Blender for Beginners - Creating Your Very First Project

1. Welcome!: Hey everyone, My name is Derek and welcome to blend or for beginners, creating your very first project, being a blend, a user for over 10 years now, I remember how my first project was scary. There's so much that goes into creating the final result. I wanted to share some tips and tricks that I've learned throughout the years with you. In this class. We're going to be starting from ground 0 and creating a project from start to finish during this journey. And we're gonna be covering all aspects of a normal computer graphics pipeline. This includes modelling, animation, lighting, some light compositing, and finally, rendering out the final result. That's right, We're doing it all. For the class project. You'll be creating a five to ten seconds isometric animation that demonstrates that techniques that are essential for any 3D artists to have in their skill set. This class is for anyone who has an interest in Blender and would love to learn as much as possible. But the different areas of computer graphics, prior basic knowledge of Blender is recommended but not required. I will be narrating and displaying my every keystroke throughout this course. So you can follow along step-by-step whenever you're ready. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. The importance of storyboarding: Before we dive into our project, I'm armed to go over the importance of creating a storyboard before we start creating our scene. Now it may seem like a good idea that jump right in 3D once you have an idea and start creating. However, more often than not, this can be pretty counter-intuitive. Let me explain. Storyboarding and animation offers you a way to get all those crazy ideas in your head on paper and really think about what the animation is going to show. This helps you not get discouraged while working on it. Speaking from personal experience, there have been plenty of times where I just jumped in without doing any planning and found myself a banding the project not long after. Now, all this to say, these storyboards don't have to be super detailed or even at every piece of motion planned out. And fact, they can be pretty loose in terms of drawing, flipping through my little notebook here, you can see different examples that I've done in the past while working on various projects. It's simply a rough framework to get the structure of the animation in place. From there, it's normal to make changes to certain things, either because they're not working as intended or you've come up with better ideas while working on it. Just having a rough idea that is somewhat plane can help prevent burnout while you plan your animation project ideas. 3. Setting up our scene: Now that we're in Blender, I wanted to go over a few things regarding the scenes set up before we start our project, I'm using Blender version 2.92. And this is important because 2.92 has several improvements for EV, which we are going to be taking advantage of, namely crypto met for compositing later on. Throughout this course, you'll notice that I was using 2.91, which is perfectly fine. However, I realized that once I got into compositing section that 2.91 does not support crypto mats. So in the later lessons you'll see that I've switched to 2.92 and that is the reason. So make sure that you are running and blender to 0.92. To begin, I wanted to first enable my screencast keys. So as I'm rotating and explaining the process, you can see exactly the keystrokes I'm pressing. The next thing I want to do is enable some plugins that are going to be very helpful when we're creating our scene. And you can do that by going up to Edit and then Preferences. And then if we type in Node Wrangler all the way here on the bottom. And this is going to help out whenever we're in the note section, which we will tackle later on in this series. But for right now, we can exit out of this. And then the next thing we wanna do is change the camera settings. Because currently if we press notepad 0 to look through the camera, you can see that we are in a prospective format, which is not exactly what we want for this course. So we can go over to Object Data Properties and change the type for perspective to orthographic. And I can see we have a nice 2.5 D representation, which is perfect for what we need. Okay, and while we're at it, let's change this point light to a son by once again going over to the object data properties and then changing from point to sum. And then we're going to want to change the default strength to three because 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 is going to be way overkill. So the last thing that I want to change with this default scene, I want you to cooperate HDR, high dynamic range image. Now we can do that by going over to the world properties right here and over by the color. If we click this little yellow circle, this will allow us to insert a different type of texture for the world settings. In our case, we want to go over to environment texture. And then this little file menu will pop up if we click Open. Now, unfortunately, based on copyright reasons, I cannot provide the one that I'm using for this course. However, if you do a quick Google search, you will find lots of free ones that are available for personal use. So once you find yours and download at navigate to it, and then click and open image. And now that should be loaded up. Okay, Awesome. Now that that's loaded up, let's begin Part 2, which is going to be starting the beginning processes of modeling. I will see you there. 4. Modeling: part 1: Now that we have are seeing properly prepped, let's begin the modeling process. So let's take our default cube here, scaled up just a little bit. Now, from here, what we're gonna do is basically create just different levels of detail. We can do this easily by just manipulating the faces and just adding some additional geometry. So, so let's begin by tapping into edit mode. Select this edge right here. Press Control D to make a bubble. And so we'll get our base shape going. Still going on along. That would look good. From here, we're just going to take each face and just start to create some additional layers to it. Okay, let's take this. And actually before I do that, let me add an edge loop when you do it by control our place it somewhere around there. And then take these main phases present. I press I to insert something along there. Something looks like it would be enough for packages go through. Okay, and then let's press E. And that should extruded along its local axis. If it's doing it correctly and it looks like it is. Alright. And then let's press X and delete those faces. And now we have this structure going on. So we're going to repeat that same process for this face, this, this, and this face. So again, let's press I to insert. And you'll notice that we're getting this weird. This is weird scaling here. That's simply because we have to press I again, and that will create it to the individual faces itself. Let's press E and scale those in. And then for these main ones, Let's press S to scale. Just to get some variety in here. Something like that looks good. Okay, so let's do it one more time for this upper face, for it I just can't I An E to extrude. And then E once more. And let's scale that in. Okay, great, So let's look at nice. One other thing I want to add is the main shoe that's going to be finally in our content into the package. So we can do that by pressing Control or Shift a rather cylinder. Defaults would be fine. Let's bring that up. Press S and Shift Z. And this will scale along the x and y-axis, x squared and z, something along that. And then let's scale it down from the top view and then bring it somewhere around there. And if we go into wire-frame by holding z and going over to wireframe, you can get a better idea and where this would be lining up. So somewhere around there looks good. Now same as before. Let's delete this face first-off. Select this edge loop by doing Shift and Alt and then clicking on this edge or any edge. And then let's eat to extrude, scale out. And then bring up E2 extrude. And you once more bring that in and bring it down just like that. And actually, you can tell that we are clipping a little bigger here. So let's fix that. So let's select, it actually is Alt to dislike, I presume, go into face select mode, select this face loop, and then a skeleton like that. And then one last thing to do at an edge loop here in the middle. And OwlTest Schelling the normals. Just give it a little bit more depth. All right, that looks great to me. So before we continue, let's select our object and then select this main hub, press Control J. And that's going to combine the two and at one object. And then let's press shape or right-click. And I'll bring up your object context menu. And from here we can do Shade Smooth, which you will see it looks airy, very unappealing. However, we can fix that by simply adding a bubble. So if you go over to the modifiers section right here on the right-hand side and add modifier. We can click bubble. And you can see that has smooth out the edges that were previously very jagged. We can also modify the segments. Something around that looks good and you can see the defaults actually look fairly good. So I'm pretty happy with that. You can see up here, however, that's not particularly nice. So one other thing we could do is if we go over to the modifiers again and click weighted normal, this will allow us to make the face is a lot smoother. However, there's one thing you have to make sure you do. Over here. You can see that you need to enable auto smooth and the object data properties. Simply enough, we can go over here. And under normals, make sure you click Auto Smooth. And certain cases you'll see that no matter how much you change these settings, you'll need to adjust them in different ways. Now, I'm gonna go back into our loose shoot that we made here. And this one actually that we created is creating some problems for us. So let's get rid of that. The edge loop. And I can see that works all having problems. However, if we go to the modifier stack, if we click and drag and bring the way to normal up to the front, you can see that we're again, still a little bit of errors, but this will be covered up by a pipe, so it's not gonna be that much of an issue. Okay, so this model is looking good. So I think we can go on to adding the rest of the detail now. To begin, I'm going to add the top air vents. They're going to be right here and right here. You can do that simply by pressing Shift a and a mesh at a cube. And now if we press Shift H to isolate what we have selected and just to get a better idea of what we're working on, Let's scale that down. Something along this. And okay, now let's go to the TEM mode at a couple of edge loops. Something along four or five, or it looks good to you. It's going to face select mode and select all of these top faces. And then all these bottom faces. Well, then once again press I for inset tool, and you'll notice that we're not in the best results here. This can be solved simply by going out of edit mode into object mode, pressing Control a, and applying the scale. Now if we go back and try, and try this operation again, you