Blender 3D for Beginners: Learn to Model a Balloon Dog

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Harry and I'm a professional 3d Artist. My jobs have included Creating User Interface Art for a major video game development company and working as the lead 3d Artist and later Studio Director for an award winning architectural visualization studio. This class, I'll guide you through a FUN beginner exercise where you modeled, shaded, and render a Balloon Dog. We'll go through each part of the process step-by-step. So you should find it fund and easy to follow along with me. We're using Blender for this tutorial, which is an amazing and totally free 3d software, the only barrier to entry is having a computer to run the software on. A balloon dog might seem like an odd choice for a beginner project, but it really is a perfect place to start. In this class you'll learn modeling, which is how we'll create the body of our balloon dog. Modifiers that add Additional modeling effects such as smoothing, shading. This will make our balloon dog look like a colorful rubber Lighting. We'll add lights to illuminate our scene. And Rendering, which involves Positioning a 3d camera and generating a picture of our new model. At the end, we'll have a cute balloon dog to render to our heart's content. It's also a model that can be easily altered into different animals just by adjusting some proportions or adding a new piece. Our class project will have you take all of the techniques you've learned making the balloon dog, apply them to make another animal of your choice. You can keep the shape simple and abstract like the balloon dog. Or you can go all out and make a balloon masterpiece. Post your balloon animal to the gallery to show off your hard work and imagination to myself and all the other students. I hope you'll join me on this Fun little beginner's journey through Blender by making your very own balloon dog. See you in the first lesson. 2. Gathering Resources: In this lesson, we'll start with Gathering photo references for our balloon dog model. Gathering our reference images is an important first step in modeling our balloon dog. Having accurate reference to follow is the key to accurately replicating the thing you're trying to make. I'm sure most people can imagine what a balloon dog looks like. But do you really know the proportions of the body segments to The Ears? Probably not. That's why we want to have at least a few reference images. In our case, Google workout fine for the reference image gathering, we want to search balloon dog instructions. If we search just balloon dog will basically only get images of a famous balloon dog sculpture, which is a bit simplified and stylized. We're going to be replicating a real balloon dog will want to avoid using the sculpture as a reference. For the purposes of this lesson, I've already collected a few good references for us. You can download them by the class resources. Using a reference images could be as simple as you printing them out on paper or keeping a folder open with all the images in it when your desktop. However, there's a free software that can help with this. I'd like you to consider downloading pure ref. Pure ref is a fantastic donation-based software that allows you to have your reference images always visible. You can download it for free and use it as long as you'd like. If you feel like the program deserves your money, please consider donating to the developers to continue improving the software. With pure ref open, we can just drag our images directly into this window and make it a nice little canvas for us to collect all of our images. We need some useful pure ref key binds are right-click to move the window. Left-click to move an image. Middle mouse-click pans around the canvas. Click and drag on a corner to resize the window. And control shift. And a makes the pure ref window always on top of any other window. Meaning we can use Blender without losing sight of our references. Right-click on your canvas to save this pure ref file so that you can open it up later. In the next lesson, we'll be getting our Blender file setup and ready for modeling. I'll see you there. 3. Setting Up Our File: If this is your first time taking a Blender class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginner's guide to Blender first, this class was designed for the absolute beginner to Blender and 3D Art in general, we cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running in Blender will accomplish this, but short and focused lessons that cover each topic from it 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 camp site. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. Let's set up our file before we begin modeling. There are few things that we can get set up right away before we dive in. The first thing we'll do is change our unit display to inches. So this is an optional thing. You don't have to do this if you'd like. However, during the tutorial, I'll be referring to things in inches rather than metric. To change this, you can go to this symbol here, which is your scene properties. You can open up units. Then we're going to switch from metric to imperial units. We're going to change the length from feet to inches. We're doing this because the object that we're creating is not particularly large. The whole thing is going to only be about a foot. So it's easier to work in inches because the scale of the object overall is much smaller. The next thing we need to do is enable your graphics card and they Blender settings. So we're gonna go up to Edit Preferences system. Then we're gonna go up here. So if you have the option to select optics, please select that. If you don't, then you can select CUDA instead. However, if you have optics, you should be using optics. You also want to put a checkbox next to your graphics card, in my case, the 2060 super, and then also your CPU down here. So you should have both of these checked. This will allow the Render Engine to access both your GPU and your CPU during render time, which will speed it up significantly. Now that we have this setup, we can close this box. Then we're going to go down to the Render Settings. So this little camera icon here, we're going to change the Render Engine from EV to cycles. These are just two different render engines. However, cycles will give us more realistic results and also the shader we're using for this will require us using cycles rather than Evie. We want to go down to the device settings and switch it from just CPU to GPU, compute. This will allow us to use our GPU when we're using cycles. Will go down to the viewport settings here and change max samples to 500. Instead of 1024. We're going to check de-noise. We can click this little drop-down here to open up more options. We're going to switch the D noisier from automatic to optics instead. Now we can close this menu. We can go down to the Render Settings. We can twirl open this option here with a de-noise which is already checked. And just make sure you have open image de-noise checked here. For the viewport will prefer to use the optics because it's a bit faster. However, the Open Image T noise is better for our final render because it does a better job of de-noising it. Now that you have those settings setup will go up to File. We can do Save. And then let's rename this file. We're just going to call this balloon dog underscore 01. Now once we have that set, we can save this file. And then in the next lesson, this is the file you'll be opening up because it has all the settings already set up. For. The next lesson, we'll start modeling The Body of our balloon dog. I'll see you there. 4. Modeling: The Body: In this lesson, we'll be starting the model of the balloon dog by Creating the body, neck and snout segment. To start with, make sure you have pure ref loaded. You can see down here at the bottom left I have paragraph open. However, there's nothing in it. So I'm going to open up a pure ref scene that I've already created. I can right-click, go to the load. And then I can either load it from a file browser or I can just load a recent. I'm going to load this recent. You can see here that it has all of my reference images in it. So let's resize this window so it doesn't overlap so much. So I'm gonna grab the corner here and drag it. Want to right-click on the window to drag it around, to reposition it a bit. Then I'm going to hit Control Shift and a to make sure that stays always on top. That way I can work in Blender without this window disappearing behind. Now I'm going to pan over to this image here using the middle mouse-click. And then I can zoom in on it just by using the mouse wheel. This is the reference we're going to start with. Now that we have pure ref setup, let's go ahead and delete these three starter items. So I'm just going to drag over top of these. I have all three selected and then I can hit Delete or I can hit X to delete them. So as I said in the beginning of the lesson, we'll be creating the body segment. The next segment, as well as the snout. We wanted to think about what shape is this. So to me this sort of looks like a sphere except it's a little bit elongated. So I think a sphere would probably be a good place for us to start. Let's start by creating a sphere. We're going to hit shift and a to create our sphere. And we're going to want to choose UV sphere. You don't want to choose circle. A circle is actually going to make a flat 2D circle. Whereas what we want is the 3D version. It's gonna be the UV sphere. Now that we've created a sphere, well want to change the properties of this, however, are pure ref window is actually sitting on top of the option box down here. So what I need to do is right-click on my pure ref window and then just drag it over here to the right. So maybe the right side is better for this sonata that's on the right. You can see here it says Add UV sphere. And you want to make sure that once you create your sphere that you don't click off of the sphere. Because this is the settings that you'll get that allow you to change some of the properties of the sphere that we just created. So if I zoom in on this, if I click off of this, now this option box disappears and I can't, I can't access it again, so I'll have to recreate the sphere. So in my case, I'm just going to delete it, shifts a mesh and then I'm going to create the UV sphere again. Now that we have the UV sphere here, we're gonna want to change some of these settings. Tim give this a little bit more polygons, which will make the object a bit smoother. You can see here that the edge of this is a little bit rough. You can see corners on these jagged edges. So the more of these segments and rings that we add, it'll make it a little bit smoother to begin with. Let's start with, let's make this 36. For the segments. We're going to change the rings to 18, which is the vertical cuts. So you can see here that we've added a little bit of smoothness to this. Now, later on we'll be actually further smoothing this. So we don't want to go too crazy at this step, but a little bit more smooth now it'd be a good spot. Then the radius, right now it's a 1 ft radius. So it's actually too big. So we're going to type in here 1 " radius and enter, and you can see it makes it a lot smaller down here. The reason we're doing a one-inch radius is because the radius is measured from the center of the sphere to the edge. So it's actually 2 " across. And these balloons here are typically made with 2-inch diameter balloons. So in order to keep that realistic, we're going to type in 1 " radius so that our balloon width overall is actually 2 ". Now that we have these properties setup, we can safely click off of this to confirm those changes. And now that option box disappears. So you might notice that this sphere looks almost like a golf ball. It has a lot of little faces all over it that are almost has like maybe like a diamond look. What this is called as actually called faceting. What you're seeing here is actually every single individual polygon on this sphere being smoothed by itself. So if we want this to look like a nice smooth sphere, we can just right-click on this and then choose Shade Smooth. We choose Shade Smooth. Now it looks like a nice smooth ball. And it actually helps get rid of the illusion that this has a jagged edge on it. So when you look at it, it looks like a relatively smooth sphere. Now, if we wanted to go back to how it looked before for some reason, just make sure you select it. Now it looks like it had before. So we'll go back to shade smooth. So before we begin, let's make sure that we turn on the wireframe for our scene so that we can kinda see where our polygons are. It'll just make our lives a little bit easier while we're modeling We're gonna go up here to this symbol with the two intersecting circles. And these are your different overlays. These are the all the viewport overlays that we have. We're going to turn it one, the wireframe checkbox here. Then we're going to turn down the opacity a little bit. So when we turn it on, initially it just makes a full opacity, completely black wireframe across the model to show us where each of the police are. However, that might be a little intrusive when we're working in some of the viewports. So let's turn down the opacity of that. We can turn this down to maybe about 0.2, 0.25, somewhere in that range, just to give us a nice light wireframe on this. This will help us figure out the orientation of this object for the next step as well. Now let's select the sphere by left clicking on it. Then we're going to rotate this sideways. So at the top of this sphere, you can see we have a point where all the polygons converge. And we want that at the end, not at the top. So we want that on the left and the right rather than top and the bottom. We're going to first rotate this 90 degrees. So we're going to hit R and then we're going to hit X to make sure that we're rotating just on the x-axis. Now we can hold Control while we rotate. And it will actually snap it to these nice increments. We can rotate it right to the 90 degree point so that it hits right here. So you can see it lines up now with this y-axis. Now we know that we've have it set to 90 degree rotation. You can also see that down here as well. Now that we have our sphere rotated, we can go into the edit mode for the sphere. Let's select our sphere and make sure it's selected. And then we can hit Tab to go into the Edit mode. Let's hit the three key to go into our Face Selection mode, which is going to select the individual squares here. Then we're going to line it up so that we select this front face here. So we can go up here to this top-right. Click on this little X here. And that'll put us into a nice straight orthographic view, which make selecting the, the midpoint of this much easier. So we're going to select the X here. Now before we select any of the polygons. So normally we would just go like this and we could select it. However, we're only actually selecting the half of the model. If we rotate around, we can see that we didn't actually select all the way through, which is what we want to do. Because our goal here is to split this sphere in half, stretch it out, and then draw polygons between it so that it looks more like this capsule shape or this elongated sphere that we want. In order to alleviate this issue of not being able to select all the way through it, we want to hit Alt and Z together to turn the the wireframe into an x-ray mode. This mode here will allow us to select it directly through the model. So if I go like this now, you can see when I select it, actually selected completely through the model, which is what we want. Let's go back to our X view here. I'm going to click on this Up at the top-right. Now I'm a nice straight view. I don't want to select exactly half of this. You'll have to select over top of these. Now that we have half of our sphere selected, we can right-click on it and then go down here to the bottom where it says split. This will do is split this model into two-halves. Now we have a half here and a half here, and they're no longer connected right down this middle point, which is what we want. Now we're going to move our camera over a little bit. We wanted to pull this apart and this will create a gap between these that will then draw polygons between. So first, let's hit G, Then we're going to hit Y because we want to move just along this green axis here. We want to move it apart about as much as that reference down at the bottom right. We want to look at the reference while we're moving these parts away from each other and make sure that we're adding enough gap here that it seems to be about the same distance here. If we don't get it perfect, It's not the end of the world. We can always adjust it. But at least use your reference as a guide when you're doing this. That's the point of having these references always a visible. Now that we have the have split up with a gap between them, we can zoom out and we can rotate our camera to go back into this regular view. Now we're going to switch to our edge view, which