Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Hello there. My
name is Gesa Pickbrenner. I'm a 3D goldsmith,
artist and teacher. In this class, we're going to learn how to
give our designs in Blender more detail, expression and impact with 3 dimensional textures. Before I understood
this awesome technique, I was sometimes so frustrated
with the task of sculpting repetitive or very
complex patterns in Blender. But not anymore. Fear not. Since with this
straightforward approach, you will have an amazing tool
in your 3D tool kit. The technique I
present here will directly change the
object's surface geometry, ready for 3D
printing or rendering. As a class project, we will be applying a scaly, snaky texture to make
our own dragon ring. I provide both the
basic ring and the 2D texture as a download
for you to jump right in. Additionally, I will provide you with a basic render setup, which I used to create the
thumbnail off this class. And we will top it up with some suggestions what to
do with your final file. You are free to use any other
object that interests you, and you're also welcome to work with any texture that you like. For this, I will give
you many pointers and inspiration on how to both pick a good object and texture. Our program is blender, the amazing open source and freely downloadable
3D design software. I will guide you through all the necessary steps
from start to finish. So even without much preknowledge you may jump right in. If you are a complete
beginner and you're touching Blender for
the absolute first time, I have a class
available for you. This class is for
3D enthusiasts, hobbyists, creatives,
professionals, and dreamers alike. Also, all designers who create
3D printable jewelry or objects will benefit a
lot from participating. By the end of the class, you will be able
to choose and use 2D textures for altering the surface and texture
of 3D models. Ultimately, make your dreams and ideas a beautiful and
exciting reality.
2. Resources Basic: In the next two lessons, I will give you some guidelines on how to approach this class. First, let me say that if I'm too fast at
any point in time, slow down the lesson speed or pause and hit the go
back 15 seconds button. That is something that I like
to do in tutorials often. Additionally, post in
the discussion tab below the class if you get stuck or have any questions
throughout. Well, what programs do we need? Blender installed obviously
makes a lot of sense. A mouse with a scroll
wheel is also essential. No touch pads. A keyboard with
a num pad is very helpful. If you don't have a numpad, you need to go to
edit preferences, and then to input and
choose emulate numpad. And if you don't
have a scroll wheel, you can also emulate the middle mouse button
with old and left mouse. But that's very annoying. So I'd rather recommend you to get to mouse
with a scroll wheel. Also, a smaller second
screen might be nice to see me and at the same
time, work on your project. But that's optional, of course. Okay. If you want to
create your own texture, you will need any kind of image manipulation program
like Photoshop, Illustrator, scale,
Gim, et cetera. Note that two D texture making itself is not
part of this class, but I will talk about textures in depth in the next lesson. A key combo cheat sheet for blender is included below
the class in the resources. We will overall mostly
use basic commands, and the key presses
will be mostly visible. I also tried to mention all the commands I
use, at least once. You can also download the basic render setup
from the resources, which I used to create the
thumbnail of this class.
3. Resources 3D Object + Texture: Now, I will talk briefly about the three D object and a bit more in depth about
the texture itself. Regarding the main
three D object. You have multiple options
in this class as mentioned. You can build your own ring
band together with me. Or if it's only the
texturing your after, you can simply download the basic ring band that I
provide in the resources. The third and slightly
more advanced option, you could use your own
individual three D object. Okay. For more info on this, please see the lesson building the basic ring band
ring creation. Regarding textures. I have created an
inspirational pinterest board, which you are very
welcome to check out. Mind you, the list
of possible textures is endless and the board
is by no means exhaustive. Also, I haven't tested all of these textures for
their suitability. The link is below the class
in the resources section. Take a look at these to get a feel for what might work for our intents and purposes as
a jewelry design texture. Make sure to check the copyright
on each texture you use, and if you're not sure, better you only use them
for private projects. You could also ask in AI for
some pattern generation. One thing that most of the
textures I use have in common. They are light and white. Since blender is white as highest and black has
no height at all, Gray scale or black and
white textures work best. Our example texture, which you can find in
the resources has clear gradients from
the lowest part of the scales up until the
tips which are brightest. Additionally, the
provided dragon scale, slash snake skin, slash fish scale texture is an endlessly
repeating pattern. This is important so
that it wraps seamlessly around the ring band
without any visual break. Maybe you even want
to take it a step further and want to design
your very own texture, which would be an
amazing skill to have. There are also loads
of good classes on skill share regarding
pattern design, especially in the
surface design section. In general, there are few limitations on what
texture one can use. You can use a cute
sketch from your kid. You can use your own sketch. You can photograph
any real life texture or image and convert it
into a gray skill image. For example, a tree bark or some stones or sand important. The more complex it is
and the finer the lines, the harder it will be
to convey your image on a small piece of
sculpture or jewelry. Try to keep it relatively
straightforward. Simple designs tend to work better than highly complex ones. The extremes of purely black
and white will result in geometry that comes straight out without any tapering
at the edges. Be creative. What kind of texture could work on your idea, feel free to try out
as much as you can. Some technical aspects
regarding the textures. Try to make it as high
resolution as possible. The less pixels are visible, even at a small
scale, the better. If you can base your image on a vector design, even better. The provided
snakeskin texture has a resolution that is 1-2 k, which works nicely
for our use case. As a file format,
you can choose JPEG, PNG, Map, or TIF. TIF is ideal because it
is a lossless format. PNG is also fine. Especially JPEX can have
artifacts or pixelation, which decreases the quality of the texture as the artifacts
get directly translated into three D. I have
chosen to create a midsize PNG because the quality is more than
enough for our purposes here. A final hint, a
unique inspiration on how to approach jewelry
design in general. You are welcome to check out the design section of my
class from sketch to model. A said, then let's dive Ride in.
