Blender 3D: Create a Manga Style Animation Using Grease Pencil

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to this retro Manga inspired Blender class. I'm Harry, a season three D artist with over a decade of professional experience and the privilege of being recognized as a top teacher on Skillshare, specializing in Blender tutorials. This class, we'll be creating an animation and blender inspired by classic sci fi manga series such as blame. Whether you're brand new to stylized rendering or you've followed some of my previous classes, there should be something for everyone to learn. You'll find my classes are easy to follow due to my focus on relaxed pacing and crystal clear instructions. This has made them popular with both beginner and intermediate artists alike. We'll start the class with a pre made starter file as the foundation for our simple animation. This starter file comes fully modeled and lit, so you won't have to spend time on those aspects before you start creating textures, overlaying compositing effects, and adding hand drawn details. Don't let the term hand drawn detail scare you off, though. I promise I'll make it really easy for you to follow along, and we'll even be using our mouse to draw. So you won't need a fancy drawing tablet, either. Grease Pencil is a really fun and easy tool, and I promise you'll love how it transforms who renders. Please note that Blender version 4.4 or later is required to access the provided files and follow along. You can download the latest version of Blender completely free from their website. By the end of this class, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to create stunning retro manga inspired animations in Blender. So if you're ready, I invite you to join me in class. Let's jump into our first lesson together. 2. Starter File Exploration: In this lesson, we'll begin the class by exploring the starter file. Let's begin. If this is your first time taking a blender class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginners guide to blender first. This class was designed for the absolute beginner to blender and three D art in general. We cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running and blender. 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 cam site. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. We'll be using a premade starter file for this class. But I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize ourselves with the file before we jump right into the rest of the class. Let's quickly go through some of the things that make this file unique, as well as the basic render settings. Our first step is to make sure that you've downloaded and unzipped all of the resources for the class. After you've downloaded the Sciimnga class assets dot zip file, we'll need to unzip it so that we can access all of the files inside of it. On a Windows computer, all you need to do is right click on this file, the one with the folder with a zipper icon on it, and then choose extract all. Here you can choose where it's going to extract the files to and whether or not to open the file once it's extracted. After extracting the folder, I suggest you move it to a location that you can find easily later. I definitely wouldn't leave this folder in your downloads folder. My suggestion would be either to put it in a documents folder or just on your desktop somewhere that you can find later. Inside this folder that we just extracted, you'll see some blender files and folders with reference images and textures in them. You should see all the same files you see here, aside from this folder here, which you have already extracted. So you should see four different blender files and then two folders, one called reference images, and one called textures. These items will all be important later, but for now, we're going to double click on the starter file, underscore Sci Fi Manga underscore 01 Blender file to open it in Blender. This is another good time to remind you that Blender version 4.4 or later is required to use these starter files without having any issue. If you're using an older version of blender, I would highly recommend that you update to Blender version 4.4 or later to follow along with this class. Now that we have the file open, we'll see that I've customized the interface slightly, featuring the camera view here on the left and the perspective view here on the right. This will simply allow us to always have a view of what our camera sees while we work in the file. You might also notice that all of the models here on the right viewport are in different bright colors rather than the gray that you might be used to seeing. This is thanks to a viewport shading setting found at the top right of the right viewport. To find the setting, we can go up here to the top right. We can click on this drop down menu. If you can't see these buttons here on the far right, it's likely because this bar has been panned over too far because it's being cut off due to it not being the full size of the window. To move this bar back and forth, we can click in our middle mouse button, so click in your mouse wheel, and that lets you drag it back and forth. So we'll drag it all the way to the left so we can see these buttons over here. Now we can click on this drop down, and then here, we'll see it says random underneath the color settings. So if I switch this back to material, which is the default, you'll see it goes back to the gray that you might be more familiar with. For now, I'm going to leave mindset to random. This simply helps differentiate the models from each other, and later on, it'll help show the different layers of grease pencil within our scene. This random setting is not mandatory and is mostly a matter of personal preference. If you strongly dislike the varied colors for your file, you can go ahead and swap it back to material so that it's all gray. I'll be leaving mine on the colorful random setting as it does help with visibility during some steps. Another thing you might have noticed as you rotate around in this perspective on the right side is that sometimes we're able to see through models such as this wall here on the left. So if we rotate around, we can actually see right through it now that we're behind it. This is thanks to a setting called backface culling. We can find the setting for this again in the exact same spot. So we click this drop down menu here on the far right. We can go down here and then turn off backface culling to turn off that setting. So we'll see if we turn it off and now we rotate around. This wall remains solid and we can't see through it. For the sake of this class, I would highly recommend they leave backface culling on for this file as it makes it a lot easier to navigate in this large scene that has narrow hallways. So I'm going to go back up here and turn it on by clicking this dropdown and then choosing backface culling. Aside from these two settings that we just covered, I already have a camera, a light, and our render settings are already set up for us. This render really doesn't need anything special, so simply setting the render engine over here to EV is enough. If we go to the output settings found here just below this tab, we'll see that I've already set up the output resolution found here, and I've already changed the frame rate for our animation to 30 frames per second. With this quick walk through out of the way, we're ready to proceed with the rest of the class. And the next lesson, we'll be discussing the main reference image that this class is based on and what makes it unique. I'll see you there. 3. Discussing the Reference Image: In this lesson, we'll be discussing the main reference image that this class is based on and what makes it unique. Let's begin. As I mentioned in the introduction of this class, we'll be using a panel from the 1996 manga called blame as our main inspiration for the look of the render. This manga is well known for its stunning depictions of a gargantuan landscape simply known as the city. I'll spare you the complete synopsis of the manga. But the absolute basics of the story is humanity used to control machines to build the city for their needs. They lost their control over these machines thousands of years ago, and now the machines continue to build the city without any input from humans. The humans are actually considered invaders by the machines and now live in fear of them. The main artistic aspect of the city, however, is that it's an incomprehensibly large structure that is built with no particular logic and without humans in mind. This results in nonsensical architecture that is almost anti human. Examples of this might be hallways that extend for hundreds of miles with no doorways that end in a sudden dead end or elevators that take weeks to reach the bottom of, or even simple things such as rickety staircases over massive gaps that have no handrails to prevent you from falling. Now that we know a little bit about this world, what are the key elements that we want to isolate from the visuals of our reference image? The most obvious aspect is the stark black and white appearance of the image. While manga is predominantly a black and white medium, blame takes a particularly heavy handed approach to the contrast in the image. The lighting in the scene creates pure black shadows and pure white highlights with little gray in between them. We can see an example of this down here on the walkway. Any gray that we see in the scene is predominantly just a gradient that goes from a light value to a dark value. We'll be capturing this strong black and white lighting in our scene, as well. Next, we'll see that the environment fades into darkness as the walls extend into the distance. This can be accomplished with lighting. However, we'll be using a Z depth pass later on to get this effect. The walls have cracks and streaks along them and are generally covered in huge amounts of wear and tear as the city ages through the years. The material that we'll be creating for our scene will capture a lot of these details, but we'll also be using grease pencil to add even more detail and accentuate the ones that are already there. This reference image also features countless broken wires and cables spanning the chasm. While we won't have quite as many wires in our render, we'll still add a bunch of wires by drawing them directly into the world using grease pencil. Lastly, the image features a pretty obvious paper texture, thanks to it being a page from an actual manga book. We can see a pretty good example of that here on the center of this wall inside this gradient. To give our render that same paper like feeling, we'll be adding a few overlays using the compositor and blender to create paper lines and fibers. We could be here for quite a while calling out all of the amazing details from the manga. But I think at this point, we have a pretty good idea of what our goal is if we want to replicate the same feeling. In the reference images folder in the class assets that you downloaded earlier, you can find a few more reference images from the same manga. Each of these images shares many details while also featuring new ones. So go ahead and look through these if you just wanted to get a better idea of what this world looks like and the feeling that the artist has captured. In the next lesson, we'll begin creating the main stylized material for all of the objects in our scene. I'll see you there. 4. Creating the Object Material (Part 1): In this lesson, we'll begin creating the main stylized material for all the objects in our scene. Let's begin. With all of the exposition out of the way, we're ready to begin working on the first aspect of our render, the object material. While the material for this scene does a lot of heavy lifting for the overall look, it's really not all that complicated to create. I'll be explaining a good bit during this first section. So while it's not all that complicated, it will be a bit longer than the average lesson. So let's jump right in. First, we'll need to switch to the shading workspace found here at the top. If we can get there just by clicking on this tab. Now that we're in the shading workspace, we can see here that I've customized the layout for us slightly. The top left viewport will display our rendered image once we've rendered it. The top right will display our three D viewport, set to the camera view currently, and the bottom viewport is set to our shader editor. This is where we'll be creating the material. In this class, I won't be explaining every single aspect of how materials work within blender. However, if you follow along with all the steps you see on screen, you'll have no issues creating the material. If you're interested in a more thorough explanation of all the basics of material creation and blender, I'd recommend my magic of materials class found on Skillshare. Before we start adding any new nodes to our material, let's enable a built in add on called node wrangler. This will make our lives a lot easier as we create the material. To do this, we're going to go up here to edit, then go down to preferences. Now we can go to the add ons tab here in this window. Then up here in the search bar, we're going to type in the word node N ODE. Then here we can see it popped up node wrangler. If you're not able to see this, make sure that you don't have enabled only checked on. You should have this box checked off, and then down here, once you see node wrangler, just check this box next to it to make sure that you enable it. This add on is really useful for quickly adding support nodes to our material with just a single click. If you already had this add on enabled, obviously just leave it turned on. That you have node wrangler turned on, we can just close this window. Okay, now it's time to add some new nodes. We'll be using this node wrangular add on to do this in a much more efficient way. First thing we need to do is go down here to the Shader Editor on the bottom, and then we can click here on this principled BSDF node, the one with a green bar at the top, and then we'll hit Control, Shift, and T at the same time on our keyboard. And then we'll navigate to the Textures folder that we unzipped in a previous lesson. This was included in the class assets for this class. Inside that Textures folder, you'll find a bunch of different images here. The images that we need right now are these metal plates images found here. So first, we're going to select this metal plates 008 image, and then we can hold Shift, go down to the last metal plates image, click that one, and then that'll select all three of these. With all three of these images selected, we can go down here and click this blue button. As a quick side note, all three of these images are from a really great website called ambieng.com. All of the assets on this website are completely free to use even for commercial projects, so it's a fantastic resource. I really recommend that you check it out at some point to see what they have. Okay, so we have our texture images loaded, and we'll notice that the node wrangler add on even did some setup for us. So if we use our mouse wheels down here on the bottom window, we can zoom out. To see all these different nodes that node wrangler has connected for us. One important thing to note is that these orange nodes that symbolize the images that we selected in the previous window are all named after the name of the image. Because we're creating a non photorealistic stylized material, it really doesn't matter too much what the original purpose of these images were, only how they look and the data that we can extract from them. This is particularly obvious with this bottom image here, the normal image. This image isn't even black and white, but we'll be converting it into one for our purposes later. If you are familiar a little bit with how materials work, I wouldn't get too caught up on the fact that this is a normal image and that this is a displacement, and this is an ambient occlusion image. We're just using these for basically just the image itself. We're not really concerned with what they used to be made for. Now let's do some rearranging of these nodes to make them more useful for our purposes. Our first step is going to be adjusting the texture nodes, these ones here with the orange bars at the top. First, let's go up here to this ambient occlusion texture so we can select this. Then we're going to click on this drop down here that says color space and then switch it from non color to SRGB instead. This will add a bit more contrast to this image by changing how Blender interprets the black and white values. Now we'll go here to where it says flat. We're going to click on this drop down and then switch it instead to box. This allows Blender to project the image from three different directions rather than just one. Due to us using this material on nearly every object in the scene, we want to make sure that it's as universal as possible. Projecting the image from multiple directions means that it will be more likely to fit regardless of the object that it's applied to. Let's adjust the other two images, so we're going to scroll down. On this one here, this displacement image, we're going to again, go to flat and then switch it to box. This image, we can leave it set to non color for the color space. We don't need to switch that. And then the very last image, this normal image, we again click flat and then switch it to box. And again, we'll leave this color space set to non color. Now that we have a few of these nodes adjusted, let's clean up some of the ones that we don't need. So we're going to zoom out using our mouse wheel. Then we're going to click and drag over these three nodes here on the right side, and then we can just delete them by hitting the delete key on our keyboard. And then next, we're going to select this black box that's behind these images and then hit Delete. And then, again, we're going to select this black box and then delete that as well. Black boxes that we just deleted are called frames, and we don't really need them because right now they're attaching these nodes together in ways that isn't super useful to us for this material. They were auto generated by the node wrangular add on, and are generally a good idea to use, but in this case, they're just going to complicate things for us. So we'll remove them for now. Then the last thing that we need to delete is the small purple dot found here connecting all of these nodes together. So we're just going to drag select over this and then delete this dot. That little dot there is called a reroute node, and it's a way just to clean up some of these wires so that it's not quite so many things overlapping. But in our case, we don't really need before we move on to our next step of adding brand new nodes, you might have noticed that these image textures here were overlapping each other. That's because when we changed the setting from flat to box, it added a few new categories here, which made them a little bit larger. To reposition these, all you have to do is click on them and then just drag them out of the way. So here, now they're no longer overlapping. Okay, so now we're ready to add brand new nodes. So to do this, we're going to hit Shift and A at the same time. That'll bring up our ad menu. Then we can go here where it says search. We'll click on the search bar. And we're going to type in diffuse DFF. We'll choose diffuse, BSDF then we can place that over here on the right side. And again, we're going to add two more new ones. So we'll hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu, search, then this time we'll type in mix MIX. We're going to choose mix color the second option. We'll place that again over here on the right side. And then one last node, we'll hit Shift and A. Search then type in value VAL, and we'll choose value found here at the top. Then this one over here, we're going to place to the left. So first, let's get the left side of the system set up. We're going to zoom in over here so we can see these nodes a bit better. We're going to start by connecting the value node that we just added, and we're going to plug it in down here into the scale socket on this mapping node. This will simplify the three directional scale values that we had into just a singular value. This isn't necessary, but it makes adjusting the scale a little bit less tedious as there's only one number to adjust instead of three of them. Now let's zoom out a bit. And then you can click in your middle mouse button here to pan back and forth. Then we're going to select this top left node here, this texture coordinates node, and we're going to drag it over here to the left to make some room as we'll need this gap here. So we just want to separate these a bit. They're still connected. We can see the wire. We just need some room here. Now we're going to drag select over these two nodes and then move them up here next to this image. Now we're going to make two more copies of these two nodes. So make sure you have them selected. So just drag select over them if they're not highlighted in orange like they are now. And then we're going to hit Shift and D on our keyboard for duplicate. We're going to duplicate these down here and then left click to place them. Then we're going to do this one more time. We're going to move down a little bit. Shift and D, duplicate, and then place them just below. So we need three groupings of these. Each one of these is going to correspond to each image. So let's reposition these so that they line up a bit better. So we can just drag this down, so it lines up with this one and then drag this down, so it lines up with the middle. Now we're going to connect each of these three groupings back to this texture coordinate node. Before we do this, however, we do need to switch the mode that this is using. Right now it's plugged into the UV channel. We want to use the object channel instead. To change this, we're going to zoom out slightly. And then we're going to plug this object. We're going to drag from object, and we're going to move it up here and then plug it into this vector socket here found at the very top. We'll see here that it replaces the UV, and now it's using the object instead of the UV. Let's do this two more times. So we're going to go down here, drag from object, plug it into vector, found here at the top, and then one more time, drag from object, plug it in here to vector. Reason we chose object is because it's the most universal and most likely to fit on a variety of different object shapes. This works perfectly for our needs, as we're going to be applying it to 99% of the objects within our scene, so we need to be pretty universal and work in most cases. In this case, object is the best option for that. Now we can go to each of these three nodes here, and we're going to connect the vector from the top of this mapping, down here to the vector on the bottom of this image. We'll do that three times. We'll go down here, do the middle. And then again, the bottom. With all these nodes ready to go, we're going to start here in the middle with this one that's named displacement. Again, remember, it's not actually the displacement image. That's just the name of the image that we're using. After we add all the nodes we need and get it fully connected to the system, we can go through the other two images, the top and the bottom, a little bit faster because we'll know most of the process by that point. Before we add any new nodes, let's just grab this mix node here, move it up to the top. We won't need it just yet. Now we can grab these two nodes here. We're going to drag select over these, drag them over to the right to make a bit more room, and then we can select just this green one here, this disfuse and we're going to move it over here about in the center. Let's add two brand new nodes. So we're going to hit Shift and A. Go to search, and then we'll type in color COLOR. We're going to choose color ramp, the second option. We'll place that over here to the left. With this color ramp still selected, we're going to hit Shift and D to duplicate this to make a second one, and then place it over here on the far right just before this other node, and then we're going to add one more brand new node by hitting Shift and A. Search This time we'll type in Shader, SHAD we're going to choose shader to RGB, the third option. Place it between these two. With these new nodes added, let's zoom in here and let's get them all connected. So we're going to drag from here this top color socket down to the factor socket here, again, from the color socket to the color socket on this diffuse. Then we'll drag from this BSDF to the shader socket found here at the bottom. And then another time, we're going to go color to factor, and we can move this over a little bit to make a bit more room. We're going to plug in the color to the surface, which is the very top socket here on the material output. Before we go too much further with this texture, let's make sure we go to the top right viewport and set it to the rendered view. We can do that by clicking this far right button here, and then we'll see our viewport here update in a moment. And now we can see a bit more accurate representation of what our image actually looks like. We won't see anything too exciting yet, but it'll be more obvious as we start adjusting settings. As a quick note, if you're unable to see these buttons here on the far right, you might need to click in your middle mouse button on this option bar and pan it back and forth. You can slot it all the way over to the left so that you can reveal these buttons here on the right side. Now that we have everything connected together, let's start from left to right and go through each of these nodes and adjust their settings. We're going to start over here with this value node. So we're going to zoom in here and make sure you're adjusting the value node that's attached to this displacement image, so it should be part of the same chain. So we can zoom into value. Then we're going to click on this number here and we're going to set it to 37.3 and then hit Enter. As I mentioned before, this value node is what controls the scale of our texture. It's just using one number and then plugging it into the X, the Y, and the Z values. When it was set to zero before, it was scaled down to essentially nothing, so we didn't see anything. It was infinitely small. We've switched the number, but before we notice any changes, we're actually going to need to go over here to the top of the mapping node and switch the type from point to texture instead. Switching it from point to texture, we've adjusted the way that blender interprets these values. In the case of this texture type that we just switched to, the larger the scale value, the larger the texture appears on the model. So if we go down here and adjust this value and make it larger just by sliding it up, we can see that the image gets bigger on the model, and then if we adjust it down, the image gets smaller. I'm going to hit Control Z to undo that as 37.3 in our case, works pretty well. Another change we need to make is over here on this location settings here inside this mapping node. Change isn't technically necessary. However, in the case of this class, I've built the scene to work specifically with these values. So we're going to adjust our Y location to 16.01 hit Enter. You'll notice that it cuts off this number. It is still 16.01. It's just simplifying the visual here to 16. And then for our Z, we're going to type in negative 5.73 and then hit Enter. So we'll notice that these adjustments have simply moved the texture around on the objects. It just slit it around on the Y and the Z direction. In our particular case, it moves the images around on the walls to spots that I thought looked better when I was creating our scene. This is important for this class in particular, though, because a lot of the grease pencil details that I drew onto my render were embellishing some of the texture elements. If I don't have the texture in the exact same spot, then my drawing that I import later on in this class won't match up to the locations that it should be. If you don't plan on using my imported grease pencil drawings at all in your personal render, feel free to adjust the X, Y, and Z locations to wherever you think looks nice. However, if you have any interest in using my drawings as a base for your own work, which is totally fine, be sure to use the exact locations that I just typed in so that everything lines up. Otherwise, when you import my drawings, you might notice that some of the details don't really match up with what you're seeing, and that's because the texture was assumed to be in one location, and it's now in another. With our mapping node finalized, we can now zoom out. We're going to go over here to this first color ramp. So let's zoom in here so we can get a better look. Now it's time to strip all of the gray values out of this image and make it really high contrast. And we'll be doing that with this color ramp node. Let's go down here and make a few changes. So first, we're going to select this linear drop down, and we're going to instead switch it to constant. Next, we're going to select this white slider here by clicking this tiny triangle at the top of it. Or you can simply go down here to this bottom left and type in one or zero. Zero would be the left slider. One is the right slider. So once you have it selected, you should see a one here and then a white bar at the bottom. Now we're going to adjust the position of this. So you could normally just drag it left and right, and you can see here it's changing the position of it. Or down here, you'll notice that this number changes as well. So we're going to type in an exact number here, type in 0.1, seven, and then hit Enter, that'll put it exactly where we need to be. Notice that after changing the gradient type from linear to constant, we've completely removed all gray values from this gradient. It's basically just black or white with a hard transition between. This makes the image really high contrast. And then by adjusting the position of this slider here, the white slider, we've changed the amount of white and black in the image. So in this case, we made a lot more white in the image and a lot less black. So by removing most of the black values, we can zoom in here and see that all we've left behind are basically just these cracks and lines in the texture. If we move back up, we can see that those cracks grow, but really all we want are just these lines. We're going to leave it at a really low value. With this color ramp done, we're ready to move on to the diffuse BSDF which is directly next to it. We won't be making any changes to this node, but it's important nonetheless. When combined with this very next node, the shader to RGB, it allows us to convert all of the previous nodes to the left over here into color data rather than shader data. By converting the shader into color data instead, we can manipulate the way that light interacts with the material and stylistic ways. This is really key to the look of our scene. So now that these two nodes have worked together to convert the shader data into color data instead, we can now adjust this here that a second color ramp. Is where the shader to our RGB node to the left is really allowed to shine. We can now filter this entire material, including the way that light reacts to the surface through this color ramp node. This allows us to have fine control over the amounts of highlights and shadows, as well as the brightness or darkness of these elements. The main thing that we'll be changing is the color of the black slider. While the reference image that we're using as a guide has really stark contrast between the highlight and the shadow, we'll be achieving that with other effects later on. We want to make sure that the shadows aren't quite pure black for this material. As such, we want to make sure that we don't lose the gray values in our render when the shadows are applied on top of them. To do this, all we need to do is go down here to this left slider, so the black one, which is currently already selected. Then we can click on this black bar at the bottom to adjust the color. All we need to adjust is just this value here. We're going to make it just slightly brighter. So we can click on value, type in 0.02, five, and then hit Enter. This very slight brightening of the shadows will also make sure that our grease pencil shows up while drawing in the shadows. That allows us to add details on this side here that's entirely in shadow. Because this isn't pure black, we can draw pure black lines on top of it and they'll still show up on this really dark gray. Just as a quick example, while we won't be doing this for our image, you can see just by moving these sliders back and forth, we're not changing the light in our scene at all, we're just changing how it's interpreted by this surface. If you wanted a really interesting and very stark look, you could possibly pull these together to make a really tight transition between the colors, or you could even invert them. By pulling them past each other and flipping the colors and making an inverted image. So you can see just how powerful this combination of nodes is. For now, we're just going to slide these back to where they were. So the white all the way to the far right, and then the black, all the way to the far left. Alright, so now that we have a basic idea of what we'll be doing for each of the three texture images, let's go through the next two images a good bit faster now that we're familiar with what each step does. I'll stop and explain anything new or noteworthy, though. We're going to zoom out. Go over here to the top image, one named Ambien occlusion. We'll go to the value node. We're going to change this to 15. So one, five, hit Enter. Then we'll go to the mapping node, switch the type from point to texture. Now we can zoom out. We're going to move this mix node over here to the right. Then we'll hit Shift and A, go to search, type in color ramp, COLOR, then choose color ramp here. Place it next to this Ambien inclusion. We'll plug in color into this bottom socket down here at the bottom. We can zoom in on the color ramp, switch from linear to constant. Then we'll select this far right slider by clicking the small triangle here above it. And then down in this position, we're going to type in 0.7 to move it to the left. And now we need to use this mixed color node that we made earlier. We can zoom out here. Our first step is going to be making room for it. We're going to drag select over all four of these far right nodes, including this diffuse node. We'll select all four of these and we're going to drag them over to the right to make some room. Now this mix node, we're going to drag down here to get it into position. Now we can zoom in and we're going to drag from this color socket on this new color ramp that we just made at the top. We're going to drag that down into the A socket down here. We'll drag from this color ramp the one we just worked on before. We're going to plug that into B and then we're going to drag from the result and then plug that down here into the diffuse. We're going to plug that right into the color. Zoom into this mix node to start adjusting some of the settings. This mixed node does exactly what it sounds like. It mixes images. So in this case, up here, we can see now that we're seeing new spots on this wall, and that's because of this image that we just added, the ambient occlusion. So we can adjust the way that this mixed node mixes these two images, though. So first, we're going to change from mixed mode, and we're going to switch it to multiply instead. Then we'll go down here to the factor slider and we're just going to click and drag this all the way to the right. So it's set to one. Switching from mix to multiply changes the way that Blender combines these two images. Multiply tells blender to remove all the white parts of the image and only overlay the black parts of the image in slot B on top of slot A. This allows us to combine a lot of different images into one more complex image. And then setting the factor slider from 0.5 to one simply adjusts the opacity of the B image. So by setting it to one, we're allowing the full opacity of image B to overlay on image A. Well, notice that if we lower this, we can see that parts of the image up here in particular, start to disappear as we're overlaying less of image B. In our case, we want to overlay them entirely, so we're going to leave it to set to one, and that's it for the top image. So now we can move on to the last image down here at the bottom. So we can zoom out. Go down here to the one named normal. We're going to adjust the value. So we'll click on value and type in 1,010.7. So 101.7 for the value. Now we can go to the mapping, change the type from point to texture. And then for this image, we are going to move it again on the location. So we'll type in for the X value. Type in 10.64, Enter, and then for the Z, we'll type in negative 4.25, and then Enter. Now let's zoom out. And then over here to the right, we're going to hit Shift and A. Go to search. Type in color, and we'll choose color ramp. Place that to the right. Now we can connect the color socket to the factor socket down here on the bottom. Now let's zoom into this color ramp. Again, we'll switch it from linear to constant. Select the right slider, the white one on the right, and then for the position, we'll type in 0.45 and then it Enter. Our color node set up, we can zoom out. Then we're going to select this mixed color node, this yellow one here, and then hit Shift and D to make a duplicate and place it here to the right just below. Right around here. This duplicated node already has all the settings changed for us, so we might as well just reuse it. We can make the process of connecting this node a little bit easier by simply dragging it and then dragging it here and placing it on top of this line. We'll see that as we drag over top of it, this line turns white instead of yellow, and then when we let go, we'll see that it automatically connects it for us. In this case, it's plugged the result into the A socket and then connected the result from here over into the diffuse BSDF. All we need to do is to connect this color ramp found down here. We're going to connect this color socket into the B socket found here on the bottom. This chaining of mix nodes that we just did here allows us to combine two images together and then combine that result with another image. This is an important concept that we'll be using quite a lot later on in this class. And that's it for the basics of this material. If we zoom out here, we can see that we have three different images all adjusted with this color ramp. To make them a little bit more contrasty, combined together, and then combined together again, fed over here into this diffuse BSDF into the shader RGB, adjusted with this color ramp, removing the black from the image and changing it instead to a dark gray. Then if we check our image over here, we can see that we have multiple layers of grunge overlaid to create a pretty interesting pattern already. We're not done with it just yet, but we can see that we have cracks and lines. We have panel lines and breaks, and it's starting to come together. Soon we'll be adding some new effects to make it look even better. In the next lesson, we'll finish creating the object material. I'll see you there. 