Blender Essentials - 3D Modelling Training Course

1. Introduction to Blender 3D Essentials: Hi there. My name is Dan Scott. And in this blender Essentials course, I've enlisted the help of good friend and master animator Robin Rudd. Now, we've worked hard together to make sure this is up to the same, bring your own laptop standards you're used to. So get ready, jump in and enjoy Blender Essentials with Robin Rudd. Hello. I am a three D model of Robin made using the very techniques you'll learn this course. Modeling, texturing and animation. Welcome to Blender three D Essentials. We are going to open Blender together for the first time, and it's going to feel like the cockpit of an alien spaceship. That's at least how it felt to me when I first got into three D, but don't worry, I got your back. My name is Robin and I am a three D designer and animator, specializing in three D for graphic design. My software of choice is Blender, which sounds weird because it's a free software, but don't let the price fool you. This is the best three D software I've ever used. Can do almost everything from charts to Hollywood VFX, but I've been told we don't have 1,000 hours for this course, so I paired down to the designer essentials. Like, no fighter jets, no castles, we'll be making stuff that is useful in design. And there are projects throughout the course where you can practice what you're learning and get some nice portfolio pieces as well, and everyone gets their own unique brief so that your projects will look distinct from everyone else who is taking the course. Start with a tour around Blenders unique user interface, and then we'll make a three D bottle. You'll learn how to make three D shapes and make them look like glass. You'll learn how to make three D characters and how to animate them. We look at rendering, which is how you make images, and I'll show you techniques of how to wrap a design around a three D model. The course is for anyone who felt intimidated by three D, maybe you're a graphic designer or motion graphics artist. You just curious about how people make those three D graphics. Whatever brought you here, you will learn all the foundations to make just about anything in three D, and we will take it step by step. So let's get into it. What do you say, Tiny Robin? Huh? Well, you have the sign off. No, I have the intro. You did the sign off. I'll see you in the first. Started with you. Of course. Smooth. 2. Getting Started with Blender: Okay, you're in the course. This is it. I just a moment, we're going to start to learn Blender or you're going to start to learn Blender. I'm going to teach you. I think you're going to be surprised by how capable this software is because, well, if you've noticed the price tag, it's free software. But I'm not being hyperbolic when I say it is actually the most capable general three D software that I've used. And how's that possible from free software? It's a whole thing. It has we have many parties. It's the Blender Foundation, which is supported by donations from you and me, but also from, like, big corporations. And they big corporations, they like Blender being just this central hub to build around. And so, companies like, I think it's Invidia is one of the biggest sponsors, I think Meta and Google, as well, a bunch of huge companies. And this is what's keeping Blender afloat or more than afloat, actually, it's growing. Like, it is growing really fast as a foundation, as a community, as a software. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in just a few years, I think blenders going to be industry standard for most three D work. That might come back to bite me. That doesn't happen. No, I think it will. So all that to say, I think you did the right choice in starting to learn blender, but I'm done blabbering. Let's get into the course. First things first, you got to download Blender. So I am onblender.org, and at the moment of recording, we are on Blender version 4.3. But I wouldn't be surprised if that number's gone up by the time you come here. They come out with a major update. It feels like every other month or so. So you'll press the big download button, and it's detected that I'm on a Windows system. It'll probably detect yours, too, but you'll find all versions down here in the dropdown. So just press the download button. So while that's downloading, also go ahead and download the exercise files that come with a course. You'll find the download link somewhere on this website. I don't know the layout of the side. You'll find them. And also remember that you can change the speed at which I talk using the cog wheel, which is in the corner on one of these sides of the video player. Some people think I speak fast. Some people think I speak slow. You know, tune me to your liking. Be wary. If you go too low, I'll sound drunk. All right. When it's downloaded, just install blender like you would any other software on your computer, and the first time you open it, it should look something like this. You may get a window asking you to configure some settings, just press Okay. The defaults are completely fine, and then you'll be here. You'll see a splash screen in the middle and the rest of the program around it. So just click somewhere in the three D viewport to dismiss the slash screen and welcome to Blender. Alright, a little bit of setup before we start. Let's go up here to the edit menu and down to preferences. And under the interface tab on the left, we have the resolution scale. When I click and drag that, that scales up the entire program. Very useful for larger screens. Maybe you want to shrink it down. I'll set mine to 1.5, I think will be a comfortable size for reading. I'll enclose that. The only difference you should see between your interface and mine is down here in the left hand corner. This little mouse icon. This is for showing you what I'm clicking with my mouse. So when I left click, you'll see the left button light up. When I click my scroll wheel, that lights up. If you're on a Mac, that might be a bit of a confusing thing. I'll get back to that in a moment, but it will also show my keyboard presses. So if I click B, you can see B shows up here. I'll right click to cancel that. C, that shows up. And if I hold down Shift, you see that button, and if I press A, you'll see, Oh, I press Shift A, I'll try not to obscure it with the menus like I did just then. I'm on a Windows computer, so when IPress Control, that'll show up as control slash Command. If you're on a Mac, you press Command when IPress Control. And when I press Alt, Mac users press Option. So Control A for you on a Mac would be Command A. Okay, if you are on a Mac and you use a Mac mouse, you we probably confused. Back when I said I clicked my scroll wheel. Mac Mice typically don't have a clickable scroll wheel. And this also goes for, say you brought your own laptop and you're using a touchpad. Well, so if you're serious about three D, you should probably get a three button mouse. But if you find yourself without one, here's what you do. You go back to edit and preferences, and down in the input tab, you have a button to emulate a three button mouse. And while we're here, go ahead and check if your keyboard has a number pad on the right hand side. That's this grid of numbers. If you don't have that grid, then go up here to emulate Numpad as well. That way, when I press, say one on my Numpad, you just press the number one wherever it is on your keyboard. And that should be it in terms of setup. I think we're ready to start using this program. 3. Blender Overview: Program can make VFX for Hollywood and worlds for video games. And that's why there are a lot of buttons. But you don't need to know all of them to make things that are useful in design. In fact, you're going to be using the same 5% over and over again throughout your career. And those are the 5% we'll focus on in this course. D is very different from other tools, and it's a lot to take in. Like, there aren't a lot of familiar looking buttons or icons in here, and I get it. It can be overwhelming. But I promise you, it is very much possible to learn by yourself online. That's how I learned it. This video is going to be just an overview of the software. I'm just going to show you around to the different areas that we're going to be visiting over and over again later on. We're not going into depth on anything. No need to take notes just yet. I just want to give you a sense of the context, where are the different things so that when we later go into depth on each part, you have a bit of an idea of how it plugs into the general whole. Just sit back for now, let me show you around. So, welcome to the world of three D. First of, how do you move in three D? Well, to turn around your center, you'll press down on the middle mouse button and drag. Remember, I have a little icon down here and you'll see when I press the middle mouse button. I actually, it turns off when I start moving. I think that's a little bug. I'm still holding it down. If you use a Mac mouse, you'll just use the touch sensor like this to move around. And if you're on a laptop touchpad, you'll press down with two fingers and just move around like this. Also it's called a track ball up here on the right hand corner. If you press that and drag, you'll also orbit around orbiting is what this is called. Second, we have zooming and I'll just scroll in and out on my scroll wheel that does that and you'll scroll however you do on your system. Also, there's this button over here under the trackball, which is a magnifying glass. The way to use it is you click down on it, hold it down the click, and then just move up or down. That'll zoom in and out. Then we have panning. Which you do by holding down shift while clicking the middle mouse button or the way I showed you how to orbit around on your system. And there's also this hand button which you use the same way you click down on it and you drag, and then you can move side to side and up and down. That's how you move your camera orbit around with a middle mouse button, shift middle mouse button pans and scrolling Zooms. But how do you move the object in the scene? Well, let's click it with a left click and we can go to the tool bar to the left here. This one, this is a move tool with the four arrows. We'll click that and a gizmo appears. This is a gizmo. If we either of the arrows on it and drag, we can move it around in three D space. You can also click the little planes between the arrows, and that'll allow you to move it on the plane of those two axis. So right now I'm moving it on the red and blue axis at the same time. And you can also click in the middle of the Gizmo and that'll move it free hand from the camera's perspective. The next tool is the rotate tool that will give you a different kind of gizmo. And if you move your mouse over any of these circles, it'll highlight that circle, and that'll allow you to rotate on that axis. If you hold down Control, even snap to I think it is ten degree increments, if you want to be precise about it. And if you just click in the middle of the ball, you can free hand rotate it. If you're unhappy with your rotation, you can like most softwares control or command Z to undo and you can do that as many times as you want. The next tool is the scale tool, the scale tool will stretch out your object. You get another gizmo and you can stretch it out on either one axis at a time or uniformly from the center or on each plane, which will stretch it out two axis. And this final tool, this is a combination of all the other different tools. If you don't want to go over here and click each one each time, you have the move, you have the rotate and you have the scale all in one. I don't want to, I want something more exciting. How do I delete it? You delete it by pressing Delete on your keyboard. And how to add something new? Well, that is in the ad menu up here. If we click that, we get all the things we can add to our three D world. And a lot of these things you're never going to use. And most of the things you're going to use are under the first menu called mesh. A mesh is a three D object. So whenever you want a three D object, you'll add a mesh. So let's go for, say, a cylinder, and you can add as many objects as you want. Let's go back to AdMnu and yeah, let's do the funniest one. Let's do the monkey. And we can go to the move tool and we can move the monkey on top of the cylinder. Maybe we'll use the rotate tool to make it look like it's kind of resting on the cylinder. Turn it around back to the move tool. I'll move it down a little bit until it feels like it's resting on there. Maybe I want to scale this out so it's more like a platform. Scale it on this plane that'll only scale it in the two horizontal directions and not on the vertical one to just flatten it up. Now we have a little platform for it, but you'll notice it's all gray gray is boring. So let's add some color to it. Where do we do that? That is in this window. This window has a lot of tabs. We'll visit a few of them. The one dedicated to color is the bottom one, the materialtab. So we'll go here, and with one of the objects selected, we'll click New, which adds a material to that object. And the material has a bunch of settings, but the most important one is this one, the base color. So let's give it a I guess, like a kind of teal, nice teal looking color for no particular reason, but we can't see it in the three D viewport. What gives? The reason is by default, the three D viewpoard only shows everything in gray, which is very useful for understanding three D shapes without being distracted by color. But we have different view modes, and those are all up here, the four little balls in the corner. The first ball, this is the wireframe ball. If we click that, we view our three D in wireframe mode, and we can see through our objects, very useful. The next one that's the gray mode, which we were just in. The next one after that, this is the material preview mode. When you click that, your system might choke for a little bit. Like, it's not unusual that it'll lag for, I don't know, ten to 15 seconds while it's just loading everything it needs into your system. That'll probably only happen the first time, though. And with this selected, we can see the nice color on our object. And we can go to the monkey and we can add material to that as well. Now in this window, there's no material here, so we'll click new. And this material, we can make it a little we can make it like dark brown. I feel like maybe desaturated a little, make it a monkey color. And the final view mode up here, this is the rendered view. When we click that, we still see color, but we also see lighting information. We see a shadow, and we see highlights, and those are dependent on the lights in our scene. And we do have a light object. Can't see it right now. That's because it's out of view, but we know that we have one because it is in the scene outliner on the right. This is a list of all of our objects. And if we press this light, we have now selected the light, and we can now zoom out until we see that we have the light selected here. Let's go to the move tool and move that light over and you'll see the shadows and lighting information react to that. So I can move it a little closer, make it a bit brighter and get a nice reembrand lighting on the monkey. This fine art we are doing here on bring your own laptop. So let's say that we are super happy with what we just did and we want to take a picture of this monkey. Let's zoom in and taking a picture in three D, that is called rendering. And we go to the render menu up here to do it. Now, don't be confused. There is a rendering button here too. This is a workspace. If we click this, then it'll change the entire workspace to be something different. That's not what we want. Let's go back to layout where we were, and this is the button you want, render on the left. So we click Render and we click Render Image. It does it. We do get an image, but it's from the wrong view, and that is because blender does not render from your current view, it renders from a camera object, which we also have in scene. You'll see it in the outliner. Click that and zoom out. We can see there's our camera. This is the angle that it was taking the picture from, so we can move this over to where we want it. We can move it down a little bit, maybe rotate it back to, got to watch out, not to click on the frame of the camera, that changes the focal length. I'll undo that and just click the Gizmo, make sure to do that. It at the monkey, and then go back to render and render image. This is a very difficult way to get the framing you want because you can't preview it before going to render, right? So the way most three D artists prefer to set the camera position is to look through the camera and move around. To do that, we go to the camera button over here on the right. You click that and you go into the camera. But you'll notice if you start moving around, you'll exit the camera right away. So there's a secret little button that I personally think should be more prominent to get the camera to follow you around. Let's click the camera again and press this tiny little arrow up here to the right of the track ball, which will open a new menu. Here, there are a bunch of uninteresting things. Don't worry about it, but go down here to view, and there's a view lock option, and we can lock camera to view. I know this is too hidden, but now you know where it is. And now, if I orbit around our monkey by pressing on the scroll wheel, the camera will follow me. So I can I can zoom it in and get a nice looking composition on the monkey and then uncheck camera to view so that I can go out of the camera again and go to the render Menu render Image. And now it renders from that point of view. If I'm happy with this and I want to save this picture, then I go to image inside of this render view window. I go to Image, save as, and I can save it somewhere on my computer as any type of picture like a PNG, a JPEG, even things you've never heard of like I go Targa, you probably haven't used unless you worked in three D in the 90s. And crucially, clicking this button is separate from saving your project file. If you want to save this scene file and go back to it and work on it later, you have to go to File, Save As, and that'll let you save a dot blend file which you can open later to keep working. Let's close this little menu here by clicking on the edge of it. When our cursor becomes a little arrow, we can drag it and just drag it all the way to the right until it disappears, and that's it for the quick overview. Now you know basically every step of the three D workflow, and what we'll do next is just go into detail on each one. 4. Your Design Brief: This is random project generator.com. The point of this site is to generate a random brief for everyone who's taking this course so that when you follow along with the projects, you don't end up making the exact same thing as everyone else. Everyone gets a slightly unique brief, although there are commonalities, and when you follow along with the course, you'll make something that doesn't look conspicuous in your portfolio. So for this course, let's click on Blender Essentials here and click Generate My Project. And I got an industrial and edgy chili oil brand. So again, yours will be different from mine, although yours will also be a liquid that's in a bottle so that we make kind of the same product. But if you're not happy with what you got, you can go down here and click Retry, although you're not allowed to click it more than three times, okay? So let's read mine. You've been hired by Daniels, a new chili oil brand with a Hmm. Guys, we got to amend this with an industrial and edgy style. As the resident three D artist, it is your job to help define the visual aesthetic and shape language of the product. The shape language, that's basically what do three D shapes of this brand look like? The same way you might make a color palette, three D artist might design a shape language. The client wants you to have full creative freedom. They'll need your help with social media content, the bottles design, and the packaging. Additionally, they're looking for a three D mascot to represent Daniels and an animation for advertising purposes. So I'm happy with this, and I'll click Download as PNG, and this will be the project brief for all my projects going forward. 5. Tour of the Interface: Let's talk about the user interface and a little more detail. I'm now in a new file and I got here by clicking File New in general. That opens a brand new file. And this window is where we have spent most of our time. This is called the three D viewport. This is where we do all of our three D work. Down here, there's another window. This is the timeline, and I can play it by clicking Play, and the playhead will play through, and you'll see your animation if you have any. We don't, so it's very boring now. I can drag that back to the start. And by the way, I know it's a lot when I'm going over it without context like this, but I just want to give you a general overview. Don't worry about the details. We're going to come back to all of these buttons later on. I'm going to familiarize you with what all of them do. But for now, it's fine to just sit back and try to take it in as best you can. Top right here, we have our Scene outliner. Outliner is a list of all the objects in your scene, and it's great for organizing things. You can organize things by adding new collections as well. There's a new collection button on the top right. When you click that, you get this box that you can double click to rename, and I'll call this say Lights, and I can click this light and drag it into the lights. It works like a folder. Under the outliner, there's the properties window, and you can resize any window by clicking between them when your cursor becomes a two pointed arrow and you can resize them anyway you want. This window down here, this is the properties window, and it has a bunch of different tabs. The top tab, this is the render tab. These are all the settings for rendering, which if you remember, that is how we made an image. So when it makes an image, it will use all of these settings to do it. And that is the output tab. This is where you change things like the resolution of your output image and the frame rate of your animation, things like that. And then we can skip down to this is the scene. And in scene, what's useful here is to change the units. I like using the defaults, which is metric and meters. That's what I enjoy. But I've heard some of you guys out there enjoy imperial units, and I won't judge. The next step after that, that's the world tab. This is where we change. Well, the world world What's the world? The world is everything that's around our three D objects. It's like infinitely far away. And we can see it if we go into rendered view. Remember, up here, the four balls, you can change the way you view your three D world. If you click the rightmost one, we view it with lighting information. The moment, it's very gray. Your light may be more powerful than mine. But if we go to the World tab and we change the color of the world, then we can change the way it's lit. So now everything is blue and the box is lit with blue from every side. And bring that back to something like a dark gray and turn on the gray viewpard mode. Let's skip over the next tab which is not very useful. You know what? We can skip over this one too and this for now and this you won't use, this you won't use, not in the course of this course. Can you say that the course of the course? Not this, not this, but all the way down here, we have the materials. This tab is only available if you have a mesh selected. If you click on a light, you'll see that changes and it becomes a light icon. This is context dependent. So if I click a mesh and I click the materials tab, this is where we give our objects color and shading information. But when I click a light, it becomes a light tab, and that's where I change the power of my light, the color of my light. If I click the camera, then it becomes a camera tab, and I can use it to change the focal length of the camera stuff like this. And this is the default workspace. Something that does make blenders user interface a little unique is that the workspace is very malleable. It's easy to add and remove windows, and that can be very useful. For instance, maybe we want to be able to see our three D scenes from two angles at the same time. What you'll do is you'll go to one of the edges of the windows, say, the top edge, right click and you can split it. Let's do a vertical split. Now when I move around, I can move the split and click to confirm it. And now I get 23d view ports. Do the same thing by moving the mouse to the corner until it becomes a radical and then click and drag into the window and that'll do the same thing. I can split that into as well. Maybe I want to use this top window to see my three D scene from the top. I can go over to the track ball on the right and click the top pointing arrow, the blue one that says Z. If I click that, then I'm viewing it from the top. This bottom one maybe I want to view that from X. I'll click X. Now I have three separate views of my three D scenes from different angles. This can be very useful. But you can also change the type of window that this is. The type of window that is on the top left, it's this little drop down here. And you'll see this is different between this window and this window because this has the outliner icon, and this has a three D viewport icon. But it doesn't have to be. I can click this and you'll get a lot of different options. There are so many types of windows, but we'll only use about I don't know, like five of them, and we already know most of them. This is the three D viewport. And over here we have the timeline, which is the same as below. There's the outliner and the properties window. Those are the ones we already have open. And if I click the outliner, now this window becomes an outliner, too. So you can really start to screw things up. And I mean that. That's what happens to me all the time. I make a mess of this whole window, and I just want to get back to the default. How do you do that? Well, the trick to do it is to check the workspaces up here. These are basically presets of windows. If you're doing animation, you may click the animation workspace, and this is what blender things are the windows you want open when you do animation. And you can add a new one by clicking plus over here, and let's add a new version of what we just had, which is a general layout. If we do that, then we get back to the default. And that is how to screw up your interface and fix it again. 6. What Are Polygons?: As is a little theory on how computers view three D objects. But for one, it's not boring and for the other, you're not allowed to skip it. We'll be very quick, but this is extremely important to understand for the future of our work in three D. To demonstrate it, I'll just delete everything that's in the default file and add a new object. Remember, adding is up here in the ad menu under mesh, we get all our meshes. And for this example, let's use a UV sphere. We get a sphere, but you'll notice it's not a smooth sphere. It's a sphere with a bunch of little squares. And why is that? The reason for that is a computer cannot in three D, show curves. Curves are basically impossible. The computer only understands straight lines, and the way to fake a curve is to add just enough straight lines. When I add an object, I get a little menu down here on the left. Now it says add UVsphere because that's what I did. And I'll press the little arrow here to expand that menu, and I get settings for it. The settings I'm interested in now are the segments and rings. If I click the segments and I drag to the right, I'll increase the number of polygons. And you'll see the more I add, the closer it gets to looking smooth. At least on that axis, let's add some on the other axis as well. And you'll see I get closer and closer to the illusion that this is actually a perfect ball. But the problem is, the more of these polygons I add, the more taxing it is on my system. And if you get into the tens of thousands of polygons in a scene and you really quickly can when you start working with complex objects, then it's going to run very slow. Is the reason why video games in the early 2000 looked so jagged compared to today because you need more powerful computers to display more polygons. And not only that, but working with high poly objects. That's what we call it when there are many polygons. It's difficult to model with, it's difficult to texture. Everything's trickier with a lot of polygons, which is why there are ways to fake having a lot of polygons without actually having a lot of polygons. It's very common when you're new in three D to just want to add a bunch of them. But I want you to try and refrain from that, and I'll show you how. Let's reduce the polycunt again to something close to where we started to where it's very faceted. And not very high resolution. I'll right click on the ball and click Shade Smooth. I think this is so cool because the mesh hasn't changed. If I go into the wireframe view up here, the first ball, you'll see the polygons are still big, but there is a clever algorithm to just fake on the surface to fake having smoothness between them. You can probably tell from the silhouette that the silhouette isn't affected by it. The silhouette is still pointed, but on the surface, we have a fake version of that shading. I just think that's so cool. But you'll notice the menu down here now changed from Ad UV sphere to Shade Smooth because the menu only shows the last thing you just did. So you'll actually have to remember that when you add an object, you got to change the settings before you do anything else, or the settings will be gone. So let's delete this and add a new object, but going to add mesh, and I'll add a cone for this just to show you that if I right click this cone and shade smooth, this does not react in the way we really want because it tries to smooth out what is supposed to be sharp at the bottom here. Like this edge here is not supposed to be smoothed out, but it's still trying to smooth it out. And by the way, I'm drawing on screen by holding down D and clicking. It's not useful for you in any way, but it's very useful for me for teaching. So if you have an object that's supposed to have some smooth parts and some sharp parts, you right click and you click Shade Auto Smooth instead, which will try to maintain those sharp parts of the object. So if you take anything away from this video, just remember, try to have as few polygons as possible to define the shapes. 7. Other Types of Objects: Let's talk about some other object types. I'll delete everything that's default, selecting it and pressing Delete. And in the add menu here, you have a bunch of options. You have so many things that you can add. So let's try. First, I want to add an image because I have downloaded an image from online of a very sad looking dog that I really like, and I want to put it in my three D scene. The way to put it in your three D scene is not to import it as a reference, and it's not to import it as a background. It is to import it as a mesh plane. That will give you a three D object of the image. I'll click that, which opens a file viewer, and I will go to the folder where I've downloaded this picture, click it and click Import Images as planes. And it's weird because the image looks gray and it's gray on both sides, but that's, of course, because we are in the wrong viewport mode. We got to go to material preview up in here, the third ball. And I'll just give you a little tip here. If this takes a long time to load, then chances are you haven't optimized the threads in your CPU. You need to increase the Max Shader compilation sub processes. And I know that sounds like a Star Trek term. Like, Captain, what are the Max Shader compilation subprocesses at now? It is critical. But no, it basically means just Google your computer and Google the number of threads that your CPU has and put that number in the edit preferences. Go to system, and here under memory and limits, the bottom one Max Shader compilation subprocesses. My CPU has 12 threads. I'll put that in there. That just means that whenever I click the material preview button, it'll be 12 times as fast. Alright, this is a nice dog. I'll go to the rotate tool and rotate it on the x axis, and I'll hold down Control to snap it so that I can get it straight vertical. And if I want to take a picture of this, then I'll need a camera, and I deleted the initial camera that was here, so I'll just add a new one going to add camera. And we can see the camera because it's added in the middle, and we can see it. It's now behind the picture. So I'll go to the move tool. And move it over so that it can look at the picture. And do you remember how we look through the camera? We go to the camera button on the right to look through it. We click the tiny little arrow above it and go to camera to view. And now when we move around, the camera will follow us, so we can reframe the photo of the dog to like a worse framing than the original photographer had. And then I can click off camera to view and move out of the camera. And now if I click the render button and render image, it does render an image of the dog, but it's very dark. And the reason for that is we have not added a light yet. So let's go to the add menu, and I keep going back to the add menu and you will working in three D, you'll go to the Ad menu all the time, which is why it's very smart to learn the shortcut for it, and that is Shift A, A for AD. And that brings up the same menu just where your mouse is. So let's go to the light, and we have different lights to choose from. The most basic one that's just a point light. I'll click that. Hard to see. You'll see it did show up in the outline. We do have a point light, but it is in the center of the image. I'll move it out here and we can't really see the effect of the light and that is because we're viewing our scene in material preview mode and not in rendered mode, which doesn't take lighting into account. Let's go into rendered mode. Now we can see it. Now we can make a nice looking vignette on our image, make it brighter in the center and not around the edge. And I'll go back to Render and press Render Image, which gives me a nice reframing and worse lighting on the photo of the dog that I downloaded. We have a text object that's going to be very useful for you as a graphic designer, the text object, you edit it by pressing Tab when you have it selected, and then you can write whatever you want. And you'll find all the settings for that text in its context menu down here in the properties. There's a letter A, and that gives you settings for things like you have a font here. You can change the regular bold and italic font. You'll just click on the little folder icon, which will open your folder view, and you'll navigate to the folder where you have that font stored. And you can go to geometry here, and if you increase extrude, then that'll make the object into three D. So you have a bunch of different objects that you can add, but for the most part, the things we'll be adding are cameras, lights, and meshes, which are three D objects. 8. Class Project 01 - Collage: Hello, it's class project time. Class projects are not scary for one. They are a way to embody what you learn because you probably know this already, but you do actually learn a lot better if you use what you learn and don't just watch it. There's something about doing it that makes it stick in your brain a little bit better. So that's why we have class projects. They are for you to learn it a little bit better, and also as a bonus, you get something you can put in your portfolio right away. Find this document which contains all the class projects in the exercise files. So download those and follow along. If you haven't done so already, download Blender using this link and go to random project generator.com to get your unique brief. I already did this. I got the industrial and edgy chili oil brand, but you go get your own one. I'll use this project for the rest of the course, and you use whatever project you get. Our first project that's this. The collage project. You've been asked to make a three D collage of images to show the aesthetic of the brand. Download a few suitable images from the web and arrange them in three D, then render it out. The image will be used on social media. You can download free stock images from Unsplash or Pixaba. So what do I mean by collage? I'll show you what I did, actually. So this is my submission for this project. This is Daniel's Edgy and industrial chili oil brand. So, you know, I went online. I looked up at Chili, I looked up some industrial things, and I found this great Brazilian graffiti I used in the background. What I want you to practice here is putting things in three D space and lighting them. So you'll see there's a little bit of shadow below all of these. That's because I have a light above it, casting shadow, and you're also allowed to add text like I did, but that's definitely not a requirement. Speaking of requirements, there's only one. You have to use three or more images in the scene. As for deliverables, render your scene and export as a square PNG. That's to make it suitable for social media. And then when you're done, you upload it to the class project or assignment section on this website, the website where you're watching this video right now. And share it on your own social media. It's a good idea to share your work and show people how far you come in your three D work. And if you want, you can tag at Bring Your Own Laptop on Instagram and there's a link to the Facebook group and the LinkedIn group. So I'll give you a tip. This is something I did for this project is to open two separate three D windows and use one of the windows to look through the camera and the other window to move around the three D scene. And that way, you can adjust things in three D and see in real time how it looks from the camera's point of view. Look forward to seeing what you guys come up with, but you won't get any critical feedback at this stage. I'm not interested in critiquing your layouts and colors and stuff. I really just want you to get used to moving things around in three D, getting familiar with the blender user interface. That's what the point of this project is. 9. Adding Color and Materials: Materials, let's talk more about materials. I went to File New General, and now I'm in a brand new file. I'll add a material to this box. That is down here in the material tab. Remember, you won't see the material tab if you have the camera selected or the light selected. You need a mesh selected, then you have the materials tab down here and you can add a new material to the box. You change the color by clicking on the big field that is the color. Don't click on the little round icon, click on the actual color, then you'll get a color picker and I can make it red. The box doesn't become red right away because we're not in the right view mode. That is up here. We have to go to material preview, and then it becomes red. But it can be a little confusing to work with multiple materials. So let me just build up a scene here so you can see how to work with multiple materials. I'll delete the objects that I don't need. Move the box up a little bit, Shift A to add a mesh, and I'll add a plane. The plane is kind of tiny and it below the cube, so I'll scale it out a bit using the scale tool, and I'll click the blue square to scale it on the horizontal axis. Now I have a floor, and I'll add another object. Shift A under mesh. I'll add let's do a cone. The move tool and move it up here so we can see it on top of the floor and let's add one more object, and I can do the Taurus. We haven't used a Taurus yet. Move that over here. So, if I have the torus selected, the material is gone because the material only shows up here if I have the cube selected, the thing that has the material on it. But I can add the material to something else, too, if I go to the Taurus and I click the little dropdown menu next to new, and there's a list of all the materials in my scene. So I can click that material, and that applies it to that as well. And these two share the same material as in whatever change I make to the material on either object will propagate to the other one as well. If I now click on the cube and I change the color to blue, it changes the color to blue on the doughnut as well. And if I later want to unlink these, if I want to make them to separate materials, I got to go to the material here, and there's the number two. This signifies how many objects have this material applied to it. And if you just click that, that makes a duplicate material. Now if I click the drop down menu, I have two materials. And one of them is on the cube. One of them is on the doughnut. And if I change the color of the one, then it doesn't change on the other. And to keep things organized, it's a good idea to rename your materials. And you can do that either by double clicking here or clicking its name here, and this one can be called green, and this one can be called blue. And now, again, if I go to the cone and I go to the drop down and I give it the green material, those are now shared. So if I change it to red, it changes it on both objects. But color isn't the only setting you can change here. Are so many sliders to play with. These are the most important ones. You have even more in the rollouts down here, like a diffuse, you have subsurface. You can play with everything and see what it does. It's all fun to play with. I'll show you the most important ones. If I right click on the cone and click Shade Auto Smooth now it's smoothed out so we can tell that when I decrease the roughness, it becomes more shiny. If I increase metallic, then it becomes a metal. Almost everything in life has an IOR of 1.5. This is index of refraction. You'll generally not want to touch this, but you can touch the Alpha. When you decrease that, that adds transparency to the object. So go ahead look through all the sliders, play with them, and see what kind of effects you can make. 10. What Is Edit Mode?: So far, we've only moved our object around, but we haven't changed the shape of the object. I mean, we have gone to the scale tool and we scaled it out on different axes. But that doesn't change the fact that this is still a cubic shape. It can never become a bottle if we do this. So that is where edit mode comes in. We use edit mode to change the fundamental shape of the object. Is how we start modeling things. Let's go up here to the top left where it says Object mode. Click that, and that brings up all the other modes. Don't worry about these. The only one we're interested in is Edit mode. These are the ones, those are super niche uses, but edit mode will be going in and out in and out of 1 million times over this course, which is why there is a very handy and very easy keyboard shortcut for it. And that is tab. You press tab and things change. We're now in edit mode. The object becomes orange. We get a bunch more tools on the left, and now we're no longer working with the object as a whole. We're working with individual points. So now if I click a point, I go to the well known move tool, I move it up. That moves just that point. And this is what we do in edit mode. We change the shape of the object. And we can change the whole object at the same time if I press A on my keyboard, that selects everything, and I can scale, and I can scale it up. This is just as if I scaled it in object mode, right? No, it isn't. And this is a very key thing to understand, and it's so confusing. I'm sorry about this. I've been racking my brain trying to find out how to explain this. And I think I'll just show you the effect so you know what happens. Here's the deal. I'll undo everything. Go back to the cube. Here, this is just a demonstration. Don't worry about the things I'm doing. I'll teach you how to do all of this later on. This is just to show you a concept. I'll go to the Bevel tool. I'll click Edge. And I will drag this gizmo to bevel that corner. This is what beveling does. It flattens out the corner and leaves a 45 degree face there instead. Now, if I go out of edit mode, I press tab, and now in object mode, I move the whole object around. This is where we've done all our work up until now. And let's say I scale it on the blue axis just up and down. I scale it up. This is no longer 45 degrees because, you know, I scaled it, and now I go back into edit mode. I press tab. I select this corner and I bevel that. It no longer bevels at a 45 degree angle. It actually bevels at the same angle this is. And why is this? The reason is when I scaled it out in object mode, I didn't actually change the position of each point. I didn't just told the program, whatever shape the object is in, stretch it out across the top to bottom axis. It's as if you print a design onto a T shirt and you stretch out the T shirt, right? You haven't changed the design. You could go back into the computer. You could change the design, print it on a new T shirt, and stretch it out just the same, and now you will have a stretched version of your design. That is what's happening here. So, in fact, what I did just do is I made a 45 degree cut on this edge, but then it stretched out right afterwards. And we can see that that's happening here in the object tab in the properties panel. Here you can see all the transforms of the objects. It has no changes on location, no change in rotation, but in scale, we have a one, a one, and a 2.159. That's the z axis that's up and down, right? That's what I changed. So if I drag this further, you'll see it stretches out further. And if I pull it back down, I can click it and type one so that they're all one. Now we're back to a cubic shape, and that second cut I made is, in fact, 45 degrees. It always was. I always did a 45 degree angle cut, but the shape of the object was stretched afterwards. And don't worry if none of this makes sense. It's totally confusing. Only thing you really have to know is that when you work in edit mode on an object that is stretched out differently on different axes, things may start to behave a little bit weird. If you have scaled it out on just the top axis and then you go into edit mode and you try to make a bevel, for instance, it won't be 45 degrees like you think it will. But let's say you have made a shape that you've stretched out like this, you feel really bad now, but you didn't remember you made a mistake and you're like, I hope Robin doesn't see this. What can you do? Well, there is something you can do before I find out. I'll put the object down here in the corner so that you can see it right next to its scale. You'll see the scale is now one, one and about 2.5. The object is stretched out, so that's what we can see. If I go to object, apply scale. This is when I'll click, but I'll move the camera down there so you can see what's happening. Pay attention to the shape of the object and its scale values when I click this. Ready? The shape of the object didn't change, but its scale did. It now has a uniform scale. So what happened now was we applied the scale to the object. It maintains its shape, but the scale is uniform. So now this is the new default shape. And if I go into edit mode and I bevel any corner, it'll do so at a 45 degree angle exactly as expected. So when you're in doubt, when things start to behave weirdly, go to object, apply scale. 11. Mesh Selection: Selecting things in Edit mode can be a little bit tricky. So let's go into Edit mode by either clicking tab or this button here and go down to Edit mode. And to start, let's do something that I know will excite you to no end, some glossary. This is a vertex or a point. This is an edge, and this is a face or a polygon. I'm really starting to wish I didn't write this out by hand and just chose a font instead. I typically switch a bit between the terminology. I might call it a vertet. I might call it a point. Now you know what it means, and we can interface with each type up here with the three buttons next to edit mode. This first one corresponds to vertices. If we click that, and now we can select different points or vertices and we can say move them around separately. Second one is for edges. When I click that, now we can select edges and move those around moving two vertices at a time. We can not only move it, but we can also say rotate it. And scale it. Don't worry about non uniform scaling when we're in edit mode. If you'll remember the scaling issues from last time, don't worry about scaling when we are in edit mode. Third one, that's the phase selection. Now we can select whole faces and edit those. If you want to add to your selection, you can hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click another face, that'll add them. And if you click one that's already selected, that will deselect it. One kind of confusing thing if I go to the top tool here, which is the box select tool, let's say I want to select all four top vertices. I view it like this, I drag a box over it, and you'd think that it selects all of them, but the back one isn't selected because it wasn't visible. Blender only selects points that are visible to you. Meaning, if you want to select things that are on the backside of your object, you need to go into Xray mode, which is one of the view modes up here, the leftmost ball, which is wireframe. You click that, now you can see through your object. And if you now drag that box, it'll select the back one as well. So remember, these are the fundamental building blocks of your object. You cannot make changes on a smaller scale than a vertex. You cannot take a point inside the middle of this face and drag it out because there's nothing there. The face must always just be a face edge must always be a straight edge. So if we want to make changes that are smaller than a face, then we need to add more vertices to the object. And that's the start of modeling, which we will start in the next video. 12. What Is Modeling?: Come to probably the most important part of the course, and that is modeling. Modeling is making three D shapes, and it's beyond the things you find in the ad menu like the cube and the cylinder. It is adding more details to an object, making your own custom objects, you can say. So in the next few videos, we'll be modeling house, and by the end of it, you'll be able to model most objects for real. So first off, we have to go into edit mode, which is up here where it now says object mode, and we can go down to Edit mode, or we can press the shortcut tab. When we're in edit mode, the toolbar expands to show us all the modeling tools. And in fact, on my screen, the toolbar even goes outside of the screen. So if yours does that, too, just move your cursor to the edge of that window and drag to resize it, and you'll get two columns like this. Now, these are the most common tools for modeling. They're not the only tools in blender, but if you know how to use these tools, you can model 98% of all models. Like, these are what you need, basically. And in fact, we'll even skip over some because not all of them are that important. 