Blender Low Poly Environment Course

1. Introduction: Hello everyone and welcome to this new low poly modeling course. As beginner and intermediate users, we'll be learning even more techniques and starting to use parts of blender which have been hidden to us before. Despite the simple low poly art style, we'll be experimenting with new different modeling techniques and the advantages and disadvantages of certain workflows that are key to becoming an efficient artist. The Asset Pac we'll be creating will be a diverse mix of trees, foliage, rocks, buildings, characters, and landscape scenery, where we'll be using procedural shaders and geometry notes to edit our terrain all inside Blender. I'm really excited to get started, so let's make a start in the next video. 2. Setting Up Your Scene and Project Folder Hierarchy: Hello everyone and welcome to the first proper video of this course. Now in this video, we'll be setting up our scene ready so we can start modeling. We're going to talk briefly about different low poly styles and create a reference board. And at the end of the video, we'll do something practical. We'll create the sky and sun. Before we start, let's quickly sort out our project folder and the hierarchy of in the scene itself. Now to start out with, I'm just going to delete all these objects that come with the default start up file because we don't need these anymore. And you can see my collections. So these are just ones we've got by default. I think I might have changed these for my start up file, but I'm just going to create and color code these collections. I typically like to have a yellow work in Brokress collection and this is where I include all the objects I'm editing at the time. The set up will include our lighting and camera, things like that. The archive is for anything that I don't want to use anymore, but I want to keep in the file just in case we need to refer back to it, restore some of our previous save points. And you can see I've also created a collection just for each category of props. So once we finish modeling them in the WIP collection, we just moved them into there and we can drag those out from our final scene. Just to quickly talk about the folder structure I'm using for this course. Most of the work we're doing will be inside the blender file itself, so we don't need many external folders for textures or other assets that we're bringing in. So I'm just going to quickly go file save as I'm just going to put this in a folder. You can see here I've got this low poly environment scene folder and I'm going to name this low poly environment period 001 like this. And each time I want to increment the file, so I say make a significant change, I'm going to come down and press this plus button. And you can see it jumps up to two. Just remember that for when you want to make a significant change to the scene in this course, I'll quickly hit Save as before. Anything else? Just note that my current blender version is 3.41 You can see that down in the bottom right. Let's just have a quick think about what we mean when we say low poly. There are quite a few different styles and it's important that we stick to the same style across all the assets in our scene. The style will be going for in this course, It's flat shaded. You can see here is a reference board of artwork that I like created this in the program Pureref. Usually whenever I'm modeling, I'll keep this on my second monitor and I'll be constantly glancing over at these reference images here. The first thing you'll notice is that they're flat shaded. These assets don't have smooth shading on them, so we've got these nice jagged angles that really show the form of the object quite well. Another thing you'll notice is that there are no textures will be showing the colors of these surfaces just through the material base color, which is quite a simple way of doing it, may not be the most optimized for games, in which case you might want to use a color palette. Or some people will use vertex colors to show color. But using the materials in blender will do us fine for the scope of this course. The last thing you'll notice is that aside from some things like the water, all the materials in the scene will have a diffuse surface with a constant roughness value probably about 0.5 And the same metallic objects, any metal in this environment pack will just have as a gray diffuse material. With our project set up and ready to go, we can now do something practical. We'll create the sky and sunlight for our scene to start out with. I'm just going to go up here to the shading tab. I would like to create my sky procedurally, but if you'd rather, you can always import a HDRI to skip this step. But I just find that using a HDRI like this with realistic lighting, will look a bit odd in a low poly scene, this is a shade of window down here. And we're going to quickly change this from object to world. And we can see that we've got our nodes here. These will only change the output of your world if in this tab you've got this used No button blue right here. You can create a new world by pressing this button or you can just added the default one like I'm going to do to see our world in this window right here. We're going to need to change our shading model if you hold down the Z key right now, Material preview. But we can go up to rendered mode and this makes it gray because that's the background color that we're inputting into the world output node. By changing the color of this, we can change it to like a nice blue color. But this is going to be consistent across the whole sky and I want to have it slightly lighter across the horizon and darker at the top. To do that, we're going to need to use a gradient node and a color ramp node to assign the colors to that gradient. I'm just going to start out here, I'm going to press Shift A and search for a gradient node, or a gradient texture as it's called. And plug this into the color. You can see everything turns black. But we just need to navigate around and you can see this whole side is black. And it tapers from very dark value to a light value. It is good. This is what we want. But of course, you'll notice that it's sideways and we want to flip it, so it's facing upwards. To do that, we're going to need to use a mapping set up. These nodes are very simple and they'll just plug into the vector input of this gradient texture and show it how to orient itself. To start out with, we need to input texture coordinates node, this one right here. And we're going to need a mapping node. This texture coordinate node generates the initial inputs. And then this mapping allows us to move, rotate and scale it. I'm going to plug the vector, the mapping node into the gradient texture and I'll plug the generated into the mapping node. You can also use object, I don't think there's any difference. By changing the y rotation to 90 degrees, our sky is now facing upwards. For the last thing, we just need to run this gradient testure through a color ramp. So I'm going to press Shift a Search for color ramp. Drag this on this yellow line right here that connects the two color values. This is just from black to white right now, but with this key selected, I can go down and change the color, make it a bit brighter. It will be the color of the horizon line. Then I can select the top one and make this a much deeper blue. You can always pan up to see how it's going to look happy of this radiation that looks a bit more natural than just having a consistent value. To me, this looks like a sky now layout, we can add a sunlight. I'm going to press Shift A, go down to the lights and add a Sunlight. We don't really see the effect of this until we've got another object in the scene. We can always change it later once we've started modeling. Now I'm just going to add a monkey head. This is one of the primitive objects in Blender. And of course, it just changed my air shading model to rendered. This is already looking pretty good. Remember that you can move your sun around and use this little yellow light right here to show which part of the surface you want to be lit. I'm quite happy with this. I think we can start modeling now. I'll move this sun up into the set up collection. Just quickly change the color. Actually this is white right now. Just make it slightly yellow, orange tone. I can delete the Susan monkey head. This is the end of the first section. In the second section, we'll start looking at some of the models. 3. Creating Low Poly Rocks - Part 1: Hello everyone and welcome to the second section of the course. In this first modeling video, we're going to be doing something quite simple. We'll be creating some different rocks using various techniques to use in our final scene. The first technique is quite simple, but a lot of blender users don't realize this modeling technique is available in a software to start out with. We just need to add an object. I'm going to press Shift A and add a cube. We can change the size and origin later on once we finish editing it. Now in edit mode by pressing Tab, make sure you have everything selected. Right here, you can see this button here will usually be the knife tool you need to press to have this tool bar up on the side. Make sure you've got that. If you hold down on this, you can drag down to the bisect tool now have everything selected. You can drag a line onto the object. You can use this arrow to slide it up and down on its normal. This acts like a two D plan in three D space. And we need to change them to the settings, so see the Cl in it looks like it's in this case sometimes it's outer. Depending on which way you draw it. I'm going to click in and I'm also going to tick fill here by using lots of these bisect tools. Using the same tool addive, we can just drag on multiple onto this object to make a rock shape right here, you notice that this one didn't quite fails because I didn't select the whole object. After I'm just going to control Z. Select everything by pressing A and I can start drawing on lines. Again, this make sure you fill each time. I'm not being too precise here, keep forgetting to select them all. I'm just going to create the rough shape of my rock. Try to create something interesting, slightly organic shape, not entirely predictable. Just let this. And something like this looks quite jagged, this would be nice in a forest or maybe a mountain scene. Not so happy with this rock, I'm going to select everything. I'm going to press Tab to go into object mode, and I'm going to recalculate the origin to the center of the center of mass of this new object because it might have changed when we were cutting parts away. To do that I'm just going to write click, go down to Set origin and choose center of mass, surface or volume. Once this is done, you can see now this actually looks like it's in the middle of the object. So when I rotate it, it's a bit more believable. I'm just going to press Shift and selection decursor. This is now in the center of our scene. When I'm working on this asset library, I'm going to try and space everything out. I'll have all my rocks going along this line. Then I might have some trees going along here and various other assets the same way. First, I'm just going to scale it down in edit mode bit, because I'm assuming that each of these squares are going to be a meter. And I want this rock to be a little bit smaller than that. Now using these techniques, I'm going to create another rock right here. To do that, I'll just open up the panel using the key. Go to the view tab and I'm going to change the y location of my cursor to 1 meter. Now if I had another cube here, scale this down a bit, I can start bisecting here to make another rock using the same techniques as before. You get quite quick, doing this is a very efficient method. In this case, I accidentally filled the L, supposed to clear the outer just like this. I'm quite happy with how this is looking and tried to get a variation of size as well. So have some large rocks in some small rocks, and make the smaller rocks a little bit more simple. We don't want the polygons, we don't want as high polycount as the slightly bigger rocks like this. I'm quite happy with how these are looking. The nice thing about this is that we get faces that have more than three sides. I found a lot of people's low poly work tends to just be consistent of triangles. And it looks a bit boring sometimes. I'm happy with this. I'm going to reset the origin the same way. Reset it to the surface. And I'm just going to press shift a selection to cursor to put it back where it was meant to be. I want to make it time a bit smaller. So I'm just going to scale it down in object mode and in control a. To apply the scale. What I'm now thinking is I've got these two rocks that are similar shape and size. I want to create a couple. I'll be using this technique just like I can have in piles or clumps, rounder ground. Because these are going to be smaller, the density of polygons is going to be fewer. I won't have as many bisects. You'll see what I mean when I start modeling Again, I'm just going to slide my cursor along to 3 meters or 2 meters. Just place it right there. And I'm going to add another cube. Just scale it down a little bit here. Using the same technique, I'm going to try to aim for a lot of fewer bisects than I had before. Really only enough to make it distinguishable from a cube that you may find it easier to start out with a different primitive object. Once again, I'm just going to reset the origin to the center of mass. Move it back to the cursor just because I like having a pivot point where the object origin is, But this isn't essential. Move my cursor along again, just so I've got about four or five of these. Move it to 3 meters. This time I'm going to add a UVs and start bisecting. The reason I'm using this is that I don't end up sticking with any of these faces that come with the cube. For example, this top face here, I believe, is pretty much untouched from the start. It just means it's not going to be cube like at all. I think I'm going for some quite sharp jagged rocks in this scene. We're getting there, I'm like a look at this one again, just going to go through the same steps, set origin to volume or surface, and then shift this, place it on the cursor. Here we go. I've got a good selection of rocks now. I might create some more using techniques later on, but for now this should be good enough. We're going to move on to the next method for creating rocks. I'm just going to place my cursor here. I want this array of rocks to be going along from this position right here. I'm just going to increase the cursor x application to 1 meter. At this time I'm going to cube object scale it down a little bit. I'll add a subdivision modifier appear on the modifiers tab. Going to add a subdivision surface modifier increase a few times and we're going to start a sculpting this. Now quickly apply modifier and go up to the sculpting tab. For this I'd like to turn non dynamic topology just so I don't have to worry about polycount wasn't going. Maybe you can use to change your brush size and play around with some of these different brushes as well like the creased brush and the flattened brush. However, we can use a decimate modifier to remove some of the geometry that we've got to make it more low poly. So a lot of the details that you sculpt on are going to be lost. Don't be too precious with it, just trying to get the basis down. You can see him using this flattened brush a lot to try and adjust the fall off here, because this is too smooth for me. I'll try constancy. If this looks good, looks a bit better. This flattened brushes really looking nice. And now I'm going to come in with this multiplane scrape brush. Just get some nice corners on here. This is looking very organic. This looks almost quite wind swept, something you could find in a desert or a canyon. I'm liking the look of that. So once finished sculpted in this, I'm going to go back into the layout tab at the top. Going to press, we're going to add a decimate modifier. We should see it to generate. You see that if I drag this issue back, it starts procedurally reducing the polycount. It does quite a nice drop of this. You can change these modes at the top. Unsubdivided is usually used as it says, unsubdivide something that's had a subsurface modifier being applied to it. So we can see how that looks Probably won't do anything for us right now just on collapse or plan as well. And this does it by angle, so it will create rocks similar to what we've got here. It doesn't always aim for triangles. It will create lots of flat planar engons as well, which is quite nice. It creates a similar result actually to the rocks we've just made fan. You get a few artifacts when using this mode sometimes. So I'm not the biggest fan of it, it's still quite nice. I'm just going to use a collapse mode for these rocks and drag this down a little bit more. Now, we don't actually need to apply these modifiers until we're absolutely finished with them. If we're going to be working entirely in blended, we never actually need to apply these modifiers. So I'm just going to leave this here. And I'm going to slide my cursor along again on the y axis by 1 meter and start sculpt in another rock. Using the same technique, I'm just going to add primitive object, just a cube, and subdivide it a little bit. Here we go, Subdivision surface, and scale it down. Apply the modifier, because I'm probably going to use this to create the next series of rocks as well. I don't have to do all that process at start again. I'm going to press shift D, Y and then type in 1 meter. There's a short cut and blender shift R, which just repeats the previous action because I duplicated it and move it as an action. Whenever I press shift, it will just keep arraying the. I only want about four or five for now. Here again, I'm going to start sculpting some of these ones to create progressively more simple and smaller rocks. Then you'll be using very similar sculpting brushes to what we used before. I find that I naturally get more sloppy as I go on. So once I've created a couple different rocks, then I start to not give as much care to what I'm doing. That's why I always like to start off with the really detailed ones that need a lot of care, and then eventually the smaller ones that will just be a few polygons. You don't need to be too careful with this one. I haven't even bothered enabling dynamic topology. We'll see how it looks. Back in the layout tab, I'm going to add decimate modified to this, drag the ratio back like how that's looking. I'm quite happy with that. I'm just going to drag it a little bit further and scale it down in mode because it's got to be a little bit smaller than the previous rock. I might play with some of these scales, just make sure that if you scale something in object mode, hit control A and apply the scale. There we go. It's going to do the same with the remaining rocks. These ones are going to be very small. I'm not going to add many details because any details that I do add will probably get taken out with the modifier that we've got. Remember that if you would rather not sculpts, you can always go into edit mode and use proportional editing. We use this at the top here. It's currently on the smooth falloff, I can just select a vertex or lots of vertices and just drag them around like this. If you prefer polymdeling to sculpt in like me, you may be better off with this workflow that I'm going to add another decimate modifier. It's going to be very low poly at this point. I'm quite happy with that. Lastly, for this one, which will be pretty much about the same size, in this case, I might not even bother scraps in X. It's just going to be round anyway. I'm going to really reduce the size here. Make sure I turn off this proportional editing and added decimate modifier to it. I like the look of that. You can imagine this just being like a little pebble or stone that we find in the forest somewhere. Now, because these are triangles like this one right here. If I were to select this vertex and move it around, we're going to start getting some shading issues because these are ends triangles. It's plan, you see this face is completely flat. If you move it off to the side like this, it'd be quite difficult to flatten out Again, I'm just going to leave this how it is, because these ones are all triangles. There are no flat planar engions in them. We can apply the modify, just move around some of these vertices. We're not going to get any shading issues or lose any details. Just to fix a couple of these things that I don't like that's looking good to me. That looks like we've got a good collection of rocks right there. 4. Creating Low Poly Rocks - Part 2: Another type of rock I'd like to make is some little paving slabs. I'm just going to move my cursor back and move to the x axis on two. I'm going to create a cylinder for this, add mesh cylinder and just scale it down. And I'm going to use the bicectal to create some of these edges going around. I don't want it to be as high poly as the actual cylinder, I don't want this many vertices going around. This will be quite nice for a forest floor. Once again, I'm going to go into edit mode and use this Bicectal try and work quite quickly here for about seven or eight different cuts around the outside to give it its shape. We still want some polygons there. I like cars is looking. Just going to skull this down a little bit. Reset the origin as well and place it. The center pivot point is on the cursor. I've got that paving slab. I might just quickly create another one of these, but this time, instead of recreating it from scratch, I'm just going to duplicate it on the y axis by one. And I'm going to come on with the knife tool. We'll be using this tool to fix up some of these rocks as well. Just add some little chipping and details that we like to do that. I'm going to go into edit mode and I'm going to press K and I'm going to start drawing some damage on here, just some little cracks like this. Doesn't need to be too precise. Then I'm going to come in and dissolve some of these edges. And join these vertices together can create some quite natural weathering our objects that we've got right here. I'm going to have this one look, one of these looks slightly more damaging than the other. I'm going to go in this time we're just going to bisect something. Think might look quite nice actually just get the right angle. There you go. I like how that's looking. Now if you go in here, this face right here isn't perfectly plain. Now it's actually quite distorted. But blender makes the faces flat. If it's on like a quadrin engon, that's an important thing to note here. We could just drag this vertex along the edge right here. It's not perfectly precise. We'll also be going to use flat shading for this. But if you want to make sure some of these faces always look right, you can come down here and enable smooth normals right here. Make sure you click and shade smooth. You'll just need to drag this angle down a little bit. 1015 degrees will be good. For now, we won't notice any difference. It'll be a bit more clear on this one. If I quickly shade this one smooth and enable to smooth, you can see the blender blends this bottom two faces to look like one right here. Whereas if I drag this down, it looks like about ten degrees or 12 degrees, it starts to separate it into two. That might be useful in some places. Right here on this rock, I'm going to go into edit mode and I'm going to use a knife tool just to create a couple of chips. This, I'm going to dissolve this edge in the middle, and I'm going to join these two together by pressing J. That looks quite natural to me. I might just edge, slide some of these around though, because I want to make the gap bigger. Yeah, it looks a bit more natural to me. I'm going to do the same on this rock, especially if you've got a pile of boulders next to each other. It looks like they've been falling into each other and chipping away at each other over the years. It's a nice little touch. I'm quite happy with that. Once I've got this collection of rocks, we're going to need to rename them and organize them. Currently, they're just sitting in my archive folder here because that's just a collection I had selected when they added these objects. But we don't want that. I'm not going to put them in a work in progress collection because we pretty much finished them. I'm going to move them down to a rocks collection. It doesn't look like I've got one under scenery. I'm going to create a new collection and call this rocks. Then I'm going to move all these down into that collection I haven't named. I'm going to call this one jagged rock. It's important to stick to the naming convention here. I'm using a camel case, which means I've got up a letter for the start of each word and no spaces or underscores between. And this is ideally how I'd want to do it, especially if you're important to game engines like Unity or Unreal. A lot of those won't want spaces in the names of your objects. I'm just going to call this jagged rock one. I'm actually going to select this and hit control C to copy it. Once I've renamed that one, it just makes it easier to rename some of the other ones. I'm going to come up here, hit control jagged rock two jagged rock 3.4 It doesn't take too long to do. Ideally you'd name them as you're working. This one right here, I'm going to call this smooth rock or round rock. Copy this, this will be round rock one. To quickly rename them, you don't have to go up here to the outline. You can just click on the object, hit F two on your keyboard and type in the new name that you like. It saves us quite a bit of time here. You could put all these in separate collections, have a round rock collection and a jagged rock collection. But I'm quite happy with this number of objects right here. I'd rather just be able to see them all at once. Call this one stepping stone 1.2 I've only got two of these stepping stones, If we're going to have a big line of them, you might some of these repetitions. But what we can do for some of these is like I copy these ones, we're just going to shift, move them and rotate them on the y axes by 180 degrees. I just place these ones upside down. It looks as if they're completely different objects. That's important to note, but I'm just going to delete these new ones for now. I think we've done a good job of categorizing them. One last thing to do is add a material to these. I'm going to go up to Rendered mode. Currently, they'll be white by default, so I'm just going to select one of these under this Material tab right here. I'm going to create a new one. I'll just call this gray rock. I'll try to use this material across all of these objects right here. I'll just give this like a slightly brown value, something that can always change this later in the scene. That's one nice thing about using these materials. I'm happy with how that's looking. We want to assign this material to all the other rocks, but selecting them and going through and selecting the gray rock material, every single rock can be quite laborious. Instead, we're just going to select them, make sure we only the rock objects that we need. And we have our yellow selection in blender. We've got all these selected, but then we've also got like our primary selection. This is the yellow one right here. All the rest of orange. Now we're going to hit control L. I'm going to link materials. You can see that that just copies the same material slots that we've got on this object to every other one. Remember, just because we're using the same gray rock material across every single rock, that means that we can change the colors right here. It affects every rock in the scene. But you could create a separate gray rock that you could create like a black rock here and have that as a volcanic one and have that as just a select few rocks. But for now I'm just going to give them all the same base color, so increases a little bit. There we go. We can always create some more rocks later on, but for now I think that's going to cover it for the forests, plains, and the desert that we need. Desert like an ocean or a beach. I can see these rocks fitting quite well. In the next video, we'll start looking at modeling trees using slightly more complex modeling tools. 5. Creating Low Poly Trees - Part 1: Hello everyone and welcome back. Last video we created this group of rocks right here. This time we're going to create some trees. I'm aiming for about four different varieties of trees. And we'll do a couple different variations within those types. There are about two or three different techniques that we can use. First off, it's important to outline the differences between different types of trees I want in the scene, and I just got to think about the climate we're going for in this environment. There are two main types of trees. There are coniferous trees, and these tend to be like your fir trees or your pine trees. These have needles on them instead of leaves, and they're very narrow and pointy at the top, they're like a Christmas tree. These don't change color depending on the season. If you're going for a full or an autumn environment, then you wouldn't make orange leaves on a coniferous tree. On the other side, we've got deciduous trees. These tend to have a broader grouping, and the leaves are flatter and clump up together differently. So we'll have to consider this when we start modeling. Examples include maple trees, oak trees, apple trees, those kind of forest trees that you see. It would be a good idea to load up your reference board with pictures of not only real world trees, but also low poly trees from other artists. Just have a bit of inspiration when you start modeling. To start out with, I'm going to create a pine tree over here in the view tab. Just going to slide my cursor along on the x location. I'll type in 3 meters. I'm going to start off with a profile of about five vertices. Shift a, a mesh cylinder right here. I'm going to slide this down from 32 vertices just down to 56. I'd like to do five because it's a bit more odd scale this down in edit mode will be like the trunk of the tree. We want this thinner at the bottom than it is at the top. I'm just going to select these five vertices here, drag them up a little bit on the x axis, and then select the bottom ones. And scale those out if you want to. You can also hit control to add another loop going around here and slightly change the profile. I'd rather stick with a low poly count and maybe do this later because I'm not sure if I want to do that yet. I'm just going to select this top ring right here. And I'm going to extrude this out instead of dragging up and dragging down on the Z axis. Then I can scale this out a little bit. You can see this is going to be the first ring of leaves going around. Once this is skirt out about there, then I can extrude upwards, scale in on the z axes and repeat this process maybe three or four times, depending on how tall you want your tree to be and how much detail you want. I'll just scale this ring out again. Now what you might like is a slight taper, just going to decrease this ring as well. We want a nice curve going outwards like this. The height of these sections gets more elongated at the top. I mean, he, once I finish modeling this, this one will go even further up than last time. It's going to be about here when I extrude it up. I'm quite happy with this. I'll hit M on my keyboard to merge these invertices at the center. I'm also going to hit the period key on my keyboard and change this to three decursor. Just thought I can scale it up a bit because tree is a little bit too short. This is going to be about 3 meters to what it looks like just by using these grids to align it. That means our character to the head height will be up to about here. Might just decrease the thickness of this trunk pan in this ring right here. Changing my mode back to medium point. And I'm going to see how this ring looks. I'm quite happy with that, I think I'll keep it. The next thing we need to do is add a bit of distortion in here because this is too perfect and you're never going to see a tree like this in row life. I'm going to go back in edit mode with this top vertex selected. I'm just going to enable proportional editing up here and drag some of these, increase the size of this circle using the mouse will. I'm just going to move it around a little bit like this, creates some nice unevenness. Next thing is if we select this vertex, actually if we select this vertices right here, I'm just going to select this ring and hit control to invert and then hide. I can select one of these vertices right here with proportional editing, instead of using smooth offset, I'm going to go down and switch it to a random mode if I press and on the axis and increase the size a little bit. You can see that when I move up and down, instead of moving everything with a smooth fall off it just randomly, which can be quicker than doing it manually, I'll just move these anywhere like this. And then if I old H I can bring everything back again. Yount to go too extreme of this. But a little bit can look quite nice. You're just going to play around with this a little bit more. I might not even isolate the ring that I move in. I quite like the look of moving everything on a tree, especially the stump. I'll do the same here. Then you can just press to turn off proportional editon. Come in here to some of these furs bit because they don't quite look right to me. Let's do the same with the bottom ring because I think this needs a little bit more detail. You can go through and manually change some of these rings. A personal touch to it. I'm quite happy with that. I think our tree is looking good here. Now, one last knee you can do in edit mode is come in with the knife to. I'm going to hit K on my keyboard. I'm just going to click here to insert these vertices, get in nice shape like this. Press Enter, And then I'm going to dissolve this edge right here by pressing X and dissolve edges. And then connect these two vertices together by pressing J on the keyboard. That just creates this nice little notch at the bottom. I'll repeat this a couple times throughout this tree, just using the knife tool. Here we go. I don't have to have too many of these. Before we move on to coloring the tree, we finished modeling it. It's important talk about shading in more detail than we did last time. I'm going to hold z and drag to solid mode Up here under this lid drops down here. I'm going to change from Studio to Mac. If I go under here, I can select from one of these different configurations. Might try this one or this one here that shows the normals. That one looks quite cool to me. It allows you to more easily see which direction the face is pointing. Right now, this entire face right here is the same color. That's because it's play. Now the whole face is flat, even though it's what we call an Eng on, it's consistent of multiple vertices. They're all aligned perfectly, which is great for us. If I move this vertex out here, then this face is no longer planar. It's connecting all these vertices together. You're breaking them down into a bunch of triangles. This is easier to see if we triangulate the mesh. Just for demonstration, I'm going to select everything in a mesh by pressing a, and I'm going to hit control on a keyboard to triangulate. And you can see now it's turned everything in to triangles. This is no longer shaded flat and that's because one blender calculates an engonehting controls the to undo, one blender calculates an gone, it takes the average normal or the average direction. Every single one of those triangles on the face is pointing and it evens it out, which is quite a helpful shading model for us. And we can see the same on these rocks right here. I'm just going to select this vertex right here and move it out. If I select everything by hitting A and control, you can see this now breaks this up into something that looks quite different to what we had before. That's quite important. Mormon modeling, we need to make sure that if we want a flat face like this, all the vertices have to be planar. We've actually broken this a tiny bit though, because when I did that proportional editing to the trees, although the effect is very slight, some of these faces like this one you can see is a little bit wonky. They're not perfectly flat anymore. I'm just going to triangulate the mesh again. We can see that back in edit mode, control a just a control. A control. Now if I go into object mode, especially with this normal matcpon, you can see there's actually a line running here and this end gone is broken up into two different triangles. I'm just going to see this, one way we can get around this issue is by using the shading. Again, it's easier to demonstrate what I mean on this tree than the rocks in the last video. The reason I'm bringing this up is because although Blender automatically faces these goes the same direction, some game engines and rendering engines like Unity or Unreal might not do that by default. If you're exporting this mesh, it looks fine in blender. In the game engine, it will automatically triangulate all the end goons. And we'll have some weird shading here, so you can't always trust how it looks in blender. If you'd like to export this to a game engine, my best recommendation would be to shade it smooth. So just right click it, do shade smooth. Then in edit mode, I'm going to sletch all these edges. I'm going to hit Control and I'm going to go down to Mark Sharpe. It's got the blue lines and basically what Yeah, the blue lines are the edges of all the face sets. Now, if I turned down all to smooth right here on 180 degrees, this should be fine when you export it and then when you export it as an FBX, go to file export FBX. And make sure that in geometry right here, we're going to change this. Moving from normals only to edge. But don't worry about this too much for now. We'll talk about exporting later in the course. I apologize for that boring theory, but it's just important to get it out of the way now before we finish modeling everything and then we'll have to go back and make all those changes. We're going to create my second variation of this pine tree right here. First thing I'm going to, saying I've added this under the Rocks collection which isn't the best practice. So I'm just going to create a new collection here under Scenery. I'll rename this trees. I'll drag this cylinder, rename this. Pine tree, much like the rocks, I want to have the biggest variation of the tree down this end, and then smaller ones are going along the y axis. So I have like a little baby tree here, a medium size one and a large one. This tree is a little bit too small for what I want those. I'm just going to move this by about 3 meters on the y axis. I'm going to create a new cylinder from scratch with a base of about six this time instead of five because I want to add a little bit more detail to it. So I'm going to add a cylinder again. I'll try and speed model this one because it's usually the same techniques that we've covered before. Scale this base down, it's got to be slightly thicker. I can line it up using an orthographic mode by hitting the pad one. I'm going to try and be very quick with this. It's important to note that I've got the origin of the object right here where the cursor is in this model, the actual base of the tree or the very bottom of the trunk is below the surface. Just means place it on a terrain, you're not likely to see the clipping of the bottom of the trunk. This will be a bit more apparent when we start actually placing these items on the landscape. I'm just going to continue modeling this now and it's got to be a little bit bigger than a previous version. I'm going to go for about four or five different sections instead of three. Make this a lot wider at the basis time. Make quite nice Christmas trees this way I'll just measure this at the center and then make any adjustments that I'd like. I'm just going to track this section down a little bit because I think it's too high up. You can always use X ray mode by holding and go to wire frame up here at the top. Go back into solid view, we can turn on our little wire frame option that allows us to C three of the object. Once again, I'm just going to quickly come in with proportional editing on smooth, but I can also do is rotate. If I slip this vertex right here, I'm going to rotate and get some nice serves. This way can look very Gothic, Tim Burton like if you go quite exaggerated with this, but I don't be too exaggerated. So that's good. And I'm going to come in with the random mode. So I just change this from smooth in circulation to random and move this all on the Zx a little bit. You can see how you can pump out quite a few trees by doing this, if you just spend one evening making a few trees, you can build an asset library quite quickly. And then I'm just going to come in and break up some of these Fetcs are tool together that looks perfect for me. And once again I'm just going to come in with this knife tool tied a few of these deliberations, the leaves, I'm going to let these vary in size a little bit as well. It's probably the most time consuming part of modeling this, but I think the result is worth it. This one is a bit too high up, so I'm just going to hold double tap to drag it down, but make sure you do along these edges wise. If I just eyeball it, then it might end up not looking flat. That's we're talking about before. That's not a big difference anymore, but using the shading mode. Just one more and then once I'm done with that, I'm going to come in and dissolve all these edges at the bottom. And work in by process here. Dissolve these edges. And then I can connect all these up by hitting J. I like how this one's coming along. Probably prefer this to the previous one that's looking good for us. Now once we've got this one, actually I'll just slightly decrease the size of the trunk scale. This in a little bit is looking a little bit too wide. I can see our player standing next to this a lot better than before. So I'm just going to create another cylinder. This one's going to be very small. I'll try how it looks with just about three or four. I'll try four. It's going to be tinier one. And in object mode, I'm going to drag this on the y axis out about here, which is about five metres. I'll scale these in a bit, just do the same as before. But this time I'm not going to have this little section here running around just to make the polycpncause this sync. This is going to be a very tiny one. Here we go, I'll just do a couple of different segments for this one because it really is tiny. Look at that. I'm going to come in again with proportional editing on random to see how this looks. I'm quite happy with that. So I'm just going to flatten out this base and add one of these cards just for consistency. Tool can be a bit clumsy to work with sometimes. There we go. So I'd say that's three quite decent truths we've made now. And also the poly counts very low, so this would be perfect for our art style to decrease the size of this trunk again. Now it's time for materials. I'm going to leave this Matt move right here. I'll leave it on. But I'm just going to drag up to the rented tab so we can see how it's going to look. A default material should just be like a tree stump color. I'll call this brown one. Very creative. I'm just going to track this into the orange part of the spectrum may make it a little bit darker as well. We can always change this later. Remember I'll just add this to the other trees as well. Now once that's done, actually we can select all these in object mode right here. I'm going to add another material slot. I'll create this, I'll call this dark leaves one and change the color of this to be slightly more green. One thing a lot of people do when they're creating vegetation is they'll drag out to a green add, and it's almost blue, it looks quite sickly. In reality, plants and leaves tend to be slightly more on the yellow side of the spectrum and a little bit more of a yellowy green. Just drag this out here and increase the value a little bit, slightly more yellow than what you'd expect to mask this. It's easier. Rather than selecting all the faces, I want to be green. It's easier just to select the bottom face. Hit control number pad plus to grow the selection. If you don't have number pad, you can also find that up here. If you go to select and then select more or less, just like I'm going to hit control to invert my selection. And then quickly creates a new material slot because it looks like this is a different object to the one I had last selected. I'm going to select from the drop down dark leaves and hit a sign. Once that's on, you can change it, tell you like. I'll do the same with this tree as well. Creates a new material slot. It didn't mean to create a new on the, I'll create a new material slot and clip this from drop down sign. Then for the last one we'll do the same. We just got to work. Not hard to see how quick it took me to add those materials rather that looks like our pine trees are done. We've just got to make sure to name them. Sensible as well. I'm going to call this one pine tree one, because it's the smallest. I call the middle one, pine tree two, pine tree three. 6. Creating Low Poly Trees - Part 2: Now that our pine trees are finished, I'm going to show you a different technique that we can use for some of our deciduous trees. I'm going to move my cursor along a bit here on a use type, going to change the x location to about 6 meters this time around. I'm going to add just a single vertex here and we're going to use something called the skin modifier to add thickness. To do that, I'm going to press Shift A and going to create a cube Edit mode. If we go to select mode, select everything, hit M and merge at the center. That's just a really quick way to add a single vertex. Once that's done, we're going to extrude this upwards. We can just create the trunk of the tree like this. It's nice to add some little spiraling, some curvature carried to the tree. If you want to add some more segments, you can either select two vertices and subdivide them like this. Or you can just select the vertex and hit control shift bevel vertex. Can't really see anything. Before we've got the modifier on, I'm just going to go up to the modifiers tab and add our skin modifier. As you can see, it creates like a quad mesh going around what we've got. Whenever I extrude it out, it's cool, it's almost like it turns into an organic figure rather than just a straight line of vertices. Can I also just drag down a little bit? It's going a little bit below the origin point. That's nice. Right about here. I'm going to fork this off into 21. Nice thing about a skin modifier is it handles intersections really well. You can see here, this joint actually gives us a really good quadropology you wouldn't expect to have. I don't see it. Another way of making this again, it looks so nice. Problem with this is that the thickness is all even across this trunk. Right now where we fix that is just by selecting any verses you want. And we're going to hit Control, a drag in and out. Sing up here to edit mesh tools that might be under item or tool. Let's try drag in and out, and here we go. This is the value of change in the radius right here, when it's set to one, it will be this thickness right here at the bottom of the trunk, which is perfect for us. If I hit control and slide in and out, you can see this value changing. I'm just going to skeleton a little bit. It's thicker at the bottom of the trunk and thinner as we go up, especially after a joint like this. I'm just going to move these around a little bit. Still not 100% sure what shape I'm going for. I think I'd making this like an oak tree. I'm just going to scare it in like this. Give it a nice figure. Mayb, you can just hit extrudes quickly. Drag out new branches like this and then scale in those branches. That's pretty good to me. Maybe we don't want to go to nuts with the pod count Still try and keep it reasonable. What we could even do is merge these ends, the tips of the branches. If you want to make these sharp, you could just type in here zero for the radius on both the X and y. But just think about how this merges together. Once we apply this skin modifier, we just need to check that the ends mergethn't have four separate vertices in the same location. You're just going to type in zero. I'll do that once I finish modeling them. This will connect the very nicely to the leaves that begin to create using some different methods over here. I'm just going to change this to the lasso select mode. If I shift click, I can just drag all these first as right here, make sure I don't miss any. I got that one selected by accident. Then I can just a value right up here to zero called the sharp. Great. That's the largest tree that we've got right here. I'm going to now create another 11 quick way before we added a cube. And then merged all the diversities to the center to get the single vertex. If we enable the extra objects add on, we can go down here under me. If we then go down to single vertex and we can add a single vertex. Got this and forgot how to enable it, just go to Edit, Preferences, add ons, and type in extra objects. And just make sure you've got this Ted, I'll just move this on the Yx, make sure I'm in object mode. It moves the origin as well. Let's move this on the Y axis to about the same point. There's this medium tree right here. And I'm going to try and be really quick. Few just extrude out some of these at the skin modifier. This has got to be a little bit shorter than the one before. So I'm just going to select everything here, this with A and increase the L, decrease of fitness. I'm going to have the diversion point be a bit lower down than the previous one. I like the way that's coming together. This can be quite therapeutic. I found I'm just going to quickly change my shading mode right here because it's hard to see things when I'm in shaded view. As nice as it is to look at, it's not very practical. So I'm just going to change back to solid instead of normal right here. I'm going to go on a Mac cap and choose this little red clay looking one right here. And then under these settings again, I'm also going to enable cavity and its from screen to both. It's just a lot more helpful to me when I'm modeling, but that's my personal preference. You can use whichever shading configuration you like most. I'm just going to set all these tips and set the weight to zero a Once that's done, just going to do very same thing again for the final time. To add a single vertex, Just track this down a little bit. Add the skin modifier the way this is looking. That's great, I just track these zero. Once that's done, we just need to add the leaves. I'm going to add the leaves as separate objects. With my cursor where this one is right here. I'm going to show you a method for creating these, these using a technique that not many people are aware is in Blender once again as a separate object going to press shift A instead of adding a mesh. We're going to go down here where it says metal balls and we're going to add a ball. These can be very fun to work with in Blender. If I just go into edit mode, I'm going to s this red ring right here, this green ring in the center. Maybe scale this in. You can see how this changes the size. If I just press, I'm going to shift to duplicate this and place another one next to this. And you can see how they join together. So this green one right here is a bit like working with water droplets, I suppose. The green one controls how much it connects to the other nearby metaballs, how much it distorts itself to be closer to it. And the red one controls the size of it. This is just like the scale. This is how connected it's going to be. So you can see if I slip both the green ones and make very big, it's almost as if they want to be separate but they're still conjoined. Yeah, these can be very fun to work close. I'm just going to di the outer one for now. I'll move this in place up here somewhere. Just like this we can use to model the leaves. Just make sure you change the scaling of some of these scaling is a bit different. I'll shift, duplicate this one again. Join these branches, make sure they're connected. Because we don't want these sharp ends to show. I want these to be clouded by the leaves. Where possible. This doesn't look very nice to me. I'll scout this one quite a bit. See how this looks. This is a very quick way to make objects. You could also use this for creating rocks, but it's not my preference. I'm a big fan of doing it that way right here. I'm just going to decrease the size of the green one so that it morphs more into the shape of this cluster of leaves right here, because this is very round. Once again, I'm just going to duplicate another metaball right here. Scale it down a little bit and decrease the size of the green one. You see how this makes the shape a little bit weird, but that's what I'm going for. Yes, meta balls in blender. I love working with meta balls once you learn to make it look right and I'm not going to cover all of the space above the tree, just some of it. It's still got its own unique sort of shape. Something like that. I like the way that's looking. If we go down here to the metabal tab, you can see we've got this resolution so we can increase the size of the san bittle bit higher res. I like that looking then. This is a metabal object right now. But I can convert this to a mesh object just by right clicking and doing convert to mesh like any mession blender. You can see this polygylittle bit weird. I'm going to add a decimate modifier to this would be used before just trying to look for where it is decimate modifier and I can drag in the collapse ratio. Like this, get something a bit more low poly, It's looking very good to me. I like that. That's how we use metal balls. And then we can also shade this as flat. Shade flat, then just come in and use proportional editing to fix up some of these parts. I'm not quite happy with how they look that's got a random mode on it. I'm just going to change this to smooth just to flatten out some parts of it. I prefer the way that's looking. That looks quite fancy. I'm sure I was aiming for an oak tree. I'm not quite sure if this that ended up looking much like an oak tree, but I came out nonetheless. I'm happy with that. I'm going to use the same process to create the leaves for these trees as well, just to keep these as separate objects. This would be like the leaves and the trunk for now. While I'm modeling it, there might be some changes I want to make. It's easier to keep it as two separate objects. I'm going to select this trunk. I'm going to press Shift A shift, then cursor selected. If I add the object where the cursor is, it just basically centers origin to the same as this object. Once again, shift a metabasI'mjt scale these in a little bit to create the shape of this tree, right? Tree leaves go down and increase. You put resolution. Yeah, looking great. Just try and change the silhouette a little bit. The tree leaves have got a different shape. We've got very few, amount of varieties here. We've just got three different growth stages. I want to make them all very diverse. I like how this cluster of trees is separate from that. Coming off this branch has a bit of character. I've got proportional editing turned on, so I think that's been tripping me a little, but make sure you turn off that if you're not using it go. Once that's done, I'm going to convert this to a mesh. Again, actually, I might increase the resolution before I do that. There we go. Convert this to a mesh and then add my decimate modifier. Shade this flag. That's looking quite nice. Once again, I'm going to leave this modifier here unapplied. And that just means I won't make any changes to it later. I can do so without committing a permanent change to the project. Just going to come and do some proportional Edison again, I like to flatten the top. It's almost like it's tapering inwards. I like the way that looks, looks almost like a acacia tree here. I'm not sure why I like it. There we go. Just track this out a little bit because looks like it's showing the inside branch let go. Perfect. So now we just need to do the little one place shift S place. My cursor just select you once again, addmtable. Get very efficient at doing this. Convert this to a mesh and add my decimate modifier again. And shade smooth. Shade flat, sorry, not smooth, perfect. I'm just going to set everything, Move it down a little bit. That's these trees done. Whether these look like oak trees or not is a bit debatable. E, I'm going to call them oak trees, so I'll just let this trunk right here call this oak three. Copy and paste the oak word right here so it's easy to re these ones. 2.1 for the leaves, I'm just going to call this oak leaves three and then two on one. There you go. Just quickly rename all please. If you want the leaves to follow around where you move, the trunk can just quickly parent them as well. The leaves in the end. Trunk control object. Probably join them together as an object later on. Anyway, we can just do this for now. I was working on them, there's no harm in doing that now. We also need to add materials. I'm just going to get to shading mode, the same trunk. Once again, we can use that, a little linking trick as well. So I set all the trunks and now I can select this tree right here. I'm going to hit control L and link materials just copies a little brown, doesn't it? It's also got this dark leaves material slot here. But I don't think anything's actually assigned to it. Now for the tree leaves, I'm going to create a new material, actually base it off the dark leaves. I'm just going to select the dark leaves. And then I'm going to hit this little seven button here just to turn it into a new version. Instead, I call this leaves might meet them a little bit more yellow color, a little bit brighter or darker. You play around with the color. See what it looks the most, right? Just change it till you be happy with it. Then I'll add the same material to the other leaves as well. So just let these two first. This one, it's number three, it's got this yellow outline. And then just hit control L and Think materials. And then we've quickly copied the materials to the other trees. There we go, That side oak modeled. 