can see we're getting a lot more consistent results, which is what we're after. So suddenly, that looks good to me. Okay? Now us X linked to faces. Now, Okay. Now I'll select each one of these edge loops. If you right-click and go to bridge edge loops, I can see that we fill in that gap with those faces. So let's continue on doing the same process. Okay, great. So he's looking good. So let's go and unhide everything by pressing Alt H. Let's bring these up and tried to slide them up a little bit. It's called the top view. And then just start to line them up appropriately. Thanks somebody, that looks good. And then let's Shift D to duplicate. And then right-click, are busy. 90, gone the top view once more. And just position our grades over here before we add in our two objects here to this main one, let's add in a loop cut to preserve the edge details. We can use simply by selecting both of them. Then going into edit mode. And this will allow us to go into edit mode for both of them. Now if we press Control R and let us add one close to the top right here. And now, once we combine it with our main one, you see now that these edges have preserved their detail lot better. So you notice that we still have this weird, fascinating going on with this cylinder right here. We can fix this by simply going into the limit method under the bevel part and change that to angle. And the default 30 degrees should be just fine. And you can see it's now got rid of all those nasty edges. So let's move on to create the last part of this, and that's going to be the little computer terminal. So let's do shift a at a mesh at a cube. And once again press Shift H so we can focus on what we're working on. And now I'm going to scale along the y-axis rather, something along that scale of z just get a little more height. Going to tab control or not control D, that would be triangulating the mesh. We don't want that. And bring it somewhere around here. Go into face select mode. Thus extrude out. This is going to be our keyboard section. Take this edge. Let's bring it down somewhere along that. Something good. And then take this face and incident. And he knows how are we don't get consistent results as because we have to press Control a and apply the scale again. And once we do that, we should have 0 problems that we are something like that works. Extrude that in ever so slightly, and then finish it off. Let's take these two edges right here. Press Control B. Give those a slight rounded edge somewhere. That looks good to me. Okay, Let's all take to show the hidden objects again. And then like before, let's us move this into position. Let's go to top view our z. If we hold Control, we can do increments of 15 degrees, which is really handy. We can go to 45 degrees exactly. Move that over to a little patch panel right here. Scale it down to get a better view now. And something like that looks pretty good to me. Let's do one last finishing touch. Take that face, once again inset, and then extrude one more time. Here we go. Just add a little bit more detail. Now let's combine it with our main object. Once again, Control J. And then right-click Shade Smooth. And there we are. We have our made-up completed. Well, almost we still have to add the two with that's going to be connecting and coming from off screen. Now for this, we're gonna do a slightly different approach. Let me explain. So let's do shift a and SFA a mesh. Let's add a metal, no metal balls you can think in relation to meshes, the way that rasterized images are compared to a vectorized images. And what I mean by this is a mesh has a predefined vertices and data. You can see with this cylinder we have 32. And once we scale it up, we are locked with this amount until we change it. Now with metal balls. We are not confined by the resolution as blender can automatically calculate the resolution on the fly. So this is going to be great once we get into the animation phase and we want to animate something going down the pipe, it being stuffed into the package. So let's get this into position. I'm gonna delete this ellipse metal ball and add in a capsule and do our x, our y rather. And then I'm going to bring that up, scale it down so it fits our little opening right here. Just get into position. Let's get it up just a tad. And now to get more heightened this, Let's go into edit mode. Let's do S and Z and just scale it up somewhere along this. That looks good to me. And actually we have a lot, lot more to play with here. So let's just scale it up really quick or move it up rather. Now the real magic comes in when we added another metal ball. So let's add an a ball this time. Now as I move it up, you'll notice that as I'm moving, it will dynamically adjust the shape of that on-the-fly. So let's move this into position. Just try to set her up the best he can. Something like that looks good to me. And a think, yeah, that looks good. So now let's move that up. And then once we begin to add emission phase, you can see now we can have a really believable way of creating a object going down a pipe. Alright, so now that's complete. Let's create the dispenser part that's going to be dispensing the boxes. So once again, I'm do shift a cube and maybe scaled up two times. So let's do S to bring that over here. Somewhere around there. Looks good to me. Go into edit mode and select this edge right here. Let's press Control B and get a little bit more roundness to this. Somebody that should work just great. And one other thing I wanna do, just, again, just trying to get more dimension like we did with our main helper here. Let's take this face and extrude that out. Something like that. Take this edge, bring it down. Yeah, I think that will serve our purposes great for this. Now, something else I wanted to do similar to how we have a computer screen right here, wanting to incorporate one right here as well to shift a at a cube. Bring that over here. Let's give it a get into position. Scale it down, maybe make a little bit more narrow. Something like that. Let's do control a, the two-point scale. Go into edit mode, select the faces. I to inset. And let's do e to extrude. There we are. Okay, so now we have that. So now let's go and add in the bevel and the other modifiers that we did for a main thing over here. You can easily do that by selecting our child object and then selecting the parent. And then if we do Control L, we can make links. And in this case we want to make links to them all fires. So you can see is copied all the modifiers. However, we need to enable the auto smooth and the object data again. So let's do this. Okay, that's enabled, and now let's right-click and then shade smooth. And now we should have something that's close to what we're after, but we set to adjust the settings. Let's go over to the amount. And let's just suggest that give a little bit more of a sharper angle. Okay, so now we have the edges beveled for this dispenser. Let's do the same for our little computer screen over here. Once again, make sure that this is set to auto smooth. And then Shift select any object that has the modifiers control and copy those modifiers. Now that I'm looking at, I would like to make these a little bit round. And actually why not just do it to all these, just keeping consistent. There we are. All right, great. So now we have one part, two part is done. Now the last part well, the last major part I should add is going to be the ramp That's going to be going from the conveyor belts, which we will add later on. 5. Modeling: part 2: So let's go ahead and add that ramp right now. It's very easy to make. Let's do shift a at a mesh at a cube approximately over here to where we're, where we think we're going to be adding it. Scale it down, make it little bit skinnier. Get a little bit length and then bring it downwards. Let's extrude out. Give it a nice long runway. And actually at this point you'd probably be beneficial to add our ground plane so we know exactly where stuff is going to line. Let's do Shift a to add a plane and scale it up. Something like that should work just fine. Now, we're going to select everything and bring it up so it's not colliding. Great, that's looking good. Now let's go back to completing this ramp section. Very simply, we will add two edge loops and then release want to scale it along the x-axis. And also, while you do that, you want to make sure that your pivot point is set to bony box center and not individual origins encounter problems where it doesn't seem like the lines are scaling. This is probably the first thing you want. Check, alright, so let's go into face select mode. Select these faces right here. Let's do E to extrude up. And that is a ramp. Very simple. Now finish this section off. Let's create the little scanner part that's going to be scanning our box for the end of the animation. So once again, you guessed it really adding a cube and bringing out around here and just scaling it. And two, we get a good, good idea of what we're after. My add in two edge loops right here. And then once again, make sure that the width is somewhere right around here. Looks good. Let's add in one more. Somewhere around there looks good. Okay, Now we're going to shift H to isolate this so we can see what we're doing. Then get rid of these three phases. Now let's fill in this gap by selecting these two edges. Present f, these two edges, pressing F and these two edges and pressing F. Okay, let's all teach now. And then let's bring in this top section down a little bit. So we can do is if I go into wire-frame, click dragging all of these top vertices, bring him down slightly. And then maybe we will take these row of vertices and then bring them up slightly. So that looks good. And then let's just add in a little more interests here on the bottom. So let's take these phases, extrude down. And then take this edge that you take this edge as well. And scale. It's a little much area. And then the fish it off. Let's just round these edges like we've done before. There we are. Okay, great. Now to finish this off, let's just do what we've done before. Make sure that we are selecting shapes booth, and then selecting a object that has the modifiers on it. Control modifiers. And now we'll have to adjust per object and also make sure our auto smooth zone. Okay, great. Now we're on the home stretch. Now the last thing that we have to do is create our conveyor belts. And luckily those are also very easy. So let's get that out of the way. Our seniors get a low clutter right now. So let's make sure to give ourselves a clean canvas. Let's just select everything. Press H to hide it. That way we can work with a clean slate. So for the conveyor belts, the simplest way I've found to do it is to shift a at a mesh and we're looking for a cylinder, the defaults should be fine. Now if we do S Shift C, that's the scale it down. So it gets a little skinny and narrow. Something like that should work. Now if we do RX 90, go into side view, and then our z 90. Okay, now let's go to the TEM mode, go into wire-frame, select the vertices, click and drag to select these on the right-hand side, and then delete those. Now, we're going to be selecting these and then extruding this way on the y axis. Somewhere around here, we can also click Control to get more accurate