Blender From Zero

1. Blender From Zero Introduction: Welcome to Blender from 0. This class is intended for absolute newcomers. So we'll go at a nice, easy pace to get really familiar with the fundamentals of the software. Gets interface, basic tools and workflow. Having said that, this course is comprehensive, every single tool you need to create renders like this will be clearly explained so that you really get to grips with them and feel at home in Blender. We'll cover tons of stuff. Fundamental modelling techniques, making materials with images and procedural tools, lighting and rendering. A quick image search for 3D illustration, abstract 3D or 3D every day's will yield an avalanche images of this source. For the 3D beginner or they experienced. Recreating such scenes is a superb way to sharpen your skills. It's standard practice for directors to scour the Internet for reference material and ask a designer to create something with the look and feel based upon multiple source images. My approach this time will be just that, to say a few images as reference and pick elements from each in order for us to make a new composition of our own will keep the modelling at quite a basic level, as well as make use of some of blenders modifiers. These are automatic tools which can be used to quickly and radically alter your models in a non-permanent or non-destructive way. Follow me into the fantastic world of 3D in Blender, the ultimate creative playground. 2. Interface Part 1: Download Blender from blender.org, install and run it. You'll be greeted with a splash screen similar to this, which offers a few options to get you started. I'm going to ignore all of them. I'll stick with English. I'll leave my shortcuts at the default Blender settings. Ignore these other options for now, and just click anywhere to dismiss the splash. Before we continue, there are two important points I want to make. Firstly, blender is designed to be used using mainly keyboard shortcuts rather than menus and buttons. That may sound obvious or maybe intimidating. But by getting used to that idea from the start, you're setting yourself up to work in a really snappy and efficient way. We'll go slowly and you'll get plenty of practice. It doesn't take long to learn the essential shortcuts. And once you do, you'll come to love the speed and fluidity with which you can work in Blender. I've created a cheat sheet of some of the most useful ones. You can also search for any function by tapping the F3 key. Blenders. Heavy reliance on shortcuts is, as I say, very much by design and is actually one of its strengths because it enables an exceptionally quick, smooth workflow. You'll also notice that I have a mouse and keystroke gizmo activated at the bottom of the screen to help me keep track of the shortcuts I'm using. Secondly, feel free to watch these lessons right through without stopping. But then when it comes to really learning techniques, I strongly encourage you to pause and repeat parts of these lessons as much as you need and try the techniques out for yourself. So here we are in Blender. If I hover over the little icon at the top left of this main window, I'll get a tooltip telling me what type of editor I'm in. This is the 3D viewport. If I click on that icon, I get tons of options enabling me to turn it into any of these other kinds of panels, each of which does a different job. We'll stick with 3D Viewport. All of these other panels work in the same way. 3. Interface Part 2: Don't worry too much about the details of what I'm about to do. This is just to get a sense of how flexible blenders interface is. I can make a new window by hovering over a border until I get this double arrow. Right-click. In this case, I'll select vertical split. A line appears as a preview of where the window will be split. Just move the mouse to where you'd like the window to be divided. And click to confirm. By default, blender will make the same type of window as the one you've just split. So now we have a second 3D viewport. Let's say I want to make changes to an object and its material and need to be able to get an idea of how this would look in the final outputs or render. Well, I could make this new window into a material preview one. I've decided I want to make some changes to this cube at the bottom. Back in the original viewport, I select it and zoom in on it by pressing the numpad dot key or use the View menu frame selected. Over in the material preview window. I'll solo this cube, so I've got a really good view of it. And back over here in the 3D view boards, I'll edit the cube, squash and stretch it, done some of its axes. Pull around some edges, some faces. Now down here, I could open another window and make this one into a shader editor. This will enable me to edit the material on the cube. In fact, I'll make even more space for myself by splitting this new right-hand area too. I'll make it about the same height as the one that I've just opened on the left. Then right-click on the border between the two. And choose join areas. Now I have the choice of which window to close. Don't click yet. Similarly to the preview line, which appeared when I split an area, moving the mouse back and forth between the windows causes a preview arrow to appear, indicating which window will close. I'll close this new one on the right. Now we have plenty of space in the shade editor. Maybe I'll increase the scale of the marble texture a bit. I could also move it slightly. Thanks to blenders flexible interface, I can quickly jump between different types of task. Modelling objects appear on the left, changing materials down here. Monitoring the material or render result. Up here on the right. I'll reset the interface to the way it was again. 4. Interface Part 3: Now as you saw in the last lesson, if I click off and then back on an object like this, ecosphere, I'll get an orange highlight indicating that it's selected and we can start performing operations on it. You'll see up here in this other editor known as the outliner, that the ecosphere gets highlighted in blue. As you'd expect. I can select and deselect it here too, just like in the viewport. Below the outliner is this properties editor, which can be used to dig into the details of whatever object you've got selected. As I click through the objects in the outliner, keep your eyes on the changing tabs down here in the properties editor. The top group, largely made up of these white icons, are to do with the entire scene. And as such, don't change no matter what we've got selected. The bottom ones though, contains settings specific to the type of object we have selected. The green tab in particular changes. This is the Object Data Properties tab, and generally it Icon reflects the type of objects we're dealing with. A polygon for polygonal or mass geometry, a light bulb for lights, a camera icon for a camera, objects and so forth. Each contains settings specific to the type of object, geometric data for mesh objects, lens settings and so forth for cameras, and so on. Now looking at the outliner, we can see there are three types of objects in this scene, denoted by this green icon next to the object name, a camera type, a polygon type, and a light. These three types of things are the minimum requirement in order to make a render. If I click on the render menu and select Render Image. After a moment or two, blenders spits out this sort of photograph of what was in the viewport. In 3D software, this snapshot of the scene is called a render. As you can see, apart from the materials, the perspective in this render is also different to the 3D view port. Why? Well, that's because blender has automatically taken that shot from the point of view of this camera. If I go to the View menu and select cameras, active camera. Now you can see that the perspective in the viewport and the perspective in the render line up. 5. Viewport Options: Blenders, 3D view port has some very handy visual modes and helpers. Currently we're looking at material preview mode, which is really useful for trying out materials and getting a fair idea of how they would look in a final render. This may not be the most useful shading mode though, depending on what job you're doing. The viewport shading settings are all under this little menu at the top right. Here's our currently active one, highlighted in blue. They get progressively more high definition from left to right. On the left. The most basic shading mode wireframe. Then solid, then material preview as we've just seen. And finally rendered, which gives us quite a high fidelity preview of what the final image would look like. Let's switch back to solid shading mode, which is the default, and explore some of the options hidden under this drop-down. First up, we have lighting options by default, set to studio, which gives us this basic sense of light and shade. Clicking the sphere, I can cycle through different studio lighting schemes. Some might be easier to work with than others. I quite like this bright 1 third from the left. The next big block of options is color, which dictates the color of the objects in the viewport. You won't notice much difference between the first three options. Single gives you this color chip with which you can adjust the color of objects to whatever you like. I'll escape out of that. I find the most useful option here is random. It really helps distinguish between objects. Scrolling down a little further in the options I find it can sometimes be useful to have cavities enabled. As I toggle it on and off, you can see how it adds a touch more definition to the scene, which can sometimes help geometry be a little easier to make out. I'll switch that off for now. There are similar options available in each of the viewport shading modes. If I switch back to material preview, under the Options drop-down, there's a lighting sphere again, but this time based on an image from the real world known as an HDRI. That's how we get these really good-looking reflections in this gold material. For example, if I zoom in on this twisty ring by selecting it and tapping numpad dot for frame selected. As i o bit, you can see the reflections look pretty realistic. Very cool. To the left of the viewport shading menu is the overlays button. Overlays are tools and information which can all help the artist, but won't form part of the final image. If I orbit around a bit so we can see our camera and lights and the ground plane itself. These are all examples of overlays. I can switch them all off just by clicking this button. Sometimes an uncluttered viewport is called four. Next to the button, again, we find an Options drop-down allowing you to customize what will and won't appear among the overlays. I could switch the floor and axes off, for instance, or turn wireframes on. Even adjust the capacities of the wireframes. I'll leave them on for now because it's worth seeing that these overlay settings carry over into other viewport shading modes. In rendered shading mode, for example, generally I'd simply switch all overlays off. 6. Outliner Part 1: The outliner is really the backbone of your project. So it's worth spending a bit of time getting familiar with it. First things first are these file box icons known as Collections. Under the main scene collection, I've made two more, in this case called G0 and crew. I put geometry in one. And things like camera and lights, such as a film crew would use in the other. If I want, I can hide all the geometry in the scene by poking the eye of the collection. I'll just pop out of camera view for a moment and instead show the geometry. But hide all these black line things by clicking the eye of the crew collection. When it's folded up like this, if there's anything in a collection, you will see icons next to it giving a brief description of what it contains. You can see, for example, that the Geo collection contains 35 pieces of geometry denoted by this triangle icon. Okay, so what if I was happy with the positioning of all my objects, but wanted to make some changes to say the lighting. Well, I could make sure that my geometry stays locked by clicking the cursor or collectability icon in the outliner. Now it doesn't matter how callous I am in the viewport. I can't select any of it, so it's safe. I can grab lights and cameras though. I'll swap the disable selection settings for these two collections, I think, and keep the cameras and lights locked instead. If I twirl the geo collection Open, I get access to the individual elements inside it. And the same visibility and selection switches are here too. 7. Outliner Part 2: Now this is quite a list in the outliner. What if I wanted to hide just the magnet in that list? Well, I could scroll down of course, and hope it has a name that makes sense. By default, Blender sorts subjects alphabetically, so, okay, here it is. Might be easier though to just select it in the viewport. See it highlighted in the outliner and switch it off. Or seeing as we know its name. We could also use this search field at the top and a G. There it is. The search field when you're done. So you can see the list again. These lists or hierarchies can get pretty complex pretty quickly. You might have say, 10 collections, each with dozens of items inside. It can easily get pretty difficult to find specific objects within large scenes. So here's a handy way to jump right to an object buried somewhere in the outliner. I'll twirl this collection closed, select the magnet in the viewport. Hover back over the outliner and tap the dot on the number pad. It'll open the collection and take me straight to it. Let's lock it in the viewport. With my cursor over the Outliner. I can also progressively unfold and fold this list with the number pad plus and minus keys. Right? The art director has decided she's not sure about some of the gold elements in the scene. I don't want to delete them, but I want to be able to quickly show how the scene would look without them. I'll shift click around in the viewport to select them. Whilst I'm still over the viewport, I can move them into a new collection by simply tapping m For moved to collection. Select new collection. I'll call it gold. And there it is over in the outliner. Click off to de-select. Now if we unfold to the original GO collection, you can see that that list is much smaller now, since all the gold objects have been moved out of it, it could still be handy to be able to hide all the geometry at the flick of a switch. At the moment, I can only toggle each collections visibility separately. That's no problem. I can simply drag this gold collection into the G1. Now I can lock or hide all of the geometry in one go. Or I can lock or hide just the gold stuff. 8. Navigation Part 1: We've had a little look around the interface. Now let's concentrate on this 3D view port and how to get around in it. Once again, I encourage you to pause the video whenever you need and try out for yourself whatever operation I'm demonstrating. 