Blender Beginner to Pro: Modeling

1. Modeling - Intro: Have you ever tried learning Blender, and then as you go to open a blank project yourself, you just don't even know where to begin? Well, then this class is for you. We're going to be going through the process of modeling and Blender and all the various techniques. Sure. Hi, I'm Southern Shadi. And in this class, we're going to walk through the basics of modeling. I'm going to show you non destructive workflows, destructive workflows, curve modeling, and also walk you through the basics of topology. After that, we're going to go ahead and create a simple robot character like the one you see here, which we will texture in future classes. This class is part of a series that I'm doing for Blender aimed at taking you from a beginner to a professional level, and we'll walk through each process step by step. How, if you've never opened Blender before, you might want to go ahead and take a look at my getting started with Blender course first, which will walk you through how to use the interface. Now, I've spent over a decade working in the industry of Fortune 500 clients, and now I want to help you build that same creative career. Blender has become a major player in animation, visual effects, and tech, and it's only growing from here. Now, whether you're aiming to work in games, films or interactive media, this is one of the most valuable tools you can learn to jump start your career. So, let's get started. 2. Modeling Workflows: There are actually multiple approaches you can take when starting a model in Blender. This includes things like curve editing, non destructive editing, sculpting, box modeling, and more. In this video, we're going to walk through some of the most common modeling workflows and try and demystify the process for you a bit. Mesh modeling and Blender refers to anything that revolves around you editing the mesh directly. And this is the most common and beginner friendly workflow and Blender when modeling. You're working directly with primitive such as cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, and more, and you're editing the vertices, edges, and faces using simple straightforward tools, such as extrusion, loop cut, inset, bevels, or more. We'll go through all those tools in this course. Now, the advantage of this workflow is the simplicity of it, how quickly it is to grasp the tools and how easy it is to produce simple objects. However, as you create more complex objects, it can be really easy to create messy geometry, which will cause you issues later. Another big disadvantage of mesh modeling is this is what we call part of a destructive workflow. This means that all the changes you are making to your model are. Now, of course, Blender allows you to undo, but only a certain amount of times. So if you run out of undos, you will actually just have to go back and re edit or start over portions of your meshes if you find out that you need to fix or change something. This is why when you're working on a mesh, I recommend that you save versions along the way so that if you make a mistake or feel you need to restart, you can just revert back to an earlier project file. Curve modeling is all about shaping objects with smooth paths instead of editing every single vertex. With just a few points along a curve, you can manipulate and alter handles and define an entire surface or path. Blender will automatically fill in that data in between the geometry for you. The advantage of curves is that they're incredibly flexible and non destructive. You can build entire shapes with only a few points, adjust them at any time, and even use them as a guide for other objects. The limitation is that curves alone don't really give you much fine detail. If you need animation ready geometry or complex editing, you'll usually have to convert them to meshes and edit them later. Curves are really perfect for things like motion graphics, emborting logo vectors, or working with fonts and text. They're also great for spinning symmetrical objects like vases, glasses, or pillars. And with the curve drawing tool, you can easily snap ropes, cables, or stylized hair right onto another object's surface. Blender also has a host of tools for using booleans, as well. When it comes to working with booleans, we would call this hard surface modeling. And hard surface modeling refers to anything that's man made, mechanical, or kind of rigid, things like cars, weapons, tools, or machinery. Boolean modeling is about combining simple shapes to make complex ones using operations like union, difference or intersect. For example, you might cut a hole into a box using a cylinder or merge two separate objects into one. Now, the main advantage here is the speed and creativity at which you can quickly combine objects. To edit these shapes manually would take an incredibly long time with traditional mesh editing tools. You can experiment a lot more quickly. It's not destructive since everything is in a modifier stack. But the downside here is that after you're done creating the geometry, the booleans can get really messy. And if you need a clean or optimized model for things like games or animation, you're probably going to have to go through a process of re topology. This means that after you've created them, you then have to redraw the faces on top of the model again, which is a really tedious process. Sculpting is another major form of modeling, and Blender has an amazing sculpting tool kit. It's like working with digital clay, and instead of carefully moving around points, you're kind of using brushes to push, pull, smooth, and carve out high resolution mesh. It feels much more like draw or sculpting in real life than it does traditional modeling tools. The biggest strength here with sculpting is that it's very artistic and intuitive. It's the best way to create organic shapes like faces, creatures, or cloth folds, and to add expressive surface details like wrinkles or pores. But the limitation here is that the models are extraordinarily dense and they're not animation ready. Usually, once you're done sculpting an asset, somebody will have to go through and topologize the entire asset. Now, one thing that remains true across all forms of modeling is the idea of blocking versus detailing. A good mindset is that you should start with big shapes first, medium shape second, and move on small details last. For example, blocking or working with large shapes means you'll start with big simple primitives to kind of define the overall form. Think of it kind of like the sketching phase before you move on to your final drawing. If I were to create a chair, for example, I would first start with some basic cubes to block out the general size and form of the chair. After that, I would move on to the medium details, adding things like arm rests, brackets or more. Lastly, I would focus in on small details, adding things like knots in the woods, nails sticking out or engravings. Now, the advantage of working this way is just like a painter, starts with broad strokes, moves into the details, is that you can define your form as you move forward. And by doing this, you can gradually shape the objects to be the model that you want and prevent yourself from having to do a lot of revisions or backtracking to fix or change things you could have caught along the way if you had a started with the bigger picture. I want to make it clear that none of these workflows are intended to be isolated. In fact, as you progress in your modeling skills, you'll find yourself switching workflow seamlessly all to deliver one object. For example, it's very common in a character workflow to start with mesh modeling to block out the basics, move in the sculpting to add the details, and use curves to add various cables, ropes or hair onto your object. So as you move forward and get more familiar with this workflow, start thinking about which workflow works best for what type of object you want to create. Now I'd like to point out that in this class, we are going to be focusing in on mesh modeling and curve modeling, as they're the easiest for beginners to approach. Both sculpting and hard surface modeling could demand entire classes on their own. 3. Mesh Modeling: Comes packed with a full suite of tools for mesh modeling. The problem is that as a beginner, it can sometimes be difficult to know what tools right for the job. So in this lesson, we're going to look at some of the tools you can use in Blender for mesh editing and how to use them. So we're going to use some basic modeling tools here to make a little crate like you see here. Now, first, what we're going to do is I'm going to grab my object here. Now, by default, you should have a cube and Blender. If you do not, you can come and hit Shift A, mesh cube or you can add it up here, mesh cube. After that, I'm going to grab the cube, and I'm going to tab into Edit mode here. Here in Edit mode, we can manipulate the mesh of our object. So if I grab the vertex here, grab the G key for move, I can move this around or use my Gizmo. And up here, we can see that we can change the select mode. So right now we're in Vertex mode. If I click here, I can go ahead and I can move the edges there, or if I click here, I can grab the faces and move those around. You can also turn all these on at once by holding ShiftClick and clicking them all. Now, this can be a bit messy for selection on denser models, but for a simple model like this, it's perfect. I also like to just use the one, two, three keys at the top of my keyboard to switch between these modes. Now, over here we have our tool bar. If you don't see that, you can press the T key here or click this little arrow, which will bring it in and out. Now, here are the primary tools that we are going to use. So I'm going to turn on Face mode here. I'm going to grab this here. And here you see I have the extrude region. If I click that, it's going to give me a little gizmo. I can click this plus icon here and drag out to extrude that face. Now, if I come down here, I have the inset tool. I can grab this little circle here in the center and drag and shrink that down, and that will inset that face there. Now, if I wanted to bevel this edge here, I would switch to edge mode, and I'm going to shift click and grab these edges right here. Going to grab my bevel tool here and pull on this little yellow tab here. And you'll see here that it just begins to bevel my edge. Now, if I roll up and down on the mouse keyboard there, you'll see that it will add additional segments. Now, beneath that, we have what is called the loop cut tool. Now, if I click this, you'll see that it is highlighting a yellow line. What that is doing is going to draw an edge loop around there. By default, it will click there in the center, but if I click and hold, I can then drag it and offset that just like that. Over here, we have the knife cut tool. With the knife cut tool, we can actually snap onto our vertex here and begin just drawing around and cutting geometry as we see fit. Now, if I hit Enter will then introduce that geometry permanently. Now, for IST, all I have to do is press I. So if I grab this top face up here, I'm going to press I and I can just move my mouse back and forth to shrink that in. I'll click there to set that. And if I press I again to NSEt, I can actually hold Control and almost do a simple extrusion, as well. I'm just going to start with a fresh cube here. Now, I just showed you how to use all these tools in Gizmos, which is nice. They're a