snapping. And I think initially that should be just fine. And you can see it's low, wide, scale it down. Okay, That looks good. Now let's select these two edges. Press F to face. And now cool part about this is every press F again, Blender will know exactly which next phase has to be filled in, which is awesome. So let's go up until this point right here, and then press Control R to add Lupin. Select this face again. Okay? Well, you want to make sure that sometimes it's not perfect, sometimes you have to output out. Do that in a sec those, and then we have that psi complete. Now to avoid doing this again, we can add a mirror modifier. So let's go on the top view and then add an edge loop right here. Okay, Now let's delete this side. And now if we go into a modifier stack, we get an, a mirror modifier. And you notice that the angle or the axis is completely wrong. So let's shift that to the z-axis. And now we have a nice mirror of our mesh. Very cool. So now let's complete this conveyor belt by adding in the side panels. So we're going to suck these phases on the side. Or new shifty. And immediately after press right-click, and then p by selection. Now you can see we've created two separate objects are side panels and our main conveyor belt. So now we have this with a mirror modifier is still applied as press a to select everything. He bring it out. If you want, we get in a little bit more depth. This de-select those phases E. And let's do Altos to scale along the normals. And some of that that I think looks pretty good. Now let's add in our modifiers to make this smooth and have bubbles. And I'm going to do that really quickly manually right here. To add in a buffalo modifier. Make sure we increase our segments and then select a limit method to angle, and then adjust as we need to. So that looks pretty good to me. Okay, This Shade Smooth. And then shapes move on that. Okay, great. That's looking really good to me. So that's Alt H to unhide everything. And I can see we need to do some proportioning here. So let's do our z and then bring it on the x-axis. Now scale this up and you start to fit this into place. Somebody that I think is going to work pretty well. We are now all we need to do is just extend it. So let's go into edit mode. Select all these verts, bring it down this way, and then select these and bring it more into there. Okay, great, that's looking really good. Now let's duplicate this and then do the same thing. On the top views get better angle. And let's just line it up right here. Flip this frontend. And we don't need this to be as long. So let's go into edit mode. And let's bring this down. Somewhere around in there I think would be great. Again, this is totally up to you. This is just how I like to make my proportions. And then let's bring the ramp somewhere around there. And of course it make sure everything's lined up and we can probably make this ramp little wider. Please take one edge. Again, just do some simple translation. Mimecast you some final adjustments. And I think that will look pretty good. Okay, great. Just a couple more things before we wrap this lesson up, I want to add some legs ray here. And then for the ramp also right there. And then we just need to add the little flaps that will be dangling right here. So let's do the legs first. Let's take two side panels and we're going to do Shift D R X 90. You notice that the origin point is all wacky. That's why it rotated around that part, not a problem. This is called the side view and then this line everything back up again. I see we get this really nasty clipping that's going on. That's because we have two objects that are sharing the same space, essentially. Go into edit mode. Make sure everything is selected and then press G x. Just move it up just a tad. Ok, That's looking good. Now let's do the same thing for this ramp down here. Shift D, and bring it down somewhere around there we go. That's looking good to me. And now the last piece of the puzzle is to create the little flaps similar to how you would see at an airport terminal, doesn't give a nice effect once we add in some cloth sims to it. So let's do that right now. Very simply. Let's once again hide everything so we can see what we're doing. Do you shift a mesh at a plane? Scale that down. Somewhere along that looks good. And now let's add an a array modifier. We are. And then increase the offset something in their own, say that looks good. And then increase it to five or six. 50 work for our purposes. Okay, So now let's rotate this to be vertical. And then just that Alt H. And now like before, let's just get into position and make sure everything is lining up properly. Bring that up, scale down. Okay, and actually I think I want to add in one more counter this. See you six, and then let's scale it down, just make sure everything, everything fits. I'm bringing it up and then scale it down. So now this is Shift D and duplicate that over to the other side. And once again, just lining everything up. We are. That looks good. All right, great. Now one last thing I did forget to put in as the little screen right here on our little scanner like we did for the computer and the dispenser. So really quick, I'm just going to take this part. And actually I'm going to right-click set origin to geometry. Now let's do 50 g y. Just to line it up, do that. Rotate it. And just get into position like everything else. Go to front view, side view rather. And just scale it down somewhere around there. And then for press period on our numpad, that will automatically snap our camera to the selected object. That is a very, very helpful hockey. Okay, and then let's just scale it up or not scaled up, moving on the x rather. And there we are. Okay, great. So now that we have the modelling done, now we can start go on to the fun stuff. We're just going to be the animation. I'm really looking forward to it. I'll see you guys there. 6. Animation: Now that we have our scene all prepped and ready to go, let's begin the fun stuff which is animation. To begin, I wanted to quickly go over our plan of attack. First, I want to place in orient the camera just so we know what exactly we are going to be animating and the frame that we're going to be looking through. Next, I want to create the box that's going to be coming from the dispenser, coming down along the conveyor belt right here, stopping for a brief moment and then coming out through here and down the ramp through the scanner, that offscreen right here. Third, we're going to be adding some cloth physics to these flaps right here. So as the box goes down the conveyor belt, they will dynamically adjust and interact with the box. And then fourth, and finally, we're going to be animating this ball right here as it goes down the pipe and squeezes through this little opening, mimicking the effect that's going to be going into the box. So let's get started. First. Let's orient the camera. If I just press control all that numpad 0, that will snap the camera in the current position that I'm viewing this Sina. Okay, so the angle looks right, but now we see that zoom out a little bit. So if we go over here to the orthographic scale on the camera, and we'd just do something around. Here, it looks good. And then from here we just drag and orient the camera to wherever we think looks good. Now I think I'm going go out just a little bit further just so we get a little bit more of that pipe going right here. I think something like that works good. You can also set up some composition guidelines that can be done by going over to the viewport display drop-down right here, and then all the way down on composition guidelines. And here you have a list of common ones so you can use to get you started. I personally like to use thirds, but you can use whatever ones you like. Now one thing we wanna do is extend our plane as it currently is not an encompassing the entire camera. So we'll just scale. Okay, great. So now with that setup plus go ahead and actually add in our box that we're going to be animating. So we can do is very simply just add in a cube. And let's just move that. So it's starting on the conveyor belt over here. And you can see it's still a little too big. So scale it down a little bit more. Something like that, that looks like guys should fit. So now the real trick for this is we're actually going to be using two different boxes to create this illusion. One is going to be the box and it's open state. And then the box coming out is going to be another box with the flaps closed. So let's get that started first. Let's create the box that has the open flaps. So let's actually duplicate this and bring it along the x-axis. So it's going to be our closed box. And then this can be an open box. So it's tab into edit mode. Go into face select mode by pressing 3. But if your letters, and then click this face and then go into Edge Select, select these two edges e to extrude, and then right-click immediately afterwards. And then do S and X just to give it some length around somewhere on their part looks good. And then from there, we just drag these down and then S and X just to bring them in just a tad. And there we go. We have our box that's opened. And then for our closed box, we're gonna do something very similar. We're going to delete the face once again. And here at the top, select these two edges. E Once again to extrude, right-click, do sx. But this time we're going to be going inward. So let's get things into position so we can start creating our illusion. Let's take our clothes box here and place it into our main package hub. Somewhere around in there. It looks about good I think. And then let's take our open box and put it inside the dispenser. Okay, Perfect. And actually we could probably pick this out just a little bit, so it's a little easier to grab. If we go into a camera, we can see that we still don't see it through our camera view, which is perfect. Let's hop over to the animation workspace, which you can select free here and the top. So if we do that, we can see now that our layout has changed. However, this is great for us because now we have our 3D view port which couldn't navigate and inspect to seen as normal. But then we have a separate window that has our camera. So now we can make adjustments and see how they look without having to constantly switch back to the camera view. And also here in the bottom you will see this is called the dope sheet, and this is where the bulk of animation is usually done. So with our box selected, let's press I anywhere in 3D view port. And this will bring up our keyframe menu and select location. And you can see down here in the dope sheet, we have these four orange dots. And this indicates that we have a keyframe set. And then if we go forward in time, say to like 40 or so. And we move our box to be inside our main hub right here. And then press I again location. Now you can see that blender is interpreting the two locations and creating a tween. And a tween is just a way of saying that you have a key frame rate here in a keyframe right here. And then blender is interpreting the in-between space and creating this movement. So if we play it back, you can see it doesn't really behave like a conveyor belt Would. You can see that as it's playing through the ease in