Blender 3D Animation: Discover the Haunting Beauty of Liminal Spaces | Harry Helps | Skillshare
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Blender 3D Animation: Discover the Haunting Beauty of Liminal Spaces

teacher avatar Harry Helps, Professional 3d Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      3:24

    • 2.

      Setting Up Our File

      8:05

    • 3.

      Modeling the Arches

      21:20

    • 4.

      Modeling the Environment

      11:59

    • 5.

      Modeling the Exit Sign

      12:02

    • 6.

      Placing the Camera and Lights

      24:54

    • 7.

      Texturing the Scene (Part 1)

      25:52

    • 8.

      Texturing the Scene (Part 2)

      10:58

    • 9.

      Compositing and Final Render

      13:48

    • 10.

      Bonus: Animating the Water

      12:11

    • 11.

      Bonus: Creating an Animated GIF

      8:23

    • 12.

      Our Class Project!

      2:05

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About This Class

Hi, my name is Harry! I’m a professional 3d artist with over a decade of experience. I’ve worked most recently as the Studio Director of an award winning architectural visualization studio.

In this class, we’ll discover (and animate) the haunting beauty of liminal spaces in Blender!



We’ll go through the entire process of animating this liminal space from a beginner’s perspective to avoid as much confusion as possible. That means I won’t be skipping any steps or going too fast for you to keep up with me.

We’re using Blender for this tutorial, which is an amazing and totally free 3d software. The only barrier to entry is having a computer to run the software on.

You can download Blender completely free from blender.org

I’m also including a handy cheat sheet filled with important keyboard shortcuts, that you can reference during the class and in the future!



In this class you'll learn:

  • Blender Interface and Tools: Learn about the many basic tools and interface elements within Blender while creating a liminal space.
  • Modeling: Use basic modeling tools and modifiers such as Array and Bevel while creating a flooded corridor.

  • Lighting: Set up a soft lighting scheme utilizing volumetrics to give the scene a somber look.

  • Shading: Create textures for tile, water and more to add color and detail to the environment.

  • Unwrapping: Learn simple unwrapping techniques to make sure textures display correctly on the models.

  • Compositing: Create simple compositing effects for the image in Blender to create the low fidelity but nostalgic look this aesthetic is known for.

  • Animation: Animate a simple looping water texture to bring some subtle movement to the environment.

  • Rendering: Lastly, Render the final image and animation in Blender so you can share it with your friends and family on social media.

You'll create:

This haunting yet beautiful liminal space animation.

 

Our class project:

I'd like you to take all the skills you've gained during the class and create a unique liminal space render of your own.

This is an example of what I created for my class project.

 

I’ll personally review every project uploaded to the gallery and give you feedback on your render.

I hope you’ll join me on this beginner’s journey through Blender by animating your own hauntingly beautiful liminal space.

Meet Your Teacher

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Harry Helps

Professional 3d Artist

Top Teacher


Hi, I'm Harry! I have over a decade of experience in 3d modeling, texturing, animating and post-processing. I've worked for a lot of different types of companies during my career, such as a major MMORPG video game studio, a video production company and an award winning architectural visualization company. I have worked as a Studio Director, Lead 3d Artist, 3d Background Artist, Greenscreen Editor and Intern UI Artist. My professional work has been featured in "3d Artist" magazine with accompanying tutorial content. I have extensive experience with Blender, 3d Max, VRay and Photoshop.

I love sharing my passion for 3d art with anyone wanting to learn!