little bit easier to use with the Gizmos, but I actually prefer the keyboard shortcuts. So here with this edge loop selected, if I hit Control B, that would be the same as doing the Bevel tool, and just like before I can rotate up and down on the mouse. I want you to pay attention to something. When you're using these tools, look down at the bottom of the screen here. You'll see all these options associated with a letter. So you can see here that if I press I, I can affect my inner sharp and change the type of bevel or if I press O, I can change the outer sharp. I can also right click to cancel the action. Now, one thing I want to note that is important is that scale will affect some of these tools like the bevel. So if I switch back out in the object mode here, come over to the item, I'm going to set my scale to something really small like 0.1. And I'm going to zoom in here by pressing the period key on the Numpad. If I tab back out in edit mode with that edge loop selected and hit Control B, you can see that it's actually changing the way the bevel works. So if I wanted that to work, I would just hit Control A to apply the scale. You can also do that up here, object, apply, scale. What that will do is zero out the scale. Now, a lot of beginners get stuck on having issues with certain tools, and almost always it's the fact that they haven't applied the scale yet. For extrusions, if you press E, you can just extrude there. And if I press X, Y, or Z, I can determine what axis I want that extrude on. Now, if we hit Control R, we get access to the loop cut. If I roll up and down on my mouse wheel here, I can actually insert more cuts. Now when I press click there, it will allow me to slide before confirming by clicking again. Next, let's look at the knife tool. I'm going to switch to Vertex mode here, and I'm going to press K to access the knife tool. You see here at the bottom, we have quite a few options, and I use the options on the knife tool quite a bit. The ones I like to use are the C for cut through and the A for angle constraint. So if I come down here, I can snap onto my vertex here, and you can see here I can drag in any direction. But if I press A, it will lock me into angle constraints based on my screen view. Now, I can go ahead and click here or if I press C cut through and click, press Enter, you'll see that it's cut all the way through the object. If it was transparent. Now there's a couple tools that are really useful that are not over here. You can access all those tools up in these menus, or if you want, you can search for them. By default, the search key is F two. I have mindset the space bar. I'd like to show you a few. First, I'd like to show you how to merge two vertex points. If I go ahead and grab this point here and this point here, and press the Mkey or search for Merge, it will bring open this menu here, where I can merge at center, cursor, collapse, first or last. The ones you're most likely going to use are at cursor at center. So I'm going to move my cursor here and I'm going to press the Mkey and do at cursor. What I've done is connect all the selected points into one point here. Now, this may not seem useful at the moment. However, I promise this will be very useful when we're trying to clean up geometry. I'd also like it to show you how to edge slide. So you can see here I have an edge selected. If I grab that edge and move around, you can see how it distorts the shape of our object. However, if I double tap G, I activate edge slide, and now it will only move back and forth across the object, making sure that I maintain the shape of my object. This is even more obvious when working on something like a sphere where it tries to keep the shape. Snapping mode also works in edit mode. You can enable that by toggling Snap up here and choosing what you'd like to snap too. For here, for example, on the grid, I can grab my vertex point and snap along all the various grid points. This is great if you're doing things like architectural rendering and need really precise grid placement. It's up to you whether you want to use the tools or the keyboard shortcuts. However, I do recommend you learn the keyboard shortcuts for these tools, as long term, it will make your process go much faster. But we're going to delete this cube and restart. Now, you can delete portions of the cube or the entire thing at once. If I hold L, while hovered over this, it will select the entire object. If I had another object in this scene here, you can see that clicking L will select each object. And also hit Shift L to delete each object. That will allow me to select an entire object piece. So any piece that isn't connected to another piece. Now, if I want to select everything inside of this object, I can press A, and that will select all mesh objects inside of this. Now, when you press delete, there's two ways you can do it. You can press the delete key, or you can press X, which is a little easier since all of your keyboard shortcuts tend to be near your left hand. Either way, once you press delete, it's going to bring up a delete menu here. Now, we're going to cover these dissolves a bit later in the course. Don't worry about those now. But up here, I want you to take a look at these. You can see that we can delete the vertices, edges, faces, only faces, only edges and faces. These all do exactly what they say. If I go ahead here, grab just this face, press X, you can see that I can delete the face there. However, if I wanted to, for example, add a couple edge loops there, and I grabbed this face here and press X, delete edges, you'll see that it will delete all the edges from the selection that I have, which is quite different. In the case here, we just want to delete everything. So we're going to press X, and we're going to click Delete and then select vertices. Now we have an empty object. We want to reset our object to a basic cube. So we'll come up here and add cube. Now we're going to take all the tools that we just learned, and we're going to make a basic crate. And I'm just going to double click up here and name this cargo crate. So next we're going to tab into Edit Mode here. So I'm going to tab into Edit mode, and I'm going to use Face Selection up here. I'm going to press A to select everything, and then I'm going to press I to Inset. Now you'll see here that as I drag down, it will inset each of those faces. If yours isn't doing that, make sure to press I again, and that will turn on individual selection. You can see the options there at the bottom. I'm going to drag mine in here just a bit. Now, we're going to make these look like they're kind of support boards. So I want these faces to be inset slightly. So I'm going to press I again for inset. And if you remember, I said, if you hold control, which you see down there at the bottom is labeled as death, we can go ahead and bring this in slightly. I'm going to hold control and bring that in. Already, we're starting to get something that looks like a crate. Now let's use the loop cut tool. What we want to do is add some boards here. So I'm going to hit Control R and rotate up once and give myself two loop cuts there and click to confirm. I'm going to do the same thing from this side as well and from here as well. Now you should have about nine faces on each inset section. Now, to make these look like boards, I want to have a small gap here. So what I'm actually going to do is hold Shift click while in edge selection mode here and grab these edges right here. Then I'm going to hit Control B, the bevel. Going to just bevel these in place. Now, if you don't see three lines there, rotate up on your mouse wheel at least once. Now I'm going to click, then I'm going to deselect and grab these here by holding Shift Click. Then with my move Gizmo there, I can just move these in ever so slightly. And you can see how this is starting to get a boarded look. Now I'm going to go ahead and do that on all the other sides. So I want you to go around and select all the edges that you want to create the board lines on. Then I want you to hold Control B, do them all at once, and now hold Control and press the minus key. And what that's going to do is deselect the outer ring. If I hold Control minus, it will deselect everything, and if I hold Control plus, it will keep adding to the selection. That's one simple trick we can do to easily select that. Now if that's selection, come up here, make sure that your transform pivot point is set to median, and it will scale to the center of all of these. So if we press the Sky and just drag in a little bit, we can see we can create all of those boards at once. Now I'm going to tab back out on the object mode here, come up here into the viewer node, and turn on wireframe just to make this a little bit more visible. This still looks a little simple. So let's add a bevel modifier. So we'll come over here to the modifier panel with our objects selected. We will search for a bevel, and we will turn the segments up to two. And now you can see that we've given our box a little bit more shape and realism. 4. Curve Modeling: Comes to editing curves and Blender, it has a whole different suite of tools. And we're going to walk through those tools in this video. If I come up here to the add menu and add a curve, you can see I have the option of a bezier or a circle. Now, by default, the curve menus pretty limited, which is why I recommend going to edit preferences add ons and searching for extra. Here you'll see the option to enable extra curve objects. I'm going to click that on come back. Now when it comes to the curve menu, you can see that I have a lot of options. I'm going just like the Bezier. Wh will give me a single bezier line, which you can see is drawn here in the viewport. Now, if I tap into Edit mode here, you can see this looks quite a bit different than a mesh. Than having vertex points all along this curve, I only have two points, and it is drawing that curve between those points. If you've ever worked in an Adobe application, this should feel right at home for you. However, this is your first time working with a curve, let me explain how they work. First, we have our point, and I can move this vertex point around, and you can see that that curve is trying to draw itself between those two points. What determines how that curve draws is the handle type. So you can see each point that I select here has two points next to it. This is what we call a handle. If I grab this point here, I'm going to click and drag and select all that. Now I have the entire handle selected. If I press the ar key to rotate, you can see that by rotating the handle, even though the vertex point is staying in place, the curve is changing its shape. Likewise, I can scale that handle as well to exaggerate the length of the curve or to tighten the curve to be closer to the point. Now, by default, this handle is set to automatic, meaning that the handle will automatically move no matter what point of the handle I grab. But if I grab the vertex point here, I come up here to the curve control points, set handle type, you'll see that we have various options. The two I want you to focus on are automatic and vector. Vector here will allow me to control each side of the point. So if I were to press E and extrude a new point here, you can see that I can control the sharpness and the distance between these two curve points and adjusting the handle on each end. If I go ahead and grab this here, come back to control points, set this handle type back to automatic, you