4. Ring Creation: In this lesson, we are going to warm up and build
our basic ring band. You have multiple
options in this lesson. First, simply go
through the lesson, follow along with me, and learn how I quickly
create such a basic ring. Second, If you primarily want
to learn about texturing, you can download the ring model
from the class resources. In that case, you don't
need to build it yourself. If you are more interested in the actual texturing technique, download that now and
continue in the next lesson. As a third and slightly
more advanced option, you can use your own model. Please feel free to use
any shape that you like. A flat plate, a curved flower
with petals, a gamy beer, a butterfly, a hard, cross skull, anything
is possible. I recommend, though, that
your model should not have too many vertices to
keep things simple. Also, quartz only
geometry works best. So if you want to
use your own model, make sure they are only faces with four vertices
making up the geometry. Any model which has
a lot of vertices or tree faces would ideally
have to be remeshed, which is not part of this class. Also, make sure that the object
is not just a flat plane, but that it has some thickness, which is logical if we want to three D printed
at some point, but I'd still wanted
to mention it. If you use a flat
plane throughout, the result will only be
usable for rendering, but not so much for printing. Let's create a very
basic ring band without any bells and whistles. Shift A for adding a Taurus. Then bring down the major
and minor segment count as this is far too
detailed for our purposes. It would make editing this
thing significantly harder. We need this
straightforward for now. Let's give it a to
12 major segments and six minor segments. You can now use the major and minor radius to change the size, but we will, and you can adjust
this anyways later still. So this is optional. Here, you see me
roughly bringing this to a realistic ring size. If you like, you can enable the pie menu for switching
modes and the preferences. Then you can choose between
all modes when switching. In added mode, we grab the outer face rings to
elongate the shape along. Hover over the edge in between vertices that you
want to select. Press Alt and click. To select the next
edge row, hold shift, and click in the same way on the other side to add
to the selection. Use and to elongate along. Add a subdivision
surface modifier, either in the
modifier tab or just press Control two for
two subdivisions. A little something about these extra modifier
buttons on the right. These come from the internal
add on modifier tools. Just search for them under
added preferences and add ons. Then we scale the outer
of these edges in a bit with shifts it to give the whole ring a more
rounded off shape. Now, let's give the shape a few more control
points by adding two more edge rings around the outer ring band
with control r, which are then
scaled along so that we have a basis for our
outer rims of the ring band. Select those newly
created edge rings by holding Shift plus old and then clicking on each of those rings one after the other. Press. Then as to scale. After that, shift it to only scale in the
horizontal axis. Move your mouse to
pull them out of it to form those nice
rims around your ring. Switch to edge
select mode with two on numro and then select
these edge rings. The edges of these
newly created rims can be creased to
keep them sharp, fully crease with shift and one. Of course, you can
always experiment with creasing different edges to
see if you like the effect. I decided to get rid of the
crease of the outer rim in the item tab of the N menu by just setting the mean crease
for these edges to zero. But in any case, we can adjust
these details later still, so don't fuss about it. I will also continue to play around with creasing
during this class. I add another two edge rows. These two new edges
help us now to reduce the little king in
the center of the ring band. For this, we just scale the center edge
ring slightly down. I also rotated the ring
by 90 degrees in x, just to have a little bit
better view and control. Feel free to adjust the shape of your ring band in
any way you like, but keep it simple. This project is
about the texturing, not the basic shape modeling. One more tip towards
creating this ring. T to your desired ring size. You can use either
the jewel craft add on or simply a curved circle. You may find a ring size
table on the resources so that you can calculate what your radius should be for
the desired ring size. With the add on, you have the advantage that it allows
you to directly choose a ring size instead of
having to calculate it and then use
the radius value. If you add a size curve while
having the ring selected, a curve modifier gets
added to your ring and it gets squished
into a pringles shape. Just delete the curve modifier again to get rid of this effect. Now you can rename
the size curve to your ring size so that you
know what it is there for. And finally, you can scale the ring so that it
matches the ring size. I will show it to you in
the four viewport mode. You can access this with Control Alt Q and
also get out of it. You can either scale in all three dimensions to
keep the aspect ratio, Or to avoid making
it much broader, you could scale
while excluding y. With a shortcut Shift Y. Also, check the ring
band thickness. A value between 1.8 and three millimeter usually works
well for suturing. But this is also a matter of three D printing and
design experience, and of course, a lot
of trial and error.
5. Create Seams: Now that we have
our model ready, let's continue the preparation. We will give it some seams, which we will need for
putting the texture onto our object
via UV unwrapping. The next two lessons
are essential for the understanding of the
whole rest of this class, so make sure to pay attention. If you are not familiar
with U V unwrapping, imagine you would
cut the surface of an object in strategic places so that you can then flatten it to be able to lay it
on a two D surface. Not unlike a tailor, just that the tailor
first has a two D shape, which then gets
sued together with other shapes to form a
three D piece of clothing. This is why we need these seams. We could we place them? What two D shape can
form a simple flat ring? We will only texturize the inner part of
the outer ring band. That is why we have
to separate it from the rims and the inner segment. Select the outer edges of our center ring band where
the ring band meets the two s. Hover over the edge in between vertices
that you want to select. Press A and click. To select the next
edge, hold shift, and click in the same way on the other side to add
to the selection. Now you can press
Control E and then mark. R. You can also go to the
menu point edge Mark Sam. Now, we basically declared that this inner part gets disconnected from the
rest when unwrapped. But if we'd unwrapped it now, it would be very squished
because it is still a continuous circle.
What do we do? We et the band in one place. You can choose any edge that runs across our
center ring band. Mark this as a seam as well.
