Bring Your Illustrations to Life with Blender 3D

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Remington from SouthernShotty 3D. Today we're going to be talking about how to bring your illustrations to life with 3D. If you're watching this intro, you're probably like me, an artist who loves to create their own worlds, and wants to see them come to life in a new way. I'm always exploring new ways to get closer to my characters. There's something magical about taking your own characters and worlds and moving them around in 3D space. 3D is a high-demand skill right now. I found that as I've added 3D to my skill set, I've gotten more clients and at a higher price as well. I believe that learning how to use 3D can really help your clientele. In this course, we'll cover the basics of Blender's user interface and be moving at a pace that should be comfortable for beginners. The goal is that anybody should be able to follow along. If at anytime you feel overwhelmed, pause to check out some of the resources I've linked to in the description below for absolute beginners never using Blender before. This will be covering animation, as it's intended for beginners, but I've uploaded my workflow recording and included some link to animation tutorials I made, if you'd like to follow up and try something more advanced. I'm also including all the project files, so if you'd like, you can poke around there, and try and learn that way. I'm really excited to share this project with you, and I can't wait to see what you create at the end. Together, let's learn how to bring illustration to life with 3D. 2. Blender Overview: For this course, I'll be using Blender version 2.83 and we're not using any features that should be time sensitive for any of the upcoming versions, including the version that'll come out later this year, called 2.89. However, if there are big version updates in this course that has a lot of interest, I'll come back and update it to meet the standards. But I just wanted to let you know that's the version being used in this software. Now this is meant to be a high level overview of Blender, and I'll do my best to make it easy for complete beginners to follow along. But if at any point you find yourself getting frustrated, just pause and review the resources for the class. I have a link in there where it goes in depth on some of the Blender basics. 3D is just complicated, and even with me moving slowly and displaying all the shortcuts down here on the bottom right, it can be tough to follow along your first time. So you may need to re-watch a video or pause and review some of the basics first, however, I'll do my best to make it easy for first-time users to follow along. In this video, we're going to be going through some of the basics of the Blender interface. Then as we go forward, I'll be covering some of the basics in other sections too or with some of the different tools and things like that. To get started, first, let's take a look at navigation. When you open Blender, you'll have this Window here, which if you come up here, you can change your different Window types and this is called the 3D Viewport. In the 3D Viewport, that's where we can move around in our Viewport to see our objects and all of our lights, cameras, and everything we have there in the scene. We can move around by middle-clicking, and if you're going to be serious about 3D, I highly recommend you get a three-buttoned mouse. Use middle-click to move around your scene there. If you hold "Shift" middle-click, you can pan around your scene, and if you hold "Control" middle-click and drag up and down, you can zoom in on your scene there. Now you can change which object you are selected and focused on, by selecting the object, by left-clicking it. Then you can press "Period" on your number pad, if you have one, and that'll snap you into there. I believe that it's called frame selection or focus selection if you don't have a number pad and want to look up the keyboard shortcuts for that. Now I'm going to tell you some of the keyboard shortcuts I have that are a bit different. By default, Blender has its own keymapping and I've altered mine for what I believe to be a bit more efficient with the things you're going to be using often. If you're following along with me in my keyboard shortcuts, this is my setup here. Let me pull this down. You just get here by going to Edit Preferences and clicking "Keymap." Up here you can choose various options, and the ones I have changed, or I have that with the Spacebar action, when you press "Space," you will search. I believe by default that's set to play. What that means is that, when we're in places and we press "Space," we can search and we can search any action in Blender here, and it is Viewport dependent. Depending on what section of the program you're in, the things you search here maybe look a little different. Let's go back to the Keymap there. Just open those preferences and look at the Keymap. I have my Spacebar Action set to Search, and then I have Tab for Pie Menu, and then I have set where Select All Toggles. That just means that when I press "A" on the keyboard, it will select everything, and when I press "A" again, it will deselect everything. Whereas, if you leave that off, you'll have to double-tap "A" to deselect everything, I believe. In terms of "Tab for Pie Menu," what that does is that when you hold "Tab" on your keyboard, you'll get these various Pie Menus throughout the program, which is really great for shortcuts and moving around quickly. Now if you don't have a three-button mouse and you want to navigate around your Viewport, there are a couple ways to do that and they may be easier for beginners. For one, up here we can come to View, and we can go to Cameras, and we can choose Active Camera, or we can choose the Viewport here, and we can choose these various options here. Then up here is where you had the frame selected if you want to focus in on your object, or frame all, if you want to focus in on everything in your scene. Likewise, up here you have a Gizmo that you can use to drag around and this will emulate using the middle mouse button. Then you have these little positions here that you can click that will snap you to different views. Now, if you want to use the keyboard shortcut for these, you can use the number pad. One will take you to front, seven will take you to top, and three will take you to side. Then holding "Control" in any one of those will take you to the opposite. "Control 7" for example, would take you to the bottom and then if you press "0", that will take you to the "Camera." You can also come up here again, as I said, and do "View" "Active Camera." With that, that gives you a basic overview of the navigation and how you can go about moving around in your Viewport. Next, let's take a look at the overall interface here. I'm going to press "N" and bring up over here and you'll see that we have all these options over here. Now these options will change depending on what view you're in. If you're in sculpt mode, if you're in edit mode and we'll cover some of those modes later. Then I can press "N" again to hide that and then over here T will bring up your tool panel, and this works on a lot of different things. Down here you can see that if I press "T," it'll pop up some options there. If I press "N," it brings up some options there which you can't see because it's pushed down there a little too far. But that works on all Viewports and we'll bring up various options. Likewise, if you don't want to mess with the shortcuts, you can always come up to the view, and you can see that you have your toolbar and your sidebar there as well. Next up, let's take a look at Gizmos. You can use keyboard shortcuts to move everything in Blender, tend to prefer those because they're faster. If I press "G" key, it will move that around, and then you can add X, Y, or Z to lock in to any of those accesses when you're using Grab. If you press "S," it will scale and again, you can lock into any of those accesses by just pressing that button after. Then if you right-click, you'll cancel your action and if you left-click, you'll commit to that action. I'm just going to right-click there. Then you can use R, which will allow you to rotate based on whatever view