5. Creating the Object Material (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll finish creating the object material. Let's begin. Before we put the finishing touches on our material, let's make sure that we have our files set up and ready. First, we need to switch to the shading workspace found up here. And then make sure that you have this top right viewpoint set to the rendered mode by clicking this far right button. Now let's discuss what we'll be adding in this lesson. We've got four new effects to add to our material that will help make it look even better. First, we'll break up some of the most obvious repeating patterns in our material. Next, we'll add some distortion to the panel lines so they aren't quite so perfect and straight. After that, we'll add a darkening effect to the material so that it gets darker the further it is from the camera. Lastly, we'll remove this darkening effect, but only from the top surfaces of the models to retain the natural highlights. We'll start the lesson with one of the easier effects. Let's zoom into the area above the very first image down here, the one called ambient occlusion. Now we can add three new nodes by hitting Shift and A, going to search. And first, we'll add a noise texture. So No, I, and then we're going to choose noise texture, the first option. We can place that up here to the top left, then hit Shift and A, Search, type in color ramp, COLOR, color ramp. Place that here, and then lastly, we'll hit Shift and A, search, type in mix color, and then we'll choose that here and place it to the right. Before we connect these nodes to our system, let's talk about what we plan to use them for. Our goal was to overlay a random noise texture on top of the ambient occlusion texture image to help break up what I like to call the sunglasses pattern. We can see that here by zooming in, we can see this sort of sunglasses shaped pattern, and it's repeated all over the scene. We can see it just going straight down the line all the way over and over again. There's a couple other repeating patterns, but this one in particular is really noticeable, mostly because, in my opinion, I think it looks like a pair of sunglasses. If we can break up the look of just this shape, it'll make a big difference in the look of the overall material. Now that we know what we're doing, let's start hooking up the new nodes. First, we need to make room for them by selecting the nodes on the right. And moving them even further right. So we're going to drag select over all of these nodes, including the two yellow mixed nodes. So everything here. And we're just going to drag these over to the right side. About here should be good. Now we can zoom into the nodes that we added here at the top. We're going to drag this mixed node down here, and then we can just drag these two nodes until they're about lined up with the ones below. Right around here is fine. Now let's get everything connected. So we're going to drag from this vector, sock it here to the vector on this noise texture. Then we can drag from this factor, sock it here, the top one on the noise texture, down to this factor, sock it on the bottom of the color ramp. Then we're going to plug this color ramp socket, so this color socket here into the factor socket for this mix node. So not either the A or Bs, this top one, the factor. Now this color ramp below, the one attached to the ambient occlusion image, we'll drag from color to the A socket here on the top, and then we're going to drag from the results of this down here and we're going to replace the one that's currently plugged into the A so that it bypasses it. With the system set up, let's adjust each of these nodes to make it look better. We're going to start with the color ramp node as it'll make all the other changes a bit more obvious. So let's zoom into the color ramp. We're going to switch it from linear to constant like we have been before. And then we're going to select this far right slider. So click on this little triangle, or just make sure it's set to one here on the left, and then we'll adjust this position to point, eight, five, and then hit enter. Just like the previous color ramps, we're using this node to remove the gray values from our texture and to limit it to just stark black and white patches. Now let's go over here to the left to this noise texture. And we're going to switch it from the FBM mode instead to the multi fractal mode. This is just changing the type of noise. It'll change some of the sliders and also just changes how the noise looks. We can now see it's a little bit different pattern here on the wall. We can adjust the sliders down here at the bottom. So we'll set the scale to 2.9, the detail to five, the roughness to 0.95, the lacinarty to 1.7, and then the distortion, we'll set this to 0.6. Changed pretty much every one of these settings on this noise texture, so it's quite a bit different than the default. In general, our changes affected the type of noise pattern generated by the node, which was this drop down here, the size and the smoothness of this pattern. Then lastly, we added a little bit of a distortion to make it swirl slightly just so it's a little bit more organic. You can see the results of these changes with the splotchy light gray pattern here found on the wall. You also notice that it's laying on top of this sunglasses pattern, so we can see here the sunglasses pattern now has this splotchy pattern laying on top of it, helping to break it up. And each of these sunglasses is changed in different ways. Some of them aren't covered as much, some are covered more. Some are almost entirely removed. It's helping break up this repeating pattern by covering up random parts of the image and making it a lot more organic. Then lastly, we need to go over here to this mixed color node that we added. And then the only change that we need to make is going down here to the B socket. We're going to click on this color bar, and then we're just going to make this pure white. So we can do that with this value slider by just dragging it all the way over here to the right until it's set to one. Doing this, we're telling the light gray pattern that we saw before to instead be the same white color as the base material applied on top of. This means that the noise pattern is no longer seen and is instead acting as a mask for the underlying image. This method works because we plugged the noise texture, this pattern here into the factor socket down here. The factor socket determines how the images are mixed together. So using an image as the factor rather than a simple number, which is just the slider that's there by default, allows us to use a black and white image to make the mixing of the image a bit more complex. We're telling certain parts of the image to overlay at a full opacity, whereas other parts are overlaying at a zero opacity. And that's it for this effect. So we're ready to move on to the next one. For this effect, we'll be adding a few nodes to distort the panel lines, making them a little bit less perfect. We can see an example of the panel lines here, and we can see just how straight and perfect they are. So we're going to try to break those up. Let's go down to our Shader Editor, and we're going to zoom out and then go to this very bottom image named normal. So we'll be working on this image now. So let's add two new nodes. We'll hit Shift and A, go to search, type in noise, and then choose noise texture, place that down here, and then again, we'll hit Shift and A, go to search, and type in mix and choose mix color, and then place that to the right. To make room for these new nodes, we're going to drag select over these two left nodes. So the mapping and the value, and we're just going to move those over here to the left. And then we can drag select over these two new nodes that we added here at the bottom, and we'll place them here in this gap. Let's get these connected together now. So we're going to drag this mixed node and place it on top of this purple line until it turns white, and then we can let it go to let them connect each other. And then we're going to plug this factor socket here on this noise texture into the B socket here on the bottom. With everything connected, now we can adjust these new nodes. We'll start by adjusting this mixed color node here on the right. So we're going to switch from mixed mode instead to soft light found here at the top right, and then we're going to change this factor number down here to something really tiny as we want a really low influence. So we'll put 0.0, two, and then hit Enter. These settings that we adjusted change how blender is combining the noise texture we added down here on the bottom, as well as the mapping node here being routed in a socaa. We're using this noise texture to warp the way that blender combines these images based on the pattern of the noise texture. Want this effect to be too strong, however, which is why we lowered this factor number to something really tiny, in this case, 0.02. Now let's make some adjustments over here to this noise texture. We're going to change the scale to 20 to make it much tinier. We'll set the roughness all the way up to one and then we'll change the distortion to 0.3. All we did with these settings is make the noise pattern a bit smaller and increase the distortion to add a bit more swirl to it. Now if we go up to our image here, we can zoom out. Then we can zoom in here to the slanted wall above these pipes, and we can see that these panel lines now have a bit more waviness and just a bit more character to them. They're not quite as perfect and straight, and it just helps the world feel a little bit more aged and have maybe a bit more of a worn down texture to it. And that's it for our second effect. Now let's move on to the distance darkening effect that I mentioned at the beginning of this lesson. Effect is going to be placed on the far right of our texture. So down here, we're going to zoom out, and then over here on the right side, this is where we'll be placing it. So first, let's make some room for it. We're going to select this far right node, the material output, and we're just going to drag it over here to the right to make some room. Now we need to add four brand new nodes. So first, we're going to hit Shift and A, go to search, and then search camera CAM we're going to choose camera data found here at the top. I'll place that over here to the left. Now hit Shift and A. Go to search. This time, type in map MAP. We're going to choose Map range, this third option. Then place that down here, two more left, so we'll hit Shift and A. Search. We'll search color and choose color ramp. And then one more shift and a search, type in mix Mix and choose mix color and then place that here. Now let's get all of these nodes hooked up. First, we'll take this mixed node that we just added and drag it here on top of this line to have it autocnect. Then let's zoom in down here. And we're going to connect view Z depth down to the value found here on Map range. Then we'll connect result down here into factor, and then we'll zoom out a bit. And connect color from color ramp over here into the B socket. With everything hooked up, now we can start adjusting these nodes. But before we do that, let's go over here to our top right view port and just zoom out so we can see the whole thing again in case you zoomed in like I did before. Okay? So we're going to go down here and start with the mixed color node. We're going to switch it from the mixed mode to multiply instead. And then we're going to set this factor slider all the way to one. Just like before, we've set this mode to multiply because we want blender to only overlay the black parts of this new color ramp on top of the image. Will allow us to only darken the underlying material and ignore the lighter parts. Setting the factor to one allows us to use the full opacity of the black parts of the gradient to overlay on the underlying texture. Now let's zoom out and go down here to the bottom, and we'll see here we have the camera data node. In this case, there isn't anything to change. All we need to do is make sure that we're using the correct mode. In this case, view Z depth. The view Z depth mode allows us to tap into the camera data that shows how far away an object is based on its distance from the camera. This setting almost looks like a thick white fog across the scene with distant objects being shown in white and close objects being shown in black. Let's zoom in down here to this map range. We're only going to be changing one setting here, and it's this from Max, the second slider. We're going to set this to 172.1 and then hit enter. In basic terms, the setting changes how far away Blender thinks the maximum distance is. This moves the fog that I spoke about earlier closer to the camera. You can see that up here that our image got darker. Then lastly, we need to adjust these color ramp settings here to the right. First, we'll select this linear drop down and then instead switch it to B spline found here just below. Then first, we'll make sure that we have this left slider selected, so the black one. We're going to click this color bar at the bottom, and we're going to instead make this white so we can go to the value and just drag it all the way over here to the right. Now we'll select this right slider by clicking this triangle or making sure that it's set to the one channel down here. We're going to set the position to 0.3, four, two. Enter, and then we need to change this color from white, so we're going to click on this bar at the bottom, and we're going to set this value to 0.02, five and hit enter. You can see that we had quite a few changes for this node. So let's go over some of the things we changed. Adjusting the gradient type from linear to B spline makes the gradient a lot more smooth. So in this case, the B spline gradient type is just a more gradual, more smoothed out version of linear. We swapped the black and white slider positions to invert this gradient. So now it's white on the left side and black on the right side instead of the original, which was black on the left and white on change inverts the color of the fog that we're overlaying across the scene, meaning that the distant objects are now darker and the closer objects are now lighter, which is the exact opposite of how it was before. We also lightened the black slider, so this far right one to a really dark gray, so it's not quite as intense as before. We can now see with all these changes finalized that the distant objects, such as this column back here or this bridge or even the corner of this wall, are significantly darker than the objects in the front. This helps make them feel like they're being pushed back into the shadows, which further increases the contrast in our scene. We're ready for the last effect for this material. This time we're going to be using some nodes to remove this darkening effect that we just added only from the top surfaces of objects. This will help retain the highlights in the world and give it a bit more contrast. We're going to need quite a bit of nodes for this effect. So please bear with me as we get all these nodes laid out and connected. It's going to be a bit confusing to begin with, but I promise I'll explain what they all do before the end of the lesson. All of these new nodes are going to be on the far right side of the system, just like this distance darkening effect that we just added. Before we add anything new, though, let's make some room for the new stuff. So we can zoom out a bit. We're going to drag select over these two far right nodes, and we're going to move them way over here just to make up plenty of room. And we're going to drag select over this distance darkening effect that we added down here and move them down a little bit because we're going to need a little bit of room here. Now we can add all eight new nodes that we need for this effect. So we'll start out by adding nodes over here above this grouping of nodes. And we're going to be adding these from left to right. So we'll hit Shift and A. Search type in geometry, GEO and choose geometry. Place that over here basically above this green node. Again, shift and A, search. We'll type in separate color SEP, and then choose separate color, shift and A, search. We'll type in Hue HE, and choose Hue saturation value. Place that here. Again, shift and A, search, type in invert, INV, we'll choose invert color, and then one more for this area. Shift and A, search. We'll type in color ramp and then choose that and place it here to the we'll connect these new nodes here in a moment. But for now, let's get the last of the nodes created. Shift and A, search mix MX, we'll choose mix color. Place that down here, and then the last two, shift and A, search, type in brightness, B R I, and choose brightness contrast. Place that down here, and then one more shift and A, search. We'll type in I and V, and choose invert color again, and then place that here to the right. Okay, so I know that was a lot, but it'll make more sense soon, I promise. Now let's go through and connect all these new nodes together. So we're gonna start here at the top. We'll zoom in. We're gonna connect from normal down here into color, then from blue into color. Color into color, and then color into factor. Now let's zoom out a bit so we can see these nodes. We're going to connect from color here, the top socket on this color ramp down into A, we're going to plug the result of this mix node down here into the factor on this very last mixed color node. And then over here on the left side, we're going to plug from color into color found here on the top, then color to color, and then finally color to B. Now let me zoom out again just to show you everything that's lined up. So we have all these nodes connected here. Then this is connected down here into this mixed color that we added, and then we have these two nodes connected to this color ramp, and then finally, this mixed color is plugged down here into the factor for this last mixed color. Okay, so now we're ready to make adjustments to all of these nodes and get the effect that we're looking for. Much of this effect might not be obvious until all of the nodes are changed, but I'll explain what we're doing with each node and why it's important to the overall effect. Going to start with the small grouping of two nodes down here at the bottom. Let's zoom in down here. So first, we're going to change this bright value here to 1.8, three, and then we'll change the contrast to five. We don't need to make any adjustments here to the invert color. So this brightness contrast node does exactly what it sounds like. We're brightening and increasing the contrast between the black and white on the Z depth nodes that we added below, which are these. So we're making it brighter, but we're also increasing its contrast. We also ran this new branch this year. Through an invert color node found here on the right to swap the black and white on the image. This means that for this particular version of the Z DAP, we changed it back to the distant objects being white and the close objects being black. This is referring to that fog that we talked about earlier. This will be important later on. Now let's go over here to the new mixed color node that we added. We're going to change this from mix to screen instead, which is found here. And then lastly, we'll set the factor all the way to one. These adjustments tell blender to only overlay the white parts of the image on the underlying texture. This is the opposite of the multiply mode that we've been using before, which only overlays the black. Factor slider set one, just make sure that the white parts we're overlaying are foli opaque. Now for the real magic of this effect, we're ready to start adjusting this large group of nodes that we added up here at the top. We'll start over here on the left side with the geometry node. There's nothing to adjust here other than noting that we use the normal mode on this geometry node. Let's give you a better look at what this normal mode actually looks like so you can understand why each of these following nodes here are needed. You don't need to follow along with this step. This is just meant for me to show you as an example. You can just watch for now. I'm going to hold Control and Shift and then click over here twice so that I can see what this normal mode looks like. Now see over here in our right viewport, the material has been converted into black, red, blue, and green. These colors correspond to the individual directions that each of these faces are pointing. In this example, all the faces pointing upward are shown in blue. We can see an example of that here on top of this bridge. So the very top of the bridge is pointing up, which means it's blue. These blue areas will be very useful for us in isolating only the upward facing parts of the objects, allowing us to selectively brighten just these parts. We can also see a good example of that over here on the tops of these pipes. Now I'm going to go back down here and set my texture back to how it was. And now we can zoom back in on these nodes. Okay, so now that we understand the foundation for these nodes, let's get these settings finalized. So for the separate color node, again, there's nothing here to change, but we should better understand what this node is actually doing. We plug the normal image over here that we just discussed into this node and then separated these colors and chose to only display the blue color by plugging it in over here to this hue saturation and value node. This allowed us to isolate just the blue parts of that image. So we don't need the red or the green, we only need the blue. Now for the hue saturation and value, all we're going to do here is drag this saturation all the way down to zero, making this blue instead into a light gray color. Just removing all the saturation because we don't really need it to be blue. We just wanted those blue areas. Next, we have this invert color node. Again, there's nothing to change here, but this node is flipping the colors for the image. The last time we saw that blue, green, red image, it was mostly black with small areas of color, such as blue. Now that we've inverted it, the image is predominantly white, and the old blue areas are a dark gray. This is important because our goal here is to use these nodes as a mask for the Z depth darkening nodes below. Mask to work as we want it, we need the areas that we want to remove from the Z depth to be black and the areas that we want to keep the Z depth on to be shown in white, which is what this invert color has done for us. Next up, we have our color ramp found here. For this change, we're going to select this far left slider, then we'll go over here and set the position to 0.7, and then it enter. All we need to do here is move this black slider to the right. This increases the amount of black in the gradient and makes the old blue areas slightly larger and gives them slightly sharper edges. As an example of this, if we zoom in on the top of this pipe here, see that as we slide this back and forth, we change how bright the top of this pipe is. We can also see that the gradient, this transition between the two gets sharper the further right we move it. For our render, we're going to leave this set to 0.7 for the position. And that's it. The material and all of our bonus effects are finished. We can see the full result of that by zooming out here. We can also see the look of the entire system down here by zooming out. Then if you'd like, you can make this a little bit more compact by drag selecting over this group on the right side and just moving them a bit closer, so it's not quite so spread out. We spread it out originally just to make room for stuff. But now that we know all the nodes are in place, you can start moving things back a little bit and just getting a little bit more tidy. I realize this material has been quite a lot of work, but it's really the soul of our render, so to speak. Have it applied to nearly every object in the scene, so it's worth spending some extra time on to get it looking really cool. The remaining material lesson won't be quite so long as well, as we learned a lot of the basics in these material lessons. I won't need to explain everything in quite so much detail because we'll have already used the same techniques while creating this main object material. We have just one more material to create before we move on. This one would be a good bit more simple too. And the next lesson, we'll create the background material. I'll see you there. 6. Creating the Background Material: In this lesson, we'll be creating the background material. Let's begin. This is the last material that we need for our scene. It'll fill in that white void beyond the distant bridge and archway with some scribbles and a dark background. This will help fill out the world and imply wires and blurry details beyond. As usual, before we begin, let's get the file set up. So we'll be again going back to the shading workspace found here at the top, and then we'll set this top right viewport to the rendered mode, which is this far right button. We need to select the background plane in either the viewport or the outliner list on the right side. So for me, I can just click on it here, which is this big open area here in the back, or over here, you can find it underneath the background collection, and it's called BG plane. And that's just in one of these collections here on the right side. Somewhere near the bottom here. Now let's zoom in down here on Shader Editor so we can see better the nodes. And then we'll select this principle BSDF node here, green one, and then hit Control and T at the same time. So just two buttons here. And now we'll create these three new nodes. These nodes should look pretty familiar as we used those in the last lesson. Start by opening the image that we'll be using for this material. We can do that by clicking the open button here on this image texture node, so we'll click this. And then you need to navigate to the folder that has all the textures in it that we used in the previous lessons. So here we can see the metal plates that we used for the other texture, and in this case, we need to use the scribbles APIg so we can select scribbles then go down here and hit Open Image. With our image loaded, let's go through here and make some changes. So on the left side, we're going to change from the UV mode, which is currently set to, and we'll instead use the generated mode found here. So we're just going to click and drag from generated down here to vector. As usual, each of these modes just changes the way that blender handles the image. In this case, generated works best for our purposes. Mapping node, we're going to leave it set to point, so we won't be changing that. We will be going down here, though, to where it says rotation, and we're going to switch this to 180 degrees for the Z. So we'll type in 180 at enter, and then we'll rotate our texture here just on the Z axis. Then lastly, we need to adjust the scale, rather than using a value node like we did last time. Let's try a different method just so you're familiar with it. So we need to change each one of these values here. 25 instead of one. And normally, you could just go through here and click on each one and type in five, and that would work perfectly fine. However, there's a little bit quicker way to do this. So you'll find that if you click and drag on the top value and then drag down to the bottom value, you'll highlight all three at the same time, and that'll allow you to change the number for all three of them at the same time. Going to click up here and then quickly drag down, highlighting all three of them, then you can see here that if I type in a number, it changes it for all of them. So in our case, we still want to have it set to five, but that's just a quicker way to do it. Now let's add two more nodes to this system to distort the scribble pattern a little bit. This process will be nearly identical to how we added distortion to the panel lines on the object material. I won't need to explain too much about the logic behind these nodes. So first, we need to zoom out, and then we're going to drag select over these two left nodes. So this red and the purple drag them over to make some room. Then we can hit Shift and A, go to search and type in noise, NOI, and we can choose noise texture, place that down here, and then one more time, Shift and A, search, type in mix, and we want to choose mix color, and then we can place that here. Now, let's get these nodes hooked up, we're going to click and drag this mix node on top of this purple line to have it automatically connected for us. And then we're going to zoom in down here and we're going to connect the factor. To the B socket here. And we can see already up here that this noise pattern has started to distort these lines, so it's making them a little bit more squiggly and more organic looking. We're not quite done yet with it, though, so let's go down here and adjust some of these parameters. So we'll zoom into this mix node first. We're going to switch from mix to soft light found here at the top right, and then we're going to change the factor from 0.5 down to a much smaller number, and we're going to say it to 0.25. So just a quarter. Now just this noise texture found down here. And the only thing we really need to change here is just the scale. So we're going to set the scale from five down to one instead, making this noise pattern much larger and causing a lot less distortion up here. Our next step is to add a second layer of scribbles to create an intersecting cross hatching pattern. This will make the scribbles a bit more complex and imply more detail in the background. Our first step is to simply make a copy of all the current scribble nodes. So let's zoom out here. We're going to drag select over all four of these nodes or five, actually. So five total. We can zoom out a bit more, hit Shift and D to make a duplicate, we're just going to move them down here. This is going to save us a lot of work, so why not just reuse the work we've already done? Now let's drag select over these nodes here on the right side. We're gonna drag them over here to make some room. So right around here should be fine. Now let's add two more nodes. So we're going to hit Shift and A. Go to search, type in mix