7. Creating Low Poly Trees - Part 3: Another tree I'd like to make here is a silver birch tree. One characteristic I like a lot of these trees you see is that they've got a small, very tall but thin trunk and end branches coming out from that. I'm going to reset my cursor again. Just press shift cursor selected to place it here. And then I'll just drag it out on the x axis. A little bit about here, we're doing 9 meters. I'm going to use the same technique as before to create the trunks, I'm going to press Shift. Just add a cube. In this case, I forgot about adding a single birth. To merge this at center and I'm just going to extrude upwards on axis to about here. It's probably going to be one of the tall trees, That's it. And then I'm going to add skin modifier. Again, to go back down here, modifier, add our skin or control a to scale it in a little bit at the top and at the bottom. Then along this I'm going to subdivide it a few times. I'll hit subdivide right here, actually just before this, scale this in a little bit here and control A. There we go. I'm going to go into this at L x ray mode, so I can see the vertices in the middle. I'm going to click and subdivide. I'll add in maybe three or four cuts. These are going to be branches that extrude out like this, just like this. You can see how this is a very different type of trunk than what we've got before. This is quite an organic curly one like the look of this one. Turn off the tray mode to create the can use. That's a little bit simpler than metaballs. I'm going to press Shift right click to place my Custer here at the end of these branches. Then I'm going to add, I'll do an add. An acosahedron increases subdivisions up to three. So we've got a little bit more geometry. I'll just scale this in a bit. Slate, this vertex at the top right here. I'm going to turn on proportional editing and drag this up. Let's give it a bit more of an egg shape. You can just go in and freestyle it a little bit more as well. Once that style, we're going to duplicate this and just add this to all these branches. Maybe drag it inwards. So more of the tree right here we've got as you know, is one to move this vertex. I want the proportional editing to only apply to the region that the vertex is connected to. I don't want it to also move this cluster of leaves up there. And the way we can do that is just by checking connected only. This fixes the problem. Let me go, I'm liking to look at these trees. Depend it looks quite nice when you merge it with the trunk as well that you can play around and experiment. Trying to add your own characteristics to your trees. If you don't like what I'm doing to mine, we're just going to duplicate this and then add a larger one at the top that connects all the other clusters together a little bit like this. Then what we can do is, first off, we need to join these together. Because if we just add decimate modifier to this, decimates the, these segments connected to. So if I drag this all the way down to the very lowest I can do, you can see it still keeps them separate. Yeah, mesh these together. But actually now I'm thinking I quite like how it looks when it's separated. Definitely like that. Look. Stick with it. But we'll show how to do it anyway. Just going to quickly hide this decimate modifier or actually and delete it. Instead, we're going to add a remesh. This is very useful for sculpting. I think that's probably the time I use it most. And it's a Vauxhall remeasure. It creates a bunch of cubes in three D space. If you've got different objects that collide in the same space, rather than using a Boolean modifier, it brings them together and you get a nice seams between them as well. And you also have a quadripology. This is better than using a Bulean modifier. I was going to add a remesh and then add the decimate modifier. After this unsubdivide, the effect is quite similar. Actually, you can choose whatever looks best for you. So I'm just going to add another one of these leaves. I'm just noticing now my cursor is at the wrong spot. My cursor is where I added that first object. I'm just going to place my cursor here to the origin of the trunk by pressing Shift cursor to selected. And then with the leaves selected right here. I'm going to right click and do set origin to three decursortrigin three decursor. It looks like it changed the geometry probably because of this re measure that I've got when I changed the origin point then it disrupts that. But don't worry, it looks okay to me still. Then I'm just going to sl this trunk and move this down a little bit below the cursor. That's something I just noticed now. It's great. With this set up, I'm just going to do the same thing again. I'm going to quickly add a mesh single vertex. I'll drag this out on the Y Xs by about two this time, say a little bit closer together. I probably won't create three variations just because I'm worried about time and I'm also not sure if I want another birch tree. Once that's done, I'll go into a vertex mode and we're going to extrude it up again, portion editing on right now. I'll drag this up to around about here. I was just thinking about where the top is of the other tree. Yeah, around about here. Add my skin modifier again and just scale it inwards. Little bit thinner. There we go. I might only subdivide this a couple times, this time just like that. That the way that's looking this time, I might even leave this branch coming off as it is without any leaves connected to it. I'll see how it looks. I can decide later. And also, it looks like I messed up my, my origin when I was moving this. That's something I need to be a bit more careful about. Just going to move my cursor on the y axis by 2 meters. And then right click set origin to three decursor to fix this. That's corrected it. I might be fussing about this a little bit too much, but when it comes to actually placing these objects, it will really become problematic. If the origin isn't in the right space, that little orange dot right there should always be in the correct spot. That's done. I'm going to add the leaves again, come down icosphereedit mode. I'm just going to use my proportional editing to place this wanting a bit more lazy of this one, but I think with the decimate modifier I'm not going to notice any of the small details that I had. So just ske this in that that now add my remeasure and decimate modify right here that locate to me that's just a really quick way to create these birch trees as well. That's another variation. Our forest is coming along quite nicely. Going to quickly rename these and add materials so called the silver and silver birch leaves. Silver birch leaves. I'll do the same for the other one. There you go. Once again I'll just apparently to the trunks. Just let that so that we can move them and as follow. Now for the materials I'm going to put a slightly different material on this. I'm not going to use a brown one. I can create a new material here and I call this silver birch trunk. I might make it play around the different colors. I was debating whether to make it slightly blue or not, but I'm not sure. I'll just leave it around about this color. I'll put the same on here and I'll create new leaves as well. Just because we might want to vary the color of the leaves rather than using the same ones. I call the silver birch leaves happy with that color. I just use the control L link materials trick again to add them to this birch as well. Remember, if you're going for like an autumn time, I find these trees look really nice if you give them like a red, orangey color. But I'm going for like a spring, summer season, so it doesn't really feel appropriate. I might still do it though, just because it looks nice. We'll see, and I've given a nice silver color. Now what we can do to go into edit mode, I'm going to save as increment this file because it involves me applying this skin modifier. So if I want to make changes then I can't go back. I'm just going to put the file, precious little button here to increment A 003. Both of these, I'm just going to do it one at a time. I apply this modifier and then edit mode to delete some of this actual go that it's given us. Be it's given us quite a few loops. We don't need hit X and then dissolve edges. That's the point. Naturally we might need to go through and encourage some of this because it's this increase in a polycount beyond what we need. Just like that. Then if I can select these faces right here, I'll, I'll give them silver bush. This will be like a more black color right here. I've got my reference material up on the other screen. I'm seeing what I want to create and I like the look that's having. I'm just going to go through and at some of these details. Because these silver birch trees almost look stripy, it increases the polycant tiny bit. But it's worth it. You could use textures to do this, but I didn't really see the point of that. Sometimes you can create these details, use natural geometry, and just give them separate materials out of its ness. Once that's done, I'm going to put it into a scene for the other trunk, and then I think it will be finished for this tree. We're going to apply the modifier again. Click Play. Get rid of some of these extra loops. We go through this properly at some point now, I'll just delete these ones and then I'll add some details with the tool, the knife tool. And what I'm doing here that you might have not just a quick way, if I'm in vertex mode. Edge mode, when I create my knife selection, quickly select into vertex mode gives you the right geometry that you need to apply the material. I'll show you what I mean the next time I do it. I've got a knife tool once I've finished my selection and I can just hit a sign. I don't need to reselect the faces again like I was doing before. Just another little tip to speed up time. There we go. I'm happy with how that's looking. Just to playground these colors again, maybe that's a little bit too bright or too dark. You can see actually I prefer those colors there. Three different types of trees done. We've covered a lot in doing this, a lot of new features. So I'd recommend taking a break and then coming back to it and see if you can create another type of tree. Maybe you want to create like a tree with berries on it or a cherry blossom or something. You can be quite creative with that. I hope you've learned a lot and taken notes and we'll carry on in the next video. 8. Creating Low Poly Foliage - Part 1: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this part we're going to be creating some shrubs and grass, add a bit more vegetation to the scene. Now starting out, I'm going to move my cursor to place it about here. I'll just slide this along one on the x axis to ten and move it back on the Y axis to zero so it's in the right spot. Now I'm going to press shift A and add a plane. The first piece of vegetation we're going to create is going to be like a fern. We'll start out by creating a leaf, one or two different sizes, and then we can move those around and rotate them in edit mode to create the whole bush. Now if I scale this down, so I'm going to scale this down on the y axis just to increase the length. And then move it along the Y axis as well. Just so the origin point is back here, but not quite past the edge point. Once we've done that, I'm going to cut this down the middle by hitting control R. I'm going to add a couple cuts along this axis as well, along the Y axis, just like this. Lastly, I'm going to delete all these vertices on this side by hitting X, delete vertices. And then I'm going to add a mirror modifier. This just means that we only have to work with one side of the mesh. I'm going to quickly change my shading mode now because when everything is white, it's a bit diff, in Ed mode. Again, I'm going to select this vertex and move it into water center. In fact, I'm actually going to shift, select the one in the middle and then press M and merge at Las just to bring it all together. You can see how I'm making the shape of the leaf like this. This one here at the end, I'm not actually going to merge. I'll do something else that later. Once this is done, I'm going to select these vertices in the middle and drag them up a little bit. I'll drag all of these up and then I want the middle one to be the highest because this is where the leaf is as thickest point. Then once that's done, I can just select all these edges running around the outside, extrude these on the x axes, and then just drag them in towards the center. In this case, I need to enable clipping up here on the mirror modifier and then just reposition them on the x axes back and forth until they are lined in the middle. Once this is done, make sure merge is ticked as well. I'm just going to apply this mirror modifier and then I can dissolve this line of edges running through the middle. I'll shift to let this again hit X and then dissolve. I go into my Y frame mode. You can see that I've created a triangular, a ray running through this leaf. And that just reduces the polycount a little bit and adds some thickness. Now to sort out the topology over here, we've got a couple of these flat quads right here that's causing some shading issues. I'm just going to shift, select these two verses here and press G to join them. And then do the same with these ones. Then I can solve this edge. We've got a pretty decent polycount for this leaf. Now you might want to enable smooth shading and use this auto smooth option right here. Put this on 180 degrees and then I'm just going to click these edges around. Select these edges, the sharp. Before we start assembling the bush, I'm just going to duplicate this a couple of times. Press shift D, and then move it on the x axis a little bit. This is going to be a tiny bit smaller, so I'm just going to select this ring running around the middle and dissolve these edges. Then I'm just going to scale the rest of the leaf down. Just select some of this geometry and move it back on a y axis. Scale it down a little bit in object mode. And then apply those transforms, because this will be a slightly shorter leaf at the base. Once that's done, I'm going to create some more variations as well. So I'll just drag this one out on the x axis. This time I'm going to go to a knife mode. And using the same technique that we've done before, I'm just going to create a little cuts into the state of the leaf, just like this. And I'm going to join these back together because I've used this sharp shading right here. Instead of the tit move, people need to mark these edges the sharp once they're done. Just like that. I'm going to go through and create a couple more of these. In this case, we're having some shading issues. It looks like probably because of the way this is trying to be rendered as an end. There are a couple ways that could fix this. One way is to join up this vertex to this one right here just changes the way that this angle is being made up. It might be best, actually when we're creating these cuts, to add some of these cuts just to particularly define how it's going to triangulate. In this case, I think that one works well. I'm going to join together and end this together. I'm happy with that. I'm just going to create one cut on this leaf right here, make quite a large one, deletes. You get quite quick at doing this. Once we've got all our leaves ready to go, we can start actually creating the bush right here. I'm just going to start out by rotating this up on the x axis using proportional editing. Right here, I've got this one turned on. I'm going to go into edit mode and just try dragging this vertex right here, make sure it enables proportional editing and just drag it down, maybe rotate it as well. See how that looks. Might need to join up these vertices right here just to fix any issues that we're getting That clicking Okay, to me looks like our thickness has proven to be a bit of a problem. I don't see any artifacts here. Once we've got that leaf and then going to duplicate it, just rotate it on the z axis, make sure it's proportional. Editing this, then I can start manipulating this. Just work in object mode for now. And then we'll combine it all to a single object later. This is a fun part and try to add a tiny bit of variation for each individual leaf. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to go in and fix some of these issues manually. But that's okay if these cuts are proven to be too problematic for you can always get rid of them, but I think it's worth it in the end. Or you could make the cuts once you've deformed all the leaves, that means having to do it all at the end, which will take longer once I've got these big ones. And I'm going to take the smaller leaf right here and move this inwards the center and quickly deform it. I'm switching between this mode here at the top, constantly, you can remember press the button to toggle it and try to get some variation in as well. Because our origin points down there in the center for all of these objects. If I scale them, they'll always scale out from the center, which is quite handy there we go. I'm quite happy with that little cluster firm right there. Just go through correct some of these errors right here. The proportions of this leaf look a little bit strange to me. You can always go through and fix. Some of you can also mark the edges running down the leaf sharp if you're getting too many shading issues, just like this. But I prefer the way it looks with the softer leaves. Let's put down to personal preference anyway, once we've got all these, we can select them all and combine them. I'm just going to hit control J. Then It looks like the origin is already down there. We want it to be, but just in case I'm going to reset the origins of the three decursor. There's our firm. The next piece of vegetation we'll be creating will be a tall grass cluster. So I'm just going to move my cursor along once again with this on the y axis like a couple of meters. I'm going to create a cylinder. This time shift a mesh and cylinder and I'm going to set the vertices from 32 down to three. Now I can scale this down a little bit so it's smaller. Just drag this face at the top up a little bit. Once that's done, we're going to create several different blades of grass, so I'm just going to duplicate this one on the Y axis and then press Shift R Copper tapes. We've got a few of these, we can start editing this top one. I'm just going to add some loop carts going along about three or four. We can scale this top face in a single vertex. Actually just going to press M and then merge by center. Then we can select all these ones and start scaling these in as well, so it's going to be quite a sharp one. Then once again we can just come in with portional editing and distort it a little bit here. Make sure to rotate it as well as move it just like that. Just add some randomness and do the same with this one. I'll merge these top ones at the center. I can start playing with the other loops running down. Remember I'm on smooth interpolation mode right here. This might not work best. I'm going to try some level ones, we can try spherical. Not quite sure how I like this one. Looks a bit better for rotating. I'll use that for this one. We can already see the difference. Tried to make them a little bit distinct from each other, we don't want them being exactly the same. Now for this one at the top, this is going to have a flat top. I'm going to add these loop cuts like always. This vertex right here, it's going to be merged with this one. And then I'm going to join these two vertices together by pressing J. I can just move this vertex in a little bit to thin it out. Then it looks like this one's been trimmed, the top, it's been eaten by an animal or something. Now, I can just move some of these loops around a little bit as well. Be creative with this. For one of these ones, I want to make it really curly. Add a bit of character. I'm going to add some loops in here. Then I'm going to keep rotating and extruding this. Remember each extrude are to rotate and try and scale it in a little bit as I go on just this, until eventually I'll just merge them at the center. That creates quite a nice character there. I'm just going to look around here because it doesn't really do much. For the last one, I'm just going to move this down. This will be a very short one. I'm going to select everything and scale on the shift Zx, scale on the X and Y Xs. I'll just add in one loop down here, and then I can merge to the top center. Just move bit here somewhere. There we go. So you can see how quick we've just created all these different blades of grass. So we can start moving them towards the center. Not on the exact center but just around it like this. Create some of them moving outwards, like the fern. They'll start from the center and then move outwards. I'm just quickly thinking now, I don't like how some of these leaves are clicking towards the center. I'm just going to select this early frac here. I can press L on Island select. And I'm going to move it this way. Looks a little bit better in the center there. Maybe do the same as this leaf right here. I prefer the way that's looking. It's the back of the grass. Keep moving thelesso add the more to the center. I'm reading this curly one right here around me of Tim Burton. I was like adding some of these Gothic cartoon styles to my low poly work. I think it looks quite nice. And once again, I can play off the scale a little bit. I'm just going to make this one, this one shorter, rotate out a little bit. You might not know from looking at this cluster that we're re using some of these plates of grass, but we can get away with that. There we go. I'm quite happy with that. Once again we can just select all of these and combine them as the same object. Once again, I'm just going to quickly reset the origin to the three decursor. For both of these, I'll just select them both and hit control A to apply scale just in case I mess that up while editing them. Next up, this will be the last push we make. It is just going to be a tiny cluster of grass and there'll be more of these than this larger one. I'm just going to move my cursor along here on the y axis again, put this to three, then I can actually probably recycle some of these blaser grass that we've created. So I'm just going to islands like this one right here and duplicate it over and then hit to separate it as its new object. In edit mode, I'm not even going to bother going to object mode and setting the origin. I'm just going to move this around maybe three or four of these to create metal tuft of grass and then with my origin to the three cursor just because it's down there, I can scale some of these in a bit so they're all the same size. There we go. Alright, look at that once again. This is its own object. I'm just going hit quickly. Apply the scale and set the origin to the three. Cursor. There we go. Now note that if you're using these assets, it's a little bit different. With low poly work, you can get away with using a few more polygons for foliage. But this is not how you would do this for realistic games these days, the grass would be a series of images, image planes. So look more, something like this. Just a quick demonstration. And then what we'd do is we'd have a grass texture. So it would literally just be the silhouette of grass like this on these planes, which will be two sided. And then from a distance it kind of looks like grass. But that is beyond the scope of the course. So we're just going to be sticking to this method for an now, which I think looks better. Anyway, creating our foliage like this is also a bit more consistent with our art style. Once we've finished these, we just need to give them materials and put them in the right collection. I'm going to quickly drag up into rendered mode, We can just select all these, I'll give them the same shade of green. So just create a new one. C, this shrub green. And select a color for them, it's a little bit darker, would ideally match the color of the grass that we're using on the landscape. And again, we can just select both these two and the last one. Hit control L to link materials, I'm going to select all of these, they're currently in the trees collections. I'm just going to create a new battery, we can put them in the foliage collection. These, instead of dragging them up to the foliage, we can also just hit M in the viewport and nclconfoliage collection. I'll just quickly rename these. Now, there we have it, Our asset pack already coming on quite well. We've got a good mix of foliage here and rocks already. We'll continue in the next video. 9. Creating Low Poly Foliage - Part 2: Well over one and welcome back. In this video we're going to be creating some more complex foliage. So we'll have some fruits and berries in there and well, let's try making a pumpkin as well. So once again, I'm just going to place my cursor. I'll move it along on the X axis to 11 and on the Y axis to zero, just so it's not a good spot for us. And I'm actually going to start out by making a pumpkin. This might be good for a Halloween theme, but if you don't like that, you could replace it with any other wild vegetable you like. I'm just going to start off here by adding a U Vs. You might need to change the segment. I think it's 32.16 by default, but I like having 12 segments and six rings. Once that's created, I'm going to go into edit mode and scale this down a little bit. Now we can scale the top vertex and the bottom vertex in towards the center, on the z axis. I'm just going to press and Z to scale in. We can use a little bit of proportional editing here set to smooth to help us out. Just to flatten it a little bit because pumpkins aren't usually perfectly round, I like to look at that. And I'm just going to play around with these loops as well. Turn off proportional editing, I'd like to look at that. Once that's done, I'm just going to come in here, turn my proportion adjustin back on and just a sorted a tiny bit so it's not a perfect shape because no pumpkin in the real world is going to look this perfect. That looks a little bit better to me if you don't like how the faces look. You can see on the inside right here, the geometries are weirdly dense and the faces are very thin. We can just add a decimate modifier to it and drag back the ratio a tiny bit. I'd like to look at that personally. There's our pumpkin. And to create the stem, I'm just going to place my cursor. Actually I'll apply this decimate modifier. And I'll just place my cursor up here because to selected I'm going to add a cylinder with just three vertices. Scale it down a little bit. If I set this top face, I can just drag it up and extrude it, make sure proportional editing is off it, it's just catching me. I rotated it as well. We try playing around with the size for the stalk, You might want to make it a bit thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top. Scale this out a tiny bit. So we're happy with that then just to get rid of this face at the bottom because that's never going to be seen, this tiny optimization right there. Next up is my technique for creating IV. We can also use this to surround the pumpkin, making it like it's the rest of the plant. This uses the same techniques that we've covered before in this course, that the leaves might be a little bit more complicated. First off, I'm just going to quickly select this object right here because the origin is where I want it. I'm going to press Shift S, cursor selected, and I'm just going to join the stalk to the pumpkin because I'm happy with how that is. Now I'm going to add a single vertex that's using the extra objects add on that we added previously. I've got my single vertex here as a new object in vertex mode. I'm just going to move this on. The Z X, I can press to extrude and then drag around the object just like this. You can imagine this being all the different strands of B, all the different roots around in pumpkin. I'm just going to go down and add skin modified that we used before we can hit control A to reduce the thickness. I've just noticed now the origin isn't at D on the bottom of the pumpkin. I'm just going to let this go into edit mode. I'll go in this orthographic mode here. This orthographic mode, I'll just drag everything up so it sits nicely on the ground plane, just a slight bit below. So it's clipping down. I can start shaping this IV just like before. You can use this x ray mode here if you're struggling to see where the actual vertices are. Might also be an S idea to connect the stems at the top of the pumpkin. But I'm going to have mine sad just because that's the way I've modeled it. We're going to hit control shift B just to smoothly bubble this out. Get rid of those sharp edges. Don't worry too much about polycount adding geometry because we're most likely going to put a decimate modifier on this after I'm just going to go back into turn off the x ray mode. Right here, I can start scaling in the tips to reduce the thickness at the end. I prefer the way this looks. Just remember, I'm just beveling this one using control shift B. Once I'm happy with that, we can work a decimate modifier on this to see how it looks. Just going to move some of these vertices away. There we go, I, this decimate modifier and reduce the ratio a little bit. We don't look into triangular, but this will always save us a few polygons. I'm quite happy with how that looks V. We can, of course, create lots of these IV patches that aren't connected to pumpkin, but we can do that later. Maybe create a couple of variations of these and we can just place these on the forest floor, put some leaves on them to create the As I'm going to start out by adding a plane to press shift a, a plane and we can scale this down a little bit. In edit mode, I'm just going to move this object up. I'm keeping the origin here. If you can just see me changing the shape of this on the x axes, not quite sure what shape of the leaf I'm going to do. I've got some reference for pumpkin images on my second monitor. I think I'm going to stylize it a tiny bit. Cuts in here like this. I'm going to merge these two vertical. Select these two vertices, then select the middle one, so it's white. And I'm going to hit M and merge it at last. Or center will also work. I can just start shaping this leaf. This, I'm quite happy with how that's looking right here. I'm just going to delete these vertices. Actually, put modifier on it. It's a bit lazy, but it saves us sometime in the nibble clipping that would be the, that outliner of the leaf. Just change the size. Then to add thickness to this, I'm going to add a solidified modifier. We can start playing the round. Let me select these firsts right here, just to keep it in a tiny bit at the top, I like Carlos looking, I'm going to shade this smooth right here. And turn on not too smooth. Put this all the way up once again, we're just going to mark all the sharp edges. We'll quickly apply this modifier and we can just select all the sharp edges on the mesh and hit control E like we did before. To mark sharp, there's a little shortcut because selecting all these edges manually can be quite time consuming. Instead, go into edit mode, clear our selection, and then we're going to go select and select sharp edges. This does a pretty good job of automatically setting them. You can see here, it does it based on an angle. Right here's 30% I'm just going to decrease this slightly so it gets to top ones as well. Just that once selected, I can hit control and mark Sharp. And that does a pretty good job. Of course, if you're not worried about exporting this to a game engine later, most people probably aren't. Then you could, of course, just drag to smooth down to the same value, down to 14% they're down to 14 degrees, but I think this gives slightly nicer control. Once we've got this leaf, we can start placing this around the V. We're just going to quickly move it back so that origin points in a nice spot. Then we can just start placing this, this, make sure it intersects nicely, just in case we want to make any changes to this leaf. I'm actually going to old, I'm going to instance instead of duplicate. I never know if I want to change the shape of it right here. If I wanted to scale it, we'll just move around some of the geometry. It updates all the other leaves. Remember to alt D instead of shift D T. This, I'm creating this pumpkin. But of course, you can go wild with this. Try to experiment and see if there are any other similar plants you like making or any other types of leaves. I like the way this is coming on. I don't have had too much drmetrycae. I want it to be in line with the rest of the assets we've created Right now, this pumpkin starts to look a little bit too dense compared to the rest of the foliage. It's okay, but I've just got to keep that in mind. What I'm happy with this, we can start working on the next object right here. So I'm actually, I'm going to scale everything here. I'll slip everything, I change my origin points to the cursor. Some of these have got their own origin points. If I scale it out, you can see it's going to go below the ground a little bit too much. I'm just going to press the period key on the main keyboard and go to three de cursor. All scale it out from the cursor so I can just change the size till it fits a bit better. That looks quite nice for me. Another thing you might want to do is just add a couple more pumpkins to this cluster, so you can just duplicate this one or instance, scale it down. And put another decimated modifier on it to reduce the poly count a tiny bit. But I'm going to stick with just the one because I don't want to add too much repetition Only once that's done, I'm going to slide the cursor along and start working on the next one. This next one here is very simple. I'm going to create a berry bush. So I'll start out by adding an cursor which is found break down here and the mesh dropped down. And I'm going to change the subdivisions down to one just to make it a little bit more low poly in edit mode. I'll scale this in just like that. I'm happy with that. Once again, we could just go around with proportional editing to make the shape a bit less consistent like this. You can even go into sculpting mode, if that's the way you prefer to work. I might try that out. You can experiment, but yeah, just use proportional editing. I got a couple of these sell duplicate this one now. And scale this down a tiny bit. Just I want a couple different clusters of these blushes next to each other. I'm just going to rotate them so they don't look the same. That's very important. Once that's done, I'm just going to go into edit mode and rotate it and move it up so the origin looks like it's in about the right place, which looks pretty good to me. I'm going to quickly scale this up. I'll apply that scalp there. Once we've got this, we can start adding some more objects. Now we can go down to core again. Next time I'm going to go into edit mode, scale it in, make sure this is a separate object by the way, and we're just going to do these around bush. Just like this satisfying. If you wanted to add some more randomness, you could of course scale and rotate these bushes as well. I might quickly scale them, but we don't go into too much detail. Just make some of them slightly bigger than the others. We go, once that's done, I'm going to whack a decimate modifier on this just to break up the evenness of these cosph. I'm going to go down to decimate and just drag this down a little bit. These should be very low poly, something like that. As long as they're not flat, that'll work. They look a bit sharp as well, which is definitely a style. It looks almost like a prickly thorn bush. Yeah. Once this is finished, we'll give it like a red material so you can tell it's berries. And imagine you're using this in a game. You're creating some little low poly game. A play could go up to this click on it to eat the berries and then they disappear. So you'd create another version of this bush like this that hasn't got the berries on it and that will just replace it. So that's an example of how you can use this in a game. Any'serry bush finished for the next other little bit of foliage. I'm just going to create another patch of ivy here at this time without the pumpkin on it because that you want a pumpkin all throughout your forest. I'm just going to move my curs or along the y axis to two the origins here. Once again, I'm going to press shift A to add a single vertex under me, single vertex. I can start extruding this out. Let this just create the rough shape of the IP patch. We'll put the skin modifier on it again. Instead of adding the manually, we can try linking the data from this object right here in object mode. I'm just going to click this IP patch right here. It control L and copy modifiers right under it looks like that's copied the skin modifier. I'm just going to quickly this decimate right here because it doesn't look like skin modifier is working. Let me try going into edit mode and selecting everything going up here to item and it looks like we just need to hold control a and drag our skin modifier isn't giving us any thickness right here. So it s like we just need to press this little button here to add skin data and we can go into edit mode and control a to scale everything down. As usual, I find it best to work with this in top view if I just press the Z up here, A gamble or you can press seven on the number pad to toggle top. If I go through, I'm just going to start shaping this now and turn off proportional editing. Remember you can select the joint right here and it control shift B to be able to smooth it out. That's a really important shortcut to remember, I'll just extrude this out a little bit more. We can add some layering as well. I'll just move this up a little bit on the z axis because it's not going to be perfectly flat. This, we've got the tips right here that they'll be digging downwards, looking for something to attach to. That way this is coming along that once again just going to set all the ends control to reduce the size, not going to completely shrink. I'll just racking down about here. And then I'll set all these ones with the joints that connect to the ends. And I'll scat these down a tiny bit as well. And then I can play around with the size of the other ones, how that's looking. We can also see how it's looking with the decimate modifier on it. Just by changing this ratio, we still want it to be triangular. It quickly turn effect, right? Yeah, we still want it to be triangular but not too distorted like this. How that's think, that's a good enough level about that. You can always add a subsurface modifier up here between them. Increase the count, sometimes just makes the result a little bit less square for the same pot. I like the way that looks. I don't want to spend too much time working on it because I'm sure you can experiment. I'm just going to copy the leaves over, so I'll slap this leaf right here, And I'm just going to duplicate this over. Let's get it down a little bit like we've done before. I'm just going to start tossing this around the objects. You can use a particle system to do this, but for such a small object, it'll be quicker just to place them by hand. And it also gives us Nasa control scale, the Syn a bit. Remember if you double tap R, you can freely rotate. It puts you in this little roll mode that's useful for adding random rotation to the leaves quite quickly rotate. Some of them are bots as well. This can probably be one of the hardest things to do on the object. Make sure we change the scale of them. Just not all the same, they're all point in the same direction. Let's set this. You may not like my design for leaves right here. May want to go through a different type. Maybe make it a little bit more rounded or add some more polygons. But remember I'm instancing them instead of duplicating. So you can always change the shape of the leaves if you like, because this is something that we're likely to want to change later. I'm actually going to put a copy of this in an archive collection. Just speak and go back to it. There you go. I don't want to spend too much time adding details I'm sure you know but will look nice. I spend some time adding these leaves. I'm just going to select all of these right here. You can hold on this and go to the last two tool or use to cycle through a different selection modes. I like the last tool, it's easier to box select. I'll select all of these right here. I'm going to quickly duplicate them with Shift D. Then I'm going to press M to move them to the archive collection. I'll make sure this collection is hidden right here, because I don't want this to be shown, I just hide that. And click the camera just in case it tries to render it. Now I'm going to join all these objects together. So I've got the berries. I'll add a material to this now because it's easier to do it as a separate object. So drag up into rendered mode or material mode, I'll go down and add the berries material, make some red. I'll add a green to this one. We could re, use the same green that we use for the grass. I might actually do that just to save some material. Slots can make it a little bit more simple. When choosing one, I'll choose shrub green. But I do want to make it a bit darker because I'm feeling late. These looking to green and too light for us, I find the vegetation on the forest floor is usually a bit darker than the leaves you'll find in trees in the canopy. Yeah, you can treat these values for a long time. Right here, I'm going to add the same material to the vine that start leaves as the wrong one. Add the shrub green. Then for the leaves, I'm going to create a new one. And I'll just, I'll call this shrub leave, Give it a slightly lighter green, slightly more yellow as well. Maybe this says a little bit of contrast the way that's looking. I'll add the same material to these ones as well, because at all instances it should copy it to all the other leaves on the object. There we go, That's the right one. Now, in the pumpkin, we just need to add orange material to be quite a unique one. That looks nice to me for the stalk. We can probably re, use one of the other materials. I'm just going to go through, select these sites right here and assign them to this slot. And then you can try how some of these look. I'll just put the silver birch trunk dark on it because it looks close enough. But you can create a new material if you prefer. So anyway, once that's all done, I'm going to select all of these using the lasso tool. And then just shift the pumpkin to make sure that this is the primary selection and hit control J to join them together. It looks like we need to apply these modifiers actually. So I'll just quickly apply the modifier and then we can join them all together. There we go. We might need to turn on this alto Smb option. I'll quickly go through and edit mode. I'll just island select the, the pumpkin and the stork. We've just got these three groups selected right here, the Iv pumpkin and the stork. Going to quickly go to edge mode right here, pressing to select sharp edges, decrease this go one degree, control mark sharp. And it looks like that also helps with some of these triangles right here. It makes them look like cause instead, which is less pumpkins. Done, this one will probably be a bit more simple. You're just going to slide the berries, then the bush, and hit control J. It looks like we need to apply the decimate modifier. Actually, there we go. Usually what gets me is not apply and modifiers control. For these ones, we're going to do the same. Just quickly apply the skin modifier subdivision and decimate. Then we'll just slid everything and combine it. I'm just doing the same thing we did for the pumpkin. I'm putting an auto smooth dragon up 180. Then in edit mode, I'm going to quickly hide the leaves just by selecting the ivy and inverting my selection. And then hiding it looks like a miss a leaf when ahead of them, but don't worry about that. Then I'm going to go select sharp edges. Strike this fat that looks right to me. Control, mark sharp. And then I just need to add everything together. Again, add this leaf to this object right here. Control. And it looks like everything is connected. So we just need to quickly rename these objects and then we finish. So I call this pumpkin berry, bush and ivy. Now this ivy of course, scatter this along the forest floor. This you create multiple of them, even create different versions of this ivy floor if you're finding it's repetitive, but I find this way looks quite nice. And you could also use it to coat rocks and the cliff side and things like this, or even have them dangling down trees. You can get quite creative with these pieces of ivy right here, and they're already in the foliage collection. In the next video, we'll be adding some flowers and we'll see you then. 10. Creating Low Poly Flowers: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this video, we're going to be creating some flowers. I'm going to start off by placing my cursor again, I've got to the view. We've done this a few times, right? No, I'm just going to reset my cursor to the new spot. I'm going to start off modeling a daisy because it's quite a simple one and I got a nice technique for this. I'm going to press shift eight to add a cylinder and set the number of vertices to three. Then in edit mode we can start scaling it down so we've got the right thickness. I'm just going to move this face down a tiny bit so it's further below the origin point about here. And I can track this one up to make it how high I like it. Once that's done, I'm going to add a couple cuts in here. The hit control R, and the use of scroll wheel, just to add a couple cuts. And I'll move these, they're displayed on the C axis just like this. Now to add some leaves to this, I'm going to use the knife tool. I'm making an assertion right here, just below this edge. And then connected touch with the other side. We should have a face like this triangular face. I'm going to hold ol and extrude along normals to bring this leaf out, so around about here. And then I can scale it on the shift z axis. That's on X and Y axis. Just by holding down shift z, I'll extrude it out again on this normal axis here. In this case it can just press and it does it. Then I have to alter extrude along normals. I'll just merge this at center, I'll select this vertex one. Scale them on the z axis by zero and then just move them up using vertex snapping to align them to this vertex just so the top face there is flat. Once I've got that leaf, you can repeat it on some of the other segments, a stem if you like, but I'll just stick with the one for now. To create the actual top of the flower, we're going to create another cylinder. I'll place my cursor up here, select all of these, and then press Shift cursor to selected. So cursors in the middle. While I'm here, I'm just going to quickly delete the top and bottom face because those aren't going to be visible as a new object. I'm going to press shift A again, add a cylinder. This time I'm going to have five Fticstead of three. Now I can scale this down, the middle part of the flower, you can just shape it around how you like it at this. And then we want a little low poly bump in the middle of the flower going upwards and make more sense once it's done. So I'm going to press to inset and then just hit M to merge in the center. The vertex select mode, I can just let this and drag it up a little bit. You can see it creates the nest little bump. Now to create these petals going around the outside, I'm going to select all of these faces. Just st the outer ring of this. Ideally here we'd be able to extrude long normals. Again, I'm going to and extrude long normals, but you can see that this drags out the faces whilst keeping them connected. And there's no option down here to enable individual faces, so I'm just going to control Z, this go back and then this time we're going to hold Lt and go on individual faces. And you can see this extrudes out all the faces on their own normals. So I can drag the petals out until they're far enough. Something like this, we can always change it later. I've got my reference images and daisies on my other monitor. So I'm looking at those wells doing this. I want happy with how far out that is. I'm going to extrude it out again, ol individual faces. This time I'm just going to select each of these faces and merge them at center. If you've got lots of petals, you could just do merge by distance and increase the amount. What we might want to do now is go into Edgemode right here, and change the size of the loops that we've got going around. So I'm just going to shift select all of these and scale them up. But once again, this all scales out from the center. That's because our current pivot point is the median. And if we put superior key on a keyboard, we can change that individual elements right here. And this time when I scale, you see it all scales on the center of mass of each selection. You see the point it's scaling by. I'll scale this out a little bit, then