you're in and again, you can lock into those various options there. Up here you have the options between global and local. Local will do the x, y, and z axis, according to the local over your object and global will do here. There's other options like, rotating around the cursor, which is that little 3D cursor there, which you can move around by clicking with "Shift" right click, which you can see down here in the bottom right. If you click down on an object, you can see that it will snap to the object and if you hit "Shift C," that will put that back to the center. Now, that gets a bit advanced and any of those things that I'm changing up here, aren't going to be very common in this course. If we do, then I'm going to walk you through them so just be aware of that those exist. But what might be easier for beginners is using what are called Gizmos, which over here on the tool panel, as long as you have that open. If you have a Rotate Gizmo, if you Scale Gizmo and you have a Move Gizmo, and clicking any one of those will bring up this gizmo that you can use. They're all pretty self-explanatory once you've learned one. Here we can see that we have our Move Gizmo, so we can move on the z-axis there if we click that, we can click here to move on the x-axis. But if you rotate, you see we get these little squares so that we can move on multiple axes. We can do this one, and you can see that we're moving on the x and the z only, and not on the y. Likewise, if we click any of those, if you click the circle, it's a free form move, so it will just move whatever view you have left there. Likewise with the Rotate, you have this white option here which allows you to free form rotate and all these will rotate on the axis, and the Scale works the same as the Move gizmo there. Now I'm just going to go ahead and reset this object's position by just hitting "Alt," "S," "R," and "G." By holding Alt and pressing all of those, I'm clearing the Scale, Rotation, and Grab. Those are the basic of the gizmos, and the sidebar and the toolbar. Let's take a look at the different view modes. With the view modes up here, we can click these here, or you can press "Z" and they will appear there and you can hover over them and let go of one and it will change to that. But I'll be using these mostly for beginners. Up here, we have wireframe mode, which will show the wireframe of our object and make it see-through. Up here we have solid, which will show a solid version of our object. Here, we have material, and material will do its best to emulate a simple version of our materials without trying to fully render your scene. The reason it does that is because fully rendering takes quite a bit of time. Here, we have the Render option, which will show our object rendered. Because we're in the render engine cycles here, you can see that as we move around, it's going to chug then once we stop, it will start to show a rendered version. That's a great way to show a preview of our object and you can change the amount of samples here. The more samples you have, the less noise it will be, but the longer it will take to render. If you're on the lower end machine, you're going to want to keep these numbers lower. However, for this course, we'll be using EEVEE, which is a real time render engine and renders much faster. Let's go ahead, switch back to Solid View here and let's take a look at these tabs up here. We have all these tabs here that have predetermined layouts for us. We can change our own layouts by coming up here and changing whatever we want in the Viewport with this little drop-down menu and we can also drag and close window. If we go ahead and click down here where it creates a cross, we can drag that to split a window and then we can change. If we had our Viewport here and we wanted to edit our shading here, we could go ahead and change to our Shader Editor, and then we could editor or shading more viewing our object over here. To close that window, we just click and drag and an arrow will appear and it will snap there. If you become more experienced with Blender, I recommend coming up with your own layouts to help you optimize your workflow. However, if you're a beginner, We have these great tabs up here. We have Layout and we have Modeling, which will automatically put you in Edit Mode, which we'll cover a little later. Here, we have Sculpting, which will allow you to sculpt your object and you can see how it's brought up all those sculpt tools. If we bring up our sidebar over here, which I told you is NNT, but you can also click that little arrow and click "Tool". You'll see we have all of our tool options for sculpting. We have UV Editing, which is complex for this course. We won't be diving into that too much. We have Texture Painting, if you want to texture paint your objects. We have Shading, which is how we can create some of our materials and things like that. Then we have an Animation panel. We have a Rendering panel, which will allow us to see our render results. You can see here I have a partially rendered image of the box. We have Compositing, which is for compositing and Scripting for advanced users that are writing their own scripts. We'll be spending most of our time in the Layout mode, but I think it's good to be aware of those modes. Let's talk about how we can add and delete objects in Blender. You can just press "Delete" key, which will get rid of that object. I'm going to undo that. You can also press "X" and "Delete", and that way you don't have to move your hand over on the keyboard. Or you can come up here in the Scene Collection here and right-click and "Delete". If we want to go ahead and delete that, we can add a new object and you can do that by hitting Shift A, and that works for most menus. For Shader Editors and other things, this is how you can go about adding objects and you see we get an organized list here with our Camera, our Lights, Empties, which are like nulls if you're familiar with After Effects. Text, Mesh, which is where we'll be using most of our stuff where we can add things like a UV Sphere around Cube or a Cube. Then you can also add up here. If you don't want to remember all those shortcuts, just think that almost everything is up here. If you find me doing a keyboard shortcut and you are having a hard time following along, just pause and look at the menu up here and you can pretty much find anything up here. You can add a Mesh or a UV Sphere. Also, you can pretty much search anything here. You can go ahead and type "Add Here", and you can see that Meshes are coming up. If we type in "Add Cube", we can do that. Remember, we switch, so Spacebar is search. Those are just a couple of different ways that you can go about finding any of your objects. I'm going to go ahead here so that it can show the example of Object mode and Edit mode and just add Monkey. This monkey's name as Suzanne, and it is just the default object that comes with Blender that allows you to do different render tests and things like that, so you have a more complex object just to work with. Let's talk about the difference between Object Mode and Edit Mode. Here, in Object Mode, you can tell we have an object selected because we have the yellow outline around it. Now, if you don't have a yellow outline around it, you might want to look up here where we have our Viewport options and overlays and make sure that this is toggled on. You can see that when I toggle that off, a lot of things disappear, and if we toggle that back on, we see we can have options about what we want to turn on and off. Now, those are a bit advanced, but you can play with those if you want to customize the look of your space and make it a little less cluttered. Here, with our objects selected, we can move our object around, we can rotate our object. But how would we go about, for example, maybe wanting to give this monkey a longer ear, for example? Well, for that, we need to edit the object and for that, we need to go into Edit Mode. To go into Edit Mode, what you do is you press "Tab" and then you hit "Edit Mode". There's also the keyboard shortcuts up here. If you see, you can press those numbers and it will correlate, but I find it much easier just to press "Tab". We will go to Tab and we will go to Edit Mode. Now, you can see that we can go