and then choose mixed color. We can place that here. Rather than adding a second mixed color, we can just hit Shift and D with this one still selected and make a duplicate of it. Now let's get these nodes connected. We're going to be skipping this second mixed color for now to make things a little bit easier to explain. We'll attach it later. So first, we can zoom in here. We're going to connect from this color down here to slot A, and then we can move down here and connect from this color to slot B and then we're going to connect from this result here all the way over here into the base color. Now let's zoom into this mix node that we just connected. And we're going to change it from mix to multiply instead, and then we're going to set the factor all the way up to one. As usual, this multiply mode just helps Blender to overlay only the black parts. And then the factor set to one, make sure that it's using the full opacity. Now that these images have been blended together, let's rotate the bottom scribble image so that they criss cross each other. We're going to zoom out and then go to this bottom grouping here. We're going to zoom in here to the mapping node. So first, we'll go to this X location, and we're going to set this to negative 1.9, then hit Enter. This just simply shifts the image a little bit off center. Then we'll go down here to the X rotation. We're going to set that to 12.5, and then lastly, we're going to set this z rotation back down to zero. And now, if we look at the image in the background now, we can see that these lines criss cross each other and make sort of an X pattern across the image. Because we have two different scribbles overlaid on top of each other, and then we rotated one so that's rotating the opposite direction. So rather than the lines going from right to left, they're not going left to right. This just creates a nice hatching pattern. That makes it a little bit more complex and helps break it up a little bit. So now we have our images blended together, but it's not quite as high contrast as we'd like, due to the amount of gray present in these textures. Eliminate some of the gray, we'll see more defined scribble lines in the texture that'll make them appear a little bit more like wires rather than just a scribbly pattern. We're going to need to add a new node for this effect. So first, we'll zoom out here so we can get a better view. Then we're going to click and drag on these nodes and move them to the left to make some room. And now we can hit Shift and A, go to search, then type in color ramp. We're going to choose color ramp here and then place that down here in the middle. Now let's get this color ramp attached to our system. We're just going to click and drag it and then place it here on top of this line, that'll automatically connect it for us. Now let's zoom in here to this color ramp. All we need to do is grab this right slider, so select this little triangle or set it to the one channel. And we're going to set the position to 0.7, then hit enter. We can see here we've added more white to this gradient. It's also brightened this image in the background a little bit, making it a little bit more black and white instead of black, white and gray in the middle. It's a relatively subtle change, but these small adjustments really add up to make a better material. Can go down here and we're going to zoom out, make sure you have this color ramp selected and then hit Shift and D to duplicate it. We're just going to click and place it down here on top of this other line. That'll automatically connect it. Now that it's been connected, we've applied this exact same adjustment, making it more contrasty to both of these images. So we can see in back here, we're seeing a lot more of just black lines with white in between them rather than the shades of gray that we had before. Okay, so now we have one last node to set up before we finish this material. We're going to be connecting the second mix node that we left out down here. All we need to do is click and drag this mix node that we have floating out here and just place it here on this line. Be using this node to control the color behind the black scribble texture. So rather than having black scribbles on a white background, we can have black scribbles on top of any color background in our case. However, we'll be using a dark gray. So let's zoom in here on this new mix node. We're going to change it from mix to multiply, then we'll set it to factor to one. And then lastly, we're going to go down here to the B socket. And instead of plugging anything into this, we're just going to change this color. So we're going to go to the value type in 0.01 and then hit Enter. And now we can see that this black scribble texture is being overlaid on top of a really dark gray. So it's really making this look like it's just kind of a dark void beyond. And if you squint, you can kind of see here that there's lines, and maybe these are wires or the tops of buildings. Our goal here is to make this kind of nondescript just darkness in the background. But we don't just be pure black. We want it to have a little bit of texture, kind of like the rest of the image, which is where this scribble texture comes in. Then the very last step before we finish this texture might seem like an odd one, but it is going to help our scene. So we're going to zoom out here. We can see the full texture, and then we're going to select this green node here, this principled BSDF and we're just going to delete it. So we'll delete this, and then we're going to plug in this mix node, the result over here right into the surface socket. Eliminating the shader portion, which was that green node from this material, allows us to remove the ability to receive lighting and shadows on this material. This means that the background material can't receive shadows or lighting from nearby objects. It's important that this background material is unaffected by shadows and lighting, as we want it to look like an endless void of wires and structures that stretch off into the distance, not like a nearby wall with this void painted on it. That would make it look more like a mat painting from an old movie, and we're trying to avoid that. We want this to look like it kind of stretches infinitely into the background. You don't want shadows being cast on this wall, say, from the bridge or the archway nearby because this plane is actually quite close to the backside of this. So by removing the shader node, we've removed all ability for this to interact with lighting. It's just an image at this point. As always, once we're done with our material, feel free to go in here and make things a little bit more tidy by moving things closer together because we do kind of spread this out to make room for stuff. Feel free to just move things together and make it a little bit more pleasing looking. And that's it. The last material we needed for our scene is complete. While this material doesn't take up nearly as much of the image as the objects material, it's still an important part of completing the world that we're creating. These scribbles add an illustrative vibe that not only adds to the hand drawn nature of our render, but also helps fill in that void with the implication of further wires and structures beyond. In the next lesson, we'll add some freestyle linework to our render. I'll see you there. 7. Adding Freestyle Linework: In this lesson, we'll add some freestyle linework to our render. Let's begin. Up to this point, all the work that we've been doing has been on the materials in our scene. This has laid the groundwork for our image, but there's still one key aspect of the manga style that we're missing the linework. The linework of a manga is sort of like the skeleton of the image that the rest of the details reside within. We're going to mimic this aspect of manga with a new tool called freestyle. Freestyle allows us to place lines on the edges of our models in the scene, making it look as though we drew them into the scene before shading in the details with pencil or ink. Let's make sure our file is set up and ready to work before we begin. For this lesson, we'll be switching over here to the rendering workspace found here at the top. We'll need to be in the rendering workspace because these freestyle lines we're adding only show up in the fully rendered image, unfortunately. We won't be able to see them in the viewport like we have been with the materials. Too much of a hassle as this image renders really quickly, though. Now on the right side, we're going to go to the rendering Properties tab found here at the top. It looks like the back side of a camera. And then before we start making any changes, let's just render our image to see what it looks like without freestyle. So we can do that by going over here to render and then choosing render image or just hitting F 12 on your keyboard. And we can see rather quickly that our image has rendered. This render doesn't look bad by any means, but it does feel more like a three D render rather than a hand drawn image. It's obviously missing something important that will make it look more like a drawing. Let's fix that now. Over on the right side in this render Properties tab, we can go down here to the very bottom where it says freestyle. This isn't twirled open, just click this little arrow to twirled open so you can see the settings. Next, you'll want to click on this little box here to turn on the freestyle settings. And then before we make any changes here, we're going to go up to the top where it says slot one, and we're going to switch it to slot two, which is just a new version of this image. So we can always go back to Slot one and see what this render looks like. And if we switch it to slot two and then render our image by going to render Render Image, or again, just hitting F 12. We can now see what these freestyle lines are actually doing for our image. Now we can see without any changes at all, this render is already looking a lot more like a drawing. If we zoom in, say, down here, we can see that all of these edges now have black lines drawn around them as if they were drawn in with a pen. If we flip back and forth between slot one and slot two, we can see what this image looks like without those lines, and it's a pretty significant difference. So this is without the lines, and this is with the lines. It used to be a transition down here between basically identical white faces now has a nice dark black line, breaking it up and giving this object here more form. This really helps reinforce these shapes. As a callback to previous decisions can also see that these black lines are visible within the shadows. If we had left the shadows completely black like they were before we turned them into gray, we wouldn't have been able to see these lines at all. This is why it was important to use that shader to RGB node to make sure that the shadows in our scene weren't quite fully black. That's what's allowing us to see these black lines on the sides of these pipes and on the shadow side of the bridge. This will be equally important when we get to the grease pencil lessons as well. Now that we know what freestyle does for our image, let's make some adjustments to the line work. The first change is a really easy one. We're just going to make these lines a little bit thinner. They don't look bad right now, but they will look a little bit better in distant areas if the lines weren't quite so thick. So we'll just go down here to the bottom where it says line thickness, and we're going to change this 1-0 0.75. Hit Enter, and that'll make these 0.75 pixels rather than one full pixel. Now, after making this change, you're not going to notice your image update at all. That's because you need to re render it. So we'll go over here and then hit render Image. Now we can see here in these distant areas, the black lines don't quite touch, so we can still see a little bit of this wire here. Now, as it gets further and further back, we can see that these wires are pretty much entirely black, but it does help for the ones that are a little bit closer. There are a few other changes that we can adjust, but we're going to need to go to the view layer properties to see those. So to do that, we're going to go over here and go to this menu that looks like three different pictures laying on top of each other. So we can click this to switch to that tab. Scroll all the way down here to the bottom until we start seeing freestyle. And then here we have a bunch of different options. There are a ton of different changes that you can make about how the freestyle lines are displayed. We won't be going over most of these settings as that could be an entire class on its own, but we will touch on just a few of them that are important elements for our render. The first set of changes that we'll be looking at are down here underneath Edge type. We can see that there's a list here of different checkboxes. By default, silhouette, crease, and border are selected. In most situations, these three options work for the majority of renders. We won't be turning any of these off, but we will be adding one more option. Before we turn this new option on, though, let's zoom out on our image. And then go all the way up here to the top, and I'm going to zoom in on this little balcony here that I have attached to this wall. We can see the freestyle has done a pretty good job of outlining this balcony going all the way around the perimeter of this shape. We can tell, however, that it is missing one singular line right here, and we can tell that it's missing because this actually is flat at the bottom. It doesn't come to a perfect point, so there should be a line going across here, but it's missing. This happens because this line doesn't fall into either of the three categories that we have enabled right now. Luckily for us, there is a way to force Blender to place this linework on whatever edge we want, though. To do this, we're going to go down here and we're going to check on Edge Mark. We just click this little button here. Now, let's re render our image to see this change, so we can go up here, render, render image. With our image rendered, Edge Mark turned on, we can see that this missing line has magically appeared. Well, not entirely magically. I did make it show up, but I can show you how I did it. For this explanation here, feel free to just watch. This is a pretty simple process. You shouldn't have any issues figuring it out just by watching what I do. So again, no need to follow along here. Watch what I'm doing. I'm going to head back to the layout workspace. Then I'll select this balcony and zoom into it. Now I can hit tab to go into the edit mode, and then I'll hit two to switch to the edge mode. And then I can just click off this model to deselect all the edges. Now, you should notice that the one edge that we had issues with before, not showing up is marked here in green. This edge being shown in light green helps to note that it's been marked as a freestyle edge. Edge mark setting that we turned on simply allows us to choose which edges are forced to have lines on them, and we do this by manually marking edges. This allows us to go into edit mode on any model on the scene, select as many edges as we like, and mark them, forcing them to receive linework regardless of whether they fit into those original three default categories. An edge. All you need to do is select it here in the edit mode, then right click and go down here where it says Mark freestyle edge. So after marking it, we can see if we click off that it's the same green color as the other one. So if we re rendered this image, we would see now that we would have a black line here extending the entire length of this green line. If you accidentally mark an edge that you don't want marked anymore, you can simply select that edge, right click and then choose clear freestyle edge. And then I'll remove that mark. With this process understood, we're going to go back to the rendering workspace. So I'll just go back up here and go to rendering. Balcony isn't the only edge mark that I placed in the scene for us, but I won't be going over every other object that I did this on. Feel free to explore the scene on your own or even add more edge marks that you like to accentuate different details. Now let's make a few more adjustments to the linework before we end the lesson. We're going to zoom out on our image and then go down here to the bottom right. We're just going to zoom in onto this area as it's a pretty good representation of the changes we're going to make. Now, over here on the right side, we're going to scroll down, and then over here underneath freestyle strokes, we're going to make a pretty simple change that just changes the way that the end of the lines are handled. Go here where it says caps, and we're going to switch it to round caps instead. This changes the end of the strokes from squares into round edges instead. I'll be 100% honest. I'm not sure that you'll even notice this change in this render, as the vast majority of our linework intersects itself. This means that we'll rarely ever see the end of a bit of linework. However, on the off chance that we do, it usually looks better to have it come to a round edge rather than an abrupt square edge. This is generally a setting I change for all of my freestyle renders. Then lastly, we're going to scroll down here where it says freestyle thickness. This area allows us to add modifiers to the thickness of the linework to change its appearance. We'll be adding an effect called noise to make our linework a bit more varied. However, I will tell you up front that we'll need to disable this effect later on in the class when we animate our camera. Due to the way that this effect is generated, it causes a really distracting flicker in animations, so it's generally only useful for still images in most cases. Still want to show you how to add this effect, though, because it does make the image look a little bit better if you only intend on making still images. So to add this effect, we're going to click Add modifier, and then we'll choose noise. Then if we scroll down, we can see the noise settings. Before we adjust any of our settings here, let's render the image one more time so we can see what it looks like before we make any adjustments. So we'll just go over here to render and then render image. Now we can see an example of this noise effect at full strength. Haven't lowered any of these settings or made any adjustments. While this hasn't really improved the look of our image, it is an obvious example of what this modifier is doing. This noise modifier varies the thickness of the freestyle linework at random intervals. We can see that here. It gets really thin and then it gets thick and then it gets thin again. At the current strength, it's obviously way too strong, but we can adjust these parameters to improve its appearance. We only really have two parameters to change for this modifier. So we'll go down here and we're going to change the influence to 0.1, and then we'll change the period to 20 instead. Quickly explain what each of these sliders do. So for the influence slider up here, you can think of this as the overall strength of the effect. We turned ours down to just 0.1 because we want this noise effect to be much more subtle than it was. So essentially, we set it down to 10%. For the amplitude setting found just below it, this setting controls how strong the peaks and the valleys of the line are. Lower values will make this randomization of the thickness less strong. So this is controlling how thick and how thin the line is allowed to get. The period setting just below that one we actually did change, changes how close together these peaks and valleys. Larger values make the variations and thickness further apart and more stretched out along the length of the line. So this would change how close together these thickness variations are. So a higher value will make them further apart, so it's not quite so jam packed. And then, lastly, the seed is just changing the randomization of this pattern. Okay, now that we understand what this is doing, let's re render our image to see how these changes have improved the image. Really see how it's improving the look of the line. We can see that the lines have a really nice, natural hand drawn appearance thanks to this new noise pattern. The variations in line weight give them a little bit more life as it feels like T Illustrator decided to use a lighter or heavier touch on certain lines to imply further details. So we can see here that this thin line on the either end and then there's a thick line in the middle. So maybe this thick line here is a chip out of this concrete. At this point, we have the foundation of our linework finished, but we're not quite done yet. In the next lesson, we'll learn the basics of the grease pencil tool. I'll see you there. 8. Learning Grease Pencil Basics: In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of the Grease Pencil tool. Let's begin. The time has come to learn grease pencil. Grease pencil is an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to effortlessly add detail to your renders by drawing on them directly in the world. Grease pencil differs from texture painting if you're familiar with that, by creating actual objects within the world made entirely of pen strokes. It doesn't require a model to be unwrapped and then painted onto as it's not a texture based tool. In simple terms, we're drawing orange objects or in the air to create physical pen strokes in the world. While we learn the basics of grease pencil in this lesson, we won't be focusing on creating actual details on our render, simple doodles as example. Simply want to learn the different tools that we have access to and how to use them within the world. The following lessons will focus on creating real details for the render, such as hanging wires or cracks on the walls. To begin with, we're going to head over to the layout workspace if you're not there already. So currently, I'm in the layout workspace, but if you're not, you can go up here and click on This tab. Depending on the type of details that you're drawing, you might be drawing in the left camera viewport, or you might prefer to draw on the perspective viewport here on the right. I'll explain as we go when you would want to change your view based on the type of details that you're drawing. Now let's start by drawing in the left camera view port found over here. With that being said, though, make sure that your left view port is actually seeing the camera view. If you don't see this exact view, you should click this little camera icon here to jump into the camera review. Our first step is to create the grease pencil object within our scene. Before we create the object, though, let's go over here to the outliner list on the right, and then we're going to click on this little white folder icon next to this word grease pencil. This will make this Grease Pencil collection the active collection, ensuring that any new object that we create will automatically be placed within this collection. These collections serve basically just as folders as ways to organize your file a little bit better. So now we're ready to create our grease pencil object, so we're just going to go over here. I either of these viewports, it doesn't matter. Hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu and then we'll go down here to Grease Pencil, and then we're going to choose blank. And now with our new Grease Pencil object still selected, we're going to go up to the top and we're going to click in our Middle Mouse button to pan this bar over that we can see this menu here called Object Mode. We're going to click this and then switch to draw mode. It doesn't matter which viewport that you access this menu in, but either way, when you look for this menu, you'll likely need to click in your Middle Mouse button to pan it over so that you can see this drop down. Can see a whole bunch of different brush options found down here at the bottom of each of these viewboards. Each of these brush options produces a different kind of stroke. But for this class, we'll be using the one called ink pen rough. Your file will likely have defaulted to this choice, as that's how I set up the starter file. But if it didn't, we're looking for this brush option. So it's someone with a really thin line and then it really gets thick here at the end. We can tell we have it selected because it has a blue square around it. But as I mentioned before, each of these pens just have a different look, and you can kind of get a preview of what they look like based on this preview icon. Will you be using the ink pen rough for this class? The ink pen rough brush has a slightly rough texture that reminds me a lot of a fountain pen on textured paper. This works really well for a manga style render. Okay, so we're just about ready to start drawing. First, we'll need to choose how Blender is going to place our drawings within the scene, though. There are a few different ways to do this. But for this class, we'll be using just two of them. Be using either surface mode or three cursor mode. We can change which mode that it's using based on this dropdown found here. Currently, it's set to surface, but we also have the option here for three D cursor. Yours will already be likely set to the surface mode, but if it's not, select this from the drop down found here. So let's leave it on surface for now. The surface mode allows us to draw directly onto the surface of an object, just like the name implies. That means if we click and drag on this wall over here in this left view port, we can see that as we draw, we're just leaving a line directly placed on this wall. If we look over here in the right viewport and spin around, we can see that this line has been placed directly on the surface. So it's not floating out in space. It's been kind of snapped to the surface here. Now, over here on the left side, if we zoom in a little bit, we can decide to draw on a different surface, though. So if we want to draw on the top of this step here, we could zoom in a bit so we can see a little better, and then just click and drag and draw another shape here, and we'll see that it's now attached to this surface instead of this wall. We can notice that over here as well. So on the right side, we'll notice that it's now applied to the top of this step. Surface mode is super useful for drawing things like cracks on the walls or writing words such as graffiti or signs. So if we wanted to have some graffiti written on this wall, we could just write it directly here. One quick thing you might have noticed already is this line here is a lot more jagged than when I wrote the word hello over here. And that's because I was zoomed in a lot closer when I was doing this. So the stroke is a lot smoother. So that is one thing to keep in mind. If you're drawing a line and you're really zoomed out, you can see here it looks relatively smooth if I draw another line here. But when I zoom in, it's really jagged. But if I drew the same exact shape much closer, you can see the line is much smoother. So that's just something you want to keep in mind when drawing. There is one more thing to keep in mind when using the surface mode, though. If your lines transition between different faces at different locations, the lines will stretch and snap to the new surfaces, regardless of how far away they are. As a quick example of this, let's draw a line across the floating stairs on the right side. So in this left port, we're going to zoom out a bit. And then we're just going to draw a line that travels between each of these steps as if it's a wire or a railing going between them. So we'll just start here and just drawing a line and just make sure that you hit different surfaces and different faces along the way. From this view, this line looks relatively straight. It looks like it's all kind of right in the same plane. However, if you look over here on the right side, we can see that this line actually snaps back and forth and attaches to the wall, and then it jumps back out and attaches to the side of the step and then goes back to the wall. So while it looks relatively fine in a camera view, in the perspective view, it's pretty obvious that there's an issue with this line. If you never plan on adjusting the camera angle by having more than one view or animating its movement, this isn't technically a problem as it looks relatively normal from the camera view. However, this looks pretty weird from any other view, as we can see here. This is the main downside of the surface mode, but it can be easily avoided by knowing where the edges of your model are and only using this for lines that don't change surface depths like these stairs. So this would work perfectly fine if we decided to only draw on this side of the step. We can see here that it attaches directly to the step and there's no issues. Before we explain the next drawing mode, you're probably thinking, how do I change the thickness of these lines? And why does the cursor not match the size of the line that I'm drawing? This is a great question. First, the easy question. You can change the size of the pen by adjusting the radius value found here at the top of the screen. So if you increase this radius, it'll make it larger, and if you make it smaller, it'll make the line smaller. This radius is showing the real world size of this line, meaning that if we type in 0.03, which is what it was set to before, this line is actually 0.03 in radius. So its actual size in this real world would be 0.06 for the diameter. This helps when making things like your wires. So if you know you want a specific thickness for the wire, you want to set your radius to match that. There's also a quick key bind for changing the radius without having to go up here and mess with this slider. You can simply hit the bracket keys on your keyboard found roughly above and to the left of the enter key. So if you hit the right bracket, it'll make it larger, and if you hit the left bracket, it'll make it smaller. Is good when you're just making small adjustments while you're drawing and you want it to be a little thicker, and then you can hit the left bracket and then make it a little thinner and just adjust on the fly. For now, I'm going to go back to a 0.03 for my radius. So now the second question. The reason your cursor and line thickness don't match is because of an advanced setting called radius unit. We can find these settings up here on the right side, we're going to have to pan this bar over using our middle mouse button, and then here we'll find advanced. We're going to twirl this open, and we can see right now our radius unit is set to seen instead of view. Default for this setting is seen, which means that it's determining the thickness of our line based on its real world size and the scene. The other option is view. This setting instead uses a pixel size based on the screen from your current view. The benefit of the view mode, however, is that your cursor and the size of the stroke on the screen will remain the same. Let's explore this difference quickly. First, we're going to switch to the view mode here underneath the radius settings, and then we'll notice over here that our radius is no longer set to meters and instead is set to pixels. So we're going to adjust this radius and set it to three pixels. Now if we go over here to the left side, and we zoom into an open area. Notice that as we draw, the line is roughly the same size as this cursor, which is a benefit of this mode. And now for the main downside of this view based stroke, let's zoom in our camera here so that we can see a little bit closer and then try drawing that exact same shape. So we're just going to draw this same shape, sort of a squiggle shape again. And we'll notice that we didn't change anything about this radius. However, this line is significantly thinner. And if we zoom in further, and do a similar shape, we'll notice that this line is even thinner than this one. This is because the view based radius only cares about its pixel size at the time of drawing. That means as long as it's three pixels wide when you drew the line, it doesn't care how far you zoomed in or out when you drew it. This interaction can be useful for drawing small details on your image, but it can also be a little frustrating when you're trying to draw and get a consistent line thickness for the drawing, as you zoom in and out to see more or less of your image, we draw out here, this line is way thicker than it was before, and I haven't changed anything about this radius. We'll be using both the view and the scene radius modes for this class. But it's important to know what they're doing and why they're doing it. Before we end the class, let's discuss the last drawing mode called three D cursor. First, we're going to go back over here to the advanced settings and then switch it back to scene. Then we can adjust our radius and set it back to 0.03 and then hit enter. Now let's go up to this drop down just above radius, and we're going to switch from surface to three D cursor instead. The D cursor mode allows us to draw on a plane and space of our choosing based on the location of the three D cursor within our after placing the three D cursor, we also need to determine which direction these lines will be facing using the drop down menu directly to the right of this three D cursor drop down. We can find that over here. Currently, it's set to front, but we also have options for side and top. For now, let's switch ours to side. We're going to choose side YZ. How do we place our three D cursor? We're going to be doing this portion of the lesson over here in the right viewport. Let's zoom out a bit. Then we're going to go over here to one of these columns. Now we can hold Shift on our keyboard and then right click on any surface of this column. In this case, let's click on this front side here. So the side closest to this large gap. After holding Shift and right click on this surface, we'll now see that our three D cursor has moved. This plus sign with the circle with red and white portions on it shows where our three D cursor is. And now that we've moved our cursor, we're ready to draw. So for this example, let's draw some simple wires between these two columns. So let's zoom in our view a little bit and then rotate around, and we're just going to be drawing a wire from here to here. So we're just going to click and drag and then just start drawing a wire over here. And after drawing this wire, we can rotate our camera a little bit. And notice that this line doesn't have the same issue that it did down here on the stairs, and that's because we're using this three D cursor mode. We've told Blender to only draw this line based on the plane of wherever this three D cursor is placed. So it won't allow it to snap back in space or go forward, can only draw on this surface, regardless of whether it's in the air or on a model. If we hold Shift and right click and place our three D cursor somewhere else, say, maybe the side of this pipe, we can now draw back here. I mean, we'll just draw some lines back here. Hanging off the side of this pipe. This allows us to have a lot of control on exactly where these lines appear, and it prevents that stretching and snapping that we saw earlier with the surface mode. It does, however, come at the cost of being a much more manual process, and it doesn't work well for curved surfaces like this large pipe as we see. So here it's sticking into the pipe, and then down here, it's hanging off the side of the pipe. It's not actually following the curvature of the pipe. In general, this works better for flat surfaces. We do have one more thing that we can control with this mode, and it's the drawing plane direction. So we'll remember before, we set this aside, but if we switch this to front instead, we can then change the direction that these lines are flowing. So in this exact same example here, I won't move this three dcursor at all, but now when I draw, these lines are projecting from the pipe rather than trying to go along the surface of it. That's because I've switched this mode. So now, any line that I draw here is going to be along the front surface. And then if I wanted to switch it back, I could go back to side and then draw some lines over here. And now you can see that these lines are now going this direction along the length of the pipe. So if we switch back to front and then we move our three D cursor back to this side of the column here, we can shift right click to place it on this side of the column instead. Now we can draw some wires that extend across the gap rather than running from column to column. You can see that here. So now we have sort of an L shape for these wires. Able to swap these directions for front and side will allow us to have a lot of control over where these lines exist within the world. You might have noticed that as you were drawing these long wires, it was kind of hard to create a smooth line, especially if you're drawing with a mouse. Worry not, however, I have a tool that'll make drawing smooth lines a lot easier, and I'll teach you that very soon. In the next lesson, we'll use grease pencil to add wires to our vendor. I'll see you there. 