the ring band. And if you now click and drag the offset again, you can, of course, put them where you want them. You can hold shift to have more control about sliding this, and of course, you can also just click on these arrows to change the distance in increments. But I always like the sliding function, and as always, you can right click to bring it back to where you started. If you now go back to Added mode, you will see that there's still only one curve, your original ornament. If you now go back to top view with seven, look at the changes that you make here on the other side, and if you now change this, all four will change their shape. And of course, you can just bring them closer together and make more of them. And then you will have a nice and easy way to bring the ornaments all the way around the ring band with very little effort. Okay, so let's say you have that now and get into this view into front orographic with one on your NMPad and we can press all set to make it transparent. This also corresponds to this little button at the top menu. And then we can put it maybe around 90 degrees from each other so that we have one of these ornaments roughly at each quarter of our ring. Then turn transparency back off. Don't worry for now about making absolutely perfect. You can still make all the adjustments later on. 11. Arrays #2: And, of course, just as with the curve modifier or the mirror modifier, we can use a helper object to give our array more precision. Okay? So let's say you wanted to place them absolutely perfectly at 90 degrees from each other. And for this, we can switch from relative offset to object offset. Right now, we don't have any objects, so all the four pieces are just on top of each other. But if we now switch to front view, and let's make this a little smaller for now, and we add a helper object just as before we can use Shift A and empty and plain axis let's call that array, empty or something like that. And then select the ornament again. Okay. And then now put the array empty in here. And right now this creates a very strange effect, which can always happen if you use an empty for modifying an array. We need to make sure that the transformation scale of our curve is so that it does not affect the array in any way. For this, we can go to control A and we apply all the transforms. Notice the numbers here. Some of these will change if you do that. Okay, so now the scale, especially the scale is very important. It has changed to one. So that means it's now at 100% of its basic scale. It's not scaled. I anyway, if we scale it, it will change its shape again. You can already see this will affect the array modifier. As long as it's at one, it will just sit on top of each other here, those four pieces in the array that we have. And if you now select the empty again, which sits here in the center, and you notice it also has zero rotation for now. So now let's just quickly hide the ringment for a second so that we see it in this view as well. If you now rotate the empty along Y, you can see that we need the Y axis to rotate this like so. So imagine the empty is our axis, and we want to rotate it like on a wheel around the empty. So if we rotate this now around Y, you will see that this absolutely makes this thing go bonkers. So for this to work, we need to put the curve modifier above the array modifier because now we turn the array off and the curve off, first, it gets curved and then the array gets applied. If we do it the other way around, it will just mess up the whole modifier. This is a little bit more advanced, but if you want absolute 90 degrees angles from each other, you will have to do it that way. Okay, so turn the array back on, make sure the array empties in here. Then select it and now rotate it along. You can choose the exact number in here. So if you go to 90 degrees, this will make sure that all these ornaments are exactly 90 degrees from each other. So now, suppose you wanted to have more, let's say you wanted to have eight ornaments and you wanted to place them all exactly the same distance from each other on the circle, then you can just select the empty again. And then you can 0.300 60/8, and that would make the ornaments perfectly placed from each other. Okay? So that would be the way to do it. Turn the ring Band back on. That would be the way to do it if you wanted the array in a perfect distance from each other. Okay? So if you've come that far, let's save. Now, if you use that method with the empty, make sure that you only adjust your ornament and added mode, or else, if you don't do that, your placement of the array will get screwed and you can make some other interesting shapes. Okay, so that's important. So for now, I will continue with a simple version. I will continue with a version which is only fob, and we will use the relative of it, and I will put it above the curve mode. And in this way, we don't have perfect distance from each other. But it is just a very simple and straightforward way to work with arrays and curves. Okay? So we will continue with a simple version without the empty of the array. Okay, so that being said, now we should be somewhere that looks similar to this. 12. Vary Profiles: Alright, it's time to add a twist. I can do that. In this lesson, we'll mix things up by changing the curve profile of our second array. You'll see how just a small change can completely transform the look and feel. Ready to give it a go? Now, you've come that far. What next? Of course, as mentioned, you can just repeat the whole ornament throughout the design and just create kind of these maybe Greek style repetitions or make any kind of pattern that you like. But if you want others which are shaped differently, of course, you can also copy and paste the arrayed version of the ornament. Okay. To make a copy of these four basic objects, we can just press Shift D, and then right afterwards, we can press X, and this will move our original object, which you remember is still lying flat on the X axis. And in this way, you can just place it so that the pattern is filled in between the original. And now, of course, if you go into Edit mode, you can just adjust the shape and make this into any kind of different ornament that you like. And since you have relative offset, depending on how big you make the ornament, it will change the placement of the rest of the array. So if you want to avoid that, of course, you can go to constant offset and just give this a constant offset so that it ignores any adjustment in shape. You can always navigate around the ring on the right side to see the result that you have. So since we copied this second object from the first ornament, of course, it has the same profile. As the first one. But of course, we can give this one a new profile now. We could give it an object profile or just simply a square profile, and this way change the look of the second ornament. And of course, you can also press Control T to tilt it or S to change individual thicknesses of the control points. Of course, these two options can as always be found here in the item tab, and a suggestion for an option that can be nicely combined with tilting on the new curve, you could select the last point, and then you can turn on proportional editing, which can also be found up here with O, turn on connected only. Now tilt this last point with Control R. Now, initially, it doesn't look like much is happening because you need to increase the influence by scaling the circle. Now if you tilt this last point and kind of turn it as if you would screw your mouse pointer around a clock, you can increase or decrease the influence, and then you can adjust the tilt for all of these points, and that gives it a nice twisted wire look or something. If you change the profile, of course, you can play with it very nicely. You can also use proportional editing to scale up more than one point at the same time along the curve, while only influence the others to a certain degree or to move them and make the others follow more or less. 13. Render Setup: Alright, O ring design is already looking Gorgeous. It's time to get it camera ready. In these lessons, we'll cover everything you need to know about setting up your render from lighting and camera angles to finalizing your composition. We'll make sure your ring looks amazing. Ready to sparkle on screen. Let's bring this design to life. Let's now give our object some nice materials. We will opt for the standard metal material here and some simple background plan. First, select the ring bend, go into the material options and add a new material. Ramp up metallic to one and change the color to a nice gold. To see the color, it is best to use the second viewport without overlays and switch to viewport shading. And this will give you a preview of the materials. Now, select all the other curves by clicking and shift clicking and then lastly, select the ring bend with the material. Now press Control L and say link materials. So if you now change this material, you can change them all in an instant. Then in the unshaded viewport, add a plane with Shift A, scale it up with S, and in front view, move it down with that so that it becomes a backdrop for our ring to sit on. Give the plane a new material as well. You can call it background or something. So let's now open a third viewport and change to the shader editor. And up here, change to world, and there you should see the background color of our world. And if you want to see the changes you make in here, it is best to switch to the next shading option, the viewport rendered shading. And right now, we can't see anything or not much. But if you change the color, you can make it at least brighter. But much better than the simple color would be a sky texture note. And for this, we can hear in the notes, we can press Shift A and texture and choose a sky texture. And if you select them both with shift and click, we can press F, and this will illuminate our scene with a nice sky background texture. To see a more intricate version of our rendered view, we can go to render and we can switch from EV to cycles. And there it looks already much more realistic. Can also turn on GPU compute. You can also go into the material and turn down the roughness a little bit so that it looks really shiny. Remember, you can also go into the preferences under system and switch your cycles render device on. Now, you