ahead and grab the vertices from our object and move those around so that we can edit our object if we want. In object editing mode, right now, we can see the vertex, which is where all of these faces connect to each other at the corners, and up here we have different modes. We have Edges, which are all the edges that touch each other. We can go ahead and grab those edges and move those around. We also have Faced Selection Mode, where we can go ahead and grab faces and move entire faces. If you press "Z", we can go back to Wireframe view. In Wireframe view, which you can also select up here. If we box select, you can see we can select through everything. Up here, is our selection types. We can select by Box, we can do a selection Circle. With the selection Circle, you can drag over, select everything, and if you hold the middle mouse button, you can also deselect things with the Circle Tool as well if we go ahead and do that. That'll deselect everything. Let's go ahead and we'll go back to our Box and we're going to click up here to go back to Solid View and that's how we can go about editing our model. Now, we have a different section where we'll cover more modeling. For now, I'm just going to switch back to Object Mode and start covering the rest of the program. But one last thing I want to mention is that, at the top, if you press "1, 2, 3", you will cycle through these. If you look up here, you can see that we can click those and as we press "1, 2, 3" it changes between those modes. That's how you can go about editing those if you want. Also, up here, you have all these different options to edit. Over here, you have your tools. We'll cover a bit more of that in the future as we dive into modeling. Switching back here to Object Mode. Down here, you can see we have the timeline and this is where we can play and we can insert keyframes and edit those here and then we can go over to our Animation tab and work with the Dope Sheet or a Graph Editor to refine those animations. However, animations are a bit advanced for this course. If you'd like, you can look at my scene. The final scene is animated and you can go ahead and dig through there and see how I set my keyframes and things. Likewise, I've also done a couple of simple animation tutorials on my YouTube channel on how to animate a frog and a couple of other small aspects from this scene. If you're looking to dive into animation, I cover the techniques a bit in there. However, they're a bit advanced for this course. We'll be focusing in on modeling and texturing and all those and that'll take us quite a bit of time. But one last thing I want to cover are the Render settings over here. Over here, we have all of our tabs here where we can get to different properties for our object. Then up here, we have what's called the Outliner. The Outliner is almost like a layer system if you're familiar with Photoshop. You can see here that I have two collections. I have one for my a Camera or I can turn that off. One for my collection here, which just has my head in it right now, and you can create multiple collections up here and you can see that you have the little, new collection button. You can go ahead select things up here, deselect things, delete things, copy things, paste things. You can go ahead and do all of that up here. Down here is our Properties panel and if you're familiar with any Adobe application, you're familiar with a context-sensitive Properties panel that pops up over here. If we come over here, we have various options and let's go ahead and look at some of these. Here, we have our Render Settings, which controls our Render Engine and the settings there. That can get very complicated. We're going to go through a little bit of that towards the end of this course. Down here, we have some other options for output and dimensions. Here's where you will set the resolution of your rendered image. Depending on your computer, you may want to set that resolution to lower to save on Render time and output here where you can choose the format and where to save. We'll cover that at the end of this project so you know how to render out your image. This gets complicated. This is where you can do various passes and things like denoising. This is good for compositing. Here, we have our Scene properties, we won't be touching any of this. This is more when you're doing simulations. Down here, we have our World settings and this can play a role in your lighting. Again, we won't be changing much of these. Here, we have the Object properties. This is where you can deal with your relationships if you have an object parented to another object, meaning, you wanted to follow another objects and other various options like Visibility and things that can get a bit complicated. This little wrench, which is the Modifier panel, and we can add modifiers to our objects, which are almost like 3D effects if that's an easy way to think of it. For example, if we go ahead and we add a subdivision surface, you can see that it's subdividing our surface and adding more geometry there to our object and these are live, so you can go ahead and turn them off, delete them, and change settings. Those aren't permanent until you hit "Apply". Down here, we have Particle tabs, which again, is more complex, but if you're interested in learning particles, I do have some tutorials on that as well. Here's the Physics tab, which we won't be covering in this course. Down here, we have Object Constraint. This is great when you're doing rigs and things like that for animation. Down here, we have our Mesh properties. We can change Vertex groups, Shape Keys, and things like that. I cover how to do Shape Keys and my little frog animation tutorial on YouTube. Down here, we had the Material tab, which is where we can add new materials to our object and assign those. Then down here, we have Texture properties. Now, the tabs we'll be using, we'll using the Render Engine tabs, we'll be using the Scene dimensions tab, and we'll be using the Modifiers, and we'll be using the material properties. That's all you need to focus on as a beginner, but there's a high level overview if you're interested in peaking at some of the other options there. Let's go ahead and get our Render Engine set up so that as we're starting the course, we can use that. We'll be using a Render Engine called EV, which is a real time Render Engine and operate similar to a Game Engine, meaning that it can render in real-time and it may not have as realistic of results, but it is great for things like we're doing with illustration and very fast to render and we'll be able to view it here in the Viewport. Here, we can click "Render Engine". I can go ahead and click "EV" and you can see there that it changes all of our settings there. That's all you need to do for now in terms of the Render Engine. We'll cover these settings towards the end of the course. Then here, under Dimensions, let's go ahead and pick whatever resolution you want to use. I'm going to be using 1080 by 1080 because I want a square image for Instagram. I'm going to be leaving mine there at what I have set to the default settings there, and that will automatically change your camera to whatever that resolution is. With that, we're set to get started working on our character in this course. As I mentioned, if at any point you find this overwhelming, feel free to go ahead and look at the resources and go into a deeper dive on how to use the program. But I'll do my best to go slowly so that you can follow along. 