I'll move my pivot point back up to the medium point just to scale it to the center, because I think it's too far out for me. Whenever you scale or hit something in blunder, always be aware of what your pivot point is. This can often catch you off guard if you accidentally said it to individual origins and then forget about it later. Anyway, I'm now going to do some tweak into the topology of this. I like this top being flat. I'd like the bottom of the petals to just be sharp. Look a bit, a little bit more rounded. There are quite a few ways to do that. What I'm currently thinking is just adding in a loop down the middle of each of these petals like this. I slit these edges right here, I can just merge at center to sharpen out the bottom of the pedal. It just means we've got two triangles down here instead of cos. I can do the same with the middle. I'm just going to set this face right here in facet mode. And hit to merge at the center. And then I can just drag this vertex down a little bit so that it intersects nicely with the stem that we've. Now the last thing to do is just select some of these right here and move them up. You can snap them. I've got snapping enabled to read it. You can either snap them on a z axis to these parts of the petals like this. It maybe come in, select all these faces right here, and scaled them on a z axis by zero just to flatten the top out. And I found that looks quite nice because there's not as much contrast on petals. Alternatively, you could set all these outer vertices right here and bring these up to change the shape of it down. That's how daisy finished. Nwi'm going to create a flower that looks like a rose or a tulip. I'm just going to reset my cursor. The stem, it's got the origin, but we want to just cursor to selected. While here, I'll quickly join this top to the stem. And I'm just going to move my cursor along 1 meter on the y axis. I'll start off creating a stem like we did last time. I had a cylinder with three vertices down. Just change the height a little bit. This one's going to go straight up. I'm not going to have a crooked extend this time because I'll have some leaf sciring around it. Cuss ready here. I'm just going to quickly press shift A to create a plane scale. This down a little bit. I've done this in the same object, but that's okay. I can just rotate this to create the shape of a leaf right here. To have to be too precise. You can see here, I'm just extruding this free hand and remember you can hit G, and G again to slide it down at the bottom right here. I'm just going to scale this in towards the center, so that intersects Nestle the stem. And then I can change the scale of these as well, just like this. I think that looks quite nice once I'm happy with it. I'm just going to these three faces right here and extrude along normals to give some thickness to the leaf. And I'll extrude up this way, might have a tiny bit of correction to do down here though. I'm just going to set this face easier to see in Y frame. I'm going to hit and again to bring it upwards. Here's a little trick that a lot of people don't know. If you hit G and G again, you can always bring it upwards, but it's difficult to bring back again direction that I moved it in. The way you can do that is if you hit G. And G start dragging up like this and then hold the old key, it brings up these yellow lines and I can start sliding it out past where it originally was. In this direction. I've got short cuts down here on my screen. Casts keys if you want to see that again, I'm dragging it up and then I'm hitting Alt and I can drag it out again. That's just a little handy trick right there. I might actually merge this at the center and I'll do the same at the bottom one. I'll merge at the center, all along the back of the leaf. Just reduce the polycount a little bit. In fact, this one right here, I'll just merge of this vertex like this. And we've got quite a nice leaf. Now I can duplicate this. We shift are on the z axis by 180. And I'm just going to move it back so it's facing the opposite direction. Like this. Maybe have one higher than the other. I think that looks quite nice to me. Now, it looks like we've got a slight problem here. I'm just going to select the stem right here, island the stem by pressing it and hide. It looks like just going to need to s this vertex and merge it to the top one. Because it's causing some, it was a quad and it was causing some issues. So just always look out for the little errors like that, but that's looking fine to me. Now we can start working on the top. There are a lot of ways to do this. I'm not quite sure how I want it to look. I'll just move, stem up a little bit. Delete the faces again because these aren't going to be visible. But actually I might keep the top face. I'll just delete the bottom one. This top face right here. I'm going to extrude it, scale it up like this, and then extrude it up again. Then we've created petals for our tulip. If you want, you can always extrude this down and then merge in the center to give it a nice vertex like this. Of course, if you wanted more edges around this tulip, then you could increase the count of the cylinder from three to something like 56 or seven. I find odd numbers usually work better. You could also add some thorns to the side if you wanted to be creative. But I'm just concerned about polycount. I want to be consistent with the rest of my models and I don't think I've gone into that level of detail before. Once that's done, I'm going to move my cursor one more time. On the axis two, I'm going to create a sunflower this time, which I think will look quite nice in an open field. Once again, I'm just going to add a cylinder. Move three s. Stan is going to be a bit thicker this time, so I'll just drag these furtices up to about a meter or so. Drag these ones down just so that they don't clear the ground and then we can start working on the top. I'm going to create my flower as a separate object before quickly. Once again, I'm just going to delete the top and bottom faces. Then place my cursor on here, shift as cursor just selected because I'm going to create a new object and I'm going to add a cylinder. As for the count, I'm thinking about eight to nine. I'll try nine because the petals are going to be a bit smaller. And I'll scale this down in edit mode until I've got the right width of the flower. And then I'll just scale it down as the axis like this. Now can select these outer faces right here, the same as we did before. And there's lot daisy we're just going to hit and then extrude individual faces like this. And then we'll merge each of these together. One way we can do that, rather than going through and merging the manually, is move our pivot point down to individual origins again. And we're just going to scale by zero, like this. Now of course we've got four vertices in the same location for each of the ends of these petals. I'm just going to select everything, hit them and do merge by distance. And you can see at the bottom we've got rid of 27 vertices, which sounds about right for us. If I go to face select Merge can select this face right here. Just in set a tiny, we've got our middle and I'm just going to insert this again and this time merge it at the center. Just drag this vertex up a little bit, then we can select the outer ring of petals right here. I'm just going to use the lasso tool and move it up a little bit. I like how that looks. Maybe I might move them down and snap on. On the level of vertices we'll see as to the bottom. I think it might look weird and too sharp if we merge all of these vertices at the center. Instead, I'm just going to select this face right here int and drag it down a little bit. And then I'll merge this a face at the center like that. And now we can rotate this sunflower, it's in the right position. Maybe just rotate it on the Y axis a little bit. Although in general practice we want forward facing things. The sunflowers facing a direction you want it facing on the negative Y axis, like this. If you're modeling a character, you'd have the face coming this way. It just makes sense to me to do that. Just rotate it like this, make sure that the stems in about the right spot. I'm quite happy with that. Now, once again, I'm just going to add some segments to this stem. I might just add three. I think it'd be nice if we add some leaves using the same method that we did over there in the daisy. I'm just going to come in with the knife tool, extrude along normals or in extrude individual faces. I'll extrude this loop right here. Or extrude it, I'll scale it up on a shift Z axis. Then I can merge these vertices together that center. Just snap it up to the others right there. That looks pretty good to me. I'll just move this vertex up a little bit so the faces flatter. Then we can repeat this a couple of times to create some more leaves going around some flower. I'll just add a couple more here quickly. You get faster at doing this, see if you can erase. This can be quite good practice for the shortcuts and blender. Actually, you can get quite fast by doing it this way. And we just merge this at the center, track the vertex up a little. That's all I leaves done. It looks a bit weird pointing forward, isn't it? But I'm not too worried about that for now. I'm still happy with the flower fact. I might just quickly rotate this on the z axis by 60, so that flowers not facing forward. And then I'll just quick hit control A to apply the rotation. I'll join all these objects together. So I'll join the top of the flow to the stem right here. Control J. That's a one object and that's one object. Now I can quickly rename these, they're already under the foliage collection. I call that one daisy. I call this one a tulip about that, right? And I call this one a sunflower. Perfect. Now we can start on materials, So I'll just drop down to the material preview. And we're just looking for some material we can use for the stem. I think we should be able to use shrub green for stems. I'll just quickly add this material to all of these using the Lincoln method like we did before. The control L link materials. Now we can create the, the materials for the petals and at the pollen in the middle, I'll create a new material slot here. Just call this daisy pollen. I hope I've felt pollen right again. And get this a nice yellow. Then we can select these faces in the middle to sign this to that nice golden colors, quite nice, a bit more saturated. Now we can start with the leaves. To do this, I'm just going to select the outer vertices right here and hit Control a number pad plus to grow my selection and then convert to face mode. It's a slightly quicker way of doing it. We could have just inverted the selection, I suppose the grow if you don't have a number pad that can also be found under select. And then Sl more and less, I'll add this to a new material slot. Call this daisy petal. And then I'm going to assign this. Don't worry about the color for now because I'm going to change this later using a lot cool trick in the shade and node editor for the tulip. Just add a new material, slot, tulip, petal. And I'll just quickly assign this to these faces again, I'll set this and grab my selection and assign, there we go, that's working for the sunflower. I'll do the same. Just quickly add a material slot. I'll have the center, so I'll just call this flower seeds. Of course it would be good if you can re some other materials in the scene that have got a similar color but I don't think there's anything else that's got the same brown. I want maybe we could use a pumpkin store called the Brown on this birch tree. I'm not worried about performance. I'll just create another material that color and then quickly assign it. I'll just use a circle the select tool there you can press to use that and then enter once we're finished. It's slightly lighter. Go this outer layer right here. I'm going to have a little bit of radiation. So I'll create a new material slot. I'll call this flower orange. Like another orange colors. Sign this. Then the outer bone called the sunflower yellow give it quite a bright yellow color. I need to assign this to the right faces. I'm thinking if I just slip both of these, maybe able to control, maybe. I'm just trying to think of a quick way selecting, I'll slip this back face right here and then groom my selection a couple times. Dest this bit. Just practice trying to be quicker with selecting the things rather than do it face by face. The quicksin, that's quite a nice color to it. I'm happy with how this some flowers looking. Anyway, back to the materials for these petals. I was going to create a way to randomize the color for each version of the flower right here. If I instance or duplicate this flower and just move it aside, this one could be blue and then this one could be pink. We won't have to change the color manually. Blender will do it for us. We're going to switch up here to the shader tab. We're in the sky right now. We're playing around with this a little bit earlier in the course when we're creating the sky. Just going to change from build back to object. And I'm going to hit number pad period to focus in on this daisy right here and then strike up to the rendered all the materials tabs, we can see our materials. This is quite a simple set up we're going to do, but very robust one at the same time, starting off, we're just going to add some inputs to the base color. First off, we're going to need color, which is under converter, and plug this into the base color. Currently it's from black to white, but we'll change that later. Before we do anything else. It might be worth instancing a bunch of these flowers just so we got some copies of them right here. I'll do the tulips as well because it's hard to see how the random list is working. And got one just like this. We've got a mini meadow, I'd like to look at that. Remember where the original ones were, of course. Then under this color amp right here next to the color, we're going to add an input and then object info. And we're going to plug in the random into this factor right here. You can see that what it's doing now is mapping each one of these flowers with value from black to white. So every object in the scene will get a random value from black to white. And it is being passed through the color ramp. And of course, we can change the color ramp to affect what percentage of the flowers, we've got a certain color. If I drag this black par up to 75% right here, you can see that under my position is about 75% 0.75 And it's coloring about 34 of the flowers black, which looks right compared to the rest which are white and gray. This can be very cool just to play around with like this. I find this quite satisfying. And you could also use this to animate the change of the color of the petals. Let's see, doing a season time lapse just than I do. But anyway, we want to have a selection of static colors that we've chosen. So I'm going to go down from linear and we're going to change this to constant. Now we can some of these around, so I'll drag the white one down. And you can see now it's snapping. It's either black or white. There's no radiation between as opposed to this ease mode where the flowers that lay in the middle are interpolating. Set this to constant. Then we can add a few more keys to this. Change the color of some of these, the colors that you want for your flowers. So I want some blue ones like this. Like the white one might want some green flowers as well. Maybe not green. That looks a bit strange. You could do like some pink ones, this and you can play around with this forever. That's kind of cool. These blue ones maybe. Or red endless possibilities. And another nice thing about this is so you wanted to change the amount of color of flower. You just drag it to the center and make it take up more area or this colorant right here. Right now, I'm going to have about 50% of the flowers that I've got being red because it's taken up all this area and it's a bit like a pie chart. You can just go down here in a shade editor and real time change the amount of each flower in C. I found this a very cool thing to do. I'm going to quickly copy and paste this node set up right here. I'll copy the object info and color ramp control C on my keyboard. If I just click on one of these tuls right here, I've got the tulip petal material selected. I can paste this in. Just hit control V. Let's paste these nodes. And then connect up the color again. But for the tus, I might want different colors to the daisies. I might give them like a yellow color like that. Really to look at that. That's nice. I can't really see any pink ones just to the til I can see some. We'll just change the slider. Right here. There we go. I like the pink ones as well. I might change this color slightly, just creating more till I get a pink one, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. There we go. I'll make this an orange one or Yes, can be very fun to play around with. I've created all of these different tulips and daisies that I've forgot where the original ones are. I'll just set one until I find one sees this daisy 0.006 right here, because we've duplicated it. I think that's my original right there, the daisy. So I'll just shift select all the other ones and delete them for now. But you can keep them there if you like them. They look quite pretty. Here's my original tulip, so I'll just delete all the other ones. These are just three examples of flowers that I'd like to add, and I really think they bring a lot of character. But of course, if you've got the bit time, then just go around experiment to see if you can create another kind of flower and give it this random material as well. We've covered quite a lot of content now, we've learned a few cool modeling tips this video. And we've gone over a bit of the Shade Editor. Great work if you've got this flow. And of course, we'll continue in the next video. 11. Creating Low Poly Underwater Plants: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this video, we're going to be creating some underwater sea life, like fish, seaweed, and coral. I'm going to start out with, I think if I go to the view tab, the location for the cursors currently on told me I'm going to change this to 13 and reset the other two. Sirius Our cursors right there. We'll start off by creating some seaweed. Now note that I've got some reference images on my other screen that I'm looking at. Whilst doing this, maybe look at a couple types of seaweed that you like before you start modeling, I'm going to press Shift A and add a cylinder. I'm going to change the vertices to three, then I can just scale it down a little bit. And edit mode, I'm going to move my shading as solid, so I can see a bit better. Sounds very simple. I'm just going to scale it in again, Select these bottom three vertices right here and merge at the center. Once I've got the rest of this, I can shift a duplicate and just move it up a little bit on a z axis. And then hit shift R to repeat this process a couple times. Then we can start rotating them, moving and submit the shape a little bit more organic. I wanted to swirl like this to the side. I've got individual origins on here. It looks like I'm going to press period key and move up to medium point. You can shape it. Another way you can do this is use proportional editing. So I'll just island this one nonproportional editing and make sure that I've disabled connected only. We can just moving rotator like this. These are the tools you can use. Then once I've got this going to duplicate this in object mode and just rotate it, it's spurt from one of these joints right here. And then in edit mode, I could just delete a couple of these just that we can create quietness, short sewed. You can even scale some of these down if you want them to be a bit smaller variation to it like that. I might scale the top segment down a little bit. You can play around with this. I'm just going to duplicate this segment right here, shift D, and in edit mode I los through this one, so it comes out again. No, once's got all of these, you can just let them all link and join them together. I'm just going to quickly go through and change some of the scaling to make it look a little bit more natural. I'm happy with that. I would advise that you create a couple of variations of this. I haven't really got that many variations here, but for the sake of this course, we'll just stick with this one. I'm going to quickly hit control A to apply the rotation scale, just in case. I don't remember if I change those in object mode. Actually, it might scale up a little bit, so it's bigger like that. There we go. One thing I'm noticing here is that some of these normals look like they're not quite right. So we're going to go into edit mode, select everything and do shift to recalculate the normals. And you can see that fixes that. To show you what I mean, I'm going to quickly undo this step. So we've got our incorrect normals back again. If you want to preview the normals and that's the direction the face is pointing towards member. We can go up here under the view shading and enable backface cling. I can see that you only see the triangles behind it. If you imported this into a game engine like Unity or Unreal, this is how it would display. By default, it's quite important that we recalculate our normals. We can quickly check some of the other models while we're here, but I think we're all looking. Okay, so I'm just going to go back on this because I don't think we've covered normals in much detail before. So if I just say, well, backface culling, another option that can be a little bit better for previewing your model is to come under this viewpoint, overlays, drop down, and enable face orientation. And this shades any incorrect normals red, which makes them quite easy to see here. I'm actually noticing now these paving stones were incorrect this whole time. I'm going to select both of these objects and I can go into edit mode on both of them at once and slit everything to do shift. And you can see that just recalculates the normals on the outside. If you're doing the interior of a room, then you'd click this inside option because you always want the blue stuff facing the right way. Alternatively, if you want to bring up an options panel for this, you can do Olt that gives you some more options. You can just flip the normals individually if you'd rather do that. Anyway, back to our seaweed, I'm going to go back into edit mode, shift to recalculate normals, and then I'm going to disable this face orientation, Not necessarily. When we're working to create some seaweed, we could use the same technique we used to create this grass over here. But rather than redoing all that, I'm going to go under, put this to increment, it allows me to move it on gridplane right here. So I'm going to move it on the axis over here or duplicate it then on the ship axis over here. And then put my snapping back to vertex and disable it. I don't forget, I want this to be swaying upwards a little bit more. So I'm just going to select some of these right here. Make sure I change it. Spactic connected. I can move these first around. So it looks like it's swaying upwards more. Irritate this. I want to uncurve this one, don't think it really looks at right for seaweed. In fact, I'll just delete it. Another thing I'm going to do to this is just spread everything out. When I was creating this little grass tough right here, I had everything emerging from the center, which I don't think looks the best. So I'm just going to move everything to spread out a little bit more like this. And I think that looks like some pretty good seaweed. So here's an example of how you can just reuse assets that you've already created to build more ones already that looks pretty distinct. You can see if this was underwater, it wouldn't look like it's the same grass model. Reuse. As long as we change it enough. There we go, there's another seaweed. Remember that when we're placing these down on the sea bed, it might be nice to add some of these rocks over here that we created as well. So I'm going to move my Custer along again from the x axis to 14 meters. We've got quite a few assets now, so it's really looking big. And I've got a cool way of making coral that I'm going to show you. So we'll press shift eight out a cylinder. I'd advise about five or six versites for this one, depending on what actual polycount you want. We'll scale this down a little bit and we're going to scale in the bottom one. And then gradually have it getting bigger as it goes up. So you'll see what I mean when I'm doing this, just using basic tools just like this. And then at the very top p, I'm going to int it, move it up a little bit, and then I'm just going to extrude downwards along normals. In this case, anything you need to Ske a bit, it looks like that. And then what we can do is just going to frame all of these and we can just move and rotate them. Rather, go into object mode, I can rotate this and start duplicating these. Integrate more of them. It'll be scale some of them up a little bit. We go into edit mode again, frame this whole bit here and we can extrude it upwards. It looks like in this case I act any instance instead of duplicating, which isn't what I wanted to do, so I'm just going to undo that. On this object right here, I'm going to hit Holt L, I'm going to hit L, I'm going to hit Control L. I'm going to go to the vertex data tab and press this little button up here just to make it unique. And I can edit it and it's on its own. I'm just going to duplicate, just extrude this up to this, but it's a tiny bit taller. And then we can just keep playing around with this, changing the size of them as we go. This one looks quite nice. It looks like I've got some pretty big ones at the top. We're going to scale this one on its local axis to make it thinner, to assume this one member. If you scale it and then hit shift, and then again you can scat on local axis. We can go up here and enable this one, this little gimble here, and change the orientation local. This might be a bit easier to do. I prefer using short cuts to add some smaller ones. I'm just going to duplicate this again, Rotate it, I can just delete the whole bottom bit because we don't need that. And then scale. The rest of it gets a little bit repetitive, but we're almost finished with foliage and we've covered quite a lot. Perfect. I'm quite happy with that. Once I've got everything, I'm just going to select everything and join it all together by hitting control J. And then I'm just going to double check the rigen is on the cursor because right now I think it's over there. So I'm going to click, go down to set origin And three cursor and it's quite a nice coral that we've created. I'm just going to move my cursor along. Actually skirt up a little bit first, make it bigger and then apply the scale. It's just going to move my cursor along one on the Yaxs. Here we've got another quick design. This time we're going to use the same technique that we use to create these trees. I'm going to be quite quick of this one. Shift a mesh and add a single vertex. This is all stuff we've done before. I'll go down to the modifiers and give it a skin modifier. And then in edit mode vertelection, we could just start extruding up to create the shape of It member, select everything and hit control A to reduce the size. So there's nothing special with this one. It's just another cool way of doing it. They're a bit more familiar with just thinking about the kind of coral I want to create. Usually when I'm doing these tree branches, I'd only have like a double fork. So I wouldn't split a vertex into three different directions. I'd only have it going out twice. But with coral, I think it's a little bit different. You can get away with extrude out like this and it looks cool. I'm going to do some of that in this case. And then select all the ones and hit control A to reduce the size. I'm quite happy with that. Now we can add a subsurface modified to this right here. I think that looks quite nice. And then decimate to reduce the polycount. And that just means it's not quite as blocky as it was before. I'm quite happy with that. I've seen similar designs where people, let's put icospheres on the ends of all of this. It's quite a nice style. I'm just going to add icosphere here in Ode. Reduce the subdivisions you can get creative adding some of these to the ends. But personally I'm not a large fan of that, so I'm just going to keep this as it is. I'm going to move this down a little bit. Just select all the vertices and move it down sits below the origin point. Then I reset the origin to the three cursor and apply the scale. Perfect. This next one is a little bit more complicated, but I think it looks quite nice. And you can also use the same technique to create crystals. So if you're making like an underground cave, this will be quite cool. So I'm going to move my cursor along on the y axis to two. Before we actually start model, I'm going to have to create a couple variations first and then we can start dotting them on. To start out with, I'm just going to create the base for the coral. Just follow with me. I'm going to add cosph, actually, no. I'm going to use metaballs. Shift D and then we can go down to metaballs. Just add a couple of these. It looks like amount of geometry is too low. So I'm going to change the resolution down here just to reduce this. So we've got a little bit more geo perfect and we can just shave. I'm happy with that. And then once that's done, we can always convert this to a mesh and start sculpting it. So I'm going to increase or decrease the resolution, rather it's a little bit more geometry. Then I'm going to hit three and just type in mesh to convert this to a mesh in sculpt mode right here. Number pad period to jump to the selection just like this, you can zoom in. And I'm going to start sculpting it just to break up some of these blobby patterns that you get when working with metabals. I like this really bubbly look right here. There we go. That's perfect. Then in layout mode, I'm just going to ad a decimate modifies to this. Likes to take polycount down, drag it, and that looks nice to me. I'm going to shade this flat so it matches everything else in the scene. Perfect. Allow that. Now we're going to create some actual pieces of coral that will stick to it. So like I said, we'll create two or three variations of this. We'll add a cylinder. This one's going to have five vertices. So we'll scale this down a little bit. Don't worry about moving it for now, unless you're struggling to see. I might just hide this base right here, so hide this by present H. There we go. And then I can scale the bottom ones in and move this up a little bit. Then what we're going to do is extrude up and merge this at the center. That's one variation. And then we're going to create another one with just four vertices. Instead, add another cylinder here. We could have also added a cube to do that. I suppose I scale this in, make it a little bit thinner because it's smaller, these top Tes do the same process and merge it at the center. Once that's done, we could just move to the side and move both of them. Actually, we could create some more of these, but I think we'll just see how we get on with what we've got right now now to place these onto the rot. We could of course, just move them like this and then rotate by hand, but that can be a little bit frustrating. Another way to do it is using snapping. We'll use some alignment method here. We'll try this one. We'll try a line rotation to target. We're going to snap. We're going to change this from closest to the median. We'll try these settings. We might have to change if they don't work. That just means that I can hover it over anything. It's on vertex, I need to change this to face. You can see that when I hover my cursor over a face, it moves the origin point to that location. It rotates the object to match the normal of the face. Just a lot faster doing it by hand. But I'm just going to quickly disable this decimate modifier here. By hitting a V button makes it easier to place these objects, it would be more natural. I'm noticing that this is a little bit too big. So I'm just going to control this actually. I'll slip both of these with individual origins and I'll just scale them down a little bit and then apply the scale. I can start placing these when I'm adding more of these, making sure to duplicate instead of instances we want to duplicate. I can just place some of these around. Don't have to be too special with it, it's nice origin. This would be more apparent when we're placing some of the foliage on uneven terrain as well. Because my origin point is raised a little bit from the bottom of the cylinder, we don't get any visible clipping issues. So that's per good, that's a big one's done. We're going to do the same move, the smaller one. Move this, this try and clump it up in little groups. I like the way this look in. Just try not to clip them into each other like that one was doing. Alright, is this too snappy for you can add another subsurface modifier to the rock just while as we're placing these. But I think this is good enough, a perfect and that looks really detailed. We're just going to move this one up and then what we can do is select some of these, just scale them down so that the scaling isn't quite as even you could even scale some of them on certain axis. I'm going to go up here and enable this gimble and set my orientation to local and I can make this one taller by scaling out on the z axes. I think that looks quite nice. There's some variation in there. Of course, if you wanted to just do it using this rather typing rather than typing, you can just select this little gimble in the center. I'm usually more of a shortcut base person. But I do understand that some people like to use these gimbles. Now, it's a lot like other software. There we go. You can do this all day, but here's a little example. And then once we've got all of these, I'm going to bring back the decimate modified. And we can just select everything, make sure that the base is a primary selection and hit control J. We actually might apply this modified. Before we do that, I'm just going to Everything by pressing shift D and then press M to move it into the archive collection in case we need to go back for it. We've got everything that we've just created. Make sure that collection is hidden so we don't act any work on that. I'm going to apply the decimate modify, and we're just going to hit control J to measure it altogether. I want the origin to be in the middle of the actual objects. I'm just going to move it in edit mode so the origin looks like it's more centered. Make sure we turn off snapping. Reset these settings just in case it messes with us later. That looks quite good to know. I'm quite happy with that one. Yeah, that's all the coral finished. I was just going to quickly create a fish just in case you wanted to animate this swimming through the water. It's a cool little introduction to creating animals and characters. So I'm just going to reset my curve. So once again, so then we can finish off the section by modeling the fish. I'm going to disable this gimble right here because I don't like to use it. Or go back to the selection tool and wasn't here. Just quickly scale this up and apply the scale. There we go to add the fish. I'm going to start off by adding a cube. This is just my design. But if you want to go for a different type, then there'll be some quite good experimentation. So I'm going to scale this out on the y axis, starting off of the, up here. And add a couple cuts going along this. We'll just add a bit of form to the body, so now we can select the front. This is going to be like the nose of the fish. And we can scale this down a little bit. I might join these two beats together. Merge at the center then. Yeah, we'll join these ones together as well. Merge at the center. I'm just thinking about the shape of it now, how this is going to come through I might end up doing is adding some cuts right along the body. So I'm just going to hit control. Yeah, going along that. And then we can scale this out on the z axis and join these furtices up to the front, right, hitting J. There we go, can start shaping it once again. I've got some reference, reference images on my upper screen that I'm looking at. I's doing this. I wouldn't advise working entirely off what's in your head. I like that. I'm going to do is cut tell source. Let these two faces right here extrude out. If I'm going to merge these firsts right here at the center, we could work with mirror modifier to speed things up, but for now we're almost finished. I think I'll just carry on like this. See I can scale this in at center. And once I've got these two faces right here, I'll extrude this out. Scale this on the Z X like this. And then we just got to think about how to join this up together. I think I'm going to connect this vertex to this one in J, this Sing on the other side. And then join these ones together as well. Now we can try selecting these edges and just moving them on the wax like that. Yeah, I like how that looks. I'll stick with that. But I'll solve these two edges right here in the middle because they're not really adding anything. Then we got a very basic model just to polycount. Further, we could probably delete this loop of edges in the middle. It's looking a little bit more abstract, now I like it. And then we could add a couple fins. In this case, I'm just going to add a cube nine times out of 109 times out of ten when they add an object. It's just a cube. Like move this up because this is going to be a top thin and then merge these ones together at the center. Do the same on the slide. There we go. I kind of like how that's looking. I'd recommend that you experiment this. If you've got another design you want to create a little top thin, I'm just going to quickly isolate this and delete the bottom ad, because this isn't going to be seen. Just like that. Remember the number pad key to isolate, And then I can actually duplicate this one. So I'm going to press Shift D and escape, just to leave it where it is, because I want the origin point in the middle and I want to edit mode. I can move the whole thing downwards and this will create the little fins on the side of the fish. You can go into wireframe mode to see it fell, or you can of course use this little x ray mode up here, right here. I want to move these two vertices inwards. But rather than eyeballing, I'm going to use little logic Meletol trick. I'm going to hit G to move it along this edge and then hit Alt to drag it out further. There we go. I'll go back into the solid view. And I'm going to quick add a mirror modifier to this just to copy across the other side. That will work because our origin points in the middle. That's why I moved it in edit mode. So I can add mirror modifier. Axis is right. I'll quickly apply this thins in the body control J. Now I'm just going to move everything so I'm more happy with where the origin points is. There's our little fish just got down a little bit. That's our sea left. This is already quite a big asset pack we've got coming together now. I'm very happy with this going to quickly go through and add some materials. Think we're going to go for some slightly darker green ones for the seaweed. I'll start off this one right here. I'm just going to use this little button here. Click on the ten to creates its own material. And I can see we've got the 001. I'll call this seaweed. For the coral, I'm not quite sure what color I'm going to go of this. We could even copy the same. Colors that we added to the daisy and the tulip. I might do that. I'm going to go to the material and just search. Here we go, daisy petal. And I'm going to hit this button here. The two button again, just to create it as its own material. And I call this coral. Make sure to add this to the other ones as well. I'll just just select them, Make sure this one's yellow and then hit a control L to link materials. But we want the base of this to be different. I don't want to base be the same color, is it? So I'm just going to island select the base. Add a new material up here and see if we've got any similar ones. We could add gray rock. I want to make it a little bit darker. I'm just going to select a gray rock right here and a sin. I'm going to create this material by pressing that button. I'll just call dark gray rock and reduce the value a little bit. We can add some little colors to our fish here. Another pad period to zoom in on this. I'll create fish, Maine, and fish secondary materials. Of course, if you've got multiple types of fish, then give them their own separate names. A figure, a way out of working that suits you. And I'm just going to change the base color. Not quite sure what color will go for. I think I'll just make it like a kind of blue silk color so it looks quite nice. And then for the fish secondary, I'm just going to assign this to these parts right there. Maybe add the tail as well, so can just do basltsing these Asics and hitting control number pad plus to grow mas selection and assign it to this material right here. So this is just silver, not got any blue. Whereas this one is slightly more saturate, It's got some blue in there. And I think that looks quite nice for a fish. Now, if you went up to the shaders tab. So currently these are using the same materials as the daisies and tulips, or in this case, just the daisies. So you're going to go up to the shading tab and we can just move around these sliders again. And of course, change the colors to make them a little bit more distinct. They'll be more underwater color. So I might start off just by, you know, changing the saturation like that. Quite sure what colors I want to go for thinking coral. So it will be like bright orange. Yeah, you can experiment with this. Maybe duplicate some of them just so you can see. There you go. And looks like that's all I see. I finished. I'm just going to go up to the layout tab now and quickly name these. These are all in the foliage collection right now, but I think I'll move them to a separate one. I'm just going to slid all these objects right here. Make sure we get a seaweed as well. I'm just going to hit M and I'll create a new collection Sea Life. Now I can jump to these ones. Haven't got the most creative names of them, so I'll just call them coral one, Coral two. Remember I'm hitting two. Jame, these interview pot coral three. And I'll name these ones Seabed 1.2 If you want to sound fancy then you could find like a real life species. Name it after that. Call this one fish. We've got a big thing, it's already looking nice. So now would be a good time just to check your normals right here. Maybe you can enable face orientations. These things looking fine. Sometimes this leaf here looks a little bit odd. We can see some red. I think that's just because these faces are so close together. There's some clipping. This is the case, our normals are all right, the simple face orientations. We could just also change the scale of the assets so everything's looking right, relative scale much quickly. Just scale these phones up, there we go, and apply that. I think everything else I'm pretty happy with, so I'm going to leave it at that. Congratulations. Following this far, we've covered a lot of content and some new modeling techniques, and we're going to use those later on. Of course, in the next section we're going to be creating some landscapes and clouds using some terrain editors and placing the objects that we've just created into the scene. 12. Creating Low Poly Landscape: Hello everyone and welcome back to the next section of the course where we'll be modeling the landscapes. To start out with, I'm just going to press Shift S and move my cursor to the world origin and collapse some of these collections here, because I might hide some of these so it looks like my foliage isn't in the scenery collection. I'm just going to move this under the scenery collection. And same with the sea life as well. What that means is that we can just hide the root scenery collection and all these trees and everything that we've model just be hidden for now. Whilst we're working on the landscape, there are lots of different methods we can use to create the landscape. I'm looking at three different sort of biomes. So we'll do like an open meadow or field. We'll do a forest, and we'll do a beach or an ocean side, because these types of landscapes best match the assets that we've created. Let's go up to the Landscape Collection right here, so that our object will be added under it. And I'm going to press Shift A to add a plane, we need to think about how large our landscape needs to be. I'm going to scale this, assuming each one of these little grids is a meter. I'll scale this out to about 200. If this is too big, yes, it might be a little bit too big. I can reduce this, I'll just scale it to 100. And I believe this will be about 200 meters by 200 meters. But I'm correct. Once we've got this, we're going to right click and subdivide. We can go down here to the number of cuts. Any increases. Fortunately, this only goes up to ten. So we might have to repeat this operation a couple times to get enough geometry. I can zoom in a bit and going to see that each one of these squares is taken up about the same size as a tree. I might subdivide it just once more about that. I'm quite happy with that. The first method we'll be using is proportional editing. This can be really, really quick for creating landscapes and I'm just going to go into edit mode right here. And if I go up and enable proportional editing, make sure you play around with these dropdowns random, it can also come in quite useful. I'm going to select one of these vertices right here. I'm just going to move it up on the Z axis. If I use my scroll to increase the size, you can see you can drag up hills like this. If I zoom in, this is how it's going to look at head level. It's quite a nice way to do things. It's very quick. You can select multiple vertices at once. You don't just have to select one. I can select some vertices like this, and it will all move them up by the same amount. That's where this method really comes in useful. Try not to create lots of identical hills like this because it looks pretty obvious. Use this technique. I'm going to play around with some of these offsets. Let's try the inverse square one. See how this slopes get some different shapes member you can drag downwards as well as upwards. But what I'm just trying to do here is put some hills on a horizon line so that if we're at head level and we look out, we're not going to see the edge of this landscape. It will make it all seamless. There we go, like this. Random is also a really good one if you want to roughen up the terrain. However, it's quite useful if you just use it subtly. And now you can see the ground slightly uneven, but I'm just going to undo that for now. I'll roughen up the terrain nearer scale, this random mode right here. If you want a nicer result, spend a bit more time than me. Anyway, that's one method for editing this landscape. What we can now do as well is going to sculpting mode. Up here on the top, we can actually just paint on the landscape, which you may prefer working this way. You can also smooth it out. If you've added a bit too much detail, you can come in and just use the smooth brush right here on the side. The only downside if using this is that you can see if I sculpt, let's say I use this drag brush just to show you the grab brush over here. I sculpt and pull it sideways and then go in top view. We've distorted the natural grid that we had before. I'll wire frame, we're just moving things up on a Zaxs using proportional editing. Everything is kept in a nice, neat grid like this. When your sculpting, you have to be a bit more careful, but you can always come in and smoothing it out to even your geometry out a little bit. I'd like to use a combination of both of these methods. I won't just stick to one in sculpton mode. You can play around with some of the other brushes. Fan grab brush, like I said, just try and move it upwards if you can. This can be quite nice and it gives you a little bit more control. Allows you to make more interesting shaped hills and mountains. The crease brush can be really good for creating valleys. There's running between two hills. Remember to change your brush size. This is nicer if you've got a drawing tablet. But I'm just using my mouse for now so we could create some rivers like this. There you go. I'll go back into the layout tab so we can see it now in terms of shading. I like the flat shading, but this looks really strange when it's got its grid on it. So ideally, we'd like to triangulate this. We can do that using either a triangulate modifier or we can just add a decimate modifier, which we used before. This will also reduce the polycount of the scene quite a bit as well. That's a bonus value in this range. Looks the right, that's looking. Let's quick go into Y frame modes. We can see it. Maybe we should try some of the different modes that looks like collapse. Probably the best one is going to work. Just be really careful. Slow down your computer. There you go. Because this is done in object mode, now we can go back and change the shape of the landscape using our high poly version that we subdivided. And then object mode, the modifier will bring it back down again. That's quite a nice way of working. This is actually quite a good example to show us how the decimate modifier works. You can see that the flat areas like this are decimated, or the geometries reduce more than intricate areas with detail like these hills over here. If we didn't want that, we could just use this a random mode. And you've got to be very subtle with this because it always looks worse up close. I can just let one of these vertices have a very large area. Now you can see that because this has actually got density to it, the geometry is changing at the decimate modifier will preserve it as well. You can click this little triangulate option if you prefer how that looks. I'm just going to go back into solid mode to see how it is like this. It looks quite subtle. I'm happy with that. I think I'll stick with the triangulate mode as well. Using these techniques, I'm not going to actually create a landscape that I want. One area of interest will be an ocean or a lake. So I might make that over here. I'm just going to sculpt this. I'll go over to the sculpting tab. And I should just be able to paint on quickly. Disable the decimate modifiers I'm working because I can slowing things down. Say I can just paint on bay area running here. This is very similar to zbrush. If you've ever used zbrush, you can hold shift and that's a short cut for the smooth brush. You don't have to switch between them, you can just hold shift and it will smooth things out for you, which is very helpful. Similarly, if you hold control inverts what the brush is doing right now. This is painting on to the mesh, is bringing it outwards using the draw brush. But if I hold control then it'll do the opposite and subtract. Sculpted in is an area of blended, has received a lot of attention in the past few years which is nice. There you go. I just sculpted up this side right here. Now it's looking at this is giving us a nice platform to place our assets on. We'll most likely be editing this landscape throughout the rest of the course. We'll be making changes to this. It's not like we're stuck with what we've got for now, so I don't worry too much about getting it perfect. One thing I'm noticing, I might want the horizon line just a tiny bit higher so that I can have a bit more verticality in it. Because at the moment it's looking very flat and boring. So I'll go back to sculpting mode right here and cannot disable this decimate. I'm just going to add a little bit of detail right the outside, just raise the horizon line a little bit. I'm using this standard draw brush because if I paint over existing work that I've done, it doesn't distort it and lose the detail like this, River Africated right here. If I paint over it, it raises it without overwriting the detail that I've added. That's looking a little bit better. And now I'm going to try painting on just around here to make the close landscape a little bit more interesting. Some hillsides, maybe a little cliff over here that's looking. We can add some proper cliff models later on, so don't worry too much about that. It's looking a little bit better to me now. There we go. There we go. Have a look at back in the layout mode with the decimate modifier on something that this is looking really good to me. I think I'm quite happy with how this is. Decimate modifier is a little bit buggy. Sometimes you get some weird triangles over here. If you thought about that, maybe at the end it might be worth applying this modifier and then come in and tidying up some of this geometry. It's not a perfect solution, but it does a pretty good job. Don't worry about the placement of these props right now, because these won't appear in the final render. They're just there while we're modeling this scenery collection right here. So just hide that if you want to get rid of it, remember, But when we're working on the scenery, we'll hide the landscapes collection. Once I'm here, I'll quickly rename this, I'll just call it ground. And then we're going to create some clouds, which shouldn't take too long. I'll do this under the scenery as well. I'll bring this collection back and I'll have a cloud collection. This really shouldn't take us long. We're going to add some Metablls. Come down here, We've used these before, so let's just go into edit mode. Sca them up and create some of