Transcripts
1. Best Blender Course from the Ground UP - Introduction: Hi there. The newly
released blender to 0.8 brings back
the fun in 3D and 2D animation was
a huge new array of tools and workflows
that are easy to use. We'll cover the
brand new interface inside a blender and do a deep dive through
the written from ground up real-time
rendering engine evening, each chapter we'll
go over topics like 3D scene creation, modeling,
sculpting, texturing, creating animation rigs,
3D animation simulations, fire fluids, and
even 2D animation. Plus, we'll go over how to
render all of your artwork in a quick and easy way by
utilizing either EV or so. If you've used Unity
or Unreal before, a real-time rendering inside of Blender is going to
be very familiar. If you've used 3D Studio
Max, Maya, or ZBrush, there's even a blender industry standard PMAC
that you can use, so you can quickly jump in the versatility
of this software. It is absolutely amazing. It allows you to create
artwork for games, movies in animation, all
within a single program. And incredibly,
it's free to use. And today we're going to begin a brand new journey,
reading articles together. Are you excited IF Let's
get our journey started?
2. 01 Getting started with Blender 2.8 - Course First Steps: As this is a big new release, a blender, I want to make a few assumptions and set the ground rules for the rest of this course. First, I want to assume that you've never used blender before, but that you are familiar with general 3D concepts like the viewport animation and the Graph Editor. Next, we're going to be using the standard blender shortcuts. However, if you're familiar with Blender 2.7, you can switch to those. Or if you've used Maya and ZBrush in the past, you can switch the industry compatible. However, for our course, we're just going to be using Blender. Next, we're going to be using select with left, the spacebar will play. And finally, we'll be using the blender dark theme. However, you can always switch to blended or light if it's easier on the eyes. But don't worry, it won't change any of the shortcuts. And finally, we're at the end of the blended 2.8 beta development cycle. So while everything has been locked in terms of features and UI, a few small things may change here. For example, the naming of something. If anything, it will still be in the exact same place as we are going to be going through in this course. If you have access to the exercise files for this course, you can download them to your desktop as I've done here. Once inside, you'll see a bunch of files that we're going to use throughout the course. A texture that we made for a monkey that we're going to rig a little bit later on, a quick UV map. Another textured monkey, an animated character that I created and you can play along with and a video that we'll use in the VFX section for compositing and camera tracking. Okay, now let's jump into Blender. Blender is new interface, takes advantage of a lot of modern graphics technology and trends. At first, it can be kind of overwhelming. So in this video, let's take a look at all the things you can do it. Now, over here on the left, when you first start Blender, you'll see a couple of things under new file. These are your workspaces. And for the purpose of this video, we're just going to go to general. But don't worry, you can always hit Control N and switch your workspace to another kind of workspace like 2D animation. Let's go back to general. Now, here is your viewport. This is where all of your 3D will happen. So you have your camera, you can left-click selected and move it around with g. And you can hit T to open up your tools panel and activate other cool tools like this rotation. Now if you hit and over here on the right, you'll see your Transform panel comma. So if I click on this cube, I can rotate it just by left clicking, dragging any one of these values. And you can even see the dimensions of that object. And this is in metric. So those are meters. Underneath here you have tools that are dependent on which tool you actively have selected. And underneath that is your view options, which controls the camera that you are currently looking through, but not the scenes camera that's over here, and it has its own options in the properties panel. We'll get to that in a second. The cool thing about this though, is you can switch your focal length to get a really wide view or really narrow view. And if something ever goes to a value don't want, you can always right-click and go to Reset to default value. Sometimes a default value might be really high. So this case I'm just going to type in 50 MM for millimeters. And there we go. Now above the viewport, our whole bunch of workspaces. And you can click on them really quick. And you'll see that each one activates a different kind of layout for your scene. For example, under sculpting, you have the sculpting mode. And under animation you can see we have the dope sheet down here and a camera view, and your 3D view. You can even create your own custom workspaces, which we'll talk about a little bit later. On the right is your Outliner. Your Outliner is your list of all the objects in the scene. So in this case we see we have a camera, a cube, and the light that's over there above it is a thing called a view layer and a scene layer. Now these are pretty deep topics, but overall, a scene layer is everything in your scene. There's a few layer is which one of these kinds of things are on or off. Let's see, customize those. Next. At the bottom is your timeline, which we can bring up over here. And you can move your playhead or actually play things. Later on. You can even set animation by hitting auto key-frame. And finally, on the right is your properties panel. You're going to spend a lot of time here as well as each and every object has its own kind of properties. For example, when I clicked on this cube, you can see all of this extra data appeared. But when I click on this light, some options disappear because this light doesn't have as many options to manipulate. And same with a camera. You'll see that once I click the camera, a little camera icon appeared here. And I can click on that and check out all of my camera properties or go up to my object. And I can see all my object properties. And here I can control the same things that I could up a nitrogen source. And there you go. You can see how each one of these windows reacts with the other one. Okay, now I know that was a lot to take in. So let's dive in a little bit deeper into the viewport. As we begin our journey in Blender 2.8, I wanna make a couple of assumptions. First, you're not familiar with the previous version of Blender at all. But you are in general familiar with 3D concepts like animation, 3D viewports, et cetera. Next, even if you are familiar with Blender, we're going to be using the blender shortcuts included into 0.8 and not the original 2.791. If you're familiar with Maya or ZBrush, you could use the industry compatible shortcuts. But mind you, this whole course will be using the default blend, the 2.8 shortcuts. Next, we're going to be selecting everything with the left mouse button. I know a lot of folks like the right mouse button. But again, to keep everything default and fresh, we're going to start with left. Next, I want to set the spacebar to play as that's what it is for default. Although tools and search are equally really valuable, buttons set it to. We're going to use play and F3 for searching. Next, you can pick whichever theme you want, blender dark or blended light. But I'm going to stick to dark because it's kinda nice on the ice. Now, at the time of recording this course, we are at feature and UI lock. However, some small things may change like tooltip pop-ups or the name of things. In general, everything's going to be in the same spot and all the tools and shortcuts will be the same. Now one last thing, if you come up to Edit preferences, bring this over here. I recommend you go to System and enable cuda if you have the option to. If you have a 1080 or similar graphics card and a pretty decent CPU, you can check both of these boxes because you'll get a lot of performance boost. For some folks, you'll be able to use OpenCL. Now if you don't see any compatible hardware support here, or if you're using a Mac, don't worry, u2 can also have a great blended 2.8 experience. Now that we have a good handle on how to move around the viewport, Let's take a look at some of the more advanced Viewport options and overlays. The first thing right off the bat is object visibility. This lets you turn off objects that you don't know otherwise want to look at so you can focus on other things. Of course, if I turn off the mesh, you won't see it. And I can left-click and just drag all the way down and just keep going until I turn off everything that I don't want. And in this case, all if left is a camera, I can turn this back on and turn off visibility. You can also turn off select stability. So in this case, I won't even be able to select the mesh, but I can everything else. Come back here and turn that on. And let's keep on going. Viewport gizmos. When you select an object, you can turn on the default gizmos. Now let's see, rotate, scale and move just by grabbing one of these sections. However, after a while, you'll get pretty good at G, R, and S. Nonetheless, viewport gizmos are really quite handy. You also have the navigate gizmo at the top right here, which you can use to change views really quickly. And you have active tools and active logic is most that I'll let you know you have selected. I like leaving these on and occasionally turning these on if I need to see what the axis of the object is. You can also turn on and off gizmos for the cameras, lights and other objects. Next, our viewport overlays. These are two-dimensional overlays or your 3D objects. The most common is the grid floor. And from here, you can even scale the grid and change it to wherever you want. There's a 3D cursor, texts, info updates, annotations, and all the other extra stuff that goes on top of an object. You can also left-click jag and hold to turn these on and off really quickly. Can even turn on Wireframe. So if i X delete this, shift, a monkey. Come back up here. You can see different wireframe options to let you preview your object a little bit better. And even turn on face orientation just to make sure that everything's pointing in the correct direction. Next is x-ray mode. This lets you see behind the object. It's really handy when you hit Z and go to wireframe away, you can see the full three object. However, you can always turn off x-ray. And that way you get a really nice clean wireframe to look at. It's up to you and it's a really handy tool over here. Or the shading mode options. You can access this by holding down z and seeing this pie menu to pick whichever one you want. By default, on Solid. I'll turn off x-ray mode really quick and explore solid by hitting this little drop-down button. There's a lot of options here. Mad cap is like a quick material they can put on objects. It won't render, but it'll give you a really nice idea of what you're looking at. Studio is studio lighting. You can click here and select any different kind of light that you'd like. And you can even click this little button and move the lights. Again, this won't affect rendering. It's just for preview and working inside the viewport. Underneath here are a whole bunch of options and it's really nice to demonstrate it with a few more objects. So hit Shift D and just make a few more monkeys. Now come back up here. Could disrupt down and you can click on random. And this is really handy because it'll randomly assign a color to each, every single object you create. Of course, if you've done any vertex painting, textures, or material, you can also click on those and have those colors appear. But when you're constructing a 3D scene, having random on will help you see each and every individual object. For now, I'll switch back to object mode. There's also different backgrounds that you can pick, or you can just specify whichever one you want color wise. Again, this is all for the viewport. It doesn't render that way. And finally, a whole bunch of extra options that let you modify how an object looks inside of the 3D view port. Okay, let's move on to the next one, which is look dev mode. Look dev lets you quickly preview lights. If these monkeys had any materials on them, or colors or textures, you could use this option to preview there lighting in different case scenarios, like in the morning and darkness or other places like even indoors. You can also rotate the light and play some with the background. And just like in solid mode, none of this will render. It's just, we're previewing it inside the viewport. Finally, there's rendered mode. That's this button over here. And it will click down this drop-down. There's nothing because at this point you're rendering. If you switch your render engine two cycles, you'll see a little pause button. Well that will do is when I kick up the viewport to say 200 samples, I can click on pause. And hopefully I caught it. Pause it right before it renders all the full samples. This is really handy if you have, for example, really big scenes, a lot of monkeys, I can hit unpause and then pause it. So that way I'm not spending a whole bunch of CPU cycles rendering. However, you'll note that now that I've paused it, it's kinda baked it to my scene. So I had to unpause it to restart that render and then pause it again. And then you get this cool thing. And although it seems a little weird, It's actually really handy when you're troubleshooting renders. When you want to pause everything, change the color and something, and then unpause it and see how it affects. Using all these tools together in concert like overlays and shading methods will make you a blender Pro. The 3D cursor is one of blenders best innovations that allows you to snap to something instantly create brand new pivot points and so much more. Let me show you. To move the 3D cursor. You're going to want to hold down Shift and right-click. As you hold down Shift and right-click, you'll note that the 3D cursor pops around the scene. Once I get it to a point that I like, I can hit Shift S and snap my selection to my 3D cursor. I can hit Shift C to send it to 3D cursor origin and to view everything in the scene. And then hit Shift S selection cursor. When I shift, right-click out into space and then hit Shift a, any new object I make, like a monkey will be created right where the 3D cursor is that. Plus, I can now click on this cube. Shift S cursor to active. Select my monkey, Shift S selection to cursor, and snap my monkey right back to the origin point of this cube. So now let me move this monkey out. Select both the cube and the monkey. Shift right-click out here into space. And then I can either hit period on my keyboard or I can come up here and change my pivot point, the 3D cursor. This pivot point menu is the same as hitting period on your keyboard. Just lets you quickly select whichever one you want. So now with the 3D cursor out here, I can hit R and z in orbit around the 3D cursor or RR and rotate around. However, when I click on my monkey, I can switch my pivot point back to active element and rotate just around him like normal. So let's go ahead and do that. 3d cursor or z. Select the monkey period on the keyboard. Active element. Look at that. Pretty cool. Okay, Now I'm going to undo that Control C. I'm going to select this cube, hit tab, go to Edit mode. Picked these two vertices by left-click selecting G, Z. Move this up. I'm gonna hit period and go to active element. I'm going to tab out of edit mode. And I'm going to click on this 3D cursor icon over here on the left and then hit N two. Now, unlike this shift, right-click 3D cursor, with this tool active, it will happen anytime I left-click. If I switched my orientation to geometry. Anytime I click on a geometric face, my 3D cursor will get oriented along that face. You can see how the angle changes depending on if I click this side or that, or maybe part of the monkey or part of a set. The cool thing about this is when I create a new object like shift a cube, I can come down where it says Add Cube and align the 3D cursor. And on top of that, I can also change my transform orientation to cursor. So that let's pretend that I had my 3D cursor right here. Go back to selection, select my monkey, Shift S, selection to cursor. Now, when I hit G, z, or x, or y, it follows the orientation of where that 3D cursor is. That. Finally, if I click on view, I can see my 3D cursor has an orientation of 47 degrees. So I can hit Control C. Come back up here to this item. And right on a rotation, I can Control V and paste that orientation right there. And so now my monkey is looking down just like the 3D cursor. Finally, you can come out to overlays and turn off their 3D cursor if you want to. However, I highly recommend that you add it to your workflow as it's an incredibly versatile tool and it'll help you a ton and your 3D scene creation.
3. 02 Properties panel, Scenes & layers : A lot of the times when you're working in 3D, you want to go under the hood and look at all the specific parts of your scene and object. That is where the properties panel comes in. So let's take a look at it. It's this thing over here on the right. And if you just put your mouse in the middle, you'll see it changes to this cursor and you can left-click drag and get some more real estate. Or if you really want to, you can hit Control Spacebar and get a ton of real estate by maximizing the view. It's a Control Spacebar again, just so we can contain it here. Now let's start from the top. The very first thing you're going to see is your tools and workspace settings. If you hit N, go to tools over here. You note that these options mimic what's over here. So I click on Move, for example. You'll note that the orientations are the same. So it's just another way of finding where everything's at. And the cool thing is that you also have workspace, reconsidered the default mode per workspace. So when you make your custom workspace, you can pick whichever default mode you wanted to jump in, like sculpt or pose mode. Okay, Now let's keep going down. And over here you'll see your Scene tab. You can pick your render engine, set your samples, play with any of the settings like simplify or adding Ambien inclusion. And note that these will be different depending on which render engine you have selected. For our purposes, we'll just leave it on EV. Now let's keep going down and you'll see dimensions. And that's where you can specify the resolution, the aspect ratio. Sometimes it's actually really cool by the way, you can specify, for example, a 150% if you want to over render something, or maybe 50 percent, and that will just automatically scale your resolution values. Next, specify how many frames long the scene is. You can enable negative frames in the Preferences. A highly recommend you don't always gets nasty. But a cool thing you can do is set step. So if I were to set, for example, a step of ten, that means it will render every tenth frame. It's really handy if you want to preview your render before doing a very, very long render. Really handy to just skip through a few frame rate, of course, always standard. And most importantly, where is it getting outputted to? Now, typically you want to render out a image sequence, but if you want to, you can render out a video by picking FFmpeg, RGB and then specifying what encoding you want. Most of the time, people want mpeg 4 with an H.264 encoding. So that is where your outputs are. So let's just set this back to PNG. Next on the list is seen. And this is really handy that specifies each layer. If you remember, that's this option up here, we can pick which objects and collections you have available. And you can say what this layer is doing, keep on going. It's another scene tab. This specifies which camera to render from on with units and a whole bunch of other cool things. Here is world. Now this is where you specify where the world lighting is coming from. You'll note that nothing changes. But if I were to go into rendered mode, you'll see everything has this world color to it. And if you really want to, you can click this button and go to environment texture. And this is where you would specify an HDRI image that you may have shot outside or if you want. So you can just go to Sky texture and just get a nice free, easy to use guy by left clicking and dragging. Let's go back to Solid mode and keep going down. Now you might remember this from before. This is our object properties. So you can specify locations, rotations, scales, and specify what parents it is. Fuzzy, have a whole bunch of other options. Next are modifiers, particles, physics, constraints, object data of this is really handy. You can add vertex groups, Shape Keys. Vertex group is like, Oh, wait, paint math in a shape keys like a blend shape that lets you animate and change the actual shape by moving vertices around. And of course you can specify a UV maps here. Finally, our last two options and properties are the material that this thing is currently using. So for example, I could change this to a color and you won't see anything until you're in look dev mode or in rendered mode. So let's just change it to something green. There you go. And of course, what brushes you want to use if you're using a tool that supports it, like sculpting mode. And there you have it, an overview of the properties panel. Now trust me, you want to get really, really familiar with this whole area because you're going to be in it for the rest of your blended career as it allows you to do so much to your scene. Now, let's move on to scenes, layers, and collections. Let's talk a little bit about blenders hierarchy. There's three things that you want to know. First versus concept of a thing called a scene, as seen as a collection of literally everything inside a blender, everything, the render settings, the objects that are in there, to collections of view layers, all of it. That is a scene. You could click on here and make a brand new scene. You'll note that it's blank because, well, there's no objects in it. So you'll have to say Adam monkey to it. Now the cool thing about a scene is that you can have multiple scenes, like the first shot or the second shot. And you can be really efficient by hitting Control L and linking the object from one scene to another. So for example, let's say you had an animation that took place in a house. You'd have one scene with one set of Render Settings and depth of field and everything. And you can have a whole another scene that takes place in a different area of the house with its own render settings, lights, et cetera. But you could share the same objects like we just did with this Suzanne monkey. And if you were to change this monkey, so hit tab edit mode to sit G and move vertices tab out of that. Now let's go back to this other scene. You can see that this monkey shares the thing because it's linked between both of them. And I can hit G and move the monkey over here. And you can see that the monkey has moved over there as well. So that's one of the benefits of scenes that lets you have a whole brand new scene, but share the objects between them. Now, view layers are really handy because they let you specify different render settings per collection. So if I were to open this up a little bit, I could call this layer and I'm going to hit C to make a new collection. I'm going to drag the monkey into it. I'm going open up these filters and I'll turn on a handful of these. This one is renewability. This one over here is the ability for an object to be a holdout. That is, you can see how there's little spear here. Means that this object will act like a mask when it gets rendered. And this one over here is indirect light. That means that this thing is only visible indirectly, not directly, so really handy. But anyways, I can go ahead and for this collection, I could say, You know what, I want this to be a mask, just this monkey. But then I can make a brand new layer and we can call this layer 2. In this case, I don't want this to be a mask. I want the original cube cameras that are to be a mask. And maybe I don't want the camera in light to be involved in there so I can hit C Again. I can new collection and bring the camera and light down there. So that way now have a mask of the cube. And in my other layer, I have a mask of just Suzanne. So it's really nifty and layers that you customize those collections as a whole group. Now let's talk a little bit about collections. Frankly, you can think of them as groups. For example, I can right-click on this selection and just select everything that's in here. Or come over here and select all of these objects. And maybe I want to come over here and right-click and de-select photos. So collections act a lot like groups. Another cool thing I can do is called instancing. So that's where I take this collection and shift click, drag it in here with my left mouse button, and then let it go. And there you go. I've created an instance that is, whatever I do to this monkey over here will affect that monkey over there. Because this is an instance or like a copy of that original collection. And this little cross hair represents origins. So you can see that my monkey is not exactly an origin, but the closer I get to origin or hitting G and moving it there, you can see the closer the monkey gets the origin or that little cross here. Which by the way, if you really want to, you can click over here and change across here into anything that you want. Okay, so now let's come back up to Collections. Other cool things it can do is just turn off the visibility of that collection. Or you can hit shift one, shift two, shift three. Just depending on the order of these shift want I'll turn on our cube shift to turn on our Suzanne. And shift three will turn on everything else, including this instance, which is pretty nifty, used in tandem with each other. Scenes, layers, and collections let you have an enormous amount of versatility when building your 3D animation inside of Blender. Think of collections as groups. Think of layers literally as rendered layers are the way of organizing collections, whether they're a mask or not. And then think of a scene as all encompassing everything that you need inside the blender, all under one button. And the cool thing about it is that you can have different render settings per scene, even though you have the same objects. So that way you'll have to save the file as multiple names, get one file and have a whole bunch of scenes within it. Way more efficient. So in some scenes, layers and collections are the hierarchy and really the backbone of how blender operates. We touched on Workspaces a little bit in the beginning when we talked about hitting Control N and being able to select any one of these workspaces. So I hit Control N and I go to sculpting mode. You can see that I'm in a really different mode inside Blender. I can still use my middle mouse and move around. When I left-click and drag, you can see that I can sculpt. And then when it could control and again and go to animation, you can see again just by left-click and move it around. I can draw and I can even move around, but my whole scene is white. So what's going on here? Well, these are workspaces. Workspaces are just a collection of organizing the windows that you see inside the blender and the different kind of modes or tools that are available when you immediately switch to that. So let's take a look at some of the workspaces that are up here included by default versus layout. This is where you'll spend a lot of time inside of Blender. Next is modelling. You can see it switches us to edit mode. Let's tab if you are keeping along and you can go ahead and just move stuff around so you're in edit mode and you can see also your included all of these awesome tools over here on the left. We'll touch on those much later. Another cool thing about being in different modes within a workspace is contexts Menu. You right-click, you'll see that there is a vertex context menu. And switch to edge or face. You'll see that it changes to face context menu or edge context menu. It's really, really handy. Move on a sculpting. And over here, you can see this from earlier. We're in sculpting mode. This thing only has a couple of little dots, so you can't really sculpt too much detail in it. But my point is, is you can see up here we have switched to sculpt mode. And because of that, you can also see we have a whole bunch of new tools. In if I right-click, you can see that instead of having a context menu of options, I have the ability to change my brush size and strength. Move on to UV Editing. And this is what you think it is, the ability to edit the UV's over here so we can go ahead and click stuff and move that UVs around, of course, won't be able to really see any big change over here. But the point is, is you are in edit mode. Next, if a KM over texture paint, this case it's going to be pink because there is no texture attached to this cube. There was, and you'd be able to go ahead and draw on here. So let's just do that real quick wishes go ahead and make a new one. Zoom out a little bit and just draw a little. Now with this cube over here being pink, you can go to material. Come down over here where it says base color. Click on that. Go to Image Texture. Click this little drop-down, you'll see this thing called Untitled. And we're going to want to puff out of object mode, back into texture paint mode. There you go. Now you can see instead of pink, we have the ability to draw on a texture. The cool thing about it. So I can draw in 2D, or I can draw it in 3D. How crazy is that? Be careful, because depending on the power of your system, this may go really quick or this may go really slow. It's at the very least you can always use the solid mode and drop it. It will lag a little bit. Just again, depending on the complexity of the object and the power of your system. All right, moving on is shading mode, which allows you to specify what the material is here. And as you can see from before, we had our material settings over here. You can see this is the image. This is the material or shader that it's using, principled be SDF. And then it outputs to the object. And that is creating this effect. And down here you can see what the reflections are happening. Note that there are no shadows in this mode. This is just for look development to get a good idea of how your textures and shading will work inside of a rendered view. Next is animation mode, which is awesome because it lets you see the dope sheet down here, a camera view, and of course be able to manipulate your object over here. And really nice mode. Next is rendering, which should you go ahead and render an object? It will pop up here. You can close out of this window really quick. And you'll see that that rendered object is now viewable. Just click on untitled and go to render result. There you go. And you can go ahead and manipulate this and add any transforms, see what's going on with the scopes, etc. So rendered mode, it's pretty cool to use compositing. Let's do composite all of the stuff together. You're going to want to click on Use nodes. And then from here you can hit Shift a and add a whole bunch of nodes to do cool things like blurring, et cetera. And then finally, for those of you really brave among us, scripting, where you can use Python and go ahead and write your own scripts to run inside a blender, because it is completely scriptable, having full access to it with Python, super-duper, cool. So that's a brief overview of all of the workspaces. Now let's take a look at how to make your own workspace. One of the cool things you can do in Blender is customize the entire view to be in your own way of working. We call that making a custom workspace. Let me show you. First, you want to click this little plus button up here. It's going to ask you, do you want to base it off of a previous workspace or just duplicate current. So let's just do that. And then I'm going to double-click here and I'm going to call it my workspace. Now, you see this little rounded off corner. I'm going to left-click and drag it right about here. I'm going to do that again to this bottom right corner, left-click, drag up. Here we go. I'm going to click here to choose my editor type. And I want to go to shader editor. I'm going to hit N to get more real estate and zoom in by holding down Control and middle mouse seen in. I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to switch to image editor. There we go. And finally, I'm going to go to my workspace options over here. Click it down, and I always want to go to Edit mode. Although I could pick any other mode if I really wanted to. So every time we switch to this workspace, edit mode will appear. Now as you get more advanced, you can even see can add and filter out or on different add-ons. So it's really, really awesome thing to customize the way you work up here. I want to turn off my gizmos because I really want maximum real estate. And I'm going to click on this little button. I want to turn off cameras as well. That way I can just focus on the object so no camera, no light. Okay, now let's switch to another workspace. Let's go to like UV Editing or sculpting, something like that. And then click back on my workspace. And you can see that my workspace and all my settings and editor types have all been saved, including showing what mode I'm in, in this case, edit mode. Now another cool thing you can do is add a thing called quick favorites. So let's go into edit mode by hitting tab. And let's say that you always tend to sub-divide something and you can right-click on it and always add a shortcut, but maybe you don't want to do that. You just want to be able to add it, but not always bind it to key. So if you right-click on it and go to add a quick favorite, then inside of say, Edit Mode here, I can hit Q and sub-divide comes up. The cool thing is that I can do that to anything, including things that do have shortcuts. So for example, let's say I always triangulate faces. Right-click Add to Quick favorites. Now hit Q triangulate faces, and then sub-divide, and then triangulate faces and then sub-divide again. Pretty cool. By using the combination of both customized workspaces and click favorites. You can make Blender work in any way that you wanted to.