Get full access to all my classes and thousands more entirely free using this link!See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: My name is Harry and I'm a professional three D artist with over a decade of experience. I've been making b***der beginner tutorials on skill share for a while. Now in this class I'll walk you through the simple and beginner friendly process of creating a haunting, yet beautiful liminal space and b***der. We'll be going through this entire process of creating this flooded corridor from a beginner's perspective to avoid as much confusion as possible. That means I won't be skipping any steps or going too fast for you to keep up with me. You might be asking yourself what a liminal space is and what makes it simultaneously Haunting yet beautiful liminal ****** are described as a place or state of change or transition. This may be physical or psychological. Liminal space imagery often depicts the sense of in between capturing transitional places such as corridors unsettlingly devoid of people. This visual aesthetic creates moods of eeriness, surrealness, nostalgia or sadness. And elicits responses of both comfort and unease by focusing on nostalgia and universal ******. Liminal images hope to capture your memory by making you feel as if you've walked through this place before. My favorite way I've heard these images described is a dream half remembered. This flooded corridor we'll be making in this class has all the hallmarks of a great liminal space. It's a featureless public corridor that has been stripped of a human presence due to disrepair or neglect. In this class, we'll learn about the many basic tools and interface elements within blunder while creating our liminal space. I'll show you how to use basic modeling tools and modifiers such as array and bevel while creating our flooded corridor. We'll set up a soft lighting scheme utilizing volume metrics to give our scene a somber look. I'll show you how to create textures for tile water and more. As we add color to our environment, we'll learn simple and wrapping techniques to make sure our textures display correctly on our models. I'll show you how to create simple compositing effects for our image and b***der to create the low fidelity but nostalgic look this aesthetic is known for. We'll animate a simple looping water texture to bring some subtle movement to our scene. Lastly, we'll render our final image and b***der so you can share it with your friends and family on social media. When we're done, you'll have all the skills you need to create a haunting liminal space, render of your very own. For our class project, I'd like you to create a new liminal space with a unique design and share it with the class. I'll personally review every project uploaded to the gallery and give you feedback on your render. I hope you'll join me on this beginner's journey through blunder by making your very own hauntingly, beautiful liminal space. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Setting Up Our File: If this is your first time taking a b***der class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginner's guide to B***der First. This class was designed for the absolute beginner to b***der and three D art in general. We cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running and b***der. We'll accomplish this with short and focused lessons that cover each topic from a beginner's perspective, utilizing a well organized starter file. We end the class with an easy project where you set up and customize your very own cozy campsite. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. In this lesson, we'll be getting our file set up for future rendering. Let's begin. The first thing we'll be doing is choosing the general file type over here on the splash screen. Now we can go to Edit up here at the top left, Preferences inside this window. We'll go down here to where it says system. Click on this, then we're going to be enabling our cycles render devices. This menu at the top here will look a little bit different depending on the type of computer you have. It will also depend on the type of hardware inside your computer. If you're using a Windows computer to run b***der, the most optimal settings would be to choose the optics tab up here. Then check on every box that you see below this. Each of these boxes corresponds to a piece of hardware within your computer. In this case, my top one is my GPU, then the bottom one is my CPU. The options next to each of these boxes will be different depending on your computer. The only important thing is to make sure that you have all of them checked on. Essentially what these settings are doing is allowing b***der to make use of these pieces of hardware while rendering. Now it's possible some of you may not be able to use optics, even if you are using windows. That's because optics is meant for newer graphics cards. And if you have a slightly older computer, you won't be able to use it. However, you should be able to switch over here to Cota. So if you select this, you'll see the exact same options below. However, you should be able to use this. Optics is a little bit faster, but again it's only available for newer graphics cards. If you have a slightly older computer, you'll be forced to use Cota, but it's not a huge difference between the two. Lastly, if you're running B***der on a Mac Computer, you'll likely not see any of these options up here. You'll probably see none. And then you might see an option for metal. One of these tabs up here will say metal instead. If that's the case, you can switch to metal. Use whichever tab up here that says metal and just highlight that. Then again check on all the boxes below. Metal is just the Mac unique variant of these options here. Now that we're done with these settings, we can close this box. Now let's head down here to our Rendering Properties tab. And if it's not already on, by default you can select this little back side of a camera button here to switch to the Rendering Properties tab. Now we can move down this list and make some changes. The first thing we'll need to do is switch our render engine. By default it started an EV, but we're going to be using cycles because we want a little bit more of a realistic result. We're going to switch this to cycles by clicking that drop down at the top. Now we can move further down this list to where it says device. We're going to click this drop down here, and then go down to GPU Compute. We're going to switch it from using just the CPU to using the GP as well. This should speed up your render speeds pretty significantly. Now we can move down here to the image quality settings. These settings are broken up into two different parts, the Viewport settings as well as the render settings. Let's start with the Viewport. The first thing we'll need to change is the max samples. We're going to lower this all the way down to 100. The 1024 that it starts with is a little bit too high for our purposes. And then that'll speed up our viewport rendering once we get to that part. Now we can head down here to where it says Noise Still inside the viewport settings. We're going to check on this box. And then we can twirl open this option box here so we can see more options below it. The only thing we'll change here is the noser type. We're going to select where it says automatic and then if you have the option, switch it to optics instead. If you don't see optics here for some reason, you can still leave it on automatic and that'll be fine. But if you do have the option for our optics, it is a little bit faster. Now let's scroll down here to where the render settings are. These settings here will only affect the final render, whereas the last settings will only affect the viewport render, which is just meant for testing. Now we can go to our max samples for our render settings. We're going to set this a bit higher. We'll set this to 200 as we want our final render to be a little bit nicer than the test render that we're doing inside the Viewport. Noser is already checked on by default, but we do want to open this up, clicking this little arrow. Then we want to double check that our noser is set to open image. Noise We're going to use open image noise instead of optics. In this case, optics is a bit faster, but open image noise is a bit higher quality. We'd prefer the higher quality for our final render. Let's choose that. Now, the last setting we need to change within the render properties is down at the very bottom of this list. Let's scroll down with our mouse wheel. We can go down here to color management. Now we can twirl this open. Then the setting we're changing is the look. Right now it's set to none. Let's click on this, and we're going to switch it to high contrast. We won't notice any changes after switching it to high contrast. However, it will affect the look of our final render. Setting it to high contrast will make the bright parts of our image brighter and the dark parts of our image darker. It'll also make the image overall a little bit more saturated. With that setting changed, we're now ready to move to the Output Properties tab. We can get there by going up to the top, just below the tab that we're currently in. And we're going to click on this little tiny printer icon printing out a photo. So we'll click this and that will switch us to our output properties. Let's scroll up to the very top of this list. And then the main thing we're going to change is actually our resolution here. The default resolution right now is 1920 by 1080. This creates a 16 by nine ratio. This is the same ratio that's used on current, modern day HD televisions. For this render, however, we're not going for a modern look, so we are going to change this for the X resolution, let's switch this to 2000, then for the Y resolution, we're going to switch it to 1,500 Now instead of a 16 by nine ratio, we're actually using a four by three aspect ratio. We'll be using this four by three aspect ratio for a few reasons. This format is present in most older forms of media prior to the invention of high definition televisions that use the 16 by nine aspect ratio. This should help trigger that feeling of nostalgia, as you might remember this format from your childhood. If you're old enough with our last setting changed, we'll need to save our file. These settings we've changed are only affecting this version of the file. If we don't save it now, we'll lose all of the changes we just made to save your file. Just go up here to where it says file, and then we can choose Save. Now in this new option box, navigate to the location that you'd like to save your file. I'd suggest somewhere that you can easily find. Again, down here at the bottom, we can change the name of this file. We're going to call it liminal space, and then I'm going to put an underscore. And then 01 at the end of it just to show that this is a version of this file by adding a number at the end of our file, we've essentially made a version for this if we need to make two different versions of this file later on or if we're going to be doing something that we're not sure we'll actually like and we want to be able to go back to a previous version. This little number at the end will make it easy to make multiple versions just by changing the number 1-2 to three to four and so on with the name set. Now we can just choose save B***der file. Be sure to use this newly saved file for the rest of the lessons. That way you don't lose any of these settings. And the next lesson, we'll begin the process of modeling our environment. I'll see you there. 3. Modeling the Arches: In this lesson, we'll be modeling the arches for our environment. Before we begin, make sure you open the file we saved at the end of our last lesson. First, let's select the cube in the middle of the scene. And then we're just going to delete it as we won't need it for right now. Now we're going to start by creating a cylinder that will make up the interior of the archways for our columns. Let's hit Shift and A to bring up our Ad menu. Go to Mesh, and then choose Cylinder down here at the bottom left. We're going to twirl open this option box so we can adjust some of these settings. First, let's set our vertices 100. This will make our cylinder much smoother. Now set our radius to 2 meters, and then the depth. We'll set that to 0.25 meters. Then lastly, we're going to change this cap fill type from gone to nothing. As we switch it to nothing, you'll notice the top and the bottom the cylinder have gone away. We would have deleted these faces either way. We might as well just start out with no faces there to begin with. With our settings changed, we can now right click on this object and then we're going to choose Shade Smooth up here in our Outliner. Let's rename this from cylinder. We can just double click on this and we'll call it Arch A, R H, and then had Enter. Now let's zoom in here on the cylinder that we just created. Then we're going to change some settings here in our viewport. Start by making sure that you're in the solid view, which should be the default, that's why this model is gray. Now go over here to this little drop down menu which will bring up an option box. And we're going to check one back face culling by just collecting this little button here. By enabling backface culling, we tell b***der to make the backside of faces see through in the viewport and we can see that effect here. Even though these faces are still here, we can't see them as long as we're looking on the back side of them. As we spin around, they're still visible on this side. But the inside of the cylinder, they look see through. This hasn't deleted them or prevented them from showing up and render. However, it does make it obvious to us which direction of our polygons are facing outward. With that said, we can see that our faces are pointing outward from the center of the cylinder. As we might expect to begin our arch though, we need to flip these faces inward. With our cylinder selected, we can hit tab to enter edit mode. Then hit three to make sure that you're in face mode. Then if these faces aren't already all selected, just hit a on your keyboard to select all of them. Now go up here to the top where it says mesh. We're going to click on Mesh and then go down to normals. And then we can choose flip. When we do that, we'll flip all these faces inside out. Now the inside is the direction and all these faces are pointing. And then if we click off of them, we can see that this side now is the invisible side. All the outsides are invisible. And then the inside is actually what's able to be seen with the back face culling turned on. A quick way to get to that flip menu would be to select all your model again by hitting A to make sure you select all the faces. Then instead of going up here to mesh and then normals, we can see here it says Alt, N. If we just hit Alt and N at the same time, it'll bring up a smaller version of that menu. And then we could just choose flip if we needed to. In this case, they're already flipped, so we don't need to flip them. We want all the faces on the inside to be visible and then the ones on the outside to be through. Now let's hit tab Text at our edit mode. And then we can go back up here to the drop down menu. And we're going to turn off backface culling. This was more or less just to show you what it looks like when it have it turned it on because we'll be using it later on. Now that we have it turned off, we can go back to our cylinder. Now we need to rotate the cylinder. The easiest way to do this is to hit R. To start rotating it, then we're going to hit X to bind it just to the X axis. It can only rotate on the X. Now we can type in 9090 and we'll see it rotates at perfectly 90 degrees And then hit Enter to confirm the change. You could have also done this with the rotate tool here, using this red circle and then holding down control to bind it to specific increments as you rotate it. However, just hitting R, then X, then typing 90 is a lot faster way to do it. I'm going to undo that change because it was already rotated how I wanted. Now that it's rotated vertically like this, let's hit Tab to go back into our edit mode. Then hit Alt and Z to enter our x ray mode. Now our model is through and we can select through it, which is the important part. Then again, three, to make sure that you're inside your face mode. Now let's go into our front orthographic view. We can do this two ways. One by either clicking on this negative y bubble up here on this gizmo, and that'll jump us into the front orthographic view. Or you can hit Tilda on your keyboard and then just choose front. Now we're going to be deleting three quarters of the circle here. We can do this by just drag selecting. And we're going to start at the top left here, we're going to select, we want to hover over everything on the left side of this blue line here, the Z line that we're seeing, drag, select over everything on just this half of it. Then when we let go, we'll see that we've selected everything on the left side of the circle. Now hold down shift to add to this selection. I'm holding shift and then clicking and dragging. And now I'm going to delete everything on the bottom half of this red line. I'm only leaving this top right corner left. Okay, I'll hover over that. Let go, and now I have everything selected on three quarters of the circle, leaving just the top right quarter behind with all these faces selected. Now we can hit Delete, and we're going to choose Delete Faces with those faces deleted. We can rotate our viewport so we can see a little bit better. See here what we did. We've deleted everything on the outside here. And the only faces that we've left behind are the inside of half of an arch. Now we can hit a to select all of our faces. That'll select everything that's left over. And we're going to move these over so that they're better centered on this origin point here. There's a few different ways we can do this, but the most visual way to do this for you, we go over here to your move tool. And then we're just going to move it over here to the left on the x axis. We're going to move it roughly over here. Now, it doesn't have to be perfect because we'll be typing in a number here in a second. Just move it roughly here. Then down here at the bottom left, we can see we have the move option box. And we're going to type in an exact value here for the move x value, you want to type in exactly negative 20.125 And then hit Enter. We're moving these faces to the left in order to center them for the mirror modifier we're about to apply. We moved them negative 2.125 meters because it's exactly half of the distance required to make a 0.25 meter square column for our arched pillar, which matches the arch thickness we determined when we created the original cylinder. This will ensure that once this column is done, that the pillar emerging from the center of it is actually a square. Now that we've moved these faces over to the left, we can hit Tab to exit our edit mode. Our next step is to add the mirror modifier that I just discussed. To do this, we can go over here to our modifier tab, which is this little blue wrench icon like this. Then we can go to Add modifier, and we're going to choose mirror, which is right here. Looks like a little butterfly next to it. So we'll choose mirror, and we can see here, it's mirrored it over to the other side. If for some reason your mirror doesn't look like mine, having this y shape to it, you'll have to change this axis over here. It's likely that your axis is not set to X. If not, just make sure your axis is set to X. And then all of these other boxes down here are unchecked. Once your arch looks like mine, we can go over here to this drop down menu, this little tiny arrow. And we can click Apply. That will apply all of the changes that that mirror modifier was making and making them permanent on the model. Now we can again hit Tab to enter our edit mode, make sure you're in face mode. And then hit A to select all faces. Everything should be highlighted in orange. Now let's hit Shift and D to make a duplicate of these faces that we see here. We can see as soon as we hit Shift and D, it'll start making a duplicate. But we're going to right click our mouse, and that will still make the duplicate, but it'll place it directly on top of the original geometry. We do have two pieces sitting on top of each other here. Now we need to rotate them 90 degrees. Again, we'll be doing that quick trick again. We're going to hit R to start rotating, then Z to bind it just to the z axis. And then type in 90 to rotate the 90 degrees, and then hit Enter to confirm the change. Now if we rotate around in our viewports here, we can see we have this X shaped column. Now let's switch to our edge mode, so we can start connecting these pieces. We'll hit two to switch to edge mode, and then we're going to go around to each of these sides of these pieces and connect them across to each other. The way we need to do this is first just click off of your model to de select pieces of it. I have nothing selected right now. Now we'll hold down the Alt key. Then I'm going to click on this side of the arch over here to the left side of this arch. I have just that part highlighted by holding the Alt key. I've selected every single contiguous edge here. It's selected the entire loop. Now again, while holding Alt, and this time holding Shift as well, Alt and Shift at the same time, hold both of those down. And then click the exact opposite side here. Right now I've selected this side over here. I want to select this side again. Alt and Shift at the same time. And then select this line. And it'll select all these edges on the other side with both of these sides selected. Now we can right click and then go over here toward it says bridge edge loops. Let's select that. Now after choosing bridge edge loops, we can see it's created faces between these two edge loops. We've made a solid wall between these two parts of the column. Now we're going to do this exact same process for each of these paired edge loops. I'll walk you through it quickly one more time, and then I'll let you finish the