13. Extrude Tool: Let's just start at the start with the extrude region tool. So extrude region works best with faces. Now, remember, we have different selection modes. Up here, we have vertices, which are the corner points we have edges which are lines connecting the corner points, and then we have the faces, which consist of four lines making up a plane. And when we have the extrude region tool selected, we get this. It's called a Gizmo. It's a big plus sign. And if we click that and drag it, that drags out the face. But crucially, this is different from moving it because it leaves the original geometry from the cube going across here. Hadi, let's just press Control or Command Z to undo that. Had I used the move tool and moved it over, we would not have that line going through the mesh. So when you use extrude, you add detail to the mesh. And that's important because if we're going to make a house, then we need to pull up in the middle. So I will go to Edge select mode to select this edge that I've made and use the move tool to move that up. Now I have a house shape. And if I had moved the face to begin with, I wouldn't have that mesh detail to work with. This is what's crucial to understand about meshes in three D. There is nothing for me here to click. I can move the whole face, but I cannot split it in two unless I have a line going there. Let's undo that. Extrude this face, press the edge select mode, the move tool and click this edge and move it up. That gives me the base of a house shape. 14. Inset Tool: Let's add a window to this house. When I want to add a window, I face the same challenge as with the roof. If I go to the face select mode, I click this face, and I want to say extrude it inward, I have to do the whole face at a time. And yes, the Extrude tool does work inward on a mesh as well. I have to do the whole wall. I guess that's common in modern architecture, but this is a classic house, so I want to do a little detail in the middle. And that's where the next tool inset comes in. I click that, which gives me a yellow circle. That's the gizmo for this tool. And if I click it and I drag, that moves the pace in on itself, and it creates a little pace in the middle of the larger phase. Not only that, but it connects every corner to the outside corners. Now, in time, you'll get a sense for why blender does this. To summarize it, every point has to be connected to another point using a line and using a face. And so had we just had floating points in here, that would be an incomprehensible mesh for blender. And that's why it added these corner lines for us as well. Now, okay. I've inset this face. I released it a little bit too early, so my window is a little bit too big. But remember, whenever you use a tool or a function in blender, you get a little menu down in the corner, which lets you refine what you just did. So if I pop that open, I can change all the settings for that inset, and it does have quite a lot of settings, and you'll be using these later in modeling. But for now, let me just change the thickness by dragging this liner, and that lets me redo the size of the window. Let's shrink it down to a more window size, and then I'll collapse the menu so I don't obstruct my shortcuts. Okay, the window has a weird shape. It has the shape of the wall, so I need to move this point downward. To get to move only a point, I can't do it in face select mode. I can't even do it in edge select mode because that would require me to move the whole edge, but I can't do it in vertex select mode. So I'll click vertices. I'll click that corner and I can move it down individually. And now now that I have a nice shape for my window, I can extrude this face inward to get thickness to it. So we'll go to phase select mode, select the face in the middle and using the extrude tool, I'll extrude it in a little bit. Nice. And I can use the same technique to make, say a chimney. We can go up here, select this face and inset it. To a chimney size. And then extrude that. Now, it does extrude diagonally, making the house look like it's from Alice in Wonderland. Well, I'm in a boring mood today, so I want a more realistic chimney. If something like this happens, then remember, you can use the tool to add geometry without moving it. Let's undo this. Let's drag it up, open the menu, and look at what the options are here. I can, in fact, reset all the movement axes. If I take this bottom one, I set it to zero, and that moves back down to where it started, but there is still that extra geometry there. It is extruded. But imagine it was extruded and then moved back, so it's perfectly overlapping with where it started. Well, now I can go to the move tool and move it straight up. And that gives me a little more control over where it goes. I can also flatten this top. It's worth actually trying to figure out yourself how you would flatten this out. What would you do? There are a couple of ways, right? You could go into Edge select mode, press the bottom or the top one, and then move it so it's flat. That's perfectly reasonable. It would be in hard to get it right at that point where it's level, so maybe not. Maybe you would instead use the rotate tool. You'd go into face select mode, click the middle face, and then rotate it, so it's flat. But now it's very subtle, but you may have seen the whole chimney kind of expanding at the top. When I did that, it changes the thickness at the top, which is, again, not entirely correct. So in fact, in this case, I would use the scale tool. I would scale this face alone down on the blue axis, which flattens it, and I'll have to refine that in the settings below. So the scale of one means do nothing. So the X and Y are both on one and on Z, I want a scale of zero, which makes it completely flat. And I can keep refining this chimney by, say in setting it a little bit, give it thickness, and then extrude that metal down. Nice. 15. Bevel Tool: The next tool is bevel. Bevel is the example I used in a previous video. It cuts a corner and makes it flat. So if I go up to my edge select mode so that I can click the corners around my roof, I'll click that giving me this stick gizmo. And when I pull that out, that flattens it. It flattens that corner out. The only thing I'd be wary of when using the bevel tool is how many edges you bevel at the same time. All of these tools work even if you have more elements selected. If I undo that, I can select this edge, this edge, this edge, and the back edges, and I can bevel everything at the same time. Had I done them one at a time, let's undo that. Had I done this first, and then this you see, I get a strange looking corner over here. So this is something to pay attention to when you're beveling. Oftentimes, you'll want to bevel large sections at a time. So let's do the whole roof in one foul bevel. 16. Loop Cut and Slide Tools: Next let's add a door because a door poses another new challenge, I know. What a coincidence. The house makes me have to use all the tools that I want to teach you in this video. Let's try to do the same thing as with the window, just so I can show you that it's not going to work. I'll click this pace, I'll inset it, and then you might think, Okay, well, maybe I can just move this down to the ground to be more like a door. I'll move it down. But once this, this little face goes past its containing larger pace, it starts to bug out. This is not an acceptable mesh. This will confuse blender to no end because, in a way, this pace is within this other pace, but in this area, it's outside. This is no Bueno, not allowed. Don't move things outside. They're containing faces. And don't worry about moving it in and out like this. It'll still connect correctly to everything else. This is what's not allowed. Okay, so let's undo everything. What am I trying to do here? I'm trying to make a shape that's like this. I need to add a line that goes like this. I need to add a line that goes like this, and I need to add a line that goes like that. And for that, the next tool is great. This is the loop cut. When I click that and move around my mesh, Blender will try to draw lines around my object. That's when I hover over another edge. It'll kind of draw a line going across that edge and all the way around the model, if I click now, that edge is now cut into the mesh and I have more detail to work with. If I like what I just did, then I can go to the move tool, select only these top faces by holding Shift and clicking each one and moving them up. And now I can change the profile of my roof, right? Well, in this particular case, I just undid that with Controller Command Z. I can add a loop cut going across the whole house here. This is that top line on my door. It's skewed, which is not great and can be fixed by scaling on zero again. Remember, if I go to the scale tool, I can kind of flatten everything. Let's go into wireframe view, so I can look through the whole house and see that the loop is jagged because it's trying to stay in the middle of every single line going across. But if I scale it on the blue axis, I can either increase that jaggedness or decrease it by going close to zero. And it's hard to get exactly zero by using the Gizmo. So I'll go down to the menu and type in zero manually on the z. That completely flattens out that line, allowing me to move it up and down where I feel like the top of my door should be. Now I can start adding more loop cuts going across like this way. So I'll click here to add one vertical loop, and let's move that over. But oh, no, I start breaking everything I've already made on my model. Can I move this line over without breaking everything? Uh huh. That's the next tool I want to show you. In fact, I'll skip over a few for now and go down here to Edge slide. Edge slide lets me move edges without changing the shape of my object. When I click the gizmo and I drag it, you'll see the edge moves across the faces on which it's attached. So I'm not moving the points farther than they can really go, and I can move them over to the side here. We can go back to the loop cut tool and another loop going here. And in fact, I think this is in the right spot, but if it's not, I can go back to the Edge slide tool and move it to where I want it. And now I have the detail necessary to make a door. I'll go back to Face select mode, and you know what? You'll go up here 1 million times while modeling. So it pays to learn the shortcuts for these selection modes. And those are simply one, two, and three. That cycles through them. I'll press three for face selections. Go to my Extrude Region tool, click on the door and using that extrude Region tool, I'll move it in a little bit. That's it for making a door with a loop cut tool. 17. Knife Tool: Okay, let's get weird. The next tool I want to show you is the knife tool, this one. The knife tool is similar to the loop cut tool, except it doesn't constrain you at all. The loop cut tool goes all the way through your model no matter what, but the knife tool lets you cut anywhere you want. You can cut from here. To here to here to here and crossing itself. And you can really start to screw up your mesh. When you're done, by the way, you press Return. How do I know that? Well, when you have a tool active, you can see all the shortcuts you can press to change how it works down at the very bottom of the program. You'll see left mouse is cut over there to the right. You have stop with right click. Some of these can be handy at some points, but you'll also see return to confirm. And now I have a bunch of ugly lines going across my house if I want to make some weird modern art. But in fact, I just want to use it to make a heart. So let's draw a heart here on the roof. Remember, there are no bent lines in three D. Everything is straight. So if you want to add the illusion of curves, you're going to have to add a bunch of points. So I'm just clicking for every single point. Trying to make I think this is probably the most beautiful heart I've ever drawn in three D. And when I'm done, I'll press Return. Again, it added a couple of lines going across to the edges here. That's just because Blender has to do that because it can't have a floating face inside another face. And now I can go to Face Sex mode, select this new face that I've made, and that is a heart shape and extrude it. Gorgeous. But Uh oh, I forgot I wanted the heart to go inwards, not outwards. How can I fix it? Everyone viewing asks, Well, if you go to the move tool, you can start to move it, but it's a little tricky. Like you can move it downward, and now it's skewed a little bit, so I'll move it over. But how do I know it's exactly right? Well you can know if you use the shrink slash fatten Tool. Shrink and fatten does what it says on the tin. It fattens things up. If I use it on my whole house, let me just press A on my keyboard, which is the same as going to Select All, selects all. And I drag this gizmo. Well, I can fatten up my house or I can shrink it, which makes it look very strange, indeed. It's doing is it's moving every single face along its own facing axis. What does that mean? Well, for the heart, it is facing this way, the exact way that the stick is pointing. When I drag the stick, it'll move that heart across that exact axis, allowing me to move it into the house instead of outward. Had I done it to this face, then it would move straight out from the ceiling. This face moves straight to the right or to the left, depending on if you shrink or flatten. 18. Shear Tool: H, the final tool I want to show you is the shear tool. The Shar tool has the weirdest looking gizmo of them all. Let's just prepare to use it here. I'll go to my move tool and select all these back faces by holding Shift while selecting each face. I'll move it out a little bit. And I'll show you that what the shear tool does is you can kind of skew the whole thing. So if I press this little line and I drag it to the left, That slopes it. And you can skew in any which direction if you want to skew it to the side like this. It can make some weird results. Again, if I select everything by pressing A, I can make Alice in Wonderland house by what say skewing it a bit to the left or the right. Skewing it over. You can make some very strange shapes for this. 19. Modeling Shortcuts: So these are the main modeling tools in blender. These are the ones you'll be going back to over and over and over again, and it's fine not to remember what all of them do right away. I'm kind of just shoving all this information into your brain at the same time. And, you know, I know it's a lot. I know, but we will be going back to these over and over again. And I think that when you watch me use them, your brain kind of implicitly learns how to think about moving three D meshes, like how to add detail where you need it and how these tools can be used to make the shapes that you want. Just kind of want to plant the seed of each tool in your brain, and we'll be coming back to these over and over again. And so mostly as an excuse to repeat each one, I want to show you the shortcut for them. It really does help to learn the shortcut for each tool if you're going to be using them a lot. And as a quick reminder, there is a shortcut sheet sheet in the class exercise files, which I would recommend you print out, have in your desk. And if you just get that into your muscle memory, it'll be so much quicker at modeling. So first, selection modes, the three buttons up here, those are one, two, three. And remember, everything I press shows up on the bottom left there. One, lets you select individual points. Two, lets you select edges that connect the points. Three, lets you select faces. To extrude something, the shortcut for that is E on the keyboard. When you press E, the new extrusion will be attached to your cursor. So when I move it, I'm not holding anything down. I'm just moving it. I'll stick to my cursor and I can confirm my movement by left clicking. Inset, that is I I I press I and I move my cursor, that'll inset it. I can left click to confirm that. Beveling. Let's add some details to this chimney. I'll go to Edge select mode by pressing two. I'll select each corner going around, and I'll make it into a Sci Fi chimney. Beveling is Control or Command B, B for Bravo. And I'm moving my cursor outward, and that bevels the corners. Left click to confirm it. Loop cuts, those are Control or Command R, I think, R for Ring. That's my best guess. Hey, notice that it's not going across the whole mesh when I have it here. It does so some places, but not all. What gives? I'll get back to that in just a second. But first, let's just click there, I guess. And now Blender actually moves automatically to the edge slide tool. That is to speed up your workflow. So if I move my cursor, that new edge slides up and down. Usually, though, I want to cut right in the middle, so I will cancel the sliding with right click. So, okay, looking at my house, you'll see that almost all the faces have four corners. This face here has one, two, three, four. This face here has four corners. This one, four corners, four corners, four corners. A couple have fewer. These have three. All these here have three corners. And over here, we have some monster faces which have, I don't know how many corners. Like, there's one here, there's one here. Like 20. It's got to be like 20 corners. These faces have special names because we are scared of them and we want to know our enemy. So these are simply known as triangles. The four sided faces, those are polygons. And any face that has more than four sides, that is called an Ngon. I'm sorry about the jargon, okay? I didn't make up these names. An engon that is our worst enemy. Very, very rarely want to see an gon on your mesh because they are hard to work with. Why is it called an gon? It basically comes from algebra, where N is the substitute of any number, right? So it's basically whatever number gone. And that is gone as in pentagon, hexagon, meaning a two D shape. An engon that's a face with more than four sides, and they make it hard to model. Because if I use the loop cut tool with Control R, Blender knows to draw a line through every single four sided polygon, but it stops when it comes to an engon. It has no idea what to do. And with triangles, similar things happen. If I want to cut an edge loop through this triangle, it also, it doesn't quite work like in this area, the mesh is a lot harder to work with now. But like, triangles are kind of bad, but you can't completely avoid them. Sometimes you'll just get them. But engons stay away from engons as much as you can. 20. Deleting and Refining Mesh: Let's talk about deleting stuff. Deleting stuff is something where I feel like it should be easier than it really is because you think you just press delete on the keyboard, right? And you can. Let me show you. I go into Edit mode by pressing Tab, and now I can edit this house that I made in a previous video and say, I no longer want the heart. The heart is a bit too much to have on a house. And so, okay, I go to my vertex selection mode and I just drag a box around that heart. Remember, it doesn't select anything that is behind a wall, so I have to go and check that. Oh, I didn't quite see this vertex, I'll hold down shift and press that. And now I have every vertex selected, let's just press Delete, eh? Okay, it brings up a menu. It asks, What do I want to delete? You might think this is a bit redundant since I have vertices selected, and I guess it is, but let's click vertices. Okay. I have a hole in my roof now. Now, sometimes you want a hole. Maybe you want a hole for the window, yeah. So I'll go to Face select. Hold Shift while selecting all these faces, press delete. And in this case, let's delete faces. Okay, that's a hole into the house, which is fine, but I don't want a hole in the roof. So how do I reconnect this? Do I build this up again? As in all programs, there are a myriad of ways to do this, but the easiest one is to bridge loops. Here's a quick example just on the side to explain what I'm talking about. Think of it like making a bridge. If I go to my edge selection mode and I press this edge and I press this edge, I just want to make a bridge between them. And the bridge loop function is not found here. It's under the extra tools, which you find across the top bar here. They are the mesh vertex, edge and face menus. These contain all the modeling tools that you can ever want. And this one, since we're working with edges at the moment, is under edge. And it's the third one from the top bridge edge loops. When I click that, they're bridged. It creates a new face between them, and this is what we want to do with our house. So going back here, which edges do we want to bridge? Select any edges that are on the opposite sides of each other. So either this and this or this and this. Go up to edge mode and bridge edge loops and filters in the face. You can also kind of skip this step if you delete the right way because there is another way of deleting that I'll show you by deleting. Let's see what do we want to delete? Let's delete the chimney. I will again go to vertex selection and drag a box over that. Doesn't select everything. And instead of going around and manually doing that, I'll go into Wireframe view, and I'll select it using wireframe. And since I can now see through it, I can also select through it. So back in solid mode, when I press Delete, I get another option. I don't have to delete, I can dissolve. When I dissolve vertices, it'll try to delete them and then reconnect automatically. Let's click that. Fantastic. It did it. It deleted everything I had selected, and then it filled in the face. But there is something terribly, terribly wrong here. Do you see it? We have created an NG. Don't believe me, This face here, how many points does it have? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Terrible. Okay, but don't worry about it. This is easily fixed using the knife tool. I'll go over here to knife, and all we need to do is to see, Oh, I have a line going straight across here, and then it terminates, and then it kind of continues on the other side. Let's just connect that. Let's click this point, drag it over, and click this point as well. Press Return to confirm that and do the same down here. Click, click Confirm. Now I've turned my endgon into 34 sided pass. This is the kind of mesh management that you have to get used to when working in three D, especially if you want to keep working on this because the engon again, it's going to make stuff difficult. 21. Modeling Circular Objects: Not really obvious how you model round things. Like, you now know how to make, cubic shapes and stuff, but I want to equip you to be able to model around bottle because, Shack surprise you're going to need it quite soon for a project. Let's just look at some of the challenges that will arise when you want to model a round thing. The first one is that the cube is not a good starting point. You can start with a cube. You can start with anything, really, but you'll save time by starting with an object that kind of looks like the thing that you want to make. So let's just delete everything that's here already, and I'll press Shift A to add something new. And under the mesh menu, I'll choose a cylinder, which is much closer to a bottle. Now let's go into edit mode by pressing Tab. And one thing that's pretty common with bottles is that at the bottom, they have a little divot that goes up like this. Let's see how we could make that. Well, I'll press three on my keyboard to go into phase selection mode. Also up here, I'll select the bottommost face. And do you remember what the tool was for adding details within a phase? It's the Inset tool. So if I expand this here, you'll find the Inset tool right here. Let's just inset this to about halfway. That gives us another phase within the face, right? We can the move tool to move it up a little bit. And what's wrong here? Well, it's very sharp. And how do we add roundness to sharp corners? What tool is that? That's the bevel tool, this one here, bevel. So let's start by beveling. Yeah, let's start by beveling this sharp corner here. And so we have to go into Edge select mode to select the edge and hold down Shift to select the edges. Now, this is tedious going around like this to select all the edges. There are a couple of other ways to do it. One of them that you might think of is to go into wireframe view like here, and then go into point selection mode. And drag a box over all the bottom vertices and then go into Edge select mode. That will indeed select all of them. Another way to do it is to hold down Alt or option while clicking on an edge. That will select what's called an edge loop. And a loop is just this. It's like a line of edges going around. That's the loop. So now we can bevel this And maybe we'll want to add more segments, and that's in this little menu here, increase the segment amount to make it smoother and then close that again. That looks more like the bottom of a real bottle, and we can do the same with this. In fact, if I go into face select mode, select the middle face, I can bevel this and it will bevel everything around it. So I can increase this until it fills almost the entire bottom of the bottle and add a couple of segments to that, which will round off the entire bottom. If I go into X ray view, you can see this is now the shape of the underside. Another common thing is you will want to add a profile, maybe a little indent for holding it properly. And what you can do then is you can add more extrusions, extrude, extrude and using, again, the loop select mode, now we want to select a loop of faces, all of these here. Again, we can go into wireframe view. And just make sure that we're right on the level. We can even click one of the axes here on the track ball to go into a straight side view and select all of these faces here. Go back into solid mode, and how do we move all these inwards to make a little indent? Because if you try to move them in any direction, you can make it like an S shape, which you might want to do. It's pretty cool. It's a cool effect. Control Z to undo that. But how do you move all of them inwards? You do that by scaling, which might seem a little counterintuitive, but I think you'll understand it when you see it. If I scale all of these inwards now towards the center, that creates the indent that we want. We can also scale it outwards to make like a bulge. What if we want a sharper indent? You might want to have a solid little seam line or something going around. Let's add that here. Well, first, we need to add a loop that we can use, and we add loops with the loop cut tool. Can click here, and then here's a really clever trick for just adding thickness to this loop. We can now go to bevel, and if we bevel this loop, watch this. It's like it expands the loop outwards. So now we've added a ring of faces, super handy trick. And what I want to do with these is I want to extrude them inwards. Or you can extrude them outward. We go to extrude region and we drag it, but it doesn't work. These extrude this way, these extrude the same way. And again, we get the weird S shape, but now much sharper. Let's undo that. Control or command Z. There are a couple of ways around this. One that you might think of is to extrude, and then in the settings, just extrude them by zero. So now they are extruded, but they haven't moved at all. So we just added geometry that's now in the same space as it already was, and we can go to scale. And if we scale those extruded faces inwards, now we have this sharp seam that we wanted. However, this is such a common thing to do that there already is a tool designed for it. So let's undo this. And you'll see the extrude tool has a little arrow on the bottom right, and that signifies that there are variations of this tool. And if we hold down on this tool, we get other ways of extruding. For example, we have extrude individual, right? If we do extrude individual, they will not be connected, and we get this kind of gear like shape, which is pretty cool. The one we want to use now is called extrude long normals. Wait, what does that mean? Extrude along normals. What's normal about this? Well, I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but normal in three D doesn't have the normal meaning of normal. In three D, normal, it means outward, which is a it's a strange word. Don't ask me why they use that word to mean outward. But it's a useful concept in three D. We will come back to it later in the course as well when we start shading glass. Normals are very important to understand in three D, and they mean outwards from the mesh. So whatever direction is outward. And if we use this extrude along normals, meaning extrude outward, and we drag, every face is going to look at what direction am I facing and extrude that way. So those are some tricks for modeling round things. I think you're equipped now to start modeling bottles. To summarize, we start with a cylinder. We used in setting to add detail on the top and bottom flat faces. We learned to select loops by holding down Alt and clicking on something, either clicking on an edge or a face. Remember to click on the edge that you want along the loop. Don't I click this edge, then it's going to select a loop in the other direction, and we learned to extrude a long normal to extrude everything outward or inward. 22. Class Project 02 - Modeling the Bottle: Alright, class project to the bottle. This is my favorite one. It's like the core project for this course. Like, this project here, this is the reason that all the brands are bottle related. So we're all making a bottle, and it's important not to skip this one because later projects will build on this one. So it's a core project. Let's read it. You've been asked to design a custom bottle for the brand. Your job is to model the bottle and its cap, choosing a distinct style that fits the brand's identity. Remember that on the random project generator, you got a product and you got a brand identity, a style for it. Focus on exploring shapes to make a unique bottle for your brand. And I used the word bottle, but it doesn't technically have to be a bottle. Like, you can make a soda can if you want, and it doesn't have to be glass, although a glass bottle can be super beautiful, but you can also make plastic. You can make it out of metal. Feel free to experiment. Make something weird. If you want, you can make it look like laundry detergent. Although, now that I said that, everyone's going to do it, so don't do that. So the requirements are model, a bottle, and it's cap. Again, you don't have to have a cap specifically. I really put it there just to remind you to put a cap on it if it should have one, but it can be a tab, it can be a cork, whatever fits your container of choice. And keep the polygon count reasonably low. What do I mean by reasonably low? I mean something like this. Try not to make your polygons much smaller than this. The rule is as few polygons as you can get away with and still define the shape. And you will thank me for this because it's much easier to work with a model that has few polygons than one that has many. It's not a requirement, but it's a good idea to go online and look for some reference before you start modeling. I mean, just looking up bottles for similar products, looking up reference for the style of the brand. It really helps when you're in there making concrete shapes to have some reference on the side. The deliverables, screenshot your finished model both in solid view and wireframe view. In here is wireframe view. I pressed wireframe and I turned off this toggle X ray. When X ray is on, you can see through the model and it's kind of hard to evaluate how big the polygons are. If you turn that off, then you can show off your hard work, and you can show us this is called the edge flow of the object. So screenshot this and put it in the project section on this website and also go to Solid View and screenshot this. And don't forget to show it in the best light. You can right click and press Shade Auto smooth and that'll smooth out your polygons. You're very welcome to post it on social media and tag at bring your own laptop on Instagram or post it on the Facebook group here or the LinkedIn group here. That's funny. It brings up a little picture of Dan looking macho. In the next video, I'll do this project for myself, but I do encourage you to model your bottle before watching that. I've taken this kind of course myself, and I promise if you do the thing yourself first, you'll have a much better appreciation of all the little things that I do. Like, when you've stumbled over something that is hard to solve, you will really remember it once you see the solution to it. And it may spark new ideas where you can go back and do the project over again and do an even better job. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys make. And now I'm going to go make my own. I have a killer idea for it. I think you're going to like it. I'll see you in the next video. 23. Completed - Class Project 02 - Modeling the Base: I went to the Random Project generator, I got an industrial and edgy chili oil brand. So what I did is I went online and I looked up some oil bottles, and the one on the right here does stand out a little bit because I thought, Hey, it's industrial and it's kind of edgy. So wouldn't it be fun to put the chili oil in something resembling this kind of mechanic oil can? To me, it fits really well with the chili oil because it feels like, oh, it's kind of too dangerous to put in a regular can. It needs to be this industrial looking thing. And I also really like the shapes of these other ones, and I'll pull some inspiration from those as I model and texture my bottle as well. It's a good idea to find references like this that inspire you. So I'll move those over to the side and I can still see them and they'll inform my modeling. So let's start with a clean canvas. Let's just select everything and press delete to delete everything and Shift A, let's start off with a cylinder. Now, we have to make a decision at the start here. How many polygons do we need around this cylinder? Remember, if I pop open this menu here, right after I have added the cylinder, I can add more vertices or fewer so let's do 64. Let's press tab right away to get into edit mode and start defining the shape. So looking at my reference, looking at this oil can on the right, this is my main inspiration. So let's try to replicate these kinds of proportions. So I'll pop over to the tool bar and move it out a little bit so I can see everything all at once and go to the scale tool. Let's scale everything out on the blue plane, meaning in both the horizontal directions until I get some proportions that I'm happy with. Something like this. And let's start at the bottom and work our way up. So at the bottom, I want there to be a little divot that looks like this. Because I feel like all bottles kind of have this. I don't know why. I think probably it's so that they overcompensate, so it absolutely doesn't go like this and starts wobbling. But there's probably some international regulation that I'm not aware of. Let's do an inset, and I'll inset these faces according to the international non wobble regulation law to 0.64 meters, which is what the UN specifies and move it up. When I move it up, it's a good idea to go into wireframe view so that I can see exactly how far up it goes. I feel like something like that, maybe even shrink it down a little bit. Yeah, that's good. Remember, you will see this because this will be glass. So you have to or I making something in glass, have to pay attention to how it looks inside as well. So I'll round off this edge here by going to Edge select mode and Alt or Option clicking on this ring when selects the whole thing and going to bevel and pulling down to bevel this. And again, I'll pop up this little menu on the left to specify exactly how much and how many segments I want. So let's click on segments to add a couple. How many do I need? Let's stick to as few as possible. Probably something like this. And I'll drag this slider to adjust the width. And if I hold down shift, then it'll be even slower, so it's easier to really refine. And I feel like the size of the bevels really helps define how big the glass looks. Do you know what I'm saying? Because if you're making, like, tiny little bottles, the bevels will be huge compared to the bottle and vice versa, right? So it's a good idea to really get in your mind. How big is this thing? And I feel like in my mind, the size of the bottle is something like this makes sense. Then let's do the same thing with the interface. Let's select faces, select this and bevel it all the way to basically just round out the whole thing by adding more segments, and you can even see in Y frame view. When I had nothing, it was just sharp. And then when I start adding segments, it rounds it off. Great. That's the bottom taken care of, let's also add an inset on the top. Where the cap will be in my case and move that up a little bit to make a little trapeze. That's not a trapeze. I really like looking on this reference how flat it is. That looks really industrial to me. So let's keep it quite flat, although it will hinder pouring. And let's extrude that up again and then round out pressing two to select edges and alt or option clicking these and then beveling that. Again, adding a couple of segments. Let's see. Let's keep it quite similar to this down here. Something like this and do the same here. Maybe a little bit more. I still want it to look like glass, not metal. Good. One thing I really like in my reference is this lip going around here. This looks industrial to me. Let's try to replicate that. I need more detail here, going around here. I'll have to add a loop. I do that with the loop cut tool, move over here until I get a yellow and click and then I can move that up and down. In fact, it's probably better to slide it instead of moving these because while in this case, it doesn't really make a difference, sliding is a good habit to get into to maintain the shape of your bottle no matter what it looks like after you've added the loop. The move that up here, and this is the trick that I really like for adding stripe details. Beveling that on a flat plane just gives a loop of faces. And I'll have to extrude those along their normal, meaning outward. And then I can select this loop by holding Alter option and clicking it. And then if I additionally hold down Shift, so I'm holding down both shift and Alt on my keyboard, I can add another loop to it, let those go, move around, hold them down again, and add these two loops, and now I can bevel them all in one fell swoop. Make sure not to overdo it. Like, you can make these move past each other and really break your mesh real fast. One way to stop yourself from doing that is you can release, and in this menu, you can press clamp overlap, and then it won't allow you to go too far. So let's add a couple of segments. And that looks good to me. Let's go out of Edit mode by pressing Tab, and that's a good base. 24. Completed - Class Project 02 - Modeling the Cap: Now I do want to add a cap, and I want to do that as a separate object. In three D, it's a good idea to keep your objects separate if they would be separate in real life. So the cap is technically removable. So let's also make it a separate object in here. Shift A at a new object, a new mesh, cylinder, keep it on 64, same number of vertices as the base. Let's move that up here. Go into edit mode, three to select pass, top one, and using the move tool, I'll move it down until the cap covers the glass, I'll take the bottom and move that up a little bit, too. In fact, I'll press A to select everything. And then using scale, I'll scale everything inward a little bit, looking at it from below, holding down shift to do it more sensitively to define kind of thickness of the cap. It's just a plastic capsule. Let's keep it fairly thin. Then remember, this is going to be glass, so it's a good idea to work on the inside as well. I'll have to add more details here. Let's inset until the cap meets the glass. Then looking at it through wireframe mode, I can extrude that upward, making it hollow. In fact, if I go up to the outliner here, I can turn off the first object that I made by clicking the little I and I can work on this alone and see that it is, in fact, hollow. Let's turn that back on for context, and I'll go back into Edit mode by pressing tab and let's add the nozzle. I'll shrink this in add another phase in the middle of it. And how big should the nozzle be? My main reference for that will be this. I want to kind of replicate this kind of thing. So I can see that it does taper in a little bit, but I want to see how big is it at the base. And I think for mine, that's equivalent to maybe something a little bit bigger than this, maybe here. And then extrude it up. How far do I want to go? How far? Let's scale it in a little bit, scale and not out like that, but in a tiny little bit to give that oil bottle feeling. Let's make it longer. I feel like it should be a bit longer. Yeah, like that. And this should also have some thickness. So let's inset that. And how thick is plastic? That's an insane question to ask how thick is plastic. Let's extrude that down as well and look at it through wireframe mode and move the new phase all the way down here. And in fact, this is a very common challenge in three D that I'll show you how to deal with. Like, for me, it doesn't really matter what happens in here. This is going to be opaque plastic anyway. But I want to show you this because this is a challenge that you may have faced in your model. And that is, let's say I have a hole here that I want to connect to this hole. I want this to be well, like the cap would be, I want this to be a doughnut with a hole here going all the way up. How do I do that? Well, first off, I need to add a new phase inside this one and I want that to be the same size as the one above, but it doesn't really matter how big, but I'll go into wireframe mode so I can see a little bit better, and then I'll inset this until it's more or less the same size. Not exactly. This is fine. And then I'll delete this phase, pressing Delete and then delete faces. I told you never to do this, but it's fine. We're going to connect them again in just a moment. Let's do the same with this phase. I'll delete that too. Delete pass. Now I have two open loops. I have holding Alt to select this loop and holding Alt to shift to select this loop. I have both these loops and I want to connect them. Looking at it in wireframe mode, this is what it looks like now. They're both open. And I can connect them using bridge edge loops. Pressing that, that connects them. And now, in fact, this top loop is superfluous. It's not really doing anything to define the shape, and I don't really need it. I I press delete on that and I decide to dissolve those edges, dissolving means deleting and then reconnecting what's left. If I just delete edges, that'll leave a huge, huge stinking hole. And if I press delete and then dissolve edges, that'll reconnect both sides of it. So now we have the hole going all the way through and then reconnecting at the bottom. And I can start to adjust the sizes now. So I press I want to alt or option click this loop here and I can move it up using wireframe mode to a good spot, somewhere around there and then do the same thing without a loop. Something like this. And now let's add a little bit of a handle. Everything feels so symmetrical. Like, everything here is perfectly symmetrical, and I think it's really nice to add some asymmetry to a design. So let's go here and select a couple of faces here and pull out a little bit of a handle that will look something like this. So what I'll need, I'll need another loop. So we'll go in here and add a loop right there and then slide those upward. How thick do I want this base to be? Something like something like that. And then using Face select mode, I'll try to select the middle ones. How do I know what the middle ones are? Let's just try those two. Are those in the middle? Well, let's click the Z on this track ball here, and I can actually see everything straight from the top. When I press wireframe now, I can see the X axis running straight through here and I can see that I didn't actually select the middle ones. I have to go one to the left. So these are the middle ones, and maybe I want one more on each side like that. Let's extrude those out. And the end is now bent. It has the curve coming from here, and I don't want that, so let's scale those down on X, scale them down. And I want it to be completely flat, not just almost completely flat. So let's go into this menu and make sure that that scale is not 0.1, it's zero. But in this case, I wanted to have a 45 degree angle looking like this, and I can specify that I actually want an offset of exactly one, which will give that 45 degree angle. And then I can extrude let's extrude it out. And since I don't want it to go out, I'll extrude it by zero and just move it down. And then I can scale that final phase on zero on the z axis. Make sure that's actually zero. That's the shape I want. Let's move that down a little bit more. Maybe, I want you to be able to fit your finger under here. So maybe I'll go out of Edit mode just into object mode and move the whole thing up a little bit. Yeah, like that. Go into tab and I'll click on this edge to select the whole loop, and I'll bevel this to add a 45 degree angle. I feel like it's a bit too thick, isn't it? Let's thin it up. I'll select these faces and move those over here and maybe just select these edges and move those up. And these here should move over. That's better. And now with the general shapes blocked out, I can start smoothing things. So the biggest candidates for smoothing are going to be this loop and this loop, for sure. So I'll bevel those going quite far. Rounding it out quite a bit, I feel like. Unless I want to keep that. Maybe I want to keep that like 45 degree angle, maybe just a little bit, something like that. And then smoothing out the intersection between the handle and the rest of the cap, that's going to be key. Like in three D, all edges are completely sharp. In real life, no edges are completely sharp, feel free to just round out everything. That will make it more realistic. Now let's select this loop and this one and this one. No, not that, but this and just go over everything, every corner. Everything needs to be beveled. A, let's just keep it going. Let's just go all the way around like that, like that. All of this can be beveled all at once. And finally, this one. I think that's all. And then bevel. Let's turn on clamp overlap so I don't make any mistakes without seeing them. And then add a couple of segments. Not too many. I feel like that's probably enough. And I'll bevel this. The plastic can have a little smaller bevels than the glass, I feel like. And let's bevel this and this. And the top as well. The top should also be beveled. Everything gets a bevel. And to finish it off, a little bit of a cap. So I'll shift A, add another cylinder. Remember, separate object in real life means separate object in three D. Move it up here, tab, and scale everything in. And how do I want to do this? Maybe actually, I'll go to this object again and I'll add a little bit of a lip here too. This is a good candidate for edge slide. If I now just start moving this up, I start changing the shape of the nozzle. But if I loop slide it, then it's going to move along the edges. Up here, add a bit of a bevel, a little bit, extrude it along normals. Select all these edges to round them out. You can see I'm only using the same few tools, all the same tools over and over again. If you get used to these tools, this is what you use to model everything. So let's go into this one again. Edit mode, scale it out. And move it up, so it's just resting on that new lip that I made, and then move the top face down, so it covers everything. That's a good cap. Inset the top. Move it a little bit, give it a bit of a curve, and then do the same thing with the bottom as we did earlier where I select the bottom, I inset and then I extrude it in Xray mode to the point where it would cover the bottle and then start rounding things out. Let's try a little experiment with this. Just to make it more reminiscent of this mechanic bottle, let's try and scooch this tip over a little bit. I'll have to edit both the cap and the Caps cap. Wait, what the right terminology here? Like a nozzle on a cap. Let's select them both and press tab to go into edit mode. Yes, you can edit multiple objects at the same time and then go into wireframe vertex selection and select all the vertices at the top. Now looking at it from the perfect side, let's just click on let's see, click on the Y axis, and that'll view everything from the side, and then I can move everything over a little bit and then rotate it to something along the same. Maybe hold down control to snap it to some logical increments and then move to match that increment. No, that's a bit too much. Something like that. Then rotate it to align with that new angle. And let's see. Do I like that? I do. I do. I think that's hilarious. Okay, I'll finish it off by selecting everything, right clicking, and press shade Auto smooth. And this is my finished bottle. 