Transcripts
1. Introduction (What you will learn): Hey, and welcome to this
blended course where you will learn how to create a
macro lens and seen, my name is Irwin and
I'll be your instructor. I currently work as
a VFX and 3D artist, working mostly on
international commercials for brands such as Hasbro, leptin, Ray OB, OB and HP
doing 3D tracking, general 3D work as
well as compositing. This course is perfect for
beginners as well as anyone interested in creating
organic objects and characters in blender. You will learn how to model the pumpkin than using
basic modelling tools. We will carve out
the eyes and mouth. You will also learn
how to use bones or armature to create the
stem of the pumpkin. Then you will learn
how to create your own materials
using material nodes. And we will also create
the lighting setup. And finally, we will
render the scene using the Cycles Render Engine. All of this in under 1
h. So grab a coffee, sit back, or follow along. And I hope you
enjoyed this course. Please reach out if you have any questions and I can't wait
to see your final renders. Please remember to
share them with me, but more on that later. I will see you in
the first lesson.
2. Lesson 1: How to model a Jack-o'-lantern (Pumpkin): Hey, and welcome to
the first lesson. In this lesson we're
going to look at the basic shape of the pumpkin. So let's delete everything
in the scene by pressing a x and then just click Delete. And then before
we start there is one add-on that I just want to show you guys that I'm going
to use in this course. If you go to your blender
Preferences and go to the add-ons section here. Then the only thing
we need to add is the auto mirror or mesh
auto mirror add-on. So you can simply
just search for that. That comes actually
worth blender. And then you can just
tick that to install it. And then go to this
little thing here at the bottom and click
on Save Preferences. Alright, so let's close
the preferences and let's begin by creating a UV sphere. So press Shift a go
to Mesh and then we're going to select UV
sphere from this dropdown. And yet the bottom is
a little pop-up menu. If you just click on this, it will show you
all the information about this UV sphere. And we're going to
change the segments to 12 and then also
the rings to 12. And then you can just click
anywhere in the scene to set those parameters. Next, what we're
gonna do is we're going to go into edit mode. So select your severe press tab. And then we're going
to switch to edge select by pressing
on the keyboard, and then just click anyway to de-select everything
on this model. What I wanna do is
I want to select all these vertical rings
around this sphere. So an easy way to do this is hold Alt and then
just click on one of these edges and make sure it selects the line from
the top to the bottom. And we want to select all
the lines going around. So an easy way to do
that is hold Shift and Alt and then just
click on these edges. So just kinda move around it and just make sure
that you select all these vertical lines,
something like this. Now, with these edges selected, we're going to bevel
them on the keyboard, press Control B, and then
just pull them out slightly. Now I want you to keep an eye
at the top of our sphere. Because if you can, if I'm going to just
change the width here, you can see these edges just
make sure that they don't go over like that because that's going to
cause some problems. If you don't see this
menu on the side, it might be minimized like this. You can just expand
that so you can see all these parameters. So kinda get it
something like that, not too close to that edge. And then also I want to
change the segments number 1-2 so that we actually get this middle edge for
each of our bevels. Alright, once you've done this, just click anywhere
to accept that. Next we want to select all
these middle edges again. So we're going to use
the same shortcuts. So we're going to hold Alt
and then click on one of these to select
that middle edge. So you can see that edge is
actually inside our bevel. Then I'm going to do the same
for all the other edges. So hold Shift, Alt, click, and then just click
all of these until you have all of these ones selected. Alright, now on your keyboard
we're going to press S to scale these edges in. So just press S and kind of
just move the mouse until you get something like that. You don't want to go too deep, but maybe something like
that should be fine. Alright, next one we can do is let's press Tab to go
back to object mode, and then let's add a
subdivision surface modifier to our object. So go to the modifiers little
button here on the side, click on Add Modifier, and then we're going to select a subdivision surface
from the menu, increase the levels in
the viewport to two. And you should get
something like this. Now, let's go back
into edit mode by pressing tab and then click on this y-axis year on the site
to view it from the front. Next, we want to press
one to see the vertices. And then I also want to
enable X-Ray mode here at the top so we can see all
of them right through. Now what I wanna do
is I want to select all the vertices
here at the top. All of these vertices kinda sitting at the top
of our pumpkin. And then when you have
them all selected, you can press S and
then z to scale them on the z-axis and
then press zero to flatten them all out and
then just click to confirm. So as you can see there, if I just disable the X-ray mode, you can see all
these vertices are now sitting on the same plane. They're all flat. So let's do the same with
the bottom ones as well. So I'm going to
press this y-axis to view this from the front. And then we're going
to select all of these vertices here
at the bottom, just make sure you get them all. Then S, z, and then just
move them around and then press zero to flatten them out and then just
