Blender 3D - The Art of Sculpting

1. Intro: Blender 3D Sculpting: Are you ready for a creative journey into the world of 3D sculpting in Blender? Whether you're a beginner, eager to learn the fundamentals or an intermediate user looking to enhance your skills. This class is made for you. I'm Gesa Pickbrenner, a professional goldsmith, autodidact and freelancer in 3D and Graphic Design. As a top teacher on Skillshare and an online educator, I look forward very much to guiding you through the process of sculpting in Blender. When I first discovered Blender a few years ago, I was captivated by the possibilities that it offered for creating 3D Art. As a broke goldsmith during my apprenticeship, I saw a chance to design exquisite 3D printable jewelry. However, my initial attempts were far from impressive. Sculpting in Blender seemed like a mysterious realm, and it took me quite some time to grasp the intricacies of the craft. But it also needed some basic mindset shifts, which only occurred for me after many, many hours of sculpting and struggling. In this class, I will share those essential insights and guide you in sculpting a creature's head from scratch, ready for rendering our 3D printing. Showing you everything and all my little trade secrets from the initial preparations like sketching and gathering inspiration to mastering the sculpting techniques. You will gain very valuable knowledge which you can then apply to all your future Blender Sculpting projects. Stop holding yourself back with false assumptions or frustrations. Sculpting doesn't have to be complicated. It can be a joyful and rewarding experience. You'll discover how easy and economical it can be to bring your artistic visions to life. So whether you're a beginner, seeking a solid foundation or an intermediate user aiming to refine your skills, come join me on this 3D journey and unlock the world of sculptural art in Blender. Let's go! :) 2. Welcome! About our Project: Welcome back to our exciting journey into the world of 3D Sculpting and Blender. In this class, we will cover all the basic sculpting techniques you need to really get creative with your own work in Blender. We're going to plan, design, model, and sculpt a lions head sculpture. This class is for slightly advanced beginners to intermediate students in Blender. The workflow is intended to bring you the best results with the least amount of struggle without overcomplicating things. If you're an absolute beginner opening Blender for the first time, I advise you to first check out my class "Blender for Absolute Beginners", which covers the fundamentals of fundamentals, like the interface and how the basic functionalities work. Sculpting in Blender is its own universe and it can be hard to know how to really get going with it. I want to empower you to create your own unique masterpieces without feeling overwhelmed or bogged down by complexity. That's why I've chosen a lions head as our Project. Lions offer us ample opportunities to experiment and learn from mistakes, particularly when it comes to sculpting their magnificent mane. Moreover, working on a lions head will enhance your understanding of form, light, shadow, texture and more. Last but not least, the lion is a powerful and mystical creature that has meaning in many different spiritual contexts. So if cats are your spirit animal, this class will be double the fun. Of course, you can choose any other animal head that you want, as the techniques here can be applied to many different types. So feel free to choose your favorite one. Of course, if you want to 3D print your lion/animal, you can do that too. I will additionally show you how to flatten the back and hollow out the model for printing, whether it be for sculpture or jewelry design in any material. At the end of this class, you're going to have your very own sculpture in 3D. You will know how to get from the idea to a finished project. And you may even 3D print your design. Make sure to share your design with me in the Project Gallery at the end. I can't wait to see your stunning sculptures. 3. Materials needed: A quick word on the materials needed for this Blender 3D Sculpting class. This class requires a PC, or a strong laptop with a mouse and ideally a numpad keyboard, as well as Blender installed. A drawing tablet is useful, but not strictly required, as you can do all the sculpting with a mouse as well. However, for finer and more intricate sculpting projects. And if you decide to generally dive deeper into sculpting, a tablet is really a very good investment. It should have pressure sensitivity, but this is probably a given for most artistic tablets anyway. They also start relatively cheap nowadays and you absolutely don't need anything fancy to take your first steps towards becoming a 3D sculptor. And always remember, fancy tools don't make the artist, they support the work, but a master can also do quite a bit with rudimentary equipment. 4. Resources: I'm so glad you want to join my class. But before we dive in, I want to emphasize an essential step for your success. Download the project files provided below. These files contain everything you need to follow along and start the class with confidence. There are even finished examples included that can give you valuable insights into approaching specific elements in the workflow. Now, without further ado, let's get into it. 5. References and Sketching: Next, we will look for references and create some sketches. If you don't want to sketch yourself, you can of course, find my finished sketches in the project files. Or you just watch how I go about searching for references and then use the photos directly. So if you just want to get started sculpting, feel free to skip this and the next lesson. Although I'll probably mention a few nice tricks in there which will come in handy for you in future projects. So you're very welcome to join it. First, I get started by just searching Google for the things I'd like to sketch. In this case, a lions head. For you, it might be anything else. I do recommend something that has some kind of face and some kind of hair, or mane, as the focus will be on facial features in general. Of course, if you have taken some photos from a zoo or a safari or something like that, feel free to use your own photographic references. Of course, I look at a lot of imagery to see what I can use best for a specific project. I pay attention to the details, to the special features of my models. And I tried to find as much material as I can, so that I have something from every perspective, from the side, from the front, three-quarter view, ideally also from above and from below. And some close-ups to see details won't hurt either. Then after I get a good mix of templates together, I use a program called pureRef, which is free to download. But you're always welcome to donate something to it if you found it really helpful. Just like with Blender. It's a really handy program that you can use to display your references above your work surface. As you can see, my pureRef window is open throughout the search and I can just drag the images in there and display them once I've saved them. Very, very handy. So I now prepare myself a new canvas in Photoshop and then I'm just going to start sketching on it to see what shapes spontaneously stand out to me. As a free alternative, you may use Krita, a wonderful open source project perfect for sketching and drawing. It's very simple. I just try to get to know the lion, I will end up sculpting. How do I get started? First, let's start with a sketch from the side to find out more about the snout shape. This stage, you should pay particular attention to such details as angles between key lines, spacing, or distance between features and certain shapes that emerge. And doing this, you can make sure to not get lost in the details so much, but really just look, what are the essential features of your model. What is important for this? I really like to sketch a few more to get familiar and also to get warmed up. Here, for example, you can see that I tried to emphasize the different planes of the lions face shape. Where are the individual sections and at what angles do they sit towards each other? Of course, such features as the eyes, the nose, and the muzzle. Very important. And it is good to understand their placement. Try looking at it with the eyes of a sculptor, where are the distinct areas. Sometimes I also shade these different surfaces in order to differentiate them from each other visually, a little bit more. I especially try to know the difference in shape between the head and the snout and also how the whole thing looks when the lion opens the snout. For example, I see that the forehead line is roughly parallel to the muzzle line, but the area directly between the eyes, the bridge of the nose sits at a somehow steeper angle. It can help to also search for drawing reference of your desired object where many people have noticed such key points and emphasize them. You should really try to pay attention to these things when getting to know your model. Another example is the distance between the corner of the mouth, eye and the nose, the triangle that these three points form. In the end of this class, the lions head sculpture will not be a completely three-dimensional shape, but it will be flat on the back so that we can use it as a pendant or on a wall. Therefore, I don't need a back view here, but I make sure to have multiple different views. So I get to know the lion well from all directions. Here I am using a lioness, a female lion. This helps with the part of bringing the mane together with the face. What's hiding behind the mane, and what can be seen in front of it. Now, we should be warmed up a bit. And we also did the work of getting to know the technical aspects of the shapes. Now we can start to find out more about the actual look of our model. I tried to trace the different curvature, the straight lines, and the structure of the face. In general, I don't want to create a photo-realistic sculpture of a lion. I'm concerned with finding a nice aesthetic representation of a slightly stylized lion that is pleasing to the eye. An artistic representation, not an exact anatomical study. You can see an aspect of this artistic freedom in the slightly curlier hair. Because I am going to give the line a slightly wavier hairstyle. This just emerged while Sketching. If you want to go at it more naturalistic or maybe even more stylized, please do so. In the end, there is no right and wrong in art, but there are certainly right and wrong ways of accurately and naturalisticly representing anatomy. And also there are questions of aesthetics. So try to stick to nature first, to then learn how to exaggerate, stylize, etcetera. This is why I always try to reorient myself to the reality that is there. I do try to exaggerate or adapt it a bit sometimes, but I always make sure that I don't lose sight of what a lions actually looks like. Here I tried to capture the basic geometry of the lions face with only a few lines. Then I reinforce the lines so there's clear where the accents are to be found. And that's my way of preparing for a sculpting project. Looking for references, then drawing and sketching from them. Trying to really get to know my subject a bit better. Well, now we've drawn a good amount. If you've been following along. I hope you had phon. And if you don't want to sketch, just use my material or references you can find online. No problem. You can get a wonderful result through many different approaches. Sketching, of course, really helps us to get a little bit more intimate with your model and helps you getting to know the whole thing a little bit better beforehand. Next, we will load the sketches into Blender so that we can use them directly as guides for our sculpting project. 6. Insert Sketches into Blender: Let's insert our sketches and references into Blender as a direct sculpting support. There is a separate object exactly for that. First, rename the existing collection by double-clicking on it in our outliner. Let's call that "reference" so that all our references go in there. And we can quickly turn them on or off. With that collection selected, which you can see from the slight highlight in the outliner, you will create all new objects in there. Press the shortcut Shift A, Choose Image and Reference. You can also use the Add button on top of the viewport. Then go to the folder where your reference is and chose it. Up here you may change the view so that you can see your sketches. To check out how big the picture is, we can use the measurement tool on the left side of the Tool Menu. And at least for me, I see that it's quite long, several meters. A small hint to delete the measurement again. Click on it and hit X, and to hide it, just go to another tool in the Tool Menu. Okay, our picture is several meters long. But if we want to work in millimeters, which would be the desired unit for small sculpture, then we have to change the units of the scene a little bit. And for that, click here on the right, on this cone and the sphere, the scene properties, and click on Units. The unit system is already metric. You could of course, also choose imperial length. You can set the unit to mm, and you will see it changing in the measurement. on the left. One of these little boxes in the background are 1 m. For millimeters, set the unit scale to 0.001. Since the base unit scale of Blender is 1 m, if we set this to 0.001, each of these squares in the background will now equal 1 mm. Now it could be that if you switch your Blender units to millimeters, that the helper grid in the background disappears. That can be the case because the grid is simply still set to meters. And we can change that up here. There's a button up here. We can toggle some visual cues and help us on and off. There you can just set the grid scale to equal 0.001 as well. My units are set and I will quickly add my reference again. Now we can measure that once more, and we should see some amount of millimeters now, depending on how big you want your model to be, you can scale the reference accordingly with S and moving the mouse. Of course, depending on what you want to do with the object, you may want to set other units. For jewelry and small sculpture. millimeters are a must in my opinion. We can scale the object in the end and when exporting as well. But it helps to work in the right dimensions right away. So now I've got the reference here, I'm going to call it front. A useful thing is to make the reference un-clickable so that you don't accidentally move it when working. This you can do in the outliner with this little filter icon, we can choose which buttons are up here for our objects. We can add the little mouse pointer shape. And now we can toggle it for our reference or for the whole collection, to lock them. Let's add a couple more references. Next, I will choose the side view. I'm going to rotate the reference 90 degrees using R and 90. You can scale the reference so that it matches the first one. In this way, we have a reference for the side view as well. If you now work with images from the internet, you can of course crop them beforehand so that you only have the parts visible that you're interested in. In this case, the face. The third sketch sits in a somehow weird position because references usually load in the same angle as we are looking at the scene. And to fix that, I open the menu and go to the item tab. Here under rotation. I can set the rotation completely to zero by just clicking and holding and dragging my mouse over all three fields and then just entering zero and then the sketch should just lie flat. In this little tab, you can always see the location, the rotation, and the scale of the selected object. They always correspond to how it actually looks in the 3D view port as well. That's a numerical description of these aspects of an object which can be really helpful because you can also change it in here directly. And this one, I will move to the side a little bit. With G and X, or you can change the value on the item tab (N menu), or with a button on the T menu. You have multiple possibilities. And this one, I will call the three-quarter view. Here in the small viewport, we can alter the view so that we can see the lion approximately from the front. Sometimes it's also quite handy to make the images a bit transparent. You can do that here in the Object Data Properties under opacity and lower the value a bit. Now, I'm going to do that with the other two as well. And with that, we always have the ability to look through our references and see the other stuff that we're working with. If this is necessary, you can experiment with it and decide for yourself if you like it, if you need it. And that's the basic reference setup for a slightly more complex sculpting project, which we will be tackling step-by-step over the next lessons. 