and ease out. Now this is easily fixed and it all has to do with curves. So let's go back to our main Position. Select our box. And then would all of these keyframes selected? If we press T and the dope sheet down here, we can see the interpolation is set to Bezier, which if you're not familiar, that just means it has a nice gradual curve to the motion. However, what we want is linear. So now you'll see these green lines have appeared, which indicates that you have a linear interpolation. And now if we play the animation, it's still rather fast. But we don't have the easing in and out of the box, accelerating and decelerating. So let's grab our box again and make it go a little bit slower. Let's try foramen a 100. And I can see we have a much more natural looking comparable. Okay, perfect. So with that part done, Let's go on to animate our second box here. And we're going to be doing the same kind of technique. We're gonna be sucking or box. And since the open box ends its cycle on frame and a 100, we need a little buffer room for this animation of the ball going down the pipe in it and going into the box to make it look like stuff is being put into the box. So we probably want to give about 20 frames of buffer. So now let's select our closed box, which it can get a little look confusing in here. That's why I'm in wireframe right now. And now let's press I to insert a keyframe. And since we want this go a little bit faster and I'm gonna go to about 140. So about 20 frames difference. Now we can probably get out of wireframe. Let's do GZ to put it or GY rather and put it into its new position somewhere around there just so it's about the tip onto the ramp. Let's press I and then location. And you can see now this is accelerating far more, greatly than the beginning box was. Which is perfect for what we need except for the ending ray here we don't want to select come to a stop. We want this to become a linear interpolation. So before we do that though, let's go back to our first keyframe. And I actually forgot to set a rotation key frame as well because we're going to need that for when it slides down the ramp. So make sure you press rotation as well this time sound we have a location and rotating Sephora. This go back to where you set the second set. And then once I get to set rotation, so now we have those two loaded up. And now we can pray, go into side view now. And then maybe go about 10 frames. And then bring it down to where it would be somewhere around here. And then we can actually go down to location and rotation right here. And that will assign both the keyframes at once, so we don't have to keep pressing location and rotation individually. Okay, so now let's go to about 190 this time. So now we can put it somewhere around there. Let's do location rotation again. And let's see how it looks. That looks quite good actually. Let's go back to where it's just about to go down the ramp and about midway through. Let's go back and the side view. And now we want to animate it rotating. So as this press R rotated about 35, 40 degrees, and then press it I rotation. And now if we play it back again, you can see that although it's very quick, and I can see there's a much more realistic behavior as it's going down the slide. Very cool. So now we have this setup. One thing I want to check is the clearance that we have. And you can see that the scanner is a little too low for the box that we currently have. Not a problem. Just go into edit mode, go on the wireframe and just raise that up ever so slightly. And then somebody like that looks good. Are ready. Make sure we save because we don't want to lose over valuable work so far. So now that we have our box enemy, how we want to, Let's go ahead and start adding some physics to the flaps right here. To get started, let's go over to our flaps, go into edit mode, and let's add in a couple of edge loops. Five or six should be just fine. You could add as many as you like, but don't go overkill with this. We use wanna give it enough resolution. So in the box interacts with it, we get a nice smooth result. Something like that looks good. Okay, now that we have that, let's select these top vertebrae here. And if we go to our vertex groups, let's create one. Give it a name. I'm going to call mine pinning. And make sure you press a sign. Okay, so with that done, all we need to do now is go to the physics properties. Click on cloth. Now, don't be alarmed if your flaps go away suddenly, all you have to do is go to the beginning of your animation and they should reappear. Now if we scroll all the way down here on the right-hand side to the Shape Drop-down. And underpin group. Select our vertex group that we just created. Okay, now the only remaining step is to set their box and give that a collision physics. Now if we did everything correctly, once we play our animation, we just see the box interacting with the flaps. Hurray. It works, but we can do a couple of tweaks to it. First, let's go back to the beginning of our animation. And under fiscal properties right here, I'm going to change the air viscosity from one to two. And you'll see that by doing this that the flaps quickly or more quickly go to their resting state. So that's great. Now, instead of doing the same thing for this flaps over here, let's just delete this. Select these, go into top view. Make sure we're at the beginning of our animation. Just be sure nothing gets messed up. Shift D, make sure a pivot point is set to the 3D cursor. Let's rotate that and then line it up. And then let's select our second box right here. Also give it a collision. Now if we play, we should see both boxes interacting with the flaps. Well, now you can see that's a little strong. What we need to do is adjust the speed of our second box right here. So in the dope sheet, Let's take these keyframes that we set up earlier and then just drag those out roughly somewhere around here. Let's see how that looks. Okay, great. I think that looks good to me. Of course you can change it to however you like, but for the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to call this good. And we can go on to doing the final part of the animation, which is going to be animating in this pipe, having something being delivered to the actual box. So this shouldn't be too hard. So let's go to the part of our animation that makes sense. Somewhere around here, probably looks good. Now, let's select our ball and press I to add a keyframe location. And let's go about 10 frames. And actually want, we want keep in mind frame or the time frame that we're working with. So the box starts moving at 120, but we do have a little bit of time before it gets to the gate. So let's say around 130. That's how long it will take to go from the top position all the way down to the bottom. So let's move it into position. Bring it down somewhere around their location. Now what we wanna do about right here, if we go to our camera view, we want to simulate it going into the low Piper here. That's easily done. Let's add a location and a scale keyframe this time. Now let's go back to the ending and let's scale that down. Make sure the pivot is set to your individual origins. And then just scale that down. Make sure you set the keyframe. And you can see the animation is happening a little late. So we have to adjust. Let's expand our keyframes that we have for his object. And let's look at the scale. One is right here. Let's take these three and let's bring these back. So it happens a little bit sooner. You see that we still need a little bit more time. Actually just scale this down. Just again. Make sure you set the key frame. You can actually enable automatic key frame toggling. So you don't have to worry about making sure you insert a key frame. Okay, so we're getting close. Let's navigate to somewhere around here. And really the idea is just to make it seem like it's going to suck into slow Piper here. Some like that. Let's add a keyframe again. And you can see that we're almost there. Just scale it down once more. And there we are. I think that looks good. Now one thing that you'll notice is that the easing is pretty boring to be perfectly honest. However, there's a simple way to fix this and it has to deal with adjusting the curves. So the curves allows you to create custom Easing, which allows you to have more dynamic timing. And it's a very essential tool when it comes to animation. If you talk to any animator, they'll tell you that most of their lives are spent in the Curve Editor. So let's go ahead and dive into that. So you can go to that very quickly. Make sure you're in the dope sheet, and then press Control Tab. And then we'll switch you to the curve editor. Now if we go over to these curves right here, you can see this is what it means by having a Bezier interpolation just has a nice smooth S curve to it. Now we can take one of these handles and bring this over. So we have a much more dramatic fall off. So you can see right here, this is actually affecting the y scale, which is not what we're after. We're looking for the location data. So if we go back to this drop-down view, we can disable all stuff that we're not interested in and make sure we lock it so we don't click it by accident. And thus disable those. And then if we press a to select everything and press numpad period, the period key by your numpad 0. That will auto align it to your view. And now what we can do is just mess around the curves to give her a much more interesting animation. So again, there's no exact science, so this is just fiddling around until you come up with something that looks good to you and will engage your audiences. 60, that is way too fast. So to fix that, I can just drag this keyframe out and is dragging down the timeline just a little bit. Just give a little more breathing room and then take this handle and may be extended out here a little bit just to give it a nice smooth fall off. And now if we play this animation again, you can see we've now adjusted the timing of this animation. And by doing so, we've made a lot more interesting than just having a standard ease in and ease out. So one thing I wanted to change was you can see around here that it's clipping a little bit with the pipe joint right here. So let's go ahead and fix that really quick. Go to our, one of our scale keyframes and then just scale that down so it's not intersecting. So round here, let's press, I, press Scale. Now, once we play it, you can see that the clipping is no longer happening. And we have our ball going into or whatever the content of this pipe is going into the boxes. Awesome. So this is all I wanted to tackle in this animation segment. In the next section, we're going to be going over materials and start setting those up. We're also going to be tackling the animation for the screens and have them glow once each action of the animation is taking place, and it's going to look for a really great fall results. So I will see you guys there. 