can see that it automatically tries to smooth out the curve in between these two handle points. Let's take a look at that circle object. Now the circle object on the curve differentiates from the Bezier, that it is one single continuous line. So if I tap edit mode here, you can see that there's no break in the line, and that as I move this around, it will try and adjust to match the entire shape. Now if I wanted to break this, what I can do is come up to the curve and hit Toggle cyclic. And what that will do is turn off the cyclic nature. So when cyclic is on, what it will do is try and connect the first and the last points of your drawn line no matter where they are at. Let's take a look at some of the tools over here. I'm going to select all my points by pressing A, hit Delete and delete the vertices. Now what I'm going to do is look at these tools. One, we have the draw tool. And the draw tool here allows us just to draw a curve in any shape that we like, automatically adding as many points as it thinks it needs. Now, a really cool thing about the curve pin tool is that when it is selected here, you have the option to draw by the cursor, which will draw wherever your cursor is located in three space or on surface. This is incredibly helpful when you're trying to draw curves onto more complex objects for things such as hair, roots, vines, or. Also have the curve pen. If you've ever worked in Adobe, this works in just the same way. You can click a point and drag before letting go to set the handle position. Now, below the curfpin we have the extrude option. However, I actually don't recommend using the extrude tool in the curve, as I feel it's a bit unintuitive. Instead, I recommend you just press E. Grab the point you want to extrude, press E, and you can just drag a new point. It in spot, and you can just rotate that point to get it wherever you want, and then press scale to adjust the handle size. Keep pressing E and rotating around. Now, one of the real powers of curves comes when you start playing with its data tab. Whenever you have a curve selected and come over here, you'll see that now you have this little curve symbol. And under that tab, we have a bunch of options here. Up here, we have an option for the shape. Here, you'll notice we have the resolution. What the resolution does is determine how many points are along this curve. So if I lower this down to something like three points, you'll see that it's only going to use three points to draw in between these. However, if I set something like 24 points, you can see that that curve gets much more smooth. So look at this next option down here called fill mode. You'll see here that by default, it is set to front. If I come up here and switch my shape to two D, you'll see that now that film mode fills in the object. Is incredibly useful when doing things like creating logos. Now if you're following along with the class files, I've included a project file called Logo Starter. And what this file has is a simple HDRI in it and a material included. I'm going to show you how we can import an SVG file, which we'll import as a curve file and allow us to create a simple logo. So I'm going to come up here to file import SPG, and if you don't know, SVG is just a vector file that you can export from pretty much any vector software. I'm going to import the included flame SVG logo. We'll just import that there, and you'll see that it is loaded into our scene as a curve object. By tab into edit mode here, we can edit it just like any other curve. I'm going to tab back out into object mode here. Now, default, when you import a SVG file into Blender, it's going to try and apply materials based on the colors of the project file. I've never really seen it work well, so I just recommend deleting the materials there and starting over. We're going to come over here to the curve data tab and take a look at the geometry options here. So now in the geometry options here, you'll see the ability to extrude. If I turn this up, you might not notice anything happening here in the top view. But if we rotate over, we can see that our object is actually extruding. So I'm going to set this to a small number like 0.025. Now, I've put a camera in the scene, which you can view by going to view cameras active camera. And we can see here that our logos quite small. So I'm actually going to press S, scale this up, use the rotate gizmo here, and then just rotate this down. Get this into a position that I like here. Now, whenever you do scale on an object like this, I recommend applying your scale. You can go to Control A, apply scale. Let's look back over here in the curve options here. We have the extrusion, and we can set this up and down just like that. So I'm going to find a thickness here that looks nice to. Down here, you'll see that we have the bevel option. What the Bevel option is going to do is bevel the edges here and give it a nice rounded look. I'm going to hold shift and drag on here. By holding shift, I will work in smaller values because you can see here, if I work in larger values, it will break the model quite quickly. So I'm going to hold shift and just move this up to something like 0.01 or 0.02. Great. Now we have the beginnings of a logo. As I said, we've included an HGI in the scene. So if I switch up here to render mode here, you can see that we're already getting some unique lighting from our abstract HGRI. I'm going to come down here to the material, grab this here, and add this RGBGGlass shader. Now we have an abstract logo. Now, you can do this with any vector shape. I recommend you import an SVG logo or create your own, and I'd love for you to share the results. If you're curious how I made this glass shader, I actually have an entire tutorial on it on my YouTube. I'll make sure to link to that in the description. So that's how we work with the geometry options on a filled icon. But let's take a look at how this works on a line. Can see here that if I opt to extrude, it just extrudes it up in a singular plane, which may be the effect you're looking for. I'm going to zero this back out and tab back into top view. But you can see here down that if I take the bevel, I can actually input the depth here, and you'll see that we will get a rounded curve. This is perfect for creating ropes, cables or more. If I turn the wireframe view on here, we can see how it is drawing the geometry around our curve. We can adjust the resolution in two places. Just like before, we can add additional resolution along the curve here. But if we want to add resolution to our befel shape, we can adjust that setting here. Make sure to always use about the bare minimum you can get with getting the result you want. This will ensure that your scene is always performing. Now, below the resolution, you'll see the fill caps. And what this will do is just fill the end of your tube here. However, you can see the geometry is not. Recommend doing this manually after you've converted to mesh. I'll show you how to do that in a minute. So one nice thing about working with curves like this is that they're non destructive, and we can just make adjustments to our geometry along the way super simply. So here in the edit mode, you can see that we have the radius option, and the radius option will give us a circle that we can click and drag the thickness. Alternatively, you can also just press Alt S and scale things that way, too. So here you can see I'm getting a nice taper. Keep in mind that we can also move these around in three D space, which is where this next option comes in place. We have the tilt here which will allow you to tilt the direction of the vertices. So if I grab the tilt option here and click this circle, you can see that I'm able to rotate that. This will be more visible if I turn on the wireframe mode. You can see how it is rotating the geometry. I'm going to tab back out an object mode here and show you an advantage of curves as well. We can actually change the shape of the curve along this path here, too. So if you remember earlier, we did the extra curves add on, so I'm going to come down here to curve and choose shape from this list. I'm going to choose the rectangle. It'll automatically tab me into Edit mode. I'm going to snap in the top view here, and I'm going to press S and scale this down here on the Y. Go to tab back out into object mode. We're going to grab this curve here, come over to the curve data, and on the bevel, instead of round, we're going to change this to object. You'll notice it disappears, and now we can select an object. I'm going to click this little button here and select our rectangle. Going to see here that the results are pretty broken, and that's because our rectangle is far too big for our small curve line here. So I'm going to tab in edit mode there, press A to select everything, and just scale this down, and you can see how we're altering the shape of the curve here. Now we can bevel any shape along this line. This is great for creating things like stylized hair, cables, ropes, and you recall earlier, I recommended you not use the fill caps, and that's because it generates some pretty nasty geometry. So instead, what I recommend doing is waiting until you have your curve complete, and then we can convert it to mesh. That's pretty simple to do. You can just search for curve to mesh. So press F two, or if you follow along with my keyboard shortcuts, use the space bar, and search for Convert two. That will bring up this menu, and you can convert from a mesh to a curve or from a curve to a mesh. This case, we want to convert to a mesh. Now our curve mini disappears and is replaced by the mesh data icon, and you can see if we tap into Edit mode here, we now have a normal mesh. What I recommend doing is selecting this edge loopeer by Alt clicking and pressing F to fill. Now, this is going to give you an gon, but what you can do is now press Control B and use a bevel. We'll drag that down there and rotate up on our mouse wheel, and you can see how we can create a nice soft little rounded cap. 5. Basics of Topology: Topology is very intimidating for beginners, I've noticed, but really to make it as simple as possible, it's how your vertex points, edges, and faces come together to shape your three D object. And there are good ways and bad ways to do that. And the reason it matters is because in certain scenarios, for example, animation, characters need extra edge loops around joints like elbows or mouse, so that when a character bends, there's actually geometry there to shift around and create a natural bend. Or, for example, it's very common to work on lower geometry and then to add a subdivision modifier at the end. And if your geometry doesn't have good form, it can lead to some pretty weird results when it tries to smooth out that object. Lastly, it really matters for performance. Having clean geometry means fewer polygons and fewer faces, meaning that overall, you will render faster and have a faster viewport performance. Let's talk about some basic topology terms. First up, I want to talk about triangles or tries. This is just faces with three sides. They're stable and usually flat, but they don't subdivide smoothly. A few in your object are okay, but too many can cause some shading problems or messy deformation with animating. I see a lot of people get confused with this because they'll hear that game engines use tries, and that's okay, but the engines usually automatically convert your quad topology. So there's really no reason for you to model with these