is the two key up here. Again, you can use these keys if you'd like, although you should probably get into the habit of using the 12.3 to switch back-and-forth between them. We're going to hit to, to go into the edge mode. Then what we need to do is select both of these loops that we've created on the inside. So there's these sort of open bowl shapes that we've created. So we want to create polygons between them now. So to do that, and we're going to hold Alt and select this edge. I'm going to angle your model here. So you actually want to select here. If we hold Alt and select it, you can see it highlighted this entire edge. Now we have this entire edge selected. If we hold Alt and Shift, and then select this edge. Now we'll add to that selection. I just held Alt and clicked on this, and then hold Alt and click on this. You can see it swaps back and forth. They won't select both unless you're holding Shift while you do so. I'm going to hold Alt and Shift to make sure I have both of them selected now. Now with both of these edge loops selected I can right-click. And I can go over here to bridge edge loops. So when I click this, you can see here that it actually draws polygons in between these now. So you can see the point of us moving these apart and splitting them in half is where a lot closer to the shape. Now, in our case, we won't need to do anything with this option box down here, so we can just click off. Now that we haven't successfully bridged, we can hit Alt and Z again to get out of this x-ray mode. So it's a little easier to look at. Sometimes the X-ray mode can be a little complicated to look at, especially at certain angles. So it looks a little nicer when you don't need it if you just turn it off. Now we can zoom out. Now let's reassess the shape here. I think maybe mine is a little too short, so I'm going to lengthen mine a bit. I can do that by going into my vertex mode. So I'm gonna hit one on my keyboard. I can go back into X-Ray mode so that I can select through it. Now you can see I have these selected. Then I'm gonna hit G, then I'll hit Y, so that I know I'm moving just on the screen axis. I'm just going to stretch it out just a little bit smoother to about there. Again, we can adjust this later if it doesn't feel right later on once we have more of the balloon dog created. But for right now this feels better. Somebody had Altman Z to go back into the regular mode. Now we can hit tab to exit the edit mode because we're not adjusting the shape of this one any further. I'm gonna hit Tab to go back into the just regular object mode. Now what we need to do now that we've created the body segment is we want to create the next segment. We can just duplicate this object that we have here by hitting Shift and D at the same time. So you can see now that it's moving this and it's making a duplicate of it. However, we don't want to just move it anywhere. We want to move it specifically on the Y so we can hit Y now. Then just move it just so it touches the edge of the other. Now we have a duplicate segment, except this one's a little bit too long. So let's go back into the edit mode with this one selected by hitting tab. Go into X-ray by using alt Z. Drag select over these G and then why? To shorten this one up a little bit? This next segment shouldn't be quite as long as the body. I think somewhere about that range is pretty good. Now I can click off of it, it Alt and Z, and then hit Tab. Now let's rotate the neck so that it's at the same orientation as our reference. We're going to hit our and then we can hit Control and rotate this neck. We're going to rotate it about here. Again, this is somewhat preference. Not every balloon dog will have an exactly the same shape. So just rotate it to about what this reference is that it looks like TO think that looks good. So in my case that was negative 55 degrees. Now I'm gonna go back into this orthographic view up here with the X. So I'm gonna click this so that I get a better view of this. Now I can just hit G. I can move this around so that it matches up about where those two poles we'll meet up. So these, these points here were all of these vertex meet up. So this is called a poll one here. I want these polls to be about the same spot. So in this case they're pretty close and they're also intersecting a little bit, so we don't have to worry about that yet. We'll just leave that as it is. Okay. So now that we have the neck created, Let's duplicate this model again. In this case, let's actually duplicate the body. So we're going to select the body, hit Shift D to start duplicating it. Now we can move it over here. We're going to hold down or just click the Y button here to make sure we're only moving on the, the y-axis. Going to move it right about to the right spot. And now we can hit G and Z again. To have it here. We might need to move it back a little bit. So we're going to hit G and Y to move it back into the neck a little bit. Now let's rotate this downward. So I'm gonna go back into my orthographic view up here. So I'm gonna go into the X view. I'm gonna hit R to rotate. Then I'm just going to rotate this down a little bit. So I want the Nose to point down just a little bit. I don't want it perfectly horizontal. I'm gonna hit Control while I'm doing this so that it snaps, will rotate it down to about here. So in that case about ten degrees. And then just reposition this with G key. It looks good. Now that we have the Nose rotated down, you'll notice that it's a bit too long. So we can go into the X-ray mode by holding Alt and C and then hit Tab to go into Edit with this selected. And then we can select these vertex here, which is the one key to be in that mode, the vertex mode. Then we can start moving these and we can move them on the Y if we want. However, you'll notice that it's actually, it's moving them horizontally, but we've rotated that down so it doesn't work anymore. So it moves back and it's sheers a downward, which isn't what we want. So I'm going to right-click to cancel that movement. And instead, we're gonna go up here where it says Global. And we're going to click that, and then we're going to switch it's a local instead. What this does is it's changing how the transform is looking at the object with a world that you're referencing. So when you use global, It's using the this as this reference. So it's saying exactly Up and down is up and down for the Z. And then this is the X and this is the Y. However, if you change it to local, it uses the orientation of the objects. So since we rotated this Nose down about ten degrees, it will rotate these, see X and Y axes, also ten degrees in order to match the orientation of the object. Now if we hit G, we can see which lets see which one it is. I think it's the Z in this case. So if we hit G and then Z, now you can see it moves nice and smooth back-and-forth because the z-axis for this object is now been rotated. You can see it's rotated about ten degrees to match the orientation of the object. And that's because we're in the local mode. So I'm going to shorten this Nose up a little bit about there. Again, we can always adjust these proportions. These aren't set in stone. Now that we have that set, we can go back to global over here. For other movements. Now we have our Nose shortened up a little bit. We have our next segment shortened up, and then our body is set to the correct length. We can now hit tab to exit the edit mode. And we can hit Alt and Z to exit the X-ray mode. And now we've finished modeling The Body, the neck, and the snout segment for this video. In the next lesson, we'll be modeling The Tail of the balloon dog and the not on the tip of this. Now, I'll see you there 5. Modeling: The Tail and Nose: In this lesson, we'll be modeling The Tail of our balloon dog, as well as a simple not on the tip of its snout. Let's begin. The first thing that we wanna do now that we have a few objects in our scene is we want to start renaming these objects so we know what they are based on this list on the right. This list over here shows you all the different objects you have in your scene. So you can select an object from this list, or you can select it in your viewport here. Either one works. So you want to keep this nice and clean and we want to know exactly what we have in our scene right now. Everything is just named sphere, sphere a 1.0 to. So let's start by renaming this segment here, body. So we're just going to go up here to the top-right. We're going to double-click on the word sphere. We could just type in body and then hit Enter. Then we can either select it here or we can select it from the list. We can double-click on this one and we'll rename this neck. And we'll rename the last one snout. The next thing we're going to be Modeling is The Tail. For that. I'd like to make sure that I have my reference pulled up. So I'm going to reopen pure ref. You might already have it open if so, great. I can right-click to move this down. Going to right-click to open it. Then I'm just going to open my most recent one. Now that we have our pure ref open and set to always on top with Control Shift and a. We can now work in this without a disappearing behind. So first let's select the body segment. Then we're gonna go into this X view up here. So now we have a nice perfect side view. We're going to duplicate this with shift and D. Then we're gonna move it just in the y-direction. Going to click that. Now we have a duplicate back here. Then we're going to rotate this so that it's about the same angle as our reference. We want it to be about out there. So that in my case it was negative 110. This doesn't have to be exact. Just do it to your preference, but you want to try to match the reference as much as possible. Now we're just going to move this here to be about where it needs to be. So we now have two options with our Tail. We can keep it simple, like this Tail in the reference. Or if we zoom out here, we can see that some of these other tails, they have these little nubs on the end here. This is a pretty common detail with your balloon Dogs. This is just a simple thing where they didn't put enough air into the balloon. So when they're folding it up and twisting it, there's a little bit of spot here where they leave this little gap here that lets the air expand. I think that looks kinda nice. I think for our balloon dog, we're gonna go ahead and do that. So you can make it short like this. You can make it a bit longer like this one. We're probably going to do something in-between these I don't quite like how long this Tail is overall are probably going to shorten our Tail, but then have a somewhat longer tip on the end of it. So first, let's begin by shortening our Tail up a bit with our Tail segments selected. So first we can rename it so we don't lose the name here. So I'm just going to double-click over here. Type in Tail. It's not, it's renamed. We're gonna go over here to our Tail. Hit Tab to go into edit mode. We're going to hit one to go into our vertex mode. And then up here we have it set to global. So if you'll remember from the last lesson, if I tried to move this in just the z-direction while one I have to go into X-ray, but you can see Z is directly up and down, but it's not moving along with the Tail. We don't want that. So first we need to go into local. Which animal now make the Z go along with the Tail rather than going just perfectly up and down within the world itself. Also need to go into Alt see, which is my x-ray mode, which allows me to select all the way through the object. Now that I'm an x-ray and I have it set to local. I can hit G. And then at Z. Now I can move adjusting the z-direction or you can see it's just shortening The Tail as we expect it should. I'm gonna make my Tail. I lay about here so we can zoom out a little bit and get a better sense of how it looks for the rest of the object. Me a little bit longer. Thinking about there. So a little bit taller than my head is right now. So now that we have the balloon for the overall Tail shortened up, now we need to add that little tip on the end of it. So let's zoom in on our Tail here. We're going to switch to our face mode by hitting three, which will allow us to select the faces individually. So now we want to select our faces here at the end. Hover. The best way we have to do it right now is just by using this square, which you can see when this object is rotated, it makes it rather difficult to select just the ones you want. You have to do it multiple times. And it's a pain. Rather than doing that? We're gonna go up here towards this square Selection Tool is, and if we click and hold on this, we can go down to select the Lasso. What this does is rather than doing a square, now we can actually just hand draw our selection. Now I can just go over here, select a little bit past the ones we want. If we get too much, you can just hit Control and deselect them. Now I have all of these selected, and that's the ones we actually want. With these faces selected. Now we can rotate our camera a bit. We're going to start extruding these out. So would extrude does is it actually is going to create more geometry here. So we can hit Alt Z to get out of this x-ray mode. Now that we have what we want selected. If you hit E, it'll start extruding. This works just like the, the move tools and that it's going to use, in this case our local axis here. So we're going to extrude it up just a little bit. Now that it's been extruded, we're going to hit S to scale it in a little bit. You can see here we're starting to try to make that little taper to create that little tip on the end of it. So we extruded up a little bit by hitting E. Then we scale it down a little bit. We can extrude it up again. So maybe we'll do one more scale. Again. If it seems like it's moving too fast for you, you can hold Shift while you're moving this to make it a little bit smoother, a little bit easier to control. Now we'll extrude it out again. This time we're gonna go up a little bit further. That's rotate around. Make sure everything we've done so far, it looks pretty good. Can zoom out a little bit. We can see here that The Tail looks pretty similar to what this looks like, except ours stops with a really blunt edge. So to correct that, we're gonna go into our edge mode by hitting to. We're going to hold Alt to select this edge loop here, and we're going to click it so that it selects the whole thing. Now we can right-click and then go to bevel edges. As we move this, you can see it's starting to sort of cut that edge and half, split the difference between them. If we scroll up on our mouse, it will add more edges to it to smooth it out. If we scroll up just a little bit, just add a few more edges here. And then we want to move it down to about, right about here. Now we can see that we have a nice round edge on this. Now that we have nice rounded corners on the edges here, let's hold Alt and click this bottom edge here. Then we're gonna use something called proportional editing. So at the top here there's this little circle with a.in the middle of it, guide and click that. Now hit your G key to start moving. And we want to move this in the Z direction. So you can see here, when I start moving that I'm getting the ability to move things sort of almost as if they were made of rubber. So it's sort of stretching everything a little bit all at once rather than just moving a single edge or a single polygon or a single vert. Proportional editing allows you to move all of them All at once, but to a different degree based on how close it is to the edge of the F selected. In order for this to work, however, you need to adjust the size of this circle that's showing the influence of it. So the larger the circle, the greater the influence it has when the objects around it, the smaller the less influence it has. You might start out by doing this and then realize once you try to move this and moves the entire object. And that's because you are proportional editing circle here is much too large. That's because this object is relatively small. So to remedy that, you can scroll up on your mouse wheel to make it smaller until eventually you start seeing it come into view. Or you can use your page up and page down buttons to change the size of it. If you use page up, it'll make it larger. If you use Page Down, it'll make it smaller. So you might just have to hold down the page down button for awhile until you start seeing it come into view. You can see up at the very top left of my screen that it's actually showing the size of this proportional editing circle. So just keep holding on that button until it gets down to about this size. So we want it to be almost in like the half inch, 2.25 inch range. So once you have a down to about this size, make sure you have that bottom edge selected and we're moving it just in Z with the local axis. Then we're just going to pull it down a little bit to help round out that edge. We can move it to about there. And now you can see it's a lot more round. We might also want to do something similar to the edge down here at the bottom. We can hold Alt and select this edge. Now