3d navigation in Blender is achieved with the middle mouse button. Hold it down and drag around to orbit the scene. To move left, right, up, down. First hold the Shift key, and then middle mouse drag. To zoom in and out. First hold Control and middle mouse drag. You can also zoom incrementally by scrolling the mouse wheel. If you get lost in the viewport, just press the home key and that will frame all the elements in your scene. You can also use the View menu. Frame all. To review. Middle mouse drag to orbit. Shift, middle mouse drag to move up and down, or left and right. Control middle mouse drag to zoom in or out, home key to frame all. You may have noticed this colorful gizmo at the top right of the viewports. This can be a great way to figure out where you are in 3D space. If I hover over it so that it highlights and click drag around in it. It is if I middle mouse dragging in the viewport, I'm orbiting. As you can see in the gizmo, up and down is the blue zed axis, as it is in lots of CAD software. For the moment, in the overlay options, I'll enable the viewports that axis. The other two axes you could think of as the ground plane, shown here in the viewport as this grid. As you can see, the axes are marked here to read for x and green for y. If I click on any of the axis names in the gizmo, I'll snap to a preset viewpoint. Click said to look along that axis. You'll notice that we're now perpendicular to the x and y axes or ground plane. The same goes for the other axes. When you're looking along an axis, click the axis name again to look along the axis in the opposite direction. The axis name gets a minus sign in front of it. Below the gizmo, our icons for other navigation functions, some of which you've already seen. Click and drag on each to zoom. Move left, right, up, down, hop in and out of camera view. And lastly, toggle perspective or orthographic view. You can check which of these major in at the top left of the screen. Perspective view mimics the usual way we see with our eyes or through cameras. Whereas an orthographic view is like a CAD system or technical drawing. Perspective or distortion created by the eye or camera is removed, which can often be useful when trying to position and model objects accurately. Let's stay in orthographic view for now. 9. Navigation Part 2: To review, we can now use middle mouse drag to orbit the scene. Shift middle mouse drag to move up, down, left, right. Control middle mouse drag to zoom in and zoom out. We can also scroll the mouse wheel. We can use this gizmo, clicking on the axis names to jump, to pre-set views. Top and bottom, right and left, front and back. It's usually more convenient to stay where you're working in a viewport and use shortcuts instead. If you have a full keyboard with the numeric keypad, you can use these navigational shortcuts, numpad five, to toggle in and out of orthographic view. Numpad 1, 4 front view and its opposite control, numpad 1 for back view. Numpad 3, 4, right view and control numpad 3, 4 left. Numpad 74, top view, control numpad seven for bottom view, numpad 0 to toggle in and out of camera view. Now, what if we wanted to adjust our camera whilst looking through it? Which would be the intuitive way to work. At the moment. If we're looking through our camera, As soon as we start orbiting, we snap out of its point of view. Let's change that setting temporarily. Up here on the right of the viewport is this tiny arrow. Click it or drag it left to reveal the sidebar. The shortcut for this is N. Find the View tab, View Lock, Check Camera to view. Now, when we're in camera view, you'll see this red border. And when we orbit, the camera orbits with us, is locked to our view. Likewise, we can move and zoom from within the camera and frame RC. And as we wish, just remember to uncheck locked camera to view when you finished. 10. Navigation Part 3: You may have noticed that when you're in an orthographic view, come out of the camera, toggle to orthographic numpad 3 4, right view. Now, middle mouse drag to orbit. As you can see, blender automatically pops back into perspective view. That can get a little distracting at times, particularly when you're zoomed in quite close to an object. I prefer to switch this behavior off. Go up to the Edit menu, scroll to preferences. And as we'll be changing preferences a fair amount in this course, instead of left clicking to selected, I'll right-click and select, Add to Quick favorites. Now whenever I want to access preferences, I can just tap the quick favorites shortcut queue. And it appears in that list. What I wanted to change was one of the navigation settings. Next to auto, I'll deselect perspective. I'll leave preferences open so we can switch this feature on and off and see the difference. Back in the viewport. I'll tap numpad 1 to go to front view, toggle orthographic on with numpad five. Now when i o bit away from front view, there isn't that popping back into perspective view, switch auto perspective back on. And once again, numpad 1 4 front view. Make sure you're back in orthographic mode. Orbit away. And there's that pop again. I'll leave auto perspective switched off. That's just a personal preference. Whilst we're here in preferences, I'll make a couple more changes to make navigation a little easier. At the moment. When I place the cursor and orbit, let's say I want to orbit around this twisty tourists, for example. So I place the cursor over it and orbit. The cursor position seems to be ignored. If I enable auto depth in preferences, however, now I'm orbiting around whatever the cursor happened to be over when I started orbiting. And that's more intuitive. Now, let's say I want to examine this stepped cylinder thing. I can orbit around it. But when I try zooming in on it, again, the mouse position is ignored. To correct this in preferences enable Zoom to mouse position. Now, whatever I want to take a closer look at, I simply move the cursor over it first and I can zoom and orbit around it. Save your preferences when you're done. 11. Navigation Part 4 Alt Q Pie Menu: If you're coming from other 3D software, you'll have noticed that blender is free and easy when it comes to navigating away from an orthographic view, you can simply middle mouse drag as usual, to orbit out of that view. There might be times though, when you need to see all of the different orthographic views simultaneously. The shortcut for that is Control Alt Q. By default, all these orthographic views are now locked so you can't rotate out of them. Middle mouse dragging will have no effect. Here in the top right quadrant, we still have the perspective view in which we can navigate Normally. Again, Control Alt Q to toggle into and out of Quad View. Now, I'm sure you feel your head is bursting with shortcuts already. So here's some good news. Like some other software, blender has an extensive set of pie or radial menus. These gives you quick access to tools, right in the viewport. This means that by learning just a few pie menu shortcuts, you can quickly get to dozens of tools. First though, we have to set up some more preferences. Q for Quick favorites. Preferences. Select add-ons. Otherwise known as plugins. Blender ships with heaps of add-ons which add extra functions, but only a few are activated by default. Search for pi and switch on 3D Viewport pie menus. We've been focusing on Viewport navigation. Twirl open the options and in the list below, at the bottom, you'll see view numpad Pi, shortcut, Alt Q. Best way here, I'll deactivate a couple of these, the select pie and the save open pie. Just because I find these get in the way a bit. Click Save Preferences before you close the panel. Now in the viewport, if I type out q, I get access to all the different view options, including toggle perspective, orthographic. I'll queue toggle quad view of Q, camera view. Alt Q lock can to view, et cetera. 12. Transforming Objects Part 1: Now that we've had a quick look at the interface and figured out how to get around in the viewport. Let's get used to moving objects around. Once again, open the sidebar with the shortcut N, find the item tab, transform. With the cross selected. We can use this panel to transform it. That is, move, rotate, and scale it. As I change these values, notice they also update in the Object Properties tab. Here's a quick tip. If I click and drag over all three values of a transform field, I can change them all at once. I'll set the scale of this to no 0.5 in all axes. If we don't like what we've done, it's simply a matter of hovering over any field of the particular transform scale, in this case, hitting backspace. And all three fields of the transform will be reset. Right? It's time to learn our three most important shortcuts. The most fundamental ones, G, R, and S. Grab, rotate and scale. Click on the cross to select it. Tap the G key. G is short for Grab. You are now in the Grab or move tool as it were, and the cursor has changed to reflect this. Blender works in a modal way. Once you start a mode or a tool such as the grabbed mode, you don't really need the mouse buttons anymore. And you can just move the mouse itself. If you go too far and lose your object, just tap Escape or right-click, then restart grab mode with the GK. By default, Blender will restrict movement to the view plane, which is an imaginary flat plane perpendicular to your point of view, which effectively just means the plane your computer monitor is in. You'll notice I can't move back into space. These axes are disappearing into the cross, is stuck to the view plane, no matter how I move the mouse. The same goes for rotation, shortcut R. I tap r. And now I can only rotate around an axis perpendicular to the view plane. If I double tap. Now I can freely rotate in any direction. Again, single tap on, Add rotation is locked to the view plane. Double-tap to freely rotate. To scale an object tap S. Scaling works on all three planes at once. So we won't notice any planar restriction. In the next lesson, we'll get into some more useful functionality of the grab, rotate and scale tools. 13. Transforming Objects Part 2 Precision: If you want to move something along a particular axis, tap G, then the axis name. Why for instance, the same goes for the other axes, of course, g, gx. And the other transform types, rotation and scale. Rotation. For example, are x and scale S x. You can also lock one axis by tapping G, then Shift plus the axis name. We can see this best in Quad View, shortcut Control Alt Q. Now back in the 3D view port, I want to lock the y-axis. So I select the cross tap G and then tap shift. And why? You can see that in the top and right orthographic views, there is no movement along the green y-axis because it's locked. Toggle out of Quad View. Be aware of the position of your cursor when you start a tool. I'll place my cursor a fair distance away from the cross now and enter rotation mode by tapping on. I get this long dotted line showing the radius of the turning circle. As my cursor is now describing the circumference of a large circle. It's quite easy for me to make quite small adjustments to the rotation. Now if I move the cursor really close and tap on, it's much more difficult for me to be precise. Moving the tool further away increases the control you have. I can also get extra control with any transform by holding down the Shift key are then X, for instance, hold down Shift. And you can see that movement is very slow, affording a lot of precision. 14. Transforming Objects Part 3 More Precision: You can also transform by increments, by holding down the control key. Rx, hold control. And we rotate in steps of five degrees. Hold shift and control to reduce the size of the increments. Now, we're rotating one degree at a time instead of five. Let's see this with the grabber tool, G, hold control, and the cross jumps meter by meter. If I hold down Control and Shift whilst I transform the cross G hold Control and Shift, it now jumps in steps of 0.1 meters. If I know exactly how much I want to transform something, I start the tool, then tap in a numeric value. Let's say I want to rotate this 45 degrees around the y-axis. I tap our than y than 45. Let's say for some reason, I need to move it up precisely no point 35 meters on the set axis. So I tap G, Z, no point 35. Whilst the grabbed tool is still active. If I decide I want to change that amount, which is visible up here at the top left. I can just tap backspace and also that amount. Let's say no point to instead. Now I'll just randomly move, rotate and scale across. Earlier in the sidebar shortcut N, we learned how to clear an object's transforms by hovering over a transform field and tapping backspace. But Blender being Blender, there's a pie menu for that. This time, the apply transforms Pi, shortcut Control a to select the clear Transform menu. And here we have a list of all the transforms we can reset. I'll just clear all. If you want to get even more fancy, you can use the shortcuts. Alt G to clear location transforms. Alt R to clear rotation, and Alt S to clear scale. 15. Transforming Objects Part 4 Gizmos: You can also access the grab, scale and rotate tools using this tool bar over on the left. Should this happen to be hidden. You can show and hide it using the t k, t for toolbar. Hover near it until you get a double arrow cursor and dragged out to show the text descriptions. We're focusing on this middle group, the transform tools. In contrast to using the shortcuts that G, S, and R, using these is a two-step process and at first glance, it offers a bit more control. First, start the tool by selecting it. Here's the first difference from using the shortcuts. You don't need to select an object in advance. I can now click on any object. And you'll see a gizmo appears showing all three transform axes of the object. Toggled quad view. You can now click and drag either a single axis to constrain movement or one of the little squares to lock movement to a plane. The same as if you'd use the G and then Shift X, Y, or Z. Shortcuts. Come back out of Quad View. And now let's focus on this cross. Clicking and dragging inside the little white circle constraints movement to the view plane. Just like when we use the shortcut G. Switch to the Rotate tool from the toolbar. Positioning your cursor on or near the white outer circle makes it highlight, indicating that rotation will be constrained to the view plane. Moving the cursor inward slightly, you'll get a very pale, solid highlighted circle indicating free unconstrained rotation, like the double-tap are our shortcut. And of course you have the rotation axis bands two. Similarly with the scale tool. I'll click the eye at the ecosphere in the outliner and had it in the view port for now. And again, toggle Quad View. Click and drag on or near the white circle to transform along all three axes at once or restrict to an axis 0 plane. Finally, at the bottom of the transform tools group, there is this multi-tool, which is simply all three tools rolled into one. I'll switch back to the Select tool for now. There are certainly occasions when I use the transform gizmos and we'll explore these in more detail soon. Generally though, when transforming objects, I stick to using shortcuts as it's so much more efficient than leaving the viewport in order to activate a tool. And in fact, I rarely if ever used the transform tools from the toolbar. Again, though, they can be a useful visual aid when you're starting out. 16. Global Vs Local Coordinates: Now I want to scale across to make it say twice as tall. So tap as Zed to click or tap Enter to confirm. Now let's rotate it 30 degrees in Y r Y 30. In fact, I'll rotate it the opposite direction. So with the rotate tool still active, I'll just tap minus. Right. I've decided I don't like the stretch look anymore. Earlier, we doubled its size in z. So now it should just be a matter of having it again to get it back to how it was as Zed No.5. And obviously that hasn't worked. It's still a bit stretch looking. I'll undo and show that again, s, z. And you can see that the preview zed axis shows us the line along which we're about to scale. That line is the global z-axis. Remember though, that we rotated the cross after we scaled it. And because of that rotation, the cross no longer lines up with the global z-axis. What we need is for the scaling to be lined up with the zed axis of the cross itself, its own or local z-axis. What I need to do to achieve that is tap the axis name again. We can see the axis preview is now lining up correctly indicating the locals that access. Now I'll tap in No.5. And the crosses back to its original proportions to change how the transform tools are aligned, you can use this transform orientation menu in the middle of the top of the viewport. If I switch to local transform orientation, watch what happens when I use the standard shortcut to scale on zed. Zed. And even though I didn't double-tap said the locals, that axis is being highlighted because of this local transform orientation setting here. In fact, the earlier behavior has now been flipped. If I double-tap and access name now it switches to global transform orientation. You can also get access to these transform orientation options under the comma pi. I'll switch back to global. 