7. Warmup: Ears: Let's start with something simple to warmup. Let's start with the ears. This is a very simple shape that we can quickly model. And also it shows the basic modelling technique in Blender, which is box modeling, or surface modeling. We're also going to add a mirror modifier in this lesson to be able to work on to mirrored meshes at the same time. As you can see, I have pureRef, open to look at ears of lions, even though it's just a simple shape. And I'm not modelling any details for now. It's already good to work with references from the beginning so that you know that you're on the right track. Okay, to accommodate the ears, right-click on the scene collection and create a new collection and just call that head. I think the ears fit in there quite well. By the way, I'm in front view, 1 on the numpad. If you don't see the grid in that view, you might have to press F5 on the numpad once because you're still in perspective mode. And to be able to see the grid you want orthographic view. Before you create a new object, makes sure that your 3D cursor is still in the center by pressing Shift C, then any new object that you add will appear in the center. Then press Shift A, mesh and cube, scale the cube by pressing S and moving your mouse so that it has about ears size. Now move it by pressing G and then place it on the ear, are on the approximate place where the ear will be later. Once you have the ears up, put your reference aside. Now we're going to add a modifier. And to do that, go to the wrench symbol here, click on Add Modifier and add a mirror modifier. And it's already preset to mirror on the x-axis. That is correct. It is supposed to be mirrored on the other side and the direction of the x-axis. But nothing seems to happen either. And that's because by default, the modifier always mirrors on the origin of the object. In this case, it's in the center of the cube. That's the little orange dot you see there. You can change that too. But what's even more handy is to create a mirror object, Shift A and empty. And for example, choose the axis or arrows. I hide my reference by clicking on the eye at the top of the outline to see that my arrows are actually sitting where they are supposed to be - in the center. I like having my auxiliary objects in their own collection. So I create a new one named "Helpers" and put my arrows in there. Then in the outliner, I call it Mirror. And empty objects, by the way, are just that: helper objects, which helps you to build your scene. That's why they are called empties, because they are empty of any geometry and won't show up in any render. Now I can go to the mirror modifier and choose my empty arrows as the mirror object, then the cube will automatically be mirrored at that object. Make sure your ears are roughly where you want them to be later. The placement doesn't have to be perfect yet. As I said, it's important not to get too caught up in the details in the beginning, but to build the basic framework first, the foundation. Now I press 3 on my numpad and move the cube back a bit with G and Y. Tab into edit mode, 7 on the numpad for the top view. Now scale with S. And again along the axis. In the references, you can see very well that the ears of the lion always go a bit further back on the outer side. Therefore, rotate them along the Z axis with R and Z. The last thing you can do is to add a subdivision surface modifier. You could do that here by clicking the wrench and add modifier. But I'm just going to hit CTRL and 2, that automatically adds one modifier with two subdivision layers. If you don't have the same view as I do, and you don't see the rounded shape as well as the cage of verts, then click on the little buttons at the top of the modifier. There you can set the different levels of how you want to see the subdivided version in edit mode. So either the verts and the sub-divided mesh together, only the rounded mesh, or you can also hide it completely. That's about it for the ears. As I said, it's really important not to go into too much detail in the beginning, but to focus on the basics. Double-click on the ears and call them ears. In the next lessons, we continue with the head. We're going to create it using a really cool method, metaballs. It's going to be a lot of fun. See you there! 8. Metaballs Introduction: Maybe you also remember those times when you were a kid or you work at Google and you played in one of those ball pits. I always get this feeling when using metaballs for sculpting. Can it get much better than this? Nope. They're totally straightforward and pretty self-explanatory. Metaballs are not meshes yet with verts and faces, but there are procedural objects. They are created by a mathematical function that interacts with the other metaballs based on proximity. They attract and can even merge with each other. Let's just play around with the Mballs a bit. And I'll explain some things about how their work and what to keep in mind when sculpting with them. It's really very simple and they're totally awesome to create geometry with. So how do we create a metaball? Just like normal geometry, shift A, or up here under Add. Now choose metaballs, and let's choose a simple ball shape. Here it sits now. To make it a little bit more interesting, I'll quickly go over to the colored material, which you can see because I'm in material preview mode. See the button up here. Yeah, and what can we do with the Mball now? We can, for example, just copy it with Shift D and make a second metaball. And the third, now we create a little carbon ring. And that's actually exactly what these metaballs are far. These kind of procedural objects were developed for modelling atoms. Now when you click this conglomerate anywhere, they're all selected at the same time. One also has a brightly colored ring, and that's the parent of all these metaballs, the papa-blop, so to speak, or mama. You can see this in the outline because he doesn't have a number. Other children of this metaball have a number and you can select them individually by their rings. And you can also move them individually. But only the papa blob is selected when you click somewhere on the Mballs themselves. Now you can scale that one and it will change the resolution of the other metaballs. You can see here that the surface of all of them is changing. If I scale papa blob smaller, you can see that the others' resolution becomes finer and finer. Scale him up, then they are getting coarser and coarser and have fewer faces, or polygons. The higher the resolution, the slower Blender gets. Switching to edit mode. you have the possibility to change the influence radius of the Mball so that it has more or less attraction to the other Mballs. But to be honest, I hardly ever use this function. And because I promised you an uncomplicated way of working, we won't go into it any further. Of course, you can play around with the two rings, the green and the red one in the edit mode and make them bigger or smaller and explore what happens. But as I said, we don't need that for now. You can also create other Mball shapes with Shift A while in Edit mode. But we will mostly stick to the spheres here. If you want to make a new parent ball, then you have to give it a new name. For example, "my ball" Then it isn't part of the first family anymore. It doesn't affect the others in any way, and it can start its own little Mball family. We can give the newly Mball parent a new material with a new color. Now, only the ones with the same color, like and influence each other. The greens are simply ignored and so are the reds. And in this way, we can have multiple blob families. Now at some point, we want to convert the whole thing into an actual mesh on which we can sculpt. For this, go to object, convert and then mesh (or right click). Then you'll see that all these individual metaballs that were part of one family are now part of one single object. If you switch to Edit Mode, see that they have verts and faces now and that you can edit them normally, just like any old regular mesh. As you can probably already tell, I totally love metaballs. It's so easy to intuitively create new geometry without having to worry about much at all. For key combos, you only need Shift D to copy them. S for scaling and G to move. And it doesn't take much time to build complex shapes very fast. It is a bit like quickly throwing and sticking lumps of clay together with the edit bonus of having no gravity to worry about. So let's do just that and create the basic shape of the lions head with metaballs... 9. Basic Shape with Mballs: Before we get started, let's make our references unclickable. So we're not moving our sketches around accidentally all the time. Here's how to do it in case you missed it the first time. At the top right of the outliner, you have a funnel icon. Click on it, and then you'll see this arrow. And if that's activated, then you can lock or unlock objects are a whole collection. Also lock the helpers collection and lock the ears as well. So shift A, Mball, and Ball. Scale that one ball with S and just bring it right there to the middle of the lions head. Don't forget that you also have the different options on the T menu on the left to scale, rotate and move. Now it's a matter of recreating the basic shape of the lion. Not every little detail, but really just an approximation as if we were children playing with play-doh. Remember, with shift a, you can copy a new one from the first Mball. We can also add a new shape, shift a. This one will be automatically part of the Mball family. Here, for example, I added an ellipse. Don't pay attention to symmetry yet, that will come later. Let's just build our basic form so that it roughly matches the outline of the references and sketches. You can create only half of the face and we're going to mirror it to the other side afterwards. And also, we can ignore the mane for now because we are going to sculpt it in a different way. Creating with Mballs is really a very uninhibited way of building geometry. You don't have to think much about it. If we now scale the papa blop a bit, the resolution of the whole surface changes. So let's not make it too fine and not to coarse, as well. As a guide on what level of detail you should work. Here I leave some indentation at roughly where the eyes are going to be. Here the cheekbone is implied. I constantly use Shift D to add the next Mball, or shift a and then the desired shape. But in 99% of the time, the balls are sufficient. And as mentioned, we're only going to create one-half of the face. But if something sticks out there in the center, that's not a problem. So we don't build up both halves at the same time. I've only taken care of the right side so far. The left, I haven't paid attention to at all. Everything that is sticking out on the left side, we will cut that off in a moment. I did mention that the metaballs are only procedurally generated. So they're still based on a mathematical function and they're not really sculptable geometry yet. Now we'll change that. While having the Mballs selected, go to Object, Convert to, mesh (or right click). Now when we switch to edit mode with tab, we see that our blob family has actually become a mesh, a continuous nice surface with voerts which we can now process just as if we had painstakingly crafted this from a cube by extruding and rotating and scaling with all these different commands and multiple mouse clicks. Only now, this was quite as easy as snipping our fingers like this. We can just continue to work with it and sculpt on the object directly. Super easy. I hope you enjoyed this basic introduction to metaballs sculpting as much as I did when I first discovered it. And let's now continue fashioning our lion. 10. Sculpting Interface: Next, we're going to start sculpting with this basic blob to add a bit more of the facial features. Here, I opened my additional lion references with pureRef again. So please open those if you have them for an even better sculpting experience. As you can see here, I already mirrored the blob and I will show you how to do exactly that in sculpt mode. Switch to the sculpting workspace where everything is already prepared for sculpting, that we can get started right away. In this workspace, everything works normally. We can rotate the model, zoom in and out, etc. But some things are set up differently to make for a smoother sculpting experience. Think of it like switching to a different room in your house. The first one was setup for building the basic model. This one is now ideally set up to sculpt, and you can also customize it further if you like. If you click up here, you can see that the shading has changed a little bit because matcap has been turned on. That's a different kind of visualization. It still has nothing to do with rendering, it's just internal to the program. A representation to make it easier for you to work with the object. This way, you can see the surface a little bit better because the shadows are rendered a little bit more intensely and the whole structure of the model comes out more clearly. You can also try out if you like some of the other visualizations better. For now, I stick with the default setting. On the left side, there's the brush menu. It has taken the place of the T menu and can be opened just like it. You can hide and unhide it and you can scroll quite a bit down. There are lots of other brushes that you can use to ultimately edit the model. Here at the top-left of the 3D view port, you can see which brush is currently selected. The settings for the selective brush, the radius, the strength, and some other options. Slightly separated from there, on the right side, you can see settings that do not only apply to a single brush, but which influence the behavior of more or less all brushes with some exceptions. For example, whether your brushstrokes are mirrored or whether dyntopo is turned on. You'll get to know these in this class as well. On the far right, you should be familiar with the menu as a whole. So the items haven't changed much. You can find all these settings here as well, mirroring the settings at the top of the 3D view port. In the panel on the right, it is a little bit more comfortable to get an overview because you don't have to open up the menus individually, like at the top. For example, here you find the menu item dyntopo, and that corresponds to this menu item at the top. What we can also do here is copy our brush and thereby create new custom brushes. Let's now mirror our object, which is called symmetrizing here. Just open the mirror menu tab and then you will see the symmetrize button at the bottom. Here you can choose which direction you want. For our lion, it would be positive X to negative X as the right side of the x-axis marks the positive area. And voila, you got yourself a mirrored blob. I'm sure this will come in handy for you in future Sculpting sessions. Also, make sure you play around with the other functions in this tab as well. They can be quite a lot of fun. If you, for example, choose the x-axis, you see that your brush, depending on where you move it, we'll make a blue dot appear on the other side of the model as well. This is then where your mirrored brush