4. 03 Shortcuts adding & creating objects: There's a lot going on under the hood inside a blender. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to manipulate any of the preferences who can really customize blender, the how you want it to be. Now the first thing is the startup file. So if I go to File defaults to see, I can always load the factory settings or I can save a customized startup file. Now, here's the thing, your quick favorites. If I go to tab Q, you can see my sub-divide and triangulate are still there. They'll transfer no matter what blend I'm using. But my workspaces are dependent per blend file. So if I had a custom workspace, let me just make one really quick here. And just to make sure that it's a custom workspace, we'll just move this over here and switch this to a random editor and click outliner. What I wanna do to save that workspace is go to File. Defaults save startup file. So now when I start a brand new blender file, my workspace is already saved and Verdi use and including, if I go to tab cue, my quick favorites. Now let's come up to Edit Preferences and look at some of the cool preferences that you can manipulate. The first one right off the bat is resolution scale under interface lets you do quite a bit, so we can change that to whatever you want. I'll just leave that one for right now. Of course, you can turn on and off tool tips and other interesting things. You can come to themes and customize the theme to whatever we want. Blender, light, blender, dark. Or if you're really ambitious, you can go ahead and specify color for each and every single user interface option. Under view-port, you have more items that you can manipulate and play with, including the ability to limit the size of textures. If say you don't have a lot of video RAM on your video card, you can go to lights and specify your own issue arise under editing. You can specify, for example, what things get duplicated when you hit Control or Shift D. Under animation, you can change how you set keyframes, whether it's visual or only insert what you need. You can even have warnings for auto keyframe if you leave it on by mistake or, and this is dangerous, you can even turn on negative frames. Add ons are like plug-ins for blender that are distributed by the blender Foundation and developers around the blender world. You can turn them on or off in Blender ships with a whole bunch of them already by default installed. You're going to want to hit the checkbox to make sure you turn them on or off. Input for those of you without a numpad in a highly recommend to have one for Blender because it makes it a lot faster to use. But if you don't or if you're on a laptop, you can emulate the numpad. So that way the numbers one through 0 on your keyboard emulate the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, cetera on your numpad. So for example, if I were to come over here, I can now hit one and go to my front feel my Num pad or one on my keyboard. Or I can hit 55 to switch between the two. It's really handy if you're on a laptop. I'll turn that off for now. Under navigation, you can play with your navigation settings. K-map. Now this is really vital, especially if you come from other 3D software or previous blender versions. You can pick using old blender shortcuts. Or if you're used to Maya and ZBrush, you can go to industry compatible and that will use the Maya and ZBrush hotkeys, really Hindi. Over here, you have your famous left-click or right-click select, depending on which one you want to use and what you want your Space-bar to do. For example, you could come over here and hit Spacebar and you can see every single command inside that blender. And you can just type it in like smooth. And can come back to my Edit Preferences and switch that to anything else that I want it to be. But by default, I'll leave it to play. And even get some really cool options like extra shading pie menus. I really like this because if I come back to my view here, I can hit Z and I get even more options, like toggle x-ray. Let's go back to our preferences and go to system. Over here, I can specify my cycles rendering device. So if I have a really beefy graphics card, like a G4 GTX 1080. I can turn that on and then it'll give me way more power and the ability to use cycles a lot faster. Welcome to save and load. This is going to save your life right here. Autosave, auto stable happen every two minutes. That's actually a good amount, but you can always come up to say versions and have a few. Extroversion is to save. And finally, file paths for those of you using Windows, it'll default to your Windows fonts directory for any fonts that you have, your auto saves and other files will be saved in this directory. And you can even specify where your render caches and outputs will go. And the cool thing is, is all of those gets saved automatically. Unless you click this little hamburger icon and turn off auto save. And that kids had to actually literally click. Save preferences. But I'm just going to leave it on. And if I ever need a reset, I can just go to Reset to defaults. And there you have the ability to customize blender and change it into any kind of thing that you want it to be to make your workflow a lot easier. To grade the scene inside a blender, you're going to need to add some objects. Now it's actually quite simple to do that. You can come up here and go to Add and click on any kind of objects you want to add. Or you can hit Shift a and add an object that way. Now, I'm actually going to delete this cube. So I'm going to hit Delete on my keyboard. I'm going to hit Shift a, and I'm going to pick something interesting, like Ico sphere. Now without clicking or doing anything else, look to the bottom left. You'll see this little dialog box that lets you adjust what you just added. So I can change my subdivisions. Be careful not to make that too. Hi. I can change the radius and I can even change the location and its initial orientation and Generate UVs. You can actually do this with almost anything. So I'm gonna hit X to delete that and shift a. Let's just go ahead and add a Taurus. You can see you have even more options and I can play it with this little options box is really handy. But the moment click on something else disappears. So just be aware that it only exists the moment you actually create that object. All right, let's get rid of this torus. We're going to hit Shift a and I can add a Bezier curve. Those are really cool. I'm gonna hit tab. I can go ahead and adjust the tangents just by hitting G and clicking on the points. That is left clicking on those points. And if I want to, you can hit a to select everything, Right-click and go to subdivide. And then G to move this new thing that I've just sub-divided. Or I can undo that Control Z. Here we go, right back to this point. Right-click again, subdivide in, remember that little options. We can go over here and change how many subdivisions I want to add. That's pretty nifty. So there you go. That's how you can use a Bezier curve. So we can just delete that and hitting delete on a keyboard. You have the ability to add NURBS surfaces. Those are pretty fun to use. Metal balls. Metal balls are really interesting. If you shift a and add a couple metal balls, just move them around and you start to get this. Well, there's really no way to explain it. It kinda looks like Plato kinda looks like I'm at a ball. It can even shifting and duplicate and scale and rotate these and it starts to create this weird kinda cool object. And if you want to actually use this, no longer have attached to a metal ball. You can always hit F3 on your keyboard and typing convert to, convert that to a mesh, then you'll actually have an actual 3D mesh to use. So metal balls, there are interesting, just a little weird. So I'm going to Shift click all of these and hit Delete on my keyboard. Let's see what else we can add. We can add some text. Taxes, really fun. You can hit Tab on your keyboard, throws you into edit mode Backspace. You can type in anything you want, hello or hi, and then hit Tab right on here. And now you have a text object that you can manipulate, move around, or do whatever you want with. Let's delete that, shift. A next thing is Grease Pencil. This is important in 2D animation, so we'll talk about that a little bit later. Armatures are really handy. Armature is effectively a rig, if you're familiar of other 3D software. There are three modes to an armature. There's the object itself, which lets you manipulate the entire thing itself. And then there's Edit Mode, which lets you add parents and hierarchy. Can hit G and move this over and hit E to add another bone here that's attached. And then there's pose moon, which actually is more for animation and gives you a whole other set of tools. If I right-click, you can see all of these awesome animation tools that we'll be talking about later on in the course. Let's go to object mode and hit X to delete that shift a, we have lattices really useful for modifying your objects. And these are just simple empties that they contain no information there just really handy to use to show off anything really in your scene. Another interesting thing you can do is Shift a and add an image either to your background or actually floating in your 3D scene. So if you have an image handy, you can just click on this reference and then find an image and then load that and it will appear right here in your scene. Pretty nifty. Whites are really handy because of course it can't have a scene in 3D without any sort of white. And we'll cover a lot of these more into flutter, along with light probes, like probes, on the other hand, are specifically for EV and they allow you to capture light and bake it to your objects. Super-useful. Cameras are of course very useful. And don't forget, you can always come over here and change which camera you want to use. Cool thing about camera is that you'll see this little border here. You can click on that and move it. Let me show you what that's doing. It's changing the focal length. So that's really handy. Syntax and delete that. Speakers are for audio. Force fields interact with your objects that have physics or particles going on. And of course finally, collection instance, which we talked a little bit about earlier, are literally adding instances to your scene of collections that already exist. And there you have it. That is how you add objects to your scene so you can populate it and create something really awesome. Now we've talked a little bit about edit mode in the past. And in this video, I'm going to go even deeper with our cube selected. Let's just zoom in and hit Tab to go into edit mode. And you'll see right away there's all of these awesome tools that appear. A couple of sub menus and even more menus up here. So let's just take a look at some of my favorites. First going to hit a twice the de-select everything. There we go. And right away, if I hit 1, 2, or 3 on my keyboard, you can see I switched from vertices to edge to face mode. So that's really handy. When I'm in Vertices Mode, I can right-click and I get a context menu that is dedicated just to vertices. You can also hit Control V. And there are some different options in here, but very similar ones. If I go two to the edge and then I right-click, I can see I have all these extra options. And the same thing is true also in face mode. When hit three right-click, I have a bunch of cool options here, and many of these will mirror what you see up in here. And a couple over here on the left. Now the cool thing is if you leave your mouse over here, you'll see the shortcut appear. So let's just go to my favorite tool first. Extrude. And you can do that by hitting E, the go. You can extrude something. If remember this little dialogue box on the bottom left, this lets you adjust the tool. But remember once you click away, the tool goes away itself. Let's just come to the next one. This one is bevel, the shortcut for that is controlled BY. So let's go ahead and Control B that you can see we have way more options. You can do some really cool stuff in here. Let's just hide this here. The next one is loop cut. Use this a lot. The shortcut is Control R. Or you can just click on the tool. But let me click here really quick and use the shortcut Control R. I'm actually just going to hit Enter. Click over here. And I can specify the amount of loop cuts. Now rather than hitting Enter, I can also hit Escape and have a position the loop cut exactly down the middle. And then of course, I can do this to get nice perfect down the middle cuts. Now when you're working on scenes like this, you probably want to be able to select edges really quickly. So if edge mode on, I can go ahead and click on an edge to get that entire loop. Or it can hold down shift to get that whole loop. You can hit a twice a de-select, or I can hold down Control and Alt left-click select and pick a whole ring. If I hold down Shift, Control Alt, select, left-click. There you go. I can now have multiple rings. And then it can hit a twice to de-select everything or hold down Shift and get any kind of combination of rings in loops selected. Now, if I go over to face mode, I can pick on some of these faces and hit E and bring these out. Of course, I have some options here. But let's just take a look at what happens when I right-click here, you can see a whole bunch of extra options appear like sub-divide. I can click on sub-divide and do some kind of fun stuff here that might recta geometry if I smooth it out. So let's go ahead and do that. Come back up here and go to object mode and hit Control 1, 2, or 3 on your keyboard. And what that's gonna do is it's going to set a modifier that subdivides your mesh. Now if I come back here to edit mode, you can see that, you know, it is kinda running that mesh. You can see there's a lot of weird edging happening there, right? So hit tab, I can see what the offender is. It's all of these edge loops. So let's just get rid of them without destroying the geometry. And hit a twice a deselect everything, hold down Alt and then shift. And ultimately it just left-click and select all of these offending edges. You can see they're all selected. And you now they are offending because they're not connected to anything. You see, they just kinda terminate right in here. And then I'm going to hit X, dissolve edges. Now, this is super-duper cool. Dissolving will actually leave the face intact or the vertices or whatever intact, and just get rid of the things up until a point that it doesn't record anything. So you can see here, there are no vertices or no edges because it doesn't need any. We just dissolve them. That's almost as if you had gone through each and every one of these and merge them. All of these little points by hand. And that's crazy. So don't do that, just use dissolve. If you're really brave, you can hit day twice and go to limited dissolved in which Blender will attempt to do that, the entire mesh, or at least everything you have selected. But as you can see here, it does sometimes mess things up. Like for example, then over here you've lost that nice hard edging that we had. Well, believe it or not, blender also has an option that you can use to get this edge really hard without having to add so many extra cuts. And to activate that I want to do is right-click and go to edge crease. The shortcut is Shift E. The cool thing about this is with a subdivision modifier on, I can just drag this and rather than manually adding a holding edge, that is a little edge right at the bottom, I can just crease it and it gives me that really nice edge. Let's just do that again. Shift E and look at that. Now if I hit Tab, I get this weird shape. But hey, it looks pretty cool. All right, well, let's finish off this object with one more thing. Let's just go to faces a to select everything. Face, Shade, Smooth, tab out of that. And look at that. We have a nice smooth, weird thing. No idea what it is, but it's pretty cool. And we made it in Blender off a couple of clicks. And there you have it. We've now gone ahead and made a quick object in Blender and explored some of the awesome things that you can do inside of edit mode. Now we've talked about editing an object inside a blunder, but they do know you can edit multiple objects. Let's pretend you had a few things in the scene. So let's grab this cube and shifting added over here. And shift right-click. Put my 3D cursor here, zoom in a little. Shift a lets us add a monkey, move them up so we have some real estate. And now shift left-click all of these and hit Tab to go into edit mode. And you'll see that I'm editing all three at once. Even though tab and edit mode, they are all separate objects with their own name and everything over here. I can edit them by using the awesomeness of multi-object editing a site of Blender. The cool thing is, is I can, for example, Control F, come over here and shade smooth. Or I can right-click sub-divide and come down to my sub-divide and push that up here. And maybe I can go ahead, go into wireframe mode. A twice a de-select, and I can hit C and just grab a handful of vertices over here. Does it matter which ones you grandma honestly hit Enter and I can hit Control Plus or Control minus to select more or less. And if I'm really crazy, Let's go back into solid mode. I can hit E, enter, and then Alt S to fatten. And you can see what's happening here. I am fattening in adjusting all of these objects simply by using edit mode on all of these while they're all selected at once. Now one more thing that's really handy about this is the ability to snap between everything. So I'm going to click on this little snap tool, come over here and go to vertex. And then I'm going to grab a vertices over here. Make sure in your vertices mode, if you're not at a twice, if you needed the select stuff, grab a vertices G and move it over to wherever I want to move it to. Here we go. Then I can see wireframe select all of these, hit Enter Z solid and just snap it to the monkey. Then I can tab out of this. And you can see all of these are completely separate objects, but there are snapped exactly where I want them to be snapped. More importantly, I'm able to edit them all at once. Multi-object editing is really, really powerful inside a blender. Highly recommend you add it to your workflow.
5. 04 Snapping, origins, and modifiers: Now let's say you've gotten yourself into a bind. It's going to Edit Mode. If all the vertices selected, Let's just move the vertices somewhere. Maybe scale and a little bit, maybe even rotate them. Maybe you've moved stuff around and then tap out of that. And as you can see, my cube is offset from the origin. But if I want to rotate R, R or move, it's using this little orange dot that an origin point than I had been well used to from the beginning. The problem is, is that I want to rotate it around the center of this thing. And now how would I do that? Well, there's actually a few options that you can do. The first is to shift, right-click and motor 3D cursor somewhere, anywhere really read like it, rotate around, that is where do you like the object to rotate around? So say I put the 3D cursor right here, shift right-click. Then I can come up to here, then go to 3D cursor. That's my pivot point. You can access that by hitting the period on your keyboard and you'll see this pie menu. So 3D cursor. And I'm going to rotate it and you can see that it's rotating about that point right there. That's pretty cool. The downside is that I really, really want to rotate it around the center. And also the other issue is that this pivot point is still out here in the middle of nowhere. So another thing you can do is just change the origin. So to do that, you're going to want to hit F3 and your keyboard, and then type in set, origin. It Enter. And you can pick on any one of these. I'm going to pick origin to center-of-mass via the volume. And look at that. My origin is right in the middle. So if I hit N to come up the transforms, I can see that now my origin is here. If I want to, I can hit Alt G and that will reset my origin right to the middle. I can also hit Alt R, the number reset my rotations. But of course, I had done these rotations in edit mode, and unfortunately, I can't reset those, but at the very least, I can reset any of the rotations that I've done to the object itself. So for example, it's just x delete that Shift C to center the scene in my 3D cursor. Shift a, let's add ourselves brand new cube g. Move R to rotate. Oh, look at that. I'm still under 3D cursor, so let's set that to median point. Or you can also set it to active element. I'm going to rotate it and come up here. And I can see you have all these crazy rotations. Alt are Alt G, that will clear my locations rotations and put it back to center. Now, one more thing. What if you wanted to go ahead and apply that location rotation? Let's say that you had it over here and you wanted the origins come back over here to the center. Well, in that case, you will hit Control a or if you're searching for it, apply. Apply, right? So I'm just going to hit Control a Apply and I'm going to apply all transforms. And will that will do is effectively make the origin at 00 000 and keep my object in the place that it was a here. Well, in the middle of nowhere. Let's pretend I hit Tab and I really, really want to snap the next object I make to this vertices right here. So what I can do is I can hit shift S. It's going to bring up a pie menu. And I want to go cursor to active the move my cursor right to the active point tab to get out of edit mode, shift a, and I can add anything. So let's add a monkey. And you can see the origin point of that monkey appears right there, right where I had it snapped before. And that is how you snapping origin and transforms inside of Blender. Trust me, adding these to your workflow will really simplify and clean up the way that you work. Making a great model inside of Blender is one thing. Modifying it and adding a whole bunch of cool stuff on top of it is a totally separate but equally awesome process. Now to take full advantage of this, we should actually model something really fast. So with this cube, I'm going to hit Tab until our control R. I'm going to hit three, select these faces, Control B to inset them. And then grab this one down here in the middle, hit S, little bit bigger, bring it down a little bit. And then finally, I'm going to hit Control R again. And I'm going to scale this in a little bit, true R and leave it there. And let's just go down to face. Let's just grab these down here and scale them in. And we have now a rudimentary pot. Alright, so hit Tab and then hit Control 3. And you get this kind of weird shape happening. Let's go ahead and go to modifiers. And you can see the first modifier is subdivision. So what that's doing is it's changing what the viewport seize control 1, 2, or 3 on my modifiers. Now modifiers, when you click on here, are broken up into multiple categories. The first is modify. What that's gonna do is modify the actual data of your object. That is the UVs or if you have normalcy, want to transfer, etc. The modify category modifies object data. It's a little complex for this video, so we're going to move on to the next few, like generate. Generate will take your mesh or object and generate more geometry or less geometry. And we can play with that here in a little bit that generate effectively works on your geometry. Deform, however, takes your current geometry and without adding any more or less, deforms it in, reshapes it into other things. And then finally simulate. Simulate talks to the Physics tab is side a blender and the particle tab inside a blender. And while you can't necessarily modified particles of physics, but it's doing, is it's giving those physics properties of place in the modifier stack. Now this is really important. For example, let's say you had a simulation of particles flying around and you had collision going on. So whenever the particles hit this object, that would collide with it, well, if I put the collision here, the particles are going to collide with the smooth surface. However, if I move this up, the particles would then collide not with a smooth surface, but instead with this blockier, harder surface. All right, so it's like order of operations. So that's why the simulation tab is here, even though it has no options, is it's just a GIF physics, a place in the modifier stack. So let's click here and we can kill physics for now. Alright, now let's go to Add Modifier. Let's play with a few of my favorites, like array. Array does exactly what do you think? It arrays and objects in lets you quickly duplicate them. And because it's an array, if I hit tab, I can go to one. I can move one of these defects, all of them. Check that out. You can hit Tab and get out of that. And another cool thing I can do, click on Copy, close this here. This is my second array now that's been copied. I can hit 0 here. I can type in 1.2 over here and look at that. I have a whole bunch of pots to smash for. I really wanted to. So array is really handy. Next is Boolean. Boolean is really handy if you have another object. So let's just go ahead and hit Shift a. And let's just add my favorite, the monkey. Move him over here, scale him up a little bit of a move here. Click on here. I'm going to click my little eyedropper. Click on the monkey. Now I'm going to grab this monkey. I'm going to turn off its visibility really fast in the outliner. And I can see here that my monkey is cutting into my pots and turn on that monkey really fast and move them down a little bit. It will slow down your system a little bit. So be careful about that. Turn off the monkey. And you can see that Boolean is effectively cutting into the pots. There's a whole bunch of options with Boolean that you can play with. Next is decimated. Now, this may slow your system down, so be a little bit careful, but decimate is how you take an object and reduce the polygons on it. Now again, as I mentioned earlier, it may slow your system down. You can see it brought the faces down quite dramatically. And in the process of that, it does kind of mess with the general topology. That is the way the faces and edges and vertices are laid out. But it does reduce them by a big, big amount. In this case, about 13 percent or so. There's another algorithm called an sub-divide that you can play with. That's pretty good, especially if you have models made with quads or planar. That's also really handy. That looks for flat surfaces. Given a certain angle, you will like decimate quite a bit, especially after sculpting. If you have something really flat, solidify as a way to make flat things text thicker. Once you start ringing, you're going to be using the armature modifier quite a bit. And another cool one just to play with is simple to form. Now, just by enabling it, you get some really weird stuff here. And you can just play around with the angles and well, simply to form your object, It's pretty cool. And then on top of that you can hit Shift a and say go to empty. Just move this empty anywhere. Click back on our pots. Click this little eyedropper, click here. And wherever I move this, a simple deform happens. And note, because simple deform is at the bottom of the stack, you can see that the Boolean that the monkey is doing is happening before it. Thus it translates with it. So watch what happens if I put the Boolean below it. Now the Boolean is below it and it only cuts the bottom part. That's because the monkey is down here at the bottom. So that's why the modifier stack is really important because it's an order of operations depending on where you have the modifiers into stack could drastically change the way your object looks. Now I recommend you go ahead and play with a lot of these modifiers because you're going to be using a lot of them throughout your blender journey. Constraints allow you to build relationships instead of blended between objects quickly and break them just as easily. Let me show you. First we need to separate objects. So let's hit Shift a and add monkey. Good, all suzanne, There we go. Next, let's go ahead and click on this cube. Click on this little tab. And let's just go to child of, that's my favorite constraint. That's the one I use for well, everything is sometimes I don't want a parent an actual object parented to the other thing. I just want to constrain it to the other thing, because then I can break it. Let me show you a child constraint on click this little eyedropper and then click on Suzanne. Now it's going to snap over there, but that's okay. You can click on Set inverse and this cube of snaps back to its original spot. Now whenever I move this, the cube moves along with it. The cool thing about this is that let's say I was animating this. So let's just hit eye, location, rotation scale. Move my play head here, left-click dragging it. Come over here, hit eye location, rotation scale. And let's just say right in the middle, I wanted to let this cube stand perfectly still. When I can do as I can hit, I write here, okay, sure, tuition scale. And then on the next keyframe, hit eye visual location rotation scale. And then hit this little X button. You're going to want to key that right here too. So let's come over here and let's make sure we had to have a keyframe right here. So I just by hovering over it 0 to one, make sure you click that little X button and bam. That little thing keeps moving even though the cube no longer follows it. Even though there's a child of constraint connected to the two. So that's one of the most powerful constraints that you will use throughout all of your blender work. Okay, Let's look at some more of them. So and Control N general scarred. And let's hit Shift a to add a plane axis and just move it up. Let's click on this cube. Come down here to constraint. And let's add a track to same thing. Let's click this little eyedropper, click on the empty, and there you go. This is now aiming wherever the EMT is, works a lot better with a monkey. So delete the cube, shift a at a monkey. Track two. There we go. Now the monkey is facing it the whole time. They're going to tell me, you know, it it's fixing it the wrong way. That's okay. You can have this little axis shifts. Let me open this right here. You can switch it from the default y to negative y. And now the monkey will correctly face this empty. So Track 2 is another constraint that you will use quite a bit. Now let's click on this monkey and let's look at one more constraint that I like a lot. It's called copy transforms and it's a little unique. So first let's go ahead and shift a at a cube and bring this down a little bit, G and Z. There we go. And I'm going to hit Tab. I'm going to select only these top vertices. And then I'm going to go to object data. That's this little one right here for ticks group sign. And then let's come to this monkey tab out of edit mode. Click on a monkey, go to constraints and Constraint. Copy transforms. Click eye dropper, click on the cube. It's going to snap down there and then go to group. Now, the monkey is sitting on top of this face. And whenever I click on this face, I can go to Edit Mode right up here. Make sure that those vertices are selected and I can move. Well, you can see what's going on. I can hit G and just move around and my monkey is dancing hiding in a box. How cool is that? And I can rotate it and get a little bit of an angle there. Of course, I can scale it. It will not change its scale because it's only capturing the rotation and location based on where the normal of this face is, or in this case where the vertex group is. This is a really handy little constraint that I actually use quite a bit, especially in rigging. And that one is called Coffee transforms. Now like all things in Blender, there are a bunch of constraints and they all do amazing stuff. So I recommend you get in there and play a little bit with them. Because trust me, you will add a ton to your workflow. Now this video is all about looking under the hood and an object's data. In fact, that's what we're going to talk about. Object data. And there's a whole bunch of things that objects are made up of. In the case of a mesh, we're going to focus on a couple of key things that make up the object data. First is the vertex groups, Shape Keys, uv maps in geometry data. So let's start with a vertex group. I'm going to hit Tab and a twice to deselect. And let's just select a few vertices, doesn't matter what Shift Left click, Select, click Plus go to assign a twice to de-select. I'm going to hit Select it. We'll re-select those vertices. Now that's pretty cool. You can also come up to Edit mode and go to wake paint. And you can see that wherever it's red, that's where I've assigned something. Wherever it's blue, means vertices is not assigned to that group. So if I make a new group, you'll see nothing is assigned to it. And the cool thing is, is I can go ahead and paint a color in-between those, like a green or a red or an orange. And that will give it a certain weight to that vertex group. And we'll talk a little bit about this more in depth. But the point is, is that vertex groups correspond to what vertices is attached to what vertex group. And it's really helpful for everything from particle physics to armatures, et cetera. So let's get out of that and go to Edit Mode. The next thing is shaped keys. Scroll first you need to hit Tab, make a base of shape key, and the mic, another one. And let's just move these really quick. Make sure you've made to shape keys by the way, you want to move the vertices on the second one, tap out of that, and you can move this value up and down and adjuster shape keys. Be careful. Some modifiers really mess of shape keys. So you might have to be careful when you add your shape P or when you add your modifier. The next one is uv maps. You can actually have multiple uv maps, which is a concept we'll explore a lot later in the course, but this is where you could select and adjust your uv maps. And finally, geometry data. And really, all I want to say about this is if you ever important object from another program, say using the FBX or OBJ format. Sometimes those edges won't be right, they won't smooth correctly, or they'll just act weird. Your first thing to do is to come to Object Data, geometry data, and clear any of the split normal data. In this case, this cube is made inside a blender, so there's no custom normal data. But you would see a little x and you can click on it and remove it. And trust me, it'll save you a ton of headaches trying to clean up the meshes. Just check normal split data. Now I know this is a brief overview of the object data inside of Blender, but being familiar with what's going on in here will help you troubleshoot and solve a lot of problems in the future.