17. Global Vs Local Coordinates Gizmos: There's another helper when you're trying to keep track of global versus local coordinates, which we've already glimpsed. Gizmos. Let's once again rotate the cross minus 30 degrees in y r, y minus 30. Now hidden under this gizmo drop-down. Find object gizmos. And let's enable scale for now. Just like when we use the toolbar scale tool, you can see a little manipulator has appeared on the object aligned with the global axes. That's because a, we're in global transform orientation, which as we've seen, we can check up here but the middle of the viewport or using the comma Pi and b. Under the gizmo options. The object gizmo is set to default orientation, meaning it just defaults to whatever the main transform orientation setting is. If I use the comma Pi to switch to local coordinates, the gizmo automatically updates. A useful way to work is to keep the object gizmo fixed to local coordinates. Let's set that up in the gizmo dropped down. Switch from default to local. Now, no matter what Transform orientation, where in comma Pi global the gizmo stays in local mode. I can now use the G, R, and S tools to quickly transform in the viewport. Then use the gizmo to transform along the desired Local Axes. 18. Snap Menu and Pivot Point: By now you're getting familiar with different ways of transforming objects with the G, R, and S k's and constraining transformations to local or global axes. As we've seen when scaling or rotating, the dotted line which appears points directly to the center of gravity or origin of that object. March by this little yellow dot. There are times though, when it will be useful to change that pivot point. In this example, let's pretend this cross is a satellite orbiting this odd-looking planet. We'd need to make the planet the center of rotation for the satellite. One way would be to edit the position of the satellites origin. Up at the top right of the viewport, there is this little Options drop-down, which is used to filter what gets affected by transforms. You'll see there's an option to only affect the origins tick that you'll see a giant local axis appear in the object. Alt Q. Jump to right view, switch to orthographic, G to grab. And now when you move, you're just moving the origin or pivot. Try and place it in the middle of the ecosphere. When you're done, uncheck origins under the Options drop-down. Now when we rotate the satellite using R, it's rotating around its origin, which is in the middle of the planet or less. In Quad View control our queue. You can see that because I only did it by eye, that origin is not in the exact center of the planet. But what do I do if I now want to tweak the scale of the satellite, use S to scale. But now it's scaling from that new origin position way over here. So all this space between the geometry and its origin is scaling to, we're effectively moving as well as scaling the satellite, which isn't what I want. A more flexible way to work is to use a temporary permit. This little cross hair with a red and white circle around it is called the 3D cursor. It looks pretty unassuming, but it's super useful. First of all, let's reset this satellites origin. We can return it to the object's center using the origin pi shortcut Control Alt X. Choose origin to geometry. Okay, we're back to how we started. Now, setting up a temporary pivot happens in two stages. Stage 1, we'll use the snap pie menu to move the 3D cursor to where we want, which is at the center of this ecosphere. So select the ecosphere. Open the snap Pi with Shift S. Choose the option at the bottom, cursor to select it. The 3D cursor has jumped to the planets origin. Stage two selects the satellite. Now open the pivot Pi by tapping dot or period or full stop on your main keyboard that's not on the number pad. The default is median point. Instead, select 3D cursor. Now when I tap R to rotate, instead of its own origin, the satellite uses the 3D cursor as its pivot point. And as we snapped it to the center point of the ecosphere, it now orbits it. If I again want to scale the satellite, as things stand, I'll get the same thing happening as before. Now though, a simple matter of using the pivot Pi again, period or full stop. And going back to the top option, median point S to scale. And now I scale from the satellites origin again, let's make it small relative to the planet. I think I'll change the orbital rotation a bit. Once again, full stop or period. Select 3D cursor to rotate. 19. Adding Objects Part 1: Let's start adding things to a scene. At the top-left is the Add menu with loads of categories of things under it. Now forget that menu because you'll never use it. Instead, you'll use the add shortcut Shift a with the cursor in the viewport shift a. Now for this course, we'll focus on just the first category mesh. What we have in the scene already, our meshes or polygonal objects that are simply solid looking three-dimensional geometry. Let's add, say, a cone. Once again, shift a mash cylinder. And now the cone has been hidden. Handily though. If I click on the already selected cylinder, Blender will assume I'm trying to select whatever is hidden by it from this point of view and show the selection highlight of the hidden cone GY. And I'll just put it out the way. Again, shift a mesh cube, Gy, move it out the way. The objects keeping added at the precise center of the scene. But I can easily change that to avoid having to repeatedly move things out the way as we have been. Well, I need to do is move our friend, the 3D cursor. Move your pointer to somewhere away from the center of the scene. Hold down Shift and right-click. Now once again shift a to add, say a UV sphere. And the object gets added at that location. Shift right-click to position the 3D cursor. Shift. A ecosphere. As you'd expect, every object has been positioned according to its origin or pivot point, precisely in the center of the cursor's cross hairs. 20. Adding Objects Part 2: So far we've been in right orthographic view. If I hop into front view with numpad 1, you'll notice all the recently added objects are nicely aligned in the same plane. I'll hide the cross and so on for now. Numpad three to jump back into right orthographic view. As you can see, this is the zed y plane. But what if I'm in perspective mode, not aligned with any particular axis? Numpad F5, or click this button to toggle out of orthographic view. I'll just delete all this geometry and zoom out a little. Now, shift right-click to reposition the 3D cursor anywhere in space. Shift a at a cube, shift, right-click, shift a at a cube. Do that a number of times. Now when I orbit around, they don't really appear to be aligned in a particular way. But in fact, they are they're aligned to the view plane I was looking at. When I added them into the scene, I used this overlays drop-down to switch on all object origins. I wouldn't be able to get it exactly aligned. But if I carefully orbit now, you'll see they'll come a point where the origins line up. I can use this annotate line tool to emphasize that when we shift right-click in empty space, blender will use our vantage point, our view plane, to decide where to put the 3D cursor. If you shift on an object though, the 3D cursor will by default be positioned on the object surface. Let's turn this poor cucumber into a respectable Gherkin by adding some wars to its surface. Now since we know we're going to be moving the 3D cursor around a lot. Let's just select the 3D cursor tool from the toolbar on the left. That way, we don't have to keep Shift right-clicking all the time. Now if I click anywhere on the Gherkin, the 3D cursor just sticks to it. I'll add a sphere. And again, click on the Gherkin, shift a at a sphere and again and again and again and again. Using this really handy function of the 3D cursor pretty quickly, we've been able to place lots of objects right on the surface of another. When you're done, don't forget to click back on the selection tool or use the shortcut W. Or you'll find yourself wondering why you can't select anything anymore. 21. Adding Objects Part 3 Last Operation Menu: Right, armed with our Gherkin knowledge, let's stick some objects to this magnet. So shift right-click on the surface to reposition the 3D cursor. Say down here on the bare metal, Shift a, and I'll add, say a tourist for change. And that's huge. Before we do anything else though, look down here at the bottom left are the viewport. If I click on it, it'll open the last operation menu. In this case, the last operation was add tourists, which we can see at the top. An operation is just a set of instructions, also known as an algorithm. And many program or recipe which blender runs to make the tourists or whatever else appear on screen. For the moment, we still have access to some of the ingredients of that recipe. So I have some options at my disposal. I can make it higher or lower resolution, change the radius, make it fat or skinny, or change its transforms. I'll just 0 out those and rotated on the y to make it sit on the surface of the magnet. As you can see, it's a handy little menu. Be aware though, that once you left-click away from this menu, you're now stuck with your settings. Plan does stops the algorithm and you're just left with a mesh. The last operation menu disappears, and there's no way of getting back into those options. Now, if you decide you want another tourists somewhere on the magnet, say up here somewhere on the right-hand side. Shift, right-click to place the cursor Shift a and a Taurus again. And notice that the changes I previously made to the torus in the last operation menu are sticky. Blender has remembered everything except the transforms. From the last time we ran the ad tourists operation are rotated on why again, make this one a bit smaller and skinnier. If I feel I've stuffed it up, I can always click on the Operator Presets at the top of the last operation menu and select restore operator defaults. Make some changes again. Maybe I'll make it into an octagon. I can still middle mouse to navigate in the viewport and keep the last operator options. But if I left-click, the menu disappears and my options are gone for good. Again, I'll reposition the 3D cursor, and this time I'll add a cone. I actually prefer to have the last operation menu close to where I'm working. And the shortcut for that is F9. Tweak some settings here. Rotate on why. Okay, As you've seen, it, it's a bit fiddly having to change the rotation of these objects to conform to the surface of the magnet every time. How about trying to align an object inside here on this sloping surface, or even appear on the curved surface of the magnet. In the next lesson, we'll look at how to get that job done quite easily. 22. Align Objects to a Surface Part 1: Selects the 3D cursor tool from the tool shelf. There's yet another great feature of it, quietly tucked away up here at the top left under this orientation dropdown. By default, it's set to view. If I click around in space, or actually, it'll show it better if I click on a magnet and zoom in a bit. If you look closely, you can see just two axes in the cursor cross hairs, but there are actually three. The reason we can only see two, because one of the axes is aligned perfectly perpendicular to my point of view, which as we saw, is because of this 3D cursor orientation setting. We're looking directly along one of the curses axis, so it's not visible to us. If I change my viewpoint a bit by orbiting. Now you can see there are indeed three axes on the cursor. We can use the alignment of the 3D cursor axes to our advantage. Let's use it to get objects to align to the geometry of this magnet. Click the 3D cursor orientation drop-down, and hover over geometry. We're given a tip, match the surface normal. Select that. What is the surface normal is simply the angle perpendicular to a surface. If I now click on one of these inward sloping sections of the magnet. As I orbit around, you can see the 3D cursor is aligned to that surface. One of the axes of the 3D cursor is always jutting out perfectly perpendicular or normal. The surface it's on. I'll add a cube. Open the F9 menu. First of all, I'll have to bring it size down to say no 0.1. And then one down from size, we have an aligned drop-down where I can choose to align it to the world, to the view, or to the 3D cursor. Thus, the setting our choose. Accordingly, the cubes alignment shifted slightly. Move around, place the 3D cursor, Shift a, add say a cylinder. F9, make it smaller. Aligned to 3D cursor. Move around, place the 3D cursor Shift a had something. Make it smaller. Align to 3D cursor. 23. Align Objects to a Surface Part 2 Snapping: If I turn on the move gizmo set to local orientation and switch to the Select tool. Now, you'll notice it's the local z axis of the objects which are being aligned to the normal. Also, since it's always the object origin which gets placed on the surface of the magnet. All our new objects are a bit submerged. Now it's just a matter of moving each object along its local z-axis so that they sit more like they're on the surface. In fact, we can go one better. Above the middle of the viewport. To the right of the transform orientation menu is the transform snapping tool. Switch that on. In the drop-down menu, select Face. Leave this next setting at closest. And now when you move objects along their local zed axis using the gizmo. And whilst you do that, drag the cursor over a nearby face on the magnet. Your objects will try to snap to the closest surface of the magnet. Sometimes you may have trouble. Objects may jump around awkwardly, but keep trying whilst you're dragging the local z-axis, try moving the mouse across a nearby surface on the magnet that's parallel to the one you want to snap to. You'll see a little yellow preview circle showing you which plane it's trying to snap to. So far we've used the 3D cursor to position objects. The 3D cursor is really important to learn how to use and also to understand how to get objects aligned. But as you've seen, it can seem fiddly at first. In the next lesson, we'll learn a really intuitive way of simply drawing objects directly onto surfaces. 24. Draw Objects: You'll be well and truly used to adding objects with the shift a menu. Now. Now let's look at a different way. First, let's navigate across to the right a bit to give ourselves some room. At the bottom of the toolbar, you can see Add Cube. Those of you familiar with SketchUp will understand how this works. Click it, and now you'll see a grid pattern as you move the cursor around. This tool works in two stages. First, click and drag to make the base of the cube. I'll make a long, narrow outline along the y-axis. Release the mouse when you're happy with the shape. Now we're in stage 2. Moving the mouse will now set the depth of the cube. If I want to make sure to draw a true cube with sides, start drawing the base, then hold shift until you release the mouse button. And again, hold Shift when setting the depth under the Add Cube fly out. But the time of recording, there are five different types to choose from. Let's try cone. Once again, holding Shift constraints it symmetrically. So now you get a circular base. Now move the mouse to set the depth. Holding shift will snap it to the same height as the diameter. Notice above the viewport that you can set the number of vertices in advance if you like. If I set this to four, now, the next time I start drawing a cone, it'll make a four-sided pyramid. Of course, I can still use the F9 menu to change that afterwards if I like it. Let's try out the others. I'll delete all these and go back to making a long tube like a building or something. I want to make a little wall flush with the shorter edges of this building. First up in the settings, I need to change the snapping options from default to geometry. If I move the tool over the building, hopefully you can see the grid conforming itself parallel to the surfaces of the cube. This time, I'll hold the control key down before I start drawing. The tool looks for an existing edge or corner to snap to. Now that I've started drawing from the corner, I can release the Control key if I like. In fact, I want to make this wall flush with the other side of the building. So now I'll again hold control. Once it snaps to both the far edges, I'll release the mouse button. Now I can set the depth. How about making a little cylindrical pole atop the new wall exactly in the corner. I'll zoom in again. Switch to the Add Cylinder tool. Now, again, holding Control, I'll snap to the edge, close to the corner. Now I can start drawing from the edge. I can release the Control key. Now if I like. I want a poll to be circular in profile. So now I'll hold Shift. And I want it to be flush with this other edge. So I'll continue to hold Shift to keep it circular. But now I'll also hold control and snap it level with the corner. Now I simply move my mouse to give it some depth. It's a great little tool and you can see just how easy it would be to put some more objects on the surface of the magnet. I'll switch wireframes on, so it's easy to see the faces of the magnet and get drawing. 