we'll hit G and Z so that we're moving it just in the z-direction. Then I can scale this up a little bit. And I want to move this down so that I kinda make a little bit of a sharper corner down here based on our reference, it shouldn't be quite so gradual So I'm gonna move it down to about here to help flatten this out a little bit, make it a little bit more of a corner rather than a nice soft edge like we had before. Now that we're done making those adjustments, we can go up here and turn off proportional editing. Now if we go back and move, you can see it's just moving that singular edge, which is the normal way of moving stuff. I'm going to Control Z that since I don't actually do that, we can zoom out, get a better idea of what are Tail looks like now, I'm gonna hit tab to exit the edit mode and go back into object mode. We can zoom out. I think that's how it looks pretty good. Again, we can always adjust the proportions as we start adding more pieces. We might want to make the tail a little longer or shorter or the body a little longer. But for now we're just trying to build the basis of this that we can then edit later. Now that we have The Tail created. Let's start on me, not on the tip of the balloon Nose. This is Reference we have for the not on the balloon Nose. We're going to be much more simple than this because for our model, we're really not doing a close-up on the nose, so we don't need to go to all this different detail and all these different folds increases and stuff. We just need to have the indication that it has a not on the end of its Nose similar to what this is. So to begin with, let's start by hiding our body segment. We're just going to select the body segment. And then we can click this little eyeball here at the top right. And that will just hide it in the viewport so we can see past it. Now we can zoom in down here. We're going to hit shift and a to create a new match. We're gonna go up to mesh and then we're going to go to and tourists. This is going to make a doughnut shape. We're going to start by creating this shape here, which is the outside edge of this balloon. Let's zoom in here. The measurements that you're going to want are what matches my screen here. So you're going to want 48 major segments, 18 minor segments. And then for the major radius, you want to 0.2 ". And then for the minor radius, which is the thickness of this, you want 0.05 ". You can see this is a relatively small detail and it's gonna go right at the tip of the nose, which really isn't the main focal point of this object. So we don't need to put a whole lot of detail in it. Something like this would be pretty overkill for this. Once you have that created, you can click off of it. Now we can select the model. We can right-click and we can do Shade Smooth. Now it's a nice smooth shading on the outside of it. So we're going to be using some align tools to help align this tourists to the edge of this Nose. To begin with. Select your tourists first, then hold shift and select your snout. Now we're going to go up to Object, Transform and then align objects. Now that we have this option box up, you want to hold Shift and select each of these letters here for the axes. So this is aligning it to the x-axis. If we have this highlighted, the Y, if we have this, and Z if we have this. In our case, we want to align it to all of these axes for this object. Now if we had Alt and Z, we can see that our tourists here is actually snaps right to the middle and the sensor of the snout. Now that we have the object aligned, you'll notice that it's in the center of the object that we want it to be. However, it's not rotated correctly. Now that these objects are intersecting with each other, it's a little bit difficult to just select the tourists. Now, we can select it from this list over here by first selecting the tourists here, and then hold Control and select the snout. Now we're gonna go up to here and change it from global to local because we want the rotation to match the local rotation of this, not the global rotation. Then we go to Object Transform and then align to transform orientation. We can see now that the tourists has been rotated successfully to match the orientation of this. Now, let's go into our X view here. It's got a nice side view. With just the tourists selected. We're going to hit G and then Z to move it on the z-axis, which is going this direction. Now that follows this. Now we're going to move it just off the edge here and we're going to leave a little bit of a gap between them. Think about there it looks okay with the tourists in place. We can now begin the modeling of the non. First, let's hit Alt Z because we won't really need that for this port. Then we can zoom in here. And we're going to hit tab to start editing this model. Now that we have the tourists and place, our goal here is to delete the backside of this torus so that we can start creating this back portion here. First, let's make sure that we're in the face mode. So let's hit three on our keyboard. We're going to start by selecting, I think this ring here is probably good. So we want to, we want to leave a little bit of this round here, but then we're going to be deleting off the back of this and then re-creating the back of it to taper inward towards the snout So I think there looks good. So we're going to start by holding Alt and then click between these two polygons here. So we're going to click on the line between them. And that'll let us select all the way around it if you select directly in the center of it instead. So if you select directly in the center of a polygon, it will actually go around the other way, which isn't what we want. So we're going to select between the two to get the line. Then we can just hit Delete on our keyboard or X, either. Neither works. They'll get It's going to ask us what we want to delete. So in our case, we want to delete these faces. So we'll just click faces and delete them. And you can see we've deleted out of gap here. Then the same story on the inside and we want to find a spot that leaves a little bit of this interior round, but deletes the rest of it. So I think about maybe here. So a few in it looks like it might be for four faces. In the fifth phase, I believe we're gonna hold Alt and select this border between the two, selects the round, then we can delete that faces. Now the easiest way to delete these faces off the back. Now that we've made two different gaps here didn't separate it from the main body of the object. We can select a single polygon on this, then hit L on our keyboard for select the linked. Then that'll select everything that's attached to that. So everything that's attached to this polygon, which in this case it can't go pass these gaps here because there's a gap between them. So it'll select everything here on the back that's floating. And then we can hit delete faces. And now we've successfully deleted off the back of this torus. With all of those phases deleted, let's hit the two on our keyboard to switch to the edge mode. Now we're going to start by selecting this interior edge loop. We've created this border that we've made on the inside. So we'll start by holding Alt and clicking this line between these two. And that'll select the interior edge. Now, like we did with the Tail where we extruded out, the polygons can actually extrude out edges as well. So we're going to hit E to start extruding, and then we can hit Z to make sure it conforms to the correct direction, which is straight back. So we're just going to scale it in just a little bit. Or rather we're going to extrude it in first. And now we'll scale it in. So we'll hit S on our keyboard to scale it in. We're going to start making a gradual bowl on the inside here that caps the inside of this, not. Now we'll hit E again with Z selected. We're moving it back in the correct direction. Move it in here. Then we'll scale it down. Again. If you're having some issues with the angle or it moving too fast, just hold shift to slow down that movement. Let's move that in a little bit. And I might've been a little bit too far, so we had G and then Z to reposition this. Now let's hit E to extrude it again, Z again, to make sure it's going to direct correct direction. Let's scale this in almost until it's touching. We want to go quite far. Might help if you rotate around now. We're just gonna do one more extrusion. So he, and then Z, just to move it back just a little bit. We only want a little edge on this one. Now we'll hit S. To scale this inward. We want to scale it until it's basically touching here. So about there. Okay, so now we have this edge here, but it's not actually fully capped off. It's an open edge here that it's an intersecting itself. So to begin with, we're going to hit the one key to switch into our vertex mode. As long as you had that edge selected, when you switch to vertex mode, you should notice that it automatically selects the vertex than made up that edge. However, if for some reason you de-selected or it didn't automatically select it, you can just go into your old C mode so that you can see through the object. Then just drag select over these vertex in the middle. Now you can see I have all of them selected again. I can get out of alt Z. Now we're going to hit M on our keyboard for merge. We hit M, we get three different options. So we're gonna do merge at center, which will merge all of these vertex into the center point. So just averages and all out picks the center point and then converts them all into a single vertex to help cap off this object. Now we can hit G and Z and then pull this so that it's a little bit closer to flat. If we wanted to flatten this out a little bit more, we can hit Alt Z to see through the objects. Select all of these, and then hit G and Z to flatten them out a little bit more. We make a nice bowl shape here. Now that we have this interior shape done, we can finish the outside tattoo on our keyboard. To switch back to the edge mode. We can hold Alt to select this edge loop here. Now we're gonna do a similar process, but instead of bringing them all to a point like we did here, instead we're going to taper it back and then just bring it back to this now. So first we'll hit E and then Z. To scale it back a little bit. We can scale this end so we can start to taper now. Then we're just going to keep performing this action until we eventually reach this. Now. Now that we've reached the snout, we can go back and re-evaluate the shape and make sure it looks like how we want it. So first let's start selecting this edge here. So hold Alt and click this edge. Maybe we need to move this a little bit more to the front. We just hit G and Z. We can just slide this a little bit more to the front to keep that sort of round edge here and that we had before. Let me can hold Alt and click this one, G and Z. Remember, we'll just pull this a little bit further forward to make the taper a little less gradual. Now let's hit Alt and Z. Then we can x-ray this mode. Then we'll hit the Alt, click on this edge will hold Shift while clicking this edge. Then the same thing for the last edge here. So we have all three of these edge loops selected. And let's scale these in just a little bit. Okay, Now hit Alt Z to get out of that x-ray mode. We can rotate around and inside of our model here to make sure that it's actually intersecting, which is what we want. Now let's zoom out and just double-check that our balloon non here on the front. It looks correct. So we can hit tab to exit the edit mode. Let's zoom back a little bit. We can turn back on the body up here at the top right by clicking the little I. Then let's rename this tourists to not that we know what it is. Let's zoom out. Now we can see here that we have a nice simple balloon, not that makes up the nose of the snout for the balloon dog. The next lesson, we'll be modeling The Ears of our balloon dog. I'll see you there. 6. Modeling: The Ears: In this lesson, we'll be modeling The Ears of our balloon dog. Let's begin. To start. Let's go to our X view at the top-right. Now let's select our body segment and hit Shift and D. To start duplicating it. We're gonna move that up to right around this intersection between the snout segment and the next segment. So you can put that about here. Now let's rotate this new piece by hitting R and then hold Control. And then we're going to rotate it until it's straight up and down. Now, eventually we're going to rotate this backwards a little bit, but it'll be easier to work with when it's straight up and down for now, because we're gonna be doing some modeling on this Ears segment. Now up at the top right, we can click on this Y to switch to the front view for this object. We're gonna move this over to the right just a little bit. We want it to be off to the right of the center. This blue line here, we're going to move it off to the right of that. So right about there, just passed it. Now that we have this starting Ears segment in place, let's discuss what we're trying to accomplish with this piece. So you can see down here in our Reference that The Ears for the balloon dog, it's actually one segment of balloon that's been twisted in the middle. And then they're folded over and then ran back down into this intersection. So our goal with this is to create something that looks similar to this sort of twist at the top. And then Abbott pinched down at the bottom. You also noticed that the balloon for the ear bows out a little bit here on the sides. So it's kind of squished together in the middle and then it pushes out on the edges. So we're gonna be trying to accomplish that as well. If we zoom out here on our reference, we can see another photo reference down here that's a little bit closer to the Ears to help see what I was talking about here. So it bows out a little bit on the edge. It is a little bit flat in here, maybe a little bit concave. So there's gonna be a bit of a gap between the ears. And then there's a section at the top where it either pinches together or they squeeze the air out so that they can successfully fold it and make a transition between them. There are different types of balloon dog ears. You can see on this balloon dog here that they've opted to not do any sort of pinching at the top. However, in our balloon dog, we're going to try to do that because I think it looks better when you have two distinct Ears rather than this shoe U-shaped for that Ears. So let's go back to the original reference I showed you. Will try to just generally match these shapes. We don't need to be perfect with this. Before we begin any modeling, let's just go up here and rename this new piece. Instead of Body 001, we're going to name this Ears. So we don't forget what this object is. Now we can hit Alt and Z on our keyboard to go into the X-ray mode. Then we're going to hit Tab to go into the edit mode. Now we need to go to Edge, which is the two key when the keyboard or this little symbol here. We're just going to drag select through these middle points here. And then we'll right-click to sub-divide. Our next step here is going to be to bend this object to get this bowing on the edges as well as the concave in the middle. And in order to do that, we need to have more polygons here in the middle to bend, because you can't really bend a single polygon. It needs to have some additional cuts in it so that you can bend it smoothly. So down here at the bottom left, we can see it starts with a number of cuts is set to one, which means it's just going to put a single cut down the middle. We're going to click this all the way up to ten. We want to have these cuts here, relatively square. We probably don't need more than this. I mean, it could be a little bit more square than this, but this will be plenty for our purposes. So once you have that set of ten, you can just click off of it and then it'll accept the change. We can hit Alt and Z to exit the X-ray mode. So that's a little bit easier to look at. The next thing we need to make is the lattice object. First, let's exit the edit mode by hitting Tab. Now we can hit shift and a. It's bring up the Add menu. We're going to be adding a lattice. So we can click this here. Now I want to zoom out a little bit to get an idea what this lattices, this big orange box that we just created is the lattice. The lattice itself is not a mesh. However, you can re-size this lattice to be a cage around a mesh. Then we can add additional cuts to this lattice. That lattice will allow us to deform the object that it's parented to. The first thing we need to do is to line this lattice up with this ear. And you can see it's much larger and it's off center. So there's a few different ways we can do this, but I'll try to show you a different way than the line method that we did last time. Up at the top center of your screen here. And you'll see this little U-shape here that looks like a magnet So this magnet is your snaps toggle. When you turn it on, you can see it lights up and it looks like a little magnet icon. Now, now that we have our snaps toggled on, we can change the type of snapping that it's going to use. By default, it should