6. 05 Cleaning up scenes & 3D Sculpting: As we wrap up our section on creating scenes inside a blender, I want to talk about one thing that we sometimes forget and that just being clean. Whenever you're working inside of Blender, you're going to create things like animation or images or really anything. And you're going to try to remove it, but it's still going to just linger in the background. Let me show you. For example, she's hit I and let's just set a keyframe. Doesn't matter what you use with this play head and smooth it over here. I hear you down, doesn't matter really what we're, we're not really worried what is exactly going to be. Now click on this little timeline button and go to dope sheet, go to Action Editor, and then hit X. And you'll note the animation goes away because we've removed it. But where did that animation data actually go? Did we actually delete it when we hit the X? Well, if we go to dope sheet, we don't see it. But if you come up to the outliner, you can go to orphan data. And you can see that the action that is our animation is right here. Now here's the thing. All of this data can clutter up your scene and make saving take a lot longer. So it's often good to just go ahead and just do that really fast. Purge and look at that. We've gone ahead and removed all of our orphan data. Sometimes you can't purge it because it has an f on it. And that stands for fake user. That is, even though the brush darken is not attached to an object, that is nothing is talking to it, nothing connected to it. You still don't want to delete it because using that brush for sculpting and painting is actually really useful. So you protect it by having a fake user sort of a come back to my action editor and make a brand new action. In this case, you'll see a shield, hit that shield and then hit x. You can see that that F is now there, that f corresponds to the shield. That means fake user. That means every time I save and reopen the file, this action will not get deleted and it will not get purged until I turn off that user. It's no longer attached to anything. Now I can hit Purge and it'll go away. And there you have it now you know how to purge data. Trust me, it's really useful when you bring in heavy images or actions or other objects and they just bogged down your scene and you have no idea why, even though you've deleted them from your file, learning how to purge data will save you a ton of headaches and make you work a lot faster. Sculpting in Blender is incredibly fun to do. Now let's just jump in real quick by hitting Control N and go into sculpting. This will enable sculpting mode, and it'll give us a nice sphere to use and play with. Now remember, this is just the sculpting workspace. You can always switch to sculpt mode. Whenever you're in edit mode or object and you're in state, the layout workspace. And also you might have noticed that all of your workspaces disappeared, but not really. If you just hit this plus button, you can go to general layout and always come back to here. Now let's switch over to sculpting mode and take a look at what we have here. First, you have a whole new array of tools that we're going to be exploring throughout the chapter. And on top of that, if you come over here to the right and click this little button, just drag this over to get some more real estate. You have a whole bunch of new options that let you manipulate your drawing sculpt brush. Now, to sculpt, all you literally have to do is hold down, left-click and push down. If you have awaken tablet or similar device, whenever you put pressure, Blender will acknowledge that as long as this little button is checked on, I'm just going to leave it on for strength. You can see as I push down on my way com tablet and get more shrink out of it. Of course, I can always push this up a little bit and then just gently go with my way com tablet and you can see what's happening there. Or it can go really hard. You can see that it's really pushing it out. Now you'll also note that there's symmetry involved and that's down over here. There's x symmetry, but really, you can turn them all on if you really want to. And that way you can get kind of a cool Mario Coupa shell thing going on here. See that? Or maybe kinda looks like a cartoony Darth mall or something. But anyways, sculpting in symmetry is really handy, especially if you're sculpting something like a face. We can do one side and it'll mirror to the other side perfectly. Now, as you're sculpting, you might notice that there's a little bit of ridging, little bit engine like polygons, if you will. Well, actually you're right. If you click down here and turn on wireframe, you can see the actual wireframe of the mesh and Howard forming it. However, if you want more detail, you can come to didn't TOPO, hit this little checkbox, open it up, and go to smooth shading. And now let's set this 12 to say six. And you can see that it's a lot finer. Don't see that edging that you do over here. It's a lot nicer AC of course, a little bit of it, but it's not as bad. If you really want to go crazy, you can go down to three or less. And so that way when you do some sculpting, it gets really nice and smooth. However, if it come back up to my wireframe overlay, you can compare the amount of geometry that say our original sculpt did versus increasing the detail size. And you can see how really tight it gets over here. Didn't tuples really awesome. And depending on your computer, you probably want to leave it on because he can really sculpt a lot of amazing stuff. And later on in this chapter, we'll talk about reducing the size of it, but maintaining the detail. I'm going to leave it on for right now and turn off this wireframe overlay. Now let's talk about a couple of more things. Namely, the size of your brush. If you hold down f, you can make it really fine, really big. Let's go really fine. There we go. And you'll note that we're always pushing everything out like we're adding on top. But over here in our tool settings, you can see that we can also subtract. So let's hold down f, get a nice big area. And then subtract a bunch. Will there be careful, depending on your system, you probably just made a bazillion polygons. Let's just check that out really quick. Yep, that's going to be really heavy. So if you notice that sculpting those a little slower for you, you may want to set this thin TOPO a little bit higher because you're generating a ton of polygons really, really quickly. And there you have it. A nice little overview of the tools for sculpting and blender. And the next video, we'll talk about some of the brushes that you can use to sculpt even cooler designs. Now that we have the basics of sculpting down, let's dive a little bit deeper into the brushes that are included. And remember it to hit Control N and go to sculpting mode if you're already not in sculpting mode. And over here on the left you're going to see a whole bunch of really interesting tools broken up into a few groups. Blues generally add or bring the volume out more towards use the balloon up an item or draw on an item. Reds kind of cut things down or maybe fill in gaps, but they definitely remove volume. Yellows are really interesting. They allow you to Paul and really drag different parts of your mesh show. It's almost like you're grabbing them with your two fingers and pinching it and pulling it out. And then finally at the bottom, you'll see a couple of really interesting ones, whites and blacks. Those are mass, and we'll talk about that in another video. So let's go up to the draw tool and come over here to the right under Tools. And let's pull this open a little bit to get some more real estate. And of course, you can just left-click hold, drag and draw, and you get some really cool stuff happening here. Now, I know that the blue tools in general ad, but that doesn't mean you can't subtract with them. If you just click on Subtract, you'll be able to cut out a piece here. All right, Let's just leave it on AD for default. The next tool is called clay. If I come over here, you can see a kind of well kinda muddies the whole mesh a little bit in it kind of feels like clay or a little bit like a playdough. So it's a nice thing that you can put on top of your sculpts if you really want to get that clay ish look. Next is clay strips. So that's taking the same concept but doing it in a strip form. And remember if it's coming out really edge like that, you can turn on then TOPO, dynamic topology and then smooth shading. And then kick this down to say six. Hit Enter and try that clay strip again. It'll look a little bit better. If it's still not looking great, you can even go down to one or three. That'll add a ton of geometry. So be careful. I'm going to leave it off for right now. Okay, on the left, I'm going to move to the next tool, which is called layer. You can kind of think of this as like making a plateau. See that looks like a nice little plateau. Next is inflate. Now for this whole down f and drag your cursor out. Then click. Sometimes it'll snap like this. If you're on the way com tablet, it'll let you do it twice. But once you get a nice big radius here, or you can change it over here on the right. Just go ahead and draw over stuff and you can see that it's inflating, turning it into like a balloon ish kind of shape. And naturally, you can also deflates if you just hold down and move, you can get some really interesting forms. Now, I'm going to actually undo that one Control Z. That way I don't get those weird edges happening. And I'm going to make my radius smaller just by holding down f. Alright, the next tool is blob, sort of similar to draw. Just a little bit more bulbous. After that is crease. And this is where you can get a really interesting crease for really tight kinda edges. Can imagine, say like clothing or say the edge of a pillow. You can get that nice creased shaped going. Moving on down is smooth. This is another tool you want to hold down F and then just really drag over and you can see it's smooth, everything out. Look at that. Nice. After that, It's fattening contrast a little bit similar to our previous tool that made this plateau. It just flattens things out. But be careful it can really flatten things more so than you wanted to. Now this one's interesting, fill and deepen. You're going to want to find a crevice here. Really won't do much over here. But wherever you have crevasses, like in this little valley that we made before. It'll try to fill that crevice out. It's actually really handy if you had made a mistake earlier, but you can't undo it. You could use this fill in deepen tool to really fill this all out. And then in combination with say, smooth, smooth out that edge. There you go. Moving on down the line is scraped and peak. It's literally like taking a scrape. It works better as a smaller brush. Just scraping things by C that. And finally pinch and magnifier through this section. And in this case, I actually want to kick it up a bunch, make it just a little bit bigger with F. And let's find some edges, some soft edges at that. Here we go. We had this edge right here. Just going to harden it up or pinch. And you can see how it pinches those edges. Now if you're tired of coming over here to hit radius or you don't like hitting F. Remember you can always right-click to change radius and you can even change the strength. Now let's take a look at some of these tools. This one is grab. Like I said earlier, it's almost like you're pinching and pulling things and look at that. You just literally grabbing geometry and pulling it where we want it to go. Right under that is snake hook and this, well, this is like grab. But let's use snake things around and be careful because it will wreck geometry. If you don't have enough. You can try a little bit of dynamic topology to help out with that. And you don't want to move too quickly, because if you move too quick, you'll just get nothing. And within 24 laugh. You get a little bit but you can see you start to get a little bit of tearing. See that tearing isn't great. That's why dynamic topologies really handy with this. Especially if you move slower. If you move too slow, you get something, you get whatever that is. So leave that alone for now. Thumb is similar to the other two, especially grab literally like grabbing your thumb and just thumb minute just pushing it in a little bit. And you just get that nice little push in. You actually really got to work it. And honestly, it's really good for fingernails. Yeah, that kind of whole bunch of weird fingernail shapes happening here now. Okay. Next is nudge. Now it's a little hard to see nudge without wireframe on. So let's turn it on, turn off dynamic topology. And let's come over here. It's a little bit more uniform F. Let's make this a little bit bigger. And I'm just going to grab a nudge and start moving in a circle and you can see what's happening. We're getting this like hurricane like shape. And that's what nudge, Let's see. Do you literally are just nudge and particles, slow molar to thumb, but just allows for a nice wider array, whereas thumb forces it in one direction and that's it. And finally, the last tool we'll take a look at is rotate. Now, this is a bit like Nudge. All you can get really crazy, really fast. It was like a tornado going through my mesh. Rotate. Let's actually make it a little bit smaller. Rotate is like a faster nudge. You just got to be really careful though. May want to actually pull back some of that strength because it can go carets easy, really fast. It's almost like there's a thing underneath the mesh and that looks really awesome. But just be little bit careful because if you kick it up too high or if your radius is too high, you end up getting some weird tearing effects. So there you go and get a nice little rotate. And we can come up through our overlay, turn off wireframe and take a look at it. Alright, so there you have it. You are now a sculpting master. All the tools. And it's up to you to create an amazing sculpt inside a blender. Sometimes when you're sculpting and blender, you want to focus on one tiny specific part. How do you do that? With the cunning use of a mask? Let me show you. Go ahead and just paint some stuff, doesn't matter what, just get in there and do some stuff. Here you go. Looks interesting. Weird, cool stuff over here. Now at the bottom left click on Mask. On the top right here, Let's come to the tool settings and bring this alphas and real estate. I'm going to set the strength up to one, right-click and set my radius down a little bit. And then just paint a mask. And it doesn't matter what, she's going to paint some interesting shapes here. See what we can get. Like a triangle shape. Going to fill this in because cemeteries on it's going to symmetrized that over there. Okay, now come to draw. Let's make a big brush right-click. Let's make the strength a little bit higher and just start moving. And you can see that it is obeying where the mask is by not raising that area. So you can make some really interesting forms. And then when you're done with it, you can click on Mask, subtract, get rid of it. I always recommend a bigger brush and we can get rid of it really quickly. Remember symmetries on, so it is removing stuff. And now that I'm done with it, I can go ahead and say put down 2.3. Wishes try that. I'm going to hit F and make my radius smaller. And then I'm going to click on Add. And I'm going to paint really hard in the middle and just really soft along the sides. Now let's come back to our draw tool. Click up there, shrink a little bit, and just start painting. And you can see what's happening here. You're getting a bit of a gradation of strength from the outer edge to the inner edge because it's obeying that mask. Basically just feathering it in. However, at a certain point it'll just drop off to nothing. So painting with a light mask is sort of useful, but it is still sometimes dangerous. So I always highly recommend painting with a mask of one and then just smoothing out anything if you really want to get that nice gradation. To do that, click on Mask, subtract, turn up the shrinks to one. Let's go ahead and erase all of this. And then go to the smooth tool right here F to make a big brush and just smooth it out. And that's a little bit more of an elegant solution than trying to paint a mask with a gradation to it. And there you have it. You have now mastered the art of Blender masking and are thus one step closer to being a blender sculpting master.
7. 06 Making your own sculpting brush : Pact of all of these great tools for sculpting what could make it even better? Why making your own brush, of course. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to make your own brush or if you have a stamp or ready-made how to import it. Now make sure you're in sculpting mode. If not, you can always hit Control N and go to sculpting. You want to come up to this top right corner, drag it over here, gets some good real estate. Switch this to image editor. Switch this to paint. Come down here to this texture. Let's open it up and click New. You'll see nothing. There'll be black. If you already have a black and white image, then you can click on open and bring it in here. Or if you have an alpha mixture that that is checked box alpha is on. If you don't have one, then just go ahead and click on new. We're going to give you some quick settings. The type ends, I'm going to say my brush. I'm going to make this two case. I'm gonna hit the right arrow key star to right arrow key shift Number 8 to get that star. And then type in to hit Enter. It'll multiply each one by two. And W2 K texture. You don't need to make it a 32-bit float. Crazy. And really for only high def stuff and everything else can just do the same. Click on OK. Now over here, come up to your tool settings texture. It should already be loaded. If not, you can just search for it in here. And finally, click on this little shield button that'll protect it next time you close and open Blender up again, or you purge orphan data. Because you might switch between a few textures and you want to save each one of them for painting. Now over here in this pane window, come up to this little drop-down and look for my brush. In, zoom out, Control and middle mouse, just like in regular blender. In hit T for tools and for a bunch of options. If you need some more real estate, you can drag this over here, shift middle mouse, drag it over some. Maybe zoom in a little bit too if you want. Now you only need really black and white. So I'm going to just leave this on weight. That looks good. I'm going to kick up the shrinks to one. You can hold down f to change your brush size. Or you can right-click, Change your radius right here, strength and of course the color. And finally, if you go to fall off, bring this up over here. You'll see some Preset curves that you can play with. If I pick this square and then hold down F, You see that my brush has a hard edge that hit Escape. Let's pick this one over here. Hold down F. Now has a more natural kind of fall off. And you can pick whichever one of these super fancy. I'll go with this one. Alright, so now just draw something. If you have a tablet that has pressure sensitivity at the push down a little bit to get it working. That's this button right here. Make sure that it's on. If you don't have a tablet or you're using a mouse, that's okay. You can still left-click and drag and play along. Just get like a cool little Smiley face. You know what? She's go full open smile here, big open mouth. Why not? Okay, Now the next step is to come over here into sculpt mode. Hold down F, and you'll see little happy face. Now my pop off to the side here. So there you go. Just line it up. F, get it right about where you want it. You might be asking yourself, why is it falling off to the edge here? You see that kinda falls off to the edges. Well, this sculpting brush also has the fall off. You can see right here, you can't switch it to just four. Then when I hold down, as you can see, it's nice and strong. I can right-click to get a lot of strengthen their hand. Finally, just to plant the guy, I'm just going to click a bunch. And I'm gonna come over here and Stanford again. And of course, if you come over to the right, you can turn on dynamic topology. So this is six and then smooth shading. Then you can stamp. And when you stamp you'll get even more granularity out of it. But in general, you've now been able to stamp a cool brush right onto your 3D model. Sometimes when you're stamping, you might notice a little bit of weird warbling in weird edging that's happening. That's a bug that's being worked on. And you can always turn off dynamic topology and just add more topology to the sphere. Because it doesn't really happen when you just do it this way. Congratulations. You have now created the creepiest looking spear and you've learned how to make a custom brush for your sculpting. Here's the cool thing about sculpting. You can really generate some amazing, high resolution, beautiful stuff really, really fast. Here's the bad part about sculpting. You can generate really high resolution stuff that is not going to deform nicely. There's going to be really hard to animate with if you actually want to move these things. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how to reduce the geometry so that you can use your 3D models in animation. Now, all I'm doing is just sculpting some stuff. That's it. You can be whatever you want. It really doesn't matter. Just add some cool stuff. And when you feel done and ready to go, then come up to this little plus button. Go to general, go to Layout. Now this is going to bring you into layout mode. It's an old, familiar place. You might still be in sculpting mode. So if you are come up here and go to object mode, you're gonna see this mesh. Now if you hit Tab, you can already see how dense the geometry is. It is fairly well constructed, but it's just really dense. So what we're going to want to do is hit Shift D to duplicate it, and then m. And let's make a new collection and we'll call it low-res and then hit enter. Now if you hit one on your keyboard, you'll have the high res version that you hit, two on the keyboard, see on the right and the outliner. We now have the low res version, although we haven't actually lowered its resolution yet. To do that, come down here to modifiers. Click on modifier. Look for decimate. Now, decimate is super cool and depending on what kind of mesh you have, is a whole bunch of options to use. If I come up here, I can go to wireframe and I can see that I have some really good quads. So let's try and sub-divide first. And just honestly hit the button until you get something that you like. And you know, maybe something's look good within other things don't look so great like down here. You can then subdivide again. And you can see some things that great over here. And after they don't look so good over there. So on sub-divide isn't too bad. You just need to know that there's going to be some trade-offs depending on which mode you pick. And in my require a little bit of hand cleaning, like down here at the bottom. The next mode is planar. And what it's going to try to do is say, are there any edges that are planar, that is within five degrees of each other? And so if there are, I'm going to actually go ahead and collapse those edges and vertices to make less geometry. You can see what it's doing up here. And you can say that this vertices is about five degrees off of this vertices. So everything between it, it's just going to get collapsed away. It's not a bad mode. And of course you could up the amounts of angle limit and get some really interesting results, but it sometimes doesn't look too good. Let's go ahead and actually turn off the overlay. I mean, it's not bad. It could work for electric good background prop. Another thing you can do is collapse. Now there's nothing inherently bad about collapsing because it will try to maintain your meshes general topology. But the downside is that you can see it really, really racks were all the quads are in adds a whole bunch of triangles. If you turn off overlay, you can actually look at it and it looks fairly decent. In fact, if you come over here and turn off these options, you can kind of compare a and B and see what they look like. But at the end of the day, you, as the artist need to pick which mode that you want to use is going to be collapse on sub-divide or planar. And the cool thing about all of these modes is that they each have a bunch of extra options on top of it. For example, I can even pick a vertex group, only decimate and leave the others behind. So I recommend you get in there and play with all of these options and see which one looks best for the sculpt that you're making. So that way you can go from a really high resolution mesh here to a really low resolution mesh. We can use it in animation over here. Now there's one more thing we need to cover before we're done with sculpting. And that is Bacon, a normal map. And the previous video we talked about remeshing to get a low resolution mesh. But what if in your sculpt, you wanted to save some of these really fine little details. There's no real easy way to do that when you're remeshing. And you could theoretically paint a texture by hand, but that would be crazy. Is there a simpler way to capture all of this tiny little detail in your mesh, especially after you have refreshed it and decimated it. Why? Yes. Yes, there is. So go ahead and just sculpt a bunch of stuff. That's all I'm doing right now. Actually. I made like a Harry diver mask kinda guy. We'll just go with that, right? Anyways, we wanna do is right-click, set that radius a little lower than usual, 18 or something and just get a whole bunch of tiny little detail. That's all we really want. Now come up here, click the plus button, go to general, go to Layout. You may still be in sculpting mode. So make sure you're in object mode. Click on this little dude, zoom into him. Let's hit Shift D. Enter M, new collection. We'll call it low-res. And we'll hit two on our keyboard. None are numpad, but two on our keyboard. That way the first collection goes away. Still here, it's just not visible. Then let's pull this open a little bit. Let's come over to modifier, and let's decimate this really fast. And you know what? It doesn't matter how you decimate it. So I'm just going to go to wireframe and I'm just going to drag this all the way down. Kinda wanna get like the worst, the worst possible decimation, right? Okay, maybe not the worst, but I really want to get rid of a lot of detail. I want to keep it nice and simple. So maybe I'll do 0.075 trying to get rid of any of those weird little harsh points like that one. Let's try 0.08. Alright, that's not so bad. I'm gonna come up here and turn off my wireframe overlay. You can see that there's some hint of it. You know what? Let's actually go a little deeper. Let's go point 0, 5. Let's just get rid of all of that really tough detail that was in there where I want to make it as smooth as we can. Okay, there we go. So now 0.05 and I want to go ahead and apply it. That way. When I hit tab, I have this mesh just already like this. There's any weird points like this. You can always just click on it and just move it over a little bit. There you go. Here's another one. You can hit G and G, moves it along the edge, cleans it up a little bit. That's better. Now, make sure you're in edit mode again, tab it a, you smart on-ramp. And you want to give your unwraps a little bit of regions. So just that these little arrows, then click Okay, tab out of this. Let's bring this over here. And we're going to click on this. And then we're going to go to Image Editor. And we're gonna do this one more time. Grab that bottom left edge, bring it about halfway up. Click on it again shader editor and hit n to get a bunch of real estate and T went up. Okay, So now what you've done is you've decimated the smash. It's pretty low resolution. And if I hit one on my keyboard, I can see you have the higher resolution version hanging out in this collection. Okay, So now how did we get this detail onto this mesh? First, you're gonna wanna make a new image. So up here, make sure your image editor mode, click on new. We're going to call this bake. I always recommend making a high-resolution bakes. Click here. If your arrow key to the right, star four. Let's do that again. Star for this time, please click on 32-bit float. We need all the bits we can get. Click on, Okay, This would be a big image and you can zoom out for a little bit. There you go. Now, down here in this shader editor, zoom in, hold down Control and middle mouse come in and out. Shift a. We're going to look for texture, image texture. Bring that over here. You can hit G or you can left-click and drag it. Click this little drop-down and click on bake. Come back up to render settings. Switch this to cycles. We're almost done. Click on bake. Okay, So now what are we doing here? Well, cycles is going to bake the high-resolution geometry to the low resolution one. But in order to do that, you have to have an image selected over here. And you actually have to make an image and it's has to be 32-bit. Let's come over here and click this little eyeball to turn on our high resolution version. Click on it. And then Shift-click on your quad sphere. You want to make sure that the low-resolution one is selected the last. And you can always tell because it's a little bit brighter. Now, over here in the bake settings, this is where the magic is going to happen. Click on big type, go to Normal, click down this selected to active, turn it on. I always like to set it to about one meter. And that's it. Just go ahead and hit bake. Now, depending on the speed of your computer, if you look down here, you can see that the texture bake has begun, might take a little bit of time. So just let it run. It is a big, big image. All right, now we have a nice big that has occurred. Now remember, you're going to want to hit this little shield button to protect this image. Case for any reason, you in a purging orphan data and you lose all of your baked stuff. It's nice and high resolution. So let's come down here into the shader editor. And you can see it says bake. So click on it, bake. Move this over here, hit Shift a search and type in normal map, normal but normal map, it entered color to color. Click dragging that, and then normal, the normal right down here. Now, go ahead and hit two on your keyboard. Or you can just turn off the collection up here. Let's uj, all of this over Bunch. Can always middle mouse drag this over here to get some real estate. You can turn off the gizmos for right now. And finally, let's click on look dev mode, which remember, it's going to use EV to generate the look of everything, but not generate any shadow information. It is little light dough, so we can go to base color over here and drop it a little bit. Or we can click this drop-down arrow, click on this, and pick any one of the options that are available to you, doesn't matter which just pick one card like this, sun City once I'll pick that. And anyways, if you look, you can see that all of that detail is in there. I can also rotate this around to get some different views. Pick on another one. Let's try this one. That one looks pretty cool. So you can see that there's all of this detail here that wasn't there before. For hit one on my keyboard. I can see here is the high resolution sculpt. I can tell because this collection is on. And then if it hit to my keyboard, I can see that, hey, this one also has all of that high resolution looking stuff. Even though if you look down here at the bottom right, it is literally way less geometry. If I go up to 1 over 24 thousand faces for hit to my keyboard, I am at 2400 phases. So that ladies and gentlemen, is how you bake a high resolution detail from high to low inside of Blender. As any sculptor will tell you, this is the biggest thing that they always do because these sculpt in all his amazing detail and you don't want to lose it. And blender, even though there's a few steps involved, makes the process really painless. And best of all, it saves all of this amazing detail. Now before we leave, I want you to come up here and you'll note that there's a little image and a star. Click on that and go to Save, and save it within your project folder. Because even though you're protecting it, you never know in case you need to refer to it back again later. All right, now you know how to sculpt high-resolution geometry and still save the detail. So get in there and go crazy because he can always break it down.