25. Extra Objects: The basic meshes that blender ships with our decent enough starting points for making pretty much anything. Once you've got some know-how. You can get more options though, if you enable another add-on, Q for Quick favorites, preferences, search for extra and enable add mesh extra objects. Now when I tap shift a mesh, you can see the top part of the menu is as it was, but more has now been added to the bottom of the list. Rock generator, Round Cube, gears, diamonds, and so on. Let's have a play with some of these. I'll use the 3D cursor. Click somewhere above the magnet and shift a mesh. Diamonds, really in diamond. Navigate around so you can see it properly. I'll switch wireframes onto so we can see how this thing is made. Now in the F9 menu, we've got a ton of options to customize things. Just play around. Okay, I'll just scale that down. Right? Let's add something else. Round Cube, F9. I'll turn that radius to something really tiny. Naught point, naught one, say one centimeter. Now for size, I'll use that trick of click dragging over three fields at once. And make it say No.1 meters or 10 centimeters on all sides. Keep on adding objects and practice playing with the parameters in the F9 menu and moving, scaling and rotating them around the scene. 26. Object Vs Edit Mode Part 1: So far we've largely been dealing with off the peg objects using the Add menu. But even with extra objects enabled, you won't find this cross anywhere. It's a custom job. Even when using the sliders in the F9 menu or changing the settings of the ad primitive tools. The changes we have made have really only been tweaks to the basic shapes of things. We have transformed objects with move, scale, and rotate. But these are applied to objects as a whole. Until now, we've been working in object mode, which is indicated up at the top left of the viewport. Under the drop-down, you can see there are a number of other modes. The one we're going to look at now is edit. You can also toggle in and out of edit mode using the Tab key. Zoomed in, you can see that the look of the crust changes slightly in edit mode. We can now make out edges and corner points known as vertices. Now if I click to select and use G to grab, I've only selected part of the object so I can change its shape significantly. By default, you'll be in Vertex Selection Mode, which is indicated up here at the top left. The two other selection modes are edge and face. The shortcuts for these above the letters on your main keyboard. One for vertex selection to four edge, and three for phase. And one more really useful shortcut, a to select all of the a, to D, select all a, Alt a. Over on the left, the tuba has grown significantly. I'll drag that out to show the names. There are far more options available to us now because we now have access to the mesh itself. In the next lesson, we'll look at a few of the most useful ones. 27. Modelling Tools Extrude: We won't go through all of blenders, mesh editing, or modelling tools in this course. And in fact, there are just four which will probably handle 90% of your modelling jobs. Tab 3, 4, face select mode, also available appear above the viewport as we've seen. And select a face. Now tap E for Extrude, we see a blues that axis indicating the normal of this phase. That's the perpendicular. Moving the mouse in the viewport will now make new geometry grow out of or into the face in the direction of the normal. When you're done, click to confirm and tap F9 to look at the last operation menu. You'll see that by default, it's set to extrude along the normal or perpendicular to the selected face, and consequently has only moved and the normal or Z axis of that face. You can play with these settings if you like. Generally though, the defaults will serve you best. Now what if I needed to extrude, say, these two faces. I Shift-click to add to my selection. Then tap E to extrude. We see a blue zed axis at a funny angle. As we've seen by default, it's set to normal. Blender calculates the average of these two normals, which are at 90 degrees to each other. So we'll get this 45-degree extrusion in this case. That's not what I was after. So instead of using the usual E shortcut, I'm going to need to open the extrude menu with the shortcut Alt E. The first option, our standard extrude tool. So we'll skip that. The next one down is extrude faces along normals. Select that and move your mouse. That's the effect I was after. Each phase was extruded along its own normal. Tab out of edit mode. Hide the cross, and reveal this sphere. Tap to edit. Let's look at the difference between extrude faces along normals, which we just did, and extrude individual faces. In our overlay options, which look a little different in edit mode. Near the bottom, switch on face normals. I'll also increase their size to say not 0.7, to really emphasize them. It's easy to see now that of course, since each polygon making up the sphere is facing in a slightly different direction, consequently. So their normals. Old Q, I'll come around to the right of the sphere. Toggle orthographic. Now if I choose extrude faces along normals like last time, the new faces will follow that radiating pattern. I'll undo and set the normal size back to nought 0.1. Now let's try extrude individual faces. The extrusion is still follows the normal direction. But rather than extruding on mass, each face has been split from its neighbors and a separate extruded column has been formed for each one. 28. Modelling Tools Extrude Toolbar: Once again, by using shortcuts, I've shown you the typical and usually the most efficient way of using the tools first. But just like with the transform tools over in the object toolbar, the Edit toolbar can be a help if ever you forget the shortcuts. And again, like the transform tools that gizmos can give you a visual clue as to how the tool will add tab to Edit, Alt Q toggle Quad View. Again, I'll select these two perpendicular faces. Then on the toolbar, click on the extrude tool. Here it's called the extrude region tool. The yellow gizmo is showing me the direction in which the Extrude is about to work. Click and drag. I'll undo that. And this time, just as with the transform tools, if I ignore the yellow gizmo and just click and drag inside the white circle. I can extrude in any direction parallel to the view plane. As with the Add Cube tool, the little highlight in the corner of the Extrude button shows us there is a flyout menu. If you click and hold, you'll see more or less the same options as under the Alt E menu. There's an extra one here though, extrude to cursor. And this one can be great for making organic curly shapes. For example, I'll select this face nearest to us on the y-axis. This will probably be easiest in right orthographic view. Zoom out a little to give us room. Now I simply click where I want to extrude to. I could scale the life phase as I go. Maybe make a kind of spiral law tentacle. Pretty fun. 29. Modelling Tools Inset: Let's say we wanted to make the lens on this little camera look a bit more like the one in this reference photo here. Select it, tap to edit and select this front face. The next super handy thing for modeling is the inset tool. And the shortcut for that is, I move the mouse to create an inset edge. Remember, holding shift will give you finer control. Now we can switch back and forth between the inset and extrude tools to very quickly rough out our shape. I'll extrude out I to inset. Extrude out I to inset. Just stepping the diameter down a little each time. Finally, I'll make a small inset at the front of the lens to form a rim. Right now I want to extrude inwards at the front end of the lens to make this first little inward slope like on the reference. I could do that using the extrude tool, moving inwards a touch. Then with the resulting face still selected, scale it down slightly. There's a quicker way to do this though with the inset tool. I'll undo those last few steps. So we've got the front of the camera flat again. And with that front face still selected. Instead of using the extrude tool, I'll tab I for inset and bring that diameter down. And now whilst I've still got the inset to active hold down control, this will temporarily freeze the size of the inset phase. And by moving the mouse, I can now move it in or out. If I released the Control key, it will temporarily freeze the depths of the face. And I can go on resizing it if I like. Until you click to confirm. You can go on switching between resizing and moving the face as much as you need. I'll make the next inward step on the lens so we can review that. I for inset, take the diameter down a bit and once again hold control to move the face in or out. Release control to resize, to confirm. I could make a little ledge here. So again, i for inset, click to confirm, and then I for insert again. Reduce the diameter and this time hold control to move in or out. 30. Modelling Tools Loop Cuts: In the last few lessons, we roughed out the basic shape of the lens in a fairly haphazard way using the extrude and inset tools in combination. If we were working too precise plans, we could place edges exactly where we need them using the third of the four essential modelling tools, loop cut. The shortcut is Control R. This tool works in two steps. Step 1, bang in the middle of these edges, I get a yellow highlight to indicate that a cut can be made. The tool will try and make a cut in whatever plane I move the cursor over. I want to cut this cylindrical surface. Step 2, I click to initiate a cut. And now as I move the mouse, I can slide the cut along the edges. I'll place this one right up close against the camera body. Again, Control R to start the tool. It's easy to make multiple cuts at once by scrolling your mouse wheel. Or using the numpad plus and minus keys will simply typing the number in. I'll stick with one. If you don't want to slide a loop cut like this, just right-click or tap Escape to confirm. That'll ensure that the new loop cut lands exactly in the middle of the edge loops on either side. I'll put another one fairly close to the camera body and leave a little gap and then put another one in. Now that we've got these extra loops, we need to be able to select them, to be able to work with them. I want to put a neural or grip texture on one of these face loops. So I'll make sure I'm in face select mode by clicking up here or tapping three. Now, the loop I want is around this cylinder, of course. So I'll hover the cursor near a perpendicular edge. Zooming in. This is the direction of the loop I want to select. So this edge, for example, is perpendicular to it. Hover near that. Hold the Alt key, and click. Let's try that again. So ALT a to de-select all. And now let's do it in the wrong direction. If I hover near an edge that's parallel with the face loop that I want to select, such as this edge. Hold Alt, and click. That selects a loop perpendicular to that edge. All day to de-select all. Once again, hover the cursor near an edge perpendicular to the desired loop. Hold the Alt key and click. Now tap eye and make a small inset. Now F9 to dial in the inset tool options. In order to make some raised grips, I need each individual phase to be inset. So I'll check that. Finally, tweaking the depth gives me the raised luck I was after. 31. Modelling Tools Bevel: The last of the big for modeling tools is the Bevel tool. Zoom in on the reference photo and you'll see a top this film Winder knob on the left. This sloping or beveled edge. I want to put one on our model. Select film winder in the outliner. Let's isolate the object so it's easier to work with in the viewport, tap Alt Q for the view Pi. And on the right, select the local global view toggle. Tap to edit, tap 2 for edge select mode. Remember how to select a loop in any of the selection modes, vertex, edge or face, hold, Alt, and click the loop you want to select. Now for the Bevel tool, we use the shortcut Control B. And simply move the mouse to bevel that edge. With the tool still active, scroll the mouse wheel to add subdivisions to the bevel to make it more rounded or not. And click to confirm. Of course you now have access to heaps of options to tailor the shape of that bevel F9 for the last operation menu. And here you can tweak the number of segments. Changing this shape value can make it concave if you like, or sharper. The default value is not 0.5. I want to have a flat bevel. So I'll set the segments to one tab to object mode. Alt Q toggle out of local view. If you look at the shutter release button in the reference, you can see there are tiny bevels there too, on every edge. And obviously the body of the camera has this rounded bevel. In fact, the perfectly mathematical edges created by 3D software are not to be found anywhere in the real-world. You'll find that adding bevels to edges, even tiny subtle ones, will bring more realism to your objects. Look here at the little socket on the front of the reference camera. At the top and side we see a bright reflection or specular highlights. And again here on the logo. Another use of the Bevel tool relates to what we've been doing with the lens. A little bit around to look at it more side on tab to edit. Taps to four edge select mode. Now I've decided I want to evenly spaced cuts, one near the front of the lens, one near this textured grip. Remember how to use the luca tool? Control R. If I ramp up the number of cuts using the mouse wheel, they will be evenly spaced, but they're not far enough apart. I can use the Bevel tool to achieve what I'm after. I'll start by making just a single cut. First click to make the cut. And remember, no matter where I slide it now, if I right-click or hit Escape, it will snap back to the middle. With the edge loop still selected, switch to the Bevel tool with Control B, and move the mouse to evenly split that loop into two. Remember F9, if you need to tweak that. 32. Apply Object Scale Part 1: To recap, we've been looking at what I've been calling the big for modeling tools, extrude, inset, loop, cut, and Bevel. Now I want to spend some time diving into some problems that might arise when you're using tools like these. I want to put an inset on the bag and a rounded bevel on the front of this gold cube. By the way, notice how since there is no bevel on the edges, something doesn't quite seem right. You'd expect the edges of a perfectly smooth gold block to catch the light and flash. That's what I was meaning about realism in the last lesson. Anyway, I'll switch to solid shading. And those get modelling. So tab to edit. First, the inset on the back. I'll go into face select mode by tapping three. Select that back face. Alt Q, frame, the selection I for inset F9. I'll give that a thickness of 0.15. And again, i, for insects have nine, again, thickness nought 0.15. This time I'll also add some depth. Let's go with nought 0.2. I want it to be indented though. So I'll put a minus in front of that nought 0.2. Now let's tap out of edit mode and try making a corresponding inset on the back of this tall cube tab to edit. Select the back face. Again, Alt Q frame selected I for inset. And straight away, you can see something's not right. Obviously, the inset is much larger at the top and bottom than the sides. F9. Let's put the same values in as before. Thickness nought 0.15. A handy shortcut is Shift R. This will repeat the last operation. So Shift R and we've inset again F9. And since we repeated the last inset operation, the thickness has stayed the same nor point 15. Again, let's set the depth to minus not point to tab to object mode. Obviously, this tall one is looking really off. I wanted a symmetrical inset or round, not this stretched look. In the next lesson, we'll see if this weirdness is also affecting the Bevel tool. 33. Apply Object Scale Part 2: In the last lesson, we were left with this stretched looking inset on the back of the tall cube. Let's go around to the front and try making a bevel on the smaller cube tab to edit. Two for edge select mode. Select this front edge. Control B for bevel. And drag it out. With the tool is still active. Scroll mouse wheel to add segments to the bevel. Click to confirm F9. I'll set its width to nought 0.8 and give it six segments. I'll leave the shape at the default nought 0.5. Now as we've seen, values you change in this last operation menu are sticky. There'll be stored by blender. So the next time I use the Bevel tool, you can expect that to be six segments and a shape value of No.5, like the bevel we've just made. Let's tab out of edit mode. Select this tall cube tab to edit. Select the corresponding edge Control B for bevel. And again, something is off. Looking closely, you can see that the topmost segment is quite narrow and they get progressively larger as we go down. Let's check the tool options with F9, the width of the first battle was not 0.8. So let's enter that. Everything else is the same. The segments, the shape value. So why does this bevel in a similar way to the inset on the back? Looks so different from the smaller cube. The answer lies within the transforms of this taller cube. If we click on its Object Properties tab and look at its transform data, its location is away from the world origins. So we would expect to see some random values. Here. There's no rotation. But under the objects scale, we see a value of four in the vertical or z axis. This is the root of our problem. In edit mode, any change to the object in the zed axis will be multiplied by four. I'll switch on wireframes and toggle quad view, whereas Control Alt Q. Now it becomes obvious. In top view, we can see that part of the bevel is in the XY plane. And from here, both cubes look pretty much identical. But in right view, it's clear that the bevel has been stretched along the z axis, corresponding with this value. Over in the object properties panel in the zed axis of the scale transform. If I set that zed scale back to one, is simply shrinks the whole object around its own origin in the zed axis. And though the bevel now looks right, of course, we've lost the tallness of the object as a whole. Will see how to get this bevel to work properly from the off in the next lesson. 