6. UV Unwrap & Texture: I very much hope you now have appropriate seams on your
model and are ready to unwrap. We will bring our
texture into blender and use it to create
new geometry. If you want to use
the example texture, then download it from the
resources below the class. No matter if you use the
example texture or your own, make sure to have it
ready in a folder, ideally in the same folder
where the blend file sits so that you won't lose
it somewhere along the way. Now, let's rep. Switch to phase select mode by
hitting three on the num row. And then all shift click, all in my case, four phase rows. Then press and simply rap. Yeah, you unwrapped
your ring band. That wasn't so hard, or was it. Let's switch to the UV editing work space at
the top of Blender. Now you should see the
unwrapped ring band lying flat. This is our sewing
table where we can put any texture we want on
that flat ring surface. Well done so far. Let's now bring our texture into Blender. Switch back to the layout, the default workspace to get
our usual look of blender. On the lower right in
the properties panel, there is the texture icon. It looks like a cute
little checkerboard. Create a new texture by clicking on open and choose
the texture you like. Click on this little icon to
see what you are choosing. Now the texture should
appear in this panel. And that's it already. Now, the texture is loaded
into this bland file, and we can put it on
anything we want. Now, for the magical ingredient, let's add a displace modifier. Lender 4.0 and above, let's you search for the mots which is awesome and
very, very helpful. Now, at first, this
looks like nothing much. The whole ring kind of changes its shape and gets displaced. First, we only want the modifier to affect the unwrap parts. We will group our selection on the ring together
into a vertex group. Switch to the object
data properties, the little green upside
down tree shape. There we can create
a new vertex group. Let's call it middle ring bed. Make sure only the unwrap
part of our ring is selected. If you didn't deselect it after unwrapping, this
should be the case. Then click on a sign. Afterwards, to test if we really grabbed all
the right vertices. Let's press de select
and then select again. Nice. Back to our modifiers. Now, of course, we can select our newly created vertex group as the target for the modifier. This instantly changes the
look of the displacement. Now, we can also plug in our texture into the
displacement mode. This kind of goes into
the right direction. One thing, though,
the displace mode needs enough vertices
to displace. Otherwise, it will just look like a very pixilated picture, not much to discern. So let's add aptive
or turn it back on. Let's place it before the display mod to give it
some geometry to play with. Increasing the subdivision
reveals more of our texture. But it still looks
kind of weird. Of course, here
the U V N wrapping we did earlier comes into play. Make sure the
subdivision is not so high that PC slows down a lot. We need to balance between
workable and visual. In the display mode, we can choose the coordinates. Instead of local, we can use our U V coordinates.
Let's do it. Cool. That already
makes a big difference. Also, choose our UV map here. But of course, we can do better. Switch to the UV
editing workspace. The the texture into the
sewing table on the left. Now to see the results in
real time and edit mode, we can click on this little
icon in the display mode. Now, if you move your flattened
ring van on the left, it will get updated on the
three D object on the right. Move with G and scale with
just as in the three D space. That looks very good already. If we increase the subdivisions, it looks even nicer. Good.
7. Fixing Double Verts: This lesson will be very
helpful for you if you build the ring with me or
brought your own model. Whether you have some
problems with a texture and the edges look weird or
anything else looks off, we will take a quick
look regarding the most common problem when building any gemetry
with blender. Double vert. If you downloaded the ring from the resources of the class, you won't have
double words. Yeah. If you want to exercise
your understanding of the double word problem
in Blender, of course, you're welcome to download
the other model I put into the resources where I have
hidden some problems. And in this way, you can
also try solving this. Just a quick tip if you
downloaded the bug fixing ring. If your ring and texture
doesn't show up like this, but rather empty
like this or pink, then you just need to reload the texture from the
folder on your PC. Okay. Now, we have some problems here on the edges
of the texture, which look really crappy. Maybe you don't have those, so you can safely skip
this little lesson. But if you have some
problems like this, maybe I can help you here. Sometimes this can happen. If this is the case for you, I will show you my approach
to the problem solving. First, I hide all
the modifiers for the bug fixing for a
unobstructed view. In my case, it seems I somehow got double
vertices on my model. As so often, they
are the culprit. So I select all with A, then press M and choose by distance to get rid of the
very close together doubles. It removed 44 words. Now, I have to repeat the
procedure of assigning the vertixGroup
selection and wrapping since I altered the
geometry of the ring. I will go through this in slight time labs and
without comment this time. Slow the lesson down in case
you want to see it again. Nice, great success.
8. Endless & Seamless Texture: Now, we should have
a solid object without any double vertices
and ready to continue. Good job so far. Let's now refine the
look a bit more. In this lesson, we will adjust
the placement, smooth it, and also get rid of any visible seams in an
endlessly repeating pattern. What if you have chosen
another pattern, which is not
endlessly repeating? You will still greatly benefit from the tips and
tricks shown here. Here, I change the look by
going to the shading options, choosing Md cup, and
then the silver style. But what is that? It seems that the seam is still visible. This is why it is so important
for a pattern that should wrap completely around to
really be a repeating, infinite kind of pattern. Because now on the
UV work space, we can slightly scale our unwrapped piece until those
scales line up perfectly. Select the unwrapped
faces of the ring easily by selecting
the vertex group. To make adjustments, you can always reduce the
subdivision somewhat. I will scale along x, since my pattern follows the horizontal axis
on our sewing table. Beautiful. I also decide to add two
more edge loops and to uncrease the inner part of the ribs so that they
get a softer look. I leave only a
slight crease around 0.2 for the inner and
outer edge of the ribs. And I scale the new
edge out a bit with, then shift to and
moving my mouse. Sometimes I also like to
add a smooth modifier that just gives
the whole texture a bit of a softer look overall. You can adjust the intensity and the smoothing factor to see what works well and also just apply it on
the vertex group. Another thing you
can do is suggest the strength of
the display mode. This can give your texture
more or less impact. Remember, for small scale
sculpture or jewelry, always do a little more
than you think you need. Because in reality,
those objects are small and they also often get worked on after
printing and casting. You can give it a
really spiky look, but watch out for your fingers.