25. What Are Render Engines?: It's time to level up our rendering. Rendering, that's when the computer takes all the lights and the shadows into account and calculates like a finished image. You can think of it like taking a picture of your three D. And in our industry in the three D industry, we have two main technologies for doing this. One is used for video games. The other is used for movies. And in blender, we get access to both. The one for video games, that's called EV and the one used in movies, that's called cycles. And these are known as render engines. Now, IV is really fast. It can turn out about 20 images per second. EV is what we have used so far in the course. When you've gone to Render Image, click that, the image appears instantly. But that's speed. That speed comes at a cost, so watch. This is an image rendered with IV. This is that same scene rendered with cycles. You may not be able to tell exactly what the difference is, but somehow cycles just looks a whole lot more realistic. That's because cycles is the technology used in movies, and it is a more realistic way of calculating light and shadow. Not only is it more realistic, it's also easier to use. Like with EV, you need all sorts of little tricks and hacks in order to make it look halfway decent. Cycles just works. It calculates light in a realistic way, no matter what you do, it'll always look pretty good. It looks good, and it's easier. What's the catch? Cycles is slow. It is very, very slow, at least compared to EV. When you press, render image, you'll be presented with this a noisy mess. Then gradually it cleans up over minutes, sometimes hours, but it is so worth it. For serious design work, I really want you to understand this. Cycles is the only real option. That's why we will be switching to cycles going forward. Rendering takes time. That's just a fact of the matter and something we have to get used to. Unless you get a good computer. I'm sorry to say it, but this is the problem that money can solve. If you are serious about three D, then what you'll want to get is a good GPU. You can find guides out there on what kind of GPU is good for your system, but a GPU, that's the component you want for rendering. I'll do my very best to tune all the projects in the course in a way that anyone can participate, no matter your system and it's going to be fine. But just know if you are on an older computer, then you're going to be waiting longer for results. That's just part of the game. Don't let that stop you. I got into three D roughly ten years ago, and that was on a computer that was slow even for the time. I'll never get those hours back. You'll be fine. 26. Setting Up the Cycles Render Engine: Et's set up cycles on your system. Turn on rendered view and then go into this tab, the Render Properties tab. And at the very top, you'll see a drop down menu that says Render Engine EV and click that and move down to cycles. Don't worry about workbench. They've just put that in there to confuse you. Click cycles instead, and if you are in rendered mode, you'll instantly see the image turning grainy and weird. And when you move around, you'll see the characteristic noisy cycles render. One thing to note is that when you move to Shaded viewport, it'll still use the EV renderer to show you the shader. So that will still be nice and quick. But back in the rendered view, there are a couple of things that we can do to make it faster. The main thing is to set up the render device. It's going to get technical for a little bit. I will simplify it as best ten, what I'm talking about is here. Under the cycles drop down, you have a device and you can choose between CPU and GPU compute. These are basically two components of your PC. You have a CPU and you have a GPU, and the GPU, typically, is much faster at this kind of calculation. Unless you have a really bad GPU and an insane CPU, you'll want to go for GPU. But when I turn that on, it turns gray, and that is because I haven't set up my rendering hardware. I haven't told Blender what my GPU is, so it doesn't know how to use it yet. But we can set that up by going up to edit preferences and moving down to system and at the very top here, we have cycles render devices. And I have a bunch of options. You may have fewer options, and which one you choose depends on the hardware that you have. And so on the screen, I'll just put a list of what to choose depending on your hardware. So you basically have to know what company made your GPU. I have an Nvidia RTX card, so I click Optics. Then possibly you get a little list of items here, and it's probably a good idea to check all the checkboxes you have here to enable all your devices for rendering. Like if you have multiple GPUs, for example, then you can click all of them, and in my case, it can even use the CPU as well as the GPU. And in my case, you'll see that makes it render a whole lot quicker. It's much faster at resolving the image. Another thing that you can do. This is just a little visual hack. It doesn't make you render faster, but you can turn on AID noising, and you do that over here, right below where you see the render engine, you have sample and then you have a viewport and a render. You can turn on denoising. For me, it's on by default in rendering, but it's not on by default under the viewport. But if I turn that on, you'll see the image turns completely smooth. The noise is gone. That is not because it suddenly rendered a lot quicker. There's still the noise there, but the denoiser tries to remove it after the fact. And you'll see the effect of it a lot better if I turn back to CPU for a moment to slow down my rendering to make it very grainy. And then maybe I'll just make a little bit more of a complex scene. And you'll see in here for one, it takes a moment to update each frame, making it a little laggy. And you may see that the edges blur out a bit and they wash out kind of like they're slightly liquid. And that's what happens when it's very noisy and the AI denoiser tries to fix it. So if I turn that off, this is what it really looks like, and this is what the denoiser has to work with. But it's doing a very decent job. This kind of thing can sometimes smooth out fine detail if you have that, which is why I typically keep it off. Aesthetically, it can improve your image quite a bit. 27. World Lighting: Alright, pop quiz, which one of these cubes is reflective and which one is mat? Don't think about it for too long because it's almost impossible to tell. There are no clues here to tell you which one is reflective and which one is not until I add a third object. I can add a monkey. And now suddenly, you can see, you can see that the monkey is reflected in one cube but not in the other. So what makes something reflective? I'm almost embarrassed to ask, really, because it's pretty obvious, and it is that it has something to reflect that shows up in it. But in this gray void that we have in three D, there is nothing to reflect. And so we don't know that this is reflective, and that's a problem. If we're making a product render that's supposed to be reflective. We need something for it to reflect. Have basically two solutions to it. One is to build up things around it for it to reflect. That's a lot of work, and there's a much simpler solution. We can take an image and wrap it around the world so that wherever you look, there is an image for it to reflect. That is called an HDRI. It stands for high dynamic range image. Really only means that it contains a lot of information both in the shadows and in the very highlights, meaning that it can actually cast light. And you can get this kind of image for free on plyhaven.com. Plyhaven has a bunch of three D assets, and among them, you can go up here to assets and choose HDRIs. Get this list of weird looking images. They look this weird because they are 360 degree images that we can wrap around our scene. Let's go over here to the filters and choose a studio for this, and you can see a little preview of what the lighting and reflections will look like on these little balls down here. I like the look of this one, Studio small nine. So let's click that and let's download it. This is the size of it. It says four K. Take an image and you wrap it around your whole scene, and then you photograph just a part of it, you'll very quickly start to see the pixels. So you don't want to go below four K, really. And then the format can be either HDR or EXR, doesn't matter. So download that. And then back in Blender, we want to set up a world. Now, I've already shown you the world, and that is over here in the World tab, but it gets quite complicated. So we want to interface with these settings, not as a list, but as a node graph, and that is a very important concept in blender. And we'll use node graphs later on as well. So we may as well get used to it now. I'll open a new window by moving my cursor up here to the corner until it turns into a little radical, and then pulling over to split the window in half. And this window here, I'll turn into a shader editor. I click this little icon, and I move down to Shader Editor. By default, the shader editor is editing the material of an object. Can choose to edit a material here or you can choose to edit the world, and you choose that up here in a little drop down. You can choose Object or world. Let's go to world now and we get a couple of nodes. Let me just close this little window to the right. We don't need it. And in here, we can move around just like we do in three D. We can scroll to Zoom and we can pan around by clicking the mouse wheel or however I showed you how to do it on your computer. Let's talk about what a node even is because if you come from adobe programs, that's not a concept you'll be familiar with. This is that same node graph, and in here, you can choose between an object and world and a line style. In a moment when I go back to the HDRI, we're going to go into world. But for now, I'm going to stay in object just to change this object. So I'm changing the node graph on the left of this object on the right. So let's look at this. In this window, we have two nodes, these little squares, and they each have a task. So the leftmost node that's called an image texture node, and this contains my image. On the right, this is the material output node, and this tells the object what goes on the surface. And on the right, I get the result, which is an image because these two are connected. If they are not connected, if I click the surface of the material output and I drag, then I can disconnect it. I just let go and it turns black because nothing's going into the material output. I want something else to go into the material output, I can do that by adding, say, another node. You do that with the same shortcut as everywhere else in blender. Shift A, and I want an input and I want a texture image texture, or I can just search image texture. That gives me a new node. This is the same type of node as the one I had here. And by clicking the open button, I can select another image from my computer. Say, for example, this one. Now if I take the output socket of this node, which says color, that's what's going out of the node and plug it in here, we get the new image on the right. This way, you can have different images and switch between them. But the beauty of nodes is that you can insert things into this line so you can change the image before it goes to the output. Let's do that with, for example, a brightness and contrast node. It's the same as the brightness contrast adjustment layer in Photoshop. If I just hover over the middle here, I can insert that in between. Now the image coming out of this node goes into the brightness and contrast, something happens and then it goes out to the material output. You can see on the right as I change the brightness and contrast, that also changes the image. I I plug the other image into the brightness and contrast, so then the brightness and contrast is applied to that image. Nodes have input sockets on the left and output sockets on the right, what data goes in and what data goes out. This is what we're going to use to get an environment texture around our scene. Have a node that says background, and we have a node that says world output, and then we have a line going between them. That line can be disconnected. We can click here and we can pull it out of the world output and release. And what happens? The whole world turns dark because we're not putting anything into the world output. Let's take this background node again, pull it into the surface of the world output, and then maybe we want to change the color of the background. So we can click the big color swatch here and we can change it to red, and that changes it. We can also pull on the strength and that changes the strength of it. Ever we do to this node is going to be output into the world. Now, this node itself has a couple of inputs. These are input sockets, and we can put either a color into the color or maybe we put an image in there, right? So let's add a new node to this graph. We add new things just like we do in the three D viewport with Shift A. What we want is a texture, and you get a lot of options here, but you'll get very far with just the environment texture, which is here. Click it and click again to place it, and this node here has a couple of options. Add a new one. We can open one. What we want right now is to open the image that we downloaded. So let's click Open and move to the folder where you've downloaded it. Here I have my downloaded studio. I'll click it and press Open Image and then I'll take the output of this node and pull it into the input of the background node. That connects them. And in our world, you can see that image wrapped around the whole world. How cool is that? And not only that, it's so cool because if we add a plane as well, I can delete the three D light that I have, and there is still lighting here. Like, these boxes now still have a shadow because this light here is actually casting light onto the scene. I think this is mind blowing, but the most important thing is that you can see reflections. Let's delete our cubes and add a sphere instead, which I will right click and shade smooth. I'll give it a material that is metallic but not rough. And then we can see the reflection of our entire scene in that ball. And make sure for this workflow that you are in the cycles render engine. In EV, it looks a whole lot different and it doesn't quite work. I'll do its best. But for proper image based lighting, you have to use cycles. 28. Creating Glass: Because a lot of you will be making glass bottles, let's talk about transparent shading. For transparent materials, you will want to add a special kind of shader. So when you click your object and you go to the shaders tab, you press new Blender has automatically chosen a kind of shader for you. It shows the principled BSDF. What's a shader, it's a way of describing the surface of your object in a way that the computer understands. And the principled BSDF is fantastic. Or making any kind of opaque surface. But once you're moving into transparency, oftentimes, you'll want to change that into a glass BSDF. So let's click it and you'll get the entire list of all possible shaders. Let's move up here to the glass one and click that. We can't see any change because we are in solid mode, so let's move to material preview mode. And here we can see a preview of that glass material. But importantly, this is just a preview. This isn't really what it looks like because the material preview mode in Blender uses the EV render engine, and the IV render engine is not physically accurate. So even though you have chosen cycles here as the render engine, this tab will still use IV. And for transparent materials, IV isn't going to work. It's not showing you what it really looks like. IV is fine with most other things, but transparency, not so much. So let's move over to the rendered mode. This is what the surface actually looks like. I still have the HDRI lighting my scene that I set up before. And you can see when I move behind the glass object, you can see it kind of has a frosted glass effect. You can see the light through it. It looks kind of nice, actually. If you want to make it less rough, less frosted, let's go to the materialtab. We don't have many settings for the glass actually. The only two worth mentioning is roughness and IOR. So if I turn down the roughness, now we get shiny glass. Use the glass BSDF for liquids as well. This works very well for liquids. What we have here is a solid chunk of glass. This is glass all the way through, which is why it's refracting the background so much. You can see the background if it's warping around inside this, and it wouldn't do that if this was thin glass, and that really matters in rendering. Cycles knows the difference between thin glass and thick glass. So you want to keep that in mind when you're modeling. You need to give thickness to things if they do actually have thickness and leave air inside if there actually is air inside. Rule of thumb really is just make it as it is in real life. Cycles is remarkably good at replicating real life, there is a very easy way to turn a solid object into a thin object in blender. Let's do that with this. Let's modify it. So I'll go back to solid view for modeling, and I'll press tab to go into Edit mode. And for this example, I'll just select all the top faces by going into sideview, wireframe View, and selecting all these faces and just pressing delete. I told you not to do this, and you shouldn't we're going to add thickness to this, so we won't leave the infinitely thin surface as we have it now. So right now, we haven't done what we need to do. Blender still doesn't know that there's air inside this. Is it that stupid? Yes, it kind of is. If we go into rendered mode and we look through this, it still refracts quite a lot. The reason for that is very simply put, imagine the light coming in from this side. It hits this wall, and then it warps around in here, and it's warping right until it hits a wall going out. And remember, this is an infinitely thin wall, so it never hits an outgoing wall, it'll keep refracting and bending and being weird until it hits this outer wall, and then it'll go straight out again. What we need is for it to hit an outer wall right after it'll warp and then hit an outer wall here as well. And to do that, we have a modifier. That is one of the tabs over here. It's the little wrench. And modifiers are really quick ways of changing your geometry. You can add details. You can add the surface characteristics of your model. There are a bunch of very helpful modifiers, and the one we want to use now is called solidify, and it is under generate here. Let's move down to solidify. And just so you can see what it's doing, let's increase the thickness a bit on that. And look at that. Let's right click on this and shade it auto smooth to be able to see what it's doing. It added thickness. That's what this modifier does. It adds thickness to the model. The really interesting thing is it doesn't do it permanently like this is done after you've modeled. The model is still flat. And if I change something about it, let's say I select this loop. Let's extrude this loop along normals, extrude edges, and then I'll scale it out. And you'll see it kept the thickness all the way around. And I can turn this off. If I click on the little computer monitor icon here, I can turn it off in my three D view port, and you'll see that the model is still flat. It's completely flat up here, but turning it on adds thickness to wherever it's flat. And now, if I go into rendered mode, it refracts as if it is hollow. You'll even see the bottom of the glass. If you have a completely solid model and you add a solidify modifier, it'll add thickness to it, and that's very important for transparent materials. You'll see a real big difference. 29. Creating Liquid: In a lot of cases, you will also want to fill this, and I'll show you a technique for filling it. Let's go back into solid mode, and I'll turn off this modifier just for working, and I'll go into tab to edit mode. Let's add a bit of a loop in here. Let's add a loop. And then I want to select everything that is below that loop. One nice way of doing that is instead of the box select, I can use the circle select, which is nice. If I click on the faces, now I can select those by just dragging over them. And while holding down the left mouse button, I can scroll in and out to increase and decrease the size of that circle to make it very easy to select all the faces I want. Then I'll just move back to the select Box tool, which I like having as a default. Let's just take this part of the glass and duplicate this geometry. We can duplicate by going up to mesh, duplicate or the shortcut is Shift D. Shift D is now attached to my cursor, so if I start moving around, it moves the duplicate around as well. I'll right click to cancel the movement, but it's still duplicated. It's still here. And now without doing anything else, I want to take this mesh, and I want to separate it into a separate object because looking at the outliner, we still only have one object called cylinder, and we want two objects. Let's go to mesh. Separate and separate the selection, what we have selected. Now we have two objects. We have cylinder and cylinder OO one. And if I turn off Edit mode, we're now selecting objects. We can select that object or the other object. Let's select that new object. In fact, I'll give it a new name by double clicking and let's call it liquid. And I'll turn off the cylinder for now. So we're only working with the liquid. Let's press tab. And what we want is now to fill this top because, remember, we don't want things to be open. We want them to be closed in some way. So we can either add a solidify modifier or we can close it. At the moment, it does have a solidify modifier on it. I've just temporarily turned it off. But this is not the way we want the liquid to behave. We don't want it to be just up around the corners. We want to fill it. So let's delete that modifier by clicking the X. And go back into Edit mode. Let's close this. We can close it by going to Edge selection mode and holding Alt or Option and clicking on the top loop to select all of that. And we can go up here to the face menu and fill with faces. We can either fill or grid fill doesn't really matter. I'll just fill it, and it'll fill it with random lines, but that's fine. That at least fills it up. And now that it's a solid object, this will read more as a liquid. So I'll go out of edit mode and back into rendered mode. And it kind of looks like a drop of water, doesn't it? If I unhide that glass object up in the outliner, you'll even see it here, but it looks it looks weird. So one thing is I need to re add the thickness to the glass because I turn it off temporarily. Remember, click the glass, go to this modifier and turn it on in the viewport. So that makes the glass a little better, but why is there this faceting down here? There are two things to keep in mind when you're doing this workflow, and both are very important. One of them has to do with normals. You remember normals, our good friend normals, meaning outward from the mesh. I'll give you an example using just a plane for now. Every single phase has an outward pace and an inward pace, and we can see which one is which by going up to this little icon, which we haven't touched yet, which has our viewport overlays, and we can move down here to phase orientation. If I click that, everything turns blue, meaning I'm just viewing the outside of everything. But if I look at the bottom, there's the red. There's the red of badness. If you see red normals, that means that you have the back face of something. And again, everything has a back face. If I add a cube and move it out here, all of it is blue, but inside from the inside, everything is red. And you remember I told you never to delete a face and leave it open? Well, here's the reason. If I go into Edit mode and I delete one face, we will be looking right into the red of badness. When you did this workflow here, when you separated out part of the glass into its own object, roughly half of you will have turned this red. Let me just do some movie magic and boom, this is what you are seeing. You're seeing this whole object as red. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes when you model stuff, some of the faces turn inward, but there are ways to fix it. Once you know what's there, you click on it. You go into tab into Edit mode. You select everything that is red. If some of the faces are red, you'll just select those, but in this case, everything is red. So I'll press A, just select everything and go to mesh, normals recalculate outside. When you click that, it'll recalculate all the normals and everything will be facing outward properly. It's the first step. The second step is to make sure that no faces are perfectly overlapping. So here's the problem. Some of these faces of these two objects are perfectly mathematically overlapping. And we can tell which ones if I only turn on transparent mode here without the wireframe just transparent. I click the water inside, and you'll see that the edges are perfectly aligned. Can probably guess why. It's because we duplicated one object which became the other object. Therefore, it is exactly the same. It's perfectly overlapping. And that really confuses the render engine. So all we really have to do is to just barely offset this either outward or inward. Now, it makes sense in this case, to do it inwards, doesn't it? So that we don't have water on the outside. But this would even be the case if our glass solidify modifier went the other way, and I'll show you that. I go to the solidified glass and I go to the modifier, and I change the offset from negative one to one. Now it's no longer adding thickness inwards, it's adding it outwards. If I turn that off, you'll see it's adding to the outside. Previously, when the offset was negative one, it was adding to the inside. Let's add it to the outside instead. And now looking in transparent mode and clicking the water. You see, we no longer have the problem of the water touching the outside of the glass, but it is still touching the very inside of the glass. And I'm no betting man, but I would bet that if we go to rendered mode now, it's still kind of funky. Yes, it is. It still has this weird faceting thing. So as I said, to fix that, we just need to offset it just a tiny, tiny little bit. So let's go into tab and press A to select everything, make sure that everything is selected. We can even go into wireframe to make sure that's the case. And let's either shrink or fatten this using the Shrink fatten tool, this one. Now, do we want to move all of this inward or outward? Well, I happen to know that if we move it inward, we will be leaving a tiny little gap of air. And that gap of air shows up very obviously in renders. So whenever I do this workflow, I always make sure to move it outward a little bit, basically moving it into the glass, but that's better than the opposite. And it'll look very nice once we go into rendered mode. And now this looks like a glass of water should look. So that was a lot of technical information just to make something look transparent, so I'll summarize it now. First thing, you need thickness to stuff for it to render properly. So think about, do you want it solid, like the water here or do you want to add a thickness using the solidify modifier. Second, you want to make sure that all the normals pace outward, and you can check that by going to the Viewpoort overlays and turning on face orientation. If anything is red, go into edit mode, select everything, and go to mesh normals and recalculate outside. Third, if any faces perfectly overlap, then shrink or flatten them just to offset it a tiny little bit to not have that weird alignment that the computer can't handle. 30. Repairing a Bad Shell: There's a problem you may face with fancier bottles. Not that this is particularly fancy, but it's a really good example of a problem you may face when using the solidify modifier. So I've made a section of this pretend bottle so that we can see inside it, we can see what happens when I add a solidify modifier. So let's look at this detail right here. As I turn the solidify modifier on, it adds thickness to this thin wall, which is what I want. But allow me to just turn off the edge for a bit, so we only see the outer face and the interface. And watch what happens as I increase the thickness of the solidify modifier. It gets thicker, thicker, and we're starting to get a weird shape doubling over on itself. So this face coming in right here, it's coming in, it's doubling over and making this strange star shape, which, honestly, it's pretty will create all sorts of problems once it becomes glass because glass is see through, right? So you look through this glass and you see this mess, and then you see further and it'll not look good. And there are a couple of ways we can fix this. There's an easy way, and there's a hard way, and sadly, the hard way is better. The easy way is right inside the solidify modifier. Under thickness clamp, we can drag up the clamp and watch what happens. It kind of tries to fix that area, and it does. It does fix the problematic area, but the thickness slopes in now. So this is going to give you variable thickness throughout your glass, which is typically not super realistic, although this is the easy solution. So for many cases, this is what I would do. However, let me also show you the hard solution. The hard solution is to apply the modifier. So if we go into Edit mode now, select everything. This interface doesn't really exist. It's just a modifier. When I click the dropdown menu, and I click Apply, got to go out of Edit mode to do that. Apply and go back into Edit mode. Now I can select everything. And now we can go in and fix this manually. So what I would do is go into Edit mode. I would press three for face selections, then I would click on one of these vertical edges here to select that entire ring. Then I would press delete, delete the faces. Make an incision above the problem. Do the same below the problem. So Alt click this or option on a Mac, delete phases. And now we've cut off the problematic part. The problematic part is no longer connected to anything, meaning we can select any phase inside here, any phase of the problematic part, and go to Select, linked, Linked. Shortcut is Control L. Look at that. That selects everything that's connected. And since we split it up here, it only selects the problematic part. So now we can hit Delete, delete the faces, and now we can reconnect these two faces. So I'll go to Edge select mode and Alt or Option click on this and then Alter option click on this while holding Shift to add that selection and go to Edge Bridge edge loops, which bridges those two. That gives me a smooth inside while I keep that detail on the outside. This is the best solution for most problems caused by the solidify modifier. 31. Class Project 03 - Shading the Bottle: Class Project three, we're really chugging along, aren't we? This is really the final step in making an object. Like, we're finishing our bottle now. This is shading, which is more or less adding materials, but you'll also have to probably model a little bit, if you remember, when you add glass to something, you also have to add s. Maybe you have to add some extra things inside your bottle if it is transparent. Remember, your bottle doesn't have to be transparent. It doesn't even have to be a bottle. Now it's completely fine. So let's read the project. To finish the three D model and make it ready for rendering, add materials to it. Experiment with different colors, roughness levels, and metals, whatever best suits your brand. If your bottle is transparent, fill it with liquid. I just finished making mine. I put it in a lit environment. I used an HDRI to light my scene, and I'm currently in the rendered mode of cycles, which you kind of have to be when working with glass stuff. And I've added materials to it. So when I click the nozzle, for instance, and go to the materials tab, you'll see the plastic and I experimented with some roughness and the colors. And I added thickness to this object. If I show you in solid mode, this object now is not completely full like it has an interior, and I did that. Not only that, but I also added this liquid object inside of it, which represents the chili oil. So the requirements are use cycles while working with materials. Just remember that. Don't use IV. Apply an HDRI to your scene environment, which I did and add materials to your model. Be creative. The deliverables are screenshot your result in the Render view. And what I do with that screenshot, upload it to the class project or assignment section on this website. And again, share it on social media. At Bring Your Own Laptop, Facebook group, LinkedIn Group. I want to see what you make. And in the next video, you'll see how I solve this project. But again, you should probably do it yourself first, because the way our brains learn is to try it and fail and then try to really jog your memory to see if you can figure it out. And if you're just following along, your brain's not really making the right connections that it needs to quite learn this. So do the project, then watch how I did it. I'm looking forward to seeing what you make. 32. Completed - Class Project 03 - Shading the Bottle: Depending on your model, shading was pretty hard. It was pretty easy. Like, you can give yourself a hard job with many objects and sub objects and whatnot. But I'll show you how I would approach shading mine. So first thing, we got to go into rendered view. Textured view is fine for some things, but as I said, not really for transparent materials. So we should go into rendered view for this. And my render engine is set to EV. I should definitely set that to cycles and set the device to GPU like I show you how to set up. To begin with, the first time, you know, it may lag a little bit, but that's fine. So now seeing this, we're seeing it in rendered view, but it's completely gray. It's like, dark gray because the environment is gray. So let's import an HDRI to get some realistic lighting and reflections in here to be able to judge the surface accurately. I will open a new window by going up to the corner until the cursor turns into a little radical and drag it over until it adds a split. And then with this little drop down menu, I'll go into the shader editor. By default, the shader editor shows the material on the current object. However, I want to see the world. So I'll go from object to world up in here, and I don't need the side panel. I can just close that up. In here I want an environment texture. So I'll do Shift A to add something. And then actually instead of finding things here, I prefer searching, and you don't even have to click the button for searching. You can actually just start typing E and V. That brings up the environment texture. So I'll add that, plug it into the background, and it's going to turn pink because pink is it's the warning color of blender textures. If something turns bright pink, then you know that you don't have a texture plugged in. So let's open a texture, and I'll use the same studio HDRI light I downloaded from Plyhaven earlier. Open image. Now let's see. That looks about right. I can close this window right up and let's see here. First thing, most important thing is the glass material. Let's add a glass material to the glass part. I'll go over to the materials tab and press new. I can rename this material to glass and go into the surface here and add a glass. Now thing is, this is now full because the ray is entering it, it's warping around and then it's exiting. That was a terrible drawing. I need to add thickness to this. So let's hide everything else. I can actually it's a good idea to start renaming objects once I have three here. So this is the glass part. This is this is the cap or the cork, maybe in this case, and this is the nozzle. So I'll hide the cork and the nozzle for now and view just this. In fact, why not have two windows open at the same time? I'll open another window again, and this can be my solid view. So in here, I can start modeling stuff while I see the results over in this window. So in here, we need to go into Edit mode with a tab, press three for face selections and click this top face or press Delete to delete it and click Faces. Now it's completely thin, which Blender doesn't understand. So this is an illustration of the problem of completely thin shapes that I mentioned earlier, that you can see, it's still warping a whole lot in here, and that's because any light ray that's coming from, say, this lamp here is coming from the lamp. It's entering the object, and it's going to warp until it finds an exit. And even though I have opened up here, this ray doesn't know when to exit anyway, so it thinks that the shape is still completely full. And so we need to add a modifier. The modifiers are here in this panel. It says modifiers when you hover over it, it's a wrench. It already has a modifier, which is smooth by angle, and that is because earlier I right clicked and I pressed Shade Auto smooth and that adds this modifier. But we'll add another one as well, and that will be the solidify. I can search here, too. SOL solidify and press that. And that did add thickness to it. So now I have very, very thin glass here. How big do I want this to be? Let's see. I'm pressing thickness and I'm dragging to the right, but while holding down shift, that means I'm changing it slower. I feel like how big do I imagine this being? I imagine this being maybe 10 centimeters tall, maybe even a little less. So this kind of thickness feels right to me. So if I go over to the modifier, I press the little drop down next to it and I press Apply. Now if I press tab, I can, in fact, edit this. First thing, I want to add a little bit of beveling to the top. So I'll press this loop, hold Shift and alt, and press this loop. And then the shortcut for beveling, that is Control or Command B, and I'll drag out and I can add more segments to it by scrolling on my mouse wheel. I'll just scroll to add a couple and then hold Shift to more sensitively change that profile.'s do something like that. Now I think I'm noticing is some weird shading issues. Suddenly it becomes sharp here and it's smooth around it. Why? That's because of the auto smooth modifier. It's trying to smooth any edge that has an angle that is higher than 30 degrees, but apparently the edges here are very close to 30 degrees, so some are over, some are below. And if I just increase this, watch what happens to the shading issue. Disappears. So I actually prefer an angle here that is a little higher than 30. I prefer probably 60 is more sensible to me. And if I pull that far too low, then suddenly on C, nothing is smoothed out anymore. If I pull it a little bit up, you'll see it only smooths out the very smoothest part already, but these sharp angles here stay sharp. And then as I increase it, more things get smooth. Oh, 60 for me. Let's fix this weird shading issue down here. What I'll do is I'll press Tab to enter Edit mode and select this loop of faces and this loop of faces. Then I'll delete them, delete faces. And I want to delete everything that's in between them as well. Now I can select everything that's linked to this phase. It's important to hold your mouse over this area and then press L, L for ink. That is selectinked. And that is select the whole thing. Now I can delete that. Delete phases. And then I'll reconnect these parts with the operation that you already know, which is bridge edge loops. So I'll go into edge mode by pressing two. Hold down Alt and select this edge and select this edge. In fact, loop of edges, and then go to the edge menu and down to bridge edge loops. That bridges it right up. Regarding the liquid, let's go into face select mode and circle select. The shortcut for circle select is actually C. So I'll use the C button instead. Press C. I'll scroll out to increase the size of that and then select everything on the inside. Right click to Cancel so that I can move around and select this side as well. You accidentally select too much like here, if I touch that by accident, I can remove it by clicking the scroll wheel over that. Okay, how high level do I want for my liquid? I want to fill it up to the edge, don't I. Let's expand my selection. I could go around and select all this, but I can also go to select more or less and a little bit more. Control Numpad plus is the shortcut. I'll click that, but let's add a little bit more. Control Numpad plus adds a little bit more. That it grows the selection, right? That's a good level to fill it up, I think. So I want to separate this out into a new object. So first off, if I separate it out right away, that's going to remove it from this object, making it thin again. So I need to duplicate it. The shortcut for duplication is Shift D, D for duplicate, or you can go up to mesh, duplicate. So Shift D. Now I'm holding that inside part. It's attached to my cursor, but I can right click to detach it and move it right back to where it started because that's where I want it. And then I need to separate it out into its own object. And I can do that with mesh, separate selection, or I can press P, separate and press selection. Now, if I go out of Edit mode, you'll see I have two glass objects, glass and glass 0.001, and when I select this inner object, that selects that. So let's rename that into liquid. That's great and the liquid, in fact, needs to be closed. Let's hide the glass and work only with the liquid. I'll go into tab and I have to close this top part. I'll click on this edge with edge mode selection turned on, that selects the whole loop and let's close it up with face fill, fills it with pass. That looks good to me. But shading wise, it too looks a little strange. Let's see if the normals are correct. Remember the normals, normals are very important for transparent objects, and I suspect that those are wrong in this case because these faces here used to point inward. These faces here used to be the inside faces of the glass and then I detach them, they're still pointing inward. Probably. I would guess let's go to the viewport overlays button and turn on face orientation. Indeed, everything is red. Let's go into tab and face select mode, select all, select everything, and then go to mesh. Normals and recalculate outside. Now they're blue, and the shading is fixed. I can turn off the face orientation and turn back on all the other objects to see another thing that was problematic that I showed in an earlier video, and that is with faces perfectly overlapping, it creates some bugs. So let's also fatten everything up in here. I'll press Shift Z to go into wireframe mode to see my selection in the object, and then go to shrink fatten. Then I'll have to fatten this up to go just a little bit into the glass. Just a little bit. And I can give it a new material, as well. I want this to be chili oil. So let's go into the material sab and remove the material that's on it right now, press minus on that and add a new one. This will be chili oil. And instead of using a principled SDF, I'll use a glass BSDF for that as well, turn down its roughness, so it's completely glossy, but make it red. Maybe I can make it a little darker, even. Not black, but a little bit. Make it feel rich. Alright, cool. And that looks dangerous to me. Let's add some plastic, as well. I'll go to the nozzle, add a new material to that, and that can be like a dark. Just pull down this value. You don't ever want to go completely black. Blender allows you to go completely black, and it allows you to go completely white. You kind of want to stay away from those because nothing in the real world is really completely black. Like, this is that vata black that you may have seen which is like, it's an experimental paint that just absorbs all light, right? And you don't really want to go there for realistic materials. You kind of want to stay above like 0.01, at least. And so this is black enough for me. And let's call this plastic. I think maybe keeping this rough and then the cork above it a little glossy maybe a nice contrast. But let's see how rough? Maybe something like that, and then go up and add a material to the cork as well. This is glossy plastic. I'll make that dark as well. Something along the same tone as the nozzle and then decrease the roughness to make it a little more shiny. Moving around to see how the light reflects off it makes it a lot easier to get an intuitive understanding of how the surface actually looks. I am pretty happy with this. One final trick that you can use to more accurately assess your object is we're not really used to light coming from below. So it can help to add a floor. Shift A, mesh plane, and I'll move it down and scale that out. Try to make sure that it's actually touching the bottom. I'll use the modeling view on the side here and move it up until it touches the bottom of the bottle. And that makes it feel a little more grounded. So once I'm happy, I can make the viewport look a little nicer but by going to the render tab and down to the viewport sampling and press denoise to turn on denoising and make things a little more smooth, and then I can screenshot this and post it in the project section on the website to share my work with everyone. 33. Combining Scenes: Often we model things separately, even if we want to combine them later. So in this example, I've modeled a wine bottle, and I've also modeled a glass. Looking at it now, I don't know why I didn't make it a wineglass. Hold on. There. Wineglass. So I've modeled a wine glass and I've modeled a wine bottle. And if I want them in the same scene, that's pretty easy. I've opened blender twice, and in each one, I've opened a separate model. So I have one blender here and I have one blender here. And getting an object over is actually as simple as clicking the object in one and pressing Control or Command C for copy, and then clicking the other window and doing Control or Command V for paste. But this will happen a lot. Things are not modeled at the correct scale. So in this case, the bottle is too small. The glass is too big, whatever you want to say. And so it's a good practice to model everything at the right scale to begin with. So to check the scale of something, there are a few ways to do it. One is you can use the measure tool over here while you're in object mode. So clicking the measure tool, you can just drag a line from the bottom of, say, the bottle to the top, and it will tell you that it is, in this case, 2.9 meters. Press delete to delete that typical wine bottles are not 3 meters tall. I don't know how tall they are, but certainly not that. So a trick I use to model things at the right scale is at some point during the model process, I'll add Shift A, a mesh cube, and in its settings, I'll just set the size to the height I want the object to be. So A is a typical wine bottle. Is it like maybe 20 centimeters. So I can type in two 0 centimeters. You can also type in feet or stone or whatever you use. Stone is weight, isn't it? And that is the actual height of a wine bottle. So I'll click the wine bottle and I'll scale that down until it fits. I'll scale the glass down as well and then move it down here. I can actually move the box up so it rests on the floor of the scene, and then move the wine bottle down here, scale it in until it's roughly the right size. Now I can delete the cube and just use the wine bottle as a scale reference for the glass. Because I know that wine glasses are maybe like this size compared to a wine bottle. Now, when you scale things down like this, if you want to keep working on them, you can run into some scaling issues because when I look at the model tab here, we can see that the scale is 0.025 for this object. And I've talked about weird scales before. Typically, we want the scale to be one. So if we click an object, we go to object, apply scale, then that scale turns into one. So this is now the default unstretched state of the object. That's a good practice again to do. However, let's say that you, for instance, let me just mock up a quick example here. Let's say you've made a glass like this and you used the solidify modifier, right? It was thin, and then you added a solidify modifier to make it thick. Okay, let's scale it down. Everything seems to work well. And then we want to apply the scale when it's the right size. Let's go this size, move it over, and go to object, apply scale. It turns into an igloo because the solidify thickness is 0.1 meters, and at this scale, that is quite thick. Now I have to turn down the solidify size. Something more like 0.004 meters. Now, this didn't matter when the object scale was shrunk because I'll just undo all that. The object really is still big when I scale it down. Like, Blender says, This model is big, but let's just show it as small. So now the big solidify value doesn't really matter because Blender still thinks that this glass is this big, and then it adds a little bit of a solidify. But once we apply the scale, going to object, apply scale, now it knows that the glass is small and this thickness is too big. So this kind of thing sometimes happens when you have to scale things down, and then you're just going to have to go into the modifiers and change the values in the right scale. This is one of the reasons why it's smart to start modeling at the right scale to begin with so that you don't run into these issues. 34. Camera Settings: When you want to make an image, you hit the render button. However, sometimes when you go to render, you'll get an error message. No cameras found in scene. That's because you need a camera to render out of. That's a camera object, and it is in a scene by default, but I've deleted it from this one. So let's add back a new camera and talk a little bit about how to use it. So press Shift A and go down here to where it says camera that adds a new camera. The camera's origin is here. This is where it's viewing things from, and this rest of the camera shows the view width of the camera. So you can tell from this square here how big of a portion of the frame that these objects now fill from the point of view of the camera. I'll open a separate view to show you. And in this view, I'll press the camera button on the right hand side to go into the camera. And you'll see these objects do indeed fill that size in the frame. And looking at the angle here, we can tell that if something moves closer to the center of the camera or I move, indeed the camera closer to the object, then it becomes bigger in the field of view. Like, in this case, I can tell looking from the side when the objects will fill the entire frame by when it touches these lines. Once that happens, you'll see on the left hand side, they do indeed fill the whole size of the frame. Now, this field of view, as it's called, of the camera is changeable, and it's called the focal length. You can change that along with all other aspects of the camera here down in the camera properties. And here, you can change the focal length. So if I pull back the focal length, you'll see it changes the field of view of the camera and the objects become smaller, even though they are still close to the camera. This is just how the focal length works in real life. This is the Zoom of the camera. And aside from this, you don't really want to change many of these parameters. Shifting, for example, shift X, shifts the camera to the side, and this is known as a tilt shift effect, and you generally don't want to touch it unless you know how to deal with tilt shift. This is advanced stuff that really only architecture photographers use. But down here, there's a button for depth of field. Depth of field can be very nice. Let's increase the focal length here and have my glass close to the camera and I'll move my bottle a bit further back. And then I'll go into rendered view. Hold down the scroll wheel on this bar to move it over, go into rendered view. And in order to see anything at all, I really need a light. So let's just shift A, add a sunlight for now. I'll rotate that a bit to the side. This is just an example, and everything works better in cycles. Let's change from EV to cycles. All right. In the camera, I go to the camera properties, I turn on depth of field. Suddenly, things become a bit blurry. We now have to focus the camera, and we have to choose a focus. We can either choose the distance to focus on down here or we can choose to focus on a specific object. Let's do that. Let's focus on an object. I'll choose the little eyedropper in that field, click that, and then click on the glass. Now the camera will focus on that glass, and the bottle will be blurry in the background. Down here, you have different settings that you'll be familiar with from cameras. The F stop number is what controls the blurriness. The lower this number, the more blurry. When I pull this down, now that explodes the bottle into full blurriness. And when I pull it up, it becomes a little sharper. Now, what if you want the image to be square, say, maybe you're posting on social media and you don't want the 16 by nine aspect ratio that's common in video. You will not find the aspect ratio in the camera settings. That's because the image size is a global setting in that it affects your entire blender scene, not one particular camera. Every camera has the same size because it's a file setting and you find it here in the file output. Here you find the resolution X and resolution Y. That's the width and height of your image. And if I set both of them to 1080, now we have a square image. 