34. Apply Object Scale Part 3: Let's set the zed scale back to four and make this object tall. Again, open the sidebar with the End key. Go to the Item tab scale. We need to get this zed scale value back to one and have the object remain as tall as it is. In this case in the dimensions, we can see that eight meters in Blender, we can do that by applying the transform. In object mode. Go to the Object menu. Apply Scale. And nothing's happened apparently. That's because unfortunately, we made the battle before we apply the scale. But having reset or applied all our scale values to the default of one. As you can now see in the sidebar. If I now test out the Bevel tool, say on the bottom edge. Now it's no longer being stretched, is no longer being multiplied by 4 on the z-axis. Tab to object mode. Control out Q out of Quad View. Ensure the 3D cursor is snapped world origin with the snap a pi, shift S. Cursor to world origin. Add a new cube, grab it and move it to the left of the first one. Now I want to scale this new cube downwards from its top. So let's shift our pivot point using the 3D cursor. Shift right-click to place the 3D cursor on the top face of the cube. Period or full stop to open the pivot Pi, select 3D cursor. Now, scale it up four times on the zed axis as zed for. As you can see that has updated in the sidebar, the scale in zed is for now is when we should reset the object scale to one. That is, before we do any modelling in edit mode. Last time we use the Object menu. Apply scale. This time let's use the apply shortcut, which you can see is control a. But before I do so you can watch what's happening among the transforms. I'll move my cursor closer to the sidebar, then tap control. A select scale. Does add scale has been reset to one, but the dimensions remain the same. Now if I tap to edit, select this top edge Control B for bevel. You can see it's behaving in a more predictable way. F9 set the width to nought 0.8 tab to object mode, and comparing it to the original cube. You can see those battles look the same. Now let's try making the indentation on the back. Face select mode I to inset. Already you can see that symmetrical top and bottom left and right. F9 thickness nor point 15. Shift R to repeat the inset. F9 depth minus nor point to. And there we have it. All this just to emphasize the importance of applying transforms to objects. Before you get into the nitty-gritty of modelling them. Scale, especially it can really throw some tools off as we've seen. So just remember, if you resize things in object mode, control a Apply Scale. This is a really important concept to remember. There is a difference between transforming things at the object level versus the edit level. In the next lesson, we'll dig into this concept a bit more because it's crucial to understand it. 35. Object Vs Edit Mode Part 2: We're discussing the difference between working at the object level and the edit level, which you can think of as the sub object level. Let's move these objects out of the way a bit to the left of the world origin. Now Shift S, snap cursor to world origin. Shift a, add a cube again. Again, shift right-click to place the 3D cursor atop the new cube. Once again, I want to scale it up four times in the set axis. But, but before I do that, this time, I'll tab into edit mode. Now double-check your pivot point with a full stop or period key. You should be in 3D cursor pivot mode. By default, all geometry will be selected. Now, whilst we're still in edit mode, will again scale from the 3D cursors position. So as zed for tab back to object mode, in the sidebar, check the transforms. The object scale hasn't changed. When you're in edit mode, you're working inside the object. An object is really nothing more than a container for all sorts of geometrical or other data. In edit mode. No matter how much you change things, no matter how much you scale or move or rotate things around. No matter how you chop and change things with any of the modelling tools, you are always working inside the object. It follows that when you press Tab and pop back up into object mode, the location, rotation, and scale won't have changed. An object is just an invisible container. When you transform what's within the container in edit mode, you are not transforming the container itself. Tab to object mode and Alt Q toggle Local view. Or use the shortcut numpad forward slash tab to Edit. Full stop for the pivot Pi, select medium point. So this geometry will now pivot around its own center. Now, I'll just randomly move, rotate, scale this geometry. I'll grab an edge here. Put a bevel on there. And as you can see, there's no weird distortion happening because we have scaled to geometry. We never scaled the object that contains it. Tap back to object mode. In the sidebar, check the transforms. You'll see that the only things that have changed other dimensions. 36. Object Vs Edit Mode Part 3: Perhaps we can really see the difference between an object and the geometry it contains in this example. These two cameras appear to be identical. Yet if I select the body of the one on the left and move it around, it comes apart. In contrast with the one on the right. If I twirl open its collection, there's just one object in there. Let's check its transforms, the location, rotation, and scale. They're all at default. Select Camera mesh, numpad dot or Alt Q, frame selected, and tap to edit. Whilst in edit mode, we can still use a shortened form of the shift, a menu to add geometry, and the ad primitive tool to draw geometry as we did on the surface of the magnet earlier. In the earlier lesson, we were working in object mode. When I'm in object mode and I draw a cylinder, say using the Add Cylinder tool from the toolbar, you can see it gets added to the list of objects in the outliner. It's a self-contained object separate from any other. In this scene though, because I'm in edit mode, meaning we are already inside an object. The cylinder is I drew on not new objects and they don't appear in the outliner. There are simply pieces of geometry within this camera mesh objects. They're all part of one object, but I can still work on them separately to a degree. If I click to select part of one of those pieces of geometry in edit mode, say a face of this lens. I can now tap L to select any other geometry that's directly connected to it. Let's model the camera a bit. I'll select the bottom edge loop of the main camera body. Hop back into right orthographic view, drag it down a touch in the z-axis. Control space to maximize the viewport. Cut an edge loop beneath the lens. Bevel at a tiny amount. Alt E for the extrude menu. And extrude those faces along normals inwards to make a groove. Now toggle x-ray mode with this button up here. Shortcut Alt said. That way you can select through the model. Vertex Selection Mode. Select the top and the dials. Move them up. Outside out of X-ray Mode. Tab to object. Maybe I need a bigger camera or more deluxe model. Tab to edit. Two for edge mode, select this lower left edge. Open the snapping Pi with Shift S, cursor to select it. Now using the period or full stop pivot pi, switched to pivoting from the 3D cursor. Tab a to select all geometry in the object Alt Q, right? Orthographic. And scale up. You could even move the geometry completely away from the object origin, which just stays put. Let's get the geometry sitting on the x-axis. In short, we can add to and edit the geometry as much as we like. But when we tap back into object mode and again check the object transforms, the location, rotation, and scale remain unchanged. They're all still at their default values. If I grab it though, whilst in object mode, we see changes happening in the transforms because the object is now moving. And of course, we can see its origin is now moving to. 37. Separate, Delete, Grid Fill: There are times when you may need to separate parts of a single object. You might, for instance, download a model that's all of a piece, which would be much easier to work upon if it had separate components. Select this camera and tab into edit mode. I want to work on the lens separately. Remember, I can select a face, for example, and use the L key to select all the connected faces. Now I can make this into a separate object by using the shortcut P. Watch the outliner as I do p for the separate menu. And we'll separate by selection, tab to object mode. Up in the hierarchy. We now have a new object. I'll hide the original one and rename this one to lens. Now I want to take that one stage further and separate out the lens glass from the housing. Again, tap to edit, select that central phase P to separate, selection. Tab to object mode. Rename that to glass. Now it's easy for me to focus on that glass objects and manipulated without affecting any of the other geometry in the scene. With the class selected tap, numpad forward slash or Alt Q toggle Local view. At the moment, this is a single polygon tab into edit mode and switch to Vertex Selection. You can clearly see that this is a single many sided polygon, usually known as an end gone. There's not that much we can do with this simply because we don't have any of these control points or vertices across the surface. If I wanted to make this into a convex lens bulging outwards as it stands, I'd be stuck. I need to retain the outer perimeter of this object, but replace the big end gone surface. It's easy to do. First, select all. Now we'll use the Delete Pi shortcut x. As you can see, we have a host of options here, but we only want to delete the end gone face. So let's select this only faces option on the right. We're left with just the outer rim. I'll select that and switch to edge mode so you can see it better. Now let's fill this room with some more useful geometry. We could use the shortcut F to fill it. But that just brings us back to where we started. Undo. Now under the face menu, find, grid fill. For the sake of neatness, I'll tweet that now in the F9 menu. With the offset, I can rotate the quadrangles to make them all line up with the axes. Are just click an arrow a few times. Where now we have lots of geometry across the surface. So we can start making it much more three-dimensional. 38. Proportional Editing: Now that we have a bit more geometry, we can start manipulating this lens surface. Let's switch to Vertex Selection and toggle quad view with Control Alt Q. I'll navigate to more of a three-quarter view in the perspective viewport. Select the central vertex. Now over in top or front view. If I grab this one vertex, g, x, obviously I'll just make a spike. What we need is a way to have the movement of that one vertex smoothly influenced the rest. That can be achieved by activating this target looking tool. At the middle top of the viewport. The shortcut is the letter O. With it active. If I start the grabbed tool with say, g x, you can see a perimeter appears in the viewport. This defines the limit of influence of the tool. As I move the mouse, all of the vertices now move. Scrolling the mouse wheel changes the size of the reach of that influence. As you can see, decreasing the radius makes the effect more acute and reduces the number of vertices affected by the grab. It's also possible to change the way this influence fades out or falls off. By using this fall off dropdown. All these options are available in the proportional editing Pi Shift O. Let's set it back to smooth shift O. Smooth. Of course, it works with rotation and scale to our X S Shift X to restrict scaling to a plane. I'll undo that and just put a gentle spherical curve on it. Shift O. I'll choose Sphere as my fall off type and then move in the x axis. Switch proportional editing off. When you're done. The glass inherited its origin position from the lens housing it was separated from. As you can see, the origin is now all alone out here. Generally, it's useful to have an object's origin relate to its geometry in a more logical way. So let's make that happen. I think it makes sense to have the origin be flush with the outer perimeter of this lens. So in edge mode, I'll select that loop. Now we want the origin pi, control out x origin to selection, tab to object mode. We see the yellow origin dot is now flush with the perimeter of the glass. Toggle out of Quad View and toggle local view. Of course, whilst we reshaped it, the glass moved along the x-axis. And now there's a gap between it and the lens housing. We can use the transform snap to get it sitting flush again, turn snapping back on and select edges under the drop-down. Now move the glass back in the x, snapping to the inner edge of the lens housing. It's looking faceted, so right-click, Shade Smooth. And there you are. 39. Parenting Objects: Let's get this entire model separated out into its component parts. If I select Camera mesh, then tab to edit, then tap P for the separate menu. There is this option, loose parts. Now, because this was built using separate cylinders, cubes and so forth, it comes apart neatly. I'll quickly rename these parts. Now it's easy for me to work on each component separately, which is handy. But supposing I wanted this camera to behave a bit like a camera in the real-world. At the moment, if I grab the body, the other parts are left behind. What I want are separate components which are somehow connected together. In 3D. This is achieved using what's called parenting. In this case, it seems logical to use the camera body is the parent. Wherever it moves, the child components should follow. First, we'll select the children either in the viewport or the outliner. Lastly, shifts select what will become the parent. The last object to be selected is known in Blender as the active object. The body should become the parent. So we have to select that last. Now open the Parent menu with the shortcut Control P. Set parent to object. The outline I reflect