last two on your own. First we click off of the model, so we have nothing selected. Then we're going to hold down Alt and select this side of the edge. We select the whole side. Hold down Alt and shift and select the direct opposite of it over here. Then we right click and then choose Bridge Edge Loops. It's important that you only try to do two at a time. You can't just select all of them and hit bridge edge loops. It'll connect edges in a not very helpful way. It'll start connecting them across from each other and it's not really what we're looking for. You have to make sure you do them one at a time, directly opposite each other so it b***der doesn't get confused as to what you want connected. I'm going to quickly finish the last two sides here. And then you should also be doing the same thing as well on your own. Okay? Now I have all of the different parts of my arches connected. Then in here in the middle, they're also currently intersecting. Don't worry about the faces intersecting each other in the middle. We'll be fixing that in just a moment. Now we can hit Alt and Z to exit our x ray mode. Just so this is a little less confusing visually, with all those lines overlapping each other, it's a little bit hard to see what's going on. Now let's begin the process of getting rid of this intersection here in the center. First, click off of your model to make sure you have no edges currently selected. Now hover over either one of the sides of your arch. In this case, I'm going to choose the left side here. Then just by hovering over it, I can hit L on my keyboard to select Linked. This will select every single edge that's a part of this particular model. We notice here that it didn't select the other part of the arch because they're not actually connected. Even though they're part of the same model, they aren't physically connected to each other. It's only selected this part here. Now we can hit on our keyboard to bring up the separate menu. And we're going to choose Separate by Selection, the very top option here. By choosing separate by selection, we've separated off just the pieces that we had selected into a brand new model. And we can see that up here at the top right. We now have two pieces of Arch. Now we can hit Tab Text at our edit mode. Now click off of your model to make sure you have nothing selected. Then again, select just one piece of this model. I'm going to select the left side here. It's just this left portion of the arch. We only want to have one selected for this next part over here in our modifier panel, Again, this blue wrench icon. We're going to choose Add modifier. And then we want to choose Bo*** would select booling here, and then that I'll apply this modifier. Typically the Bo*** modifier is used to cut the shape of one object out of another, such as cutting a square out of a wall for a window. We'll be using boiling a bit differently. This time though, we're going to use the union mode rather than the difference to combine these two objects into one cleaned up model. To do this, we can go over here to the Bo*** modifier and we can choose union. This will switch the type of boiling that it's doing. So the union will allow us to combine objects. Now over here, make sure it's set to object mode for the Operand type, which is the default in this case, you shouldn't need to change it, but if not, switch it to object. And then over here where it says object, click this little eyedropper. And then we're going to eyedropper the other piece of the arch that we don't currently have selected. In my case, it's the right side which is not highlighted. We'll click this. Now we need to change the solver method. Right now it's set to exact and we're going to switch it over to fast, which will actually give us a better result. Now, right now, it doesn't actually look like it's solved our issue. We still see some intersections here. But that's actually because we have two models sitting on top of each other. If we go over here to our outliner, we hide the piece of the arch that's not currently selected. Right now we can see we have this one selected, but this one isn't. If we just click this little eyeball icon, we can see here that it gets rid of all that weirdness that we saw there. And if we rotate around, we can see that we have no intersection in the middle. A nice one piece connected model. Now that we're happy with the results that we see here, we can actually apply this booling modifier. So we're going to go over here to this dropdown and then choose Apply. Then I'll make these effects permanent. Then lastly, we can go over here to this arch piece that we deleted. And we can see here we no longer need it, we'll just right click and then delete. Depending on which piece you selected, Your Arch might be called Arch 001. Now if you'd like to get rid of that 001, you can just double click on it and then delete it. And then hit Enter. Now with our new combined arch selected, let's hit Tab. And then hit one to go into our vertex mode. And then hit A to select all vertices. We have everything selected Now now we can hit on our keyboard for Merge, and we're going to choose Merge by distance, which is the very bottom option here. We won't need to change any of these settings down here as the default works pretty well. This will merge together any remaining vertices that were left separated after the bulling step. It will ensure that the model is all cleaned up as possible. Before we move on to the next step, with the model fully cleaned up, now we can make the column a bit taller. Let's hit two to enter our edge mode. We're going to zoom in down here on the bottom. Click off of the model to make sure you have nothing selected. Now hold down Alt and click this very bottom edge that will select all the way around the bottom of the column. Now we can hit to start extruding off more geometry off the bottom of this to make a longer column. After hitting though, we'll need to hit Z to make sure it only moves in the z direction. Then we're also going to use that quick method where we just type in a number. We'll type in negative one for 1 meter, and then hit Enter. The reason we use negative one is because right now this pillar is actually sitting on zero right here. In order to make it longer this direction, we needed to go negative in the z direction. Again, you'll just hold Alt. Select this edge loop at the bottom. Then hit then Z to make sure it only extrudes it in the z direction. And then type in negative one and hit Enter. Now let's finish off the top of our arched column by extending the walls upward a little bit. Let's zoom out a little bit so we can see the very top. This part here is what we're going to be extending again. Click off the model to make sure you have nothing selected. Now we can hold down Alt on our keyboard. And then we're going to select near the top edge. We're actually not going to select directly on top of it. We'll select roughly, just a little bit, hovering off the side of it. We'll see here that it does still select that top edge, even though we didn't select directly on it. There are a lot of really close edges here, hovering your mouse just outside of the model. And near the end of this X shape that we have here, we'll make sure that you select the correct edge loop. You'll know that you have the correct edge loop selected. Because you'll see this orange line will travel all the way around the outside of this X, including the ends here. Now that we have the correct edge loop selected, we're going to again hit to start extruding then Z to make sure it only extrudes upward in the Z direction. Then we can type in 0.15 and then hit Enter. This is made a small top wall to our arches. And this is again another good indicator here that you had the correct edge loop selected. If when you extruded this up, you only saw a portion of the X get extruded upward and not the entire thing including the S. That means you didn't have the correct edge selected. So you need to control Z, undo the change that you just made, and then try to make sure you select the entire edge loop again. Now let's switch to our face mode by hitting three on our keyboard. And then we're going to select each of these faces here at the ends of the Xs. So we're going to select this face and then hold shift. And then spin around and select each one of these faces here. By holding shift we're adding to our selection. We don't lose the previous ones. Now I have all four edges of this X selected. And then we can hit Delete, and then choose Delete Faces. Deleting these faces is important for our next modifier. With that last change made, we can hit Tab Tex at our edit mode. You'll probably notice by now that our flat walls on the side of these arches look odd right now. This is because the smooth shading that we added in the beginning of the lesson doesn't know how to handle these new shapes. Let's switch it to auto smooth, which will take into account the different angles of the faces to produce a better result. We can do that just by right clicking on this model, and then choosing shade auto smooth. Now the arches still look nice and smooth, but the walls on the side are still flat. The last thing we need to do for this lesson is to add a tiny bit of rounding to the corners of this arched pillar. This will add a little bit of realism to our model and allow later textures to create nice high lights on the edges of the model. We'll again be making use of a modifier to do this. Let's go over here to our modifier panel. Click Add Modifier, and then we'll be adding a Bevel modifier. Let's zoom in here on our model. So we can see a corner here that has a couple of these edges all coming together. We have a few settings to change over here, let's start making those changes. Now, the first thing we need to change is the amount. We're going to go to the amount here, we're going to make it really small. We only want a little bit of rounding, and we can type in 0.001 And then hit Enter for the segments, we're going to set that to 22 and then enter the amount is the width of the rounding. How generally large is the rounding? The segments is how round is this rounding? With one set, it's going to have a flat rounding to it. It'll only have a single segment, a single face, Making the face a little bit more round but still blocky by setting it to two. And we added another cut in the middle, which will make the corners a little bit rounder than they were before. Now we can head down here to the geometry tab. We're going to uncheck clamp overlap. The clamp overlap setting will prevent b***der from rounding edges when they get too close to each other. However, we've used such a small measurement here that we don't need the setting turned on. Then lastly, down here at the bottom where it says shading, we can twirl this open, we're going to check one harden normals When we select this, you can see on our model here, if I check it and check it, it actually makes these flat edges look a little bit more flat. It prevents this rounding. We're putting on the corners here from making the model look too rounded and bubbly. And make sure that the flat areas still stay flat again. We want to have this turned on. And now with our last modifier added, our arched pillar is officially completed. In the next lesson, we'll be assembling the rest of our environment by adding more pillars walls and water. I'll see you there. 4. Modeling the Environment: In this lesson, we'll be assembling the rest of the environment by adding more pillars, walls and water. Let's begin. We'll start by adding a lot more of these arched pillars utilizing a modifier called array. The array modifier will allow us to make a duplicated grid of pillars to create a seemingly infinite corridor for our render. Before we do this however, we'll need to apply our transformations to the arch so that B***der considers its current rotation. The new default. To do this, select your arched pillar. Then hit Control and a ring up the Apply menu. And then we're going to choose Apply Rotation. Now when we add the array modifier, it'll populate it correctly with our pillars still selected. We can go over here to our modifier panel. Let's scroll up to the very top so we can see ad modifier. We can leave this pebble modifier as it is. If you don't like seeing the entire modifier. You can click this little tiny drop down to collapse it. It'll still have the effect, it's just not taking up so much room. Now choose Add Modifier, and then pick Ray from the very top of this list. Now let's zoom out to see what this array modifier is doing. We can see here that the array modifier has made a second duplicated copy directly next to the first. Given the illusion that this archway is a complete arch, not two separate models. If we increase this count number on the right side, we'll just continue to add copies next to the last one. We're going to set our count to ten, that way we have ten of these arches going in a row. We won't be changing any of these other settings here, but just so you know, we can change the type of array here. We're going to be using fixed count, but there are different options here. We'll leave that on fixed count. The options down below, we have our relative offset. This is where we determine how far apart these individual clones are as well as which direction they're moving. If you have this number set to one, it'll have them butted up directly next to each other. It's moving one width of this column, and then placing the next one, they're all touching. If we increase this number, it'll move them apart. And if we lower them, it'll actually intersect them. We're going to leave it at one for the X direction if we wanted them to instead go in the Y direction. In this case, we don't need to, but if you just wanted to know, you could change this to the Y, change the number here. If you use both of them, it'll move in a diagonal. Or if you get rid of the x, it'll just move them in the Y. But again, we're going to leave ours as it was before because the default actually works fine for us. So you should have x set to one and then the other two set to zero. Now that we have one single row of these columns, let's add another array modifier directly on top of this, so that we can make a large grid. We'll go back over here to add modifier, choose array. Then if we scroll down, we'll see the new one that we applied here. We are going to need to change some of these numbers. Let's start off by changing the factor down here underneath the relative offset. By default, it's duplicating this entire line twice in the X direction. Instead, let's set factor to zero for the X. Then for the Y, we're going to set that to one. And then hit Enter. Now it's duplicating this row that we made with the first array modifier. And it's duplicating a second one, in this case in the y direction. Now if we set this to ten instead of count two, now we have a ten by ten grid. We can see now by layering these modifiers, we've easily made a large grid of pillars that will be the bulk of our environment. With our pillars finished, let's create the walls, floor and ceiling for our render. We can hit Shift and A to bring up our Ad menu. And then we're going to go to Mesh and then choose Cube. If we zoom in down here on this cube, the size that we choose here doesn't matter because we're actually just going to be stretching this out so that it fills the entire scene. It doesn't really matter what size you have said here. Before we go any further, let's go up to the top right and rename this cube. So we can just double click on the word cube. We're going to call this walls. Now let's change the shape of this cube so that it fills out the entire environment. We're going to hit Tab to enter edit mode, then Alt and Z to enter our x ray mode. That way we can select through the cube and then hit one to go into our vertex mode. Now we can adjust the shape of this cube so that it covers the entirety of our pillars. To do this, we'll be using a tool called snapping. This will allow us to snap the edges of this cube to the pillars. That way, all the walls are perfectly lined up to enable snapping. Go up here to the top center where we see this little magnet icon. We're going to click on that to turn it on, it highlights it blue. Now we can click on this drop down menu here to open up the options. And we're going to switch it to snap to vertices here with the second option from the top. All of these other options down here at the bottom. We can just leave set to the default. Now that we have snapping turned on, let's go into our front view again. Again, we can do that by clicking on this negative y bubble up here. Or hitting tilda. And then choosing front. Now we can go down here, drag select, over the top of this cube. We're going to move it just in the Z direction, just the blue handle. And you can see as we hover over different vertices on this column, it starts snapping to it. And we can tell it's snapping because of this little tiny orange circle here snapping to individual points. Let's move it so that it snaps to the very top vertice, it's lined up at the very top. And then place it there in the bottom here. It should already be lined up for you, depending on which size you made. But if it isn't, just grab this blue handle and then drag it down so that it meets this exact vertice on the very bottom. Now let's zoom out and do the same thing on the left and the right side of this cube. We'll start with the left. Just drag select over the left side. Again, you do have to be an x ray mode in order to select through the entirety of the cube. If you're not in x ray mode, you'll only be selecting the front side of the cube and it's going to mess up the shape of it. Make sure you're in x ray mode with the left side selected. We can drag it here to the left and line it up at the edge of this pillar. Now let's drag select over the right side of the cube. And we're going to have to zoom out pretty far here so we can see the far right side. And we're going to drag it all the way over here to the far right. And we see here, it's snapped to the very edge. And you can zoom in just to make sure it's snapped to the right spot. Okay, now we have everything done here in the front view. Now we can do the similar process here in our top view. We can get to the top view by clicking this z bubble, or hitting Tilda, and then choosing top, due to the grid behind it. It is a little bit harder to see this view. You're going to have to be careful about what you're selecting. But first, we'll start out by selecting the bottom half of this long rectangle that we've created. We're going to have to zoom in here. Again, it's going to be a little bit difficult to see if you're having trouble seeing the end of this column here. You can go up to the top right and these two little intersecting circles. If we turn on this, it'll turn off all the overlays inside our viewport. Now that we've done that, we can click and drag this down. And then hover over this edge here to drag it to the very edge of this column. Now let's zoom out again, drag select over the top of this. Now because we've turned off these Viewport overlays, we've also turned off this orange highlighting. You'll have to know that it is selected. These top here are selected, even though we can't see them. Now let's drag this all the way up in the y direction. We're going to drag it all the way up to the very top here, so that it fills out the entirety of this grid that we've created. With that last movement done, make sure you turn back on this overlay. That way we can see the selection and the highlights. Now we can go over here and turn off snapping as we don't need it anymore. Let's rotate our view to get back into the perspective view. Now we can hit Alt and Z to exit x ray mode. And then we're going to go back up here to the place where we were turned on the backface culling before in a previous lesson. We'll click this drop down menu. Then we're going to turn on Backface culling. When we turn this on, we won't really notice any changes. And that's because all of these faces are currently pointing outward. We actually want to have them pointing inward. So let's fix that now, hit three on your keyboard. Just switch to your face mode while still in your edit mode from before. Now we're in face mode. We can hit a to select all of these faces. And then we're going to do it the quick way. This time we'll hit Alt, and at the same time to bring up our Normals menu. And then we can choose Flip. Now we'll notice that we've flipped them inside out. And now we can see through all the walls that we're currently looking at, which makes it easy to see into our scene. But these walls are all still there. When the walls won't be invisible like they are here, this just makes it easier to view with inside our viewport. Now the last thing we need to do is to select the wall here on the negative y side. You can double check that you're deleting the correct wall. You want the wall here on the negative Y side, we're going to select just this wall, then we're going to delete it. Biting delete and then choosing faces, this wall we just deleted will be important later on when we start to add lighting, as this is where the sun light will be coming into our render. Now let's hit Tab to exit our edit mode. Now we can add the last model for this lesson, which is the water. To start, we'll hit Shift and A to Mesh and then add a cube. We are going to change the size of this cube. So we'll go down here to the bottom left. If this option box is collapsed like this, just click this little arrow to open it up. And then type in for the size 0.7 And then hit Enter. We want to a 0.7 meter cube. After you've done that, we can go up here to the top right. Double click on the word cube and rename it Water. And then hit Enter. Now let's zoom in down here where our cube is at. Then we're going to switch to our move tool. We're going to move it down just until it starts to intersect the floor. We're going to need to zoom in a little bit here. We'll just keep moving it down until right here you can see it's just sticking through the floor here. Right about there is fine. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just make sure that it's poking through the floor just a little bit. Now we'll be doing a very similar process with the water as we did with the walls. We'll be using the snapping tool again to snap the water cube to the edges of the wall cube so that it fills the entire room. Now let's go into our front view to start this process, Tilda and then front. We can hit tab ten or our edit mode, and then we can hit Alt and Z ten, or our x ray mode, and then 110 or our vertex mode. Let's go back up here to the top and turn on snapping. We won't need to adjust the settings again, because remember what we used last time. We just need to turn it on by clicking this button here. Again, we're doing the exact same process as we did before with the last cube. We're just extending it so that it meets all the edges of this room. I'll quickly walk you through the first two and then I'll speed up the video and then just follow along and make sure that your water filled out the rest of the room. We'll drag Select over to the left side here. Drag it to the left. Snap it to this corner here again, drag it over here on the right side. I'll have to zoom out this time. Drag it all the way over here to the right until it snaps to the edge. And now go into your top view and do the same thing. Go tilda top, and then just extend this out. Now that it fills the entire room, We can turn off snapping and then rotate our view so we can see more from the side here. Then we can hit Tab to our edit mode, Alt and Z to exit our x ray mode. Now obviously at the moment, this cube doesn't really look too much like water. But we will be changing that in a future lesson. With our water model finished, we're done creating the bulk of our environment. In the next lesson, we'll model the final detail for our environment, an exit sign. I'll see you there. 5. Modeling the Exit Sign: In this lesson, we'll model the final detail for our environment, an exit sign. Let's begin. We've arrived at the last modeling exercise for this class, so let's jump right in. The addition of an exit sign to our scene helps add some real world context to our image. The small amount of additional context should help trigger those foggy memories we all have of public ******. This will add to the liminality of the render. We'll start by hitting Shift and A. We'll start by hitting Shift and A to bring up our Ad menu. Then go to Mesh and choose Cube. We can zoom in on this cube down here. We are going to change the size of this one. We're going down here to size, we're going to type in 0.45 And then hit Enter. Now we can write, click on our cube, choose shade auto, Smooth. Then go over here to our Outliner. Double click on the word cube. We're going to call this exit sign. And then hit Enter. Now we can move it off here to the left side, that way it's not intersecting with this pillar, and we have a more clear area to work on it. Now, hit N on your keyboard to bring up your side menu over here. And then go over here to the item tab. It's very top tab on the side menu. And then go down to the bottom. And we're going to be changing these dimensions. We're going to actually just hand type in the exact size for this cube. We'll be leaving the x dimension set to 0.45 But for the y, we can just click on this. We're going to type in 0.025 Then hit Enter. We zoom in on our cube here, and we can see it made it much thinner. It's not a square anymore, it's a flat board. Then for the Z, we can type in 0.2 And then hit Enter, and then I'll make it a shorter, rectangular shape. And then the last thing we need to do is we need to apply this scale. Because we can see over here that we actually, by typing in these dimensions here, we did affect the scale. We'll hit control and A to bring up the apply menu, and then we can choose scale. Applying the scale ensures that the bevel we're about to add to the bottom of the sign doesn't look stretched out due to the scaling that we just did. Without applying our scale, we would get a squished bevel that wouldn't be nice and round at the bottom. You can hit N now to hide your side menu again, we'll just hit N and it'll go away. Now hit Tab to go into your edit mode, and then two tend to your edge mode. Then we're going to click off the model to deselect and then click the bottom edge here. So this bottom corner. And then hold shift and select the other corner. We have both of these short lines here selected on the bottom. Now hit Control, and at the same time to begin beveling it. Once we hit that. As we move our mouse now we'll see that it starts beveling these edges, so we're going to start rounding them out. You can also scroll up and down on your mouse wheel as you're moving your mouse back and forth to change how round these edges are. Don't worry about the exact size or roundness of these edges as we'll be typing in values here. Anyway, just move it up to a random spot. That's fine. Then it'll pop up this option box here where we're actually just going to type in the exact numbers we want. First, for the width, we'll type in 0.05, Hit Enter. Then for our segments, this is how round this edges. We're going to type in ten. We're going to make it a lot more round than it was before. Now it has ten cuts in here, making this edge nice and round With these edges rounded. We can hit Tab Text at our edit mode. Now we're going to be adding text to our sign. Let's zoom out from our sign here, because our text is going to pop up over here. Now we can hit Shift and A and then go down here to where it says text. We'll choose text, and that'll pop up a text object over here. First thing we'll need to do is rotate this text. Right now it's laying down and we need it to be vertical. Hit R to start rotating, then X to bind it to just the x axis, and then type in 9090 and then hit Enter. We can now move our text over using our move tool, just moving it closer to the sign. We'll get it lined up here in a minute. Let's zoom in so we can see the text a bit better. Now we need to make this text a bit smaller. To do this, we can go down here to the object data properties, which is this little a icon, this little green for the text. Now we can twirl open this font setting. Twirl this open and then go down here to where it says size. We're going to type in 0.17 and then hit Enter. Now that our text is smaller, let's go over here and slide this down. It's roughly in the center of our sign. We'll line this up better later, but let's just get it roughly in the center. Okay, now we can briefly go into our x ray mode. We're going to hit Alt and Z to go into x ray. And then hit Tab. And then this is how we're actually going to change what it says on this sign by hitting Tab. Now we're in the text editor for it. We'll hit backspace to remove this text. Then we're going to type the word it, IT, but we're going to do it in all capitals because typically that's how an exit sign is written. Write it in all capital letters and then hit Tab again. Tex Edit mode, now that we have the correct word written. We need to give some thickness to this word right now, it's paper thin. And we can do that by going over here and then going to the geometry menu for this text. And we're going to need to increase this extrude value. Let's type in 0.01 and then hit Enter. And we can see here now that our text actually has some thickness to it. Let's turn off our x ray mode by hitting all ten z. And then we're going to grab this text and move it forward into this sine here. We're actually moving it in the negative y direction, in this case, the green handle. We're moving it so that just the front of this exit word is poking through the front of the sign. We don't need to poke it out very much. Just a little bit will be enough. Just a small amount so that we can still see the word exit. The last thing we need to add for our sign is a little arrow pointing towards the exit. We'll be adding this using a cube. Let's zoom back out again. We can hit Shift and A go to Mesh. And then choose cube. Down here at the bottom left, we're going to change the size to 0.08 And then hit Enter. It's a much, much tinier cube than before. Now drag this cube all the way over here to the right side of our sine, we can zoom in. We need to push it into this sign, about the same distance that the word it is. It doesn't need to be perfect, but just move it backwards that it's only poking out about as much as the word. It is right there is enough. You can see here, there's a little bit of it poking through, just like the word. Now hit tab, tend to your edit mode on this cube. We'll switch to our vertex mode by hitting one on the keyboard. We're going to spin around to this back side here, then just drag select over the entire back side of this cube. We want to have all four of these vertices selected. Now we're going to move them in so that they intersect somewhere in the middle of this sign. It doesn't really matter where they end on the inside of the sign, we're going to be hiding that. Next. We need to make this cube into an arrow and we're going to be using Merge to do that. First, deselect off of your cube, so make sure you have nothing selected. And then select this top vertice here on the front. And then hold shift, and then select the bottom vertice, You have both or the top and the bottom on the front of this new arrow selected. Now we can hit M for merge. We're going to choose merge at center. It's going to merge both of these vertices in the center of the distance between them. So we can see here, it's made this arrow shape. Now we need to do that again. On the back side, we'll select the top. And then the bottom on the back side hit M, merge and then choose at center. Now it was important that we did the front first and then the back side of the cube. If we had just selected the entire right side, both front and back, top and bottom, and then hit merged, it would have merged both of these points together as well. They would have came to a point here and there would have only been a single vertice on this side. We wanted to keep this thickness, We needed to do just the front first and then the back second. Now that we have our arrow shape made, we're going to drag select over both of these. We have the full side of this arrow selected and then we can pull it in and make this arrow a good bit flatter. Typically, these arrows aren't very long. They're usually a really tall but flat arrow. We'll move it into somewhere around here. That's fine. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be an arrow shape. Now hit Tab Text at our edit mode and we can move this arrow out so that it meets basically where the edge of this is. It can overlap a little bit. Right about here, it's overlapping just a small amount. If you'd like to, you can move it out to the edge right about there. And now we have our arrow for our exit sign, which is pointing to the right. So it's just letting people know that the exit for this made up space that we're making is to the right side when they see this exit sign. Now that we have our arrow placed, let's select the arrow and then hold shift and select the exit word as well that we have both selected. And then I'm going to go into my front view here by either clicking this little bubble or doing the tilda front view. Now let's slide this whole word plus the arrow here to the left. And we're just going to center this up a little bit better. I'm looking at the distance between the edge of this arrow and then the edge of this E here to the edge of the sign. And just making them roughly equiva***t, this detail is going to be pretty blurry in the background, so any imperfections in the sign are going to be pretty much invisible. So don't worry about it getting it perfect. Just visually line it up. Now that I'm happy with the placement, I still have the arrow and I have the exit word selected. I'm going to also hold shift down and select the sin itself. I have all through these objects selected. Now we need to convert all of these into meshes. You'll notice up here in the outliner that the text has a different symbol next to it than the other two pieces of this sign. That different symbol here is letting us know that this isn't actually a piece of geometry, it's something different. In order to connect all of these together into one single piece, we do need to make sure that they're all geometry though. The easiest way to do this is with all of these objects selected. We can go up here to where it says object, go down to where it says convert, pretty far down near the bottom, and then choose mesh. Now if we look over here where it says text, you can see that that A is gone and it's been replaced by this triangle, just like the other objects, meaning that it's geometry. The last thing we need to do is combine all of these into a single piece. We can do that by having all of them selected and then hit control in J at the same time for join. Now that all of these objects have been joined together, we can see over here it just says it sign and that's the only thing we have selected. In this case, it does actually look like we've lost the text. That's only because we're in this orthographic view. So if we rotate to the side now, we can see that the arrow as well as the exit word are still there. They're all just part of the same object, so they only have a singular highlighted edge. You're not seeing the exit word highlighted as well. And now we've finished modeling our exit sign. We won't worry about placing it in our scene until the next lesson, however, because we don't know where it will be in the view of our camera just yet. In the next lesson, we'll be placing our camera in lighting. I'll see you there. 6. Placing the Camera and Lights: In this lesson, we'll be placing our camera in lighting. Let's begin. We're going to start by placing our camera. You should still have a camera in your scene from when we chose the general file type. If you deleted it by accident though, no problem. We can add a new one. If you need to add a new camera because you've deleted your old one, just hit Shift and a That'll bring up your Ad menu. And then we can go down here in the list. And then choose Camera. That'll place a brand new camera here on the origin of the world. I still have my original camera left over from when we created the file. I'm going to delete this new camera and use the old one instead. Let's create a new viewport on the left side of our screen that we'll use to view our camera. We can do that by going up to the top left corner of our screen, right here on the viewport. And we'll notice that our mouse turns into a little plus sign. When that happens, just click and drag, and then pull it over to the right side, and that'll drag out a brand new viewpoint on the left side. When this new left viewport, click this tiny white camera button here. This will jump us into the view of the camera that we see over here on the right side. Now that we have a viewport made exclusively for our camera view, we can begin placing our camera in the scene. We'll start by selecting a camera over here on the right side. Then we're going to move it all the way over here on the right. We're going to move it to the second, from the end square, it's this square here. And the second from the end. And the first full square, we see we have a couple, two squares here. Instead, we're going to move it to the full square. Now let's move it up in the y direction. We'll move it to the bottom side of the square. We'll just try to place it somewhat central in this location. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'll be giving you exact measurements for your camera in just a moment. Now let's move our camera down in the Z direction so that's not floating way above the ceiling. Can do that just by pulling it down here. And we're going to have it floating just above the water here. This box here is actually the water. It's not the floor because we haven't made the water clear yet. So it's a little bit harder to see. Now that we have it closer to the correct position, we can start fine tuning its position a little bit more. Move it a little bit closer to the center, maybe a bit closer to the water as well. Now we need to start adjusting the rotation. Currently, our camera is pointed straight down, basically directly into the water. And we need to point it up so that it can see the rest of the scene. Now let's switch over to our rotate tool. We can do that by clicking this symbol here. We'll notice that the rotate tool, the direction of this, doesn't really face the camera. It seems to just be following the world orientation up here. Luckily, we can change that so that it better reflects the direction that the camera is currently pointing. And we can do that by going up here where it says orientation. Right now it's set to default. We're going to switch this clicking on this dropdown menu. We'll switch it to Local. After we select local, we'll notice that this gizmo now actually aligns with the camera. This will make placing the camera and rotating it a lot easier. Now we can click on this red handle here and rotate the camera upward so that we can see the rest of the scene. And we can see that reflected over here in our camera viewport. We can continue rotating our camera to get a better view of the scene. If we'd like, we can rotate it to the right a little bit more. We see these pillars here. We can also switch back to our move tool and then move it back a little bit so that we see more of the scene and we're not quite so close to that pillar at the moment. We can only adjust our camera using the typical move and rotate tools. We'll be changing this later on. But know that if you try to use your normal viewport controls and the left camera viewport, it will just pop you out of the camera view. If I try to rotate over here using the normal viewport method. We'll see here that if I zoom or rotate, it just pops me out of the camera. It doesn't actually move the camera. To get back into our camera view, I'll just click this camera button here. Right now, we only can move our camera and change its view by using these tools on the right side. Now let's begin discussing some of the settings for our camera. We can find our settings over here using this little green camera icon, which is the object data properties for the camera. The main thing we'll be focusing on is the focal ***gth. Currently, our camera is using the default focal ***gth of 50 millimeters. This is a relatively high focal ***gth, meaning we'll see a pretty narrow view of our scene. If we lower this number to 36 millimeters, we'll get a wider view of our environment, allowing us to make a more compelling render. Let's change that value now, over here we can see focal ***gth set to 50. We're going to lower that to 36 instead, and then hit Enter. And we'll notice that we now see more of our scene here. You don't have to change it after you've switched it to 36. But if I increase this number, the higher it goes, the less we see it basically zooming in your camera. The lower the view is, the more zoomed out your camera is. But it's also starting to distort the view in order to avoid some of the distortion but still see enough of our scene. We're going to set it to 36, which is a nice medium value. Now that we have our focal ***gth set, let's fine tune our camera angle using a new tool. Let's hover our mouse over our left viewport, which has our camera view in it. And then we're going to hit to bring up our side menu. And then we'll go down to view the view tab here. The third one from the top. Then there's a setting we're going to check on here. And I'm going to make my window a little bit wider so you can see the whole thing. That setting is called Camera To View. When we check on Camera To View and then hide our side menu. We'll notice now that if we try to use our normal zoom or rotate, it actually moves the camera inside this left view. It allows you to use a little bit more of a natural and intuitive way to position your camera. With this new camera view setting turned on, we can more easily position our camera. Let's do that now. I'm going to start by moving my camera inward a little bit. Holding down control and middle mouse button to slowly zoom it forward. Now let's rotate my camera up a little bit. I just want to see a little bit of the ceiling here. And I want to make sure that this pillar here doesn't go off the bottom. Because everything that we're seeing here, essentially what we're seeing is the floor right now is actually going to be water. I can pan my camera a little bit to the right, so I see a little bit more of this right side. I think for right now, this camera angle looks fine. Now comes the most important step when using camera to view. And that's actually remembering to turn it off if you hit to bring up your side menu, we can go over here where it says camera to view and then uncheck it. The reason it's important to uncheck this is because you don't want to accidentally move your camera later on when all you wanted to do was just zoom in on your render. Now that we have camera to view checked off, we can hide our side menu. Then we're free to zoom in on our render or pan to the side. And we'll notice over here it's not actually moving the camera. That's a good thing. Let's just center this back up so we can see the whole view again with our camera angle looking a bit better. Let's make a simple change that will add a lot to the liminal space. Look. Many liminal space images have the appearance of being taken on a low quality disposable camera from the late '90s or early 2000. These cameras are meant for everyday people to take photos with. They won't always take perfect photos. And they might be slightly off center or tilted. Let's mimic this slightly imperfect and tilted look with our camera to make it look more like one of these photos. To do this, go over to your right viewport, switch to your rotate tool, then all we're going to do is just slightly rotate the camera on this blue axis, the z axis, In this case, it doesn't need to be a very big rotation. We actually want it to be as subtle as possible. I'm just going to grab this blue handle here, then rotate it just a little bit. In