9. Adding Grease Pencil Wires (Part 1): In this lesson, we'll use Grease pencil to add wires to our render. Let's begin. The time has come to draw some wires in our scene. We'll learn some tips along the way to make this an easier task as well. So let's jump right in. Before we start drawing anything, let's get our file cleaned up and ready to draw. First, we can delete the test G pencil object that we added last lesson to test Grease pencil. We can find that over here in this Grease Pencil collection. We're just going to select G pencil and then delete it with a delete key. Next, we're going to hide all the objects on the left wall to make our view of the right wall a little less obstructed. This can be done easily over here in the outliner list just by clicking on this little checkbox next to the collection left side. So we'll click this, and then we're also going to hide wires three D as well. Lastly, we're going to go into a side orthographic view so we can get a perfectly straight on view of the right wall. The easiest way to do this is to simply go up here to this colorful little gizmo up here, and you just want to rotate your view so that you can see this bubble here. So you want to hover over the one here that says negative X. And then when we click on that, it'll jump us into this view. And then you can just use your mouse well here to pan around and get it censored. Benefit of this new flat view is that it'll give us a much easier canvas to draw on and make it feel more similar to drawing on a piece of paper. Now that we have everything set up, ready to add our new grease pencil object and get drawing. Make sure that this grease pencil collection is still marked as the active by clicking on this little white folder, then we can hit Shift and A while hovering over this right viewport, go down here to Grease Pencil and then choose blank. Before we do any drawing, let's go over here and rename this D pencil object. We can rename it just by double clicking on the name and then we'll click over here on the right side and we're just going to add underscore wires to the end of it. That way we know exactly what this. Help us differentiate it from the other grease pencil objects in the scene, and it's just good practice to name objects to keep the file tidy. With the grease pencil objects still selected, we can go over here to the drop down and then choose draw mode. Your grease pencil object will likely remember the settings that we used in the last lesson. Let's go through them quickly just to make sure that everybody is ready to draw and using the same settings. So first, make sure that you're on the ink pen rough brush found down here just by clicking on it. We want to be set to three D cursor mode found up here in this drop down. We're going to switch from front to side instead. Over here on this toolbar, we're going to pan over using our middle mouse click. We're just going to click in the mouse wheel, go to advanced, and then make sure that your radius unit is set to seen. Lastly, we can go over here to the radius, and we're going to change the radius to 0.035 and then hit enter. Now we're ready to set our three D cursor to the side of one of these columns. It technically doesn't really matter which column we choose as they're all the exact same depth. But in our case, let's zoom in over here to this right column, directly right of this ladder. You should be able to see the ladder here and we're going to put the three D cursor here on this column. Would be a good reminder for us when we're drawing that this is the first column that isn't actually in the camera view. So this is just outside the camera view, and then this is the first column that we see. So let's hold Shift, and then we're going to right click on this front face of the column. Try to place it towards the center of it. So anywhere here is fine. You'll know that the three D cursor is moved because you should see this symbol here now. And then, lastly, in another step to keep our file tidy, we're going to rename the layer that these wires will be drawn on. To do this, we're going to go down here to the bottom right. We're going to click on this little tab here, Momothe. I guess you could say it's a little corkscrew or a spring icon. Over here where it says layer, we're going to double click on the word layer to rename it. We're going to call this column wires and then head enter. As we add more wires, it will be useful to have each type of wire on a separate layer, so keeping them clearly named will be important. Well, remember from our testing in the last lesson, that it was a little difficult to draw nice smooth lines for our wires. This is because by default, our brush strokes have very little smoothing applied to them. So any small movements of our hands while drawing the lines are captured, and the result is a somewhat wavy line. Luckily for us, Blender has a handy tool to fix this exact issue and make drawing with a mouse much easier. Let's go up to the top where it says stroke, and then we're going to click on this drop down menu. And then down here at the very bottom, we'll see stabilized stroke. So we're going to turn this on by clicking this little box next to it. Now if we just draw a test line using our mouse, we'll notice that the actual pen stroke is slightly delayed behind where the cursor is moving. So let's see an example of that now. So I'm just going to zoom in here, and then we're just going to draw a line from here over here, and we'll have it droop slightly. So we're just going to drag down here, and we can see here that this line is actually following behind where the cursor is at. Also notice how much smoother this line is. It's a lot easier to get a nice gradual curve on this rather than having the mouse jitter as we move the mouse back and forth. You can see here that as I jitter, it's barely affecting the line. It is making it a little bit more wiggly, but it's generally a lot smoother. And you also notice the faster you make this stroke, the smoother it is. The stroke stabilization that we turned on has a similar effect to us towing the stroke behind us on a long rope. It will make detailed drawings a bit more difficult because there is a delay in the movements of our mouse. It does assist greatly in keeping your lines nice and smooth for these wires. While we're drawing, if you make any strokes that you don't like, you can simply hit Control and Z at the same time to undo the last thing you drew. If you hit the button again, Control and Z, it'll undo the second thing you did. It'll just keep going back through the steps. This is a really useful keybnd to remember if you just draw a line and then realize, Oh, maybe I drew it down too far or I drew it too high. You can just hit Control Z a few times and then go back to where you were. Another option that you have is if you draw a line, then you realize you want to erase just a certain part of it, but not the entire line, we can use the erase tool. So we can switch to the erase tool over here on the left. It's just below the brush. And then I would suggest that you switch it to the point mode instead of dissolve. Well, notice that if I go down here and I erase it with the dissolve mode on, it makes a really soft edge on these lines. However, if I switch it to point instead, it makes a nice hard edge on these lines. Personally don't use the erase tool all that often usually when I'm drawing and if I make a stroke that I don't like, I'll just hit Control C a few times to undo the action and just try the stroke again. But feel free to use whatever method you prefer. Although in most cases, I'm just going to be using Control Z and then redrawing the line. Now I can switch back here to my brush tool. So our first step here is going to be creating a few hanging wires between each of the columns moving left. So let's zoom out here. We're going to be drawing lines going from this column to this column and then so on and so forth, all the way down the line until we reach the end. Just going to focus on drawing a single wire between each of these. I'd also suggest that you vary the height of where the wires meet the column to help give them a little bit more of a chaotic and natural feeling. So rather than having every one of your wires, start at the very top and then end at the very top on the other side, maybe have one start at the top and then meet somewhere down here, and then the next one can go higher, and then the next one can go lower, just to give it a bit more variation. Speeding up the video slightly as I draw my lines throughout the rest of this lesson, just so it doesn't take too long as I don't want you to have to watch me draw in real time. Please take your time while you're drawing, though. So feel free just to pause the video, see what I drew, and then if you want to try to match it, go ahead. But don't let me rush you through your drawing. Simply pause the video and then catch up to where I'm at. I'll see you in just a moment when I'm done drawing my first lines. Okay, so I have my lines drawn across each of these columns, and it's just a single wire going between them. I also varied the heights, just so it's a little bit more chaotic. Might have noticed as you were drawing or if you were watching me draw that some of these lines don't really meet up. That's a really easy fix. So we'll just zoom into any of these intersections that don't quite meet, and we'll just click and drag here to draw a line between them. You really don't have to worry about these lines being perfect. We can see here this lines a little bit more wavy and it also doesn't line up perfectly. That really just adds to the charm. This is supposed to be a little bit more of a scratchy, sort sketchy process. So don't worry about having perfectly smooth intersections between these. You really just want to make sure that they're connected. Zoom out a little bit and just kind of fill in this gap here. Then just go through the tops of each of these intersections and just make sure that they meet. Okay, so I have all of my intersections connected. And now our next step is going to be drawing a second layer of wires. This is just going to make these wires a little bit more dense, and in general, you're going to want these wires to meet up roughly where the other ones meet. So you're going to be drawing a line similar to this here. So I'll draw you this first one. So you're going to start up here. And have this one droop down and then meet up here. They can gope through each other here at the top and intersect. You just want to draw a second layer of wires drooping below the first. This is another situation where you might want to vary how much they're drooping, so maybe one stays a little bit closer, and then the next one droops down much further. So I'm going to go through here and then draw a second line below each one of my current first ones. Again, don't worry about these lines being perfect. Just try your best. I promise you it's going to look totally fine in the final render. Just do your best and have fun. So I have all of the second wires placed. And again, I'm going to go through here and just connect these intersections. So we'll just go through each one and just draw these lines here. If you want, you can just fill in this gap here, so it looks like it's a bundle of wires. You can be really kind of loose with these intersections. You'll see even in some areas, I didn't even bother connecting them to the same point. And that, again, is totally fine. So just draw a line here and just make it kind of look like they all meet up somewhere here in some sort of nondescript bundle. So get and go through each of your intersections and just make sure that they connect. Alright, we have all of our main wires drawn for the columns, so now it's time to add some smaller detail wires that hang from these thicker wires. These smaller wires will help add some visual texture to the main wires and imply age and decay to our world. We're going to make the line a little bit thinner than the first one to help differentiate them from each other. So we'll go over here to radius. We're going to change from 0.035 down to 0.02 instead. So slightly smaller. Now let's go over here to the far left side of these wires. We'll zoom in. Going to start with this one as our first example. This is the furthest set of wires from the camera, and it'll let us get a little bit more comfortable with the process before drawing wires that are more prominent within the camera view. So you can do a little practice down here when the wires are really tiny on the camera and will generally not be seen all that much. And then as you get comfortable, you can move further and further right. Until you're drawing the wires here that are a little bit more visible in the camera. So for the process of adding details to these wires, we're going to be drawing squiggly lines along the length of the wire with small drooping areas and broken segments. As an example of what I mean, I'm just going to zoom in here. We can start anywhere near the end of this line. I'm just going to start anywhere I want down here, and I'll just start drawing a line, having it droop down slowly, then I'll wrap it up over the top, then again, down the bottom. Maybe we add a little bit of a longer droop here. We can just keep doing this along the length of the line. We can see just by drawing a line directly on top of the other one and having it snake back and forth over top of it, it really looks like there's another smaller wire wrapped around this one as if somebody just twirled it around this one to give it some support as they ran it down the line. This is a super simple way to add more detail to these wires and make them look a little bit more natural and realistic. You also don't need to do these lines in just a single stroke like I did there. If you run out of room while you're drawing, simply wait until the line crosses over like I did here. Move your camera down a little bit, and then just pick up your stroke again. Maybe I go down here and just keep drawing and then just having it go back and forth. Another detail that I like to add while drawing on these details is to have a wire that looks like it's been cut. So for this detail, you'll just continue the wire, maybe have it do one more loop. And then this one, we're just going to go straight down, and then we'll stop drawing. So it looks like here, this wire has been cut. So it ran from over here to over here, but at some point, something broke this wire, and now it's just hanging down. And now, if we want to continue this to make it look like there was a cut here, but there's still wire on the other side, we're just going to pick a height roughly about half the height of this one. I'll start around here, draw a line straight up until it touches the wire. Go back to what I was doing and just start doing these wiggles again just have it go across the line. Now if we zoom out, this line here is significantly more interesting and realistic than these single lines that we drew here. And it was really easy to do this. So if you haven't already, go ahead and finish this top line. Just doing details, something like this. A couple wiggles, areas where it droops down a little lower, maybe at a break in the line, something similar to this until you reach the other side. Before we work on the lower line, I do want to let you know that I won't be walking you through every single bit of drawing for these wires as it's largely the exact same technique over and over again. Doesn't mean that you're on your own for the rest of the lesson, though. We'll still be going through all of the unique areas that wires might appear in, and I'll walk you through the first part of these areas. But the bulk of the drawing is going to be self guided after we've given you all the tools that you need to be successful. For the large part, these wires are basically all the same. We're going to be doing very similar details all over the image to make wires that look like this just in various different locations. There's something new I can teach you, I'll let you know. But in general, you're just going to be adding wires like this across the rest of the scene. The best part about grease pencil is that it's unique to the hand that drew it. Even if I showed you every single brush stroke that I made, your drawing would still be a little bit different than mine because you're the one who created it. There's no way that you could perfectly replicate exactly what I was doing either. Those of you that would rather have a result that's identical to mine for learning purposes, though, I will be showing you how to import my exact drawing into your scene at the end of this lesson. This is by no means necessary, and you should use your own drawing if you enjoy the process. But I want to make sure that it's an option for those that want it. With that out of the way, let's go down here to lower line and add some detail here. So we're going to zoom in over here on the left side. And this time, we can try some different techniques, such as loops or wires that jump from the lower line to the upper. Start with a normal wiggly line like we did before. We're just going to start over here in this corner, and then we'll just start drawing lines here, that loop back and forth across the length of this line. Do your best not to have the exact same shape, however, directly above one another. I wouldn't want to have drawn this longer droop area directly below this one. I do want to vary their positions vertically. And now as an example of something new you can do, let's go over here further to the right, and then this time, we're going to pick the line back up, start drawing it down here, and then we're going to have this line just go all the way up here to the top line and start sneaking back and forth up here. And then once you're satisfied with the amount of distance it's covered, you can have it just drop right back down to this lower line. Now it looks like somebody wrapped this wire across both of these lines instead of just having it follow one. Can do this method as many times as you want, if you want your line to have a lot more criss crossing wires. You'll notice over here, the way I drew this line, now it intersects with the end of this broken line. So if that happens to you, just feel free to extend this line down, make it a little bit longer, and then maybe make this one a little longer to compensate. Now let's finish the far right side of this line and finish this wire going over. This time we can add some loops to it instead. Instead of having droops, we can have a corkscrew go across. So let's just extend this line down here, and then we'll have it loop back up. And then this time, let's just do a full loop right back this way and then loop back. Maybe do it one more time. And then just go up to the top. These loops are just another way that we can give this wire some character as it runs the length of the longer wire. Feel free to use any of these tricks on any wire in the scene to add some fun variety. I'm sure you can even think of other different techniques to add to your wires that are different than the ones I just showed you. As the final step for this grouping of wires, let's add another line here that covers this bottom segment because right now, after we jumped from the bottom to the top, there's this large bear patch. I'm not going to bother starting from the very end and going all the way across. I'm just going to find any intersection here, and I'll just pick it up. So I'm just going to add a new line here. Then just have it start cork screwing back and forth. Maybe I'll add a little loop here. Then I can scroll over, and then just continue this line, maybe have it droop down a little bit. You can see it really doesn't matter what you do here. It can be pretty loose and chaotic. We're just doing this to add a little bit more detail and fill in the scene. We really just want to bulk these wires out and make them look a little bit thicker so they take up more room in the scene. For now, we're going to move on to the next area of wires, but feel free to continue adding details to your wires after this lesson or just pause the video right now and then finish doing this type of detailing down the entirety of the line here. The way, we're going to be moving on to the next step. The next area of wires that we add are going to be on the opposite side of the column and we'll run towards the pipes and the walls. We're going to have a wire that stretches from here and then runs this direction towards this wall over here, this slanted wall with the pipes. To do this, we need to decide which column we want to have these wires start on. Let's use the camera view on the left side to determine which of these columns is the best for this view. I think in this case, we're probably going to want to choose this column here as it's the first one that we can see the entirety of. What we'll do is just zoom in here and we can hold Shift and right click and then click anywhere on the side of this column here and place it. When you move your three D cursor in the left view, you'll notice that it's disappeared here. We did move it, however, we can't see it. And this is because we have the viewport overlays turned off on this left side. If you wanted to turn them back on, you could go over here on this top bar, paint it all the way over here to the right, and then click this button here that looks like two circles overlapping. We'll see if I turn this back on, how I can see where this popped up. So if I wanted to reposition it, I could reposition it and see where it's at. But then once I'm happy with it, I am going to turn this back off as it does clean this view up a bit more. Wires that we're about to draw are going to flow a different direction. We need to change the mode from side over here on the right side. We're going to switch it instead to front. This will change the plane that we're drawing on based on the placement of three D cursor that we just moved. With these two settings changed, we're ready to begin drawing. We have two different ways that we could approach this drawing. We can draw directly from the camera view over here on the left side or over here on the right, can rotate this view to get it back into a perspective view and then draw over here instead. Method works, but they each have their own concerns. We'll start by drawing a line in the camera view first. So I'm just going to zoom in here, and then I'm going to draw a line from this intersection. Just click and drag a line and then place it down here. So now we can see I've drawn a line. And while I wasn't expecting to have to teach you this right now, this is as good a time as any. So you'll see here that this line actually went into the column. I almost appears as if it's going through it. And that's because this line got confused as to which plane it was being drawn on. So if we zoom in here, you can see this line is actually going behind the column here. It's intersecting with it. The easiest way to fix this is to simply hit Control Z to undo that line you just drew. And then we're just going to hold Shift, and you can do this in the left or the right. It doesn't matter. Hold shift. And then right click somewhere new on this column. We want to kind of force Blender to update its position of this three D cursor. Then we're going to try to draw our line again, see if it has that problem. We can see here it no longer has that issue. Seems like it's going in front of the column now, which is what we want. Like Control Z, now I'm free to draw my line again. You have this issue at any point while you're drawing with this three D cursor, simply hold Shift and just click somewhere near where the three D cursor used to be and just have it update the position slightly an inch to the left or an inch to the right and then try to draw your line again and it should hopefully fix it. Again, I'm going to draw from this intersection. I'll just draw down and I'll have this wire go until it touches this wall. Right about there, it stops drawing because it's going behind the wall. So you might have noticed already that because we drew this line from the camera view, everything over here looks correct. It looks like this line meets the center section well enough and it looks like they're all connected. However, if we look over here in this perspective view, you'll notice that line I just drew is actually poking out slightly. That's because this camera view isn't a great representation of how these lines are actually meeting. This is the concern that I mentioned before. The main downside of drawing directly from your camera view is you're not really drawing directly within the world. You're just drawing directly from a view of that world. So you have issues like this where this line looks like it's touching, but in reality, it's not. At this point, this is a situation where you need to decide if this small inconsistency matters to you or not. This small gap that we see here is not noticeable at all from the camera view. So as far as that view is concerned, there's nothing wrong. We would only notice this if we included a lot of camera movement or change the angle of our camera drastically. If neither of these situations concern you, then there's really nothing to worry about. You can just carry on as normal and continue adding lines. However, if you'd rather make sure that these lines are at least close to touching or they have a believable intersection, we'll need to do a little bit more work. If you would like to know how to fix this and make them a little bit closer to each other, we're going to control Z, this line that we just drew. We're going to have to redraw it. And then over here in our right viewport, we're going to be drawing from here instead. So it's a little bit more awkward to draw from this view because we're kind of drawing at an angle and we're not really drawing right on a flat image. You'll find it's a little bit more difficult here, and also this cursor is kind of jumping around and it's changing its size. It will still draw the line where we want it, wherever this three D cursor is, but visually, things are a little bit more chaotic over here. So now in this right view, to find a view that's a little bit more straight on. We're going to do our best here to try to make sure that this line we start is around the same location as this line above. I'm going to start drawing here at a view that's a little bit more consistent with the location. So I'll just click from here, and then I'll click and drag, draw my line down until it makes contact with the wall. And now we can go over here and zoom in and see how well we did. So in this case, here, we can see it's roughly on the same plane, but they're still not connected. However, this is a much easier problem to fix. In this case, all we need to do is zoom in on these lines, get a better view, and then just draw a line doing vertical until these eventually touch. Now these lines are actually physically connected to each other. So let's see. Okay, so there is a small gap here. We are a little bit off. This is another situation where I can show you something else. So if the same problem happens to you, we're going to instead switch to the side view like we were before. Then we're going to hold Shift and right click, place our three D cursor here on the front side of this column, and now we're going to draw a line from here and try to intersect it with this. We're just doing our best from different angles here to make sure that these lines somewhat attached to each other. So in this case, we've gotten much closer. There is still a small gap here, but you would never notice that in most cases. So in general, these lines here are basically intersected, and we've avoided that issue that we had before when we first drew this line only from the camera. You do notice, however, that this is significantly more fiddly, and there's more to think about while you're drawing them. So if that seems like a lot of work and you don't have to worry about that, I would suggest that you just draw from the camera view, and then if anything's really bad, maybe go back and undo that line or erase the portion of it that's the problem and just try to do your best to redraw. You plan on having a lot of different camera angles and you want to have a lot of camera movement in your animation, this is the process that you're probably going to end up going through to make sure that all these lines intersect. Up to you to decide if it's worth the effort for your intentions. You can also take the approach of waiting until you're near the end of the project and you're basically finished drawing, then you can see if these little mismatches are even worth fixing. You might have a mismatch of the lines here, but then when you move your camera around, you don't even notice it anyway, so it really wasn't worth the effort and fixing. Either way, both methods are valid. With that discussion out of the way, let's go back over here and switch it from side to front and then we're going to hold Shift and right click and then place our three D cursor here on the right side of this column again. Now we can finish drawing some extra lines on this side of this column. I won't be narrating each movement here it's essentially an identical process to the first drawing that we did, but feel free to follow along roughly with what I do. So let's finish adding some more lines here. All right, so I finished adding some lines here that just go back and forth between this slanted wall and the column. Some of them go back and forth across the column, and then eventually they just terminate down here underneath this pipe or we can't really see them from the vio. Before you add any extra details to these wires, like we did down here with the wiggly lines and broken lines, double check what size brush you were using when you drew these. So right now, I know that I used a radius of 0.02, which means that I want to go a little bit smaller when drawing the details on these lines. In this case, I might go down to say 0.015 for these details just so these lines are a little bit thinner. I mentioned before, I'm not going to go through the entire detail process for these wires as it's basically the exact same methods as we used before, drawing these details on the far left. But you would be using the same techniques, just going back and forth, drawing some squiggly lines, going back and forth over here, maybe adding a loop every once in a while, having them meet. And then you can also have parts where they just hang down as if they're broken or have areas where they jump back and forth across the line. So maybe it jumps from here over to this one. You really just want to add some visual texture to help tell a better story. You can see with this really messy example that I just did here, it already looks kind of cool from this camera view, so you really can't go wrong with adding detail. Don't be afraid to try new techniques and make it unique to you and your style. You can also do this process of going back and forth between the column and the wall on a different column just by changing where this position of your three D cursor is. If you wanted to do it again down here, hold shift right click and place it down here. Now you can do this exact same process that we see on this column instead. In the next lesson, we'll finish creating the wires in our scene. I'll see you there. 