should have seen the background light up with a nice atmospheric glow. If you switch to perspective view with five on the numpad, you will even see the dark bottom of the texture and the nice bright lit sky. Let's go back to orthographic mode. Of course, in the shader, you can increase or decrease the strength. The sun rotation, and even the atmosphere. Also the elevation. You can also switch between different types of sky textures, but I really like the Nishita one. It looks quite realistic. So the background plane, of course, doesn't have to be white. You could also make it very dark, and this will change the whole atmosphere of the scene. You can also make it metallic and decrease the roughness to have kind of a glossy backdrop where the ring is mirred can also lower this further so that the ring has kind of floating aesthetic compared to the way that it sits on top of a plane. And so you have many options to play around with the placement and the color of the backdrop. I like this particular scene here just because you can see the shadow, and this just gives it a little bit more of a realistic touch. So I will just leave it at that for now. And of course, you could also, if you, for example, wanted to give one of these ornaments another color, you could click on new material while having the ornament selected. By the way, you can close this shader window here by right clicking and join areas and then go down. Then you can create a copy of this gold material and call it silver, and then you can make that white. Then you would have another material in here, or you make both of them white. In this way, you have a variation of this design. Pretty neat. A small tip, if you like to experiment with fancier materials, you wanted to give this ring a wooden surface as a backdrop or pillow or something to present your jewelry, you can download the blender kit add on. It's this here. And if you turn that on, you will get a ton of free and paid materials. So you will get a little menu up here and sometimes they will send you advertising. But you can, for example, if you have the plain selected, you could search for wood and you could go to material, and then you could just search for a nice surface that suits your idea of your scene. For example, this one. And let's just bring up the Shader window once more. Here you can see this material has been automatically added, and it has all the different textures and alpha maps and all that stuff that you need to create a beautiful material. Up here on the left, you can change the rotation, and that will change the rotation of the texture. In this way, you can adjust it even more or change the scale, can also hold down and move your mouse done, then you can change the whole scale at once so that it looks even more realistic size wise. So yeah, that would be an option, how you could play with backdrops and materials. And there's also a ton of other stuff in there. For example, if you need a pillow, you can go to material and you can go to pillow, and then you will find a pillow. And some of those are paid, but some of them are free, well, it's very much worth a try. You can just close this here if you don't need it and close this here, or if you don't need it altogether, you can deactivate the add on. It will keep the materials that you added with it in there without having this big kind of menu up here all the time. Yeah. Okay, so that's just a little tip for creating nice realistic scenes. Let's go back to the white background just to keep things simple. And I would just switch to the world Shader once more. Here's also an end menu, by the way, and make this a little bit darker just a little bit because now let's make this a little smaller. Close this back up. You can also create hold your mouse pointer here until it becomes a plus and then make it swallow the other viewport. Now the next thing that we can do, we can add two or three lights to emphasize the highlights on this thing. Let's first make this plane transparent in this viewport so that it does not obstruct or view. For this, we go to object properties and viewport display and switch this to wire. And then in the render, it is still visible as before, but here in this viewport, it will just become a square. 14. Lights: Now, let's add the lights. Switch top you, and let's impart a light. And let's import in light with Shift A and choose an area light. Move it a little bit out of the way. And with this little yellow spot, here you can make this bigger. Can move it a bit up. And then, of course, we can point it towards our ring. Right away, this should not have a lot of effect because usually these lights get imported with very, very weak strength, just to show you the difference with or without lighting. Let's create the shader viewport once more. By the way, if you don't want to open up the Shader viewpod like that, you can just switch to the shading workspace up here. But then we can't work on the layout at the same time. I like to just create my own workspace plus shader down here. If you go to the world and you just disconnect these two for a second, then you see the true intensity of this light. If you just type one in there, it will instantly light up very bright, so we will have to give it some value 0-1. Why not 100 milliwatts, 0.1. The sky shader is for an even environmental glow. The lights are to make it pop. You can use the plain shaded viewport to add and move around all the stuff and see the result in the render preview next to it. You can press Shift D and just copy the light and then rotate it to the other side, or you can take this little yellow dot and point it towards the ring, and then you can see it update in real time on the right. There's a little fun bonus that you can use to make it easier to move the lights around without losing the focus on the ring, which would be to give the light a constraint. And you can say track two, and you can say the target would be the ring band. And now, if you move the light around, it will always focus on the ring band. I probably won't do that here too much because I like to have some more control about how the light points. And in this way, it will always point at one exact spot. But if you want to do that, and give the light an object constraint that could help you to just make the lights focus on the ring all the time. Okay, so I will get rid of that again and you see the light jumps back to its position without the constraint. Well, in this way, you can also then once you're satisfied with the lighting situation, you can also turn the background back on to get a feel for how these two look together. And maybe you realize that the light is too strong and you can turn it down a little bit, or you notice that the background sky texture is too strong, and of course, you can turn it down as well. And always make sure to double check how it looks with and without the sky texture to just get the best possible outcome in your render. I always look for beautiful, well lit scene and the details should be visible, but depending on what effect you want to achieve, you might need more or less lights or you might want to get rid of the background sky texture altogether because you want to have a more moody, atmospheric candle lit kind of scene, and you can also lower the light temperature a little bit, make it a little bit reddish. And in this way, you can, of course, control the way that the whole scene looks and the whole feel of the scene. And if you notice, by the way, that this on the right here updates very slowly, you can go into the render settings and you can decrease the previous samples for cycles. So you could say, okay, I want SMAx samples on the viewport only 200, for example. So if you move around here, it will only render 200 samples instead of 1024. Of course, you can also turn denoise on, and the actual render denoise is turned on automatically. I usually like to have three lights, which I kind of locate in a 120 degree pattern around the model. And we can play with different light temperatures here. You can play with some colorful accents if you like. So everything is possible. And of course, you can always turn off the sky texture to see the effect. And this, for example, gives it a more LED like lighting situation as if it was lit by some colored LEDs and not so much a natural lighting. If you want to have some more control over how the background color affects the ring and also be able to kind of play with the visibility of the shadow, then you can create a half or full box, and you can do this with a plane Vs you can scale that up a little bit, maybe exclude Z by pressing and shift z and then scale that up. Then you can take an edge or two edges of the plane and just pull it up with E and Z, and you instantly notice that this took away this shadow that the sun from the sky texture casts. You might notice when I move this, you can see the shadow moving from the big white plane that we just created. Then of course, you can rotate this along and you can also play with the different ways this affects the surface color of the ring. Of course, this becomes even more visible if you change the background color of the plane this way, you have a lot of control over the mood of the scene as well. One more thing, if you want to hide the sharp edge in the corner of the plane, you can just give it a subdivision surface modifier, like that. Of course, it should be rammed up a little bit, maybe to two. Then ddt mode, you can add more edges with control R and pull them down a little bit, and that will give this edge of the plane a little bit more definition, also along here. And maybe along here. And this way, you can hide the corner, but not so much that it is super, super curved. And then you can also right click and say, Shade Smooth. And that will make this edge a lot smoother. And if you select here, these edges with all click and you move them up, you can control how edgy this plane becomes. Okay. So that is a way to be able to influence the background visibility. Alright, so that looking quite nice already. Let me just quickly save an incremental version that will just save another version of your file with a number behind it, or it will increment any number that it finds. So if you have, I don't know, cool ring number one, it will make co ring number two next to it. So now, finally, we will need a camera to be able to actually render that. And a very easy way of doing that. I mean, we have a camera here, and you could just press Control Zero to fly into it, and then you would see the camera view or you could do this on this side. Or what you can actually also do, you can zoom out press five, so as to get out of well. If that happens and you don't know where you are, you can press Shift C, and that should bring you back to a nice placement in the scene. It will also bring the three D cursor back to the center, which might be cool for you as well, because then you can rotate the lights around the three D cursor. Okay, but what I wanted to say, so if you want the camera to jump exactly to that view that you're currently at and you want to see what you're seeing right there, then you can press Control A zero. And if this happens and you can't see anything, it might be that the clipping settings of a camera are set too low. So here under the camera settings, you might set these end settings to, I don't know, something like 10,000, and that should bring you into view where the ring is visible again. 