35. Light Types: When it comes to lighting, you have a bunch of different options. If I press Shift A and go to the light menu in here, you'll see I have four different lights, and let's just take them by turn. The point light can be argued to be the most basic form of light. If I click that, I get a point in my scene that lights up. Let's move it up above my ground plane and over a little bit. The point light, it emits light in all different directions, and it is, as the name suggests, a point in space, meaning it is infinitesimally small. And small light sources create hard shadows. The reason these shadows are hard is because it is a point light, and that is just a fact of light. It's the same in real life. The bigger your light source, the softer your shadows. But it doesn't have to be a point in space. If I go over to the right hand side of the software, you'll see at the bottom of this row, there is a light tab. This is only here when you have a light selected. And in here, you have all the settings for the light. So I can, for example, turn down the power a little bit by sliding the slider to make it a little less overexposed. And I can warm it up by changing the color. And I can indeed increase the radius. The radius is currently at 0 meters. But if I increase that, pitenino the orange ring around the light as I increase this. You'll see it increases as well. So now the light is this big, and you can see from the shadows that it casts that it is bigger. It casts softer shadows. So this is small and big, small. Big. See the shadows react? All right, that's the point light. Let's go over to Shift A, add another light. Let's do the sunlight. Sunlight's peculiar because the precision doesn't matter for the sunlight. I can move it around and absolutely nothing happens. The reason for that is the sunlight isn't actually here. It is infinitely far away in a direction, kind of like the real sun. And if I click the little yellow circle here, I can change the direction of it. They can move it around. And you'll see in the left hand view that changes like the angle of the sun. The sun now comes from a different angle. You can also rotate the object itself to change the angle of the sun. And in the light settings, there is an angle slider, but this angle slider is not actually the viewing angle of the sun. This is how big is it in the sky, which is measured in angles. And about 0.5 is how big it actually is in real life. So this is the hardness of shadows from the real life sun. But if you do want to simulate maybe an overcast day, you'll increase this angle, and that increases the softness of the shadows. All right, delete that. Next light is the spotlight. Spotlight looks a bit like a spotlight, I would say. Basically, it's a point light that is constrained to a specific area. So this point light, actually, all lights are interchangeable. In the light properties across the top here, you have all the different lights and you can click each one to change the light to that type. But the spotlight has all the settings of a point light like the radius to change the softness, but it also has down here a beam shape. And if I drag that, you can see I can narrow the beam or widen it, and I can also smooth out the edges of the beam. Very useful light. And the final one is my favorite kind of light. It's the area light. The area light by default is a giant plane. Let's scale that down because it's too big for my scene. And it doesn't have to be a plane. It can be any shape. And you can change the shape in here from square to say, disc maybe. And this is the equivalent of a soft box for you photographers out there. What's really cool about this is, well, for one, it is soft by default because it is so big, which means it casts very soft shadows. Let me turn that down. It's a bit too bright. Very soft shadows, but unlike a point light or a sunlight, it is very easy to control the direction of it because by default, it is directional. If I turn this right hand viewport into a rendered mode as well, you'll see it only emits light in one direction, which makes it very easy to control where you want the light and where you don't want it. And in fact, there's a slider to make that even easier. This is very overlooked by blender users in general, and that is down here, it's called spread. And if I turn that down, see, I generally narrow the beam coming out of the light until if I go down to zero, it becomes completely straight. All the light rays are parallel to each other as if it's a sunlight. But if I turn this up to say maybe 90 90 degrees, this will be an angle that's akin to a soft box with a grid. It's very useful for constraining the area that the light is lighting up. I generally don't deal in favorites, but this is my favorite form of light. 36. Rendering with Cycles: Once you're happy with your composition, you'll want to render the image. And now that we're in cycles instead of IV set here, rendering is a tiny little bit more complicated. There's one more thing to consider than when we render it in IV and that's because it's slower. So when I go up here into render and render image like we've done before, the image shows up, but it's not finished once it shows up. It will gradually remove the noise that's in the image. You'll see up here, it's a sample 65 out of 4,096. This number keeps on climbing. That's as it calculates the image as this goes up, the amount of noise, say for example, in this area goes down. At the moment, this is quite slow because I've set my cycles device to CPU, which is a slow render device. That's just to show you what it looks like. Rendering will stop once the sample number hits the final sample number, which is 4,096. You set that down here in the render settings. Under render, not under viewport, viewport settings are just for what you see here. But when you click Render, uses the settings that are here under render. And you can change the Mac samples. This is when does it stop rendering? And when it hits that number, if you have denoising turned on, it'll denoise your image. So let me close this and change my device to GPU compute so that there's a chance that it'll actually finish and then go to render and render image. You'll see now, the sample number climbs a whole lot quicker, and you can actually see it calculating the noise away. If I zoom in here by scrolling, you can see that it gradually removes the noise and smooths it out. Now, for some computers, this happens fast. For some, it happens slow. It also depends on the scene in question. This is a very simple scene, so it actually renders pretty quickly. And I just skipped some time here, and now it's finished. This number froze for a second and watch the image as it denises and there we go. Now it's done. This is the final rendered image, and it looks nice. I can go to Image and save as and save this finished image. Now, you're going to have to experiment with your own scene and your own computer. How long does it take to finish rendering an image versus how good of a quality do you need? I can go down here and I can set my max samples to 100. Let's just do that. And then I can render render image, and the sample number will climb until it hits 100 and then it'll denoise. So the noise level is this. It's pretty extreme, and it's gradually trying to denoise this, and it looks fine. For a simple scene like this, you can actually get away with a lot of noise, and the denoiser will fix it. But the more fine details you have, the more the denoiser will smooth out details that you actually want to keep. And the way to mitigate that is to actually increase the number of samples. Realistic character like this one is the perfect example of this. If we zoom into it, then we can see all the details and pay attention, especially to the skin detail on the cheeks. So the left image was rendered with just 50 samples and the right image closer to 4,000. They both have a little bit of noise in them, so let's denoise both of them and see what that looks like. They both clean up nicely, but when you look at the left one, it's lost a lot of detail in the cheeks compared to the right one. You have to get as close to a smooth image before denoising as possible to get a high quality image. And once we start rendering animations, that's even more important. We have to have a clean image before denoising. So you're just going to have to experiment for you that trade off. This MAX samples number, it's individual, for your computer and for your scene. You're just going to have to experiment with how long are you willing to wait for a finished image versus how good of a quality do you really need? And in this case, 100 was fine, but a good default is actually 4,096, which was the default. 37. Class Project 04 - Product Render: It's class project number four, the Product render Project. Time has come to photograph the brand's bottle in a digital studio. The client wants a simple but visually striking setup to showcase their bottle. Design a stage using geometric shapes and experiment with lighting. Have fun exploring different compositions, lighting setups and shapes. The reason I wrote that last part is because I never nail it on the first try. I always have to try different compositions, different arrangements of geometry and lighting. I recommend you do the same. It's very easy in three D. Move some things around, save a new version, try different things and see how it looks. The requirements are, build a studio using objects from the ad menu. That is the cube, the cylinder, the sphere, et cetera. Copy the bottle into the stage. That means opening the bottle file where you made it, pressing Control or command C, and then opening a new file and pressing controller command V, that is copy and paste. You may use an HDRI, but the main light has to be a light object. The reason I wrote that is one, I want you to experiment with lighting setups, and using an HDRI won't allow you to do that. Those are baked in, right? But also HDRIs are infinitely far away. That is a feature of meaning you won't be allowed to experiment with light fall off because fall off of the light depends on the distance to the light. It's a key feature of lighting, and I want you to see how it works. How far away is the light to the object determines what it looks like. So the main light has to be a light object. Keep the design simple but effective less is more. So don't clutter your frame with a bunch of objects everywhere all around. Really just focus on the composition, light and shadow, making some few interesting shapes. It's really true that for this kind of stuff, less is more. The deliverables render your scene in cycles and save a 1920 by 1080 PNG or JPEG file, upload it to the class projects or assignment section on this website. In the next video, I'll go through my solution to this project, but I would recommend you try yours first, and then if you want, after watching My solution, if you're inspired to make any changes, you can go back and do it then. Good luck. I'll see you in the next video. 38. Completed - Class Project 04 - Product Render: All right, so I started by opening the file where I shaded the bottle and an empty file. I just want to copy all this over. So actually, I'll go to the outliner, click the top object, and then move down to the bottom, hold down Shift and click that, which sights everything in between. And then I'll move the cursor over to the three D view port because shortcuts are dependent on where the cursor is, and then press Control C. Then in my new file, I'll move over and press Control V. Which pastes it, and then I can start working on the stage. So first off, let's just select everything, and I want to move it up so that it rests on the floor because I like working in that kind of space. And it feels logical to me. I'll also make sure that I look over on the gizmo and I work in an axis that makes sense to me. I usually work with the X stick pointing to the right. So I'll be viewing everything from this angle here. Click this ball, Y minus now to view it from that angle and then move up everything until it rests on the floor. I'd rather have it poke a little bit below the floor than floating a bit above. Just so I make sure that everything's in contact. All right. And then I'll add a camera. I'll move the camera over to that area that I first talked about. No change the focal length, but move it over. I just clicked on the camera, which changes the focal length, but let's move it over here. And when you create a camera, it's looking in the same direction as you were looking when you created it. And I want to define that completely for myself because I like having it point straight at it. So I'll go over here to the object data, and here, I'll zero out all the rotation values. And this is so cool. It's a thing that blender does that I don't think any other software does. Where if I click the top number and then I move my cursor straight downwards, I can select all three numbers and edit them at the same time. So I'll press zero and return, and that zeros out every rotation, and then I can use the rotate tool to make it point at a 90 degree angle this way, I'm holding down Control. That's command on a Mac to move it over until it's 90 degrees. You can even see that over there on the right, where I just zeroed everything out, the X rotation is 90. Great stuff. All right. Let's move it a bit back. And like a previous project, I want to open another window. I'll move my cursor up to the left hand corner until it turns into a little radical, click and drag to get a split. Now I have 23d viewports, and I can press the camera button on the left hand one. Which gives me a view through the camera so I can work in the right view and I can see what the camera sees in the left view. Let's precision the camera. Let's see. I think what I want is I want a long focal length, so I'll go to the camera, and I think I want at least 100 millimeter. That's when I usually use for high end products, 100 plus maybe 200. I usually looks a bit premium. Then I'll just move it back, and let's see. Maybe I'll have it kind of small in the frame because I can also shout luxury. And then I'll rotate it with a rotate tool to just place it. See, now I can rotate it on the right and I can see where it ends up on the left. Now, it's a bit too sensitive for me, so I'll hold down Shift, which makes it a little smoother, so I can really place it where I want. And maybe I'll even move it a little more back. And okay, let's build the scene. So I will shift a add a mesh, and I'm thinking cubes for mine. It's the most industrial looking shape, I think, maybe some cylinders. Remember, my project is an industrial chili oil. So I want, like I want it to be reminiscent of industry. Let's see, let's start with just a cube. And let's scale that up. To make it pretty big, and I can move it down so that this will be the platform that the bottle stands on. Now, it's come to the point where I can't really zoom in on this. Like, for some reason, the camera is stuck somewhere else, so I can click off and click on it, and I still just it won't quite let me zoom in on it. If this ever happens to you, then that means that the camera is centered around something else. And in this case, it's the camera, so zooming in wants to zoom in on that, and I can't really go past the camera in any other direction. And so to center the three D viewpoard on another object, there's a shortcut for it, and that is coma or period on the num pad, and that zooms in on another thing. I think probably if you've turned on Emulatenumpad, then you'll just press period wherever it is on your keyboard. Okay, so I've zoomed into this, and let's move it a bit further up so that you can actually see when it crosses the boundary off the floor because you can see the grid poking through it. I just want it just above. And I can even hold down shift to make it more sensitive or to make it slower and just get it right on that floor. Just to give me a bit of a head start on the next object, I'll just start by cloning this object or duplicating with Shift D, D for duplicate. I can move it around, but I'll just right click to reset its location, to move it back. And then I can scoot this over a bit. And I just want, floor below this platform. So I'll scale it out on two axes, I press the blue square here, scaling it out and maybe more horizontally because I think I want a wall as well. And I can move that over a bit to make this like a platform poking out. I'll try to make that an even thickness so that this thickness here is the same as this thickness here. And then to add the back wall, I'll just shift D, right click and then move that up and back. And how much space do I want to leave here? Maybe, maybe something like this. Can always refine it later and then scale that up to fill the whole frame. Got to make sure everything's filled on the left side. And why not go a bit higher. Let's turn on rendered mode on the left hand view. Rendered mode is out of view here, so I'll just click on this bar with my scroll wheel so that I can drag it over and then click the rendered view. Now, it says compiling EV engine shaders, telling me that I'm in the wrong render engine. So I'll move over here to the render tab and switch the render engine to cycles. And that's great. Now, in this view, I didn't show you this earlier, but I like to clean this up quite a bit to make it as close to the final render as possible. I'll grab the edge of the toolbar, I'll move it in so that it disappears. Now it's collapsed into this tiny little arrow right here. I can expand it again or collapse it. Then up here, I have a toggle to show or hide gizmos. If I click this, look at that, cleans it up quite a bit. And then also the overlays. And when I click that, all of this will disappear. Watch. And now it really looks like the final image. But one more thing that I kind of want is, let me show you by just going to the world and increasing that color. You can see a bit better. You can see around the camera, and I find that often that distracts me from what the image actually looks like. So I like going to the camera, clicking the camera, going to its camera properties. And here under viewport display, there is a pass part two slider. And if I slide that all the way down, then we're going to see everything around, and if I slide it all the way up, then we're going to see nothing around. It just turns black, and I like this view. Okay, back to the World tab. Let's give ourselves, again, a bit of a head start by just adding an HDRI. I'll keep using the same studio HDRI as I've used up until now. So I'll turn this window into a shader editor. Close this tab over here and go to the world Shader. In here, I'll shift A, add environment texture. I'll just start typing ENV shows me the environment texture. I'll click Open. And here I can select that HDRI I downloaded and plug that into the background color. That loads it in. Now you may have the question, how do you rotate it? Like I it's wrong, if it's the wrong rotation, if I want shadows on this side, oh, you can't see my drawing because I turned it off. What if I want the shadow on this side and not on this side? Yeah? Let's add a mapping node. This mapping node lets you move and rotate to this texture. So I'll plug this vector into the vector input here, and it all turns gray. The reason for that is I just is that this vector input expects a coordinate system. All gets very technical. But basically, it's asking where is the world? What does it look like? W I just plugged into it is zero. It's just empty. So it doesn't know what to do and it just turns gray. When specifying a vector through the mapping node, we need to give it an actual world vector. Let's shift A, add a texture coordinate node. That is also under input and texture coordinate, we want the generated output of this into the vector input of this. This is just one of those strings of nodes that you have to kind of learn texture coordinate, into mapping, into environment texture. I would say this is probably the only string of nodes you need to memorize, but you kind of need to memorize it. So write it down on a posted node or something, so that you have it for later because this is super useful because now I can slide the z rotation. This is the only slider I care about in the mapping, actually. Actually, this will be much clearer if I turn on the GPU rendering. So I'll go to render here and change it from CPU to GPU makes it a whole lot faster. And then I'll slide the z rotation. Look at that. That rotates the light around. But the project brief specifies that I'm not allowed to use this for my main lighting. So I'm really only looking for the reflection details here. So I'll scroll here on the left hand side to zoom in on the reflections, and I'll just rotate it until I see a reflection shape that I like. And I ended up not liking any rotation on that HDRI, so I went and downloaded another one and another one. And finally, I found one that I liked. Let's go back into the three D view port and add some materials to the scene. I'll just click one of these objects, and in the materials tab, I'll click New and give it a color first. Let's go for some green looking color like maybe a yellowish green and decrease the value of it to make it darker and maybe the saturation as well, because I feel like dark grayish or muted colors usually look pretty high end. Something like that. Then pressing one of the other objects, I can select that same material in that drop down. See also that all the bottle materials are here now in the scene. I'll click that and go to the back wall as well and click that. Looking at this now, I feel like it should probably be even more desaturated and maybe even darker. And I need some dynamic lighting on this. And I have an idea. What I want for this image is I want a streak of light coming in from the left and going like this and like this, hitting the back wall, giving us a nice rim light over here on the bottle. And maybe you can even see through the bottle. Like maybe it'll shine a bit through the glass and through the liquid. That's my idea. And the way I'll accomplish that is by adding a sunlight first. I think I'll use the sunlight. So let's go down to sun and let's at least try it out. So move it up. The movement, again, doesn't really matter, but I like having it roughly where it's coming from and then rotate it to come from the side and then a bit towards the wall. And then to get the streak, I need to obscure it. So let's shift A, add another mesh, a cube, and let's move this up and add a ceiling. So I'll scale this out on just the horizontal axis to make it flat. And look at that. I'm getting close already to getting that streak. Shift D, right click to duplicate it and move it over so I can open up just a little streak. Maybe I'll rotate it a bit down to get that angle that I want. Let's see what happens if I increase the strength. Yes, that's nice and increase the angle as well to soften it out a bit. I think that's nice, but it needs more shadow in the foreground. So I'll do another duplicate of the ceiling, shift D, and then move that over here so that I can put the foreground in shadow. That looks very nice. Now, I do not like the brightness of the shadows. It's way too bright, and I want a very high contrast image. So let's go back into the shader editor into the world and decrease the intensity of the background. Zero makes it completely dark, so let's hold down shift while dragging to gradually increase that to a shadow level that I like. Maybe that is good, and I'll go back into the three D view and click the light and increase that even more. Let's make it more intense. Let's type in 20. And I don't like how much of the bottle is actually showing because of the light, and that is because of the angle of the light. So I will rotate the sunlight away from the wall until I like the definition on the bottle. And I can't really get it to work because I like something like this, but on the wall, I like this. So what I'll do actually is I'll hide the bottle with the ceiling so that it is in complete shadow, which kind of looks nice in itself. And then I will shift A, add another light that can be a spotlight because spotlights are pretty easy to control so that they don't spell out everywhere. And then I'll use this to light the bottle. We'll move it over. And again, period on the num bed to center on that object. Let's move it down a little bit and over increase the intensity of that to 20 as well. Maybe it has to be even higher because it's so small, so maybe 100, multiply by two. Multiply by ten. There we go. Only at 40,000 watts, I start to see this. So these numbers are you may have to make them real high. So let's move it back so that it's kind of behind the bottle, rotate it to point at the bottle. That's very nice. And now the radius will determine the softness of that light. So if I increase it a lot, then it's very soft. If I decrease it, then it's going to be very hard, and softness usually equates to luxury. Let's make it quite soft. And what I'm seeing here is that the reflection here is circular, which doesn't look great to me. I prefer squares. So I'll actually turn this from a spotlight to an area light, and I'll increase the size of that area light. And then decrease its spread, which makes it more like a spotlight. And this aerial light can be stretched out, so I'll actually scale it on the z to make it taller. Then maybe a bit out and even taller to make sure that the reflection goes all the way down the side. Then to make sure it doesn't spill, decrease the spread on it to really make it hit only that. I'll move it even further back. And this is too intense. I'll have to decrease the intensity of it. Maybe divide by ten, and I can even move it in because what I'm seeing is on the left hand side here, it's spilling onto the floor, and I don't quite like that. So I'll move it in so you can't really see that. And that is a nice rim light. Let's also add a bit of a refraction light, one that lights up the interior of it. And for that, I think, again, I'll try a spotlight first and move it back behind the bottle and point it at the floor below the bottle. And what happens if I increase that to 40,000? That's kind of nice. Here, you can see the before and after if I find it in the outliner and click the I icon, and you can see that's without, and that is with. It does light it up quite nicely. Let's do it even stronger. Maybe try multiply by four. Let's try the extremes. And I do like it. I'll place that light there, but then I'll go into the object itself, click the liquid, and maybe I'll make that darker. To get a nice looking contrast in the liquid, a dark liquid with some strong highlights. Let's refine the color of the background. I'll go there and find just a hue that I feel fits better with the look of the oil. And since it's starting to get quite noisy, I'll also go to the render settings and turn on the denoiser in the viewport. To get a better sense for what it'll look like when it's done. I feel like maybe this needs a bit of a wrap light. Let's duplicate this. I want to show you, this is not planned. I want to show you the process that I'm going through as I think about this. I never hit the final result on the first try. I always have to try multiple things. And I'm seeing here that I think maybe I want this light to wrap more around. So I'll try it. I'll shift D, duplicate this light, and then move it over and rotate it. And this I can decrease the size of. And let's see. It needs to be constrained more and even lower spread, and it has to be a lot weaker. Maybe I'll even add a bit of a tint to it, a little blueness. Let's see that's before and after zooming in before and after. I could do with it. I can do without it. That's fine. That's fine by me. But one photographic trick that I really like is the use of negative fill. So I'll add just a new object, and this can be a plane. A plane is fine. And then I'll move it over to the opposite side of the Kelte side. I'll scale it up and then rotate it. And right now it's working as a bounce light. Light is coming in from the left hand side, it's hitting it, and it's bouncing into here. That's the beauty of using the cycles render engine. That would not happen with IV. It's not realistic enough. But I want this to do the opposite. I want it to absorb all the light. So I'll give it a material, a new one, and I'll call this NAG stands for negative. And in the color, I'll just give it a pure black. Let's make it nonreflective as well. Just pull the roughness all the way up. So now what it's doing, watch this. If I increase the size of it, and then just zoom in on the bottle, watch what happens when I hide. Brighter, darker. So it adds a lot of contrast. It's a nice trick. So I'll just rotate it over a bit and move it back to just add some contrast to that right side. So that's before and after, before and after. Looks very nice to me, but I feel like the background needs some more interest. It's not quite interesting enough. And in fact, you know what? I'll refine the composition a bit because I feel like if I rotate the camera a little bit to the left, I can place this at a more interesting location in the frame, something like that. And then let's add some interest to the background. I'll start with this, actually, and just shift de duplicate it and move it back and into the wall. And I think maybe what I want for this is I'll scale it up and skill it in a bit for it's two be reminiscent of a girder or a column to give that industrial vibe, right? You can't really see the edge of it. So let's rotate it a little bit to the side so you can kind of catch the highlight on one side of it. Then I'll place one right behind the bottle and then shift D, move that copy over. And the distance kind of depends on the angle of the shadow. Like, do I want to fill in the gap between them with shadow? And I think I do. So shift D to another one where I fill in that entire gap with a shadow. And then Shift D again, get one to the other side. That's quite nice. But actually, I'll select all of them holding Shift, and I'll scale them all at the same time to get them to be a little thinner so I can fit them all right inside. Like that and maybe add another one to the right and another one to the left. That's a little bit more interesting, right? Let's add even more highlight on the back wall. I want that sun to be very strong. Instead of 20, let's do 40, add more contrast to the image, making it more interesting. And this, I feel like is getting very close to what I want. Actually, you know what? Let's delete it. I feel like it adds more to the drama if I don't have it. Feels even more premium. Now the brief specifies that I should render in 1920 by 1080. I'll go to the output tab and type those in if they're not already there and they are in my case, so I'll just go to the render menu and render image when I feel like I'm done. And it'll start out noisy, and as the samples increase, it'll get less and less noisy. And the more complex your scene is, the longer this will take. The faster your computer is, the faster it'll go. But once it in my case, hits 4,096 samples, which I specified here in the render settings right here, then it'll denoise and it'll be finished. So when I clicked out, it minimized the window, but I can just get that back, and I'll just edit out the rendering for you. It is done, so I'll go to Image and save as. And I'll save mine as a JPEG called BYOL product chart Version one. Always at a Version one because there will be a Version two. Probably. You will never be happy with Version one. Save As image, and this is the finished image that I can share proudly with the world. 39. Movement Shortcuts: I'm going to level up your movement skills. I'll be honest, I've been holding back a little bit because I've been using the gizmos to move around, and there is a quicker way. Now, you may be thinking maybe rightly that I am kind of insane, claiming that using the tool and the gizmo is slow, like you just click it, and then you move. But you're going to do this thousands of times per project, moving things around. And moving over here, clicking the icon, and then finding the Gizmo and clicking the right axis, the seconds actually add up. I mean, they actually do, and there is a quicker way of doing it. So I'm going to familiarize you with GRS. Those are the shortcuts for grab, rotate, scale. So I'll go back to the Select tool, and these will work with any tool selected. I usually just keep it on the box select, and if I press G on my keyboard, remember that the shortcut shows up in the bottom left. The cube is now attached to my cursor, and I can click to place it somewhere. So G, move it around, click. And this works wherever on the screen my cursor is. So say I'm working on something over here and then I want to move the cube somewhere, I can just press G and then move it, and it's still going to be attached. If I move my cursor out the edge of the screen on the left, it'll wrap around on the right. How cool is that, and I'll just keep on going. I can right click to cancel, and that'll move it back to the start. You can even constrain this to axis just like with the Gizmo. The way to do it is to press G, and then press the letter of the axis. You'll see the letters here up in the track ball. I can press X on my keyboard and that'll constrain the box to X axis, press Y to constrain it to the Y axis and Z to constrain it to the z axis. I'll make it real quick to just G Y, move it over here, G, X, move it over here, and this is the preferred method of everyone I know using blender. If you go online and you start looking up tutorials, no one's using the tool. Everyone is using G to move. And I wonder because it's not only faster, but it's also more precise. So let me show you if you want to move it, say, I want to move this cube diagonally across the floor here. I don't have to do one axis at a time. I don't have to GX and then GY. I can do G, shift Z. Shifts means all other axis then Z, meaning X and Y axis at the same time. So now it's moving across the floor. G, shift Z that's that. I can also do G shift X, which constraints it on every axis but the X axis. If I want to be precise about my movements, say I want to move the cube 1 meter on the Y axis, I know that this is the plus of the Y axis because of the track ball, the Y is pointing in that direction. And I can I can move over here and I can go to the Y axis and I can type in a number I can say, Oh, two instead of the 1 meter than it was before, but I can also do G, Y, and then write one on my keyboard and click the mouse. If I want to move it 10 meters up, I press gz10. That moves it 10 meters up. And rotating works in exactly the same way. If I press R on the keyboard, that activates rotate mode, and I just move my mouse around, and it rotates it. Now, it kind of matters how close you are to the center. You'll see the little line. If I'm right up against the center and I start moving, like, it's going to be super sensitive, but if I move far away, then it's going to be less sensitive. And if I again, hold down shift, like we've always done when we want it to be slower, that slows it down. Can also move the cursor out of the edge of the screen on one side. I'll wrap around visually on the left, but it's as if it's even farther away. So I can just move it super far away, and now it's going to be very slow at rotating. It's the same thing as with the move. I I press R and Z that rotates it just on the Z axis, R and X rotates it just on the X. And what's very common is to rotate it by 90 degrees, so I can do R, z90, rotated 90 degrees and scale, that's S, press S on the keyboard, then move it out, scales it up, move it in, scales it down, hold down shift, makes it slower, pressing two, scales it up by two. This is what allows me to work at the speed of thought. If you're serious about three D, then you should get used to using the keyboard shortcuts. If not, it's fine to use the tools, but it will be a bit slower because you won't be able to move, rotate, scale this fast if you're going back and forth between these all the time. Going forward, I will be switching to this kind of movement because I'm tired of being constrained by the tools. But if you don't feel like learning a bunch of weird keyboard shortcuts, that's fine. It's not for everyone, but I would recommend that you try to transition if you really want to get into three D. 40. Subdivision Surface Modifier: We were modeling, we added bevels to everything, like little edge bevels to make everything smooth, right? We went into Edit mode with tab, press two, select edges, clicked on an edge, and then we used the Bevel tool, which is over here. We used bevel or we pressed Control or Command B to bevel, and we moved the cursor out. And then sometimes we added more segments by scrolling. You know, we added more segments, and that smooths it out. And typically, we did this with many edges at a time. So maybe I press everything, A to select everything. Control B to bevel that, hold down shift to make it easier to control. And this is how we made curved surfaces. There is another way, and it's called subdivision modeling, and it is a very common way to model because in contrast to this method, where you start out with a boxy shape and then you smooth it out with subdivision modeling, you start out with a smooth shape, and then you sharpen it up. So basically, if most of your objects going to be smooth, then you probably want to do subdivision modeling for. It's very fun to use. I'll show you let's delete this cube and add a new fresh cube and the core of the subdivision workflow is a modifier. Modifiers are here under the wrench icon. We press Add modifier and you'll find the subdivision modifier under generate and subdivision surface. You can also go up to the search bar or just start typing SUB, and it's here subdivision surface. It's actually so common that it also has a shortcut that is very easy to reach, and that is Control or Command one. So that adds the subdivision surface modifier, and the shape of our cube completely changes. So the modifier, it added more faces to the object and smoothed it out. What happened was I'll actually illustrate it for you. We had a box going like this. It was just one pace from the top. Then what the subdivision surface modifier did was it split this pace into four phases. So it added a line going through here and one going through here, and then it moved the corners in to smooth it out a little bit. I moved this corner over here. It moved this corner over here. That way, it now resembles more of a ball, and we can make it do that again to all of these phases. So right now we have a phase that's like this. And when I add another level here, levels viewport, it's going to subdivide that one more time, and it's going to add a line going through here and one going through here, splitting that phase into four new phases. Watch. There we go. Almost exactly. If I add more, one more, one more, one more. It's going to gradually become more like a ball. Now, if I press Tab on this, we can still see the cube. This is what the cube really looks like. We can still see the cube unaffected, as well, if I go to the modifier and I click the little monitor icon here that hides it, and so we can work on our object without seeing the modifier. Turn it on and press tab to edit our object and say, I want to move this face up. So I'll press the face, and then I'm going to use the shortcut, so G, Z to move it up, and then move it, and that affects the smooth shape as well. It's still smoothing out that cube, but the cube is now stretched. And what happens if I add more geometry to it? Let's say, for instance, press this face here and I extrude it E to extrude. That's going to extrude the smooth phase as well. What about this? E extrude. And now I have kind of an L shape. It's really cubic. If I turn off the modifier. It's a cubic. It's like a stair step. But when I turn it on, it's a very, very smooth stair, and I can start to sharpen up the edges that I want to be sharp. Think about it for a second. If I want this here to be less smooth. Say I want to keep this sharp corner here, what would I do? Well, the modifier splits all the faces and then averages them out, right? So this giant face here is split into smaller faces, and then all the corners are moved in, yeah. So if I add a loop going across, well, say, here, then this corner here is not going to smooth all the way over here. It's going to smooth only to here. So let's do that. Let's add a support loop with the loop cut tool, which is here or the shortcut Control R, which adds the loop cut, I'll click, and then I can slide it over. And see, that's exactly what happens. Now, this part is more sharp because we added what's called a support loop. A support loop tells the subdivision surface modifier to keep this more sharp. Let's add another one. Let's say I add a support loop going across here and then move it up. Try to pause the video for a second and imagine what's the object going to do when I add this loop and move it up? You got it? I'll click and move it up, and this is what it does. It sharpens up all those edges going across the top. But it's still bent in this direction. Why is that? Why is it bent like this? Well, that's because nothing's going across here. But we can do that, too. Control R, click across the object here, and move it over. And that'll square that up too. And now we have a square top. And it's never going to be completely sharp, but it can get pretty close. If you move the support loops really close to the edge. So you can slide support loops. Do you remember that? You can use the slide tool or you can use the shortcut, which is G, and then G again slides it across the mesh. Then if I move that very, very close to the edge, I'll select this entire loop here by holding Alt and clicking on it, GG to slide it. Up like this. Now, it still has a few small polygons to make that shape not entirely sharp. Like, it's not mathematically sharp. I'll still keep that slight little bevel. And that's why three D modelers love this technique because you're never going to get super sharp corners, you'll always get some smoothness, which is very natural and very aesthetically pleasing as well. Now, you don't have to feel constrained by the loop cut tool. You don't have to use the loop cut tool to add support loops. You can use any tool. The inset tool is also very useful. Shortcut for that is I. So let's do it with this face. If I press I on this face to inset, that'll add a couple of loops going across the edge. And unlike if I added a support loop, like if I did this and then slid this over, it would go across the entire object. But with an inset, I can keep it to just this little face and keep this kind of sharp while everything else is round. So when adding support loops, in general, stick to the loop cut, control R, and slide things around by either sliding them right away or pressing GG, to slide them after the fact, to sharpen things up. Sharpen the attachment point here, for instance, or use inset by pressing a face or multiple phases and pressing I. I don't know if I showed this already, but let's delete this and add a new cube and make the same kind of shape. Insetting is very useful on multiple phases. So if I click this phase, this phase, and this pace, and I inset it with I, then it's going to inset all those at the same time and add a support loop across the entire side of the object. And so if I do a Control one, or I can do a Control two, three, or four to instantly add more levels. So I press Control four and that adds four levels in the viewport by default. So I'll just do five for now. I want this entire side sharp, but everything else smooth, then I can inset this and hold down shift to make it slower. And that'll sharpen up that entire side. And if you haven't noticed yet, when there's a support loop only on one side of the main edge, this is the main edge going across here, main defining edge. And here's the support loop going across. There should be a support loop on the other side as well, because if not, then we get a super smooth ramp going in and then kind of a sharp turn going out. So I'll also add a control R edge loop across the other side here. And that adds a super sharp side to this shape. It's a really fun way to model because it's very easy to start defining curves. Like say I don't like the way this curve looks, this one going across like this. I can just press two to select edges and select this edge. And actually, you can't see the problem now because the objects obstructing the view, but I can go into X ray mode. Now I can see, Oh, there's another edge that I haven't quite hit here. So I'll actually press Alt while clicking on this, which selects the entire loop going across, and then I'll go out of X ray mode. And if I move this loop around, say, I press G and then shift Y to not move on the green axis. Now I can start moving this around and very, very easily define the curve that I want. Say I want it like this. It's a really fun way to experiment with shapes and to get, like, wacky, smooth shapes and also to get sharp shapes. And this, the subdivision workflow is the one we'll use to make the character. 41. Modeling Symmetrically with the Mirror Modifier: I want to get ahead of myself, but I think you're going to love this video. This thing blew my mind the first time I saw it, and it's a way to make something really complex looking very easily. And it is the mirror modifier for adding symmetry because oftentimes we're making symmetrical objects in three D, and we don't want to have to work double up. We want to automate that, and we do that with the mirror modifier. So with this cube selected, I'm going to add a modifier to it in the modifier tab here, it's the wrench and then go to modifiers and add, I'll just start typing MIRR mirror modifier, and now it's added. Now it is mirroring this cube, and it's doing so on the x axis because the X axis is selected in the modifier. We can work out which axis that is by going up to the track ball here, and we can see that it is the red one. So across this red line, it is mirroring our object currently. Anything we do to one side of it is going to be copied to the other side of it, across the center of the object. So let me show you that. I'll go into Edit mode and press three for Phase select mode up here. I'll click this face and I want to inset it. I can do that either with the inset tool or by pressing I on my keyboard. And I'll move that in and then extrude it with E and then move it out, and look at that. It comes out the other side as well. Let's just keep going. I'll extrude this again, maybe scale it in and extrude it. Scale it out. Extrude it. Like, how cool is that? You can so quickly make something look pretty interesting. I'll even I'll move this up, and maybe I'll loop cut right here so that I can extrude this out. And now here's something interesting. What happens if this crosses over the center? I'll show you. So let's move this up G to move it, and then Z to constrain it on the blue axis, so I'll move it up and then extrude it. And when I cross over the center, it looks pretty good. If I move it outside the other side, you'll see it does so over here as well. So not only does it copy from left to right, but it also copies from right to left. Anything I do to either side is going to be copied to the other side. So in edit mode, if I press Select, this orange is the only geometry I've actually made, and everything else is just added on top using the mirror modifier. But the thing is, I typically don't like geometry intersecting with itself like this. So going into itself and out of itself like it's doing in this area is typically no Bueno. So what I almost always do is I want to cut it short. I want it to mirror across just from one side to the other and not from this side to that side. And to do that, we need to turn on bisect for this axis. So again, we're working on the X axis. So here under bisect, I want to turn it on for the X axis. Let's do that. And something weird happens. It becomes a super strange object. And the reason for that is when we bissect, we need to choose one axis to copy over to the other. And I was modeling on the left side, and I wanted to copy it to the right side, but Blender, by default, chose to do it the opposite way. If I go into tab, let me just do this axis a little bit better. Anything that's to the right of this center line, that's just half a cube down here, and this rod over here is being copied over to the other side. And that's why we're getting this strange looking object. So let's flip it by clicking flip for Xaxis as well. So now this is the result I was after. I'm taking what's on the left side and duplicating it to the right side without having that thing poking out the end here. So anything that crosses over the center line is just cut off. So if I turn off bisect for it for a second, you'll see, we get that line going across. If I turn it on, then that's cut off. And anything I start doing on the right here, if I extrude it, extrude it again, none of this has any effect. The only thing that has effects is what I do on the left side of the object. This is how I typically work. Now, we're not constrained to only doing this on one axis either. Right now we are doing it on the red line, but we can mirror on the green line at the same time. Let's turn on the Y axis and start modeling on, say, the side here. I will inset this and maybe extrude it inwards a little bit. And what I can see here is that when I'm extruding inwards, it's really hard to see because it's duplicating the other side over here. I am making a hole and moving it in, but it's adding a face on top here because it's taking this face and it's mirroring it over to this side. So let me turn on bisect already and see if I move this in, and this is the correct side to bisect, it's doing it on the other side as well. If I didn't see an effect, if it were like this, everything is flat, then I would know that it's mirroring the wrong side, the sign I'm not modeling on, and I would have to flip it. But in my case, unflipping is the correct thing to do. Let's inset it again, maybe move it out. And it's moving out on that axis. Let's add a loop here. And since I'm also mirroring on the X axis, I can start modeling in the X direction as well. So I can add geometry going that way and add a loop going like this. How cool is that? Like, you can so quickly make something that looks pretty intentional. And that's the weird thing because let me just disable this modifier for a second by clicking the little monitor icon. Like this, this is the object I made. It makes absolutely no sense. It's just random geometry. Once I start symmetrizing it, suddenly, it looks like it's supposed to be that way. Okay, let's just go all the way. Let's add the z direction as well. Duplicate it downwards as well. And let's bisect it. And since it's looking good, then I don't need to flip it had it looked like this, then I would need to flip it because it's deleting all my detail. So how cool is that with just a few operations, just a few little modeling tricks that you already know, you can make something like this super easily. I absolutely love this tool, and we will be using it for our character before we do that, I need to explain a little bit of how it works under the hood because you need to know how blender decides where the mirror is. And if I move this object, let's just hit G and X to move it on the X axis. You can tell that it's not mirroring over the center of the world, which is here because then the object would change now. It is remaining its shape. So what's happening is the mirror is looking at the object's origin point, and that is this orange.in the middle. I think you can see that. The little orange.in the middle of the object. That is the point at which Blender looks at what's to the left and right of this and where to mirror it from. Now, if I move my object in object mode, which is where I am now, I'm in object mode up here. Then that origin point moves. However, if I'm in edit mode, the origin point doesn't move. Let me just turn off the modifier for now. Go into Edit mode. I'll go to select all I've selected all my geometry and watch the origin point as I move it. I'll hit G and X to move it on the X axis. Look at that. The geometry moves, but the origin stays put. So now the origin is in a completely different area of the object. And let me just turn off the Y and Z axis to make this next part a little easier to understand. Try to imagine what the object will look like when I turn this mirror back on. Know that Blender will look at what's to the left of the X axis of this origin point and mirror it to the right side. What will the final object look like now? What's C? This is it. Now, if I go into tab, look at this. It took everything to the left of the little orange point and it mirrors it to the right. Now, what is super cool, and I think you're going to love this is you can move stuff around with the mirror modifier enabled. So if I now hit G and X, look at this. We're seeing it update live. And if I turn back on the other axes as well, I'm just holding down my button while moving the cursor over to enable all of those. Go into tab and then start moving this around. Look at this. How cool is that? So I can move this down and find interesting looking shapes. I can move this over, make this really big. I can even rotate everything and look at that. It is so like, how would you even make something like this without the symmetry? It's crazy. So you can tell that I obviously love this. Usually, you won't be making stuff like this with it. We will be using it to make our character so that we can make just one half, and the other half will be made automatically. But have fun with this. This is such a powerful workflow. 