in mind. Another type of face we have is called quads, faces with four sides. These are the gold standard for modeling because they subdivide cleanly and allow edge loops to flow nicely around your model. Most good topology is made up of quads. Engons are faces with five or more sides. These can look fine in still renders, but they can break easily when subdivided or animated. It's best to avoid these except on flat surfaces when they won't deform. I actually have one of these on the robot with its ears. You can see here we have an gon at the end, but since it won't bend, it works. Edge flow is how the edges of your topology follow the natural shape of your model. For example, if we look at the mouth on a character here, we can see that the shape of the mouth slowly moves out in these loops around the mouth until it naturally dissipates into the shape of the rest of the face. A pole is just a point on your model where an unusual number of edges meet. Normally at every vertex, you're going to have four edges meeting. However, if it's three edges, five edges or more, that would be considered a pole. Now, poles aren't mistakes. Every model is going to have some, but they can cause weird bins or artifacts if they're in the wrong place. For example, a safe place for poles will be on the back of the hand here. Or a bad place for a pole would be in a bending area, like an elbow, because when we go to bend or to form this mesh, it's going to create some weird artifacts. Now that we understand the terms of topology, let's define what are some signs of good topology and bad topology. Some signs of good topology are that you have mostly quads. You have even spacing between your edge flows and polygons. Nothing's too stretched or too tiny. You have edge loops that flow with the shape of your object. Your lines of your edges should wrap naturally around features like eyes, mouth, or joints. You only have poles and safe spots. The occasional pole of three or five edges meeting should be kept in flat or non bending areas. Your object is subdivision friendly. Adding a subdivision surface should make the model smooth without any weird glitches. And your model should be efficient. Don't have any unnecessary faces, edges, or vertex points where you don't need them. Use the minimum amount to keep the shape you want. Let's walk through some signs of bad topology. You don't want too many tries or engons. This will lead to shading or deformation problems. You don't want stretched or warped faces, long skinny polygons that look uneven when smooth. Cause issues. In general, you're going to want most of your faces to be square. You want to avoid messy edge flows. You don't want a ton of edge loops around small details that wrap around the whole model, and you also don't want edge loops that move or clash over one another, even overlapping each other. You want to avoid poles and problem areas. Clusters of edges meeting at joints like elbows, knees, and mouse are going to cause some bad artifacts when you try and bend. Also be mindful of how your shape is subdividing. If you notice that when you toss on the subdivision modifier, it's destroying the shape of your character. You probably don't have enough edge flows, and you should add more to help define the shape. Be aware of hidden geometry. Sometimes things like extra faces or holes can happen in your object, and these can lead to glitches. Now, here's top ten tips from me on how I think you can fix or avoid bad topology. Loop cut tool to add new edge loops to break up long or stretch polygons into evenly sized quads. You can access this by hitting Control R or selecting it on the left tool panel, and once you click, it'll automatically center the edge loop, and then you can drag it up and down before confirming. Use Edge slide when trying to reposition slides. By tbl tapping G, when you have an edge selected, you can slide edges along the surface to balance spacing without actually changing the shape. Use the merge vertex function. If you press M with one or more vertex selected, it will weld those together. You can choose to do it at the first vertex selected, the last, or the center. Welding these together, you can remove unnecessary vertex points. A great time to do this is after you do a Boleon cut, you will oftentimes be left with a bunch of engons and you can quickly combine vertex points together to create a cleaner geometry. When you have a point, face or edge selected, you can press X to dissolve. What this will do is try and remove that edge or face without altering the rest of the geometry. This is most commonly used on edges. If you have a bunch of extra edge loops, go ahead and click that edge loop and then press X to dissolve. Now, this is a simple one, but one of the easiest things you can do when cleaning up your geometry is learn how to select loops by holding Alt click and clicking at either the top or the side of a face, you can select that face loop. Likewise, if you are in edge mode or vertex mode, you can use this to select edge loops. Use the knife tool. The knife tool is a versatile tool, but what it allows you to do is click and snap to various vertex points to cut in new edges to help redirect loops around features like eyes, mouse, or joints. This is really great if you're trying to fix or remove a pole or if you're trying to convert a quad or a try. Take advantage of the grid fill tool. You can access this under the menu or with Control F. You select a border of edges, for example, with this hole on the object here, and I do a grid fill, Blender will do its best to try and automatically fill this with the most appropriate grid. It doesn't always get it perfect, but a lot of times it works really well. Use the bridge edge loop tool. If you have two objects with similar amounts of faces and they're separated, you can select the edge flow at each hole and hit Control E. Select bridge, and this will connect the two open loops with clean geometry. You can add additional edge loops here as needed, as well. Another way to fix your topology is to add support loops for subdivision. So the point of subdivision is to smooth out your object without adding additional geometry. Allows us to create detailed or smooth objects without too many faces that'll slow down our scene or renders. Now, one mistake I see is people adding too many support loops. This just leads to messy or uneven edge flows. So be careful of that. But one tip I'd like to say is that you can come to the subdivision modifier on your object, enable it in edit mode, and this will make it visible while working in Edit mode. This allows you to see exactly how your support loops are going to affect the final subdivision. So if I want to tighten up an edge here, I would just need to make these edge loops closer together, so it could add an additional edge loop with the loop cut tool, drag this down and tighten up that edge to maintain my form. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just delete. If you see a bad portion of your mesh and you're struggling to fix it, just go ahead and select all the surrounding faces that aren't good topology, delete them and work your way inward from the good topology. Can do this by dissolving vertices, edges, or if you have a hole, you can grab these surrounding edges, press F, and it'll automatically put in a face. You can then go through and add faces one by one until you filled the hole and cleaned up the bad area. An add on that makes this easier is the F two add on. This comes free, packaged with Blender. Go to edit preferences and enable F, and this allows you to automatically fill in these holes a little bit easier when pressing F by just selecting one single vertex sometimes you won't be able to avoid tries or gons and that's okay as long as they're not completely around your model. But what is important to know is to understand how to transition down from a quad to a try or from a quad to an NGO. Here's a very helpful guide laid out of what that edge flow should look like. And here's an example of me using the dissolve functions and the knife tool to go from a quad to a try and from a quad to an end. At this point that I see a lot of beginners give up, they get overwhelmed by all these rules and these technical details that it's too much, and they just stop. I want to say that I just want you to get in there and model to the best of your ability. Your first few objects are probably going to have pretty bad topology, and that's okay. I'd say my objects had bad topology for years. That's just part of the learning process. Right now, do the best you can to get from A to B, and over time, you will learn and improve your topology. 6. Modeling our Robot: To this point, we've covered a wide array of tools in Blender, and it's time that we take all those tools and apply them to a singular project. Now, if you follow along in these lessons, we're going to be making this little robot character that I've provided sketches for together. Now, the techniques I'm about to teach you in the next few lessons are the same that I use to create all of my characters and models as well. I'd love for you to come back with your own designs and create something unique to you. Once you're done, make sure to share it because I'd love to see what you create. Now it's time to get to the fun part and actually begin modeling our little robot character. Now, if you open the starter file that is included in the example class files, you'll see up here there is a collection called reference, and I've put two collections in one is two D. This is the original two D sketch of my little Robot character. If you like, you can use this to model alongside. However, since this is a beginner class, I've included the final model in this three D sketch here. I've made it so that you can't select the model. The wireframe is visible and it is see through. So this allows you to almost trace alongside my model if you would like to follow along this way. Do keep in mind, though, that the reference file has the selection turned off. If you have the reference file selected and you add a cube and you can't select it, you've probably accidentally put it in the reference file. Just move it into the scene file, and then you can select things again. With that being said, let's get started. I'm going to snap back into front mode here, turn on Xray and turn back on my reference. I'm going to select my scene collection up here, and we're going to go to add mesh Cube. Now we're going to do something called box modeling. What this means is that we're going to apply a subdivision surface modeling modifier to this box, which will give us extra geometry, and then we'll shift the box around until we get it into the shape we want, adding just a little bit of geometry as we go along the way. There's two ways you can do that. You can go to the modifier panel and search here, or I recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts and hitting Control one, two, or three. By hit Control one, you can see here it heads a subdivision level of one, two will up that to two and so on. I'm going to set mine to three. So hit Control three with your keep select you should have a cube with three subdivisions. Now, before I get started modeling, I'm going to turn on this mode uppe called Xray, and that's going to make everything see through just so that I can see all of my elements at once. I'm going to grab the cube here with the move Gizmo on, I'm going to move this up until the top of the head matches there. Now I'm going to