10. Adding Grease Pencil Wires (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll finish creating the wires in our scene. Let's begin. We've got a lot of other areas that we can add wires to. So we're going to move through them a little bit faster due to them all being basically the same technique. Let's talk about the areas with the three D wires now. So first, we're going to go over here and turn back on the three D wires collection. We'll just click on this little white box to turn them back on. And then before we do any more drawing, let's create a new layer for these drawings. So on this right side, inside this little green tab here, we're going to click on this plus button to add a new layer, double click on this, and then type in three D wires and then hit Enter. Unsure that these new lines are on their own layer. So if you ever wanted to hide them for any reason, that's possible using this little eyeball icon here next to them. So we can see an example of that here. If I turn off this eyeball next to column wires, that will hide these wires, and if I turn it back on, now we can see them again. One thing to note, however, is that if you ever want to go back to a different layer after creating a new one, you do need to make sure that you select it before drawing on it. So if you wanted to go back and add more column wires, if you weren't done here, you have to click on this column wires to turn it blue to let you know that you have it selected. Then do your drawing and then switch back to the other layer that you want to draw. Does take a little bit of remembering to switch back and forth, but I promise you, it's definitely worth the effort if you ever want to get rid of a specific wire for a different render or for an animation, it's really nice being able to go through and selectively hide different wires. And now with our three D wires layers still selected, highlighted in blue, we're ready to begin adding detail to these three D wires here that we just turned back on. These three D wires, all we're going to be adding is detail. This will help add detail to these pre existing three D wires that are already spanning the gaps. So we don't need to draw the initial wire like we did up here. They already exist. We're just going to add more detail to these. This will also help blend them in with the entirely hand drawn wires that we drew up here. By adding hand drawn details on top of these three D wires, they'll sort of mesh with the rest of the scene. So first, let's decide which of these three D wires we're going to be drawing on. We're a bit more comfortable with drawing, let's choose a three D wire that's a bit closer to the camera. So in this case, let's choose this one here. So it's the first wire to the left of this ladder. So over here on the right view, we can see that it's this wire here. Now, let's zoom in on this side here. We're going to hold Shift and then right click on the side of this triangle mount here. So anywhere here on the side, we're just going to place our three D cursor. Go up to the top and make sure you're set to the front view because that's the direction that we'll be drawing. And then over here in our right view, you might find it easier to draw from an orthographic view like we did for the first wires. To switch to this flat view, we're going to go over to this top symbol here, and we're going to click on this little bubble here that says negative Y. So we'll click that and it'll just jump us right into this nice flat view, and then we can zoom back in. And we know it's this wire that we're drawing on because that's where our three D cursor is sitting. And now we can start drawing new wires on top of this three D wire. We're going to be drawing similar details to the wires we drew before with loops and cuts and droops in. Also probably want to switch your radius from 0.015. If that's what you were on, we're going to set it back to 0.02 instead. And now let's just start drawing some wires. So in this case, I'm going to start up here and I'll have them start wrapping around this three d triangle amount. We can have them go down here and start sneaking back and forth, then we can just continue this line here, maybe adding a larger droop here, going back and forth, maybe a smaller one. And then maybe we'll end this right here with a line cut. So we'll go over here and then just go straight down to make it look like somebody cut the wire with something. While you're drawing this view here, you might want to look over here to make sure that these lines don't land anywhere that obscures them. If I drew this cut line here a little earlier, it might have lined up with this edge and looked a little weird. So keep that in mind when you're drawing over here on the right side, just a glance to the left and see how it looks. Let's quickly finish this detail on this line, so I'll have the line start here, parallel to it, a little bit shorter. Maybe I'll draw a little loop here before it ends and have it snake around to the bottom. So now if I zoom out and see what I drew over here. After drawing these basic wires on top of the three D wires, you could add even further detail by adding thin detail wires on top of the original detail wires. You can really see that you can get as detailed as you want with this. So for these smaller details, let's go up to the radius, and we're going to set this even tinier, so we're going to set this to 0.01. It doesn't really matter which side you start on. I'm just going to start over here on the left. Now I'm going to take these smaller wires and wrap them around the original drawing wires that I just did, then just have them go across these gaps, and zoom out here, and then maybe this thin wire here just completely avoids this cut in the line, and droop down, catch back onto this wire here, go back up over, and then just continue drawing these details down these loops. Maybe it goes up and attaches now to the three D wire and really just do whatever you'd like. Then we'll finish it over here going up over the back. How you add detail to your wires is entirely up to you. One thing I wouldn't suggest, though, is that you try to add detail to every single three D wire in the scene. As many of them are really far away from the camera and you're going to be drawing lines so small and back in the darkness that you really won't notice your efforts. So I would just pick out some of the ones that are closer to the camera and just kind of dot them back and forth. So maybe this one, maybe one down here, this one in the back, and then maybe one down here. So maybe like four or five total and just space them out. Because if you start drawing wires on every single one of them, especially like this one back here where they really overlap, you're going to kind of just be wasting your time drawing wires that you really won't ever see from the camera. Another important tip is don't forget to move your three D cursor after you draw your wires. So now that I'm done with this one, if I wanted to draw, say, on this line down here, I do have to remember to move my three D cursor. Or else from this view, it'll look like I'm drawing them correctly. But then if I spin around, I'll notice that I was actually drawing wires for this three D wire out in space below the first one. So make sure you move your three D cursor to the correct three D wire when you're drawing. Now before we finish this lesson, let's go through each of the remaining areas that I'd recommend that you place wires on your scene to match the look and feel of the reference. I won't be making a new layer over here for each of these areas just to save myself some time, but I highly recommend that you do for your own render. For now, I'm just going to go over here, hit the plus sign, double click on this and name this test. But if I was doing this for real, I would definitely be making a new layer for each of these areas that I show. Okay. So with that warning out of the way, let's go through some of the areas quickly that you might want to consider adding wires to your image and a brief explanation of how I would do it. The first area would be that partial bridge on the left wall. But first, we'll need to turn this collection back on. So we can do that over here on the right side. We're just going to click this little checkbox here to turn on left side. I'm going to increase the radius of my brush back to 0.035 just so they're a little bit thicker, now we can spin our camera around and then I'll hold Shift and right click on the side of this bridge and then make sure I'm set to front. So for this area, I would probably jump into the front view, so the negative Y view over here. Zoom in here, and then maybe I'd have a wire hanging down here, going back and forth, looping down. Maybe it would skip this corner, and then it could snake back and forth, down the side of this all the way down the bottom until it's no longer in view here on the left side. And then as always, once you get your main wires placed, go ahead and change your radius to a smaller number, say maybe 0.025 and then just start adding detail wires here that help further embellish these wires. Again, I'm just doing this very quickly, very sketchy as an example of what maybe you would do. But as usual, just even this really quick sketch already looks kind of cool having wires hanging here. Another area you could add detail would be this curved bridge far in the back here. So in our camera view, it's this bridge here. So if we hold Shift, we can move our three D cursor back. Again, we're just going to be drawing ribbons of wires hanging from this. So we'll start from the back here, have them hang down, maybe they attach to the bottom, then this one can go all the way up to the top and just vary the points that they're connected and how deep the droop is, and then just have it droop down. Always, you could just go through here and add your detail, add your brakes, and just generally make this a little bit more chaotic and interesting. Because this area is pretty far from the camera, you're going to need to make your lines a little bit thicker potentially and add a little bit more density of wires up here for them to even be noticeable from the camera. Moving on to the next area that you got detail to, it's this really large archway here in the very back. So again, hold Shift, move your three D cursor back here by shift right clicking on this column back here. And then since this is really, really far from the camera, we're going to need to make our radius a lot larger just so these lines are even seen. So in this case, I would suggest something like maybe 0.075 to make them a lot thicker, but still be able to be seen from the camera. For these details, I would probably suggest you draw them in the camera view as it's really difficult to tell what is in view. The entirety of this archway. So for these details, maybe we could just have them start outside of the camera view, go down, maybe connect somewhere over here, go to the edge, and then just start snaking back and forth across this, and then go down this way and disappear off to the side. You could also have this area here branch. Maybe go down and disappear behind the side of this building. And then as usual, you would just go through here with a slightly smaller brush, add your details. Maybe they skip lines, do some loops, hang down, and just general chaos back here. And then we have two more obvious areas to add wires. So let's quickly finish these up before we finish the entire lesson. This right wall over here has a lot of different model details that we could add wires to to add further detail. So in this case, we can hold shift right click on this wall anywhere on this wall here, and then don't forget you need to switch from the front view to the side view because we're drawing it this direction instead. Then in our right view port, we're going to rotate our perspective view so we can get a better view of this wall. And then you can just start deciding where you'd like to draw these lines. And you can see here that this bridge and this wall here is kind of getting in the way. So I'm going to go over here to the left side collection, turn this off, and I have a bit better of an unobstructed view. And then before we start drawing, make sure you switch your radius to something a little bit smaller, maybe 0.035, and then we can start at this bracket and we can draw down here. Just find this area here and connect it, maybe lead it down to this hole in the wall or the wire just above it, have a drape across this. And then if you want, you can draw from the camera view instead if you prefer that. So maybe we have this go down, go up underneath the step and kind of stop just below it, or we can have it stretch from here, down behind these pipes. Really up to you where you want these wires to go. Then as usual, just add detail to these wires to help bulk them out. And then as the very last example, let's return to the first example we had when we started learning how to draw with grease pencil. We're going to add some lines to the side of these stairs so we can hold we're going to place our three D cursor on the side of one of these shorter steps. I'm going to place it on the very first step here right on the side. In this case, you want to choose the shorter step to place your three D cursor because these are all on the exact same plane in terms of their depth. However, this one is a lot longer. If we put our three D cursor here and started drawing a line, we'll notice that it's floating away from these steps. But if I change it back and put it on the side of the shorter step and start drawing a line between these, you'll notice now that it just looks like it attaches to the bottom of the larger step, but it's still in the correct plane for all the short steps. So let's control Z, this. And then this time, we're going to be using a lot smaller line. Let's go all the way down to 0.02. These are a lot smaller details and they're closer to the camera, so they don't need to have quite as thick lines to be seen. So for this example, maybe we'll start from the bottom of this larger step, have it droop down, meet the smaller one. We can skip steps, we can it go directly to the next step and then just have them go down. You can see here that I actually missed the distance here for this line. Would want to be a little bit more precise when I'm drawing this from my actual render. You can get an idea of what you would want to do here. You can also add multiple lines here, so you can have some skip steps that you missed before and then go between others. Maybe this one's broken and it's just hanging down. With this last example out of the way, these are by no means the only areas that you could add wires to improve the look of your render. But this should at least give you plenty of ideas for your own version. Before we move on to the next lesson, I did promise you that I would show you how to import some pre drawn wires for your scene. So to do this, we're going to go over here and we're going to leave draw mode for now. We're going to go back to object mode. Now go up to the top and choose file, then go to append down here has a paper clip next to it, so we can click this. Then navigate to the class assets that you downloaded at the very beginning of this class, and then we'll choose this file here called Grease Pencil wires append. We'll choose this one and then we'll go down here and click this blue button that says append. Then we go to the object folder, double click into this and then choose GP wires. And then here I wrote down the thicknesses that I used for the wires in my scene. So I had lines that are 0.035, 0.02, and 0.01, just as a guide for your own reference. With this object selected, now we can click append one last time. You have all of my wires loaded directly into your scene. So these are all the wires that I drew for the original render. If you do plan on using these wires, the ones you just appended, you are going to want to hide your original wires because they're going to conflict with some of these others. So to hide the ones that we just drew, all you would do is click on these two icons here, the eyeball, and then the small camera icon. So this is left your drawings within the scene, but they're just hidden for now so we can't see them in the render. Now we can zoom out and see all the different lines that I drew on the original version of this file. You're going to also want to go over here and turn on this left side collection so you can see all the walls and objects within the scene. That's it. You can either spend some time finishing your own drawings or you can proceed to the next lesson with me and use these appended wires for your own render. In the next lesson, we'll use grease pencil to add some new details to our render. I'll see you there. 11. Adding Grease Pencil Details (Part 1): In this lesson, we'll use Grease pencil to add new details to our render. Let's begin. Before we begin drawing new details on our render, let's render the image and appreciate the wires that we added in the last lesson. To do this, we're going to go over here to the rendering workspace found here at the top, and then we can go over here on the left, hit Render and then choose render Image or hit F 12. The render is done, and it's really coming together with the added details of all these wires. We can see just how much detail it's added to these areas in the background on top of these three D wires on the sides of the bridge here, and just in general, the whole image has a lot more character. Possible that you might have noticed the small error pop up here at the top, saying warning to render Grease pencil able can bind and Z passes. This might not mean a whole lot to us right now, but we can see the results of what this warning is trying to tell us about. If you're using the imported wires that I showed you in the last lesson, you can zoom into this small platform down here to see an example of what this issue is. If you're using your own wires, you'll likely have this issue present somewhere in your image as well, but you'd have to look around it on your own to see where it might be. Here we can see that a portion of these wires are visually on top of the small platform. However, in reality, the wires should be obscured by this platform because they go behind it. We shouldn't see this wire keep going past this. It should actually disappear once it crosses over this line here as it goes behind this large step. Is a perfect example of what this warning is trying to tell us. This warning is referencing the fact that our grease pencil lines are displaying on top of all objects in the scene, regardless of whether they go behind an object or in front of it. Luckily, for us, this is a really easy fix. To fix this issue, let's go over here to the View layers tab. You may already be on it, but if not, it's this one that looks like three images laying on top of each other. Then let's scroll up to the top. And then eventually we'll see a menu here called passes. To fix this issue, we simply need to check on the Z box here, and then we're also going to turn on normal found just below. So we're going to check this on. This normal option that we just turned on isn't needed to fix this issue at all. However, it will be useful later on, so we might as well just turn it on while we're here. With these two passes turned on, now we can go back over here, go to file, render image. And now we'll see just like that this overlapping issue that we had before is completely fixed. All we need to do is just turn on this Z box here underneath passes. With that issue fixed, it's now time to start adding the remaining details to our scene, such as cracks on the walls or dripping rust lines. We'll again be using grease pencil to add these details. Just like the last lesson, I'll be walking you through all the early steps and teaching you everything you need to know to add your own details to the render. We won't, however, be drawing every single crack and line together, as that will slow the class down more than it needs to. I'll show you the types of details I like to add to my images, as well as different tools to make that process a bit easier. After you know all the tips and tricks and the areas that I might add detail, it'll be up to you to add your own detail. This detail step of this lesson is actually my favorite part of the entire class, as it's really easy to just go wild and add details all over the scene in multiple different places. You can add graffiti or cracks or lines or drips, it's really up to you what you add. So I suggest you just have fun with it. Don't worry so much about matching exactly what I do. Just learn the techniques from me and then apply it to your ownimage. At the very end of this lesson, I'll walk you through how to import my completed detail drawing if you'd prefer to use my drawing instead. But as always, I encourage you to experiment and make something unique to you. With all these disclaimers out of the way, let's get to drawing. So first, we're going to go over here and head back to the layout workspace. We're going to be doing the bulk of our drawing over here in the left camera view port. This is because the details are largely dependent on what is actually visible from the camera's view. Not a whole lot of reason to draw cracks and lines on the backside of a column or a wall that isn't even visible from the camera. With that being said, let's extend the size of this left viewport to give ourselves more area to draw. To make this viewport larger, we're just going to hover over the border between these two viewports until our mouse turns into these horizontal arrows, and then we can just click and drag to pull it over and make this left side much larger. Don't want to entirely remove this side, though. Now that we've made the left viewport larger, let's change the right viewport into the image editor instead. This will allow us to quickly render the image in the right viewport, but allow us to continue drawing on the left viewport without having to constantly switch back and forth between the layout and the rendering workspace. So over here in this right viewport, click in your middle mouse button and then pan it all the way over to the right. That way we can see this tiny menu here on the left. We're going to click on this menu and then go over here and choose Image Editor. It's the second one from the top. That we've changed this right view port into the image editor, we can click on this small drop down here next to the new button. So we're going to click on this tiny menu, and then we'll choose Viewer node. Now that we've set it to the viewer node, we can just zoom out on this image and see the full render that we had before. Now all we need to do to update this render is simply go to render and Render Image or just hit F 12 to make the process a bit faster. So we can just click that. We'll see down here the render bars finishes, and then this image didn't really update at all because we haven't changed if we had done any drawing over here on the left, we would see those reflected over here. Now let's switch this left viewport to the rendered mode. So we can do that by clicking this far right button over here and remember to use your middle mouse button if you can't see it. So we'll switch to this so that we can see the better preview of this image. The reason we want to see the rendered version of the viewport here is because many of the details that we draw on our scene will be embellishments to the details already present in the material that we made earlier. So we might be drawing cracks or something or drip lines. Focus on these areas that we have on our texture. So if we can't see our texture, we don't really know where to place these details. Now we're ready to add our new grease pencil object so we can begin drawing. Before you add the new Grease pencil object, make sure that you have this grease pencil collection set to the active just by clicking on this little white folder here. Now we can hover our mouse over here in this left viewport, hit Shift and A, and then go down here to Grease Pencil, and then choose blank. Let's rename this object, so we can double click here, and then at the end, we're just going to put underscore details. So we know what it is, and it differentiates it from the other. With this new grease pencil object still selected, let's go over here to the left port, pan this toolbar over to the right, and then we're going to switch to the draw mode. Now we have a few settings to set up before we start drawing. So first, make sure you're using the correct brush, which is the ink pen rough brush found down here. Now we're going to switch the mode from three D cursor to surface instead. Next, we're going to use the toolbar here, pan this over, go to the advanced settings, twirl this open and choose view instead for the radius unit. And then, lastly, we'll change our radius for the pixels to two pixels and then hit enter. You'll notice that we switch to the surface mode for these details rather than the three D cursor mode that we used before. This is because we'll be switching surfaces really frequently while drawing these little extra details all over the place. And it would be really tedious to have to move the three D cursor and switch the drawing plane each time we moved around the image. With the more precise drawing of the wires, this was easy enough to do. However, you would be pretty annoyed having to do that over and over again across the entire scene every time you wanted to draw a new crack or a new drip. So in this case, we're just going to avoid it entirely and use the surface mode. Also decided to use the view radius units rather than the scene like before. This is mainly for two reasons. First off, it will just be a nice learning experience for you to use the other method while drawing. Both methods have their strengths, so it's a good idea to practice both of them to see what you like and don't like about each method. Secondly, while drawing these details, we'll be changing depth quite often while we draw. What I mean by this is we'll be drawing on objects that are really close to the camera and really far from the camera. Might be doing this rather quickly as we just jump around the image and add details wherever we feel like. The view based drawing method is based on the pixels rather than the real world size. So it's a bit more universal when changing drawing depths. We don't have to worry about how thick the line is here versus back here, as long as we're around the same Zoom depth. Okay, so let's start drawing. We're going to start out with something really simple. We're just going to draw some cracks on the walls. Let's zoom into the very top of this vertical pipe segment here. So we're going to zoom into this large block sitting on top of these pipes. While it's not immediately obvious what material this box is actually made of, we can assume it's probably some sort of concrete or maybe a metal. That means as this object ages, it's prone to cracking and chipping. So let's add details similar to that. So I'm simply going to zoom in a little bit here, not too close. And then here I can see there's a line break, so I know this is where the corners at, and I'm just going to start drawing a little sort of a lightning bolt shape. So we can just draw a couple cracks. And don't worry about these being perfect. I mean, they're basically perfectly imperfect. They are cracks on a wall. So don't worry about making perfectly straight lines. I'll really look better if you just kind of let yourself be a little loose while drawing. While drawing in the viewport, we unfortunately won't be able to see the linework placed on all the edges by the freestyle setting that we enabled in a previous lesson. To see these edges, however, we can just render the image quickly to see what it looks like on the right side. So I'm just going to hit F 12 on my keyboard or again, one last time, you could go over here to render and then render image instead. And now that our render has finished, we can zoom in down here and see what these cracks look like when combined here with the freestyle linework. Can see just how easy it is to add relatively complex effects such as these deep cracks just by drawing right onto the scene. Details like this would be kind of a pain to model in or to have to place the texture perfectly so that it lines up here on the edge. However, we can just draw right onto this image and add really detailed effects like this in a matter of seconds. If you had difficulty figuring out where this edge meets the corner here, we can enable something called the wire frame within the viewport. To do this, go over here to the top right. We're going to turn on this icon here that looks like two circles laying on top of each other. This will enable our viewport overlays. Twirl down the options for it by clicking this tiny arrow to the right, and then we can go down here to the bottom and check on this box next to the wireframe options. So we'll check this on, and now we can see the wireframe for this object. This will show us where every single edge is on this model. While it does make the view a little bit more cluttered on objects like this ladder here where it has a lot more edges to make this round curve. It does give you a subtle indication where this corner actually meets instead of just being at a relatively white face here that's difficult to parse out. If you were having difficulties before seeing where these edges meet, I would suggest you leave this setting on for now. Let's add a few more cracks along the edges and corners of this object before we discuss any other techniques. Feel free to follow along with what I'm drawing or just come up with your own different details. So in my case, maybe we extend this crack across this corner. We'll have it go down here, just kind of lightning bolt back and forth and then maybe branch off here. We can also have a crack start from the bottom corner here, so we can see this little black dot here from the texture. Maybe we can embellish that make this look like a chip that's started to crack. We can also focus on this corner here. So instead of having a nice sharp corner, we instead of make this look like it's been crushed. So that would be just drawing across these corners here, kind of choosing an area here that we've decided to crush and just break it up with a bunch of lines. You can extend it out further in one direction if you'd like. You can also have cracks emerge from this area. I mean, we have a crack here that's starting to snake off. And then maybe one last detail down here, we can have a corner here, have another little lightning bolt crack. Really just going around this thing and just adding details wherever we feel like. After you're satisfied with the details that you've added, go ahead and hit F 12 on your keyboard to render the image to see what it looks like over here on the right side. Now we can zoom out and see all these different details that we added. We can see that just by drawing some lightning bolt shapes around the edges of the model and scribbling some triangular doodles in the corners, we managed to add some pretty believable wear and tear to this model in no time. This was really easy to do. Basically, all we did was just kind of scribble along the edges, and you can really be kind of messy with it, especially along these edges here where it's going to blend in with the freestyle. So if I do that and then just hit F 12 again to see that even really simple and messy scribbles like that actually look pretty cool when we look at it on a fully rendered image. You really don't need to spend too much time making detailed drawings in these areas. Just adding some visual noise at key areas can really help imply broken metal or concrete. The details that we just added didn't rely on pre existing markings. We weren't embellishing already present details. We just added them there from scratch. Let's try another method of adding detail, which is simply accentuating details that are already there. For this example, we're going to zoom out here and we're going to focus on this marking here, this one that has kind of a triangular shape. You can also zoom out here on the right side. Zoom into that area as well. This area will be a good place to draw some streaking rust, as if some exposed rebar has been rusted by the moisture and is now staining the wall below. So as a really rough example, we can just zoom in here. And then we're going to find a spot where it looks like maybe rust would have streaked down. So at the end of this point in here, I'm just going to draw a sample line straight down. Just wiggle it a little bit to make it look like the rust has followed cracks in the walls, then we can add a little thickness to it. So any point here that points downward is a good spot to add a little streak. They can all be different lengths. You can kind of scribble around the edges to rough them up. It's really up to you what you do, but we just want to make this embellished a little bit more than it already is. One really important thing when drawing these dripping stains, though, is to consider the perspective of the image. These lines that we're drawing would primarily be pointing straight up and down, regardless of where they originate from this broken patch. Is because gravity would be pulling this water drip straight down. It's okay to have it go back and forth a little bit as it goes down, but you don't usually want to draw a line that goes like this, as that'll make it look like this drip is kind of defying gravity. So I'm going to control Z to undo that. Now let's quickly go through here and add just a little bit more detail, such as more drips and maybe even more cracks. So again, feel free to follow along with what I'm doing or do something of your own. Okay, so I've finished added some more drips, and I've also added things like a rough edge here at the top and just some general cracking here along the different parts of the concrete that are still attached to the overall hole here. With our details added, let's hit the F 12 key and then see what it looks like when it's rendered. Again, we'll notice that just a few scribbles along the edges and some well placed vertical lines can add a ton of detail to your render. If we zoom out a bit more, we can see what it looks like in conjunction with the other side. So you can see, as we do this across the bulk of this image here, choosing different places that we'd like to add detail, we can really add a ton of detail and character to this image and really make it look like it was more hand drawn than three D. Through both of these examples that we just did, we've been trying to at least replicate certain details like cracks on the corners or drips on the walls. For the next example, we're just going to start drawing vertical and horizontal lines on the walls that don't really mean anything in particular, but still add to the overall look of the image. Suppose if you wanted to assign some meaning to these lines, we could call them more panel lines that are just scattered across the walls. Before we start this next step, you might find it easier to enable stroke stabilization that we used while drawing on the wires. This will help you get the lines nice and straight, but it's also not mandatory if you have a steady hand. As a reminder, we can go over here to the stroke settings and then go down here and turn on stabilized stroke. Now on the left side, we're just going to zoom out so we can see more of the image. Before we draw any lines, there's really only one guideline to follow. You should try to follow the perspective of the image. Means that your vertical lines should be basically completely vertical or up and down. So if you're going to draw a line here, it should be basically up and down as much as you can. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect, but just do your best to make them vertical. And then the slightly more tricky one is that your horizontal lines need to follow the perspective of the image. So what that means is that the horizontal line here, in this case, should follow the horizontal lines that we have already in the texture. So we can see here there's a panel line going back in space. Here, we also have horizontal lines following this see that they're not all perfectly straight left and right. They start low and then move high. And then up here, they have the opposite effect where they start high and then move low. So you want to make sure that these lines follow those lines backwards in space. If you have your viewport overlays turned on like I do, we'll notice here that we have a grid that we can use somewhat as a guide for this. This helps us line up our perspective. So if I was drawing a horizontal line back in space here, I would want to follow something similar to this green line here. So I would start here and then just start drawing my horizontal line back in space. That way, it maintains the same perspective as the rest of the image. So let's Control Z that now we're ready to start drawing on some details. For this first example, let's zoom in down here again in this bottom right corner where we were working before. We're going to focus here on this area. The typical pattern that we'll be drawing to imply some extra details on the wall is sort of like an off center plus sign. It might look something like this. So we would draw a short vertical, and then we can choose either higher or lower on this, and we're just going to draw a horizontal line that's significantly longer maybe in this case. Something like that. The shape that we just drew here looks like the corners of a metal or concrete panel. But the slightly off center nature of the lines is less eye catching and less perfect than a simple plus sign would actually be. So if you just go around drawing actual plus signs like this, it might be a little bit more obvious as this is just a more recognizable shape. So we want to make them a little bit more off center and a little less perfect. Goal is to add more detail to the walls in these large empty spots without drawing attention directly to the drawings that we added. We want them to blend in with all the other various lines in the image and simply add to the greater whole of the image. Also, the more these plus signs and other markings that we add, the less any single drawing stands out. After you've drawn your simple plus sign like this, you might want to also embellish it with further details. We can do this just by zooming in, and maybe I'll draw a small line here. Have it go over, just adding more cracks and different panels to this. For the detailing portions of this, you might find it a little bit easier to remove the stabilized stroke while you're doing it. I'm going to turn that off so my mouse is a little bit more responsive. Then we can add a line over there on the edge. And really just go up and down this line and just help blend it into the rest of the scene. One important note is when you're drawing these drips, try not to draw two of them to the exact same length right next to each other. You want to have them a little bit shorter and a little bit longer when they're close together, and that's it. The small detail that we added is done. You can see as we zoom back here, this little symbol that we drew here really doesn't stand out from anything else in the scene. It just looks more of the same details. And the more we add of these, the less any one particular one will stand out. Instead of drawing more complex shapes like this, we could instead just draw parallel lines that are either vertical or horizontal. So for this example, we can zoom in down here. Find an area that's relatively empty, and I'm just going to draw two vertical lines, and I'm going to have them offset a little bit. So they're relatively parallel, but they're not the exact same length directly next to each other. We could also do this same process maybe down here with horizontal lines. I'll draw a horizontal line here, and then again, I'll overlap them a little bit and draw this one a little bit past it. As with the plus sign that we just drew, these lines just help fill in the open space of our walls and imply further panel lines and breaks. There's really no limit to the amount or combination of these lines that you can add across the walls or objects. Well notice the reference image we base this render off of is absolutely covered in seemingly random vertical and horizontal lines. Your only guiding principle should be to maintain the perspective of the image and try to offset the lines slightly to make them less perfect. Other than that, you're free to go wild. As one final example of this method, we can combine a few of these other techniques to make one new shape. So maybe we'll zoom out here. Find somewhere lower on this wall, maybe somewhere down here. Con draw some horizontal lines. Remember, following the perspective of this image, this horizontal line is going to be a lot more slanted. So maybe we'll do this, Ctraw a second one, kind of parallel to it. Next, we can have a vertical line, bridge the gap between these, and then maybe one more vertical down here. And then we can just add some more details. So we can add some more drips and cracks and really whatever we'd like. Just remember to try to maintain the perspective while you're adding these details. You can also add cracks between these corners as well to make it look like we have broken edges on these panels as they meet. Really, it's up to you. As long as these drawings are placed in dense areas or you work them into existing details, you can draw some decently complex shapes without drawing unwanted detail to any particular area. In the next lesson, we'll use grease pencil to add some new details to our render. I'll see you there. 12. Adding Grease Pencil Details (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll use Grease pencil to add new details to our render. Let's begin. That we know the types of details that we can add to our render, let's quickly zoom around the image and give some simple examples of how I might detail the image. When adding details, you'll typically get the best results for your efforts if you focus the most detailed drawings on the areas that are the closest to the camera. You can then save the more simple details such as the plus sign method for areas that are further from the camera and are a little bit more obscured. This method will allow you to add the most implied detail to your image with the most efficient use of your time. An area close to the camera that's worthy of detailing are these floating stairs here on the right side. Let's add a few details to these stairs now. So I'm just going to zoom in down these floating stairs might be a nice place to add more cracks and crumbling corners. This will further add to the aged and decrepit nature of the world by making these already unsafe stairs feel even more precarious. So let's quickly go through here and add some more details. Okay, so I've added some more details to these steps. So over here on the right side, I'm just going to hit F 12 to render the image and see what the details that we've added look like. So let's zoom over here to the steps. If you're following along roughly with what I did, in general, I was just replicating the symbol details that we've added other places. So I have this kind of crumbly corner. I have lines here that, in this case, go around the corner, but in general, they're very similar to the plus signs. I've also added some cracks here. On some of the steps, I've added details that look like a crack that has split this corner here. So there's a deep gouge here in this corner. I've also added a crack that goes up the wall from the step to make it look like it's putting strain on the wall. And then further down here, I just did simple lines that cover the corners here and also more crumbly edges. So even with these really simple doodles, if we look over here on the right side, they all kind of work together in gel to make a much more detailed result than we would expect. These steps now really look like they're kind of crumbling and falling off the wall in some cases. It's really easy to add details like this when you simply just have to click and draw right onto your model. One word of advice, though, when you're drawing is that we'll remember from our lesson going over the basics of grease pencil that we need to be careful with drawing over the edges while using the surface mode. So you wouldn't want to draw lines, say on this step here, that go down past the edge of the step. While it looks correct here, if we rotated our camera, this line here that goes off the edge is actually going to snap backwards and stretch to meet the wall beyond. Be careful when drawing details like this. You want to make sure that any detail that you draw remains within the step that you're drawing it on. It's okay to go around corners like I did over here, but make sure that you don't extend off the edge of a step where you know that it's basically just open air behind it. With these steps detailed, now let's go over here to the left and add some details to this bridge. Bridge is likely made of some sort of metal, so let's add some details to help reinforce that. Adding details like the edges of metal beams or the separations between supports can really make it feel more like metal. You can also add things like rivets to make it feel like it's multiple pieces of metal that have been riveted together. Now let's go through here and add some more detail. As always, feel free to follow along with what I'm doing or just come up with your own details. Okay, so I have my details added to the side of this bridge. So I'm just going to hit F 12 to render them, and then let's zoom over here onto the render. So let's discuss some of the details that I added. So in general, I went through on this bridge and added breaks between some of the more obvious parts that look like they might have been a separate piece of metal. So I separated off this front side here. I added a cross line here to separate this beam so that it looks like a different piece of metal. Left this one down here unbroken, but then I added a line here so that it's attached to this larger block. And then in some areas like down here, I added a long line that goes along the side to make this look more like an eye beam. This is also an area where I added a bunch of those rivets that I talked about earlier. And then, in general, I just kind of went through and added different cracks along the edges where these pieces of metal meet, similar to this. I added some cuts and drip lines along the side of this one. Over here on this piece of metal, I added some horizontal lines as well as vertical lines here to make this look more like a structural piece, and then I just went through and embellished some of the details that were already there. I continued this scribble line down the side, and then I went through the top here and just added some parallel lines. Like all the previous examples, just a little bit of scribbling and doodling along the edges can really imply a lot of different details. You don't really need to put a whole ton of thought into where these lines go, some simple decisions like making this horizontal line carry across, or deciding to keep this one slightly diagonal to make this piece of metal, really the bulk of the decisions that you need to make. After that, you can kind of just start adding cracks and drips and rivets wherever you like on the side of this metal thing. And when you zoom out, it's going to look pretty cool regardless of what you did. Everything we draw is just to break up the surfaces and imply further detail, even if it's just nonspecific scribbles. At this point, we're going to stop going through in depth examples like the stairs, the walls, and this bridge. But before we end this lesson, let's quickly go through all the areas that I would consider placing extra details. The first place that you might consider would be the sides of these columns as well as the front. You can just go through here and just like last time, we're just going to add some non specific scribbles, some different cracks, and really just do whatever you'd like. You can also add details to these pipes here in the background. Or even along the side of this bridge here. So maybe we extend some of these broken pipes and add cracks here to make them look like they're not just kind of cut off cleanly. We want these edges to be a little bit more rough, so maybe we can make some jagged lines here. On this side, you can find some of these lines that already exist and just further embellish them to make it look like there's more drips and stuff coming from these maybe cracks in the pipes or just openings in them where it's rusted through. Other areas that you could add details would be the walls. So that could be literally any of these walls, but in this case, maybe we add some to this slanted wall here above. So we're going to add some drips here. And in the case of this specific wall, for these drip lines, you would actually want to follow the curvature of the wall. So these drips would actually run this direction. So they're going to run the length of the wall. Because this wall is slanted, which means the drips would have to flow down diagonally until they reach the end, and then they would fall down this direction. So that's something to consider is the geometry of the wall that you're drawing these drips on does make somewhat of a difference. In general, almost all of these walls here are flat, but in the case up here of this slanted wall, you do have to take that into consideration. Then the last example I have for you, would be this area in the back here. We have this bridge, as well as this huge archway in the back. So for the bridge, we can add cracks coming from the corners, just like usual. Or we can add long bands on this. So we can start drawing a line here and just follow the curvature all the way down to imply some sort of extra architectural detail on this bridge. Maybe the top of this bridge is a different material than the bottom. So maybe the bottom is, like, a big metal piece, and then the top is concrete. So these are the kind of things that you can think about you might be able to draw details that make the material look like it's made of one thing versus the other. So if we went through here and just started adding rivets to the bottom of this, this might make this look a lot more like metal rather than concrete. And then for the archway in the back, this area is really far back there. In general, you're not going to add too many specific details back here, but this would be a good place for the plus sign method that we discussed earlier. Or just doing the horizontal or vertical parallel lines. This is just something here to break up this large space. These are by no means the only areas that you could add details to. Honestly, the possibilities are truly endless. You could really go wild and detail every single inch of this image if you had the time and the desire to. Before we bring this lesson to an end, let's quickly walk you through how to import my personal detail drawing if you'd prefer to use that for the rest of the class. If not, please by all means, continue using your own unique drawing. So our first step here is going to be to exit drawing mode. We can do that over here by clicking this drop down and going back to object mode. And then just like last time, we're going to go over here to file. Append, navigate to the project assets that we downloaded at the very beginning of this class, then select the Grease Pencil details Append blender file. With it selected, go down here and click Append, then go to Object and double click on that. And then we're going to select GP underscore details and hit Append. Just like last time, this is going to import my exact drawing into your scene. And then we're going to want to hide the one that we were just drawing during this lesson. So we would go over here to G Pencil Underscore Details, click on this eyeball, and also click on the camera icon. And now, if we select this GP underscore details object, you can zoom in here to the image and see all the different places that I added drawings if you wanted to use it as a basis for your own, just as inspiration. If you just like to use my drawing for the rest of the lesson. A option you choose is perfectly fine, and that's it. You can either spend some time finishing your own drawings or you can proceed to the next lesson with me and use these appended details for your render. While we're done using Grease Pencil for this class, don't hesitate to draw any details you want into your own world. The best thing about Grease pencil is how easy it is to make the scene incredibly detailed and unique. In the next lesson, we'll start the compositing process for our render. I'll see you there. 13. Adding Compositing Overlays (Part 1): In this lesson, we'll start the compositing process for our render. Let's begin. Our worlds have been fully detailed. However, they are still very smooth and still resemble a three D render in some places. There's nothing wrong with this, and the render still looks pretty good. But we're after a very specific look that we haven't quite arrived at yet. Our goal is to make our render look as if it's a scan from a paper manga book. We want to have visible imperfections that a printed page from a book would create, such as print lines, paper fibers, and patchy darkness from the ink. Be adding all of these effects and more in the compositing workspace. So let's head there now. You can find the compositing workspace up here directly next to the rendering, so we're going to choose compositing. I've already customized a layout of this workspace for us to make our lives a little bit easier. On the left side, we have an editor, and on the right side, we have a window for our rendered image. Before we begin working in the editor, let's render our image so we can see it on the right side. So we just go over here to render and then render image. You should now see your completed render here in the right view port. If for some reason you're unable to see your render over here on the right side, we can go over here to the left window, and we're going to click on this backdrop button, and then we're going to turn it off again. After doing that, hopefully everything here updates, and you should be able to see your render. So what is compositing? Compositing is the process of adding additional effects on top of our rendered image. This can include simple things like adjusting the contrast or the saturation of an image, but it can also include slightly more complex things like overlaying texture images such as paper fibers or lines on top of the image to change its look. It can also be algorithmic effects like adding lens flares, distortion or painterly effects on the image. There are a ton of different things that you can do with compositing. If you're familiar with post processing images and applications like Photoshop, you'll likely understand the theory behind a lot of what we do here, even if you're not familiar with the process within blender. We'll be adding all of these effects to our image over here on the left side. This editor might look really similar to the shading workspace that we created our material with, and that's because it is. The method of using this editor is basically identical to the shader editor, so it should feel really familiar as we work. This left node over here is our rendered image, and these we two nodes are just outputs so we can see exactly what we're working on over here on the right. All of the effects that we'll be adding will exist in the middle between these two groupings of nodes. Start out by adding a really simple effect that's going to soften our line work slightly. To add this new node, we're going to hit Shift and A, go to search, and we're going to look for a dilates erode node. So D, ILA, we're going to choose dilate erode. And then we can just place this brand new node directly on top of this line here when it turns white. This node hasn't done much to our image yet, and that's because we need to adjust the settings to fit our render. Let's zoom into this new node now. Our goal with this dilate Rod node is to soften the linework in our image. We want to make it look like the ink from our linework has bled into the paper a little bit and soften the edges. This might seem unintuitive, but a large part of our compositing efforts here will be actually making the image more imperfect, meaning that we want to break up the hard edges and perfect gradients present in the image right now to give it a more hand drawn and less computer generated look. This is the key to the manga effect that we're after. Before we make any adjustments to this node, let's find a spot on our image that's a good place to look for the effect. So again, let's zoom in down here to the bottom right on this pipe area with the ladder. We can begin adjusting these settings. So our first step here is going to be switching it from mode steps to feather instead, and then we're going to change the distance from zero. We're going to set it instead to two just by clicking this arrow here to the right twice. And we'll see after making these adjustments that these lines here have a slight blur to them. If we lower this distance number, we'll see that this blur is a lot less. However, we're actually looking for this amount of blur, so we want to set it to two. Discuss these settings quickly. So first, there are a few different modes that we could choose. However, we use the feather mode as it creates nice soft edges for the linework. The distance value simply changes the strength of the softening effect. Higher numbers mean softer images. We still want to have distinct lines just a bit softer, so a value of two works nicely for this purpose. We can now see over here in this right view port how this node has softened our image slightly. Has the effect of not only giving the lines a slight bleed, but it also helps make our hand drawn details blend in better with the freestyle linework that we have along the edges. By running the entire image through this dilate slash Rode effect, we've made everything just a bit more harmonious and blended together. It's a lot harder now to tell what parts are from the material, what parts we hand drew, and what parts are from the freestyle linework. Okay, so that effect was pretty easy. Let's add something a little bit more complicated now. Going to be overlaying three different images over our render to make it feel more papery and aged. Let's start with the first of these images now. On the left side over here, we're going to zoom out so we can see more of the nodes. And we're going to be adding five brand new nodes for this effect, and we're going to be adding them from left to right. So the first one that we add, we're going to place over here, and then every new one we add, we'll just start placing further right. So let's hit Shift and A, go to search, and then type in image IMA, and then choose Image. Place that here to the left. Shift and A, search, type in color. We're going to choose color ramp. Found here on the third option. Place that next to it. Shift and A. Search. This time we're looking for translate. So TRAN, and then we can see translate here as the second option. Next, we went transform. So shift and A, search, transform, TRAN. We're going to choose the first option here, transform. And then, lastly, shift and A, search, type in mix MIX we're going to choose mix color and place that here. Let's get these nodes put into place and then connected. So first, we can zoom out a little bit. We're going to drag select over all of these nodes here, move them a bit further to the left right around here should be fine. Now let's start connecting them together. So we're going to drag this mixed node up here and place it on top of this line so it automatically connects. Then we can drag from image here on transform to the bottom socket here on the mixed node. And then we're just going to be connecting from image to image on all of these. So image from translate to transform, from color ramp down to the translate, and then lastly, from image to the factor down here at the bottom. Okay? So we have everything connected now. Render on the right side has turned black because we didn't add the correct texture image just yet. So first, let's go over here to the image node here on the far left. We're going to click on this little white button here that looks like a folder. If we make this a little bit bigger, we can see here that it says open. So let's click on this open button. Now navigate to the Textures folder that we downloaded at the very beginning of this class. Next, you're going to choose the paper underscored fibers image. On here and click Open Image. Our next change will be to the mixed color node. So we're going to zoom out here and then go over here to the right side and we're going to adjust this mixed color. So first, we're going to switch it from mix to multiply, and then we're going to leave this factor set to one. As a quick reminder, the multiply mode that we switch to overlays just the black parts of the image when the render blow it. And now on the right side here, we can see that this paper image that we had before is now placed on top of our image. So we can see all these paper fibers laid directly on top of our render. And with just that single step, it's already looking a lot more like a manga page. We do have some other changes to make, though, so let's start those now. So over here on the left, we're going to zoom out. Go down to the bottom and go to the color ramp. And now with the black slider selected, also set to zero down here, we're going to change its position to 0.175, hit Enter. And now let's select the right slider by either clicking the small triangle here or just setting this slider to one, and then we're going to change the position for this to 0.4, five, and then hit Enter. The adjustments that we just made to this gradient knock out a lot of the gray values from the paper fibers, while still leaving behind the most prominent fibers on the image. So we can still see that texture applied. It's time to shrink down this texture image so that the paper fibers aren't quite so huge. We're going to be doing this with the translate and transform nodes found here. Our first step is going to be using the translate node to make this image tile in all directions. That way, it doesn't stop when it meets the edges of the frame, and then we're going to use the transform to shrink these paper fibers down. That way, they're a better size for this image because right now they're a little bit big. So let's start that first change now. We're going to go over here to the translate node, the one on the left. We're going to switch from repeat none to both axes instead. We're not going to notice any changes to our image just yet, and that's because we haven't shrunk however, in reality, this paper fiber image that's being applied on top of our image now repeats in all directions, both up, left and right and down. Now let's move over to the transform node directly to the right, all we're going to do here is change this scale. So for the scale value, we're just going to type in 0.3 and then hit Enter. This will shrink this paper fiber image down to just 30% of its original size. We zoom in on our image, this paper fiber is much tinier and it's a better size for our image. This provides the image with a somewhat subtle, staticky appearance across the image that has just enough variety to make it look like fibers and not just digital noise. Just as a quick example to see what this translate node is doing, if we go back over here and switch it from both axes to none instead, now see that this paper fiber image only sits directly in the center of the image because we haven't told it to tile in all different directions and repeat. So if we switched it, in this case, say to just Y, it would only repeat up and down, or if we did X, it would only go left and right. But for us, we wanted to have it set to both axes. That way, it covers the entire image. Let's add one more image overlay before we end this lesson. This new overlay will largely be the same as the one we just added. However, it'll feature a few more nodes. So let's add those now. So first, let's zoom out. We can see the whole system here. Then we're going to drag select over these right three nodes. So including this dilate and one, we're going to move those over to the right. And now down here along the bottom, we're going to add brand new nodes again from left to right. So let's add those now. Shift and A, search Image I A, choose image, place that down here to the left, shift and A, color ramp. Place that down here, shift and A, search. This is one of the new ones, so we'll type in Rotate ROT then we can choose Rotate. Place that next to the color ramp, shift and A, search, mix color. Place that here. Shift and a search translate. Place that here. Shift and A, search transform. We'll choose transform this time. Place that to the right. And then one last node. Shift and A, search, mix. We're going to choose mix color and place that here to the right. With our new nodes added, let's get them in position, and then we can connect them together. So first, we're just going to select all these nodes on the bottom here and move them to the left, and then we can take this mix node. And we're going to start by just dragging this up here on top of this line, so it automatically connects it. Now, let's zoom in down here to the bottom. And again, we can reposition these nodes just to get them a little bit tighter here, and then we can connect them here from left to right. So let's zoom in. We're going to connect from image to factor. And then this one here is a little bit tricky. So first, let's move these down. So we're going to select the image and the color ramp, drag select over those, move them down slightly. And now we're going to connect from the image socket on this color ramp up here to rotate. Then we'll connect from the image socket on the rotate. To the top socket here for the image. And then, again, we're going to go down here to the color ramp, and we're going to go from this image socket to the bottom image socket on this mix node. So we're actually having two versions of this color ramp going to this mix node, one of which is being affected by this rotate. I'll explain this here in just a minute. For now let's keep moving right. We're going to connect from the image socket here to the image on the translate and then again, from image on translate to the image on transform. Spread these out a little bit to make some room. Then the very last step is to attach from the image socket on transform to the bottom socket here for image on this last mix. Like last time, this is going to turn black because we haven't attached this image yet. So let's get our image attached now so we can go over here to this image node. We're going to click on this right button with the white folder on it, click Open, then navigate back to the Textures folder that we had the other textures in, and we're going to choose paper underscore lines for this one. We'll select this image and then hit Open Image. And now, just like last time, we can now see this entire image shown here in the render window on the right side. Image that we're using for this overlay almost looks a little bit like cardboard, but the main thing that we're concerned with is that one, it's paper, and two, it has these horizontal lines going across it. These are going to mimic something like a textured paper or maybe even print lines from the printer. Now let's start adjusting these nodes. So first, we're going to zoom out. We're going to go all the way over here to the right, and we're going to adjust this mix node. Let's zoom in on here. Just like last time, we're going to switch it from mix to multiply instead, and then we're going to leave the factor set to one. Now we're able to see our render behind this image. Now, let's zoom out. Go down here to the bottom again, and we're going to adjust this color ramp. So with the black slider still selected, and it's set to zero here so we know it's selecting the black. We can go to the position, and we're going to set this to 0.1, hit Enter. Now we can select the right slider, the one on the right, and we're going to set this position to 0.3 and then hit Enter. Just like the last time we adjusted a color ramp, we've removed a lot of the gray from the image and left behind just the major details. In this case, these horizontal lines. Now let's zoom out. Then just for a moment, we're going to skip this rotate node and go instead to this mixed node. We need to adjust this mix node so that we can actually see what the rotate is doing. First, we're going to select this mixed mode and switch it to multiply, and then again, we'll just leave it set to factor one. Now we're ready to adjust this rotate here on the left. We'll notice before we make any changes here that these lines currently only go horizontal. We don't see any vertical lines really, at least not from the paper texture. However, if we go over here and switch this degree to 90 instead, we'll now see that we have vertical and horizontal lines. We're getting a criss cross pattern here, almost like a waffle. Setting the rotation on this rotate node, we've rotated the second version of this image that they cross over each other. This is the reason that we branch this. So we have one version of the regular image that's going directly into this mixed node, and then we have that exact same image rotated by 90 degrees overlaying on top of the other one, which is what's giving us this crisscross pattern. Just like with the last image, we can go over here, and now we need to adjust the repeat. So right now, it's set the nun. We're going to set it to both axes, and then for the scale, we'll go down here and we're going to type in 0.21 and then hit enter. We want this pattern a little bit tinier than the paper fiber. Smaller scale retains that same crisscross grid pattern that we saw before, but makes it a lot more subtle because it's so much smaller. I particularly like how much detail it adds to these large open areas of the wall that used to just be primarily white. This really gives this area here almost a concrete feeling now. And at this point, we're done with the first two image overlays, as well as this lesson. Hopefully, by now, you're starting to appreciate how just a few simple overlays can really transform the image into something special. In the next lesson, we'll finish the compositing process for our render. I'll see you there. Uh 14. Adding Compositing Overlays (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll finish the compositing process for our render. Let's begin. We set a good foundation for our compositing in the last lesson. We still have a few more effects to add before we move on. So let's get started. First, make sure you're in