click to confirm. So now we can press Tab again and we can disable x-ray mode. So now we have
something like that. It's kind of starting
to look like a pumpkin if you use
your imagination. But let's fix that. First of all, I'm
going to press S and Z to just scale our pumpkin. So it's a little bit
more of a pumpkin shape. Next we're going to press tab
again to go into edit mode, and then press three on the keyboard to go
into face select mode. Now I want you to select all of these phases right at the top. So just drag a box to
select all of these faces. And then the same at the bottom. So holding Shift and then just
select these ones as well. So now we have those phases at the bottom selected
and at the top. Alright, so next we're
going to scale them down. But if we just do a S and Z, you're gonna get
something like that. But we want to affect all of the other geometry
around this as well. And an easy way to do that is to use proportional editing. You can use the shortcut
0 on your keyboard, or you can just click on this little circle
here at the top. So now if I press S and Z, you can see how that's
affecting the whole shape. Now on your keyboard you can
use page up and page down to make the influence
circle bigger or smaller. You can see how that's
actually affecting. If it's too big, it kind of
flattens out the whole thing. If it's too small, it only affects a certain
part of the model. So I find it works pretty well
if it's kinda this shape. And then you can just play with that distance and then just click once you are
happy with your shape. I think that looks kinda okay. Now press tab again to
go out of edit mode. Let's have a look. So we can also
shade this smooth. So just right-click on your pumpkin and then
select shaped smooth. Or you can use the new
shade, auto smooth, which will actually keep any
sharp edges if you have any. Let's rename our pumpkin
in the outliner. So just double-click on sphere, you're on the side and it's
just called a pumpkin. Like so. Alright, so if you have a shape that looks
something like this, you can now go ahead
and save this project. In the next lesson, we're going to look at
how we can actually call the eyes and the mouth. So I will see you
in the next lesson.
3. Lesson 2: Carving the eyes and mouth: Hey, and welcome to listen to. In this lesson
we're going to look at are we can actually call the eyes and the mouth
into our pumpkin. So first of all, what I'm
gonna do is I'm going to apply the subdivision
surface modifier because we don't really need
this and we need the extra geometry
if we're going to cut those eyes and mouth. So go to the modifiers, panel E on the side. Click this drop-down
and then just click apply to apply that. Now if you go into edit mode, you'll see that we've got all this extra
geometry that we can use to create our
eyes and mouth. So what I'm gonna do is I'm
going to enable that auto mirror add-on that we
installed in lesson one. With a pumpkin selected. I'm going to press
N on the keyboard to bring up this side menu. And then you can go all
the way down to edit. Yours might be in a
different position. And then right here at the
top you'll see auto mirror. So just expand that. And we're going to auto
mirror across the x-axis. So that's why we're
looking from the y axis. So the left-hand side and the right-hand side
will mirror up. So make sure that's
on x and then just click this auto mirror button. Now I can press Enter
again to hide that panel. Now if you go into edit mode, you can see anything
we do on the one side will actually happen on
the other side as well. You can also view it
from this side if you prefer to work on
the right-hand side. So maybe let's do that. So just zoom in until you have something that looks like this. Go ahead and save
your project now. And this is where we're going
to start creating the eyes. So a really easy way to do
that is to use the knife tool. The shortcut for the
knife tool is simply k. So make sure you're in edit
mode and then you just press K to bring up
this knife tool. Now we can go ahead and
draw the eyes basically. So you can either click on
vertices or you can click in-between vertices or just on a face and it'll
actually automatically create those vertices for you. So I'm going to
basically start on this corner and I'm going
to draw a straight line, maybe something like that. And then I'm going to
follow a little curve, maybe something like that. You can be creative and see
what you can come up with. And then just close
it again and then press Enter to confirm. Let's now zoom into this area. Make sure you're on your
normal select again. Now we're going to
select all these faces. So make sure that
you face select mode by pressing three
on the keyboard and then just start selecting all of
these phases you can hold Shift to just kinda select all of them like this and
make sure you select all of the smaller faces in the
corners of these eyes. So that little triangle there, just make sure you get them all. Sometimes you might
need to just zoom in and get those small
ones as well. So let's just do that. Alright, so once you have
all those faces selected, press X on the keyboard and then select faces from the drop-down. You can see there we have
our cut-out for the eyes. And because we've got
the mirror modifier, it's going to mirror it
over to the other side. So now let's create the mouth. So I'm going to click
on this minus y-axis again to view it from the front. And then we're going to start
somewhere in the middle. So just press K again to
bring up that knife tool. And yeah, you can be very creative and either make
it quite big or small. It all depends on what you want. I'm just going to click here. And I'm going to
try and just draw some interesting looking
teeth or a mouth, maybe something like that. And then just come back
and follow this shape. Maybe something like that. And just click