tap into Edit mode and actually begin editing my cube. I'm going to click off here to the side. Now, because I have X ray mode on, when I click and drag, it will not only select what is in the foreground, but also the background. Keep that in mind. If I were to toggle X ray off and switch back, grab here, you'd see it would only grab the front facing ones visible to the camera. But I want all these selected. So I'm going to grab all of those, and I'm going to use the move Kismo here. I'm going to bring the bottom of the cube here up to the bottom of the head of my character. I'm also going to grab the top here and bring this down until the top of the visible mesh here matches the top of the head. Now, you can see here that we have more of a rounded with a flatter bottom of the head. This gives us a much more natural looking head for our robot character. And the way we can achieve that is by adding additional geometry. And this is why it's called box modeling because we start with a box and just keep adding edge loops and moving things around until we get a general idea of the shape we want with the subdivision. So I'm going to hit Control R, or you can use the loop cut tool over here, add a loop cut there in the center, and then I'm going to drag this down. And as I do that, you can see how it is tightening up the model at the bottom and how we're dragging that subdivision down. Is exactly what we want. Now I'm going to grab everything by pressing A, and I'm going to press X. Now, what that means is I'm going to scale on the X axis, and then I'm going to drag this out and move this along until I widen out the face of my character here. Perfect. Just like that. This is looking good, but it's a little boxy. I'd like it to have more of a rounded taper as it comes down like this. So I'm going to grab these bottom two lines here, and we'll use the scale Gizmo this time just in case that's what you're more comfortable with. We'll grab the scale Gizmo there, and we'll just scale this in just on the X, just like that. Now, I want to make sure that this looks good from the side view, too. So I'm going to click up here, drag till it snaps here in the middle. And then over here, I'm going to switch this to the side view. Now, you can use the gizmo up here. I like using the Numpad. You can also come up here to the view, viewport, and do right. And now we can see our model from both angles. So here we can begin playing with the shape a bit. I recommend just clicking and dragging and using the move Gizmo here just to move these around and give a little bit more of a rounded and less boxy shape to your head. There's no right or wrong answer here. You can match mine exactly. I encourage you to go ahead and differentiate your character a bit. Now, if I tab back out into object mode here and I'm going to click off my reference and turn off X ray mode, you can see how now we have a very simple model with pretty even topology. Next, let's take a look at creating this body here. Now I'm going to hit Shift A this time, at a mesh in a cube. I'm going to drag this cube up to around the center of that body, and then I'm going to tab into Edit mode. Now I'm going to grab these top points going to bring this down to the top of the body there, bring these bottom points here, bring this up, like so. Now I'm going to drag over everything, selecting the entire model. Going to turn on the scale gizmo here, and I'm going to bring this in so that we're relatively close to the sides of our object. I'm going to grab the top ones here, scale those in so that we get a nice little kind of body taper. And now you can see that we have our object matching along. Do the same thing in the side view here. Now on the side view, you can see that we have a nice little natural angle, and this just gives us a little bit better shape language, and profile. So I'm going to click over here, grab these top ones, grab the move tool here, and just bring this on the Y axis. Likewise, I'm going to do the same thing for the bottom until I get an angle that I'm happy with. You don't have to match my angles exactly. Just do whatever looks nice for you. Now we have a very simple box shape to work. You'll notice here that we have this nice kind of rounded edge, and that's something I'd like to get. Well, that's pretty simple. Let's do the top two first. I'm going to switch to edge mode up here, grab these two edges by shift clicking. I'm going to snap back into the front view here with the one on my Numpad just to make it a little bit easier. Remember, you can always use the Gizmo or the view menu. Now I want to use the bevel tool to round those edges. You can use the tool over here or hit Control B, and I'm going to drag that down until I get a small bevel at the top. Then I'm going to rotate up on my mouse wheel and just add a little bit of geometry. Two or three lines should work. Now let's do the same thing for the bottom. I'm going to grab just these two here, switch back to the front face mode, it Control B, and drag in there until I get a slightly bigger bevel. Now you can see that we're getting a nice rounded shape for our character's body. However, I think it looks a bit weird to just have a harsh flat edge here. So it's bevel that edge as well. I'm going to click off and deselect everything, and I'm going to switch to face select mode. Now, since we're in X ray mode, we can't just click and get the correct face. So instead, you need to point to these little points right here. So if I click that point there, I'll select the front face. But come around and shift click this point here, I will select the back face. Now if I hit Control, we will only bevel those edges. So I'm just going to add a small bevel there, just like that. Now, if I tap back out into object mode and turn off X ray and turn off the reference, we can see that we're starting to get the shape of our robot's body. We'll go ahead and add more details to this in the next lesson. But for now, let's move on to blocking out the rest of the basic shapes. But I'm going to turn X ray mode back on, turn on my reference, and snap this back into the side view here. Now, I'd like to point out that on the front of my character here, I have a very large end gon, and this is a flat surface that isn't going to bend, so it shouldn't pose any issues. However, it may cause potential shading issues later, and if so, we'll make sure to fix those. Now, you can see up next we have several spheres that are very simple. Let's go ahead and add those next. I'm going to hit Shift A at a mesh and a cube. Now I'm going to hit Control three to add a subdivision. I want to use a similar subdivision level as the head to try and maintain a similar size in terms of topology. This is so that at the end, most of the topology is even. I'm just going to move this up here to the bottom of the body there, and then I'm going to press the S key and just drag down and scale this down a bit. I want this just to fit inside of the body, and I'm going to drag this up just a bit so that it just kind of pokes out. This will serve as our hip. Now, now you might be wondering why we're keeping this entire sphere up in here even if it's invisible. And it's true, that's not exactly the most performant option. However, in a future lesson, we're going to be learning how to rig and animate this character. So I'm just thinking ahead. The body will pivot around the sphere like a joint, and it's possible that pions of this will become visible. So I'm going to leave the entire geometry in there for now. You might also be wondering, why did I just apply a subdivision to a cube instead of using the UV sphere option? Well, let me show you. If I add the UV sphere option here and move this over here, you can see what the way that the geometry is. I'll turn on the wireframe to make it more visible. All comes down to a single point and there's a ton of engons here. So when I try and add a subdivision to this later to smooth it out, what ends up happening is you get these weird pinching lines here. And that's a problem with UV spheres that you don't have with cubes. So I'm just going to leave that for now and delete that sphere. I'm going to snap back in the front view here. Next, let's add the joints here for the arms and the legs. Now, we've already made this cube sphere, so we might as well just reuse it. So let's grab that hip sphere, and we're going to hit Shift D to duplicate it. And then I'm just going to center this over here over the leg joint, press S and scale down. Now, we don't want to have to do everything twice. So what we're going to do is add a mirror modifier. I to click Search Mirror. And you'll see here that nothing happens, and that's because it's using its own origin point and duplicating on itself. Instead, we're going to use the body as our mirror object. So if I click Search here and do body, you'll see that it's using the origin point of the body there. Now, if yours doesn't match up perfectly, what you can do is grab your body. Use the search function and look for origin to geometry. What that will do is recenter the origin on the geometry. And as long as this is sending center on the line, your object should mirror over correctly. Now we have this shoulder joint up here, and we can actually just grab our cube here. And if we hit Shift Deep, not only will it duplicate the cube, it will also keep those modifiers applied. I can just drag this up here. And you see that it has all the same modifiers as the cube down here. Next up, let's work on this kind of calf or leg piece here. Well, actually use this cube again. So I'm going to hit Shift D and then just drag this down. I'm going to press Z so that I maintain that on the axis there. And I'm just going to bring this down so just the tip sits up inside of the sphere. Now, if I tap into Edit mode, don't forget. This is actually just a cube. So again, we can move with box modeling from. I'm going to switch over to Vertex mode here, and I'm going to grab these bottom to here. I'm going to drag these down to the bottom, just like that. And then I'm going to use the loop cut tool. You can use the tool over here or press Control R to click in there and give us a little bit of extra geometry to work with. I'm going to drag this down here to about that line right there, and I'm going to grab both of these and press S to scale out. I'm just going to flare out the bottom of the foot. Take a look at the side view here. I think we can make the shape a tiny bit more interesting. Let's grab this top point up here and just move this forward ever so slightly. If you don't see this Gizmo, just remember click the move Gizmo. I'm going to grab these back pieces here and move this in forward. I'm going to turn off my reference here so I can get a better look at my foot. I actually wish this portion was flatter, and you might think that you just want to add another edge loop and drag down. That is one way to do it. But if I switch out here to the wireframe mode, you'll see here that I am adding a bunch of extra geometry. I'm going to turn off optimal display there so you can see. You can see how we're just adding a ton of unnecessary geometry there. So I'm going to undo that. And instead, what we're going to do is control how much strength the subdivision has over this edge loop. The subdivision is smoothing out our entire object, and we can actually add creases to certain edges to reduce how much it's smoothing it. So I'm going to switch to face mode here, grab this bottom face here, and then we're going to open the end panel here by pressing the end key. Up here, you should see the item. So I'm going to grab the item tab here, and down here, you'll see that we have some various data we can. Including mean crease. And if I move this all the way to one, you'll see that the subdivision has no effect on these edges, and it's completely sharpened out the edge. I don't want it to do that, per se, but I'm going to set it to something around 0.85. And now you can see we have a nearly flat edge, and we haven't ruined it by adding too much geometry. I'm going to snap back to the front view here and I'm going to turn back on my three D reference. Let's actually copy this shape to work on our forearm. So I'm going to swap out into object mode there. I'm going to hit Shift D and move this over here. I'm going to close my end panel by pressing N so I can see what I'm doing a little bit better. I'm going to press R and rotate. Remember, you can always use these gizmos if you're uncomfortable with the keyboard shortcuts. I'm going to rotate there so that the lines are in line with my arm. And then I'm just going to make some simple adjustments. For one, I don't think that the forearm should have such a harsh edge there. So I'm actually going to grab that bottom face again, open the end panel. Maybe lower this something like 0.5, maybe even lower. 