9. Smoothing Edges: Now, if you still have some irregularities in
your textures edges, then this lesson is
definitely worth watching. If you did not watch the lesson about fixing double vertices, now is a good time for that. But if you still feel the edges look weird or rough
or kind of cut off, just not beautiful, then make sure to watch this
lesson right here. I always show you a
technique to improve the overall of the
displacement edge. Maybe you also have such a harsh cutoff on
the edges of the texture. There is an easy
method to get rid of those artifacts and make it look a little nicer
and smoother overall. Let's first clear the edges of any edge creases and of any
seams we previously created. We can uncrease the
purple edges by selecting them and going to the N menu
and setting crease to zero. Then select the
red seams and hit Control E and
choose clear seams. Now, select one
additional row on each side compared to what
was previously in the UV map. We will create another
vertex group with them. You can call it middle ring band broader or
something like that. Now it's time to make these
outer edges into new seams. Also, create a new sam across the ring band to the ring open. Let's select our new vert
group and unwrap it again. Just like before, you
can see me adjusting the UV mapping and taking care of the seam at the end of
the flattened ring band. Sometimes in Blender,
the texture is not shown on the searing table,
but it still works. We always want to take care of these tiny imperfections
in our patterns. Scaling carefully
along x and hold shift during scaling to be able to adjust it in very
fine increments. And this looks so much better. I think that was definitely worth the extra
mile we just went. Some adjusting and I like it. One additional thing, you can try to give the surface
a smoother appearance. Give your object a
smooth modifier. Here I turn off all
visual overlays to have a little less
visual clutter in the three D viewport, like the grid, axes, three D cursor, and so on. I also switch the viewport shading again back
to the silver dc. One important thing to note, the displacement modifier should still point to the
old vertex group, which is, of course,
one row of vertice is smaller than the one
that is now unwrapped. In this way, there is
a smooth gradient and not an abrupt end of the scales like before. See the difference? Another detail you could adjust here is the height
of the edge rooms, which could be slightly
higher than the texture. Make sure to adjust
the subdivision before editing an edit mode to not
slow down your workstation. I very much hope these tips could really help
you to bring out the best in your
idea. Let's continue.
10. Native Textures in Blender: If you've come so far, you should now have a nice
looking displacement texture, and you are hopefully quite
happy with the result. We will now continue
with something I personally find
super exciting, creating a texture
natively in Blender. We will be adding
another texture to our model and be able to switch between them to see both their looks and
adjust them individually. Now that we have imported
and worked with our texture, I'd like to show you a fun and even more
straightforward way to create such textures easily
and natively in blender. I'm also going to demonstrate
how to switch between textures quickly and keep
them all in one file. First, let's disable
the displace mode for a second to not
cause a conundrum. Then create a second displaced by duplication so that we can swiftly switch back and forth between textures without
any saving and loading. We rename our displace modes so that we can quickly identify
what is contained within. Then we delete the texture from the second march so that
we can plug in another. Let's now switch to the
texture tab and create another texture by
clicking on the icon. Then rename it to her. Switch back to the
original and call it fish scale to identify it. Now in the bottom at the top, you see that we are currently in the texture menu for the
fish scale modifier. We have created another modifier which we also called hammer. When we switch to the
hammer modifier menu, we see that this modifier
doesn't have any textures associated with it because we deleted the texture
from it at earlier. If we click on the texture kin, we can make a choice
between our two textures. The hammer texture has a zero
next to it because it is not yet used by any
modifier. Let's choose it. You see that because we
copied it from fish scale, it also has the fish
scale PNG loaded in here or snakeskin
or dragon skin. Let's delete the image data from this texture so that we can
plug something else in here. Let's switch the type from
image or movie to Voronoi. This is a cool procedural
texture that looks a bit like skin cells or bubbles in
foam or something like this. It also makes for a
cool hammer texture. Leave it at default, and let's see what comes out. The texture is a bit
stretched and doesn't really look like a
hammered surface yet. Hence, we can play with the settings of our
generated texture. Feel free to try any slider
out and see what it does. I especially want to adjust the size to fit
my object better. Now, the cool thing is because we have two
displacement modes, we can quickly
switch between them. An important note
for image textures. If you change the file
location of the image or you send the bland file to
someone without the image, the link inside the
bland file will be broken and the texture
won't work anymore. It is best to store the image in the same safe location and move it together with
the bland file always. This doesn't apply
to native textures, of course, since they are all stored internally
in blender. Now, another thing we can do
is adjust the UV mapping. But if we just adjust the UV
mapping we first created, we will also change the mapping of our fish scale texture, and maybe we don't
want that because the fish scale texture takes
the exact same UV map. So we can create another UV map, which we then can also use
for any of our modifiers. Certainly, there are a
lot of moving parts. We create the second UV map where we also create
the vertex groups. Makes sense since they are both additional data connected to
our base mesh, our vertices. To be able to
identify our UV maps, let's call them their
respective names. Now we can plug in
the renamed UV maps into their modifiers, the fish scale to fish scale, the hammer to hammer. In the upper menu of the UV editing window, you can scroll. This will move sideways
through the menu. Then you can choose the UV maps. If you work on the one that is not connected to the displaced, nothing will happen
to the texture. You can also switch
between the UV maps in the mods to try out their
effect on the texture. Or you could even try combining multiple textures on top of each other and see what happens. Just activate multiple
displace mods with different textures at once. Wow, so many options. But in this way, we
stay very flexible, and if we change
something in one place, it won't affect everything. All parts are independent
building blocks and can be combined without
breaking the whole object. That is a very powerful thing to understand about blender.