be set to increment. However, in our case we want to set it to vertex. One vertex is going to do is allow it to snap to the vertex is on an object and the scene. So to start, let's go up to our Y view to see the front of the balloon dog. We consume in a bit. Now let's hit G to start moving this lattice around. And you can see this little orange dot is snapping to these vertex through these points where they converge on the model. We want to center it up on the center line of this year, which is this line here. Then we also want to put it into a center point on this ear. I think right about here, it looks good. We can always adjust this later if it's not dead center. Now let's go to our X view at the top-right. Can recenter our camera a bit? Now we're going to hit G. Then why? To make sure that it's only snapping on this direction if you just hit G, It's going to snap to the outside of this and it'll mess up the last movement we made. We want it to only consider snapping in this direction, so we'll hit G and then Y. And then we're going to snap it again to this midpoint here. Now if we rotate around, you can see it's centered in the middle of that. Now that we've snapped the lattice to the sensor, we can go up here to our snap toggle and turn it off just by clicking it off. Now we're going to scale down this lattice so that it's the correct size for this ear. So we want to snug it up, right up to the edges of this ear without intersecting it, we can leave a little bit of breathing room around it. So to start, let's just start scaling it down uniformly to meet roughly the same size. Again, you can use shift if you find that easier to slow it down a little bit. You might also find this easier if you're in one of these more orthographic views by clicking one of these dots at the top right. We can see here by scaling it down, I was a little bit off on my choice of vertex here. So if that's the case for you as well, click this handle here and just pull it down. Again that you were seeing these handles here because I actually have the Move Tool selected at the top-left. If you don't see these handles, or you could just, you could select this icon up here or you can just hit G and then use Z to move it as well. I'm going to center it up. And now we can scale it up a little bit because you don't want to actually intersecting, you want to just a little bit outside of it. Right about there is good. You can see I've a bit of a gap. Now I can hit S and then X to make sure that I'm only scaling it in the x-direction. Just hold shift to slow it down a little bit. We're gonna get about the same distance from the edge. And I'm going to go to the X view at the top right. Now I hit S and then why? To make sure I'm only scaling it in the y-direction. I think that looks good. So now we have a little bit of breathing room all the way around the object. If we rotate around, it seems to be nicely centered and it's scaled down to an appropriate size. Now let's go into the lattice properties. So we can do that by going down into this little green icon down here on the bottom right, that looks like the lattice. So we select that. Then the settings we're concerned with here are the lattice resolution, which is how many cuts it hasn't it? So if we turn this number up here by turning and accepts a three, you can now see that we have a cut right down the middle, going this direction. And we'll do the V as well. Now we have a cut going this direction. And then for the horizontal cuts going this direction, we need to increase the W value, except this one, we want to have a lot more cuts than just a single cut down the middle. We're going to turn this up to seven. We're choosing seven specifically because it gives us a nice mid point. If we make it an even number, then we lose a midpoint that we can select in the center here. So we're going to turn it back down to seven. That way we have a nice point right down the middle that we can use to select basically direct center of this year. Now that we have the lattice resolution setup, we can now select the ear, then select the lattice, then hit control and P to parent these together. What we want to select this lattice to form. So when we select this, you'll see nothing happens immediately. You might have noticed that your little menu over here has changed and now The Ears reside within the lattice itself. What this means now is if we select the lattice and then go into the edit mode for the lattice by hitting tab, we can start adjusting the points on this lattice. And it will actually deform the object within the lattice that we put there. So I can hit Control and Z to undo that change. The point of putting this object within a lattice and then deforming it with the lattice instead of just using the points themselves, is we get a bit more control by using this lattice because we have less points to worry about. So we don't have to worry about getting it sort of weird and lumpy in there by not selecting the correct points are having to make a nice smooth curve. We can just let the lattice do some of that work for us because it's going to deform all these things uniformly based on the lesser amount of verts that we have to work with on the lattice itself. Let's switch back into our front view using the why Up at the top right. Now we can select a points on these lattice. We can start to try to match the shape that we see here. So one thing you might find a little bit easier while moving these lattice points is to turn on your proportional editing like we had in the last lesson. If you click this, now when you move things with the G key, so we can hit G and then X to move it only in the x-direction. We can make this circle larger or smaller to affect other points with it. If we wanted to affect these, these two points directly above and below it, we can make this circle encompass those points. And the larger we make it, the more influence it will have on other points nearby. So first let's just try to pull this out a little bit. Some of that sort of rounding we see in the reference image. So we'll pull this out. Maybe I'll make my circle a little bit bigger so the, the pool is a little bit more uniform. We can select these inner points here by selecting them and then hitting G and X. Let's pull those in just a little bit. So we're going to try to create a little bit of a gap because eventually we're going to be duplicating this ear and setting it next to itself. So we want to have a little bit of a see-through gap here to let people know that these are two unique segments of balloon and this isn't one confined object. Now let's select these points on the bottom. This case we can just hit R to rotate these. We want to rotate these slightly towards the center because we want to give the impression that this little segment here is going into this intersection where there's going to be more knots and things in real life tied together. Since we have that move there and we can just drag this over. Tried to center it a little bit back towards the middle. Now I encourage you just to go through this ear and just start, just try to massage some of these curves here. If something seems a little too lumpy, go ahead and just, just start pushing these points around. It's pretty easy to mess with this lattice. We're going to try to round this out, try to match this shape a little bit. Now once you get something you're happy with. We're gonna go up to the top. We're going to select these top three points here. We're going to start rotating these. So our goal here is to rotate this center point more towards about where this corner is actually. Because eventually we're going to have two different here segments here. And then we want to have some sort of connecting bridge between them. And a connecting bridge is going to look a lot nicer if these are rotated towards each other so that the bridge isn't so thin and sort of squished at the top. Let's start by hitting the R key to rotate. These might need to hold Shift to rotate these a little bit slower. We're just going to rotate it just a little by little. And at this point you might want to turn off your proportional editing because if you're happy with your shape down here, you don't really want to mess with it too much. So you can just click this icon here. Every time we rotate it, we're going to need to try to pull it back towards the center. So in this case, I might want to grab a little bit further down, rotate these a little bit. And then I'm just going to move them back towards the left again. So you can see I'm slowly inching this central pole at the top or all these points are coming together. I'm trying to move a little bit. So that's angled more towards the left. I think one more rotation of just the top points should do it. I'm going to rotate a little bit more to the left. Then we're just going to pull this out again. So in this case, it's starting to look a little bit flat up at the top here. And we can adjust that just by grabbing just like the center point here. And moving just that. You don't have to grab them in large groups. You can grab a single-point at a time and really tweak this shaped here. Heart's content here. We're just going to try to make a nice little rounded top on it. But eventually we're going to be bridging between. So just go through here, finish up any rounding you wanna do, make sure your top is rotated about where mine is. It's I'd say it's just about a 45-degree angle, maybe a bit shy of 45 degrees. Okay, So I'm pretty happy with the shape that I have here. Now for my ear, I'm gonna hit the Tab key to exit the edit mode on the lattice. Then I'm going to select the ear instead of the lattice. Then you're going to go to your modifier properties panel here on the right. So it's a little blue wrench icon. And then you can see here that we have this lattice here as a modifier on this object We wanna do is apply the changes of the lattice to the modifier. Because if we just delete this lattice now that we're done with it, it's going to lose all these changes we've made to it. We need to have first apply those changes to this balloon model, the actual mesh itself so that when we delete this lattice and get rid of it, it doesn't just lose all the changes. We can do that by hitting this little drop-down here on the right side and then just choose Apply. Now those changes, you can see the modifier is gone because it's actually applied those changes directly to the model. We can now select the lattice, then just delete it with the delete key. And you can see those changes stick around. Now that we have these changes applied, Let's select the ear again, hit the Tab to go into the edit mode. Then we're gonna go to the face mode. We're going to have three. We can select a single face on here and then it L to select all the linked ones. Or alternatively, since there's only just this object in here, you can just set a and it'll select all those faces as well. So either one works. Now we're going to hit Shift and D to start duplicating just these faces. And we went to only duplicate them on the x-axis. We hit X while we're duplicating and it'll make sure it only moves on the X. Just move it to about here. You're gonna have to reposition at any way after we mirror it. Now we have our duplicate. We can go to Mesh mirror and then we don't wanna do X global. So you can see now that it's mirrored these and then we can just move it back into position. We want to move these so that the top here just about touches. I mean, it's okay if it touches just a little bit so it can intersect just a tiny bit. Right about there seems good. And then we want to make sure that these bottom here is close together. I think that'll be okay once we slide these Ears down into the correct position, right now there are a little too high and they're also not angled. So I think once we slide them down, you won't notice the small gap here. I think this works out fine for ours. Now we can rotate around our model. What we wanna do now is select these polygons surrounding the central vertex here at the top. So just make sure you have your Lasso Select tool on. Up here. You want to select lasso. That'll make it easier to select this circle. Then you can just click and drag and just draw a little circle around this hold Shift. And draw a circle around the other side. I can see we have both sides selected. Then we can just hit Delete. And we want to delete the faces that we just selected. Now we have all of those faces deleted. We can get to the jump to our Edge mode. And then we're going to select both of these edge loops. We can add Alt and select an edge here. Then, while selecting the other one, make sure you're holding shifts. So we're going to click while holding shift for the second and select both of them. Now. Now we want to hit right-click and then choose bridge edge loops. We can see here now that it's bridged across these edge loops. So the intent that we're doing here is we want to try to make it look like whoever was folding this balloon dog and twisting it up did something similar to what they did here where they didn't fully inflate the balloon with the intention that they would need to have somewhere that they could bend this. So rather than going with a really tight, twisted look, we're going to just let it be a little bit sort of uninflated in the center here. And then we'll have a bridge between these two pieces to let people know that this is one single balloon that's going around the ears. But you might notice that we're getting some really weird looking shading on this enormous looks like this part here is in shadow. That's because when we duplicated these faces across, it's actually flipped this one inside out for some reason. The best way we can check that to make sure that we are correct and the fact that this is inside out as go up here where we change the wireframe mode before. So these two little intersecting circles, we want to go down here to face orientation. So when we check this on, you'll see the whole model here is blue except for this side of the year, which is red, which means this side of the year is actually rotated inside out. So it looks correct as a model. However, these faces are actually turned inside out. So this is the inside face. And then the inside of the balloon is actually the outside face, which is obviously incorrect. And that's why we're getting these weird shadows here. Blender isn't quite sure how to, to sort of figure out what's going on here, because the model just abruptly turns itself inside out. So the way we can fix this is by hitting the a key while we're in this edit mode, we want to make sure we're in face mode actually. So first switch to face mode. So adding three. Then we're going to hit a to select the entire model. Then we can go to Mesh. We can go down two normals. We wanted to re-calculate the outside. So essentially we're just telling Blender, Hey, can you look at this model again? And then just make sure everything that we have selected is actually considered the outside, not the inside or the outside. So when we click this, you can see now the model is turned entirely blue We can go back up to this overlay panel here and turn off for face orientation. And you can see now that the shading between these is actually a lot better. So the smoothing groups are able to figure out what's going on here. Now, it's a pretty sharp edge here that we have and we'll be fixing that. You're still getting a little bit of a sort of a weird look at the top. But it's much better than it was before. Now that we have the faces correctly oriented. Let's go into the X-ray mode again. So we're going to hit Alt and Z. Then we're going to switch to our Edge mode. We're going to select these edges here in the middle. So we want to select these new bridged edges that we have. Then we're going to right-click. We're going to do sub-divide again. We don't need a ton of faces here, and let's just try. We'll do three. So we can see we add the three little cuts here, which this is just going to give Blender a little bit more resolution for the next step where we're going to smooth this stuff out. We have three cuts in it now, we can click off of it. Now let's switch back to our vertex mode, which is one on the keyboard. We can get out of this x-ray mode as well. So we can Altman Z get out of that. Now we'll hit a to select everything. Then we're going to right-click and then go to smooth vertices. So once we select that, we can zoom in up here. We can see it's started this actually smooth out some of this. So let's a little bit more rounded. You can see it's not entirely flat here. It started to bow it down a little bit. We can make that smoothing more severe by turning up the smoothing value down here. By default, it's set to 0.5. If you turn it down to zero, it's doing nothing. And then you can turn it up to one to increase the smoothing. That's at one. It looks a little bit better. So we can click off of that. Can check it out. We hit tab, we can go back into our regular objects mode to get a better idea of how smooth it looks. Maybe we want to try that one more time so we can go back into our edit it a, to select everything. Right-click. Go to smooth vertices. We can turn that back up to one. You can see it's actually, it's smoothing it out a little bit more this time. However, if we wanted to do it again without having to go back in and re-select and rehydrate everything. We can just increase this repeat value down here at the bottom. So this is essentially saying paid, do this smoothing that one value except to it twice on the model. If you turn it up, it'll do it three times, four times, five times. However, you can see as we smooth it more and more, it actually starts pulling these points away from each other. So we might not need to do it quite as much as that. I accidentally clicked off of it there. So I just need to go back like Control Z that no listen with vertices, maybe five, a little bit too much. We'll try to. At this point, we've smoothed this thing about three times. Now I'm happy with that. We can click off of it, go back to object mode. We can see here that it looks a lot more smooth. That's a lot more gradual now. Now we just need to adjust the placement of our ears. So I'm gonna go into my X view here. Select my year. Now we can pull it down so that it intersects with this intersection here. Let's pull it down to about here, and we might need to adjust it later. And then we can hit the R key to rotate these Ears back. And we don't want to rotate them back too far. Although it's up to you. If you really wanted to pull it back, then it just kinda have Ears is sort of look like they're blowing in the wind. But maybe we'll try to match the rotation there of the Tail, make it uniform with that. So think about right about there, maybe a little bit less somewhere in that range. So about 20 degrees backwards is a nice match for the tails rotation. We can rotate around, see how this looks. When you to pull it down just a little bit more. I think that looks pretty good. So there's sort of like a hidden, not essentially that we're implying to the viewer of this object that's somewhere in here. All these balloons are being tied together. And then the areas where we can't hide it, we're giving them this indication that the balloon is not fully inflated at the top. That way they were able to fold it over, sort of like The Tail. The next lesson, we'll be modeling The Legs of our balloon dog. I'll see you there. 