3. Illustration: This isn't an entirely illustration focus course, but I would love to walk you through the thought process of my characters in hopes that you can learn a bit from my process. I've linked to one of my favorite illustration courses in the resources for this class, if you'd like to check that out. You're also welcome to use my illustration files, which are included with the course project files as well. Feel free to follow along with any software or medium of your own choice. I'll be using Adobe Photoshop for my drawing because that's what I'm most comfortable in. Use whatever method or drawing works best for you. The only thing you will need is to make sure you have a JPEG or PNG of your drawing to use as a reference and blender when we model. Let's walk through a bit of my thought process here. First, let's talk a bit about the technical side of things. I wanted to design a character easier to model for beginners. I encourage you to do the same if this is your first time. I also chose to draw my character from a front view so that I can use it as a reference later when modeling. You don't need to do this, but I do recommend you sketch a front version of your character. If they're not facing forward in your drawing, it will make the modeling process a lot easier if you're new to 3D. As I mentioned before, I wanted to keep the character simple to make it easier for beginners to follow along in the process. You'll notice that I'm using a lot of basic shapes like triangles and circles on my character here. That's because using these simple shapes will make it easier to model, because we can start with basic shapes that are already close to our character shape in our 3D application. Despite being simpler, proportions are still a big focus for me in this illustration. I'm measuring out my character's proportions by using her head as a reference. I'm aiming to make her around 5-5.5 heads tall and trying to make her arm span 5-5.5 heads wide. Paying attention to some of the basic rules will help ground our character in reality despite being more abstract or simple. Our brains love relationships and shapes. We naturally gravitate towards healthy balances of similarities and contrast. Adding variety to the relationships of shapes in your illustration is key to creating an appealing illustration. For example, I wanted to create straight lines with the shape of the raincoat and a triangle to contrast her head, which is circular on top. This contrast in shape and curvature is an excellent example of contrast, whereas her round hands are a great example of sharing similarities. I'm also paying attention to my size relationships as well. For example, I made sure to make her hands one-fourth the size of her head, and the bottom of a raincoat about twice as large as her head. Working in these kind of fourth and half increments provide easy to process shifts in size that are appealing to the eye, and ensures we get a balanced amount of contrast and it's also easy to process for the viewer. I chose a very simple pose to make it easier for the model for beginners, but I still wanted to be mindful of my illustration profile. Your profile is the silhouette of your character and you want to make sure that your character has a recognizable silhouette. Meaning that if you colored your character all in one color, you'd still be able to recognize them from their silhouette. Sonic and Mario are great examples. Now the silhouette here is pretty bland because it's just a very simple front view of our character. This can be remedied by a bit of rotating our character, and once you've made them in 3D to find a better and more readable angle. However, for the sake of the illustration, I gave her this umbrella to create a little bit more of a dynamic silhouette. I also rotated it at a 45-degree angle to add some angle contrast because everything on the character so far has been pretty vertical. Color contrast is also vital to your illustration's appeal and readability as well. The lighting and shading in this illustration are pretty simple, so to make the character pop off the background more, I chose to use all warm colors for my character and all cool characters for my background assets. This makes the color scheme more complimentary as well, which can help add cohesion to your illustrations and strengthen their color palettes. Skillshare has a lot of great courses on color theory if you're looking to learn more color relationships on the color wheel. Lastly, I want to talk a bit about the composition of the project. I chose to use more of a triangular composition as I felt that that would get the background assets some nice appeal and strengthen the focus of the character. You can see here in this final image how the layout represents more of a triangular shape than its focus. At this point, I'd really encourage you to pause this course and upload your illustrations so that other students can see what you're working on and comment along the way. I'll do my best to pay attention to what you're uploading and comment on what I see. 4. Side Reference: Having a front and side reference of our character will make it much easier to model our character later. I encourage you to draw your character from both angles. In my example, my side sketch is an ultra simple because it's just a reference, not a final illustration. Feel free to download my references to use, to follow along, if you don't make your own. The more angles you have here, the easier it's going to be to model your character in 3D if this is your first time. So if you're more comfortable with sketching, I recommend doing a couple of angles. You could do front, back, side, top, or bottom. Now doing any kind of other angles, like a 45-degree angle, I don't really find it be very helpful in the modeling process, which will make more sense when we start modeling. 5. Illustration Assets: This can be a difficult process to plan ahead and see what you need, when it's your first time in 3D. So I'm going to walk you through what we're going to be creating and how we'll be using it first. Hopefully, this will help you decide what you need to do to follow along with your own illustrations. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking some of our illustrations and putting them on a plane in 3D and converting them to 3D planes by just bending and warping those planes for certain objects that don't necessarily need a lot of depth. This can help translate our illustration into 3D Rom simply with the textures, and it's also an easy way to model or cheat and get some quick to render scenes. Video games use this method a lot, and I'll walk you through the different assets we're going to do this through with our illustration to hopefully give you an idea of what things might work or not work from your own. That being said, let's start focusing on the different assets. First up with the plant leaves, we're going to be cutting them out almost like a piece of paper. So I recommend drawing them all flat here and we'll cut them out later and bend them to give them some dimension later in the course. With the rain, we're going to create a simple rain, and we'll just paint the rain on an empty layer here. We want this to have no background and will be using it in layers to create rain in our scene when placed in front of the camera. You can see an example here. For the raindrops, we'll be cutting these little raindrops out like we do the leaves and bending them and placing them around to give the illusion of ground underneath our character here. If your illustration actually has a foreground illustration, you can go ahead and just animate a top-down view. For the raindrops we'll be cutting these little raindrops out like we do the leaves and bending them and placing them around the scene to give the illusion of a ground underneath our character. Now if your illustration has a fully illustrated ground, you can go ahead and illustrate your ground here and I recommend doing that from a top view, and then you can paint that into your scene and we can then move the model around and bend it a bit to give the illusion of a ground under your character. For the rain splashes, we'll be doing the same thing as the raindrop and the plant leaves. So we're going to be placing these around a scene to sell the illusion of rain hitting objects. Again, I'm going to paint these all out. Now it's important to know that we can cut these out in any way. But if you want to do it very simply and easily, you can actually put these in a grid-like pattern and that'll make it easier to cut out and divide them later. I'll be showing you methods of how to do both. For the mushroom textures we'll be projecting this onto the umbrella top to create a mushroom style texture for our umbrella. I went ahead and made mine seamlessly tileable, in case I wanted to change the size of the umbrella later. This isn't necessary and if you don't know how to do that, don't worry, you can just go ahead and paint your texture. I also have a YouTube tutorial that I can link to on how to make tileable textures in a couple of different ways, that might be helpful if that's something that you're curious about. I'll link that in the resources. 