strokes will appear. You have the option at anytime during sSculpting to mirror your brushstrokes across different axes, X, Y, or Z, or all three at the same time. Very useful during sculpting is to open up a second 3D view port. So that while you're sculpting on some details are close-up or in a specific angle. You always have the opportunity to observe the result of your actions from a distance. Let's do the following. Create a new viewport element here on the right between the outliner and the other options and make it a 3D view port. Now, we can navigate here exactly in the same way as in the big one on the left side. Let's choose a frontal viewpoint. Another useful thing for you to know before getting started, we can switch back to object mode, while being in the Sculpting workspace, for example, to strategically replace our references. Of course, we could also go back into the layout workspace at the top. But then our view might change a bit. And sometimes it's useful to keep everything in the same perspective when switching. So we can switch over to object mode and move this reference to the side. I then copy it again with Shift D and move it back directly behind the model. So that when making the whole thing transparent, I can see if I'm following the shape correctly. Again, it always depends entirely on the project. But here I make sure that I have both. And yes, I could have just copied the original one to spare me one additional step. Another quirk of metaballs is that when you convert all your Mballs to geometry, that the shading is automatically set to smooth. This is sometimes quite fancy, for example, for rendering, but you don't see the individual faces of the model. And to change that, let's go to the menu point: object and shade flat (or right click) And you can finally distinguish the individual faces on the surface to make the whole thing a bit more sculpting friendly. I'd like to have a few more faces from the start. And that's why we are now using the subdivision surface modifier again, which you'll also have to add in object mode. And you'll see that the whole model is now a bit smoother. You can see some artifacts here on the surface because we didn't have all quad geometry, but this doesn't matter here for Sculpting. Make sure to apply the modifier before continuing. For a really in-depth introduction into modifiers and especially this modifier, please go over to my Blender beginners class and then come back here. Because then you will know all the basics necessary to really get a grip on the next lessons. Now, we're going to switch back to the sculpt mode. Either do that with Control Tab and 2, or just switch back to the sculpt mode at the top-left. Next, let's finally leave the preparations behind and get started sculpting! 11. Sculpting Go!: So let's dive into sculpting. Right now we have a pretty shapeless head. Now we want to go into a little more detail and we're going to loosely block in those details like eye sockets and the overall shape of the snout. No need to go really tiny yet. It's important to know that if you press F, you can change the size of the brush. If you press Shift F, you can change the strength of the brush. You can also do this up here in the brush menu and by just right-clicking. I'm just going to use the uppermost brush, the draw brush first. You can also select it with X as a shortcut. Turn on the sculpt mirror in the x-axis. If you hold down control then the brush subtracts and if you sculpt or draw normally than the brush adds material. Since we have a mirror turned on, every brush stroke gets mirrored. If you hold down Shift while sculpting, you automatically switch to the smooth brush. It's also to be found here on the left side menu. And you can also select it directly. But you will most often access it during sculpting by holding Shift. At the moment the model still looks like a misshapen potato. Don't fret, that's not a problem at all. What's important is that you emphasize the places where the eyes and the nose will be later on. So that we clarify the basic shape a bit more. Let's now activate dyntopo to really dive into sculpting. We want to use it so that we can have a lot of detail and some areas while not having too many verts and faces in areas where we don't need so many. Because the more vertices, the more of your computers resources Blender uses up. So it makes sense to only create many faces and finer resolution in the areas where this really is needed. If you look at this area in edit mode and paint over it with the draw brush, you will see that the faces just move outwards, but no additional faces, and therefore no additional vertices have been added. To create new faces, you use dyntopo. If we turn on dyntopo and draw something new and then go into the edit mode, we will see that we have created new faces here. The actual topology has changed. For a detailed introduction into the technique of dyntopo, I will refer you again to my Blender class for Absolute Beginners. Here in Sculpting dyntopo does not affect all brushes. You always have to try it out a bit, but many are affected and will help you get the right amount of detail onto your model. You can also adjust the amount of faces created so that it is stronger or weaker. by changing the detail size in the dyntopo settings. Dyntopo should only be used if you don't have any UV maps or vertex detail because dyntopo will screw this up for you, all modifiers should be applied. And since this is exactly the case for us, ignore that little warning that pops up. Another great brush I love to use often is the clay strips brush. It's great for building up geometry in a controlled and quick manner. The shortcut is usually something else, but I like to change the shortcut to C. So just right-click on the brush, click, assign shortcut, and press C. I'm going to reduce the number of pixels in dyntopo a little bit. I will go to around nine, but this is also a question of trial and error. I like to use this brush for defining the different planes of my object in a more precise manner, building material up and then smoothing it out afterwards with shift. For example, here under the eye socket for the nose bridge, or at the snout. We can use it to add some material there to define the snout shape more. In general, I'm not thinking in details yet, but only in different distinct planes which are defined by the basic geometry of our object. You can also adjust the strength of the smooth brush itself, of course, if you select it directly on the left and use Shift F and lower the number. Let's go back to the clay strips brush and built up more geometry here at the jaw. Always smooth it out so that it becomes a nice even surface. Dyntopo really works like constantly applying new material exactly where you need it. Don't forget to adjust the detail size of dyntopo if you feel it is necessary, but don't lower it too much. Because we want to stay in this level of detail for this step in the workflow. The detail size of dyntopo is a good indicator at what stage we are currently. Here, for example, I'm now working at this plane that I've shaded dark on my sketch. Let's say we want to get rid of some material to define a certain area. This case, we just use CTRL to clear away some material, then smooth it again. Thus, we can define the different planes. of our model in the 3D space, the clay strip brush is very nice for that. And wherever you see little bumps in the surface maybe also leftover from the metaballs surface. We can also use the same technique. The smooth brush itself does not create new geometry and it is also not affected by dyntopo. So whenever we smooth the whole thing after painting new geometry, it doesn't change the faces. And as you can see, with just a few brush strokes, we've already refined the basic shape to such an extent that the whole thing looks much more lion-ish now than it did before. And in the process, I also looked at some references of lions skulls. It's always good to also be aware of what's going on underneath. So you also understand where's the bone that's supporting the eyebrow, or make up the bridge of the nose, what bones form the jaw, and so on. I look at all of this for preparation and during the sculpting process as needed. But anatomy, of course, is a whole topic in itself, and it takes a lot of time to study it thoroughly. Therefore, I will not go into it too deeply. Now, the sketches we have made ourselves are another important orientation. For example, going into side view with 3 and turning on transparency with Alt Z, I see that my lions shape doesn't really match my sketch yet. And to change that, of course, we could now clear some of our geometry with a brush. But I can also just use G for the Grab Brush, increase the size of it, and then just drag the geometry with a brush to where I need it. To get really good results with a grab brush and only affect the area that you want to affect, It is important to play around with the size and strength until you get the effect you want. In-between, Don't forget to save. Nicely done. You've come far already. Let's get into the next lesson where we will finally give our animal it's eyes. 12. Eyes: In this lesson, let's give the lion his eyes, or of course, the animal that you have chosen to model. For projects like this, it's very handy to include all basic shapes early, so you can keep track of the proportions throughout the modelling process. Let's go back to object mode. We're just going to add a UV sphere. Very simple. Press Alt Z to turn on transparency mode so you can see them when we create them. Then press Shift a and mesh UV sphere, by the way, it is called UV sphere because in contrast to the ecosphere, it consists almost completely of quotes and therefore has a very good geometry to play UV map to unit that when you're working with textures for entering for us, it's currently purely about the geometry itself because the UV sphere, it's also nicely suited for eyes. I inserted the sphere into the Reference Collection, which is currently hidden. Therefore, we can see it yet because of that, a drag and drop it into the head collection in the outliner. Now we can see that for some reason this Sphere was important. It is quiet, the gigantic object, so does not directly visible because it is too huge. It is so big that you can see the inside of the sphere and the small viewport. If I zoom out, but you can see that our balls actually way too big. And because of the viewport view settings, it is also getting clubbed. In Blender. The 3D viewport has its own view settings. And this built-in view has certain distance limitations. Just as if we were playing a 3D game. If you want to broaden this limit, you can do so in the end menu under view, simply raise the end value to a higher number, like ten thousands or 100,000, for example. By the way, the same goes for very small distances and objects there. You can lower the start value and then the clipping should disappear. Also are Sphere is very much to huge. I would just press S and 0.1 a few times to scale it to an approximate eyeball size. So once I get the square to the appropriate size, I'll turn my head back on in the outliner, makes sure that you're still in the transparency mode all set. And then go to front mode with an unpaired one. Then use G to replace the sphere where the I should be. It is important to keep the eyes anatomy in mind. It's partly hidden behind the eyelids. A large part of the eyeball is not visible at all. The biggest part is inside the skull, inside the eye sockets. So I use the sketches, a guide, and make sure that the visible part of the eyeball corresponds to the actual size of the eyeball off the animal. Of course, anatomical drawings can be a great help here to understand these size relations. If you can find some of those, this will help you tremendously to grasp where the eyeballs should sit. And Edward size and also at what distance both eyes should be from each other. The eye, it doesn't sit exactly in the middle of the head either. So I'll move it forward on the y-axis so that it's roughly where it should be. Of course, we can always adjust the whole thing later still. And if you have trouble selecting it in the viewport is surely can select it in the outliner at anytime. Let's add a mirror modifier like with the Ears. First select the I, then the ear, then press Control L, and choose Copy modifiers. You can leave the subject modern. Please don't worry, doesn't look really cool yet. You can see that the is somehow still floating a bit too freely and that the eye sockets and the islets are not yet really well-defined. We're still just setting things up at this stage, placing the eyeballs at their approximate spot now will help us greatly when sculpting the eyelids and their surrounding anatomy in greater detail. They act as key guides towards which we can orient ourselves. And thus, we have prepared the eyes of the Lion of cars. The placement also varies between different animals. Suggest try to estimate the eye spot using a references and find a good middle ground. There's no single right place because each animal is also unique in its own way. Of course. Let's continue refining our sculpt. Some are, and continue to add more details. 13. Refine the Shape - Techniques & Insights: You have come quite far already on your journey towards being able to sculpt your own beautiful ideas from scratch. Let's continue refining our lion and slowly making our way into the more intricate details. I think this is one of the most important lessons in this whole course. You will hopefully gain a direct understanding of the ease of sculpting. I will show you what is important and what might be unnecessary. Please enjoy. We have edited our shortcut to the class strips brush so that it is quickly available with C. When going out and back into sculpt mode, dyntopo is often turned off and you need to reactivate it with the shortcut Control D. We will now refine our sculpt and we will start by concentrating on the eyes. Because they are very expressive and they are very important for a good design. Even more so for a portrait, which this basically is, a three-dimensional portrait. I would now like to have a little bit more detail and dyntopo. So let's go for around 8. Nice - That will do. Now we can just draw more material where it makes the shape of the lion more recognizable. I start by building some material up without caring about the exact shape. Same principle as with the big overall head shape. But now on a smaller scale, I tried to go along with the flow direction of the specific form, I am working on. My brush strokes going along the upper and lower eyelids. The eyelids are like hoods, or covers that fold over the eyeball, both from the top and the bottom. The top eyelid is usually slightly more pronounced, but this can vary. And to give it that nice sharp edge, we can switch to the crease brush, which is accessible with Shift C. As the name implies, this creates creases. It pulls the vertices together and leaves a groove. But once you hold CTRL, it can give you a nice crisp edge. And this can be helpful to define the fold of the eyelid a little bit more. I'm not quite satisfied with where my material is, but I don't want to change the overall shape. So here I go again for the grab brush with G. Let's increase the size a bit, lower the intensity a little. And then we can quickly move material where it needs to go without changing too much of the shape. And in this moment I realized that the lions eye is just a little bit too low. So I tried to check periodically if it's still in a place that makes sense for this design. Hence here I make it a little bit smaller because my lion shouldn't have super bulgy eyes or something. And then of course, the eyelid material is now in the wrong spot. We can just pull this over with a grab brush without changing the underlying shapes. We can quickly readjust. What I also like to do is rotate the eyes with R, X and 90. Then you have this part of the sphere in front, which looks a little bit like the pupil. So right