11. Render Setup: Although rendering itself is
not the focus of the class. I won't leave you without a nice little setup that you can use to really bring
your objects to live. You can download this
basic render file in the resources as well, and I use this exact file to create the thumbnail
of this class. So feel free to drop
your jewelry in here and create some really
nice presentation images. Now, you probably want to bring your specific ring or object
into your render setup. You have basically
two options here. The first one is
really the simplest. You just click your ring
and you go Control C, and you will see that blender
copied one selected object. Then you go into your other file where you preferably
have deleted this basic ring
and you go Control V. Well, and there it is. With all the modifiers, they will have been copied over, and all the textures will
also have been added. So that's really
the simplest way to bring over your object. Note that you
definitely need to have two blender files open here, the one where your object is
created and the render file. The second way to
import your object. And I will just undo this until we have our
empty room here again. You can go to file and
you can go to a pen. And with a pen, you can
basically navigate to any other blend file and
get stuff from there. I could choose the file
where I know I have created my finishring I
could click a pen. Then I will find anything that is contained
in this blend file. Materials, but also textures
are to be found here. And if I only wanted to import the texture, I could do so. But we can also go into object. Here, we only have four
objects right now, and one of those is the
cube which is my ring, and the rest, of course, I can ignore because
I don't want to copy over the
camera or the light. I select the cube and say a pen. And there, the same
thing happens, and our textures are here, and our modifiers are here. Everything got copied over. So that is the second way. If you don't want to open
up another bland file, just go into file and a pen. This is how you get your
object into the scene. Now, how to place the object. You saw in my thumbnail that I stack the rings that
I moved them around. For example, with X 90. For these next steps, switch on the render
preview in the viewport. Also go to the no tab and turn on cycles as your renderer. More on that in detail later. We can create a second viewport and we can just go into
front view with one. Then we could just move
our ring up or down until it touches
the plane until it basically lies on top there. That would be one
possibility to move the ring around without
moving around in here. Then I could do G y and just move it so that it
stays in the plane. Of course, if I now
wanted to stack a ring and I would do Shift D, copy it, G, and, and move it up, stack it on top,
maybe place it a little bit to the side
so that it looks a little bit more natural and
a bit more interesting. And here I could now turn off the fish scale and maybe
turn on the hammer texture. And in that way, we can get ourselves a little
composition going on. Now, of course,
you're also welcome to choose any material
for your objects. You could also move
around a little more, and you could, for
example, rotate it around. With this little
widget, you always know which axis you can navigate
around with your objects. Then you can try to place it
so that it looks as if it is leaning on the other
ring, something like that. You have lots of options
to play around with. So that's really cool. Of course, you can also play around with the material itself. You can increase or decrease
the roughness so that it changes its look a little
bit, and you can, of course, also change the color and give
it another metal color or also something fantastic
that even though this could be titanium or aluminium. Now that you place your objects, you can definitely also
adjust the scene itself. First, you could adjust all the lights in
any way you wanted. You could select them, and you could rotate them, you could move them
around so that you get another effect
for your lighting. You could also move the ring. And just in case,
let's say you want to move it here because the light here is
more to your liking, but the camera is now set
up in the wrong place. You have a few options how
to place the camera here. You could go just G and y and move the camera so that
it is in the right place, and you can do this with all
the xs also in the N menu. And here you can also rotate
it For example, here, it's not exactly on minus 180, which would be like horizontal. You have these options. You
could also do something else. You could go to view and you
could say camera to view. This means now you could
press control zero, and your camera has now become your view or rather
the other way around, your view has become the camera. If you now navigate around
blender like you would normally with shift
and middle click, you actually move the camera. If you go to view and you go
out of camera to view again, you can just navigate
normally again. Sometimes if this happens and it just seems to be
completely lost, then just press shift C, and this will just get
your back to the center. You could go to the end menu
and view and camera to view. Now you can see
your camera here, and here you are in your camera and then you see how
it moves around. I'm going to show you
a neat little trick. You can get the camera
and object constraint. You can say, I
want to track two, and the target, you
could say the cube. In our case, this is the ring. No matter how I move my camera, this ring is the focal point. Okay. And, of course,
you could also s, this is the focal point, then this ring becomes
the focal point. But in our case, I
think this is not so useful because if
you have two objects, we just want both of them in the scene and not one
to be in the center. But just as you like, you
have a lot of options here. You don't have to worry that your camera is not
always straight, but if you want it to
be straight, of course, you can always go here
and just adjust it until it's at minus 18. And as I said, if you stop wanting the camera
to track your view, then you turn off
camera to view, and then you can just
navigate out of there again. Okay. One more thing
about the light, if I go with Control
zero back into our view. Maybe you want it a
little bit further down and you wanted it a
little bit further away, and you want to have
an accent light here, like a little accent
that has some color. Select it, go to light, and you can set it to pink. You can of course,
adjust also the power. If this is a little
bit too strong, you could go to 00, one, and it would be only ten. That would be something
that you could do, adjust your scene exactly
how you would like it. Okay.