there, press Enter. And now we've got those edges that we can go in and
delete those faces. So I'm going to save my project and make sure you're
on the normal select. And I'm gonna go
in here and select all of these phases again. So again, make sure you
get all the small ones, as you can see, is
a small one there. So just go through this and make sure you get all those phases. Once you have all
those faces selected, press X on the keyboard
and select faces to delete those faces. Then you can see we have a very basic shape of
our mouth and the eyes. And now I can press Tab to
go out of arithmetic and I just have a look at your model
to see how it looks like. Next, we can add a
solidify modifier to our model to give
it some thickness. So with your pumpkin selected, go to the Modifiers
tab here on the side, click on Add Modifier, and this time we're
going to add solidify. Now if we move a
little bit closer, you can already see that
it's got some thickness now. And I can also adjust
this thickness to just see how thick you want the
inside of the pumpkin to be. Maybe something like that. Works great. So yeah, just play around
with that thickness value. You can also take this even
thickness and that will just give you a very universal
thickness throughout the model. And let's just scroll
down here under normal. So you can also enable
high-quality normals. Sometimes this gives you a
little bit of a better result. So just make sure that
you tick that as well. Alright, so once you are happy with the thickness
of your model, we are going to create
a lattice to kinda just deform the overall
shape of our pumpkin. So let's just zoom
out a bit and make sure you are in object mode. And now we're going to
create our lattice. So press Shift a and then select lattice
from the Add menu. Now you want to make
sure this lattice is big enough or just a little
bigger than your model. So I'm going to look
at this from the side, and I'm just going to
scale this in the y, so y can make it a
little bigger like that. And then let's have a
look from the front. So I'm going to
scattered on the x. So it's x, scale it,
something like that. And you also don't want
to make it too high, so make sure it just
fits inside that box. Now with the lattice
still selected, click on the little
lattice tab here on the side and increase
the resolution to fall. So just set this to 444. And you'll see that's
going to create these extra points on the lattice so that we
have more control of R2, the form, our pumpkin shape. So next we need to
apply a modifier to the pumpkin to tell it
to use this lattice. So let's select the pumpkin, go back to the modifies tab. And as you can see,
we've got the mirror, we've got this solidify. And now we've got
to add a third one, which is the lattice modifier. So just click on Add Modifier
and then go to lattice. And then you need to select
the letters objects. So you can either
use the droplet where you can just click here. And because we only
have one lattice, you can just select that
lattice from the drop-down. So now you can click
on the letters, go into edit mode. And you can select some of these points and you
can move them around. And as you can see,
that is now forming our pumpkin without
changing the geometry. So if I go back into
object mode and if I select my pumpkin
going to edit mode, you can see that it's still
keeps original shape. So that's pretty cool. Just an easy way to deform
something using a lattice. Now you can go in and you
can kinda move some of these around just
to deform it a bit. You can also use,
as you can see, I've got my proportional
editing is still on. So if you have that and you
can play with the page up and page down buttons to see
how that affects it. Or you can switch it
off if you only want to manipulate that certain
parts of your model. I'm just going to drag some of these points
around to just make it a little bit non
uniform or not as perfect. Because you never get a
perfect pumpkin as you know. Alright, so once you're happy
with your overall shape, you can just go back
into object mode. And let's have a look
at our pumpkin head. You can also go in
and you can hide the lattice from the viewport, so we don't see that. And I think that
looks pretty good. So before we move
on to lesson three, I want to duplicate
this pumpkin, because I want to apply
all of these modifiers, but I will also want
to save a copy. If I want to make any
changes to the pumpkin, I can go back. So select the model
in the viewport, then press shift D, and that's going
to duplicate it. And as you move it
around, you can actually see how the letters is affecting the model
because we're moving the model and not the letters. So that's perfectly fine. Just press Escape to snap
that back into place. I can see we've got two
pumpkins in the outliner. So I'm going to
hide the first one. We can add it from
the render as well. Now the second one, I want to apply all
of these modifiers. So the mirror modifier, the solidify, and the lattice. Now it is kinda important the order in which
you apply these, if I apply it from
the bottom up, I will get different results than if I apply it
from the top-down. So we're going to apply
this from the top-down. So we're gonna go and do
the mirror modifier first. So click on the drop-down, then apply, then the solidify. So dropdown apply. And lastly the lattice
drop-down applied. So I just did some
tests and I found that that order work the
best for this model. So, yeah, so now I can go ahead and I can
select this pumpkin, this new copy press Tab. And now you can see this
is an actual model. We can go in here and we can
move some things around. Yeah, it's not using any of
those modifiers anymore, so that's exactly what we want. Alright, so save your project
now and in the next lesson, we're going to create the stem. I'll see you there.