15. Render Adjustments: By the way, if you use my blind file that comes with a class, then there's a light in the rendering collection already. You can just delete that because I didn't use it for the setup here, but you can click and Shift click all the three lights that you might have built, and you can put them in the rendering setup, and you can also select the background plane and put it in the rendering collection. You can also press M to put it in the rendering collection with a shortcut. And then the model will be in the model collection that you can also hide all at once, and all the rendering stuff is in the rendering collection so that you can instantly turn it on and off. This way, you also get a good look at how the scene looks just with the sky texture. So that is handy, and you have the camera now at the position where you want it. But of course, if you want to move it around a little more, you can either do that here. So you can move the camera so that it moves around the ring like that. And by the way, you can also give the camera an object constraint, so Track two, and then you Pie pad the ring band here, and now if you move the camera, it will automatically stay focused on the ring, and you might like that. In this way, you can move the camera around in here and still get a good look on the render scene in here. Another thing you can do is you can go into the end menu, go to view and say camera to view. And now, if you navigate around the ring and here, well, it doesn't work with Track two, so you have to turn off Trac two. But if you no navigate in here, like pressing G and Z to move the camera around or R and Z to rotate it around the three Dcursor or any other movement that you can then you will automatically make the camera follow your view. You have multiple options on moving the camera around either from the outside like this or from the inside like that, if you have turned on camera to view, or you just say track two, and that way you can just move it around here and the ring will always stay in focus. Another thing you can do with a camera. No matter if tract is turned on or not, you can always use G and Z Z to move the camera along its local Z axis. That's very nice for zooming in and out. Also, you have some options in the camera settings over here. So first thing you can do is you can switch between perspective and orthographic, and then you can change the orthographic scale. Or you have the perspective view where you actually have some perspective going on. In perspective, you can change the focal length. So the smaller the focal length is, the further away you seem to be, and if you then use G and Z Z to move in with your camera, then the look becomes more dramatic. You can see that the perspective is now emphasized a lot. Okay. If you take this focal length to say 100, that is a very long camera lens. And in this way, the perspective aspect of the scene is not as emphasized. Okay? So you have a lot of options to adjust the look of your scene. I already talked about the clip start and end setting. So if your scene looks cut off when you move around, just increase the clipping end settings. And now, if you're more or less satisfied with the whole scene, you can just press F 12 or you go to render and render image. Now, the first thing you might notice is that we have some extra objects floating around in here, which you might not want. So, if things look different than the scene that you actually see when rendered, you can just press Escape to stop the render, but you can just also click on the X up here to close this window. And then you just have to take a little look at your collection, and you might want to take a look at what is visible in the render view. If this is something like the Bezier curve, of course, it will be visible in the render view if this camera icon is turned on. So here, this just means you hit it in the viewport, and you also have to press that to make sure that it does not come up in the rendering. Here everything seems fine. So let's try that again, Render image RF 12. And that actually looks pretty nice. That's exactly how we wanted to look for this scene. And I just notice here that I would like this area of the ring a little bit more lit up. Okay? So I would like some light bouncing off of this edge. So I just close that once again. And since I'm looking through the camera moles from here, I might want to bring that down a little bit, that light, and I might also want to rotate it around. So that is this pinkish light. So maybe I want to turn that pink tone down a little bit. But actually, I quite like it, and I would also like to rotate that to come down a little bit and a little bit to the left. And of course, if you rotate the light, you can also press R and XX or the G and XX or the respective axis to move it along its local axis, this might help you to move it around a bit more skillfully if you don't have the track to modify or turned on. 16. Composition Nodes: In the render settings, you also have some options. You can increase or decrease the sample count for your scene. I like to put it somewhere around here for jewelry. By the way, you can click on this little icon on here to bring up the image right away. And you can always press Escape, and then it will stop at the sample where it's at. So in this way, you get a nice clean looking scene without any of these fireflies. There's a light noise that sometimes occurs in scenes with a lot of reflections in them. One other tab that you might want to check out is down here under color management, and you can say you want the look to be high contrast, and that will make your color a little bit sharper. And you can also turn it to low contrast to have a little bit more of a dreamy look. But I like high contrast that really gives it a bit of a punch and medium high contrast, depending on the scene. And by the way, this applies to all the cameras in the scene. Let's say you want to try out the scene from the other side, you can press Shift D, and then you selected. And then you can rotate it around the ring and see it from another angle. And if I now go to the scene format settings, this will apply to both cameras. You can change the scene format, for example, to square, and then you could zoom in a little more, and then you would have a square scene, which would be perfect for Instagram and such. And if I switch this camera now to the other one, which you can do, you can instantly fly into the L by clicking on the little camera I can hear on the green one. This will make it the active camera. And then you can, of course, try out different things and change the focal length and everything corresponding to the individual camera. And if you just want to make a quick test render here under output, you can set this to 25%. And if you now press render, it will make a small version of your scene, which of course will take much less time. And it will help you to quickly check out your scene and if everything is as it should be before committing to the 400%. This is especially useful, of course, if your PC is a little bit on the slow side. And once your image is rendered and the sample count is finished, I will just wait for it to do so. So it actually takes quite a bit of time with 4,000 samples with such a setup. But there we go, and this is now finished. Make sure if you want to save this image to now save a version of it, because otherwise it will get overwritten by the next rendering that you do. So you can just go in here and you say renders, and you might call that something. And then if you go to the composition workspace up here and you click on use Notes, you will see that you have your render image here, and you can now put some cool stuff on top of it that blender will visually apply to it once it's rendered. You might already know that, but one of my favorites is the glare node, and you can put it in here. And I really like the fog glow, and I like to turn down the mix value a little bit towards minus one, but around -0.7. And then if you now bring up the render image again, just open that. Then you will see that Blender has applied this fog glow on top of your rendered image. If that's a little bit too strong, you can turn down the size to seven, or you can say, I want high quality, and let's see if that changes. And you'll see this has toned down the glow a little bit, but it now looks a little bit like shiny and you can, of course, also say, I want simple stars and this. Now we'll apply simple stars to your image. And you can save a version of that, as well, you might call it like stars or something, underscore stars so that you know that this is a different version. Alright then if you are satisfied and you have saved all the versions of this render that you want, you can close it. If you haven't rendered anything new, you can go to render and say, view render with Fleven and this will show you your last render. And you can still change the composition notes on this while it's in that state. Only if you now render a second scene, let's say you switch to the camera and you want to do a second version of that, and you render that one, then this will override the initial version. And now it's lost and you have to work with a new image. All right. 