6. Gradient Color Palette: Let's take a look at the color palette we'll be using at the texture parts of our scene. I sampled various colors for my image and I created this color palette here of gradients. We're going to use these to texture our character with a cool method used by a lot of independent games. I put all the colors I [inaudible] into this palette and left some open slots in case I wanted to add more colors later. You can save over the file and it will update Blender next time you close and reopen the project file. You can always change your colors later if you don't like the ones you choose at first. We'll be using the color palette to color our characters with a unique form of projection mapping, which I'll explain how to do later in this course. If you want to skip and come back to this step after that video, feel free to do so. But I like to plan out my scene with colors before starting, and I like to add and adjust them later if needed. Here's an example of how we'll be doing that. That might help you wrap your head around how you may want to choose your color palette. But again, feel free to return back later and create your color palette at a different time if you'd like to move forward with the course currently. 7. Modeling Basics: We're going to take a minute to go through some of the modeling tools and blender to get you a little bit used to the modeling work flow before we hop into modeling. Now this is by no means a deep dive into modeling. We're just going to cover some of the basics that we'll be using. Throughout the rest of the course, we'll actually be going through some of these techniques as well and hopefully you are able to learn more through that process. Right now, as we've discussed, you can grab your objects and you can move them around. That is because we are in object mode and we are grabbing this object, which you can see up here. Now, let's say that we wanted to take this cube and instead of just scaling it one way or the other or rotating it, we wanted to take this point and move it out that way. You'd see that there really is no way to do that right now, but what we had to do to actually edit our objects not just scale, rotate, or move them, we need to enter edit mode. We can go into edit mode up here. If you'd like to use that, or if you've done the tab menu for me, you can hold the tab here and switch to edit mode. Whatever objects you have selected will now open in edit mode, meaning there'll be editable. Let me show you an example that if you have multiple objects, we can go ahead. I'm going to duplicate this one. You can hit "Shift D" to duplicate, that's the shortcut for that. Let's go ahead and edit this one here, and you'll see that we can only select this cube, we can't select this cube. You see here that we have two objects. If I go ahead and grab both these objects and go to edit mode, you can see that it can edit both of these objects that I can then go ahead and select everything on both of these objects. I'm just going to de-select, they'll go back out to object mode and we can grab our objects here individually. I feel like for beginners starting blunder, the idea of object mode in edit mode can be difficult to graphs. Now if you're familiar with After Effects, you can almost think of an object like a car or if you use Adobe animate, you can think of it as a motion symbol and you can enter inside of that and edit. You can have, if we go in here to edit mode, this is a mesh because it's a singular object inside of the object. So it's a mesh inside of the object and it is a cube mesh. We can do all edits to this cube. Let me just go ahead and grab. Let's add a couple of faces there. Then I'll just extrude this up and I'll show you how to do these things later. You can see that now we've created a different mesh inside of here, we've done a lot of edits to our mesh and then we come back out to object mode, you can see it's an object, but we can also add, and if I come back here into edit mode, we can also add multiple meshes within sight and objects. I could go ahead and I could add a UV sphere. We can't see it right now because I'm in solved view, but if I switch over to wireframe view, which I'm using the Z key. Again, you can do that up here yourself. I can go ahead and grab this, move this over here, and switch back out the object mode, and I can see that now both of these are in the object and I can rotate them together and scale them together. That's because all these meshes are inside of an object. So that's how that works. You can think of an object as a container that holds meshes. Sometimes, you're going to want certain things and objects and you may not want to put all of your character mesh inside of one object. For example, you may want the head to be separate from the body so that you can animate them differently. That's more of advanced techniques, but that's the basics of the edit mode and object mode. I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to delete this here. I'm going to take this cube and delete this cube. I'm going to hit "Shift" here. I'm going to add a new cube, which is just going to give us a cube there at the default position. It's worth noting that the mesh by default will span wherever this cursor is. If you have your cursor over here and you do shift add, and we go ahead and add a cube there, you see that it spans where the cursor is on the objects origin point, which is the point and will rotate and scale around. You can tell where the origin point is by that little dot right there, you can see that it added over here. If at any point in the course, you find that you've accidentally or purposely move to your 3D cursor and you're trying to get it back to the center, you can actually just purse shift C and that will reset that. If you ever find you want to get your cursor back to the center, that's how you do that, shift C, That's the one you're going to be using quite often. Let's come back here. We're going to grab this cube, and we're going to go into edit mode, and we're going to look at the different ways we can edit our meshes because this is how we're going to model our character. Now if you look over here on the left, you see that we have quite a bit of tools and we're only going to cover a few of these tools that are important. Then over here, we can see we have a couple of options here as well, like the position of the 3D cursor, which is another way you can zero it out by entering numbers there and some various options here. Here's an add on I have enabled, which will show up there. For the most part, you'll be using tools from over here. First of all, let's talk about selection modes, and then we'll go into how to use some of those tools. We have three different types of selection modes when we're trying to edit a mesh. So up here, you can change that mode by clicking here, which is vertex select, edge select, and face select, and you'll see that it looks a little different there. If I go ahead and grab vertex select, which is where any face meets at a point there, and we grab that vertex, I'm just going to use the GQ. We can go ahead and move that around and edit our mesh anywhere in 3D space there. Then we can switch over to edge view, which is where two faces meet at an edge. Go ahead, grab an edge there, and we can go ahead and move that around in 3D space as well. Then lastly, we have face mode, and you can go ahead and grab that face there, and you can move that around. I'm just using the G key, but remember, you have these gizmos here. You can go ahead and use those gizmos with all of these as well. I'm just going to go ahead and undo that. Those are the three main selection nodes that we will be using. If I tap A, I'll de-select everything, if you have the same settings as me that we went through at the beginning. One way we can change modes if you want to use a keyboard shortcut is 1, 2, 3, and you can see that up there, it is switching as I press 1, 2, and 3 down here. That's a quick way to switch between the different modes. For now, let's go ahead and we have our tools over here. Now in this course, the