now, this doesn't look like much yet. But it's normal that in the beginning your sculpt might look weird. Like a, well, strange animal or ugly or stuff like this. Don't worry about it. I would say that 99 percent of any sculpt looked weird at some point. I'd suggest have to get through this weird face to get to the good stuff. I also want to emphasize the edges of the eyelids with this brush. It's called draw sharp. And with it, we can engrave the surface kind of. With a clay strip brush, we can clean up the surface directly next to this to give it a cleaner appearance. Now this is all a little bit more defined. Dyntopo has turned off again because I rotated the eye in object mode. Need to remember checking if it is really on. I also fill the inside of the eye, behind and next to the eyeballs, with some material and smooth it out. Because in reality, the eyeball sits very snugly in its socket and is surrounded by tissue. And I constantly look around the thing I'm sculpting on from all sides to make sure that in all dimensions it looks fine and agreeable. So I think this is now a nice, slightly more refined and anatomically realistic foundation for the eyes. Additionally, you can watch out for specific unique details that are characteristic for your animal and that stand out. See that above the eye, the lion possesses these spots. And I just mark them loosely here. There can be defined a little bit more, but later. Also I give the nose this crease that it has in the center and some more smoothing. Okay, that should be it for the eyes at the moment. A few more words about dyntopo. When it's set relative detail. The more you zoom in, the more detailed your brush strokes become. This way, not only does the detail size setting influence your brushstrokes, but also how close you zoom in. This is good because it gives you the ability to quickly zoom in and out and create shapes on different levels. Though, I highly recommend to not get too close at this stage. To not get lost in the details to quickly. I know I said this already, but this is one of the most common pitfalls as a beginner. Let's continue with the nose. When you look at it from the side in my sketch, you'll see that the nose has a kind of humpy bridge. And the tip of the nose has this kind of triangular shape. Here, I'm building the nose shape by first outlining the lower part that is recessed with the crease brush. Then I use the same brush while holding CTRL to emphasize the part that sticks out the most. Then I fill the surface between them with clay strips. And I'll also draw very near towards the upper edge to bolster the edge created. Afterwards I smooth everything over. Careful to not draw over the edges. By smoothing very near to the upper edge, it is possible to define it very clearly. Let's quickly look at two more very nice brushes for clean edge creation. First, the pinch brush can help you pull geometry together to define previously created edges. On a thin geometry, this can lead to very high and thin edges, which should be avoided for sculpting. So this brush is ideal to reinforce somewhat existent edges, for more visual clarity. The scrape brush scrapes material off on a very flat plane, hence enabling you to give the object a clear cut look. It is nearly as if you've scraped off the surface with the edge of a knife, which can leave very sharp and refined edges. General, it's a lot of fun to build shapes with very little effort. Actually, when I started out with sculpting, I always thought that it must be so complicated. And you have to do so much to achieve results. But this is not true. Imagine Picasso. He sometimes drew these magnificent pictures with very few brushstrokes. And the same can be true for sculpting. You can achieve beautiful results without having to go overboard, and do a lot. I think one of the most important insights I had in the last years where I practiced and practiced sculpting. Was that doing less often makes for much, much better results. So I invite you to try to see where you want to go and try to go there with minimal effort. Don't struggle. That's what one of my favorite yoga teachers likes to say. Here with the nose and snout, I try to follow the plants again. I strive to find the distinct direction the different plants look in. And I always confirm with my sketches. Here, for example, I see that the chin, it's a lot too low. We don't need so much chin. From the front, I see that this is a little bit too broad. So I bring it in some more. So you see, I do it in a very uncomplicated way. This is the way the sculpting makes the most sense to me. I focused on one place at a time while I also try to see the overall picture. And I tried to as best as I can to work with the planes. I change the size of the brush accordingly. And I always go to my references so that I have the best way of working from reality. Some brushes are not affected by dyntopo. For example, draw sharp is not affected. The crease brush, however, is. Usually if I don't do something with ease, I realize that I struggle or start to be unfocused and I do something that is not with a clear goal in mind. I notice that I need to step back and look at it from a little bit further away so that I can understand what I'm doing from a distance. And also very important. Once you have the basic shape established, leave it at first. You don't have to draw endlessly in one space. It's not necessary. Just create with a clear goal and path and mind. Once you have that first satisfactory result, stop for now and return to it later for the next round, so to speak. Using the different references, I have an easier time to see the line from all sides, the lions head and to recognize the places where I can improve something. Notice how I just followed my own advice and went from the snout back to the eye for some further refinement. Also important is to change the size of the brush according to what you're doing. If you feel that you don't make progress, that you're stuck This is very often because you probably use the wrong size of brush for the thing that you want to accomplish. Very simple thing, but very powerful to know: the size matters. Throughout I constantly go back to my reference again and again to understand the shape better and better. I know I'm repeating myself here, but it is so important to go back to your references regularly. I also, as I mentioned, have looked at pictures of skulls from cats and lions so that I can see the underlying structure and understand where everything is. Because everything has its place. And as an artistic touch, I want to draw a little heart up here that integrates into the shape of the lions head. Just like this. In general, just lay the base, the groundwork for continuing later on. And you see, we already have created a quite convincing shape with relatively few brush strokes. No struggling and little effort required. And this is the ease which you can develop with practice. 14. Dyntopo Details: A few more in-depth details on dyntopo, to show you some things you can do with it. You don't have to follow along. But feel free to try dyntopo out as much as you can to get a feel for it. Right now we work in relative detail and the setting is subdivide collapse. This means that our brush creates geometry relative to how far we are zoomed out from the model. The further away we are, the coarser the geometry becomes. If we zoom in a lot, it becomes very fine. Now here we have a few options. First, we can adjust the general detail size but we can also decide if we only want to collapse edges or if we only want to subdivide them or both. By default, subdivide collaps is enabled, which means that we subdivide edges if they are coarser and collapse edges if they are finer than our detail size. If we choose to only collapse edges, we can not create smaller geometry than there already is, but we can collapse them into coarser detail. The opposite is true for subdivide only. Here you cannot collapse the geometry any further. So this is a good option if we already have quite a lot of detail. And we want to make sure that even if we sculpt from far away, if we're zoomed out a lot, we don't want to lose our details again. For example, here on the nose, if we choose subdivide collapse and then sculpt from far away, the nose detail would become very coarse again. And we would have to zoom in more to retain our details. But if we choose only subdivide, then it will not collapse any edges. And so we can create more geometry here, even though we are zoomed out, without destroying our carefully created shape. Okay, then the next thing is, we can choose constant detail. Constant detail is useful as well. We can have constant details no matter how far we're zoomed in or zoomed out. We always create the same amount of detail with our brush. Here we have the same options of only subdividing, collapsing or both. Constant detail is very good if you are sculpting on a specific part of your model. And you want to work on it from far away first, you want to stay in one level of detail so that you don't get lost in the super tiny parts, but focused on the overall shape. Even if you are zooming and more during the process. One of the coolest features of constant detail is the ability to use the eyedropper tool and just grab the desired resolution from any part of your model. Not unlike if you would use an eyedropper in Photoshop to sample a color. Here we also have this extra option of detailed flood fill. This can be used to quickly give the whole mesh the level of detail we want. If we set it to 9, Blender might load a little while and then the whole mesh is much finer grained. But this is not always useful as this very fine resolution is rather for small intricate details. And it's not very useful to create large or medium-size details. It will also slow down your PC to much, which would contradict the purpose of dyntopo in the first place. So you can imagine detail flood fill like a subdivide and unsubdivide mod that is applied immediately during sculpting. With 1, it becomes very coarse again. Okay, so this is constant detail. You can also always turn on smooth shading here as well. But I like to see my exact geometry when sculpting because it is important to know the exact surface when you want to 3D print something later on. Then the next dyntopo setting is brush detail. That's cool because it depends on how big our brush is. Actually I don't use brush detail so much, but maybe that's just because I haven't found a workflow where this particular setting works for me. So feel free to try it out in different situations and see what you can make of it. These are the different ways of generating topology, dynamically in Blender. I personally mostly use relative detail with subdivide collapse. But once you get to a certain level of detail on your sculpt, it can be also very useful to switch to only subdivide so that your details to not get destroyed once you zoom out. And I also like the constant detail because you can just set it to whatever you want and it will stay that way. You can control exactly how much detail you will create, no matter how far away you are or how big your brush is. A similar effect can be achieved with relative detail when you keep it at subdivide edges and you don't want to collapse anything more. You can also zoom out without hurting your geometry. You would just create more details if you zoom in more. That's just why I really like to use relative detail because it flows nicely with my particular artistic approach. Going from big to the small. And at a certain point, not going back to the bigger again, because the overall shape should be set and just focusing on the smaller details. Maybe for you, a different set of combinations work better. Be sure to try them all thoroughly. So this is it for this particular lesson. Next, let's continue with the mane, where I'm going to show you another distinct way of sculpting. 15. Mane: Sphere and Snakehook: Let's move on to the mane now, or with any other hair or fur you need for your animal. For the mane, we will again use a slightly different way of building geometry. To do that, we switch out of the sculpt mode first. You can click up here of course, or you can hit control tab and then 4 to go back into the object mode. Now I'm going to click on "Toggle X Ray" up here. You can also do that with ALT + Z. Then you see everything translucent. And I'll hide my references for now to have a bit more overview. At this point, I'm hiding my head collection, but I will turn it on again in a second. Let's add a new sphere in this collection. It is pretty huge now. It doesn't really have to be that big. Maybe it is already in the right size for you or even smaller than the head, but for me, it is a bit too big and I need to scale it down. I turn the head back on once to see how big it actually is. Here in my small window, we already see that the lion is actually very small compared to the sphere. Or the sphere is scaled much too large. I'll scale it down with S and typing .1 to scale it to 10% of its size. Now it has the right size. Let's move it with G and Z a little bit up and a little bit back. Let's turn transparency off again. That's now our base for the mane. What are we going to do with it now? First, let's save. Now with the sphere selected, let's switch back to sculpt mode, control tab and 2. Here I have now accidentally turned on a multiresolution modifier, but that doesn't really have to be there, I don't need it here at all. If you need more info on the multires modifier, then you can check out my blender beginner's class. We are now building the entire mane from this simple sphere. If you're creating different hair or fur, you can also always start with this technique. But this technique is actually very basic and you can basically create anything with it. You will see in a moment. Let's turn the references back on. And also dyntopo. The detail size is allright like that, at around 7 pixel and relative detail. Next I press K, and that is the shortcut for the snake hook. The snake hook is similar to the grab brush, which you can activate with G, that you can use to easily grab and move geometry around. The difference is that the snake hook creates new geometry in the process. If I pull on this, now you see you can actually pull out snakes with your hook. You can create quite a lot of new geometry without much effort. The bigger you make the brush, the more geometry you can pull out. You can also see that new verts are created through dyntopo at the same time. And we don't have a problem of not having enough vertices, which we would if dyntopo were turned off. You can create new geometry really quickly with this. Very very handy. Since I don't have a mane here in this frontal sketch, I replace the image here. For this, you can select the reference you want to change and go to the data properties. If you click on the folder symbol here, then you can simply select any other image. Since I've conveniently already sketched a lion from the front where you can at least see the shape of the mane quite well, I am just going to choose this. Let's take a look at it with transparent mode again and scale the lion about as big as the 3D model for our reference. After that, I make my sketches unclickable again. Before I start, I move the sphere into my head collection, if it is not already in there and call the whole thing "mane". Switch to sculpt mode, dyntopo needs to be switched on. Also make sure that the sculpting mirror is turned off. Now let's continue with the snake hook. Use F for the size of the brush and shift F for the strength. You can also configure it as a shortcut on your tablet or you can use right click. I also have set Control Shift and Alt as hot key combinations for ease of navigation on my tablet. Often though, I use the tablet in combination with the keyboard. Having the left hand on my keyboard and the right hand on the tablet with a pen. Though I am sure this varies for different setups. Then just go ahead and pull some geometry out of the sphere here. Because of dyntopo, we always have enough new geometry to work with. Sometimes you pull something out with a snake hook, but the whole thing is just totally flat and you can't get a decent three dimensional shape. That is why I'm constantly moving around the object to see whether I'm actually creating enough geometry in all three dimensions. Again, I'm not looking at the details at all at first. Just making sure that they have a big block of geometry that matches the basic shape, very similar to the lion's head in the beginning. I'm putting a melon shaped helmet on my lions head. For now, and in each position, I keep looking at the sketches with a lion's mane to see roughly where I need geometry, which I can then refine later. That's already more than enough to start with; a good foundation on which you can then build the details later. Very nice. You've already learned to use the snake hook. Next I'm going to show you a cool trick for sketching out your ideas in Blender directly, so that you can easily use them as a three dimensional reference for your shapes. 