17. Evolving the Design: Hey, I hope you also have a fundamental render setup now. Beautiful. And now it's time to take our ring to the next level. In this lesson, we'll explore ways to evolve the basic design we've created. Let's see how far we can push the digital artistry. I will now adjust the shape of the outer ring main curve so that more ornaments fit into the middle of the ring. Also, adding more ornaments and gemstones to give the ring a swirly, dynamic and playful appearance. Finally, I will play around more with the render settings. These next lessons represent a typical iterative workflow of generating a basic design, improving on it, and making it into something truly unique and eye catching with each further refinement. Let's first bring the upper control point outwards along Y. Then select both the middle control points and bring them in slightly. Now switch to side view with three. There we can switch to individual origins as the pavtPointT rotate both the control points to adjust the curvature of the ring bend. You can also move the lowest point outwards and maybe even tilt it a little bit. I tilted only the upper control point because quite frankly, I forgot about the lowest one. To have a really nice flowy shape, it would have been even better to tilt this one as well. Now, let's copy one of the ornaments and move it along X and Y to grow our composition. I delete the array here from this particular ornament so that it is easier to work with it. And also because I just want to have it as a standalone part of this design. Here, we should switch back to median point as the pivot point for scaling. To get a better overview of this more and more complex project, let's switch to the four viewpot mode with Control Alt Q. In this way, we get a much better overview on the design as a whole. Be aware that the views in the left, lower left, and lower right viewports are fixed. You can only navigate in the upper right. Since the design has naturally and spontaneously evolved during the filming, hence reflecting a real artistic workflow, I will time lapse through many of the following video material. For example, modeling every single ornament and later adding the stones. If you want to watch it in real time, find the link to the YouTube video in the resources to take a closer look at how I did this. S. So if you want to switch back to the normal view, you can just do that with Control old Q again, and then you can turn the render settings back on and get another viewport out of there. And there you go. And then you can also go into the camera. Make sure you have the camera selected. Sounds fantastic. Now, after experimenting with all kinds of setups and lighting situations, I just settled down on this for now, and of course, you're very welcome to change it all up and switch it around the way you wanted to. Okay, I will bring the plane back into wireframe mode so that I'm free to move around here without obstructing my view. And I will also save a new copy. Alright. 18. Gem Stones: Time to add some more sparkle. In this segment, we'll work on setting stones, including a side pavil and an ornament pavl. Ready to add somebling. Now, it might be that you want to add any kind of nice gemstone. And I highly suggest for that to again, use the jewel craft add on. Let's say we wanted to fill some of these holds with stones, and we can have all kinds of different cuts. But for this particular design, I think a round one works well. And maybe 2 millimeters from now, we can switch this up later. No problems. And we could, for example, choose a garnet which has a nice red color. So it will be imparted into the viewport already with a red color visible here, which you can find in the material settings, it has a base color of red, but it is also in the viewport display set to red so that we can distinguish the colors even when the rendering settings are not turned on. And you can also see the beautiful stone. Just notice that I want to change the shape here a little bit so that this piece is not visible. There you go. All right. And now you can just bring up this stone somewhere where you want it to be, for example, here in the center. So you can bring it up here or say you want to place it in this hole, and then we can set the pivot point to median and we can scale this up. And we can just place it somewhere in here so that it looks nice and it is filling up this empty space here. And of course, now we can create more gems from this one if we want more garnets. Okay. And if we want more stones, of course, we can add more gems and of different colors, obviously. So if you want to have some just simple diamonds, we can get this as well. And then we can plug it in here. We can always copy material and just style it ourselves into a different color. Maybe we want to have some blue gem here instead of a green gem. So we don't have to kind of religiously follow the samples which are there. Can just build our own little collection. So in this way, we can build a little sky of diamonds. Of course, this one is green here because the sapphire still has inherited the green plur from the emerald, but we can change that here so that we can see the correct color as well. And in that way, we can fill up the whole ring. Just be aware that if you put stones on the bottom of a ring, they will most likely break very quickly because you will smash the ring against stuff inevitably. So it is useful to just fill up the upper half of the ring with stoves. Otherwise, you might not be happy about it for so long. But of course, for rendering, you can just do whatever you want and just get crazy with your fantasy and ideas. The colors are quite strong, so maybe you want to tone them down a little bit, so they look a little bit more realistic in this whole setup. Maybe you want to do some monochrome design where all the stones are more or less in a similar color, or you want to go for a rainbow look, so everything is possible. Also check out another camera view from time to time just to see stuff from the other side. Now, we can also build prongs and cutters for our stones with a jewel craft add on. For example, here, they overlap quite a bit, and it might be nice to cut some hole for the stone so that it is not interfering with the metal so much. But for now, I would just leave it like that because we would have to transform our ring from a curve to a mesh, but then we will lose the ability to easily manipulate the shape. So for now, let's leave it as it is. So now I'm selecting all the silver pieces because I want to make them gold again. I'm not so happy with the silver color. So I just select all of them, and then at last, one that is already golden, Control L, and link materials. And then they should all be golden. 19. Pavé Prep (& Tidy Viewport): That's easy, right? We can add gems. We can just move them around until they look nice on our design. But what if we wanted to make the stones follow an ornament or maybe the side of the ring? So for that, let's try something different. Let's first hide all the render stuff to be able to work in here and go into the shaded view. Not the stones are all not the correct color corresponding to here, but it doesn't matter to me. Now, what if I wanted to give the edge of our ring complete diamond encrustation all around this ring. Okay. Let's give this an object profile so that we have the best control about how it looks. Let's insert a new curve. Yeah, let's use a circle. Let's bring this over here. Let's call the circle. Maybe first let's clean up and here a little bit. Let's take all the stones and press M in the three D report and give them their own collection. That, and then we could also hide them completely if we wanted to. Let's do that for now because the colors are a little distracting. Let's call this ring bevel shape, something like that, and also take all the ornaments and put them in their own collection and call them ornaments. Okay. So that is a little bit more clean, and let's put the collection into the model collection and the stone, as well. So they are all on the model, and the ring bevel shape, of course, goes in here because this is part of Ring band, which is this one. Which one is this one? Ah, that's the ring curve for the ornaments. If we scale that up, you see it will mess up everything. That is part of this curve. So this is part of the ornaments, as it is called, and here is another ornament that I haven't used, so I will delete it. Here's another one that I haven't used, so I will delete it. That is called viewport hygiene, and I feel it just makes thinking about your whole design so much easier if you have tucked it away in the boxes and you can turn them on and off at will. So let's save that. 20. Ring Band Pavé: Finally, let's go into the ring band, which is right now only a curve. And you can also see that it does not get rendered as long as it is a curve. It is not visible at all, only once we give it a round shape, it will be visible again. But we want an object, so let's call it in here. And now, of course, it's just a circle. I want to make this a little bit more square. Change the pivot point to individual origins, and then I just scale them up, and that will give them more of a square shape. And, of course, that is a little bit too chunky. So I will scale it along g here we have to do the median point again, so as to make it smaller like that. Okay. So in this way, we've given this whole outer curve a different style, a different definition. And what we could also do, of course, we could scale this one thing down a little bit at the top or at the bottom, because right now it is kind of squished in the middle here. So let's bring that in a little bit. And let's bring that in just a little bit. So that is more or less a round it off square as a basic shape. And now maybe some of those ornaments poke off, poke out here, and of course we can bring them in a little bit. Just make sure that it all looks nice and clean in the way you want. Also, the stones are still sitting in their respective place. Nice one. Alright, so now we have this outer edge, and what we're now going to do, I hope will be a lot of fun. Let's get into the Jewel Craft addon again. Let's create another gem. Let's keep it at 1 millimeter in diamond, okay? It will come up here in the center. Now, our ring bend is still a curve, right? Originally, this is just a little curve that has handles. Now, what we can do is we can