12. Render Settings: Okay. So now you have imported your objects
into the scene. You have set them up, you have placed them
so that it looks nice. You have adjusted the camera. You have moved it
around. You have maybe adjusted the light, and everything looks
as if it is ready for rendering super what
can you do now? First, of course,
you can just press F 12 or go to render
and render image. But before you do
that, you might want to take a look at
your render settings. First, you should go to edit
preferences and system. And there, you should check out what your cycles render devices. And for this, I have chosen Optics and I have chosen
my graphics card. And I have not chosen my
CPU because I have Googled, and I have found out that my graphics card seems to be appropriate for doing
the job on its own. You can also choose
one of those up here, and you should inform
yourself what is the best option for your
specific graphics card. And you can also
Google how to find out which graphics card you
have, if you're not sure. And that's it for the settings. So let's just go
out of here again. Let's go on to our render
settings in the scene. These were our global settings, and now we go to the
render settings of sin. First, let's go to
render up here. You can see that my
render engine is cycles, we can also choose EV. But you see instantly
if you switch to EV, it just looks a
little bit more dull, a little bit more
boring and I just like how cycles handles, especially the reflections
on metallic surface. Then you should
choose your device, which should say GPU
compute if you are using your GPU because graphics
cards are meant to render. If you don't have one,
it should say CPU here, but in general, set it to GPU so that your graphics
card can do its job. Okay. Then let's go
further down to sampling. This is a very
important setting. Right now, we can see we have the sampling for the
viewport and for the render. And for the viewport, I have set it to 200
because obviously, my graphics card
can handle this, but you can also set it to
64, even something lower. If you just want a
quick preview in your viewport when you have set your shading
to render preview. If this is also
too slow for you, then you can always go back to material preview to
set up your scene. Only in the last steps, you can go to render preview, which will show you the
final result more or less. The noise is turned on, you can also turn it off
for your viewport, if you notice that it
becomes quite slow, and then we can
close this up and go to the render itself, which would be the render
that comes if you press F 12. Here, I set it right
now to 500 samples, which is okay for a scene like this because there are a lot
of reflections going on. I like to set this
at least to 1,000, and if I notice that my
scene looks good enough, we can always stop the
render beforehand. If you set this
to, I don't know, 1,000 samples, and then
you go to render image. Oh, and then you notice that your subdivisions are
not set correctly. Then you can just
go to x and stop this and you go to modifiers and set your subdivisions
to the amount that they also have on the viewport so that it looks exactly like this. If you notice that
blender is going slow because of the
high viewport levels, you can always also decrease it in the viewport during setup. If you are just
your scene and you notice it's going very slow, then you can turn
this down and it will be faster for
the setup phase, and you can keep this at six for render so that it looks very
detailed on the render. Back to our render settings, if I render this now with F 12, and I still see there
are some problems. I see that both displacement
modes are turned on here. This is why it looks a
little bit like garbage. So let's stop our render, go to the modifiers and just keep our displacement mode on which we need for the render. So we have the fish scale and the hammer
both on this ring. And if I want to not
show it in the render, I need to turn this off. Then only this gets rendered. This is this little camera
icon. This is for viewport. If I turn this off, it also
disappears in the viewport, and this is for the render. And same goes for this one. Let's collapse all those. We have fish gale here
and it's turned off in our viewport and so I turn it
off on the render as well. Now, let's try hitting
F 12 once more. And now it is closer to what
I want to see in my render. So this definitely works better. And you see my rendering
is already finished, and it looks nice. But if I would have a
very high sample count, let's say I say I want
4,000 samples here. And this takes a little longer. I can always if I notice this takes too long
for my liking, I can always press escape, and it will just
stay where it is. It will do nothing more,
no de noising, nothing. It will just stay at
the point where it is. Obviously, that's not ideal because then no de
noising is going on, and if you zoom in a
lot, you see a lot of these little
noise patterns here. So let's just set this to number that our
computer can handle. D definitely keep it on. Everything will look nicer. The other settings in
the render properties are not really important
to alter right now because I wanted to keep it very simple for you
and just give you the best results
possible without having to tweak all
of the settings. Just one other thing that I
like to do, I go down here, scroll down to color management, and I like to set the view to film and the look
to high contrast. You can also set it
to very high contrast because usually it's at medium, and I find this I don't know. It looks a little bland. If you set it to high contrast, it definitely pops a
little bit more right out of your screen just to show you the difference with
some more subdivisions and we go to the
color management. If it's a medium contrast,
it looks like this. You may like this look,
even like the low contrast, maybe if you want a
little more dreamy style rendering and if you go
to very high contrast, it really blows the colors over blows the
colors a little bit. I like to go with high contrast. It looks nice and punchy for me. Okay. That would be all that we really need to take
care of in this tab, and then we can take
a look at output. The output determines first and foremost the format
of your render. You will notice that I have
set it to 3,840 to 2,160, which would equal four k.
And I also set this to 50%. Which means the
rendering in reality is just 1920 times 1080 p, which is also a
very usual format. So if you want to
make a test render or you just want
to quickly check out if you have
thought of everything, you can set this, for
example, to just 25%. And if you now press render, it will be just 25% of
this high resolution. And you see it is already
not as crisp as before. And if you Zoom in, you
see a lot of pixels. And if I set this to 100 and I crank this up
and render it now, You see how big this thing gets and
how much slower it is. You see you can
zoom in quite a lot more and you have
a lot more pixels. Speaking of pixels, I see that this looks a little pixilated. Let's stop this. You can also stop the render by clicking on this
little x down here, and with such a big fire size, this can take a
little bit longer. For renderings, we can go to right click and Shade Smooth. Let's see if this
makes a difference. This looks like buttery
smooth to me now. Mind you that this
does not affect the output fail when you send
it to a three D printer. It will still in reality, look like this when
you shade it flat, which is also very
nice resolution for three D printing,
by the way. This will also come out
fine if it looks like this in this scale
for such jewelry. But right click in
Shade Smooth can help you with rendering
such details. If I now press render again,
after shading smooth, You will see that
this whole thing has gotten buttery smooth and it
looks very nice to my eye. That's a little trick. You might notice it renders
these two big chunks. You see that it does the
de noising right now, there's a lot of noise which blender will get rid
of in the final step. Then if you look closely, it also starts to shine
a little bit more. You see it's finished. Now
de noising is going on. This takes a little while for
such a big object or image. And now afterwards, it also
added a little glare on top, so that it just glows
a little bit more. If you go do your file and you
go to compositing up here, it's far on the right.
You might have to scroll. You see that I have set up this glare node
that I mentioned, and this is just there to give you a little bit of an extra
shine to your final image. Once the surrender is finished, I can go in here
and I could unplug this and just put
the render layer directly into the output. And then you will see that this little
glow has disappeared. I don't know if you
notice it on camera here. It looks very clean. It does
not have the shine anymore. Look at the lower picture.