this case, it looks like about three degrees is enough. You can go a little bit more if you'd like, but I probably wouldn't go past five. You start going past five, it's really starting to look tilted, maybe. Let's do a nice halfway point. We'll do 2.5 down here. Just type it in, and that'll be exactly 2.5 rotation. This might seem like a subtle change, but it really does add to this liminal space look that we're going for by making the render imperfect. Now that we're done rotating our camera, we can go back up here to where we have it changed to local and we're going to set it back to default. Now that our camera is roughly placed, I'm going to give you exact values that I'll be using for this tutorial. Feel free to use my values that I'm going to tell you here in a moment or just leave the camera angle as it is now. If you're happy with how it looks, the exact values I'll be using, we'll have to hit to bring up our side menu. Now with our cameras still selected, we're going to go over here where it says location for the X, we'll type in 32. For the y we'll type in 0.75 Then for the z we'll type in 0.14 And now for the rotations, for the x value we'll type in 97. For the Y we'll type in negative 2.7 Then the z, I'll type in 3,090.5 Again, these measurements here are just optional if you'd like to follow along exactly, these are the values I'll be using. With that done, we can now hit to hide the side menu With our camera placement done, let's add one last effect before moving on to lighting. We're going to add some depth of field to our camera in order to get a slight blur on the objects furthest from the camera. This will further add to the realism of our image, due to it being a property of real life cameras as well. Before we enable this setting on our camera, let's make sure that we can actually see it in the viewport over on our left viewport, we're going to go up to the top option bar and we'll click in our middle mouse button. This will allow us to pan this side to side. We're going to pan it all the way to the left. We can see the far right side of this bar. Now while we're still in the solid view which we're currently in now, this is the gray view we see. Now we can click this drop down menu. Then we can go all the way down here to the bottom, and then check on depth of field. This setting doesn't give our camera depth of field. However, it does allow us to see the depth of field in the solid view. By default, you can only see depth of field in a rendered view unless you have this enabled. With that done. Now let's go over here to our camera settings then we're going to scroll down until we see here depth of field. We can turn that on now by just checking this box. There's only two settings. We'll be changing here and it's going to be the distance which will set to 4 meters. Then down here for the stop, we'll set that to 1.5 And then hit Enter. Now let's go over to our camera view here and zoom in on these pillars in the back. We can see here now that after we've enabled our depth of field and set up our parameters, the furthest pillars are getting pretty blurry as they go back. Whereas we zoom out, the pillar in the front is still nice and sharp. This will help obscure the background and give it the impression that it goes on forever. For a little bit more detail on how depth of field works. Essentially, the F stop value here is how blurry the image is going to be. The lower the value, the more blurry the background will be. Then the higher the value, the less blurry it will be going to set mine back to 1.5 Then the other thing we changed was the distance. This determines where the blurriness starts. This is an exact distance from this camera. I told it 4 meters out from the camera, start making things blurry past that point. In our case, if I lowered this value, it'll start making that closest pillar blurry. Because I'm telling it to start making things blurry before it even gets to that pillar. If I wanted more pillars in focus, I can make that value higher than 4 meters and it'll start making closer pillars here, still sharp, whereas it starts getting blurry the further back. But I'll set this back to 4 meters as I think that looks good for our render. Now let's zoom out here so we can see the full view again on the left side. With our camera in depth of field set up. We're now ready to place the exit sign that we made in the last lesson. Now let's zoom out on our right viewport and then find the exit sign which is over here on the left side. We can switch to our move tool. Now we can start roughly placing this exit sign. It's going to be easiest to place this from the top, just be above your scene here, And we're going to move it over. I will move it two squares over from where the camera currently is, roughly centered here. Then we're going to move it to the back of this square here. It's one square up and then two squares over. Now that it's roughly placed in the correct spot, we can zoom in here. Zoom in much closer to the exit sign. And then we can move it up to the ceiling. Move it forward so that it doesn't intersect with this. We're actually going to have it floating just in front of this archway. But first we want to make sure we move it up so that it just barely intersects the ceiling. That way it looks like it's connected to the ceiling. Once you have it touching the ceiling, then you can zoom out. And we'll just slide it over so that it looks like it's in the center of this archway. It really doesn't need to be perfect, just make it generally centered. Because you can see over here, it doesn't really matter whether we slide it a little bit left or right, It looks pretty much centered regardless. Now let's make one more duplicate of this sign. To make this duplicate, we're going to be holding down Alt and D to make our duplicate not shift and D, I'll explain why in a minute. But hold down Alt and D now we can hit Y to start cloning it just in this Y direction. We can just move it here. For now, we're using Alt and D to make this duplicate. That way it shares the same material data as the first. This means in the next lesson, when we texture one of these sines, the other sine will also be a textured along with it. At the exact same time, we won't have to do it twice. The difference between using Alt and Shift is Shifty makes just a clone of that object. They aren't directly tied to each other, whereas all makes almost an identical clone of it. Anything we do to the original will also be affected on the second one as well. When we use a D, if we just use shifty, it's made a duplicate, but it's branched them and made them both unique. Anything we do, the first one will not be reflected on the second one. With our duplicate made, let's get it placed. We'll zoom out again above, so our original sign is here. We're going to slide this back, so we'll consider this one square, two squares, and then three squares is we're going to end it. Now let's zoom in. We can push it closer to the wall, that way it's close to the arch. Then for this sign, we're actually going to have to make this one offset. We're going to slide this one all the way over here to the left. And we'll notice as we zoom in over here on our camera, we won't be able to see this sign until we get it in this little gap here. I know it's a little bit blurry right now, but there's a gap here between these arches. And if we centered this sign. Notice that it's hidden behind this arch here. In order to make it visible from a distance, we're going to slide it over to the left side. We're faking the fact that this one is supposed to be centered. This is going to be so blurry here and obscured though, that we won't really notice that it's off center. We just want this little pop of red light in the back. Once we get to the texturing part, now that we have our second exit sign placed, we're ready to add some simple lighting. First, we need to zoom out on our camera view here on the left side so we can see the whole view. We'll be keeping our lighting very simple. With one small exception, we'll be including a subtle fog throughout the scene in order to further obscure the scene and leave it a bit mysterious. Before we start adjusting our lighting, we do need to switch our left camera viewport into a different rendered mode. To do this, go up here to the top right where you see your different rendered modes. And we're going to switch it into the rendered viewport mode, which is the furthest right button here. This will give us an accurate preview of our final image. Right now, the scene is pretty dark and that's because we haven't adjusted the lighting. Now let's go back to our right viewport. We can zoom out on our scene. We're looking for the original light that was left in our scene when we created the general file type at the beginning. Again, if you've already deleted this by accident, that's fine. Just hit Shift and A. Then go to light and then choose point light to add a second light. Just like before, I already have the light in my scene. I'm going to delete the one that I just made and then go back to the original one that was left in my scene. With your light selected, go to the object data properties, which is this little tiny green light bulb icon. And then we're going to go up to the top here and we're going to switch it from a point light to an area light. Instead, we'll just click Area Light, and that'll change the type of light that this is. With that change made, now we can start positioning our light first. Let's just drag our light over here to where roughly where our camera is. We want it to be in the same row of squares here that our camera currently is. Now, we can hit R to start rotating and then z to rotate it just on the Z axis. And we're going to rotate it towards where our camera is pointed, roughly here. Now let's zoom in on our scene here so we can get a little bit better view. First, we need to pull our light back. We're moving it in the y direction. This will move it so that it can shine through this large gap here that we delete it on the side wall, we can see as we move it back, our scene starts getting brighter because it start letting light into the scene. We can also move our light down in the Z direction. Again, more lights getting into the scene. Lastly, we'll hit and then X to start rotating it just on the X axis. And we'll point it more towards where our camera is now. Just like the camera before, I'm now going to give you the exact position and rotation of the light that I'll be using for this class. Again, this is optional, but if you'd like to follow along with the exact values, this is how you'll do it. We'll hit N to bring up our side menu. Then we're going to change our location. We'll set this to 31.5 For the y location, we'll set this to negative 4.5 And then the z, I'll set this to 5 meters. Now for the rotation, let's set the x rotation to 55 degrees. Then we'll set both of these to zero. We can see after making these adjustments, our scene is a good bit darker. And that's because this light has moved further up and a little less of the light is actually getting into the scene. If you're not planning to use this exact position for your light, I would suggest you try to get your scene roughly as bright as mine is now. Not a whole lot of light coming in right into the foreground. Just generally bounce lighting illuminating the scene in general. The darker a liminal space render is, the more convincing it will be with the light placed. Now let's start adjusting the settings on the light itself. First we'll change the color. We can do that just by clicking this little color bar here. And then for our hue value, we'll type in 0.05 Then for the saturation, we'll type in 0.45 And that'll make our light pretty warm, almost like a sunlight coming in. Next we'll change the power. We're going to set this significantly higher. We'll set it to 2000020, and then three more zeros after that. Don't worry if the lighting seems a bit bright right now. This is because we haven't textured anything yet. After we have some darker materials in our scene, the lighting will feel much more balanced. Lastly, we're going to change the shape of the light. Right now it's set to rectangle, We're going to change from rectangle to square. Then we'll change the size from 0.1 meters all the way up to 10 meters. By making this light source physically larger, we'll also be softening the shadows caused by the light. Now let's add a pretty subtle but important light that's going to mimic a camera flash on our right viewpoint. Let's zoom out. We can hit shift and a go to light. Then we'll choose spot light. Before we place this light, let's adjust some of these parameters for the power. We're going to set this to 80 watts. 80. Then for the radius, we'll set that 2.1 for our spot size down here below underneath beam shape, we'll switch that to 65 degrees. That's just going to make the spot light a little bit wider. And then the b***d value, we're just going to drag that all the way up to one that'll make the edges of the spotlight as soft as possible. Now we need to place this light behind our camera so it feels like the camera flash went off when we took the picture. I'll be gaming you my exact settings for this light placement, but feel free to adjust them to match your camera placement if needed. First, let's zoom out over here so I can see my camera now with my side menu open, you can hit to bring that up. For the x location, I'll type in 32 for the y, 0.55 z is 0.18 Now the rotations for the X, we'll set that to 9090. Then the Z, we'll set that to 39. Then that's the last change. Now we can see here that our light is positioned off just to the side of our camera. That's to mimic the fact that the flash is typically offset on the side of a camera. It's a pretty subtle change, but it does make a slight difference. Now we can hit N to hide our side menu. Now we're ready to add the subtle fog that I mentioned earlier. We'll be adding this fog inside the World Properties tab. We can find that here with this little red globe icon. The first step is to turn off the ambient light that's currently in our scene right now. It's set to strength one, we'll just type in zero. And that will remove a little bit of the ambient light that b***der ships with by default. Now let's twirl open the volume settings here. Then under volume, we see none. We'll click on the word none. Then we'll switch it to Principled volume, which is right here, a little bit below the center line. We'll choose principled volume. Now I can see over here on the left side that we have a ton of fog in our scene. We will be adjusting some of these settings. Now there's only two settings that we'll really need to change. The first one is density, and then secondly we'll be changing the anisotropy. First, let's change the density, click on density and then we can set that to 0.05 and then hit Enter. The density value is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. If we lower the number, we'll lower the density of the fog, making it thinner so we can see further in it. The second value will be changing anisotropy. That one's a little bit less obvious. First, let's set this to 0.3 which is the value we'll be using, 0.3 You might have noticed after we've changed that, that the background here has a little bit less fog in it. It's gone a little bit closer to black like it was before. The anisotropy value basically is pulling the fog in and making it more concentrated around light sources and having a little bit less effect in the areas that have less direct lighting on them. The higher this value, the more concentrated your fog will be around the actual light source and the less it will cause. In the background, we can see here at a 0.7 value, it makes the background really dark. We don't need it quite that dark, so we'll just leave ours at 0.3 With our volumetric fog set up in our scene, we're officially done with our lighting and the next lesson, we'll start texturing our scene. I'll see you there. 7. Texturing the Scene (Part 1): In this lesson, we'll start adding some color to our scene by creating textures. Let's begin. We'll need to switch into our shading workspace before we begin. Let's do that. Now we can find the shading work space up here at the top center by clicking on the word shading. Now let's get rid of these two smaller viewports here on the left side as we won't need them, and they're just taking up space to remove them. We'll go up to the top left corner of this viewport. Wait until our mouse turns into a plus sign, and then once it does, we can click and drag to the left until it turns into an arrow. And then let go cover up that old viewport. Let's do the same thing down here on the bottom Again, we'll keep this one. So we're going to hover over the top left corner of it. Click and drag, and then let go. Now up on our top viewport, we're going to switch this to the rendered mode. We can do that by clicking this far right bubble here on the right side. Then lastly, we'll switch into our camera view by clicking the little white camera icon here. Let's zoom out a little bit so we can see the full view of the camera. Let's start with the water texture first. First we'll need to click on our water. So we can do that either here in the viewport or we can go up to the top right, and then scroll down until we see water. And then select it here. Now that we have it selected, we can go down here to the bottom center and click on the new button to create a new material for the water. Before we make any changes here though, let's rename this so we know it's the water material. We'll just click on the word here where it says Material 001. And we'll replace that with the word water If this is the first time you're seeing the node system within B***der, let me give you a very brief rundown. You can zoom in and out on the shaded editor down here on the bottom by scrolling your mouse wheel in and out. You can pan the view around by clicking and holding in your middle mouse button and then sliding the view around. Each of the squares that we see down here in the shader editor are called nodes. Right now we have two nodes. Nodes pass their attributes from the left side towards the right side. All of these nodes flow from left to right. Each node has colored dots on it called sockets. You pass the properties of a left node to the right node by connecting its sockets together with wires. And this white line here we see is the wire. To add more complex effects, you simply add the appropriate node and connect it to the other nodes in the system. We're going to keep most of our textures pretty simple. For this project, we won't be using too many nodes. Now let's begin making this water look like water. The first thing we'll want to change is the color. Right now it's set to white. We're going to make it a pale blue. To change that, we'll just go down here to where it says printable SDF, This green node here. We can click on Base Color. The quickest way to change your color, if you're not concerned with getting it as an exact color, would just be to go up to this color wheel and then click and drag on this color wheel. And it'll move this little white dot around and that will change the color to wherever you place the dot. You can also click and drag this to make the texture darker, the color rather darker or lighter depending on where it falls on side the scale. I know what the exact color I want to use here is. I'm going to go down here to the sliders and we can just type in the exact value for the very top slider, the hue, we're going to type in 0.55 For our saturation, we'll type in 0.35 And then for the value, we'll set that to 0.8 We can see here our color now has a very pale blue color. It's not super blue, but in real life, water really isn't that blue either. We're going to make it a pretty subtle blue color. Now let's continue moving down this node. The first place we'll stop is the roughness slider. This roughness slider determines how sharp or blurry the reflections of this water will be. As we lower this value, we'll make our water either sharper in the reflections or we'll make it blurrier. By making the roughness higher for our water. We want it to be relatively reflective and shiny. So we're going to set this to a pretty low value. We'll do 0.05 Now we can see up here in our viewport that our water and is now reflecting these columns on the surface. Let's continue moving down this list. We'll move down to where it says clear coat. This clear coat value. We're going to make it all the way up to one which is the maximum value. And then we'll set the clear coat roughness to 0.2 This clear coat slider adds another layer of reflection on top of the original reflection that the material already has. Like a car paint has a clear coat on top of it to make the car paint shiny. The clear coat roughness slider works exactly like the last roughness slider, except it's only affecting the clear coat reflections and nothing else. We've decided to make our clear coat roughness a little bit more blurry than the original roughness slider. This just makes our reflections a little bit more complex. Now, for the most important slider in this case, at least for water, is the transmission slider. And we're going to slide this one all the way up to one. By increasing our transmission all the way up to a value of one, we've made our water actually see through. A transmission value of one will make it refractive and allow you to see through it. And a transmission value of zero makes it completely opaque, which is what it was before. For our water, we're going to leave it at one, that way we can actually see through the water. This is already looking a lot more like water, except there's one important thing that we're missing, still waves in the water. We'll be adding the waves using a node called bump. The bump node converts black and white images into height data that b***der will use to mimic bumpiness on an object. It's important to note that this doesn't actually add any new faces or vertices to the model. It simply fakes that detail using some trickery that disrupts the light hitting the object, making it look bumpy, or in our case