0.25. And you can see there how it's softening up the edges. Great. Now I'm going to go back here in the front view mode here, turn on the vertex, and then I'm just going to begin moving those in. I just want to give this forearm a little bit of a smaller look, not quite so large, like the legs. You can do whatever shape you want here. I'm just giving it more of a little bit tapered look. Switch back out to object mode here, since we still have that mirror modifier on, you can see how everything is transferring over. Next, let's do these arms here. So if you zoom in here, you can see that for the arms, I was kind of going for this rubber pump type look. So I'm going to hit Shift A, and I'm going to add a mesh and a cylinder. Now, down here in the Adminu we can control how much resolution we have. I'm going to half this and go down to 16. And that's because we'll be adding a subdivision, and I don't want the geometry to get too dense. I also don't need these caps on the bottom or top, so I'm just going to turn off the gon and switch this to nothing. I'm going to snap back into front view here. What we're going to do is rotate this into place. I'm going to press the key to move out the end panel, and I'm going to press the S key to scale this down and make it small. I'm going to press the G key to grab there. And remember, you can use the gizmos here if you feel uncomfortable. I'm just going to zoom in here, and I'm just going to rotate this into place here. So I'm going to rotate there, move this around, press S. So again, I'm just using the S, R and G key to move things around. Now I want to scale this out so that it's a little bit longer so that it sticks in the arm a little bit more securely for when we're trying to animate later. So I'm going to grab the scale Gizmo here. However, you see that it's going to scale kind of in an oblong way, and I want to scale this way. So let's come up here to the global, select local, and you'll see that now it snaps to the original coordinates of the object. Then I to just grab the scale gizmo here for the Z axis and do this until we elongated now, thanks to all of our moving around, our scales are pretty oblong, and I'm going to be using a bevel modifier on this. So I'm going to hit Control A and apply the scale, just to zero that out. I'm going to press the end panel to close that. And now we're going to tab into Edit mode here. Now the problem is, we have a lot going on on our scene, and there's a lot of things overlapping. I'd actually like to just focus on the cylinder. So what I'm going to do is press the forward slash key. What that's going to do is isolate this single object that we are in edit mode. You can grab the loop cut tool or you can press the Control Rkey and just roll up on your mouse wheel. Let's just add a couple subdivisions there. It click and let go to leave them in place. Now I'm going to switch over to Edge Select mode, click away, Alt click here, and I'm just going to grab a couple of these. Then I'm going to hit Control B and drag with the bevel there. And since we've already used the bevel, it's remembered how many segments we have. I'm going to rotate down one so that I only have one line in the center. I'm going to click there. Now we're going to do Control minus. And if I do Control minus, that's going to reduce the selection to just the lines, which is exactly what we want. Now I want to press S to scale. You can see we have a problem here. Everything's scaling in on the medium point here, which is leading to some really kind of weird and uneven distortion on the bevel that we're trying to create. Now I'm going to press Alts. And what Alt S will do is scale along each object based on its own normal position. So if I do that, you'll see that it instead will scale and place correctly. I'm just going to move it in a little bit there and click. Perfect. Now if I press Ford slash again and tab back out to object mode, you can see that we have a little kind of rubber pump for our arm. In fact, let's grab that object in object mode, forward slash so we can see it, and you can see here that things look pretty low poly. If we want, we can go ahead and preemptively add a subdivision surface. I'll hit Control one. You'll see here already how things are looking smoother, more like a rubber pump. Going to press forward again to back out here. Next, let's focus on making the front of our feet here. To do the feet, we can just go ahead and grab the leg here, and we'll duplicate that. But this time it's duplicated and the side view, so we can drag it forward. We'll hit Shift D and bring this forward. Now, I want to keep these at the same level. So I'm actually going to press Y and lock that on my Y axis. And I'll bring the front of the leg to the front of the foot here. Now, if you remember, this is a cube, so we can tab in edit mode and begin playing with our shape here. Switch over to the vertex mode, grab these top ones here, bring these down. I'm going to grab all of these here with the Scale Gizmo and just flatten those out on the Y axis. Then I'll grab the move Gizmo here, bring things forward, grab this top one here, and bring this back up a little bit just to give us a foot shape. You can continue to play with that if you like. I'm going to grab the front of the foot here, bring these in and scale them on the x axis here. Just give us a little bit more of a tapered look. I'm pretty happy with that, so I'm going to stop there. Let's tap back out in the object mode here. Next up, let's add the ears on our character. Now, the ears are going to be a simple cylinder. So let's add another cylinder that Shift A mesh cylinder. Now, let's drag this up here and we're going to rotate these 90 degrees. Now you'll notice here that we have a hole in the top. That's because we previously turned it off. Let's look at how we can simply fix that. We're going to tab into Edit mode here, and I'm going to switch to edge mode there by pressing two. You can select the edge loop here and press F for fill. Now, this is technically an end gun. However, it's a hard surface that's not going to bend, so it shouldn't cause us any issues. Let's go ahead and do the same thing on the bottom there. Going to click there and press F. Nice. Now I'm going to smack back out to front view there. I'm going to switch back out to object mode, and I'm going to scale this down until I get a size that I think looks good for about an year. Now I want to rotate this 90 degrees because I want the circle facing outward here. So I'm going to press R, and then I'm going to type in 90 on my keyboard. I'm using the Numpad here, and I'm going to type out 90, and now we have our object rotated. You could also do it up here under the item panel on the end panel. Just rotating this 90 degrees. In fact, you can see that my got off kilter. So I'm just going to zero this out. Great. I'm going to close the end panel. I'm going to drag this ear over here and put this into place. I'm going to tab in edit mode here, switch over to vertex, and I'm just going to grab these and bring these in a bit. I don't need the ear to be quite that large. Let's switch to face mode here. Let's grab this face right here, and then let's hit Control B to create a bevel. I'm going to leave just about two segments there, and that'll just prevent us from having sharp, unrealistic edges. I want this to mirror. So just like before, we'll come over here, add a mirror modifier. This time we'll select the head, and you'll see here that it mirrors to the other side. And now we have our ears. Next, let's do the eyes. For the eyes, we're going to reuse the ears. But first, I want to turn off the reference here, and I'm also going to turn off the X ray. We're going to use our face here so that we can snap the eyes into position. So I'm going to grab the ear here and hit Shift D to duplicate. Now, if I switch out into the top view, I'm going to press seven on my numpad, or you can click the Z up here. I'm going to press the G key and move this around. Now when it comes up here, I'm going to turn on snapping. I'm going to click the options here. I'm going to toggle surface snap a turn on face project, and then I'm going to align rotation to target. Now, when I grab this in the top view, you can see here how it's snapping to our object. Once it's gotten into a good position there, I'm going to switch back to the front view here and get this somewhere I'm happy with. Right there, it looks good to me. Now I'm going to turn off the snapping. And now, if you've left your option on local up here, you should see your axis like this. If not, just switch it from global to local. And now we can grab the Z here with the moves Git most selected and then just drag this inside so it sits inside of our face, just as deep as you want the eyes to go. Nice. Now let's add an inset here. We'll tab into Edit mode here, make sure everything's deselected. And with face select mode on, we'll grab this front and face here. Again, you can use the Inset tool over here or press the eye key. I'm going to press the eye key and drag in ever so slightly, press the eye key again, hold control, and move back. And just like that, we have a nice little eye offset. Great. Now, I'm going to tab back out to object mode, turn back on the X ray mode, swap into front view here, and turn back on the three D reference. Now, if you want, you can play with the eyes here and get them into a position or size that looks nice to you. I'm going to make my eyes just a little bit bigger. I'm going to snap in the front mode here, and we're ready to begin making the hands. And for the hands here, I've just done a simple box with a bevel. So we're going to hit Shift A. We're going to add a cube, and we're going to scale this cube down. Drag this over here and just begin rotating it in place. So I'm just going to rotate this hand here, scale it into place, switch over to wireframe mode here, and just begin kind of placing things. You can shape the hand however you want. However, I know hands can be intimidating. So you may want to just fall along and copy my shape directly. I'm going to go and scale this here just to widen this out. Now, I'm going to stay in edit mode here, and