8. 07 Basics of unwrapping 3D models : As we move down the pipeline, we come to the next step, which is UV editing. That is, we're gonna take our 3D mesh in, unwrap it into a 2D image so that we can paint textures on it. Think of the planet Earth. You've seen 2D images of Earth rate. At the top where you see North Canada and Greenland, it gets all stretchy. But then the rest of the planet looks fairly normal. And then it happens again at an article way at the bottom. Well, that's what we need to do here. We need to take the 3D genus of the planet and unwrap it into a 2D map. So to do that, let's go ahead and hit X and delete our cube. Hit Shift a mesh monkey, come down over here and turn off Generate UVs because that would be cheating. Now come out to UV Editing in, zoom in, and you'll see that there's nothing over here. That's because he has no UVs. If you look on the right there is in fact nothing under UV maps. Okay, So now just with your mouse over the 3D view, hit you, unwrap and you'll get this. Oh boy. Now what's happening here is a blended is taking this full continuous mesh and unwrapping it across this 2D image. It's a little Genki, but that's okay. We can clean it up and try different modes of unwrapping. In fact, if you hit U, you'll see there's a lot of different ways to unwrap. Let's take a look at a couple of smart UV project is probably one of the best ones out there. You'll come up to this new window and you want to set a little bit of a margin between every one of these. In fact, if you look at this, you'll see that there's this big island. And then these two little islands. That's what island margin is an area. Wait, make sure that everything is equal of all this set. I'm going to hit OK. And now we're gonna get this kind of mesh. That doesn't look too bad. And we can probably work really well with that. In fact, if you hit U, you'll see that there's even more different kinds of projections out there. So let's try another one, like project from view. Now what this will do is take my current camera and project the UVs straight on. If you don't see this little option box, you can always just click on it and it'll appear. And you can set it to camera bounds, clipped to bounds. That way you can get the maximum amount of real estate in your UV. In fact, project from view is really, really handy. You want to use it sometimes if, for example, you have something in the background and you want to project an image or something that you've drawn on it. And you know, no one's ever going to look around to the side of it. I recommend you get in here and play with a lot of these different options and see what interesting unwraps that you can come up with. In a previous video, we looked at how to unwrap 3D models based off the typical projections of blended gives you. However, what have you had a really complex or interesting shape and those projections weren't working for you. Well. Let me introduce you to the concept of using a seam. Now let's hit X, delete this cube, shift a mesh monkey. Click over here, turn off, Generate UVs. Click on UV Editing at the top. Zoom in, hit, you, unwrap. You again, live unwrap. And then at the top here, click this button and go to edge mode. Now, click on an edge like this one right here. If your UVs this appear, you can always click this little button at the top left and they'll come right back. So let's click on this edge and then hold down Control Shift and click on the back of the head. You'll see that it's picking the shortest path to get there. So let's just work our way down. That looks like a good place to stop. Zoom out a little bit, hit you, mark seam. And you can see the moment I do that, it instantly cuts this little monkey out and it's actually looking a lot better. Let's come over to the ears and let's do that. You can see that all this geometry is getting really smashed in together. So you can do this however you wish. You could go on the inside or maybe you could go on the outside. I'm just going to work my way around. The outside. Gets a little complex of here, but I think that we can make it work. Hits you. Mark, seem, Hey, there you go. Cut out an ear. Let's do that again. On this side. There we go. We're almost done. We have to come in here. You mark seam. Of course, if you really want to, you can go ahead and unselect everything and then hold down Alt. Select this edge loop. You mark seam. And you can do that again over here. Hold down Alt, left-click select, you, mark seam. Now if you look on the left, your UVs look really good. But they're all kinda close together and touching. That's kinda bad because when you're going ahead and texture painting, your brush my bleed from one island into another. And it'll produce unpredictable results. So you want to do is come up to UV. Go to pack islands. Click on it down here at the bottom, and you can set it to whatever number you want to do that much, but just enough so that when you're painting your textures, they won't bleed from one island to another. Then once you're happy with the settings, go ahead and click on export UV layout. And now you can take that PNG image into other texture painting software. And you'll know that it will match up exactly to what you have inside a blender. And that is how you unwrap a mesh by using marc seams inside a blender. The next step in the pipeline, after unwrapping, is painting the texture on your character or mesh. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do that with just a few clicks. Now first, let's go ahead and delete this cube. Hit Shift a, click on monkey. And in this case, let's leave Generate UVs on because we're pretty good. Click on texture pane and right away you'll see a pink monkey. Now let's hold here for a second. Pink is assigned from blender that a texture is missing. So if you ever see this exact shade of pink in your scenes, in your renders, regardless if it's EV or cycles, This is assigned to you that a texture is missing. Now, interestingly enough, if you see everything is kinda washed in a pink light, that means that your world, which is right up here, has a texture connected to it and it is missing the texture. So pink is assigned to you that a texture is not linked correctly. Now let's click on material. Click on New, down on base color. Let's click on it and go to Image Texture, and then click on New. And we'll call it my texture. And just hit enter. Now if it's still pink, you might want to pop out of object mode and then right back into texture paint mode, just so you can force the reloading. Now over here, you can zoom out a little bit and hit N and pull over a little bit. And that way you get some good real estate. On the left, you have some tools that you can use. And on the right over here, color picker and a whole bunch of options, including a texture where you can actually create a different kind of brush, much like we did when we were doing our sculpting brushes. Now, I'm just going to pick a random color. Let's go with blue. There we go. Let's kind of a nice little Avineri blue, right? And over here on the right, I'm going to paint just literally by left clicking, dragging. And you can see right away that I'm painting in 3D. And if you really want to, I can go over here and left-click and check. And you can see that I am painting in 2D. That is the coolest thing about blender. You can paint in both dimensions whenever you want to. So I can come over here and paint knowing that I'm going to cover all of those seems that you usually would get if you were hand painting this in something like Photoshop. In fact, you can see this top little thing just ends right at that edge. And then it begins over here on these edges. And that's because blender is calculating where everything should go depending on how I'm painting it. Now sometimes you get these really, really hard edges. So you've gotta be really careful because even though it paints really well, sometimes you get a little bit of a weird edge. You can come up to your tool settings and it will mimic what you see over here on the left. So let's close that out and bring this together a little bit more real estate. And I can check out all of the amazing things I can do in here. Now, honestly, we could do a whole chapter on the awesomeness of painting textures inside a blender. But rather than do that, I recommend you just get in there and just start painting and playing around and see what interesting textures you can come up with. Now that you've gone ahead and painted the most awesome texture that you've ever made inside of Blender. Let's move on to the next part of the pipeline, shading. Now if you don't have a texture painted Suzanne, you can either make one really quick, open one of your old models, or even open the texture paint It's designed that I've included in the exercise files. Now this isn't selected. I'm gonna go to modifiers, am going to add a subdivision surface. And then I'm going to hit Tab Control F shades move. That way. I can get it nice and smooth. What it would look like pretty close to final render. This is a really cool mode, by the way, this is what's known as look dev mode. And you get this nice HGRI that you can rotate around and play with to give you a really good look of what your asha, it will look like in very different lighting conditions. Okay, Now let's come down to the bottom and you'll see this thing called principled be SDF. That's our main shader that Oliver things connect to. And those shaders connect to material output over here, which ultimately tells Blender, Hey, take all of this information and put it onto this geometry. So you always need at least two things, shader in the material output. And then if you really want to, you can add optional things like image structures. Now let's zoom in a little bit and take a look at principled be SDF. This is like our Uber shader. If you click over here on the material tab, you'll see a few of the options and all of those are mimicked inside of this shader editor. Now not to get too complex, but there are some really cool ones, like subsurface. If I drag this little bit, you can see that light scatters throughout this object, kinda making it look milky like as if it had a subsurface like human skin. Next is metallic. Now for those of you familiar with the PBR metal rough workflow, that's what this metallic channel represents. That's where you would plug in your metallic map. Or you can just drag it and get some cool stuff. I can go down a little bit more and we can check out roughness. If you've never use PBR metal rough, you can just drag it all the way to the left. And hey, that, that actually looks pretty cool. Let's kind of mirror-like and drag them back over here. Another cool option is clear. You can just drag that up. And it's a little bit like a roughness and it's a little bit milky, kind of like adding some of your subsurface scattering. And it's cool because it looks like a clear coat that you have on a car. Now for those of you familiar with the old principle, be SDF and Blender, you'll note that there's a few new options in here, like admission, which lets you emit light from the object. And Alpha, if you want to add some transparency to your object or just parts of your object. Now, there are other shaders. If you come up over here, you can hit Shift, a click on Shader, and you'll see a whole bunch of them. Let's add another one like diffuse. This is your basic, basic shader. Unlike our Uber duper shader, this just has a few things, color, roughness and normal. Now, ordered a connected, I need to move my material output here. And either control, right-click drag to cut it, and left-click drag the SDF to surface. And there we go. We have now put on a surface onto this monkey. Now if I really want to, again, just bring down some of the color, or I can come to my texture. Left-click, drag the color from here to here. Give it a little bit. And hey, look at that. I now have my monkey with some cool color on it. And of course, I can mess a little bit with roughness, but I'm not going to get the same level of sheen and metallic that it would with principle of BSD F. There you have it. You've now made a very simple shader structure. Like all things in Blender, there are tons of options inside of these things. And you can connect all of these things in so many different ways. So I recommend you get in there and play with it and see what interesting shaders that you can come up with. 3d animation and blender is where you give the illusion of life to your static objects. It's the heart of every animated scene and blenders tools for animation are second to none. Let me show you now first in our brand new scene here, we want you to come up here and click on animation. Doing so will shift you into the animation workspace that we talked about a little bit earlier. You can see here that you have the camera on the left. So when I move it, it moves my camera over here. And of course, I have my full 3D scene. Down here. I have a dope sheet and on my rate is still my properties panel. Now there's one more panel that you're going to want. You can just grab this little corner and drag to the left, and then click here and go to graph editor. Now we need to add some keyframes. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's zoom out a little bit and hit the letter I. And you're going to see an Insert Keyframe Menu with a whole bunch of options. Now the most important for you right now, and really for the vast majority for you're going to be doing is location rotation scale. This will set a keyframe on your locations, rotations and scales down here below, or visual location rotations, scales. Those are handy when you want to break your constraints off and you want to leave the object in its place, even though it was parented or had a constraint on it. Anyways, let's just go ahead and set location, rotation scale. Boom. Now, it's going to be a little annoying to have to pick that menu every time you set a keyframe. So if you come down here, you'll see the auto keyframe button, which will set a keyframe every time I move the object. And just for good measure, over here, under keen, click on it. And you'll see something right up here called active keen set. Click here, and you'll see a menu that looks fairly similar to the one from before. You'll want to pick location rotation. All right, now you can close that over here. Zoom out. Let's left-click drag or timeline a little bit. Doesn't matter where we put it in, just put it somewhere. Now hit G, are, are, are really whatever you wanna do. This is all up to you. You're the animator. So go ahead and set a keyframe. Let's go to like frame 50 and set a keyframe over there. Or R, S. You can do whatever you want. Just said it about there. Okay, now let's preview our animation. You can do that by hitting Spacebar. Hey, pretty cool. You're well on your way to becoming an awesome animator. Now, in my case, you can see I'm outside of the camera. Hence why it's really handy to have the camera view on the left. So you can always just cheat it down. And don't worry, you have auto key-frame on, so it'll set a keyframe as soon as you move it. Now, it's going to take a lot of finessing and get this right on a 100. So instead you can use your up or down arrow keys to cycle between these really quick. And if you want to, you can use your left and right arrow keys to go between each frame. So for hit up or down, I'll eventually get to a 100. And now I can just move it right into place. Aright. Now I'll add a little bit of a rotation. Come back here, hit Spacebar and play my amazing animation. Love it. Now if you want to, you can hit the down arrow. Come over here to the bottom right and you see where it says 250, type in 100 or whatever the last keyframe use set was. Hit Enter. And now next time I hit the spacebar to play the animation, it will loop at that 100th keyframe. And there you have it. You are now, well on your way to becoming an awesome blender animator.
9. 08 Animations & Basic Rigs: Hose mode is blenders special mode for animation, bringing with it a whole new suite of tools for you to use. But it's not readily available when you click up here. So let's enable it by adding an armature, hit Shift a, go to armature and click on single bone. Now initially, then armature disappears because it's hidden beneath the cube. So come to this little running man. Click on viewport display, scroll down and click on in front. There we go. Now zoom in a little bit. And let's select our cube. Then shift select the armature. That way it's the active object and then hit Control P. Now, when Control P comes up, you'll see a typical list of options like set parent object. This allows you to parents a objects, other objects or MTS or whatever. But when you have an armature as the last thing you have selected, that is actively selected. You have a new armature deform menu come up. And that lets you literally bind the vertices to the armature is Rick, It's really awesome. But for right now, we're actually just going to use bone. So now if I click on the armature here, I can control tab to enable pose mode. Or I can just come up here and click on Post moon. Click on this bone here. You'll note that it highlights blue. You can zoom out and hit G. And hey, take a look at that. I'm able to rotate it, move it, or scaling. And the best part about this is that you have a whole giant menu of awesome things to explore. Some of the shortcuts are fairly similar to object mode. For example, if I move it off center, I can hit Alt G, Alt R, and S to clear my transforms. I can also hit I to set a keyframe, in this case, location rotation scale. And I can come down to Keene and select either available, which will set a keyframe to anything that's already been keyed. Or location rotation scale. I'll leave it on that one. Now, you might also notice there's this thing called key-frame type. If I click it open, you can see there's a whole bunch of cool keyframe types. This is just a visual thing for you. So if I pull this up, I can move over to say frame. Let's just go to a 100. Right there. I can click on keen keyframe type. And I can go to extreme and then hit I. And you'll note that my keyframe is now reddish. This is just a visual representation. It doesn't actually change what's happening in your animation. All right, anyways, let's go to frame a 100 and let's move it all the way over here. And I really don't mind what you do. You can hit R, R, you can hit G, gh and hit S. But whatever you do, move it over here to the right and then hit I. And then for good measure, turn on auto keyframe by clicking this little button down here at the bottom. Okay, So now ideally you have some animation with one keyframe at one, at the center and then one at about a 100. And so in one direction, just as long as it's not on-center. Okay, Now, put your cursor around frame 50. You can hit the left or right arrow keys to get into the right place. But you can't hit up or down because they will sit to the keyframes. So kits about frame 50. And then let's try out this breakdown or tool. The shortcut is Shift E. So let's just put my mouse about where my bone is and this is important. So keep my cursor right about where the bone is and hit Shift E. And now I can move left or right. And I can favor either one side of the keyframe or the other. So if I move my mouse towards the left side of my monitor, and then I play this animation. You'll note that it ease out and then speeds over. If I come back to frame 50, put my mouse over the bone and hit Shift E. I can shift it all the way over here. And now in this case, if I play my animation, it favors keyframe 100. That's one of the coolest things about breakdown. Or you can set your keyframes and then for your in-betweens and breakdowns, you can use this tool to favor of which one you want more or less of. Super awesome. Now, you can come up to frame 100 and set your n to 100. And we're going to do one more thing, frame 80. If I right-click on here, you'll see that there's a whole bunch of new options that come up. One of the most handiest ones is calculate. So let's click on Calculate. You'll see some new options come up. You can specify the end to be frame a 100, and then just click Okay. We'll calculate does, is it shows your path of animation. And the cool thing about this motion path is as I move it, it updates along with me. How cool is that? Now like all things in Blender, there's a billion things to play with inside a pose. So get in there and see what amazing things you can create with your new found animation tools. Drivers allow you to connect objects together to create animation. Think of it like having a switch to turn on a light bulb blender allows you to make that switch Lyft driver. Let me show you. Now first we're going to need an armature. So hit Shift a and add a single bone armature. Come to our little running person viewport display and click on in front. We'll zoom in a little bit. Click on this cube in if you're not already here under Object Data, go to it and then click on Shape Keys and hit the plus button twice. And now hit Tab Control 3, or just click on the face button right up here. And let's click on this top face and hit S and just make it big. Doesn't either be Giant, just big. It looks about good. Now hit tab to get out of that. And you'll notice that it disappears, but that's okay. Become down to the shape key. You can drag the slider and you'll see that it's still there. Now we need a control, this value somehow. To do that, you're going to want to right-click on it and go to add driver. You're going to see this menu pop up. And when you get really good at drivers, you can use it to quickly create them. For, for our purposes, we're going to go to Show in drivers editor that's going to bring up something that kinda looks like a graph editor. Let's just move it over here a little bit. Over here. Let's just move this over here. Now with this driver's editor here, I wanna go ahead and click on Object. Go to armature. It'll say bone right over here. I'm going to click on it and go to bone. And I want to control this with the scale. Although if you're brave, you can set it to whatever you want. I'm going to pick on average scale. Now the moment I do that, this cube gets really big Y. Well, if I click on my bone here and then I go into pose mode, we've controlled tab or just by clicking, I'll pose mode. And then I click on this bone and I hit my N for transforms. I'll see that my scale starts at one. So that's why I went to hop out of pose mode and then click on this cube. You'll see a value of one because my scale is one, so it's transmitting a value of one. Now there's actually a really easy fix for that in the blenders driver editor, all you need to do is click on var and hit Minus, and then type in one. Another thing you could do is just literally move the keyframes by hitting G and Y and then hitting one on your keyboard. As you've come to notice, there's a lot of different ways to do things inside a blender. But anyways, we've already set our driver. So now let's click on this little bone. Go to pose mode. Click on it again and hit S. And look at that. I am now driving the shape key with my bone. And if I want to, I can click on this cube, just hop out a pose mode, come back to my shape T. And let's set my range to negative 2. Hit Tab on my keyboard, hit two again, and then enter. Now when I click on this bone Control Tab to go into pose mode, click on the bone. I can hit S and grow it, or even shrink it. And look at that. You have now discovered the magic of creating a driver inside of Blender. The graph editor inside a blender has a ton of specialized tools that allow you to do all sorts of animation tricks like going to infinity. Let me show you. Now first we need to generate some animation. So let's just take this cube. Good, a keen set. Switch it to location, rotation scale, turn on Auto key. I, come to a 100 and, and just make some keyframes, doesn't matter where. It doesn't matter what you can hit G, you can hit R or you can hit S. Just make some animation. Do what ever you want. And when you're done, come to the bottom left area here and just click and drag up. Now be careful. If you do click and drag up and you see a window that looks like this with this little arrow. Well, if you do that, it's actually going to override your view. Careful about that. Now click on Editor Type and go to graph editor. And if you want some more real estate, you can just grab the middle and pull it up. And here is a blender graph editor. And when you're working in here, you may sit yourself, gosh, the translation keys are this big, but the rotation keys, they can be this big. Everything can go all over the place. So the first thing I want to show you is how to click on normalize. Now, everything they'll squished down, but that's okay. You can go to view, scroll down to the bottom and you're looking for view selected. There we go. And I can hold down Control and middle mouse. To do all sorts of cool stuff. We're shift and no mouse to move it around. Now in here, I can hit G to move my keyframes and values are again hit G and X just to move it on time, G and Y move it on value. I can scale. I can even rotate. And don't ask me why you would do this. But it's just cool the fact that you can do that. All right, so now let's leave those keyframes alone. Let's come over here. And you'll see when I click that little drop-down arrow, There's a whole bunch of channels that appear like x location, X, rotation, and Y scale. I can hold down my left click button and drag a little box and highlight X, Y, and Z, and then hit Shift H on my keyboard. And now what happened is that I just focused on only the x, y, and z location control. So I can hit G and X and move this around, and I'll move the locations, but not the rotations. Let's reframe that so we can see it a little bit better. There we go. And of course I can always undo control Z. There we go. Now let me turn these all back on. And I'm going to hit eight twice. And I'm going to hit shift and E to get extrapolation. Extrapolation is what happens over here at the end. For hit shift in E, it's only constant. But I can go to linear. And now it'll take that last keyframe and just say, keep going. Goodbye little cube, it came back. I can also hit Shift E and go to constant. And then Shift E makes cyclic. And now I have a looping animation. Of course it doesn't look too good because my animation just pops right back into place. But the point is, is that the animation does in fact loop. Nice. Now if you're really crazy, you can go ahead and hit T and change the tangent type. That means, how do you go from one keyframe to another? By default, it's on Bezier, but you can go to linear for everything just kind of quickly goes over from one to another. Or you can go to constant. And now everything just kind of pops into place. Go back too busy. I can also hit V. And that gives you a few more control over your tangents, like vector or automatic, which, uh, let things kind of slide. Or just go back to our clamped. And look at that. You've now created some cool looping animation. And we're going to just set it to automatic. So bounces around a little bit more like everything inside a blender. There are so many tools and options available to you. So get in there and see what amazing things you can do to your animation. We've talked a lot about how to animate inside a blender. And in this video, I'm gonna show you actually have a maker rig to intimate with. First we're going to need a character. So let's hit Delete and get rid of this cube. Then hit Shift a and add an armature, and then shift a mesh and add a monkey. Now hit one on your numpad or you can go to View, viewpoint front. Zoom in. You'll see a little dot up here. That's the armature. Come over to our runner Viewport. Front. There we go. Now let's click on this bone and leave it alone for right now, hit Tab to go into edit mode. And with this top dot selected, hit E and drag it to about a year. Let's come over to the side here. Hit G and why bring it back? Just so we can get it at the base of the ear, baby G and X. Get it right in there. Let's go to our front view again. Click on this bone and let's name it. Left ear. I blenders really smart. You can actually use left ear L dot L underscore. We're going to use left just to make things easy. Now under armature, go to symmetry eyes. And you'll see that it auto named Left and Right. Now if it didn't do that for some reason, you can always come down to names and then click on Auto name left or right. You can also flip names if you really want to. But I'm going to leave it alone for now. Okay, so now we have left ear and right ear. Now I can hit N tools and x axis mirror so that when I hit N and then E, it creates a duplicate bone on the other side. I'm going to put this one about here. Then I'm going to make, Let's put it about here. And there we go. Now we have an ear bone. We can hit this little dot and z and y. Z and y are right. Now we've gone ahead and made some really simple rigs for our ears. Now let's go to the front view again. Tab out of edit mode and shift select the monkey, and then shift select the rig. The ring should be highlighted light orange, like it is over here. And that's an indication to Blender that it's the last selected thing or the most active thing. With that selected hit Control P, you'll see a bunch of options. Empty groups means you'll attach the mesh of a monkey to the rig without any weights. Envelope weights is another way of weighting, but we're going to use automatic. So just go to automatic weights. Okay, now it doesn't look like anything happened, but if you rotate it out, click on the armature again, you can come up to object mode, pose mode, and then pick on one of the bones and then hit RR and then move it around. And hey, take a look at that. We've gone ahead and attached a rig to our character. And we can do a lot of cool stuff with it. Like for example, I can rotate this ear. Are, are, just rotate them wherever you want and then grab these two. Go to pose, copy, pose, pace flipped. And because blender auto named everything, it flipped the ear on the other side for you. And there you have it. You've made yourself a very simple rudimentary rig to animate your characters with inside of Blender.