wavy. Let's start out by adding our first new node. We can go over here to the left side and we're going to hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu. Then up the top here we have a search bar. We click on Search and allow us to type something in. We're going to type in bump B, U, M. Then here we can see it filtered it out. And here's bump, we'll select that. This will create a brand new node. And we can place it down here near the bottom left side of this original node. Now we need to connect this new node into this system over here. And we can do that by clicking the word normal. We're going to click this little blue socket next to it, purply blue. We're going to drag it down here into the other one that also says normal. Now we have this purple wire connecting the two. We won't notice any changes in our water just yet. And that's because we haven't given it a black and white image to turn into waves. Let's do that now. We can go over here, further over here on the left side. We'll hit Shift and A to add a brand new node. And we're going to choose search again. This time we'll type in Noise 0, I at the very top here we want noise texture. Make sure you don't choose white noise texture. That's a totally different node even though they have very similar names. Again, we'll be choosing just noise texture, the top one, we'll place it here to the left of the bump node. Now we're going to drag this gray socket here, the FAC, which stands for factor. We're going to drag this down into this gray socket called height on the bump node. Now we have a wire connecting them. We can see here that our water isn't perfectly flat anymore. It has a bit of a wave to it. There's still a bit more detail we can add to our water though. Let's add another smaller wave bump to this texture and combine them together with the subtle larger wave bump that we currently have down here in our shader editor. We can zoom out a little bit. We're going to drag Select over these two nodes here. We have both of them selected, and then we'll just drag them a little bit to the left to create some room here. Now we'll hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu. Then here in the search bar, we can click this and we'll type in Mix. And we'll choose Mix here at the top. We're going to drag this in between these two until this little line turns white. And then click to place it on this new mix node. Can zoom in here. We need to change it from float, we'll click on this, we're going to switch it to vector. This will change the type of mix node that it is and the options that it has available to it. After doing that though, it will disconnect the original connections we're going to need to reconnect them. The first thing we'll do is click this normal socket here on the bumped node. We'll drag it down here where it says A. So we'll drag it into this socket. Then over here on the output of this, the result node, we're going to drag this over here and put it into the normal socket on the original node. Switching this mixed node to the vector mode is important because bumps are considered vector information. In order for this mixed node to mix together these two bump nodes, we need to set it to the vector mode. It's not super important to understand why, but the bump node is considered vector information. It requires the vector mode to be correctly mixed. You can also get a clue due to the same color, this purple color on both of these nodes. Now once we've switched it to vector, now let's zoom out a little bit on our shader editor. We're again going to drag Select over both of these nodes, both of them selected. We can now hit Shift and D to make duplicates of them. We're making exact copies of them. We can place them down below. Now we're going to zoom in here and connect this normal socket on this new bump node, and then plug it into the B socket over here. This new bump and noise texture that we just made is what we'll use to make the smaller ripples in the water. But first we need to change the factor on this mix node. Right now, the factor is set to 0.5 which means it's mixing both of these equally, half of this one and then half of this one. We don't actually want these to be equally mixed though, we want a lot less of the value. And a lot more of the value. We're going to set our factor to 0.1 Instead you can think of this factor slider almost like an opacity slider. In other programs, you're basically choosing how much of each layer, either A or B, is present in the texture with a value of 0.1 We're only allowing a small percentage of the B socket to be visible. If we set it all the way down to zero on, the socket would be visible at all. If we set it all the way up to one, only the socket would be visible. As I mentioned before, 0.5 would be a perfect 50, 50 mix of both A and B. Now let's make some adjustments to the new noise texture which is plugged into the B socket. We're going to go down here. We can zoom in here so we can see these values a bit better. First, let's change the scale. We're going to change this to 112112. By making this number much higher, we've actually made the noise much smaller. It's a little bit of a confusing opposite value that they have here. But the higher the number, the smaller the noise, the smaller the number, the larger the noise. Because we're going for smaller waves, we needed to make this number a bit higher. Lastly, down here below where it says detail, it's currently set to two. We're going to set this down to zero to make the small waves a little bit more blurry than they were before. When it's set to two, the waves are a little bit too sharp. Setting it down to zero makes them a little bit more blurry and wavy. They b***d together better with the larger waves. With those changes made, we definitely have a lot more smaller waves in our texture. However, they are a little bit too strong. Right now, the water looks really wavy and we want it to be pretty still. The way we can effect that is by lowering the strength of the smaller noise texture in this lower bump node, the one that's plugged into B. We're going to set the strength value 2.25 to make these smaller waves a lot more subtle. Now we can see up here, our texture still has small waves in it, but they're not nearly as strong as they were before. With that last change, our water texture is officially done. Now let's work on the white tile that's going to be applied to the arched pillars. We're going to start making this texture on a cube, then we'll apply it to our pillars later. Let's go back to our layout tab. So we can create this cube and then place it in the scene. On our port we can zoom out a little bit, then hit Shift and A go to Mesh, and then choose Cube. We will be changing the size of this cube. Let's set this to 1 meter. And then hit Enter so that the cube is a bit larger. Now we just need to move this cube so that's in view of our camera. This doesn't need to be perfect. We just want to make sure that we can see the whole cube. We're going to move it somewhere in front of this pillar here. Then move it up a little bit. It's not stuck inside the water anywhere, Roughly in the center of your view is fine. With that done now we can head back to our shading workspace. We can go up here to the top center, and then just click shading. Another thing we'll want to do is to select our camera over here on the right side. Just scroll up to the top of your list. Select camera. Go down here to the object data properties, this little green camera icon, and we're going to uncheck depth of field. For now, this is only slowing down our render and it's going to make it a little bit harder to see the texture. We'll turn it off temporarily while we work on this texture. Now in our Viewport here, we can just click on our Cube, and then we can click the new button here to add a new material. Before we make any changes again, let's change the name here. And we're going to call this tiles white. And then hit Enter, because we'll be making two tiles for this render. This first one we're making is the white version. Now let's zoom out down here so we can find the nodes. We can see them here. We won't actually be making any changes at all to this principled BSD node. Let's just add our first new node. We'll hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu. Then click Search, and we're going to search for the word Voronoi. It's a weird word, V, R. And that should be enough to have it pop up to the very top. And we want the Voronoi texture, we'll select this, then we can place this node here, to the left of this green one. The Voronoi texture is similar to the noise texture that we used earlier. It just generates a different black and white texture for us to adjust. Let's zoom in on this node. We're going to be plugging in the distance socket over here into the base color socket, this principled SDF node. That will allow us to see what this ino texture looks like here on the cube. Now that we have it connected, we can click down here where it says one. And we're going to switch the mode of this vino texture from one to distance to edge. Instead we'll select distance to edge. Then you see up here, it'll change the look of this texture. Now that we have the mode switched, let's change the scale to eight. That we'll make this texture a little bit smaller. Then the biggest change we're going to be making is changing the randomness value. We just set this randomness value down to zero, we'll see that it turns from that chaotic, cracked looking texture. This very orderly grid texture, which looks a lot more like tile. Now if we zoom in on this image, we zoom into one of these intersections here where they meet. We'll see that these tiles all come together with a perfect 90 degree angle. There's no variation at all, and they're all perfectly laid out. Now if we go down here to random, and we type in 0.01 and then hit Enter, This adds just a tiny bit of randomness to the positions of these tiles. It's a relatively subtle change, but it does make them look a little bit more realistic. Because in real life tiles aren't going to be absolutely perfectly laid out. There will be a little bit of variation even if they look like they're 90 degree offsets. We can see that here on this corner, we're seeing a little bit of that offset. They don't meet up in a plus sign here. They're slightly imperfectly laid out, which is how our actual tile would be. Now let's further adjust the look of this Voronoi texture with a new node called color ramp. First, let's drag this over so we can make some room here between the two. Then we can hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu, click Search, and then type in Color. Then once we type in color, we'll see here color ramp. We'll choose that, drag that between the two highlights over top of this wire. It'll turn white. And then click to place it, and it'll automatically connect it for you. This color ramp node will allow us to adjust the distributions of colors generated by the Voronoi texture. In our case, we want there to be less gray and more flat areas of white. That will get rid of this studded look that we have up here where we see this x that goes across it. We'll be making these adjustments by changing the positions of the sliders down here on the color ramp. First we can zoom in here on the bottom left slider, so the one that's currently black. We're going to click this tiny little triangle above it. And that we'll select this slider node. Then we can either move it by hand, and you can see the effect up there that it's having. Or we can go down here where it says position and we can type in an exact number. In our case, we're going to type in 0.005 and then hit Enter. This will move it just slightly inward and that will create more of a thicker black line between each of the tiles, which is to represent our grout tiles. Typically in real life aren't butted up directly next to each other, there's a little bit of a space between them filled in with grout. Next, we're going to change this from pure black, a brighter gray color. We can do that by clicking this black bar down here. And the only thing we need to change is setting our value to 0.75 In the hitting enter, this will make the grout of our tile a lot less bold. Next, we need to go down here and select the right most slider, this pure white one. And then we're going to change the position to 0.01 It's really close to the other slider, we can see by making that change. Now when we look at our tile, it's not so blurred. It actually has very defined edges for these tiles. They're almost entirely white. And then there's some gray grout between them, and then it goes to the next white tile. Let's add one more level of subtle detail to this texture, giving it a bump map. This will make the grout between each tile appear to push into the texture slightly, making it a little bit more realistic. Let's go down to our shader editor and zoom out. Then we can hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu, click Search, and then type in Bump again, choose Bump from the list, and then place it down here. Now we can connect the normal socket on the bump node down here, to the normal socket on the principled BS DF node. Again, we won't notice any change up here because we don't have any image plugged into the bump yet. Now we can zoom out. We're going to select this color ramp. Hit shift to make a duplicate of just the color ramp. And we'll place it here next to this bump. And now we can connect the color socket on this new color ramp node down here, into the height on this bump node. This still hasn't given the bump node any real information to work with, and that's because we need to plug in this Voronoi texture first, let's drag this vino texture a little bit over to the left. Then we're going to drag from this distance socket here on the Voronoi texture, down here into the factor slider down here on the bottom for the new color ramp. Essentially what we've done is we've used this exact same tile texture, this Voronoi texture, and plug it into two different color ramps, and then plug those color ramps into two different parts on the same texture. That way if we make any changes to the tile size, if we say change this to ten instead of eight, for some reason it will update both of these because they're both utilizing the exact same texture. Now, we're not going to switch ours to ten, we're going to leave it at eight. So I'm just going to control Z, that change. But that was just an example. Now let's go down here to the bottom and make a few adjustments. The first thing we need to do is adjust the color ramp. The only thing we really need to change is change the grout color from that light gray that we put between them back to black so that it works better with the bump map. The easiest way to select that black slider is to select a little bit off to the left side of it. If we just click over here and click slightly to the left side, you might need to zoom in a little bit. You can see it's here. It's just overlapped by the other one. Just select a little bit off to the side. There we go. I was able to select it. It might take a couple clicks, but you will find it after you have that one selected. That's the one that's set to 0.005 just to make sure you have the correct one selected. We aren't going to be changing the position, but we will be changing this back to black. We can click on this colored bar here and then just set the value all the way down to zero again. Then lastly, the only thing we need to change here is the bump node. We're going to set the strength down to 0.25 as right now, it's a little bit too strong. We just want to really subtle bump map, we can now see that there's a subtle shadow and highlight created around the edges of each tile due to the bump node that we just added. There's one last thing to add to this texture before we move on down here in our shader editor. Let's on back out. We're going to go over here to where our Oi texture is. Now we can hit Shift and A to add a new node up here in the search bar, we're going to type in texture R space. As soon as you type in C, it should help the filter. And we're going to choose texture coordinate. The very top option here, we can click and place it here. Now we need to connect the UV socket on this new texture coordinate node. We're going to drag this over and plug it into the vector socket here on the Voronoi texture. You'll notice our tiles look much larger now, but we'll fix that once we apply it to the pillar itself. The texture coordinate node is an important part of this texture as it will let us dictate the exact size of this texture across multiple objects. At this point, the white version of our tile is complete. However, we will be also making a green version of it as well. Luckily, this process will be significantly easier and faster now that we can use this material as a base. Down here next to the name of the tile, we'll see this little button here that looks like two squares overlapping each other. If we click this duplicate icon, we'll make an exact duplicate of this texture that we can rename and change. The color of this will leave the original white texture tile intact. It just won't be currently applied to anything. Let's click this little button now. We can see here it's changed the name. Now we're going to delete the word white and replace it with green G, R, E, N. For this green variant, we only need to make a single change before it's finished. All we need to do is zoom out and go over here. Now zoom in on this top color ramp. We're going to be selecting the white slider here, the furthest right 11, that's currently set to 0.01 Again, just select off to the side of it if you're unable to select it, but it should already be selected from before. Now that we have the white slider selected, we can go down here. Click this white bar. Now let's start changing the color for our hue. We'll type in 0.45 our saturation. We'll set that to 0.4 Then lastly for our value, we'll make it a good bit darker. We're going to set this to 0.25 That's it. Our green tile variant is complete by re using the white tile. We saved ourselves a ton of work. We went for this gray green color to add a little bit of a pop of color to sine without making it too eye catching and jarring. At this point, we can now delete this cube that we added to apply this text as it was only temporary and there to make our life a little bit easier while creating these textures, we'll just select this cube and then hit delete. Don't worry the fact that it disappeared down here at the bottom of your texture. We didn't delete the textures. The textures still exist within the file, They're just not currently applied to any object. Now that we're done making the tiles, we can go back up here to our layout tab. Then we can select our camera. Go down here to the Object Properties tab. We're going to turn on Depth the field again. Now that we're done making the textures, now we're ready to apply these tile textures to the rest of our scene. In the next lesson, we'll finish applying all the textures. I'll see you there. 