Look at how it changes. If I now plug this
glare node into the composite node,
It does compositing. And now, did you see the change? It changes a little
bit, and of course, you can also change the size, and you could set this to one. One is the processed image only. And of course, you can also do other stuff with
this compositing note. You can set it to simple star, and then it gets all kinds of little stars where
it is so bright. But I really like the fog glow because it's nice and subtle. These stars are a little
bit too catchy for me. Okay, so that would be the composite note and
why I put it in there. It's just nice to play around
with it. So try it out. Now you have this
beautiful image that you rendered and you want
to save it, of course. That's very important because
if you now press on x, this image gets lost. It might show up in some
temp folder somewhere, but to make absolutely sure that you get this image
where you want it, you go to image and save as. Then you save it as something. Save image. Now it's in there, it saved as a PNG
and it's saved in this nice high resolution if
you rendered it like that. Then you can close
it without worries. Anything else really in this render setup you don't have to worry
about. All right. And that basically
would be how you can use this render setup. I hope you learned something. And I hope you enjoyed it, and I'm really looking forward to your beautiful renderings. If you have any questions or problems with the rando setup, leave me a discussion post.
13. Change Ring Size: Now, if you have a ring, you will probably want to know a quick and easy way to
adjust the ring size. First, it is clamR. There is no way to adjust the ring size by just
punching in a number and the ring and everything
will become bigger and everything will
instantly still look good. This is because
not every texture looks good in all sizes, and sometimes we need
to readjust manually. I personally find it easiest
to just manually scale the ring to size and then reposition the
texture if needed. Alternatively, you could apply the texture like we do in
the following lessons, and then just scale the
whole ring up or down. It always depends on
the particular model. The trick is at
least for ring sizes to use a helper curve
that will guide us. If you still need to change
the ring size in general, now is a good time before any non reversible or
destructive application of our modifiers. The important thing is
to keep a safe file of this version so that you can
quickly come back to it, whether you need
another ring size or just want to use the modifier arrangement for another project. Switch off the
subdivision surface mod and get yourself a
ring size curve. Preferably with the
jewel craft add. In our case, the
curve is just there as an orientation on how
much to scale the ring. The size curve should line up with the inner
edge of the ring. If you look at it
through the ring hole. You can also just scale the inner ring edges to change
the thickness of the ring. You can use S then shift
and y to not change the width of the inner ring band and only scale in x
in that direction. Value between 1.8 and three millimeter usually works
quite well for string design. In general, try not to
make it thinner than 1.5 or even 1 millimeter as this becomes
quite flimsy at some point, at least for silver
There are exceptions, of course, depending
on your design. But I just tried to give you
a rough orientation point. And guess what? After resizing, of course, we might need to
adjust the UV mapping again. But no harm in that, you
will only learn from that. Here's a tip, save the scaled version with the ring size in the
name to quickly find it. Something I very much
recommend is to zoom out occasionally and
look at the ring as if it was real
life size already. This often gives a very
good hint if the design makes sense or some
details are too small. Even though they look pretty
giant and chunky, if you. In jewelry, this is all relative because of the tiny dimensions.
14. Applying Mods & Decimate File Size: After all the hard work, I am sure your model
will look very cool. And at some point, you
might want to export it and send it to any kind of three D printing service
or three D printer. Once we apply all the modifiers
to bake in our texture, the great amount of
vertices will make our model size quite big. As soon as you want to bow something else to
your textured model, like a stone setting or
simply want to sculpt on it, you will need to
apply the modifiers. And to not make your file
size super big then, we have some tricks to keep it simple, the decimate modifier. Make sure to keep a safe file before
doing all of this now. To be able to quickly go
back to the now if needed. Very important. Definitely
keep a safe file before applying the
displacement models in case something goes wrong, or you just quickly want to revert to the
unapplied stage. Now, you want to apply the
textures in two main cases. You want to export the ring
directly for printing. You want to go to
file export STL. However, you can just leave the modifiers unapplied
in the safe file, and then take the box, apply modifiers in the
STL export window. This is all you need
to do to export the model with all the
modifiers applied. Or you want to alter the resulting geometry from the displacement model
in subsequent ways, like sculpting or
further booling. And we want to do
both potentially. Once you apply all the mods, the size of your bland file and also of the exported STL might become really huge because many more vertices will
have been created. This will make further refining your object much
more of a hassle. Look at the upper left corner, where I turned on the
statistics overlay. This thing is already chunky. You can fix this by adding
a decimate modifier. Try setting the lowest
ratio that you can get away with by still keeping
the overall shape intact. I found that 0.1 or 10%
of the original amount of vertices still works well and my ring looks as
if nothing happened. You can experiment and see
if you might go even lower. Now I apply the
decimate mod and voila, you are left with 10%
of the vert amount, as well as a much
smaller file size. This will be a key factor in further refining and
working with your object. Too many verts kill the fun and blender
very quickly because weaker machines can't handle those and will
object profoundly, so everything slows down. We want to save data
space as much as we can. Refactoring is also a
key word in programming, and it makes as
much sense here as it does in other
computing applications. Here's an example
of another file. Just notice the difference
in size between the undecimated blend
one backup file and the decimated
version at the top, which was decimated with 0.1. Which amounts to the file being roughly 10% of the
original size?