main tools we're going to be using are the knife tool and the extrude region tool. Then we'll also be using the loop cut tool. Now, if you use it over here, you'll get a few extra gizmos, which can be useful and sometimes also a bit more difficult. You can see that as I'm clicking around here with the loop cut tool, what it's doing is drawing a loop around the object and the center point of whatever point I'm clicking over. If I click over here, you can see now it's creating a loop between those two center points. That gives our mesh more data so that we can then move those points around more. You can think of it almost like a piece of clay, and it's almost like we're making the clay more malleable so that we can better edit our mesh. You can see that if I go ahead and do that, now our cube has a lot more vertices. If I go up here to our gizmo mode and I go to vertices, you can see that now we have a lot more control over editing our mesh there. I'm going to go ahead and undo all of that. We also have the extrude region tool. So if we go ahead and grab a region, let's go ahead and grab this here. I'm going to grab those four faces. I'm going to hit "Extrude Region," and you can see we get this little icon where we can drag it up. We can also drag it down, and that's just going to extrude our geometry there. Then lastly we have the knife cut tool, which we'll be using later when we're doing our illustration assets. The knife cut tool lets you cut anywhere. When you start dragging around, you can just click and drag anywhere on your mesh there, and when you hit "Enter," it will enter all of those points and try and add that to the mesh, to the best of its ability. Here I did some really ugly geometry, which can be difficult for the computer to calculate. Now in general when you're editing, you want to keep everything a triangle or a quad, meaning that it has four sides, and that will make that when you're rendering or animating things will be easier to edit. So that's what you may hear me refer to as topology, which is the placement of these faces on your object and then generally you want mostly quads and you want to try and keep them about even size if you can. Again that's a deep dive, but just in case you hear some of the terminology, that's what I'm talking about there. Now when I use the knife tool, you'll notice that when I click here a bunch of options push up there in the bottom. You can see that we have angle constraint and cut through. For example, if we turn on angles or constraint and cut through and we drag across, it will lock us into an angle there, and then when we click and hit "Enter" and look on the other side, we'll see that it cut through our object. The other thing I want to talk about is that when we're in edit mode, so let's go ahead, I'm going to press one to switch to vertices, and I'm going to come back up here and I'm going to grab the box select tool. Now here we have the various options. We can work in all of these options in edit mode as well. Generally you're not going to want to work in rendered view because it may be a bit too slow when you're editing, but if we come back here we have our solid view, and if I take box select and I grab here, you can see it grabs a couple vertices there, and if we come around, it hasn't grabbed anything on the other side. I'm going to hit "Control Z" to undo that, and if I come here to wireframe view, you can see that we can see through our object, and then if we go ahead and click there and drag across, now I'm going to switch back to solid view. You can see that it's selected all the way through. We'll be switching between solid view and wireframe view quite a bit so that we can sometimes select entire portions of our object. Now there is a toggle up here for wireframe view right here called toggle x-ray, and if we turn that off, it will behave similar to how solid view does. We'll still be able to see our wireframe, but we'll have x-ray off. I just want to make sure that you're aware of that toggle because sometimes that can get bumped off and then people have a hard time selecting through their object. The last thing is let's talk about the selection tool. You saw here that I have a box select, and in general, when I'm working, I leave my selection on box select there, and then I switch between my gizmos or I just use the keyboard shortcuts. There I'm holding G and moving around and I'll use the box select to grab there. With the box select you don't have to click and drag to use a box, you can also just click "Singular Points," and then just like you're using Windows or Mac, if you hold "Shift," you can go around and select multiple points there because I selected these four corners, you can see that it selected an entire face by default. So you can go around, shift click there as you would, and that's how you can go around doing that. Then you can click those again. I'm just holding on "Shift" and clicking those again to remove the selection. Now another type of selection that I like to use a lot is called circle selection. If you'd see here there is a select circle there. But I actually find it better to use the version if you press "C." If we press "C," this gives us a circle and by scrolling in and out of my middle mouse wheel, I can adjust the size of that and you can see anything within that circle will select. The reason I prefer using it when I press "C" is because when you press "C" and you're using this version as opposed to the version up here for whatever reason does not do this, if you middle click, you can actually deselect everything in the circle, and that can be really nice when you're trying to select complex pieces of your model and you accidentally grab pieces you don't want, you can just go ahead and get rid of things like that. That covers the basics of model editing. Now as we get into the character, inevitably new things will come up and we'll cover those but this is the crash course to get you started. One more thing I want to mention is that just like in object view we can delete vertices, edges and faces in here, which all have slightly different behavior. I'm going to go ahead and grab this vertice, and you can just delete that. When you press "Delete" you'll notice that you get these options. The two options you want to focus on are you have vertices, edges and faces and whichever one you want to delete there, and then down here you have dissolve vertices, edges and faces. The difference being that if I delete this vertice, you'll see that it just removes it from the object completely, and because that's been removed, the connections all around here have been removed. Because they needed that vertice to connect to one another. If I go ahead and undo that and I hit "X", do dissolve vertices, you will see that it is trying to get rid of that vertice and maintain its geometry. In this example here, you can see that it's doing it poorly because it didn't really have enough geometry there to work with so if I go ahead and delete this, I'm going to add a UV sphere showing an example, something that might do it a bit better. Here we have a lot more vertices to work with and there's a lot more things to hold the structure of the object. So if I go ahead, grab this vertice and dissolve that vertice, you can see how it's trying to maintain the structure there without ruining the mesh. Likewise we can do that with edges and faces. If I go ahead and I grab this entire edge loop here, which I just did by alt, shift, clicking that edge loop and I try to select the edge loop as much as I could, which just allows you to select an entire edge loop on a mesh which can be useful. We'll probably use that some in the modeling of our character. If we go ahead and I tap "Delete" and those options pop up, and I dissolve edges. You can see that it gets rid of that edge loop. That's the difference between dissolving and deleting. Again here's another example. If we just go ahead and delete that edge, you can see how it's leaving a gap and not closing that. Now another important thing to note is that it's based off the structure of the object. Here you can see that we deleted the edge loop, but it didn't get rid of all these edge loops, because these edge loops here can be completed without that edge loop there because they still have a vertice there. If we go ahead and delete that vertice, you can see that now there is no connection there. I just wanted to explain some of the deletion process there as we may be using that throughout the modeling of our character. 