8. Texturing the Scene (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll finish texturing our scene. Let's begin. We'll start by applying the green tile texture we made in the last lesson to our walls. First, we'll have to select our walls object. There's a few different ways we can do it. Either we can do it over here in the right viewport by selecting one of these side walls. Or we can select it from the list at the top right, or from our camera view over here on the left. We can actually select the ceiling, which is also part of the walls. Now that we have our walls selected, we can go over here to the Material Properties tab down here at the bottom right. We'll click on this. It's this little red circle icon with a checker pattern on top of it. Now rather than adding a brand new material, we're going to click this dropdown menu here. This dropdown menu lists all the materials that are currently in our scene. The one we'll be choosing is the tiles green material. Let's select this. Now the material is applied. However, we really can't see the individual tiles because the texture is so large and stretched out. Let's fix that now with a process called unwrapping. Unwrapping is how you ensure a texture is applied at the correct size and at the correct location on an object. This is an entire discipline of three D art. We'll only really be going into some basic unwrapping in this class with our walls still selected. Let's hit Tab, Enter our edit mode, then three, enter face mode, and then hit A to select all the faces on this wall object. Now we can right click on our viewpoint here. And then we'll go down to the middle of this list where it says UV unwrap faces. Now we can go down here where it says UV unwrap faces. And then we're going to look for cube projection. Now, for some reason you can't see cube projection on your list. It's possible that it might be scrolled up to the top if there's a little arrow up icon at the very top here. You can see now at the bottom as I mouse over it, it'll scroll the list. For some reason you can't see cube projection. Just hover over top of one of these arrows here to scroll your list until you can see it. Again, we'll be choosing cube projection, which is here. Let's click that now. After choosing cube projection, we have a little option box that popped up down here at the bottom. The cube size has currently defaulted to the actual size of this wall object, which right now is 42.2 That's going to make our tiles pretty huge. We're going to change this all the way back down to one type in one for cube size. Now, it may be a little bit difficult to see with this orange overlay, but if we look up here, we can actually start seeing individual tiles on our ceiling. Now that's thanks to lowering this cube size. In basic terms, having a larger cube size for your cube projection is going to make your texture much larger. The smaller the number, the smaller your texture. It started out at 42, which was really huge. By lowering it down to one, we've made these tiles a lot more realistic in their size. Now that the tile size is correct, let's apply the white tile to the ceiling instead of the green that's currently applied to it. Now to do this, go over here to your Material Properties tab that we were just one click this little plus icon that we'll create a new material slot on this object. Now we can go down here to our dropdown. Click the dropdown and then choose tile white instead. Now this hasn't actually applied this white material to our object. And we'll notice that if we click off of our model to remove this orange highlighting, everything is still green here, nothing has changed to white. All we did was add this white tile material to a material slot. We haven't actually applied it to the model to apply it to just a specific face, while in face mode, we just need to select the face we want to apply it to. In our case, just the ceiling. We'll select it here in our viewport. Now we need to select tiles white from this list. And then we can click Assign to assign this white material just to the ceiling. Now if we click off of our model to deselect this face, we'll notice that the ceiling is now white, but the floor underneath is still green as well as the walls, although they are a little bit more difficult to see in this view. With the ceiling changed to white, we're done texturing all the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. We can hit tab, text it on our edit mode. Now let's work on our pillar object. First, select any one of these pillars here. One of them will do even though they're all technically clones of the original. Again, over in our Material Properties tab, rather than creating a new material, because we already have the tile we want created, we're going to choose this dropdown to see all the materials in the scene and we'll choose tiles white, just like the walls object. We see that the texture is stretched out and in need of some unwrapping. To begin our unwrapping process, we're going to hit Tab to enter our edit mode. Now we can hit three to enter face mode. And then we'll hit A to select all the faces you may have noticed at this point that we're not actually seeing anything. Select here. And that's because if we zoom out here on our right viewport, the only pillar that's being selected is the original pillar. Now every one of these other pillars here are clones of this original one. We only need to unwrap the original, but that's why you're not seeing any selection here on the other pillars. We can zoom in on this pillar to get a better look at what we're actually doing. Again, just like last time, we're going to be unwrapping this pillar using cube projection. Now we could just like last time, right click and then choose UV unwrapped faces. But we also notice next to it it has a hot key, which is rather than right clicking, we can just hit with these faces selected. I'll bring up the exact same menu. It just saves us a little bit of a step. Now that we have this UV mapping menu up, we can choose cube projection. Again, down here at the bottom for our cube size, we're going to set it to the exact same size as the walls at the ceiling and floor, which was one. We'll select this and then choose one and it enter. This will make sure that our tiles on our columns and pillars are the exact same size as all the other tiles in the scene, such as the walls, the floors in the ceiling. Now that we have the white material applied and the tiles the correct size, let's add the green tiles to the insides of the pillar arches for a bit of an accent color. First let's click off the model, so we deselect all the faces. We can hold Alt and shift down at the same time. We're going to be selecting on these little horizontal lines between each of the faces that go up and down the curved part of our pillars. First we'll select here that will select all these faces going up and down the curved part of our pillar. Now we can hold down Alt and shift again. And then select these faces here. Again, selecting the horizontal parts of these lines to make sure that it selects in the correct direction. We'll select here. Now we have these two sides selected, but we're need to rotate around to the back side so we can see the others. Now again, Alt and Shift. Then click over here as well to select both sides. At this point, we have all four sides of our pillar selected. Now we just need to add a new material slot with the green tiles attached to it. Just like last time, we'll hit the plus icon to create a new slot. Go down here to our dropdown, choose tiles green. Then with these faces still selected and our tiles green material selected inside this list it's currently highlighted, We'll just choose a sign and that will apply the green material just to these highlighted faces. This little pop of green here on the inside of these arches gives just a little bit of an accent across the scene. It's not just all white and water. With that done, we can hit Tab to exit our edit mode. Now lastly, let's texture the exit signs. So let's select one of our exit signs up here in the list. So I'm just going to select the first one and then we can zoom into it. Let's now I have the exit sign in view, and then the shading on this is going to be really simple. We won't bother going to the shading tab for this one. We're just going to do all of our shading here inside of the material properties tab. First, let's just hit Tab to go into our edit mode. Now three to enter our face mode. Now click off your model to make sure you have no faces currently selected. And then hover over the sign part of this. Don't hover over any of the words or the arrow, just this back flat part L. To select all of that, again, L means select linked in this case. Now in our Material Properties tab, we can click New to create a new material. First, let's rename this right here where it says Material One. We're just going to type in exit sign white. In the case of this white material, that's it. The default settings for this material work perfectly fine for a really simple exit sign. It just needs to be white and shiny. Now let's add the glowing red material to the letters in the sign. The easiest way to select all these letters in the arrow is to hit control. And at the same time, that will invert selection, since we had everything but the letters and the arrow selected before by hitting control, and we flipped that selection, and now we have just the letters in the arrow selected. Now we can go over here and click this little plus sign to add a new material slot. We can click New to create a new material for that slot. Let's rename this again. We'll call this exit sin space Red. Then before we do anything else here, let's click the assigned button. We automatically assign this material to this. Now our first step after assigning it is to change the base color. Let's click on this base color here. Then we'll change the saturation all the way up to one. And we can see here that a hue value of zero is actually pure red. So we can leave it there. We won't be touching the value as this red is perfectly fine. Now hover your mouse over top of this base color block, the red square here, and hit control C to copy this color to your clipboard. Now we can scroll down this list until we see the word emission, which has currently a black square. And we're just going to hit control and V while hovering over top of this black square to paste that new red color directly into it. With this red pasted into the emission slot, these letters now glow a bright red. We can see that here on our camera view by zooming in on this far back sign. And we'll see that that second sign that we created is also glowing bright red. This is because we use Alt and D when making this duplicated instance for our other sign. It's already textured and correct for us. Now we can hit tab Text at our edit mode on our exit sign. And then let's zoom out so we can see the entire camera view. In the next lesson, we'll be doing some simple compositing and rendering our final image. I'll see you there. 9. Compositing and Final Render: In this lesson, we'll be doing some simple compositing and rendering our final image. Let's begin. We're nearing the end of the road on our liminal space. However, we're not quite done yet. We'll spend the bulk of this lesson working on some simple compositing to really hone in on that low fidelity look that we're after. Then we'll end by saving out our final image. First, let's render out a quick still image to see what we're working with so far. To do this, let's go up to the top where it says rendering. And we're going to switch to the rendering work space. Now to render our image, we can go over here to the left side where it says render. Click this button and then choose Render Image. We can also hit 12 if you'd like to use the key bind for it. I'll just click Render Image Here, and that'll start the rendering process. B***der will now utilize the render settings we enabled at the beginning of this class to render the image. This may take a minute or so, depending on the strength of your computer. I'll see you in just a moment when my render is completed. Okay. My render is done and it looks pretty great so far. However, we can still add some effects to make the image look even more liminal, so to speak. First, we'll need to switch to the compositing work space up here at the top. It's right next to the rendering work space. Let's click that tab now to switch over. Now let's set this work space up so it's a little bit more useful for our purposes. First thing we'll do is make this bottom window here a little bit smaller by clicking between the two until our mouse turns into an up and down arrow. And just pulling this down so it's smaller, we won't really be using this. Now in this upper viewport, we can hit to hide the side menu. Now at the top left corner, we're going to move our mouse all the way up to the corner until it turns into a little plus sign. Then click and drag, and drag it over to the right so that we have two identical viewports. Now this right viewport, we'll go over here, to the top left corner of it's this little drop down menu. If for some reason you can't see this menu, click in your middle mouse button here. And that will allow you to pan left and right on this, but it's this little drop down menu here. And this gives us a bunch of different options for this viewport. We're going to switch it to the image editor, which is at the top left here of this list. Then in the top center, this little drop down here with the picture in the middle of it. We'll click this. And then we're going to choose viewer node. Now over here on the left side first we'll click this box here that says use nodes. Now we'll show us the node system that we'll be using. This works very similar to the shader editor, so we can just zoom in and out with our mouse wheel as well as click it into pan left and right. First, let's move this composite node over a little bit so we can make some room. We'll be putting new nodes in the middle here. Now hit Shift and A. To bring up the ad menu in the search, we'll type in Viewer. That'll be enough to show up Viewer here at the top. We'll click this and place it over here. Now let's hold down Shift, and then we're going to click in our right mouse button. And drag across this line here at the end. As we drag this line across the intersection here, we're going to make something called a reroute node. This node allows us to branch one single wire into two. Now that we have a new socket here, we can click and drag from this new socket that we created. And drag it down here into the image slot on the viewer node that we created. After hooking this up, we're now seeing our image twice. We really only want to see it on the right side. We'll click the word backdrop over here to remove it from the background of this editor. Now on the right side, we can just zoom out so we can see our entire image. Now that we have all the basic stuff hooked up, let's add our first real node. We'll hit Shift and A to ring up our ad menu. And then in search, we'll type in glare G, L, and that should be enough to show up, the word glare. Click this to make a glare node. We're going to drag it on this long line here. This long wire, so it turns white. And then we'll just click to place it, and that'll automatically hook it up for us with that place. Let's zoom in now so we can see some of the settings. This glare node will create a glowing effect, also known as bloom, around the brightest highlights of our image. There's a few different modes for glare, and each mode has its own settings. The mode we'll be using is up here, so we click on the word streaks. We're going to switch it to fog glow, which is the most simple of the modes. This just makes a soft glow around the highlights areas. The only setting we'll be changing here is the threshold. So we're going to set the threshold from one down to 0.7 and then enter. And this is going to create a really subtle glow just around the edges of the brightest parts of our image. You can see here, there's a little bit of this warm glow that's bleeding into this green color here. There's this soft orange highlight here, just on this right side. The reason we needed to lower this threshold is because the threshold determines what is bright enough in order to receive glare. The lower this number, the less bright an object needs to be in order to actually receive this glow from the glare node. The higher the number, the brighter the object needs to be because our image isn't all that bright. We needed to lower this value here in order to get any glare at all, while we won't be changing any of these other sliders here. The top one is not one that you would use all that often. But if you change this number here, it will change how this is mixed on the image. If we set it all the way up to one, it makes the entire image black. But it shows the areas that are actually receiving the glow. If you're trying to troubleshoot and figure out exactly where this glow is appearing. This might be useful to you just for testing purposes, but then you'll usually set this back down to zero so that it b***ds the images together. And then the last slider here that is somewhat useful, but we won't really be changing it is the size. Let's just changed how big this glow is. The minimum number here is actually six, for whatever reason. Then the maximum is nine. It's a six to nine slider. The smaller numbers makes less glow, which you can see over here. Then the higher number makes the glow bit larger. We're going to set ours back down to eight because I think that amount looks fine with a little glare added to our image. Let's add a distortion effect to blur the edges and create a little bit of chromatic aberration. First let's zoom out so we can see more of our system here. Then we'll hit Shift and A go to search. Then we'll type in L, E, N for ***s. We're going to choose ***s distortion. Select this node and then place it after the glare. But before these two over here, just place it directly on top of the wire. And once it turns white, you can click to place it and it'll automatically hook it up for you with it placed. Let's zoom in so we can see the options. This ***s distortion node mainly does two different things for us. It has a distort slider which will give our image a bit of a fish eye look so that it bulges in the middle and then it peels off to the edges. There's also a dispersion. If I make this a little bit wider, you can see the full word dispersion down here. Which is responsible for the chromatic aberration that I were mentioned earlier. We won't be using the distort to make a fish eye look, but we are going to use dispersion. If you're curious what this distort looks like, you can just play around with the slider by increasing it just a little bit. You can see just a small amount here. Just 0.2 made a huge difference on the image. Again, we won't be using this. I'm going to set this back down to zero. But if you'd like to, you can play with this slider here. The one we will be using though is dispersion. Let's click on that. We're going to set this a really low value. We're going to set it to 0.0, to five. And then hit Enter, And we'll silver here. Our image moved just a little bit. Almost looked like it zoomed in. But what it did is if we zoom in down here, right on this edge of this water here, we can now see that there's this rainbow. Look on the edges of these highlights. We have a warm orange highlight over here and then a cool blue green color over here. We've also noticed that the edge of the frame now has this thin blue highlight on it as well. This is caused by the dispersion value here. The higher this value, the more intense this rainbow effect and the blur is going to be on the edges. Just for the sake of example, if I set this to 0.5 this will be much, much stronger now on the sides. Now it's almost imperceptible what's going on here on the edges and it's giving a really rainbow, zoomed in almost motion blur. Look here. Now that's a bit too much for our image. We're going to set it back down to 0.025 for a bit more of a realistic result. Grammatic aberration is essentially the three colors of light being offset slightly from each other at the edges. This is an important effect to make our camera replicate a low quality disposable camera from real life. Feel free to adjust any of these values here to get a look that you like for your image. But for now, let's move on to the next node in our editor. Let's zoom out a little bit. We're going to click and drag over the far left stuff here, the three nodes on the left side. We'll just move them over so that we can create a little bit more room for our last node. Now let's hit Shift and a go to search. Then we're going to type in RGB. We want RGB curves. The third one down on this list. Click that and then again drag it on top of this wire so that it turns white. And then click to place it. Now let's zoom in, so we can see these settings here. We'll be using this node to collapse the range of light and dark values in our image. In particular, we're going to significantly darken our highlights to the images more flat and washed out looking. So the first thing we need to do is go up to the very top right corner here and there's this tiny little square here. If we click on that tiny square, we'll now get a position setting down here at the bottom. This right value here where it says 1.0 We just need to click on that so we can change it. We're going to type in 0.65 We'll see after doing that, two different things happen. One, this dot has moved down to the 0.65 position. This is one up at the top, this is zero at the bottom, so this would be white, then black. And we're moving it down, so we're making the white values darker. And we'll also notice over here on the right side. We've significantly darkened our image. We've pulled a lot of the highlights out of our image and got rid of that blown outlook that we had before. Now let's adjust the last sitting over here. If we select this tiny dot at the bottom left corner, it might take a little bit of clicking to actually get attached to it. It's right on the corner here. Just click around until you find it. And we'll see here now these values are both set to 00, which means I have this selected. This is responsible for our black values. What we'll be doing with this one is actually raising this dot up a little bit. We're going to make our black values not quite as dark, so we're going to make them more dark gray. To change this, we're going to change this far right value again. And we're going to set it from 00 instead to 0.02 which is a relatively small change. We'll see the change in our image over here is pretty drastic. Even just a little bit of movement on this one makes a huge difference in our image because there's so many dark values. By lifting this dot up here on the curves, we've successfully removed all of the pure black values from our image and made it a washed out gray. With this RGB curves node set up, we have the final look for our image. We've successfully mimicked a low fidelity and washed out disposable camera look for our render. The last step, and in my opinion, actually the most important step, is how we save this image. To save our image, we'll go up here where it says image, then we can choose save As. Now, navigate to wherever you'd like to save your final image out down here at the bottom, we can give it a name. I'm going to call mine liminal space underscore 01. Again, I'm adding a number at the end just in case I decide to make another version. I can call the second version, two instead. Now for the important part, and this is the file format and the quality of the image, we're going to go up here to where it says file format and we'll change it from PNG to Jpeg. Then lastly, we're going to switch it from quality 90% We're going to set this all the way down to 60% Much might seem counterintuitive. We're setting the quality to just 60% because we actually want this image to have a compressed and a saved and shared 1 million times look to it. This will add to the idea that this image was taken a long time ago and shared many, many times by people online, thus losing quality with each subsequent download and share. This step is technically optional if you really don't want your image to have low quality artifacts in it. But I'd recommend you save both versions just to see how it affects the image. With these settings changed, we can just hit Save As image. Now if we open this image and zoom in a little bit, we can see all the J peg artifacts that are left behind by using the low quality settings. So if you look here, we can see all this kind of square, blocky look that we're getting. It has a low resolution, low quality look to it that we're actually after for this look. Personally, I think it actually adds a lot of realism to this image. With our final image saved, you can share it with all of your friends and family on social media. And the next bonus lesson, we'll be animating the water in our scene. I'll see you there. 