this change. The other objects appear to have vanished. But if we twirl the body objects open, we see that they're all there. In fact, we can also use the outline. If a parenting let's undo the last step. Undo the parenting. Select the child objects first in the outliner, and now drag them holding Shift, drag them on top of the body and release. That's had the same effect. If we select the body in the viewport. You can see that any transformation we make to this parent object, RR for free rotation, scale, is followed by the child objects. I'll undo those changes. The opposite is not true. If I select and move the lens, for example. Nothing else moves with it. Of course, it might be handy for the glass to come along with the lens so we could select the glass. Then the lens Control P, set parents to object, de-select all. Now select it again and move the lens object. And now the glass does move with the lens. And of course, as I move the body, since the lens was already parented to it, everything still moves along together. Finally, if you decide you don't want something to be a child anymore. Let's again use the lens as an example. Select it. This time, use the Alt P menu. Choose Clear parent. Now when I move the body, the lens is left behind. To review. Choose the object you want to be a parent. Last, how repairing the lens to the body. So lens first, then body control P for the set Parent menu, parent to object. And again, Alt P for the clear Parent menu. 40. Modifiers Part 1: We're almost at the point where we can just cut loose and build this scene. But there's a major modeling topic we haven't covered yet. Modifiers. We've been getting used to some mesh editing or modelling tools such as the bevel, extrude and so on. These all come under the category of direct modeling techniques. We apply them directly to the mesh, and that's that we have the F9 last operation menu. But once we click away from that, we no longer have much flexibility. Look closely at the render here, and you'll see that the magnet has a slight bevel to it. Let's practice recreating that here. Maximize this viewport control space. I'll switch to solid shading for the moment, which we can do with the zed Pie Menu Tab to edit. Let's start off in face select mode and select these two underside faces are now switch to edge select mode. Shift out, click to select these outer edge loops. Now all the outer edges are selected. We can apply a bevel Control B. Remember you can hold shift for more precision. Control space to toggle Full Screen. With our last operation menu open, we can tweak the bevel to try and match the render. That'll do. Tab to object mode. Tap said, switch back to material preview mode. Okay, orbiting around a magnet. That looks fine, but we're now stuck with that. Bevel, you or your art director may later decide you want, say, around bevel instead of a straight chamfer or a bigger bevel, it'll be tedious to make such a change. Now, this is where modifiers come into their own. In the outliner, unhide this cube object Control Space to maximize the viewport. Again, the objects called cube appears to be almost identical to the magnet we just beveled. But if I tap to edit mode, it looks radically different. What's going on? I'll switch back to solid shading, zed PI, control space. This simple cube geometry is being transformed into a magnet shaped by modifiers. They're found under this blue wrench tab in the object properties. You can see there are two, a simple deform and a bevel modifier. Next to the modifier names are these visibility buttons, this square icon, toggles visibility in edit mode. If I switched them both on, you see a ghost of the original geometry and the effect the modifiers are having upon that geometry. Zooming in as I toggle the bevel modifier on and off in edit mode, you can make out the bevel It's creating. If I twirl the bevel modifier open, you can see options similar to those you get with the direct Bevel tool. The difference though, is that these options remain live. Even if I click away. Of course, the same goes for all modifiers. I can adjust the simple deform. Obviously, this makes for a far more flexible workflow then direct modeling. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to use modifiers to build a magnet like this from scratch. 41. Modifiers Part 2: As you can see from its name in the outliner, I used a cube as the starting point for this magnet. But let's see if we can make an even more flexible one enabling us to control its thickness with yet another modifier. Generally, the simpler the base geometry and the more modifiers you stack, the more flexibility you have. I'll just move this along in a wife and now say three meters. Shift a to add a plane. Switch to solid shading. And top orthographic view. It in y, say two times. And in x, say nought 0.2. We now have this long narrow strip. Now, remember the golden rule. We've been scaling at the object level, which we can check in the sidebar. So now we have to reset or apply that. Control a Apply Scale tab to edit. At the moment, we just have this single polygon. If I add a simple deform modifier now, under the default category, simple deform. Bend mode. In the viewport orbit around a bit. Now I'll crank up the angle and nothing happens. Part of the reason is that similarly to when we started making a convex lens, we don't have much geometry to work with. A single polygon simply won't bend. I'll use the loop cut tool Control R. And instead of scrolling the mouse wheel, I'll simply type in a decent number of cuts, say 64, to give us plenty of geometry to play with. Left-click to confirm the number of cuts. Right-click to leave them evenly spaced. Still nothing happens. The simple deform modifier can seem counter-intuitive at first, clicking the axis options doesn't fill me with joy either. Though. Something changes when I choose the z axis. But it's hard to tell what. I want the plane to bend around the x axis like the other magnet. So I'll click that axis in the simple deform options. Let's think the band has to happen around the x-axis. And as a consequence, we want this plane to have dimension in the y-z plane. If we tap numpad 3 4, right? Orthographic view, we're now looking along the x-axis at the YZ plane. The rule with the simple deform is if you want to bend around the x or y-axis, then you must have geometry in the z-axis from this angle. Especially if I de-select it, it's clear our plane is invisible in the zed axis, tabbing to object mode. In the sidebar. Under dimensions, there is 0 in the zed axis. It has no height at all. The simple deform won't work. Tab back into edit mode and orbit around a bit. In the simple deform, let's set the deform angle to 180. In the viewport, our Select All and rotate in x. And as soon as I start to rotate the geometry in the x-axis, it gains some height in the zed axis. And so the bend deformer starts to work. Type 90. So the geometry lines up with the z-axis. In the deformer. Playing with the angle setting, you'll start to get an idea of how it's working. 360 gives us a full circle around the x-axis. 180 gives us half. Now under this restriction dropped down, we have these limit fields which control which section of our geometry to apply the bend to 0 representing one end of the plane, one, the other. We could have this 180 curve affect only the midsection of the geometry by ignoring, say, the first and last 25 percent of it. If I put 25 percent or nought 0.25 in the start field and have it only affect the plane up to 75 percent of its length. So I'll enter nor 0.75 in the end field. Now we're getting something more like a magnet shape. I'll make these sides a bit less parallel by increasing the bend angle a bit tab to object mode. And now we can simply rotate it through minus 90 in x to compensate for the rotation we gave it earlier when we were in edit mode. 42. Modifiers Part 3: Now let's give this magnet some thickness again with a modifier. Click Add Modifier. And under the Generate heading, find, solidify. The simple deform to give yourself some room. Under the solidify modifier. Play with the thickness. Negative values will add thickness to the outside rather than the inside. 12 or solidify up. Finally, Let's add a bevel modifier, which will again find under the general heading. Of course play with the amount of segments, etc. Further down we can adjust the shape of the bevel under the Profile tab. A value less than nought, 0.25. We'll make a concave bevel in right view. Let's move it up and have a side-by-side comparison with the one I made earlier. I'll try and match the size and style of the bevel on the old magnet. Now watch what happens to that bevel if I change the overall scale of the new magnet in object mode, first, I'll switch to scaling from the 3D cursor. If I really exaggerate the scaling, you can see the bevel has been scaled to. If I apply the scale, control a scale. The bevel goes back to what it was. But now we've got other problems. Undo a couple of times to get rid of that scaling. When you're working with modifiers. Just as we've seen with the direct modeling tools. If you want to scale something up or down, you're safest bet is to tap into edit mode first and do your scaling at the mesh level. Toggle Quad View. So tab into edit mode first, a to select all, change your pivot mode to median point, to scale from the median point of the geometry rather than the 3D cursor. Scale up. Tab back to object mode to move. Again, edit to scale, tab back to object mode to move. Now we've got quite a flexible setup. With the solidify modifier. We can change the thickness along the length of the bar. If we want to change the thickness in the x-axis, we can just tap to edit mode S X to change the length of the bar S, Y. With the simple deform, we can change the band angle, change the tightness of the bend by changing the percentage of the body that gets bent. And of course, change the bevel. Thanks to the use of modifiers. This all remains live is what's known as procedural modelling. 43. Bool Tool: The last modifier I want to show you is for chopping one shape out of another. There is this chopped sphere in the render. Let's go through how I made it. Delete these magnets and bring in a UV sphere. Under the F9 menu, we can see it has a radius of one meter. Let's switch to top view. Now, I'll bring in a cube. In the F9 menu, we can see its size is two meters. If I move it one meter to the right, Gx one, we see half of the sphere. If I move it one meter up in the Y-axis, G, Y1, we now see three quarters of the sphere. We're now going to use the cube as a cutter to chop away the hidden quarter of the sphere to be on the safe side and make sure the quarter sphere is completely enveloped by the cube tab to edit and scale it up, say 1.5 in z. Now select the sphere. Add a modifier. Under the Generate list, find Boolean. In the Boolean modifier. These top three options are known as operators. By default, it'll be set to difference. Now under object, either click the eyedropper and select the cube in the outliner or the viewport. You can also use this drop-down lists. And now hide the cube. And there you have it. There is a much more efficient way to use Boolean modifiers in Blender using one of the pre-loaded add-ons. Q for Quick favorites. Preferences. Add-ons. Search for bool, be double l, L, and there it is, bool to activate that and to hold it open to see the shortcuts. The ones I'm interested in are the brush operators. You'll remember that the operator we just used was difference. So under brush operators, Let's learn this shortcut Control. Numpad minus. Back in the viewport. Select the sphere and delete the Boolean modifier. Unhide the cube. Now pay attention to the color of the highlights as I select the sphere and the cube. If I select the sphere first, then shifts like the cube. Notice that the cube has a brighter highlight. As we've seen in the parenting lesson in Blender, the last object you select is known as the active object. So if I were to use the Bowl Tool now, it would apply a Boolean modifier to the cube instead of the sphere, control numpad minus. And as you can see, that's the opposite of what I wanted. Let's undo and reverse the selection order. First, the cutter, the cube, then the sphere. The sphere now becomes the active object. And we'll get the Boolean modifier applied to it, control numpad minus. And there we are. Notice though that I haven't had to hide the cube this time. Bool tool has automatically put it into bounding box display mode. So I can still select it and edit it if I want. For example, I could tab into edit mode on the cube. Select the 3D cursor as my pivot point, because that's right in the center of the sphere. Go into face select mode and rotate the face on the z-axis so as to cut out a narrow segment of the sphere. Tab to object mode. So it's easy to see the result. Once again, because this is a modifier applied to this sphere, it remains live control space to maximize. If I want, I can select the cube, once again, tab into edit mode. And this time use the Shift a menu to add more geometry to the cube object, say another cube. By scaling it down and moving it so that it intersects with another part of the sphere. I cut out another chunk. Staying in edit mode in the cube object, I could use the add primitive tool to draw geometry onto and into the surface of the sphere. With the Bowl Tool, I can very quickly start getting some quite interesting shapes. 44. Vertex Groups: We don't always need to split things into separate objects in order to be able to isolate parts easily. In the gold and marble rods in the render, for example. The only difference between the middle and the ends is the material applied. But it's all of a piece. You can control how materials are applied to a model using vertex groups. Let's take a look at how this was done. Let's say that a bit like this rod over here. We wanted the end phases of this 3D cross to be gold. Toggle, local view, tab to edit. Switch to face select mode. Select all the end faces. This selection can now be saved for future use. To do that, we assign these selected parts to a vertex group. Over in the properties editor. Find the green Object Data Properties tab. And find vertex groups. Click the plus sign to add a new group. Let's rename it to say ends. Next, click Assign to assign the current selection to that new group. Tested by de-selecting in the viewport out a. And back in Vertex groups, click Select. There's also a de-select button here. That's working. Our selection has been stored in a vertex group, ends. In the next lesson, we'll see how to use such vertex groups to assign different materials to different parts of the cross. 45. Assigning Materials: Now that we're starting to work with materials, Let's switch our Viewport Shading mode to material preview. De-select all in the view-port. Down in the properties editor, below the little green triangle is the material tab. At the top of it is this empty area. An object can have any number of materials assigned to it. And this area is where they will all live in containers known as slots. The first step is to make a new slot with this little plus sign. Now we have an empty slot or container for a material. Next, we need to create a new material, which we'll go into that container or slapped. Click the New button. The previously empty slot now has a material in it. As you can see. Scrolling down, we have heaps of parameters for this material. Let's change the base color. Click the color chip, and use the wheel and or sliders to pick a blue color. You'll see the whole cross turn blue. Double-click the material name to rename it, blew. Back up at the top. Let's make another empty material slot. Click the little plus sign. I want a different material to be put into this second slot. So once again, I'll click the New Material button. The second slot now has the new material inside it. Let's call it pink. Click the base color chip. This time, select a pink color. The cross remains blue. Blender is keeping track of the material slot list, remembering the first one that was assigned, and simply ignoring any other materials. Let's use the vertex group we made earlier to instruct blender to assign this pink material to the ends of the cross. B, sure you're in edit mode. To ensure materials only get assigned to the parts you intend. Always de-select all geometry with the shortcut called a first. Now wonder the green object data tab. Go to Vertex groups. Select and click Select. Now switch back to the material tab. Select the pink material and click Assign. Easy as that. Using multiple materials, lots and vertex groups in combination, it's easy to assign them to different parts of your models. Hide overlays to see that better. 