7. Lighting/materials: part 1: Now that we have our scene animated, Let's begin the process of adding some lights and some materials to it. So to begin, you'll notice that I'm in the shading tab right here. And what I want to do to start off is it makes sure that I'm in the EV render engine, which you can check right here. You could do this in cycles. However, Evie has got a lot of new updates in the most recent Blender version, and I want to share that with you guys. Let's begin by splitting our side panel right here into a smaller view area for our render view. And we can do that by going to the bottom right-hand corner. And once your cursor changed into these little crosshairs, and you click and drag up. You can split the window. And then if you click this icon right here and go to 3D Viewport, you can see now that we're in the same 3D view port as before, but now we're taken up a lot less space so we can focus on the materials on this section once we actually get to that. So let's go into our camera view by pressing notepad 0 and thus expand this out a little bit. And if we hold z and go up to render view, you can see now we are in our actual EV render. However, everything looks very flat in gray and that's because we don't have any lights. Let's start by fixing that right now. I'm going to be employing a simple three-point lighting setup. And that consists of three lights, a key, a fill, and a rim light. The rim light is generally optional and that gives a little bit more depth in the scene hover sets. We are going for this isometric scene and the camera is going to be at a fixed position. It's not necessarily required to do so. And the key and the finish we sufficient for our needs. So let's do Shift a to add an a light and I'm a pec area light. And it won't bring that up. And then make sure we're set to individual origins. Scaled it up. Okay, and now we can go back to 3D cursor. And then let's rotate that Come top view. And generally the best position for your key light is going to be to a 45 degree angle to your scene. So something like this. And then we want to bring it up. Okay. So now let's give it some power. Make sure the lighting properties. And I found that during my testing, a power 2000 looked good for my seen how for this will vary based on your individual needs. So experiment, play around and see what works best for your scene. Okay, so we can see that we're getting some nice lighting here, are ready. How are the shadows are a little dark. And this is where the Philae comes in. To fill a is going to illuminate the shadows that are cast by the key light. So what we're gonna do is duplicate this Somewhere around there. And again, the fill light wants to be at a 45 degree angle to the opposite end of the key light. And for the power, a good rule of thumb is to do about a quarter of the strength. So I'm going to drop this down to 500. And you can see that we're starting to get a very nice-looking scene with only two lights. One thing you'll notice, however, though, is we have the soft shadows which look very nice. Hovered. They don't particularly fin with arsine that we're building. So we can change that by going over to our render properties. Then going under shadows right here, unchecking soft shadows. And now we're getting some nice crisp edges that are more in line with the style of animation that we're going for. And while we're at it, you can see that the edges are a little aliased. And that's because our resolution for our shadows are set relatively low. Now, there's two different types of shadows when dealing with EV, thirds cube size. And then there's cascade size. Cascade size only refers to a sunlight. And since we're not using those, we can just focus on cube size. So if we change that to 2k, you can see that we have a nice crisp edge that I think will work just fine for us. Okay, Great. So this is looking really good. Now the next thing I wanna do is start setting up some materials. One thing to keep in mind once you get to this stage is thinking of a color palette that you would like to use. So for example, if I navigate over to this webpage, I'm going to navigate to a picture that I found on Pinterest, which I think has a nice color scheme. So if we go over to select a file, and you can choose any picture that you would like to extract a color theme from. But I'm just going to select that. And now you can see there is automatically populated. A color palette for us, which is great. And we can take these hexadecimal numbers down here and plug those right in the blunder. Okay, so to get started, let's select any part of our scene. Let's just start with the dispenser. And down here in the note editor, we want to pick new under Materials. And this is going to give us a principled BSD f, which is going to be the main shader that we're gonna be working with. And let me expand this by pressing control and space. It makes sure that your cursor is in the note editor to expand that full screen. Now we're not going to be going too much into depth about this shader as this is not the primary scope of this tutorial. However, the main area that we're going to be concerned with is going to be the base color and the roughness. The roughness defines how glossy or matte the material is. A roughest of 0 indicates a perfect mirror finish where roughness all the way to one indicates a perfectly match material wouldn't know Clausius to it. So let's go back into our 3D view and over here and our render preview. You can see that if I changed this all the way to one, that our material is very matte. And if I go all the way to 0, we have that glossy finish that I was talking about. And you can see the reflections of our HDR image. So of course, nothing is perfectly a mirror in real life. Even though this is a stylized animation, we want to have some aspects of realism. Somewhere around 0.2, I think will work great. Okay, um, I'll keep it at the default white. And while we're at it, let's name this material. You can call it whatever you like. I'm going to name mine plastic, glossy, underscore M. And it's actually probably a good idea to indicate the color. Okay, great, So now let's go to our other machines that are adding that material as well. So for our main hub right here, once again, in the note editor, if we click this little button right here, we can navigate to tear that we just created. And then just assign it. Then we can do the same for our scanner ray here. And then our slide is going to be using a different materials so we can hold off on that. However, our conveyor belt sidewalls and our legs can use the same materials. Let's apply those. And before I forget, let's select our fill light and make sure that we don't have any shadows. So our main key light is the only light that is casting a shadow goes. Alright, so let's go ahead and add in some materials for our flaps. Now, if we click them and then click this little material icon and select our glossy white material that we created. Now what we can do if we press this number right here, what's this going to do is create duplicate of this material. And you'll notice that it is created the suffix dot 000 001. Now we can rename this to something more descriptive of the type of material that we're after. So let's name it. Plastic, matte, black. Okay. And now let's change the color to black or close to it. Okay, perfect. So we can see now that our flaps are indeed black. So let's apply that material to this one as well. And one thing that we want to change is the roughness as it's still set to point to. It's less increase out to around 0.7.8. Okay, that looks good to me. So next thing I think I want to do is if we look, go back to our always my reference image, we computer screen is being a dark purple. So let's go ahead and create the computer screen for a now. So if we go back to our scene, and let's select our main hub. And over here let's select this button to edit different material slot. Okay, now we're going to add in another material. However, if we go back to what we did before, select bat and then click this number to create fake user. Okay, Now let's name this computer screen. And the roughness, I think it'll be just fine at point 2. But now let's go over to our color palette and select this deep purple. Now if we go to the base color, and then under the hex value, just paste that in. And now what we have to do is tap in and select the faces that we want to apply the material to. So in this case it's just the face. Let's do the same for the other computer screens here. Go into here. And now this one doesn't have the glossy white. So let's add both of those in. At a different material slot, then add the computer screen tab and select this face. Do that. And if we go over to the scarce computer and let's do the same thing. Add a material slot this time the computer screen tab open and select that one face. Okay, perfect, So now that is all set up. So let's tackle the slide now as that's going to be the one unique material and all of this. So let's go ahead and add a new material this time. Let's name this metallic underscore m. Now for this, we're actually going to be looking at this metallic field right here. And as the name would imply, and metallic value of 0 indicates that a surface as non-metallic. If you boost it all the way up to one. You can see now the is more like a brush aluminum, very shiny. And this can be further illustrated by bringing the roughness down. Okay, great, so that's all set up. That was nice and simple. Now, the last remaining thing to do in regards to materials and textures is to setup our conveyor belt. So once again, let's select our accurate conveyor belt. And this is going to be a little different because we're going to be applying a actual conveyor belt texture to this. So let's start off by going into our UV Editing window up here at the top. Okay? And to properly texture an object, meshes have to have what are called UVs on them. And you always indicate how a 3D object is displayed on a 2D flat surface. So for example, if I select our conveyor belts ray here and do Shift H to isolate them. And let's tab into edit mode. You can see that some UVs are already here, which are indicated by this little rectangle right here. However, they are entirely correct anymore because we didn't do some modifications to these conveyor belts. So let's go ahead and create some new ones. I'm going to start with this comparable on the left. So if we hover over this edge and do Alt Shift, and then right-click on that, because see that it has selected this one edge loop. And let's do the same for the bottom. And then select these by holding Shift. And now if we press Control E and mark seam right here at the bottom. And you'll know if you did it right, because it would be marked as read. And now if we hover over the object and press L to highlight and we press a, you unwrap. You can see now that these are the updated UVs. Well, mostly because we still have our mirror modifier applied, this is only showing half that UVs. So I think now's a good time to apply those modifiers. But before we do that, let's do the same for this one over here. Select these edge loops. Control E Mark scene. And actually what we could do as well is select these back ones as well. And let's do that for this one over here. Make sure we have all those selected. Okay, now let's go over to our modifiers section and apply these by just hovering over the modifier and pressing Control a. And now you can see that the UVs have been mirrored onto the other side of the mesh, which is why we want to make sure we had those setup before we applied it. So let's press a to select everything and then press U to unwrap again. And you can see now UVs are correct because we are displaying the entire model now. So let's do that again for this one. Apply those tab in and then unwrap. And there we are. Okay, great. So that's part one. The next part is we're going to be hooking up a conveyor belt texture to this. And then we're going to be animating it to make it look like it's actually in motion. 