10. Bonus: Animating the Water: A missed bonus lesson. We'll be animating the water in our scene. Let's begin. Now that we have a nice still image created for our scene, let's walk through how we can add a little bit of subtle animation to the water. We'll make sure this animation loops seamlessly so it can be turned into an animated gift later. As this is a bonus lesson, I won't be going into quite as much detail explaining every single parameter we're adjusting. That doesn't mean I'll be skipping steps or going super fast. I just won't be explaining the meaning behind every single change we make. If you're interested in animation and want more detail in this process, I have a lot of other classes that go into more depth on animation. I'd recommend my cartoon bumblebee animation class or my staff pick Vapor Wave Animation class. Has great starting points. The first few steps will be preparing our file for animation. First, let's shorten our timeline. The animation is only a little over 1 second long. We can do that down here at the bottom right. And we're going to click on the word end and then type in 30 so that the animation ends after 30 frames. This will ensure our animation is just slow enough so that the water isn't moving too fast. It will also keep the render time relatively low, as we'll only need to render 30 frames. Now let's make a copy of our water material so we can make a new animated version of it. First, select your water from any of the different places, we can do that. So we can either do it here on the right side, on the left side, or inside our list at the top right. We now have our water selected. Now go to your Material Properties tab down here. And we're going to scroll all the way up to the top. Now let's duplicate this material. We can do that by clicking on this little button here that looks like two pieces of paper sitting on top of each other. After clicking this, we're going to make a duplicate of this material and make sure that it's still applied to the same object. It's no longer affecting our original water material. It's made a new water material called Water 0.001 instead. Let's rename this. We'll get rid of all those numbers, and then I'm just going to have water as animated that way. I know this is the animated water. This will allow us to keep our still water if we want it later. But also adjust parameters and animate our new water. We can switch over to our shading work space now by going up here to the top center and then clicking shading. Now we need to drag out a new small viewport at the bottom that we're going to change into the timeline. Down here at the bottom left, we'll hover over the very bottom left corner until our mouse turns into a little plus sign. Then we can click and drag, and then pull it up to create a new window on the drop down. Then you here at the far left, we'll click this and we're going to choose time line, which is right here. This will allow us to see our key frames as we begin animating our water. Now on our top view, make sure that you're in your camera viewport. You can do that by jumping into our camera, by clicking this little white camera icon here. Now we're going to switch into the material preview. So the preview is nice and fast because any animation right now is going to be really slow and bogged down by the fact that we're using the more high quality cycles render viewport to change into that, we're going to switch into our material preview, which is the one directly next to the higher quality one that we're currently using. After switching to this, it will take a moment to load up all of your shaders. Just give it a moment. You can see up here it's compiling the currently three shaders that are in the scene. After it's done, you should now see all of your materials in your scene. The lighting is just going to look a little odd right now. Now let's zoom in on our camera here. We're just seeing the bottom half of our water. Just the water in our screen. We don't really care about what's above because we're not animating that. Another thing to note is this hasn't actually changed the look of our scene when we render it out. It's just this material pre view that's making the scene look different in terms of its lighting. It's because it's using a different baked in HDRI lighting for this. And it just helps us speed up the workflow that way we're not having to wait on it rendering each individual frame as we're animating the water. Now we can begin in the actual animation process. We'll only be animating three parameters to create the looping water animation. Let's start with the first one. Now, down here in our shader editor, let's zoom out so we can find the nodes that we're looking for. Currently, we're looking for the noise texture on both of these. The top and bottom noise texture. If you find this bottom window to be a little bit too small for your liking, you can always increase the size of it by pulling this up and then just re, centering your camera so you can still see the water. Now, on both of these noise textures, we're going to switch it from three D to four D instead, we're going to do that for both of these. Your material up here will flicker for a little bit as it loads up this new detail. By switching it to four D, we've gained this new parameter here called W. We'll need this new parameter as it works, similar to a phase slider on procedural Noise. Now we'll hit Shift and then go to Search. Here, we'll type in value, the very top one here, VAL, we're going to choose value. We'll click and place this. I'm going to just place it between these two nodes. Now drag the value socket here into the W for each of these two nodes. So we're going to connect the value into the value for each of the two Noise textures. Now select the value node, actually have it highlighted here by clicking on it. We'll need to have each node selected as we place the key frames so we can actually see them on the time line below. Because we're animating the value right now, We need to have the value node selected down on your timeline. Make sure your playhead, this blue line, is placed at the zero key frame. Now hover over this value node on the slider here where it says 000. And we're going to hit the button that will place our first key frame. Again, that is on your keyboard, the letter. By placing our first key frame one, frame zero, we'll avoid a repeated frame at the beginning and the end of the animation. This will help in creating that seamless loop that I mentioned earlier. Now to place our next key frame, we're going to move our playhead here up to frame 15. Then over on the value, we're going to type in 0.001 and then hit Enter. Now we again need to hover over this number and hit to place a key frame. Again, we can see down here, the key frame has been placed. Now drag your playhead to Frame 30, which is the end of the animation, and we're going to set the value back down to zero. So it's the same as the beginning type in zero for value. And then again, hover over it and hit to place your key frame. Now if we go down here and hit the play button. So this little rightward facing arrow, we can see up at the top, our water is starting to move. Now it looks a little bit robotic. Right now our next few steps, we'll be adding some overlapping animation to make the movement a bit more natural. We can hit the pause button down here to stop our animation. Now let's work on the lower noise texture node. We'll select the lower noise texture here, and we'll see all of our key frames disappeared, but only because we don't currently have the value node selected. If we select the value node, we can see all those key frames we placed. But when we switch our selection, we can no longer see the key frames because we don't have it selected anymore. Again, your lower node here should be the one with the scale set to 112. Make sure that you're selecting the correct one. Scale set to 112 on your noise texture, which is the lower noise texture, assuming you follow the exact placement from the previous lesson. On this node, we'll be animating the detail parameter first, let's go to zero on our timeline. I'm going to zoom in here just so we can see these numbers a bit bigger. Then on frame zero, we're going to key frame our detail, also at zero. We'll hover over the word detail and then hit I to keyframe that value. Now go to frame 15, and then we're going to change our detail to 0.1 Hit Enter, and then again hit I to place our key frame. Then frame 30, the end of the animation. We'll set this back down to zero. Hit Enter and then hit to place our key frame. It's now a hit play to see how this has affected our animation. Up at the top we can see it's a little bit more complex now, but it's still robotic. Let's keep changing some more settings. We'll hit pause here to stop the animation. We can go back to frame zero now. Now let's animate our last parameter, which will offset some of this movement, make it a bit more organic on our shader editor. Here we can zoom out and we're going to select the top noise texture. And this is the one with this scale set to five. Now again, when we select this, all of our key frames are gone. And we'll also be animating the detail on this node as well. Go to frame zero and we're going to place our first key frame. Which detail set to two. Which should be set to. We'll just hover over this hit to place a keyframe on zero, detail set to two. Now go to frame 15, we're going to change detail to 2.5, Hit Enter again, hit to place your key frame. Now frame 30. Then we'll change this back down just to, that way it matches the very beginning. And then hit to place our key frame. Now we're going to do something a little bit different. First, drag select over all three of your keyframes down here in your timeline to make sure they're all highlighted in yellow, which they might have already been before. But just to double check, just drag select over them so they're all yellow. Now hit Control and C, copy these keyframes. Control C to copy, then move your playhead to the very end. So we're moving it to frame 30, and then hit control V to paste key frames. Now if we scroll out by scrolling down on our mouse wheel here, and then we can click in our middle mouse wheel to pan. We can see we've copied all of these keyframes and then paste them again. Our animation is actually twice as long. Now move your playhead to frame eight, right here. Then we're going to drag select over all of these key frames. We have all five of these keyframes selected, and then just click on any one of them. I'm just going to click on this one here in the middle. I'm going to drag it over until this keyframe here, the second key frame of the five lines up on frame eight. This will offset the animation roughly 50% earlier than the rest of the animations, But still allow it to loop seamlessly, because we added those duplicated keyframes at the end. By offsetting this animation, we've hidden these dead spots that we had around the 25% and 75% mark on our timeline. These are times when the water wasn't really doing much other than resetting back to its original position. This also adds some more complex movement in our water as these animations overlap rather than sync up with each other. Now let's hit our Play button to see the final animation loop that we've created. So again, we can hit this Play button down here, and we can see the movement that it's created. At the top, you can see the animation. While short still has a relatively organic loop. Our final render will have a good deal of artifacting and compression. It'll help conceal any of the more robotic nature that's left behind. Now that we have our texture animated, we're ready to move on to creating our video. In the next bonus lesson, we'll be rendering our animation and converting it into an animated gift. I'll see you there. 11. Bonus: Creating an Animated GIF: In this bonus lesson, we'll be rendering our animation and converting it into an animated gift. Let's begin. The first thing we need to do is to get our file prepared for rendering an animation. We'll be using different settings for our video. As we want to speed up the render time per image. We have to render this scene 30 times, once per frame in order to create our video. Let's start with the render properties. So we can go over here to the top right and choose the Render Properties tab, which is the backside of this little camera. Now we can go down here to our render settings. The actual render settings, not the viewpoint ones. We can leave those as is going down to render. Then for our max samples, we're going to switch this down to 50. We're going to significantly lower it in order to speed up the render time while lowering this max sample count will significantly shorten the render time. It will also lower the quality in the process. This is a sacrifice I'm willing to make in order to lessen the amount of time it takes to create our animation. Now let's move over to the output properties, which is this little printer icon printing out of photo. And then up here at the very top, we're going to lower the resolution as well. We're going to set this down to 1,000 pixels wide for the X value. Then for the Y value, we'll set this to 750 pixels here for the Y. By lowering our output size, we again, lessen the render time, but we also make the image more pixelated. This might sound like a bad thing, but we're actually going for a old videotape look. Anyway, older video cameras didn't capture high resolution images. This should actually help the look of our animation. Lastly, let's get our output location and file type set up. To do this, we're going to scroll down to the very bottom here where it says Output. And then we need to choose a location for our file. We can do that by clicking this little white folder icon. Now navigate to wherever you'd like to save your animation file. And then we can give it a new name down here. Again, I'm going to call this liminal space underscore 01, and then this time I'm going to add an underscore at the very end of this name as well. B***der by default is going to append the number for the amount of frames of your animation to the end of the name. By adding this underscore at the end, you avoid the numbers for the frames running into the numbers for your version. So make sure you add this little underscore here. At the very end with our location chosen and our file name set, we can choose accept. Now let's choose the file type. We'll go to File Format, and then we'll choose PNG here, and we're going to switch it to FFmpeg video. Now, we can twirl open the encoding tab here and we're going to change the container type to Mpeg four, which is probably a video type that you've heard before. We'll choose Mpeg four here. Then the only other thing we'll change here is the output quality. We're actually going to lower this to mimic the 60% output quality we did for the Jpeg image. We're going to lower this all the way down to low quality. We have our output quality now set to low. With that change, all that's left to do is render the final video. Let's go over here to our rendering tab then If you'd like, you can switch from slot one to slot two. You don't overwrite your other image. Now, this would have gone away if you had closed your program between these lessons. But if you haven't, and you wanted to keep this image around, we can choose slot one. We're going to switch it to slot two instead. And then we'll go up here to where it says Render. And then this time we're going to choose Render Animation, or you can hit control 12. Let's click this now. Now as this renders, you will very likely not see the compositing effects we created applied to each frame of the animation as it renders. Don't worry if this happens. They will still be visible in the final video. This will take at least a few minutes to render, even on a pretty good computer. I'll see you in a few moments when my animation is finished rendering. That's it. My final animation is finished rendering and it looks great. Our last step is to make this video into an animated gift. This will make our animation easier to share on websites that don't allow videos to be uploaded directly. To do this, we'll need to head to a free gift creation website called Easy Gift.com slash Maker. This website will allow us to upload our video file and convert it easily into an animated gift. Now that we're on the site, we can just go here where it says Choose Files. We'll click this now, navigate to wherever you saved your animation video. And then we can select it here from the list. And it should be the one that has underscores 0001 dash 0030 at the end of it. It's pretty easy way to figure it out. And if that doesn't happen, then you can look for the one that's listed as an MP four file. Okay, so we'll select this, and then we can choose Open. Now go down here and click Upload and make a gift now that it has our video uploaded. And we can scroll down to see some of the settings that we have options for. First, let's change the size, so we can click here and then choose original, Up to 800 pixels. And that will allow our gift to be up to 800 pixels wide. Now for the frame rate, we can click here. And then we're going to change it to 20, because that's the closest thing to our actual frame, right, without going over it. So we'll choose 20. Then lastly, we're going to check this box down here which says optimize for static background. It's basically just going to optimize the file size. Assign so many colors to parts of the image that don't move, since only the bottom half of our image moves and the top half is basically entirely static, that works well for us. So make sure you check this box here. Now we can click Convert to Gift. And then if we scroll down here for just a moment there, we saw a little dancing cat, which is their load bar. And then if we scroll down, we can actually see our animated gift. Now we can see at the bottom left here, the file size for our gift, which currently is just over a megabyte. This file size is important, as many sites will require a relatively small file size for you to upload them. Keeping this under 8 megabytes is a good idea. In our case, 1 megabyte is well under 8 megabytes, so we're perfectly fine if your gift is larger than 8 megabytes though. So if the size here says larger than eight, then we can use the optimized setting that's built right into this website. To access the optimization settings, just click this little button here that says optimize. We can scroll down. Then we have a few different options here, but the most common one is just leaving it on lossy gift and then adjusting this compression level here. If we choose optimized gift with the compression level set to 35, we can click that. We'll see down here, it's optimizing the image. Now it's half our image size. We can look at the quality difference between these two. This one is half the image size, then this one is the full megabyte. There is a bit of a difference in the quality. We're not getting nearly as much like moving noise at the top on this one, which is a little bit larger as we are on this one. We can see up here, there's a lot of movement and shifting of the pixels in the noise. In my case, I prefer this original one because it's already small enough. So I'm going to use this as my actual gift that I'm saving out. But if you needed to optimize it, this is how you could do it. If after optimizing your gift is still over 8 megabytes, you might need to start over the conversion process and choose a smaller resolution for the gift, such as 600 pixels instead of 800 pixels. In my case, I'm happy with the one that I have. Now we're going to save this image. Now to save our gift, all we have to do is right click on this image. So whichever gift we've decided to save, so either the optimized one or the unoptimized one, we can just right click and then choose Save Image. As now just navigate to wherever you'd like to save this gift. And then down here we can give it a name. I'll call this space Underscore On. And I had my caps lock on, so I'll retype that space, underscore 01. Okay, great. And we can see down here it says it's a gift image. And we can just choose save with our final animation converted into an animated gift. You can share it with your friends and family a little bit easier than the original video file. And the next and final lesson, we'll discuss our class project. I'll see you there. 12. Our Class Project!: You've made it to the end of the class. Congratulations, I want to thank you all so much for taking my class. It really means a lot to me. I hope you found this experience valuable in learning both the basics of b***der and liminal ******. Hopefully, the knowledge you gained throughout this class leads you to exploring the concepts of liminal ****** A little bit further for our class project, I'd like you to try your hand at creating a liminal space of your very own. Feel free to experiment with different locations or themes for your class project. Examples of common liminal space locations are hallways, lobbies, rooms devoid of furniture and subways. I've also included a folder in the project resources that contains examples of liminal ****** that you can use for inspiration. When you're done, post your render to the project gallery. I'll personally review every project uploaded and give you feedback on your render. For my class project, I created another flooded corridor with a slightly more distorted and dream like look. I utilize many of the same techniques we learned in this class and some simple compositing effects to get this dreamy look. If you like this class, let other students know by leaving a review, your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in the class. You can leave a review easily going to the Reviews tab just below this video, and clicking the Leave of Review button. I appreciate the support. After leaving the review, you might want to follow me here on Skillshare as well. You can follow me at any time by clicking the Follow button above this video, or by going to my teacher profile and clicking the Follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make important announcements. Lastly, I want to thank you all again, so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Farewell and I hope to see you in another class soon.