the compositing workspace found here at the top. Now we can hit F 12 on our keyboard or go over here and go to render Render Image. I want to have your rendered image displayed over here on the right side if it's not already. Alright, so we have a few easier effects to add to our image and then one complicated one. Let's start with the easier effect as a warm up and then move to the more complicated effect. Let's start by adding a new image overlay. Our first step is to select these three nodes here on the right side. We're going to zoom out a bit, and then we're just going to move them over here to the right to make some room. Now we can add our new nodes. So we'll hit Shift and A. Go to search. We'll type in Image, choose Image, and then one more shift and A. Search. We'll type in mix MIX, and choose mix color and place that here over on the left. We can get our new nodes connected. So we can zoom into these new ones we just added. We're going to drag this mixed node that we added on top of this yellow line here. And then lastly, we can plug in this image socket to the bottom image socket here on this mix node. As with all of these image overlays, we're going to have to load our image so that it's not black over here. So we can just zoom in here and then select this little white folder icon. Now navigate to the folder that we've had all these other textures in, and we're going to choose Grunge one here at the very top. With it selected, we can just click Open Image. With our image loaded, we can now see what this grunge is going to do for us. It's going to add this splotchy darkness and lightness across the entire image and give it kind of an aged and stained If you ever worked with charcoal on paper, this is also a similar effect you might see on the edges of your frame. This would just be caused by your fingerprints and things like that. So we're trying to replicate that kind of hand drawn feeling. I like to move over here to our mixed mode that we added, and we're going to switch from mix mode to overlay instead, which is down here at the bottom. And then we're going to change the factor from one down to 0.75. And then head en. You'll notice that we didn't use the multiply mode this time, and that's because we not only want to overlay the dark parts of the image, but also the light parts. The overlay mode allows us to do that. That means we're getting the dark areas from the grunge map on the tops and bottoms, but we're also getting some slight lightning here in the middle from the overlay as well. We also lowered the factor to just 0.75 because we want to diminish the effect slightly, and that's it for that effect. So now we can move on to the next one. We'll be adjusting the contrast of the image using a node called RGB curves. So first, let's add that new node. We can zoom out here. And then we're just going to delete this gap here as it is. We'll shift and A, search, then type in RGB and choose RGB curves. Now we can just drag this up here on this line. We're going to place it off here to the left side and then drop it here so it automatically connects it. Now let's zoom in on this new node. I mentioned earlier, we're going to be using this new RGB curves node to adjust the contrast of our image to make the brights brighter and the darks darker. We'll accomplish this by changing the shape of this diagonal line here in the middle of the grid. The bottom left of this grid represents the darkest pixels in our image and the top right represents the brightest pixels in our image. To make each of these areas a little bit more intense, we're going to create what's known as an S curve. It's called this because when we're done, the line will look somewhat like the letter S. Let's start by adding two new points on this diagonal line. You can do this simply by clicking on this line. So we're just going to click on the line here and here. Don't worry about exactly where these points are. Just place them roughly here and here. We're going to be moving them in a second. Start with the lower point that we just added. As an example of what this dot is doing, let's just click and drag this dot to a new location and then let go and let the image on the right side update. We can see here by moving this dot, we've significantly changed the brightness of our image, specifically the darker tones. And that's because this dot here is on the lower half of this grid. These lower areas in the bottom left of this grid are what control the dark spots in our image. If we grab this dot and move it higher, we'll see that this should get brighter, and then if we grab it and move it much lower, we should see that it gets darker. A lot of control over the image just by moving this dot around and changing which parts of the dark areas are getting brightened or darkened. So with this bottom left dot still selected, we can tell it's selected because it's highlighted here, we're going to be changing these two numbers. So this first number here controls the position. We're going to type in 0.1, seven, five, and then hit Enter. And then don't worry if it only says 0.1 here, it's just shortening the value. It does still know the exact value we typed in. And then for the Y location, the second number here on the right, we're going to click this and then type in 0.15 and then again, hit Enter. Small adjustment to this dot has just made the darker areas of our image a little bit darker. Now let's do a similar process over here for this top right dot, changing the brightness of our image. So again, if we move this around, we can see our image over here, we'll update with the brighter values. Because there's not a whole lot of bright values in our image, we won't notice as much of a change here. Our image is predominantly dark. So this one is a little bit less sensitive than the bottom left slider. Let's get this in place. So first, make sure you have it selected so that it's highlighted here in white. And then the first number for the X, we're going to change that to 0.7, and then the second value, we're going to hit here and then type in 0.8. As I mentioned, this change is a little bit more subtle because of the lack of bright areas in our image, but it still did brighten some areas. With the contrast for the image dialed in, we have one more image overlay to add before we move on to the more complicated effect I mentioned earlier. Are going to need to make a little bit more room, though. So let's zoom out here on the left. We're going to drag over here, and then this time, we're just going to grab this dilate node, so this purple one here, and we're going to move it left to make room here between these two. So just move this over to the left and then make sure you have a gap between this purple node and then these two red ones on the right. Then this time, rather than creating anything new, we're actually just going to be copying some old work. So we're going to zoom out, and now we're looking for the paper fibers image. So we'll need this node here, the paper fibers. We can just select on that and then we're going to hold Shift and select this multiply node here. So now we have both of these selected, we can zoom out, hit Shift and D for duplicate that'll make copies of each of these nodes. Then we can just click to place them over here and then we'll move them together. So we just pull these together that way they're a bit closer. With our nodes copied, let's get them connected. So we're going to place the paper fibers over here to the left, drag this multiply node here on top of this line and then plug the image socket on paper fibers into the bottom of the multiply node. Now you can space them out so that nothing's overlapping. The only thing that we need to adjust is the mixed color node, as the paper fiber, image is already loaded for us. So let's zoom in here and we're going to switch it from the multiply mode to screen instead found here. Then one last change, we're going to switch the factor down to 0.015 and then enter. You'll notice this time, we use the screen mode, which is essentially the opposite of the multiply mode that we've used a few times. The screen mode only overlays the white parts of the image on top of the underlying render. We've also dramatically lowered the factor value to make sure that it's really subtle. If we zoom in down here into this dark spot of our image, we can now see that we have this paper fibers texture overlaid across the entire image. Really only want a tiny bit of this brightening across the image, though, because we don't want to lose our shadows entirely. And just by example, if I increase this factor to something larger, we'll notice that the shadows almost entirely disappear, and we don't want that for the image, so we're going to keep this pretty low. It's at 0.015. And now if we zoom in, we just get a little bit of kind of softening of the contrast just for these shadow areas. This final image overlay is actually a pretty important step. As you'll remember, our goal is to replicate the look of an image on an actual piece of paper. It's pretty difficult to get such a deep and pure black when printing on paper. So limiting it to a really dark gray is actually a little bit more realistic for this effect. So by overloying this light image on top of the black shadows, we're bringing them up slightly and making them more of a dark gray, which is more realistic for printed paper. It's also introducing just a little bit more visual texture to the image. We can see all these little paper fibers here on the image. Is just a nice effect. Alright. The time has come to add this complicated effect that I keep hyping up. However, there's a little secret. You've already done this effect once before while creating the object material. We want to utilize the normal channel to isolate the top surfaces of objects in our scene. Then we'll be removing many of these image overlays that we added from just those areas. This will help restore brightness to those areas and really help the contrast and readability of the image. Many of the overlays that we added darken the image, which also darken the highlights. This step will help us restore their brightness without affecting the mid tones or the dark areas that look pretty cool right now. Unfortunately, Blender doesn't let us copy the nodes that we used in our material over to the compositing workspace as they are technically different. But it shouldn't take too long to set them up again. Our first step is to make room for them here on the left side. So let's zoom out. We're going to be going all the way over here to the left. We're going to select our actual render here and pull it over here just to make a bunch of room here for the new nodes. Now let's add the nodes that we'll need. We're going to be placing them up here above this line from left to right. So we'll hit Shift and A, search, type in SEP. We're going to choose separate color. Place that here to the left. Shift and A, search HUE. We're going to choose saturation value, shift and a search, type in INV for invert color. Shift and a search color ramp. Place that here, and then one more shift and a, search MIX mix color. Out here. Now we can connect all these nodes together. So let's go from left to right. So first, we'll zoom in over here on the left, and feel free to space these nodes out as you move just to make everything a little bit less crammed. So we'll drag from here the normal socket on the rendered image and place it into the image for the separate color. Then we can go from blue to the image socket when the hue saturation value. Now we'll go from image here down to the invert color. Now we can zoom out a bit, and then we're going to plug the invert color into the factor on the bottom of the color ramp. Then this right here is where it gets a tiny bit tricky. So first let's zoom out a little bit. And now we're going to grab this mixed color node here that starts out with the paper lines. So if you follow your paper lines image here, it should be on the bottom. We're going to go on to go all the way over here to the mixed color that connects it to the main line. We're going to pull this up slightly, we need to get to a specific socket here that's sort of hidden behind it. Now, from our color ramp up here on the top, we're going to connect from this image socket all the way down here onto the factor socket here for the one that we just moved for this mixed node. Then we're going to drag again from the same image socket on the color ramp. The top socket here on this mix node that we just added. And then we're going to plug from the image socket here onto the factor socket for this mixed color node just before the one that we moved. Alright, so we have everything connected. Let's just quickly discuss what we did. We started this whole chain here by going from the normal socket to the separate color. This normal socket is what produces that red, blue, green, and black image that we saw way back when we made the material for the object. How we're isolating just the top surfaces of these objects. We remember that they're blue, which is where the separate color comes in. So we're choosing to only choose the blue color and then put that into the hue saturation value. The other odd thing that we noticed was how we connected this color ramp to a few different locations. This color ramp here was branched off into two different nodes, one of which has this extra mixed color node that we had. Need this color ramp to power two different settings, but they each require a slightly different approach, so we added this extra mixed color node here to help with that. Lastly, we plug this color ramp node into the factor slider for two different mix nodes, each of which are responsible for the paper fibers as well as the paper lines texture. This means that this color ramp is now being used as a mask for these overlay images rather than the simple opacity slider that we had before, which is just the factor set to one. This is how we're going to eliminate the overlay textures from only certain parts of the image while leaving the other parts untouched. Okay, so now that we know a little bit about how these nodes are connected and the logic behind the orientation, let's adjust the settings on each node to finish the effect. We'll go left to right. We'll start over here, and here we have separate color. As usual, we don't really have anything to change here, other than noting that we're using the blue channel. Next, we have the hue saturation in value. This time we're going to drag the saturation down to zero. Just like last time, we're turning the blue color that we're outputting here down to a medium gray by getting rid of all the color from the image. We have the invert color. Again, no changes here. It's just useful to note that this is flipping the color of the image. Now our image is mostly white with areas that are marked out in a dark gray. Now we can adjust the color ramp found here. The only change we need to make is to select this black slider here on the left side, and then for the position, we're going to set that to 0.7 and then head enter. We're doing here is significantly increasing the amount of black in the image to help narrow down the areas that we want to remove from the overlay textures. For this effect, the more black in the mask we're creating, the more areas that the overlay texture will be removed from. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of masking, it's essentially using a black and white image to control the visibility of an effect or an image. In our case, the black parts of the image tell blender to remove the effect from this area, while the white parts of the image tell blender to keep the effect in these areas. Shades of gray are also viewed at their respective brightness values. For example, a 50% gray mask would limit the effect to 50% of its typical strength. Now let's zoom out and move on to this lower mix node that we added. This is the one that exists between the color ramp and this multiply node here, this mixed color that controls the paper fibers. So we're going to zoom in here to adjust this. This mixed node is here to adjust how the mask is affecting the removal of the paper fibers overlay image. To this point, the paper fibers have been a pretty strong presence in our image. We're going to take this opportunity to lessen their impact now that we have so many other overlapping effects. We're also removing them entirely from the top surfaces. So first, we're going to go over here to mix and switch it to the multiply effect, and then we're going to change this color found here on the bottom. So we can just click on this color bar, and then we're going to change the value to 0.5, making it a 50% gray. And we'll notice as we change this value here that the amount of overlay across the entire image changes as well. Higher numbers mean more paper fibers across the rest of the image, and lower numbers mean less paper fibers across the entire image. Going to leave our set to the middle at 0.5. We will notice, however, that as we zoom in here onto the top surface of, say, this bridge, it doesn't matter what color we make this. It doesn't add any more paper fibers to the top surfaces because we're removing them entirely from those areas. So anywhere that's the top of a model is being removed entirely, this slider here only affects the areas around those. So again, we'll just leave this set to 0.5. And that's it. That was our final compositing effect for our final image. We can zoom out here on the left to see all the different notes that we use to create this effect. By selectively removing the overlay images from the top faces of objects, we've injected a lot more contrast and brightness back into our image without removing all of the character that the overlays added. At this point, we've reached the final look for our image by using various techniques and overlay images to make our render really look like it's printed on some rough paper. As a quick example, this is what our render looked like before we started this process. So I can just drag from here this image socket and plug it over here into the reroute, and we'll see just how much our image has changed over just these last two lessons. Under doesn't look bad by any means, but I think it definitely looks better when we connect all the effects together and get all the different overlays on top of each other. You can really see just how much age and character we were able to add to our image with just a little extra effort in the compositing workspace. We're getting pretty close to the end of our class, but we're not quite done yet. And the next lesson, we'll animate the movement of our camera. I'll see you there. 15. Animating the Camera: And this lesson we'll animate the movement of our camera. Let's begin. It's time to put a little motion in our world to bring it to life. This will be a relatively simple lesson, so let's jump right in. First, make sure that you're in the layout workspace found here at the top left. We can set our viewport layout back to how it was when we started the class. So first, we're going to make this left viewport a bit smaller by grabbing this border between the two and simply dragging it to the left. Now we can set this left viewport back to the rendered mode, we can find those options up here on this toolbar, click in our middle mouse button, move it all the way to the left, and then keep going until you see these buttons here on the far right and then click the far right button. If you still see the wire frame on your render, like I do here, where we're seeing all these different lines on top of our model, we can turn that off by going over here to the viewport overlays tab, twirl this down, and then go down here to geometry and then uncheck this box here, that'll clean up our view a little bit. Let's zoom out so we can see the full image again. Now over here on the right side, we're going to switch this back to the three D viewport. To do this, go to this drop down menu here, click on the small arrow and then choose three D viewport. Okay, so our scene is set up and we're ready to begin animating. Before we jump right into animating the camera, I did want to mention one change that I made for us regarding its heading. I added something known as a constraint to the camera in our scene. What this means is I've added a constraining effect called Track two that tells our camera to always face a specific object. If we go over here to the scene collection, we can twirl this open. See here that we have an empty object named animated camera underscore Target. For our file, I told our camera to always face this invisible object called animated camera Underscore Target. You can see an example of what this constraint looks like by going down here to the Constraints tab, this little blue Poly icon. What click this. And then we need to select our camera because that's where the constraint is applied. You can also get a clue that this has a constraint on it because you'll see this same blue icon found here to the right of the camera. If we look down here, we can see that the target is set to this animated camera underscore target object that I mentioned before. Then we'll also see here that I'm choosing to track the axis as negative Z, and up is Y. As a quick example, if I select this empty object, this target object here, and then just move it around anywhere in the scene, you'll notice that our camera always follows wherever this move. So if I move it all the way down here, all the way up here, our camera is always choosing to follow this object. I like Control and Z to undo this. And then the more useful option is to instead select the camera. So we'll select this, and then we can move this camera anywhere we want around the scene. And we'll now notice that our camera orbits this location. So regardless of where we move it, it's always looking towards that point in space. This is how we'll be animating our camera for this class. So if you decided to move your camera, just hit Control and Z to undo that movement. We'll be using this locked orientation that we just saw to our advantage when animating our camera. We'll be free to animate only the position of our camera while the constraint will ensure that the focal point always remains at the center of the image. Our first step is to select our camera from the outliner list on the top right if you haven't done it already. So you can find the camera up here at the top right inside this camera and Lights collection, and then just select it here from the list. With our camera selected, we can go down here to the timeline, we're going to click and drag on this blue icon down here and move it to frame zero. As a quick note, you might have just noticed that all your grease pencil lines in the scene disappeared when you moved this to frame zero. But if you move it back to frame one, the lines will come back. So let's move it back to frame zero, and then I'll show you why this is doing that. Lines disappeared because Grease pencil is actually drawn on specific frames due to its use in Toti animation. Your lines disappearing on frame zero won't have any effect on the actual animation, as we'll never see frame zero in the animation itself. But if you would like to fix this issue, just so you can see them, all we need to do is move our key frames for the lines to frame zero. This will make your drawing start on frame zero rather than frame one. Also worth noting that you would only notice this issue if you decided not to import my lines for your animation. So if you're using the ones that we drew during the class and not the ones that we imported at the end of it, that's when you would like me to notice this issue. So just as a really quick example, I'm just going to hide the imported lines, so I'll just hide both of these. And then I'm going to turn on the wires that we drew in class. So now if I select this G pencil wires, we're on frame zero, we can see here that all these wires are gone. We can't see then if we look down here on frame one, we'll see our keyframe is sitting here just ahead of the playhead. So if I just drag select over this keyframe and then click and drag and move it over here to frame zero, we'll see just like that, all of our lines are right back where they were. So if you also didn't use my detail drawing, you would need to turn that on. Select the detail drawing, go down here, drag select over the keyframe, and then move it to frame zero. I'm going to go back to using the one that we imported before, but that's how you would fix it for your own drawings. Okay? So if you did anything with your grease pencil lines, make sure you go back up here and select the camera again. Now that we're on frame zero and we have our camera selected, we're ready to place our first keyframe. Let's head over here to the object properties tab, this tiny orange square icon found here on the right, and then this lets us see all the parameters for our camera, at least in terms of its transform. This is things like the location, the rotation, and the scale. Now all we need to do is go over here to our right viewport. We're just going to hover our mouse here and then hit the I key on our keyboard to place our first keyframe. This will place a keyframe on all three transform values for our camera and lock them in place just for this frame. Know the keyframe was successfully placed if you look over here on the right side and you see all these numbers here shown in yellow with white diamonds next to them on the right. And then you can also see down here that our keyframe is placed here on frame zero. Now let's drag our playhead to frame 90, which is the exact middle of the timeline for animation. Our goal with the animation for this class is to make a really subtle movement that loops seamlessly back to the beginning before it starts. We make this animation seamless, we can also turn it into a really mesmerizing gift later in this class. We'll only be moving our camera a very short distance from where it is now, as we want the animation to be quite subtle. The more subtle your camera movement is, the less likely we are to notice issues like stretched out grease pencil lines, static overlay patterns, or just unmodeled or undetailed areas. If we have large sweeping movements in our animation, we'll not only expose issues like I just mentioned, but we also need to make the animation a lot longer to avoid rapid camera movements and an otherwise unpleasing looping gift. With all of that said, we're ready to move our camera. Over here in the right viewport, make sure you have the move tool selected here on the left. Now, let's Zoom our camera back a little bit, so we can actually see the camera object here in our scene. So you're looking for this object here. It's a rectangle with a small triangle above it, and you should also see the move Gizmo sitting on top. Now we're going to click and drag on this red handle, this red arrow here, and move it to the right slightly. Don't worry about the exact distance that you moved it. We're going to be typing in the correct distance in just a moment. So now that we've moved the camera, before you do anything else, don't click anywhere else after moving it. Go down here and twirl open this move option box. This is where we can type in the exact amount of movement that we want in all three directions. So let's start with the X value. So in the X, we're just going to type in 0.5 and then hit Enter. And then for the Z value down here at the bottom, we're going to type in negative zero, point, six, and then hit enter. Will allow all of us to use the exact same movement values for this class. As always, you're free to customize your animation, however you'd like. But please do keep in mind the potential issues that I mentioned earlier. Now that we have both of these values typed in, we can just hover our mouse over here in the right viewport and then hit I to place our keyframes again. We'll see down here that we have a keyframe sitting on frame 90, and then all these values now are set to yellow, and we can see the white diamonds next to them. Our last step is to make a copy of the first keyframe and place it on frame 180, which is the last frame of our animation. We'll ensure that our animation loops seamlessly back to itself. To do this, we can just go over here to the timeline. We're going to click into this empty area here to make sure that we have no keyframe currently selected, and then we can drag select over this keyframe here on frame zero and then hit Control and C to copy that keyframe. Now we'll drag our playhead over here to frame 180 and then hit Control and V to paste it. Now our animation begins and ends at the exact same place, meaning it will loop seamlessly when the animation plays over and over. With this final keyframe placed, we can go over here to the play button. Watch it in motion. Just this small amount of motion that we added to our camera in the left ep really adds a lot of life to our world. We can see objects pass over each other as the perspective shifts, giving the image a lot more depth than a simple still image could convey. In the next lesson, we'll be rendering our final animation. I'll see you there. 16. Rendering the Final Animation: In this lesson, we'll be rendering our final animation. Let's begin. This is it. Time to create our final render. This will be a relatively simple lesson, as many of the settings have already taken care of for us. But I'll explain them quickly for you. Before we move to the render settings, however, we do have something important to disable. I mentioned in an earlier lesson that the noise modifier that we added to the freestyle linework that outlines each object in our scene needed to be turned off before we render the animation. This effect creates more interesting lines for still images, it also causes a really noticeable and distracting flicker in animations due to each frame being calculated randomly and resulting in constantly vibrating lines. Luckily, we are able to disable this effect without deleting it entirely from the file. This will allow you to turn it back on for still images if you want to render them and then disable it again for animations. We're going to start by heading to the view layers tab here on the right. We can find that here and it looks like three little photos sitting on top of each other. Scroll down this list until you find the freestyle thickness options. So it's pretty far down here. We can see freestyle thickness, and we can just twirl this open here. And then all we need to do to disable this is to click this little camera icon here found next to the word noise. So we're going to click this icon, so it's no longer blue, and it has a small X on top. As I mentioned before, this doesn't delete the effect. It simply hides it in your render. So you're always free to come back here, turn it on for a still image, and then turn it off if you want to render more animations. Alright, so now it's time to head to the output settings. We can find those over here just above this tab. It looks like a little printer printing out a photo. We can start out by just scrolling here to the top. We won't need to really change much here, as I've already set up the bulk of our settings. Let's go through some of the notable changes, however, just so you're not completely in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. First up, down here, I have the frame rate set to 30 FPS rather than the default 24 FPS. This makes the animation just a bit smoother thanks to the increased amount of frames rendered per second. It also makes the math for the animation length much easier. For our animation, 180 frames at 30 frames per second creates a six second long animation. This is a nice duration for a simple looping movement. Now let's roll down here to the output settings. These settings here are where the bulk of the changes were made for this file. So for the file format, I've changed it to FFM pEG video. Changed the output file type from a sequence of still images that would need to be compiled later into a video to simply rendering a video file by default. This isn't always the best solution for longer animations or files that are more likely to crash mid render, but for our purposes, this animation is relatively simple and short, so we have little risk of it crashing or taking ages to render. My personal preference is to just render animations like this directly to video to save some time. Now we can go down here to the encoding settings, and then we'll see that I've changed the container to MPEG four. This will create an MP four video as our output. This is a really universal file format that works on pretty much all platforms. The last setting I changed is down here under video, I've switched the video codec to h264, and I've also changed the output quality to perceptually lossless. The video codec that I chose is just generally well supported, and then for the output quality, I chose perceptually lossless. Setting the render to perceptually lossless simply increases the quality of the render to the point that compression is no longer really noticeable. Setting will be more obvious in the video file rather than the animated gift that we create later, as it will already be heavily compressed by that format regardless of what we do. It really doesn't change the render time for this animation all that much, so I would just leave this set to perceptually lossless. Then the last thing that we need to do is set an output location so the blender knows where to save this video file when it's done rendering. We can find the output location just above here next to where this white folder icon is. So let's start by going over here and clicking on this folder icon to choose our location. No navigate to wherever you'd like to save your file. I recommend that you choose the same location that you have your blender file saved in. This will keep all of your files together and easier to find in the future. Now we can go down here and change the name of this file. I'd recommend that you name your file something like Sci Fi, manga, underscore animation, underscore zero, one, and then finally, one last underscore at the end of the file. Name you choose really isn't all that important, but I would recommend adding a version number like 01 at the end of the file. I'd also highly suggest that you add an underscore at the end of the file name, due to Blender automatically adding frame numbers to the end of each file. If you didn't have this little underscore here, you would have no space between the numbers that Blender automatically puts at the end of the file name. So your version number, 01 would run directly into the file numbers that it's putting at the end. Once you have everything set up here, we can just click except. With the output location set, let's head over to the rendering workspace. We can find that here at the very top. Now it's time to render our animation. Before we start the rendering process, I did want to mention that you might not see all of the compositing effects on each frame of the animation. Don't worry if it seems like they're missing. They are still being added to each frame of your video, but Blender sometimes skips the visual and the preview to save itself some time while rendering. And now to render our animation, we simply need to go over here, to render and then choose render animation. Go ahead and pause the video while you render your animation. See you back here when it's finished. Okay, my animation is done, and I think it looks great. It only took my computer a few minutes to render this full video, so hopefully yours didn't take too much longer. At this point, we have a finished video file that we could share anywhere we'd like, thanks to its universal file format. We're not quite done with a class yet, though, as we can make this animation even easier to share on platforms that don't support video files. In the next lesson, we'll convert the final animation video into an animated gift. I'll see you there. 