8. Lighting/materials: part 2: So let's go over to our shading tab again. Let's create a new material for our conveyer belt. And what we're gonna be doing is adding in a conveyor belt texture. And we're going to be animating it to look like it's actually a motion. So let's go over to new new material. Let's give it a name, conveyor belt, underscore M. And the cool thing about Node Wrangler is if we click our principled be SDF, press N to bring up the properties. And I go to Node Wrangler. There's a button called add principal setup. So if we click that and then navigate to wherever you saved those source files. In my case, it's going to be right here. If you select both the base color and the normal map and click the principal tetra setup Node Wrangler will automatically hookup the selected textures for you. From here, let's delete these frames that were created. And now let's drag this setup down for the normal map. And then we're going to be duplicating it again for the base color. And then get rid of this normal map. Hook up the color to the base color, this vector to the vector node right here. Make sure we switch this from non-color to sRGB. And then finally, let's go and select our base texture. That's hooked up. Let's go over to our mapping node and adjust the tiling of the texture. Because currently right now it is far too large. So we can do that simply by going over to the scale section and then click and dragging to highlight all three. And let's do a scaling of three. And that looks pretty good to me. Okay, perfect. So now let's go ahead and start animating this texture. So I'm gonna go over to the bottom-left and it's split my screen. And it won't be clicking on the timeline. And from here we're going to be keyframing and the location section of our mapping node. Just a little preview. If you see, if I drag that, we're getting a nice translation of the texture being pan across our UV channel. So let's bring that back to 0. Make sure that we are on frame 0 while hovering over this press I and your know, that key for me has been inserted when all three channels have been assigned this yellow color. So let's go to frame 100. Now. Let's adjust the y value. I'm going to shoot for something very small to start off with. Let's try 3. And the mixture we press I again. Now, if we pay attention to are smaller window here and press Spacebar to play the animation. You can see that now our conveyor belt as having movement. However, the easing right now is not quite what I would imagine a given variable to look like. But first I want to change the color of the comparable. So let's tackle that now. I'm going to be going over to our base color node right here. And then I'm gonna do shift a color. Let's add an RGB curves node and drag that and drop it right here. And to match the rest of the stack that we have going on, I want to have this more a whitish grayish color. So I'm going to do that by clicking and dragging anywhere on this slope right here. And get a white color wheel to drag up some like that. And then we can just drag it into, we are satisfied. Something like that I think works for me. Of course, this is going to differ depending on how you want your scene stylized. But for this tutorial, I think this looks good. So now that we have are comparable looking the way we want, Let's go back and address the problem of our easing and that we were happen by default. You'll notice that the keyframes don't show up in our timeline editor like they normally would for a traditional animation. So what we have to do is go over to our Dope Sheet. And then let's expand this just we have a larger view to look at. And this button right here with this little arrow, you want to de-select that because what this is doing is it's only showing the keyframes that are currently selected. So let's select our mapping node right here, and then de-select this. And you can see if we expand this section called summary and then go all the way down to shader nodes right here. You can see that this is the data that we're after and what we want to change the interpolation to. So with those highlighted, press T and press Linear. And now if everything is working correctly, we should now see our texture animating with a linear interpolation that will maximum match the box. However, is still a bit too fast, so we'd have to adjust some values here. Now, let's do 1.5 I to insert. And there we are. That looks a lot better. Okay, great. That is looking fantastic. So let's do the same for this conveyor belt over here. So we can add in the conveyor belt material. But then since we're going to be animating in a different direction, we're going to be wanting a different instance of this material. So let's create a copy. And then we can give it a unique name conveyor about two works, just fine. Okay. And now all we have to do is adjust the timing of the belts. So when this box comes out from here, it will be on. So we can easily do that by just clicking and dragging these. Bring it over. So it starts around 145 ish, I think is where the box started. Around there. Let's do that. Let's see how far it should go for. Probably about halfway down the slide, I think would look good somewhere around there. And that is 102. So let's click and drag and bringing these in. Okay, Now let's put the whole animation to see how our timing looks. The box goes in, it gets filled up, and then that comes out and spits it out. And one last thing before we end this lesson is less, do some nice easing on these conveyor belts. I know that I said that we wanted to have it set to linear. However, I think that having a nice gradual stop to the conveyor boat movement will look very nice. So let's go ahead and do that right now. Let's start off with this one right here. And I'll select our keyframes for our first one right here. And let's go back to Bezier. And now we're going to expand this and we can probably get rid of this file window as we don't really need it. So if you click in the bottom right-hand corner and drag all the way up, that will snap back or that will get rid of that window. And then we can probably just expand this. Okay, and now while we're in the dope sheet, if we press Control Tab, like we did before, that will allow us to go into the graph editor. And now we have these values isolated. Let's get rid of the ones that we don't particularly care about. Make sure we lock OEM. So now let's select the handles for the first one and have a start off at 0. So we still have that quick and snappy start. Now if we play it, we have a nice gradual end to the movement. However, you can see that we have to adjust. A little bit of values vary now as they aren't particularly that lined up anymore, but not a problem. So let's change this two to see how that looks. And you'll notice that that error only popped up because we have certain keyframes locked. It's not a problem, it's just something to be aware of. Let's do one this time. Yeah, there we are. Okay, great. Let's go ahead and do the same for our second variable. Was saying select everything, press Bezier, and then hide the ones that we don't care about. And select this handle. We have a nice gradual deceleration of this conveyor belt, which I think it looks really nice. And one last time, let's see how it looks altogether now. Yeah, I think that looks great. One final thing to wrap this lesson up now is now that we have our lighting in, that's looking very good. We want to do some light baking so we can really emphasize the darkness and just get some more contrast around these areas. And what I mean by this is if we do Shift a and add in a light probe and then iridescence volume. This is a way of baking the light would then EV. Ev is a real-time engine. It doesn't have the benefit of doing ray tracing like a engine like cycles does. Now, it's very simplest setup. Basically what this has is two cubes are two boxes. One has, or the inner box has all these little dots. And then the outer box is essentially be fall off or how far it will travel. So it really simple, we just want the areas that we want baked to be within this inner tube. So if we scale it down just so it matches up to this top level right here. And we can scale this anyway, we want just trying to match it up as best we can. Sunlight that. Okay, so let's see how that looks now to make the lighting, all we have to do is go over to our render properties again and all the way down to our indirect lighting. If we select our baked indirect lighting button, that will go ahead and calculate the indirect lighting. So you can see that now we have a lot more use of shadows, and especially here on the ground, it's a lot more dark. However, we can do a little bit better here. I think. Maybe we can adjust this just a tad. And then we can also increase the resolution of our cube map size. Let's try to K and let's pick that again. You can see it's taken a little bit longer, but the results now are a little bit more higher resolution. And now we have our big delighting with our shadows, which I think looks very nice and was well-worth it. Our guys. And that's going to conclude for this lesson. In the next section, we're going to be going over some ways to get a final result and final shot, we're gonna be going over some basic color correction. And then from there we're going to be exporting our final animation. I'll see you guys there. 