select the stone. We can select the curve, and we can choose distribute on curve. So for now, this looks not like much, but what we can do now, we can open up this little panel and bring up the quantity of the jams. So they seem to be a little bit in the wrong place. So fortunately, we can offset those and we can bring them out, and we can rotate them or rather tilt them 180 degrees so that they poke not outwards, except you want that maybe, but that they show their beautiful upper edge towards us. And then, of course, we can increase the count even more. So in this way, we can encrust this whole edge with diamonds. And I think that's pretty cool. Okay, once you're satisfied, let's just click somewhere else and this menu disappears. So now we have a bunch of diamonds, and those are a lot, but as you might see in the render, the problem with those is that the metal is cutting through the diamonds, okay? They are intersecting each other, and that is why the diamonds do not sparkle as nicely as the ones which are just set into these holes which are already there. So to fix that, we would have to convert this curve because we can't cut something out of this curve, yet we would have to convert it to a mesh. So for now, you'd have to be satisfied with how that looks, but we will fix that in the end. So now we have added stones in those holes. We have added a whole array of stones on the edge, and we will, of course, copy that over to the other side in a bit. 21. Ornament Pavé: So, let's say we want to encrust one of the ornaments with stones. I mean, that's not far fetched, right? Could very well look pretty cool. So maybe we want to encrust this ornament with stones, and maybe we just hide our garnet for a second. Wait. That's the other side. So let's hide our garnet for a second. And now let's go in here, go on a curve. And let's give this the same object profile as the ring band. Let's see if that already works. Ring bubble shape. Nope, that looks absolutely hideous. So let's just give it a profile again. So we have some options here, pre made options, but they all not as I want them. I mean, this looks pretty nice as well, right? But I probably going to give this its own shape, okay? So I will create another by the way, all these rounds, if you want to select them all at once, you can go to select Select Link or Shift L and click Object data. And this will select all those tones which were created together, and then you can put them into another new collection called St stones or something. All then you can just clean up in your report once more. Select the bevel object again and call that Ornament bevel shape. Let's now insert the ornament bevel shape. So that is a lot too big, so let's scale it down a lot like that. And my aim here was to have a clean surface where we could put all those stones. Now, this is interfered by this nice little ornament here, and we have a few options what we could do. Of course, we can shorten that ornament or we can just scale it down so that it does not get in the way, and then we don't have to delete anything. We can just get rid of it by scaling it down like that. And the same goes for this piece here, which is kind of in the way a little bit as well, and we can scale it down with old S. That just makes it so easy to move stuff out of the way. This one is a little bit trickier because when we scale it down, the whole shape gets lost a little bit. But for that, we can just take our ornament that we want to work on now and maybe just slightly bring that up around z. Okay? So that it has its own space above the rest of them. Okay, and then we can adjust the shape a little bit. And once you're pleased with that, and we think, Okay, now I want to put some diamonds on there, you might guess how that is going to go. So first, let's create a new gem, a diamond. Let's select the curve, and let's say distribute on curve. The thing is, they get distributed on the curve that is lying flat. Not on the curved version. You might remember that this curve has a curve modifier and it's originally there. Okay, so that does not work. So what we have to do here is we actually have to apply the modifier, okay? And that might change something about the looks of it, probably the tilt or the scaling, but we can just bring it back to how we want it. And we can also scale this up a little bit again or do some other stuff that helps us bring it back to its original shape. And also, of course, we can adjust the shape of our little curve here. And if I zoom in here, I can make it a little bit broader because right now it is pretty flat. Like that. Alright, so that looks cool to me. And now I think we can work with this curve. Our diamond still sits here, so we can select it, and we can select the curve, and let's do distribute on curve. So now, it should look very different. It looks kind of crazy here, but as you know, we can adjust all of it. So first, let's set the tel to zero. Let's set the offset lower, maybe tilt it in to this direction. I think we need to tilt them 90 degrees. We might have to offset, that's the wrong 90 degrees. We might have to offset them like that. So I'm just going there by eye. I don't have a recipe for that. Then we can increase the count. And here, this distribution percentage comes into play. You can already see the result here and it looks quite nice. However, of course, they are still sunken into the metal, and we need to do something about that eventually. So we can change the distribution because not all the way to the end, there are going to be stones. There might be not enough space. So we can change the distribution until it is kind of here, maybe. By the way, if you now move the curve up a little bit because I noticed that I would like to have this piece here come up a little bit towards the outside, you see that the stones move with it. Okay? So you can adjust the shape of the ornament and the stones will act accordingly, which is pretty damn neat. All the stones have gotten a follow path constraint, okay? So it's similar to when I set the camera to always look at the ring or the light, always to point at the ring, they have gotten this follow path thing here. If you want to now redistribute those stones because you notice that here, they overlap a little bit, and we don't want that. We always want a little bit of space between the stones. You can just select all those rounds again. You can always do Shift L and select Link and then select the curve. And then you can click on Redistribute. And this will give you the same menu again. And I just have to recommend the add on again and again. If I go in here, I want to change the end because the stones here, they are not visible, okay? And this way, I notice that I need less stones than I initially thought, maybe 18. And now we can also change the beginning of the curve a little bit, and always, you can click redistribute if you need the new placement of the stones. And maybe we also want to change the offset a little bit. And maybe you need to adjust those a little bit by hand, because, of course, if you scale the different parts of the curve with d a differently, the offset of the stones will be different according to that. So maybe you have to move some of the stones. Make sure you always only move them in object mode. And now you have a really nice pave on your ornament. Okay? So let's select those all and also give them their own collection, call it ornament stones or something. There you go, and we can turn on the side stones again. And in that way, we can really build our design, and we can give the other curves. Of course, we could give them now the same profile. The bevel. Okay. And we could give this one the same as well, and then we could put stones on there as well. And it would be pretty easy. You can just select one of those stones, Shift D, delete the follow path constraint. This should put it back into the center, select the next curve, distribute on curve. Okay? And then just work with the offset and everything until it is where you want it to be. Well, where is it actually? Oh, it's down there. Of course, because I forgot to apply the curve. Okay. So that's just important to note for you that you need to apply the curve modifier and put the curve actually where it is so that we can adjust it here. And then we can do the same distribute on curve like that. Put it up like that. Increase the count, change start and end positions like that. Decrease the count again. And in that way, build your own wonderful design. And here as well, we might have to adjust the curve a little bit. We have to bring it up a little bit so that it is not instructed by the rest. Just bring it up slightly like that, and there you go. Nicely done. 22. Backup Stone Curves: Okay, to make sure that when we convert these curves and do stuff with them, and the stones, you might recall, there are connected to the curves, right? They have a constraint that makes them follow the path of the curve. So we need to make a backup of these curves so that we don't accidentally convert them, and then the stones will lose their placement. Okay? So let's call this ring ring meant stones and just make a copy of it and click right away so that the second ring bend doesn't move, so now we have a copy on top of it, and let's just call that ring bend. Okay? So we have a ring bend with stones, and this one is the one. You could also give it a different profile. Or we could just hide it altogether, so that we don't accidentally confuse that. And then we can just hide it. Maybe you can see that in the transparency view. So this is the curve now that has the stones attached to them so that we don't confuse it with a ring bend. Then the next one, we will just also find in the outliner let's call it ornament stones 001. Let's also make a copy Shift D and immediately left click without moving your mouse and also call that just ornament. So that is now our backup, and that is the ornament with the stones. And as with the ringnt, we can just hide the bevel here. So now we only have this as a basis for our stones, and then we can hide that as well. And just as well with this one here, ornament stones 002, and make a copy, Shift D, immediately left click. Make sure that you have the correct one, hide the bubble so that you can discriminate between them. And then the one that is now empty without any stones attached, you can just give it a name without stones, and then you hide the curve with the stones as well. So now all of the visible curves are not connected to the stones anymore. And that's very important for the next step. So make sure that all the curves where the stones are connected to are hidden and have a replacement in place. 