46. Materials Orphan Data And Fake Users: Let's bring in a bit more blink and make the ends of this cross gold instead of pink. Get rid of the pink slot by clicking the minus button here. If you're still in edit mode, you'll be notified that you have to switch to object mode in order to do this, tab to object. Delete the slot. Now the cross has no pink material slot, so we're back to this blue material all over. Note however, that just because you deleted the slot, you haven't lost the pink material until you close this project. Blender will store it. When the project is closed though, it will be deleted. Clicking the little sphere icon below the materials thoughts here will open the material drop-down. And you'll see that the pink material is indeed the lab. Notice that it has a 0 in front of it, indicating that is used on 0 objects in the scene. In Blender land, this is known as often data. If I select the remaining material slot, then in the materials drop-down, select pink. The slot name updates to reflect the material it contains. And if I click the material drop-down again, now the 0 has disappeared from the pink material because it is now in use. But the blue material now has a 0 instead. If you really want to make sure Blender saves orphan data such as an unused material, protected with this little shield icon next to the material name. Once again, I'll switch materials back to blue. In the materials drop-down. Pink now has the letter F next to it. Because I clicked that shield. Blender is now pretending it's a new somewhere. And we'll store it even on closing. The F, standing for fake user. 47. Metallic Materials: Make a new material slot and a new material. Call it gold. In the viewport tab to edit. Select all. Let's enable overlays. And with the gold material slot selected, click Assign. Tab to object mode. Hide overlays. As you can see in the viewport. We're now back to this blank new material. Scroll down a little through the gold material settings to find metallic. Set that to one. Fully metallic. It's now looking a bit more reflective. Let's put a little bevel on this model using a bevel modifier. Turn the amount way down. Naught point, naught, naught one looks good. Make six segments to round it off. The viewport, right-click, Shade Smooth. Orbiting around. That does look sort of metallic though it's a bit rough. Adjusting the roughness is a simple matter. A few sliders down from metallic is one aptly called roughness. As this value approaches 0, the surface gets glossier and more obviously metallic. Changing the HDRI lighting maybe to this interior scene will help us see that better. Okay, That's a nice shiny silver, but let's make it gold, which we can easily do by changing the base color. Let's practice assigning this gold material to that vertex group we made. Make sure overlays are on. Now in edit mode. First, we'll have to reassign the blue material, which the gold material replaced. In the viewport. Select all select the blue material slot. Click Assign. Now de-select all geometry with Alt a and back under the green object data tab. Select the ends, vertex group. Click Select. Finally, switch back to the materials tab. Select the gold material slot and assign that material to the selected vertices. 48. Transparent Materials: Transparent materials like the one on this cone shape in the render. A pretty simple to make, but we'll tackle it in a slightly different way from the last material we made. Instead of using the material settings like we did with the cross over here in the properties editor. We'll edit this new material in a different window. Right-click on the border, select join areas. Move over the image editor and click to close it. Hover over a corner of the view-port down at the bottom until you see the cross cursor. And this time, simply drag to split the area. I'll drag up a fair way to give myself plenty of room. Turn this lower window into a shader editor. Tab N to get rid of the sidebar, if there is one. In the viewport, select this cone to tone base object. Make a new material, which automatically creates a new material slot. I'll call it blurry glass. You'll have seen some nodes appear in the shader editor. Zoom in and you'll see that the big one is a duplicate of the one under the material tab. It's called the principled be SDF, or more commonly the principled shader or Uber shader. I don't want to use it this time, so I'll delete it. In the viewport. The cone base has gone black to indicate its surface has no shader. Now in just the way you would add geometry in the 3D Viewport, use Shift a to add nodes in the shader editor. But the top of the list is a blue Search button. Click that. We want a glass shader. So start typing glass. And there it is. Select Glass be SDF. Material nodes have their outputs on the right, their inputs on the left. On the glass shader. Click and drag from its green shader output to plug it into the surface input of the material node. Let's give the 3D Viewport more space. And frame selected. At the moment. That's a perfectly smooth surface and it looks like a mirror. It's hard to tell how this would really render in material preview mode. So switch to rendered view. Hide overlays. Down in the shader editor. I'll just add some roughness to that quite a bit. I should say, nought 0.25. You can also change the color if you like. Something not too saturated might look good. 49. Image Based Materials Part 1: There's a marble texture on this rod in the render, which was created using an image texture downloaded from a fantastic open source website. Ambient CG. Resources such as this are invaluable to the 3D artist. So I'd strongly encourage you to support them by making a donation. I've already downloaded this material. You'll find it in the project files. The workflow for using image-based textures requires us to dig deeper into the material settings. And so once again, we'll need the shader editor. Across the top of the interface are all these tabs, which are simply different layouts designed to make certain tasks easier. In the world of 3D graphics, making materials is also known as shading. Let's switch to this tab. We're presented with the 3D viewport. We have a file browser on the left and image editor below that. And the shader editor itself. Shaders usually require quite a bit of space. So I'll drag up to make this bigger. And in the 3D view port, Let's hop back into camera view and frame selected. At the moment, the materials tab of the rod doesn't have any materials in it, make a new material. I'll call it marble. You'll see some familiar nodes appear in the shader editor. There are endless ways to modify shaders by adding more nodes and combining them in pretty much infinite ways. Shift a to add a node. Click Search. We're going to be using an image for our texture. So we need an image texture node. So search for image. Select that. Click the Open button and navigate to the marble 0, 1, 2 texture folder. If I switch this file browser to thumbnail view, you'll see these are simply standard flat PNG images, like photos. We were only going to concern ourselves with color at the moment. So open the color texture. This node has a yellow color output, and we can connect that anywhere we see a corresponding yellow input on another node. In this instance, let's replace this blank white in the base color field with the color information from the image texture. And there we have it. In the next lesson, we'll look at how to move and resize this texture. 50. Mapping Textures: We've now got this marble texture showing up on the cylinder. But to change the position, rotation, and scale of the texture, we need a couple more nodes. First, we need to tell blender specifically how to wrap what is, after all, a flat 2D image onto a three-dimensional object. It's the reverse of the problem faced by map makers. How do you flatten a globe's surface into a plane? In order to make a map. There's no limit to the number of different ways you can do this. Just as there are infinite ways to peel an orange. Each projection type has its pros and cons. Some cause more distortion than others. In sticking this marble texture onto a solid, we're attempting the same process in reverse, taking something with only two-dimensions or axes, which we'll call u and v. And by bending, shaping and perhaps cutting and stitching, get those u and v coordinates or UVs, to somehow map onto the 3D XYZ coordinates of an object surface. 51. Image Based Materials Part 2: We won't be going into the intricacies of UV mapping in this course. But one quick and easy way for blender to work out a UV map for an object is to work out the smallest box that the 3D object would fit into. And simply stick the texture to all six sides of that box. Under the yellow object properties tab of this cube. Scroll to viewport display. And at the bottom, enable bounds. Now in this case, of course, the bounds line up precisely with the cube they envelop. So we don't notice much difference. Just these black lines. If I show this sphere though, the bounding box is easy to make out. I'll hide that sphere for now. Now. All we did with the marble rod was plug an image texture straight into the base color input, like this. Blender just squashes the whole texture into each side of the bounding box. And as this pocket dot texture happens to be square shaped, as we can see here in the image editor. There's no apparent squashing or stretching of the texture on the cube. Now on this regular cube, that looks okay. But on this cube, long object, the ends look okay because they're dead square. But the sides, obviously they are not square like the texture, but rectangular. So the texture, which in this case does happen to be a square, gets stretched out into a rectangular shape. It's a similar situation with the marble rod from before. To show it, I mean, I'll reveal this cylinder here. Once again, the dots are circular on the ends because the ends are as tall as they are wide like a square is. But again, the dots becomes stretched along the length of the cylinder. We need to be able to transform the texture. And at the bottom left of the image texture node, we have what's called a vector input, which can have transformed data or coordinates, plugged into his shift a search for coordinate. Plug the first output into the vector input of the image texture. And that's messed things up nicely. Along the sides of the cylinder. The dots haven't changed all that much. But at the end, they just smeared out into lines. Let's look at a cube rotated to see what's happening a bit better. Notice it's local zed axis. If we look at it from its local top view by toggling orthographic and pressing Shift numpad 7, it becomes clear that the whole of the texture is simply being projected along the objects local z-axis. The other axes are being ignored. And the texture is being projected right through the object. To the bottom where we see dots. Again. To fix this, we can force the texture to use the box type rejection, similar to what we had before bringing in the texture coordinate node back in the image texture node. The second dropdown is a projection control. If I choose Box. Once again, the texture is projected from all sides of the bounding box. 52. Image Based Materials Part 3: We still need a way to move and resize the texture. And for that, we'll need another node. Shift, a search for mapping. If I now drag this onto the noodle between the coordinate nodes and the image texture node. The noodle will highlight and the node will wire up automatically. Now I can move, rotate, and scale the texture on each axis independently. Note that with textures increasing, the scale appears to work inversely. The larger the scale value, the smaller the pattern seems to get. One of the main drawbacks of the box projection method is the CME created between size of the box, which we can clearly see in this cylinder. With a graphic texture like this. There's not much you can do about this scene. But if we hop back into our main scene, let's add our two helper nodes, texture coordinates and mapping. Again in the image texture node, change the projection style to box. Zooming right in on the end of the cylinder. As we just learned, a siem is visible between the sides of the box projection. Unlike with the polka dot texture though. Because in this case we're dealing with an irregular, natural texture with no clear graphic shapes anywhere. We can use the blend function just underneath the box projection setting. Increasing the blend value will blur out the seem a little. And of course, we can transform the texture with the mapping node. I'll switch on local gizmos so we know where we're working. In this case, it looks as though my texture is a bit stretched along the z axis. So I'll increase the scale value there. About 2.5 to three. It looks okay. 53. Procedural Materials Wood Part 1: We now have this image-based marble texture applied to the rod. Let's shift our attention to this chopped sphere that looks sort of like would. We won't make as detailed texture as in this render. But I'll show you the basic principle. First, apply a texture to the objects in the Properties Manager. I'll call it, would procedural. Procedures are just mini programs that contain a series of steps to be carried out. You may remember, I used the term procedural during the modifiers chapter. They save you from directly modelling objects and making geometry that you're pretty much stuck with. Instead they remain live. So you can change them at anytime. This magnet you remember, has a procedural bevel on it, which I can change whenever I like. Procedural materials, work the same way. In contrast to a fixed image, like in the marble material we just made. We can make a network of nodes in order to create patterns. And just like with modifiers, we can change them whenever we like. Select sphere chopped again and down in the shader editor, Shift a to add. Search for Wave. Plug that in to the base color. This wave texture is one of the procedural textures. Now on my model, that texture is going black inside. Let's try a different type of wave, say, rings. At this point, it would be a very good idea to enable another add-on, specifically for working in the shader editor like this. So open Preferences, Add-ons, search for wrangler, w, r, a, n. There it is, enable that. This add-on makes working with nodes much easier, right? To me, that wave texture is looking a little awkward and I'd like to line it up better with the sphere. By now you know what I need for that. The texture coordinate node and the mapping node, Node Wrangler makes it dead easy to bring these in and wire them up. I'll just select the texture node that needs adjusting, in this case the wave texture. Then I use the shortcut Control T. Hey presto. Now I can shift that wave around. In the next lesson, we'll look at how to fine tune the wave texture to get it looking a bit more woody. 