4. Lesson 3: Use basic rigging to create the stem: Hi and welcome to lesson three. In this lesson we're
going to create the stem. So first of all, select our pumpkin press Tab
to go into edit mode. And now we're gonna go
just zoom in here and select these faces
right at the top. Just those few days. So you can just drag a box. Also make sure that
you in Face Select. So just press three on
the keyboard and then you just select those faces. Now let's expand
that selection by pressing Control plus
on the keyboard. So use the plus on
the number line. So control numpad plus. You can also use
minus to go back or decrease it or control
plus we'll expand it. So just something like that. And that's the phases
we're going to use to create our stem. With these faces selected,
Let's duplicate them. So press shift D
and that's going to duplicate those phases and then just press Escape
to snap them back. So now we want to separate
that from this model. So right-click, go to separate and select or choose selection. Now we can go back to object
mode by pressing Tab. And now you'll see that
you have a second model in the outliner and that's
basically the stem part. We separate it. So let's just rename this. I'm going to call this stem. And yes, and now we
can start to extrude our stem with a stem selected press Tab to go into edit mode. Select everything by
pressing a on the keyboard. Make sure you in face select
mode by pressing three. Now we're going to extrude it. So press E to extrude and then just make sure you
extruding It's straight up. So if it doesn't
snap to the z axis, you can just press
Z on the keyboard. So let's make it
maybe that's maybe a little bit higher than it's
going to G and Z that down. We can also scale it inside. Only want to scale it on the x and y and not on the z-axis. So to do that with
that stem selected, press S and Shift Z, and that will only then
scale it on x and y. So maybe something like that. Let's go back into edit mode and let's
add a few loop cuts. So I'm going to press Control R. And then she can know
Javier and click once, and then right-click
to center that. And now we can increase
the number of loop cuts. You're on the side,
so I'm gonna make this maybe about five, that should be fine. And then what we can also
do is maybe let's select some of these top
faces, maybe like that. I'm just gonna go around and
select all of these phases. I just want to scale it down a bit so it
looks a bit better. Scale this down. And for this I'm going to enable proportional editing as well. So scale it down. Maybe. Let's just decrease
this a little bit. Maybe until we have something
that looks like that. We can also scale it up
again and move it down. Don't worry too much
about that for now. And then we can also
set the pivot to the center of this stems
are right-click on it. Set origin to geometry. So maybe let's just take some of these edge loops and
scale them down. For this, I'm going to disable proportional editing Br2 to go into edge select
mode and then just Alt, click on one of these to
select that edge loop. And then just press S on the keyboard and you
can scale it down. So maybe that scale this
one down a little bit. Maybe just something like that. Alright, so next
we're going to create all mature or bones to actually control
the shape of the stem. Let's focus on the stems. So just select the stem
and then press forward slash the one next
to your right shift. And that will just hide
everything else and just focus on this one
object in your scene. I'm going to look at
this from the front by pressing this little
ACCC on the side. And then I'm going to enable
wireframe and also x-ray. Next, we want to create
our armature or our bones. So I'm going to
press Shift a and then we're gonna go to
armature single bone. You can see it created
this big single bonds. I'm going to scale it down. So just press S, scale it down. And then I'm going to move it up so it's kind of sitting at the bottom of our stem. So just press G and
Z and just move it up so it's kinda sitting
at the bottom of our stem. Just make sure just kinda move around it and make
sure that the bone is kinda in the center
of our stem. Cool. So now with the bone selected, I'm going to press tab and then I'm just going to select
this top part of the bone. So just drag a box around
that little severe. And now we're going to
extrude to create more bones. So press E to extrude and then z to lock around the
z-axis and click. Extrude Z, click, Extrude Z, click, and last one, extrude z and click. Make sure you have
about 12345 bones in this armature that we are
creating for the stem. So now we're gonna go
back to object mode. So press Tab to go
to object mode. And then with the bone selected, we're going to go
into pose mode. So you can either use Control tab on the
keyboard or you can use this drop-down
here on the side and then just choose pose mode. Now we want to enable some
IK or inverse kinematics. So let me show you. Everything will make sense
once we've created it. So select this top bone that right at the
top of your stem. Now with that bone selected, go to the pose menu, then go to Inverse Kinematics, and then select Add IK to bone. And now it's going
to give you these two options and we're gonna go with two new empty object. Now that's going to
automatically create an empty object for you, and it's just gonna make
your life so much easier. Now let's go back
to object mode. And now we're going to
select this empty only, and I'm going to press
G to move it around. If you have a look at the
bones underneath that stem, you can see how that is kind of moving around if I just
move this empty around, which makes it pretty cool. So press Escape to cancel that. And now we're going to parent
our stem to the bones. Alright, so before we do that, let me just apply the
scale of our stem cells. You can see if I bring
up the item menu, you can see that this stem
is not exactly 111 scale. Let's do that now.