8. Setting Up Reference Images: Here we are with our default new scene open. By default, you should have a camera and a cube present. What we're going to do is with our box selected up here, we're going to click and drag a cross there. Then we're just going to hit "Delete" and get rid of those. Now by default, I have a camera collection here. You should only have one collection set here. But I'm going to go ahead, and if you have more than one, I'm going to delete that collection. Then here, we'll have this collection. If we double-click that, we can name this character. Then we'll keep that selected, and that'll just help organize our scene. It's also worth noting that over here we have an eyeball. By clicking then eyeball on an off, we'll be able to turn off everything inside of their viewport. If I go ahead here and I add a cube, and I drag it up here into my character collection, and I go ahead and turn that on and off, you can see that hides that cube, but it works just like a Photoshop player. Let's go ahead, and I'm going to delete that. First, before starting, we're going to enable some add-ons. Add-ons and blender are plugins, and it comes packaged with a bunch, but they're all turned off. The reason being that they want blender to open up quickly, and if you turn them all on, blender would have to load every single one when turning on. By default, they turn them off so that you can just enable the ones you need. We'll go to Edit, Preferences, Add-ons. Then up here we can search, and we're going to turn on three different add-ons. First, we're going to turn on Import Images as Planes. If we type in Import, we'll see there are a couple pop-up here. You just want to make sure that Import-Export: Import Images as Planes is selected. On the next one we're going to do is type in extra, and you'll see that we have extra objects, mesh, and curve here. We're going to make sure that mesh is turned on because we'll be using that one in this course. Lastly, the one we're going to turn on, which is one that you'll want on all the time because it saves a ton of time, is Node Wrangler. Type in node up here, and turn on Node Wrangler. Later, when we go to texture and add some shading to our objects, that will go ahead and make that process a bit easier for us. Now if it doesn't save, you can come down here and click "Save Preferences", but by default, auto save should be on, so you should just be able to click out. With that, we are ready to begin modeling our character. The great thing is, that we have those references of our character that we can drag into our scene here. Here I have the Explorer window open, and you can download these in the project files. We are going to be using Side-Ref and Woman-Raincoat. Woman-Raincoat is the illustration where I painted her from a front view, and side reference is the reference I created to make it a little bit easier to model her from the side. Let's go ahead select these two and drag these into the viewport here. You can see that that automatically created an empty, and in this case, you can see that wherever you dragged it, it will put it in that viewport. If I go ahead here, and I open that back up, and I drag over our side reference, we can see that now those are floating around in space at whatever angle we drag them in, which is not what we want. Now if you remember, I mentioned about having the cursor here at the center. When you click this, you can see the origin point there. If I go ahead and I select both of these, so I have this one, and if I Shift-click this one, it will select both. We can tell those to snap to the cursor, and there's a cool shortcut for that called Shift S. Now remember, if you don't want to remember all the shortcuts, as I've mentioned before, you can tap Spacebar and search any one of these functions. In this case, we would want to do selection to cursor up here. What that's going to do is take our selections here and snap it to the cursor based on their origin point. If I click that one, it will drag us there. We can see that they're still rotating around in space. Now if you remember before, I showed you a keyboard shortcut that allowed you to press Alt and then R, G, and S, and that would reset all of those properties. Another way that might be a bit more beginner-friendly, is if you come up here by pressing N or going to view, and showing your sidebar to get this information here, and then you click the Item tab, you can click the Object, and we can see here that the rotation is all out of whack. We can just go ahead there and type in zero into all of those, and we'll see that it snaps down there. Again, we can type in zero to all of these, and see that now both of our images are snapped into place there. But of course, we want these to be facing frontwards. If we go to our front view, Viewport, Front. From now on in the course, I'm going to be using the number pad to switch between those, which I mentioned in the keyboard shortcuts before. They'll also be displayed down here. If you have a hard time finding out what view I am looking at because I may switch quickly a couple of times, you can look up here and it will tell you what view we are in. Here we are on Front Orthographic. You can also look at the gizmo up here and use that gizmo to switch around. Here I am in the front view, and we want those to rotate so that when we look at our character in the front, we are able to view our character from the front there. If we can rotate these up here by entering numbers, or we can use the gizmo. Let's go ahead and use the gizmo. We're going to switch to a side view. I'm going to click here, and the shortcut is number 3. We'll go ahead there. We're going to box select to grab both of these. Here in the side view, what we're going to do is we're going to grab the red here, which will rotate it on the x-axis. Now if we hold Shift, it will slow that down so that we can get more precise. Or if we hold Control, you see that it opens all these little tics, and we can make sure that we rotate that right onto 90 degrees, which is what we want to do. But now we can only see our front view, so we need to make sure that we grab our side view as well. We drop our side view in second, and we can see here that it has shown up as empty 0.001. Now when we click that one, we can see here that we have our gizmo for that. Now we're going to switch to the top view, so I'm just going to click up here. We want to rotate on the Z here, 90 degrees. We're going to click that blue one, and then we're going to rotate that by holding down Control so you get 90 degrees. If we come down here, we can see that now we have a side view of our character intersecting with a front view of our character. Now you can see that when we switch from our side view to our front view, that we can go ahead and model from the front and the side with that as a reference. Let's do a little bit of organization up here. As I mentioned before, we can click this button to do a little scene collections. Let's call this Ref for reference. Let's go ahead. This is our front view, so let's type Front Ref, and then we'll type Side Ref here. Now because we drag these images into the viewpoint and they have these little picture options right here, we know that these objects won't render. But by putting them here in the reference, we don't need to worry about them rendering, but we can go ahead and we can turn this on and off so that as we're working, we may not want them in the way as we are working at times. So we can turn them off easily that way. Another thing is they're completely opaque. If I go ahead and I do Shift A and add a cube here, we can see that we can't see through it, so it's not very helpful as a reference. What we're going to do is we're going to grab these images, and we're going to come down here to the object data properties. It looks like a little photo because this is a photo object. Then here, we have the options of depth, which is default, front, and back. We're going to go ahead and leave it at default. But