7. Modeling: The Legs: In this lesson, we'll be creating the legs of our balloon dog, utilizing The Ears we modeled in the last lesson. Let's begin. We'll start by going into the X view at the top right. Now we need to select our ears and then we're getting to duplicate them using shift in D. We're going to move them down here. It's about where the legs are. About. There looks good. We can rotate around. The first thing we wanna do is we want to make these Legs symmetrical. So before this intersection here was pretty well hidden by these two pieces. However, on the legs, we're going to want to make sure that we have this sort of deflated section, that bridge that we made before on both ends of this this Legs segment because we don't want them separated at the bottom. Let's start with censoring this pivot point that is currently down at the bottom leg to the center of the object. So that's easier to make symmetrical. It's we're gonna go up to Object and then go to set origin. Then we're going to choose origin to geometry. Now you can see here that it's snapped at right to the center of this object. And that'll make it easier for us to make it symmetrical. Now. Now we can go into the edit mode for these Legs by hitting tab. We're going to switch to the face mode using three on our keyboard. Then we're going to hit a to select all of these phases. Now go up to mesh and then down to symmetrized. We'll click that. Then you can get, I need to switch your direction here on this drops down to plus Z to minus Z. So if we did the opposite of this, so if you did minus C two plus Z, you can see now it's duplicating the side that had no bridge on it. At the top there's no bridge and the bottom there's no bridge. Then also there's these other options here that will make it symmetrical in other ways other than what we want. The one we want is plus Z to minus Z. And that will make the top symmetrical as well. On the bottom. We can see here and now we have that bridge on the top and the bottom. So much you have that setup, you can just click off of it. And now that'll confirm that selection. The symmetrized, did a pretty good job of making the model symmetrical. However, it left some messy geometry here in the middle, there's a lot of cuts really close to each other. We don't really need that. We're gonna go into our edge mode now with the two key. Now we're just going to zoom in here and we're going to select the top edge by holding Alt. And then we're going to continue holding Alt. And now hold Shift to select the bottom on both the left and the right leg. So we're only leaving the middle one behind. Now that we have those selected, you can hit X or delete on your keyboard. And we want it to dissolve these edges. So we don't want to actually delete the edges because we delete the edges entirely. It will delete the faces that are associated with them as well. By dissolving them edges. We're only getting rid of the edges themselves but leaving behind the faces that they are attached to. Those edges deleted. The model is a little bit more clean now. We don't have all those really close together faces. Now we could do a little bit better job here of placing this leg. So we're going to switch out of our edit mode. Now we can just move this leg around and make sure that it's kind of nestled up inside this this intersection here. We want to make it look like it runs into some sort of twisted, not with inside here. We can check on our X view here. We can see as long, as, long as this rotation looks good, we can probably leave it as is right now. It's currently the exact same rotation as the, The Ears are. If we wanted to make that a little less symmetrical on the top and the bottom. We could also rotate these a little bit. So maybe we rotate them out just a little bit further. So about ten degrees more. You can move this back to where it was. About there. I think these legs should be a little bit longer. So currently our ears are the same length as our Legs, which is a little odd. So you can see up here at our reference, The Legs are a fair bit longer than The Ears, maybe 25, 30% longer. Let's try to make sure our Legs match that proportion as well. To lengthen our legs, Let's go back into edit mode using tab. Then we're going to change it to the vertex mode, which is the one key. We're going to hit Alt Z so that we can select through the model. Make, see here that this edge here is kinda like the exact midpoint of this leg. So let's select all the vertex below this point. You can see here I'm also using the Lasso Select to change into the Lasso Select in case you don't have that selected. Now is up here at the top, you can click and hold on this button. Then you have the option between different types of selection. So I'm currently using lasso. With these vertex selected. Make sure you don't have your proportional editing turned. One's still, we're going to turn that off. Now we can hit G and then Z to move them just in the z-direction. Now that we've lengthened it a little bit, Let's zoom out and see if the proportions are correct. I think our leg could still be a little bit longer. So we're going to G and then Z again. To pull these Legs out a little bit further. We'll hit tab to exit or edit mode and then hit Alt Z to X at the C3 mode. And let's just spin around and make sure that we liked this leg before we decide to duplicate it to the back. So before we've duplicated it, Let's switch back to global, because right now you can see our arrows are pointing the wrong direction. If we move this in this direction, it's going to go downward. We want to make sure it just goes straight forward and backward. So we'll go back to global. Can deselect this just to rotate around our model. I think that looks okay for now. They might be tilted a little bit too far, but let's see what it looks like once we get the back leg on the start and we're going to select our front leg. We're going to hit shift in D and then hit Y to make sure it only moves in the y-direction. We're going to move it approximately the right spot. We're going to have to rotate this. Now you have the option to either rotate this leg by hitting R and Z to make sure it only rotates and the z-axis. And then you can just hold Control to rotate the amount of degrees you need, which is 180. Or alternatively, if I Control Z, that change, I can go up to Object mirror. Then why global? And that will just mirrored across the y-axis. So either one works. In this case, because this object is symmetrical, it really doesn't matter whether you rotate it or you mirror it. It's the same thing either way. Now we can go into our X view. And let's just make sure that this leg is positioned on the same roughly the same area, but the last one was like That looks okay. Let's rotate around, just get a feel for whether or not there's any gaps in the model. I think overall, it looks pretty nice. Our next step is to parent all of these pieces together. That way we don't have to move each piece individually or just drag select over it every time we want to move the entire balloon dog. So to start with, we're going to select this body segment. We're gonna kinda go to Object, set origin and an origin to geometry. Because we're gonna be using this body segment as the main parent for all the other pieces with the origin set. Now we can go through and select each of these pieces individually. We're going to hold Shift while we select them. Make sure you select your body segment last. You have to select every piece first. Then the body segment will be last. That way this operation Nose, which piece is the parent of all the other pieces? You can see that these pieces are a different color from this one. So this one here in the center of the body segment will be the parent of all the others. Now we can hit Control and P together to bring up the parenting menu. And we're just going to choose object. When you click that, you might even notice that these little dotted lines shoot out of this body segment here and go to the other pieces. They're the most noticeable here on the top and the bottom of the head. What that means now is if I select this body segment and I move it, it moves the entire balloon dog with it. You do, however, have to make sure that you, when you're selecting this balloon dog and you want to move the entire thing that you're selecting, the body segment. When you do that, if you select just a, another piece and then try to move that, it's only going to move that piece. It won't move the entire balloon dog because that piece is not the parent. I'm going to Control Z that change because I don't want to actually just move The Tail. I want to move the entire balloon dog. Now the last thing that we'll do in this lesson, because we're going to be applying a modifier to this model that will make the model overall a bit smoother. So it's going to add more geometry to this model to even out some of these jagged edges we might see when we get a little closer to it. So to start with, we're going to have the body segments selected. We're gonna go to our modifier panel here, which is the little blue wrench icon. We can select add a modifier. We want to add a subdivision surface modifier. We can click that. Now that we have the Modifier applied, we can turn off the effect to see what it looked like before and after by clicking this little monitor icon here, which will disable this effect within the viewport. If we turn off the little camera icon, this will also turn it off for the Render as well. So by turning this on and off here, we won't see any change because this is not the Render. However, we turn off the little monitor icon here, we can see a change in the model with a subdivision surface Modifiers doing is it's duplicating all of the faces we have on this monitor and putting in-between cuts between all of these different edges here. When we turn this back on here, you can see that overall it's a little bit smoother here on the edge. And the reason why it doesn't look like it's adding any additional phases. Because we have this optimal display turned on. When you turn this off, you can see here now that we do have more cuts. So by turning it on and off, this isn't actually changing anything about the edges of the model, but it's allowing us to see these hidden cuts that it's putting in. So it's up to you whether or not you want to have this optimal display turned on and off. If you want a cleaner looking model, then you can just leave it checked. But if you want to know for a fact that you have this thing turned on and it's enabled, then you can uncheck it so you can see all these extra police. This modifier also has to other settings. We can adjust. The first one here where it says number one is how many cuts it's displaying within the viewport. So this is the multiplication of the faces that it's going to display within the viewport. So if we turn this up, this is only adjusting what we see in the viewport. It will not adjust what it looks like in the final render. That's what the second one is for. This one here is, we can have this higher than the viewport display. If we have this sets of five, that means that the Render is gonna be significantly higher poly than what we see here in the viewport. Now five in this case is significantly overkill in our situation here, I think that the Render could actually be set down to one as well. We don't really need the Render to be much more smooth than what we're seeing here. I think this is plenty. We can have both of these set to one. And then like I said, it's up to you whether or not you have the optimal display turned on or off. In my case, I'm going to turn it back one just so that the model looks a little bit cleaner. With the smoothing now applied to our body segment, we can zoom back out. We're going to deselect the body segment. And now we're going to select each one of these pieces by holding Shift and clicking on them. Remember select your body segment last because that's what we're going to be pulling from. Now we can select the body segment. We're going to hit Control and L. Then we're going to choose copy Modifiers. So when we do this now, it will copy the modifier from the last selected thing. In this case the one in one subdivision surface modifier. And it will apply it to every other piece here. Now, we don't have to go through the hassle of adding each individual one by itself. We can just copy all the Modifiers from the one that we've already set up that we like. And it'll apply to each one that we also add selected. In the next lesson, we'll be building the Render Studio for our balloon dog. I'll see you there. 