23. Remesh Modifier: Here comes one of my favorite tricks, the remash modifier. In this lesson, I show you an insanely quick way to turn our curve based self intersecting mess design into a solid, cohesive, three D printable mesh from mess to mesh. Just a simple modifier that makes our model watertight and ready to three print in seconds or minutes depending on how quick your PC actually is. This trick is a game changer when you're working with complex curves that need to be three D printed. Well, it's not for rematching and game design. It's not like we're building a new topology that is usable for textures or stuff like that. It's perfect for jewelry and other printable designs where booleans are just very, very time intensive. So let's jump in and watch this modifier do its literal three D magic. So you've come this far. You have built your dream ornamental ring design, and hopefully you learned something along the way. So this next step is super important. If you have placed the stones somewhere and they look dull, just as they do here on our design with the ornament and on the side, and maybe also some of which we placed on the holds. This means, basically, we need to cut some holds into this ring for the stones to look realistic. And you also maybe would want to do this if you eventually would want to three D print your ring depending on how you want to process it, you might want to have a hole where the stones are sitting pre drilled, so to speak. So, in any case, we would have to do something with this ring to make this possible. In short, we will convert these curves to mesh and then combine all of them to be then able to boll those stone holes out of there. There are multiple ways to do so, but I will show you one of the easiest and by far, the quickest one. Make sure you save a new version of your latest creation since this process is destructive and will not allow you to make changes on the curves as before. Maybe call the Safe file VauxlRmsh or something. Because that is what we're going to do with this ring. First, let's hide the stones for a second. Also hide the render. And maybe right click in between those join areas and hide the render view completely for now. By the way, you might have noticed that I have some statistics down here, and this is quite helpful if you want to know how many words and trees, if you want to keep track of them, and how many objects there are, also how much memory your file is using. And you can also turn statistics on the overlays then they will appear here. But if you want to see those statistics down below on the right, you can just right click on this lower bar and turn on the scene statistics. Select all the curves that you use on the ringmn the ornaments, the outer edges, and so on. So you can go into the outliner right click and say select objects, then you have selected all the ornaments, and then shift and click on the outer edges. Now, right click somewhere and choose convert to mesh. This will instantly apply all the modifiers and convert all those curves. You might notice if you select this piece here, it hasn't got any modifiers anymore. It is also not a curve anymore because now there's this mesh data tub and not the curve data. It also has become a mesh. You can see all those triangles here on the ornaments. They are not curves anymore, and that also means if you go into Edit mode, you will see that this geometry has now become a mesh, and they have individual vertices and they are not easily changeable and malleable like the curves ware. Okay? We will need to do a second step, so reselect everything here. And now press Control J. Now, this whole thing here has become combined in one object. If you go into edit mode, you will see they are all there. You can edit them all individually. But if you hover over one of them and press L, this means select all linked to this one word that you hover over there, you will see that these are still individual pieces. They are not yet combined. Okay? So this is one object, but there are many different measures in here, which you could, if you select one of them, move individually. So this is one big object, and the finst step that we have to do to make this actually into one watertight three D printable and Blab mesh, you go to the modifiers and you go to remesh. And this instantly looks quite different because our vaxer size is quite high still. It's not very fine grained. But if I turn that off for a second, you may notice that all these pieces, they kind of overlap themselves and each other. Okay? So they all are stuck inside each other. And if I turn the remash modifier on, you might note that this all has now become continuous surface. So all these self intersections and these overlapping parts, they have just become one giant mesh. So if we take this down a little bit to, let's say, 0.05, you will see that the details become much finer. And if you go to 0.02, be careful because at some point it will take quite a while for blender to calculate that. You will see that it nearly looks as before. And if you now going into the render view, you will see that it also has become quite nice and glossy and all the pieces are now stuck together. Alright, if you are happy with how that looks, you can go and save another version of that. The thing is, if you now notice that here are some kind of jagged curves. They are not as finely detailed as you like. You can just repeat that process and you go back to the file as it was before when we still had all the individual curves and make sure that you say shade flat so that you see the actual surface. And then you could give this subdivision surface modifier before you convert it into a mesh, and then the surface will be much smoother even after you remash it. Okay? So if we go back to the remshed version, I feel this still looks quite nice. I'm happy with that. You might also notice that now you have a lot more. You can turn on the statistics here as well. A lot more triangles, faces, edges. Before the remshing, this is like only a tenth of that. So this object has become much bigger now than before. But of course, we can deal with that later as well, because we could now export it as an STL. So that would give you a printable file. Okay, so you could just get yourself a new folder. I call it SDL selection only to not export anything else I might float around there and then export STL. But that would make the STL quite big. It will also take a long time to generate it. And there you have it. So it's nearly half a gigabyte, and that's pretty big. Of course, we could just open that in a slicer now. If you have, for example, the Prser slicer, which is awesome. And I always use it for three D printing. And there you have it. So it is completely printable right now. And that's the cool thing about this technique. But if you don't want to have such a big file, we have one trick, and of course, you might know this already if you followed me for some time. But if not, let's check it out. So first, to reduce the file size, let's first apply the remesh modifier and then give it a decimate modifier. So now we have baked this kind of this shape. Now we want to retain the shape, but we want to have a lot less vertices. Notice we have around 8 million triangles. And if we turn that down to a ratio of 0.2 or something, so we just bring it to 20% of how many vertices and triangles there are, while Blender still tries to retain the look of it. That also can take quite a bit of time. All right. But now you see that we have brought this down 8-1 0.6 million, and the ring, fascinatingly, still looks the same, which is really nice. And then we can apply this decimate modifier. And this also brings down the file size, which can be quite important if you're working with such big objects. Well, it's not that big in the real world, but big in the sense of how complex the geometry is. Then it's nice to be able to decimate it so that you can keep your file size low. 1 minute later. And there you go. And now, if you export that, just to prove my point, if you export that STL, maybe with a decimate at the end of its name, and you export the SCL, it will not only be much quicker, but it will also be much smaller. There you go. So it's now only 20% of the original size, and maybe you can go even lower to 10%. But reducing the vertices always takes some time. So keep that in mind. Okay. So now that we've done that, and it all seemed to have worked out, we have one single piece of ring, which is also mashed together. By the way, if you have some problems because somewhere something stuck through the surface, which shouldn't, you can actually just go into sculpt mode and maybe go over there while holding Shift with any brush and smooth it out. Okay? So that would be a very quick way of fixing such minor arrows without having to go through all the previous stuff again. 