10. 09 Painting Weights & Human character Rigs : In a previous video, we created a rig for our little monkey. It's pretty decent. But as you can see, when I start to move some shapes, it affects the eyeball incorrectly. Or if I move the ear, it starts to pull the eyeball itself. In order to fix this, we need to do something that's called weight painting. Let me show you. First you want to come to this little running dude. Come over here where it says display, switched that to stick. You're going to want a lot of real estate and you don't want a bone in the way. Next, come up to object mode. Shift select a monkey, come down to weight paint mode, and you'll be greeted by a blue monkey. Now here's the thing. If it's blue, that means that that specific vertices is not attached to the bone that you have selected in any way. The hotter it gets, the more attached until it's red, and then that means it's completely attached to the bone. Now you can cycle between these by clicking through the vertex groups on the right. Or my favorite, just control if click on each one of these and you can directly select the weights. Let's start with this one right here. So I'm going to Control click this right ear dot 001. I'm going to come up to my tools and set my weight to 0, make my brush a little bit bigger with f. And then I'm going to just start painting. And that's all you need to do. You just want to get rid of these weights. Now, which weights in particular? Well, if you're going to move the ER, ask yourself, do I want to move this part of it? I want to move a little bit of the side of the face here, but I don't want to move the eyeball or the eyelid. So I'm going to make sure that those are as blue as I can get them. All right, Now control-click the tip. And same thing. Let's just clear it up a little bit. There we go. Now control-click this big one. And you'll see that the eyeball is solid blue. So let's give it a little bit of a wait, somewhere around 0.3. Make my brush a little bit bigger. And in this case, I want you to paint and click a bunch to get that paint. Right underneath. There. You go. Making some happy blue eyeballs. And as you can see sometimes when you click, you can click just right and get right underneath the eyeball. Now, let's set it to 0. Make our brush a little bit bigger, and get rid of everything. On the opposite side. We don't want to be affecting it in any way. And you know what? Probably the nose as well. And a little bit of that mouth. There we go. Don't forget the top of the islands. Perfect. All right. Now we have a well painted monkey. So let's go back out to object mode. Click on our armature controlled tab to switch into pose mode. And I can move these around. Take a look at that. And it's not affecting the other side at all. Now, don't worry, you don't have to paint the other side exactly like you did on one. You can just come to vertex groups. Pull this open and we're going to delete everything that says left. And then we're going to click on right ear and this drop down and go to Copy vertex group. Don't worry about renaming. We'll do that in a second. Come over to weigh pain. Make sure write your copy is selected. Click this drop-down and go to mirror, and do that for every one of these. And here's the thing. Mirror works really, really well. If your model is perfectly symmetrical. If it isn't, you can always experiment with mirror topology. It's never totally accurate, but it's pretty decent and they'll get you a good part of the way. All right, Now that we've mirrored the weights, need to rename all this stuff. So let's go ahead and remove the word copy and change right to left. You can always tab once you're done to get to the next line. So left tab. There we go. And just go ahead and rename these and hit Enter when you're done. Then come back up here to object mode. Click on the armature controlled tab, pose mode. And now I can hit RR and rotate the ear. And you can see that the weights are pretty good. Looks like I missed one little weight here, but we can fix that real fast. I'm overweight paint. Let's go to this ear. There's just a little bit right there. So let's go ahead and set that to 0 and paint that out. Same with these over here to paint that out and paint it up. Now we can come back to our armature. Controlled Tam to pose mode. Perfect. Painting weights on your characters is paramount to the success of having great character animation and a great character rig. As you continue your journey of being a great character animator inside the blender, It's kinda help to have reusable tools like making rigs over and over, rather than doing them by hand. Thankfully, blender comes with a really easy tool to rig your characters. Let me show you. First, let's go ahead and come over to Edit Preferences. Under Preferences, you're going to have an add ons tab. You can click on it right here and then search for rigor phi. It's off by default. So just click the check box and it'll take a second to load. Then exit out, come over to this cube and delete it. Hit Shift a, come down and armature. And you'll see a bunch of new options have been added. Like animals, basic pieces that you can use, or the human rhetoric. Let's go ahead with human metric. The human metering is a well-built character rig that you can use for your characters. Now, we don't have a character here to work with, but we do have a monkey head. So let's hit one on your numpad or go to View, viewpoint front. Now, over here we can zoom into the face. You can shift, right-click and put our 3D cursor right there, shift a and come up to mesh. Monkey. Lets skill in our monkey a little bit. Click on our character, go to our little runner viewpoint display. In front. There we go. Now and just move that monkeying to be somewhere around in this area. Somewhere about right. Like going to be perfect, of course, g and y to fit it back in. And then you can hit N for transforms and make sure that the x is zeroed out. So now let's talk a little bit about this human metric. It's actually got every point that you'll need from nice to hands, the feet too, if you've been noticing a full face. And it's right. Once you build the face right, you can just use this human mentoring and attach your face directly to it. Now, obviously, it's not going to totally match up with our monkey, but we can always edit it by hitting Tab. And that'll take us into edit mode. You hit a twice the de-select everything, and then just start hitting G and Y and moving whatever you need to move. Be sure though to hit N and coming to Tools and click X axis mirror so that when you move one side, moves the other along with it. Let's just focus on the mouth really quick. We can come to the front view and grab these shapes. G, Z, move him down. Move down the shape a little bit. Move this corner in. If you have too little corners so you can hit B to make a box, then move them together. Here we go. Now let's play a little bit with these eyes. So be really tough on a monkey. If it's a little hard to see, you can always switch to stick. That's my personal favorite. And then just drag some of these corners in. Remember you're gonna have to hit B to grab all the bones at once. If not juris only grabbing a few of them and you don't wanna do that. So just go ahead real quick and move some of these bones to match right about where the eyelids are going to be. Once you have something that looks pretty good, you can move on to the eye lids. If you want, you can hit snapping and then switched the vertex. So that way when you move all of these snap right to it. Now remember, you might need to hit B to select everything with box. So go ahead and do that. B. There we go. Now we can snap directly to where the eyelids are. Be careful not to select too much though. See that. Here we go. And actually you're going to want these right over here. And you can always hit a twice a de-select everything. Okay, we're almost done here. Now, we want to attach these to about where the eyeball is. Actually. Let's just drop this down a little bit. That way we get that nice big O eyeball. And finally, this part might be a little tricky. There you go. If you use B, you can just snap it right to that center point. All right, now we have a pretty cool monkey. You can even go above and beyond and start doing the rest of the mesh. But for our purposes, I think this will be good enough. Now, come up to object mode. And if you're still on this little running person, turn off viewport display and scroll down and you'll see a new thing called reify buttons. This is a cool thing. This is where you actually generate the rig. This thing that you're currently looking at is like an outline of the rig. There are some advanced options. For example, you can name it something different, custom, but we'll leave those alone for now. Click on Generate rig. And depending on the speed of your computer, this will take a few minutes because it has to calculate and build this entire rig. But honestly, it's a lot quicker than doing it by hand. Now, we need to select our layout of the rig and move it somewhere else. So just click on one of the bones. You can tell it's the layout because it looks like a stick figure. And then you can hit em, new collection and we'll just call it matter rigged. And then you can hit Shift 2 and that'll hide it. All right, now let's click on this rig right here. And we can hit Control tab and move it around. Pretty cool. Now let's attach it really fast to our monkey. So go to object mode, like the monkey. Shift-click the rig, Control P, automatic weights. It will wreck the monkey a little bit, but that's to be expected. Her back to our rig right here. Control tab to pose mode. And let's select this neck and look at that. We can move them all around. Already. We have ourselves are rigged monkey. Now the next thing you can do is hit N and come over here to view. And if you scroll down, you'll see something called reifying animation tools. So many clothes off, view and everything. And these were liquefied tools are really awesome. Let's see, turn on IK or FK, et cetera. But look at that. We now have a moving monkey head. That's pretty awesome. Now before we let you go, hit N to come up to transforms and come up to the top right here. We can minimize transforms for a second. And here you'll see a whole outline of tools. This is where you can hide different options. Do IK, FK switching and all other sorts of cool things. Reify is a fully featured feature film ready character rig to use and you can attach it to virtually any character, from humans to bipeds. Two monkeys and other animals, get in there and see what amazing characters you can bring to life using your new found knowledge of rigor phi. Now as you've had a good time animating and sculpting inside Blender. Wait until you get to particle physics. There's a lot of really cool things. We can do. Everything from lighting things on fire to raining particles to cloth. It's super awesome and really, really easy to use. To start off this chapter, birdie, dive into particles and look at how to make it rain. First, let's go ahead and delete this cube. You can hit X to delete shift a. Let's make a plane as the scale G. Let's move it up. Then what? We don't need a light right now, so let's get rid of it. It's calm right about here. And then come over here and click on particles. Looks like a little exploding anime or something. Just add a brand new particle and hit Play. As you can see, you're already making it rain. Pretty easy right now, like all things in Blender, there are a billion things that we can do. So let's just start playing around with them. One of my favorite things to do this semester with Brownian, this adds a little bit of natural shake to each one of these particles as soon as a spawn. You can also play a little bit with damp and drag. That'll give it that kind of slow motion feel. And the best part about it is that you can actually animate this property via supra-aural whoo. All right, what else can we do? Rotation is important, but it's easier to see it with something. So let's go ahead and add a monkey. We're going to hit M to attitude new collection. Then we're just going to hit Shift to, to hide it. Click on here. Let's scroll down until we render. It says render as core collection. Instance collection Number 2. You'll note that the herd now a lot of monkeys raining. Stick with me. Come all the way up here. Let's go to rotation. And then it's got a dynamic. And let's just see what we get. To the frame-by-frame it, you'll see all of the monkeys are slightly changing rotation and it's going to be hard to see them. So let's come back up here. Let's end it at about frame 215. That's a longer animation is let's make the lifetime of a lot longer has put in like a 100. Here, we're actually just put in 250, go all the way to the end. Let's make less. So it's making about a 100 of them. And then come all the way back down. And under scale, type in something big, 0.25. All right, Here you go. Now you have a whole bunch of monkeys fallen out of the sky. You know what? It would be nice if they interacted with something. So let's hit Shift a mic a cube. Move this cube over here, G. And why? Tap to edit mode. Shift select these two vertices and just move them down too easy. Then you can hit S in x and y, G and Y. There you go. Give it a little bit of a ramp. Then come over here to physics. Click on collision. Now come back up to this monkey. And let's play that again. And there you have it. You now creating raining monkeys that are rolling off a platform. Didn't think you would do that in a video, did you? There's a lot of things to pay attention to inside a blenders, particle systems. But the few that are really important, or emission, which controls how things are being created. Rotation in velocity that controls what happens when they actually come out and start interacting with things. Physics, which actually controls what happens when it starts touching other things. That of course render, which actually lets you adjust what the particles are when they get spawned. Now one last option you should pay attention to is show emitter. If you turn this off, that plane won't appear when you render it. All right, now get in there and start seeing what amazing particles you can come up with with your new found degree in particle physics.
11. 10 Force Field & Cloth Simulations : Now that you know how to generate particles, let's look at ways of interacting with them by using force fields. First, let's get rid of this cube and let's get rid of this light. Hit Shift a, go to Mesh plane, scale it up a little bit, and then come over to the particle stab at a new particle system for n type in 250 and for lifetime type in 250. And then I want you to do one more crazy thing under field weights. I want you to type in negative one. And over here, which says start sent that to 0. The reason why I want you to do that is because our start frame is actually one particle system. But I want to start at 0 for blender. That way we reset every time it loops. And hey, look at that. We've got something pretty cool already happening here. It's kind of like one of those bubble things at the bottom of an aquarium or something. Okay, now let's start playing around. Hit Shift a, and come down a force field. And let's go ahead and add one of my favorites, vortex. Now if you move it up GZ, you'll start to see a little bit of a light vortex situation happening here, just a light one. So let's zoom out a little bit and kick it up a notch. Come over here to the Physics tab. And with the strength type in 10, that's going to get a little crazy at first, but let it in reset and see what you get. If it's too much, you can say type in five. And then you can even play with inflow. So you can really shape that vortex. Look at that. Now that's pretty cool. Sort of DNA like or alien like or something like that up here. Okay, Now let's add another one, shift a, and I'm going to add force. That's a good typical one. And I want to put it right about here or so. Just so it seems like it's pretty high up. Next, I want to type in ten. It's gonna make it really kinda strong. It might actually make it a little too strong. Let's see what's going on. Yeah, look at that. It can't really come up. So why don't we come down and where it says falloff, type in one under power. Now what's going to happen is that it's going to fall off to a certain amount. Maybe it's a little too much. Let's bring it down a little bit. And let's see what happens on the next loop. Does look like it's falling off a little bit too much and maybe type in a shrink the 20. If you want, you can even kick it down a little bit further. And hey, now, that is looking kind of cool. Of course, if you want to be really crazy, come back to the vortex and you can type in like ten. So now you're getting this really, really cool particle system. That's something really crazy and futuristic. Kind of liked it back at five. So we'll just leave it at five. When you hit Shift a and come to force field, you'll actually see there's a lot of different force fields. You could add. Forces, wins, more tax, etc. Recommend you get in here and play with these because they're all incredibly versatile. Even wind. You could animate this, for example, come in left and right and kick up the strength a little bit. Let's set it to like ten or so. And then let's come over here and hit I, ski the rotation, our key the rotation, our Z key, the rotation. And let's just do that one more time, or is the key the rotation? And now just play it. And you can see how you can start to mix in so many different kinds of force fields. Both for their power, their fall off, rotating it, and of course, having them react to each other. And they get some pretty wicked things like this. Force fields are one of the funnest things you can do in Blender. So get in there and start playing around and see what really interesting particle simulations. You can come up with. One of the biggest updates and blended 2.8 has been the cloth in collision system. And in this video, I want to show you how easy it is to use it. First, let's go ahead and delete this cube. We can hit X to delete. Then shift a. Let's add a monkey. Let's tab into edit mode. Right-click and sub-divide our monkey and come down over here and change smoothness to one. This way we can actually collide with a monkey that has a little bit of a softer edge around this ears tab out of that shift a mesh plane. Let's scale up this plane a little bit. Something like that. Looks pretty good. Gx, move it over here. G Z, bring it up a little bit. Tab into edit mode. Right-click sub-divide. And let's set this number of cuts to 50. And you can turn smoothness down to 0. Now, come over here and hit a twice, then hit C. And let's select these vertices over here. And select these vertices over here. Then hit Enter. Let's come over down to object data on the right. Vertex group. Sign, Double-click on Group and go to pins. Talk about that in a second tab out of edit mode. And now let's come over to our Physics tab and click on cloth. Now like everything in Blender, there are a billion settings, but a couple of the most important ones are stiffness, dampening, and shape. Stiffness controls what the actual shape of the cloth is as it comes down. If the tension is really low, then it'll flop all over the place and the tensions really high. It'll be a lot harder, kinda like see like sales or something like that. Strong burlap compression is really important to mess with. And in fact, I want to set ours to 5. The higher the compression, the more your cloth can take the shape of what it's colliding with. The lower the compression, the less likely it will. Dampening takes the above stiffness effects. Say for example, when your cloth collides with something and it says, hey, does the rest of the cloth react that way too? Or does the effect get dampened across the rest of the cloth? Say for example, party or cloth interacted with, say, the ear. Does the rest of the class also react the same way, or does that affect it dampened a little bit. We'll leave those default for now. And finally, shape. And this is where you can pick your vertex group pins. And what that will tell the cloth simulation is, Hey, don't move these vertices. They're stuck in space. And of course, you can play with the property, but we'll leave that one for right now. Finally, let's click on our monkey and go to collision. And under collision, you'll see soft body in cloth. These are the settings of what happens when cloth in Iraq's, we've said monkey. And in this case, I actually want to turn up the thickness outer, a little bit more. Thickness outer tells the cloth simulation that there is a border comic, a shield or brown the mesh, It's not exactly on the message, just a little bit around it. And that will soften some of those interactions. It's really handy. Okay, Now let's click on this plane and hit Play. Now, depending on the speed of your computer, this will go by really quick, or it'll take a little bit of time. And hey, look at that. It's actually interacting really well. Now of course our cloth is a little faceted, but we can fix that. You can hit Tab really quick. A to select everything, control F, Shade, Smooth, tap out of edit mode. And now when the simulation runs, you'll see you've lost at faceted look. And if you want to, you can come to modifier, add modifier, and add a subdivision surface. And that will add a nice bit of smoothness to everything after the simulation runs. And again, depending on the speed of your computer, this might take a little bit of time. But as you can see here, you have yourself one awesome looking cloth simulation. It's super fast and it's really easy to use. Now, like all things in Blender, there are a billion settings in here for you to mess with. And there is a little bit of peaking in there that you could probably to equal for a little bit of dampening and some compression. So get in there and see what amazing cloth simulations you can come up with. Dynamic paint is one of those hidden features inside a blender that has an enormous amount of power. Yet we don't talk about it much. In this video, I want to show off one of my most favorite features that it has, painting. Now let's go ahead and delete this cube x Delete, hit Shift a plane. Let's hit S and make this kind of big, something like that. Now hit tab, right-click sub-divide. Come over here. And if your computer can muster it, 75, hit Enter, close out, sub-divide, tab out, shift a. Let's go ahead and add a monkey. Now, let's click on the plane and split this open. And we're going to click over here. We're gonna go to shader editor down to material, make a new material, and hit n to get a little bit of real estate. Now let's head over to physics. And with our planes still selected, I'm going to zoom in a little, click on dynamic paint and add a canvas, and then click my monkey. Do the same thing. But in this case, I'm going to add a brush. Now, as you imagine, dynamic paint has both Canvas and brushes. Brush is what influences the effect. A canvas is what receives the effect. And there's a lot of different effects that can happen on a canvas with a plane selected. If you scroll down, you'll see advanced surface type. If you click here, you'll see a drop-down of many different options. Waves, height, displacement, and paint. Paint this what we're going to focus on today. But in order to see it, you need to come down an output. And then you need to either create a paints map or a wet map. In my case, I'm just going to make a web map really quick. I'm gonna come over here, control C. And then inside this shader editor, I'm going to hit Shift a. And the search for attribute, we need to be able to pipe in the wet map attribute in here, and that's what this attribute node will help us do. So under name hit control V, and then enter. Now in order to see it, it might be best to add a color ramp. So shift a color ramp and then connect the factor, the factor. And finally color to base color. Now this color, I can set it to whatever I want. So for example, I can set it to maybe it's grass. So let's go for something a little kind of greenish and the darker green. Then over here on white, maybe it's a little bit blue. So I'm going to set it to blue. All right, Now I'm going to zoom out over here. I'm going to click on my monkey. Gets some good viewpoints here. But I'll put my monkey on the edge over here and scale him up GZ, make sure that he's cutting right through. And finally, let's come over here and go to look deaf mode. You'll notice that it turns green and you can just barely make it a little bit of blue right here. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and click on play. And I'm just going to move the monkey around. And as I move the monkey around, you'll start to see that I'm painting on the surface. Now if it becomes a little too hard to move, the monkey can always hit G, Shift Z. And that way you'll lock it to the x and y axis. And then you can just literally start painting with this monkey. Now let me pause it and I'm going to hit I on this monkey. And then I'm going to go all the way to the end. I'm going to hit G, Shift Z, my monkey to the other corner, hit I Location. Click on this plane and I'm just going to hit play. And that's thats plane. I'm going to come back to my canvas dynamic paint properties and scroll down and check out one more co-option, and that's the dry option over here. Now with this, you can actually change it to do whatever we want. Maybe, for example, you want it to dry a lot sooner. Under my shader editor, I can always hit plus and add a brand new color. Maybe I want to be crazy and I want to make it red. Now look at that. Isn't that pretty cool? Or maybe I want to make it seem like the monkey is going really fast, like leaving a scorched part behind. So I'm going to sit one to read, come over here. I'm going to set this more to like an orangey brightness. There we go, something, something kinda hot. And then move this closer. And there you go. You now have a monkey who is scorching across the grass floor. Get in there and start playing around with some of the options that you have inside the dynamic paint. And remember, if you use a wet map or a paint map, you have to attach it to an attribute and then eventually to your shader so that you can see it in either looked at or rendered mode. Another awesome thing you can do with dynamic paint is create waves. Now, what can you do with waves? Well, you could have a bowling ball smash right into a puddle or maybe you can make it rain. Let me show you. First. Let's go ahead and delete this cube. Hit Shift a, and a plane. Zoom out a little bit. S, scale it up about. There's good tab, right-click, sub-divide, open up or options. And if your computer can support it, type in a 100. If not, something less is okay. Tap out. Let's get a little bit of real estate here. So let's move our camera out and mover like to hear. Now with a plane selected, go ahead and come over to the physics, dynamic paint and canvas. And under surface type, go to waves. Okay, we can leave this alone for right now. So let's hit Shift a mesh, add a UV sphere, skill it up a little bit. Dynamic paint. Go ahead and add brush and Susie at it. You'll see that it's created a little bit of a wave. You can click on this big old plane here, Tab Control F, Shade, Smooth, tab out, and that'll look a little bit smoother. Now let's zoom out here, grab our bowling ball, play, and just drop it. Look at that. Let's do that again. It's pretty cool. Now here's the cool thing about dynamic pain that's come back here. Grabber, bowling ball location, go to frame 40, ish 49. That's fine. I again location. And let's just play that from the beginning play. And if I click on Canvas and, uh, come down here, you can see you have tons of different options. For example, timescale. If I set that to say 0.2, and then come back to the beginning. That will make everything feel nice and colic honey or something like that. It's really slow, super, super cool. Of course, we can set that to one. And then we'll get something pretty cool too. Now let's make it rain. So grab this spirit deleted. Come all the way back to the beginning. If it always gets stuck, you can switch your start to 0 and then hit this little button. And that way it'll force restarted. It's a handy little trick. Okay, Now hit Shift a plane, GZ. Scale it up a little bit. Particles plus come back down here, dynamic paint, brush and brush. Scroll down, source. Go to particle system, particle system, that your particle system. And now just click Play. And hey, take a look at that. It's raining. And of course, if you scale this up, you'll get even more rain. We'll just wait for it to restart. Nice. You're making it rain. Now, let's go ahead and add a few materials to really make it feel right. Click on our Canvas here, come down to material, add new, switched, principled to glass. Since we're an easy by default, we want to scroll down and click on screen space refraction. Come back up to Render Settings, and then turn on the screen space. Reflections. Come to world color environment. And that's going to make everything pink when you switch to rendered mode because you need an environment to actually light everything with. So let's go ahead and to HDRI Haven. It's a free website for fully distributable. Hdri is to click up here on each DRIs OR you'll see a huge selection of them. I'm just going to grab the first one is c, which conveniently is Lakes. You don't need a giant one. You can just download it to K12. Go ahead and download that free. Back inside Blender. You can click on open over here on the right. And then just open that file up. Click open. And finally, go to rendered mode, which is this top button right here. Now if we come to the beginning and hit play, we can see that it's raining and we get some pretty sweet reflections and refractions by using blend is dynamic paint wave system and a particle system. Now that you've gone this far, go ahead and start exploring what other options there are within the physics dynamic paints, canvas tab. And see what interesting things you can come up with.