17. Creating an Animated GIF: In this lesson, we'll convert our final animation into an animated gif. Let's begin. We rendered our final animation as a video file, but we can make it even more universal by converting it into an animated gift. Animated gifts are a really useful file format for platforms that don't let you upload video files directly. Platforms such as Skillshare won't allow you to upload a video file directly to your class project yet. However, you can upload animated gifts with no issue at all. So to begin this process, we need to go to this free converter website. For this class, we'll be using easygif.com slash MCR to make our gifts. It's a really simple and free way to convert our video file into an animated gif. Now that we're on the site, we need to upload our file first. We can do this by choosing choose files found here. Then navigate to wherever you saved your final animation in the last lesson. Now we can select it from the list and then choose open down here. After you've chosen your file, go down here to where it says Upload Files and click this Blue button. This process might take a minute or two to complete. So I'll see you in just a moment when my video is uploaded. After your video file is successfully uploaded to the website, you should now see it here. If we scroll down, we'll see all the settings that we have to adjust. The settings that you use will depend on where you plan on uploading your gift. If you don't have a size restriction to the platform that you're planning on uploading it to, you can feel free to use higher settings. My goal is to make this animated gif less than 8 megabytes, as that's what Skillshare requires. So the settings I'll be showing you here will keep it under 8 megabytes. However, if you have a platform that you're uploading to that doesn't have such tight restrictions, feel free to increase the setting slightly to make a slightly higher quality gift. So we're going to start out by going over here towards this size. We're going to click on this dropdown, and then we'll choose 400 by Auto. That means that our gift will end up being 400 pixels wide, and then whatever it needs to be in terms of vertical to keep the same aspect ratio. Next, we're going to switch our frame rate 10-12 instead. Higher frame rates will mean a smoother gift, but it also means that the file will be larger. Due to the movement in our animation being really subtle, we won't really notice a 12 FPS, so that'll be perfectly fine for our purposes. We won't be adjusting the method or checking on this box here, so we can leave these as they are. Now we can just go down here and click Convert to GIF. And then you should see this little tiny dancing cat here as a loading bar, and then relatively quickly, it's popped up my animated gift. So now you'll notice below here that this is actually an animated gift. We can see the image just subtly moving back and forth and it's looping perfectly on itself. One of the most important things that we need to look for here, though, is this file size. And we can see here that this is just over 9 megabytes. Is too big for the purposes of Skillshare, so we do need to make this a bit smaller. Luckily, this website makes it really easy to optimize the gift and make it a good bit smaller without sacrificing too much of the quality. To optimize the gift, we can go down here and just click on this blue hyperlink, or you can choose this icon here that's a little broom with a cog behind it. So I'll just click on this. Now if we scroll down, we can see here that we have a few different settings we can change for the optimization. Don't often change this drop down method here, as lossy gift usually works fine. The main setting that you'll be adjusting is this compression level. Ideally, you want this number to be as low as possible while still getting your gift to the desired size. So we're going to start with a really low number. I'm just going to change this down to five and then hit Enter and it'll immediately start optimizing the GIF. That it's done optimizing, we can scroll down, and we can see that the look of the gift really hasn't changed a whole lot. There's a little bit more compression, but you'll notice that the size is now below 7 megabytes, which is perfect for us. So we've lost almost nothing in terms of its look, but we have made the file size smaller so that's more universal for different platforms. Once you're happy with the look and the size of your gift, all we need to do is right click on this image and then choose Save Image As. Now navigate to the location that you'd like to save your gift. I'd recommend you save it with the blender file as well as the video file that we saved in the last lesson, just so everything's together, and then down here, we can change the name. Just to make it really obvious that this is the GIF file, I'm going to name it G F, underscore, Sci Fi, manga, underscore animation. Then if you'd like, you can also add a version number at the end of this with an underscore and then a 01. That way you know which video file this is a GIF of. In this case, this corresponds to the video file named 01. Then when you're done, just hit Save. We're done. You can now upload this animated gift as though it were a regular image file in many different platforms. For example, if you're uploading this to a project on Skillshare, choose the image upload rather than the video upload when adding media for your class project. Don't forget to add this image to the textbox, though. If you only upload it as a cover image, it'll be cropped and the animation won't play. So you need to click into the textbox first, then scroll down and go to the image upload. That'll add that image directly into the textbox, and we'll get to see the full image as well as the animation. In the next lesson, we'll discuss the class project and learn some useful tips to customize your vendor. I'll see you there. 18. Discussing the Class Project: In this lesson, we'll discuss the class project and learn some useful tips to customize your render. Let's begin. We finished the example from class and rendered our animation as both a video file and an animated gift. So what else is there left to do? While you might be happy with your render thus far, there's a lot of satisfaction that can be had from customizing the render to your own unique style. This could be something as simple as moving the camera's position or as complicated as modeling new objects for your scene. We won't be going over every single change possible for the render in this lesson, as the possibilities are endless, but I'll walk you through a few simple changes you can make to your render to get your imagination going. Before we start making any changes, though, let's get our file set up and ready to go. So first, make sure you're set to the layout workspace that you see here. Next, make sure that you have this left viewport set to the rendered mode found here with this button on the far right. Okay? So now we're ready for a very important step, saving a new version of this file. We won't start making any changes to this file before we save a new class project version of it, because we want to make sure that we have the freedom to return to the original class version of the render if we need to. First, we simply want to save the file as it is now to make sure that the original version is as up to date as possible. So we'll just go over here to file and then choose Save. Now we need to create a new version of this file, so we'll go back up to file and then choose Save As instead. Navigate to the same place as the original blender file if it didn't put you there already. And then down here in this red bar, the very beginning of your file name, put the words class project, underscore, and then you can click off of it, and you'll see that this word is no longer red. The red was there to let us know that we haven't changed the name yet, so if we saved it again with the same name, it's just going to save over the original. We do need to change the name. Also notice that the file name that you see down here is going to be different than yours, and that's because I had class example in front of mine just for class recording purposes. So yours should just say class project, underscore starter file, SciPi Manga, underscore 01. With the name down here changed, go to Save As, and then click this Blue button. Okay, so now we have a new version of this file that's jumped us right into. So now we're editing the class project version of the file, not the original version of it. And now we're ready to start learning some new tips and tricks. So what's the easiest change that we could make that would make the largest impact on the overall look of the image? Changing the colors. Changing the colors in our image can drastically shift the mood of the render while being incredibly easy to adjust and customize to your own unique style. To do this, we're going to go over here to the compositing workspace found at the top. And then before we make any changes, we are going to render the image so that we can see it here on the right side. You can go do render, render Image, or just hit F 12. Okay, so now we're ready to make some changes. We'll be adding a single color ramp node to the far right of this node system to allow us to change the colors of the image. So let's zoom in over here on the far right. And then we're going to click and drag on these nodes here, including this reroute node, so this little dot. And then we're just going to move them to the right. Now we can hit Shift and A, go to search, and then type in color and choose color ramp found here. And then once you have the color ramp selected, just go over here and drop it right on top of this line once it turns white, and that'll automatically connect it for us. Now let's zoom in on this new node so we can see the settings we have. We're free to adjust any of the settings on this color amp node to change the overall color of our render. One thing to note about this color changing process, though, is this is going to make it look a bit less like a manga, as they were primarily printed on white or Sepia toned paper. Don't let that stifle your creativity, though. It's your render. Do whatever you want. For my render, let's just add some wild colors. As always, feel free to choose your own colors for this step if you want to even do this step at all. For the white, I'm going to change this to maybe a yellow color and then for the black slider, I'll change this to maybe a dark purple red color. You can see right away that these changes have made a huge impact on the look of this image. You can also change the position of these sliders on this as well. So if you wanted more of any one color, you could slide this to the left or right and create a very stark look, or if you wanted to be a bit brighter, we could slide this to the left. Also add new colors to this gradient, so we have more than just two to play with. So I'm going to drag this all the way over here to the right, and then I'll select this last slider here on the left. In my case, the dark reddish purple color, but for you, it might be black still. Then we can hit this small plus sign button here found at the top. And that'll add a brand new slider here in the middle that we can adjust the position of as well as the color. I'm going to select this middle slider here, go down to the color bar, and maybe I'll make this more of an orange color, somewhere between the two that I have now. Now that I have the color changed, I can also change the position of it. So if I slide it more to the left, I'll see a bit less of it. Now if I zoom in on my image here, I can see that I have yellow on the highlights, orange on these mid tones, and then this deep sort of wine purple color for the shadows. And you could continue adding more and more colors here just by selecting one of your sliders and then hitting the plus sign to add a new color, and you could change this to something even crazier, like bright green and see how that affects your image. In my case, I don't think that particularly helped the look of this image, I can just select that slider and then hit the minus sign to remove it. These colors are a bit wild, but I'll leave them there for the rest of this lesson. As I mentioned before, feel free to make any changes you like, but you don't have to go as crazy as I did. You'd prefer a more traditional look, you could try using shades of tan to make your render look like it's on a CPA paper rather than a bright white paper. So that would still allow you to experiment with this color adjustment without making it look completely wild like mine is. For our next change, let's head back to the layout workspace found here at the top left. Wen anos over here on the left side, we can see this orange color that I changed mine too in the compositing workflow. If you also changed your colors, but you don't see those colors reflected here on the layout workspace, you might need to go up here to this drop down here next to the rendered button that we turned on before. At the very bottom of these settings, make sure you have the compositor set to camera. If you don't see your colors, it might be set to disabled, which means that you wouldn't be seeing any of the compositing effects, including the paper textures and the value adjustments we made in the compositing workflow. So you want to have your set to camera. Okay, so another easy change that we can make is simply moving the position of the light in the scene. There's only one light in our scene, so it should be pretty easy to move it around and get a completely different look for our render. Over here in the right viewport, in the camera and lights collection, if we twirl this open, we'll see an object here just called light. And now with this light selected in our right viewport, we can zoom out a bit. Select our move tool found here and then decide to move this light wherever we like. Just as an example, I'm going to move my light down here, so I can just click and drag this, and we can see over here on the left port that our light is changing the look of the scene pretty dramatically. It's really changing the way these shadows affect the scene, as well as where all of our highlights are. So if I move this light up or down, we can see that we're seeing more light on the top services, or if I move it below, we're getting shadows that go straight up into the air. For my example, I'll move it back up a little bit. So they're kind of coming horizontally out of this. Again, this is just an example. I understand that this might not be a look that everybody enjoys. I'm just doing this to show you what you could do. After you've moved the main light in the scene, which is the only light, you could also hit shift in D to create a duplicate of this light so you have two lights to play with. So if I wanted to do that for this scene, I might zoom out a bit, hit shift in D over here in the right viewport to make a duplicate, and then maybe I'll move mine down here somewhere low, lower than the original light and on this side of the bridge, so I can fill in a lot of those shadows. And then I can just fine tune the position of this light wherever I'd like to get the type of shadows and the illumination that I'd like. So maybe right here looks good for. Okay, so now that we've adjusted our lighting as well as the colors, let's discuss the changes that we can make to the grease pencil drawings. Obviously, you always have the option to simply add more wires or cracks to your walls. These can all help detail the world further and make it look even more unique. However, you also have the option to add completely new objects to your world just by drawing them. This largely will depend on how comfortable you are at drawing objects from scratch, but it can add a lot of fun details to an already dense world. A quick example, let's scribble a really simple character down in this hole on the wall at the bottom right. First, we need to create and set up the Grease Pencil object. So first, go over here to the collection on the right side called Grease Pencil. I make sure you click this white folder here to make this the active collection. Now in the right viewport, you can hit Shift and A, go down to Grease Pencil and choose blank. Quickly rename this, so we're just going to have it named G Pencil, underscore character, and then head Enter. And then in either of these viewports, it doesn't matter which we're going to switch from the object mode to the draw mode instead. And now over here in our left viewport, we're going to hold Shift and then right click to place our three D cursor somewhere on the floor here inside this hole. My example, I'm going to place it right around where this crack is on the wall. So I'll just hold Shift and then right click to place that. Wherever you place this three D cursor is where the feet of your character will be standing. So keep that in mind. And now over here in the right viewport, we can switch from the surface mode to the three D cursor mode instead, and then we'll switch from side to front instead. Alright, so we have everything set up and we're ready to draw. Our goal here is to draw a character for your scene. It could be a human, a robot, a creature. Anything you want, really, do keep the scale of your character in mind when drawing, though. We have a general sense of human scale thanks to the ladders placed in our scene. So if you want to create a human character, think about them using the ladders in this scene as well as the perspective of your drawing. A robot or some other creature could be any size you want, though. They don't need to conform to the world that they inhabit. As a really quick and loose example, I'm going to draw just a simplified human shape here, looking over the drop off on the edge. So it'll be standing here looking down over the cliff. So we can just zoom in here and begin drawing. Feel free to follow along with the shapes that I'm drawing. But again, this is just going to be a really loose and scribbly human shape, so feel free to do much better than I'm doing. Okay, so my perfect little masterpiece is done. And as you can see, it really doesn't take a whole lot of detail here to just imply some life in this world. So if I zoom out here, you can see my drawing gets a lot tinier, and the individual little details and pen strokes don't really matter as much. You can see just how tiny this person is within the world. So you really don't need to have perfect drawings here. They can be loose and scribbly and just kind of imply a human shape, and you'll get along fine. This also really helps imply the massive scale of this world. We can see if this is a normal human person, that this world is gigantic. It's really, really big, which can help really set a perspective for this world. Repeat this process however many times that you like and wherever you'd like in your world. I'm really excited to see what you add. For now, though, I'm going to leave draw mode so that we can proceed with the rest of the lesson. We'll just go up here and then click draw mode and then switch back to object mode. Our next change is to the animation of the camera or even the lights. A really simple way to make the animation look different is to simply change the movement of the camera. This could mean changing the directions that it moves or how quickly it moves. As a really rough example of how you could do this, let's make our camera move up into the left rather than down into obviously this is a very minor difference, but it'll just show you how you could update your camera. So first, we'll select the camera from over here on the right side. We're going to choose animated camera. Now down here on the timeline, we're going to go to frame 90, which is where our middle keyframe is sitting. And then over here in our right viewport, can zoom into our camera. And then we're just going to move our camera up into the left beyond the original position that it starts at on frame zero. So if you want to get an idea of roughly where it starts, you can drag this back to frame zero and then pay attention to roughly where it's sitting right now, and now we can move it back to frame 90. And then we're just going to move our camera to where it was before and then move it up a little bit past that instead. So maybe up to here. Going to have to guess the position at first, but we can always adjust it later. Once you found the new position for your camera, hover your mouse over here on the right viewport and then hit I on your keyboard to update the keyframes. This will place a new keyframe directly on top of the old one replacing it. And now we can play our new animation to see if we like the new movement. Make new of that just by going on here and hitting the Play button. We can see that the animation is technically different, albeit very similar. Obviously, if you were going to make a change for your animation, you'd probably want to do something a little bit more exciting than this. But again, that's totally up to you. Do whatever you'd like, but also do keep in mind that you don't want your camera flying all over the scene as it's going to expose some different issues within the world. If you're happy with the position of your camera, we can just pause this animation. Another thing that I mentioned was that you could animate your lights. This can be a fun way to add life to the scene that is either in addition to the camera movements or instead of them. This means that you could remove all the keyframes from your camera so it remains completely still and then animate only the lights in the scene to give a sense of movement. Going to leave the camera animated for this example, but we can still add some light animations. We already understand the process of animating movements for objects like we did with a camera. So this time, let's animate the brightness of the light to try out something new. So your first step is to select the light that you want to animate. In my case, I'm going to animate the duplicated light, the one that's providing most of the illumination for here on the front. Move your playhead down here on the timeline to frame zero, and then over here with your light still selected, we can go down to the Object data Properties tab. In this case, it looks like a little green light bulb. So now that we can see the lights parameters that we can adjust, let's adjust the power value to change the brightness. First, we're going to place a keyframe without making any adjustments on frame zero. To do this, we need to go over here and click on this white dot next to the power value, that'll turn it into a white diamond, and it'll also make the numbers here yellow. Before we go too much further, I did want to preemptively answer a question that you might have. Notice that I didn't mention animating the colors of the lights. Unfortunately, I didn't mention this because it isn't really possible given the way that we've created our material. The material in our scene has been filtered through a shader to our GB node in order to capture the strong contrast and sharp lines of our manga reference. This node forces all lighting to appear the color of the gradient that we set in this material. In our case, just black and white. Due to this limitation, the only thing that we'll be able to effect is the brightness of our light, but not the color as it's being overridden by that color ramp node. Limitation would be true, even if we didn't have this bright orange color in my case, over top of the entire image, as that compositing node also has no effect on the way the material interprets lighting. So even if this was still black and white and we wanted to change the color here, you wouldn't really notice any difference. It would still look black and. With that out of the way, now let's move down here to frame 45. And now we're going to make the light dim every 3 seconds, meaning that it'll happen twice during the duration of this animation. So our first step is over here in the power. We're just going to change the very first number here from four down to two instead. So we're going to have this number. After you've changed this number, you'll notice that it's orange and that this diamond over here is now hollow. So all you need to do is place a keyframe here by clicking on this hollow diamond to turn it white, and then make this number here yellow. Values for these lights might seem incredibly high, but it's just the brightness that we needed for a world of this scale and to achieve the effect that we're trying to recreate. So now we'll notice if we go down here and drag our playhead back and forth that from frame zero to frame 45, this light dims in brightness. We can notice that here on the front of the bridge. So if we look at this area here, it's pretty obvious that it's brighter here and it's dimmer here. Now we have the basics of this animation setup. So now we can just copy these keyframes for the length of the animation to make it repeat. So our first step is to go down here and drag select over both of these keyframes from zero and 45. Now hit Control and C to copy these keyframes. Then we'll go over here to frame 90, which is right in the middle and then hit Control and V to paste these keyframes. And now we can drag select over frame zero again. So we're just selecting just this keyframe. So only the one over here, hit Control and C and then go over to frame 180 and hit Control V to pace that keyframe. And that's it for the light animation. We now have a subtle pulsing animation for the light in our scene to add to the movement already created by the camera animation. We can see a quick example of that down here if we hit the Play button. Now we can see that as our camera moves back and forth in the scene, we also have a subtle pulsing of that light, just adding a little bit more life to the world. The last tip I have for you regards the models in the scene. We didn't cover any modeling in this class, but that doesn't mean that you can't make changes to it on your own. Modeling is probably the most involved change that you can make to your world, but it can be incredibly satisfying to shape the world to your own vision. While we won't be discussing modeling anything from scratch in this lesson, I can give you a few tips on how you could use the models already present in the world to change the look of your render. The first change is to simply remove models from the scene. If there's a model that you'd rather not have present in your image, we can just hide it. For this example, let's hide the ladder down here on the side of these vertical pipes. All we need to do is select the model here in the viewport and then over here on the right side. We're going to twirl open the right wall collection because that's where this model lives. Now if we scroll down this list, we'll see here we have ladder oh two selected. To hide this model from the render, we simply need to click on this eyeball, as well as this camera icon here. If you only hide it with the eyeball, you won't see it in this viewport render over here, but it will still show up in the render. And if you only hide this render icon here and not the eyeball, you'll see it in the viewport, but it won't show up in the render, so it's kind of confusing both ways. So generally, when you're hiding things like this, usually, you're going to hide both of these options. Process of hiding objects is possible with literally every object in the scene. Some objects are a bit more important than others based on what they obscure or attach to, but don't let that stop you from experimenting. One thing to note, however, is you'll need to keep in mind that hiding a model doesn't hide the grease pentel drawings on top of it as they're separate objects. So if I selected this object here and hid, you'll notice that all the drawings that I had on top of it still exist, and that's because these drawings and the objects exist separately from each other. I'm going to go over here and turn this back on. You'll need to either erase the grease pencil drawings that were on the object or turn off the grease pencil layer corresponding to those lines if you want to split up your drawing that way. As a quick example, if I went down here to my grease pencil wires object, I could go down to these layers and turn off the visibility for any one of them. If I wanted to hide all the wires here on these columns because maybe I'm planning on removing the columns from my class project render, I could just click on this eyeball here, and that will remove all of these wires just found on the columns. This would only be possible, though, if you remember to split up your drawings into different layers. For now, I'm going to turn these back on. All right, so we've learned how to remove an object from our scene, but how do we add them? The easiest way to add a new object would be using the duplicate function. This would allow us to select either one object or a few at the same time and then make an exact copy of them to place somewhere else in the world. We'll be able to craft new focal points with this method or simply add more detail to the world to make it more dense. First, you'll need to decide the object or objects that you want to duplicate. I'll continue using these vertical pipes. Here is my example. If you only wanted to duplicate a single object, simply click it here in the left viewpoard or over here in the right viewpard. If you wanted to duplicate this entire group of objects, though, so this pipe cover, as well as the two pipes below it, I would need to select all three of them at the same time. To do this, we'll just hold down Shift before selecting and then click on the new object and then click on the last object here. So we can see here, and now I have all three of these objects selected. So I can control Z that. Holding Shift enables us to keep our previously selected objects while we continue to select new objects. Okay, so now that you have your desired objects selected, you can just hit Shift and D at the same time to begin duplicating these objects. Before you left click to place this new duplicate, we do have a few options. You can change which axis this new duplicated object moves along by simply pressing the corresponding axis on your keyboard. So if you wanted to move it only up and down when you're duplicating it, you can hit Z so that it stays on the Z axis when you move the duplicate, or you could hit X to move it this way or Y to move it this direction. In my case, Y makes the most sense because it keeps it attached to the wall. This obviously isn't mandatory, but it can help you keep an object firmly planted on the wall if you want to make sure that your duplicate remains on the same original plane. Just going to find a place to move this to initially. Somewhere back here it looks fine. Then we can zoom our camera out here to get a better view of where it actually appears, and then we can adjust this position. Maybe, in this case, I'll slide it down. So let's zoom in here and just find a spot that I like for this on the wall. So maybe somewhere around here would be fine. At this point, feel free to move, rotate, scale, do really anything you want to these objects to make them fit better in the scene that you want to craft. For this example, now that I've moved it back in space, maybe I want to make it much larger so I can hit S on my keyboard to scale it up larger. Then maybe move it away from the wall and then slide it back down. As another quick example, we could zoom out here, and we could select this large pipe, hit Shift and D, then hit X to move it this direction. Now we can hit R and Z to make sure that it only rotates on the Z direction, and then we'll rotate it around somewhere here maybe. Move it up. And then we could also slide it back in space. And now, if we look at it over here on our camera view, we can adjust the position to match where we want it. And then feel free to adjust it further within this view, using your rotate or your scale to get the look that you want. You could also just keep making more duplicates to fill out this area a bit more. You can see it's really easy to start making some simple changes here to really change the look of the overall image. Possibilities really are endless, even with only using the models that already exist in the scene. Obviously, you don't let that stop you, though, from making brand new models of your own to detail the world. At this point, I hope you can appreciate just how much customization is possible within the scene, even after we've finished the original example from class. I'm really excited to see where your creativity takes you. And the very last lesson, we'll end the class with some conclusions and farewells. I'll see you there. 19. Conclusion: Congratulations on reaching the end of our class. I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for taking my class. Your participation and excitement for learning is incredibly rewarding for me as a teacher, and I can't thank you enough. I hope you found fun learning how to create a stylistic manga inspired animation and blender. It's been a pleasure guiding you and I hope you found the class both enjoyable and valuable. Now that you've got these awesome new skills under your belt, I can't wait to see where your creativity takes you. I wish you the best of luck in creating your own awesome animations and blender. 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. Leave a review easily by going to the Reviews tab just below this video and clicking the leave a Review button. I appreciate the support. After leaving your 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 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. Don't forget to check out my teacher profile for more classes just like this. You might find something else that interests you. Lastly, I wanted 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 for now, and I hope to see you in another class.