So select the stem, press Control a, and then just select scale to apply that. And you'll see that the
scale is now set to 111. Alright, so press N
to hide that again. And now what we need to do is
we need to select the stem first and then
just kinda zoom in here so you can see
the bones as well. And then we're going to press Shift and click on the bones, and then right-click,
go to parent. And then with automatic weights. Now, if we select this empty and we press G
and move it around, you can see that our
stem is moving around. So one thing you'll notice
when I do this again, you'll see that the
bottom of the stem as kinda rotating as well. And we don't really want this bottom part of
the stem to rotate. So to fix that, Let's go back into our
armature or the bones. And let's go back
into pose mode. Now, make sure you
select the top bone. We enabled the IK or
the inverse kinematics. And then you're on
this side panel, click on the one, this bone, that's his bone
constraint properties. And you will see the
chain length now this is the length of the inverse
kinematic system. So currently it's on zero, which means it
will automatically use all the bones, 12345. But we only want to
set it sets using the for the first four
from the top-down. And it's not going to use the first or the bone
right at the bottom. So I'm going to
increase this to four. So it's only using 1234. And now let's go
back to object mode. And now if I move
this empty around, you'll see that
the bottom part of our stem is not really rotating. It's kinda moving a little bit, but not too much. And that's exactly what we want. Just press Escape. And now we can bring
the pumpkin back by pressing forward slash
on the keyboard again. Let's go back to Solid View. And now we can
just click on this empty and kind of move this
stem the way we want it. And then we can also add a subdivision surface
to this stem object. So select the stem, go to your Modifiers,
add modifier, subdivision surface,
and maybe just increase this for the viewport so it looks a little better. And you can obviously play
around until you have the perfect shape for the stem. Now just remember if you
want to move it around, you can't just click on the
stem and move it around. Because that's going to do this. Because we're not moving the bones and we're also not
moving the empty around. To do or to move this around, you need to select the mesh, the bones, and the empty, so all three objects together. And now I can move it around. Just remember that when
you are moving this stem around, something like that. Alright, I think that
looks pretty cool. Go ahead and save your project. And in the next lesson, we're going to look at
materials and texturing. See you there.
5. Lesson 4: Create materials for the pumpkin and stem using nodes: In this lesson, we're
going to look at materials and textures
for our pumpkin. So let's start by
adding a material to the pumpkin body or
the actual pumpkin. So just select the
pumpkin and go to the shading tab right here
at the top of the interface. And let me just wait
for that to load. And now we can just
kinda zoom in here to get a better view
of our pumpkin. So make sure that pumpkin is selected and then click on New. And let's give this
material and name. So just click at the top and
let's call this pumpkin. Simple and easy. So first of all, let's
give it a base color. So just click on base
color and we're going to make this orange as we do. So find a nice orange. And yeah, that looks,
that looks pretty cool. So now we can go
down here and we can play with the roughness. So if it's very reflective, we can see a nice preview there. Also make sure that you
are in material preview. So you can decide how shiny you want your pumpkin
to be or not shiny. So I'm going to set mine
at around 0.3, maybe. That looks alright. And then you can also
play with the specular, kinda how bright those
reflections or how dull they are. So maybe leave this at
around 0.5 for now. Alright, now, there's
only one more thing that I want to add to this. And that's a very
subtle bump map just to kinda have some little bit of bumps
on the pumpkin as well, because you will never find a natural pumpkin that's
as smooth as this. So an easy way to do that
is to use a noise texture. So I'm going to press shift
a to create a new note. Just search and type in noise, selecting noise
texture from the list. So I'm going to place this
can be at the bottom. And I'm going to
drag the color out, just let that go. And I'm going to type normal, and I'm going to select
a normal map from the drop-down and just make
sure that the color go into, this should go into the
color from color to color. Alright? And then you can connect the
normal to the normal input. Now something's
going to happen in the viewport and you'll see
it's going to look all crazy. And that's because this
strength is way too high. So I'm gonna bring this
down to about 0.1. And that already looks better. Now we want to make
the noise smaller, so it, make it smaller. We need to increase the
noise texture scale. So by default that's E15. So let's increase
this to around 200. And now you can kinda start to, you'll start to see the
noise on the pumpkin. So maybe let's
increase that to 500, Maybe, just so that we