42. Separating Mirrored Objects: Go into a little bit of detail on how to detach objects from each other. So one very common example of this is with arms, let me just make an arm and go into edit mode to move it so as to not move its origin point and then mirror that over its Y axis. That's the green axis, and now it's mirrored, and we're also probably going to have a subdivision surface modifier on it with a couple of support loops. And an inset on the bottom and top. Now we need to detach these arms from each other because at the moment, they are one object. If I click the box and click one arm, both of them are selected, and if I start rotating, they rotate together, which is not animable. If you want to animate one arm separate from the other, you need to detach it. But the way we typically detach something isn't available to us right now. That is, we go into tab, and then we go up to mesh and separate and buy loose parts. Le is there is only one part here, and that's this. This is the only real geometry we have. This one is a ghost R made by the mirror modifier. So what we need to do is to apply this mirror modifier. So click the little drop down, click Apply, and now that has become real geometry. Whatever that modifier did is now real geometry. Now we can go to mesh, separate by loose parts. And because these are not physically connected to each other, that makes them loose parts. They are now separate objects. 43. Drawing: Lot of people will want to draw on their model in the beginning. Like, in a moment, we're going to model a character, and a lot of you are going to want to draw maybe a mouth onto the character. I want to challenge you to try and shape it in three D most of the time. So if there's an open mouth, trying to actually sculpt that cavity in three dimensions instead of just drawing it on the model. The more you can push yourself to do that, the more professional in general, it's going to look. In a lot of cases, you don't really want to add much volume. Like in my Mini Robin example, I have the mustache and I have the eyebrows, and those are basically drawn onto the model. So I want to show you how I did that. So I'll start by just shift A, adding a mesh cube to begin, and this can be my head. So I'll go to the modifier stack by clicking modifiers and add modifier and search for subdivision surface at that, and I'll increase the number of divisions in the viewport to say maybe five that's a good head, and then I want to add an object that can be like my drawing object. So I'll shift A, add, and it's still a mesh, but I want a two D object. And the most basic two D object is a plane. The plane is not a three D object. It doesn't have volume. It's completely flat, but it's a good start. We'll add volume later. So I'll press tab to edit this, and then I'll move it up by pressing G to grab it and then constrain it to the z axis by pressing Z on my keyboard. Then I'll move it up and click to confirm, then scale it down by pressing S and moving it in. How do I conform this to the surface? I want to draw on the surface with this plane. Well, to do that, I have to use the snapping settings. And those are up here in the little magnet icon. I'll click that and turn on snapping. Now, by default, it snaps to increments, not to surfaces, meaning that if I press G to grab it and I start moving, nothing happens for a while until I move it far enough that it finds an increment of 1 meter, and then it snaps to that increment. Oh, this is not the behavior I want, but I can change it by clicking a little drop down next to snapping. And instead of increment, I'll go down to face project. Let's press G now to grab it and move it over the sphere and see what happens. It now conforms to the sphere. It's very hard to see right now, but if I click and then move my camera, you can see it is actually conformed. You can't actually tell that it's happening while I'm moving it because it doesn't change shape from the perspective of the camera, but it does, in fact, stay conformed to the sphere. Now let's undo all that, bring it back onto the top and snap it straight down by viewing from the top, pressing G, and then just clicking. And that snaps it straight to the surface. Now I want to start modeling on it, but it's very hard to see because it's inside the other object, kind of, and it's very hard to tell what I'm doing. So I'll also go up here to the viewport settings and turn on X ray mode. Now I can see what I'm doing. Regardless of where I'm putting it, I can always see where it is. I'll view everything from above again and then just click Edge select mode up here and click on an edge, and then I'll extrude that edge by pressing E to extrude and then move it out and click. Now, what happened in three D? If I move and view it from the side, this new part is still conformed to the sphere. Let's keep going. I'll go up, and I'll press E to extrude, maybe move it over here, R to rotate it, maybe S to scale it in and look at that and it's still conforming. And it'll keep doing that. This is how I made facial here on my model. E, extrude that, scale it in with S, R to rotate, G to move E S, R. And that's a pretty good base. Now let's give it thickness. We do this with a modifier and you've already used it, it's the solidify modifier. So SOL solidify, add that, and that adds thickness. It's going the wrong way. So let's change the offset from negative one to one. Now I can turn off X ray mode. That adds thickness to it. And it's still pretty easy to edit because remember, if I go into Edit mode now, I'm not editing that three D object. I'm still editing that two de ribbon. So I can still press that final edge and press E to extrude, move it over, and the thickness will be added to it. We can also smooth this out by adding a subdivision surface modifier to this. So minimize this modifier and add a new one, subdivision surface, and that stacks another one on top of the solidify. So I'll add a couple of levels to that. And maybe I even want to now make it a little thicker so I can see it. And that's pretty nice. Maybe I even want to offset it to zero so that it offsets down and up at the same time like it's in the middle of the object. Then I can stack one final modifier onto this and that will be the mirror modifier. So MRR, mirror, add that and bisect it on the x axis. Now I've given the sphere a mustache. 44. Modeling Clothing: Let's talk real quick about clothing. I've mocked up a quick character here. It has blocky shapes just like the character you're supposed to make later on, and I want to give this guy a T shirt. So how do I do that? Well, let's start with the shoulders because those are going to be key to making a T shirt. Right now, I have a model here with a bunch of modifiers on it. So the model itself looks like this. I just entered Edit mode by pressing Tab and it's quite blocky. On top of that blockiness, we have a few modifier. Let me turn off the bottom two, you just see the first and that is a subdivision surface modifier. Without that, we have the blockiness with the subdivision surface, it smooths it out. Then there's a mirror modifier which mirrors it over to the other side of the body, and then there's a smooth modifier, which is automatically added by right clicking and clicking Shade Smooth. We can just ignore that. That is just for making it look smooth instead of facety if I did a shade flat, then you can see that it's faceted and then shade smooth, smooths it out. When we are adding clothing, we have to be mindful of the order of the modifiers, because let me just mock up a very quick demonstration here with a plane, moving it over and another plane over here. So on the first one, I will add a subdivision surface. And add a couple of levels to it, and then a solidify. Solidify adds thickness. So I'll set the offset to one and increase the thickness. So that's what that does. Now, what happens if I add these same modifiers, but in the opposite order on this other plane? What do you think is going to happen? How do you think this is going to look? If I first add the solidify and then the subdivision surface? Well, let's see. So solidify, offset one, add some thickness to it, about the same, and then a subdivision surface. But with a few levels. Look at that. So why is this happening? It's because the object is reading the modifiers from top to bottom. So this one first smoothed out the flat plane into a flat circle and then it added thickness to it. And the solidify just adds this one straight thickness. For this one, we first added thickness and basically got a cube, and then we smoothed out the whole cube shape, so we even smoothed out that thickness that we added. This is very important to understand when we're adding clothing. Because we're going to do it based on the model that we already have. So let's do that. Let's press Tab on this and go into face select mode. I want to select all the faces that I want to become clothing. So I think I wanted to go down to this line here. So I'll Alt click on this edge to select the whole ring, and then Alt Shift click on this one, to select this ring as well, and then hold Shift to select those two top faces. So now all of this is selected. And then I will separate out this into a new object. We've done this before. It is mesh, duplicate. That makes a duplicate of what we've selected, just brings it out, and it's now attached to my cursor, so I'll right click, which brings it back to where it just was, but we're still in the same object. It just has multiple elements. So let's separate it out into a new object by going to mesh, separate selection. So that gives us a separate object. And if I press tab now to go out of Edit mode, we can see that we have one object here and we have one object here. And this is my clothing object, and I want to add thickness to it. So let's do that. Add modifier, solidify, set the offset to one, and then let's adjust the thickness. So that is the start of a shirt. Now, again, be mindful of where in the stack the solidify goes. So at the moment, we have subdivision surface, then mirror, then solidify. And this is good. This is fine. You can reorder them by dragging the dots on the right side of the modifier. So I can drag it to the very top, and that will smooth out the entire piece of clothing. So the edge will become fairly sharp, actually, because the edge of it is smoothed out. So counterintuitively, smoothing actually makes it look more sharp in this case. So make sure that this is after the subdivision surface modifier. Let's add an open shirt so you can see me do that again. I'll go to the body object, go into tab, and in this case, I don't have the geometry I need to separate out. So I'll have to add that. We'll control R at a loop cut and click here, and then Control R, click here. I know that I'll need one on the side as well, so I'll click here too. Because now if I hide the other object and I've done a terrible job naming my object here, I'll just click the head and hide that, click the shoulders, hide those, click the arms, hide that so that I can see what I'm doing. Going into tab, let's select these sides going all the way down. Select the side of the object and select the very back, everything on the back. I'm just holding down shift while clicking every face. And on the top here, I want an opening for the head, but I'll select a U shape on the back. And leave the bottom open. Then I'll duplicate it by either going to mesh and duplicate or clicking Shift D, that separates it out, right click to cancel, but it just cancels the movement and brings the duplicate back. It's still here. If I press G to grab it, it is still here, and then I'll press P to separate or we can go to mesh and separate P selection. That gives me a separate object. So now I have two objects, the original body, and the shirt on the side, and I'll add a solidify modifier to it. Set the offset to one and increase the thickness. Now, it looks like it's smoothing on the side here, but that is because I have shaded it smooth. So right clicking and shade smooth. Remember, that kind of fakes a smoothness to everything. The mesh is not smooth here. It is completely flat. So if I go to my wireframe view and turn off the X ray, you can see that it is, in fact, hard. It's not smooth, but there is this smoothing fakery going on. So if I right click and shade Auto smooth instead, it'll try to keep that sharpness. Then I can unhide all those objects that I hid earlier and try to match the thickness of the clothing on the right. Now he kind of looks like he's wearing a shirt open in the front. So this is one way of modeling clothing that I think you'll have good use for. 45. Class Project 05 - Character Modeling: It's the character modeling project. Time to put our subdivision surface modeling skills to the test, eh? It says, The brand is looking for a fun, recognizable mascot to use in marketing materials. Your task is to design and model a cute three D character that fits the brand's personality. For an extra challenge, you can make the character an animal. That means if you feel really comfortable with the subdivision surface workflow, you can try to make an animal. Animals are quite a lot harder than the blocky character I'm going to be making. But if you're feeling confident, go ahead and try. So focus on creating appealing shapes with simple blocky objects. Don't try to do any realistic, round organic shapes just yet. We will be using subdivision surface modeling, which you learned in the previous few videos, which means that things will be rounded out, but try to keep them fairly blocky. One good reference is my mini Robin model. This guy is blocky, but he still has some appealing shapes. So try to just focus on proportions and don't worry too much about trying to create, interesting curves and stuff. You can get pretty far with just blocky shapes. So the requirements are use subdivision modeling. That means use the subdivision surface modifier and add support loops to sharpen up edges. Separate limbs so they can move independently. Is going to be very important for the next section where we animate this character, and you need to be able to animate all the lens separately. And when you're done, just screenshot your character again. No need to render just yet. We'll do that later and upload it to the class project or assignment section on this website and share it on social media. That's at Bring Your Own Laptop on Instagram, and the Facebook group is here and the LinkedIn group is here. And in the next video, I'll make that robot character, but try to make your own character first, see what hurdles you meet, and then we'll work them out together. 46. Completed - Class Project 05 - Modeling the Head: Okay, I'm in a new file and time to make my character. Mine is going to be a robot because I have this industrial chili oil brand, and I think having an industrial character being, like, a robot guy, that's going to be fun. And I want to give him a movable mouth because in my animation later, I want him to be able to drop his jaw as if he's eating very spicy food. I think that'll be fun. So let's start with the head. I'll add Shift A, a mesh cube. And then let's round this out right away, going to the modifier stack and adding A. Subdivision surface modifier. I'll add a couple of levels already. So maybe four. And then let's start defining the shape of this. I want it to be a bit wider than it is tall and maybe less deep. Kind of like that. And let's start sharpening up the edges. Actually, you know what? I'll press control R to add a loop in the middle. And while I'm in edge slide mode, I'll bring this over to the left. And then at this point, I'll just add a mirror modifier so that I can work on the left hand side and not have to worry about the right hand. So I'll add a modifier. Mirror is right here. Click Mirror. I'm working on the green axis right now. So let's turn off X and turn on Y and then turn on bisect, and it's copying the wrong side, so let's flip that. And the reason it's going down like this is because when I add this loop only on the left hand side, look, if I turn off the mirror, it is going kind of down because it's smoothing the right hand side so much. So to fix that, I'll have to add another loop over here. Control R, add a loop and bring that over here, which straightens that out. Now I will add another loop going across here in the middle. Click there and right click to cancel the sliding. Then I want to select with phase select mode. This, this, this, this and this pace, leaving that one, and then extrude those down by parsing E. That extrudes it and leaves a hole for my mouth that I want here. Now, I need to sharpen this up because it doesn't look very robotic to me. So let's add some more loops. I know I need a loop going across here to sharpen up that a little bit. So control R, click the loop and bring it down, sharpening that up. And then let's also sharpen up this, bring it over, and have one here, too. Everything is automatically mirred, which is nice. I'll also add one going across here and here to sharpen up that. I that looks pretty robotic. But again, we get this weird seam because I'm not working on the other side, so let's just add another loop over here to get rid of that seam. That's nice. But I have made it a little bit difficult for myself up here. But that's fine. I'll just press vertices and select every single one of these up here, and I'll bring those down a little because I'm not liking the profile of my face. That looks pretty good. Let's sharpen up this top side, control R, bring this up to make it more boxy. And do I like the backside? I think I do. Although this bottom here could be rounder. So I think the reason it's not round is because I have a support loop going here and here. So it's basically smoothing out between these two points. So if I move those farther apart, then that'll smooth it out. Now, if I just move this whole thing up, then that'll mess up the front, so I can do just the back. Let me select this loop and just go across all the way to the end and do the same with this. Then I can move them all up by pressing G, and then lock it on the Z axis by pressing Z and move those up. And that rounds out the backside a little more. That's nice. I can do the same here. And this time, I'll do a shortcut to select this entire loop, and that is hold Control or Command on a Mac and click the end, that just selects the whole row from the start to the end of where I clicked. And then I'll move these down. Great. Let's give him some big round yes. I'll shift A, add a mesh, and this time, I'll do a cylinder, and this cylinder can rotate on the Y axis. R Y, 90 to rotate at 90 degrees. And then I'll go into edit mode and start scaling. I'll scale it down and move it over. I can just move it free hand. No need to constrain. Move it to here, something like that, and then I'll add a mirror modifier to it. So mirror. Now, it says that it's mirroring on the X axis, but it added on the top. Why is that? Well, that is because I rotated in object mode. And when you do anything in object mode, it just rotates the objects axis. So this is no longer correct. But I think probably Y is still correct. Yes, yes, it is. So doing it over Y now is fine. Let's press tab and just work on the scale of these. How big do I want my eyes to be? Something like that. And I'll bring them closer to the head. And I'll press I to inset and E to extrude in, give him some goggle like eyes, and then I to inset again, and then E to extrude out. This looks fine, but the project says that I have to use the subdivision workflow. So let's do that. Let's add a subdivision surface modifier. I'm tired of going over here, so I'll press Control five, which automatically adds a subdivision modifier with five levels on it because I pressed five, and it looks a little bit funky. So first thing is it's bending on the inside. So that's the same problem as I had before. I need a support loop over here. So press tab, Control R to add a loop, and I can't see anything. So I'll go over here and turn on Xray view. I'll have to cancel that actually, and then turn on Xray view. Control R, add a loop. Over here, that straightens it out. Now, another weird thing is it's kind of like a star. It's like folding in on itself, making this tire shape. And I'm not a huge fan of that. The reason for that is a problem we have touched on before. This here is the dreaded end gone. It's one face with very many vertices. So all of these vertices are connected to this one face, and that confuses the subdivision algorithm. It's trying to smooth it out, but it doesn't know what to do at this spot. Now, that won't be a problem if you're smoothing out a flat surface. But in this case, it's trying to bend here and going in and it doesn't know what to do here. So all we have to do is make sure that the gun is on a flat surface. And how do we do that? It's very simple. We just inset it one more time. I to inset and bring it in. Now the gon is on the same flat plane as these faces, and these faces are fine. These are all four sided polygons. Gon is fine. It's flat, leading to no shading issues. Now, I want to sharpen up some of this here. I'm not a huge fan of how smooth this is. So I'll add another ring going across here, slide it over and sharpen that up a little bit. Can do the same on the inside, actually. Bring this over here, and I'll sharpen up the inside here too. Add at least one in the center there. Which looks more robotic now. Very nice. Let's give him some ears. So same thing, mesh, cylinder, and I've learned from last time, so to not screw up my mirror modifier, I'll go into Edit mode right away and not start rotating in object mode, and I'll rotate on the x axis, R X 90, and then G, Y to move it over. I know it's a lot of letters. You can still use the gizmos, you know, I will become second nature at one point. So S to scale it down. And I'll just move it into place free hand. This, I think, I'll click the X icon in the track ball to view it from the very front, and then I'll move it over until it actually barely touches because then it will smooth out here and it'll look kind of like it's attached instead of being welded in, which I think is going to be cool. Click this G Y to move it in, maybe S to scale it down a little bit, G Y and let's control B bevel it and press faces, go into this one, I to inset, and maybe E to extrude that. And that's a good start. Let's control three at a subdivision surface modifier. We have the same kind of problem. It's making the weird tire pattern. So tab, and I can hide this head. I'll click on the head and up in the outline or I'll click the icon. Actually, let's start renaming stuff. So head. And this is eyes. This is ears. I'll hide the head, click the I icon on the head. Then I can see what I'm doing. Press tab and this part needs to be inset, I to inset it. It's still doing the star thing because we need to inset it one more time, I to inset and that removes the star. It's doing the star thing over here too, click that I to inset it and it's doing the star and inset it again. I'll turn back on the head to see the context, and this is pretty cool. Let's sharpen things up here. Let's add some support loops. So control R and bring this over until I like the curvature on this side. So probably something like that. I want it to be quite sharp, and I want this to be quite sharp, add a loop there and add a loop here. I'll do the same here to sharpen this up. That looks mechanical. Let's also add line going through it. So one loop here, Control B to bevel it. I'll hold down shift to make it small and then I'll extrude it inwards using the extrude tool and extrude along normals. Or as I prefer to do, to use the shortcut that is Alt E for extrude, and then I get all the extrude options and I can do extrude faces along normals move those in. That looks nice. Right click, Shade auto smooth on that. And I'll do the same on the head, shade auto smooth. Did I do it on this? I think so. Shade auto smooth. And on the air, I'll add a modifier. I'll add the mirror modifier across the Y axis, turn off X and turn on Y. That brings that over, and I'll move it down so it's in the middle of the head. And that looks fun. I like him already. Let's give him the mouth that he so sorely needs. Shift A, add a cube, and this cube needs to just fill the mouth. So I'll go into X ray mode and just from each angle, I'll try to put it straight inside the mouth. So I'll start from the side, press tab, and then G to move everything over until it touches the corner here, G, move it here. And then I compress vertices and select all these vertices and GX move those in and then select these vertices and GZ move those up. And then look at it from the front by clicking the X, and I can select everything, select, and scale them in. S Y, scale them in until if it. Then go out of Edit mode. That's pretty good. I'll probably have to adjust a little bit, though. Once I add the subdivision modifier, subdivision surface at a few levels. That makes it completely round, so this needs a lot of sharpening. Going to tab Control R. And in this case, I think I'll just work symmetrically without adding a mirror modifier just to show you how to do that. Control R, just click that in the middle. I right click to not slide it, and then I can control B bevels, but I can bevel it quite far. I can bevel it until I get to the point where the curve starts. So I'm looking at the curve of the head, and I feel like it kind of starts there and ends up kind of like there. So that's where I wanted for this object too. So Control R, do the same here, click in the middle, and then Control B, increase it until I feel like the curve is pretty similar. Then I'll do the same here. Control R, and this is quite smooth, in fact. I feel like maybe I need to smooth it out more than is possible. So maybe I'll take this whole edge, this, this, and this and move that over on the X axis to round it out even more than what's possible with just the modifier. So it follows that contour. I like that. Okay, let's add one more support loop on the back to sharpen that up, not that we'll see it a lot. And then let's see. I think those top faces need to come up a little bit. I'll hide the head, go into face select mode and select all these faces then unhide the head and G Z to move those up so they fill it a little better. It's fine if it intersects. That's cute. I want him to have a thicker mouth, though, let's edit this and this together. I'll click both of them, go into tab, and then looking from the front, I'll go into Wireframe View in vertex selection and select everything on the bottom here. Everything this far down. I'll go out of wireframe view and then G Z. Now I can adjust those two together. And how thick do I want it? Something like that. 47. Completed - Class Project 05 - Modeling the Body: A let's do the body next. I'll just select everything here and move it up G Z, move it up above so that when I add something new, add cube. I'll add below. Feel like that's nice. Let's go into Edit mode right away and just scale it in on X. How skinny is this guy? What do you feel like? Something like this. And then on Y scale, Y SY. I want him to have a tiny body. Then G Z to move it down, G for grab. Let's scale him down again on Z, S, Z, scale down, and GZ move them up. His body should probably grow a little going downward, so if I'm just looking at it from the front, I can go into wireframe view again, select these bottom vertices and scale them out on Y S Y. Scale it out a little bit, and then view from the other side, scale X a little bit, making him a little trappizoid. Control four to add a subdivision surface. How am I choosing the levels? It's basically on intuition. I know roughly how big I want these to be to kind of define the shape. I know that three is going to be way too little. Five may be too much, so I just started with four. So going into tab. And by the way, at one point or another, you'll probably add too many levels and it'll start lagging quite a bit. Just turn down the levels, and you should be good. Because when you start adding geometry, right, if I add a loop going here and one here and one here, you start to add a lot of polygons. The subdivision surface modifier adds a lot of polygons. So it kind of grows exponentially with each loop you add, and I saw that happening with the ears, especially. Just let's look at the wire frame. And it's not actually showing me the new polygons that it's adding because optimal display is turned on. But if I turn that off, you'll see how many it's actually adding, and it's quite a few polygons. Those are tiny. So if you can get away with two, then turn it to two. And in this case, I can. The mouth is still shaded flat, so right click, Shade Autosmooth. That's good. And let's go back to the body and sharpen everything up at. It's all sharpen up the top, control R, drag this to the top. He's pretty boxy, so I want these to be fairly sharp, and I want this side to be sharp. Let's add a mirror modifier. Mirror on the Y axis and bisect, and the other way, not that way. So let's add another support loop on the other side. Very nice and one back to front. I can just keep one in the middle, I think. I like that roundness. And then let's give him a separate hip section. Just close to the bottom. Control R to add a loop somewhere something like this, and then do that same trick as with the air. Control B to bevel it, and then I'll extrude this in with extrude along normal this tool, to E for me, extrude faces along normals, then move these in. It gives me a separate section for that. It's very nice and I can sharpen that up by adding some support loops around it. Good. He needs a neck, Shift A, mesh. Let's do a cylinder for the neck and just go into edit mode and scale it down. And it's attached at a weird place. Let's select everything on the head and just move it forward a bit. GX so that it actually attaches to the head and not to the mouth. And then on the neck, I can right click, shade auto smooth, smooth it out. And I'll press Shift A again, mesh, cylinder, and I'll work on the shoulders next, tab. And the shoulders should be fairly thin, so I'll actually go into X ray mode again, tab, scale it inwards, but I will only scale on the X and Y axis, so shift Z as in not z, and that kind of makes it more skinny. Then I'll rotate it R on the X axis, X, and right 990. Go out of edit mode, go out of X ray mode, and move it down. Now I can scale those in a little bit. S Y Nice shoulders. Right click Shade Autos move. And let's give him some arms. Shift A at another cylinder, go into X ray mode, tab, scale on not Zs or Shift Z. Move it in. How big do I want this to be? Maybe a little less. And then viewing everything from the front, I'll move it over to here. It's way too big. Scale it down, G to move it. How big are arms? I feel like maybe like that. For this guy. And he needs two arms, obviously. So mirror on the y axis. And since I moved everything in edit mode, the origin, the little orange dot is still in the middle, meaning that it will mirror over the middle. Right click, shade Autosmooth. But yeah, the arm definitely needs a subdivision surface. Subdivision surface modifier, add a couple of segments to it. It's really bad because I don't have any support loops and it's so long. Let's add a support loop at the top. And an inset at the very top because it's doing the weird jagged thing. So I. That's good. And at the bottom, I'll do the same, Control R, drag it down. Press this face and press I. Rounds that out. We're still getting the star shaped, so I once more. And hell, I'll even extrude it in words and press I again just to add some detail. And it's still doing the thing. I once more. Whenever it's doing the thing, just press I. Cool. And I want a separate segment for the hands. Let's add a new loop going down here and how big are the hands? Something like that and Control B, beveling it, and Alt E, extrude faces along normals inwards. And I can actually go just a little bit, and then a little bit more by Alt E extrude face along normals again. Because if I turn off the subdivision surface modifier, you can see what I just did is that first round added this loop and the second round added this loop. I basically added my own support loop. But another way to do this is if I undo this undo, undo, I can alter, extrude phases along normals, go the whole way, and then Control R, add a loop going here. That does the same thing. Control R, at one here, two to sharpen it. So go into Edit mode and add another support loop here and here. Very nice. That's my hand, and that should be deeper. So I'll select this ring. I'll use the shrink fatten tool, which is here, which is also Alt S, so Alt S, which shrinks it in, makes it an even bigger segment change, and I can scale it up. So I'll view everything from the front in wireframe view, select vertices, select all of this, then S Z to scale it up. Oh, I wasn't in X ray mode, so I didn't select the backsides. So do that again, select all that. S Z, scale it up. That's better. I'll add a segment for the shoulder too. Control R, drag it up here, Control B, and tE extrude pass along normals, bring it in. Control R, support loop, support here, and here, that's good. Fun. The legs are obviously no different. Shift A, mesh, cylinder. I'm just doing the same things over and over again here, going to tab, move them down, scale them in, view from the front to position it correctly. Do I want short legs? Yeah, short legs are cute. Move these up. And right click Shade Auto Smooth, Control four, add a subdivision, then add some support loops here and here, and inset on the top. I don't even have to see what I'm doing because I know it's going to work, I and I on the bottom. And let's add a segment for the knee. So click in the middle, Control B, bring those out. Now I have two new loops that I can Alt click, Alt Shift click, and bevel both of these at the same time and Alt E extrude faces along normals. You know what? At this time, I like that it's going in and then bulging out and then going out. Yeah, I like it. Mirror it to the other side on the Y axis, bisect. And give him feet. What shape or feet? My feet, in this case, will be cylinders, too. Add cylinder, move it down. Scale it on z axis and scale it on the Y axis to elongate them. Scale down, how flat? Kind of kind of like that. Move it over X, GX, GZ, to move it on the Z, and S to scale it out. GY, OGX to move it forward. And Control four. Subdivision surface modifier. Got to inset the top and bottom at the same time this time, I. And then add a support loop in the middle. That's a foot. It needs to be shorter. Tab, select everything Bpressing A, scale with S, X, and shrink it down. GX, move it over. That's cute, and then mirror. Although, did you see that there's still the weird pattern, so got to inset once more at the top. Cute. He needs thicker feet, though. So tab A to select everything and then shrink fatten, alts, thicken them up. And that's pretty good. Now, I want to give him an apron because this is a cooking robot. He's working with oils. He needs an apron, and I need an excuse to add some sort of clothing just to show the technique I've shown you before. So let me just go through and rename everything real quick and then I'll add the apron. Cool. Got to hide the head and the mouth. Oh. Didn't rename that. Mouth. Hide that. Keep the neck and hide the eyes and the ears. Good, good. Right click Shade Auto Smooth. That wasn't on. Then let's select the faces I need for the apron. So go into tab and remember, I used a mirror modifier on this, meaning that I only modeled one side and it mirrored to the other side. Now I've kind of lost track of what side I was working on and what side just support loops. And if that ever happens to you, it's fine to just apply this as real geometry. So I'll go to the little arrow and click Apply. But it's gray out because it says this modifier operation is not allowed from Edit mode. Okay, so I'll go out of Edit mode into object mode. Click the arrow, apply, and go back into added mode, and now it's symmetrical. So it's a little easier to work with. And what do I need for the apron? Let's select this face at least, and this and this and this. I think I want the apron to cover the whole belly. So this as well, this part. And these two corners. And at the top, I guess, it can go across as two straps here. And down on the other side, go across like this. But I do want just a little cut out here, and I don't have the geometry for that. So what do I do? Well, let's just bring it along for now, and I can add more geometry to the new object. That is fine to do. Shift D to duplicate this part and then right click to move it right back to where it was, and then P, separate selection to get a new object and then tab to go out of edit mode. So now I have this new object that's extracted from the belly and I can hide the belly object. And just edit this. If I go into tab, I can add that part that I was talking about. Control R, add a loop here and a loop here. Add a loop here and a loop here, and then I can delete these, delete faces, which makes a hole in it. And I think I can delete these to delete faces. Yeah, that's fine. And in fact, I think clicking these, I can dissolve those, delete Dissolve edges. Dissolve just removes them and reconnects. That kind of looks like an apron. Maybe I don't need this back part, click this, Control, click this to select everything between delete pass. That's more like it. Let's unhide the body to see how it fits. It fits snugly like it should. So let's add a solidify modifier. Set the offset to one, so it goes outward and not inward and just add some thickness to it a little bit. Very nice apron. I kind of want it to be more round at the bottom low so that you can see his body behind that little bevel. And the reason it's not showing right now, let me just hide the solidify in the Viewbard is because we have a support loop going across here and one here, making it very, very sharp. Let's bring those in. Let's actually maybe I can dissolve this. Let's try that. All click on this, delete and Dissolve edges. And yeah, that's fine. That's fine. So let's do the same here. Alt click, delete, dissolve edges, and then dissolve this as well. That rounds it out, and let's add one support loop, actually, to give it a nice roundness. And then turn on the solidify and we have our apron. Turn on the ears, the eyes, the head, and the mouth, and I think this is my character. 48. Completed - Class Project 05 - Separating Mirrored Objects: Let's go through and just separate everything that I need to separate in order to animate this because at the moment, the arms are one object, the legs are one object. Everything that's mirred is one object. Let's see. I don't need the eyes and the ears, those are going to be attached to the head, those don't need to be separated. Those don't move, really. The mouth is one object, and I want this to move, so that's good. The neck is one object. The shoulders, I don't need mine to move, you may need yours to move, so we may be different there. The arms though, those need to be separated. Let's apply the mirror modifier. Lick the little drop down and apply. That makes them both into objects. Let's select everything and select and all, and then mesh, separate by loose parts. So that gives us two separate objects in object mode. And I even think that I may want to rotate the hands. So let's also separate out the hands. I'll select both of these and go into the front view and press tab to go into edit mode and then go into wireframe to look through it so I can select backsides as well, vertex select mode, and select everything belonging to the hand. I'll do the same over here. And then P to separate and then selection separate just the selection. That gives me a separate hand here and a separate hand here. Good, good, good. Let's rename everything. I may want to detach the hips from the body. Maybe I want to rotate around the hips. Let's do the same thing there. Go into the front view, tab, go into wireframe and vertex select and just select the bottom part, P separate selection. That gives me that as a separate part. And it's open, though. So if it does rotate, you're going to see into it. So actually, let's close that hole. I'll hide the body and the apron. Click this and go into Edit mode, and I just need to close this hole. So I'll select all of these edges on this side, and then same thing here. And I'll take these edges, too. And go to face and fill. Fills everything up. And that's good. And maybe I'll do the same thing to the body just because I'm a completionist. Tab, I alt click on this, actually, which selects the whole ring and go to face, fill. I'll separate out the legs. Tab, too early, I can only select this part and this part isn't real, go over here to the mirror, apply, tab, select everything with A, P, separated by loose parts. That gives me these two separate objects and the same with the feet. Apply tab P by loose parts. And if I needed the legs to bend, I would also need to separate out these into three separate segments. But in my case, they're not going to bend. And once I'm done with all that, I can screenshot my model like this and post it to the assignment section, and I'm very happy. I think this is a cute little guy. 49. Working with Multiple Materials: You may want to add different materials to different areas of your object. Is that possible? Of course, it's possible. Anything's possible in three D. So the way to do it is you first have to go to the Material tab, add two new materials. I'll click New. And that adds my first material, and then I'll click the little plus up here to add a new material slot. Just adds a space for the object to hold the material, but there's no material in here yet. To add one, we either have to pick a material that already exists from the drop down or click New to add a new material. And the first one that can be skin, in this case, and maybe I want a different material on the eyes. So the skin can be a dark brown. The eyes can be a completely black creepy void. Now, on my object, I have a subdivision surface modifier that smooths it out. So if I hide that, it's kind of easier if I shed it flat to see the actual mesh I'm working on. Another thing you can do actually, instead of turning this off every time you want to edit, is you can turn off little box beside it, which disables it when in edit mode. So if I go into edit mode now, you can see both the smooth version and the unsubdivided version, the actual mesh. If I turn off this, then going into Edit mode hides the smooth version, allowing me to edit the original mesh, which is very handy. W in edit mode, I'll go to phase select mode and select one phase on each I and then go to select Linked Linked, which selects everything that's attached to that. Since eyes are separate elements, they're not separate objects, they're still in the same object, but they're not connected to anything, meaning they're separate elements, that selects the whole I. Oh, let's go to material, and to be able to see what we're doing, let's go into material preview mode in the view port. And we can see that. Well, first of all, it's flickering a bit. That's just because I'm in edit mode, but in any case, my whole object has the skin material, and to add the eyes, I just have to select this mesh, click the eyes, and click a sign. Now when I go out of Edit mode, you can see the eyes have a separate black, creepy material. Now, it's worth running over again just the different selection modes that we've learned. So we know that clicking one face and then shift clicking another allows us to select more faces. We also know that clicking one face and Control or command clicking one far away selects a whole line between them. I haven't shown you yet is that you can also select a rectangular area of the mesh by clicking one corner of the rectangle and holding both control or command and shift and clicking another. And that selects a rectangle selection on that. We also know that with this tool selected, the select box tool selected, we can select a box. But that won't select the backside only what we see. So if we want to select the backside, we got to go into wireframe view, and then we can drag a box and select all sides of the monkey. That's handy for selecting stuff. And also, we haven't used it much. But there's the circle select tool, which I prefer by accessing using the shortcut C, which gives me the little circle. And when you do that with the shortcut, you can scroll out to increase the size of that circle and then kind of paint your selection. Then right click to Cancel so that I can move around. If I hadn't done that, then clicking on my mouse wheel would remove selection. This, however, is a little different if you select the tool, if you select the tool, then you can move around using the scroll wheel, and you have to click and then scroll in order to increase the size. And in order to remove from that selection, you got to go up here and click on subtract mode. Zano can add different materials to the same mesh, very handy. 