16. Annotate Tool: Sketch in 3D: Now we start to add details to the basic shape of the mane. We will not sculpt every single hair that would be nonsensical and also much too time-consuming. What I want to do here is to define blocks of hair and emphasize them. If you look at pictures of hair, you will also see that hair actually always aggregates and they form strands. In many cases, also in the case of the lion, these are sometimes thinner and sometimes thicker. What matters to build up the shape well, is the flow direction of these strands. With each type of hair, this is a little different. For the lion, our references show soft curves, very slightly curly. Now we have two options. You can start sculpting on the object directly, or you scroll all the way down here in the brush menu and use the annotate tool. It's a great way to sketch the flow direction of the hair as a visual guide. If we try that now, you see that most likely the line is not drawn on the surface of the lion, but somewhere in the center of the viewport. With control + left mouse button, you can delete your lines again. Because I want my lines to be drawn on the lion, I go up here and click on surface. And then I can draw directly on the surface of the mane. You see the whole thing is then also displayed on the mane. Here the ears are going to pop out once the mane has more definition. If you don't stay on the surface with your sketch, then it looks a little bit funny right away. Make sure that you really stay on the surface and don't paint across the edge. I don't always use the annotate tool, but especially with more complex concepts, it really helps a lot. It gives you the chance beforehand to approximate where are the shapes will go. And you can play with them a bit without the actual sculpting effort. You can easily draw an erase your ideas. Since I'm planning on flattening the line at the back of the head so that it's wearable as a pendant or wall decoration. I'm not going to sketch the shape all the way around the head, just at the front and the side. Of course, you are free to design and sketch around the entire head. So I think that's enough for now. I'll fix some little mistakes here and there...aaand nicely done. If you want to get started with sculpting and you need a little visual guidance, then definitely give the annotate tool a try. Remember, I used it in the object mode, but you can work with it directly in the sculpt mode as well. 17. Mane: Shape Design: So let's sculpt. Let's get out of the annotate tool. Small checklist before getting started. If you are in object mode: is the mane selected: check, then switch to sculpt mode if you aren't already there with control tab and 2. In sculpt mode, check if dyntopo is turned on, very important: check, set it to about these settings. Then, is your file saved before starting to sculpt: check. One helpful tip, with shift and space, you open a list with all brushes. Where you can also see the annotate tool, shortcut is D. You can see all the shortcuts for all the brushes and can select them. This is quite practical. If you need this menu, shift + space it is. You can also right-click on any tool and add it to quick favorites. And then you can press Q at anytime to see all your favorites. And this time I start with a very basic draw brush, shortcut is X. Another important thing to keep in mind when using brushes. Check the brush menu up here and select this option. Front faces only. Usually, in most cases, we don't need to also sculpt on the back of the mesh. And if it happens, you will probably be extremely annoyed because you mess up the backside of your model without realizing it. That's what happens to me from time-to-time. And anyone who has perhaps seen another class of mine, where we sculpt together, knows that it upsets me terribly every time. So spare yourself the stress and make sure to have a quick look here under the brush menu item, the rest can stay the same for now. And now, I'm proceeding quite intuitively. Check if the size of dyntopo fits, the exact pixel setting of dyntopo is not even that important. Just whether it fits the detail size of the object right now. I think it fits quite nicely. Not too big, not too small. The draw brush is always quite aggressively building up new geometry. It always seems to create very high humps very quickly. But to create such a basic shape, that is wonderful, you can set it to high strength with Shift F or right-click and then just keep smoothing it with Shift and really build the basic shape up. You could, in theory, also turn on some auto smoothing in the brush menu or with right-click. If you want to have your brushstrokes automatically smoothed each time you do some. And of course the strokes are made with the annotate tool, are helpful guides, but not a template for the perfect shape. This means that a bit of instinct is also required and of course, regularly referring back to the references. So keep looking at pictures of lions. See how these hairs grow out of the head, how it is moved by the wind. How individual strands separate. That always helps a lot. Again, don't go into high detail right now. If the melon helmet was the first stage. then this is the second stage of detail, which only shows the basic direction and structure of the mane. Maybe now a little sentence on the ears. Because what I'm currently noticing is that we used box modeling to create the ears at the beginning. But I think now that it doesn't necessarily make that much sense in this model. That's why I'm just building up the ears with two courageous brush strokes from the head. 1 (NUMPAD), go to front view, hit ALT + Z to see the sketch. G for the grab brush, make the brush a bit bigger and then move the ears so that they don't look so huge and correspond a bit better with the sketch. And we already have some fluffy ears. I also make sure that I adjust the whole mane shape according to the face with a grab brush so that the places where the face should still be visible are exposed. And besides, you can always still change everything later. It's a matter of finding a rough basic foundation now. Of course, always with the help of your trusted references. If this happens to you that you navigate close and the model disappears, then it's probably because you're in perspective mode and you are way too close. And if you want to avoid that, just press 5 on your numpad and get out of perspective mode. Then you are an orthographic view mode again. And you should be able to zoom in closer without flying into your model. And in the navigation preferences, you can also turn off auto perspective. This means that you don't automatically switch to perspective view once you navigate freely. Now, if you navigate to any of the numpad views, 1, 3, 7, etc, and then move out of there. Then the perspective view doesn't come on automatically. And now that the basic shape of the mane is already quite advanced. Let's switch back to the face to adjust it a bit more. Congratulations on making it this far, so far! <3 18. Sculpt and Switch: To continue, let's give the shape a little more of a slightly sloping tear drop shape so that it is slightly asymmetrical but not too much. With the snakehook, we can refine the mane a bit more. Sometimes hair developes such small peaks where the strands end, and separate from the basic shape. Especially when the hair is slightly curly. And I'm going to pull those peaks out here with my snakehook and then make a little indentation under there. Such a small tip that detaches from the overall volume of the hair. It gives the whole thing a more natural look and feel. Because not all strands of hair simply disappear in the mass, but sometimes stand out from the entire hairstyle. Now we're going to refine the mane a bit more and also adjust the face at the same time. Because sometimes it is really useful to work on corresponding objects together, quasi simultaneously. In this way, you can adapt the shapes to each other. First, I will make the annotate tool disappear again. Because as soon as we have blocked our strands out sufficiently. We don't need these little sketches here on the mane anymore. To make these sketches disappear. scroll down here to the annotate tool in the T menu, and then click on the note menu up here. You can just make all these sketches disappear or delete them completely. This too, by the way, can be undone with CTRL Z. So now that we have the basic mane shape, we can deepen and refine it a bit more. As I said, sometimes it is quite useful to work on both objects at the same time. And thus we can switch between the lion's head and the mane during the sculpt process, without actually going out of the sculpt mode. And it works like this. You hover over the unselected object and press Alt Q. The lions head lights up briefly, and then you can directly sculpt on it. You see after switching objects, the mirror mode is now turned on again. Now if you go back to the mane with ALT Q, it will be turned off. And all the settings are the same as before, the switching, except for dyntopo. Unfortunately, the dyntopo often turns itself off. So you should always take an extra look to make sure that it is really turned on. Remember our little checklist. Now that we have warmed up our artistic muscles a bit, Let's get into the most fun part, defining the details and really dive deep into the sculpting process. Come and join me! 19. The Process of Creation: Now the next phase begins, where we will give the animal more personality and try to bring out a little bit more realism as well. First, we can now delete the separate ears because we've already sculpted the the ears directly out of the mane. I think that this makes more sense in this case. Of course, stuff like this can sometimes occur in your workflow, you notice while progressing in your design that some ideas you have imagined simply don't work out anymore. And then you just adapt to the flow. An artist always needs to alternate between adapting to what is there and reshaping it into something new. You know already how to switch between the individual objects in sculpt mode. Now we can start arranging both shapes in more detail and arrange them together. Let's continue with the face. Check that the mirror and dyntopo is turned on. Now I will use the grab brush with G and take a closer look at how the lion looks from all sides, starting from the front, I noticed, for example, that the cheeks are much, much narrower here. Our lion doesn't have such an extremely round face. In-between, I switch back to the mane and move it so that I can see a bit more of the lion's face here. So I adapt the objects nicely to each other, gradually moving closer to the main features, you could also start with the small details in the face. But I found it more supportive, if you work from the bigger to the smaller, if you already took care of the outer edges, they also form a kind of canvas for the main features to be more expressive. I want the lions hair to look dynamic so that it first curves to the front and then flows back along his head. That way it forms a nice expressive wave. But not only do I want it that way, I also see it in the many pictures of lions I look at. Now that we have the basic shape going, we can also opt to turn off our references inside Blender to get a bit more of an unobstructed view at our model. I also look for the other distinctive features of the lion. For instance, I noticed that usually the forehead of the lion is a bit flatter than the nose. At the same time the forehead is often rather high. So I bring the mane up a it with the grab brush. You should pay attention to things like that when you build a creature like this, no matter which one, whether it is a lion or some other animal or even a human. The basic principle of creating believable geometry always stays the same. At the mouth, I remove a bit of material and make sure that there's a small indentation because many lions have a small opening or recess here at the mouth. You see, we are closing in, I'm starting to get more detailed to make individual facial features stand out a bit more. For this, I now lower the detail size in dyntopo a bit more. Now it is also time to zoom in on our references and try to understand these smaller details. The eyebrows are a single edge which I create with the crease brush. The shortcut for me is Shift C. I also decided here to amplify the heart shape at the forehead of the lion a little bit more. I still always try to think in basic shapes, sphere, cylinder, etc. The upper and lower eyelid is stretched over the eyeball from above and below. Those are basically two relatively flat strips of muscle which are spanned around a ball. That's exactly what I am sculpting. The eyeball is held in place by the skin and muscle that surrounds it. Small, uneven spots are also filled up with a clay strip brush and smoothed over afterwards. To create a clean edge, I build up some material on both sides of the desired edge. And then smooth surface from both sides will shift without actually touching the center. So that in the end, one clean edge remains. To make the eye section more believable, I look at it from all directions again and make sure that the strips of muscle, which form the eyelids, are really the same thickness around the whole eyeball. This is why I'm using the grab brush to bring some parts in more. I also pay attention to the eyelid fold, which is the region on the edges of the eye where the upper eyelid usually folds in just a little bit over the opening. This can be more or less accentuated in different eye types. Here, the cheek forms a different plan than the snout. There is a rather distinct edge visible between these two sections. The more distinction and clarity you have in your design, the more aesthetic it often becomes, because there's a visual statement that gives the viewer orientation and he or she doesn't have to guess because the eye follows these distinctions and also expects them. This is how we recognize where something begins or ends. You see, I really don't use many brushes, and I don't use many brushstrokes either. Often, as I mentioned before, we tend to overwork our sculptures because we don't know what we aim for. So at the moment, I mostly switch back and forth between G and C, the grab brush and clay strip brush. Of course, we can use other brushes if necessary, and I encourage you to try them all. But oftentimes, as I said, less is more. Throughout the sculpting, of course, it is important to constantly check, that we have a meaningful shape in all three views and also in the three-quarter view, which is always a good view to present a shape to someone. If you take a look at marketing, like ads for shoes or something, often they're presented in the side view, but very often also in a three-quarter view. I'm flying around the model all the time, making adjustments here in there. But I don't go into too much detail now either. I try to be as clear as possible in the statements I make so to speak. With that, you can create a shape that convinces in a relatively short amount of time. And I see that many lions here have those lips that hang down a bit. Like many dogs do as well. So I incorporate those a bit too. But actually not too much because I think they make the whole lion look a bit brutish. And I want him to have a little bit more of a disney-like, stylized and also a little bit of an elegant appearance. You see, I really don't do much at all. And I don't change a lot in the big shape anymore. The overall form is already as good as set. We worked from the big to the small, and the overall shape gets determined in the earlier stages. It is also good to stay in one level of detail until we're satisfied. Because each time we switch, we have to adjust our tools and our minds. Of course, this also depends on experience and on the project you're working on. But it is a good starting point to not get confused and also to not get lost and spend huge amount of time on some relatively small detail. Great work so far. Let's continue in the next lesson with giving the eyes some are character. The eyes are the window of the soul. So they're especially important for any artistic character and art project. 