9. Compositing: One thing to point out, you'll notice that I've put in a little extra work since our last lesson. You can see that I've added some additional colors to our scene. I've added some vents, and I've also just tweak the settings ever so slightly. One other thing that I've done is if I play our animation, you can see that as a box goes through each section of our covariate line, that the screens will light up. And just to give us that little extra bit detail, which will make the scene a little bit more engaging in the interest of time. I'm not going to go over all the steps I use to complete this. All the steps I use for covered in the last lesson with the screen is being animated the same way that we animated the conveyor belt textures. Where here you can see that I just animate this value here for the screens at different points of the animation. So with that out of the way, Let's start jumping into the final leg of the pipeline and that's compositing. First, I'm going to go into a camera view and make sure that we have all of our settings corrects for when we render out a single image. For example, if we go over here, you want to make sure that we are in EV. You can look at the sampling rate as default. I've enabled ambient inclusion, screen space reflections, which you can see is why I'm getting this nice reflection on the ground. And finally, motion blur. Once we ever rendered image, you can see why this is going to be a very important factor. Okay, so with those settings enabled, select a frame that you think looks interesting. I must select this one right here, and then press F2. And you should be able to get it render out. And you can see mine open in a separate window. However, a scale it back down. You can see now we have our final render. And this is where the additional compositing is really going to help it comes to the next level by introducing more contrast and just giving an overall more finished appearance. So let's cancel out this window. Now if we go over to the compositing tap here on top. Now you can see we have a blank work area similar to our node editor. If we go up here to use nodes and we click that, you'll see we have two nodes here, our render layers, and then our final composite output. Now by default, we're not seeing anything here. That's because we need to have a viewer node, which we can easily do by pressing this node and pressing Control Shift and left-click. And that will enable our V or note. And now we can see, we are seeing the final output. If we press Alt V and V respectively, you can zoom in and out. Okay, great, So now we're ready to start adding in our little minor compositing touches that are going to help out a lot when it comes to the final image. So now if I do Shift a and then add an a color balance, we can drop that in right here and you see that it automatically connects. And from here we can make small adjustments to your scene. Say if we want to give it more of a bluish tinge, you can simply by just selecting any one of these sliders and then just drag them to the appropriate color. But once you get to a point that you think you like, Sunlight that I think will look good. Now, we can add in some other nodes. But if Shift a again to color, this time let's do a hue saturation value. And this will allow us to bumper saturation up ever so slightly. Let's do 1.2, for example. Because you can see if we go too high, then the colors start to get a little wonky, especially here in the Great and especially here at our box because these are lighter colors, so that would be more prone to saturation changes. So let's go and 1.1 just to split the difference. Now let's add in one more, and that is going to be our RGB Curves. Drop that in once again. And he should be familiar with this node as we used it for our conveyor belt texture to make it more white as opposed to the black that we had. So if we just click anywhere on this grid right here, and now we can drag up just to give it a little bit more punch. So you see right there that has increased the dark qualities and really have blown up the whites, which could look for interesting look. If you do the opposite. Again, what we're looking for is just a nice balance of contrast with the definition over shadows and just something that makes it look more interesting. Systems like that, I think looks good. So once you have everything that you like in your settings, we can move on to the next section. One common technique to use for a final render image is adding in what's called a vignette. Now a vignette will darken the edges around the border of your image, allowing the user to focus in on the main interests, which is dissenter usually. So to do that, we can do this very simply. If we do shift a input image. And there are ways to do this procedurally with nodes, however, that's outside the scope of this tutorial. And for this, I'm just going to using an image which I will link in the description. So once we have our image node, Let's click Open. And then once you download it from the source files, you can go to wherever you saved it to, and then open it up. So now that we have this, if I Control Shift click again, you can see that the very center is transparent and it has a nice subtle gradient up until the corners which are dark and doubt. It's now let's go back to this. And now, if we do shift a search this time, if you do it alpha over node, this will allow us to combine the vignette pattern that we have here. But our main compositing chain right here. So let's drag the image to the image. And this image is already inserted here. And now you can see that if we press M to mute the node, you can see the effect that it's having since the edges aren't necessarily the main point of the image. What this technique does, it allows you to draw the viewer's eye to the most important parts of the image, in this case, is going to be our main hub right here. Now you can also change the factor of us. If it's a little too strong for your tastes, you can bump it down to about 0.5 or so. However, I quite like it to be more on the strong side. So maybe I'll pump it down to maybe like 0.85. And that will allow the image to have a nice balance of contrast while maintaining some interesting points. One final problem we're facing is that the screens are a part of the whole image. And this is going to be problematic because if I go to another frame, for example, and we see that our screen is illuminated and we press Render. You can see that everything looks fine here. However, if we go back to our compositing, you can see now that our screen that was a nice white, is now a weird purplish color. Because the chain of our compositing doesn't know that the screens should be omitted. And we can fix this with one simple addition. And that's called crypto mats. And you can find crypto maps over here in the right-hand side. And we go to our layer properties right here. You click that. And we scroll all the way down until we find Crypto Map. And then we have three options. Object is what it sounds like for each different object in your scene, crypto mass will display a unique color ID that will allow you to isolate. The same goes for material. And then essa is a third way of doing this. However, in my experience, it's not particularly useful. So for our case, we'll just use object. Ok, and you can leave levels as six and then aggregate mode checked. And now if we go back to our render layers node, you can see now we have three different inputs. So now all we need to do to get this to work is to update our render. So let's press F2 to do that. But now if we go back to our compositing and we search for a crypto met node, shift a search and they encrypt on that. And if we drag and drop that before our color balanced node, you can see that everything has gone away. Now. That is because we need to add to the current selection. We can look at the color ID that has been assigned to each object. If we click our crypto met node and then Control Shift. And then if we left-click, we can cycle through the different outputs. However, we need to hook up these outputs into these inputs. And here we are. These are the color ID maps I was referring to. Now, this isn't particularly useful because the screens are not isolated as we need them. So let's go back into our 3D view. Now we want to isolate the screen is for each of the computer modules, for each of the three main areas. So let's go ahead and do that now. I'm going to isolate the computer for the dispenser first. Let's click that going to ten mode and then go into face select mode. Select this face where the computer screen is. Press P. And then that will break that apart into its own separate object. Now let's do the same for the main hub right here. P. Okay, that's all set. And then once more for the scanner. Okay, so now we have three separate objects. Now what we want do now is press Control J. And now we have three different meshes. Right here, all within one object. And once we re-render, you'll see what I'm talking about in terms of trying to organize this in a nice and simple way. So let's go back to our compositing screen. Okay, so now that we're back, Let's press F2 one more time to refresh this. So now the render his refreshed. We can get rid of that. And now you can see while this particular area is white, we now have, if we zoom in here, we can see that the screens for each component. Since they're the same object, they are now going to share the same color ID map. And this is great because now this makes compositing a whole lot simpler because we can isolate the screens from every other element in the scene. Okay, great, so let's go ahead and start our isolation process. First. I'm going to select this first Crypto Map node right here. And what we wanna do is select every color ID map that isn't the screens. So for example, we can go over here to the node. And if we click this little eyedropper, just said add, and we just click on the colors that we want to add to the selection. Okay, so now if we did everything correctly, if we cook our crypto Matt anode again, I can do Control Shift to go to the image output. You can see now that we have created a mask, hides the screens for all the computer elements. You can also see here that I missed a leg on the slide. So let's go back and fix that. But not a problem. It says add that back in. And there we have it. Fantastic. So let's go ahead and now create the selection for the screens and then do some composite for that. So I'm going to duplicate the crypto Matt node right there and then clear the selection. And now once again, I'm going to take the image to the image input and then take this first crypto object slotted into this first input. And then like before, I'm going to click this second node, do Control Shift and left-click. And we go to pick. And now we see we have a familiar looking scene. But this time we want to add just the actual screens. And one more. Okay, there we are. Now let's go to Image. And now you can see we have isolated the screens and create a second selection. And if we take a look back, you can think of the second node as a second pipeline that we will use to affect the way that the screens look without affecting the look of this first pipeline. So one thing we can do is if we zoom in here, you can see that the screen gives a nice glow. So we can emphasize that by going over here and adding in a glare node. Let's do shift a search and then glare. And now let's drag the image output is the image input. And if we click this control shift to preview it, you can see now that sense this screen is illuminated over here. And it's since we have isolated the screens from the rest of the image, we now have lots of flexibility to customize this how we'd like. So here in the glare node we have lots of different options. We have streaks, we have Ghost, which can be used for some interesting lens flare. However, that's not particularly what we're after. What we want is fog glow. And this is just going to create a nice subtle haze around each screen. And we can adjust the threshold. Basically, the lower the threshold, the more easily other components are going to be affected by the glare node. So we want something around 0.7.8 should work just fine. Legally the size to eight, that looks great. And now we need to add in this to our other pipeline that we have right here. And we can do that simply by taking a alpha over and over again. Shifty. You create a duplicate of that. And that Let's preview the whole chain. And now what we need to do is drag and drop this rate here right after the RGB curve node. And then drag this to the bottom slot. And there we have it. Now we have reconstructed our image while maintain