get something like that. Now, we will probably
render this in cycles. So this is just an EV preview. So it might look a little
bit different in cycles. Just play around until
you are happy with the scale of that noise. And obviously you
can increase or decrease the strength as well. If you want it a little
bit more visible, you can change it to
point to maybe see, you can see that it's
much more visible now. And let's change it back to 0.1. If it looks like
it's not going away, it's not covering
the whole object. You can also change the
tangent space to object space. Sometimes it gives you
better results at kinda depends on how your UVs and all of those
things are setup. But because we started
with a sphere, I'm not really
going to go into UV unwrapping in this course. So kinda just find
something that looks nice. And then we can move on to
the material for the stem. So yeah, really, really
basic materials setup. They are all the nodes. We just using the
noise texture for the normal map or a
bump map basically. And then we just
using a base color, simple stuff like that. Later on when we look
at the lighting, we can actually try and add some subsurface
scattering to this. Subsurface scattering
will actually allow the light that
we're going to put inside the pumpkin to kinda make the outside of the
pumpkin glow a little bit, almost as a see-through object, but not completely transparent
so you can get that flow. So yeah, we'll play around with the subsurface value
when we do our lighting. So next let's do the stem. So it's gonna be
very similar things. So what we can actually do
is we can copy or duplicate the pumpkin material and then just change
it for the stem. So to do that, I'm
going to click on these two little file icon, which is new material. And that's just going to create a copy. As you can see that. Now I can click on the
stem and I'm going to sign the second pumpkin
material to that. And then we're
going to rename it. So just click here
at the top and let's just call this stem. Alright, so now you
can see we have two materials, pumpkin and stem. Now, before we change the
base color of our stem, you can see it's got a little
two next to the material. And that means it's actually using the same data as the
other material as well. So can you just need
to click on that to make it its own material? Now you can see that's
looking a little bit better. So let me just go back
to stem and delete that. And then we're going to assign the that one so we don't
want that to next to it. That's the only thing
you need to worry about. So if we change
this to green, now, you will see that it's not
going to change the pumpkin. Yeah. So you just want to
make sure that it's not using the same material. All right, so we have
our stem right there. And maybe let's just add
some noise to that as well. So maybe let's
increase this to 0.5. So we can kinda see
how that looks. And maybe let's make the scale for this
one a bit smaller. Maybe 200, maybe 500. Yeah, you can play
around with the scale of the noise just to kinda
see how that looks like. Alright, let's go
back to our layout and it's changed over to the render preview. And just have a
quick look around our model to see
how it looks like. I think it's looking,
looking pretty cool. You can obviously
make some changes, add some more materials
if you want to. But in the next lesson
we're going to start adding the lights to our scene. So go ahead, save
your project now, and I will see you
in the next lesson.
6. Lesson 5: Lighting the scene: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're
going to look at our lighting setup
for the scene. So I think first of all, let's just create a flow. So I'm going to
create a new plane. So press Shift a mesh plane
and then just scale that up. Now, let's move the plane down so it's kinda underneath
our pumpkins. I just pressed G
and Z and you can hold Shift to just make sure you moving it just a
bit at a time to kind of get it somewhere
where the pumpkin is sitting on top of our floor. Now what we can do as well, we can create a curve at the
back like a infinity curve. So select your plane, press Tab to go into edit mode, press two to select
the edge at the back. Just make sure you
select that edge. And then press E to extrude
Z to go straight up, select this edge, press
Control B to bevel. Pull that out. And then let's
increase the segments to around 24. That
should be fine. Then you can just
click press Tab to go back into object mode. So you can obviously
see these lines here. So just right-click,
Shade Smooth. Alright, so now we
have our backdrop. Let's start creating
our first light. So for this, I'm
going to go into a render preview and I'm going to set my render
engine two cycles. Okay, so as you
can see, we've got this gray background and that's the environment that
we're currently using. So I'm going to click on
this world setting year. And then for the strength
of this gray color, just set that to zero for now. So let's create the light that's going to be inside
of the pumpkin. So press Shift a go to light
and then select point. I can see because our pumpkin is in the
middle of the scene, it's automatically creating that light inside the pumpkin. So obviously, if your pumpkin is not in the middle of the world, just move the light until