20. Stylized Irises: In this lesson, let's make some small, but important adjustments to the eyes, which I think always looks very, very chic on models like this. Let's select the eyes in Object mode, then go to Edit mode. It is important for this step that the spheres are already rotated 90 degrees on the x-axis. This means that the poles of the UV spheres face forward. Select the pole vertice. Now we can use G and Y to pull this vert in a bit, moving only this one vert wouldn't look very cool though. So here's how we do it. Go up and switch on proportional editing, or press O. And if we now use G and Y for moving the one vert, the surrounding verts will move with it. We can adjust the circle of influence with the scroll wheel and then pull the vert inside the eye until those words start to move, which would make the outer edge of the iris, again, look at references to get an idea how this could and should look. You can control that from the front as well. And it's a bit back-and-forth from here. Because of course you want to find the perfect shape. But I don't really like it that way yet. The behavior of proportional editing doesn't quite fit here yet. Let's try it a little differently and adjust our fall off type for proportional editing. That looks pretty cool already. Then I look at it from the front as well. Turn transparency off with ALT Z back to the object mode with tab Ah yes, that's swell. And of course I gaze deeply into the eyes of lions to see if that fits our particular model. This seems quite adequate already. Press forward slash / on the numpad, which isolates the eyes. This makes it a bit easier to work on. Alt click on one of the edges to select one ring of vertices. Then we can scroll down to make the circle of influence so small again that we don't take anything with us here and adjust the whole thing a tad more so that the indent looks really spherical. To get out of isolation, press / on the numpad again. Let's see how it looks from a bit further away. Sweet. You can already see the lifelike 3D effect that this type of eye style gives us. The irises still seem a little bit too big for me. So again, select the whole ring with alt click. And I move the whole thing slightly outwards again. If it doesn't quite want to work the way we want it to, we can do these adjustments manually. Finally, I would like to increase the size of this outer ring slightly. So I select it with alt click and then I press G twice. Thus we can slide the selection along the edges. Let's make it just a bit bigger. Classy. That size looks adequate. Now we can also subdivide our eyes with control + 1 to make them smooth. To keep this edge sharp, we can activate edge crease for it. While still having the ring of verts selected, go to the N menu under item and increase the crease to one. That's a bit too harsh a crease for me, so I reduce the crease value to 0.8. That looks pretty cool. Now, the light that gets reflected from the indents, gives a different impression depending on the angle from which you look at them. It gives the eyes a very lifelike and dynamic appearance. Now, once you go back to the sculpt mode, the irises act as very nice references for you to know where the eyelids should sit, exactly. Alt + Q to make sure we actually have the face selected, not the eyes or the main. Grab the grab brush and gently pull the geometry closer to the eye. The grab brush can be quite strong, so make sure you lower the intensity with Shift F, if you get the feeling that it is. These small spots seem to be a common appearance for lions. So I emphasize this region above the eyes as well. And for that, I'm using the layer brush because it's really great at creating additional layers of geometry. Then I utilize the crease brush to emphasize the edges of these spots a bit more. I tend to use these tools with quite a bit of restraint. It is not necessary to harshly dig into our material to get the desired effects, in many cases. You'll see me zoom in and out again throughout these steps to get a good overall impression. And of course, don't forget your second viewport here if you opened one up earlier, where you can see the model from afar and also in perspective mode if it's necessary at some point. Nifty. Well, so much for that. And now I'm saving again. Very well done so far. If you have been working along with me completely. You must have already learned like a ton. You have already leveled up your sculpting game, big time. I hope you're still motivated. And next, we're going to combine the head and the mane into one mesh. And this way we can sculpt on them as a whole, creating soft transitions between both parts and also prepare our model for flawless printing if so desired. 21. Combine Mane and Head: To put the head and the mane together, first switch to object mode, and now we have several options. I could select both options and then go to Object and join (or Control J). Now it looks as if that was one single element. You can also use G and move that as one single object. But if we now go to Edit Mode with tab, then we see that the lions head is still there. As you can see in here. It just overlaps with the mane. This means that the two meshes have become one object, but they are not properly connected. It's not a continuous outer shell. We just put one inside the other. We don't want that in this case because we'd like both meshes to be one single mesh and to be directly connected where they are touching each other as if somebody had sewn them together. Here's how we're going to do it. First, I go to File and Revert to get back to the last safe. And if you did not save, we can separate it easily in Edit mode. I go back to the separate objects again. The modifier we are using is the Boolean modifier, which can be found in the modifier menu of course. With it, you can either fuse things together, cut one out of the other, or create the difference of two. There is also a quicker way to fuse both meshes together by using the Bool Tool. This you may find in the Preferences under Add-ons. It is already available internally in Blender: type "Bool" and activate it. Once switched on, you can get this Bool Tool here in the N menu on the right side, under Edit, you can see very clearly what happens if you press these buttons. Brush Boolean creates the modifier and a brush which you can move and alter the boolean result. Auto Boolean directly applies it so that booling things is only one click away instead of many. The active object is always the one to which the operation happens. We want to unite our pieces. For that, let's switch our modifier to union. Same thing as doing iz up here, and click Apply. And if we go into the edit mode, this is what you should see. Namely that there is no longer any geometry in the middle. The lions head and mane should be perfectly connected. Short, check: with ALT A, deselect everything, then go to Select, select all by trade and choose non manifold. I can also do this with the shortcut Shift Control Alt M, which I set up beforehand. Most probably there would be some vertices selected at the seam between the head and the mane. This is where non manifolds most often happen when you bool something together. At the part where the two objects intersect. Now you can see that at least for me, nothing is selected. And that's great because that's how it should be. Checking for non manifolds is very important to check if Boolean operations were topologically successful. If you always have two faces coming from a single edge, not more, not less. Failed booleans often result from or lead to non manifolds. And non manifolds lead to non-water tight objects. Especially for 3D printable objects, they are not useful. And for all other problems, you're welcome to look at one of my earlier classes: "Blender In-Depth: Jewelry Design Foundations in 3D", where I have a few lessons dedicated just to solving various booling problems. Amazing. Now you have learned a lot about how to combine objects with Booleans and what to watch out for. In the next lesson, we will really enhance our models character by further accentuating the hairstyle. Join me. 22. Sculpt All Together: Join me, in truly giving our model character now through the quality of the hair. Both meshes have become one now. And because it is now one mesh, we can refine the seams between the two former objects. At least for me, we can see that the mirror mode is still turned on. But we don't want that here because the mane should not be completely symmetrical. From now on, we'll mainly go into the asymmetrical sculpting. This is a usual progression for sculpting projects such as this. First create the basic shape symmetrically to quickly make progress. Then introduce asymmetry once you're satisfied with a basic model to make it come to life. Because in real life, nothing is perfectly symmetrical. However, we can turn it back on at anytime as the need arises. But if we then sculpt on something that is already asymmetrical, the results might look weird. And once I started sculpting on here, I discovered that the separate mane object is also still sitting there. Actually, we can delete it now because we don't need it anymore. Why did we connect these two meshes? Because we want to adjust them to each other and make them really become one. Turn dyntopo on for this. We will use the clay strip brush again. If you have a very sharp edge here and you don't want to destroy it so much, but just soften it. Then apply a very gentle, very weak brush stroke. And the smaller dyntopo detail size is set, the finer the underlying geometry remains. Now you can really define the transitions from the hair to the head without always having to keep this crisp edge in between, because this is also not how it looks in reality. I continue to define the different strands of the hair. And of course, don't forget the little ears. I also work on them individually compared to as in mirror mode, because first, they don't require that much effort. And second, they are not perfectly symmetrical, anyway. Also, of course, it always depends on your chosen subject you want to sculpt. Here, I emphasize the shape of the ear a bit more, giving it a clear, cup-like shape. In-between, you can always peek here into the right-hand view port to grasp the overall look, so that you don't adjust too much or too little. And as always, look at your references. I mostly use the clay strip and the draw brush with C and X here, as well as G to move the geometry around. Sometimes I also switch up the viewport shading during sculpting to get impressions of the shape under different lighting conditions. In the sculpting workspace, it is already on Matcap. And the red shading is one of my favorites. If you aim to print and cast the whole thing later, you can turn on the silver shading for a quick look at how this might turn out. Or choose a different lighting angle, which already brings out the shapes in another way. And always look from all sides at what you are doing. Also from above. Here we can see now that the ear has a bit of rotation, albeit only on the right side. So the other one should be adjusted accordingly. And again, utilizing the grab brush. We could also use the rotate brush. Sometimes this one works even better than the grab brush, in such cases. To quickly hollow out the inside of the ear, we can use the draw brush with X and holding Control and just dig into the ear a bit like that. Really getting out the ear wax here. Then you usually already get a nice cavity. But the lions ears are often not completely hollowed out. There are also small hairs in front and inside of them that makes them disappear a bit behind the main. You needn't be too strict with yourself and give the the form a bit of freedom. Once I have created a form that I like to some extent, then I let go of the spot where I was. I don't look at it for some moments to not over-engineer it, so to speak. Getting back at one spot with fresh eyes recurrently is often, much more rewarding than trying to perfect it in one go. Now I just realized that front faces only was not turned on for the clay strip brush. That is why this little dent became visible. I mean, who would want that kind of surprise mess up their model? I can't really remember any moments when I did not want it activated. Well, now that we've turned it on, we can follow the mane in a gentle curve, which we have already built in here earlier. While recording this, I just realized that it might be a great idea to turn front faces only on for all brushes. And then save a new default file. Wow, (sarcasm) I'm such a genius, realizing this after how many hours of using Blender? (/sarcasm) Alright, in-between, I keep changing the strength and also the fineness of my brush. I always find it important that the forms are really well-defined and not muddeled so that they don't have wishy-washy transitions. But that you see clearly, that's where one thing begins. That is where the other thing begins. You really get involved and follow the different sections with your eyes. Where am I actually right now? What am I actually looking at? When it comes to the mane, I don't think it's that important that it has super high resolution. The dyntopo is almost a bit too fine for me here, because the look of the mane thrives on the fact that it has such a beautiful structure. Lions hair is shaggy after all. I'm also experimenting a bit which brushes might give the effect needed right now. It also differs from model to model. And I always like to experiment in between. For example, the draw sharp brush is always quite aggressive and often needs some down-regulation. I also like to first create little recesses, little canyons when sculpting the hair, and then fill it up from both sides from left and right with a clay strip brush. This way, we can get the impression of individual strands. The lion's face itself, I will keep relatively smooth, also because it has much finer detail. But when it comes to the mane, it can get a bit wilder, a bit courser. You could in theory also model some individual strands as singular objects and then afterwards bool them to the lion so that it has some more definition in the hairstyle. But I think this is not needed here right now. Of course, the whole thing can also be applied a bit to the head itself. But I find this contrast between the beautiful smooth head and the rougher mane particularly appealing. Contrast can make things more interesting. From my references, I can see that sometimes the curves of the hair are going against each other. Especially when they're a bit wavy. They don't all fall in such a rank and file way, but also sometimes compliment each other in their rhythm and even contradict. This kind of smaller detail can also look very attractive. I mean, most people and animals have some shorter hair throughout their longer overall hair length. You might have noticed that