I'm just going to duplicate the hand itself within edit mode. So I will press A to select everything, hit Shift D, rotate this down here, and I'm just going to scale this down for the front of the hand ever so slightly. Then I'm going to hit Shift D again and just rotate this around in space. Duplicate this here. I'm just going to shrink that back down and begin kind of rotating it over to create a little thumb. And then once more, I will duplicate that for the tip of the thumb and make that kind of poking out there. Going to tab back out into object mode here. I'm going to grab this object, and first, we're going to apply the scale, so hit Control A scale. I'm going to press Ford numb slash so we can see what we're doing here and turn off the toggle X ray. I'm going to adjust this thumb ever so slightly. So it's a little more of an angle like that. Now what we're going to do is add a bevel modifier. And you'll see here that it's going to completely envelop our object, and that's because the bevels too big. So we just need to set this to something really small. I'm going to do 0.01, and I'm going to up it up to two segments. Now that's giving us a nice little kind of mechanical looking hand. I'm going to press Ford slash so I can see my entire object again. Now, at this point, we have everything but the ears. And before we move on to the ears, let me turn off the reference collection here. Currently, our arm and our hands are missing a mirror modifier. So if you like, now would be a good time to go and add those your objects. Just mirror them over the body. And finally, let's make the ears. Now, things are getting a bit messy, so I'm just going to turn off both the reference and the scene here. With this top seen collection selected, I'm going to hit Shift A and add a mesh and a plane. This is going to be flat in our front view, so I'm just going to hit R 90 X. That'll rotate at 90 degrees on the X axis, or you can open the end panel and type that in. I want to apply this rotation so I get control a apply rotation. Just like we've been doing with the scaling, that will zero out the rotation in its current position. Now I'm going to press the key to close that panel. Over here, we're going to use a new modifier. We're going to use the solidify modifier. Now, what the solidify modifier does is solidify the faces here. So you can see that it can make this thick or thin. Let's start with something like 0.05. Now we're going to tab in edit mode here, and essentially, we're going to draw our ear. So I'm going to scale everything down here by pressing the S key and move this up so that it is zeroed out on the origin, just like. This ear, we're going to create almost like a rabbit ear. So we will grab these two points here, press E or use the extrude tool, and move up on the Z axis there. Now I'm going to use the scale Gizmo and just scale these out ever so slightly. Grab the move gizmo here and move this forward. This kind of gives us almost a robotic rabbit ear. On the side view, if you want here, you can actually angle this off to the side a bit and give it a little bit more shape. We can actually stack modifiers here. So if I were to search and stack a bevel modifier here, you can see that that would actually round out the ear. I'm going to add two segments, and then I'm going to lower this to something like 0.005, and that just gives us a nice rounded edge. I'm going to tab back out into object mode here, because we kept this origin point down here, now wherever we rotate our ear, we can rotate around that base point of the ear. So let's turn back on our scene here. I'm going to put my robot back in here, and I want the ear to be located right here. So I'm going to rotate around here, grab the ear here, tab into edit mode, switch to face mode here, grab this face, and then we're going to snap the cursor to there. So if you hold shifts, you will get all these options, and we want to snap the cursor to the selected. Perfect. Now we have the cursor here. Let's tab back out an object mode. Let's grab this ear, let's hold Shift S, and now we want to snap this selection we have to the cursor. Nice. Now the origin point of our ear is centered around the ear circle that we have here. I'm going to snap back here into front view. Then what you can do is begin rotating and playing with the ear in the position. You can make these ears look however you want. I'm going to scale mine up a bit there, and then I'm going to snap to the top view here, rotate those ears back, move this around a bit, and I'm going to snap back to front view here. I want those ears to be standing up a bit. So in the side view, I'm going to grab this kind of rotate up just like that. I actually want the ears to bend the other way, and thanks to our setup, that's super easy. I'm going to tab into Edit mode here. I'm going to switch to edge selection here and grab this ear edge. Now I'm going to switch this to normal, and what that will do is snap the gizmo here to the normal. So I'm going to just grab the Z key there and just drag this out. Now you can see I'm starting to get a similar ear shape to what I have in our example. Feel free to keep playing with this until you get a shape that you like. I don't want my ears to be too large, so I'm going to scale those down. But I think this is looking nice. Feel free to keep playing with these. You might also want to make sure that you switch this back to global or local. Otherwise, it might be a bit confusing when you grab objects later. I'm going to add a mirror modifier to this and choose the head as the center. And now we're ready to begin moving on to detailing our object. 7. Detailing our Robot: That we've laid out the basic shapes and proportions of our model, let's go ahead and begin adding our details, which is where the real character comes in. First, let's add some bolts to our character. You see here that I have bolts on the front and the back on the side of the feet. We can actually just cheat and use these ears. They'll work fine just as bolts. So let's grab the ears here, hit shifty, drag this out. Now, we want to rotate these 90 degrees, so we can also just zero out the 90 there, and we're going to add 90 here. Now, I want to apply that rotation, so I'm going to apply rotation. I'm going to drag this over into the front view, so it matches here and just scale this down. Then in the side view here, I'm going to bring this out. I'm going to rotate this so it matches the angle of the panel, just like that. I'd also like some on the back. So I'll hit Shift D, duplicate there, rotate that around, and just move that into position, just like that. I also want it on the inside of the feet. So I'm going to hit Shift D drag down here and move this into position on the side of our feet. Now, if we want to reset the rotation, we can zero this out or hold all R, and that will reset the rotation completely. I'm going to snap in the top view here and rotate from this angle here, bring it into the side of the legs. Now I just need to make sure I rotate around a C. Now, when you're rotating around your viewport, it won't always rotate around your selection. You can fix that by pressing the period key on your numpad or on the right side of your keyboard. And what that will do is zoom you in on your selection and make you rotate around it. So I'm just going to drag this and move it inside the ankle there. Now we have some simple bolts on our characters. Next let's take a look at how we can create these cutout panels. And for now, I'm going to turn off the reference, and I'm going to turn off the X ray mode. Then I'm going to snap back out into the front mode here and get both of my viewports set up. So if you haven't, I would recommend that you save a new version, and you can do that by save incremental. What that will do is take your project file and save it with an additional number at the end. So here it's saved as file one. Now we can revert back if we need to. So up until this point, we've been working with modifiers, boxes, subdivisions, and more. We've also been placing our objects in random. Now I have the objects I want in space, and I want to work with this geometry, not just a box. So we're going to apply all the modifiers at once. I'm going to show you a really simple trick to do that. We're going to click and drag and select everything. Then we're going to use our search function, and we're going to look for Convert two. You can also find this up in the object menu as well down here under Convert and select here. I'm going to select to mesh. What that does is convert everything, including the modifiers into a mesh. Now, if I click my objects, you see my modifiers are gone, and if I tab into Edit mode here, now I can work with all this geometry, which is exactly what we want. The other thing that our object looks really flat, and that's because it's low poly. Well, if we right click here, we can change the shading. Right now, it's set to flat. If I right, click everything and shade smooth, it'll smooth everything out. You can see we get some weird looks here. If I undo that, it's because there's not really much geometry there to smooth out. It doesn't know what to do, which is why we have the option to auto smooth. What that will do is smooth everything based on a degree. So any angle above 30 degrees or below 30 degrees will be smoothed out. You can go ahead and change this option if you'd like a different look. But for now, I'm going to leave it as is. Now that everything's smoothed out, we can actually take advantage of a function and Blender, allowing us to sharpen specific areas. So if I tap into Edit mode here and select an edge loop and go to edge, mark sharp, and then tab back out into object mode, that edge will be sharp no matter what. I'm going to undo. Going to use this to our advantage to create some panels. Let's start with the joints first. Now, we're going to use a couple modifiers, but this is a fun trick you can use when adding insets to panels. We're going to come to the joint here, grab a modifier here, we're going to search for a modifier called Edge split. What this is going to do is split edges based off of an angle. But we don't want that. We just want it based off sharp edges. So go ahead and check this. Now our object will be split wherever we have a sharp edge, which we can add manually, as you just saw. So let's go in here and add one. I'm going to tab into Edit mode here, deselect everything. Make sure I'm in edge mode here. I'm going to Alt click and grab both of these edge loops. It should wrap all the way around just like that. Now I'm going to mark these as sharp. Remember, you can do that up here under Control E, or you can use a search function and look for mark sharp just like that. Now if I tab back out into object mode, you can see that we have a line here and it's been split. So let's take advantage of that split. Now I'm going to add a solidify modifier. Going to search for solidify, and the order of these modifiers matters. They will stack on top of each other. So we want the solidify modifier to be under the edge split. I'm going to set my thickness to something like 0.05 for now. We can always adjust this later if we want. Now we're going to bevel. And what's going to happen is that because we have a split here and an object beveled, it's going to bevel along that edge and create an indent. Let me show you. I'm going to search for a bevel and add that there. Now you can see we're getting a nice line there, because as far as blenders concerned, these are