it is inside the pumpkin. So let's go back to render. And you can see
now it's starting to look pretty cool already. Now with this point
lights selected, I'm gonna go to the lighting
properties here on the side. And let's increase
this to around 200. I can kinda see that's creating some interesting shadows and things which are
looking pretty nice. You can also change the color of the light if you want
it to be more of a warm orange or
more of a cold blue. I'm gonna go with a more of a warm orange tone,
something like that. Alright, so let's just switch
back to Solid View for now. What I wanna do next is
create some backlighting. Because if I go back to render, you can see the pumpkin
is very dark at the back and our camera will probably
be somewhere at the front. So it's always nice to
get some backlighting to just show those
edges of your model. So let's go back to Solid
View and I'm going to use a spotlight for this. You can use a point light, you can also use an area light. But as sometimes find that a spotlight works well for this, I'm going to press
Shift a light and then spotlight. And
let's move it up. So g, z, so we can kind of
see where the spotlight is. I'm going to move it back. So GY, just move it back
and maybe not this high up. So GZ bring it
down a bit, right? And I'm just going to rotate it. So are an x and we're going
to rotate it on the x-axis. So it's kinda shining towards
the back of our pumpkin. We can probably move it down even further and then rotate it. So it's kind of more like that. So it's literally just kinda eating the back of the pumpkin. So now let's go into
a RenderView again. And I can start to see those
edges a little better. But let's increase the
strength of that spotlights. Spotlights selected go
to the light properties and it's increased to
around 200 as well. See how that works. So already That's looking
quite interesting. We can change the
color of that as well. So maybe also like a
dark or a warm orange, you can go with a
cold blue as well. The contrast between the warm
and cold always looks nice. But yeah, you can decide what color you want
for that backlight. Alright, so next, for
our wolf properties now, you can go in here and you can add an HDRI if you want to. You can obviously just click
on Color, environment, texture, and then you can load a three-sixteenths
HDRI if you want to. But for this example, I'm just going to
use a solid color. So I'm going to
click on this color and I'm just going to select a dark blue,
something like that. And let's increase
the strength to 0.2 and see what that does. Now you can see we get this interesting blue light
coming from the back. And you can play with this. We can maybe make it
a little bit darker, maybe 0.1 or 0.1. That's looking
pretty, pretty nice. So you can play around
with your lighting. You can add more light so you can take away some
of the lights. It all depends on you. Alright, so let's
quickly revisit the material for our pumpkin. Remember earlier I mentioned
subsurface scattering, so I just quickly want
to show you guys how that works with the
pumpkin selected. Go back to your shading tab. I'm just going to switch over to the render preview so we can kinda see
what's happening here. With the pumpkin selected. Make sure you're on the
pumpkin material as well. And right here at the top of
the principled BSD F shader, underneath the base color, you will see the
subsurface value. Now, if we increase
this number slightly, Let's put this on zero point. Let's start with 0.1
and press Enter. So immediately you can
see that our pumpkin is looking a lot different. It's actually glowing
from the inside out. So let's just maybe
decrease this to 0.05. So we just want that slight glow to kinda come through there. You can see it nicely. So let me just enable
denoising in the viewport so we can kinda see this a
little better now you can see it's glowing
really nicely. Just something to keep
in mind when you are using this subsurface
scattering. Subsurface scattering
will increase render times with quite a lot. The problem is it's going
to add a lot more noise. So it's going to take
longer to get rid of those noisy artifacts or just more light bounces because
the light is now actually traveling inside the mesh and it's kind of
bouncing around inside. So it's got to calculate
all those things. So it is really
difficult for a renderer to calculate
subsurface scattering. So you can use it. You don't have to use it. So it's all up to you. Now, if we go back to our scene, you can see that we've got
a nice glowing pumpkin. I'm just going to leave this for a few seconds so we can see
it a little bit better. Alright, now you can see
it's looking pretty cool. We can maybe add
one more light just to kinda show the
stem a little better. So I'm just going to create a
point light and move it up. And maybe move it slightly
in front of the stem. And then let's drop the power of this light to maybe just
like two or something. So we can just see the green
color a little better. Alright, go ahead and
save your project. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to look at
adding a camera and rendering our final image. I'll see you there.