12. 11 Light it on Fire & Rigidbodies : As we continue down the journey of being a blender physicist, nothing is more cooler than leaving something on fire. In fact, it's really straightforward. Let's go ahead and delete this cube. You can hit Delete or X on your keyboard, then hit Shift a. Let's add our favorite monkey, so we have something interesting. And then hit Enter on your keyboard to bring up search. And if you type in quick smoke and hit Enter, you'll immediately be greeted by a big ol boxy domain. Now real quick, before you click away, opened down the options at the bottom left and where it says smoke, click on smoke and fire. Okay, now come to the Physics tab and let's talk a little bit. Physics objects like fluids and smoke need a thing called a domain to react within. This sets like the boundaries of where your fire, smoke, fluid, etc, will actually be occurring. It's pretty cool because you can even scale it up and move it around as you wish. Then there is this little monkey who has a flow type on it. And a flow tells Blender where the actual thing will be emanating from. And in our case, since we picked fire and smoke, this little monkey will be the flow. And that's where all of the fires smoke will be emanating from. Okay, so now that we have that all established, we can come back to domain and check out some quick settings. And trust me, there are a bunch under flames. You can pick the different kinds, speed you want things to act at. Under behavior, you can have temperature differences that you can control. There's really a whole bunch, but honestly, just typing, smoke and hitting play, you end up getting something that looks super, super cool. And depending on the speed of your machine, will probably render fairly quickly. Now if it doesn't, you can always come to the domain and set the resolution to something lower. Or if you think your computer can handle it, you can set it a little bit higher, like I just did the 64. And here you can see the blender is charging a little bit, but you start to get a lot of really fine tiny little details. See that right up here. And the best part about this, if I posit really quick, is I can switch over to rendered and I get something really awesome right away. And because of the benefits of having multiple render engines that are compatible, you'll note that I am an EV, but when I switched to cycles, the fire looks a lot better. That's because cycles allows light to bounce all around it and you get slightly more proper volume reactions. And because EV in cycles start to each other in terms of nodes, you don't actually have to change anything to get this big benefit of the look. Let's switch back to EB so that way I can keep playing around and exploring. And if I want to, I can even go to solid. So I get a really good idea of what's happening in my fire. Now this is really just the essential principle of making a fire. Typing quick smoke, hit Play, watch the magic happen. But there's so many things you can play with. So if you set the resolution just a little bit lower, Let's go to 32. Pause this really quick. Come to the beginning. We can play a lot with say, temperature and let's just kick it up a bunch. Will have to start it again. And you can see how we actually go a little bit higher, a little bit faster. Another interesting feature to play with is adaptive domain, which when I open it and turn it on, or actually let the domain grow as the fire grows. So I can set all sorts of thing, margin resolution, the threshold that it hits. But let's just turn it on and hit play. And you can see what's happening already. It grew just a little bit. And naturally the higher and the more that I set these features to, the more this domain will actually grow. And this is really helpful if you have a fire that you really want raging in, you're not entirely sure how big the domain is going to be. However, you can see that even with my peripheral system here, blender is taking its sweet time to actually figure out how the fires processing. And the more fire there is, thus lower it's going to go. So I can pause that. And adapted domain is really handy, but just be careful because it will slow down your systems a lot. Honestly, I recommend you just set the domain is big as you need and run it from there. So if your system is chugging, you can turn off adaptive domain and then just take your current domain and scale it up and maybe move it up a little bit cheesy. And then just hit play. And if it doesn't start, go back to the beginning, hit play again. And you can see that even with a giant domain, my system is a lot faster with adaptive domain. But a really large domain. Like all things in Blender, there are so many things to play with in here. So get in there and see what amazing fires you can come up with. Because the smoke physics property is one of the coolest things to play with inside a blender. In our last video on becoming a blender physicist, we're going to look at rigid body physics. A rigid body physics is really all the other things you can imagine that physics can do it. Let's see crates springs. Let's create hinges. Let's simulate things connecting together like chains. And in this video, we're gonna do all of those. Now to start, we want to have some real estate. So let's get rid of this slide and this cube and just hit X to delete shift a for a plane and we're going to make it current the big. That looks good. Let's click on physics here if you haven't already, and then rigid body, and then come down to passive. Like the other physics options, passive means that this will only receive but not necessarily fall or react gravity. So it's important. It will be our floor. Then we're going to hit Shift a and make a cube, bring it up here. And I suggest going into front view, one on the numpad. If you don't have a numpad, you can always click on View, viewpoints and then go to the front. Okay, so now let's move this little dude above the camera. That's important. We want to keep it above the camera. And then we can move our 3D cursor here, shift, right-click, shift a, and let's add a Taurus. Now when you add a torus, I want to actually rotate the view real quick where it says minor radius. Let's make that kind of thing. We want these to be thin rings. That looks pretty good. Okay, now let's come to the front view again and we can hide this, our x and let's rotate by 90. So RX and 90 S scale in, and we want this inside. So G and Y. Here we go. All right, so we want that in there. Now these two objects, we want to set rigid body passive. And again, rigid body passive. And then I want to shift the duplicated and just rotate it through to them. Because we want this to start from a high angle, something like that, that looks pretty good. Right? Now in this case, I want you to set it to active in under shape. I want you to select it to mesh. Now from here I just want to play and show you what's going to happen. See how it should do during like that. Ooh, pop right off. The reason is because under the ring here, if you click on it, it's set to passive, but the shape is set a convex hull. Let's change that to mesh, which will make it a little bit more complex. But it will actually use the real mesh and not generate one for physics. It's really handy when you have something like a tourist or a ring like this. Because now when you play it, you'll see that it moves nicely. Okay, so let's pause that. It's going to the front view again, shift the RR and just add a handful. And RR again, shift the move them around. Just add a handful. We're not trying to make it super specific, we're just trying to make a handful of rings. Okay, so now let's go ahead and play that. Well, that's pretty cool. I like it. I actually want to come back all the way here and I want to delete this ring. And I want to come to this ring because we're going to swing down pretty far and that's what I want you to do. I want you to hit play and make sure that you can get pretty far down. That looks pretty good, right? This ring gets pretty far down there and understood a little bit of space here. That's good. So I deleted that other ring. We're going to just use this one. And I'm gonna go tab edit mode. I'm going to Shift right-click here. I'm going to shift a at a monkey because y naught and a monkey. And again, we're not looking to be super precise here. We're just trying to put a monkey on these rings. I don't want it too big. I want it just big enough and I'll show you what I mean by that. There we go. Tab front view, play. Well, look at that. He even gets caught in there. That's pretty cool. Okay, so now let's see how it swings down. It gets down there pretty good, pretty good. So now what I wanna do, want to select this plane and bring it down just a little bit. Shift right-click here or Shift C to center your scene. Shift a. Let's go to Mesh and add a cube. Scale it in. We want the monkey just to miss this cube. Okay, so right about here. Okay, And now we're gonna go to rigid body. Passive. Hit Shift D to duplicate, hit Z and move it up on the z axis. In this case, we're going to go to active. Now if it pops down like that, That's because you're not at frame 0. In my case, I'm at 30. So let's hit this button to come back to frame 0 or one, whatever your starting point is. Ok, So now I want to just change the name of this object. So I'm going to click here, and I'm going to say B. I click on this bottom one and I'm going to call it pay. That way. I know exactly what names are for each. And the last thing I'm going to show you is the hinging parts. So hit F3 and type in Connect rigid bodies. Now, let's think about this for a second. At the top we have a passive piece and then a whole bunch of active rings and a monkey at the attached at the end of it. And that's given us as cool swing at the bottom here we have this four That's passive just so we have something that hit in case we overshoot. And finally we have this little passive thing right here. And this little cube that's active. We've attached a hinge by using our F3 searching for Connect rigid bodies command. And what a hinge does. This, it says, hey, wherever this locator is and wherever it's pointing, connect these two pieces. Now, it's all dependent on z. So z is pointing up and it's not going to be really useful for us. So hit R x and then just type in negative 90. Now the z is going to point in this direction. And for good measure, g and x left shifted, right about here. If I click on rigid body constraints, you'll see there's a bunch of options in here. We're going to pick hinge, and you can think of that as like a door hinge. Let's pick this top cube and let's rotate it a little bit. Kinda like it's about here. Like it's sitting on that hinge, like it's about to fall into it. I want to turn off Disable collisions because I do want it to collide with this passive part. Now let's hit one on the numpad. And honestly, let's just see what we get. Oh, nice, well done. Oh man, we have lost the whole thing. That is the magic of rigid bodies. Sometimes you gotta really finesse those details. Now, one last, last thing, I promise, when you click on this hinge and you go to the beginning, you'll see another thing that says breakable. Well, hinges can be broken. So if I click on it, I can set the threshold to one. And that means that basically any force more than one is going to break my hinge. So with this setup, I'm going to hit a twice to deselect everything and hit Play. Oh, hey, take a look at that. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. You've created yourself a swinging monkey, the NOX, a block off of its block. Like all things in Blender, there's an enormous amount of things you can do a rigid body dynamics, including playing with the newly updated generic spring. And let's see what amazing dynamics you can come up with. In this next chapter, we're going to cover one of the biggest updates to Blender there's been yet. And that's the introduction of a brand new rendering engine, EV and the upgrades to old engines like workbench or previous OpenGL viewport and cycles, the workhorse of all blended rendering. Now let's talk a little bit about EV and what does it actually mean? It's like a real time render. You can take a bit like rendering in a game engine like in unreal or unity. Now to enable it, neither come up here and turn on this button. And at first you may not notice anything really in particular. But when you hit Shift a, you can add a plane, scale it up. You'll start to see some shadow. If you hit GZ and say G and move it all around, you'll start to see that the shadow reacts well, actually reacts really well. If you come up here, you can turn on the original solid mode. You won't see any differences. You turn on the look dev mode, nothing new. But then you turn on rendering in EV, and suddenly everything is starting to look well, rather nice. And that's the power of EV, is that it lets you see rendered stuff quicker. However, it uses a couple of tricks to get there. For example, let's say we took this object and we added a brand new material to it. Looks like there's one here. And then we went ahead and turn that metallic and return down roughness. So right now this should be really, really shiny. If I add something in front of it, shift a, Let's go ahead and add a monkey, GZ. But this monkey right here, and we'll make this monkey read, well, you're not really seeing anything right now. And that's because an EV, you had to come to your render settings and turn on certain options to fake things like reflections. So for turned on screen space reflections, you can see that, hey, I can, I can actually see it looks like a monkey in the background and of course the floor. Now, this is actually a cheat. For example. Why can't I see the front of the monkey? Well, actually it's because we can't see the front of a monkey. Eva uses a lot of tricks is speedup rendering, but in that process, it also misses some things that we wish we had. Ev doesn't use ray tracing to determine things like refractions, reflections, etc. It's actually using big shadow maps and spring space effects to render the look that we have. So if we were to just leave this alone right now and switch two cycles, you can see right away how ray tracing will actually generate a more accurate looking thing. However, you have to note that when you switch the EV, this works really well, really fast. Now, if it does include some tricks like reflection cubed maps that let you fake the kind of reflection that you want. But it's also limited to only a couple objects. Nonetheless, EV is really awesome and really fast because men look at these shadows, they look pretty sweet. And of course, we can just move the slide around and it's reacting super-fast. Now before we close out this video, we should also talk really quickly about Workbench and what workbench really is. It's actually just the OpenGL viewport that you may have been used to an old blender. And it's really the solid mode that you've been using this whole, entire time. It just has a few options that when you go to Solid mode and say you're an EV, you can click this drop-down. All of these options that you see here are available when you switch to workbench here. So for example, you can go to mat cap mode and pick red, and then go to rendered mode for workbench. And this now looks a bit familiar like sculpting mode. That's what work benches is effectively a really fast OpenGL render. The lets you do everything from visualization to mat, cap, et cetera, all with just a few clicks. And finally, if we come up here, we can switch the cycles and see our good old render and how it's working. Each render offer Xu a lot of power. Ev is fast, but not really accurate. But man, it's really fast and it looks great. Workbench is really great for when you're working, visualization, architecture, etc. You don't really need all of that reflection stuff, but you want something that looks really pleasing. And it's also what you primarily work in when you're using Blender. And finally, cycles is all the best stuff smashed into one really good render. It's ray trace, it's really fast and it's really pretty. However, it comes at a cost and that means it goes a little slower than all the other renders. All the renders offer you a lot of possibility. And throughout the rest of this chapter, we're going to dive in through each one of them and find out how awesome they really are.
13. 12 EEVEE, Reflections & Shadows : Let's talk about EV, because honestly, it's amazing. Let's start by hitting Shift a and add in a plane, and then zoom out a little bit, scale it up. There we go. Switch to rendered mode. Let's take this cube and move it up. And we'll click on this light color light settings over here. We'll go a little more in depth with this in another video. But for now switched to area light, It's a really good one to use. Move it over, it's rotated here are our, there we go. Click on color and make it like a light reddish. Go for like a rid of shimmer around there doesn't have to be super accurate, just something close to that. Now shift the duplicated, put this light over here, our z, rotate it because we want it to come from this angle. And you can start to see how we're getting this cool to shadow thing that can color blue. There we go. Something similar to that. Now, click on this cube and hit RR and rotate it. So you're just touching like a little tip there. I'm gonna move it up a little. That looks pretty cool. Okay, Now, let's talk about Evie. We have set up our scene with two lights in this awesome cube in a plane. Here's the thing about EV. It's cheating to get this look. For example, if we zoom into the shadows, you can see that there are little pixelated. That's because it's basically baking these things in real time or as quick as it can. You can adjust them by going to the Render Settings, opening up shadow, and you'll see a whole bunch of options in here. We'll hit the highlights. For example, ESM is really fast, not as accurate though. Vsm more accurate. And of course it takes more computational power, cube size. While the bigger these are, the nicer the shadows are going to get. But be careful because depending on your GPU and this is using your GPU, it may go a lot slower or lot faster. Now, I'm going to set both of mine are 2k because I have an NVIDIA 1070 and it's working out pretty well. For zoom in even more, you can start to see how the shadows start to break up. And if I switched the ESM, you can see that things get nice and soft. If they're not really accurate and you're getting this slum white halo around it. And if I switch to VSM, you'll start to see the halo is gone, but of course, things get a little broken up. You can click on soft shadows and that will fix it. But then you're seeing str, str, really chug and hypothetical also help out because sometimes light from other lights start laddering up on top of each other. But again, it will start to tax or GPU, especially on a heavy scene. Now, this is looking pretty good so far. But we're not really getting any light bouncing back, hitting the underneath part of the cube. For that, you need to create a light probe. So hit Shift a, come down a light probe and you'll see a handful of them in here. The first to refer to specular things, that is, things that are reflecting basically. The bottom one is for diffuse, that is light that gets bounced around. So let's go to irradiance volume. There we go, scale it up GZ. And you don't actually need to make it this giant. In fact, as you start to make these for your scenes in general, you want to be really cautious on how much you're actually making. So this looks pretty good. I'm going to come over to my right. I'm going to find the indirect lighting panel. I'm going to open this up. And like all things, there's a bunch of options. The only one we need to concern ourselves with right now is baking. So go ahead and click on bake. And as you bake it, you'll start to see the lighting change at the bottom. That's because, like in a video game engine, blender is going ahead and actually determining where all the rays are bouncing and baking that data back onto objects around the scene. We're going to bounce three times. This is how big that image or that bait map is going to be an all these other options help us control the quality and filter out things like fireflies. Now there is one cool thing you can do under display where you see irradiance size. You can click this little eyeball and scale these up, but be careful, don't make them too big. And you can actually see what got baked. It's pretty cool. It's like a little orb for every point in the scene. So I'm going to turn that off. And you can see right away that this is all looking much, much better compared to when we had no lighting cash and we had our default shadows on. So I'm going to undo that. A quick Baker indirect lighting again. It does take a couple of seconds. Have you ever really heavy scene that might take a couple of minutes. Then I'm going to turn this off. And there you have it. You have a beautiful looking scene with this cube. However, it won't work if you start to animate and move around. And if you escaped the volume, you're going to lose all of that data that you just baked. That is the limitation of EV in its current state. But don't worry, the blender team is working on this all the time and it's going to be a huge update for blended 2.8. So get in there and start learning how you can incorporate into your animation in scenes. In previous videos, we've talked a lot about how EV uses tricks to speed up the workflow and produce some great results. However, there are case scenarios like reflections where it doesn't always look as good. So in this video, I want to talk about how to work with and around screen space reflections. Now we need a scene to demonstrate this. So let's go ahead and delete this cube, hit X to delete, shift a mesh plane, RY 90, Gy, actually GX. Let's put it over there and skill it up with S. Let's add ourselves a UV Sphere. Tap to edit mode control, F, Shade, smooth, so it looks nice and smooth. You can scale it up too, not too big to move it over here to the side. And then for fun, let's add Suzanne. So shift a monkey. Because who doesn't love suzanne the monkey? And I'll just rotate these in. Now, let's click on this plane. Go into rendered mode, make sure we're in EV, come down to material and make a brand new material. Now, this material is going to be a perfect mirror. So it's going to be really shiny, so really metallic. And we need a kick the roughness down. The higher roughness, the higher the roughness of the actual object is, the lower the more like a mirror it is. Now, right off the bat. We don't see any reflections that don't worry. We're going to get there. Now with this Spiro here, Let's make a new material as well. Under base color will tend to it. Let's say like a bluish aqua ish Doesn't have to be anything in particular. You can make it green if you want. And the metallic we're going to kick it all the way up. And the roughness, we're going to kick it all the way down. Same thing. You don't see any reflections yet. Now come to rendering settings. In here, you'll see screen space reflections. Open that up and checkbox it. And right away, you'll start to see, well, actually you'll start to see some reflections. Let's look at this sphere for a second. If I get too close to the sphere, everything disappears. But once I kinda zoom out a little bit, I can see some of the monkey, hey, it's working. Now, for the most part, you can get away with this and it looks okay. It's a little grainy though, right? That's what half red traces. The name of this may change in the future. The basic idea is this allows you to draw a little bit more accurately, so it looks a little bit better. So half restraints could be off giving you more ability to see a lot better and more cleaner. However, if you have a really complex scene, this is going to get really, really expensive. There's a lot of other interesting options here, but one of the ones I want to highlight is something you'll see a lot in shadows and screen space reflections and so on. It's this thing called thickness. And that's because screen space doesn't actually know how deep something is. Remember this is not a ray trace engine. This is actually just based off what you see is what you get. So thickness allows you to kind of modify and say, Hey, you know what, you should render a little bit more of what you're seeing. If I drag it, you can see what's going on, especially in the mirror. It's kind of effectively duplicating what's already there. It allows you to get just a little bit more nicer edges on stuff. But again, it's faking it so it's taking what you see and basically duplicating it and putting it onto that mirror behind you. And it sorta kinda works and it's really fast. So that's the advantage of screen space. And that's why you see thickness and a lot of different options. But again, it is a cheat. So just be aware of that. I'll just leave it at one for now. Okay. So let's say that this was your scene in EV and you're saying, You know what? I really want to reflect at least the ball in the monkey. I'm okay with the spear, but I really want to have it fully reflected on this plane. Well, Evie has this option called a light probe. If you hit Shift a, come down a light probe, look for reflection plane and add back. Now let's rotate it RY 90 g and x shifted back. Put it about in the middle ish. Oh, this is really cool. I'm just going to hit S and scale it up. And I need to make sure that it's completely in here. There we go. Just needed to push it forward a little bit and look at that. Now if I scale it down and you can see goes away for scale it up, it appears awesome. Now in its current release state, blender to point E, the engine only allows really for one of these. And it's really expensive and really heavy because it will really tax or GPU. Nonetheless, it does give you a nice mirror to work with. You just have to be aware though, that this entire thing needs to envelop the object within it. So if for some reason your object is outside of it, like here, you'll note that it doesn't work. It has to be perfectly inside of it. And if I come to my camera view, if I hit 0 on the numpad or it can go view cameras, active camera. You can see the reflections. So if I hit N, I can come down to View, Lock camera to view it. And again, rotate here. And then I'm just going to render this image and look at that. It looks pretty good for a real time render, and it's wicked fast less than the second. That doesn't really use that much memory. Of course, this all gets more complex the harder and bigger your scenes get. Still. Screen space reflections will give you a lot of power going forward when you're using the EV render engine. In previous videos, we've talked a lot about how EV uses tricks to speed up the workflow and produce some great results. However, there are case scenarios like reflections where it doesn't always look as good. So in this video, I want to talk about how to work with and around screen space reflections. Now we need a scene to demonstrate this. So let's go ahead and delete this cube. Hit X to delete, shift a mesh plane, RY 90. Why actually GX, it's peered over there and scale it up. If S, Let's add ourselves a UV Sphere. Tap to edit mode control, F, Shade, smooth, so it looks nice and smooth. You can scale it up too, not too big to move it over here to the side. And then for fun, let's add Suzanne. So shift a monkey. Because who doesn't love suzanne the monkey? And I'll just rotate these in. Now, let's click on this plane. Go into rendered mode, make sure we're in EV, come down to material and make a brand new material. Now, this material is going to be a perfect mirror. So it's going to be really shiny, so really metallic. And we need a kick the roughness down. The higher roughness, the higher the roughness of the actual object is, the lower the more like a mirror it is. Now, right off the bat. We don't see any reflections that don't worry. We're going to get there. Now with the spear over here, let's make a new material as well. Under base color will tend to, let's say like a bluish aqua ish Doesn't have to be anything in particular. Make it green if you want an a metallic we're going to kick it all the way up on the roughness. We're going to kick it all the way down. Same thing. You don't see any reflections yet. Now come to rendering settings. And here you'll see screen space reflections. Open that up and checkbox it. And right away, you'll start to see, well, actually you'll start to see some reflections. Let's look at the spear for a second. If I get too close to the sphere, everything disappears. But once I kinda zoom out a little bit, I can see some of the monkey, hey, it's working. Now, for the most part, you can get away with this and it looks okay. It's a little grainy though. That's what half raise traces. The name of this may change in the future. The basic idea is this allows you to draw a little bit more accurately, so it looks a little bit better. So half risk traits could be off giving you more ability to see a lot better, more cleaner. However, if you have a really complex scene, this is going to get really, really expensive. There's a lot of other interesting options here, but one of the ones I want to highlight is something you'll see a lot in shadows and screen space reflections and so on. It's this thing called thickness. And that's because screen space doesn't actually know how deep something is. Remember this is not a ray trace engine. This is actually just based off what you see is what you get. So thickness allows you to kind of modify and say, Hey, you know what, you should render a little bit more of what you're seeing. If I drag it, you can see what's going on, especially in the mirror. It's kind of effectively duplicating what's already there. It allows you to get just a little bit more nicer edges on stuff. But again, it's faking it so it's taking what you see and basically duplicating it and putting it onto that mirror behind you. And I sorta kinda works, and it's really fast. So that's the advantage of screen space. And that's why you see thickness and a lot of different options. But again, it is a cheat. So just be aware of that. I'll just leave it at one for now. Okay. So let's say that this was your scene in EV and you're saying, You know what? I really want to reflect at least the ball in the monkey. I'm okay with the spear, but I really want to have it fully reflected on this plane. Well, Evie has this option called a light probe. If you hit Shift a, come down a light probe, look for reflection plane and add that. Now let's rotate it RY 90 g and x shifted back. Put it about in the middle ish. And now this is really cool. I'm just going to hit S and scale it up. And I need to make sure that it's completely in here. There we go. Just needed to push it forward a little bit and look at that. Now if I scale down, you can see it goes away. If I scale it up, it appears awesome. Now in its current release state, blender to point E, the engine only allows really for one of these, and it's really expensive and really heavy because it will really tax your GPU. Nonetheless, it does give you a nice mirror to work with. You just have to be aware though, that this entire thing needs to envelop the object within it. So if for some reason your object is outside of it, like here, you'll note that it doesn't work. It has to be perfectly inside of it. And if I come to my chem review for hit 0 on my numpad or it can go view cameras, active camera. You can see the reflections. So if I hit N, I can come down to View, Lock camera to view, hit it again, rotate here. And then I'm just going to render this image and look at that. It looks pretty good for a real time render, and it's wicked fast less than a second. That doesn't really use that much memory. Of course this all gets more complex the harder and bigger your scene sketch. Still screen space reflections will give you a lot of power going forward when you're using the EV render engine.