these. Remember to change the size of the green inner circle, right here. There we go. Andy got proportional editing, so I'm just going to enable this and set it back to smooth so it doesn't mess with me next time I try to use it. There we go. That's my little method for creating clouds. Then once you're happy with it, we can convert this to a mesh, come into the sculpting mode and just make it look circle. Just smooth it out like this to use the grab brush that's looking nice, make sure the botos looking okay. Perfect, back in layout mode, we can give this notorial as well. We'll do that later though. And let's decimate modified to this to make it look more low poly. And we'll add some ash shade into this later on so it doesn't appear completely solid. That's the basic method for creating clouds. Might just quickly run through this again to create another one, then we can move on, get quite fast at doing this. Try and create some clusters as well like this, because not all cloud is going to be a single object like that. Some clusters of lots of different clouds can work out quite nice. Convert this to a mesh, sculpt it, that looks quite nicely. They've got a flat bottom. I put the des mat modifier on this. Let's see how these look from below. We got to rendered mode. I'm quite happy with that. These look like clouds to me, but like I said, we'll add a better material to them later on. We've covered some quite useful techniques here. I'm hoping these techniques will be useful to you. So, yeah, spent some time perfecting this, make sure it's looking really nice, and then we'll move on. 13. Creating Low Poly Mountains and Cliffs - Part 1: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this part, we're going to be creating some mountains and cliffs. So some more fatcy terrain to add to the level aside from this landscape that we created here. To start out with, let's create a cliff place. My cursor here, so I can shift and right click to place my cursor. And I'm going to add a plane. Then I'll scale this outer bunch something like this. What I might do is hide the scenery collection. So if I just move this outside to the work in progress and I can quickly hide the scenery and I'll get rid of all those objects and then I can also hide the landscape. With this, I'm going to go into edit mode. And then using K to enable the knife tool, actually I might press seven on my number pad. All go up here to the top of you, just so I can see it from above. And I'm going to trace the outline for the cliff face that I want for mine. I want to create a little protrusion coming out separate to it, almost like what you'd find in a Mesa Canyon in Utah. I've got some reference on my screen and I like the look of this. I'm just going to draw the outline right here. Of course, it might be nice to create lots of variations of these, not just one. I've got something quite here that I'm happy with. This looks like a nice cliff. And then I'll just press Enter to confirm this. Now what we can do is select these faces that we've just created, these Gns, and extrude them up a bit. It might be nice to have some kind of layering going on rather than just going straight up vertical like this. So we can scale these in, but you see that protracted tortal center. So you might want to change your pivot point down here to individual origins, and this will scale inwards on either part of the cliff. You can also use old, but it doesn't really work of the top face. You might want to extrude up first. And then if I select these rings of edges right here, I can hit Alts to scale in and out. This actually looks really nice. Even this right here could be a cliff if you wanted to. I'm going to add a little bit more detail to mine. I'm going to select these faces and extrude them up a little bit. Just scale them in like this, same thing we're done before. Maybe one last time. You can also delete the top face right here, X to delete the face. And then if you strings of edges you can use old it will actually skeleton rub and moving up and down. It's a slightly annoying thing about blender. Once that's finished, I can start in in some of these faces together I'll join because I want some different layers going on. I'll just select these edges right here, press F, and then I'll select the rest of this, press F. And then I'll extrude this section up and create the O cliff. Just let this got the basic shape of this cliff face. But I'm just going to go in select some of these edge loops, just program of the scaling, change the shape of them slightly because I might not be happy with how it looks a bit thinner at the top. And I'll do the same for this a little bit. It almost looks like layers of sediment rock. I suppose we can also come in with a proportional editing if you like this. Let some of these fats is moving around, make it a bit less, even if you're going to do this, rather than having a messy end on the top. I would recommend filling in some of these just right here. I'll hit Control Arts out of a loop. Going around here with proportional editing turned off. It's almost like we're doing retopology here, just going through Cretin. Anything that looks odd to us, you can hit J and it will just create a new face that goes between the existing edges. Just like this. Okay, So I've tied it up, mesh a little bit. I'm going do the same up here now that looks a little bit more tightly to me. A tool that I sometimes like to use is a randomized transform. So I'm just going to hit control A to select everything or just A to select everything, sorry. And I'm going to hit F three and I'm going to search randomized. And then we go randomized transform. And then we can just drag the amount up here. And this will do this to every vertex you've got selected. Just drag the amount until you're happier quickly. Tidy up this gee try on top, then if we wanted to take this further, we could also put a decimate modifier on it because it's still looking very quad light. Let's add a decimate modifier and see how this looks when we drag down the ratio a little bit to low poly. So I'm going to add a subsurface modifier here. First I'll just drag this one up, that's looking a little bit better to me, just getting some problems with the subsurface modifier and the face at the bottom. And I think that's just caused by these two faces here that we've got. If I delete those faces, you can see this looks a little bit better. There we go. I suppose one problem that comes with this is the subdivision takes out a lot of detail to the mesh. So I would recommend coming in here again with proportional editing and just changing the shape to make it a little bit less round and boring. I add some character to it and you can always tap back into object mode to see how us will look. I'm quite happy with how that looks, so I'm just going to let everything actually, I'll let this bottom ring of edges right here on both parts. I'll just using proportional editing the stretches. I'll just drag this down, the origin point. So that we can place this on a rough landscape and it looks okay. Now we've finished this. I'm just going to rename it cliffs once again. Maybe create multiple variations of this if you like. And I'll move this down to the Landscapes Collection and bring it back so we can see it. I can just place this off in a distance somewhere on the horizon. Line in rendered mode makes the scene look a little bit more interesting, doesn't it? Then of course you could duplicate this or instances and move it around, skated out, so you've got different sizes. Rotate it on the z axis, and it already looks like we've got some variety in here, which isn't actually the case. That's one way of creating cliffs and now a mountain. This will be a little bit more simple. I'm just going to press shift A to add a plane just like before. Scale this out, I'll just move this up here rather than hiding everything. Then if I go into edit mode, we can right click and subdivide this a few times. Remember it maxes out to ten, so you have to right click and do subdivide again if you want to increase even more. Here we go. I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to either the linear or the sharp mode. We'll rag both of them. We're just going to drag up the profile of mountains that we want. Great ness and sharp. Just let that now switch to sharp mode, make it a little bit more interesting. Remember we're doing a low poly style, so it might be nice to make it cartoonish. You see what looks best for you? Of course, we can take this into sculpt mode as well. Let's go across to the sculpting tab. We can smooth some parts out. Use the snake hook tool, which I believe is down here. You can just drag parts up like this creates a nice swelling effect, if that's the style you're going for that like others looks actually. Or the move brush and this crease brush right here. So you can use this to create a nice screws running along the side of the mountains, it looks almost wind swept over here. You can get quite creative with this, with those details. I'll go back into the layout mode and I'll put a decimate modifier on this. Once again, once again I'll just move this down. Don't need to worry about having accurate scaling here. It's going to be off in the distance. Doesn't have to look right. Let's see how this looks from where we are. This is where I'm thinking of having the camera in the scene. And that looks quite nice off in the distance. You can imagine it once we've got materials with snow on top will look quite nice. I'll just create a couple of these and rotate them around on axis just like this. That's one nice way to add details to your landscapes. These mountains, I got a bit carried away place in using the sea and I forgot to name them. So I'm just going to select these right here. I'll drag these both into the landscapes collection and I'll just rename this mountain one and mountain two and sing the cliff looks like. I've already done that again. I'm happy with that. We're going to quickly save this. Then in the next video, we'll be adding some color to this. But we won't just be selecting faces and adding colors that way. We'll do some procedural materials, take some time, have fun creating some mountains, and clear whatever scenery you like to the background. And we'll continue in the next video. 14. Creating Low Poly Mountains and Cliffs - Part 2: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this video, we're going to be adding some materials to the landscape. So I'm going to start out by bringing my scenery pack just because it's nice to be able to see. So I'll add this, and I forgot to rename the clouds, so I'm just going to quickly call this clouds one and clouds two. And I might bring these a little bit closer to the ground. I'll just put them down here somewhere. They're easier to see right here. I'm just going to one of these objects I can focus in on. And we're going to move up to the shader tab to add a material to this ground right here. If I hold and go down to either Material Preview or Rendered, I'm just going to go to Material Preview across the Materials tab. I'm going to create a new material, I'll call this ground now. We can start out by giving this like a solid green base color. This would be the color of the grass. But I want to make something a little bit more complex than this. What I would like is for this shader to automatically mask any up facing surfaces to be green. For the grass and the size of cliffs or the hillsides like this, it will be like a brown or a gray color. So this would be soil or rocks. The way we do that is using a couple nodes. We need to use a geometry nodes. This is under input. We had a geometry right here. Here we drag out the normal and we add a separate color, Separate color in older versions of blender called separate RGB. I believe I'm just going to move this over here. What this does is it gets to the normal. Remember the normal is the direction that a face is pointing towards in three D. And it just outputs it as RGB. By plugging in these to the base color. We can just preview them here so we can see it looks like the red bonds pointing in this direction. The white areas, bits that are going to be seen here. The green one looks like it's face in this direction. So you can see it's like the positive white direction. And the blue one, which is the one we want, is all up facing surfaces. This is difficult to see right now because most of our landscape is flat. If I rotate it, you can see this starts to become black. This right here isn't a shadow. This is part of this node right here. I'm just going to controls to bring this back. You can see this hillside is slightly darker. The surrounding which is nice and this will be more apparent once I add a color ramp node, I'll search for color ramp and I'm going to drag this between the two. Then what we can do is drag black one over here, over towards the right, and that will start masking away parts that we want to be dolled. This will have a brown color to it. If you wanted to, you could start changing the color of this. We could make this like a brown color, but I'd like to have a black and white color amp like this, which then feeds into another color amp just in case we wanted to use this one for masking in the future. I also find it gives us a little bit more refinement. You'll see what I mean when I add it. So let's add another color out right here. And this is going to be colored. I'll make this a brown color. Looking at the tree trunks of reference, you can always change the slate to remember for the white. Yeah, if you wanted like a snowy forest would look quite nice. Already looks quite snowy, but I want to have grass land. I'm just going to change the color of this. Maybe bring the value down a little bit. I can look at the foliage I've already got for reference, this is looking quite nice to me. There we go. Remember, this will only work as you and blender. If you were to export this to a game engine like Unity or Unreal, you need to recreate this shade in the engine. That's easy to do. In most cases. I'm noticing my computer started to slow down a tiny bit here, so just be careful when you're initiated. Editor, make sure to save regularly. You can also apply the decimate modifier that we've got on the landscape here. I've got the decimate modifier. The actual geometry here is quite complex. This might be what's causing me some performance issues, but I'll keep it there just for now and then we can track this. That's quite satisfying to do. That's our basic setter. Now we can copy this and use this on the mountains and cliffs that we created before. I'm just going to sl all of these nodes box selecting them. Then I'm going to hit Control with my curse in the Shade editor. Then I'll click on this Cliff side right here. Creates a new material that name these pretty sure I have named. Then in here I can paste these nodes into this material, feed it to the base color. You can see because this is a very vertical surface, it's got like a really rich brown color to it. I'm not quite sure if I like that. So I can come in here because this is a different material. I can change these colors and it won't affect the rest of the landscape. My computer has really started to slow down here. I'll just select this one. Saturate it, darken tiny bit. Just. The color turn. More happy. There we go. I want to have a little bit more grass on top. So I'm just going to move these about. That looks nice. Those are clips. Now, I'm just going to past the same node set up into the mountain. So I'll create mountain material. I believe I have instances, the material should be copied across both of them. In here I can just hit control beds past the nodes in and drag this up to the base color. Nice thing about this set up is that if you place objects in your scene, you can rotate them. And the grass, if you were to select those places manually, it wouldn't change when you rotate it. But right now you can see I can rotate this mountain and it automatically corrects the grass, which is really nice. If we were to have some smaller rocks in the scene, let's say we wanted moss or snow grown on the top. We can rotate them and it would automatically correct it, which is very nice here. I want to have a little bit of snow on top of the mountains. I'm just going to play around with these colors. I might actually delete this color ramp and add a new one between the two. I'll just change these colors. I quite like these cartoony mountains. I'm going to with a slight blue purple tone like this, Almost feels like a Bob Ross painting. I can track this slider to adjust the amount of snow that I want on top of this mountain till it looks nice. I'm quite happy with that, but it's a little bit too high contrast. I might even try a muddy color like this. But I'm happy with this. You can play around a bit as much as you like. Of course, I'm just using the material preview at the moment, if I hold Z down, like we got to render to see how this looks. This is currently using the EV engine, which I probably won't use in my final renders. I prefer cycles because I think it looks a lot nicer. But remember this V engines is a lot faster just for looking around. You've seen like this. One thing I'm noticing is I don't like these shadows the clouds are casting. I'm going to come down here on the material, it doesn't look like I've got material on this cloud. So I'm going to quickly create one, create a cloud material. I'll assign this to the other clouds as well. It doesn't look like I've done that already. And we're just going to come here to the shadow mode, which is currently on opaque. We're going to change this to none. And that stops the shadow from casting. Then if we go back into cycles, so maybe we change our rendering engine up here under the camera tap. Cycles has a different way of disabling shadows. So we're just going to go down to this little object tab right here. And then I believe it's under visibility, you ray visibility and shadows, we can just disable that. You can see what I mean when I say this looks a lot nicer in fair cycles mode, you just have to wait for it to render and do its job, but already our sines are coming together quite well. I like the way this is looking now for the clouds themselves, they look a bit blocky and I want to give some actual volume to them. So I'm going to select this cloud right here. I'm just going to drag up this node and instead of the surface, and I'm going to disable this. And you can see it turns black because we've got nothing going into the surface on a material out. I'm going to add something called a principle follume right here. And I'll plug this into the volume socket. And this makes our clouds look black, like a cloud of. So I'm just going to change the color. It's like some gray valley right now. I'm going to lighten this a little bit, so we've got nice white clouds. Another little hack out found probably isn't the best way of doing it, but if you just want to brighten it and make them always look white, no matter the direction the sun's coming from, you can increase the emission strength like this. Not that high, but it just means that your clouds are always bright, which looks quite nice. Then of course, you can at instances scale them up just moving around. You seen, I'm happy with the way that's looking. This probably won't work as well in V, so that, that's nice. Cycles, clouds using the volume. If I go up here and change this from cycles to V, yeah, it doesn't look like it's working at all. If you're using V, I'd recommend because it just gives them boxes. I would still recommend just using the principled into the surface. Like I said, I'm going to stick with cycles for my rendering. So I'll go up, change my rendering engine here to cycles. I'll still try and cover some like the way of doing things in V for the people who, who want to stick with that rendering engine cycles. There we go. I'm just going to drag this into the volume and get rid of the surface, decrease the intensity a little bit. This is quite bright. 0.40 0.5 perfect. Then we can go back to the layout tab. Some of these shades might slow down your computer a little bit. Even if you're in material preview, I'd recommend sticking in solid view walls. You still can. And also I'm noticing that the landscape's a little bit too rough, a little bit too glossy. So I'm just going to go to the material tab right here, and I'll increase the roughness a little bit. That looks slightly better to me. We can see here some of these trees look weirdly shiny. But I'm okay with it. I'm happy with how that's looking. So in the next part, we'll create some water using the similar technique that we just have done in this video. For the shaders, we'll be creating some water to fill in this little lake. We're already tackling some quite advanced concepts in the shaded editor right now, so don't worry if it's not all going in the. I don't expect to remember everything, just have fun with it and over time you'll pick up quite a good understanding of how the shaded editor works. 15. Creating Low Poly Water: Hello over one and welcome back. The scenes already starts to feel quite sick now, but in this video we're going to add some water to this little river and lake over here. I'm going to start out by going into solid mode just so things run a little bit faster. I'm okay where my cursor is, but I might actually just quickly shift S and cursor to selected at the same origin as the landscape object. Now going to add a plane scale this out in edit mode by about 100. There we go. It looks like I've got proportional edition. I'm just going to turn that off before it messes things up over here. Now that we've got our plane, this is all act as the water. And I'm just going to move this down in object mode so it's at the level we want it. We can always change this later, so let's just have it there for now. And so yeah, we're going to go down to this modified tab and we're going to add a subdivision surface and increase the level was up to about six because I think that's the maximum we can do. And this is looking good. If we go into wireframe mode right now and hide this floor, you can't see it. And that's because of something called optimal display. So if we disable that, now we can see the true wire frame, Marine wireframe mode, which is quite helpful. And we're going to change this from Tmall Clark to Simple, which basically means it won't smooth out the end result, it will just subdivide it. An advantage of this is that we can always change the level rather than doing it in edit mode like we've done before. I'm going to go back into solid view and bring back the rest of the landscape. And going to add a displaced modifier to this because it's perfectly flat right now, we want to add some relief. Looking for a dip goes right here. You can see it already brings it up. What this modifier does is it moves everything up in its normal direction. So you can see here that we've got the strength that we can change this. Let's just keep it at one for now. Currently it's moving everything up by about the same amount, but we need to change that by adding a texture so we can use one of the procedural textures that come with Blender. And to do that we can select one from, I'll drop down, we can just press this new button right here. And then if we press either this button or we can go down to the Textures tab, We're going to press this Sp. You see it's opened up this window, which we haven't used before. This can be used in many ways. So if you wanted to import a terrain map, like using Google Maps data or something like that, you'd import an image, a bitmap image. We're just going to use some of the procedural noises that come with blender because they work well for what we're doing. I'm going to choose distorted noise. And there are a few sessions in here I'd like to change. I've figured out my settings just from playing around earlier, but I do encourage you to experiment with all the different noise maps and see what you can create. What I'm going to do is go down to colors right here and just decrease the contrast a little bit because right now we don't want all those black areas. I want to have it a little bit more blending going on like that. That looks quite nice. It's a bit more subtle I found. So let's stick with that. And you can see our water is looking a little bit more interesting. Now, you can always add smooth shading if you wanted it to look more smooth. But then you might need to increase the strength because otherwise you won't really be able to see the waves. You can also add another subdivision surface after this, but keep it So Catal clock this time instead of simple, that looks quite nice if you want this realistic water. I want to keep with the low poly perfinose. I'm just going to get rid of this subsurface and make it flat. Here we go. I think I'm happy with that strength level. Another thing to take note of, everything looks really square right now. We've got a bunch of square faces. You can add a triangulate modifier if you don't like this, but I like the look of the square faces, the quads I'm going to get rid of. This is an option that Sara, if you need it. Yeah, we've created this. Now we need to add material to it. I'm going to go up to the shading tab and this will be the first time we've used transmission. For this, selected are going to go down add a material, call this water. We can just go up into rendered mode and select a nice blue color like this. We can always change it later. And then to make it transparent, we can increase the transmission like this, and it becomes almost like glass. You can see through it. I might also suggest changing in this alpha slider here. Don't go all the way. That maybe put this down to about 50 or 60% about here, just so we can see through it. And then we can play around with the amount of transmission we like as well as the roughness waters. I think it might look nice if it's really glossy, but not too much. Let's also see what the transmission roughness does. You can experiment with this. That's the surface of the water. If we want to be able to see below it, we need to add a volume. So I'm going to press Shift A and search for principled volume. And then I'm going to drag this into the volume input, but I find the density is way too high, so I'm going to set this to 0.01 needs to be very low. You might not even see the effect of it there. You can change this value how you like it. And sometimes it might be asked to copy the base color from the principled BSDF into the principled volume. The volume will do is that when our camera is close to it like this, it will mean the deeper parts are more murky and it's harder to see them, and then the shallow parts are more visible. And you can see that quite well just going around the bank here. I'm just going to play around of the roughness value until I'm happy. I want it a little bit more rough, just like that. There we go. If you're using V, this probably won't work. So what you might need to do is go into edit mode. Right here, I'm just going to select everything and I'm going to extrude down on a Z axis to about here. And then just select everything and shift to recalculate the normals. So let's change the rendering engine to V and see how this looks. There's no transparency right now, so we might need to go down in a material settings and change this blend mode from opaque to alpha blend. And it is looking a little bit better, we can see this now. But still I think it's always going to look nicer cycles than it will do in V. I'm just going to change up, We've got this water, and just before we finish up, it'd be nice if we could find a way to animate it, because currently it's just stuck like that, and it'll be a bit boring for a video or an animation. Let's just go back into layout mode so we can see it a bit better. The way we animate this, we won't go into too much detail. Just enough for what we need to get this moving is going to press shift A, and I'm going to add an empty, and we can choose any of these that we like. I'm just going to go for plane. There we go. Let's move this just over to the lake so it makes a bit more sense. Then what we can do is on this displayed modifier here, we change the coordinates from local to object, and then using this pat, we can select the empty. Now the texture will move around wherever this is. If I move this on the x and y axes, I just slide it around, which is very cool, but you have to be quite subtle. I'm holding down Shift was doing this. It moves it slower. Yeah, these waves move quite fast. I'm happy with that. We just need to quickly animate this for a basic animation. Very basic. We're just going to go to this animation tab right here. And I'm going to number pad period, just to jump to the location of this empty. I'm going to go to frame zero right here. And I'm going to press the key frame location. You can see this gives us a little yellow dot right here. Now if I slide this to the end of the animation right here to frame 250, I can move this. Let's just move it to about here. And then hit and set the location again. Now we jump to the beginning of the animation and press play. You can see the waves moving, but right now they start off slow. Then they move really fast in the middle of the animation. And then they should start to slow out at the end. Don't worry about this too much. Allow this is just down to the interpolation mode that we've got. So I'm just going to select all these key frames right here. We'll press A to select everything we're going to press, which is a shortcut to change the interpolation. And I think it's on bezier by default. But we're going to set this to linear easier. It's marked by these little green lines between the key frames. And now everything should play smoothly. So if the waves are moving a little bit too fast for you or too slow, you can just let these key frames right here, it looks like my computer is struggling. So we can just let these keyframes and move them forward. It doesn't matter if it's past the end point. This black line right here at 02:50 means this is when my animation ends. And we can change that down here. So this should last about 10 seconds right now. And we should see that because I've moved this key frame further along past the end point, the waves now move a little bit slower. So I keep playing around with this until you're happy with how it looks. This is a very basic way of setting up water, but I think it looks quite nice. Let's just move this along even further. So I'm going to quickly save this and then go back into layout mode. And if I go up into rendered mode, see how this looks, it's going to be very noisy for me because my computers are struggling to render in cycles. I can just quickly change this EV and see how it looks. I don't think that looks too bad. It looks quite similar to how we make water in a low body game. Now that we've finished our water, in the next part we can start placing some of these trees and plants that we've made around the scene using a particle system. 16. Using Geometry Nodes To Populate a 3D Environment: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this part, we're going to start actually populating this environment with these assets we created earlier. And to do that we're going to use something called geometry nodes. Now another method that a lot of people like to use is the particle system in Blender. But this is becoming quite outdated and a lot of people are switching to geometry nodes, which is a more robust system from my experience and allows us to do more things. We'll start off by going up here to the Geometry nodes tab, which operates similar to the shader editor or the compositor, which we might have used before. But I actually found it's more sinful to learn, especially if you've got a background in game engines. I find it's quite similar to unreal blueprints. It'll start out here by slept in the ground. This Lund s get right here. Me personally, I'm going to apply this decimate modifier just so things run a little bit quicker. Because it means it's not having to compute the base mesh before it's got decimate. But I can always append an older version from a previous file that I've saved if I need to because I've backed up my project. So I'm just going to go here and apply this modifier. Perfect. Now what we can do is right here, we can click Add New, and you can see it's called Geometry Nodes by default. I'm just going to rename this, and I'm going to, I'll call this object spawner. You can always rename it something else, whatever you like, You call it foliage or something. And this acts a bit like a modifier. So each one of these modifiers will place a collection of objects onto the board. So this first one right here we're going to use will be used to place grass. And then we'll create another one that will be used to place trees, rocks. Basically all these assets we've created here, if we wanted to edit the grass, change the amount of grass that's on the landscape or paint where it is, then we're just going to edit this version. It will make sense later anyway, to start out we're just going to navigate down here. I find mind moves about really slow and I zoom in and out. So I'm just going to keep it at this distance. The first thing we're going to need to do is select a bunch of points on this landscape. And we expand this window so we can see it a bit clearer. We're going to select a bunch of points on this landscape randomly, and then we're going to use that data to tell Bender where we want to place our grass. So we're going to go down and we're going to press Shift to add. And we're going to search for distribute points on face. We distribute points on faces. I'm just going to drag this down here so that it connects between them. And what this done is it's hidden the original mesh, we can't see it. And it's replaced it with a bunch of point data. So we can see currently the density is very high. So I'm just going to reduce this because we've got way too many there right now. I think even 0.2 or 0.3 will be too high. I'm just going to leave it like this because this has replaced the original mesh. We actually can't see it, so we're going to need to add in that geometry data back. The way we do that is using the joint geometry node. Going to press shift A here and search for joint geometry. Then I can place this here. And this connection type right here allows us to just drag in as many lines as we want. It looks like in this editor, right? The green is used to show meshes or geometry data. Much like in how the shade editor, you have separate colors to convey whether it's a float value or colored data vectors. Now we've got these points on this landscape and it's also keeping the landscape geometry, we need to add the objects onto these points. So we're going to press Shift, and we're going to search, for instance, on points. And just drag this between the distribute points on faces and a joint geometry node by hovering over this connection right here. A little tip, something I struggled with at the start is dragging away from these. You can also hold bolt or control and then right click between and it just draws this little knife that you can use to break connections. But this is fine for now go instance on points. Then I'm just going to move this about so you can see it a bit clearly. We probably don't need this in here. The instance inputs where we're going to drag in the objects that we want to do. I'm going to start off the grass. In order to do that, I'm just going to expand this out here and get rid of the archive collection. Here we go. We're in scenery right now. I'm going to go down to foliage. And within the foliage I'm going to create a new collection. And I'm just going to call this grass. And this is going to contain the small grass and the tool grass. I've only got two objects, you might have more variations than me, which is good. But I've only got these two. So I've created Do collection and now we can drag this grass collection down into the Geometry nodes editor. You can see it's got this collection info right here. And now I can drag the geometry into the instance input. And you can see this is placed the grass all around the mesh, which is very nice. One thing I'll notice is that everything is offset a little bit. And this is the distance between the grass right here. I think my objects, these two down here, it's very difficult to see they're offset from the world origin and that's okay. We just need to do reset children. And separate children as well. It looks like it's updated and that's looking great to me. Now, when I was modeling these grass pieces right here, it doesn't look like too careful applying the rotations because they're all slanted. So I'm just going to select both of these here in the outliner. I'm going to hit control A and apply rotation. And it looks like that's fixed. It, they're all facing up right now. Perfect. So I'm going to click back on the landscape now. The next thing I'd like to do is add some random rotation to these tufts of grass. Because as it is, it looks like they're all pointing the same way. And that's not very good. Just track this window up a little bit. I'll try and keep my node set up on screen at all times, but I'll zoom in so you can see the values that I'm typing in and I'm going to pick instance. You see this already fixes us because currently is only showing the tall ones, not the small bits of grass. We do pick instance. This means that this block of nodes right here, right here will apply to every bit of grass we're instancing instead of the entire collection. So it'll pick an object from the collection and then work on this node. What I'm going to do is randomize this z rotation right here. And the way we can do that is by searching for random value. You can see the type is set to float. That's perfect, that's what we need. Then I'm going to plug this into a combined XYZ float factor. And you're going to plug the output of this vector into the rotation because we only want to alter the z value. And we do that with this one right here on a combined X, Y, Z. This is how we rotate them. You can see it's doing it to every single piece of graphs. Right now we want to drag in the random values. I'm just going to let the value out of the random value node, put this into the Z, and then we can increase the maximum until we get a result we like there may be a perfect number that makes it perfectly random. I'd like to think it's 360 because I'm thinking about degrees, but I'm not sure if that's entirely true. I'm just going to type it in, We can see it rotates in the more random direction. So this works fine for us, and I'm quite happy with that. We can also see how it's looking in rendered mode. It's starting to look quite cinematic. Actually, I like it, but one thing you might notice is that the grass is equally covering every part of the landscape. What we'd like to do, ideally, is paint on to the landscape the bits that we want to have the grass on. And to do that, we're going to use vertex painting, but we need to expose a couple parameters, as it were, to the geometry node that we've created. This node acts like any other node in blender that we've got. For example, I'll show you the subdivision, the Bevel one, because it's got all these parameters going in. We want to add some of these to our custom node, right here to our geometry node. We want to add some inputs. I'm going to press the panel on the Not right here. I'm going to go down to the Group tab and we can see we've got our inputs and outputs listed currently. The only one we've got is geometry, and we can't change that. That's just the object that the modifiers put on. We don't change that one, but we want to add one for the collection that we're instancing right now. Grass, this is just default one, but we want to select a collection from this window right here. One way we can do that, this little plus here, and then change the data type from geometry to collection. You can see now it's showing over there, it's called geometry, but ignore that. But a quick way of doing it is just dragging this arbitrary group input right here across to the collections node. And you can see it's automatically detected what data type it is. And it's named it collection. But I'm just going to quickly rename this collection to incense. Just expand a little bit. Now we can see it's showing up and the default is grass. But we can change this to any other collection we like. I could type in rocks instead. Now it's showing our rocks, which is quite na, I'm just going to undo this perfect. Now we need another parameter for this input. And I'm going to drag another one and put this into the density of the points, which is up here. It looks like a density. Now we can change this value in the node, which I believe we can apply to other objects as well. So I'm just going to reset that, the default, but what we want to do for this one, I'm just going to click it and rename Weight Map. Then what we do every time we add this node, we click this button here just to get rid of the value. Instead, we're going to select a vertex map that we're going to paint. I'm going to go here to this tab right here. It's called the vertex data object data properties. And we're going to add a new one. I'll just call this grass. If I go into weight paint mode, you see everything turns blue. I'm just going to press to reduce the size of my cursor and I can just start painting on. The red parts are going to be full with grass, like really densely populated with grass, and the blue bits aren't going to have any grass on them at all. I'll be very rough of it for now, but I'm just going to paint on, try and have most of it close to where the camera is going to because there's no point rendering a bunch of grass up on the hills we go. And then you can use this little blood brush right here or this smear tool just to break it up and play around with some of these brush settings. We're going into too much detail on this if you want to subtract. Instead you can set the weight to zero and reduce the strength little bit. And you can just paint on this because we don't want to have everywhere perfectly red. We go to perfect. I'm just going to hit control tab to go back into object mode. And then if I go over to the modifiers tab, I can select that, it should show up. Now see we've got points and in grass and now our grass is only being added to the spots that we've painted. I want to add another value. Personally, I want to multiply this weight map by another value, and then that holy our density, because this is way too dense right now, and we could weight paint it, these parts aren't as red. But I want to a quick way just to adjust it overall. So I'm going to press Shift A and we're going to add a math node. This is another one you might be using quite a lot in this editor. For one of these values, I'm going to drag in the weight map right here. And then the output will go into the density. We're going to change this operation here from ad to multiply. Right now it's multiplying it by 0.5 You can change this to any value, but of course, we want to add this as a customizable input rather than hard coding it. So I'm just going to drag in, and you can see it's called value. I'm just going to call this density a little bit confusing because we've got a density there, but this makes sense to me. Then this is now being exposed in the A node right here. And we can quickly change the amount. Another thing I'd like to expose is the seed. Because if we added another one of these nodes and then we would say adding the trees or the rocks, it would be placing them in the same points when it generates this distribute points on faces. So I'm just going to drag the seed out into this input right here. And that's fine. We'll call it seed. And now I can just change this to any value we like. That's looking good. I'm quite happy with that. Now let's try duplicating this set up and see if we can use it on some of the other assets we created as a little practice of running through it again. So I'm just going to drag this window down so we don't need a much work space. Quickly. Save it just in case my computer doesn't like what I'm doing. And we're going to add modifier geometry nodes. And once again, we're going to select the objects corner that we just created this time instead of grass, which is our default one. I'm just going to click that and we're going to add rocks that's already looking quite ness, it's a little bit busy. I'm just going to hit control tab to go up to weight paint and instead of using this grass one right here, I'm going to create a rock. The vertex group go back up to the modifiers panel, looks like that's working fine. We just need to get rid of this weight map here. We're going to press this button to reset it to default, and then we're going to add in the rocks. Now I can start painting. This. Going to change my weight, to increase the strength a little bit. These ones are going to be a, the river and they can pink in maybe some of them at the bottom as well. We, it's hard to see underwater. I'll just paint these around this that's looking next to me. If I reduce the strength, I can just add in some randomness. So we get some in the rest of this forest, in the cliff, because we want some in the forests as well. Just not as many. I like to look at that. Let's go back into object mode. There are a few. Too many. Let's just decrease the density. Also decrease the density of the grass because that's quite a few. If these are too big, you can change the scale of them right here. So you could add like input to the scale, even randomized scale if you like. But this is confined to me and I'm quite happy with this. Less L looks rendered great. So now we can add some trees to this using another object born. I'm just going to collapse these two or call this one grass and rocks just to stay organized and side another geometry, nodes call this trees and let's set this to objects. Borer, once again, I'm just going to get rid of this grass and I'm going to drag in the trees collection into this. I've added quite a few of them right now, which is okay, let's just decrease density then let's start painting again. I'm going to go down and add a new vertex group, set the weight map of the trees. But yeah, now we can go across to weight paint mode and start painting some of these as well. We can just do this for every object that we created. Just place them wherever you like in the scene. It's quite satisfying, Much better than using a particle system. We used to have to use the particles hair mode and it wouldn't place them with the right rotation and scaling. We'd always have a bunch of problems, but this geometry node set up is really good. Once we've got it working, there we go, Perfect. See it's an object mode that's looking quite nice. It's already, it looks like a game more, doesn't it? You can imagine walking around this. But one thing I'm noticing is at the top of the trees are detaching from the trunks. And that's a very simple fix, we just need to combine them. I might recommend doing a save as incrementing this file just because we are making changes that we can't repair. But I'm just going to go up to the trees collection or hide this, just we can actually see what we're working with. Its like we just need to join this one to this. I might need to apply my modifiers Before doing so, let's go down, just quickly apply this decimate and the skin modifier on the trunk that shall do all these trees right here. Just quickly select the ply, that's looking fine. Yeah, we can just select the top one. Enjoy it. If you wanted some of these trees to be dead, you have no leaves on them. Let's say you making a winter scene. These ones right here. So not these year round trees like the pine ones. Some of these you could just have this tree tranconitszone about the leaves as one of the objects, but I'm not going to do that. I'm making like a nice summertime scene. All the trees will have leaves on them. Let's see how it looks now. If I press H to bring back the landscape, that's looking pretty good to me. Let's just change the seed on this one, make sure each of them has got a random seed. You set any value that looks good and I just want to decrease the density a little bit. You can already start taking some nice screenshots, just go up to rendered mode. It's coming together quite well. You have the clouds in the background. One thing I'd like to change is the gradiation of this sky right here. I think a little bit too subtle. So I'm just going to go out to the shading tab, change from object to world to drag up to render. And just put my camera on a horizon line so I can actually see everything. Okay, let this just increase the intensity a little bit so it's brighter at the horizon. And then let's add a point and just drag it down. It's subtle, but I think it makes a big difference. That looks nice to me. Another thing is I'd like to change the brightness of the grass, or make the shade of green a little bit more intense. Let's just change here from a world to object. Let's just tweet this color. How colors look make quite a nice winter scene of this, but I'll stop playing around. A nice color, there we go. I'm happy with that. If you look at these areas here, below the water and around the water, you say like a very bright shade of green. There shouldn't be grass right here. There should be some sand or dirt. We'll also paint onto the drain areas. We want to be masked with a dirt to start out with. Let's just let all these nodes right here. I'm going to change from rendered material preview just because it's a bit faster and we can see everything we need to. Yeah, let's just this landscape make a bit of room and we're going to use a mix node to distract this. Now we can interpolate between the result of this color ramp and this white color. Let's just go to a factor of one. So we can change this color. We'll change this later. Let's just make it a nice sandy color. Then for the factor, instead of just using a 50 slider like this, we're going to go to this tab again. This time instead of adding a vertex group, will go down to Color Attributes. We're going to create a new one. I'll just call this sand right here. Leave it on these settings. That's good for now. And then if we go up here to vertex paint, we can paint on areas to this mesh we want to show. Just go to vertex paint again. We might need to go into solid view to see it better. Now we can just paint on the white area is going to be about 100% in the darker areas aren't going to have any influence. Just imagine that we're painting on sand right now. We can always change it later. Just like this, We want the bottom of the water to be completely white. And then let's go back into material preview. Now we just need to get this data into the shade editor. The way we can do that is by using an attribute node. Then we'll run the factor into this factor here. For the mixed node, nothing's happening. That's because we haven't chosen which color attribute we want. Let's just type in the name sand. It's a bit annoying. It works this way. You have to actually type. We can see this is updated. Yeah, this name here has to match the sand. I'm beginning to think I've missed a part. Let's just hide this water. Let's go back into vertex paint. You might need a stronger strength. Let's just make sure we're really getting this as we quite smooth blending between them. If you want it to be a little bit more harsh, what we can do is add a color ramp between the attribute and the factor for this mix. I think I'm going to do that. I'll press Shift a Color. You don't have to do this, but I just find it makes the art start a bit more consistent. We don't have everything flat shaded, low poly, and, and we got this smooth blending right here. What we'll do down here is we'll change this from linear to constant. I'll add a couple of these on the slider. I'm going to set this one right here to white because it's on constant, There's no interpolation. You can see this has already got the effect I've got in mind. This is looking nice. But this one right here, I'm going to set this to a gray value. And this will blend between them just like this, make it look a little bit more natural. We don't have to be completely harsh, but I'm quite happy with how that's looking. This is a nice set up. Let's just go up into the vertex painting tab and we can refine this a little bit more. I'm going to decrease the strength because I want to paint some of these parts in the mid tone here, don't to be 100% but that's looking good. Let's go back into object mode and see how this is. A couple refinements we need to make. Let's just get some of these trees out of the water. I'm going to to edit this in the tree. So we go, let's go up to the weight paint. I'm going to set my weight to zero and just paint these out of the water. They don't belong there. Everything else is looking fine to me. Looking very cinematic. I suppose the next step to do now is pretty much everything finished. In terms of editing our landscape, we could see if there's any more foliage to add. Maybe add our flowers. I'll let you do this on your own. Add what you want. I'm just repeating the same process, but I'll go over to geometry nodes and st the objects. Brner, which one of these should I do, like? They're all under the same collection. I'll just create a new one and let's call this one flowers. I'll just put these ones in. It's the flowers collection right here. Just quickly turn down dense. It's not a linear process. I'm always changing things. Something sticks out to my eye and I want to change it there. Got some point I'll go through and paint off the bottom of the water because I don't want to have this. Where the grasses. Yeah, let's change this collection right here. Let's just drag in the flowers. That's fine. And then go down and create a new weight map for this. Go up to weight paint. Can start painting these on. It's nice if you have a drawing tablet, but don't worry too much about it. I'm not using my right now. I'm just using the mouse. But if I wanted to make some refinements, I'd probably switch to use with drawing tablet. We've got quite a few, some flowers. It's probably looking like a very busy forest floor right now. But I like it and it allows us to see everything such as paint out of this section. We want some area for us to put a little campsite, maybe a couple of buildings of our cameras to change the size of your brush. Remember, we've got a little clearing and we can see our flowers, huss looking beautiful. Some of these objects though, might want to place by hand, like this fern. I'm just going to instance this ultra D and then shift tab to place it one we're placing it. We might also, I should be working in the layout tab instead of geometry notes such as zooming. And I'll go down to material views. You can see it better when I'm moving this. Let's change the snapping mode from close to active I believe, or center on reports fan. There we go. We can move these manually because for some objects you won't want to use the foliage system we use, We just created this nasty place them by hand. I like how that's looking and I'm just going to select all of these objects that we've done by hand and I'm going to add them to a new collection. Let's just call this manually because I'd like to keep things tidy. Let's jump to that in the outliner. There we go. That's okay. We'll keep it down there. Just quickly tidy everything up. Perfect as scenes looking tidy. It doesn't look like I've named the water, so I'm just going to quickly rename this From Plane to Water and believe that's the end of this section. So that's nice. It's good to see these assets that we've spent so much time making actually in a scene together. You see them come alive. I'm quite satisfied with that and we'll continue in the next section. 