50. Advanced Shading : Do a deep dive into materials because there are a couple more sliders that you should know when doing character modeling because you can make almost every material with the values that I've shown you, just the color metallic and the roughness and at least if you also use the glass shader. But there are three more like slightly advanced things, and those can help you achieve a couple more materials that I want to show you now. And to do that, I have some interesting looking objects. Go into rendered mode. And you can see that I've set up an HDRI image. This is one that I've found online with a strong light source to show these examples. And the first one, that's this object right here, and that is an ear. Because what we're going to do on this one is to add subsurface scattering, and that is what you can see on my ear. When I'm back lit by the sun, they start glowing a little bit, like the light goes into the ear and it mixes around. In my flesh, I'm sorry for getting nasty for a moment. And then the light exits with a color, and that is called subsurface scattering, and we can do it with a material. So let's go to the material tab and add a material to this and go down to subsurface. These are the settings for the subsurface. So to set this up, let's first get close to my skin with this. So I'll give it a color that's close to my skin color, which has to be very pale, indeed. And then decrease the roughness a little bit to make me a little more sweaty. Then I'll go down to subsurface here and I'll increase the weight 0-1. That means it's on. You can do half on, half off, but in general, keep it fully on if you want to keep it on. We cannot see a huge difference here. The reason for that is because the scale is very small and this ear is very big. If I go to the measure tool here and drag from top to bottom, we can see that my ear is 1.5 meters tall, and that means that I'm going to have to go outside of regular values for the subsurface. I'll increase the scale from 0.05, which would make sense for a realistically scaled ear, and that's much better. Now, if I look at the ear from behind and let the sunshine through it, we can see that it lights up. Let me turn that off so you can see what it looked like before and then on how cool is that? Now, everything in the subsurface is set up to mimic skin because that is the most common use case for. And the radius is one such example. So the radius consists of three values. Those are red, green, and blue, and that is how much of each color is scattered. Now, these values correspond to skin. If you're doing anything other than skin, you should click the top one, drag down to select all and set them all to one. That just makes the subsurface white. So for most other use cases, just do white, and you can start mixing. Like if I do no green, just zero on the green, then it's going to become purple, right? And you can start messing with basically RGB values here. But in general, yeah, stick to one or the skin color. And mess with the scale until you're happy. In my case, I needed something like four. If I set it to one, then it's going to be less prominent. Now, not everyone is going to want to use subsurface because subsurface takes a long time to render. You can see that it is very noisy compared to all my other objects. You can especially see that if I go to my render settings and I go from GPU to CPU, which is slower on my system, you can see that this left object resolves a lot quicker than the right one. So subsurface is notoriously slow to render. So it's kind of prohibitive for some projects. But if you can, then it can add liveliness to your object. So use this for skin, use it for translucent plastic like legos, great slider. The next one I want to go through is the sheen value. And for that, I have a cloth object here. So we'll go to its material and add a new. And to prepare for this, I want to do something like a denim color. So make that kind of teal and quite dark. H. And then add some roughness to it. Denim isn't very shiny. Now at the moment, it kind of looks like plastic. It looks like rough plastic. The reason we can tell fabrics apart from plastics is because along the edge here, you can see that fabrics light up a little bit. They kind of catch the light, and that's because of tiny little fibers or hairs sticking out, and those catch the light. And you can simulate that with the shen value. Down in the material, here's sheen. And as I increase that, watch. Edge of the material lights up, and that's even more prominent if it's back light. I this is without sheen, with sheen. Increasing it to max make it look more like velvet. If I do more like 0.2 0.3, that's more like denim. And also, you can mess with the roughness value. If that is low, then you see that shrinks the effect, and if it's high, then it grows the effect. You can fine tune that, fine tune the weight. You could even do tint messing with the tint, that will give you some wacky effects. I can make a green sheen around it, and that's unrealistic, but can be fun for some materials. So that hen, very good for fabrics. And last but not least, I've built a torch, and that is to demonstrate the emissive value. So let's add a new material, and in fact, let's add another new material because I want this last one to be emissive. And I want to add that only to the top. So let me go into Edit mode, and I'll go into Face select mode and Alt click this ring and Shift Alt click this and this and this and this and go up and up and the last one. Oh, that didn't work. Let's use the circle select tool then. And with add mode selected, click. Then go to the emissive material and assign that to the selection. Nothing happens because the materials are identical, but let's make something happen by going down to emission and turning up the strength. To, let's do ten. Now it lights up. And not only does it, light up for itself, it lights up the world around it. So if I move this with G, grab it and move it over to the fabric, and I'll turn this up to 100 so we can really see this. You can see that this even lights up everything around it. So it's like it's become a light. And unlike a light, you can assign it to just part of an object. And that is very cool. We can make that more of a torch fire color, like a dark, like this. That's interesting. Let's see how that plays with the subsurface. Let's put this on this side. Look at that. We can even see the subsurface. So those are three interesting values you can play with in a material. You have the subsurface scattering for skin and for plastics. You have sheen for fabrics, and then you have a missive for things that glow. 51. Class Project 06 - Character Shading: Alright, shading time. Class Project six. Now that you've modeled your character, it's time to bring them to life with materials. The client wants the mascot to feel friendly, simple, and in line with their brand. You guys know this. Always stick to brand. Use materials to differentiate parts like skin, fur, clothing, eyes, and any accessories. Think about roughness, metallic accents, and how to create interesting contrasts. And also remember what you've learned about subsurface scattering for skin and plastics. Machine for fabric and emission for anything that's glowing. Requirements regularly check your materials with a cycles render. You're allowed to use EV when working on this. Some computers have to because cycles just isn't feasible, but you should regularly check in cycles because the final render is in cycles and it's a good idea to check in there occasionally while working so you don't make any huge mistakes that'll show up in the final render. Use an HDRI when rendering. Don't worry about advanced lighting at this stage. Just find an HDRI that you like. You may want to build a little backdrop, just an even color that can really help with readability. The deliverables render your character with cycles. I will not accept EV renders, not for this project. Save it as a PNG or JPEG, upload it to the class projects or assignment section of this website. And if you want, you can share it on Instagram, tag at bring your own Laptop. Facebook group is here and the LinkedIn groups right here. Get these links in the project guide document. 52. Completed - Class Project 06 - Prepping Your Character: Let's finish this character. We'll give him some material, some color, and get him to the stage where we can start showing this to people proudly showing people this gray model. Not as cool as showing something that's like a final finished asset. First thing we have to do is decide, do we want to work in rendered mode or material preview mode? The two balls on the right on this line because I want to work in rendered mode. Rendered mode is what we're going to do. At the end, we're going to render our character. However, working in rendered mode is not very fun on a slower system. So I can do it because I have a very fast GPU. I can work while in rendered mode. Not everyone can, and that's fine. That's why we have material preview mode. So material preview mode works in real time. It uses the EV render engine, which is a real time render engine. In the viewport. Even if you have selected cycles as the rend engine, which I'll do now, I'll go to cycles and turn on GPU. And when I go to material preview mode is going to start up IV, and I'm looking at my character through EV. It's going to give a preview of your materials. Not exactly the same way they're going to look in rendered mode, but pretty close. So working like this is how most people, I would guess would have to do it. I, however, I'm going to boast about my system and turn on rendered mode and work like this. Now, he's very dark because I have no lighting in my scene. So let's open a new window, go to the shader editor, and turn it from object to world. So I'm changing the world shader. And in here, I'll add an HDRI image. We add an ENV environment texture. Here, I'll just open my file browser. And I think I'm going to probably blur this. I mean, I don't know why people blur it exactly, but I fear that maybe some of you techies out there may be able to hack me or something, if you can see my details. I don't know. Let's go for this one. This is an HDRI that I downloaded from the Internet. And it has a strong lighting from the side, which I like. When doing shading, I like using strong, harsh lighting because it allows me to see surface detail more easily. If it's soft, I mean, it can be more aesthetically pleasing, but it's harder to tell little details because it, smooths it out. So the light is coming from behind. Let me just close this. Light is coming from behind, and that's not the best. I don't want to work on the shadow side, so I need to rotate my character. However, rotating it can create some problems. So if I select my whole character and I press R and Z to rotate on the Z, and then I type 90, 90 degrees, press return, then he does indeed rotate. However, he rotates around the middle point of his body, and the middle point of the body is here. The middle point of the head is like here, probably. So it averages out and it rotates around the front of the neck. Meaning, if I want to continue working on this guy, he's going to be off center now. Like, he's not exactly in the middle of the green line. So while we're working on the guy, try not to do this. Try not to rotate the guy without re centering him. And the way to do that is, I'll undo do all my drawing, get him back there. And I'll go over here to this little chain link. And this is where do we rotate around? We can rotate around a bunch of different things. For the moment, we'll just turn it to three D cursor. The three D cursor is this life buoy kind of thing in the middle of the scene. This was the middle when I modeled this, and it's still going to be the middle. This is the middle of the entire scene. So let's rotate around that. So I'll press R and Z and 90 again. And now when we look at it from above, he is actually in the middle. That back. And then I want another background for him. This is a distracting background, and I want to be able to see what I'm doing in the right context. So I'll shift A, add a plain G Z to move it down, and then scale it out. Let's do that in edit mode. Scaling an object mode is always a bit iffy. So press S and drag it out. To give him a floor to stand on. And then just for the back part, let's press two to select edges and select this edge and this edge and E Z to extrude on the z axis and get him a backdrop. Then I'll smooth out the backdrop by selecting these edges, Control B to bevel and drag it out and scroll up to add some segments, and that smooths out the backdrop and then I'll right click shade smooth. Now I have a nice, nice, even backdrop to work on. And I'll give that a color. So I'll go to the material, add a new one, call it back. I want to work in the context that it's going to be shown in. I have to decide what kind of background I want to put this guy on. I just kind of green background color for the bottle. So maybe I'll add that same background color for this guy so that I can place those in the same scene, and I know that it'll work. So let's do that. Let's give it a greenish color. Slightly dark one. If I really cared about this, I would go back and sample the exact color that I already used, but I'll just do it from memory. It was something like this, I think. And then let's increase the roughness to get rid of that shine in the background. It was like this, but let's just increase that, make it matt, and this is a good place to work from. 53. Completed - Class Project 06 - Shading Your Character: Start with, like, the main material that I want across most of the guy. And I feel like that should be a kind of plastic. He reminds me of a little toy robot and I don't want to make him metal. I want to make him plastic, and I want to make him look small and cute. So let's just click the head at a new material and call it main. I don't like naming materials after the color they have and rarely after the materiality of it, so I don't name it green and I don't name it plastic. I name it main because then if I ever go back and change it, always going to be the main material, but if it's called green metal and then I make it into black plastic later, then that's going to be awkward. So I'll just call it main. And let's select a color that vibes well with a background. I immediately go to, like, red because that's the color of my chili oil. I think that kind of works. What about a yellow? It does, but it's not quite the vibe that I was going for in my earlier color scheme. You know what? I just decided that I've already taught you how to bring in images, so I'll bring in that render as a reference. Shift they add an image. In this case, we can actually add a reference image. We don't need a mesh plane. A mesh plane will pick up lighting from the scene. A reference image will not. Then I can open that image that I rendered earlier and get a much closer, see, look at that. The color of my background was way off. Let's bring it closer to where it was. It was more like that. And then the color of the oil. That is more deep red. More like this. Are you screaming at your monitor right now? Are you screaming that there is an eyedropper here? Why not just click the eyedropper? I should have explained this, but I'm going to do so now. I generally stay away from the eyedropper when working in three D, and there are a couple of reasons for that. Let's just use it now to see what happens. If I click the eyedropper, and then click the red. It doesn't sample, and that's because a reference image isn't actually in the three D scene per se. It's just like an overlay display. And therefore, we just sampled the ground right behind it. But let's delete that and let's instead add an image mesh plane. Now it's added as an actual mesh in the three D scene. But notice what happened. It's now affected by the lights as well, and it's right now in the shadow, meaning that if we sample it, it's not going to be the true color. It's going to be some modified color, which is also not what we want, although now the sampling will work. But we're going to get the wrong color. This is not right. Okay, there is a third option, and this is the best if you really need to sample a color. And that is, you can open a new window, open an image editor. And here you can open the image, or I've already imported it so I can find it in the dropdown. Here is the image with no lighting modification, and here I can sample the exact color. But it's still weird because of a couple of reasons. One, this is that background green refracted through red, meaning it's not the pure red. Also in this three D view, we're still lighting it, meaning that this color looks different from this color and because of all of these things, whenever I want to select a color in three D, I eyeball it because I've just learned that over time, eyeballing is the quickest way to get to the right color. And now we can just move this to the side. Let's just hide it in the outliner. Click the eye icon and the guys gone. So for this material, let's work on its materiality. We don't just work on color, we work on these other sliders as well. So the roughness I think maybe a glossy surface can be fun, and then I want to add some subsurface to it. Subsurface is good for skin and for plastics, any translucent material, and it's most visible in back lighting. So I'll just move to the back so I can see it with back lighting on and turn up the weight to one. It's not visible here because I'm working in a huge scale. The guy is probably very large. Let's measure him. The head itself is, yeah, about 2 meters, so I definitely need to increase the scale of the subsurface, say to maybe 1 meter. It's nice. That's adds some translucency. And let's change the radius because it's now a skin value, and let's change it just to one. Generally good idea for a plastic. So let's see that. That's before and after. Before and After. Just as a softness and a toy like one. Let's actually see. Like if I increase the roughness instead, an increased roughness with a bunch of subsurface is also pretty beautiful. Reminds me more of rubber. And you know what? I really like that aesthetic for this. So let's add that material to other parts as well. Let's add it to the ears. And to the body. To the arms, legs and for the other parts here, I want an accent color or an accent material. Let's add a new material to the shoulders or where do I want to work on this? Maybe I want to work on it on the mouth because it's more exposed, easier to see what I'm doing. This new one will be accent. And oftentimes, I feel like doing a contrast in roughness can be very nice. Maybe I'll do a glossy material for this and make it like a dark blackish color. Zalmat shininess plays against the roughness. That's a very nice contrast, but in some cases, maybe it should be similar, which makes it even more friendly in this case. Let's check subsurface on this too, set the radii to one and turn up the weight, and then the scale to one as well. That's before and after. I can't actually see any difference on this, probably because it's so dark. So I will turn it off. Having it on just increases the render time unnecessarily. So in general, keep it off if you don't need it. But I'll add this material to the neck, as well. Accent. I can always go back and change the way it looks once it's everywhere. I really like just scattering my materials everywhere before I start refining them because then I get to see them in context. And I definitely need this accent material more places. So let's add it to. Let's start at the top here and add it to the ring that attaches the ear to the head. I can open a new editor, a three D editor that is gray, and I can work in this one while seeing what I'm doing in this left one. So let's go to tab into Edit mode and select this ring, and then I can grow my selection with select more or less. You can see the shortcut for that is Control Numpad plus. That just expands the selection. And expand it one more time, Control plus on the numpad. And in fact, let's hide the head for a bit, just to make sure I've selected everything on this side, and I haven't. So let's select this ring two with Shift Alt and click here, and then shift click here to add that to the selection. Alt was to select a ring shift is to add, and then I'll add a new material to this. I need another material slot here to be able to have two materials, add a slot. And then in this slot, I'll in the drop down menu, select the accent material that I made and then assign it to this part of the mesh. Then I can unhide the head and look at how it looks. Luckily for me, the error was mirrored to the other side, so I didn't have to do the work double up, and I like that. So let's do it to the shoulder as well. Go into tab, select the top face, and then just Control plus and expand it until I've gone down to the bottom of the shoulder. Add a new slot in there, I'll put the accent color and assign it. That looks good. Do the same on the other side. Tab, press the top one plus plus plus plus plus, and sign the accent. And let's do it for the knees, too. Great. Now for the eyes, let's start actually with the accent color just to separate it from the rest. And then since it's a robot, I would really like these to glow, but I have a feeling that if they glow in the middle, he'll look a little crazy. Let's try it. Let's add a new material called emissive. And in here, I'll just add some emissions of strength, say five for now, and I'll select this. Let's do the green background color and go into tab and assign that to the center. Click emissive and assign. And yes. Yes, he definitely looks crazy. Not only that, the center has a star, and that is because of the subsurface modifier working on that final face in there. If I wanted, I could inset it one more time, and that would get rid of that star. But he does look fairly creepy at this point. So let's not do that. Let's instead add the emissive to the ring around here and then some glossy black to the center. So Alt click on this ring and shift Alt click on this ring and assign the emissive to that instead. And let's add a new material, which will be black. And going no roughness. Reason I want to go completely black is your pupil is a dark hole, so it can actually go to complete black. So let's click this center polygon and then Control plus on the numpad to increase it to be that whole section, and add this material, which I haven't given a name yet. I'll call this pupil. That's much cuter, much, much cuter, although Feels like he's really scared or surprised or something. Let's change that. I mean, you are allowed to start changing the model once you're at this stage. Never feel like you need to only add materials once you've come to this stage. When you see the materials, you can make more informed decisions about other things like maybe where the pupils are. And that's what I'm going to do. So I'm going to go into tab and just select the pupils like this. Look at it from the very front by clicking the Gizmo up here, and then I will, let's see. Let's scale it down. S to scale and scale it down a little bit, and then I'll move it with G. Over here. That's a little more cute. Let's move it even more. That's better. And then you know what? Wouldn't it be fun if he looked like he was wearing glasses? Let's do that. Let's shift A, add a mesh, UV sphere, and in edit mode, I'll move this because I want to mirror it later on, and I need the origin to be in the middle. So I'll move it in edit mode and just G, move it over here, S to scale it, GY, move it on the Y axis. And I just want to fill the I. And then I'll right click and shade smooth to make it less faceted and add a mirror modifier. Mir it on the g. That is correct. It's mirrored over, and then add a material, a new, I'll call this glass and make it a glass shader. Right now, it's frosted. Frosted is not what I want, so let's decrease the roughness to something near zero. I can actually go zero for this. And now he looks even more dorky. That's hilarious. You know, I really do like that. But for the color of the emission, I'm not sure I like that, actually. So let's go to the emissive and look at the color. Let's increase the value to Max so that it's really clearly glowing, and then maybe decrease the strength so we can see the color. Increase the saturation, perhaps, then increase the strength again. See if that looks better to me. What happens if I do 20 here just to see? Oh, I can see two things happening. So one thing is I kind of like it. So maybe I'll turn it down to ten, but I'll show you the other thing I noticed, and that is it's lighting up his face. Can you see that? You can see it around the eyes. It's adding glow to his face. So if I turn it off, it looks like this. And if I turn it on, it looks like this. The reason for that is fascinating. It's because of the way I modeled this. The eyes go into his head, meaning that glowing side, this side is actually glowing into itself, and then it's not hitting its back wall, it's hitting the face first, and then it's scattering through the subsurface scattering in the face, which is fascinating. And the way to fix it, because I don't really like the way it looks, is to just bring this backside of the eyes outward to be able to block the lighting. So if I press tab to edit the eye, and then I can hide the head while selecting. I'll have to fix this side, the star shapes. You remember how to do that with I inset, and then I'll have to do it one more time. I can see on the right that it's still there. There we go. And then Control plus and plus to select the entire backside. And maybe I'll probably need to bring this part forward too. So let's do plus one more time. And then I'll unhide the head so that I can move in context and see what I'm doing. G, to move Y to constrain it to the Y axis, and then move it forward until at this point, I can see that this first line is hitting the other line and I don't want to move it past there. So let's press there and then control minus to shrink the selection, and now I've only selected the back part, and now I can move that forward. So GY, move it forward until I can actually zoom in on the left hand side and make sure that I keep it as far in as I can without it lighting up. You can see that as I move it out, suddenly it pops and it's no longer lighting up. Great. That fixes that issue. And then for the apron, let's see. Let's try just accent material and see what that looks like. I mean, it's nice, but I feel like it's covering a bit too much, isn't it? Let's change that model as well. Let's go into edit mode. And since this is made using a modifier, it's very easy to change, but I will hide the modifier in edit mode. So in here, I'll go to the solidify and then turn it off in edit mode so that I can see what I'm doing. But I'll keep the subdivision surface modifier on Edit mode so I can see the way it's curving. And with this loop selected, let's press G twice to loop slide it. That's the same as this tool. And then just slide it up. And then I'll do the same with this loop, slide it up. Cover maybe just half of the torso. Yeah, that looks better to me. And now that everything's basically where I want it, let's go back to the first decision we made, which was the main material, and let's change that to now fit the entire context because I feel like maybe it's a bit too dark now. Maybe I want it to contrast with the black even more. So I will try just increasing the value for it, which is the brightness. And I feel like that's going the right way. It feels brighter, more toy like, and I like that. Let's see how big of a scale I want on the subsurface. I see now that apparently I wrote the wrong number when I did it earlier. I'm pretty sure I tried to type one, didn't I? And then I probably missed it and typed four instead. Let's go back to one, and it's now a little less intense. Let's see here. On the back, it's clearly visible. You can see it in the arm that it's lighting up. Let's see that. That's without subsurface and then with. So it's clearly doing something, but it's not that visible from the front. Maybe increase the scale to two. That fields pretty good. 54. Completed - Class Project 06 - Rendering Your Character: Let's set up a preliminary render just to be able to share this in its best light. What we can do is shift A at a camera where I can reset all the rotation values because as I add it, it's pointing in the direction where I add it. I'll just remove all of the rotation data by typing zero for every rotation value and then G, Y, move it over here, and then I can rotate it like RX 90, press Return and then R Z 180 to turn it around. And then in this window, I'll click the camera button to go into the camera, and then I'll move it back and maybe this should be a square image. So I'll go up to the file output tab and type 1080 for both X and Y, and then I'll zoom back in on the camera. What do I want the focal length to be? Let's just zoom it in. And then GZ, move it down a little. Let's clean up this viewport, yeah. So let's go up here and turn off the viewport overlays to really be able to see what this is without any visual clutter. Let's also see what it looks like with denoising turned on. I'll go to the render tab and in the viewport, turn on denoising. I'm not sure how well the noise shows up in the video compression, but it was quite noisy, and now it's not. And I really like how it looks, but one more pro tip is to try it in a couple of different lighting settings. So I'll even open a new window. I'll split this one again in two make it a shader editor, and then go to the world And then here I'll just select another HDRI that I have. Let's maybe do this one. It's like a sunset. Now you really see the subsurface, don't you? And for this, I feel maybe the emissive is too bright. I was thinking that in the previous HDRI, as well. So maybe turn it down just to half, like two. Let's try it. And one more lighting scenario. Let's try this and once I feel happy, and I do with this, I'll go to render and Render Image. It'll open the render window, and if I expand it a bit, we can see 22, two, two that it's on sample roughly 100 out of 4,000. Why does it say 4,000? Well, in the render tab, I've set my MAX samples to 4,000 and something. And once it reaches that, it'll stop rendering, and I can save the image. And this is the image that I'll share with everyone on the assignment section on the website and, you know, on your portfolio and whatever, if you're proud, which I think you should be. Like, you've completed a character. This is a lot of people's main goal with TD is to be able to make a character like this. So I'll go to Image now that it's done, and save as, and I'll save it as a PNG and call it character shading version one. Save Image. 55. Parenting: Before we can animate anything, we got to attach objects together. Imagine just moving your torso forwards and the arms stay behind, that's no good. So to demonstrate how to attach things, I've made a cube man. Now, if I were to move this body over, like walking, none of the other objects come along, right? But we can change that with a process called parenting. It's a weird word to use, but it's basically a reference to the new hierarchical structure in the three D program. Like one object kind of reigns over other ones. And that means it's parenting them. So, the top object is the parent, the ones attached to it, are the children, and that's the terminology they use. I actually got me into a weird situation once when I was learning blender, and I was Googling stuff related to this. And so I started typing into Google, how to remove child blender. I caught myself like, I'm not sure I want that in my search history. Like I'm moving child. Anyway, so the way to do it is to click one object and then click its parent, the main object that you want to attach it to. And you can see that in Blender, when you have multiple objects selected, one of them is selected with a darker orange and one with a brighter yellow. So in this case, the arm is the darker orange highlight and the big cube is the brighter yellow. That means the big cube is the active object. It will always be the last one you selected. So now the head is that. And if I click back to the body, holding shift still, that is now the active object. And you can also see that in the outliner. The active one is the one that's more highlighted than the other ones. And so I click the arm, and then I click the body, and I go to object down to parent and you get options, just ignore it all. You'll learn what these do in time. But for this course, we only care about the top one, which is object. We want to parent one object to another object. That's what it's called. And now, what happened is we don't see a difference, but the one cube is removed from the hierarchy. And it is now inside the other one. If I now click the little drop down, we can see the main cube and the arm is inside that. That means this is the parent and this is the child. Now, in real life, if one object is attached to another, then that other object is attached to the first one as well. That's not the case in three D. When working like this, it just goes the one way. Now if I move the body around, if I move it forward, arm follows along. And that's good. That's the behavior we want. But the arm itself, if we move that, the body does not follow along. And notice also the little line going between them that indicates a parenting. So that means this is parented to this. So just bear that in mind that the order that you select things in when parenting matters because it is only the active object which will control other objects, and this one will not control the main object. That is actually good because if we rotate the main body, we do want the arm to follow along. But when we rotate the arm, we don't want the body to follow along. That is what we want. Let's just go ahead and click all the other objects and parent those as well. You can do it with multiple objects at once. Make sure to click the body last and then go to object, parent object. Now in the outliner, all the cubes are inside this main cube. When I move the main cube forward, everything follows along, but we can still rotate everything independently. That's great. But there's one more key to making this rig as it's called. When you attach things together and make them easier to animate, that's called rigging. We're making a rig here. That last point is, where do things rotate from? It's very weird to rotate the arm from the middle because it's attached here. We could, of course, when we animate this, we could rotate it and then move it and then rotate and move, and that would be possible, but we can make it rotate from this point. That goes back to something we've talked about before regarding the mirror modifier, and that is the origin point, this orange little dot here. Every object rotates around its origin. And you remember if we move something in edit mode, the origin stays put, right? So if I go into edit mode with tab and then move the arm, the origin point doesn't move. It's now in the top left corner. And now when I rotate the arm, it rotates around that point. There's an easier way to do it. If we model like this, we can actually just move the origin point. We can do that by going up to options and then effect only origins. We have three different options there all useful in their own right, but origins, if we click that, we see an axis and we move only the origin. If I press G to grab, I no longer move the object. I only move the origin. And to do this, we can also use the Gizmo. So we move this up and over. And then go to options and turn off affect origins. Now the arm rotates around the point that we want in every direction. Make sure to think about it in every direction, by the way. Don't just look at it from the front, look at it from the side, look at it from the top, make sure that the origin is in the right spot. And we can do this for every limb. So go to affect only origins, move it down, move this up. Up and up, go back to options, turn off only origins. This thing can confuse you if you leave it on and nothing happens. You just start moving the origins and not the object. Anyway, now we have a puppet that we can move. So I can move the whole thing by clicking the body, and then I can start moving the legs back and forth and waving the arm. I understand that it's not always obvious what gets parented to what. Like, in some cases, you know that the hand, for example, should be parented to the wrist, meaning that moving the hand doesn't move the wrist, but moving the wrist does move the hand, right? But what about the body and the hips, for example? Well, as a general rule of thumb, the center of gravity is your source. So in humans and most animals, that will be the hips. You start with the hips and everything else gets parented to the hips. So the legs get parented to the hips, the body gets parented to the hips, and then chaining out from that, you get the neck parented to the body, the head parented to the neck, and so on and so forth, going down the leg as well. But, like, the top point in the hierarchy, if you want, you know, this diagram, at the top, you have hips. And if I ever want to remove something from its parent, I can do that, too. In a couple of ways, I can either go to object and parent and clear its parent or I can go inside the outliner and I can find the object. I can drag it and look at the little hint that comes up above the cursor, it says, move inside collection, control to link, shift to parent. Meaning if I hold down shift, drop it, that unparents it. It moves it outside that cube. Now when I move the cube, the arm is no longer parented, and I can drag it back inside the cube by holding Shift again and dropping it on the cube, and now it's parented. So that's the basics of rigging. 56. Keyframe Animation: Now we're going to learn the most fundamental building block of making animations in blender. Now, animations, many people actually don't know what animation means. Now, animation just means making something move. Actually, it comes from giving life to something dead. That's what it etymologically means. So animating in blender means making stuff. Move. And that's the reason many people get into three D in the first place. The fundamental building block of an animation, that is key framing. Now, if you've used after effects or another animation software, you know keyframing. Keyframing is the way we animate on a computer. Typically don't animate frame by frame like they did in the old days where they had to draw every single frame. We make the computer do a lot of the work for us. So we just say we want an object here at the start and here at the end, and the computer figures out what to do in between. Those are key frames. You say the start and you say the end and the computer figures out the movement. So your keyframes live down here in the timeline. Let's expand that a little bit so you can see what we're doing. Timeline can be scrubbed by clicking the playhead dragging it over. We can play it by hitting play, pause. We can also play it by hitting Space Bar on some computers. But when you set up blender, it asked you, what do you want to use Space Bar for? For some of you, when you press Spacebar, this happens. You get up a search bar instead. For those people, you will play the timeline with Shift spacebar instead but you can change that by going to edit and preferences and going down to key Map and set the space bar action to play. Then Spacebar will play and pause the timeline. We can also over here, set the start and end frames. So if we don't want a timeline that's 250 frames long, we can go to end and we can say 50 instead, say. So I'll just click on my scroll wheel to slide this over and then scroll in to Zoom. No, a keyframe is only for a single value at a time. What do I mean by value? I mean, the sliders over here, like the location sliders and the rotation sliders. And every single slider, almost every single slider in blender can be animated with keyframes and you do so by clicking a little dot to the right of it, where it says animate property when I hover over it. Let's animate the location X. Location X is location on the red axis. When I drag it, my ball moves left to right. Let me click that little dot and the number turns yellow. Yellow means we've set a keyframe. The dot turns to a diamond, and if we click on the sphere, we also get a diamond in the timeline. That's our keyframe. And remember, we had to set one for the start and end of our movement. So let's say we want our movement to end at frame 50, so we go to frame 50, and then where do we want the sphere to be at frame 50? Let's say we want to move it over this far and see the color changes. This means you have changed the value, but you've not set a new keyframe. So the keyframe symbol is now empty. We don't have a keyframe here. It's orange to tell you you've made a change, but you haven't saved it as a keyframe, so we have to click the little diamond to now save that as a keyframe. That puts a keyframe in the timeline. And if I hit Play, we can see the sphere moves from left to right over the course of the timeline. This is great. Like, I absolutely love this. This still feels like magic to me. And also notice when I pause in between them, the number turns green. A green value means there exists keyframes on this, but you're not currently on one. So if I move it over to a keyframe, now it turns yellow. So green means it is animated, but you're not on a keyframe currently. So that's a way to know if this value is actually keyframed where you currently are. And it's not obvious necessarily. You might think, well, you can see it down here, but say you have multiple values animated. Let's say we animate the Z value as well. So the Z value starts at one here, we click for little diamond. Move it to frame 50, and then we move it up, and then we click the diamond again, and now our animation looks like this. At one point, it just lifts off. And so, okay, we might think, well, we can see the z value is animated because it's green, and it has a keyframe here. Yep, it's yellow, and it has a keyframe here. Yep, it's yellow. But at the first one, it's not yellow because we only have a keyframe for the location there. So I hope that makes sense. You can see where the different ones are. But I'll go over a way to get another overview over what is animated where later. Now, if you're unhappy with a keyframe, you'll want to change it. Say, we don't want it to start here, we want it to start here instead. Well, then we have to go to that keyframe. We have to change it. And then this is a little quirk with blender. If you now hit the diamond, it's not going to set a new keyframe. It's going to remove the keyframe, and then we click it again and it sets a keyframe at that point. That's just a quirk you have to get used to. If you want to change a keyframe, you have to change it and then turn it off and on to set a new value. While the most common form of animation is locations and rotations, don't forget that anything can be animated. So if I add a camera, the camera has a bunch of values, too, and say, for example, the focal length, the focal length can be animated. I can start at seven, keyframe that. At the end, we can go to 166 keyframe that, and then the camera changes its focal length. And what does that look like? Looks like this, looks like it's zooming in. You can keyframe light strength, and you can keyframe just about anything. Let your mind go wild with this. 57. Graph Editor: This wouldn't be a proper animation course without doing a bouncing ball. Like, everyone does it. Everyone does the bouncing ball, and there's a good reason for it. So we're doing the bouncing ball. And the reason I'm doing the bouncing ball is to teach you about another animation concept, which I think you're going to love. It gives you much more control over how things move compared to keyframes. But let's start with key frames and build up to it. So what I'll do is I'll click on this ball and I'll go to its object properties where I can see its transforms. And if I slide the location X slider, it'll move back and forth, left to right. That's good. So let's add a keyframe for that on frame one down here. I'll add a keyframe on location X, and then I'll move my playhead over to say frame 50, then I'll move the location X slider over to, well, say here. You don't have to slide the slider, by the way. You can also move it using say the Gizmo. You can move it like this, and the location slider will change like that as well. So you can move it in three D viewboard and then click the diamond to add a keyframe down here. Now if I play the animation, bring it back to start and press space to play, it's going to move from one side to the other. That's good. Actually, I'll even shrink down my timeline because I'm playing and then it goes past this and then there's a whole bunch of nothing. So over on the right here, I'll change the start and end so that the end says frame 50. Now it's going to loop when it comes to the end. I'll just click on my scroll wheel to slide this over and then scroll in to Zoom. And that's good. Now, what if I want the ball to move faster? How would I do that? Well, for one, I could say that it goes farther in the same amount of time, or I can make it go the exact same length in a shorter amount of time. So if I click the last keyframe and I press G to move, or I can just click and drag it and I move it to the halfway point on 25 frames, you'll see it moves faster because it moves the exact same distance, but in just 25 frames instead of 50. First idea to remember is you can change the timing of things by just moving the keyframes closer or farther away from each other. But we want control over how it moves between the points, and we don't get that control in the timeline. We need a different kind of editor. And that different kind of editor is the graph editor. So let's expand the timeline even more, just bring it up. And over here on the left, where we can change the window type, we'll go to the animation section and then go down to Graph Editor. This looks a little confusing. But let's just hide this right hand panel. We do not need it for the entirety of this course, and then scroll out and see what's going on here. You already know this if you've worked with animation in another software before. This is the animation graph, and it shows you visually the change you made on this parameter. So we can see from this that there is a keyframe here and there is a keyframe here. Those are the same ones as in the timeline. We can also see on the left hand side that we have some values. We have zero, we have five, and we have ten. Those correspond to a location value. So we can see just looking at the graph that it goes from zero to just above five. And looking at this, we can see, indeed, it goes to 6.4. So we know that this ball moves from X zero to 6.4 in 50 frames just by looking at the graph. Not only that, but we can tell that there is a slight easing curve to this. That means it's not a straight line. It may be hard to see, but it's not quite straight. It's curving like this. It's called an S curve, and we can change the S curve by clicking on the handles. Every keyframe has a handle, and this is the handle, and we can click this and drag it and change the profile of the curve. So we can say, for example, bring this down, and now it has a new motion. Now we can see that it stays close to zero for longer, and then it changes more quickly. And the way that looks in the three D view port is like this. It starts very slow and then it speeds up towards the end, or we can do the opposite. We can bring this over like so, and move this over like so. And now it moves over fast and then it gradually stops. And not only that, we can actually see it overshoots a little bit because this is now pointing upwards, so we can make it go up and then down again, and up and down in the X value means right and then left. So this is super powerful. Let's make another graph, an S curve but much more sharp. So let's move these handles past each other to really sharpen up this S curve. Make it quite steep. And the way that looks is like this. I gradually starts, and then it moves quickly over, and then it gradually stops again. You can see how powerful this is. Just with the two keyframes, we can completely change the way the ball moves between the two points. Now, there are a couple of ways to change where the handles are. As I showed, you can click them and drag them. You can also press G to grab them. Or you can click the keyframe there on and rotate it with R, rotating like this and scaling S like this. You can scale them in and rotate them around. Also bear in mind, let's say we have a keyframe here on frame 25 as well. Let's add a keyframe, which as a keyframe in the graph editor two. Every keyframe actually has two handles, one on the left and one on the right. So let's delete that middle keyframe by clicking it or dragging over it and pressing delete. Let's talk about different types of handles. So these are Bezier handles, the same kind of handles you have in Illustrator, and when you're editing a Besier curve in blender, as well. If I right click on one keyframe, I can choose the handle type. Have a few different handle types. The pictures really explain what they look like in the graph as well. The vector is just straight. If I click vector, then it's straight, no matter what I do to the right. Let's do that with the right keyframe as well. Right click vector. Whatever I do now as I move these around, they're going to be straight no matter what, and straight means completely abrupt start and stop. If I right click and I set the handle type two free, then I can change the left and right hand side independent of each other. If they are not on free, if they are aligned, then the handles are going to change according to each other to kind of mirror on the other side. If I right click, set the handle type to automatic, it's going to try to smooth it out no matter what it looks like. So let's move these back to where they were and select everything with A and right click and set the handle types to automatic for everything. Now it's going to have a smoothing curve. And if I go over here and I add a keyframe in the middle and I right click and set that to automatic as well, as I move it around, you can see it adjusts to try and make it smooth no matter where it is. But that can lead it to overshoot sometimes. So at this point here, I've decided, I want the ball here and then it overshoots a little bit. So if you don't want that, then you go to autoclamped. In which case, this is the default. I'll try to automatically smooth, but it won't ever go past horizontal. 58. Animating a Bouncing Ball: Let's actually define the motion of this ball now. I'll delete the center keyframe and I'll just leave these two. And what do I want it to do? I want it to kind of be as if it was thrown from the left hand side and then it slows down toward the end. Meaning I need this first keyframe to be fairly abrupt, not too smooth it. So I'll rotate this around like this, meaning it'll change fast and then gradually come to a stop. That looks good to me. Now let's add another axis as well of animation. Let's not animate just the X location. Let's animate Z two to make it bounce. So I'll press G and then Z to move it up and how high do I want it to start? Maybe start up here around Z eight, I can tell, and then add a keyframe on frame one. Now we can see two graphs here. We can see the blue graph and the red graph. We see them overlaid on top of each other. This is completely fine when we're working on two axes, but it can get pretty messy if you're working on like ten controllers at the same time. So over here on the left, you can use the drop down menu and see everything you're animating. Hide different channels and show them and click them or double click to select everything in there. So if I double click on X, and it selects all the X keyframes, stuff like this makes it easier to handle. But for now, I'm pretty fine. I'll animate this, and what I'll do is I'll set the second keyframe at a point where I feel like it should have hit the ground. So I'll start playing my timeline while here, and then in my mind, I'm imagining how fast I want it to fall. So I'm just playing, and then as I feel like it should hit the ground, I'll pause it again. So play pause. That's how fast I feel like it should hit the ground. Around frame 18. So I'll add another keyframe there where it falls to the ground. So I'll move it down to the ground. And in my case, it hits the ground at around 1 meter, and then I'll click the keyframe, and that adds another keyframe here. And if I look at that animation, this is what it looks like. That's fine, but it doesn't look like it's dropping because it's easing out as well. It's like dampening before it hits. It's like it's anticipating hitting the ground and it doesn't want to hit too hard. So let's change this bottom keyframe to a vector. Right click, handle type, vector, meaning it's completely straight. And then let's look at that again. Much more realistic. But we want it to bounce. So let's see how far do I want the second bounce to be? Let's play it and check. Bounce there. I pause it at this point, and I want it to land there. So I'll press the z location again to add another keyframe there. And in between those halfway in between, I'll add another z keyframe where I bring it up a bit. Add a keyframe. I need to zoom in a little bit, but I want to zoom in only vertically, not horizontally. I want to bring this keyframe up here and this keyframe down here so I can see just how tall this is compared to this. I can do that with a little scroll bar to the right. I can either scroll it up or down, or if I press the edge, I can compress where the top is and where the bottom is. Although I prefer using a different scroll method, which works both horizontally and vertically, and that is holding down control or Command on a Mac and clicking the scroll wheel and dragging. And that lets me zoom in independently on X and Y, and it may look a little confusing, just looking at me doing it, but I promise it's very intuitive once you do it yourself. I'll frame all this and then make this keyframe also a handle type vector, so it's bouncing. And then how high do I want it to bounce? Maybe about half as high as the first. Let's play that and see what it looks like. Not too bad, but not great, either. For one, now in context, it feels like it's dropping too slow the first time. Let's move that first keyframe over so it falls faster. That's better. And it feels like it's climbing on that second climb. You see that? Oh, I kind of drags up, meaning I feel like it needs to be more abrupt. So let's do that too. And one good rule of thumb is you want the angle coming into this keyframe to be the same as the angle coming out of it. And that happens when I put the keyframe about here, then I can adjust it up and down until I feel it's exactly right. And then I'll move this keyframe over to make a nice parabolic arc. Let's look at that. Fine. I feel like the second jump is too high. So maybe bring that down. That's better. But it feels like it kind of slams into the ground on the last one. Like it's dragged down. So maybe expand that just one frame. Better. And for the next bounce, instead of adding the keyframe manually, I'll just copy what I have here. So I can take this keyframe and I can shift D to duplicate, and then I can move it over. And that just duplicates the frame. And I can move that maybe to here to start, and then duplicate this and shift D and move it over. This I don't want to move the up and down axis. In this coordinate space, that means Y. I'll just press X, which constrains it on the X axis in this space. It's weird to talk about axis, both. We're moving the ball's axis, and we have a different axis space in this graph. But what I mean is in this space, do I want to move it horizontally or vertically, and that means X or Y. Even though we're animating the Z location of the ball, I hope that makes sense. Let's take a look at the animation, bounds bounds and bounds. The last one it feels like it's slamming into the ground again. At last keyframe needs to go over one and I feel like it's also a bit too high. Let's move it down a bit. Let's try that again. Great. And then one more. I'll zoom in using that technique, and then Shift D, duplicate this over, and shift D, duplicate this over. And try maybe like this. My last one feels a little too long. Let's bring both of these keyframes in just one frame and see what that looks like. That's better. First bounce is a bit too high to me. Let's bring that down. And it feels like it's climbing. What I mean by climbing? I feel like when it's going up, it's going so against the gravity. Like, it's pulling up more than it would if it were bouncing. And that tells me that it's going up too slow. So I'll bring it over one frame as well. Great. And then everything else has to be brought along with it. One frame. For me, animation has always been about just adjusting until things look right. I'm sure some people have an intuition for where the keyframes need to go. I don't, so I need to just look at it 1 million times and adjust accordingly. 