14. 13 Workbench & Cycles: Believe it or not, you've been using the workbench mode this entire time. It's the default viewer inside the blender when you're first starting out. And it's your typical solid mode that's up here. And if you remember, when you click this Drop-down, you'll see a whole bunch of interesting options that you can use to preview your scenes even better. Well, when you come over here to render engine, you can also pick workbench and get all of those same options. Now this is really handy for things like sculpting and layout. And you just want to look at something pretty basic and not spend a lot of time shading or texturing it. Huge kinda wanna build out the scene. So in order to demonstrate this, let's make ourselves a really quick scene. We'll move this cube over here. So G, Shift Z, move it over there, too easy. So it moves it up a little. Should a, let's make ourselves a plane, kinda big. Shift a, let's add our favorite monkey. There we go. Let's tab into edit mode. Control F, Shade, Smooth, right-click, sub-divide. Open this up. Smoothness, one number of cuts to turn it off, tap out, and shift a one more time. We'll add something totally different. Let's had a cone. Haven't really added cones. And we, here we go. Tab control F, shade smooth, nice. Now we have ourselves a smooth cone. It doesn't matter if it's clipping. Mover monkey rehear, scale him up and down, something cool like that. All right, now we have our scene setup. So come over here to switch to our render mode. And over here under lighting, if you click on it, you'll see a whole bunch of other options. Just pick one. It doesn't matter which. And you can start to see how each one of these changes the way that your scene looks. You also have a little tab here to control rotation. I'll just have to check on it a little globe and you can rotate where the lights are coming from. And if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see some other options like cavity. If you click on that and drag it up, it's kinda like an ambient occlusion. You can see where all the cavities in your measure then mix it for fairly interesting kinda looking mesh. If you have no materials on everything, you can pick random. That way, everything in the scene has a random color. Or of course, you can go to material and it will read exactly what's on that material. There are, of course, other options like vertex. If you went ahead and vertex painted some of your scenes. But I'm just going to leave it on random because that looks pretty cool. If I come down here, I can also turn on outline. That gives you a little bit of like a contact shadow. So if I de-select everything, you can see just a faint outline around everything. It's kinda nice. I'll bring this down a little bit because it's getting kinda noisy. And come back up here and explore some of the other lighting schemes that we got. Once you find the lighting scheme, you're happy with. The other thing, you can change its shadow. Come over here and click on shadow. If you come back here you can see it creates a very nice accurate shadow, which I can dial back di afford. I can even play with shadows shifting or the focus of the shadow if I want to, even where the shadows are coming from, if it doesn't want to obey my lights. Or course I can move these two independently, so I have one for lights, one for shadow. Now you might be asking yourself, well, what about this light? Well, this is workbench mode. It's only going to factor in what's inside of these settings. There are a few other modes we can look at it really quick, like mad cap. And you might remember this from sculpting mode. So come over here, you can see that everything has well, the skull to kinda look. I can go into material to get rid of that randomness. And here you go, everything has that reddish hue. But there are other cool math camps like this normal looking mode. I can set that to random, but it doesn't change too much. I can come over to this green thing has been like a jade kinda feel to it. I've got this black one. Yeah, That's pretty cool, right? Or this white one, if 100, keep it nice and simple. All of these Matt caps are really cool to play with. Okay, let's take a look at the last part, which is flat in as he get it. It's flat. It's really, really, really flat. And this mode is really good for random. So you can see where everything in your scene is and it's slightly different color so it won't overlap. Plus, if you really kick up your cavity, you can really start to see how all of your meshes are built. Now, all that's taken into consideration, workbench, It's not a final render mode though. You could render from it if you wanted to. It's real intent is just to be a workbench to give you a way to look at things without having to worry too much about materials and textures and lighting. You just want to see things really quickly and you want them to be pleasing to the eye. So get familiar with Workbench and find what settings you like to work in. The last render engine we're gonna take a look at is cycles. It's the main workhorse behind all major Blender animations. And trust me, it makes your stuff looks super good, but it is expensive, as in it takes a long time for it to process. Now, we need a scene in order to see it in true form. So let's build one. You can click on this cube and hit G, Shift Z to move it in the back. Move it up a little bit, shift a and let's add ourselves a plane. There we go. Shift a again, we'll add our favorite monkey. And you can Tab Control F sheets, move. Of course, right-click and sub-divide our monkey. Make sure you sit that smoothness to one. Can tap out of this, get out of edit mode, shift a, and let's go ahead and add something fun like a cone. We can bring this down over here, g, Shift Z, send it to the back. And why not scale it up and move it up a little bit. Maybe we'll move or cube a little more for it so it doesn't feel so left behind. There we go. And we'll rotate it just like we had in our EV cube. Cool. I'm gonna move this over so we can get some more real estate. And finally, I want to preview everything. So I'm going to hit this rendered mode button. Then I'm going to switch from EV to cycles. And right away you can see that things don't look too different. If you zoom in a little bit, you'll start to see that this little bit of graininess. Now remember what happened in evening behind the cube. If we come to EV real quick, you can see it looks pretty flattened, bland. But if we switched the cycles, you can see starts to get dark here and there's a little bit of light coming from the sides now because cycles is a ray trace engine and rays are bouncing all over the place, giving us information like light that we otherwise wouldn't get inside of EV. So what I'm trying to say is, is that cycles is way more accurate. But the accuracy comes at a cost. And you can see that that cost means things are a little grainy. Now in order to remove the grain, one of the simplest options is just to add more samples under sampling. And that often will help. And unfortunately, you can never really get rid of it. So there's other tools. For example, if you come over to this view layer tab, you can scroll down and you'll see an option called de-noising. If you open this up and check box it, when you do a final render, all of this noise will get cancelled out. Here. Let's go preview that really quick. Right, going into our camera, moon cameras, active camera. And you can see we're looking a little too down, so let's it and lock camera to view. And let's just move a little bit. Just like we would normally in the viewport. Hit N again, turned off law came rid of view. And now let's render with de-noising on. You can see as this image is getting processed, that all that grain gets removed by the de-noising tool. That's the power cycles. You get some really beautiful, accurate scenes. But you also have to be careful. You might need more samples. You might need to turn on de-noising. And more importantly, it's going to take a lot longer than EV. But trust me, cycles will look great and it's worth the wait. There's a lot of awesome new features and speed ups inside a blender to plenty, It's cycles. One of my favorites is a principled hair. Let me show you. Now we need something that's going to be kind of furry and Harry, so let's get rid of this cube, hit X, Delete, and hit Shift a, and let's add a monkey tab. And you know what we're gonna do, right-click, sub-divide. Open this up. Smooth subdivides movements to one, close that control F, Shade Smooth tab out here. Let's switch ourselves to Cycles render engine. Zoom in a little bit, F3, quick for type that in. And come over here, we can make it a little bit longer. Or you go close that out. Come to the right. And under particles, you're going to look for something called field weights. Now we're at the bottom is a checkbox that will turn on all the weights. And in this case it will make your hair go all the way down because there's a lot of gravity. So we're going to defy gravity and type in 0.008. There you go. Look at that cool monkey. Now to be honest, there's a more proper way to do this. You go up to object mode and you switch it over to particle edit, and you really start to shape the hair. But for now, we're just going to defy gravity. Okay, now come down to the material tab. You'll see something that says for material, you can click on Use nodes, switch surface, two principal hair. And finally, since we're in cycles, just go up to render. Now this white might be kind of far away. So I'm going to click on it. I'm going to turn on area and I'm going to bring it a lot closer. Or Z. There you go. Now if your machine is chugging, you can always turn off rendered mode and just position this right where you want it, and then turn rendered mode back on. Now let's zoom-in, click on this monkey and look at this gorgeous hair. And here's the gorgeous thing about this. It's all controlled through this amazing node. And if you click on direct coloring, you can even pick on melanin concentration, so you get really accurate kinds of hair. For example, I can go down a point three-ish, and I can get myself a blonde haired monkey. And I can play with roughness or any other sort of value. Or it can just kinda leave it alone and maybe let's bring down some of that redness. Now it's kind of more platinum blonde bike. Principled hair be SDF is both fast, easy to use. And let's face, it looks super, super cool. This is one of the many features that had been added a blender to 0.8. And it's honestly one of the most fun to play with. So get in there and see what interesting hairdos you can come up with. Have you ever rendered something? And afterwards went, Man, I really wish I could change the color of this thing or make the background darker or lighter. How would you do that after you've rendered something? Well, with a little bit of preparation, you can do that inside the cycles. Let me show you. Of course, let's switch our render engine to cycles. And then let's make ourselves a quick scene. You know, the drill, Shift a and a plane. Move our cubic here. Let's add ourselves. The more interesting items. There we go. And let's go ahead and add a few more things upfront. So shift a spear. And let's Shift a again. Let's add a cone. There we go. Now grab your camera and rotate it up a little bit, are XX. And then we can view the camera really quick. Here. That's looking pretty good. I'm going to scale up my plane a little bit. I'm going to grab the sphere and I want it to overlap just a little bit. Okay? Now with each one of these objects come down and Material and go ahead and add a new material for all of them. You can make it whatever colors you want. Just have some fun and some interesting things. Now, in the case of at least one of these, like this cube and the plane, I want them to be the exact same color. And we'll talk about why in a second. Great. Now that we have materials in the scene, I want you to come over to this view layer tab and scroll down and look for something called crypto met. A crypto Matt is where each and every single object gets a unique color. And you can use that color as a mask to change it. After you've rendered it. I'm going to set it to object. Although you can see here you can set it to material or asset. And levels of six means there's going to be six colors. However, you could set these levels are higher if he had more objects. Six is okay for now, so we'll just leave it at default. Great. Now the next thing I want you to do is go ahead and render this. Cool. Now we have a rendered image. So let's go ahead and close this. And let's come over to compositing up here in the top. I want to change this dope sheet to image editor. Bring it up a little bit, and I want to go to render result. Here we are. This is our compositing editor. I want to switch this to use nodes, hit End to get some real estate. And I want to pull this open. And finally, I want to control Shift left-click. And that's going to create a viewer node. And the saved myself that performance. I'm going to turn off backdrop, come down here and go to Viewer Node. Cool. Now, a viewer node means that every time you control left-click, it will cycle through everything in here. If you go to cook them at, you can kinda see something. What you need to do is shift a to add a crypto mat. So let's type that in there. And we're going to control right-click, drank the cut that again, that's Control, right-click drag. Then we'll put the script DOM at right here in the middle. Image, image crypto 0, 0, 0 to the crypto 00, 00, 00, 00. And just kinda drag him over top to top, middle to middle, bottom to bottom. Okay, Now, Control Shift left-click on image. Nothing. Control Shift left again. Nothing. One more time. Hey, we got something. We have the picker window. Now, if I open this up just a little bit more, you'll see that in my crypto met node, I have add and remove. Click on Add, and let's just pick an object. Let's start with a cube. All right, Now Control Shift, left-click image. Hey, I'm starting to get something. And if we do over time, I can go to mat and I'll get that black and white mat that you can use another compositing software or in Blender or pick. And I can come down here and say, I want the spear, but I don't want to cube. And I do want the monkey. So all you have to do is use Add, click on what you want, remove and click on what you don't want. Now again, Control, Shift, left-click image, mat, pick, and go back to image. And there you have it. The power of crypto mats at your fingertips. It's super versatile and the best part about it, it's, it's all nicely anti-aliasing little work really well in any compositing software. Now one more thing before we leave crypto myths, he actually export them after you've rendered. In order to do that, you need to add two more notes. So Shift A Search. Set Alpha. One more, shift a search file output. Now at normal render time, if I click on dimensions, you'll see this output. And this is where all if I renders will output from the composite node. Anything else that needs to be outputted with the file output node. So we can move our viewer over here and get some real estate track image to image, matte to alpha. And then finally this image to file output. And then that can hit N to open up some tools. I can come up to item, open up properties. And in here I'll see whole bunch of things I can pick mixture that you have a format that supports RGBA. And in this case, P&G has little RGBA. So you know, you'll get the Alpha map and you can scroll down and change the file name right here under what's called the file subpath. And there you have it. Every time your composite renders, you'll have the output over here on the right. And every time you have a crypto met set up, as long as you have set Alpha and file output set, you'll also get your crypto Matt export it. And that is how you utilize the power of crypto mats in your rendering and compositing workflow. One of the coolest things is how fast cycles is gotten from 2.79 to 2.8. In fact, there's a 10 to 30 percent speedup just out of the box using blender to 0.8. Nonetheless, there are still some things you can do to speed up your render is a little bit more, and I want to cover some of them in this video. The first thing we need to do is switch the cycles and we need to make a scene. So let's go ahead and shift a at a plane, scale it up. And you can construct the scene in any way you want. We've done plenty of these by now. So go ahead and just add a couple objects. Nothing too complex, wherever you feel is best. My personal favorite, cone, a cube, and a monkey. Typically this camera's pointing a little too far down. So if you select it and then hit our x dx, okay, and rotate it up. Going again, review camera, active camera. Hey, that looks pretty good. And the scale is out, so we cover everything. Now first, let's talk about how rendering works in cycles. You have your camera right here and where it's going to do is send out rays from the camera throughout this scene. Each ray is going to look for a light or light source like say the world or meshes that emit light. And then it's going to bounce. Then it'll hit an object, bounce again, bounce again, Unbounce again. Eventually about this for a long time. And you can control how many times it bounces under like paths. You can set a total limit for everything. Or you can set how many different kinds of balances for each type. For example, diffused bounces or velocity bounces. Okay? So that's how it rendering works. Now, every time a ray bounces, you have to resolve what it looks like. And that's our sampling comes in. The more samples you have, the more you can resolve what actually happened when that light ray bounced. So at the default, you have a 128 samples for render and 32 for viewport. The more samples you have, the cleaner image will look. If you're working on an outside scene, path tracing issues, pure ray tracing, and it's really fast and really good-looking. Now the downside is that it'll actually take a really long time to resolve. So that's my under like pass. If you scroll down a little bit, you'll see this thing called clamping. And now this is where we're going to spend a lot of time. So let's go into camera view. Switch to rendered mode. And you can see what's happening right now. It looks a little bit of graining because we don't have a lot of samples. So if we shove a 128 more into our viewport and hit Enter, we can see that things start to clean up just a little bit more, just a little bit more, just a little bit more. After a while, you can just clamp it and say, you know what, you've taken too long to resolve. I'm just going to cut all indirect way down to one. Now here's the trick. You can set this value to anything you want, but set it to a point where you can't tell the difference between it being a 10 and at being at one. The same thing goes for directly. You can set it, for example, to 10. But if it looks just as good at 10 as it does one, then maybe you just want to use one. This will clamp the bouncing and sampling and give you a cleaner image sooner. On top of that, you also have this thing called pattern, and you can switch the correlated multi-donor. And that's just the pattern of noise that is in your scene. Pics are invented the correlated multi-generation. So that's why we tend to use it a lot more, because it does look a little bit more tasteful. If you're working on an indoor scene and you have light coming from outside through a window, for example. You want to use branch path tracing, which will resolve scenes a lot faster initially, but take a long time to get to the final work. The cool thing about branch path tracing though, is that each and every single ray after the initial hit breaks up into what's called sub-arrays for diffuse and glossy, et cetera. So if for example you have seen that had a lot of glass in it, this might be kinda helpful to use. I do like branch path tracing a lot. But in general, shader path tracing does the most of what you need. Now we touched on this a little bit earlier, but she come to this view layer setting. You scroll all the way down. You'll see the famous de-noise. And trust me, turning this on or save you a whole bunch of headaches. It'll go ahead and filter out and blur a little bit of the noise all along the image. And in general, it works really well. But of course, you're going to need a good amount of samples to use. So we'll set it to 32 and then do a quick render.
15. 14 Grease Pencil & Draw mode: One of the biggest changes to blend the 2.8 is the introduction of a whole new 2D animation system. They've taken an old grease pencil system from 2.79 and refactored it, used the power of EV and made it way better to work with. Over the course of the next chapter, I'm going to show you all the amazing things that we can do inside a 2D animation. Now first, let's actually switch to 2D animation mode. Just hit Control N and go to 2D animation. And you can discard changes here. You'll be greeted by whole new workspace. So let's start from the top. Over here, you'll see that we have a brand new mode. It's called drop. Across the top. You'll see a bunch of different options. For example, what material to use, what kind of brush that we're using. And different things like radius and strength. You can move left and right by holding down the middle mouse button. Like all modes in blender, you have some extra workspaces to work with, but we'll just be using 2D animation from here on out. On the left, you'll see a whole bunch of new tools to play with. At the bottom, you'll see we're in the dope sheet animation editor, and it's been switched to grease pencil. Now this is important because this will let you manipulate your grease pencil drawings to create 2D animation. And finally, on the right is the new Strokes panel. And there's a lot to take in here. The most important ones are layers of an onion skinning. A layer, it's just like layers and other software, gimp, Photoshop, et cetera. It allows you to draw on one layer, which you can do just by holding down left-click, do some cool stuff, and then select the next layer. Change what material you're using. You can go to fill. And you can just fill any one of these layers were some pretty cool stuff. Now, if it fills the entire screen, that's okay. You can Control Z that. You can then hold down Control left-click drag and create a cool little fill box. Anyways, back here in layers, you can turn off each of these layers and see what you're working with. You can control the opacity and play with blending modes such as addition, multiplication, etcetera. Next, It's onion skinning, and we'll dive into this a little bit deeper and animation, but this lets you see previous drawings so you can compare your current drawing with what you've done before. Now there's one more thing we need to look at. If you hit N and come over to tool, you'll see the brush tool. It's similar to what you see over here. When you switch to draw and you come up here, you'll see brushes. And of course, all of these options, you have them available on the right under n, plus a few extra ones, like curves for sensitivity and other options to play with while drawing. Okay, now that wraps up our overview of the interface of grease pencil in 2D animation. Now let's start playing around with some of the tools. Now I know what you're thinking. Isn't this supposed to be a talk about 2D animation while it is? And one of the cool things about crease pencils, big update and blended 2.8 is the addition of annotate. Let's say you're just working in 3D, doing some pretty cool stuff. If you click on this annotate tool, you can left-click and drag and leave notes for people. In fact, you don't even need a clicker. You can just hold down the D button and make a whole bunch of drawings. And there's a little slide out here. So if you hold it down, you see some extra things you can do like a line polygon or an eraser. I'll just stick to annotate. This tool is really handy, especially if you're working in teams of people. This, each one of you could leave different annotations to point out things that aren't are working with this 3D object. Now here's the thing. If you hit N income over down to view annotations. Let's close these really quick to get some more real estate. You can see how you can change the color of each annotation. So in your team, perhaps you can be double-click the art director. And then you can hand it to another person who could potentially be the animation director. And they could say, This looks great. And the art director could be like It does not. That is the cool thing about annotations is that you can change different colors instead different labels. And of course, with our little viewport overlays, you can click here and then turn them off to work in a clean interface. They also work over times over, come down to my timeline. I can come to say a 101 and then just draw another annotation. An annotation is based on where I'm looking by the way. So you'll note that when I rotate over here and I draw circle. You can see how that circle seems projected onto an invisible plane from the camera. So I can try one more, which tried from above. And I look at it from the side. You can see it's about flattish. Annotations are really handy to add to your workflow. They allow you to leave reminders and paths are between people and leave some notes for them and recommend you edit to your workflow. Now, let's start drawing. Just hold down the left-click and start making interesting shapes. If you have a pressure sensitive tablet, you can lightly sketch and hard sketch. Or if you don't, you can always play with the strength up here. Or by right-clicking. It can even change the radius. At the top left, you can pick any kind of brush that you want to use. For example, draw noise, kinda looks like calligraphy. And draw marker gives you a really thin line until you really press down. Or draw ink will get you something a little bit more consistent from the get-go. Go ahead and pick one of the drawing brushes you like, and we'll keep going. Now. We're in the lines layer over here. And we talked a little bit about fills. So let's go ahead and click on fills. And then on the left click on our fill tool. Now, how do I change the color that I'm filling with? If I come up here, you'll see there have a few options already, but what if I wanted a new option? Well, I could come to gray and change the color here. Or I come down to the material tab right here. And you'll see I have a lot of different materials I can play with. If I come up here and click the plus new, and I can choose is this stroke or a fill or a stroke and fill. Let's try both. Under stroke, I'm going to click here and pick a random color. And under Fill, I'm going to click here and pick another random color. So now when I click with this tool, it'll leave a blue outline and a green inline. Now if I click over here, I'm going to make the whole canvas green and I don't want that. So instead, I'm going to Control Z. And you can see that there's some faint lines over here. In fact, I can zoom in, since this is a 3D workspace, believe it or not. So I have an infinite resolution. Now if I hold down Alt and left-click drag, I can leave a little helper fill line. So let's go ahead and fill some of these. And then click here to fill that space. If I'm really lazy, I can hold down control and left-click around and just draw the shape that I want. And if I mess up, I can hold down Control Alt, right-click and drag this little cunning box tool and let it go. Now here's a little note about this tool. You can't actually cut out the middle, unfortunately, at least now at the station blender, That's because it's relying on all the points that are at the end to determine what the shape is. So if you want to cut something out, you're going to have to do it like this to cut out the edges. And if you want to add in kind of like a filler, you'd have to do something like this. Okay, Now let's zoom out and come back to our draw tool over here. And let's look at the eraser. As I mentioned before, it really only works on the edges of stuff. If you really want to erase the entire thing, well, you're just gonna have to hold it down and really work at it to get all those vertices that are making up the fill shape. However, when it comes to erasing the stroke lines, it works really, really, really well. So it's a little finicky, but it is a really good tool. And finally, this cutting tool is exactly like holding down Control Alt, right-click to create that pattern. Okay, great. Now you have a good overview of all the draw tools inside the blend is 2D animation workspace. So get in there and start playing around with it and see what interesting drawings you can come up with. Now before we begin, I don't want any complaints that you don't know how to draw. Just start john, doesn't matter what. Just lightly make a couple of cool sketches. We go. Look at this. Coolness doesn't have to look amazing. It can just be a circle, no erasing, not allowed. Okay, so let's say you've gone ahead and you've drawn this really cool looking character. In this case, my little guy has a crown. And like most artists, when you're starting out drawing, you're gonna stay nice and loose and really sketchy. Now let's say you wanted to ink it and have really strong crisp lines. Well, what I want you to do is come over to layers and make a new layer. Go ahead and lock your previous two layers. That way you don't erase them by mistake. Click on this new layer. If you double-click on it, you can hit control a type in ink. There we go. And now let's take a look at these tools over here on the left. I'm just going to undo that real quick. There's a handful of these and I wanted to reserve a whole video for them because they're really, really handy. So let's pretend that you wanted to start inking this person. And let's start with a line. You can just go ahead and left-click and drag and create a quick line. Maybe you want to go ahead and make a few more lines so you can hit E, extrude E to extrude E and just, just keep hitting it until you feel like you're in a good spot. And then hit Enter. Maybe you want to try something a little bit more wiggly. So let's try this one right here. Click and let go. That's going to give you this kind of tool and this little dude. And now you can go ahead and edit these around and, and really just have some fun. Now here's the thing. Like in edit mode for 3D stuff. Moment you hit enter, you can't go back. So be really mindful of placing these exactly how you want them. So go ahead and start inking this little dude. I'm going to go ahead and make the eyes really quick. And it looks pretty good. Although I can move it around if it really wants to or make it oblique. I just want perfect circles. All right, so now I'm just going to go ahead and finish out the rest of this character really fast. Okay, so now I've finished inking this little guy. And I'm going to turn off my lines and fill. I'm going to hit Tab to go into edit mode and hit a twice. You might say yourself, wait a minute, it's really light. What am I gonna do about that? Or I really want really thick ice harmonic, the lines thicker. Now that I've already gone ahead and inked it, it's actually really easy. So let's hit B, draw a box and select the eyes or something similar on what you've drawn. And you can hit Alt S. And that way you can control the thickness. And we can hit a again to select everything, and then hit Shift F. And that will make everything really fit or controls the opacity you can kinda see at the top left what's happening there. Now be careful. You can go all the way down and remove the opacity is we want to be smart about what opacities set. Cool. Now we have everything nice and thick and dark. However, for hit eight twice, you can see that there's a few overlapping areas that don't look good, like right over here. So I can zoom in. And because I'm in edit mode and strokes or nothing just But vertices, I can grab the little point here and hit delete and delete again. That way I can clean up these nice little edges and have a really good-looking character. Using those line and ink tools inside of Draw mode. And then cleaning them up inside of edit mode will help make your 2D animation look rate. One of the cool things about blender to point eights new 2D animation system disaffected. Everything's actually in 3D. Let me show you the color to draw. I can go to object mode, hit Shift a, go to grease pencil, and you guessed it at a monkey. Now, if I rotate my view around, can see that my monkey is actually a 3D shape. If I come over to the outliner, you can see I have a stroke object. That's what we initially started with, even though it's blank. And Suzanne are predrawn monkey for us. And because it's an object, I can come over here into Grease Pencil, switch to dope sheet and move this object around, rotate it, hit S and set keyframes. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's hit I occasion rotation scale. And let's go to about a 100. And we can rotate this monkey, then hit G to move it around, and then hit I and set another keyframe. And look at that. We have an animated to the monkey moving across 3D space because it's actually a 3D object. And because everything is 3D, I can grab my camera and hit, I go to location, rotation scale, come down to say frame a 100, G and Y. Move it forward. I again location rotation scale and have a 3D movie camera with my 2D drawings that also get moved around. It's probably a little easier to demonstrate without the monkey moving. So let's click on a monkey and just delete that last keyframe that you said. By hitting Delete. If it's a little hard to see with the white background, you can click on the color and drop it down a little bit. That looks pretty good. Now let's go into camera review really quick. I can zoom out a little bit and I can scrub my timeline and see how I move through 3D space. It may help to actually have a 3D object. So we can come up to my overlays here, turn on my 3D cursor, Shift a and go ahead and add a cube. And we'll just move that cube over to the side really quick. Maybe rotate it a little too, and come back into camera view. Now you can see that I have a 3D space and a 2D drawing. And the best part about this, the second click back onto this monkey, go to Edit Mode. And maybe on this keyframe, I can have the monkey close its eyes. Let's go ahead and hit C to select all these points. While in edit mode as z. There we go. And take a look at that as we approach with our 3D camera. Since then closes her eyes. This is so cool and it's never been done before. We're able to combine 2D animation in 3D animation into a single easy-to-use system. And that is the power of blender to 0.8.