15. Refining Texture by Sculpting & Booling: After applying and decimating, we can have some fun. As announced in the last lesson, I will give you some ideas and suggestions on what
you do after this. We will be using
different techniques to refine the model through
sculpting and bling. Once we have decimated
the object vertex count, we can then further enhance
and refine the object. Sometimes the displacement
technique leaves artifacts, especially at the edges
where blinder tries to solve the geometry and the
texture might get squished. We have solved some of this
in our previous lesson where we smooth the edges by using
two different vertex groups. Make sure to check it
out if you missed it. Also, sometimes our
textures are not super high resolution and the pixels show in
three D. Basically, you should always strive
to have as high of a resolution for
your textures as possible, as mentioned earlier. Here we now have
multiple options. First, we can use sculpting, especially smoothing to
take care of those areas. Just use dopo to read apologize, which means giving them just enough geometry to
be sculpted properly. You can also smooth over the shapes directly by
going over them with a very weak dnopo brush and then smoothing
them out afterwards. For a full format
introduction into sculpting, check out my class deep
dive into sculpting, where we sculpt an animal head together from start to finish. Another situation where
sculpting can be very helpful is for clearing up the visible seam in a
non infinite pattern. You can get creative
and build on the existing structure to
incorporate it into the design. I will go over this
in time lapse mode. It is pretty much very simple. You just have to be careful to incorporate the existing
surface rhythm. Here a keen eye and a bit of
creativity is very helpful. Of course, for each texture, there might be multiple different solutions
you can come up with that all depends on the kind of texture that you have
chosen for your model. If it is not reasonable to scalp because there are just
too many small parts, or they are not very
well accessible. It might be a solution to
just both something on top. Mind you, this does
only work if there are no flipped or inside out
phases in the booling area, which can helpen through
the displacement mode. Once you fix that, usually
also by using dintpo and just creating new topology in those places, booling
usually works. For an intro into Boling, check out my beginners
class blender for absolute beginners. Let's now quickly create some neat little setting with a garnet on top for this ring. With this, you could conveniently
hide an unsightly seam with a suitable and at the same time, pleasant
design addition. You can create a
cute little garnet easily with a jewel
craft add on. You can even choose
the stone type here to give it another
color right from the start. Then we can just
create a circle mesh, which you can use to build a simple setting by
extruding and scaling. Just make sure the lower
part overlaps into the ring so that it can be
combined with it later. If so desired. You can and should, of course, give it a subdivision
surface mod and also some extra
geometry rings with control R to crease
the edges in this way. Of course, you
could also suggest crease edge in the end menu. But I find using additional edge rings because you have a little
bit more control over the shape of your geometry. And finally, we can give the metal a simple
metal material. As well as recoloring our
stone in any way we like. And that's definitely
looking all right to me. So I hope I could give you
some ideas how to build on the initial ring that we created or whatever other
object you've chosen. And I'm sure you can think of multiple additional ways how you could enhance your
personal and unique design.
16. What to do with Printable File: Once you are happy with
everything about our object, we can then think about
three D printing it. For starters, I still
recommend using a printer demand service
like shape ways. I have used them again and
again throughout the years, and they offer a wide
variety of materials, including bronze,
steel, silver and gold. Additionally to all
those materials, they also offer quite a
few different finishes, which is very interesting, especially when it comes
to precious metals. But they also offer loads of
different kinds of plastics, which are good to
quickly test out any new design you're
experimenting with. Shapeways also offers a lot of guidelines regarding
all of their materials. If you click on tools and
open in three D tools, you will get loads and loads of information about
the printability of your uploaded object, including details
like wall thickness, loose shells, and
so on and so forth. On the left here, you have
the material overview, and this will show you
how your model fares in any of the technical
checks save automatically. For example, one very
important aspect is the wall thickness,
and if you click on it, shape waves will show
you a heat map of your object and where there are potential
problems in your model. Here you can see some red spots, and you could
potentially also click on fix the model problems. But the way this looks, I would definitely
give it a go and not worry about some of
those red spots. Only if the majority of your
model throws any problems. But from my experience, how it looks now,
that's completely fine. If you don't want to invest in precious metals right away. Of course, you can
also choose some of the cheaper plastics options. And they also offer some sample kits for
you to check out. So all in all, I
highly recommend them. Oh, and by the
way, Shape was now apparently also offers
C and C machining. So that would be something to keep in mind if
you're interested. With a little Googling, you
will probably also find many more printer
demand providers and you can compare
between them, depending on your
location and preference. Or, of course, you could open your exported STL in any slicer program like
Cura or Prusa Slicer. When printing with filament, I would definitely recommend the lowest possible layer size because filament obviously is not capable of giving you the highest resolution that is possible with
resin, for example. So if you want to
go really deep or deeper into jewelry
printing and maybe casting, I definitely recommend
a resin printer. For test prints or
quick experiments. Filament is very nice because
it is very easy to handle. And so you can just load it
in here and slice it once you have set all the parameters which are needed for
your three D printer. You could export your G code and send it directly
to your printer. Because this whole class
was aimed at creating a completely three D
printer ready object, you should be ready
to send it to any of the aforementioned
services or machines. Next lesson. Do we
have any more lessons? No more lessons. Hell Lua. Okay. Sound of.
17. Suggestions at the Finish Line: Hello there. I hope you're
happy with what you created. Awesome that you made
it to the finish. Here are some things to make your class experience
even more enjoyable. Share your project picture with us in the project gallery. I will give you
feedback and you can get likes and give
other slides as well. Did I mention
Skillshare badges yet? So that's definitely nice to
do after all the hard work. You can leave me a review. This is a perfect way
to help both of us. You can share what you
think about the class in a constructive way and help me make better classes
in the future. It will also help spread
the word of the class. So if you liked it or even dislike something,
why not share it. Another thing you can do post
your beautiful artwork on Instagram and tag
me at Palo Design. Also, of course, check
out my other classes, all my free content on YouTube. There's loads of cool
projects waiting for you. Finally, but not at, book a one on one with
me if you want to really dive into three
D and jewelry design. All links are in the
class description. For now, let me wish
you a wonderful day. Thanks for taking the class
and most importantly, keep doing RC stuff. See you around.
Gesa Pickbrenner, 3D Jewelry Artist & Designer