24. Cutting Cutters: It's time to cut the cutters. In this lesson, we're going to cut some holes with our cutters. We'll use custom cutters behind the stones to make room for them so that they can really sparkle in three D, and, of course, maybe use this for three D printing and prepared for jam setting. If you now unhide all the stones, they should still sit in their correct position. This is thanks to the safety copies we created of the stone curves prior to meshing, joining and re mashing everything. Let's bring back the second three D view part so that we have the render look available. The stones still look relatively dull. So what we have to do, we have to cut out holds for those. So first, let's select all the stones on the ornament. Let's say we want cutters for those. Okay? We could create prongs. As you see, this foot results in this kind of look with prongs, and we could adjust their placement and everything. But for now, I think I just want to cut out some holes for them. Okay? So we select cutter. When bringing in the cutters, you have lots of options, but for now, we can just stick with the standard settings. You can even create your own presets in here. The most important thing is that these cutters are created in the same size as the diamonds so that we can use them to cut perfectly sized stone holes out of material. One important feature is the so called hole part, which is the lower end of the cutter, and is meant to create a slightly smaller drill hole below the part where the diamond sits. In the real life, these are drilled into the object to let in light, safe material, and also make the piece of jewelry easier to clean. So you can decide for yourself if you want to have these in here or not. Okay, so let's cut some holds here, and then let's go there. Select linked, select those stones, give them cutters, and the settings are the same as you used before. So this should result in the same only that we need to make them a little bit longer here because the material is thicker here. Alright. Let's select the stone curves and make them always visible above everything else. Under the object settings, we can also do that with the second one, and then we always see this stone curve like that. And for the side ringing, we can hide the extrusion, and there we can put it in front, and then we see all those curves all the time, which is handy for working with them like that. And like this, if we move that, all those stones will move with it and also the cutters, okay? So the cutters will follow the stones. So that's pretty neat. If we want to cut all those cutters out from the ring, we will need to select them individually. So select select linked object data, then we select the ring. And then we will use an add on which is called Bool tool, which is native to blender. So if you want to find the boll tool, you can go to the preferences and to the add ons and just type Bool. There you will find that and you can activate it. And if you want to have a nice name instead of just dt, which it has by default, then you can just call it Bultol and here. And there you have it. And here we can just create the brush boolean, which will not apply all the cutters at once. Make sure that the ring is the active object by selecting it last and then it will glow orange. If we use difference, it will just create a bunch of modifiers on the ring. My notice right now it has none, and if we now choose difference, it will take some time If that happens and it does not respond anymore, then close the program. And usually blender is so cool because I haven't made a safe for a while, but if I go in there and open that once more to file and recover auto saved. And that shows me that just 4 minutes ago, it did an auto save for me, which is awesome. And I will just click on recover. So one of the potential problems I noticed is that the cutters very slightly overlap, and this can become a big problem with booleans. If stuff overlaps, generally tends to screw up the whole process. One potential solution would be that we go in here and we select the stones. If you can't select them here easily then press Alt and click, and then you can say, I want to select the stone, which is always called round if you create it with a Jewel craft addon and then of course, the cutter will follow, and then you can manipulate it slightly so that it does not overlap with the neighboring cutter anymore. So you really have to zoom in here quite a bit to see that. But that is one solution that may or may not work. The second thing that we can do is we can just redistribute this whole thing on the curve. So what we need to do here is we need to select all the stones and our curve, which you might recall is the curve that all of the stones are connected to. Okay. So first, let's select one of the stones, and if that's hard, then you can all click and choose the round. Select linked object data or Shift L. And then shift select our stone curve. And you can also shift select the stone curve so that you can select it with this selection menu like that. And now let's go into the Jewel Craft addon and instead of distribute on curve, we will choose redistribute. Nothing should immediately change, but you will get back this menu, which we used in the first place to distribute all those stones. And you might recall that we can manipulate the start and end point of our distribution. And of course, we also have the option to take 1 stone out of this configuration. And in this way, we have a lot more space and the cutters, as you can see, they don't overlap anymore. So that would be the most straightforward way to fix problems regarding non ideal distributions. Just reselect the stones, and since the cutters are connected to the stones, they will always follow them wherever they get distributed by this function. Unfortunately, the brush Boolean function, which basically creates a lot of modifiers, depending on how many objects you have, will make blender crash in case of these many objects. And really, you have to think about what you want to achieve in this situation. So if you want to have more flexibility and you want to keep those bullions as modifiers so that you, in theory, can move all of these, and the stonehlls will move. If you want that, then of course, it would be good to create modifiers for each of these cutters. And you can do that with a brush boolean tool, or you can just go into the modifier menu and get yourself a boolean modifier and then select the cutter. Okay, so the effect would be the same. If you press slash, we're having only the ring selected, you will see that you have your stone hall pulled out of your ring. And, of course, because it's just a modifier, it's reversible, and you could select the cutter and move it somewhere else or move the whole configuration with a curve. The downside of that, it is not really useful to have so many boolean modifiers, because first, you always have to turn them off to move your objects because otherwise it will get very, very slow. And if you try moving all of these at once while having all the booleans turned on, it will take forever, probably, so I wouldn't recommend that. What we can do instead that is a non reversible operation, so watch out. What we can do instead is we can just join all of these cutters into one object. So we can click Select, select Linked Object data, select all of these cutters, and then press Control J. Now I can move that as one object. But obviously, if I try to move the stones, the cutters will somewhat move with them because this whole cutter object is still parented to one of the stones, but they have lost the individual connection to each stone. In essence, this is now not useful anymore. You want to redistribute anything. So you should be very sure that you want the stones and the cutters in this exact place. Of course, you can still go into Edit mode and select one of those and then move it somewhere else and move the stone with it. But of course, it's not as easy and straightforward as just moving everything together, right? Now you have this as a complete object, as one single object. And now, of course, you still have the option of making this into a modifier. And if you try that now, when all of these are joined into one object, just click the ring and you say difference. It will still take some time, but blender will actually not crash, as it will if you try to make all of these individual objects into bully and modifiers. Because now we have only this one modifier. If we select the ring and isolate it with slash, you can see that all of the cutters have been cut from this object. Very beautiful. And it is still reversible in the sense that we can just turn off the modifier and it will just disappear. The next option, of course, would be to just apply the modifier or to just use the auto Boolean function if I delete the modifier. Bring back the cutters, which have been transformed into this brush because we use the brush Bullion function. But we can just remove the brush, and then this big square will turn back into the cutters, and then we can shift select the ring. And if we now do autoblean, this is the exact same as if we now would create a modifier, put those cutters in there, and then apply the modifier. It just saves us some steps. Is, of course, the most final option because we can't even move those holes anymore. Don't have any modifiers. This has now become a permanent part of this geometry. So you really should only use auto Boolean or apply the modifier if you're 100% sure that this is where you want those stone holes to be. But of course, in handling this whole object and maybe rotating it around or doing other stuff, it is the most straightforward thing because you don't have to keep track of any other object that is connected to a ring of any Bolian objects. You can just handle it as one singular object and no bully and swell. Slow anything down. So you are very flexible in how you approach this. And for this particular kind of design, I will probably go just with the auto boolean because I just want holds at this particular place, and I'm pretty sure that I won't adjust it anymore, at least not for this project. So now, why did we do all that, of course, so that our rendering looks nicer. So if you switch to the render view, you should already see that these stones here, let's hide the tea menu, that these stones here and also hide the overlays already look a lot more glistening and not as dull as these on the side. Okay. So last but not least, now we have cut holes from this part and from this part. Now we still need to take care of the stones on the side. And, of course, all of these stones need cutters. So let's do the same as before, select Linked object data, select all of these stones. And give them cutters. And there they are very nice. If you want to ring manto folds as well, you can increase the depth of the cutters, but I don't want that, so I just leave it like that. And, of course, we need cutters on both sides, and the easiest way really is to join them and then mirror them over. You're sure that you don't want to adjust the placement of the stones anymore because just as with the ornaments, right now, you can move them all individually. And that's nice and all, and you should definitely keep a safety copy of the version where you have not joined any of these cutters. But for bowling them, it's really easier to just make them into one big object. So I will just select all of them. I will join them, and then I will give them a mirror modifier and bring them onto the other side across why. And in this way, we can just cut from both sides at the same time. And, of course, the same with the stones, but first let's take care of the cutter. So we have made this into one big object. Let's select the ring, and let's see if a boll tool helps us here as well. So choose difference. Alright. So now we have even more holes in our ring bend, which is awesome. But now, of course, we still need to mirror the stones over a bunch of them. Let's select the first one. Let's give it a mirror modifier. Let's use our Mirror empty to mirror it over. And now, how do we mirror all these others? Do we join them as well? Well, we could. But in this case, maybe we want to give them individual modifiers, and that's also very easy. So select the linked ones, object data. Make sure that the one with the miror modifier is the active one and then Control L and copy modifiers. And this will give all of them a mirror modifier. 