17. Creating Low Poly Lighthouse: Hey guys, welcome back to the next section of the course where we'll be creating some manmade structures to occupy the landscape. We're going to start out here by adding a lighthouse. So I'm going to place math red cursor on the other side of this water right here. And I'm going to press shift A and add a cylinder. And for the vertices I'm going to choose six because I'd like a hexagonal base. Once we've got this, we can scale up the bottom. So I'm just going to slit this face. You can always go into Y free motor forstroller to Z, go back into solid and just scale this up. You can use these criteria as reference, so I can tell that this's going to be a decent few meters wide. And then I'm going to move the top one up and just scale it up a little bit as well. Il we're happy with the height and we can use the trees to gauge the proportions. So once we've got this, I'm going to hit the forward slash key on the number pad. And then we can start adding some loops to the lighthouse because I want to get some white and red stripes. So I'm going to place the loop here and I'm actually going to scale this in quite a little bit. And then by bevel in this using control B, we can add some cuts in. Remember we're going to use these faces right here to color the stripes. So make sure you've got enough. I'm here, I'm going to delete the bottom face because this is just extra trametry we don't need. Now we've got this. I'm going to set this top face, extrude it up a little bit and then scale it out to create this platform. I'm going to extrude it once again. I'm going to just press the skate once it's extruded and then we can scale it out to the right thickness because I'm thinking of having a walkable platform going around the outside. Then we can just build up the shape extruding again. There we go. And then I'm going to insert at the top by pressing till the thickness is just slightly thinner than the lighthouse walls. About this, I've got some reference images on my other monitor that I'm looking at while it's doing this. Just some designs that I like to look of. And then I'm going to extrude this up on the z axis. Let's make the windows right here. And we'll kind of have to do the windows in a bit. The ones we've got the top face just going to exclude this out. Again, press escape scale up. This is all stuff we've done before and then we can build out the shape to do the top. I'm just going to merge in center. Actually I'm going to scale by zero just because we can still move it around after. And if I hit control R, having those versities at the top will allow us to add this loop. But we can just scale in and move it down a little bit. Just add a nice shape, There we go. And then once everything selected, I'm going to hit M and merged by a distance that will get rid of those actually versities at the top as well as any other that we might have accidentally created. So now for these windows, and this is a technique we'll be using for a lot of the buildings we're creating. I'm going to select all these faces. Just select them. And then we're going to press to inset just like that. And then in the Boston, we're going to enable individual faces and we can change the thickness using the sladder. We want to still be able to see the frames, so I'm going to add a bit of thickness to them, just like that. And then once we've got this, we can hit o extrude long normals just to insert the Matai bit. And I'm going to get out of isolation view now, just so I can see it a little bit better. Might be a bit too thin if I were to do this. Again, I might make these actual windows a bit thicker in comparison to the rest of the tower. I might quickly do that. Let me see if I can just slide everything. So I'm going to slid this top vertex and just keep hitting control number pad plus until I've got everything and get these vertices as well. All this trometry, see if I can scale this on the shift Z axis. That seems to work. It looks less like a witch's tower now. Now for materials, I'm going to go down to the materials tab. Let's go into Material View so we can see it starts out with, I'm just going to add a red lighthouse material, give this a red color, reduce the saturation, tiny bits, it's not quite fully red. And do the same, the value. And then we're going to create another material for white lighthouse. And this time we're just going to set all the faces that we want to be white. This walkable platform, the outside. I'm just going to set these faces and hit control number pad plus to grow my selection. If you don't have a number pad, remember you can always hit three and type in select more, I believe it's called. We select more. I'm going to set this and then add a new material. I call this dark metal because it's one that we might use for other materials in the scene. Let's, this is a dark gray, slightly blue color. I'll do the same for the frames. To select the frames, I'm just going to hide these faces. Hide these faces. Island, Select this and then hit a sign. That's just a little way of doing it. There we go. For these actual windows, I'm going to select them all and we're going to add a material lighthouse windows and assign these. Now during daytime, the actual light might not be on, so we can just like a blue color, something like that. But if you're doing a nighttime scene, it might be to actually see the emission coming off. In which case we can just give this emission here a color set to like an orange, yellow color, something like that, the intensity and increase the emission strength as well. Right here, if I go up and to Rendered mode, we can see how this will look like that just as I'm here. This isn't quite looking how I want. I'm going to play around with this roof a little bit as well. I might actually change the material, this on here. I'll try giving it the metal material. See how that looks. I'm more happy with this. Can just place this a little bit further away. This has been quite a nice warm up video, but in the next part we'll be covering some more complicated concepts like adding the windows, doors, adding texture to the side of buildings. We'll see then. 18. Creating Low Poly Buldings - Part 1: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this part, I have a few different techniques that we can use when making low poly buildings. So I'm going to show a couple of examples and you can get creative, have some fun trying to make some building to occupy this landscape that we've created. So I'm going to place my cursor down here. I've got this flat area next to the river. I'm going to clear out some of this foliage later, but we'll do that once we've decided where everything is going. So I've got my cursor here. I'm going to press shift A and I'm going to add a plane. This is only a couple metres wide right now. So I'm just going to scale this out. We can use these grids and of floors reference it in the lake. So we're going to scale this out about here, not using precise measurements for this, just eyeballing it then. And so we can always add loot cuts as well, that by hitting control R. And then I might want to extrude a section out. So at this edge right here, I can just extrude this out on y axis to about here. Once we're happy with the shape, we can just slid these faces right here and extrude them up so we've got the right height, something like that. I want a couple stories to my building so I can show some different techniques when it comes to texturing the sides. Because we want to add in some brickwork and maybe some wooden planks and things like that. You'll see later, I might have the first one as like a stone material. Then the next one would be would, then we'll also try and place some buildings, some windows around here. And then for the next story we're just going to have some nice roofs. I'm going to extrude up again. Actually I don't want this phase, I'm just going to select these two. I'm going to extrude up just like this to meet this roof. I'm just going to add a lot going round and scale this on the Y axis, going to make sure I've got my point on median, not individual origins. I'm just going to scell this on a Y axis by zero. And then for this part right here, I can just select this edge right here and move it down. Let's to align it with this piece. There we go, Lost quite a nice house. Just move everything about, make sure you've got your proportions right before we start editing anything. I'm quite happy with that. There you go. Select everything, do merge by distance. Now, these edges, these ones here, I'm just going to move them so they're more in the center. These edges around the building are going to be where these wooden bars are. You don't have to include these if you don't like them, but I think it's quite a aesthetic. I'm just going to delete some of these edges where I don't want the bars to be. Don't worry about Engnes while we're doing this. By the way, that's not a problem for us. So you just delete some of these, especially here where the stone is going to be on this rooftop. So I want to get rid of these. Here we go, I'll let that look, we've got a nice variety across this building. Then what we can do is select all these faces that we want to, that'll be these ones. And the reason I dissolve those edges right here is because when we use the inset tool, it will insert each of these individual faces rather than the two separate faces side by side. I've just selected all of these. And then we can use the same Inst tool we used last time, just slight this, and then extrude along normals. Once again, what we might like to do is select some of these faces like these ones, and just move them along the y axis a little bit to make the edges thicker. They look a little bit spindly like this. Sometimes may be more approximate than me, but I'm just eyeballing it. In a simple example like this, I don't think we need much precision like this top one here. I'm just going to move the top one, not the bottom one. There we go. I like how that looks. Now what we can do is just select all these faces and we'll hide these. So we can just work on them. Just select them manually. Here we go. Make sure we've got everything. What I'm going to do here to make sure we can just work on these ones, I'm going to hit Control. I select all the other faces and I'm going to hide them. Now what we can do is start adding some loop cuts along here. I'm going to hit control R to go into vertex let mode control R will only work if it's actually a quad like on this face right here. But for this one it's technically an end gone. It's got six vertices. So I'm just going to set the top and bottom one and connect them like this. In this case you'll just need to subdivide the bottom edge, right click subdivided, and then we can connect them up. Don't worry about how these engons will affect the rest of the object. If I press H, just to show you an example, this vertex right here will already connect up to everything else. That's one quite nice thing about hiding, unhiding and blender. It connects everything up Once you're done. This looks a little bit slanted to me, so I'm just going to align it using snapping to this vertex to make sure it's straight. That's nice. The only other thing I want to do this is for me, add cuts. I'm going to subdivide this edge right here, and then I'm going to select it and drag it all the way down to this vertex. That just means that when we hit control R, we can actually add vertical cars because it's a quarter. We try doing it here. Control R doesn't work. Let's just subdivide these top bits right here. In this case, we might need to connect up this one first and do it one by one there. Okay, perfect. So now we can start adding some planks to these. I'd like some nice vertical ones, so I'm just going to hit Control R and add a few like this, trying to remember the amount, make it consistent across the whole model, but it doesn't need to be perfectly precise. Now is when you've got a little bit of deviation would go something like that. I think if this looks a bit plain, we can start adding some textures to it later. By textures, I don't mean actual textures, I mean adding windows and miscellaneous bricks, little details like that. There you go. Yeah, that's why we subdivided these. We can place these if you want to make sure the cuts you're adding a is consistent. It should appear down here at the bottom of the screen. When you use the scroll reel, you can see right here it says number of cuts three. If I use the scroll wheel that goes up and down, you can make sure it's consistent. There we go. Now we just need to select all the vertical, uh, edges right here. So we're just going to select everything Do merged by distance because we should have a few vertices around here doubles. We need to find a quick way to select all the edges running around. My preferred method is just to use circle select. You can bring up the tool bar and just hit till it goes on circle slip mode, or you can hold it, go down. I just slp them like this. Use shift to slect multiple quicker than clicking on them individually. There are lots of ways of selecting them. You can also go into x ray mode and select them, but this works for me. There we go, to go back to my last, let's keep it on. By default, we unhired the rest of this by hitting OltH. We'll see that it's selected everything else. We can just get rid of that by deselecting this box right here in the reveal hidden panel. Once we've got all these, we're going to level these. So we're going to hit control B. We just want one cut between this. Now we only want to include the edge in the middle. I'm actually going to undo that step where unhid everything. There we go. And I'm going to level it like this. There we go. We can gauge the thickness, something like that. This will add a few polygons to the model of course, but I think it's worth it for the final. Then we want to select the edge in the middle of all of these. But a quick way of doing that is just to go to vertex mode, I think we need to invert the selection. So hit control to invert selection, that's it. And then we hit one to go into vertex mode, and then we just hide all of these. And that will leave us with only the middle bits. So we'll just press A to select all of these, and then we can H to bring everything back. Once we've got this, we can move everything along. It's normal. I'm going to change my pivot points to individual origins and then I'm going to change from local to normal. If we move everything on the z axis, it should move it inwards. Just I've look around you model to check this is working. That looks quite nice in object mode, that's added a few details to the model. We can come around and fix this topology right here. If you don't like it right here, we can join these together. And just delete some of these edges that we don't want right here. I might even join some of these just like this. Let me make sure I change this lgomal back to global. There you can do this just in case out me, try extrude lonomalsjtt. Outset these parts says different line of thickness quickly work around my model and how this just for some of the edges and this will also reduce polycount a little bit as well where it's not needed. I'll just do that for this layer because it'll be the same for the rest of the model if you wanted to do the same. There you go. I'm not going to worry about this part, I'll just subdivide this. This looks like the topology might be a little bit diffultreI'mjt. Use a knife tool that looks nice. I've probably spent a little bit too much time working on this than I should have done. This is going to give us nice results. Go to follow along whilst I'm finishing up now. We can just select these. They're all langnes, but that's okay. There we go. We can hit and extrude long normals because we're getting some weird thickness around the edges right here. We can just make sure that we take offset even you can see the difference right here. And then just change this offset. I think that leads to a slightly cleaner result. And then leaving how it was before. Look, we've got a few bugs around here. We can just go around and clean that up. Nothing always works perfectly in blunder. It looks like I've cleaned it up a little bit. Now if we want to straighten everything out, we can just select all of these faces right here and scare the money. X taxes by zero. That will always work just to clean things off. I think the reason I'm having some issues around here is I didn't take the time to fix the topology. Be a bit more careful with your version and don't same so excited. That's right, we've got these wooden frames now and I think that does make it a little bit more interesting. Of course, you could do it for all the other layers, but there will be the same process. I'll just select all these roots right here and we're going to hit to make this its own object. And then we can go back into object mode, select this and we're going to extrude it on its local normal. Extrude low normal until you've got thickness that you like. You could also use the thickness modified for this, but I'm just going to do it all in edit mode. There we go. If we select all of these faces running outside, I believe o might work. That's working fine. We're just going to increase the thickness a little bit right here and make sure we've got offset even. It looks like it's working fine. Let's just check in my frame. I'm happy with that. There we go. And let's do the same with this as well. This is clipping into the side of the building a little bit here. So I'm just going to move this face out in that's the kids actually quite like this edge that we've got here. It looks like it's been properly crafted. Here we go Then to add a bit more detail to this roof, and I'll just make it plain. We can add some loop cuts going along. Second might need to dissolve these two edges right here. Dissolve edges, and I'm just going to hit control art and add a few loops in there. I might want this one right here to be a little bit thicker. I'm just going to move it up just like that. I'll do the same over here. Then we can just play around with these cuts, make it a little bit more inconsistent. And it adds some mass texture to the top, doesn't it? It looks almost like a barn roof like corrugated iron. Quite a nice look. We could do the same with the bottom ones as well, but just be careful about moving these up because that will change how it intersects with the house. So I boot careful of that, but I like the way this is looking. And another little detail we can do right here is place our cursor at the top, shift a, add planes. Try and be quick with this one because we're taking up a lot of time. Just rotate this until it matches the angle and then we can extrude up and it looks almost like a displaced roofing tile. You can do a lot of this. It could be like a solar panel or a roofing tile. It could be lots of things. Just a nice little details. It's gone. There you go. You could have these different sizes as well. Just make sure once again, for every object we want to get in the habit of recalculating normal. So just going to select everything. Going to edit mode shift, I'll also do merge by distance. Well, as I'm here it looks like I've got some issues coming on with this part. I imagine this is something I've done. Think this error right here, I might have accidentally pressed the fill button. So I just try selecting, yeah, there we go. Looks like it's fixed it. And of course you can delete the bottom face because we don't need to see these. There we go. So these areas can be quite hard to spot. I think that's just my stupidity in this case. There we go. So as one we can texture the roof. We can also add chimneys as well. Of course, just place your cursor up here, add a little cube. Just move this face up. And of course you can start detailing the outside. There we go. Moving on now to how we can texture this base part right here. I'm going to press H to bring everything back. I'm going to let these going around the outside and we're just going to work on these. Start out with, I might just extrude them out. Extrude faces, long normals, not quite sure I'll be thicker or thinner. I quite like this rough stick look, having them thinner. Let's isolate this object. Extrude long normals, drag them in a little bit, make sure we haven't got any doubles 18 vertices, we just got rid of speak, a little bit thinner. Make sure we've got offset even on. Then we can just this outer ring right here, the vertices. We don't need these. Just to let them any geometry that we don't need we can just get rid of. It looks almost like some medieval Victorian building, doesn't it? To add some brickwork to the side. I'm just going to place my cursor here and I'm going to add a cube, scale this in quite a bit and increase on the y axis. There we go. And delete the interface because we don't need this. Once I've got this, I can shift, we can just move this about, duplicate it like this, create a nice little pattern scale, everything in lots of these. So this is just one patch right here. I'm going to duplicate this one and press P. I'm just going to create a few of these different patches of bricks right here. This one is just going to be one on its own. Once we've got these by the way, we can select them and do set origin to center of mass surface. Another little detail we can do is just select one of these edges right here, one of the corners. Or even this vertex right here. We can hit control shift B, if it's a corner, add a nice little notch to the side of it, maybe do emerged doubles just to get rid of that little text. Or we can these corner edges and level this cut that looks, let's just do that to a couple of these on this brick here. I'm going to use a Ni tool and I'm going to create a little corner using my favorite method. I do this quite a lot. I did this made creating the foliage as well. If I remember that tool can be a little bit difficult to use sometimes. I'm still struggling with it, but it's really powerful. This is all stuff that we've covered before, so it should be quite easy to follow along. There you go, sees these brick patterns, and of course you can just instance them across the wall, try to make it look interesting. It'll be better if you have more versions of what I've got here. To do these corners, we could try placing them, since you can duplicate this one, move it down a little bit here. For this one right here, we might want to actually fill the back. So let's just let them both and fill, there you go. I'm going to set the origin of this to this little vertex right here. I'm going to let this one on a building cursor to selected. And then move this object selected, right, clear origin to three decursorn. I can duplicate this one on the Zxis about here. Just rotate it. Let's rotate it by 90 degrees to create the rest of the corner. Join these objects together. Then we can just press shift D on the axis and then hit shift R to repeat that action creates quite a nice corner. I want it to be a little bit thicker. I might just set all these faces, set my transform to normal in my point to individual origins. And I'm just going to move the z axis, just make it a little bit thicker. That's something I should have done earlier. That's how we get these nice corner pieces. And then I'm just going to join these altogether because I've got a consistent height across this building. Then we can snap to these corners and rotate it around. There you go. It's quite a nice detail I think. And of course we can copy this whole brick passing right here. I'm going to try and be quick with this. Instead of replacing it manually, I'm just going to slit everything, instance it, and then use my snapping mode set to face projectors to place them here, there. We could just place them on this wall. We could just across the whole building. That's it, I'm just rotating this by 180 degrees and then placing it down here. There we go. And having the origin point at the same depth of the wall makes it easy to face snap it. There we go. Now we've already covered quite a few techniques that I'm sure you can get creative with when making your building. But this video is already running quite long. So I think we'll split this up into a second part where we'll be showing how to make windows and doors and add in a few more details to the building. And then maybe do another example. If we've got time, good luck using these techniques and we'll continue next time. 19. Creating Low Poly Buldings - Part 2: Welcome back to the next part of modeling these buildings. We're going to start out by adding some doors and windows, because that's quite a nice thing to start with. So I'm going to place my cursor here. Shift right click. Remember to place your cursor, and in this case I'm going to add a cube. And we can just scale it in a little bit. Scale it under the x axis as well, just so we've got the right thickness. Once again, this face back here, we don't need. So I'm just going to delete this to save us a few polygons or a couple polygons, in this case. There we go. We've got the right. Hey, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to st top and bottom face. This is just one technique for creating the windows. I like, by the way, you of course, don't have to follow this. We've got another star. I'm going quite like a rustic design of these buildings. I'm going to select everything and just extrude it along. Normals. Once again extrude long normals. Then for these faces, I could just sl everything actually and scare on the y axis out a little bit and drag these faces outwards on the x axis, in this case, perfect. These should be separate objects. Now the inner one, I'm just going to create a lute cart running through the middle and emblevel this out with two segments. And this will be like the side of the window frames on. We've got this face right here. I'm just going to extrude this back a little bit like this. Then we can delete these top and bottom edges because we don't need these. Then I'm going to set this face right here. Control, I hide and just work on this one. I want to add a nice little shape for the window, so I've got some reference material on my upper monster. I'm keeping an eye on this right now. I'm going to set this face right click and subdivide. Then what we can do is we actually, I'm going to set all these faces, I'm going to inst them a little bit this and then extrude them back. There we go. And then we can unhide the rest of this once again. Because we've got the nice, we hit things, we hit the rest of it. And then it, we've got these nice engones on the edge, which might not be desirable for you, but I like the way it works and I'm happy to have those engiones, one of your exports. And mesh will be triangulated. Of course, for some things it might be nice to put a triangulate modifier on it just in case we get some artifacts. We just added the triangulate modifier because we're having some issues before with this piece of wood right here. It might be a good idea to put a triangulate modifier on this object. Which one is it? There we go. Just so we can see any issues, they do pop up. Yeah, that's one effort for creating Windows. If you wanted to add some more details here, we could add some cuts. Just a couple. There we go. And then let's move this edge up a little bit, makes it look a little bit more rustic. Depends which art style you're going for. This might not be desirable for you, but I like the way it looks. Just like that. And then of course, if you wanted to reduce polycount further, you could dissolve these edges, but I don't want to be that strict on it. I think we're doing fine for polycount. So it'll be pretty much the same effort for the door frame. Now, I'm going to place my cursor down here. We're going to add, scale this in, try and be quick. Was working here because it's pretty much the same process. Just make sure you get the thickness right. Going to go into iframe mode, it looks like it's going to be about a meter wide. That's good for us. So I'm going to press on this face right here. And just pretty much repeat the same steps. But I'd like to add some planks to this door. So we'll have a little bit more detailed in the window. And we'll be doing that using pretty much the same technique that we created these vertical planks up here. I'm just going to delete this back face and bottomline. Why not an extrude tool that might work sometimes. Sometimes if you hit same thing for extrude long normal, you can do manifold. It won't work in this case I believe because the outside isn't connected. But if these edges right here were connected up, I'll just quickly for demonstration the back connect, this is a manifold mesh. And then at and extrude manifold, you can see it will cut in automatically and give us nice results. I'm just going to do these en back face, there we go, because I don't need them. But remember that all can be quite useful. See I'm going to add in some cuts going along here. In this case, we probably don't need to hide this face because it's all vertical. I'm just going to bevel this a little bit the same technique we used in the last video control. And then if we select all of these and bring everything back again, just move it back on x axis to create some little notches. Perfect. Going to add a little door knob. Just place my cursor there. Shift, add, do. We could just do an ecosphere scale it down. It doesn't need to be fancy, just recognizable. You can even shade it smooth as well if you wanted to. I think that looks okay. And where the door is actually going to sit on, think about this. I'm just going to add in, well, these vertices right here. Press P to create the Missourian objects, Select the new object, select everything to fill. I'm just going to move this forward a little bit and scale it out. And it will just create an nice little step for us. And of course, when you're placing these buildings, you might want to move them down a little bit. I'll just let everything in this case, I'll raise the whole door. This can just be one object. Just raise it up a little bit and then I'd select the rest of the house, All these objects like the roof, the chimney, make sure we get everything. It might take me a while to it. Now, that's to demonstrate that we could just move it down. And also I'm going to select this whole house right here, and I'm going to put this in its own little collection. So right here in this se collection, I'm going to create a new one. Call this House One. And let's just go through in everything. Let's join these window objects together. I forgot to add the details to the door, so let's do that now. We can experiment. In this case, I might try making these edges a little bit taller instead of the same thing we did for these windows. I'd like to look at that. I'm just going to set everything and move it into this house. If I hide the collection, it's easier to see which objects are inside what we've moved it in because I don't plan on exporting any of these meshes. I don't feel like naming them yet. I might do later. But we'll see because unlike the rest of the bits of foliage that we're going to repeat across the scene, a lot of these houses, the parts of the houses are going to be modeled on a case by case basis. So it doesn't make much sense to me. Yeah, let's just move all to this collection and we can hide and unhide it when we need to. It makes it easier to select all the objects as well. Perfect, So we've got this window. Let's just quickly instance this a couple times. Well, as we're here, get quite quick at rotating things by 90 degrees. I found in this case, I might actually put this window down here and then we'll try creating a circular one that will go up here. I think that might look quite nice. There we go. So yes, great. This circular window will be pretty much the same process. I'll try and be quick with this. I'm going to add a cylinder for the amount. Let's have 12. Let's see how 12 works for now, just it's nice to divide when we're adding the window frames, we're going to select everything. Skeet down, rotate on the Y by 19. If you're doing lots of buildings, we've got to work on S. So we go to be as quick as possible without rushing the result. Might want to take a little bit more time than what I'm doing. So yeah, let's extrude this along normals then. With this face selected, I'm just going to quickly hide everything else so we can zone in on this. I'm going to join the top to the bottom. And then the side ones a cup as well. So hit J on those. If I just select all these edges and hit control B, so it might be easier to do once we've unhidden everything just join a little bit better. I'm debating whether we have a segment in the middle or not. I think we should actually, instead of beveling, we can just select all these faces and insert them. This will probably work out a little bit better. You should have done this from the start. There we go, Just like this. And then we can construe them back. And that's quite another way to create a circle of window has a lot of character to it, this building. Another thing you could do is if you select everything and unhide, you got to be careful with doing this. Maybe take off the triangle modify if you're going to do this building. But we could put on some proportional editing here, disabled connected only, and put it on smooth. Then we could just drag bits of the house around, make it look quite rusty. You can make quite a nice wanted house doing this, but for this example, I'm just going to leave it how it is quite like this look to ask us how to create some more of the details to this building. Looking at this now, I'm thinking some of you might find creative ways to turn this into a windmill that looks like quite a nice farmhouse as well. You can make a cabin using these techniques. Let's now create a log cabin. I'm going to place mount cursor here. I'm going to add a cylinder right here and I'm going to set the count six. Now we can zone in on this. I'm just going to hit forward slash on my number pad so I can isolate it. It's easier to work with solar. Then let's disable portion of everything. Get rid of this. I'll just turn on connected. Before I forget, let's scale everything down on just to make it thinner like this. And I'm going to rotate this on the Y axis specifically because we want this flat edge right here, has to be running length ways. Let's rotate on the Y axis by 90. Can scale it out to help you with the length and everything. Then I'm going to duplicate everything. Move this on the y axis, out to put here. That's looking nice. And I'm just going to let everything duplicate it again. But this time press to create it as its own object and then I can rotate. I'm just going to quickly cut it to origin, to center of mass surface. And I'm going to rotate this shift to Z axis by 90 degrees. You can scale everything in just like this, so there's a slight overhang. There we go. Yeah, that's a basis for this log capping. I'm going to st everything here and I'm just going to move it down. Let's put on vertex snapping so we can align everything nicely. Just like that. I'm thinking these vertices right here, we'll align with this edge running through the middle of the log. Once we've got everything, I'm going to quickly save as just in case we choose to use a different method later. But I'm going to join these together and I'm going to add an array modifier using yeah, relative offset right here. We're going to type in zero for the x axis and one for the z axis. I don't think one is the right number. I think it's 0.230 0.6 666 type, a bunch of 66. There we go, looks like it's welk for us and we can increase the count. I'm going to add it quite high because the actual the walls will only come up to about here. But then I'm thinking about the archway as well, because I want to have these logs keep running under the roof. So let's put that up to about here. But it depends on what style we want. Actually now I think I will just have to the roof as a separate, but we'll figure that out later. So just make sure this is tall enough. I think that should be fine. And I'm going to apply this modifier. And what I'd like to do now is make sure that these logs are each offset by different amounts because right now they're all going the same. So what we can do is slit these faces and just move them out manually. Let that takes quite a long amount of time. And I'm lazy, so I'm just going to select all of these faces control hide. And then I can select one of these right here. Turn on proportional editing set to random and disabled connected. Then we can just move on the x axis, make sure you have a really large size because otherwise all the randomness will clump up next to the one you're moving us the scroll wheel to have a large circle. And just move something like this go quite extreme because we can always scale it down proportionally later on, something like that. And then once we select everything and then change our pivot point to individual origins, we can scale on the x axes by zero because we've got individual origins, each one will be flattened as if it's its own. I'm going to go a little bit more extreme of this wasn't quite as extreme as I should have been because they're still very bunched up. I'm just going to let everything scale x zero and then unhide, we just move everything back, turn off a portion as we can move everything back. There we go. That's quite a nice method I found for doing this for some of these as well. You could select one of these edges and make it look as if a little bit, if it's chipped in this quite a nice little detail. This geometry might not be the most optimized because we've got a lot of internal faces right here. These faces right on top of each other. Try and change that, but for the purposes of this course, I think it should work fine for us. This will add a few more polygons to the model, but if you wanted to select one of these faces right here, you could insert it and then almost create like a bark texture. Merge this at the center. It looks like it really is the end of wood. But I'm just going to keep it as flat faces right now because it's more in line with the polygon for the rest of the scene that we've done. We're just going to quickly repeat this process for the rest of these logs. You get quite quick at doing it, essentially, if you keep playing around in blender, you'll start finding these little techniques for doing things that you can always come back to you later. Remember is the shortcut to enable and disable proportional editing for some of these. If you want it to make it look like they're not cut perfectly straight, you can use the Shear tool, believes this one there might be worth doing that for some of these don't just have to diversely, you can do sideways as well. Side a little bit more randomness, there we go. And we'll do this for the side ones of course. Make sure you disable proportional editing when you unhide the rest of the objects, otherwise it can mess everything up. I've almost done that a couple times. That's looking good. Just one more side to do and then we're finished trying to follow along at the same time, if you can. I think we're at the point now where we're focusing on speed inefficiency. We've covered most of the modeling tools in Blender. It's just about knowing how to use them and when there we go, that's it, there we go. And then to create the top and bottle or rather to finish the top and bottom, we can just join these two vertices together. And J to join, delete vertices. And these faces should sit a level of the ground now. And add the roof. I'm going to place my cursor to the middle of this object. Shift S cursor to select it. And let's add a plane scale this out a little bit just so it's going to overhang slightly. And then we can move this up, add a cut in the middle control logo. Just drag this up. Doing this is important, obviously, is to make sure that the roof touches the logs right here, there's not a gap. That's good. And we'll add some thickness to the roof so we won't see these weird bits over here. If you want to increase the overhang, you can press G to slide up against these edges and then hold Alt. And it will allow you to drag out further, just that roof. Then for the edges right here where these logs are poking out, I'm just going to select just move the vertices back in manually or just scale them, make sure you're on medium points, not individual elements. Scale them on the Y axis by zero, they're at the same point. Then we can just share them in using the same tool you're using earlier, this shear tool. It matches the angle just like this. Then once that's done, you can of course, delete these faces. We don't need any. I'm always trying to delete any polygons aren't going to be visible, we're just keeping the ones that we need. Although you could criticize all these internal faces right here. But because of this overhang that we want, this finos can stay because we're going to do these faces at the bottom anyway. Perfect. Then this roof, we can add a couple of blue cuts going along. That's just like that. Then in this case, I'm going to use solidified modifier to add thickness. Let's go down to solidifier. We are, we want this going out instead of inwards, right about there. Maybe a little bit thinner, just like we did before. We can select some of these loops that we've got to make it easier to click this busting right here and then the edges appear on the outside. Let's just drag this down. So we've got a nice overhang as far down as we can really go. That's it. I like how that looks nice. Start to it right here. Instead of layering these logs up here diagonally, there's probably a more authentic way of doing it. I've got some reference images of an 18th century log cabin from North America. We'd line up these logs to make the roof, but in this case, I'm just going to add a wall of planks. So let's select these edges right here. And we use the same technique we used before, so I'm just going to hit P, And then if I select this new object, it's a little bit difficult to select. Let me try to get it, I'll just hide this quickly. Let me just select everything, extrude it up to this level, and then unhide it in object mode. That's just going to scale it in and these vertices right here, let's scale these into the center. Zero. That's it. I'm just thinking. Now if we want the planks speed vertical or horizontal, I think we'll do them vertical. Let's just isolated on this object. It looks quite nice in the forest already. See let's isolated on this object. See if we're able to add some loops. Does that add one there? Merged by distance? I'll try and be quick with this because it's the same method we've used before. I'm just subdivide the edges. Remember the reason I'm turning these into quads is because it means we can hit control to add the loop cuts, which we wouldn't be able to do on these triangles. Try to be a bit more consistent with the amount of cuts this time. Let's add seven to each of them. I'm just using scroll wall seven times and I can see that update down here in the bottom left. Right down there. I could really annoy some of you just by putting six on some of them. I'm not going to do that once again, let's just circle these edges the season. Other quick shortcuts. Go into circle, select, there we go. And double this out. Go use my old little method here. We're going to invert the selection switch to vertex mode, hide. And then I can select everything that we want. In this case I can just scale it all on the x axis. There we go. I like how that looks. If we want to, we could even put one of our windows down here. We're going to duplicate this. In this case, instead of instancing, we want to change it up a little bit. Just going to snap this down here. Scale it in. I really like how that's looking. Rotate on the Zaxis by 180 degrees there. Now we've got a little window and I'll do the same with the door. We can just duplicate this whole door. One criticism some of you might have is that these logs right here, they look a bit weird when they're hexagonal. It's almost like it's corrugated of course, and roll out the men to be round. To fix that you could increase the amount of vertices that you had when you add to cylinders, but I think anything higher than six just makes it a bit too high poly for what we're doing. But it's a personal preference, some of you might like it differently. We could also add some of these details to this roof if you wanted to, but I'm just going to keep it bare. I hope these techniques are useful to you. You can make quite a nice little homestead using some of these buildings and it will continue in the next video. 