59. Exaggerating Motion: So when I'm happy with how it bounces and I'm pretty happy now, let's add some cartooniness to this by making it stay in the air for a bit longer. We can do that by scaling out the top keys. So if I press S on this, I can scale it out and move it out so that it stays in the air longer. Look at this. And then it slams into the ground. And what effect this will have is for one, it'll make it look more cartoony, more exaggerated, and for the other, it'll look heavier. So let's do that here too, scale it out, scale this out, and also this. It looks much heavier now and more cartoony. So let's just go all in on the cartooniness, yeah. Let's add some squash and stretch. This part I love stretching it out as it speeds up, and then squashing it down as it hits the ground. So to do that, I'll look at the scene from the side, just click the Gizmo, and then I'll go into wireframe view so that I can see the rotation of the ball more clearly. Now, if it rotates, I can actually tell that it does. Had I been in solid view, you can't really see, can you? So the way to add a squash and stretch is we look for the impact keyframes where it hits the ground like here, right there. We want to squash it down at this point. So let's animate the scale z. That is this value. It's fine to just try the different ones and see which one is right. So I can find out that scale Z is the one. What I can do is I can drag this down and I can squash it on this frame and add a keyframe. Not only that, but I need to move it down a bit now because it's now hovering above the ground, right? So I need to G Z, move it further down, and then update the key frame of the bounds. So the Z location here you can see over here that it's now orange, meaning there's a change here that isn't saved in a keyframe, meaning I have to click the little diamond and click it again. But what happened, I changed the handle type because I added a new one. So either you can right click and just change the handle type again to vector, or you can bypass that entire thing by just clicking that keyframe and moving it in the graph editor. So I can zoom in on it, and then G Y to change it and move it like this. I prefer this. Now it touches the ground again, and then a frame after this, I want it to stretch out in the opposite direction. So what I need to do then is I need to first scale it out, stretch out on that direction, and add a keyframe. And then I need to rotate it so it kind of follows the direction it's traveling. So we need to animate another value, and that is one of the rotations. Let's check which. So if I turn X, that's not right. Turn Y, that's it. So I want to turn it like this. Let's add a keyframe at this point where it was correct. We want to keep the rotation on this point where it's just straight up and down. Keyframe there, then on the next frame, we'll turn it like so. And then a couple of frames later, we will add a keyframe to scale it down again. So just scale it back to one, which is completely round and then add a keyframe there. So if I double click on the Z scale, you can see what the scale graph looks like if I zoom in. At the point of impact, it's at this point, and then it scales out to stretch it, and then back to zero over the course of a few frames. And we should do the exact same thing on the other side on the mirror side. So on the frame before, we want to stretch it out in the opposite direction. So we can duplicate this stretch frame, shift D, and then move it over here, constraining it to X. I don't accidentally move it up and down. Then like this, now it's stretched out the exact same way, but we will rotate it to point this way. Add a keyframe. So the rotation, if I double click that and then zoom out to look at it. Oh, it's huge. So let's scale the graph to be able to see that a bit better. The rotation gradually swings from one side to the other. That's the rotation. Okay, let's go back to scale. Zoom in here. And then a few frames before this, I wanted to go back to one. So just press one and add a keyframe. So what it does is it comes in, round, stretches out. As it hits the ground, it squashes down, then it rotates around and stretches the other way and gradually goes back to round. Let's see what that looks like in real time. Go back to frame one, go back to solid view, and look at it. It is very hard to see. You don't really see it, in fact. You just kind of feel it, but we can exaggerate them a little more if we want to see it a little better. What we can do is we can keep it stretched a little longer. So we can take this frame and this one, and we can scale those out X to scale on the X axis, and we can scale them out a couple more frames. Let's see what that looks like. I feel like that's good. Just keep it stretching a little longer. Great. And then let's do the exact same process for the next bounce. So on the impact, we scale it down on Z, not as much this time. Scale it down on Z. We add a keyframe. We need the rotation to be zero so that it's scaling just straight down. So zero on the rotation, keyframe that. And we need to move it down. So I'll take the movement key, grab it with G, and then Y to constrain it up and down, and then move it so that it's actually impacting. Then the frame before, we scale it out a bit, not as much as last time because we don't have as much speed going into this, right? So add a keyframe there and add that same keyframe on the other side, so Shift D, move it over. And the handle here is a bit weird like the handle is super long because it was copied from here where long made sense, but it doesn't anymore. So let's select this and this and right click and set it to Autoclamp to update. So now it's stretched, it's squashed, and then it's stretched again. But we need to rotate it. So the rotation is correct here, but not here, so rotate coming in, add a key, and then rotate going out. Add a key. And then a couple of frames going in. How many did I choose here? We had one, two, three, four, five. So let's do the same here, one, two, three, four, five, and then it's back to one on the scale. Type one, and add a key. Same on the other side. One, two, three, four, five, scale back to one, and add a key. So now it's stretching out, it's coming in, squashing down, and stretching out again. Let's look at it by playing the animation. That looks good to me. And for the final bounce, what I'll do is I'll just copy what I did over here so I don't have to redo it again. So as to not copy things that I don't want to copy, let's hide the location. X location is the ball moving from left to right. We don't want to change that. We don't want to change the Z location, either, which is the bounce. We just want to change the scale and the rotation which contribute to the squashing and stretching. And then I'll scale out to see all the keys, and I want to take everything around this bounce, everything that contributes to the squash and stretch, and I'll copy it to the next impact, which is on frame 37. Shift D X to move it only on the X. If I hadn't pressed X, it would move around freely, but pressing X makes it just move horizontally and then move it so that it happens on the next impact, it comes in, squashes down, and then goes out. But in this case, I needed to do so less intensely. I'll zoom in again. I'll take that squashing and I'll decrease the intensity of it. So right now it's going down all the way to here. So let's G Y to move it on the Y, squash it down less intensely, just a little bit this time because it's not bouncing very high. Then for the stretching, let's bring those keyframes down. Let's not stretch it very much. Then again, we have to correct the Z location. So let's turn back on the Z location and just move it down until it hits the ground. So now we kind of automated the squash and stretch for this. And then for the final hit, I'll just squash it down a little bit more and then gradually bring it back up. So on the final, I'll squash it down to scale 0.95 and add that and make sure the rotation is zero. And before that, I'll stretch it out a little bit, just the tiniest bit and rotate it coming in. Oh, I forgot key framing the scale, so let's scale it out again. Key frame it. Then it comes in, and then it rolls out and it gets back to scale one over time. And I need to adjust the Z location. So it impacts, goes back to the ground, and then over time, it expands a bit and so it has to go up again. So increase the Z location at this point. So that as it expands, it stays on the ground. I think it's done. Let's look at our masterpiece. That looks like a cartoony ball bounce to me. Now, that seems very complicated for just a ball bounce. But I promise, for one, you will become much quicker the more you do this. But for the other, I can assure you that the ball bounce is actually quite complicated. It is deceptively complicated. If you can master this, then it can master just about any animation. So I'd encourage you to try this exercise for yourself. You can follow along and just do exactly the same as I do, or you can try to give your ball another character than I did, maybe make it more bouncy or lighter or make it go farther if you're up for a challenge. I would encourage you to do this to get comfortable in the animation graph because that is the key no pun intended to all animation in blender and in almost every software. Like, the graph editor is such a core skill. So try this exercise and make your own ball bounce. 60. Rendering Video: And now back to rendering because rendering an animation is not the same as rendering an image. I've just set up some lights here, two lights and a backdrop and a couple of materials to the ball and the background. And I'm in rendered view on the left here. I'm rendering with cycles, not with Evie, but we'll actually have to discuss that for this video. But for now, I just have this animation that we made in the last video where the ball bounces and I want to render it out. Let's just go to a frame and go to render and render Image. It will render the image that your playhead is at, and you can save it in the same way as you would any other image. However, this is not an easy way to render out an animation, like going to every single frame, rendering, and then saving the image. No, no, no. We want to automate it and maybe not even just automate it, but maybe save a video file out of it and not just 50 images. So first off, we have to tell Blender where to save everything because it will do so automatically. And that is in the file output tab where we set the output resolution and the frame rate. We also set the output path. And by default minus set to temp. Let's just define that. Now, if you keep it on PNG, is going to save out 50 PNGs. But I want to save a video out of Blender, and you can do that because Blender will render each frame and then at the end, combine them into a video. You can do that by changing the file format to a movie, and the only movie available is FFMPEg video. We just need to change one thing about this because the default is WAC and that is under the encoding. Nobody uses Matroska. Click that and choose MPEG four. That's all we have to do. Now I can go to render instead of rendering image, I can render an animation. When I click that, no matter what frame I'm on in the timeline, it'll jump back to frame one, and it'll start rendering, it'll render every single image and then at the end, combine them into an FFM BC video. It just completed frame one. It now says on the left ear frame two, and it tells me how long the previous frame took to render. Previous frame in this case, took 14.8 seconds. Meaning if I just bring over a calculator here, I have 50 frames, so 50 times 14.8 or let's just round it up to 15. That's going to be 750 seconds divided by 60 to get minutes. It's going to take 12.5 minutes to render the entire animation. This is where the other render engine comes in because it is so much quicker. If I close this out and I go to the render tab, I change from cycles to EV and then I do that again. Render render animation. And look at that. It does multiple frames each second, and it's getting close to finish. Now it is halfway finished. So this is the situation in which you might want to use IV for animations, where you have to render 50 frames and not just one. But again, cycles is going to look better, and I render all my animations in cycles. And sometimes I have to render all night. I set my computer to render when I go to bed, when I wake up the next morning, it's been rendering for 8 hours straight or depending on how many hours of sleep I get, and then it's finished in the morning. That's not entirely uncommon. It's a really nice excuse to go out and get some sun. But if you're in a rush, you can make your scene so that you can render it with EV, and then it won't take as long. So let's go and check our output now that it's done. Here is the folder where I saved it, and we have a video indeed called ball bounce, and it says the frame range, so one, two, Oh, 50. Well, let's double click it, and that's my rendered animation. So it really is as simple as that. You render the same way as an image, but it'll take much longer. Now, one more trick that I want to show you, which will really help with realism in animation. This goes for both EV and cycles is to go down here and turn on motion blur. When motion blur is turned on, it's going to kind of blur out as it moves. So if I go to render and animation now, you can tell that it's blurring out and that it looks much nicer when you're playing back the video. It's probably hard to see any difference, but trust me. 61. Rendering an Image Sequence: You're dead set on rendering your animation in cycles. You're like, It's going to take 10 hours, but I don't care. I want to use cycles. It looks so much better, and I would agree. I typically render in cycles, even for long animations, and I render for ten plus hours. I'm actually right now waiting for a render that's taking me 120 hours. When you do that, you have to render a little bit differently, or you have to save a little bit differently. So let me switch to the cycles render engine and go to final output. Last time we rendered an FFMPEG video. That's the easiest way to do it. But the problem with that is, let's say you render for 10 hours, and then your program crashes on hour number eight, speaking from personal experience, do you get 80% of a video? No, no, no, no. No, you get no video. If you don't complete your render, you get no video. That is why the default is not video, but rather a PNG. Although I prefer JPEG, takes up less space. But if I press render now, let me switch to EV just so I don't have to wait so long and render my animation. It renders it out. And if I go to the folder where I've set it to save, this is what it's doing. It saves 50 images, and it's going to be like a flipbook if I go to the first one, then I can just hold down the right arrow key and it kind of play through like a flipbook. But how do I compile this into a video? Well, you can do it in after effects or premiere or Resolve. That's the most common way to do it, but you can also do it in blender. So I'll just show you how to do that. Let me copy this file path so I can use it in blender in just a bit. Then in blender, I'll open a new file new, general, and sure I'll save this. Then I'll go up here into my workspaces and I'll make a new workspace. Click the plus, go down to video editing, and press Video Editing. That makes Blender into a video editing software. Bet you didn't think that was possible, huh? Actually, Blender can do a lot of stuff. Like, you can even do green screen stuff and motion tracking, and it's crazy what you can do in Blender. But I just want to compile a video. So up in the left hand corner, I'll put my file path that I copied. And now down in the timeline, I can hit Shift A to add, just like in any other window, Shift A, add an image or sequence, which opens up that folder that I have here. I'll select the first image. The order is important here, and then press e to select everything in here or just click the first one, go all the way down and shift, click the last one, add Image strip, and when I hit Play, that just puts it into a video. I'll have to crop it, set the end frame to 50, just like in the original. Then I can go to my file output, and now I can save an FFM Peck video anywhere I want. Like here, And in the encoding, I'll set it to MPEG four and then make sure at the bottom here under post processing that the sequencer is turned on. It should be turned on, but the sequencer is, this is the sequencer. If this is off, it's not going to render whatever's in here. And then we can go to render animation. It'll go through real fast because it's not actually rendering the three D, it's just rendering the images as a video. And now in this folder, I have all of my images and ball bounds the movie, Return of the ball. I 62. Class Project 07 - Character Animation: You've leveled up from the ball. It's time to do a full character. I'm excited about this one, if you can't tell. This is like, I know there's more course after this, but I feel like you're kind of graduating now. Character animation feels like to me, like, the pinnacle of Breed animation. Like, if you can do this, if you can make a character, you can shade it. You can animate it and render it out. Basically know three D. Like you're so capable when you can do this. And so, Okay, let's just get right into it. The brand wants to see the mascot come to life with a simple animation. You'll rig your character using parenting and animate a short idle animation. Just a few seconds, a subtle motion to give your character some personality. Have the character stand in one spot. Think of breathing, blinking, swaying, waving, or any small movement that adds life without being over the top. For an extra challenge, make the animation loop seamlessly. So what I'm thinking of here is just don't try to do any walking. Walking is, for one, a lot of hassle to do, and for the other, we don't really have all the tools. We need to do it right yet. So if you want to move your character around the screen, I've kind of set you up for difficulty unless you have a butterfly character or something that doesn't walk, you're going to have to make a decision about this, but the project is, have your character stand still and just blink, wave, wag its tail, you know, whatever fits your character. The requirements are use parenting to attach body parts together, animate a two to five second idol animation. You may render in cycles or EV. And this extra challenge is making the animation loop seamlessly. So you know how when the playhead gets to the end, it comes back around and plays again, you can copy all your starting key frames to the end to make it kind of loop as if it doesn't skip back, but it just kind of continues. It's very handy for a lot of things, but not necessary for now unless you want an extra challenge. The requirements are use parenting to attach body parts together, animate a two to five second idle animation. In the output panel, here we have the frame rate and mine is set to 24 FPS. I think that's the default. W 24 frames per second and we want two to 5 seconds. Let's see what that is. 24 times two, that's 48, minimum 48 frames. That's 2 seconds and maximum five frames. 24 times 520. 120-48 frames. You may render in cycles or EV. Again, I recommend cycles. Looks better, but if it takes way too long and you just knead it out, I get that. You may use EV, which is going to be a lot faster. And the deliverables say that the output resolution to a square format that's either 720 by 720 or 1080 by 1080, and then render your animation either as an FFMPEG video with mbeGF compression or save an image sequence and compile it into a video. Easiest thing is to just go straight to video. But if your render takes more time than half an hour, I would suggest rendering an image sequence just in case crashes during renders are not unheard of. I speak as a man with countless rendering hours lost in my career. And then you know the rest uploaded to the class project section of the website and share on social media. And here's the Macho picture of Dan to inspire you to join the Facebook group. Have fun animating. 63. Completed - Class Project 07 - Parenting: Alright, my robot is just begging to move around, so let's give him a dance. I really want the guy to kind of flail his arms around, open mouth, like, turning around as if he's eaten something really spicy. Maybe. Oh, you know what would be fun if the eyes were flashing. The setup in the left hand viewport, I've set my mode to material preview mode, and I've set the scene world on so that it's receiving lighting from my HDRI. The reason I have material preview mode on and not rendered mode is I want to be able to see my animation in real time. And when I play my playhead, if I press Play, you can see in the top left corner of any viewpoort that has the viewport overlays on. This one doesn't. I've turned off the viewpod overlays, but in this, we can still see it that it says it's like flipping 24-25 frames per second. That is what we want. In the file output, I've set my frame rate to 24, meaning I'm getting real time playback now. I am seeing this as it actually is supposed to be. A quick aside here about frame rates. My animation is 24 frames per second. Now, when you play the timeline with space bar, you get a number in the top left showing the speed you're playing at, and that number should be around the same number as the frame rate. But sometimes your computer can't play the timeline at 24 frames per second. Maybe the scene is just too awesome. Then this number turns red because you're not seeing the correct speed. The whole animation is slowing down to calculate every frame to animate correctly, you want to see the animation at the correct speed. What do you do? The first step is to turn off modifiers. This button here in the modifier turns it off while working, but it goes back on when you go to save an image. Remember also that subdivision surface modifiers have separate levels for viewport and render. Viewport is what you work with, render is what you save. And finally, if all else fails, you can go to the timeline and switch from play every frame to frame dropping. And that lets blender skip over frames so that you see the correct speed. And as a second point of preparation, I'll just show you another little trick. So what I want to do with this is to make it unselectb, kind of lock it. To do that, I have to add another icon to the right in the outline. We have an eye. We have a camera. But if I go up to the what's this called a hopper. Go over to the hopper, can turn on some more icons, and for this, I just want this one selectable. If I click that, now I can turn selectable on or off or anything. So if I click it for this, now I cannot select it in the Viewboard anymore. Very handy. Let's do the same for the camera. Press the camera, go up here, turn off selectable. And now I can start rigging my character. First off, I'll set the origin point of everything. Origin point is the little orange dot. It's where everything rotates around, and I can move it by going up to options and effect only origins. Now I can move the origin where I want it to be, press G to move it, and then make sure it doesn't move on the side to side axis. Shift X, no X, and then move it down here. Or where I want it to pivot from maybe from the front, G Y, from the front here. And then the mouth, I'll view this from the side. Other side. Then I can alter Z to go into X ray mode, also this button here, and then move that origin down here to where it would realistically pivot. And what else? If I want to pivot the neck, this is fine. And the apron, if I wanted to slide around, that's where it would slide around from. The body I'll put at the bottom near the waist. And for the hips, I'll put it in the middle. That's the most common way to do it. The shoulders, I feel like this is okay. This arm here should pivot from this point, I think. And looking at it from the side, it looks good. I'll do the same with this arm. Should be around here. The hand. Now for this, I don't feel confident really because I really wanted to spin around perfectly on this axis. So what I'll do for this one, actually, I'll right click, I'll press set origin and do origin to geometry. That puts it in the precise middle. And if I turn off the effect only origins now and try to rotate it on the Z axis, it should look like nothing's happening. Had it been a little off center, say I just put it like there, just a little off center. Say it looked right to me, and then I start rotating it. Is not going to look right. Although you know what? I mean, that may be fun, but let's not. So right click Set origin origin to geometry. Same with this. The legs, viewing it from the front. Oh, turn on affect only origins, and it should probably pivot around here and this as well. Foot around here and the other foot. And for the hands, I'll bring that up now that it is in the perfect middle, so it pivots around the wrist. You know, another thing I thought of is if you have low frame rate playback rate, I do have 25 here, but if you don't it can also help to let me just turn off the effect origins. It can help to go to the modifier stack and turn down the levels of the subdivision in the viewport, because this can also be taxing on your system. So just going down from definitely don't need five for the eyes just enough to see the shape, then this can drastically improve your viewpoard performance as well. Don't forget to occasionally save file, save, and I have to attach everything together. So first, let's start from the hips, yeah? Everything's attached to the hips. So the legs and the belly are all attached to the hips. I'll select those, and the hips last and then control or command P to parent and parent to the object. In some cases, when you do this, things will skip around. That's because you have uneven scales on things. Like you've scaled things in object mode like this and things will kind of skip around. In that case, go in and object, apply scale. Let's do that again. Parent everything to the hips, and then parent the feet to the legs, the shoulders and the neck and the apron to the body, arms to the shoulders. Hands to the arms. I feel like I'm singing a kindergarten song. Hands to the arms, arms to the shoulders. Is the neck attached? Let's check. Yeah, I did attach the neck, so let's attach the head to the neck. And then everything on the head to the head. Now let's check, move the hips, everything moves around. Move the body, move the shoulders, the neck, the head, legs. Everything looks correct to me. So we can start animating. 64. Completed - Class Project 07 - Animating: So again, I want the guy to be like crazy. First off, I want the head to go back and forth like this. So let's set my frame range. Let's start with 120 and see if that's too long. That's the max allowed for the project, and then I know I need to animate. Let's see. That's the z rotation. We can check it by doing it, right? We can do the rotation and then look down here at what value changes. So we know it's the z rotation. Let's see let's start him looking over here. That's 60 degrees, and then add a keyframe. And then how fast do I want him to turn around swing like ten frames. Let's go to frame ten and do plus 60 and then add a keyframe there. So now he turns his head like this. And then I can just duplicate that first keyframe, Shift D, duplicate it over to frame 20, and then duplicate this keyframe over to frame 30. And you know what, I'll just keep going. Let's see what that looks like. I think the timing is good, let's go in and refine on the graph editor, the graph. So I can't really find it anywhere, but I can go to view and then frame. That brings the view to the keyframes, and then let's see here. Let's expand all the keys a little bit. Instead of doing this, another trick I like is to go over here and let's close this menu. In here, we can decide what the pivot point is. Where do we scale things from? And we can scale from individual centers. That way, if I select multiple keyframes and scale them, and that scales them each individually out. Had I been on the bounding box center, then it will scale like this. So this is a really cool way to edit multiple frames at once. Let's look at that. It's a little faster. Scale down this was a bit uneven. I like that and I think let's go back to bounding box scaling and scale everything. Let's just move the last keyframe to frame 70 and set the frame range in the timeline to frame 70. Let's say that's the length of my animation. And I kind of want it to loop perfectly. So actually, let's add one last keyframe on frame 80 and see how that looks. That loops around. That's great. Let's add some arm flailing. Let's do this arm here. And let's see what axis is that? That's probably going to be the Y axis. No, it's not. Not for this because the object is rotated, but that's fine, because I want it to flail about on this axis. And look at that. That doesn't quite work. When I'm rotating around that pivot point, it's exposing the axle underneath. So actually, these pivot points need to be higher up. So I'll select both of them and then go to affect only origins and then move them. Or, no, they need to be lower down, don't they? Oh, and look at that. It's moving the hands with it because the hands are parented. So now we have a problem, but it's not really a problem. We can fix it going up here and affect only the parents as well. Don't affect children. That's my PSA going out to the bring your own laptop community. Don't affect your children. So now I can move this down. And now, turn these off going back, if I rotate now on the X, yeah, it's going to hide the axle all the way through. I think that's going to be the way to go for me. Even though obviously, it's not a realistic movement, but, you know, it's a stylized thing. So rotate on the X. Let's start out with the arm kind of upward like this. Key frame that. And let's also go into the graph editor already. And find this, go to view and frame. I want this keyframe on the last frame as well. So shift D and just make sure that the last frame is there. And how many times does he flail? Like, Oh, it should probably go pretty fast, shouldn't it? Like maybe five frames. And so it flails down. And that went very, very high up because I framed selected on just one frame so I zoomed in a lot. So let's go again to view and frame all. So it goes down. And then I'll shift D, duplicate this frame over to frame ten and up again. That goes very fast. Let's do that again. Just shift D, all those, move them over. Select everything. Shift D. That's good. I feel like they should be a little more varied. So maybe some of them should go even lower. Some of them should go higher. Then Shift D, duplicate all this over. And I needed to be down on frame 80. So right now it seems I'm out of phase. That's fine. Can delete this keyframe and move this to frame 80 and then just nudge the previous ones a little bit. I'm cheating. That's fine. Let's see. Yeah, that's fun. That's very cute. Let's do the same on the other arm, so I'll copy all of these keyframes, Control C, and add them here. I need to keyframe the X first, so go to the X channel, click that and Control V. That does the same here. Obviously, it's not quite right. But I can scale all of these on negative one on the Y axis. S to scale them, then Y to scale only on the Y and then do minus one. That inverts. Then just make sure that at the start, it's up and then it goes down. Yes. Great. I don't only have to do it on one axis. I can do it on multiple axis. Let's go back to the Y rotation, and that doesn't look quite right, does it? Z rotation. There we go. That's better. So you can probably do a little bit of this, too. Let's play it and then just preview that. I can kind of look like it's swimming. Maybe I'll just move those permanently a bit to the front. I think that's probably fine. Let's make him drop his jaw. What rotation axis is that? Not that, for sure. It's this, yes. So he should have it around 27 and then maybe quiver a little bit. Let's just start with this, and I can shift D duplicate this somewhere. And then shift D duplicate it the other way. And now that I have my range, I can just randomize this. And then the last one will be the same as the first one. Let's. It looks like he's panicking. Oh, you know what? I feel like cheating a little bit. I think I'm going to do it. I think I'm going to cheat. So I told you that everything attaches to the hips, and that is true. But right now, I think I want him to kind of balance on one leg. And for that, I can parent the hips to the leg instead. So I'll actually unparent the leg with Alt P, clear parent or go to object and parent and clear parent. And then I'll parent the hip to this leg. And I can set the origin point of the hips to that same point. Oh, don't affect children. Only affect parents, PSA. Come down here. And now I can rotate the whole dude over that point and kind of make him balance. Oh, that's nice. That should be fairly slow on the X rotation. So let's see. Let's say that is the default, about three degrees. Shift D, duplicate that keyframe over to the end, and then maybe tip over at a keyframe, tip the other way, at a keyframe. Let's see what that looks like. Not quite. Maybe we put this in the middle. That's better. And then on the Y axis, should I do anything there, too? No, I feel like that should be just zero. But what I do want is the eyes just so I can see the eyes. I can't see them right now because I doesn't let me see through glass. I'll find the eyes under here. You can see that I've selected something parented to leg right by its selection here. So I'll click that and then it's under hips, and then here under body, and then under neck. And then we get the head. We're deep in it now, and then glass. Let's just turn the eye off so I can see underneath. Let's make the eyes flash as well, because you can animate, as I said, any value, so you can even animate the strength of the emission. You can make the flash like this. Oh, that's going to be nice on frame zero. Let's have a strength of two and on frame 80, a strength of two. And what's the highest I want to go? Let's actually check this in rendered mode. I want to see what it really looks like. Yep. Yep, 50. And then what's the lowest I want to go? What about zero? Zero is good. I'll go back to material preview mode and hide the glass and see what does that look like? It would probably turn on real quick and then kind of fade out and then do the same again. No, it should turn off quicker. See that? And in more of a rapid succession. Yep. That's the thing. Shift D. Hilarious. I don't like the quivering of the lip, actually. I think it's too much. So let's scale down those keys. Select everything, scale on the Y, scale those down. It's still a bit too much. That's better. Should the arms be out of face of each other? So if I take one of them, and I just shift it over. That's more chaotic. That's fun. That's fun. I like it. But let's make sure that it ends on the same frame as it starts. He should spin his head completely around once. He is a robot. He can do that after all. So for that, I have to make sure that the start is like the end is the start plus 360 degrees. So 60 plus 360 plus 360. That is the end. So that's all the way up there. And that final spin, I can just delete that middle keyframe and see what that looks like. Yes. Yes. I like it. I like it. But it's kind of weird how, you know, he spins around and then stops here and then continues. You see that? So he spins around, then stops and then continues. That's kind of weird, meaning I should probably maintain that speed. So I'll rotate this first key to point at this angle where it follows the curve and then do the same here. That's better. And then you can have some randomness in the amplitude here, too. Bring some of them down, bring some of them up. Let's not be too rigid about it. This guy just ate a serious chili pepper. Let's check the other rotation axes on the head just to make sure that I don't want him to, like, nod or anything. Maybe he's facing a little bit up. Yeah, that'll be good. And the other like the tilt. Oh, that's good. Yeah, you should probably tilt. Definitely. Okay. Starting here, tilt that way. And let's see. If I go to view and frame A, that's the X tilt. Let's tilt over the other way. Yeah, let's kind of synchronize it with the other head tilt to make it follow. Look like it belongs. And then prepare to spin all the way around by just going to zero. And then it spins around. Oh, good, not good because the first frame is ten degrees and then it ends at zero degrees. So we need that ten degrees at the very end too. But he shouldn't spin around at ten degrees. He should spin around at zero, so I need to bring those down. That's better. 65. Completed - Class Project 07 - Rendering: Okay, let's say I'm fine with this. This is pretty good. I'll turn back on the glass. I don't actually have to. I'll still render because it's on in the render. That's the camera button, but I do want to keep it on. And then let's see. Is it okay to go EV for this? Let's see the difference. This is with cycles, and this is with EV. And obviously, not. Doesn't look right. I got to do cycles for this. I'll turn it to GPU compute. Go down here and turn on motion blur, which is going to make a difference in this. Lots of fast motion, then choose an output place. I want to save it as an image, but let's do JPEG and save it. I've got a path here and I'll call it Oil boot version one. Then underscore and leave some space for numbering. Remember, Blender will add frame numbers after this. And then in my render settings, let's see. Do I want 4,000 samples? Maybe I can do with half of that. So divide by two brings me down to half. Remember that samples are, how long will blender render for? How long will it work to remove noise from the render? And my experience tells me that I don't need this much. I can do with about half. But if you're ever in doubt, just try on your scene. How many samples do you need to get a clean image? My resolution, I have 1080 by 1080, which is what the project specifies. Let's turn off this render to save some resources on rendering and then go to render and render animation and see how long one frame takes, and then I'll calculate how long 80 frames will take. Here we see the motion blur coming in very strongly. So the last frame took 28 seconds. Let's just round that up. So I have 30 seconds per frame, and I have 80 frames. So it's going to be 2,400 seconds, divide by 60 to see that that's 40 minutes. So that'll just keep rendering for 40 minutes and then it'll be done. And so it's time for what we in the industry call an extended coffee break. I'll edit it out and I'll see you when I'm done. Oh, that was a lovely break. It's now 40 minutes later, and it's finished. It says frame 80. We've finished. We've saved all the images in the folder. Here they are. And it's time to compile them into a video in a fresh version of blender. So I'll open a new blender. And here, just go to the plus and video editing at a video editing workspace. Down here, I'll shift A, add an image sequence. I go to that folder, press the first image, press eight to select everything and add image strip, and I'll trim the end to 80. And let's check. Looks about right, but the aspect ratio is wrong. So I'll set the output resolution up here to 1080 by 1080. And lovely. Okay, let's rend route a video. Go down here and in that same folder. I'll just paste that. Call it Oil bought version one. Select an FFM peg video, under encoding. I'll select MPEG four, and you know what? I'll even up the quality from medium to perceptually lossless. I really want this to look good. So render and render animation. I'll run through real fast. I didn't speed that up. And now in here, we have a movie, finished movie. And that's my character animation. Now, let's just go over again why we did it this seemingly very tedious way of first rendering just still images and then going back and making it a video. Just remember that, if you render straight to a video, it'll break if you crash. Problem really is only you may just crash or maybe you need to cancel the render or something, and you cannot pick back up if you're rendering straight to a video. The video needs to go on rendering from start to finish in order to not be corrupt. But an image sequence, you can start and stop whenever you want. If one of the images fails, you can re render just that image. And that's why we render a bunch of images first, and then we go back and we compile that into a video later on. 66. Procedural Modeling with Modifiers: Video, I'll introduce you to my favorite modifier. We'll do a couple new modifiers, and among them is the Boolean modifier. It's the coolest one. I'll show you that using a plane to begin with. Shift A, add a mesh plane, and then immediately, I'll go into Edit mode with tab and then scale on X axis, X and drag out to make an oblong shape because this is going to become the basis of my staircase. And what we're going to do is to model a complex looking staircase using only modifiers. Modifiers are so ******* powerful and with them, you can create stuff that you would have no chance of making without modifiers. We've already touched upon a few, and we'll use all of them to make this staircase. So first off, we'll go to the modifier panel, and then we'll add a modifier and we'll start with solidify. Lladify we've used before, it makes a two D plane thick. So I'll add some thickness to this. That's a stairstep to me, and then I'll just close down this modifier to make some space so that I can see the next one that I'll add, which is the bevel modifier. Bevel. That does the same as beveling something by hand, except it does so with a modifier. So if I decrease the amount or increase the amount, you can see it bevels all the edges on my object. Let's add some segments to this. So one is a bit too few. Let's add one more and one more and another and then decrease that to just have a slight bevel. But it's a little faceted, so I want to shade this smooth. I'll right click the object and shade Auto smooth, which adds another modifier, a smooth modifier, and this one is pinned, meaning it's going to stay at the end of the modifier stack no matter what I add. So just bear in mind, this is going to remain at the bottom, because as I've discussed before, these are all calculated in order from top to bottom, and that does matter. So we got to be mindful of that. Now, the next modifier I'll add that's the Boolean modifier. It's my favorite. So EOL Boolean. Why is it called a Boolean? Boole is the name of a mathematician, and a Boolean value is either zero or one. That's what Boolean means. It means on or off. And the Boolean modifier does that with the geometry. So when I add it, nothing happens because this modifier needs another object to use as a guide. So let's add one. Let's add Shift A a cylinder. And then I'll go back to my staircase with the Boolean modifier. I'll use the eyedropper next to the fields and use that to select my cylinder. And did you see what happened? If I go into X ray mode, you can see that the cylinder cut a hole in my staircase. And if I move my cylinder around, the hole moves with it. That is so cool to me. So if I hide the cylinder now, there is a big gap in cylinder hole in this, and we have a couple of settings in here because this may not work. Like, if you're following along for you, this may not work, depending on the details of your objects. You got to switch between the solver type, fast or exact. Fast is faster. Sometimes it doesn't work, so you got to use exact. Sometimes exact doesn't work, so you got to use fast. And in this case, fast leaves an open mesh on this side, but a closed mesh on this side. So in this case, exact works better. What I typically do with my Boolean objects is I turn them on here, but I click the object and I go to its object properties. And down in the viewport display section, I go to display as and I switch that to wire. That way, it'll always show as a wire, so I can see through it while modifying it. So I can still see where it is, but I can also see through. And also I go up to the outliner and I turn it off in the render. So I turn off the camera icon, meaning when I render, this cylinder isn't rendered. It's just like a cutter object, a cookie cutter. Now, I'll do you one even better. Look at this. I'll scale down the cylinder, maybe scale it up on the z axis so that I can scale it down even further. I'll move it over here. Scale it even further. Make it small. Oh, and what you saw there was it was moving just halfway into my object and just cutting halfway, but I wanted to cut all the way through. And then I'll go into the modifier stack of this cylinder object. It doesn't have any modifiers yet, but I want to add one. The one I want to add is called array. Array duplicates the object in a straight line. I'll add array, and you see we get another cylinder, and this also cuts a hole because the Boolean object is referencing whatever this object looks like, and that's with modifiers and all. Let me change the factor X from one and I'll slide it over to negative one. And then I'll up the count too. Say, six. Let's increase that number a little. Look at that. If I hide that, I've now made a bunch of holes in my stairstep. But I will add another array modifier to this. So not only will I array this object along this line, I will take all of this and array that in a different direction. So add one array. And I don't want to do it on the X axis. I'll type zero there, but I want to do it on the Y axis, all type one. Then let's do a little bit more than one and add a couple more. So now we've made up perforation in the stairstep. Let's look at it from above and just position this in a place that makes sense. Now, it's very slow to move around, and that's because it's calculating the Boolean modifier, and the Boolean modifier is very slow, but it is faster if we change it from exact to fast. If I now move it around, it's much quicker. Doesn't lag as much. Okay, so we've added the cylinders. I'll hide those. Now, here's an interesting point of order of operations. The bevel modifier is now before the Boolean modifier, which is why it's beveling this part, but it's not beveling these edges. Because it's beveling and then it's doing the cookie cutter. If the bevel comes after, then it's going to bevel those as well. But the bevel modifier does not like the Boolean modifier. And that's why we both get some strange shading issues like here, where you can see it, it looks kind of like bumpy or lumpy in a way, and the bevel won't go as large as we want. That's just a thing to keep in mind, the Boolean modifier makes weird geometry that the bevel modifier doesn't like. So I'll move that back to before. And then let's add another modifier. Let's add a mirror modifier. You know this one. And we'll mirror on the X axis and bisect it. And we've obviously copied the wrong side because all our holes disappeared, so I'll flip, that mirrors the whole thing. And then on this object, I'll add an array modifier. Array, which duplicates that whole thing, but not on the X axis. I don't want anything on the X, but I will move it over on the Y. I'll move it one object over. And then add a couple more. And not only on the Y will I move it, but I'll move it on the Z axis as well. Which raises all those. And we have an interesting staircase. I think what's amazing about this is we started with just a plane and added modifiers, and now we have a whole freaking perforated staircase. And this kind of modeling is called procedural modeling. Procedural, as in it follows a procedure from start to finish to know how to build the object. And this is a very common workflow for stuff like this is a very handy tool to have in your tool belt. Often, you won't build something using one, two, three, four, five, six modifiers like I have here. That's not very common, but it's good to know these. What I love about procedural workflows is you can always go back and change your mind on something. So at this point, I've completed my staircase, but let's say I want a different pattern of perforation. I can do that. I can go into the original cylinder. I can unhide that, go down here, I can now move this over here and I can change I can change the factor on the first array to bring those over, increase the count, decrease the count on this maybe, bring those up. And that new pattern updates over the entire object. I think it's really cool just to move this around and see it update across the whole staircase. And at any point, if I need to realize the modifiers to go in and edit something, I can do that, and I can do it with all of them or just some of them. But it's a good idea to start at the top and go down with your applying. So in this case, if I go to the first, first modifier solidify and I apply that and I apply the bevel and I apply the Boolean. Now all of that is real geometry. So I can actually go and delete the original cylinder, not need it anymore. And if I go into edit mode, this object now actually has that geometry. The geometry is kind of weird, but it's there. And had I not applied those if I undo and go back, then going into Edit mode just gives me that original plane without the hold, without anything. And if I start adjusting that, I can do this. And now that is the new base object that is replicated across everything else. I'll have to decrease the z offset here. And in order not to pinch this corner, I'll have to go into the solidify and turn on even thickness. So