I very rarely use shift right now. So I smooth very little because I find the structure so appealing. You can play with it very well, even if you normally aim for a very even surface. Sometimes you can use structure to increase visual interest and contrast with the smooth parts. We can also create some smaller strands with our snakehook (K). Then smooth it out a little and then add to it with the clay strip brush. Oh, here's a small, very deep hole that was created through booling. We can fill these quickly and smooth the model like this if they're not too deep. Sometimes with such geometry holes, it can also help to set dyntopo Details size, very coarse and make the whole disappear in that way. Then afterwards set it to small detail size again to clean it up. Another way of filling such crevices would be with the aptly-named fill brush. With it, you can simply fill up any canyons in your geometry. As always in Blender, there are multiple ways to achieve any shape. For the strands, I make sure that I just do nice loose swings with my wrist. It really is a lot like drawing, especially when using a tablet. As I'm going to end up cutting this around here. So we could either hang it on the wall, or just put it on a piece of jewelry I'm not sculpting the backside of the mane. Of course it's up to you to really live it out. A thing about intuition when sculpting, sometimes it is the case that I just have a certain brush selected. But I want to do something specific that another brush might be better suited for. But then I just use the one I've selected by zooming in or moving or changing the size, etcetera. So sometimes, and that will become more with experience. It just the case that we can intuitively rely on what arises in the flow. I don't try compulsively to find the right brush for what I'm doing all the time, but just allow the thing that works in that exact moment. Now I want to make this wave on the bangs of the lion, so to speak, a little bit cooler and maybe make it look like an anime hairstyle. And also don't forget the parts behind the year. Can you dent that in a bit? Because in my references, I see that hair is flowing around and over things which are underneath. And therefore I will create more strands behind the year, which parts the flow of the hair around it. If I want to have clear sections like this, I usually go there with control and carve some material out. So instead of trying to sculpt the edge directly, just carve away material from one or both sides until an edge emerges naturally. The clay strip brush, as you've probably noticed, is one of my absolute favorites, because it's just so quick to create beautiful surfaces. And it's also really well suited for creating those kind of edges. That actually already looks pretty neat after a relatively short amount of time. What still needs some work, are the transitions between face and mane. I want them to look really chic and not too wishy-washy. You should really be able to see where the strands begin and grow out of the head, where the ears begin, etc. Sometimes, especially when spending too long time at one point, we notice that we're getting nowhere, we're kinda getting lost. That is a good sign to go back a few steps and either start again or leave the part alone for some time. Over-engineering is a real enemy of artists and designers. And it can really lead to a lot of frustration. If you don't stop early enough. Especially when sculpting, it is sometimes super important that you can take a few more steps back. This is why we're setting the undo steps to 50 in my beginners class. Sometimes it is really helpful. I don't need to add another strand, at least for now. At the moment, my hand doesn't seem willing to sculpt anything there that I really like. Just leave it be and get back to where you were before. So what I am going to do now is I'm going to work a little bit more on the whole model. I will show you a few more refinements now to see how to bring the lion to life a little bit more. How to embellish the whole thing a little more. How to make it slightly nicer and also what to watch out for when indulging in this perfectionism at the end. And plus some extra tips for some potentially tricky parts. And I'm going to go through most of it in time-lapse. So if you want to, stay tuned, sit back, and enjoy! And maybe learn a thing or two :) 23. Details and Refinement: Hello there! Much of this lesson is about manipulating and adjusting the last details. This work is very much characterized by perfectionism, and it is basically about taking the model to that next level of development. Sometimes this phase, this final phase, even lasts as long as the whole creation of the model earlier. Depending on how much love and attention to detail you want to put into it. You may be familiar with the 80:20 rule, also known as Pareto principle, which says you can achieve 80% of the results in 20% of the time. And then the remaining 20% of the results will take the remaining 80% of the time. Therefore, a large part of this lesson will also be shown in time-lapse. So be aware that you can quickly overdo it in this phase without really achieving any significant improvement. The trick is to become mindful of what the results should look like. And where editing is actually still necessary. Or what may have been good enough or even just right for a long time, already. In this last session, I worked on such parts as reducing the chin a bit and making the eye lids more elegant and clearly defined. I also tried to make the cheekbones more expressive. And I refined some parts of the mane. I also set the detail size of dyntopo lower here so that I could keep a smooth surface. Of course, you can also slow down the playback speed at anytime, if you would like to understand exactly what I did there. Throughout the whole process, I again, kept looking at references, not only from lions, but also from other statues and sculpture that might have a similar style and where I felt my model could profit from inclusion of a particular artistic expression as well. Here I paid particular attention to the eye so that the eye lids really stretch around the eyeball from all directions. And that the surfaces show even and gentle curves. For this, I used the grab brush a lot and adjusted the curves of the model with fine movements. At the same time, I smoothed the surface and defined the indentations very evenly. Note that if you're working for 3D printing, you should rather make the indentations a little deeper and the elevations a little higher because after machining and maybe after grinding and polishing, the whole thing will overall be smoothed out a bit. And the details will slightly disappear. Here I add the finer details on the point where the mane and head meet. Because in reality they hairline is not one perfectly trimmed edge. Some hairs grow somewhat outside of the main scalp area. And this makes the transition rather soft and a bit fuzzy. To help us with finally finalizing the shape. Let us now also take a look at masking. Masking is an essential ability that every 3D sculptor needs to handle tricky parts of the model much more gracefully. 24. Masking: One essential technique that we definitely need as sculptors again and again is masking. It is especially needed when you want to sculpt on one part of an object without influencing another at the same time. As an example, I want to add some material here under the chin, but it's quite difficult to edit the mane without also altering the chin. By the way, this part is a good example of over-engineering. Actually, the mane under the chin had already been quite good, but I dabbled around with it too much and smoothed it out too much. Hence I'd like to correct this now. To make this task easier, I can use the mask brush. This brush can be found a little bit further down in the menu. You may use it just like any other normal brush. And if you hold down Control, you can of course, erase the masked areas again. As with any other brush, you can also change the fall-off so that the edges of your brushstrokes are more defined. You can additionally increase the strength so that you're masking becomes completely opaque and less transparent. With ALT + M, you can simply delete the entire mask again. Unfortunately, the masking brush has a problem. If I tried to paint the chin from below, then a certain part of the mane is automatically masked as well. That said, this brush suffers from the same problem as many other brushes. Namely that it alters all the geometry in the environment. And not necessarily only what you want to affect at this moment. But of course, we have some more tricks in our toolbox, namely, one of it is the box mask brush. You can actually draw masking boxes with it. Anything inside this box will automatically be completely masked without masking any adjacent areas. If you click and hold down on the box mask brush icon you can also select the lasso mask brush or the line mask brush. The lasso mask brush works in a similar way to the lasso tool in Photoshop. You can freely draw and the area you encircle with your lasso is then masked. If you hold control as with any masking brush, you may unmask again as needed, or you use the line mask brush. And it really masks everything on the dark side of the force, uhm on the dark side of the line, of course. Just with all masking, you can always completely erase it by hitting Alt + M. A third and also very practical possibility to exclude things from sculpting is the box hide. It does exactly what the name says. Namely, it hides the entire surface that is inside the box when you drag it. And if you sculpt now and then reverse the whole thing with holding control and box hide. Then you can see that really only the part that was visible was altered. Hiding things in that way, is also very useful if some parts of your model are blocking the view and or access to other parts. So you have quite a few options to exclude things from being edited. Another example for box hide, admittedly, that looks a bit macabre now, but it will further solidify my point that this tool is really, really useful. Now suppose I just want to turn the right side of the heart into something else. With control, I undo the whole thing and we're already seeing how wonderfully this works. You could sculpt this form without any problems, without affecting the heart on the other side in the slightest. Wonderful. And well done! You have already improved your Blender understanding in huge ways. We are already pretty much at the finish line. So next we're going to cut the backside from the lion, and we're going to do it in the sculpt mode. No Booleans required, yes! 25. Cut It: Now that our work enters the final stages, we can evaluate where would be the best place to flatten the backside of our head. Because at the end of the day, I want to make half a bust that might be useful for a pendant or to hang on the wall. I might have mentioned this already. To check out where we might cut it, let's first pretend we already have a wall here. Go to the object mode and quickly create a cube with Shift + A or under: Add and cube. It's way too big right now. So I scale it down again a bit with "S 0 . 1" and then move it slightly behind the lion with G and Y. It's still a bit too big, so further down...and here, I wanted to scale around the 3D cursor because that's where my lion is. So you can use this button up here to make the 3D cursor the reference point, scale it even smaller... and this way it looks better. Then in the transparency mode with ALT + Z or the button up here, we can already see very well where the cube is, whether it is in the right place to cut the lion. And maybe here approximately. We can have a look at it without transparency and get a good impression of how the sculpture would look on a wall, or hanging on the skin. Another useful trick for previewing such things, go to this yellow button here in Object Properties. Scroll down a bit and then go to Viewport Display. Under display as, choose Wire. Now we can see the location of the cube, while still having an unobstructed view of our lion. That's really useful sometimes. If you want to see the stuff you're cutting, just turn on the wire mode. Now there are several options. First would be adding a Boolean modifier, but I already showed you this way. Remember to always turn off the Booleans before moving any booling part or your PC might protest. Great. That would be one option. Important: save a version now to be able to come back to the uncut version of the lion if needed. The second variant is actually doing this directly inside the sculpt mode. We can leave the cube here for visual reference. Then go back to sculpt mode. And there's a brush further down here, which is conveniently clearly labeled with a pair of scissors. With this brush, you can simply cut out a box or a free form from an object. Sometimes it takes a really long time to calculate the result. But it is so useful when you sculpt and need to get rid of certain parts without much hassle. I'll do that now. And I'm right on the side view. Pull this out, let go. And attention, this is irreversible. Unlike an unapplied Boolean modifier, you're doing this for real. And it's done. In edit mode, you can see that the back now consists of two giant faces. In sculpt mode, you can see that the back has become a different color. This means this part is now a different face set. These face sets are very useful for marking different parts of the model during sculpting for additional operations. In this case, for example, we could select the operation face set and extract face set. That means, extracting what is now selected and making it a new mesh object. And I show you that. Bang, and we're already in object mode. And I have created a completely new mesh and object from the flat back. But back to sculpt mode. We can also grow the face set which we are on top of with our cursor. We can also add additional face sets with a face set brush. And if we'd now wanted to extract one of them, we can choose it by using our eyedropper. For example, the ear. By the way, if you have now painted a lot of face sets just for the fun of it, and that annoys you... Then you can select Make Face Set from Visible. And that combines all the different visible face sets into one. Okay, this was just a small excourse into this useful face set functionality. This is what our lion looks like now and we did not need a Boolean modifier for it, but we were able to do it all in sculpt mode. If you'd like to visualize your lion a little bit better, you can do it wonderfully with the viewport shading. For this, you have to first set a material. You can do that down here on the right in the material properties. Create a new material, and let's say you want the lion to be a nice golden yellow tone, set the base color and increase metallic to one. You can also choose the same material for the eyes. One material can be shared across multiple objects. You can also reduce the roughness a bit. And then you can already visualize the lion wonderfully in gold. How the whole thing could look like when cast and printed, without even having to use the rendering. And don't forget to bool the eyes to the lions head so that they are part of the mesh once you're satisfied with everything. Well done. So this was the easy thing of flattening the back of our model. And I promise you that we would also hollow out the model as well. So let's continue and do exactly this to make it more lightweight and to reduce the amount of material used. 26. Hollow Out with Meshmixer: In case you want to make something really lightweight and reduce the amount of material used in the printing or casting process. You can hollow out your model. First, safe, another incremental version to be able to quickly get back to this stage in case you needed. Make sure to bool the eyes to the lion before you open up the model, If you haven't already. We need an open mesh to make this work. Hence, we will delete the faces which make up the flat backside of the model. In any case, it