8. Creating the Render Studio: In this lesson, we'll be modeling the Render Studio and adding some lights to our scene. Let's begin. The first thing we wanna do is start organizing our layers up at the top right. So let's start by renaming this collection which currently has our balloon dog in it. We can double-click on the collections name. We're just going to rename this balloon dog. We can now collapse this collection. Then select the scene collection at the top. So we're going to select this little white box here. Then we're going to right-click and create new collection. This collection here we'll name Render Studio. A collection is essentially just a folder that holds different items that are in your Blender scene. And a nice compact package or Render Studio will be multiple parts. We want to make sure we have a nice way to categorize that. With the little white box highlighted next to the Render Studio. By clicking it, we can go back to our viewport and hit Shift and a. And we're gonna go to Mesh. We're going to create a plane. This plane is going to make up the infinite wall of our Render Studio. However, we can see that our balloon dog is actually pushed down into the floor of this plane. So let's select our body segment. Now we're just going to move the balloon dog Up until it reaches the plane. We can zoom in here. We go up underneath it, we can see where it's intersecting. So we're gonna move it up slowly until it's just barely intersecting with the plane. Right about there is good. It's okay to have just a little bit of a poking through. Now let's select our plane. We're going to zoom out a bit. We want to scale this plane up pretty large. So we're going to hit S on our keyboard and we're just going to start scaling it. We want to make this pretty big because our camera needs to make sure it doesn't see the edges of this plane. I'd say somewhere in this range is okay. In my case, I made it about 22 times the size. So maybe we'll just make it a little bit bigger. I think, right? There's good. This should give us plenty of room to render this balloon dog without any worry about seeing the edge of the scene depending on which angle are camera is going to be. Now let's switch into our edit mode. We're going to switch into our edge mode here. So we're going to have to on the keyboard. We're going to select this back edge here so we can just click and drag over top of it. Do matter. But now we're going to hit E. We're going to hit Z so that we can extrude this edge straight up. I think about, what about there's good. It's almost as tall as it is wide here, might be a bit shorter. We'll see if we need to make it any taller once we get to the next step. Now we can go down here to our modifier panel, which is the little blue wrench icon. And click add a modifier, and we're going to add a subdivision surface modifier like we did on the balloon dog. Since we click that, you'll see all of a sudden our plane now is a rounded kind of almost potato chip shape. So while this is helping smoothing that out and get rid of that hard corner, it's obviously smoothing it a little bit too much. Subdivision surface is trying to average out all of these points and make the surface is smooth as possible. But since we're giving it very little to work with here by only having it at a single subdivision. It's doing a pretty poor job of smoothing it out while also keeping the floor flat for us. So first, let's turn this up. We're going to get a bit more subdivisions. I think three will work well, want to set both of these to three. We can go back to our object mode by hitting Tab. And then we're going to right-click on this plane and choose Shade Smooth. How it looks like a nice smooth surface rather than all those facets that we were seeing before. Now we can go back to our edit mode and we're going to try to figure out how to get this potato chip shape that we currently have to be a little bit more cooperative and a more flat on the bottom with a nice subtle curve at the back. To start with. We're going to rotate around. We're going to drag select through all of these vertical edges here. So we want to select this edge, this edge, and then this front edge. So we'll select down. So now I have all three of those selected. I'm going to right-click and then do sub-divide. I want to add two cuts here. We're going to set it up to number of cuts to. Now we can click off of this to accept those changes. I'm going to hold Alt to click this edge, which is going to select this entire edge loop here. I'm gonna hold shift while holding Alt to select the second one. What we're seeing here is two different versions of this. So this see-through frame that we're seeing here is what the model actually looks like. And then the, the potato chip shape, for lack of a better word here. Is what we are seeing after this subdivision is added to it. The way we're going to try to clean this shape up. So it's a little bit more cooperative, is by adding more geometry to it to let this subdivision surface modifier know where it needs to smooth things out and where it's okay to leave them flat. So first we added these two cuts. Now we need to hit S and X. And we're going to scale these cuts further apart from each other. So you can see as we're scaling them more towards the edges of the original plane. It's making it a little bit more square, a little less rounded. So we're going to scale these up pretty close to the edge, I'd say about right about there looks okay. There's a little bit of a gap here. We can see we've made it uniform on each side. That way this shape means consistent. We solve the issue of it being a little bit too rounded on the corners here. However, we still the issue of not really having a flat floor to render this balloon dog one, it's pretty much entirely curved. So what we need to do now is we need to add cuts going this direction. And then we're going to slide those cuts further down here to let the subdivision surface modifier know that this top wall can be mostly flat and that the bottom floor can be mostly flat as well. And the only place we really want this soft curve that it's giving us is basically just right in the corner here. We can click off the model to deselect these edges. Now we can hit Control R to bring up a loop cut option. So when we hover over an edge here, you can see this, the little yellow line pops up. So this is saying that it's going to put a cut here once we click on those edges. So the place we want to put a cut is across this back wall like this. Since we click it, it's going to make the edge. And now it gives us the option to slide that edge. So the further down we slide it, the more straight that back wall is going to be. In our case, we don't want it entirely street, so maybe we'll stop right about here. And then we can do the same thing on the bottom here by hitting Control into R. And we're going to hover over this bottom line here. And we want this horizontal cut, this direction. We're going to click. And now we can slide this back as well. The further back we slide this, the more of this front area will remain flat. We're going to slide it back to about here. I think that's good now. Now we can click off. We can rotate around the model and see what we have. I think for our purposes, this wall should work out nicely. If we need to adjust it later on, all we need to do is just move some verts around and we can make the wall slide back a little bit further so that this curve is more gentle, so it's not quite so tight here. If we find that we're seeing the edges of the plane, we can simply just select this object and scale it up in the direction that we're seeing the edges on. For now, we're going to leave this as is. Our next step is to add lighting to the scene. However, we want to turn off the wireframe that we've been using wall modeling because at this point we're not going to be doing much modeling anymore. It's not that helpful to us to see this wireframe at all times. If we zoom in here, we can see that we have the wireframe displayed on our model. But we want to turn that off now so we can go back up to this little drop-down here with the two intersecting circles. We can go down to our wireframe. We can just uncheck that. We don't need to see this at all times, will still be able to see it when we're selecting the model and working in the edit mode like this, if I select The Ears here and hit Tab, I'll still be able to see the wireframe when I need to. But otherwise, if I'm not working on the model, I don't need to see the wireframe anymore. Now let's add our Lighting. We're actually going to be using an add-on that's already pre-packaged with Blender. So you don't to worry about purchasing this. It's entirely free, it's already in Blender, you just need to enable it. So we're gonna go to Edit and then our preferences. Now you can go to Add-ons. Then the search bar here you want to type in trie, T-R-I-E. That'll bring up the try Lighting lighting plugin. So you need to do is just enable that by checking the little box on. There's some information here about how to access it. So once you have this checked on, we can close this box. Now that we have the add-on enabled, let's first turn on our cycles rendering for our viewport. This is how we're going to visualize what these lights are actually doing. So up here at the top right, you'll see this far-right circle here. If you click that. Now you're seeing is going to actually be rendered. So currently, it's only rendering with the default scene Lighting, which is sort of ambient light that's just being cast across the entire scene, which is a light gray. However, once we add our lights, you'll be able to actually see what the lights are influencing without switching to the Cycles Render, you won't actually see what the lights are doing. You'll only see the gizmos for the lights. With our body segments selected. We're going to hit shift and a to bring up the lights. So normally we would be adding a mesh from here. However, there's also options to add lights. What we've added is this three-point lighting system. By default, there's only four lights that you can add, but the three-point lighting system has been added by that plugin. We're going to select the three-point light system. Then you should notice an option box down here at the bottom-left By default, these lights come in very dim, so you might not have even noticed that we've added lights. There are some subtle shadows now being cast by the Legs. However, overall it's still pretty dim. So first we're going to turn up the base energy, which is defaulted to three. We're going to turn that all the way up to 50. If we type in 50. Now we can see that these lights are actually doing something. We can see the shadows cast by each one of them. Now let's zoom out a little bit and our scene, make sure you don't click off of anything though. So only use your, your mouse wheel to zoom out. We can see that these lights are being generated all the way out here. So they're really, really far away from our balloon dog. Let's get them a little bit closer. We can do that with this interface here. So first let's adjust the height of these lights. As we lower the height, they'll get closer to the floor. I think 1.5 looks good for this. We're going to type in 1.5 here and just hit Enter. Now we can see that there are a lot closer to the floor. However, there's still too far away. We can see that the light here is actually not casting that far. So as we move it closer, it should actually be brighter on this as well. For our distance here, we're going to basically have this. So we're going to type in 80 " for ours. Then hit Enter. Now you can see that the balloon dog is much brighter because the lights are a lot closer to it. If we zoom in down here, overall, the scene has gotten much brighter. We also have the option to adjust the rotation of each of these lights before we leave this option box. For the left angle, Let's slide it up a little bit. So we're going to move it a little bit more towards the front of the head, which is about 30. For the right angle. We're going to move it a little bit further behind it. So maybe just five more degrees to about 50. So that's this one. Then the back angle, you could probably leave that where it's at or we could just move it a little bit more towards the back of it, which is 230. So we can see here now that the bulk of the light is coming from the front here. And there's just a little bit of light here filling the back of the object. This seems like a pretty good place to start. So now we can click off and we've gotten rid of that option box and accepted those changes. Let's go light by light and see if maybe we can improve this scene at all. The key light is typically your brightest light in your scene. We can see the properties for this key light by going down here to this little green light icon. So our key light here, it sits currently to 50. I think it needs to be a bit brighter though. So we're going to turn this all the way up to 100. I think. We'll type in 100 here and then hit Enter. We can see now that the key light is much brighter, this is almost starting to feel more like a sunlit scene. Your fill light here. So the try lamp fill is a light that's there just to fill in the shadows. So there's not really, really dark shadows anywhere. Right now it's defaulted to 25. I think this could still be a bit brighter. We're going to turn this up to 65. Now might seem like our scene is getting really bright right now. However, we have to remind ourselves that currently everything is pure white. Almost all these lights are sorted being exaggerated in the scene. And eventually our scene will not be entirely white. So we have to compensate for that. Now. We can always go back and adjust the brightness of our lights if they feel a little too dim or a little too bright later. Now for the backlight, let's see what that set to. So that's at 25. I think it could be a little bit brighter. It seems a little dim here. Maybe we'll turn that up to 30. I think that looks good now it's a little bit less dark there. Again, if you wanted to play around with this, you can just slide these lights and get it to something near your liking. The settings I'm giving you now, or just something that I prefer. Another thing we can adjust is that global light that I mentioned earlier. So to adjust that, we'll need to go to this little red globe icon. We can click that. Then this is the area where we can adjust the lighting. So currently it's casting a gray light at one strength. So let's switch this to white instead. We're going to just grab this. Slide it all the way up. So you bring this color slider up by just clicking on this color here. You can also adjust it to be a different color if you wanted to be. So you can make it a little green, a little blue, little pink. But for our purposes, let's just leave it at white for now. But now it's way too bright. So we're going to slide this all the way down to, I think about maybe plus 0.2 or 0.3. So let's start with 0.2. For now. Need to make it brighter. We can always just adjust it here. Now that we have our lighting setup that we're happy with, Let's start Positioning are camera. First, we're going to make a second viewport to work with. You're gonna go all the way up here to the top left. So next is little icon here that has the ball sitting on a grid. You'll notice when you move right to the left, at the top-left corner, your icon changes. Once it turns in that little plus sign, click and drag, and you're just going to slide it to the right. Now we've created a brand new viewport to work within. So we can set it right in the middle here. And now we have two different viewports. However, they're showing the same thing. So I can rotate around this one independently of rotating this one In this new left viewport, we can select View and then go down to cameras. Then choose active camera. Alternatively, you could just hit numpad zero if you have a numpad. So we'll click active camera. Mic can see here now that it's snapped us into our camera. What this will allow us to do is visualize what our camera is actually seeing. However, the second you rotate, you'll notice you pop out of that camera. So we have two ways that we can move this camera around so we can go back to view cameras, active camera. Now we have to go to the right viewport. We can zoom out and select this camera and we can move it this way. We see as we move this camera, it's adjusting it on the left. However, I find this pretty unintuitive and rather difficult to get a good camera angle doing it this way. My preferred method to adjust our camera is actually go back to the original viewport. We're going to hit N on our keyboard to bring up the side menu. Then we're gonna go to View. We're going to choose camera to view. By default, it's a little bit too narrow here to see the word. But if we check this camera to view, now if we go back to this viewport, we can hit Enter to close that menu. Now when we zoom in or rotate our camera, it's actually moving the camera on the right side as well. So I find this a lot easier to position my camera in a way that I like because I'm already used to orbiting my camera around when modeling. This is just a nice intuitive way to adjust that. We're going to select our model here. Selecting the body segment will allow the camera to rotate nicely around that. We can just zoom in and get a nice framing around this, this dotted line that we see here is the framing of the camera. So let's just get a nice tight view on this. And this is the only thing we're looking at in our cameras. There's not much else to see. We'll slide it off just a little bit to the right, give it a little bit nicer composition. But again, there's only one thing here, so there's not really much the focus on, I think about there, looks nice. Now I'm going to hit N on my keyboard again. Then go back to the View tab and uncheck camera view. Because I want to make sure that now if I accidentally rotate my camera over here, that I don't move my camera, I want my camera to remain locked like an IT N to get rid of that menu again. Now if I rotate around, I can see that my camera's pointing directly at my object. Now let's flip the purposes of each of these viewports. So we started out doing a viewport render on the right side. And now we're moving our camera and the left side, however, we want to just have all of our rendering done on the left side now. So we're gonna go back to view camera, active camera. So that's set to this. We can also zoom in now so we can get to see a better view of our camera, because now we're not moving the camera because we uncheck that. Now we can just zoom in, get a relatively close framing on this. Maybe we tighten this up a little bit since we don't really need to see the left and the right past the bounds of the camera. Then up here, we'll notice that we don't actually see this menu is here on either side because we've made each of these viewports smaller. So the way that you can see that cycles viewport button that we clicked over here to begin with is by using your middle mouse-click and then clicking on this top bar. And that allows you to slide the bar left and right. Now we can slide it to the right. We're going to switch this back to cycles. Now this is the cycles viewport. And then on the right one, we can do the same thing. We can slide this over and we're going to switch this back to the regular shaded viewport, which is this solid circle here. Now we have all of the Rendering been done on this viewport. And then the right viewport is where we're actually going to do our work. One last step to do on this viewport is to uncheck this little highlighted button here. So before this is where we returning on the wireframe. If we just click this, this hides all things in the viewport that aren't actually the model. If we unselect the model now we just see a nice clean version of our Render. You also might have noticed now that we're seeing the edge of this plane that we put in the back. Simple way to fix that is just to select our plane. Then we can rotate this. So we can hit R and Z and just rotate our planes so that the entirety of that plane is encompassed within our camera view. So just rotate it until you can see on the left side that it's entirely covered up. Now we're good. The next lesson, we'll be adding color to our balloon dog with shading. I'll see you there. 