the flexibility of two separate pipelines for adjusting and fixing colors as we see fit. And then if we zoom back out and go to the first part, our animation, just to illustrate this. So now that that part is illuminated, do F2 again, and there we have it. And you can see that we have done the color correction on everything that isn't the screen while maintaining the nice purplish color that we're after. And then for one, everything is active. Each screen that has a missing value will be affected by this glare node. And this is all possible due to crypto mats. A couple more things now to wrap this lesson up. First, you can see that the box was not part of the selection due to the fact that it wasn't visible when we're doing our initial setup. So let's go ahead and add that back in. And then additionally, we're going to take the background and apply the same process here. We're going to create a separate pipeline so we can adjust that as we need to while maintaining all the flexibility that we created for the screens. So let's go ahead and do that. Now. Let's tackle the box first. I'm going to go to this first node right here. And then go to the pixel section and then add that to the selection. All right, Now if we go back to View, you can see now that that is looking good. So let's go ahead and isolate the background. Now. Take this clip, a metronome, duplicate that, bring that down. And let's clear the selection. Now like before, let's us take the image, I'll put into the image input. And then this first slot for the crypto object, bring that into there. And then let's go to the PEC section. And this time we just want the background. So now if we go to view that, we can see now that we have isolated this, which is fantastic. And now what we can do is if we go over to here, to the end, we can take the ending over here. Let's hook up our end of the chain to the viewer node. So let's organize this a little bit better. And then what we can do is take our Alpha over, duplicate that again, place it right here in the middle. And now make sure the top slot is occupied by this Alpha. And then that goes to our final one over here. And then we're going to take this bottom image and then drag that right here. And now we have recombined our image into one final master shot. And we can take this a little bit further. Now that we have another pipelines setup to adjust the background as we need to. Let's go ahead and add in a brightness and contrast node. Just to brighten up section just a little bit. It helps if you can spell correctly and drag and drop that in. And now if we just crank this up to somewhere around there perhaps. And then less, maybe increase the contrast just a little bit. And the edge, you may not have much of a, much of an effect that you can see here. And the contact shadows, if we zoom in, it has little bit of an effect. But that's actually too strong. Let's go down to like eight, maybe. Something like that I think would do just fine. And then maybe bring the brightness up, just a smudge. And there we have it. We have our final image that has been deconstructed into separate pipelines for easier compositing and then recombined over here to have a final master image. One final thing we wanna do now is to make sure that our composite node is at the end of the chain, which we can do very simply. If we use this, go over here, every press Left Control, and then right-click. This will bring up a nice Select tool. And then we can separate this connection. And then just bring the composite node over here. And then just hook it up. And now every time we press F2, we can see our final result right here in the compositing window. In the last section, we're going to be going over how to export this animation. I'll see you guys there. 10. Rendering and exporting: Now that we have our animation complete with compositing animation and lighting, the last step to do is to render out our animation and combine the final image is inside the video sequence editor. So to start off, let's go over to the right-hand side and double check our scene setting and just to make sure we have everything set to the way we'd like. You have ambient occlusion. We can probably put some bloom on if you would like, just to give it a little extra pop. I'm going to leave mine off depth of field. We don't have to worry about make sure you have screen space reflections on and that motion blur is probably the most important. And then moving right along, let's go to our actual output dimensions. You can see here we're doing full HD at a 100 percent. Make sure the frame range is within your animation. In our case, we should be fine with the defaults and we are, we can actually bring us back a little bit more so we're not wasting precious render time. So it looks like around frame 220 is one, the animation ends. It's less. Cap it off right here. Okay, that's looking good. And if we keep scrolling down, and then down here we have a section called output, and we click this little folder icon. This is going to be where we're going to specify where we want our final images to be outputted. Now that's all well and good. However, there is another way to do this within the node editor, which I think is more flexible. So let's go ahead and set that up. Okay, so in the note editor, Let's go to the end of our chain. Let's do shift a output and then a file output. And where here we are greeted with a very similar looking node to the output over here. And if we open up our properties by pressing N. And then if we go to Item, you can see now we have all this extra information that we can use to specify the output of our file. Now, like I said before, this is more flexible in my opinion than just doing the standard output right here. And the real magic comes from this section right here. What you can do is if you have multiple passes that you want to output, you can specify that by pressing this add input button. If you do that, if we took a look at the node, we now have multiple slots that we could feed multiple passes into. So we do one render, but we get multiple images out. But for our case, we don't have multiple passes that we want to export so we can get rid of these extra ones. Okay, and we're just concerned with dismayed one. Let's go ahead and create our final export location by pressing this folder icon right here. Let's navigate to wherever you'd like to save your images for me. I'm going to go to my desktop and then create a new folder by pressing this little button up here. I'm going to name it iso metric animation. And then make sure we double-click this folder and then press except, okay, great, so now that is going to be our destination folder. And now within that main folder that we just specified, we can create different sub folders, which is again very helpful for what I was talking about with multiple passes. For our case, we're not using multiple passes hover. We can still structured the output to mimic that. It's good practice to get into the habit of creating naming convention for your outputs. So in this case, I'm going to name this main combine image, the beauty pass. Okay, and now if we forward slash and then let's do a abbreviation. In this case I'm gonna do BP for beauty pass. And let's press Enter to confirm that. And now all we have left to do is to take the final node in our main chain right here, and drag and drop that to this file input right here. Now this is doing the same thing as the viewer and the composite noted. However, now we are actually writing this file to disk, which is great because now it's going to be living outside a blender. Just one more thing to verify before we kick off the render is make sure that we have our file format is set to the way we'd like in our case, since we don't have transparency, it's not going to be critical to choose this, however, common practice and my personal preference is to use PNG and then make sure we just have RGBA enabled. Now if all those settings are correct and to your liking, the only thing left to do is press Control F 12, graph of coffee or some tea, and just wait for your animation to be done. I'll see you back when it is midway through my render, I realized that I forgot to include this second box into our selection for the crypto minutes. And you can see that we have mast out this box. And this is the error that I did not think of because we are using two different boxes for our animation here. What happened was we selected this box right here, but we forgot to include the second box. This is a common example of why we like to render out in images instead of a movie file. If I render it out into a movie file, then the entire movie file would have to be scrapped because I notice about halfway through. However, since we're doing this in PNG sequences or a, or a PNG sequence, we can just go to the frame that the second box will appear, in this case around here. And we can just start rendering out from this point forward. Sameness, valuable time, both on Render and your sanity. So let's go ahead and add in that second box really quick. Let's go back into our pick. And then let's just add this box to our selection. And now if we go back to this, everything should be playing nice. And then all we have to do to start ART render from where we want is just to adjust the start value right here. So let's do a 145. Let me just control click to get the full frame here. And now we're all set to render out the rest of the animation. All right, hopefully that they're not take too long for you. But now that we have our animation all rendered out, the last remaining part is to combine all the PNG's into one file. And we can do that simply by going over to the video sequence editor. So if we go over to the plus button right here at the top, we could add a workspace. And I'm going go to video editing and then video editing again. And now we should have the screen. Let's do shift a image sequence and then navigate to wherever you saved your files to. And then if we press a to select all of them and then Add Image strip. We can see now if we press Spacebar, now you can see that my star point is still sell to a 145 plus just that back to one. And then let's drag this back. Now if you do Shift and left arrow key, go back to the beginning of our animation. We can now see it in its full glory. And we can maximize this view by hovering over this window and pressing Control Spacebar. And that brings us to the end of our journey for this project. I hope you guys really enjoyed this, and I really hope that you've learned a thing or two and felt like this wasn't too intimidating of a project. But for now, I hope you guys enjoyed this course and I will see you in the next one. 11. Thank you!: Thank you so much for taking my course. I really appreciate your time and I hope he had a positive experience while watching. If you haven't already, I would really appreciate it. If you would leave me some feedback in the review section of this course, my hope is that after you take this class, you can take those skills and techniques that you've learned throughout this and apply them to any personal projects you may have, or take what you created for this class and expand upon that further. Once again, thank you so much for your time and I hope you have a great day.