20. Creating Low Poly Buldings - Part 3: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this part we're going to be creating some tent and we'll also be adding materials to these buildings that we created in the past videos of this section. I'm going to place my cursor down here. I'm going to press shift A to add a cylinder. In this example I'm thinking of making like a little TP tent around conical tent. I'm going to increase the vertices to seven just because I think it's a bit more inconsistent, it's not quite as uniform around as having a number. So I'm just going to slip this bottom face right here, move this up a bit, slightly below the origin point, and scale this out. This top face right here, we can move this up. I'm actually going to scale this in quite a bit, just about here. And I'm going to add another cut just below. And then scale this in, because I want it to look like it's been bunched up. It will be easy to see what I mean later. That's quite a nice opening. And then we can use the knife tool and cut out entrance for us. It doesn't need to be. Even I like this look right here. This face can be deleted. There you go. I'm going to add a solidified modifier to this. So let's just quickly isolate this. We can see the inside. Yeah, I'm going to go here, add a solidify modifier and even thickness. It's interesting to see what kind of the geometry we can get around this entrance. Let's just try reducing, it doesn't need to be very thick. That looks good to me. And then we're going to have to do some clean up to start out with. Let's go on the inside, this whole top section right here. Let's go into Y frame mode. I'm just going to expand my selection and I'm going to merge everything at the center. And then this vertex I'm just going to drag down. I'm not being too precise with this. That looks good. These edges here, again, needs to be more in line with the rest of it. Let's just move, I'm going to eyeball it. That looks good. I want to fur, probably should have pit a different face for the entrance. But I'm just going to move everything down better. So we are. I'm relying on blenders being able to shade these faces properly, these ones here. But of course, if we were to triangulate this mesh, then we need to make sure that all these faces are actually play now, because I think some of these might not be. Anyway, that's okay. I like the look at this TP. Another way we could also fix this is by cutting in the entrance to the inside of the face rather than having the edge line up. It would have been easier for us to do that way, but still I like this and we've got a nice top as well. For the top. I'm going to place cursor here around this ring shift S, cursor to selected. And then I'm going to add a bunch of sticks poking out the top. As if Let's just go down actually, I might be able to sled all these faces right here, Shift D to sets as its own. Objected. I can just move this up a little bit, then I'm going to s the top and bottom ring of edges. I'm just going to delete them. There we go. Now I can slid the top vertices. Just move them down using G and then hold Alt to drag them up. They're poking out a little bit more we can go through on each individual ones. Make sure the length is different member of you. Hold G, drag it down, and then hold Alt, you can drag it up again. That's quite nice. Lots of ways to add thickness to this. One way of doing so is to go into object mode and hit three to convert this to a curve. Just type in convert. And then this option right here, if you go, this is now curve object. We go down to the curve tab under geometry, we can increase the depth. I'm going to give it some thickness, something that they don't have to be too thick, and then reduce the resolution to zero, which just means there will be a little sticks sticks of square profile. We can also decrease the viewport resolution. That's like. It's fine. I suppose we'll see how many cuts we get along it. Let's make sure we fill the caps as well. Let's convert this back into a mesh object. Now, just going to type and convert to mesh. Then if I isolate this, go into edit mode. Yeah, it looks like we're not getting any segments along, which is good. We can just select all of these vertices at the bottom and just press X and delete faces, and that'll get rid of any unnecessary geurometry that's looking like quite a nice TP tent. Now if this is going to sit on a flat surface, it might be nice to add some things to the inside. You could add some little bags and camping gear. I might just try adding a mat to see how it looks. I'm going to add a circle. Let's say five vertices. Just going to scale it down a little bit, fill it in. Let's put a solidify On this solidify, it should be here somewhere. I'm a little bit blind and add a bit of thickness there we go. And this could be some sort of mat on the inside or like some bedding area just like that. Of course, if you're going to do is make sure you place it on a flat surface. Another little detail we could add is some rocks around the outside to make it look as if it's weighing the tent down. And on the inside as well, maybe let's just add some icospheres right here, increase the cuts. Let's just scale this down. You can also do this with metaballs. I'm just going to see how this looks. You can sculpt this. I'm just going to use proportional editing for quick quick example like this and then use remesh or a decimate. I'm going to put a decimate on it, just like this, same method we used to create the rocks. I'm just going to instance this a couple times, right, the outside and rotate it. That looks good to me. And on the inside as well, but I'm not sure why there are rocks on the inside of the tent. But it's just a nice little bit of interest. We can select all these objects. Now, me personally, I'm going to combine them all the same mesh. Can't imagine needing to separate them anymore. If we need to, we can do that on a case by case basis, but it's just nice to have it all as one mesh. Let's make sure we apply the modifiers on this though. There we go. And we can just select them all. Going to select the TP last and just hit control J. It looks like need to apply the modifiers on this as well. It because they're instant and they're all the same object, It's not letting us apply the modifier. I'm just going to quickly join them together. Something we probably should have done before and then see if we can apply this estimate now. Yeah, it looks like it's working. Yeah, let's just set them all and try to combine them again. Should work at this time. That's it. And then we can hit F two to rename this TP ten. I hope I'm spelling that right. And I'm just going to move this up to a collection. Let's just create one here. Collection ten looks like it's called. That's the last step we need to do is make a frame ten using the similar method that we do this, TP. It should be a bit more simple and then we can add materials to all these buildings. That'll be it for the buildings in this course. Let's go down, as always, I'm going to place my cursor, let's do it right here. I'm going to add a plane for this one. Just set the dimensions, make it slight bit wider, like this is quite good to me. And I'm going to add a go through the middle. And then we'll raise this up. Let me turn off a portion added. I'm not sure why that's on. Raise this up to the right height that we want. That looks nice. Another little detail we can do. We'll put in some rods or some sticks running down and maybe here to support it, But we can make the side sag inward a little bit, so let's put some cuts along inside this. Let's try four and a couple this way as well. We can always put a mirror on this if we want it to be symmetrical, but we'll see how we can make it. I'm just going to drag this one down to make it look like it's properly sagging down. Let's assume on the other side, maybe I won't use a mirror modifier just because the slight discrepancies between them make it look a lot more natural. It's not computer generated. I'm happy with that. We can select these edges right here. I might actually use some proportional editing for this. Well yeah, let's try turn on proportional editing and we can just sack this edge down a little bit and do a same to these ones. I was that looking of jet mode n go through every Be text as well N we can put on auto smooth for this if we want the to be smooth. Make sure we shade smooth and then shade this edge flat at the top. It just hit control mark. Sharp mind to smooth again can be a bit weird. Sometimes that might look better to you all. We can have the flat shading per face, which probably is more in line with the foliage that we've created and the landscape. But I like how it looks smooth like this. I might keep it to add some thickness to this tent so that it's not completely flat. I'd like to add a solidify modifier. So let's do that now. We go to solidify, let's just increase the thickness a little bit and take even thickness just like that. That's looking good. So I'll apply this and we might need to correct some of this edge data. Let's just select these edges right here that it's like it's not quite catching. I'm talking about the smoothness here. If you're using flat shading, don't worry about this. I'm just going to select all these edges that should be sharp. Control, mark sharp. And that's looking better. Perfect. I'm going to pres my cursor up here. Shift S cursor to selected. On this vertex. Actually I'll select this vertex. And I'm going to press to extrude downwards to the ground. It's going to dig into the ground a little bit, just like this. There we go. I will select this edge, press P and separate by selection. This time I'm going to try using a skin modifier to add thickness. Sometimes doesn't work. I'm add modifier and select skin. Yeah, it looks like it's picked up this time. So I'm going to go into edit mode. If we, remember, we use this to create the tree trunks, so let's just try to reinforce that now. We're going to hit control eight. If you remember to change the thickness, let's reduce that a little bit. And I'm going to scare up the bottom one because I want it to be a bit thicker. Let's go into vertex mode. Slip the bottom one. Increase it, and then reduce the top one. Just like that. And I'm going to slip both of these and move them back a bit on the x axis. That's good. Let's duplicate this one and add it to the back. But just before we do that, I want to subdivide this a couple of times. There we go. Just move some of these verities. It's not perfectly even. I'm thinking it's going to be like a natural stick that the campers are found in a wild. I might even extrude a little bit out, but I'll do that. Once we've copied it, let's just select everything shifted D to duplicate. And just move it down on the x axis to the other side. I'm going to ill this. Yeah, let's just select one of these vertices and extrude it out to make a little branch and control a to reduce the size. That looks nice. There we go. Just let you want to clean up this topology, we can apply this skin modifier and go in because it looks like it's added quite a few polygons. Let's try a limited dissolve first. Because this sometimes works, let's let everything press X and then limited dissolve looks like it's working for me. If not, you can always change that angle right here. There are a couple cases right here I might need to join these vertices together. It's not quite getting them. Just because that angle is not intense enough. I should have changed the angle from five degrees, but it's working fine. There we go. There's always a bit of manual clean up. Going to delete the bottom face because that's going to be poking through the ground, We'll never see it. Same with the top one as well. Always make sure we do a bit of clean up after applying some of these modifiers that don't always do the best job. Then we have our little a frame tent as well. You can place some mats and rocks and things like that, maybe a sleeping bag on the inside. If that's your thing. I'm going to leave this like it is. The last thing to do is add materials to these buildings. That's instead we ski and we'll see if we can do it quickly now. It's something we should be quite familiar with. After working with materials on a foliage and landscape, we've done some quite complex things. So let's quickly go down to material preview just so we could see them. And let's start adding some material. So I'm going to use the same material for both of these tents right here, let's call it tent fabric. And of course, if you wanted to have different tents next to each other that are different colors, like you want a red one, yellow one, you just create another version of this material. Or we could use the random generator that we created for the flowers, if you remember trying to get that working. But I want to be able to manually tweak them, so I'm just going to give it a simple color like this for these sticks. I'm just going to island select them and create a new material slot. Let's see if we've got one we can use. I'm not sure if there are any names properly. Let's just try this brown one. I think that's the one we used for the trees. That'll explain to me. So yet's do the same for this. Once sat down I can join this together. I might just check the modifier. Yeah, let's draw these together. And I'm going to rename this frame tent and move this to the campaign collection right down here. Okay, so let's now make these rocks a different color. Make sure we select them all. That looks good. Let's create a new slot right now. We'll see if we can use one of the gray ones. We've really got It was a while ago. House. I don't remember which ones they are. Yeah, Gray rock, it looks like that's what it's called. That's good. It's pretty seenless with the other ones on the landscape as well. And this Matt at the bottom. Let me just quickly check. There's no geometry. Might need to delete this face right here. We'll get the floor there. Just for now. I'm not worried about it, actually. I will delete it. It's taken up the polygons, it's not being seen, that's looking good. We can always have them later if we need to. We can't find another material in the list that we like. Yeah, it's just create a new one. Let's create a new material slot to sign it. I'll call this one light brown one. I'm going to use the color picker right here to get the same hue from the tree trunk, but we'll just increase the intensity a little bit. Maybe to saturate, it's nice. I prefer that look. That's the ten done now, we just need to do the buildings, so let's let this lock cabin, let's put brown one on this and do the same for the door. I think should actually let's make this door a separate color. Sometimes it's nice to try things out, see if you like it or not. Let's call this brown two. So I'm going to press this button just to create a new version of it is now a separate material to the. Let me change this one. It won't change the existing one. We won't overwrite it, that's good. Let's do the same for the top bit. Add a bit of detail, these window frames right here. I'm going to select the glass first. I think these are instances of each other. I'll create a new material, call this window. This is going to be like a darker blue color. For night time scenes I might do like what we did with the lighthouse over there. For night time scenes will increase the emission, but for daytime scenes it will just be like this blue color. Now that we've got these faces selected, we can do control number pad plus to grow our selection and then deselect the original faces. And that's just a quick way of selecting the frames. Work fast, not hard. And then let's put on the brown material. The brown one material to these ones just says a little bit of distinction between them and see how this looks and rendered. I like it. This log cabin looks nice. We can get some nice reflections coming off the grouse onto it as well. Now on to the house, the larger house. Let's try giving it the rocks material. This one right here, gray rock. And this will be the base. And let's create another material slot. And this will be a dark gray rock right here. And we'll add this to all the bricks. I don't like the bricks are part of the same object. Let's quickly go down search for dark gray rock and then I'm going to select all the other ones. This might take me a while. So there with me, let's just hide this building. A lot of these are instances actually. Remember we select multiple objects, we can link materials, let's unhide the rest of the building. Now we can see we've got this nice contrast between the two brick colors. Whilst we're here, we're going to select this building and let's just quickly get the faces for the wooden parts. Quicker Way to do that might actually be to just select the inner faces, these ones. Then we can grow our selection a couple times. We've got some weird topology that. I'll correct that in a second. As we've got this, let's just quickly add this to a new slot and unassign the middle faces. I might add these to like a lighter color, create another slot and assign them to this one. And then let's actually call this light wall. And this could be some plaster perfect for this material slot. I'm just going to put the brown one here. We can choose which one. Let's try this one. For now, let's see what's wrong with this topology. Here should be an easy fix. I wouldn't say it's too important to create as like this, but I always like making sure models are polished. This vertex might just slide up to the top, so I don't think we need it. There we go. That looks fine to me. Now for the rest of it, let's just keep selecting these wooden planks for these faces. I might do it manually. We can also slide some of these vertices in towards the end. Just reduce polycana'jtqulect, these ones. Quick wave donors might be going into x ray view from the side in face mode. Just box selecting aid. Just box select. We should only get these bonds. Let's assign is to brand one. It seems like it's working quite well. I'll do again. But going through and doing it by hand does also make it easier to spot errors like the one we just fixed. Annoyingly, some of these might be gone, so you can't always select them. In some cases like this, I can select one on one side and then control shift, click the other to quickly select them. Let's sign them to this material. See if there's a quick way to select these planks. Now let's try selecting one and then shift clicking to the other side. Doesn't look like it's going to work. If we do it in steps like this, then yeah, this works. Just have selected and shift control, click another one and it just selects all the faces between if they're all quads and they're connected. Let's be careful there. It doesn't always work. If this doesn't work, you can try using circle select. You can go in an X ray mode like we did before. Whatever works for you. So you're going to add a brown wood to this. I think that would look good. I'm just thinking about how the colors on our log cabin compare to each other. I'm happy with that. And let's do the same top as well. What I might end up doing is tweaking these colors because I think this brown is a little bit too light and saturated. But we'll get to that later. I'm going to add brown two to the roof as well. Maybe you can always search materials, if you can't find them in the list, this chimney will be the same. I'll do a combination of the two. Let's set this one to brown two and then create a new material slot for a lighter brown. Like I said, I'm going to change these colors later. That's the nice thing about doing it this way. It looks like instance these windows that lucky for us. So speed it up. Time. There's lot door knob, let's see, we got a metal, I think there's a dark metal that we used on the light house. We can probably repeat that. Looks nice. And let's just go in and do the windows quickly and then nothing will be done. This is all the same way I did it for the log cabin, by the way, put my window material on it. This is the beauty of instance. So yeah, as I was saying before, let's go back into ndenmugcause. I'm not quite sure. I'm happy with the color of this brown. So let's just see if I can darken it a tiny bit. This will affect the trees as well because they're showing the same material. So if you don't want to change them both, it might be worth having a separate one for the trees, It's fine. I'll keep the same one on both of them. That looks a little bit better to me. I might also change the dark brown to be a bit less saturated. See how that looks? Yeah, that's good here. Let's also change the window because it's too saturated. I find it's way too easy to make colors very saturated and bunder sessions decrease this. I'm happy with how that looks. Yeah, last detail. I know we're finishing with these buildings, but one last detail, just like we do with everything, it can be nice if you just bevel control shift, be just bevel the corners into buildings like this or come in with our knife tool and just make a couple notches. You can add so much character that I think it's always worth doing. Yeah, that finishes these buildings. I challenge you to create something much better than what I've got here. I don't think this building exactly looks the best or the log cabin, but we've been created it and we've got a three different layers right here. So that adds character and you can use, you might want to swap out these gray bricks for like a red brick wall instead. You can experiment with this, see good luck using these techniques. And we'll continue in the next section. 21. Creating Low Poly Props - Part 1: Hey everyone and welcome back to the next section. At this point in, of course, we're almost finished. We've covered a lot of modeling techniques and concepts when it comes to this low poly style. And so in this section we'll just be creating a series of props to reinforce this knowledge you can use to populate this scene. So let's start out just by organizing the outline. Because I thin, it's a little bit messy right now. I'm not sure what all these objects are, so I'm going to select all these ones and just put this, let's see what the house ones go. Inside it. Okay. I can just just hide house one because it looks like I've got part Yeah, I've got the door from the log cabin in the wrong collection. I'm going to move this to a new collection. I'll just call this log cabin one that if I hide it, then we can start moving some of these objects into there as well. Should have done this in the last section, but here we are a log cabin one, and it just makes it easier to select. Perfect. So we've got some space out here. We're going to start out by creating a little barrels. Quite a simple technique here. We're just going to add a cylinder. Have as many sizes as you want. I'm going to choose eight and we'll create a couple of these as well. We can create a small one next to it. Let's just scale this down and isolate it. I've got some reference images of barrels on my other screen. It might be worth having a look at some. I'm going for like an old classic wooden barrels. Always fun to make. Low body can see here I've created this cut in the middle. And then we're going to level this to get the curvature any outside of the barrel. So just make sure that everything's scaled properly. We might end up mirroring it vertically. Here we are, This right here. If we select this and then hit control beads bavel, we can get the shape like this. Don't want too many cuts. I'll stick with this. Okay. If you don't like it, you can always scale it on the shift Z axis. Now for the hoops going around, this barrel under is going to have four hoops at the top, two at the bottom. You can always have more if you like. I'm going to try and get the right thickness. That looks good to me. Yes. So let's just select these rings. Add a couple of loops at the top. It might be easier to see what I'm doing here. Once I've extruded them out, I just eyeballed the, all the thickness of some of these loops. But you can of course put a mirror modifier on it if you want it to be more precise. As here, once I've got this is just going to extrude along normals like this. And then I'm going to expand my selection by one and add some materials to here. I don't want to use the brown one that I put on the other trees because I'm already using on quite a few assets in the seam just in case I want to change it. Let's give this a brown color like this. And then let's create enough one and call this barrel metal. It would be like a gray blue, not quite saturated. That looks great. And then at the top and bottom, we can just select these two faces, insert them a bit. And then extrude long was once again and that looks pretty good. Now we want to add a little plug in at the top. We just place our cursor on top shift add cylinder. Let's just put five sce this down and we can delete the bottom face. It's never going to be seen. A little tip of this is if you scale the top out like this to create that bung shape, add a bit of stylization to it. Let's put the barrel wood on this. I'm going to copy this material and call it barrel wood and make this slightly lighter. Just to differentiate it, what we could also do is have the top of this barrel of lighter color and then there's a barrel wood. One's personal preference. Yeah, I'm going to rename this barrel. And I'm going to move this to a little props collection which will work, contain all the assets for this section. We've got a couple of objects here, I'm not quite sure what the cylinder is, let's just jump to that. It looks like I have a mystic. Couple objects that's part of the bowl. Sls, rain this together. Let's move this cylinder back into the house. One collection. My mistake then let's see what this empty is as well. It looks like this is one we're using for the water waves, the water. That's okay. I'm just going to put this up into the scenery collection just to keep things tidy. When you're placing this, it might be a good idea to set the origin to the bottom. So I'm just going to select this ring of edges. Cursor to select it and then set origin to three cursor. You can just snap it to the ground. The place these around your scene. You might want to have a couple outside the house and Beth, looks good to you. I'm going to do this really fast. But as an extra challenge to try creating another barrel, I'll give this 16 and we're going to make this little bit smaller and only put two hoops on it. Just to do this, see outqu you can make it, I suppose might be net bit of bread. You can make it look better than mine. I'm going to bubble to make the hoops using the same techniques as before. And let's put the same materials on it. Cally we can just re use them. Set the origin and we can place this around a couple of times as well. Nice. Another little thing we can model right here is a camp fire. Because we've really got some tense, it might be nice to have a little fire pit. The way I'm going to do that, me personally, I'm just going to use metaballs to block out the basis for it. I always forget about these are under metaballst's. Add a couple of these. We're going to go and increase the put resolution. Decrease it rather we use this to block out the shape because I'm thinking of having like a little pit in the middle. And then to change the size of the green ones as well as the red ones. I mean, when I say, is this just reinforcing knowledge that we've used throughout the course? It's all stuff we've done before then. Once we've got that, if you want to, we can go and sculpt it, but I'm going to leave it like that for now. I think that's okay. Let's convert this to a mesh then. Let's see what the topology slide. We might need to put a decimate on this or remsh, let's try remeshing it first to a Vauxhall Re mesh. Apply that and then let's put a decimate modifier on it. Let's make it nice and low poly perfect. We could also add a little circle of stones going around the outside. Let's add some ospheresjust going in top right now could create some nice little game assets like this. You could sell these in a pack maybe. And then I'm just going to scale some of these down, change of size, use a bit. Portional editing with connected mode so I don't move neighboring ones. Let's just distort some of these stones so they're not perfectly sercal. We could spend a bit more time on this than me, but I'm just trying to be quick here. Let's put mate modifier at see other slopes. Then we could add some sticks, so let's shift a, let's add a cylinder with just three births that will allow us to do that. Lets it will, let's scale this down. Disabled portional edit. What I'm going to do now is move it up in edit mode so that the origin point stays there. And that would mean that we can now rotate it around the point. It just makes it easier to manipulate. I'm instancing a couple of these, rotating them on the rest axis. If you're taking it into a game engine like Real or Unity, you could have a nice little particle emitter here. That would be a co, addition. Maybe we could animate some smoke coming off. We get creative. That looks good to me. I might have my camp fire extinguished. I'm not sure if we'll have a flame coming off. Yeah, I'm happy with that. So let's draw a news altogether now. Let's keep it separate while adding materials. I'm just going to put were brown two on this. Let's try brown, dark gray rock for the stones. I'll just call this sot, something like that. Very similar to the color of the rocks. Try, give it a slight tone. Nice. Let's see how this looks rendered perfect. That will look good around the tents. Noticing that this grass might be a little bit too saturated. I'm just going to quick go out to the shading tab fully saturated. Let's turn down a tiny bit and reduce the brightness. Doesn't need to be so bright. See how it looks in rendered view. You can always tweak these settings. Yeah, that looks better to me. It's tiny bit more yellowy as well. It's quite green right now. That looks good. Yeah, I'm always too bright and saturated with my materials. That's one thing. I got barrel. Once this is done, we can just combine this into the same object, control J. It looks like me to apply these decimate modifiers, I always forget to apply these modifiers. There we go. Control J part archivo point somewhere. Sensible at this time, I'm just going to move it manually. The way we do that is by turning on transform origins up here. We can actually just place it like anything. Let's just to make sure that it lines up. That looks good to me, that looks like it's a pretty sent. Let's turn off this, rename it Camp Fire. Nice. I've got one other idea for an object that we'll create now, I'll be like a little tree stunt with an axe poking out of it. So that'll be fun. And then in the next video, we'll do a couple more objects. I'm just going to place my cursor here. Once again, shift A to add a cylinder. I'm thinking five vertices, depends how big you want the trunk to be. Just like that. And then just sculpt the shape of this. It's going to have like a nice little taper on, isn't it? That's extrude distance to ground. Once again what we could do is lt, one of these vertices and control shift to bevel and merge by distance, and then we can move this vertex out. It just makes the shape a little bit more interesting. You can imagine that roots are going to be coming out of this rather than being perfect. There we go. But I do want to keep the top plane up. I've probably distorted some of these faces running outside, but that's going to be okay. Let's put triangulate modifier in this to see how it looks. That looks good. I'm happy with that. This it's probably a little bit too far out. Yeah, that sits pretty well. And let's also do this spot on face because it's not going to be seen. Great, that's tree stump. I'm going to let this face and just insert it a little bit. Then let's add materials. First, let's put brown one on, this Brown two, Ashley. Then let's create another one and put brown one. We'll see how this looks. We can always change the colors. If we don't like it right now, I think I'll have it brighter than. Let's create another material slot. I'll do this wood, Ashley, I'll call this wood lights. Sign this. Yeah. Remember if you go back into object mode when you're actually changing the color but just have the material selected, then it's easier to see because when you've selected a face in edit mode, it turns a yellow there. Just that if you want to, you can maybe extrude it down a little bit just to set it back. Could try in setting it, give it some texture. I don't want to increase the poly count too much. Let's do it just for this one because I think it looks really nice. It just looks as if we've got some circling going around, isn't it? That's the tree stump. Then for the ax, we can place our cls here. And I'm just going to add a cube scale this in. I got a picture of an axe on Monitus. I'm looking at that right now. You haven't really made any hand props. Would be a nice starting point. Just get the length. I'm not thinking about measurement here, I'm just eyeballing it for the actual blade. I'm just going to select to this, duplicate it. Let's think about how the top is going to look. Going to need to be slightly thicker to bring this face back right there. I just scaled it on the x axis and did it merger by distance. See how we want this profile to look? There we go. That looks quite nice to me right now. I'm debating the profile. We keep this rectangular or not. If we want to add an extra loop, I'm debating adding one. Let's try how it looks to be the. I do think that's a little bit nicer. Yeah, I might just bevel these and I'm going to scale these on the x axis as well, merged by distance mirror. Let's just add a few cuts in here to get the profile axes have quite a distinctive shape. And there's usually a bit that props out right here. Let's just add that. Now. Let's reset the origin to center of mass surface and add some materials quickly. Just put brown one or brown two and let's add the dark metal that we created for the lighthouse. I think just quickly assigns one to the blade, then let's place it so it's chopping into the axe. That looks good to me. I'm happy with that. Let's join these objects together. Just going to quickly save, before I do that, train these objects together and I call this tree stump. Whilst I'm here, I haven't checked the normals, so I'm going to quickly turn on face orientations. I believe it's one of these ones right here. Face orientations, I've got add on that allows me to see this hard ops. If I press out B, then I've got a little shortcut to change some of these settings and right here we can see that this ones are not right. I'm just going to go into edit. Most everything shift in, that's good. I don't see any here, incorrect normals, so I'm just going to disable that up here, remember face orientations and we'll continue in the next video. 22. Creating Low Poly Props - Part 2: Hello and welcome back. In this part we're going to start off by creating a, well, we'll be using a lot of techniques that we've used before except for some radial symmetry that we're used to create some bricks going around the outside. Let's get into that now. So I'm going to start off place my cursor here and we'll add a cylinder just to block out the rough shape of it. And let's set list to 12 vert. Want a few polygons to work with. First off, let's just get the diameter of this right. I think it should be about a meter. Just over a meter. Let's use these grids to lend that up. I'm happy with that. Then let's just scale this in edit mode. Let's move the bottom face up to around about here at the top. With this, well, we can insert this and just use it like this. We can have this is the outer wall running around the outside. It will also create like a little frame structure and a roof on top. But I'd like to create the outer ring using bricks. We'll get into that. Let's start off creating the frame. That will probably be simplest. I'm going to press Shift A to add a E in edit mode. Make sure we're in edit mode. Let's scale this down and move this on the x or y axes to around about here. That looks good. It can either be on the inside or outside. I've got some reference images here. I'm going to put mine just about there. Let's make sure we move it down just to sure it's below the ground. And delete the bottom phase. We don't need that anymore. Perfect. Now we've got this phase, we can just drag this up a little bit till it's tall enough. And skeleton, that looks good. Now what we'll have at the top here is we'll have two little prongs coming out to support the roof. I'm going to add a loop around about here. Let's maybe make this bit tall. Keep changing this. Let's add the loop. We'll try selecting both of these at the same. We could mirror it as well, but let's just try to do it like this. So let's extrude press skate and you'll find if we scale it on the y axes instead of moving them, let's just like another way of moving it, it's a bit more simple and creates a roof. Let's add a mirror modifier to this. Just so copies across the steel side. That'll be down here a modifier. And it looks like it's already got the right axis. Perfect. Now for the top of the roof. Oh, this will form the top of the roof. We've already got a cursor down here, so let's just press shift A, add a cube scale, this down a little bit, just like we did before. Let's move this up and elongate it. I want mine slightly overhanging the support structure. Let's just place it about here. Then we can delete this face because it's not going to be visible. That looks good. If you want to add a bit of detail, we can probably do this later as well. But let's just add a couple cuts along and then move some of them down so it looks like it's poking up at the end. This has the effect of looking at the woods expanded over time in the get maybe it's slightly symmetrical, slightly asymmetrical. I like that look. Let's also drag this one down. The weight of the roof as pulled down on the support that Los. Good, then I'm actually thinking we can add another cut up here. Let's just think about how we're going to do this. I probably will add a cut going along this side, right here, and it can do everything to the left of it. Make sure I'm using the last tool, let's follow along. Then we can mirror on the y axis as block. Just close things up. Now let's create the actual roof piece. To do this, I'm going to add a plane and just move this edge on the Y axis by one by minus one. So in the same spot as a curse, that just means we can move it up and it's easier to manipulate because we can just rotate it like this. First off, let, let's think about this. Yeah, let's move this to the side slightly. We'll add a cut going, we'll skeleton. So it's further in top part just scale on the x axis. There we go. We'll add these cuts. Going along here, we'll just add one and then bevel it across. Let's give us two side bits that we can bring outwards. Let's delete this face in the middle and just slept everything and extrude down. You can see if we rotate this, this is how it's going to make the sides. I can see already this two wide. Let's just bring these faces in a little bit. Now I'm going to put my cursor here and I'm going to add a couple more cubes that's just follow along. I want to be slightly smaller and I'm going to delete the faces as well because these might be visible from below. And I'm just going to join this to the other objects, it's all the same. Quickly calculate normals because it looks like some of these are flipped. If we rotate that now it should look a little bit better. That looks good. So we'll add some kind of tiles here. We can add individual roof tiles, but I'm thinking to stick with the poly count of the rest of the scene that we've got. Let's just try adding a plane and see how it looks. We can always change it later. Let's just add another plane. Put a Slidify on this as well. We go something like that. Like it's being held up. Here we go. Another thing we can do is add a couple cuts running down. I've added one to both of the tops. I've got both of these objects at the same time. I've added a cut going down on the actual roof. And also along with these bars across, we can just move these down a little bit and then level this. I think that looks a little bit better. Perfect'm. Going to apply the solidify on this because I'm happy with how that looks. Join it to the other object, and then let's rotate it down just like this. See how it looks from below. That's looking nice. Then for this part, let's think about how we're going to fix this isolated. So we can see it might be the case of selecting knees, just pressing GG to move them out, deleting this face. And then if I select these two edges, we can scale them in a little bit. On the x axis. Yeah, that looks like it joins it nicely together. Then let's copy this across the other side. So let's add another mirror modifier on here. It looks like it might need to be the Y axis, or it might be because we've got a mirror on it. I'm just going to use this little pete. This top part, it is a Y axis. Anything else we need to do? I'm happy with it. I might quickly, We're here, just change the length of these tiles. I'm moving them on the local Y axis here, so I'm pressing Y twice As the shortcuts do that. That's looking good. I'm happy for the top of the well now we need to have a little rod running between these two supports that the rope is going to coil on. Let's think about how we're going to do that. I'm going to place my cursor down here. I'm going to add a cylinder and I'd like to use five vertices. Let's just rotate this. This should all be stuff we're familiar with, so that's good to me and we'll have some handle on the end. Let's just place a cursor right here. We can shift cursor to selected. Let's add a little cube while I'm here, let's delete this face and scale this in a little bit. At the bottom, if there's no rope hanging off it, then the handle will always hang downwards. But if you're going to put a rope off, then you can spin in such an angle like that, it's up to you. So let's just quickly duplicate this pentagon right here. Just let these edges shift D and then press to set it as its own object. Let's try to select, have a hard time selecting it if we can just hide these ones. There we go. And then let's just st everything and extrude it out on the x axis and move it down a little bit. Remember, just in case we take this into a game engine, I always like to have my edges intersect in slightly. When there's no face here, let's just intersect it with this block. Because sometimes it can mess up baked lighting, but not always. If you're rendering in bland, it should be fine. Don't worry about it too much, especially if you're using cycles. Let's fill in. You might want to add a loop here and scale this out. Just add a little bit of stylization. It could also come in above all this, how that looks. This is going to be quite worn down, isn't it? At a bit of aging right now. I'm just experimenting. I think that makes it look a bit better. I'll come in as well to the support I supply this mirror modified because I'm happy with that now. And I'm going to use my little knife tool trick to add some cuts into the side. Nothing too deep. Just a little bit of detail to add some character because as well, it's probably going to be quite old. Let me go. You can imagine where someone's been turning this handle and they might have scraped along the side. That looks good to me. Now we just need to create this stone bricks right here. There are a few different ways we can do this. One way might be to add a radiule array. So we'll add an array modifier and then use a curve to direct it round. Yeah, let's get to this. I'm going to place my cuz here. And just create a couple bricks. Actually, I'll place yeah, right here. We can line up and I'll create some bricks that will be roughly the same size as each of these segments here. Because I'm thinking about 12, it's just scaletons. We've got the correct thickness, that looks good. And some of these duplicate it in place, one next to it, but this one is going to be a little bit smaller. Yeah, we've just got a few of these. Maybe every other one will be a small one. And then we're going to wrap these round so as to do that. One thing you might want to do so we don't get gaps between is add some loop cuts to all these, then just old so they intersect in the middle. We can get some messy geometry this way, but I think it's worth it. That looks good. Yeah. Once again, we can come in and chip some of these like this, but I might do it after we've added the modifier so it doesn't look too repetitive. Great. We're going to place a cursor here and let's we need like a path to array it round. Let's just create a circle, See if this one works. I hope it will be the right type of path. Then let's go on here and we're going to add a curve under the deformed section here. We've got a curve and then we just need to select the curve. I think there should only be one in the scene, so we can just set it here. Looks like it is working for us. You see it's wrapping around a couple of things we might want to do. We could try changing the diameter of the circle. We just scale it, but we can also select this in object mode to move it along. Move it around. By the way, if we select this, sometimes I think we need to move it on like the y or x axes. If we can turn on this option, right? Yeah, that one right there, this button in the middle. And we can see it update in real time. That's it. And then let's just hide this one. I'm only using this as a visual reference so you can see it. And then we might want to add an array modifier to this. That looks good, but we'll drag the ray modifier up before the curve and it's just duck a normal ray. I think we've used these before. It'll just copy the object. Make a couple extra ones. Let's add about three of those and it looks like it's going all the way around now. Now what we might do is I'm just going to place my cursor here. Shift S cursor to selected because I think it's too long. We need to scale it so that it correctly matches up. Let's just scale it on the x axis until we've got, there we go. That looks good. Nice. We've got our bricks just quickly shift to recalculate. It almost looks like everything's fine. I'm quickly safe. Just in case we need to go back and revert. I'm going to apply these modifiers. I'm going to duplicate this, Move it up the z axis. It looks like I didn't scale it properly. So let's just slt all these bottom vertices and move them so that they're at the appropriate level. Looks like that. It looks like the bottom bonds are already fine. And let's delete these faces because we're not going to need these. Then for the top ones, let's select all these vertices and move them down to the bricks the right height. We can just rotate these. We might need to place our cursor here to shift as curse to select it because I don't think that origin matches up to where we want to spin it. Let's just set the origin to three D curse. Do the same for the bottom one as well. At, we can just rotate this on a Z axis. You can see we shouldn't have the gaps between the bricks. It looks like they all line up fine and it's quite a nice way to bile texture. I suppose you could also use this to texture the side of the building. If you're doing like an entire wall, you're going to get quite a few polygons from that perfect. Then if I'm going to press O H to bring back this, maybe we can scale it in a little bit. Let's scale out this out a bit, then let's delete these faces. They just extrude it down a little bit. This could be like stone bit that sits on top or maybe like a little wooden thing. Let's just quickly recalculate normals and get rid of the sextemetry. I don't think that's meant to be that. Instead, actually we could bring this up. We'll just have this to represent the water, make it look like it's really flooded. Well, let's scale this in a little bit. I'll separate this as an object. Perfect. I'm quite happy with that. That's looking good. You'll notice that these vertices here in the middle, or this glute rather it has moved down slightly. I can snap it up to the same level as the other vertices on the outside but to make it flat like that. But I'm now realizing actually quite like it because it gives us some weird shading and I just like the angle that we get here. Yeah, let's go into material mode now and let's quickly add some materials to let's try and re, use some of the ones we've already got in the scene. Let's go down, I imagine we'll just use brown one foils of this, the two just add a bit of variety. Add brown one for the top, these parts right here, I think I'll isolate this and this will be a brown. To use a slightly darker shade, we could set it to like a stone and maybe add some roofing tiles in here, but I quite like this. Look. Let's put a dark gray rock and light gray rock on here. We can alternate between there. Let's just select some of these. Use an L to island. Select right here. We'll just do every other couple ones that as dark gray you can even give this like a green mossy color if you wanted to. That might look quite nice. It's looking a bit contrast. I might have a bit too much contrast here, but I'm okay with it. Looks a, there we go. Let's see how it looks in rendered view. I think I'm happy with that. I think that looks great. Go before I forget, let's just add a material to the water. Let's select it. I think we have really got the water material, but it's transparent right now, and I don't want to actually be able to look down at the ground instead. Let's add a new one. I'll just call it matt water. That's turn nice blue color. Look at it in rendered mode, we change the roughness. Even a green color. There we go. We can add a lily pad to this as well. Let's place makers here. Let's add a plane. And I'm going to isolate this, look at it from the top. I'll try and be creative with this. Let's go into Select mode, and we can just trace the shape of the lily pad and then delete these two outer faces. We don't need these. Delete faces. Nice. And move it up slightly. I'm okay with this being completely flat, but if you want, you could add solidify modifier to it. But like I said, I think I'm okay with that. Let's just give this to green materials, very sharp green. Let's have a couple of these. Well, maybe the wall hasn't been used in a while. Let's combine these. Yeah, I'm happy with everything, so let's combine everything to one. Let's just quickly go through and apply these modifiers. I think we've got a couple mirrors in some of it, just these bits. Maybe It's hard to see sometimes which objects are selected and which ones aren't. I think I've got them all, everything control J. And let's call this, well, quickly hide this and delete this curve that we're using. We don't need that anymore. There we go. This vast one is going to be very simple. So let's just add a cursor here for this. We're going to create a park bench. Let's add a plane. Just scale. This looks like it's going to be 2 meters long, so that's okay. And then I'll add some cuts down here as well. Maybe four. And then let's just level this out and delete these faces. Select everything and extrude this. There we go. So that'll be like the top bench Island. Select three of these, we'll go into this mode, shift it D and just place it down here. This will be like where you sit, that might be too many of them. Let's just have two. I'll set it as its own object. And then that means we can quickly put a mirror on it because the origin here, the same supports the top on the Yaxsw. We just need to add some supports. Let's add the cube scald. We're going to use snapping to align this top face right here. Just put it there. I'm going to keep the top face because we can see it through these cracks in some angles. Let's move this out. We're going to duplicate this. Move this down on a Z axis and align it with the bottom. And then we can scale this out and it's all at light supports for the sides and also hold them up from the center frame. And to create that, we might just be able to add a couple cuts down here. Actually all creates a separate objects so we can insert it. We'll see what I mean later. Let's just place my cursor here somewhere or snap it. Place my cursor here and create a new cube. And I want to scale it just slightly thinner, perfect, and delete the top face. This won't be visible if I go into this mode. We can just scale it up on a z axis. I'm going to reset the origin. I shouldn't have changed that, really reset the origin to center of mass surface. I'm rotate in it in object mode just in case I want to change the length or the width later on, it's easier to do. For example, I want to move this face out. Now I can just move it on the local axis, double tap Y, it's going to be a bit thicker than the Scss supporting. There we go, I think I already deleted the face at the top, so that's all fine. I'm going to add a mirror on here. Let's just place my cursor where the origin of this object is. Add a mirror modifier for the x and Y. I've got some images on my screen that I'm looking at whilst doing it. Let's apply this then. We can just draw everything is the same object. Apply this mirror modifier as well. Let's just drain everything up. This has been quite a quick one then let's put brown one on here. Or maybe light brown we can see, see how it looks. This up this down a little bit, that looks good to me and then we can its origin of the decursor. It looks like I'm missing this piece on the other side, that's a bit silly of me. So we can just select it. We could separate it as an object and put a proper mirror on and everything, But I'm sure it'll be fine if we just don't tell anyone There we go and yeah, that's a little part bench, there we go. Looks like I'm missing this piece as well. I'm not quite sure how I missed that one. That's just duplicate it and everything's fine. Great. So now for objects on top, I want to put some things on. Top also was on, I'm just quickly noticing, I want to move this in a little bit, slick it a little bit closer so I've broken symmetry by doing this. But I don't think anyone will notice. Bad habit though. Should have first seen how it looks before we combined everything into the same object. I'm sure it'll be fine. Then we go, yes, we could add some little plane cards on here. I'm going to place my cursor, just add a little cards like this. Then for this one I'm going to extrude it up because it will be the stack pressed old D. I shouldn't have done that. To break the connection, we can just press this little four button here. The object data tab, I think it is. Your object data properties, and that breaks the instancing. So then we can extrude it up and it won't affect the others. So it looks like that's the deck and these are just other cars. I'm going to move these up slightly so we don't get any Z. Fighting with the table top quickly, combine these. Let's rename this Ben Chatty and add the cards to it. Put material on it, See if we've got a white one. We haven't got one, so let's just create a new one. We go playing cards and let's add it. We could also add some poker chips as well, just thinking. Now let's add a shift A, let's add circles, five vertices, scale them in a little bit. Just create a few of these that there have been a few players for some of these stacks. We can increase it a little bit, that's good to me. And we can give them some colors as well. Maybe we could put the tulit material on here. Tulip petal just got random ones. Actually, we want to come combine it as a object, so let's scrap that idea. We don't want to have separate objects. We want it to all be the same part of the bench. Just call this poke Che. Let's give it a nice dark red color and we can add some green and black ones in there as well. Maybe, there we go. Let's make this one green. That's good to me. That's combined this the rest of the bench, and I think that's all the objects time. So there we go. That's pretty much all the modeling for objects, at least in this course. So congratulations, if you followed along every step this far, don't worry if not, but I hope there's some new skills you can take away from this. In the next section, we'll be creating characters. We'll create a male and female character, and then we can just round it up by placing all these assets in the scene together and go through the render settings to create a nice portfolio render. So congratulations, I hope you've learned a few modeling skills and we'll continue with the characters in the next section. 