9. Shading Our Balloon Dog: In this lesson, we'll be adding color to our balloon dog with a transparent balloon material. Let's begin. The first thing we need to do is that a brand new material to our balloon dog. So let's select the body segment of our balloon dog in the right viewport. Then we can go down here to the bottom-right, and we're going to click on the material icon. Now that we have that selected along with the body segment, we can click the New button here to add a new material. With this new material added, we're going to rename it. So we're going to double-click on this material O1 at the top. Just double-click that. And then we're going to just type in balloon. We know what this is. Now that that's completed, we're gonna go up to the Shading tab at the top. So this is actually going to switch the view ports that we have access to. Since we click shading, you'll see it all updates. A few of these viewports are irrelevant to us, so we're actually going to collapse them. So the way to collapse these two viewports on the far left is to go up here to the top left of this viewport. So the larger one at the top rate, we're gonna go up to this corner. I'm just going to click and drag over top of this viewport. We can see here that it makes this viewport larger and gets rid of the original one. Then we can do the same thing at the bottom. We're going to click the top left to the bottom and then move it over to collapse that viewport. Now we can use the top viewport to rotate around our scene. And we can see here that it's defaulted to a different type of render and we need to switch it back to cycles. So we're just going to click this top right one. Now it'll switch it back to how it looked before. We can zoom in on our balloon dog here. We're also going to check this little box up here. So we're gonna make this invisible now so we can uncheck that. Now all of those overlays have gone away just like we had before. Then lastly, we're going to switch this to our camera view so we can go up to view cameras, then active camera. Now we have a nice view of what we had before. Our first step is to choose a color for our balloon dog. And we can do that by clicking on this little color box here next to base color down at the bottom. Then you can choose whatever color you like. For my purposes, I think I'll go with a pinky red color. Now that we change this color, however, we noticed that the whole balloon dog didn't change. And that's because we only applied our material just to the central body segment. Now we're going to duplicate this material to all the other pieces of the balloon dog. To start with, select the body segment of your balloon dog up at the top. For this purpose, we might want to turn this overlay back on so that we can actually see what we're selecting. It's a little bit hard to tell what you're selecting. If you don't have the overlays turned on. We're going to select the body segment. Now we're going to hold Shift, select over the rest of the balloon dog. Now we have the rest of the balloon dog selected, however you can tell it also selected these lights that we're seeing come in here. And it's also most likely selected the plane in the back. So to avoid that, we're just going to hold Control and then drag select over everything that isn't the balloon dog. In this case, that'll deselect the lights. And it should have these selected the plane as well. We can just make sure by going around here and just avoid touching the balloon dog with this hold Control selection. But now we should have just the balloon dog selected. Now we'll hit Control and L. To bring up the link menu. We're going to choose link materials. Once we click this, you see the entire balloon dog now shares that central material that we had. It's now if we make any adjustments to this, it should change the entire balloon dog. So just to double-check, I'll move the color around and you can see now the whole balloon dog is textured and they're all moving together with the material set. Now we can go back up to this little overlay button and turn that off. So we get a nice clean view of our render. As we start talking about how to create our material, I'm going to move this window up a little bit so it's a bit smaller at the top that we add more room to explain. Feel free to leave yours at the same size if you'd prefer to see more of your balloon dog or you can resize it so it's a bit smaller like in. Let's begin discussing what this actually is at the bottom. This is where you're going to be adjusting the nodes for your material. So each one of these boxes here is considered a node. And then each node typically has an end point and an out point where you can draw lines between them to make sure that they all work together. There's a considerable amount of settings within this material editor down here. I won't be going over everything, only the things that are in the most important for our balloon dog. Let's go down here and just start looking over some of the settings up, you will be changing. So the first thing we're going to change, we already have, and that's the base color. So this base color here determines what color the balloon dog is. You can see it's being a little bit adjusted by the lights and the reflections and the scene. This material and naturally has a little bit of reflection on it. And then it's also being bathed than white light. The color we see here is being a little bit washed out in our scene. The specular slider here is something that will, as we increase it will make the object either more reflective or less reflective as we lower it. For our purposes, I think we're just gonna leave it right at 0.5 because that amount of reflection is probably accurate and we're going to be adding more reflections later on. The one thing we do want to change though, is the roughness The roughness is what makes this reflection on the balloon dog either sharp or blurry. Right now it's right in the middle, so it's 50% blurry, 50% sharp. We need to make ours a little bit sharper. So we're going to lower the roughness. We're going to lower it down to about 1.6. So you can see as we pull this down, Our Balloon Dog is getting a lot shinier. You can also just click on this number here and then type in the number you want. Instead. You can type in 0.16 and then hit Enter. And now we've set that. The next thing we'll do is add more clear coat to this object. We're going to turn up the clear coat. So clear code is a clear almost think of how a car pain works. It's a clear paint or a clear layer that sits on top of everything and adds an additional level of reflection. So right now we have the reflection on the bottom, which is what we were setting with the specular as well as the roughness. But now we're adding another Additional clear coat layer on top of that to have some more deep reflections. Similarly to the specular value with the roughness, we also have a clear code roughness. For this one, we're going to set it to 0.1 and then we're going to hit Enter. Now you can see here that we have a very shiny balloon. You want to get a better look at your balloon dog. You can simply just scroll in and zoom into your balloon dog to see what it looks like. We can see here now that we have a very shiny, very polished rubber look to our balloon, however, will notice that it's not actually transparent at all. We can actually see through it at all. Let's zoom back out a little bit. Now we're going to add our transparent node to the material. We're going to zoom out here. Then at the top, we're going to hit shift and a to add, just like we were before. In the search bar here, we can just click search. We're just going to type in transparent. So as you fill it in, you'll see more options put pop up here. And then when we want is transparent, be SDF. Click that can after adding it, we notice that nothing really changed. And that's because this node is not connected to this system at all. But we also can't just plug this directly into this line or into this part here because that'll actually make the entire balloon dog transparent and that's not what we want. We're going to reconnect. This should look like this right now. We're going to add a node that will allow us to mix the effect of this node along with this node. So we'll hit Shift a. Again. We're going to search, and this time we're just going to type in mix. And then when we want is the mix shader. Now that we've made the mix shader, we can plug this node by clicking this little green dot and plugging it in here at the top. Then we can plug this node into the bottom. Now we'll take this output. So the combined results of these two, we're going to drag this down into this one instead. So now we've bypassed the direct link from this to the output, which is what we're actually seeing. This node here is essentially what we're seeing on the model. Now we're routing it through this mix shader, which is combining the effect of the transparent as well as the original color that we had before. Now that we've done this, we have a few more things to adjust. Now. We're going to take this base color that we add before. We're just going to hover over top of it and hit Control and C to copy it. Now we can hover over this white for the transparent, we're going to hit Control V to paste that color. Now you can see it's back to being read except it's really not that transparent anymore either. And that's because of this color is so dark. So we're going to click on this color. And we're going to lower the saturation of it first. We're going to make it in a pinky color. Then we're going to raise the brightness up as well. In your situation, depending on the color you chose, you might need to adjust your values here. But right now I have mine at 0.7 saturation and then 100% value. The next thing we need to do is to adjust this factor value here. So the factor value here is determining how much each of these is being blended with each other. So currently we're at 0.5, which means it's 50% of each. However, we want to favor this transparent went a little bit more. And to do that, we're going to lower this number. So all the way to the left is going to favor the first one in the list. And all the way to the right will favor the last one in the list. This is essentially entirely this, the bottom one. And that can make it zero. It's entirely the top one. We're going to make this 0.35. So we want to slightly favor the transparent over top of the, you'll pick one. And we can see now that we've lowered this number, that we're actually seeing through our balloon dog. We're seeing through this body segment now and we're seeing the back, the top of the back leg. Same thing here. We're seeing through pieces of this to see through it. We're also getting a nice reflection here where we're actually seeing the back sides reflection Shown through this model. So this little reflection here with overseeing this DEM, reflection is the backside of the balloons reflection being shown inside the model. So it's a nice little detail here to make this look more like rubber. The next node that we add is actually going to be on this side of the node tree. We're going to hit shift and a. Then the search bar, we're going to type an ambient occlusion. Here at the top. We can choose ambient occlusion. We can set that here. Now we want to copy this color from here and put it into the color for this will hit Control C over top of the color and then Control V on top of the ambient occlusion color. Now we're going to drag this color output from the ambient occlusion into this base color node here, we're saying that this base color is supposed to pull all of its information from this node instead of what we had before, which is why it was important that we copied this color and pasted it into this node before we plugged it in. Because as you can see, once we plug it in, this color disappears and this node won't pull that color from the original. You most likely would have noticed right away that when we plug this in, that the model changed. However, if you didn't, I'm going to show you on mine. So if I hold down Control and then drag my right-click, I make this little knife icon, which is how you sever a link between these. Now plugging in again and watch the balloon dog at the top. It's gotten a lot darker, but it's specifically has gotten darker in these crevices of the model. So in-between the ER and these intersections where the balloon is all meet up. In this segment around the nose, what ambient occlusion is doing is it's darkening the crevices of a model while leaving the outsides of the model relatively untouched. So in our case, we actually have a really high distance on this, which is the influence of the ambient occlusion, which means we're getting some darkening actually on the outer parts of the model, which normally you shouldn't with ambient occlusion. So to lessen that, we're going to lower this number. We're going to type in 0.08 and then hit Enter. Now you can see that the edges of this model, the outermost segments of it now, won't really have any change to them. However, the insides of the model are getting this darkening. We're adding this ambient occlusion node to make sure that we have some definition between each of these parts. It's just overall gives the Model a bit more depth. The next set of nodes we're going to add will make more sense if you're looking at our reference here. So I'd probably referenced backup. The thing we're trying to accomplish here is we want to match this darkening you see on the edges of this balloon. The reason you're seeing more darkness on the edge and less than the middle is because we're actually looking through more rubber on the edges than we are in the middle. We're looking down through all of this rubber going backwards in space, rather than the situation in the center where we're looking through a much thinner piece of rubber. To start with. Let's make a duplicate of this mix shader. And because we're going to be again mixing two things together. So select the mix shader, hit Shift and D to make a duplicate of it. And then we can just drag it directly on top of this line. You can see it turns Willie, when we do that, that means that it'll automatically start plugging things in progress. Let me do that. Now we can see it's running it into the top. And then again, it's going to run the output down into the material output. So you can space these out a little bit. Now we can hit Shift a to create a new node. We're going to search for the word diffuse. So D, E, F, F. We can choose to diffuse be SDF. We can place that down here. Now we're going to copy this red color with Control C and then paste it into the diffuse with Control V. This diffuse note here is essentially just a flat color. So we're telling it to whatever this is plugged into is just going to show whatever this color is. We can run the output for this into the bottom shader of this new mix shader, the node that we have. We can see here and now that it's just entirely red, which isn't ultimately what we want, but we need another node to make sure that this doesn't happen. So we're going to hit shift and a. Then in the search, we're going to type in the layer. Then the one we want is layer weight. We'll choose that. Now what we're going to do is plug in the facing node here. So this output at the top, we're going to plug that down into the factor for the mix shader. Now we've plugged it in and we can see it's gone back to being a little bit more transparent like we had before. This facing output that we've plugged into the factor is going to allow us to adjust how this factor is being applied. Facing means that anything that is directly facing the camera, he's going to get less of the influence of this. Anything that's facing away is going to get more of the influence We can see this effect in action by adjusting this blend slider here, which is now controlling the factor of the mix shader. So as we lower it, we