could be that there are some extra geometry inside, just floating around. If you want to get rid of these floating pieces of mesh, which can be created during sculpting. Select the lion, press Control L to select all the connected verts on this mesh. Then go up to Select and choose Invert to select everything except the lion. And then you can just hit X to delete this extra geometry. Back to object mode. Another save version just in case. And now we will add a solidify modifier to the lions head. This is going to give this super thin mesh some thickness. Now we can control the thickness of the mesh through our modifier options. To make the modifier true to its numbers, press Control A (in the 3D viewport), and apply all transformations. When we add the solidify mod, it can be that our new geometry is overlapping itself. It may be that we have to try out different amounts of thickness to get an acceptable result. And maybe we also need to smooth out that backside afterwards through sculpting. You also want to be careful not to make the material too thin. Or otherwise the front might always be affected when sculpting the back. 1 mm is probably a minimum. Then you have to keep track of the weight, also. You can do this with the JewelCraft add-on. Apply the solidify modifier, if you are satisfied. You can try to clean up the backside a little bit by sculpting. I guarantee you this is going to be a painstaking process and probably it's not going to work out anyway because at some point you are going to ruin the front faces. If you want to be careful that you check for each brush, you use front phases only. But with such a complex geometry, we could also try masking. We can just paint the front of the lion with a masking tool. If you want to delete the whole mask, press Alt M. Front faces only was not turned on. Now we can be almost sure that we won't alter the front of the model. But still, it is very hard to properly clean up this inside model geometry. So we have another alternative. Export a version of your lion where you haven't yet hollowed out the backside, but it should already be flattened. While having the model selected go to File, Export and make sure to select selection only in the STL menu to not export, any other of our unused stuff floating around. Now, download and install Meshmixer. You can find it under this link, which is also in the description. You maybe want to opt out of them gathering, your usage data during installation. Then open up Meshmixer and load your previously exported lion STL. You can hide the grid and the 3D printer surface under View so that it doesn't get in the way. First hollow out you model by going to edit and choose hollow. Now you can set the thickness of the model. You can either go by eye, are you use the needed thickness you found out with the JewelCraft add-on weighing function, and the solidify mod. Afterwards, just click accept. Now we only need to cut the backside of the object. First, go to Edit, create pivot point, select snap to face, center, and choose the world frame as a coordinate. Click on the flattened back to set your reference point, which works similar to how it does in blender. Again, go to Edit and choose plane cut. Now you can orient the cut on the pivot point by clicking on it, so that the cut will be exactly perpendicular to the lion. Now you can pull on the arrow that faces the lions front and pull until the shell is gone. And we can see the opening. For this purpose, it might be useful to cut the lion a bit further back before doing this, so that you have some material left. You may notice that the inner surface is much smoother than it was in blender, which might not be a good thing depending on what you need. But for our intents and purposes and for 3D printing, this is exactly what we want. Now we can export the STL file again. Comparing it to the original lion it might be much larger. Now, we can quickly take care of this in blender again. Let's re-import the STL into Blender. Now, we use the decimate modifier. You can see that the face count is shown at the bottom of the mod. We want to reduce this value by lowering the ratio while still keeping the appearance of the lion intact. 0.8 works. 0.6 also still works well. This would still be more than enough detail to print it, in the size that we are planning for. 0.4 doesn't work anymore, as you can see, 0.5 also. So let's stick with 0.6. Let's re-export the STL to check how much smaller it is. Now, we can see the file size has been reduced a lot from around 50,000 kB to around 30,000. Which means that it's only at around 60% of its prior size. Which makes sense since we set the ratio at the modifier to 0.6 and fewer faces means less data to store. Now, last but not least, for printing, let's check the file out in a slicer. We can check if it gets sliced well, even if we don't want to print it ourselves. But if you do happen to have a 3D printer, you will need to do this. I am not going to go deeply into the slicer settings as this is a whole topic in itself, depending on what material you're using and what for and what kind of 3D printer you have. But just some basic thoughts on what to watch out for in a model like this. I am using Prusa slicer and just load the model or drag and drop it in here. Try slicing it in the highest quality setting and check out the layers. If you worked rather detail oriented, it should all get sliced well and no missing geometry or holes should be visible. Congratulations, your model is now printable in a lightweight material saving fashion. Alright, to finish up, let's now look at the render setup I used on the presentation rendering. 27. Bonus: Render Setup: Ladies and gentlemen, let's check out the render setup to achieve this slightly dramatic and might I say, pretty darn cool looking lighting effect for our model. You may find the complete render setup .blend file in the class resources. If you haven't already, now is a perfect time to download those so that you may follow along my explanations of each aspect of the scene. First, let's take a look at our render settings from top to bottom. These are pretty straightforward. I've chosen cycles for this setup, in contrast to the title slides and the vortex animation in the beginning of each lesson, these were done with Eevee. De-noise for the viewport as well as the final render is turned on, so that our artwork is properly noise-free. I've chosen 2000 samples to make sure to get a really high detailed picture and because I didn't care about a quick render. But usually for a static scene, you might get away with 100 to 200 samples without a noticeable lack in quality. Although with particularly low settings, the denoising might take a bit longer respectively. Here are three versions, slightly zoomed in with 100, 200 and 2000 samples. Here are the same three versions. Without de-noising, you'll see how much of a difference denoising makes. Be sure to have it turned on, especially with a low sample count. Basically, all other settings are at the default except for the sample count. In the second menu, you will spot my format, which I set to 3,840 x 2160, which is quite a high resolution and would be the equivalent of 4K on YouTube. Basically, all my other render settings here are at the default. Let's now move on to the actual scene. I quickly check if camera to view is turned off so that I want move my cameras around for now. As you can see, the render preview in the viewport is turned on and gets updated in real time. I have opened a new panel with a shader editor down here. But for now, our world environment color is a simple dark gray. This is also visible on the right. under the World button. We could also alter the environment lighting here, and it will be visible on the lion. The reason we don't see the different color of the background is because behind the lion there is a black plane. Let's take a look at the actual setup now. First I switched the render preview off and choose the solid mode where have turned on Matcap to have a metallic preview of the lion. We're looking at three cameras for different angles and four lights. The cameras look a bit weird and we're going to fix this very soon. We can select a camera and with control + 0, we can look through it towards our object. On the right in the camera settings, you may see that I switch the camera to orthographic and not perspective. This works in the same way as the orthographic and perspective view in the 3D view port itself. The orthographic scale allows us to zoom in or out so that we don't have to move the camera around for different views constantly. It is clever to duplicate them until we have the main angles covered. We may also switch to perspective mode in the camera. Then we can also see the Matcap metallic effect on the background plane. Notice that the scale settings have now switched to focal length, just as with a lens on an actual camera. Then I tried to close the shader editor, but I kinda messed up the panels and tried to fix it for an embarrassingly long amount of time. Honestly, these things are sometimes just to finicky. Constantly, when I thought "now I got it", the next panel appeared. My girl, finally, you got it. Okay, back to the topic at hand. After playing around with the placement of my panels for I don't know how long. And also with my lion for a bid, I produced another render which was quite satisfying. Don't forget to click on Image, Save As, and save your picture in your preferred rendering folder. I like to have a dedicated Render Output folder in the same folder where I keep my blend files, especially for larger projects. Now let's do something about these hideously large cameras. Well, is it size? No, that isn't it. Let's check under view-port display as these cameras might not have downsized accordingly. When we set the units in our scene to millimeters. And there we go, setting them to 10 mm instead of 1,000 mm does the trick indeed. Now we can move on to the lights. You may discern that our lights are called points, but I previously set them to be spotlights in each light's setting. The reason I chose spots because they emit a clearly directed light beam and are nicely controllable, just like a spotlight on a stage that is focused on the main actor. Hence, they're able to produce nicely dramatic lighting effects. For soft, evenly distributed light, you might want to opt for a point light or an area plane instead. We can also turn on a preview of the lighting effect in the preview window. But I found this to be quite slow and usually just test it out on the scene itself. But if you want a clear view of what your light is doing, check here. In the viewport, you may move the direction of the light around with the arrow. The radius, by default is set to 250, And we will not alter this here. Looking at the whole scene from the top, my lighting setup consists of four lights, one of which acts as a primary spot light, and one which is behind our model for dramatic effect, and to bring out the silhouette of the model. The lights have different spots sizes which you may find under beam shape in the settings. The tighter the cone, the more concentrated is the beam. Three of the lights sit at around 45 degrees, the fourth being a bit softer at around 120 degrees, to cast a soft yellow, kinda ambient light around the lions features. In general, I choose the placement of the lights for my sculpture so that the features are clearly defined while still having a clear main light source as well. Two are shining from the left. One being this softer yellow, orange light. And the second one which casts a stronger, more directed and less saturated pale yellow light from the left. The softer light is set to 30 watts, and the harder beam is set to 80 watts, which works well in these default exposure settings. In the front right there sits a blue light with a lower wattage of 20 watts, which gives a soft blue in opposite to the warm yellow orange tone coming from the left. Since the main light is coming directly from the left, it is also there to light up the otherwise very dark right side of the face. The back light I placed directly behind the object and set it to 70 watts so that only the silhouette of the object is lit up looking at it from the front. Why did I choose these light colors? First, they look pretty cool, but then there's also a bit of color theory behind it. Blue is the complimentary of orange, which gives it a nice contrast towards the main light source. I have toned the backlight a bit more towards the pink, hence introducing a bit of blue into the red and visually marrying the soft blue glow together with the backlight forming violet, Together with the yellow orange, this forms a harmonious trio of colors. So, yes, knowing a bit about color theory definitely may help you choose a really nice and harmonious, colorful light theme for your scene. Now what about the plane and the background? Since it is dark, couldn't we just set the background itself to black and omit the plane? Yes and no. Now if I set the world background to completely black, it will affect the shadow on the lion as well, and it becomes a bit too dark for my taste. If we instead set a black plane as a backdrop, we can leave the world background at a dark gray, hence leaving the shadows on the lion's face slightly brighter. Of course, play around with all of these as you like. This is just the thing that I found worked really well for this particular model. The material of the lion is a standard material with a metallic value set to one and the roughness at around 0.5, the eyes have the same material, a little bit of a lower roughness to make them a bit shinier. Now, what about the material of the plane? It's also very simple. Just another standard material where the color is set to black. I also made it metallic so that it is truly black. Try turning off the metallic effect, it makes a big difference. Another fun thing you can do is give the background some texture. If you'd like to try that. Here you may see my node setup, which alters the material properties. In this case, I used a mix shader to combine two principle BDSFs. One just of a dark brown metallic color, and then I plucked a wave texture node into the other. You can create those nodes just as any other object which shift a. The search function is especially nice for those nodes because there are so many. Try adjusting the texture values and see what happens. Well, that was my walkthrough of this basic but very effective render setup. Have fun adjusting it for your own project. And if you want to share your creation with us, please do so in the project gallery. It will be a very cool show off piece indeed. If you want to present it on social media, please tag @Phialo_Design so that I can reshare your work. Now, after a lot of tweaking, we are basically finished. <3 Big congratulations <3 And now please enjoy the outro video... 28. Outro - Final thoughts: Hello there. I'm thrilled to have you here for the outro. If you've only peeked into this lesson, I invite you to try out some of the earlier ones. I guarantee you won't regret it. If you had a great time and learned something valuable. Here are a few things you can do to enhance your class experience. Classy. Share your project pictures with us in the project gallery. I will provide feedback and you can receive likes and give others likes as well. Let's celebrate each other's creations. Leave me a review. Your constructive feedback is immensely helpful for both of us. Share your thoughts about the class and help me improve future lessons. Additionally, your review will help spread the word about the class. So if you enjoyed it or have any suggestions, don't hesitate to share. Tag me on Instagram @Phialo_Design when you post your designs. I love to see your work and of course, reshare it with the community. Don't forget to check out my other classes or explore my free content on YouTube. For now. I wish you a fantastic day and thank you for being a part of this class. Most importantly, keep exploring and creating art. See you around...