23. Creating Low Poly Characters - Part 1: Welcome back to the new section of the course where we'll be creating our low poly characters. So I'm going to start out here just by hiding everything else I'll do in the same file, just so we've kept everything in a blend file, but if you like, you can do this in a separate blend file. So I'm just going to collapse these collections here and I'm going to click on this little restrictions toggle right here. So we've got this little TV and I'm just going to disable all of the collections that we've currently got because I don't want to be able to see these including the archive one and set up as well. Why not? So I'm going to press Shift, that's a shortcut to put your cursor at the center of the screen. We're going to start off adding a cube. It'll be like the basis for the character. We're going to create a male one and a female one in this course, while I'm here, we may as well create a collection for these characters. So I'm just going to click on the Scene collection, create a new one, call this characters, and then add this cube in. Before we start, let's just quickly discuss the style that we're going for. We want to target this towards games because we're going to get in this course as well. Which means it can then be animated. And if you look at this example, we've got like edge loops that run down the limbs and across transverse. And we'll have a bunch of cuts here like the elbows and knees, so that it can animate properly. In this part, we'll be creating the base mesh that we can use for both male and female characters. So we'll create derivatives of this mesh. We can also add a bit of stylization. You see some of these low poly characters will have like enlarged heads, or in the case of characters, in large proportion to certain parts of their bodies. But I'm just going to create like a basic humanoid shape. Talk about proportions a little bit, and then if you want to stylize it, you can take it further. Also for the face and hair, We won't be going into too much detail on that. I suppose we'll see later we might do what this artist has done here and just add some eyebrows and facial hair, but we'll see about that later. Let's start off by transforming a cube right here, so it's going to edit mode, Front view, and it can move it up on the axis by one just so it's flat with the ground. This doesn't matter. Assume that each one of these grids is a meter. Let's try and make that character fit within that range. Let's have got about here, maybe a male, 16 foot tall, female one would probably be slightly shorter. You can use these grids to set your height. Let's just scale this down a bit. Places where the torso is going to be. I'm going to add a loop cut going through the middle. And then I'm going to delete this face. We'll delete the vertices of this face. And then that means that we can just add a mirror modifier to it. Whatever we do to the side will copy across. I've got the negative Y axis pointing forwards, which is usually what we do when creating a character. Although we'll be adding close, the character will be using the base mesh to create a close. That makes sense. We'll scale them out, maybe put a solidify on it. So it's important that we get this down right from the start. I'm just going to scaling this if you'd like, you can load in the background image as well, but I'm just going to guess at proportions. I might do some annotations here using this little pen tool right here. You can click on this and then go down to view annotations. I start drawing head is going to be up to about here, isn't it? And you can see it's created a new annotations layer. Usually the head will take up about a seventh or seventh and a half of all the proportion the height of the body. That might be about here, so we can make sure our heads are right size, but obviously it's low poly is stylized. Don't be too fast about this. Then we can just block out the shape of the character. My torso, here are my legs. The tips of the fingers should come down to about the sin midway, the thigh, midway through the thigh, the fingers should come down to about here we can start modeling The nice thing about annotations and blenders at their three D. Now we can start actually shaping this to the body. We also need to think about whether we want our limbs to be hexagonal or octagonal, like the ring running around the arm. I want it to be hexagonal, so we need to make sure that we've got six vertices coming off. This can be quite complex to think about and try and visualize. Just follow along if you're worried about that. You're going to add some cuts going along here. Let's add one here, then. I can start shaping this in as well. Try and have the front wide in the back if you can, a bit like this. We can also add some cuts running up and down to get the curve of the spine and the form of the chest as well. Make sure you take a lot of time to tweak this, a whole day's work on its own time consuming process for the top bits. I'm happy with the shape actually. I might change the scaling. We can always go into y frame mode or use this little tool here. For a simple object like this, it can be quite useful. I'm just trying to align this to the annotations that I drew, although it wasn't that detailed. I'm noticing now that when we move this in, the vertex was passing through to the other side of the mesh. So let's make sure we enable this clipping option and then that will lock everything to the middle. Let's just select everything that's supposed to be in the middle and try to move it left and right on the x axis. And that should lock it. There we go, for this. Part right here, I'm going to bring everything to the middle because that's where the legs will be extruded out. Now I'm going to add a lot, cut this way down this side of the character. Direct some of these out. I'll disable this x ray just so it's easy to see. Maybe hide notations as well. We can keep it on this side of the screen. Just enable and disable it as we need to see it. I'm just worried about being too high. Poorly here because I've added quite a few cuts already. This is manageable. We'll try and keep it low from that one, but I don't think we'll be adding any more cuts vertically. This should be enough for us. So that's got this hexagonal form that I was talking about. If we select these two faces right here, and then extrude these down, that will be like basis for lens. And we'll do the same up here. We've got these two faces. And if we extrude them out like this, and then we can either rotate them like this and then extrude these ones out to be the arms. So we've got these shoulders, obviously ignore my proportions, or we can just rotate it around this and then extrude out the arms. It's up to you. I'm going to do it this way, but let's try and keep everything in a post. Sometimes if you're modeling organic characters, it's nice to have the arms come down like this, but I'm going to do mine in a post just because it's a bit more simple when working with low poly characters. And we can start actually rounding this off so it's not boxy anymore. Keep it a bit thicker at the back. For the shoulder blades, for the chest. I'm actually going to bring some of these edge loops down a bit so we've got more geometry to work with. Let's select all of these faces, inst them. Now you'll notice that when we inst this, it's got like another set of faces coming on the inside of the mirror like this, which isn't ideal. If we press B, we can toggle it, then you can see it like clears at the center, which is really useful when working with the mirror at all. Then we can just bring this in, select all these faces, move them up a little bit. Then inside view, we can extrude this up to create the neck, which should be slightly going forward at an angle, a slight curve to it as well, but because it's a low poly character, you don't need to add that much detail. It's okay, great. And then we can start shaping the rest of this as well. Let's just move the back in. You've got the Loop tools and add on enabled, which ships with Blender. You can go to Edit, I believe if you just select a set of edges like this. First off, let's delete the edge in the middle. By the way, There we go. We can do the same up here. Let's just delete these vertices and this edge because it's just confusing and it makes selecting easier. If I select all of these, we can use this little relaxed tool and also the space tool just to make it consistent. So if you've got one vertex over here, let them all use the space tool and it evens everything out, especially if you repeat it, you can use both of those tools. I'm going to undo that already Looks good how it was before I messed it up. There we go. I'm going to add another blow cut down here. Actually, just thinking about how it's going to deform. This can actually be quite therapeutic, so just keep playing around experiment. Don't be afraid to go back and make changes to what we've already done, because it's an intuitive process. You don't expect to get it right the first time around. Let's see what things look like. I'm struggling to get the shape of these legs right now. Might add another loop cut. Relax this one. Just try and shape it a bit more easy. Make sure you're looking at your reference material as we're doing this as well. If you found like a really good example that's got good apology, then you can use it as a rough guide. We've also got to decide later whether we're using flat or smooth shading. Smooth shading would probably be easiest, but I think flat looks best if you can get these planes in the right spots. Flat will look much nicer in this art style. Like I say, your personal choice, I'll probably model it, see how good it looks, and then decide I'm going to use flat will smooth because it would be nice if it fit the rest of the art style. It had flat shading. Said these faces right here will be extruding them out and using them to create the clothes later on, which will probably be a bit more fun. You just got to make sure they deform properly. Let's just to enable this sanitations layer. Again, make sure we've got our proportions right. Let's go to this view. We're going need to make the neck a little bit thinner by look, we can do that by moving it in. Scaling it and moving it in on the x axis. Let's also just scale this up a little bit and place it because is supposed to be. Let's use these tools I was talking about earlier as well. We can also use a circle tool as well. If you click a circle right here, you can see it just rounds everything off. But you might need to move everything back in place and scale it down. It's quite useful. So I'm going to place this loop right here where the knees are and keep finding the rest of the legs. This can be a very time consuming process, if you spend a bit more time on it than I am right here for these videos, then sure you can make it look great. Like this vertex here. I've accidentally dragged it too close to the middle and it's clipped into the center. So I'm just going to disable this clipping option temporarily to move it back again. This looks like I've done the same with the middle one. Let's just move that out. Be really careful about this clipping option. If it's too close, it looks like it's on 1 millimeter here. You can just add an extra zero. Let's drag this in. The reason I've got these two cuts so close together is for deformation. When we've got the joint here, it's going to need fertases to the form, but don't worry about that for now. If you're not experienced with rigging, we'll cover that later. If you're struggling to block out the form, you need a bit of help with that. We can always go into sculpting mode as well. Some people prefer to work organic lease, It's more natural to them. Let's do that in a second. Just correct this. Turn a clipping back on and you can go up to the sculpting tab number pad period to zoom in on it again and we can just start sculpting it as normal. Let's go back to our standard brush and then you can hold shift to smooth, might help if you've got a pen tablet for this. The grab tools are useful quite as well. So let's go down to this one and you just reshape. It doesn't like it's working for me. There you go. I think it's because I'm trying to sculpt the other side. We need to sculpt the side that hasn't got the mirror on it, so this is where the actual meshes the other side, it is just the mirrored version. Let's just pretend that's helped a little bit. Sometimes it's easy just to move things around like this. You don't want your fingers to aid from using all those shortcuts in edit mode. Here we go. Just going to move some of these loops up to form the shulder blades right here. Make sure we get the curve. The spine is, should be going like this, Like an S shape, almost just like this. Shouldn't be completely straight. Just go easy. If this smooth tool can have quite strong effects, it might be worth reducing the strength a little bit. I'm just using my mouse right here. But of course if you're using a tablet, you'll have pressure sensitivity. Another thing you'll notice about the back, I've got this little dent going inwards, just where the spine is. That's a nice little detail. Let's go back into the lay out mode because I want to change things. So you can see this is taking characters aren't an easy thing to do very long process, but it's still fun. I always enjoy this. We begin to think I've got too many polygons up here now. It looks like this next quite poly, But we'll see. We can always change that later. See if there's an easy fix. I can think of what I might end up doing. You don't have to follow along if you're happy with it. But I'll delete. I'll delete everything that we've got here. To delete, I'm just going to extrude this vertex in right here. Let me hide our annotations so we don't have this. In a way, I'm going to join these two edges together. That's it. And then I'm just going to create the neck as a hexagon rather than what it was before. Let's fill this in. Set it, make sure that we're hitting here. We have the middle and move this up. Let me use the loop tools now. Space this out, relax it. But I don't think this will work actually, because we've got the mirror. Let's delete this edge in the middle and see if it will still work. It doesn't look like it will, that's annoying. So that's like the one limitation of it, using it with a mirror. But aside from that is really useful ad or perhaps I'm doing it wrong, I don't know. Something like this is why I'm thinking. So it looks like this will be eight sided 12344 gear. If you really want to use these tools, you can quickly apply the mirror modifier. Use the tool and then go back and add the mirror modifier again. But I won't do that because I think it's quickly just to do it manually. Nice looking a bit better to me now. That's kind of what I wanted from the start. And I'm having a little vertex here raised, just I'm thinking this is where the clavicle will be. At the top of your chest, you've got this little pointy bit that goes out and I'd like to look at that. So let's let the Pages right now extrude out to create a new neck. So like I said, it's a iterative process. Don't be afraid to go back and make changes even if you've already done something unless you're really on a time constraint that looks nice. And just remember the shading model that we're using right now. It is going to make all these faces look flat, but if we put a triangulate modifier on it, you can see how it will look like the final rendered version. So this is another reason to be a bit scared of using flat shading, but if we're just using it within blender and we've got the flat shading, we should be fine. I say I'm probably spending a bit too much time on this because it won't be seen with the clothing. I'm a bit of a perfectionist sometimes, so you haven't noticed already. That looks quite good to me. See, I can spend hours correct in this, but I'm sure if you spend as much time on it that I have right here in this video might not get the best result. I'm not too happy with this. It's okay for what we're doing. There we go. And let's just quickly check up the portions as well. That looks okay to me. Let me just move up time a bit. Let's do Edd. There we go. Let's start working on the arms and legs. We've got the most difficult, but now everything after this should be more fun. We're coming up to the end of this video now let's just quickly try and finish off the limbs before we move on. And then in the next part, we create a separate female and male character. Even if we work on some parts of one, like we want to take the hands off one, we can just copy those and put them onto the other one. Yeah, the arms and legs, it's as simple as just extruding them downwards like this and making sure they're nice and thin at the bottom because limbs tend to get thinner as you go down. Then from the front view, we want to have a couple more loops. Let's put one here, and this will bring out the calf just like this. And also having these loops will make our deformations a bit more organic. That is good to me. Once we've read it, we can always go through and make changes. If something's not working, you only realized after gin for the first time, something is not going to work as well as you thought. You can go back and make changes. We'll talk about that later. Just focus on the modeling for now. Everything will be fine, that looks okay. You can always play around with the thickness. I might be changing this later, but like I said, I'm going to probably have thick close in this character, so I don't need to worry too much about the anatomy. Sometimes polychacism might want to have another loop in here, so there'll be like three. I might actually do this. Yeah, I think I'll have just so it deforms properly, then these vertices running through the middle of the joint, you want to add these slightly closer together. Just think about how it's going to bend. So these ones will contract closer and these ones you want to spread out. But yeah, like I said, we'll discuss this later when it comes to rigging. And then I'll add another loop here just to break it up to play right here. But we still want to have some loops and we can see to shape carts a bit more. Definitely helps. If you know you're an Asm, you get the opportunity to try to do some life drawing classes. Maybe your school or gives you As classes, make sure you follow. It's more helpful than you think. It could be quite fun as well. I'm noticing the legs too long, so let's just scale this a little bit, make it all bit wider. Maybe just working on proportions that looks okay. It'll be easier to see once we've got the head there. Might need to be, might need to make the legs longer. But I could do this all day. Let's try and get this finished. Move this up to where the elbow should be. We bring back our annotations. Remember I said that the tips of the fingers should be going down midway along the sins, right? Anymore about here maybe. But because we're drawing in pots, we're going to need to them up should be around about this point. Let's go back into edit mode. Arms, go about here. The hands might be about here. Let's extrude again. We'll create the arm separately. Let's add some cuts. This would be like the fore arm will be a bit thicker. Can scale this on ship X axis, this is where the wrist is going to be. Let's had some more cuts along here, perhaps some fitness for the bicep. Just like that. Bring your shoulder out. I don't know why our shoulder is looking so timplyow looks a bit better to me. I'm going to let this loop right here and control bevel. It's another way of adding cuts. You can use the bevel tool as well. Let's just get this shape so we'll bring the elbow out a little bit. Here we go and we'll bring this in. We want to have a slight curve and it's something one is later when it comes to rigging as well, because we'll be using something called K. Don't worry about this. This is all stuff we'll cover later. But we want to already have a slight curve in the arm that looks okay, bring these fever along. We keep tweaking this forever, but we've got to move on at some point. There we go, We're just using the G to move these ones. There we go, and those are our limbs. I think that wraps up this video and then we can continue in the next one. Just going to quickly make a couple changes to this background here because it's annoying me. There we go, so you follow along, you don't have to finish. Take your time refining. This is already looking okay, but wants to be a really high standard. We're done following along this far and we'll continue in the next part. 24. Creating Low Poly Characters - Part 2: Everyone, and welcome back to the next part of this section. In this, we'll be doing a bit of everything. We'll be adding some hands and feet to the characters, as well as creating a copy of these for the male and female version. Let's start out by doing that. Actually, let's just copy this character model and move it along a bit on the X axis so we can still se next to the other one just like this. The first thing I'm going to do is disable mutations. That's under view right here, we just disable this note layer. I'm thinking for these characters we're going to have like hiking gear or camping gear I suppose. Because that's a theme we've gone for like the camp site and being in the woods and everything. So let's start out by modeling some feet here. We're going to give them some boots and we'll copy them across to the other version as well if we want to do so. Yeah, create as many characters as you like. I'm just going to do a male and female one. Let's start out here, think about the foot topology also, remember we can hide the other one. So I'm just going to call this male base because we've already gone for kind of like a male body type and let's call this one female base. We'll just hide this so we can see it inside view. So I'm going to just let all these vertices right here and then we can extrude this down and maybe drag it back a tiny bit. That's it. And then I'm going to turn on this chromo us, easier to see Now I'm going to start modeling the ankle, so just follow along here. It will give them a heel shape as well. So by the heels, that's going to dig back a bit. And then I'm going to select these edges and extrude them down the z axis. Scale them on a z axis by zero, and then just move them up a tiny bit. In fact, what we can also do is press N, go up to item right here, and change the global median transform on the zaxis to zero. And that means that each of these versites will lie completely flat. You can see this topology right here. Now we can select these edges. Be careful to not accidentally select the wrong ones in this x ray mode, and we can just extrude this forward on the Y axis, and then maybe move this edge down a little bit to shape the foot. When you first look at this model, trying to think about which edges you want to pull out and what kind of topology you want to have for, you know, just by looking at it can be quite difficult. But I'd honestly say this just comes to practice. If you're not sure, try different things, see what works. Okay, I'm going to shift a little bit, so I'll just move this one out on the x axis. May move this along as well. Kind of have it going out wider towards the toes. You can move this on the shift Z axis. And I'm just thinking about the plane. So we want to have the inner toes a little bit further forward than the ones on the side. It looks like accent. You move this on the wrong axis. Let's just snap these ones. So if I enable vertex snapping right here, I could just snap it as the access to the other ones. Let's have this nice line running around the side. There we go. I'm just thinking about, I'm going to join this up. It'd be nice if we could stick to quads because we've done that for the rest of the model just to keep it consistent. But I'm not worried too much about that and I can't help myself going through and clearing up some of these parts. But I promise I'll try to move on. Yeah, let's just select this edge right here and we can do it in top few. Just extrude this out and try and get the shape of foot that we want. I kind of like that silhouette. So I'm just going to merge these vertices together. Now, merge at last. There we go. Now we've got to think about how we're going to join this up. Let's try this. See how this looks. I'm just thinking about where these quads and triangles are going to be. Let's traders off in this edge. Maybe I need to move this down a little bit as well. That there we go. Yeah, the basics of the topology I'm going to do for the first you can follow by topology, of course, I just mean where the actual vertices and edges are. I don't mean the proportions. Feel free to move this about, you don't have to follow exactly what I'm doing. This is what I'd recommend. Then another little detail as well. Like I said, it's going to be wearing some hiking goos. Let's add a cut down here slightly below. And we can scale this out just like that. We can give a different color later on. If you'd also like you move the whole thing down a bit. That looks a bit more convincing friend that try lots of different things that looks quite good to me and then, yeah, I want this to have this on the female version as well. I shouldn't have created the separate ones. I'm just going to quickly delete the female version. And let's also do the gloves as well. And then more copyist across to create the female version because a lot of these things are going to be in common. That's something I should have thought about from the start. We're here now, so yeah, let's just slip this loop right here that the hand's going to come out of. Let's go up a little bit on as the access, there we go. And for the hand I'm not going to have four separate fingers and a thumb. I'm just going to have a thumb. And then create like a sort of mitten shape which I find works quite well for these low poly characters. Adding fingers could be quite difficult, and it also adds a lot of polygons. You really need them. Creating a first person game, I'd try and avoid it for locally characters that we go do. Now I'm just creating this part right here where the fu is going to come out of. We could have our whole hand as just one quad. Think we should try that actually. Going to move this up a little bit. We can experiment. I might not stick with one thing. Try lots of different options. Let's just extrude all of these out and fill herds. And then let's let this loop and extrude this out to create the fun. Let's just let the whole thing and move it down a little bit and rotate it. There we go. For this, we need to adapt a little bit more detail to these fingers. So let's just add a loop right here to see how that looks. We can start breaking this up into triangles as well, like this. This is very deformed, so we might want to add a triangle here. Just press J. See if you like that. I'm not quite sure if I do. In fact, what I might end up doing is having a cut running along it. So let's create this little loop cut. I think it'll be worth it even though it does add a few extra polygons. This is what I mean when I say I'm trying lots of different options, I'm not just sticking with any. There we go, Just like that. Let's dissolve this one because I think accidentally created one. Always be careful about that. Now looks a bit better to me. We got a bit of thickness to it now and a curve it in on the palmer as well. You don't want to be completely flat. That looks nice to me. Everything will always look better with smooth shading if you choose to go for this. I'm just wasting time right here. But whilst we're working with quads, it's always called surface modifier on if you want it to look smooth. Yeah, we'll carry on model in the hand now just like this and then less skeleton on the sides. That looks nice to me. Then maybe just extrude it out one more time. Nice little mitting shapes perfect that looking at my hands. While I'm doing this, of course, and I've got some reference on the other monitors, always have some other low poly characters to see how other artists have done it. There you go. And I'm just going to move these vertices inward a little bit so we've got a taper going off and then we can fill this in. That looks good to me. Fun might be a bit too long, maybe just needs to make the actual handle itself figure this. Let's use proportional editing as well. With her, it's not too detailed, but it will work for us. It doesn't have to be perfect here, we've got those hands I might quickly scam up a little bit, looking quite small right now. That's better. Let's add an evolut cut along here as well. So I'll put about here, make sure it turn off proportion editing. Go and nest gloves for the character. It's quickly look around. I'm quite happy with that. Yeah, maybe we should do the head as well before we create the female male version before we start differentiating. This can be probably one of the most difficult parts of the character aside from the hand. The way I'd go about this actually is by creating a new measure. Let's add a cube. Scale this down, and place it in position like this, trying to get the proportions right then to make it work with the mirror, we'll need to delete one half. Let's just right click and subdivide it a couple times. Let's go for three times. And then we just need to join these Tics up with this square right here. It'll be easier to see once I've deleted the other half. Let's turn off this Lowlaxra right here. Be sure, there you go. This can be a bit weird, you need to have it separately in Y frame, normal mode, just deleting the other half. What we probably should have done actually, is smoothing this out. So I'm just going to quickly undo this poles when we just subdivided it, subdivided three times. Then we've also got this little smoothness slider which can be quite useful, so we can use this to make it more round. This should have a similar effect of just putting on the subsurface modifier, creating a cubit for the subsurface modifier. But we've just done it slightly differently. There we go, and I'm debating how far forward we put this thing. Let's turn on proportional additon, start changing the shape of it now. Hope this isn't too high poly for us. That looks good. Yes, I'm going to delete this vertex in the bottom. Delete all of these vertices on the side that we don't want. Then I'm going to join these edges up. Let's just select these ones as well. There should be the same amount, because I've created this with 1234 on this side and four on the other should be the same up there. And then we're going to press three and do bridge edge loops. Then this loop right here, we can, we can G, move it down, move it up a bit. We can scale it. Let me turn off proportional editing member to proportional editing, we start rounding this out, make sure you've got clipping, enable you to accent and move it either side like this, we don't want to make that mistake again. Here we go. This is of course, just my way of doing it. If you've got another way to do it that you prefer, go ahead. This is just my method that has worked for me in the past. A lot of this head won't be visible. It might just be the face that we see in the end, if we'll have hair on it. Also, notice now the next way too long. So let's change that. Let's just let everything, move this down a little bit. For them one, we might want to move this out a little bit. Like, I guess Adam's apple around his throat. There we go. Head should be a little bit thicker at the top compared to the bottom. As exaggerated as this. Something like this. So there you go. If you don't like proportional editing, feel free to go into sculpted mode. I might use that a tiny bit. This grab brush can be quite helpful. It's a bit like the move brush in Z brush, if you've ever used that software. There's our base mesh. You see the polygon counts quite high, but I always like to have a bit more detail for the face, the rest of the body effect. I'm thinking for this course we'll have a blank for this character. But if you wanted to, you can create eye sockets by sleting some of these faces, like these ones. Then we can insert, we could try this. See how it looks, actually this looks. You can insert them. Press if you like, and this will create the cheeks or the eye socket. You can move these back, make sure we've got a nice bow at the top. You can also use the knife tool just to draw on topology and then move everything around. So it's not as strange there lots of ways to do this. We'll experiment and see if this looks good. Might stuck. What's do with this vertex? What we could do is merge this one up here. Merge it at last. Do the same with this one, then bring this vertex over, merge it here. I'm not really worried about quatpology anymore. This works for us. That looks nice actually. Then let's think about how we're going to do our mouth. You can experiment. I might just throw back to having a plane face. Yeah, you can use the inset knife to, for this looks like I'm going to have to dissolve some of the dissolve edges. It's always worth experimenting. I'll just delete these vertices and then fell back. Let look. Psych based characters finish is Mel base. Let's duplicate this, create the female version, let's hide the Mel one. We might make a little bit shorter as well, but we'll do that later in case we want to copy anything across. It'll be nice to keep the same proportions. Now, I'm just going to go quickly hide the female version because I think the Mel might be easier to add the clothing for. I was just thinking, we'll have a top on him. Let's put a lot cut here and another one right here. Scale this one out a little bit. It's like he's wearing some T shirt. Let's move this in and then we'll do the same round as ways to add. Think about where you can put this. There we go. I'm trying to think of it should be this cut or this cut. I think we'll end up adding a new one. Let's just put this down here. And then we can maybe use this relaxed tool, see if it works. Just scale this out. Let's make sure we use Os instead of to scale. There we go. We can move this edge loop out. This might be a bit too high at. Let's undo this and just strike this up like a belt going around him as well. Yeah, let's maybe try this loop. Let's, I'll test this. Move it down. I think that looks a bit better for where the top is. And I'm just going to go through and make sure that the bottom of the shirts roughly the right length all around his body and see fitness. That looks good to me. We might also give him a belt later. We'll see that looks good. Now let's just make his legs thicker. He's got like cargoes on thicker jeans. Maybe give him a belt in some pockets. There we go, if you need to. We can always add a couple more cuts here. We might actually, when it comes to deforming, because I don't know if we've got enough cuts for this to bend properly. We'll explain that more when it comes to rigging it later on. Low, there we go, as a male character, that's the clothing done. Now we'll just go across to the female version. Let's have this female one here. Let's go into edit mode. The first thing I'm going to do is just change the shape of the face. We want it to be a bit thinner at the bottom. Scale this in this. There we go. Just very subtle. We'll also need to make the limbs a little bit thinner. Let's select some of these edge loops and just scale them one by one. We can turn off proportional addition. There we go. I'll do the same for the shoulders and neck. There we go. Bring the shoulder a bit closer together as well. There we go. Let's just make sure we're scaling proportionately from the side as well as the front. Now this can be quite hard working in both side. In front of you have to constantly switch between selljust base body before we start adding close. And we'll probably do it the same way we did before. We'll just add some cuts along to make it look like there are seams there we go like this. I'm not even using proportional dits in here. I'm just going through each text one by one. Remember before with the Mel, we added another cut along here, so I might do that as well. Just move this forward. Let's get like the curve of a splint. Perfect. And then let's go free. Let's make the feet a little bit smaller. Maybe let's just slap them all in wide frame mode and scale them down. I'm going to press Period right here and set my pillar 0.3 D. Cursor just so it scales down proportionally. Just make them a little bit smaller and then move them across on the x axis. Let's make the legs thinner at the bottom. As always, you can spend all day on this. Maybe spend a little bit more time than I am for this demonstration. A lot of cuts down here, around a middle, but not all up here at the upper torso. So you can add more loop cuts or in sets if you need to. I think I'm just going to stick with this. I might bring the neck down. We've got some more polygons to work with down here. There we go. I think that will work for what we need. Let's make the hand smaller as well. I think I've got to do that. Let's just slide all of these and scale them down a little bit. Just a tiny bit and then move them into place. There we go. You can use sculptors. Well, let's make the head smaller. Why not? Let's make the head smaller as well. We might have to rig them separately if they're two different. We'll try to use as much the same rig as we can. Scaling things with a mirror on can be difficult. Sometimes I find I need to scale it down and also move it into, towards the center. But I'm happy with that. I think that looks okay. As best we'll get with the time that we have, there we go. For her clothes. I'm thinking we could try giving overrules because we can use the knife tool, cut away some straps onto the base mesh. Let's give that a go. First off, let's select all the faces that we want to thicken or all the edges. Rather we can start using the knife tool to draw on. It might come up to about here. I'm just drawing round. They, I've got a center snap turned on. So if we look at the bottom, which one of these, because I forget which one of it is midpoint snaps on. I had the shift key held down, so we just need to get the shift, there we go. That's just a thing with a knife tool, we can cut round as you can see the outline that I'm going for here. Then we'll cut across to the middle. There we go. And then let's create the inner strap as well, although the outer part of the strap. And then we'll extrude everything up. It'll be a bit easier to see what I'm on about later. There we go. So I've drawn these on actually, we might need to clean up with the topology. Maybe move these up as well. I might have done this bit low, a bit too low down. Just try moving this here, don't worry about distorting it. I'm going to join this vertex up to here, pressing J. And then I'm just going to join some of these up as well, because we want everything to be nice quads. As much as we can do this one, I'm not quite sure where to join us. I think I'll just disolve this. I'm not quite sure why I do that one there. Yeah, let's join these ones up then. We can select all of these. Right here, there we go, F. Let's just draining this up. Don't worry too much about keeping everything quads, but it's ideal. The main reason when we're doing characters we try to use quads is for subdivision. If you want to add a subsurface modifier, it can always work better with Quds Pology. But for this low poly character, we don't worry about too much selected. All of these, I'm just going to extrude out along normals to add some thickness to it. We can see how that looks. The. Just get rid of the bottom one. So let's press X and dissolve edges. It flows a bit better. It's like it's actually coming out. This might look a bit better once we've added materials to this. Now let's just go through and try and flatten out some parts of this. Make it look nicer. I might have made this bit thick when I extruded it out. So we can just move some parts inwards like this course, you don't have to follow on the clothing. I'm going for whatever clothes you want to give looks quite nice. Yeah, this is could practice using a knife tool while we're here. Let's add another layer like the neck line. I think this is something we've got to do on a mal version as well. So we'll have to go and do the same there. I'm just going to use the knife tool to create this neck line. There we go. Let's have a little inner loop as well. In fact, what we can do is just control R and then G to move it up because I don't think there's too much distortion and we can just use old to bring it in. That's it. I'm using a lot of this GG tool, it's very useful. There we go. If that's too high, we can move it down as well. Maybe it's a little bit too high. Might try rounding off this. Let's just move this up. I'm not quite sure. I like cart loves it looks very jagged, doesn't it? There we go. And then let's do the same for the mal version. For this one I might just control to add a car down here and then S, and move it down. Probably a bit more receive for the mail version because we haven't got all the rules and straps going up over the shoulders. There we go. One thing about me is I always make my clothes too thick on my lo poly characters You might have noticed. If you don't like that, try not to follow exactly what I'm doing. That's a fair criticism of my work. I think. There we go. While we're here, we can quickly add some materials. Let's go down to the materials to call this skin. Just create whichever skin tone you like. Actually, it will automatically assign it. Let's just pick a color for this. Let's make it a pink color. I always find it really difficult to make skin tones. Let's try how that looks and then we can, let's do it one by one, actually, because I want to change them later. It's easier, rather than trying to use materials. And it looks like we've forgotten to fill in the bottom of the boots. Let's just do that now what I'm doing, always make sure you pan around your models. Make sure we've got everything. There we go. So to do that, I'm just going to s these faces and hit Grow selection. We need to do the same thing for the female version. Let's a brown, muddy color that looks good to me. Now for the jeans trousers, guess just select all these faces that be easiest to do it x ray mode. I've got it Now I'm just thinking about outdoors where let's maybe you give them a green top as well that looks good. Get us green material for this. Create new one's made this green like a yellow, earthy color, slight shaggy. Make these legs a bit thsn'tlw like leggings. It's just thicker around the knees. I might both these edge lots and just bring them down for the hands. I might actually not have these as gloves look. Okay, so let's delete these because it just looks like he's wearing gardening gloves right now. We can just dissolve this edge loop and it still looks like a hand to me. I'm happy with that. And then let's circuit the A material, the female version as well. Let's select our skin tone skin. Let's do the boots. Although I might be able to set boots already, I'll just copy this. I want to change the color for the female version, I'll just have to do the same thing I did to the feet again, a bed with me. I'm just drawing up these faces. I think I'll also move this vertex back a little bit. Just a round it off though Y. This is a good way to practice getting quit of selection as well, adding these materials. Yes, for the overalls. Let's do that. Now, A quick way to mask selection as well, if you find yourself doing it a lot, is just selecting the boundaries like this. Select all the bounding loops. Mark this as a seam, which is used for UV unwrapping, but let's not worry about that. If we go into Face select, we can just island slightly over rules and it might be a little bit quicker. Then let's give this a material, let's sign this. There we go, the saturation. Maybe I always find it a bit difficult to pick these colors and then add a top as well. I'm going to add a seam here, a seam here. You don't have to use this method. You can just select the manual, I find it a bit quicker. Sometimes female top, we can keep this as white. Maybe we'll try and give it a slightly muddy color that looks alright to me. Gloves as well. I think I might stick with this method of marking scenes stream and I want always forget about it. If you've got multiple different characters, give them names. Don't call the men and female, you can give them names as well. I like that. Then in the next part we can add some more details in the face, like give them hair. I think we've already spent a lot of time on this in this part, but we've made decent progress. Yeah, we'll continue with this in the next video. 25. Creating Low Poly Characters - Part 3: Hello everyone. So we've got our base meshes finished for both the male and female character. And now we're going to go in and just add some hair, you know, last little detail to the character. Maybe do something with the faces as well. I give them some eyebrows, but I might keep this quite simple and not have like an actual face on there. And then we can start rigging the character. So let's start out on lots of different ways to do the hair. One way I'm thinking is well, we're going to sculpt using a dynamic topology and then add a decimate or some kind of remesh to the sculpted object. So let's start here. I've got my cursor down here. Shift seeds, put it back. Good to press shift A, and we'll add a mesh to block out the shape of it. I'm going to use metal balls. Let's go down. I always forget whether our metaballs. Let's just scale this down a bit and once again change the resolution. The resolution is always too high for me, so let's reduce the viewport resolution. Try 0.10 0.01 that's a bit better. Can move this up and scale it down to create the shape of the hair. Let's create a couple of these. Skull is down and we can use this to block out like the rough form of the hair. I'm thinking about giving a pony tail coming out here. Let's just add this and then let's get some nice bumpy, a bumpy hair texture. Let's add a few of these, lots of ways of doing hair. By the way we're starting off of the female, we will probably be a bit more difficult because we'll probably have shorter hair for the guy like this. And then once again, we'll sort out later in sculpting mode then I imagine us having like a little fringe that comes down on this side. I'm just going to give us something to sculpt later. Yeah, as long as we've got something like this, this will be a starting point for us. Perfect, that's done. We can then convert this to a normal mesh. Just type in three such mesh. I'm going to call this a female pair. For now, we'll keep this as a separate object. It's so great. Let's go into sculpt in mode. I'm going to use a tablet for this, but you don't have to. So just going to move my keyboard up now. Get my drawing tablet out. You can just use your mouse. It's not like we're going to be sculpted in for very long. Yeah, we'll do a remesh of this, a dynamic apology, so don't worry about apology too much. Let's go in here. We're getting used to the navigation right now on my tablet. Let's use a combination of like the smoothing brush. Use this one, increase the strength a little bit. You can also hold shift and the crease brush as well to add some patterns in there. And of course, most importantly, the grab brush. We'll use this to get out the basic shapes. We might end up adding some small geometry later on as well. A lot of these details is going to be taken out. Decimate modifier or we do our re mesh, make it quite bumpy. We want some of these details to come through. We can also go down to the modifiers tab and add a decimate modifier just to preview how it's going to look. It will look a bit like this right now, Triangulat. Don't suppose we need to just in case we shade this smooth. So it's going to object mode, shade it flat. Let's shade it flat. And then if we go back into scalp mode, we can see it. And let's hope that the decimate modified keeps us. This should decimate it real time. As we scalt, it can be a bit distracting to work with. So maybe disabled. If you don't like it, that's it and we want to have some triangles that we can then extrude out to create this fringe that's trying to sort this out. That's looking quite nice for now. This is dragging up to get the right shape of it. This can be quite a weird way of working so you don't always have to have this flad. All right, let's just use a smooth tool here to get rid of that dermetre looks like got messed up a tiny bit. That's part of decimate modified. Also, if you wanted to have some nice lines growing across back of the hair, you can use this crease brush right here, the multiplane scrape, the crease brush, which I believe is here, there we go. Might need to reduce the size and increase the strength a bit. And we can create some nice rows. Going back, here we are. I'm adjusting this slide right here. I'm holding down shift so that it moves slower. There we go. I just want to get the grab brush back now. Just change the shape of this because I think our hair line is a bit too high. So here we can also change the shape of the face. If you don't like it, I think it's too triangular. Select some of these vertices. We're in mirror mode and with a proportional addeds, you're just going to move them in this, maybe with this one back just to correct the shape of the head. Looks a bit as it is. And we can go into sculpt in mode, control tab sculpting mode and just shift to clean it up a tiny bit if we want to all. But of course if you change the shape of the head too much, then you're going to have to fix that hair as well. I'm quite happy with this. I like the way this looks. If we hide this body, we're going to have some weird. Jomturonianside. We can either delete some of these faces or just keep it. I'm going to keep it because it's not too much of a problem. If you're going to export this to a game engine, always get rid of the faces you don't need. I'm certainly going to press H to bring everything back. Oh, sorry. I'm just going to. Oh yeah, I'll do it in the outline here, but we can actually just switch back to lay out mode and unhide the female base. Okay, then for the hair or for the pony tail, I'm going to save this file As, to save As, and just press this little plus here to increment it. I'm going to apply this modifier. Then we can start editing this geometry manually. So let's get rid of some of these weak spots right here. Just use proportional editing. I'm correct in the face for a time bit as well. That's like the method we use in to do the hair, but of course takes some time to make it look better than mine. This isn't perfectly symmetrical as well. Let's put our cursor here. I'm going to press shift A to add a mesh. Let's go. Could be one of the few situations we use, the Taurus. I'm just going to use the cylinder. Let's give it six vertices. Let's scale everything down. I'm just going to rotate it in object mode in case we want to rotate it later. For example, here I'm scaling on the x. That's something we can only do if it, if we rotate it, it object mode, when I scale on the shift Zx, I'm double tapping Z, just like this scale out and this is going to be like a little hair band. Then we can add a cut going around here. And scale this out if you want to as well. Just to add a bit more curvature that looks okay to create the rest of the hair. We could use metabls again, but I'm just going to press shift A, add a cube right here. Scale this down a bit and we're going to subdivide this rightfully, increase the cuts to ten and increase the smoothness as well, just so it's around. We'll just use the move and snake hook brush to create this pony tail because it's a bit easier. Let's go up to sculpting, and we'll also put on a dynamic topology. While we're here, let's go up here. This is like the work tab for scot mode. If you like to use it enabled dynamic topology. Let's check that we haven't got symmetry on here, because sometimes it's enabled as we don't have any symmetry. Now we should just be able to scot this. I'm using the move brush. Where's the snake hook? Right here, K. I think the shortcut is a shortcut. K. We can just drag this down. Maybe our dynamic. Apologies it too high. Let's change the detail size. This is on relative detail right here. We want this to be constant detail. Don't worry about this too much. This is all sculpt in stuff and this low poly course, we're not really using much sculpt in. But let's try. We need to either increase or decrease the resolution. Let's try decreasing it. Increasing it, don't go too high. Let's see how this works. Slowing to increase it. I'm going to set this to 150. Keep it high poly. Why not? Yeah, we can just sculpt out this shape using the snake hook brush. Really useful to add more dimension to this. We can use the smooth tool, just the shape. So we got like a nicer wavy pattern going on here and we add those bumps. There should be an inflate tool as well. This one I'm more familiar with, brushes, sculpting in blender, but a lot of the brushes are the same. It's just about finding the right alternative blenders. Sculpting tools really powerful. I'm starting to use this more and more using the smooth brush right here. Then we can use the scrape brush as well. It gives us a nice planar surfaces like this. This wavy patterns try to make it thinner towards the end, flatten. It is a short cut for the grab brush. There we go. Ah, let's put a decimate modifier runners as well. Before we forget, say it won't work because dynamic topologies enabled. I'll just go into object mode, we can see the decimate and drag this down. I think that it looks really good. I'm happy with this just to make sure all joins up right at the top need move some of these vertices around after. But I'm happy with this result. Apply this modifier as well. Now I'm not going to bother saving as I'm pretty confident with it. Let's just go and correct a couple of these vertices. I'm going to move this one in, just it joins up with the rest of the measure a bit better. And actually looks like it comes out now doesn't it can move everything we need to. That looks good. And then here I'm just doing some very quick refining, but take a bit more time than me with this step. You know, just to make sure each of the vertices fit together nicely, we want this hair to join up with a hair band, no intersection like this. Just take your time on it. I mean, no one's probably going to notice this, that it's always nice to be polished, isn't it? I think that will do for now. First see, I'm just going to join these objects up together and let's quickly go to Materials. It's good anti materials tab. Let's see how she looks with blond hairs. Let's call this female hair. Let's give it a yellow color. That's nice. Let's see what color for this. Create a new one, female hair band assigned this. Let's see, I like this green, yellow hornsco, something like that. That may be too bright. There we go, I always make everything too saturated, so I'm trying to be like a bit dull with these colors. There we go. That's our female hair. Now we need to do, say from the male, one shouldn't take as long in the sculpting type. Right? Now, let's go back to the layout one, actually I'm going to join this hair up to the base mesh. Actually what I'm saying, we'll do a later because we want to keep the mirror modifier on the base mesh. So let's go down to the mel one, hide both of those This time what we might do instead, because it's shorter hair, we can just select the faces that we want to have for the hair. All the ones that are going to touch it, we're going to press Shift D and to make it its own object. Now we can let dissolve some of these faces. I'm just going to move this one though, don't worry because we'll re mesh everything later. There we go. At that. I'm just going to extrude down a little side burn here. There we go. To do this, we can add, solidify, modify. There we go, Solidify supply, this mirror, because we don't want to be working symetrical anymore and it should be coming out here. Let's quickly put material on it just so we can see it as a separate object. These one. So go Mel hair. What color do you think for this's a dark color movie. Dark brown. This is even thickness right now, which isn't very nice what we're doing. Let's start increase the thickness a little bit, so let's going further then. We can actually use a vertex group to mask the thickness. We haven't got any vertex groups on this met right now. Let's go down and add one thickness. This might be a convoluted way of doing it, but it's nice and will work out. Now we can actually see this factor, we need to actually start working on a vertex group and sit. Let's go up to weight paint. And I believe now let's said this. We can start painting on in areas like in red there, let's increase the weight. Yeah, we can start painting on, and red areas should appear more thick. Now said, I suppose we need to decrease the factor. There we go. But we don't want to do that. It's almost like sculpting. Now, supposing that we just paint on, we want the thickness to be, this can be cool, probably not the most useful for what we're doing in this situation, But it's something nice to show you a cool thing you can do in blender. Use these vertex groups for modifiers and see it update real time. Going to try and conto them a little bit. Then once that's done, I'm just going to apply this, we've shown that. Now I'll apply this back to solve the. We go into object mode and we're just going to use a bit of proportional editing to fix some of this. You might have made his head a little bit too wacky. Okay, let's fix this fringe as well. So one thing we can do here is select some of these faces and we can inst them like this. Just move everything back so into sect of his head, shifted everything a bit nice, heirs looking a little bit nicer. Now these are just a couple of techniques for you're creating these hairstyles that I've played around with before, but try to develop, you