can see in here that the transparency is being more concentrated towards the center of this object. And it's less so on the edge. So what we're seeing blended onto the edge is actually this diffuse that we plugged in down here before. We're essentially just overlaying a solid color on the edges. But we're using this to determine how far into those edges that that color is being overloaded. The higher the number, the less that we're seeing of the transparency and the more we're seeing of just this entirely diffuse object. So as we pull this down, we're getting the effect more that we're looking for. The value you want here is 0.26. That'll give us a nice sort of darkening on the edges like we're seeing down here and our reference, but still remain transparent in the middle. Then the last step we're going to do is optional. So if you don't want to do this, you don't have to. But I think this looks a little bit nicer and renders when it has a little bit more reflection to it as well. So more than what we have now. So we're gonna give it another layer of clear coat on top of it. To do that, we're going to select our mix shader. It's Shift D to copy it. I'm just going to drag it right onto this line so that it duplicates it right into there. Then we're going to hit Shift a and we're going to create a glossy be SDF. We'll type in PLOS to get glossy. Can paste that down here. Then we're going to copy the lighter red color, or in your case, the lighter blue or green, whatever you chose. So we're going to hit Control C to copy that color and paste it into this glossy. And how we can plug this into the bottom shader. Now right away you can see the difference here and it's ruining the look that we had before. Unless you were going with more of a metallic rubber, which does exist if this is a lucky like, you can leave it as this. However, we're going for a more realistic rubber look. We're going to lower this roughness down. This glossy be SDF works very similar to the specular and the roughness that we adjusted earlier, or the clear coat and roughness if you want to think of it that way. However, we gave it a bit of a tinted color. So the reflections we're getting here are actually a little bit more pinky to match the color of the balloon. So first let's lower this roughness down. We're going to lower it to 0.15 and then hit Enter. Now we can see that this whole thing is a lot more reflective. However, it's probably too reflective. Now, we can lower the influence of this glossy node that we added. By lowering this number. We're going to type in 0.15 to make this influence a little bit less when the overall material. Now with this final step done, our balloon material is completed. So we can zoom out and get a little bit better look at it. If we want, we can just rotate around in the Viewport here to get a better feel of what this balloon material is actually doing for us. So we can see here that it's nice and reflective. We're also able to see through it. So down here we can see we're seeing through this back leg to see through and see the front leg. So it has that transparency that a normal heavily inflated, in this case balloon would have. The less you inflate the balloon, the more opaque that balloon will be. But in this case, this balloon is pretty heavily inflated. So we should be able to see through it pretty well because this rubber is being stretched really thin. Now we can go back to our camera view by going view cameras, active camera, or just numpad zero. If you have a numpad. The last thing we're gonna do is we're just going to change the color of this environment that it's end to make it feel a little bit more FUN. So it's not quite so sterile. So we can select this plane back here. We can see here that we've moved to a new shader panel, and this has nothing in it because of that plane has nothing applied to it. So we can just click this New button for this material and we don't really need to change much. We're not going to go nearly to the same depth as that one. So maybe we're just going to choose a different color here. We're probably gonna wanna pick something other than our balloon color. Maybe just slide this around until you find something that complements the color of your balloon without detracting from it. In my case, maybe a light blue would look nice. I think somewhere in there it looks nice. Maybe I'll brighten it up a little bit. Then if you want, and you can adjust the specularity and the roughness to make this plane a little bit more reflective. Maybe I'll turn up the specularity a bit to make it more reflective overall. Then I can just lower the roughness down to let it have a little bit of reflection. So you can see here on the left side, we're actually seeing a reflection of this back wall on it as well. Then if we zoom in down here, I can see a slight reflection of our balloon dog on this floor. So it's a shiny blue paint that we've created. If it seems like it's too much, you can always just turn up the roughness to make it a little bit more blurry. Or you can lower down the specular value to make it a little less reflective overall. I think there it looks nice. Now without apply, and we have everything in our scene textured. The next lesson, we'll be creating the final render for our balloon dog. I'll see you there. 10. Rendering Our Balloon Dog: In this lesson, we'll be rendering a final image of our balloon dog. Let's begin. To begin the rendering process. Let's go up to the Rendering tab at the top. This will again switch our viewport. Now this is the area in which we'll actually see the final rendered image. But before we do anything, we need to make sure that our Render settings are set up. So to start, go up to your render properties tab up here. We're gonna go through each of these settings and just double-check that it's actually set to what it should be. So these are all things that we changed in on one of our first lessons where we went through and set up a bunch of initial settings before we got into it. That was said that we had a good fast viewport render, as well as to kinda preemptively get everything set up for this step. But let's just go through each of these and make sure that you have everything set up correctly still. So to start with, you'll need to have cycles set as your render engine. You want your device set up to GPU compute. At this point, the viewport doesn't matter anymore because we're going to be creating a final render which we'll use these settings. But just make sure that these settings are matched as well. So it should be 0.1 noise threshold, five-hundred max samples and zero Min samples. And then your de-noise should be set to optics that it all should be checked on. Now the part that actually matters for the part of the process that we're in. Now, let's open up the de-noise here. We'll just go through each of these. Your noise threshold should be checked on and set to 0.01. Your max samples should be at 40, 96. Men should be at zero. Time limit should be at 0 s. Zero second time limit means infinite. So if it's at zero, that means it'll just Render forever. However, if you typed in 1 s here, it would only render for 1 s. Or you could type in 120 s. So it would render for 2 min. However long you have to render, you could type in there, but I would suggest keeping on zero that way it actually reaches these settings. Then for our D noisier and just make sure it's checked on. And in this case, you want the Open Image de-noise, not the optics. The optics is a lot faster. However, the open image de-noised looks a lot nicer and we're going for a nice image, not a fast image necessarily for the final render. Let's a quick rundown of what each of these settings means just in a really basic term, our noise threshold here. The lower we have this number, the more noiseless the image will be, because it's getting closer and closer to zero noise. In the case of our viewport, we added a 0.1, which doesn't sound very high, but that's still higher and further from zero. Then 0.01 is. The lower this number, the more noiseless our image will be. The max samples is just saying how many times will Blender go through the image and checking it individual part of the image to make sure that it's met a certain quality threshold. The higher this number is, the longer your render will take, but the higher-quality one up being the minimum samples is telling Blender how little it can check a part of an image before moving on to something else. So if blender thinks it got to an acceptable quality threshold after 345 samples, then it'll just move on so we can tell it to make sure that it's checking longer in certain areas by raising this minimum samples. If you haven't set to zero, it's not actually zero samples. It's just saying that Blender is going to use some sort of automatic system to figure out what the minimum samples are for the image. We can just leave this at zero. For a time limit here, it's set to 0 s, but it's not actually set to 00, just means that zero is going to disable the limit, which means it'll just let it render forever until it meets these thresholds. If you have a time limit set here, so if you have, say, 60 s set, it will only render for a minute. And regardless of whether or not it meets these thresholds, if you haven't set to zero, it will render until it meets these thresholds. That we know a little bit about these settings. We're now going to go to the output settings. So that's the setting tab right below the Render Output, or sorry, the Render properties settings. So we're going to click this. It's sort of looks like a little printer printing out an image. And this is where we'd set up how the image is going to output for this Render. And we're gonna go down here to the output. We're going to change it from PNG JPEG. This is a pretty simple image. It doesn't have any transparency in it. I think JPEG will work fine. And we're also produce a smaller image. We're going to set the quality up to 100%. We want to make sure RGB is turned on. We don't want it to render out a black and white image. Then the last thing you need to do is just change this output location to a folder on your desktop or in your Documents folder or along with this Blender file that you've been saving. So you can just click this and then navigate to the folder you want and then set it up. So I currently have mine set up now. With all of our settings done, now we're actually ready to render the image. We have two ways of doing that. We can either go up to render and then do Render Image at the top. Or alternatively, you can just hit the F2 key on your keyboard. We click that. Now our image will begin rendering. We can see up here some of the settings that we said before. So in this case we can see that we had at sets of 40, 96 samples. And currently it's at 71, 80, 89. And it's just going through this image and trying to reach the sample count. You can also see your current time that you've rendered, then how long it thinks it's going to have remaining. You can see here this says is going to take 6 min, five-minutes, but it's quickly dropping. This is purely just an estimate. Almost always this number will go down unless you have a pretty complicated image with a lot of reflections and refractions and other complicated effects, then this number might go up once it reaches certain spots of the image. However, in our case, it's just quickly plummeting. The image has reached its 40, 96 samples. It's completed the image. In my case, I took a minute and 32 s and 0.2 s after that to finish this image. And again, this is on my computer, so this is going to change entirely depending on what your computer's configuration is. If you have a stronger computer than mine, it'll probably rendered much faster. If they have a weaker computer than mine, it might've taken a bit longer. So we can change some things to make this render a little bit faster. So you could change the resolution, which by default we didn't change it, and it was set to 1920 by ten at which is standard HD resolution. If you wanted to render faster, you can make this a bit smaller, like 12, 80 by 720. That would speed up your render because it has less overall pixels to render. However, we don't usually want to adjust the overall size of the image. We kinda wanna keep that at whatever the intended purpose of it is. We'll set it back to 1920 by ten at There's something else we can change and the Render Settings instead. So we can go back to the Render. Let me can go down to the Render Settings here, not the viewport. I'm just going to collapse viewport for now since we're not adjusting that those settings have no bearing on what happens here. We can instead change this noise threshold. So remember how I said how the lower the number, the closer it's trying to get to zero noise. But in that case, it actually takes longer to render an image with no noise, because it takes longer to render those bits of noise out of the image. If we make this number higher, to say 0.020, 0.03, your image might lose some overall quality because it'll be generally noisier than it was. You should notice that the render speeds and improved significantly. So we'll just do a test here at 0.03 to see how it compares to the 1 min and 32 s that I had before. So another thing you could do is to switch your render slots. So up here you can see I have it set to slot one. Now I could render something else into slot t2 and then I can go back and forth and compare them. So in the slot t2 now I'll render this with 0.03 noise and we can see how it adjusted the Render speed. So our new render is done with the 0.03 noise. We can see that only took 40 s, so we knocked off almost a minute. So basically 48 s, I believe, off the original time. Now we can zoom in here and we can see a difference in the quality. See if we notice much. Sorry, now we're on slot t2, which is the higher noise image. Now if we just go up here and choose slot one, we can look at the difference in the image. So let's zoom in here I noticed a little bit of a change here. This is the longer render, the a minute 32. Then slot t2, you can see there's a little bit more noise here. We saw some pixels move around here. But overall, the amount of difference that we're seeing in this image versus the first. Probably doesn't make up for the fact that it took nearly a minute more. Now, 1 min doesn't make a huge amount of difference. Maybe if you have the time to kill, but if you really need to get these renders out done fast, or if you just want to do some quick test renders, this noise threshold is something that you definitely should consider adjusting. So if you make it, like I said, if you make it higher, your render will go faster. It'll just be a little bit lower-quality. Now that our images complete, we can go up to Image and then Save, As we can say about this image whenever we want. What does call this balloon dog. Let me can hit Enter and then choose save image as. Now we have our completed image. We can see here this is what we've actually output from Blender. And this should be the exact same quality that we were looking at within Blender, except now this is a JPEG and we can post this wherever we want. Social media. You can print it out if you'd like, you know, whatever you want. Now with this JPEG image, at this point, feel free to adjust the color of your balloon dog. Move the camera, or adjust the color or placement of your lights to get a different result with your render. Now that you've modeled, shaded and rendered your balloon dog, ready to discuss the class project in the next lesson, I'll see you there. 11. Our Class Project!: You made it to the end of our class. Great job. Now that you have an understanding of how a simple balloon dog is modeled, shaded, and rendered. I'd like you to create a balloon animal of your very own. I suggest you keep this balloon animal to a more traditional and simple style like our balloon dog. As this will allow you to practice the skills you just learned, but with a slight twist, pun intended. Examples of other traditional balloon animals would be a T-Rex or a Monkey. Feel free to come up with your own ideas though. As an example, here's a render of a balloon giraffe I created for this class project. You can see that it has a lot of similarities to the balloon dog and was created primarily through adjusting some proportions and modifying some key pieces. It doesn't take much to create a brand new animal. After you've modeled, shaded, and rendered your balloon animal. Post it to the gallery for all the other students to see. I'll provide my feedback on aspects of your render that look fantastic, as well as other areas that could use some adjustments. Thank you for taking my course. I really appreciate it. I hope you found this course both PFK-1 and educational. I'd really appreciate it if you could leave an honest review on this course. So you could let other students know if it's worth their valuable time. Also feel free to check out my other courses via my instructor profile. You might just find something you're interested in. Thanks again for your support. I hope to see you again soon.