16. 15 Hand Drawn Animation & Sculpting: In this video, I want to talk about some of the classical 2D animation tools that are included in Blender to help you if hand-drawn animation. Now, if you're not comfortable drawing, don't worry, you can still follow along because we're just going to be making circles. Plus, it will show you how the tools work. With this. I want you to come up here and draw a circle. And we're going to do the basic assignment you give all beginning animators the bouncing ball. I'm going to draw a ball all the way at the top here and then move my playhead and about frame 12 and squish my little ball. We're going to pretend that the bottom here is the bomb for our ball. Then I'm going to come to about 24. And I'm going to draw the ball again. And then I'm gonna come over and say 34. And right away, you can see when a blender is really handy tools, onion skinning. Let's see, see your previous drawing to make sure that what you're currently drawing looks about the same. So with this nice flat bottom here, I'm going to try to mimic more or less with that drawing was like now I can come over here, make another drawing of the ball. And I can come over here and flatten them out yet again. There we go. Cool. Now with this amazing ball bounce animation, you might be asking yourself, wait a minute, where all the other joints that have while onion skinning works by specifying how many drives you want to see. So you're gonna wanna go ahead and click this number just so you can see all the previous ones. However, it won't show up while you're scrubbing. And if for some reason you can't see your onion skin, you can always come into overlays and make sure that it's checked on orange, check it off if you rather work with them off. Cool. Now we have this amazing ball bounce animation. Now the next thing is how do you fill in all the joints in between these keyframes? Well, you could hand draw it, That's one way. Or you could use blenders edit tool. Let me show you. Come over to draw and click on Edit mode. And let's go to about frames seven something between the first line and the second one when it's on the ground. And then hit a to select all of our points. And then just literally move him down wherever you'd like. You can scale them in, say AZ AKS. You can rotate it if you'd like. Just get it's about what you think it should be and then hit Tab and then scrub it again. Now that's one way of going between all your drawings but is another. So let's go back into edit mode and you're going to look for something called interpolating. It's going to help to come over to your onion skin down here at the bottom right, and just set it to 11 so we can see your previous and next drawing. In this case, we're gonna go from the bottom to the top of these two. So I'll set it right here, and I'll click on interpellate, and I'll see two new buttons. The first one called interpellate, gives you a breakdown or sort of tool from the 3D animation side of things. Let's you favor one keyframe or another, or just overshoot it altogether. I'm going to leave it to about here. The next one underneath it is called sequence. For that, we're going to want to go to a new area. So between this drawing and this shrine. So let's just put our play head right here. Go to interpellate and click on sequence. Now, all of a sudden, if I zoom in over here, you can see blue keyframes and how blender has tried to fill in what's happening between these two major keyframes. These are called breakdowns, and it's a really handy way to rough out what your animation should be. To come back up to interpolate. You can remove the breakdowns and then maybe changed the tangent type to something you'd like, like quadratic. Let's see what happens here. Sequence. And now we can scrub the timeline and we can see how it favors the top one a little bit more. Now admittedly, this is not going to be really perfect, beautiful looking drawing. But if you plan on inking it later, it's pretty handy to give you a rough idea of what you should have. If you feel good about it, you can go ahead and zoom out and just play your animation by hitting Spacebar. It may help to be out of edit mode though, so I'll switch back into draw. Okay, Now one more thing in the dope sheet. If you hit the P button, P like play, you can draw a box between the play area of your animation. So in this case, I'm going to go between one and 50 and let it go. Now I can hit Spacebar and watch my amazing 2D animation. Tools blender has for 2D animation are really versatile, simple and easy to use. So get in there and see what cool things you can animate. Now you may notice in our previous videos that I like to be really kinda loose of my drawings. And then a little bit later I'd like to make an ink layer and make them really nice. And Chris. Although admittedly, that is the worst circle I've ever drawn in my life. Nonetheless, you get to make some pretty cool stuff with a light sketchy layer and a thicker ink layer. But now let's say that you had this amazing interlayer and you wanted to clean it up even more. Like maybe you had some really cool stuff on here and you're like, Man, I want to clean it up just a little bit. Well, blender gives you an awesome thing called sculpt mode. So if you haven't already drawn something, just draw something, doesn't matter what. When you're ready, come over here and search the sculpt mode. And let's take a look at some of these really cool tools. The first is move. I'm going to turn up my radius of bunch here. And I'm just going to smooth things out. Actually, let's make that 3D is a little smaller and smooth this area. And that takes all of my horrible circle drawing and kind of smooths it out and mix a little bit pretty decent. Now actually, the next tool is thickness, and that lets you make lines thicker from what you had originally drawn. So don't worry, if you've drawn, you said, oh darn it, I wish I made the line thicker. You can always do that in thickness mode plus. And if you think in only parts of it, you can get this kinda cool, wobbly look. Underneath that is strength and like sickness. If you forgot to make something really dark in your initial drawing, you can use strength to really thicken up that dark line. There we go. That's looking pretty good. You can also remove strength by clicking the minus sign. If you want to make things look kind of faded. In my case, I can kind of strong. Alright, the next tool is randomized, and this is, well, just going to make things random. Let's just be honest. It's going to look, goal is going to look really cool. The next tool is called Grab. And if I come over here, I can hold down f bigger radius. And I can just grab stuff and start moving it all around. And it's going to look well, it's going to look grabbed admittedly, but it's going to look pretty cool. The next tool is called push. Now with Graham, you had to click and drag a selection that was push. You can hold down your left click and move around the image and just do some really wicked kind of stuff. They can make things really dirty, really fast though. So I'm going to undo that and just push out some things. There we go. But the best part is you don't need to lift up your mouse. Underneath that is twist. And I make this brush a little bit bigger with f, I can just hold down my left-click and start moving in circles. Effort don't move. I can just twist what's right in front of me. And sadly, an endlessly start twisting our poor little happy person. Okay, I'm going to stop that. And I'm going to undo poor little guy. Underneath that is pinch. I'll hit F to make a little bit bigger and just hold it down. You can see I'm starting to pinch that little edge. Just pinch that edge. And like push and twist. I don't have to lift up my mouse. I can just work my way around the image as I went. Whoa. And finally, it's clone. Now for this tool you had to hit a to select everything, control C to copy it to your buffer. And then click somewhere and voila, paste, zoom out and paste space space, space, space, space, space, space, space. This can be really handy for say, grass or just annoying all of your viewers on your video. Okay, Let's undo all of that. Boy, I really did make a bunch, did in a clone is actually quite handy for things like graphs, et cetera. Just an easy way of building now the scene. Great. Now you know how to use the sculpt mode tools to make it 2D drawings look even better. In our last video on 2D animation inside a blended 2.8, I want to talk about adding effects to your drawings. Now, it's going to help to actually see a good drawing. So let's go ahead to World and click on color and drop it down a bunch. And then come over to draw set to object mode, shift a grease pencil, and add our favorite monkey. Now the monkey selected, you can go to Draw and we can zoom in and then look for this little magic one. It's called effects. And then click on Add effect, and you'll see a whole bunch in here. Let's go through some of them. Blur is exactly what do you think? Blur. And you can add more samples, but be careful, this will make your system really slow. Depending on how many samples you use. We can remove that and go to colorize. And this lets you take all of your drawings and add cool color effects to it. Or maybe you can even add your own kind of effects. And now you're monkeys at a rave. All right, let's get rid of that and move on to flip because you know what? You always need to flip or drawing here, there. And why not just have a tool do it for you? Next is glow. Now, glow depends on threshold. That is, anything that has a color brightness higher than 0.1 glows. If I set this to say 0.5 ish or so, right about here, you can see that only the eyes and there's little top areas glowing. That's because the skin of the monkey is actually darker than 0.5. If I set it higher, you can see eventually the eyes go away. So a threshold lets you control how much of that you see. And on top of that even have another mode called color, which has its own version of settings. Next up is light. Now to really appreciate like we need to add an object. So come up here and go to object mode, pull out a little bit, shift a, and let's go ahead and add or cells in MT and just bring it right in front. All right, now let's go back to our camera. Move that right here. Click on our monkey. Click on this little eyedropper, click on the empty. Hey, take a look at that. We have a light right inside the monkey. This can be really handy, especially for characters carrying a torch or something like that. It does not respect scaling or rotation, but it does respect movement. And from here, you can control the energy or how bright it is and how much ambiance it's giving off. Next up is pixelated. And for you 2D game fans out there, you guessed it. Blender has the ability to create really simple 2D pixel animation. Take a look at that as they move it around. It looks like an old NES game or something like that, all through the power of a simple effect. And of course, as you animate this character, the pixelate will update. No longer really have to draw every single little block in MS Paint ever again. Next is REM. Now at first you may not notice it. So let's set it a color like blue. And there you go. Now you can see it. Rim lets you add a light or shadow depending on what kind of mode you set. This is a really helpful tool because it allows you to focus just on drawing your characters. And then if you want to add some light or shadow, you can just use a rim tool. And depending on the mode, you can get yourself a really cool looking shadow or add. And there you go. Now it's like a backlight. Next on the list is shadow itself. This is a little different. This is like a drop shadow and it's honestly kinda weird but kinda cool. You could use it, for example, to have like an eerie glow behind your character. Maybe it's scaling around or something like that. I really like this tool. And you can click on wave effect. And there you go. Now you can get a really eerie wave. All you have to do is animate the faith. Spooky. Alright, let's get rid of shadow. Keep going down to swirl. And we want another object to attach it to a. So let's click on this empty and wish, there you go. Here. We're swirling our monkey away in depth, pretty cool. And of course, you can less than the radius or even the angle if you want to. So it's not a giant swirl, but it's still really cool. And finally, wave distortion, which we saw a little bit of inside the shadow. We have desorption just makes it look like our monkeys underwater. And then you can control the period of it, the amplitude. And of course, you would want to animate the phase. So you can get that nice waviness. Now get in there and start playing around with some of these 2D effects. And you can see how they're going to make your 2D animation look even better. For this next chapter, I want to talk about how to bring in video into Blender and manipulate it or play with it. In particular, for this video, I want to show you how to take a video and then recreate the scene inside a blender. To start, we want to hit Control N, switch to V of x. Now you're going to want some footage to track something that has good lighting, that has a lot of edges and good points to track and something that isn't too flat. If you have access to the exercise files, I've included one called LinkedIn carpenter area porch. So go ahead and click Open and click on the MP4 that's been included. And then just go to Open Clip that we'll go ahead and open this video for you to manipulate. Now there's a lot to take in inside this tracking window. So let's briefly go over it. At the top-left, we have where our tracking points will show up and we'll see how good our trucks look up here. The top right is our 3D view. On the right is our typical outliner and properties. In the middle is our movie clip editor set to a tracking mode. And then at the bottom is another graph editor where we can see how good our track points work. Now, in the middle here, you'll see a bunch of buttons on the left. In particular prefetch, which grabs all the footage at the bottom. So you can quickly scrub and detect features, which is really handy because it'll try to go ahead and figure out all the points in the scene for you to track. Let's go ahead and click on it. Right away, you'll see a whole bunch of yellow dots appear. If I click on any one of them. For example, this one right here, I can go to track and I can see what it's looking for. Just that hard little white dot. Now, I'm going to tell you the truth. Detect features is not really the best option. What you really should do is zoom in and control left-click and look for plants where there are hard contrasts the edges. Once you control left-click, you can hit G or S to move it around. So I'm gonna go ahead and put some markers that I know will work. Okay, so now we've gone ahead and added some of our own points on top of the points that we have already from detect features. The next step is scroll down, click on track, and you'll see this little play button. Go ahead and play it. What's happening is Blender is tracking each and every single point from the next frame to the next frame to the next frame. Trying to make sure that it can get a rough idea of what it's looking at. As each of these points turn a dim red, that means that it lost tracking and it's not sure what's really going on there anymore. This unfortunately happens a lot. So you're going to have to go in here and clean them up, checksum of them by hand, or just add brand new ones. Now, if your footage is anything like mine, partway through, it's just going to go quickly through because it's lost all the tracking points. What I like to do is right before it starts to lose a whole bunch of them. I go a little bit further back, say about frame 50 or so in my case. And then go to detect features again. And then I hit Play. Now we've gone ahead and shocked a whole bunch of points. And we can see that there's a lot of arrows here. Let's open this up. And now if you look here, you'll see there's all these little peaks and valleys. Those are error points were, were the tracking really doesn't know what's going on. Whenever you find where these, you can click on it and literally hit X, delete in the main window. It's going to throw off all your tracking. So it's best to just get rid of these really crazy extraneous points. There we go. That looks a little bit better. It does get a little bit wobbly here. And you know what, as much as it's nice to have a bunch of tracking points, I think I'm still going to get rid of it just to keep all my footage looking good. Next, you want to go to solve. And in here there's a lot of options. But the most important is what is a key-frame? The first, second key frame are really important because blenders going to use this as a guide for the rest of the footage. I'll leave the default to one and 34 now, under Refine, blenders going to try to guess the focal length and the optical distortion. Now, this is a giant topic that could be its own course. But the simple thing is on the right, if you know what kind of camera you're using or what kind of lens you're using. You're going to want to specify that both under camera and under lens. My case, I used an iPhone XS. So I'm actually just going to leave it all at default and have blender figure it out. Now the next step you want to do is click on Solve camera motion. Now, depending on how your truck went, you'll see a little error pop-up at the bottom. And then at the top here, you'll see a whole bunch of numbers up here, 1, 0, et cetera, et cetera. These represents your error or how off you were. You'll also see a general solve error, 0.6. Now, honestly, anything under one is pretty decent. And anything 0.1 and below this pretty much perfect. So the fact that we got under one right away, It's pretty amazing. Nonetheless, there are a few values that are over one. You can go ahead and just delete them. Or you can go to cleaner. Come over here and say, what is the maximum area one? And I'm going to say one. I'm actually going to click these to de-select them. And with an error of one maximum set, I'm going to go to Filter tracks and then honestly EX Delete. Now I'm going to click on Solve camera motion. And the pending how your error goes, you might get a lower number. Now be careful sometimes this can be finicky and you actually get a higher number because you lost some really key points. So playing along with this value and picking which ones you really want to delete is really important. All right, so now we've gone ahead and made a scene, cleaned up some points and tracked it. The last thing we need to do is setup our scene and blender makes it easy. There's a little button called setup tracking senior, so we'll just go ahead and click that. And you'll see at the top right that my scene is immediately set up. Let's go ahead and click this plus button and go to general layout. And then I can switch the camera mode, view, camera, active camera. I can zoom in here. And on the right, I can click on camera, camera background images. And I can scroll down a little bit and set it to front. Maybe bring that alphabet a little bit. And then if I grab my play head and scrub, I can see that my cube is actually tracking pretty decently in the scene. Now right off the bat, there's obviously some errors. For example, the perspective is completely different, but I can't fix by rotating the camera to get it right. Or I can go back into motion tracking and find at least three points that create a floor, selecting all three of them, and then go ahead and clicking on the floor. I can also set walls x-axis and y-axis, taking video footage that you've shot and bringing it into Blender to recreate a 3D camera is really straightforward and blended 2.8. Plus there's an enormous amount of tools available to you to make sure that that 3D track looks amazing.
17. 16 Compositing your next great piece : Compositing inside the blender is incredibly straightforward and there's a ton of tools available at your disposal. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to take a monkey from Blender and composited onto some footage I shot outside here in carpenter urea. First, let's go ahead and delete this cube. Shift a, and let's go ahead and add a monkey. I want to switch the cycles so I can get something pretty good and accurate. And I'm just going to put this light right about here. I'm going to go into camera view. Next, I'm going to go and click on film. Come down a transparent, I don't have any transparent glass, but if I did, I'd want to check that on. And finally, I just want to go ahead and render this. Okay, now I have a rendered image. Close this out, and let's switch the compositing and click on Use notes. Right away, you'll see your image that we created right over here. I'm gonna come down here and I'm going to switch this to image editor. And I'm going to Control left-click. And that's going to open up the viewer node right here. And down here. I'm going to switch this to View node as well. And finally, I'm going to turn off backdrop just so I can get some more speed on my computer. Okay, Now we need to add some footage that we shot. So let's go ahead and hit Shift a. And let's go to Input movie clip. Put that here, click on Open, find some footage that we shot in open clip. Now I'm just going to put that right about here. And I have an image output and an image output up here. So what I want to do is hit Shift a search and search for alpha over. I'm going to hit Enter and I'll put this right here. It's going to wash out my screen. Don't worry. Now with this movie clip, I'm going to drag it to the bottom. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to see no monkey. Then I'm going to zoom into alpha over, grab the top image and put it at the bottom. That will flip my inputs. And voila, I now have a monkey inside my viewer. Now there's more cool things we can do. For example, like adding a vignette. So I'm going to hit Shift a and a search for ellipse mask. Here it is. And I'll make this a little bit easier. I'm going to Control Shift click ellipse mask. And I'm just going to toy with these settings until I get something that I think looks pretty good in zoom out here. So I get an idea of what I'd like. Maybe I can play a little bit with value. Now I'm going to hit Shift a. I'm going to type in blur, the blur right after the ellipse mask and let's try something like 50 and 50. How about 250 and 250? Oh, that looks pretty good. Next, I'm going to bring this over here. I'm going to hit Shift a again. I'm going to type in mix. Put that right here. I'm going to grab my Alpha over, drag that to the bottom here. You might be asking yourself, nothing happened. I'm gonna switch this to multiply. And hey, look at that. I'm starting to get a vignette. Now. Maybe I'm not too happy with that vignette. Maybe I want to play with it a little bit more. Well, I can play with the blur over here or hit Shift a Enter and type in color ramp. Put that in the middle here. And now I can play with the engine of this. And now I've created a pretty good vignette for my scene. Okay, one more thing. Let's hit Shift a and type in color balance. Now, I can put color balance really wherever, at the beginning or at the end. I'm going to put it at the end, since I've already mixed everything by this point. But sometimes it's good to put it right at the beginning so you can get all the colors just right and then start mixing it. And here, honestly, I'm just going to play around and just have some fun. Maybe we'll make it like an old timey photo, something like that. Nice. Okay, so now that you've created this pretty cool node structure, the last thing you wanna do is grand composite. Hold it all the way over here. And since this is our final node, left-click drag image to image. That way when you go up to render, you'll get this image all composited together. Let's watch. Now you've created yourself a monkey floating over carpenter Maria, and a cool old school kind of image. There are so many nodes for you to use inside the blend is composite. So get in there and see what amazing things you can composite. Editing video inside a blender is actually pretty shaped forward and easy to use. The story, you want to hit Control N and switch the video editing. Next you'll be greeted by a new workspace. On the left is the file browser. In the middle, a preview for your videos. Properties. On the right and on the bottom is a sequencer where you can edit the timeline is different videos you drag and drop in. I'm going to navigate to my exercise files. But if you don't have access to them, you can just add any videos that you've created or images. All you have to do is drag and drop a video and it's suddenly appears in your preview window. From here, you can preview the footage and find different cut points. For example, maybe I want to cut right at three. I can right-click and go to touch. Then I can grab this and move it up with G and then slide it over with g. Now, depending on the speed of your computer, this may take a few seconds, especially for footage that's been compressed like an MP4. I also have access to color tools like on the right for saturation or multiplying video on top of each other. I can strobe the video or play around with it. I can crop it offset at positionally or at the bottom. They can go to Info and I can start my video at a different point in time. Next, I can go to caching settings here and cashflow my footage. If I want to edit a lot faster or my favorite, I can go down the modifiers and add a bunch of different ones. Let's go to the first bit right here, and click on this strip called a modifier. And let's go to curves. From here. I can middle mouse drag down. And from here I can play with the curves inside of my video and to really make it pop. I can also add a mask if I want to mask out part of the foot inch. Or I can go ahead and even play with the color balance right down here and set something more like a duo tone. As I mentioned before, you can drag any kind of image or other media on top of here. So let's just say at 1, I want to switch to this image. Looks pretty cool. I can come back up here, go to Crop, and I can start cropping this. Or even better. I can hit I. And maybe partway through crop 30 pixels all around. Because it's animated. I can now drag and see how I zoom in to the footage. Blend. This video editor is filled with a lot of options for you to play with. So I recommend you get in there and see what masterpieces you can edit together.
Thomas Jhonson