two separate objects, and this has a wall in between. Now, you can change the size of this bevel or add segments if you like. I'm going to leave mine simple and just add two segments like that. Now let's do the same thing to our shoulder joint. But we don't want to add all these modifiers again. That's kind of tedious. So what we're going to do is grab this shoulder joint here, grab this one with Shift click, make sure this is bright orange, hit Control Evel, and what we can do is copy modifiers from one to the other. So now I'm going to copy modifiers to that shoulder. If I deselect those and grab just the shoulder, you can see all the same modifiers are here. So now if I tab into Edit mode, grab and edge loop here, mark those as sharp, you see that I have also created some lines. Perfect. Now, you can change the size and shape of these by adjusting the solidify, and that will make it bigger by making it more solid. I'm happy with it as is, so I'm going to leave mine at that size. Let's do the same thing to the ears. I'm going to grab the ears, grab the shoulder joint, hit Control L, copy those modifiers, and then I'm going to add an edge loop in here. I'm going to do this edge here and this edge here. Go to mark those as sharp and pop out. And now you can see we're getting nice little robotic lines over our character. Again, let's do this to the head. Let's grab the head. Let's grab this ear, hit Control L, copy modifiers. And then I'm going to add one edge loop around here, and that'll almost make it look like he has a little mouth. Now, let's do the same thing to the body. But this is going to take a few extra steps. So let's grab this here, grab the head, hit Control L, copy those modifiers. And now we have those here. I'd like to do a panel here in the center. So let's add an edge loop. I'll hit Control R. You see, immediately we run into an issue because we have this giant engon in the middle. We can't do an edge loop around the whole character. In this case, we're actually going to use the knife tool. So I'm going to press K, and then I'm going to press C. That's going to activate the cut through. And I also want to lock it onto an angle. So I'm going to turn the angle constraint on, click here, move across, click again and hit Enter. Now, what that I'll do is add in line around the entire object. Just like that, it cut through. Now we will repeat the same process. So press K or selected over here. Press C and A, click through there and hit Enter. We have edge loops here that we can work with. Now again, let's do that two more times, but this time from the top to the bottom. So again, that's K, A, C, click, drag down, Enter. Same thing. K, A C, click, drag down, it Enter. Now in the edge mode, if we click, we have an edge loop that wraps all the way around that we can select. But if I try and move this up and down, you can see that it's going to alter the shape of our character. This is where we can use the slide function. So you press G to move, but if you double tap G again, it instead will try and maintain the shape of your object. So what you can do now is grab these edge loops here and get them into the shape that you're happy with. So I'm just going to do these here so that I have a rectangle kind of in the center of the chest. Now in Edit mode here, we can grab this face and face select mode, search for Mark Sharp again, which is there in my recent. I'm going to tag back out into object mode here. I'd like this to be a little bit more prominent since it's more important on the chest. So I'm going to come to the solidify modifier here, and you can play this moving this up or down. If I move this down to a really tiny kind of value there, see how it gets ever so slightly bigger there. Then I'm going to move this up and play with the bevel option here. You can see on the bevel here that we're getting a sharp line there. Now, if we twirl down the geometry on the bevel, we have options to play with how it connects the corners here. By default, it's at the sharp, which is giving us that sharp edge. I'm going to switch this to patch, which will give us a rounded edge. However, you see that because we have these kind of ugly geometry here on the outside, it's creating some shading hardifacts. Well, they have a solution for that built in. We'll come down here to shading. Click on hard and normals, and that should fix that. Just like that, we have a little panel on our character. Now, it's worth noting, if you rotate out, you might notice how it's trying to add a bevel to everything. Can just change the limit method here of the angle. Right now it's set to 30. We can set this to something higher like 75, and then it will only bevel the angles here that are sharp 90 degree angles. Now let's check our model and see if it's good to subdivide because we've created a low polity model. When we go to the final renders, we'll add a subdivision on top to smooth out rough edges like around these eyes. Well, I'm going to grab everything at once here and hit Control one. Most things look okay, but we can see we're getting a few artifacts, for example, around the body here and in the eyes here. Let's fix these eyes first. Let's tab into edit mode here, and I'm going to press fdlash to zoom in on that eye. First of all, we can see here that the back of our object is broken, and we're getting this ugly shading artifact here. If I come over here to the subdivision and click this on, we can actually see what the subdivision is doing in edit mode, and you can see it's creating this really ugly GOD. For the back one here, we can switch to face select mode, press X, and delete that face. We don't even need that face, and by deleting that, we maintain our shape with the subdivision. We need to fill our e. So how can we fix this? Well, I'm actually going to turn the subdivision off here so we can see our initial thing. We can actually add a bevel here, and it will solve this issue. So I'm going to switch to edge selection mode here. Click, I'll click here, hit Control B and add a bevel. But remember, we have this eye here and we're no longer in mirror mode. So let's grab this base as well, and we're going to hit Control B, add a very tiny bevel there. Likewise, let's also grab the edge loop around this edge as well and over here, too. Let's hit Control B. Just add a tiny bevel. If we tab back out in the object mode, we can see here that we've cleaned up the ugly artifacts inside. So I'm going to press forward again Return to My model. We can see that we're having some issues on our body here, so let's fix that next. So to understand why we have this problem, let's take a look one piece at a time. If I turn off the beple up here that is holding it in place, we can see that what's actually happening is that it is trying to turn our limited geometry in here into a circle. If you remember before, we can just go ahead and turn up the mean crease so it doesn't affect those lines. So I'm going to turn that up to one with that face selected. When I turn everything back on, our panel is restored to normal. Now we're ready to join our objects into one. But I'd actually like to apply these dents before joining them. But if you recall, we added a subdivision to everything. So if we apply everything now with our convert to mesh method, everything on the subdivide will also apply and we'll get really dense geometry, which isn't what we want. But here's a simple little trick. We'll grab everything, we'll hit Control zero, and that'll essentially nullify the subdivision surface. So now we can grab everything again and use the same method we had before, which is go to object, convert, mesh. Now all of our modifiers are applied, and we can join them all into one object. I'm just going to press A to select everything and pick a random object, maybe the head. Now we're going to do the join operation. You can do this by Control J. You can search for join, or you can find it up here under the object menu. Now everything is one object, and we can apply a subdivision surface modifier. I'm going to hit Control one, and now everything is applied to one object here. I'm also going to hit right click, shade Auto Smooth, change the angle here to 60, and now we have our final little robot character. But I want to show you one way we can actually clean up the geometry a bit. We're going to tap into Edit mode. Generally, what we want is even topology. So the head here is a good example of how the head, the eyes, and the ears all look pretty even. Now, certain things like the body, the hands, or the ears are not going to have as much quads just because they're large flat surfaces. And that's okay. However, certain things here, like the feet, the arms, or the legs seem that they have too many faces, and we can actually reduce those and get better topology overall. I'm actually going to combine these windows. I'm just going to drag this over here and show you how we can do this. Now, if you recall, we can click to select edge loops. And if we click an edge loop there and press X, we can do this thing called Dissolve edges. What it'll do is try and dissolve that edge loop without altering the rest of the geometry. And you can see here that dissolving that edge loop had zero effect on the shape of the object, which means that that edge loop was not necessary. This is actually pretty common when working with box as we add edge loops, what it does is add a bunch of unnecessary geometry. Now in edit mode here, turn on the subdivision over here. And what I recommend you do is go through your object and try and remove as many edge loops as you can without altering the shape of your object. What you're aiming for are good, clean, almost square like edges that move evenly across the surface. Now, in certain areas where things are tighter, you will need more edge loops. But as you can see here, I can already delete a ton of geometry and not affect the shape at all. So we want this object to be as low poly as we can without affecting the shape. This ensures that it'll be as performant as possible. Now, I'm not going to show this entire process because it can take a very long time. However, just move around your object and experiment with what edge loops you can delete and try and reduce the geometry overall. I would leave the body, the head, and the ears alone. I would focus on just the arms and the legs. Those are really the only ones that are a bit denser, just by the way that we modeled them. Now, if you'd like to continue the class series, I'll walk you through how to texture, rig, animate, and light this character, as well. 8. Modeling - Outro: Congratulations. From here, I'd say it only gets easier. Now, with the tools and techniques you've learned in this video, you have the capabilities to go and model your own original designs. I'd love to see what you come up with, so please share those along the way as you complete them. Now, if this class was hard to get through, don't be discouraged. Modeling itself is an art form, and every artist models in a different way. So as you create more models, you will learn tools and techniques that work for you and your design specifically. So just get out there and practice more with what you've learned in this class, and I promise it'll get easier as you go and it'll become a lot more fun. I recommend checking out the rest of the series where we'll walk through texturing, lighting, rendering, animation, and more. All this on your path from moving from a Blender beginner to a Blender professional that can work in the industry.