25. Rendering Stones: Okay, if you've come this far, you're really into it, right? Then I have some cool stuff for you. Let's make some finer tricks to our render and add a pop of color. We are just lightning refined materials and add a bit of custom coloring to really make the design shine. It's the finishing touch to make everything look truly polished. And if you're a perfectionist, then this will be just right up your alley. So buckle up and come with me into the world of jewelry perfectionism and blender. And now, of course, the whole reason why we did all of that, let's get into one of our camera. And let's turn the rendezvous back on. Okay. Now the second thing, of course, let's turn all the background back on. And let's also turn the special stones back on. Oh, my. And that already looks so different to the version before that I'm absolutely falling in love with it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you render such a complex piece of jewelry with all the stones glistening and glittering. Of course, same goes for these stones. You can give them individual cutters and cut them out of the design. Yeah, you can see that the surface is kind of jagged. This is because it's shaded flat. We can, of course, shade this thing smooth. So the whole ring bend, let's try it. Let's shade it smooth. That can sometimes mess with the bullions, but in this case, I think it still looks very much fine. Can see some of those edges here. They might look weird. But for that to be completely avoided, the stone also got shaded smooth shaded flat again. For that to be completely avoided, you would have to subdivide it further before doing all the re mashing and stuff like that. So there's not so much that we can do here now, but I think it still looks very, very nice. And, of course, we could give this one a cutter, as well, and we could cut it from the ring. And that would hide the cutter automatically and also give the stone enough space so that the metal does not overlap with it. And there you go. And this should make it sparkle just that little bit more, and it would just look better. So here's the cutter again, here's the ring and boll tool and difference. And there you go. And the fire is already much brighter. Cool. So let's try rendering this ones more. And of course, this will take longer, especially if you have lots and lots of samples because that is just now a more complex piece of jewelry. And I also feel that this could use a little movement of the camera. Oh, it also looks nice from that point of view. Okay, I think I want this look, but for the other side. So let's bring back the shader for the world, let's rotate the sun a little bit. Oh, i. And let's rotate the plane a little bit. And you can play around with the lighting so much on air. You can really make shine. Just make sure that you try out lots and lots of different ways of lighting compositing this thing. It's so cool. If you can just give the different looks and different starts. This one is also pretty cool, I think. Can also make it float, of course. Okay, let's try that one. Well, if that's not a nice final result, that just sparkles like Christmas or more. 26. Recolor Ring Parts: Just in case, let's say you wanted the inner ornaments to be white, just as they were before. Let's isolate it. Let's go into edit mode. And now your task would be to carefully color all the pieces which are not the outer ring band. And unfortunately, there is no set recipe for that. But first of all, make sure that you are in transparency mode. And then you see to paint on all of these inner vertices. And that might take you a while, and that's okay. Just be careful that you don't color the outer part of the ring man. Like that. I mean, that could be good enough, but, of course, you can go make sure that you do this in transparency mode because otherwise, you might not select all of them. But once you have kind of the selection that you want, then you can create a new vertex group, which is found here under data, and you can call it ornaments and assign the selection. Let's just turn on the shader so that we see the color. Just to test it, you can click DeSelect and select O. Now we have the selection assigned, and then you go to color and then you click on plus here. So this means this object now has two colors. And but only one is visible. And for this, we will search for D we have some silver? No, we didn't. So let's give it gold as well. But let's copy that, and let's call it silver. So now we have one color which is called gold and one color which is called silver. Let's make that white. And now let's press a sign once you still have all these vertices selected. So in that way, you can already see where you missed some parts of the ornament, and you might want to re select the parts where you failed to select properly. And always be careful that you don't accidentally select the back. But if you re select that and you can click a sign there you see it also go much further in here, turn off transparency, to really be careful to not select anything else, and then click Assign once more. Like that. And also, I think down here. So for this, you might need to zoom in a lot and just work on it a little bit until it looks really good. Now you can update the vertex group to make sure that you have the new selection in there. And then, of course, you can just render it once more in the new version. And maybe this time from the other side, experiment with the lights. I had turned off this light all the time. So we can still, why is this not because I isolated it. So we can move that a little bit. We can play around with the visuals. If these stones look dull, feel free to also give them cutters. As you might have noticed, I don't always give all the pieces the same treatment just depending on what I aim for here. And if I aim for a nice render view, might not cut out all the holes for the stones. Let's try rendering it once more. 27. Wedges and Channels: Now, here's a time laps of how I continued with the model to create the wedge and channel cutouts below the stones. See this result in the animation I created from the ring. This was basically the same workflow like with the whole cutters. You can add them in the jewelry craft menu in exactly the same way. They are also initially parented to the stones and can be moved with them when moving the curve. However, when it came to booling, those, there were some problems. Lender had difficulties to bool all of them at once when joined into one object. So I first created all the wedge and channel cutters, and then I joined the first quarter amount of them with Control J, and then I tried booling. If that worked, I selected the next quarter amount, tried bowling again, and so on. A bit tedious, but that's Booleans for you. One thing initially threw me off. All wedge cutters and the channel cutters as well are initially linked to each other. So that's why you can select them with Shift L and say linked, and then they will all be selected. Also, what that means is that when you have selected one and you go into edit mode and adjust the shape or move and scale it, all linked objects are scaled and moved and rotated in the same way, which is super neat. However, when I joined some of them with Control J into one object, this link resulted in all the others also suddenly consisting of multiple cutters, and this looked like a total mess. So this took some time to figure out. The solution was to unlink them all prior. You can unlink objects by selecting them all. Then you go to the menu point object relations, and there you go to make single user, and there you choose Object and data. So that's a little bit hidden. But in this way, they get all disconnected from each other. And if you change one, then the others won't follow suit anymore. And once I finally got them to bool as chunks, I mirrored them over and everything looked fine and dandy. Oh, my. The sparkle. 28. Thank You!: Congratulations. You made it to the end of the class. I hope you're feeling as excited about curves as I am now. We've covered a lot of ground here, so let's quickly recap what we've learned. We started by diving into curve fundamentals, getting comfortable with profiles and different curve types. From there, we built our ring band and added some beautiful intricate ornaments using paths and bezier curves, depending on what you've chosen. You learned how to repeat elements effortlessly with arrays, gave those arrays a unique twist with different profiles, and then, hopefully, curved your ornament perfectly into ring shape. We took things to the next level by setting up our render, adding lighting, and refining our design for that polished, really professional look. And finally, we learned the quick trick of using the remesh modifier to make this, well, giant self intersecting mess into a 3D printable piece without having to bool anything. Alright. I hope this class has opened up new possibilities for you in Blender. If you're proud of what you've created, share it in the project gallery. I'd love to see how you brought your own style to the design. And if you enjoyed the class, leaving a review helps others find it, too, and also helps me to improve, so everyone wins. Yes. And finally, thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I'm excited to see what you'll create next, keep exploring, keep designing. Follow me here on Skillshare to get updated with the latest class information, and I hope to see you in another class very soon. Happy modeling.