7. Lesson 6: Create a camera and render using the Cycles Renderer: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're
going to look at rendering our final shot. So before we add a camera, I quickly just want to
look at the floor plane. So I'm just going to select
this flaw because we haven't really added a
material to the floor. So I'm gonna go to
Shading. Click on New. Let's just call this floor. For this one, I'm
going to give it like a dark base color, maybe like a dark gray. And then I'm going to
increase the metallic value, maybe all the way to one and maybe bring the
roughness down to 0.2. So we have something that's
nice and reflective. You can obviously
play around with these settings to get the
exact roughness as you want. Maybe that's a little
bit too shiny. So maybe 0.5, maybe
too much roughness, maybe point for
somewhere in the middle. So play around with
these values until you get a nice reflection. I think that just makes
it look so much more. I don't know. Nicer. I suppose. So. Alright, so let's add
a camera to our scene. So I'm going to go back into
solid view and press Shift a select camera and then
just move it out forward. So press G and Y, pull it to the front. And with the cameras selected, I'm going to press N to bring up the side menu and then make
sure you're on the item tab. So for the rotation, I'm going to set the X to 90. And then for the y
0.4 z also zero. So that's just going to
create a camera that's perfectly positioned to
the front like that. So now we can go into the camera by clicking this icon here or pressing zero on your numpad. Now we can kinda move it
around and see what we want. So maybe I'm going to
move it back slightly, so just G and Y. And then on this camera tab, I'm going to increase
the focal length. Currently it's using
a 50 millimeter lens. So I'm going to
increase this to around 80, maybe even more. Let's try 90, even 100. So it does actually change the way that your
object looks like if you're using a long
lens that zoomed in, or if you're using
a wide angle lens with the camera close
to your object. So experiment with
these values for the focal length
and the distance that your camera is from
your object and see how that affects
the overall look. So I'm quite happy with this. We can maybe move this slightly up so that the composition
is a little better. Next one I want to
do is I also want to add some depth of field to our cameras so only the front of the pumpkin is
perfectly in focus, while the background
and maybe the rest of the pumpkin is
slightly out of focus. So really easy to do that. Click on the camera,
go to the camera tab. And then we're going to enable depth of field here on the side. Now, you can choose your object year from the list and it will keep that
object in focus. But I like to do it
manually as well. So to do that, open the viewport
display section under the camera and then
just click this limits. And that's going to give you
this line and it's going to show you the focus distance. So now I can play with this focus distance
value here on the side. And you can see it's moving
that crosshair around. So I'm going to place this right at the front of the pumpkin. So let me just zoom in slightly. And I'm going to
praise, place it right about, right about there. So now we know that the
focus will be right there. So I'm going to go
into the camera, go into render view. And now we can set our
f-stop to a lower value, maybe something like 1.5
and see how that looks. Maybe even a little
bit less, maybe one. So remember, a
smaller f-stop number will give you a shallower
depth of field. Some more things will
be out of focus. And then if you
increase that number, a bigger f-stop
number will give you a wider or a deeper
depth of field. More things will
then be in-focus. Just play around with this
until you are happy with that. Look. One thing that you can
also try is if you go to your render settings and you scroll all the way down
to color management. So first of all,
I'm going to change my view transform from full mic to standard just to
give it a bit more contrast. Then what we can do here is
we can lower the exposure. So I'm going to set
this to minus two. And I can see we get all
those extra details. So now we can maybe go into
our world settings and increase this background,
kinda environmental light. To 0.2. To maybe make that
a little brighter. We can maybe also
select the light inside and make that
brighter as well. So maybe instead of 200, I'm going to increase this to 300 just to get a little bit
of a brighter light there. And obviously you
can change or play around with the
material of the pumpkin so you can set the subsurface
to zero to kinda get that. Look if you're going for
something like that. Or we can maybe give it like a very subtle subsurface, 0.02. Maybe that will just
give you a very, very subtle glow that's
maybe a little bit too low. Maybe 0.05 almost
feels too much. 0.04. That's nice. So just like a subtle glow. And let's see how that goes. Alright, so once you are
happy with the overall look, let's save our project. And now we can do
our final render. Let's go to our render
settings and you can choose if you want to
use your CPU or GPU. So if you have a GPU installed, set this to GPU, and also choose
your render engine. So we are currently using
cycles, which is good. And now we can just go to the render settings so you
can set the noise threshold. So I usually take this off. I like to set the
samples manually, but you can obviously use the noise samples if you prefer, or the noise threshold,
threshold if you prefer. The samples, I'm going to set to 51 to four now so that you can go
higher, you can go lower. This is kinda just
for this test render. And then you can also
choose if you want to denoise or not the noise. Usually if you using
subsurface scattering, it's a good idea to maybe enable denoising because you
will get a lot of bright pixels That's
kinda noisy if you don't do noise when using
subsurface scattering. It also depends on the amount of samples you
using and all of that. So I'm going to just go
with five-twelfths samples, de-noising on for now. And then you can obviously
also set your resolution of the renders if you go to the second little icon just
under the Render Settings, which is the properties. You can set the resolution. So I'm just going to render
this 120 by 180 normal HD. If you want to do for K, you can simply just
increase this 100%, 200%. That's gonna give you four K. Or you can just input the values and then bring this back to 100. All depends what you want to do. Once you are ready, I'm going to just save
this one more time. And then you can click on Render and render image or press F2. And that's going to start the rendering process
for this image.
8. Conclusion: Thanks for watching: Alright, and that's the
end of this course. Thank you so much for enrolling
and I really hope that you guys learned a lot
during this mini-course. Please reach out if you have any questions or
comments or suggestions. And I'll also make this
project file available so you can download this project file opened in Blender and
play around with it. Also, please share
your renders with me. I would love to see what you guys and goals
that will this one. So please upload your renders, share them with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is one water such as add one louder,
please share them. Keep well, have a great day and thanks a lot for watching. Goodbye.