procedural modeling for making really complex things very fast and make them editable after the fact. 67. Spline Modeling: Other modeling type I want to show you is spline modeling. We introduced splines early on in the course. Shift A, we have curves, as they called Bezier curves. Don't worry about the rest. Let's add a Bezier curve and we edit this the same way we edit anything else. We press tab and that gives us the Bzier handles. These are the same as in the graph editor for animation and it's the same as in Illustrator. You can grab the handles and you can change the profile of the curve. Now be mindful that you're still working in three D. So now if I look from the side, I can drag this down and I can drag this up. And it's very easy to not really know what axis you're working on. And it can start to look really strange, really quick. So be mindful of that. And if you ever want to flatten everything down, just select everything, A, and then scale it S on the z axis. Which scales it on the blue axis and then just type zero, which scales everything down, and now it's flat. So it can be smart if you want everything to be flat to work from the top view. Now everything you do will be flat. So you can rotate these, you can scale them. You can grab the handles. You can even right click on a point and change the handle type just like in the graph editor to say vector, which makes it straight. Right click vector, and now they're straight. Or like I like to aligned. If you want to add a point in between these, you also select both of them, right click and press subdivide, which puts a point straight in between. And if you want to extend one, you can press E, which is the same as extrude on a mesh and then drag out a new one. E, drag it out, E, drag it out. And if you want to connect the ends to each other, in other words, close it, you can right click and press Toggle cyclic. That makes it cyclic in blenders language. But this curve is not visible in any renders. This is just a guide curve at the moment. If we want to be able to see it, we need to make it into geometry. We can do that in the curve tab over here in the properties panel. And here we can change a couple of things. We can change the resolution as well. If I turn that down, it becomes very jagged. If I turn it up, it becomes smooth and under geometry, I can change the bevel. So if I increase the depth of the bevel, that adds a thickness to it. And the resolution, that is the circular resolution going around. How many segments are there going around? If I go into wireframe view and turn off X ray mode, you can see how many polygons are around there and if I decrease it, you can see it becomes much more jagged and if I increase it, it becomes smoother. And this object is renderable, if you want to make ropes or tubes, this is the way to do it. 68. Intro to Texturing: You've learned several keys to realism and blender. You know to use cycles instead of EV. You know to add little bevels to corners to enhance realism. And now comes the final piece of the puzzle for realism, and that is textures because so far, our objects have been one flat uniform color over the entire object. Now it's time to wrap an image around it. But plot twist. You can't just slap it on. Oh, no, blenders not that easy. If it were, they'd call it Figma. No, it's not actually obvious how to add a two D picture to a three D object. You have to make decisions about where parts of the image go. And to prove how hard that is, I brought a visual aid. Chocolate bunny. So the wrapper is two D. The bunny is three D, and you have to find a way to, like, get the wrapper onto the bunny. And the wrapper can be applied 1 million different ways. You can apply it like this. You can apply it like this. But there's one way you want to apply it. You have to get it right. And this is the problem we face in blender, as well. Now in Blunder, we solve the problem in reverse. Instead of wrapping the picture around the model, what we do is we unfold the model. We make little incisions in the model and fold it out, and then we glue it onto a picture. Then when we fold the model back together, the picture sticks in all the right places. That's the way we do it. Unfolding the model, sticking the image to it, and then reversing that. Obviously, this is in a computer, so it's all instant. This process is called unwrapping and good news. In this course, we'll let blender do it kind of automatically. There's another aspect of texturing, too, because remember, color wasn't the only slider we had in the materials panel. We had stuff like roughness, too, and it turns out that you can use images for roughness, as well, because the roughness slider, if you remember, goes 0-1, and that is the same as black to white. So on an image, black would be completely glossy while white is completely rough. And if you take a black and white image, you wrap it around a model and you tell Blender this is a roughness map. Then the black parts become shiny and the white parts become rough. That's pretty cool, huh? The good news is you do not have to make these from scratch. This is so common in three D, that there are huge libraries of materials with a bunch of maps online. And the cool thing about these signs is you get a complete material with matching maps. So, for example, I found a nasty swamp material, which has water and it has sticks, and you get a color map. But you also get a roughness map and when they're put together, then the water becomes glossy and the sticks become rough. They align perfectly and they combine to become one cohesive material. On these sites, you get more than two maps. You don't just get color and roughness. You can get up to ten different maps. You only really need to know about four. These are the four that create almost any material, any material you can find in the real world can be described, almost every single one, can be described using just four maps, those are color, roughness, metallic and normal. Color is the image that you actually see roughness. We've talked about that's shininess. The metallic describes where is the object metallic. In this example, the copper frames around the tiles, that's metallic. And then there's normal, and this one's a bit of a mind bender. It looks the most groovy, and what it describes is bumpiness. So your object can be completely flat. But when you add a normal map, it kind of looks like it's undulating, like it's not flat anymore. And when you look at the edge of the object, you can tell that it still is completely flat. It's just that on the surface, there's the illusion of bumpiness. So this one's really interesting. And these four maps go together to create any material. And you get them on different websites, I can recommend two. I will recommend polyhaven.com, which is free and also where we got our HDRIs from and polygon spelled with two Is and that is a premium service, but they do have a lot of free materials that you can use as well. Another benefit of using professionally authored materials is seamlessness. So when you take an image and you want to replicate it across a surface that can look really stupid. But these are made to be seamless. So when you tile them side by side, they repeat without showing a seam. Seamlessness is key. But you don't need to go to these websites yet because in the exercise files, I've put some materials for you, download those and in the next video, I'll show you how to put them to use. 69. Texture Setup: Know what? I think you're ready. I think you're ready for the Shader Editor. We've already used the shader editor. I don't mean to be too dramatic. We have opened a new window. We've already gone to the shader editor and we've already switched to world. What we didn't hear was we added an HDRI image, right? But let's go back to this step where we change to world. Let's go back to object. You may have already glimpsed this. What you see here is the material on my cube. If I click the cube and I go to the materials tab, there is a material on it, and that is the same material you see here in node form. This list has the same parameters as this node does, and they're even synced up. So if I change the color, say to red, then it changes to red on the left hand side as well. This window syncs with whatever material you have selected on the right. So if I add a new material, press new and make this green. Then you see, we see the green material on the left, and if I click the red one, we see the red one on the left. So we can edit any material in the Shader Editor. And you might think, What's the big deal when they're exactly the same? Well, the big deal is in here, just like we did in the Worlds hab, when we added an HDRI texture, we can add textures here as well, and those textures will map onto our object. So let's do that. Let's add a node to this window by pressing Shift A, and we get a list of all the possible nodes that we can add in this window, and there are a lot of them, but don't be intimidated because we'll only use a couple. And the first one is under texture and image texture. Stay away from the image sequence, we want to use the image texture. Add that, we get a node that's very similar to the one where we pick the HDRI. And what we do is we click Open. And I will go to a folder where I have a material saved. So here are all the maps that come with this material. We have a base color, we have a metallic, we have a normal, and we have a roughness. Let's just click the base color for now and press Openimage. And now we have that image loaded into this node. And where do we want to put it? We want to put it in the color of this node. So pulling out of the color here, we drag it red, and we plug it into the color of the shader. Can't see anything yet because we're not in shaded mode, so let's do that. Let's scroll over here by pressing the scroll wheel and clicking material preview mode. And here we go. The material has been mapped onto the cube, and this is how we make our materials realistic. Like, up until now, they've only been flat colors, but now they can be anything, anything you find a material for. Not going to take long until you feel the need to change the mapping of the material. Say, for instance, in this case, that the squares are too big for the cube, we want to make them smaller. How do we do that? Well, we can do that too with nodes. The image has an input of its own a vector, and that is where you tell it how to map onto the cube. Let's add another node to tell it that. Let's shift A, add a texture coordinate node, press return to add that, and we have a bunch of different ways to map it. We only care about one of them, and that is UV but I'll show you just for fun, what happens if you pull a window into here because I really like this one. Now it's mapping from the point of view, you're looking at it, no matter where you're looking at it from. It's super strange, very trippy. I never use this, but you get the idea. This node tells this node how to put the image onto the cube. And so let's just use UV. And what happens then is we go back to the way it just was because if you don't plug UV into here, it's going to assume you want to map with UV. UV is the most common way to map. And so Blender will just assume that's what you want, and we'll go over what UV is and what it means later. But for now, just know UV is how you map an image onto the object. Blender already assumes we want UV, why did we add the node? Well, because in between these, we can change the mapping with another node, and that is the mapping node. So MAPP mapping. I can insert this automatically by just clicking on it when it's between these two, and that'll put it into the noodle chain. This allows us to change the mapping. So if I pull on the X location here, you'll see the mapping changes in the right hand side. It's jittery and weird because it's changing really fast, but if I hold down Shift, it'll change a little slower, and you can see probably that I'm actually sliding the texture around. I can do that on different axis, and I can even rotate it. When you rotate a texture, you want to do that on the z axis. And then we can say align the lines with the cube. So it's no longer a diamond, but it's more like squares. And then we can change the scale by clicking the first scale value, dragging down to select all the scale values and now I can drag those back and forth holding shift to change the scale of the texture. All right, we know how to map an image onto the object now. Let's do it with more maps. So in this folder, we have multiple maps. We have, for example, the metallic one. So let's get this one in. And my preferred way of getting an image in is not, in fact, adding a node and then opening an image. It is clicking the image and dragging it in. For me, that's much easier. Now for this node, we need to do a little bit of preparation. If I zoom in here, you see, it has a color space, and the color space is SRGB. This drop down tells Blender how to interpret this image. Like, what kind of an image is it? SRGB basically means it's color, and this isn't color. This is metallic. So we have to change that. We have to click it, and we get many options, but the one we care about is non color. If an image is not for color, we set it to non color, easy to remember, that goes for everything that's not used for base color. But we have to remember it or else Blender isn't going to interpret this map right, and it's not going to look right. Let's plug this output into the metallic input of the shader because it's the metallic map, and it's weird. And the reason it's weird is this image isn't mapped the same way as this one is. Remember, we moved it, we rotated it, and we scaled it, and we haven't done so with this. So let's do that with this too. What we can do is we can select these two nodes, and we can press Shift D to duplicate, move it down, and plug this node into the vector input here, and that maps the metal onto exactly where we want it onto the interstices. But doing this isn't utilizing the power of nodes. So let me show you something cool. Let's delete what I just did and instead drag out a second noodle from this mapping node and plug that into the image, and it does the same thing. And now, if I change the scale of this node, it changes the scale of both the images, so they stay aligned. That is so cool. You can really start to see the power of nodes when you can hook one thing up to two other things to control both of them. This is one of my favorite windows in Blender. All right, let's keep going. Let's complete this material. I'll go back into the folder. For now, I'll skip over the normal and add in the roughness map. We'll do the same thing with the roughness map, zoom in and change the color space from SRGB to non color because roughness is not color. We'll add the mapping node to this, as well, so it maps the same way as everything else. And let's look at this at a grazing angle so you can see what happens when I plug it in. I'll plug this node into the roughness of the shader and boom, Roughness applied. We get some interesting play of light on the surface. Really cool. Then finally, let's add the normal map. Back into the folder, drag in the normal map. Same thing with this, zoom in, change the color space from SRGB to non color and plug the mapping node into this too, so it also follows the same mapping as everything else. And hold on a second because we need one more node in between this image and the shader to tell the shader that this, in fact, is a normal map, and the node to do that is conveniently called normal map. There is also a node called normal that looks like this. This is not correct, delete that. What we want is this one. We plug the color into the color and we plug the normal into the normal and we get the normal map effect. It's subtle in this case, but it raises up the metal bits. Let me plug this out so you can see this is without and this is with and we can even exaggerate this effect by pulling the strength up over one. Let's go to ten for now. You can see that really enhances that bumpiness effect. But I'll go back down to one. So that is how to map every single kind of map into the shader. The color has a color space of SRGB, the other ones have non color, and the normal map goes into a normal map. To map them over, we use a texture coordinate node with the UV socket going into a mapping, and in here we change the mapping. And this is how we make any material. Any material is made in this exact same way. So to give you some practice with that, you can download the exercise files, and in here, I have six materials for you to set up on your own. You know everything you need to set this up, but there is a challenge here still because most of the materials don't have maps for every single slider. If you only hook up these maps to their corresponding spots in a material, it's not going to look right. Because some things are missing. You don't always get a roughness map. You don't always get a color map. And in those cases, you have to set a color or roughness manually. So what I want you to do is download these exercise files and set up all of these materials to look like this. This is my version of every single material, and try to make yours look as close to this as possible. You should be able to do that, but do remember what we've talked about before using the glass shader. Remember what we talked about Sheen, think you'll be able to set it all up on your own. And when you're done, you can open the materials dot blend file where I've set everything up and you can see how I did it on my end. And then when you're done, these materials are yours to keep. You can use them for any project going forward. 70. Projection Mapping: Let's look at how we can wrap an image around a model. I have a simple house model here, and I've applied a material to it. That material, if we go over to the Shader view, you can see has an image plugged into its base color socket. Otherwise, it's a completely regular material, but we have an image texture plugged into the base color. And we can see what that image looks like if we turn this into a UV editor. Remember, UV editing is the process of mapping a texture around a model. And then in the dropdown menu at the top, we can select that image. And you can see this is an image of a couple of roofs and a couple of windows and some doors. And I want to apply these to the model. And to do that, we first have to be able to see an image on the model. And right now we're in grayscale view, and we can turn it over to texture view or rendered view, but you can also view a single texture in the solid view, which will be faster and less laggy. And that is you can go into the drop down of this viewport shading menu, and under color, we switch to texture, and that'll show whatever texture is selected in the material. But we can't see anything yet, and that is because I haven't started UV mapping. This house has no UV data. It doesn't know what area of the image to put on what area of the house. So let's start adding that. Let's go into Edit mode and select just a side of the house. I'll select one corner and then Control Shift click on another corner to select that whole side. Then I'll go up to the UV menu up here. And we have a few options. Let's ignore unwrapping for now and just look at project from view. Project from view will take whatever shape you see in this viewpoard and put it here. So if I'm looking at it at an angle, it'll project at an angle over here. If I'm looking straight on, it'll project straight on onto here. So let me show you that. Press UV and then project from view. This is what we get. This exact shape over here. And to demonstrate, if I go over to the side, UV, project from view, you see, we get that perspective in here as well. And if I just get it exactly from the side, I'll even click the ball over here to go precisely from the side, press UV, project from view, and now I can start moving it over in this window. You have the tools over on the left hand side, but I prefer using the shortcuts, which are the same as in the three D viewpoardG to grab and look at what happens on the right as I move this. It's like this is a window onto the texture, and we can see that exact texture over here. It's not entirely unlike the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. If you think about the shape on the left as the source where you're cloning from, and on the right where you're cloning to. So if we want a door here, then I'd have to move this over to the door, and that would show up. If I want a window, we move it to the window. We can even scale it down and see when I scale it down on the left, then it scales up on the right because the window fills more of that shape. So this is how we start UV mapping. Let's see what we can do to the roof. Let's look at everything from the very top, select it all and see, did that select anything on the sides? No, it didn't. Only the tops. And then from the top, I will go to the UV menu and project from view that gives me the roof, and I can move it over to the purple roof here. And that gives me the roof texture on the roof of the house. However, it's not exactly as I wanted. For one, it's pointing in the wrong direction for a lot of these tiles. Like, on this side here, we can see the roof tiles be going the right way, but on this side, they're going the wrong way. So how do we fix that? Well, we can select only this roof here. And in the UV editor, we can rotate it. So as I press R and rotate it, watch what happens on the roof. It rotates around. So if I hold down control, I can snap that to increments and get that exactly on 180 degrees. And look at that. Now it's pointing in the right direction. We can do the same thing with these two smaller roofs. So rotate this until it's pointing the right way. Same with this. This one and this one. Everything's pointing the right way. And if we feel like the tiles are too big, remember what we do we scale up the UV. I'll select this polygon, and then I'll go to Select and select Linked Linked that's Control L for me, and that selects just that island which is disconnected from the rest. It is not connected to anything and I can scale it up. I don't want to scale it too far because then the second texture starts creeping in on the side. So I'll have to do something like this. That makes it smaller. So let's see. What can we do with this part here? Let's go here, click the track ball. I'll press the shortcut for going to the UV menu, which is fittingly, and project from view. I'll move this over to one of these round windows. Get this round window here, and on the other side, I'll get the other round window. Project from view, move it over here. That's nice. And let's get a door in here. So let's do these four you project from view and line up the door to be on the bottom. Now, what you can see here is this part is lighter than this. The reason is this part has UV coordinates pointing right over here. And this part doesn't, meaning it takes an average of the entire image here. So the average color of the image that is applied to this part. So if I want to just get a section of this color, then I'll have to UV map it to that area. So let me Alt click on this loop and I'll shift click to add this loop and this loop, and then I'll deselect what I've already UV mapped. I want to UV map, all of this. I can do a project from view again. But if I do that when I have selected a three d shape, then you'll get this. As you can see, the side walls get squashed a whole lot. So if I try to map anything to the sidewalls now like this window, then it'll be stretched out and look really weird. So a better option in these cases is to press U, and then under unwrap, we have a couple other projections. We have cube projection, cylinder projection, and sphere projection. Let's use cube projection because this is more like a cube. And that is like projecting from view from this side, this side, and the top. It's like projecting from all three angles. What we get is every single wall laid on top of each other and each of them map the image without being stretched. I'll scale that down and just place it in an empty area of the image where it's just blue. Now it's blue all the way around. Now I can map those sides again so I can select this side, you project from view and move it to a window. So to summarize, you can project these three D shapes onto a two D plane over here, and where you place them is the area of the image that that area will pick up. 71. Intro to Unwrapping: Looked at how to select polygons and then project them individually. But what if you want a continuous texture that isn't broken up? That isn't quite possible with the technique I've shown you, like in this example, with a strip and a checkerboard texture. Let's see how we can do this kind of effect. First, I'll delete the UV map that I've already applied. Clicking the object, going to its object data, we haven't really used this tab yet, but this is where you store a bunch of metadata for the object. And under here, we have UV maps, which brings up a list, and this is the UV map that I've made. Let's just click minus to remove that and start UV mapping from scratch. So I'll open a new window and open the UV editor. Then I'll press tab and start by projecting from view. So project from view. This is what it does. We get the checker texture on there. We get to see the ring from this angle. But as soon as we move from that angle, it stretches out, which is weird. Let's also try the other method we learned, which is U unwrap and cube projection. That seems to do the trick a little better, but we still get some stretching like the corners of the cube. That is cube goes like this. And it's projecting from each side. But on the corners, it's like it doesn't know which side to pick, so it picks some from here and some from here, and we get stretching. Now, in the case of a perfect cylinder like this, we can cheat because you may have seen that if we go into Edit mode and press again, in this menu, we have a cylinder projection as well. And if I press that, well, it doesn't it doesn't look great, even though it is a cylinder. That's because of the settings. We get a little pop up. Down on the bottom. And in here, we have a couple of different settings, and you can just tweak these until it looks right. I happen to know that line to object typically works really well. And in this case, we do, in fact, get the UV map that we want. It's a little bit stretched, but that just means we need to stretch it out in another direction. So in the UV map, I can press S for scale to change the scale, but I'll constrain it to the Y axis. And that way, I can shrink it down and get the checkerboards square. It is fine, by the way, to go outside of this square. That just means it'll bring it back around. It's like it's tiling. So if I scale this up, and that'll shrink the entire texture. Get back to the place where I started. Let's look at what the perfect UV map for a cylinder looks like. It's just a strip. And the reason this isn't connected to itself like the strip is in three D is you can't really lay a three D strip flat on a table, like you can try, but you'd have to bend it and it becomes weird. So what you have to do is you actually have to cut at some point, you have a place to cut it, and then you can lay it flat. So that gives us a hint as to what we have to do. So let's remove this UV map and do this manually. To do that, we have to select everything, press U, unwrap and just press angle based. What that does is it takes this three D shape and it tries to squish it flat as best as it can in the UV space. In this case, we haven't told Blender to cut anywhere, meaning it just tries to flatten it as best it can and the result looks predictably weird. But if we go in here and we select someplace where we want to make a cut, say, I just want this edge to be cut. I can go to the UV menu or press and click Mark SM. A Sam is like a cut in UV space that highlights that edge as red. Now, we know that that's a seam. We can now select everything again. We can hit U, unwrap angle based. And now blender knows to cut that and then lay the whole strip flat and we get the result that we want. And this is how we start UV unwrapping with connected spots. 72. Manual Unwrapping: A let's unwrap this simple house together in a way that makes the checker board completely square on all sides. And so that we get checkers that flow across seems unbroken. If I try to be lazy about this and I go into here and I press U unwrap cube projection and just make a cube, and then let's go into textured view to see what that looks like with the checkers. Then we see that the checkers don't really flow across corners. It kind of looks like they do, but they're squished down and they're weird and it doesn't work up here either. So let's try to unwrap this properly. We first have to make a decision of which of these faces of the house do we want to be the front of the house? Which one is most important to not have any cuts in it. And I would say, let's just say this is the front of the house. So let's select this, this, this, this. And let's say this here, this is the front. Want this to stay put. Well, that means that we want this roof tile to be attached right here. We want that to be attached to this side, meaning this is not a seam. And now we have to start imagining a little bit. What happens if this is connected to this and this phase is also connected here and here. Well, it won't work because this phase kind of wants to fold out this way and this phase kind of wants to fold out this way, meaning we're going to need a seam going across here. So I'll press Mark Sam and then I'll select this face, this, this, this, and also all the front faces and try it out. See what Blender does with us. Unwrap angle based. And here's what happens. Let's rotate all this so that it makes more sense. We get exactly what I described. We get these two roof tiles pointing out in different directions because they're attached to the top of the house. Now, that means that the checkerboard flows perfectly over to the roof. This is often the way you want to texture. You want textures to flow over without a visible seam. Let's see how we can do the same thing with the walls on the side. We want this to be attached along this edge, meaning we're going to have to cut up the ones beside it. This and this and let's do the same for the other side, this and this. You mark seam and then let's select all the front faces and just press C to bring up the circle select tool. Let's select everything we want to unwrap and hit unwrap angle based. And that does that. So now we have that front face with the walls attached to the sides. And what does that look like in three D? Like the checkerboard pattern continues perfectly. Let's do the same at the bottom. We want it to be attached here, but not here nor here, meaning it's actually correct now so we can just add this to the selection. Hit unwrap angle based, and I think we should be good. It looks great. Now, this means that the checkerboard cannot flow perfectly across all edges. This is just a fact of UV mapping. Making a three D object two D is if this face perfectly flows with this, it cannot also perfectly flow with this. That's just a fact. And the checkerboard pattern is a bit forgiving with this, but you can see that it is actually squished here. Now, what happens when we come to the backside? What do we want the backside to be connected to? Well, in the UV space, we want the backside to be connected to either this wall or this wall. It'll end up either here or here. And it doesn't matter where, but let's just make an incision. At this point here. You Mark Sam. And then again, select everything. You unwrap angle based. Oh, and what happens? Everything everything breaks. When everything breaks, that means that you're missing a seam somewhere. Something doesn't work. And I can tell what doesn't work in this case. Now, Blender won't tell you what doesn't work. Blender will just screw it up. But the reason this doesn't work is because the backside was supposed to just come out the side, but it is also connected to the bottom and the top. So I need to disconnect it from those as well. So I need a seam on the top and on the bottom. And that looks about right. Let's try that again. Press and unwrap angle based, and now it works right. Now we have the back side of the house on the right here, connected to this wall, and it looks right. Let's just finish this up with those flanges on the side where do I want those. I think what makes most sense is they're connected to the roof, so the flow goes across here and down the bottom, meaning that I have to cut out the sides here and here, and here's already a seam. So let's see if this works. First try. It's always a bit of a gamble. You kind of have to imagine what it'll do. You, Mark seam, select everything, unwrap angle based. And I did it right. And the whole house is now unwrapped. Now, you might say, that was a lot of work, Robin. And, yes, yes, it is. It is quite a lot of work, which is why Blender has an automatic option for this, which I'll show you in the next video. 73. Exporting a UV Map: Make blender, unwrap the house automatically this time. Really wanted to show you the logic behind unwrapping because in a lot of cases, you're going to have shapes that aren't possible to unwrap automatically, and you're going to have to do manual work, and you've got to understand how it works. So now that you do, I can show you the automatic method. And that is you press U, you go to Unwrap, and you just press Smart UV project. That is going to do the process that you've learned, making seams, projecting things from different angles in the way that blender things is best. Let's click that. You have a bunch of options. I'll just accept the defaults, hit Unwrap, and this is what it does. Every face is unwrapped and it looks decent. I mean, it's not great. Things aren't connected in the best way that they could be. The roofs are a little bit stretched. Those would have to be stretched back. Scale on the X, stretch them back. Do how they're supposed to be. But all in all, pretty good. And now, if I select everything, I can go into here and see that those roofs now kind of overlap a little bit with other parts, which I don't want. I don't want them to overlap with other parts of the model. So I'll move this up here and do the same with the roof down here. Move it up And what I can do with this now is I can actually export this and open it in a photo editing software like Photoshop, or I'm going to use Affinity Photo. So I'll go up to UV and down at the bottom, you have Export UV layout. This is going to be so useful for making packaging. So export UV layout. Put it somewhere on my computer and then I'll open that. In my case, Affinity Photo. You can use Photoshop or any other image editing software and now we have that UV layout, meaning we can start to design on our house. Let me just do a real quick job here with the brush tool and I'll make a smiley face on this face of the house and then a really angry face on this side of the house. I think these are the roofs, aren't they? I'll do a little roof pattern. And now if I hide that background and just export what I just did, export that as a PNG. Now, back in blender, if I import that image into the shader editor, instead of using my checker texture, I add an image texture and I open what I just made in affinity, and I plug that into the base color. Look at that. It perfectly maps onto the house in the same way because in the UV editor, everything lines up and I drew onto the UV as it was when I unwrapped it. This is the way you can make designs onto three D models. You export the UV map in a way that is the same as a label template. Then you design onto that and you bring it back into blender. So now you know how to do it both ways. You can either map your model onto an existing image or you can unwrap it and then make your image on top of that. 74. Class Project 08 - Product Packaging: Yet another project. This one is for packaging. You may say, didn't I already do packaging? No, you made the bottle, but the bottle needs a box. In fact, that's the way the project starts. The bottle needs a box to seem more expensive. Design a box that will contain the bottle you've made and render an image of it. You may think that this seems a little contrived and it is, but this is a very useful project. So focus on simple shapes. Most boxes are cubes, so there is no need to make it more complicated. Focus instead on visible seams in the cardboard and variation in textures. So I just finished making this box, and as you can see, it is nothing more than a cube, but you can see visible seams going across here. And the separation between the box and the lid, these are the kind of details that really shine through in product renders. And also notice that I didn't do any custom texturing for this. I didn't export a UV map and then made a design for it. I simply used two textures, a rock material and a tiling pattern. Map them onto different areas of the box. That is enough for this project. And as it says in the project guide, you can download free textures from polyhaven.com. If you want text, you can make your own custom texture or use three D text. The easiest option is to use three D text. That is a three D model of text. That's what I did. In this case, I went to Shift A and pressed text. Then you can edit that text by pressing tab and then just start typing. So the requirements are, UV unwrap the box, however you want. That means you can Smart project, you can cube project, you can project from view, however you want, but you will need it because the next requirement is to use textures as part of the challenge of this project and then render out in EV or cycles. The deliverable is a JPEG or PNG image that you upload to the class project or assignment section on this website. I think you're going to nail this one, so have fun and good luck. 75. Completed - Class Project 08 - Product Packaging: My packaging is going to be square because I want to make it easy on myself. So add a cube, press G to move it, Z to move it on Z, and press one on the keyboard to move it just 1 meter up. That way, it's sitting right on the floor. Let's just go into tab and select the top face and G Z. Move that up until I have a nice nicely proportioned box. I feel like I should probably put my model insign here just to check that it fits, but I'm sure it's fine. Let's say this is my box. And you know what I'll do? I'll duplicate this, Shift D, and move this up till it's resting on top. And this can be like the lid on top of it. That's probably good, although I should probably now go into Edit mode on both of these, select everything that's on top and then move it down to keep those proportions that I liked. And then here's what I'll do. I'll go into each of them, hiding the other. Actually, I'll start renaming stuff. So this is the box, and this is the lid. Let's go to the lid. Move it up. I'll edit both of them, and I'll select this pace and also like this pace and I'll inset them by pressing I holding Shift, and let's see how much about that much, then I'll extrude both of them. I'll go into wireframe you actually so I can see that what I'm doing. Extrude on the z axis upward, so they're both extruded the same amount. And that may have been a bit redundant because, in fact, I want this extrusion. Let's view it from the side to go all the way up like this. That makes more sense for a lid. And then on the bottom, I'll actually delete this, press delete, and then faces. And then this one can get a solidify modifier. So I'll add a modifier, search SOL for solidify and then just increase the thickness until I feel like this should be the thickness of the cardboard. That looks about right. And then let's add a bevel modifier, BEV, bevel, because no corners are completely sharp in real life, so let's add a few segments to that and just remove the weird faceting. I'll right click and shade Auto smooth and I'll decrease the amount until I feel like it's a good beveling amount for cardboard. That's for me at 0.02 meters, and I'll actually copy that value because I want to use it on this as well, the same value. So I'll add a bevel and add that same amount to this. Add a couple of segments, right click, Shade Autosmooth, maybe one more segment. And that looks good. Now, I can see here that the solidify is actually slanting inwards a little bit, and that's because I didn't set it to even thickness. If I turn on even thickness, then it goes straight down. That's good. Now let's UV map these so that when the lid is on, the UV map kind of flows from one to the other so that the texture will be continuous when the lid is on. First, I have to add a material to both of them, and I'll call this material pattern because I'm going to add a pattern texture to it. And in fact, I'll go right into the shader editor for this. Shader editor. And I'll import a pattern that I've generated using AI to fit with my theme. And in order to see it, I'll go into textured view, and this is it. So I'll add that same material to the lid pattern. I'll open a third window. I'll split this one in two and go into the UV editor. And selecting both of them, I'll go into tab, select every single phase, and I will for this, not bother to UV unwrap it properly, although that would be nice, but I'll just go into unwrap and cube projection so you don't sit here watching me unwrap all day. And it's actually unwrap them at different scales here. So the top one has a smaller scale than the bottom one, and I think that's probably because I have to go to object apply and scale. That's usually why that happens. So let's try that again. Set everything. Unwrap cube projection. And that fixes that. So now let's try to line these up. I'll go to just the lid, select everything. And in the UV editor, I'll select everything here, too, and I'll just press G to move it, and then Y and then move it up until it lines up. And I think that's roughly there. Let's zoom in. I think I kind of nailed it. So that's nice. Now at this point, I got to choose which side is the front side because I want that to be slightly better than the other sides. I'll just do a little bit of work. So let's see. Let's do this one. Let's choose this side as the front, and I'll select this face and see where it is on the texture. And actually, I'll just draw a little mark by holding D and drawing, just to remember where that ends. Then also like the top face, and I'll move that up to start where those marks are. And that means that those will actually line up as well. Now it flows continuously from bottom to top. Let's make it a little more realistic by adding a paper material to the insides. So I'll add a new material, new call it paper, make it quite rough, and then go and select these faces on the inside of the lid and assign those to the paper so that that becomes white. And I'll do something similar on this side. But here I think I'll actually just add a new mesh, a cube, shrink it down, move it up and delete the top side. And I'll make that paper, too. Select the bottom face of that. Go into wireframe view, viewing from the side, and I'll move it down. Shrink it in a little, and move it up. So now that's kind of lining the inside. Now let's make this a little funky. I really want to use the Boolean modifier. Let's make a Boolean cutter with a cube, viewing it from the front, then move this up. I'll go into Wireframe Vew and press tab to edit it and make this slanted. Move it up to say here. I'll use this to cut this object. So on this, I'll add a Boolean modifier. I'll set it to fast just so it's a bit quicker, and then I dropper that slanted object, which should cut it in two, that's a little hard to see. So I'll go into this object, go into its object properties down to viewport display and set it from textured to wire. That way we can see through it. And that's really cool. And then here comes the cool part. I'll duplicate this object, the object that is cut, shift D, duplicate it and right click to just place it where it was, then go into its Boolean modifier and instead of setting it to difference, I'll set it to intersect. And that way, it only shows up where the Boolean object is. So this now can adjust where the cut happens between the two objects. Now we got to be mindful of where in the stack this Boolean modifier happens to go. And I actually think, let's see. Let's hide this for a second and hide this as well. And see the different options we have. So the boolean modifier can come after everything that looks like this. It can also go before the bevel. What happens then? Well, then the bevel happens on top of the boolean, meaning that this won't be sharp anymore. Rounds it out a little. And if I put it before the solidify, then it cuts the object before it solidifies, meaning it adds a face here, and that just fills it in. So in my case, I actually want this after the solidify, but before the bevel, so I get the bevel effect. Let's do the same for this top part after the solidify, but before the bevel, because then I get it a little bit of a rounding here. And this bottom section, I don't want to have the pattern material. I'll add a new material to that. I'll just remove the pattern. Add a new and this I'll call bottom. And for this material, I want to use a material that I downloaded from online, which is a slate material. Drag in the image of the slate, plug it into the base color, and see what that looks like. It's pretty interesting. Let's adjust the size of this light a little by going to tab and just adjusting the size of the UV, scaling it down so that we see more of that texture. Even a little smaller, then I'll bring in the other maps as well. So this is the normal map. And remember, the normal map should always be set to color space non color and go into a normal map node, not into the strength, but into the color. And then I'll drag the normal into here, and that gives us some bumpiness on the surface. I think this is cool, then I'll just increase the roughness. To something a little more believable. That's pretty interesting. Let's finalize this by adding some text. Shift A, add some text. I'll press Tab to edit the text, and then delete what's there and just type Daniels. That's the name of the brand, and go into the text settings. And under font, I'll select the brand font that I selected randomly for the very first project. Open that font. It's just then I'll give this text some thickness by going into its geometry. And turning up the extrude, that gives it some thickness, and then let's also add some bevel to it. Just a little bit. And it's material that should be, I think, just a glossy black. So turn down the roughness, make it very dark. I rotate this on the X axis, 90 degrees, scale it down, move it up, and let's align it from the front view. And just bring that into the box. G Y to move it on the Y, holding down shift to make it slower, and then bring that into there. That looks pretty sweet. So let's say this is it, and I want to render. Well, there's one thing we have to remember when rendering things with booleans, and that is, if I go to render view now, that boolean object, that shows. And even if you turn that off in rendered, it's still going to show up in the viewport renderer. This year, it just won't show up if you go to render render Image, but it'll still show up here, which is annoying. So the easiest way to deal with this is to go into each Boolean object and go to boolean modifier and apply it. However, remember, if we apply this and still solidify, then it's going to Boolean and then solidify, which gave us that bad look where it just connected at the top, so we need to actually apply everything above it, as well. That is very typical when you apply modifiers, you got to apply from top to bottom. So go this, apply, and this apply. And then this as well, solidify, apply, and Boolean apply. Can be a good idea to save the project before doing this so that you can always go back and edit before you apply the modifiers because now going into edit is going to be a little harder. Now we can just delete the Boolean object, delete, go into RenderView, and it's going to render fine. Let's change it from EV to cycles, GPU compute and add a nice light, a soft box. Increase the power. Add a camera. Go into the camera in another three D view. And bring that camera back. Set this viewpoard to render this to solid. This is how I like to work. And then I'll just make a quick backdrop by adding a plane, going into tab, scaling it up, extruding the back edge, clicking that edge, Control B to bevel, making that smooth by scrolling up. And let's bring that light out so it's not in the camera view. Got to increase the power again. Right, click Shade Smooth on the background. And in this case, let's just make it dark. Render Render Image. This is an image that I can share on my portfolio. I went fairly quickly on this project, and that's for two reasons. One, I think you can follow along because it's just repetition of things we've already done. And two, I wanted to show you how quickly you can actually whip up something like a decent product shot. This is the kind of stuff that looks just mind blowing to someone who doesn't know three D, but you know all the steps involved to make this. You know that it's just basic modeling. You got to do some automatic UV unwrapping and maybe a couple of modifiers and you get something that is actually half decent. So well done getting to this point and completing the packaging project. 76. What's next?: And that's a rep. You survived the whole course, and now your brain is full. So I'll let you go digest all that. But first, let me just shove a couple more bits of information in there. You can handle it. So next, it is on you. You start using blender in your own projects, and sooner or later, you are going to hit a roadblock that I didn't prepare you for. But that's fine. You now know the terms. You have a search engine. There is a bunch of answers about blender online. And bring your own laptop also has courses where you can learn stuff that jams really well with blender. I want to highlight the Photoshop course in particular because I consider a T D artist who doesn't know Photoshop an incomplete TD artist. And the equivalent for animation is after effects. So if you want to dive into animation, focus on the after effects course. And what also jams really well with animation is the animation for beginners course. It's not focused on blender specifically, but everything is transferable to blender. But no, those are just my suggestions. Go learn everything. Everything is valuable and bring your own laptop has courses on, you know, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Light Room, Canva, Figma, Webflow. Like, if you can think of a design soft, why don't bring your own laptop has done a course on it, probably. And I would love to see you in any future course I make, too. So thank you to the team for doing their job and to you for learning. And in the course of your learning, you have made projects. I would recommend and I've said this before, I will recommend that you share your projects with others on maybe this platform or on social media, maybe both and get some feedback on it and give feedback to others. Like this is a really key part of developing as an artist. I'm serious. That's the end of the course. Well done, sticking through it, and now off you go. Those models aren't going to make themselves.