54. Procedural Materials Wood Part 2: Now let's add a little distortion to the wave. Say three. We can also add noise to the pattern with the detail setting. I think I'll take mine down to 0. If I wanted to make a tighter or looser grain, I can change the scale. But what if I want relatively more white than black in the pattern? For that, we'll need a way to squash and stretch black and white values using something called a color ramp. Shift, a R, a SNP. If I now change the ramp by say, dragging the black not rightwards towards the white one. I'm getting relatively more black and vice versa. Now I could add a bit more distortion maybe. Okay, let's say I'm happy with this simple wood grain pattern and now I want to colorize it. I could just add a second ramp. This time, leave the knots where they are, but change the colors instead. The color ramp is just looking for incoming black and white values and shifting them according to whatever changes I make in the ramp itself. The left-hand side of the ramp will transform any black values. The right-hand side will transform any white values. If I select the black not of this new color ramp and click the college it below to change its color, to say a brown. Accordingly. Up in the viewport, you'll notice that what was once black in the way of texture has shifted to brown. Let's do the same for white values. Selects the not. Click the color chip. I could even use the ink dropper to select from the gradient itself. Tweak it as you see fit. Play with the wave texture settings. And the first gradient ramp to get something would ish. In the reference render, you'll notice that wood texture is slightly more complex. It's simply two slightly different wave texture setups layered on top of each other. But we'll cover procedural textures in more detail in another course. 55. World Lighting Part 1: In an earlier lesson, we used rendered view to check the transparency of the blurry glass material on this cone. Behind the scenes, I had already set up some lighting so that things would render reasonably well. Now we'll start learning how I did that. A render needs geometry, a camera and lights. If I switch over to this minimal scene, obviously we have some geometry and the camera. But in the outliner, there are no lights. If I go to the render menu and select Render Image. Well, we don't get an image because there's no light in the scene. Switch back to the main scene. And scrolling through the outliner, you'll find there are no lights here, either. Again, random menu, render image or tap the shortcut F2. Now this might not be a very appealing image, but we do at least see something in the render despite the lack of lights. Why? It's because of this little red world tab. This is like a sphere of sky surrounding our scene on all sides. It creates ambient light coming in from every direction. If I now switch to rendered view and orbit the scene, you'll see there is this foggy gray in the background. No matter which way I look, that color is being controlled here in the world tab, you'll see the ambient light change. As I change this. It can have its uses, but far more options become available to you. If just like with materials on objects, you use the node editor to modify the world lighting. Come down here to the shader editor and to the right of the little shader icon switched from object to world. Again, as with materials, you can see that this simple background shader corresponds to the surface settings under the World tab. Let's bring in a sky texture to replace this monochrome color, which is what's making the render look so flat. It's almost totally devoid of shadows or highlights because the same intensity and color of light is hitting our objects from every direction. Shift a click Search type, sky. Connected to the background node. We see some sort of environment now surrounds our scene. That's an improvement. We can see more shadows under our objects. Because if I orbit over the top, there's little to no light coming from below. We can better make out the transparency on this cone. Object to the few controls in the sky texture can significantly change the lighting. With the elevation setting, we can make the sun higher or lower in the sky. And like in the real-world, this affects the color of the sunlight. I'll set it to early morning or evening. The sun just one degree above the horizon. We can also rotate the sun around at about a 130 degrees. You can make out the disc of the sun. Now you'll see it change as I increase its size. Other settings affect the color of the light to increase air pollution. Darken the horizon. Increasing the Ozone makes it look more blue. Play around with these settings. It's a very handy tool to have to make a reasonably convincing outdoor lighting setup pretty quickly. It can also be really useful when you're setting up materials. Because there are times, as we've seen with this cone, for example, when the material preview shading doesn't quite give us enough information. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to take things one step further and bring in real-world scenery instead of the procedural sky texture node. This can lend incredible realism to your lighting. 56. World Lighting with HDRIs: The sky texture is a great tool, but it can only ever be an approximation of real-world lighting. You will also have noticed that the viewport is a bit laggy and grainy because blender is making a massive number of calculations in order to create something very close to a physically accurate render. Recall that when we are in super snappy material preview mode, under the drop-down, we can change the world lighting as we cycle through them. The lighting is changing. These special spherical photographs are known as h DRIs. If we want to see the HDRI in the viewport to get a clear sense of what's causing the world lighting in material preview mode. We can turn up its opacity and turn down It's blur. Now as I cycle through, you can clearly tell what's happening. Even better if I hide the geo collection and switch on cross 3D gold control space to maximize the viewport. As I orbit the cross, it's clear, it's reflecting the photograph. This is largely whether realism is coming from. Of course, as I switch between HDRI is the reflections on the cross change accordingly. These are presets a reasonably wide range of different environments to enable you very quickly to test out your materials in all sorts of lighting conditions. At the time of recording, these eight presets are all you have at your disposal. On the other hand, for your final render, which will also be what appears in rendered viewport mode. The sky really is the limit. You can use any HDRI you like. And there are thousands available for free online. My favorite source is poly haven. I found it such a useful resource over the years that I make a monthly contribution through their patron. As you can see, there are a hundreds. The particular one I chose was cipher Fontane, 60, clear available here. Thanks to their incredibly generous Creative Commons licensing, I've been able to include it in the project files. If you haven't already switched to rendered view port mode, which still shows the sky texture we brought in in the last lesson. To set up a new HDRI Environment. Once again, make sure your shader editor is in World mode. Shift a to add click Search. We need a node called environment texture. So in the search bar type environment, we need to load an HDR image here. So click Open and navigate to cipher Fontane 60 clear. This node will now replace the sky texture. So just drag the output from the environment texture node onto the background input. We can now delete the sky texture. Let's see how our scene looks. Jump into camera view, hide the gold cross, and show the geo collection. That's looking a bit silhouetted as if the sun is somewhere behind these objects. So let's try rotating our HDRI. By now you know how to transform textures use a texture coordinate node and a mapping note on this environment texture. With Node Wrangler enabled, select it and make a texture setup with Control T. Now as I rotate around the z-axis in the mapping node, you can see it updating in the viewport. And the direction of the lighting is changing. 57. Adding Lights: Now that I've applied materials to everything, I'd like to add a touch more light to the underside of the scene and maybe catch some of the edges from behind. I think the bottom faces of the magnet could be brightened up a bit. I also think I'd like to see more of a highlight on the right of this twisted tourists. When you're lighting, it's a good idea to leave one viewport in render preview shading, and maneuver around in a separate viewport. To prevent myself from jumping out of this camera view by mistake though, I'll select the camera. And under its object properties, Transform. Click and drag the little logs to dock all it's transforms. Now in the render preview, you port Alt Q for the view Pi lock camera to view. Now, no matter what I do, will stay fixed in our camera view here on the left. It also helps to switch off overlays in the render preview as they can be distracting. Now let's like this magnet. To start off in about the right place, our position, the 3D cursor on one of these underside faces. Using the 3D cursor from the toolbar. I'll set the cursor to align to geometry. Then Shift a to add. And this time, skip down to the light menu. I'll choose area. This act a bit like a photographer's softbox. Great for adding extra light to specific areas of your scene. Now under the F9 menu, I'll align it to the 3D cursor. Already you can see the bevel on the magnet is catching that new light. And notice that the local z axis of the light is what has been aligned to the cursor. You can also see a little yellow gizmo. This shows us which way the light is pointing. By clicking and dragging it. You can put it wherever you like. I'll undo that though and instead enable the local rotation gizmo. I find this gives me more control. I'll move the light down below the magnet and shifted to cross to illuminate both ends of it. 58. Adding Lights Part 2: I need to shift this light until I pretty much only see it reflected on the bottom of the magnet. At the moment, I can see it reflected in a gold sphere. By moving it a bit behind the magnet, we can sort of just about get it to lighten the magnet exclusively. We might change its color a bit to match the background better, perhaps by picking a color from near the horizon. And now to catch the outer edge of this tourists, we could just duplicate that light Shift D, then pick an axis name, say the local zed, zed, zed. And again move and rotate it to better catch that outer edge. Scaling it down will obviously give us a smaller highlights. Maybe I'll change the color to perhaps a pale yellow would look good. Always good housekeeping to rename things. So I'll rename these lied to. I can now move these lights into their own collection. Then move that collection into the crew collection. Now let's use the hide in viewports switch to toggle the new light collection off and on. 59. Render Settings Part 1: Now that I've got all my materials applied and the lighting setup, the way I want. The only remaining job is to make a high-quality outputs or render of this scene. I'll close this right-hand viewport. You've been used to looking at this square format, which is our camera view. But this is not the default camera aspect ratio. Now switch to solid shading for a minute and turn overlays back on. If I add another camera in this scene, shift a camera, you'll see that it also looks square-shaped. But in the default seen hour shift, right-click next to the cube over here on the right somewhere. Add a camera. And it looks rectangular as does the one that was already in the scene. If I toggle camera view. The shape or aspect ratio of these cameras is reflecting the resolution set in the output properties over here in the properties editor third tab down under dimensions. We're now in active camera view. And as you can see, it's a standard HD 16 by nine rectangle. Watch what happens to this as I change the resolution x field, the rectangle gets relatively taller or shorter. And you'll notice the other camera is also changing because this resolution setting carries through seen wide. Whichever camera you decide to render from. It will render at the scene resolution set here. Let's go back to our main scene and try it again here. Changing the x or y resolution, changes their proportions or aspect ratio of the render. I'll reset it to 1080 by 1080 pixels. So it's square again and delete that extra camera. All we need concern ourselves with now are the render properties in the second tab down. And we'll take a closer look at these in the next lesson. 60. Render Settings Part 2: We've set the render resolution to 1080 by 1080 pixels and can now set up our render properties. Let's switch to rendered shading. When you first launch blender, the render engine, what you might call the finished image maker, is set by default to something called EV. Ev renders images in a similar way to that seen in video games. And whilst is incredibly fast. Let's switch to it now. And compare orbiting around in the scene in EV. With cycles. You'll see EV is really snappy and responsive by comparison. Yet, if we jump into camera view and toggle between EV and cycles. And back to EV. There are certain gotchas with EV which have to be worked around. Notably when it comes to transparent and reflective materials. This hex prism and the cone obviously look different in the EV render. I'll zoom in on the prism so you can see it clearly. And now switch to cycles. And right out of the box, cycles is calculating some pretty convincing reflection and refraction as compared with EV. Setting up EV to render more physically accurately is a topic for another course. For now, we'll stick with cycles is our render engine because it's a fantastic tool specifically designed for making seriously lifelike renders, as you've seen. Now hit pause on the viewport whilst we adjust some settings. If you have a decent graphics card in your system, then select that in the device dropped down. Whilst we're on the subject. Open Preferences. Go to System cuda. And if you have a compatible one, ensure your systems graphics card is enabled. They're unable to CPU 2, if you like. This allows blender to throw all the computing resources it can add the render will be doing some side-by-side comparisons of renders. So to prevent new render windows from popping up all the time. I'll also change an interface setting. Interface. Editors, temporary editors render in. Change this from new window to image editor. Close preferences. Now let's get an image editor open so that in the next lesson, renders will appear here in the interface. 61. Render Settings Part 3: Start the viewport render again. Remember that in the viewport you only seeing as cycles preview render. It's a little grainy, which is to do with the number of calculations or samples which are being run here. You can see that setting under sampling in the render properties, viewports, 32 samples. Pause the viewport again just to save computing power. Now compare this to a proper Render, Render, Render Image or F2. You can see the pink of the magnet is a bit cleaner looking in the real render, then in the preview render. That's largely because we have 256 calculations or samples at render time as opposed to just 32 in the viewport. Note how long that took at the top-left of the render window. Just under eight seconds. We do still see a fair amount of noise in the full render though inside the arch of the magnet, for example. Happily, we can probably clean that up with a flick of a switch. Further down under the Sampling options is denoising. Next to render. Switch that on. The default Open Image de-noise should work fine. Before we set off another render. Go to the top right of the render window and select a new slot for the next render to be placed into F 12 again. Again, note how long that took. Let's focus just on the shadow inside the magnet and compare slot one with slot t2. The difference is quite clear. If you want an even sharper render, you could go the brute force route and double the number of total samples. This is a lot more work for Blender, so it will certainly result in a longer render time. But as this is a single frame, I'm not too worried if it takes awhile. Let's fit the entire render here by tapping shift home. And compare slot one with slot t2. And finally slot three. Well, I can see a slight difference between slots 23. But how much of an improvement we see with 512 samples and the extra seconds of render time is debatable. There comes a point, especially if you're rendering thousands of frames for an animation, when you need to balance render quality with render time. In the case of this still image, and there being only a 4 second difference, it doesn't really matter so much. Multiply those four seconds by thousands though. And it was soon add significantly to your render time. When you're happy with your image in the render window, go up to Image, Save As, and choose your directory for it.