know, like your own technique as well. If that's something you'd like to do, a bit more original than me, that looks okay, then let's make sure we get a nice shape, like a nice silhouette of his head, making him look a bit like me right now. This is the best way to scrub my hair style. There we go. I pretty much just made myself in blender. There we go. Yeah, you can keep tweaking this, but we'll move on now and we can move on to reading just before that. If you wanted to add eyebrows, it might be nice for a little character as we'll just quickly go through it because it's nothing difficult there. That's fine. Shift to add a cube, scale this down a bit. Let's just work on one side, so mirror to cross a cut in the middle. Just so we can work on the shape a bit more here. And let's add a mirror modifiers like the original points right up. So let's just use this mirror object right here to select this. And let's put the same hair on it. There we go there eyebrows. Let's move them back a tiny bit. There we go. I'm going to apply this team, I'll just add control. We've got a mirror modifier on both of them, so it's just control a join it to the rest in the face actually going to eyebrows shift to create it as its own object right here. And then I'm just going to call this, I don't need to name it, let's hide the male, male and let's bring back the female one. And let's just join this to her. She's got a slightly different head shape, so we need to move it back in place. I think her face is a little bit flatter as well. Now she's got eyebrows as well. Just a little detail. Perfect. I will work. Yeah, this material. Create new material. Slot female hair and sign. And now she's got a blondes match at Perfect. I believe that's our character model finish. We can add, add some more details but I think we should move on to the reading now because we've pretty much covered everything. Yeah, let's get started. I'm just going to press Shift to place our cursor back to the center so we can create our armature. Sometimes it's nice to use a bit of help as a starting point. So you press Shift, we can come down here to armature and there's an add on that comes with blend. I believe it's called Rig that gives you some of these options, this basic human like this. And then we'll just move these bones around to our character to enable us to control it. But we're using put a lot of time ready and I think we've come towards the end of this video. Sort of that miles start off in the next video and we won't use one of these preset things, so don't worry about the Adam. We'll create it from scratch, but that's basically what we're doing. We're going to create this a little armature right here, and then we paint on for each bone the vertices that will be controlled by it. And that means we animate our character. We'll just be moving around these bones like this. She ever wanted to move her arm? You rotate this bone. And we can just use like move, rotate, and scale like anything in blunder. Yeah, we'll be posing these and that's how you animate a three character if you've never done that before. So I'm just going to delete this armature, and we'll create our own armature from scratch in the next part. So we'll see you then. 26. Character Rigging Tutorial: Hello everyone and welcome back. So now we can finally get into rigging. So not waste any time here. Let's start out, I'm going to work on the female character first just because we've already got it open. I imagine we can copy the same skeleton onto the male one, and then just move the joints around a bit so that they fit his proportions. So we're going to create a new object here. I think we showed this a bit in the last video just to hype it up. So we add a new object on this armature section right here. And instead of selecting one of the presets that come with this add on I've got enabled. We're just going to add a basic bone and we'll create our own one from scratch. First off, we can see create this new object called an armature. And I'm going to rename this, I'm going to call this Rick female. Later on we'll parent the body mesh to this. Now let's change a couple of these sessions. The first thing you'll notice is that this bone is going to be inside the character. It's hard to see. Let's go down to this tab. I believe it is right here. The Viewport display. I'm going to tick in front, which just means even though it's inside the character, it will always appear in front. We can also enable names. Why not? Because we're going to rename these bones later. Let's go into front view. I'm going to scale this down, make sure we're in edit mode right now. There's a new mode right here for these objects called pose mode, which is when we actually want to animate them and move them around and pose them. We don't want to use that. We want to use Edit Mobile as we're actually editing it. Let's go on to Front View. First thing I'm going to do is move this bone up to where the hips will be. This will be like the actual hip bone. Let's move it forward a tiny bit as well. You can always change this later. Then let's extrude this one up. This will be like the spines. Let's just add a couple bones here. I'll add one here and one here. For simplicity, this neck bone will be extruding one out for the neck like this. And then another one for the head, which means that the head will be posed about this point once again, we can always change it later. I don't rod too much might even move this time. This shouldn't be perfectly flat by the way. Let's, let's move it around so it better fits the shape of the first spine. Of course, the actual spine is back here, but just for automatic weight, something will cover later. It's usually, I find it, the bones in the middle of the body. Let's just move this around. It follows her spine. It should curve like this. That's all right. Then let's quickly name these ones. I'm going to hit two to rename it. You can also do it here, like you have to find it in the outliner. Or you can go to this bone tab right here. I'm going to stay on this tab and I'm just going to rename this hips, spine one, spine two, spine three. Actually, I'll call this neck. I call this one head perfect. That's all the middle ones running down. Then we can start extruding out to create the shoulders and legs. So let's go into the front view again. I'm going to extrude out, this will be the shoulder, but we're actually going to move this bone. We don't want it to be attached to the spine. We're going to move it. When we try moving this bone, its head I suppose, still attached to the spine. And we don't want that, we want to disconnect it. The way we can do that is by hitting Op, You can either clear parent or you can disconnect the bone. We're going to keep it disconnected because we still want it to be parented to spine two. Let's just move this in shape so it's about where her shoulder is. It will be her shoulder bone. And then we'll extrude our arm out. You'll notice this black line right here that shows a hierarchy is because this spine two right here, let's rename this shoulder. And then a period capital L. We'll talk more about that in a second. You'll notice this line here means that this bone is parented to this one. So if we wanted to parent this bone to spine one, we just hit control And you can either connect it like this, which will actually move the head down to the tail of spine one like a chain. Or you can hit control and then keep offset. And you can see this line moves. So that is the head. This is, I suppose, the actual bone itself. And then this is the tail. If you connect it, then the head of this bone will be connected to the tail of the other. Don't worry about that too much as the reason I put a capital L at the end. I don't know if it needs to be capital, but I always do. That's because this is on the left side of the character. Everything in the middle doesn't matter because it's just in the middle. But everything with a period L, we need to name it like that. So that later on when we symmetrize the skeleton, it will copy all the vertex groups to do vertex groups and it will create a new set of bones. Do that later. Strewed out here. I'm going to try and put where these cuts are in the middle. Might be easier to see them in wire frame just like this. Let's extrude out again to where the wrist is. I remember earlier saying you already want a natural bend in the arm. I think this is one we're modeling. I'm just going to move this back on the y axis so that if we add K to this, it will know where to put it is something will cover later as well. Don't worry about that. Just put this here. There's already a slight bend. That's nice. Then we can extrude out a hand. Let's clear parent. Let's move this to where the thumb should be and I'm going to parent it to this bone right here. So control, keep off set. And you can see this line indicates such. Now, let's just move it down to in place. I always enjoy Regan and Blender. I think it's quite fun. There we go. So let's quickly rename these. Remember everything here should be. Let's rename this upper arm, lower arm, or four arm. Just going to say lower arm. And same with the fun. Now we dodged a bullet by adding the mitten gloves. Because if we were to do every bone in each of the fingers, that can take a lot of time to rename them. We don't have to do that. Continue with the legs. Now she believes all we've got to do left. Let's just head right here. Let's extrude it down on a z axis. And we're just going to move this into position and we're pairing this to the hips. Control, keep offset. This will be where the actual hip is about. There should be in the middle of the knee. Then we'll extrude this down. Remember, have a slight natural curve, You can see it's bent to where the ankle is going to be. It should be about there for the foot. You can usually have a little joint here where the toes are. But because it's such a low poly model, I think I'm just going to have one bone. Let's extrude this out. Move the whole thing down a little bit. Just like that. We can check everything in the center. That looks fine. Let's rename everything. Fl shin foot looks like everything sorted. We might end up going back. But w, we're here. Let's see if we can actually get this character to move. Just going to go into Material View, where not first off, let's select this character right here. And we need to add a modifier onto this character. Let's keep the mirror there for now. I don't worry about that. Let's go down, add an armature. Can select this armature object right here. Can use to select rig female. We'll notice I don't think anything will move right now. That's because instead of adding the modifier manually, we're going to use like an automatic way to do it. Let's get rid of this. Let's parent to the armature. Hit Control. This is a little shortcut that blender gives us. It gives us a usually just parent to an object and it's all right. But we can go down to armature to form and then with automatic ways this is just Blender helping us here. It automatically creates a vertex groups that assigned to each one of these bones. A vertex group, I think we've, you see this before in this course. We used to create the hair in the last video. In fact, I think you can see it masks each one of these bones. Right here, that's a foot, one of these bones. We'll have the vertex groups right here. You can see which parts of the character are assigned to them. Then if we move this in pose mode members mode, short cut is control tab. You can also change it up here as goose mode. If we rotate it now the character moves. It's created each of these vertex groups automatically. To be honest, they look okay. Most of them seem to work fine. Of course, the hair won't follow, But this can be quite satisfying. Our characters are really animated. Now see how usually the shoulder is a difficult part, but it looks like it's okay. I'm happy with this. Even the head looks like it's all right as well. We tend to need to fix the chin. It looks like we're going to need to fix the eyebrows as well. Actually, don't worry about the other side, by the way, because we're going to use tries that this is a little short cut in blender. Another thing that's helpful if we name these as such, we can copy this whole side of the characters. Let's just select everything here. We're in edit mode. I'm going to change to last because I like this three to type in, I believe it is symmetries, amateur symmetrites. It's created our other side and it's automatically rename these, which is very useful. Let's see if this works now. Might to do something else. Yeah, it looks like it's because we haven't got the vertex groups named this mirror modifier right here. Let's also try moving it after. Just to see if that works, let's try switching the auto back sometimes. Let's put the mirror first. What this mirror will do, I believe, is create copies of all of these vertex groups. Well, we need to create the copies, but if we create an empty vertex group with shoulder, it will mirror the information from l across to it. Let's try that now. Let's try the dot l. Let's create a new vertex group, and let's call it had. Let's see if it mirrors it. Not quite working. This one's working though. I think it's just the thumb. Let's go through and create copies of all these groups. Just empty ones. So f each bone. Let's go down in order. So I've got up low arm as we're going here, so make sure you name them correctly. The hand. Now we need to add the thumb. There's probably an automatic way of doing this, but it's quite a simple character. We've got do this by hand now we'll probably be quicker. And I believe that's all of them. You can always fix it later. If it doesn't work, now we can pose each of these bones. And we've still got our mirror modifier. Of course, if your character is not symmetrical, maybe you've really applied to mirror modify. Or you want to have like a pocket or a strap on one side that isn't on the other, then you might have to do this by hand, but don't worry about that. There are also lots of rig editorials out there on the Internet. This is just to quickly show you. We can, we can say we've done it and we've tried it before. We might need to do some manual weight painting here. Cha selected this object, this mesh control tab. Go to weight paint mode and we can select the vertex groups that we want to paint here. Let's go to head to start out with let's just make everything let's increase our strength and our weight to one. Everything here should be read. The whole face should be red, including the jaw. Let's quickly fix that. We can also isolate the object. Hide the hair. Remember, you don't always have to weight paint. There are lots of ways to assign to a vertex group, in this case, for the eyebrows. Let's go back into the object of isolate. We're going into object mode, and if we select these eyebrows right here, and we want to assign a weight of one, we can use this weight slider here. Whenever you hit a sign, it will assign this value to the group that you've selected. With all the vertices that you've got selected, I'm signing just the eyebrows to the vertex group with the weight of one. You can also remove them from a group or give them a weight of zero instead. Let's go back into object mode. And now they should move with the head, it doesn't look like they are. That might be because they're also part of another vertex group. Most likely the neck. Remove them from the neck group because it will blend between the head and the neck. It will try and reach a compromise. Let's go back into object mode now. We can see they move with it while we're here. Let's also just paint away from the neck because it looks like some of the faces that assigned from the neck. We can see, although this is red, it will blend with all other vertex groups. They've got the vertices selected. That makes any sense? This is all red on the head because it's also on the neck. We're just going to need to paint this away with a strength of one and a weight of zero. We could just paint her face blue. That's okay. Let's also get rid of some of this chest as well because too much of that selected. Now we can just go through the hips are looking okay, but we might need to add a little bit more. You can use a drawing tablet for this as well, if you like to select the hips, there's a hip screw. We go, I believe actually if we select this armature and then shift select the mesh over I got this right around. And then control tab up to the weight paint mode. We can select these bones right here, I think you can shift control select control click to select them. It just means you don't have to choose it from this. You can just pick the bone. Pain, not many people know that one. It took me a while to figure that out. I know the advantage of this. You can quickly pose it around slight here. I'm going to pose this to move it up. Let's just increase the strength. Decrease the weight. I'm going to keep the strength around about here, but decrease the weight. We can just paint a weight parts of this because it shouldn't be moving right now. Unfortunately, we'll have to repeat this process for the male character, but I just see as extra practice can never hurt paint her away. That's deforming it a little bit more naturally. Now let's also see how the hips are looking. Let's control this. That's okay. To be honest. I think that's the forming A, right? Let's see how the knee is looking. It looks okay to me. I have the strength of one and the weight of one. I'm just going to paint this whole thing red. Not the whole thing, but the base of it. That's to forming a bit better. Now, I like that I'm going to paint away from this, decrease our weight. Base of the shoe should be blue. That's looking good now. For the most part, maybe a few tweets we need to make. But I'm happy with that yet. Once again, like everything, spend a bit more time on this than I am. This is just to show you hands looking, okay. So the farm, the number pad period to jump to A if you want to pivots around it. Let's see how our left sides do. Remember the right side, not the left side. Everything should copy across. That's looking good. Just like in object mode, you can select everything. In pose mode, if you hit opt G and opt it will just reset everything. Sometimes you need to spam it's pose this, don't worry about posing something because if you press Tab to go into edit mode, we might act because we've got both selected it's, let's just select the Armature. And if you go into edit mode, you can see this is like the rest, I suppose you'd call it the resting position. This is the pose. And then the and an object mode will display how it's being posed. You can put it in a nice position like this, but if you want to edit the armature again, just hit Tab and everything will be back to normal just like this. So I'm just going to set everything and clear. Now we need to copy this for the Mel version, select this armature, press shift a D to duplicate, call it rig mal. Now we need to assign this Meld. See if we can remember how I'm just going to hide these. Bring back the Mel base and Mel, remember we need to select this mesh and then we need to parent it to the armature. Let's do that quickly and hit control. It's a parent with automatic weights. This female one still showing up. I think they've been buried in the outline, haven't they? Unfortunately, because they're like children of each other. We'll also to hide the female based under That's okay. I don't think we did actually make the female shorter. We didn't scale her down at all. Our proportions are okay. Let's just move some of these because I've already m, whatever I do to one side, I'm going to have to copy across to the other. Just be a bit more careful with that and everything should deform. Yeah, we just have to weight paint it a little bit. That's looking okay and our shoulders are working a lot better than the female version, which is nice. Let's just do the same thing that we did before. I'll try and be quicker this because this stuff we've already covered. So I'm going to remove this from the neck collection and I'm going to assign it to the head collection. Let's just quickly do our weight painting. If you remember before, when we painted this head to be red, we then had to paint it blue on the neck. We're painting it away from the head. We're painting it onto the head, and then we're painting it away from the neck again. But there's an option to do this for us called auto normalized, and I believe this should work. Let's hope it does. We can see currently a little bit blue here on head. It's like a little bit of green, I suppose you'd say. It's on scale from blue to green to red. But if we paint this onto the head, let's go a weight of one. And paint on the head like this, it should auto normalize and paint it away from the neck. And you can see now it's turned blue, which is perfect for us. It saves a lot of time. This is another thing. I didn't know till a little bit too late. Let's do the same. This will be useful for the Fi as well. This mode makes the whole weight painting process so much better. There we go, looks like this. Mel Wonder forms a bit more. Actually, I think the shape of the hips and shoulders just a bit easier. Again, I'm going to set the weight of one and the strength of one. I'm just going to paint it on the base of the foot. This is fully assigned, just like this, Everything should copy across. Remember when I'm selecting this bone set, I'm holding control because otherwise you could just start painting. You control to select this is weird. Yeah, let's go back into object mode now. That looks like the ricking done. Now we just need to add the hair to it. We can either assign this to this bone or we can just add it to this character mesh quickly. Join it up, make sure there are no modifiers on it. Yeah, let's join this head. Before we do that, actually this will give us, we'll try mirroring it. Let's apply this mirror modifier. Want to be happy with it? I'm going to quickly file save us just in case I want to go back to the pre mirrored character. There we go. Let's apply this mirror modifier. This should mirror all our vertex groups as well. Now that's fine. Let's join this head and then we just need to s these vertices go down to the vertex groups just in case you think it's already assigned to any vertex groups. I believe here you can go and remove from all groups and this would We do this button right here, but to every single group. So have to do it individually. And let's add it to the head with the weight of one. Now if we try posing him, the hair should follow. Let's do the same for the female one. I'm just going to bring these back. Not sure what this empty hairs and I think that, that might be for the water. We'll see there's a hair gone. It's right here. Play this or modify, then we'll merge the hair with control J. Control J. Go through and I'm confident there, it's not assigned to any vertex groups. Put Ambuls tools here if you ever need it. Let's assign it to the head with the weight of 11 thing. You might notice her pony tail, like it won't wiggle around with her head. You might want to add a couple bones for her pony tail. When she turns her head like this, you can have it dripping downwards. But that's another level of detail would be a challenge for some of you maybe. But yeah, we've covered the basics of rigging. The only other thing to do is K, we add inverse kinematics. This is probably beyond the scope of this course, so just consider it a little bonus crash course. But we'll add a constraint to some of these bones right here called K Inverse kinematics. Which means instead of posing it like this, when we animate it, say we're doing a walk cycle. Instead of having to move the legs up like this, we can just move the foot and the knee will automatically bend for us. Let's go into edit mode with this bone slighted right here. We're just going to extrude up and we're going to rename this foot. We probably should have done this before we mirrored it, but this is okay. We can do it manually. We'll just show you the left side and then you can figure out the right side as well if you want to do that as well. But like I said, this is just a crash course. We want to untick this to form option right here just so it doesn't add any vertex groups. But don't worry about this because we've already added our vertex groups. We've got this. Now let's select this K bone right here. We've got this one selected, and then we shift on. This should be yellow, and this one should be orange because this is the one that the constraint is going to be on. And we press shift, nothing has happened. That's just me being silly. That's because we're in edit mode. We need to be in pose mode. For this hold down control tab, go to pose mode, and luckily our selection carries across the same from edit mode to pose mode. Now we try this shift I, it's active bone, and you can see it turns yellow. And that's because it's got this constraint on it. It's bones constraint, not the objects constraint. We should be able to move this. See what's wrong here. It might be because it's parented, that's in edit mode. I'm going to be switching between pose and edit mode. It's yellow, it's edit modive, it's like like turquoise. Then it's pose mode. And I'm just going to press P to clear parent. Let's see how this looks. Now we can see it's moving. It's doing what we want. You see this bones bending automatically and we need to reduce the train. If the chain length is on zero, that just means we can see that's increase it to two, I believe one, I think two is the right man. That just means that the next two bones will move. If it's on zero, it's effectively infinity. So it will move the whole character to bend. But yeah, we can see this leg working now quite nicely, but we can't control the angle that's going around. And to do that, we need to add something called a pole. Let's just select this block right here. Extrude it out on the Yaxs. Let's call this a foot pole. And we're going to to this, you don't have to have it parented to anything, but I usually like to parent the poles to the bones just because it's easier. We're moving about sills. Let's select these control P, keep offset. And we're just going to move this out on the Y axis. Then we'll use this as like the direction, the head right here will be the direction of the knee points. And we'll see this later. Let's go down for the pole target. We're going to need to select this and then just type in type in popo. I probably should have named it leg instead of foot, but that's okay. And we also need to change this pole angle right here to an offset of -90 degrees, it looks like, or something like that. Just so it's got the angle right. Let's try moving this now. So you can see we can move the leg up and then we can also rotate it around. It's hard to see of all these bones here. If you don't like this shape by the, I believe this is octahedral, but we can go up here, changes this from octahedral to bone. And then if we select everything we can think it's control old S. Yeah, control old S. You see it in the bottom left, right there. It's a decrease of in a send. This looks a bit more professional to me. It's easier to animate with. This is how we'd animate our character. Let's do the same for the arms quickly. We'll try and go through this as quick as possible. Let's extend the whole thing. There we go. Let's just extrude upper hand. K C Perkel Pol. Extrude this out. I'm just using this as a starting point. It's clear this actually will be parented to K control, keep offset. And I just repeating the same process, but of course the elbow is going back this way. And I'll rename this poll. Now we need to go to pose mode. Don't make the Sam mistake I did last time. Try doing an edit mode. Make sure we've got this selected. Last shift to active bone and that will add our bone constraint. And we can also select it from this list right here, but it's quicker just to do shift I. Let's set the chain length to two and try selecting this pole. A target, we might need to rotate it or change that angle. Sorry, rotate it, that's fine. Let's just play under this angle. Sometimes it's more difficult to find then this, but I think it's just -90 Then we've got our arms done as well, and it is much easier to animate. Just move our angle. Here we go. So we can repeat this for the other side. I think 90 might not quite be the right angle, so let's just try reducing this a little bit. Yeah, there we go, -70.1 Something like that. Yeah, that's very quickly how you set up K, and we can use this to pose the character in the final renders. I think we'll leave it just like this because we're not animating a proper walk cycle or anything. We can just pose them in FK. That's what we're doing here on this side of the character and it's quite nice and rendered actually, doesn't it? Let's put her foot back down on the ground. It can also rotate her hand trymkawave our characters finished. Now let's go back into rendered mode. We can bring back our Mal one. We got our Mal rig as well. If you want to move the whole object, just move the actual rigs control tab and reset his poses because we put him in a bit of an odd spot. Let's just bring his arms down by his side like that. When it comes to rendering, we'll put these two in a mass pose. Just start here looking like idiots. Let's take these arms forward. I'm aware this video has been quite long, but we've managed to finish off the characters. So let's finish up quickly, Robin, continuing anymore? Let's add the scenery back. It looks like I must have created a characters collection before. Don't need that though, since we've pretty got one. And let's just move these rigs. We can always use snapping a face snapping just to snap them on the ground. The point to snap with actors, there we go. So we can just place them on the ground and see how they look. Rendered mode, remember to disable this option here so you can see them properly. And let's also bring back my son. I think I hit the setup collection. Congratulations for finishing this section. We've got our characters added, very basic, but I think they look quite nice. Yeah, try and be adventurous of this. Take it forever. Maybe you can add more characters. And just to or modify the existing ones we've got, that's all the modeling finished in this course. In the next part, we'll just be talking about placing these assets in a nice way. We might touch on the asset editor and we'll go through render settings so we can get some nice portfolio images. So nice work and we'll see them. 27. Final Section of the Course - Finalizing Scene: Hello and welcome to the final section of the course. We're almost finished in this part. We're just going to place around some of these assets because when we are modeling them, we just got everything clumped here in the center, which might not be ideal. So the first thing I'm going to do here is set this landscape we got, go down to material preview. Which one of these? This vertex right here. So I'm going to paint away some of these flowers. This flower bush right here, I believe it is. Let's go to weight paint mode. Might bear with me because I've got this option here. There we go. Yes. I'm just going to reduce my weight and have the strength of one and maybe ones too high. Reduce it about here. I'm just going to paint away the flowers from this area around where my camera is. There we go. And let's do the same with the trees as well. Justus, I want to get rid of some of these. We'll probably do is place these trees manually. Instead, let's just clear this area out because where the houses are, that's it. And then we'll do the same with the rocks. There shouldn't be that many rocks around it. And grass, we'll all keep some of the grass. There we go. Remember we created these vertex groups of force, That's what I'm using. In fact, this area around here, I might actually just place all the trees manually. There we go. Well, notice when we first modeled all this foliage, it's all stacked up here as well, so you want to get rid of that. Let's see if we, they're all nested within these collections right here. So I'm just going to hide these ones like this and should it'll disappear, cleared up a lot of space. We'll leave the clouds though. We can reorganize this folder structure to whatever works best for you Y that should look more open and rendered for you. Now just like that, I've noticed as well that this little bush right here is on its own. Let's go directionally under trees. This is the final 10% of work we do, our portfolio renders, but it ends up taking 90% of the time. Looks like this oak, 1.01 trees are separate because the parentage, let's just apply this decame and add it to the tree. I think we did this before. I must have missed it with this tree though skin as well. So I just applied the modifiers and joined it together. And now that should work a bit better. Thug And it's like it's recalculated where some of these trees placed. So great. So yeah, I'll hide this tree. And remember to also take this little camera Ac on here because that not only hides it in the view, but it also hides it from the final render. So we need to do that as well. And same thing with the sea life and footage. We haven't placed any of the sea life assets yet, but we can do that in the river if you'd like to. There are a few, too many flowers now. So let's go for and paint some of these flowers away as well. In fact, actually I might just decrease the density. So under this flowers spawner, it doesn't know like I've named it good flowers. We can just track this density down. This is a slider we created before I was lucky of us to do so. And then let's also as O S trees, that's wrong one. I want to have a bit more graphs, so let's increase the density of graphs. This might be too high, but I think it looks quite nice. So I'm going to place my camera here, so control all zero to place your camera if you've got one, if you haven't already got one in your scene. I'm just going to select this set up collection so that it will be added by the fault. I'm going to press shift A to add a cameras camera. I wish go a bit blind and forget where it is. Right down here, Right down a camera. Look. Control zero there with me. If we haven't used cameras before in Blender, you can always hit number pad zero to jump to the active camera. There are a few sessions that we can change as well. This is really framed quite nicely. You can hit to activate this free rotation mode and hold shift as well. You can angle it like that the way I like to rotate this, go to local orientation, then do x to up and down z to do a dutch roll and Y to pan. But I'll leave it on global because I used to double tap in the axis. Let's go down to this camera tab right here, we can change some of these settings. The focal length is on 50 millimeters by de four. You might want to increase this or decrease this. Sometimes it looks nicer. If you decrease it and then dolly the camera backwards a little bit, 'let's press G and then double tap Z to move it backwards. You might need to. I think I had snapping on then. Yeah, bear with me. And then let's just drag it backwards. It looks like it's clipping into the ground. But the focal length acts a bit like a field division, I suppose in like a video game if you play in FPS, as you'd like to have a nice high field of vision. So I'm going to stick with about 74, 75. But if you'd rather work with a field of vision, then I believe you have the lens unit right here, you can change it to field of view. And it says 23.3 Let's put this back to millimeters and it's just like a welcome of a real camera here. It's very useful. Let's just move some of these assets around to try and frame it a bit nicely. We could add in some of our own trees if we want to result. So that's got to render view. I don't think I'm going to do that. First off, just move this building. I'm switching between lots of different things. So let's jump down to where this is in the outline, if you remember this. Building we didn't actually organize. I'm just going to right click the selection to select objects and then we should have everything. I go back into camera mode. Just going to move it down a bit so the, the floor is clipping into the building. It's only going to look good from this camera view. Let's just rotate it like this. Move it back a bit. Here we go. It looks like the back of this building is intersection of the river. But we're not going to see that from where our camera is. I wouldn't worry about that at all. Let's also make sure this log comes in a neprightlbjs. Then we can rotate this on a Z axis. And let's just move it over here like this. You move it up a bit as well. How does this looking rendered that it's nice? Set the clouds and move them down. This might want to have this cloud in front of the mountain slightly is nice, doesn't it? What's on? What else can we change stretching in the color of the ground. Because I'm still not 100% happy with it. I desaturated it before, if I remember. But I think it's a little bit too desaturated. So this just quickly change the color, get more of a yellowy color and increase the brightness. Gas much more vibrant. Now, isn't it? Remember you can always switch to V was you're doing this. And I'm now noticing that these greens, I'm happy with it. I was going to say the grass is a little bit too vibrant as well, but I think this looks nice. Let's go to the sun. It's our sun. We can search for it up here in the outliner. They will probably be under the sat up collection. I'm just going to move it over here so it's easier to manipulate from eye camera view and we can select a nice angle from it. So let's quickly change our rendering engine to V, just possible doing this. It doesn't break anything. You can use this yellow ball to place it or you can just move it and rotate it manually. Let's see how this looks in cycles and keep switching between. We're just going to rotate this down. And I believe I read this in a book by James Gurney, but one way to add drama to tool structures is to have like a partial shadow obscure in this. So that's kind of nice. That's what we've got here with the trees on this hillside in the building. I'm not sure how far we want it to obscure. That might be a bit too much actually. Yeah. If you want something to look tool, sometimes it's nice to cast a shadow across it and whil're here. Let's go into solid view just so we can see what we're doing a bit faster, all material view. And then I'm going to open up a second window. So we're just going to drag from this corner right here upwards. And we're going to change this from a Properties window to a three D Viewport number pad zero to go to our camera view. And let's just disable the overlay with these two buttons right here. And then we can put this in rendered mode. And that means that we can see everything rendered in the bottom right. But whilst we're actually working on stuff, it's not going to be rendered. So now let's go in and paint some of this hillside. Because I'd like to change it and because we're using like our procedural node set up, these trees should update. So let's go to what should we do used to do this. Let's go to edit mode. And bear with me if it is taken to a long, and I'll keep switching between, let's put this back to V because the shadows are going to look the same. If this doesn't work, it doesn't work, it's fine, we don't have to stick with it. But it might be nice to try out. There we go. Let's just try dragging this landscape down a bit so we've got more light coming in because our suns are quite a lower angle right now. Let's try and figure out where the sun's coming from. It's this sort of angle, doesn't it? There we go. That looks nice. And we've got these nast long shadows coming up from the grass. Just reduce that. Great. And then, yeah, where's our sun? It's coming from here. I want to have a shadow cast in over this building. But just the building. Let's see if we can extrude up like a very thin part of the landscape to cover this up. Not quite sure. We're experimenting. You can try different things. I kind of like how that looks. It's a little subtle shadow spending quite a lot of time on this. Yes, it's what's going through my head. I'm lining up a shop, this is just one example, switching between different things, not just sticking with one idea. As soon as I see something, Right now I'm thinking, oh, there's too much grass. So let's go through and decrease the grass again. It's not a linear process. I'm constantly switching what I'm doing. Let's try how that looks. Great, so we've got some nice objects in here. Let's see if there's anything else we can move about if you like, using your composition lines. I've kind of got things set up in third, you know, like this building takes up like the left third of the frame. Same with this log cabin, we can go through down here in the camera settings. Let's just thepanerslp. So we can see the property spanel under Viewport display, I believe it is. We've got these composition guides and we can choose different precess that come with blender. So you can see here, or I was talking about with the third. And then we can just rotate, it's a little bit more to line it up better. Rotate it on the z axis. Yeah, we can also try once you've got center lines right here, we've got these diagonal ones and golden ratio as well. So these can be quite useful. Another thing is optional if you have it and that's debt fulfilled. So I'm going to go up to Rendered mode. I'll change it back to cycles now, although actually we can leave it on in V. They've updated it in the past couple of years and I find that De fulfilled works a lot better in V. Now, let's go down, raise it again. De fulfilled. Yes, we just need to enable this option. We can see everything goes blurry. This F stop right here controls the intensity of the blurring. Reduce it, everything will be a bit more blurry. And then we can also change the length, the part that it's focused on if we want a really shallow depth of field. You can also use this pepe here to select an object to focus on. Let's this house object. If we want everything to look really small, we can reduce it like this. And it looks like a miniature set piece, doesn't it? If you want to increase it, then you can do that as well. Let's see how this looks in rendered mode right now. Let's go to cycles. I'm happy with this. Everything's a bit noisy now, but don't worry about that, any of the setting. Let's talk about color quickly. About like saturation and contrast and everything. If we go down, I believe it's under the range of settings under color management. We might have really touched on this. Let's just bring my properties panel wing because I'm not used to working with it like this. It feels a bit odd to me management, so LGB right now. And we can see that the view transform is on film. And then we can change our look to comdiumhi contrasts and make everything pop out a little bit more like very high contrast. If you're doing something brightly colored, I like the way this looks. High contrast. This is just quick and dirty ways of getting it. But we'll go over color balancing as well in a sec. So let's go back to the camera tab. Slightly too much depth of field. Let's just increase five F stops, try five F stops. I think that's just because we're going to get it and these people here, let's move this guy. It looks kind of like she's not sure telling them off. Maybe let's just remember to move the rig by the way, not the character mesh. So let's quickly change our rendering engine to V. Let's rotate him like this. There we go. Let's put them in a nice spot. Didn't need to press that. There we go, See how that's looking. I'm quite happy with that. And now we can go place some of these assets manually because so far, all this foliage is just the way it's been painted on. But we might want to actually move some of these about. Let's go to Material View just so we can quickly edit it. Let's bring back our foliage collection because it's under scenery. The first thing I'm going to do is add some paving slabs. These stepping stones. Let's duplicate these. Do it in the outline. I don't know if it will hide the duplicate them. I'm not quite sure where they are, whether it will let us. It looks like I've got this overlay thing on there. It keeps annoying me there. Yeah, as I was the duplicate these and let's move them to a new collection And I'll just call this manually placed scenery. I'm not worried too much about keeping my files organized because we've pretty much done now. Unless you want to continue expanding this and add more assets at this point in our project. Just just whatever works. I don't want to spend too much time refining things now that we've got. What else do we want to add? Add some trees. Let's go under trees right here. Let's have an oak tree. We can just choose, actually let's have this one. This one and this little birch tree. I'm going to shift the deed to duplicate and then move them to the manually placed scenery collection. Should we hide these again? Perfect. So I'm using this in the bottom right now. Inge my engine back to V and I'm just going to use this to place some. Yeah, the defer field looks really nice. In cycles, in V, sorry. Now I used to not use it because it didn't look as good, but I'm quite impressed. Let's put this tree just here, just there's a bit more foliage actually. In shot we can barely see any of these nice trees that we made. Here you go. Let's put in here, not quite sure if we want to know completely. Take up the shot, we can even move it closer. You kind of have it looming over. What do we think? How does that look? Just something subtle in the top right, isn't it? I'm quite happy with that. And some of these trees look a bit odd. You on the hill, we've got some trees facing the same direction. There's not much we can do about that to actually move them, but if we select this landscape here, got to the trees. Yeah, When we did this, we exposed a parameter for the seed, if you remember in geometry nodes. So we can just change this in a properties panel and it will regenerate where it's spawning all these trees, we can just select one that looks nice. Should have probably done this before we started adding the extra assets. We can just roll through these, generating quite a lot of them in front of the camera, which is nine. So let's just go through into weight paint mode. Let's put the strength, serial strength for one. Let's just get rid of all the trees in front of the camera frame. This is too much. That's okay. That's looking good now. I'm happy with that. Let's try changing that set now. If you, when you're like in your accent, you went past it, don't worry about it. Because you can always just go back to the original number. If you think, oh, I'm going through now, 23 looks nice. I might go back to 23. You can think about it like that. That looks nice. I like this one. Let's stay with this. That tree is it looks like it's intersection of the log cabin. Impossible to see, you can spend all day on this. But once you put one that you're happy with, then we can move on to rendering and go back to solid view slide. We finish weight painting now. Yeah, that's how I line up a shot. Let's change our rendering engine back to cycles and it will look ten times better. There we go. I get used to working with D, and as soon as I change it back to cycles, it looks amazing. A subtle detail. If we wanted to do it, we probably should have done it from the beginning. But it's just another thing sometimes when you're doing these low poly renders is to add a little devil modifier. Let's just to show you on this how, what I mean, let's add a devil modifier segments. We'll just give you a slide. Ten, put in solid mode, works quicker. I wonder why it isn't working pebble in the edges. It might because we've got it's triangulate, modify or it could be because clamping the reel. It's disabled clamp overlap and now we haven't got perfect geometry. But of course if you wanted to pebble it from the start, you'd do this from the beginning. What that does is it gives you nice little reflections on the edges of everything on my cameras. You can see it a bit better. It's quite nats I find, but it's not quite in line with the art style that we're going for. And I'm also targeting this towards games where we wouldn't be likely to have this babble. But I thought I'd still show you. Yeah, there we are, Believe that's everything done. Let's go back into this view. Let's go up to the composite in tab. Because we can do a tiny bit of color balancing. Let's quickly take us nodes. We might have done this in a previous course. Let's also give us a bit of de noising as well. We can change this later for the final renders. Let's up the sample count. It looks like it's max samples are on 14, 96. Right now, that's very high. We'll reduce this. Let's, let's just put it on 20 for now at F 12 to do a render. F 12 is a short cut. Then once this is finished, we can change it in the compositor. That's nice. And then let's quickly add color balance. It's on right here. That's at our backdrop as well as our backdrop. I need to add a viewer node. To do this, you press shift A. Let's just search for our viewer. We go and let's put this in. Great. Now if you remember it looks like As on down the As probably because we got this render open. I might be wrong about this F, let's just put this into solid view and in the composite. Let's play some of these. And you can also change the temperature. This will make our shadows darker and cold. I found I always go a little bit too extreme with this. It looks like it's taking its time. It's got a lot to compute. I'm not sure which resolution I rendered that it looks like it's only 1920 ben 80. There we go. Like I said, I always go to extreme of this. Let's drag it closer to the center. We just got to see how sunny we want this to be. I, it's in the evening. Let's give it a slightly cool look like a purple blue color. Los, like that. I think that looks quite nice. One problem that I tend to get with these low poly shrubs, or these bushes right here, is they cast pretty gross shadows. And sometimes if I'm taking this into a game engine, I'll just disable shadows on foliage or give them an opacity. Because these ones are already in a shadow being cast by that landscape that we added behind to the right of the camera where we don't see any other shadows, just these nice diffuse reflections. A bit of criticism. Maybe some work could be done on the character poses because they look right right now, let's go back to the layout tab and quickly fix that. Just because we're so close to the end. It's always worth doing this last bit, let's just rotate them. It's difficult to do because we haven't got K on this one. Let's just rotating. Go up to local orientation. You can make it look as if he's walking. You want to move the whole thing? You can just move his hips, make sure his foots on the ground. I'll do that close enough. Let's just give him a little bit of character. You make him look not quite as immobile but looks better to me. For her, maybe she's checking something on her hand. Let's just make her look at her hands to say with this local orientation, which froze me off sometimes. Just pick whichever one you like. I'll stick with Global. There we go. I don't think I added K on this side today. Let's have her hand slightly turned in. There we go. She's kind of leaning back, checking something. I'm spending a lot of time on this, so obviously go through and refine it on your own. It's just a quick example. I don't want to rotate her head too much because the Pu cell isn't lined up properly. It's going off to the side. We haven't got a bone to make it go down now. Do I want this lighthouse to be in background or not? Because currently we haven't got it there. See how it looks? Oh, yeah, That looks nice. Of course. Let's have it. Because we've made all these assets. We don't have them off on the side. Of course, you can do multiple shots as well if you'd like to. Down here somewhere, I'll just look nice. And then I know I shouldn't change something like this so late. Let's change the angle of the sun. Just the tiniest bit. That's nice. I know you've done color balancince, this might throw us off, but I do think the sun's a little bit too cold, maybe. Let's try making it more yellow. I think I like that. Yeah, I'm quite happy with that. I'd say that's our final version. Let's just say make sure that anything you don't want to be rendered, I'm going to disable this archive. Yeah, anything that you don't want to be rendered should have the camera disabled every time I render. Pretty much always. Every time I render, I'll accidentally have it there. Let's just just go through the Outliner and check it and then, yeah, we can increase the sample count to something a little bit higher as sort I render one, Let's set this to, I don't know, it's 2000. And you can increase the resolution as well. So it's on 1920 by 1080 right now. Yeah. So I'm going to render this and I'll see you once it's done. There we are. There's my final render. I've left it on its own for about 5 minutes there. So let's make sure we get a nice, really high quality version. And of course, if you want to save this, just go file and then save As and select somewhere you want to keep it to be quite a nice portfolio. Remember, maybe render square. If you're going to post this on Arts Station or Instagram, then you can change this from 1920 by 1080 to like 1920 by 1920. But yeah, that's pretty much it for the course now. That's everything. So we've covered a lot of content. I hope you take some of these skills onto your blender careers in future. And yeah, congratulations for following along. I've really enjoyed making it and thank you very much.