we're going to come down here to transparency, and we're going to click this on. Then here, one is fully opaque and this is fully see-through. We want it at a really low number. I tend to want mine around like 0.15 or 0.25 so that I can't see it very well, but it can still see it a little bit because I don't want it distracting my view too much. I'm going to go ahead and do that for the front view as well. I'm going to do 0.25. The front view has a lot of color, so I find it a bit harder to see through, so I'm going to do 0.15. I'm going to delete the cube so we can see that a bit better. We can see here that now we're able to see through. If we add the cube back by just hitting "Control Z", we can see that we're able to look and still see our cube on the other side of the image. But we'll notice that because the depth is set to default, it's being hidden by the cube, which we want it in front of the cube the whole time because we are using it as a reference. Click your object, make sure you're under the object data properties. Down here where it says depth, you can go ahead and do front, and that will keep it always in front of whatever object is there. We'll go ahead do that here for our front view as well. Now as we rotate around our object for editing, we'll be able to see our reference image no matter what, which is why it's useful to be able to turn it on and off because it makes it pretty obtrusive in the view. Now I'm going to go ahead and delete my cube here. Now there's one more thing that might cause in issues. We want to select our object, and if these are constantly in the way, we won't be able to select. What we're going to do is come up here and we have the option to turn on filter. By default, it only shows the eyeball, but we have all these options that turn on these others. This little picture camera right here will disable it so that things don't appear in the render. As I said, these are photo objects, so they won't appear in the render anyways, we don't need to worry about that. But that can be useful when you want things in your scene, but you don't want them to show up in the render, so reference objects or other things. But if we come over here, we have the selectable options. Let's go ahead and toggle that on. You'll see that now we have the option to turn on the selectability. If we do this, it will toggle off selectability for all objects within that collection, which means that we can't select our reference image anymore, making it pretty useful. Now that we can go ahead and model with our images, have them in the viewport, but not necessarily have them obstructing our selection. I'm going to press "Numpad 1", and remember, you can follow along with this or your views up here if you do not have a number pad. But I'm going to use the numpad for speed. I'm going to do numpad 1, which will take us to the front view. We're going to go ahead and move our objects here. One last step before we add our objects is we'll turn selectability back on. Up here, we can grab both of these and select those there. We want to grab the front reference there. Right now, it looks like the character is slightly off-center. Now I didn't do my character perfectly symmetrical, which is fine. But I'm going to hit the Gizmo up here, and I'm going to move on just ever so slightly on the X so that it looks like their face is a little more down in the center. That'll just make it a little easier to model. Off of this reference, I'm going to go ahead and turn off selectability. 9. Modeling the Head: I want my objects that I add to appear in the character one because we want them to be selectable, and if they're adding to reference, it won't be selectable. So I'm going to make sure I have my character selection up here, selected when I add, and by hitting Shift A, we have options to add different meshes. Now, if we go up here to Mesh, because we enabled extra meshes, we will have all these various options here. We're going to be using this round cube quite a bit. Let's come down here and click "Round Cube", and you'll see that it gives us a cube with rounded edges, and down here, we have the option to tweak all the settings here. Some of these may look a bit intimidating if this is your first time using it, but really the ones we're going to be focusing on are this arc here, which is how many faces and polygons it will have and the operator presets up here. Those are really the only ones you need to worry about right now, but feel free to play with these if you like. I'm going to go ahead, click "Operator Presets", I'm going to come down here to a Quadsphere, and I want my character to actually be a little poly just for stylistic look. I'm going for an Indian game look. Right now we have eight subdivisions, and I'm going to go ahead drop that down to four, and with that, I have created my first cube. Now I'm going to grab this, and we can move this up. We're going to center this up on the character's face here, and then we can go ahead and scale that down, so it's about the size of the character's head there and the image. So you can use the Scale Gizmo if you want right here, and you can just click in that little circle and draw that way. I find the Scale Gizmo to be a little bit more difficult to work with than the Rotation or the Movement Gizmo, so I'm just going to press S on my keyboard, and then that allows me to drag my mouse back and forth there to get it right where I want it precisely, and then if I left-click, it will leave it there. Now we can see here that our piece is looking a little bit ugly there with all the faces being visible. If we right-click that and we do Change Smooth, you'll see that it'll smooth out that object. We still have that low poly look there, but we have a smoother look, which is probably what you want to go for unless if you want all the faces to be visible. Let's go ahead, press 1 on the notepad key again to get us back into our view port there, and we need to keep organized. We're going to call this one head, and then we're going to hit Shift D with this head selected, and what that's going to do, is create another head there which you see pop up there, and we will call this one Face, and then again, I'm going to press S, and we should be able to see that outline there. I'm going to scale that down to about the size of the face there. Now, if we go into side view, we'll see that it is completely inside of the cube. Let's go ahead and start adjusting our objects for this side view. If we come down here and click "Head", and we use our Move Gizmo up here, we can move that back on the little green arrow right there. I want to be able to see both my objects. What I'm actually going to do is click the wireframe up here, and now I can click through and see both objects. I'm going to bring my head back just a little bit, and I really just want my head to be this portion right here of the rain coat, and I want my face to really take up this portion. I'm going to bring my face forward a little bit, and then I'm going to grab the Scale Gizmo, and I find that the Scale Gizmo works really well when doing individual accesses, I really only have troubles with it here in the center, it gets just a bit wonky sometimes. But I'm going to go ahead, scale this up here on the Z a bit, and then I'm going to scale that in on the Y, because I just want to flatten their face a little bit. We don't want a complete circle for their head, at least in this case, and then I'm going to go ahead, grab the Move Gizmo, and move that forward a little bit. Now here, with this head, we're going to need to adjust it a bit to flatten out there. With the head selected, make sure it's the head not the face, we're going to tab into edit mode, and remember, you can change those modes up there too if you don't want to use tab, and now you can see that we have everything selected by default. I'm going to press A or click "Off" to the side to deselect everything, and then I'm going to box select, and you want to make sure you're on wireframe view so that you can see through here and grab both sides, and I'm going to grab everything here, then I'm going to turn on my Scale Gizmo, and I'm going to scale that in on the X and we're going to flatten that out quite a bit. I'm going to grab Move, and I'm going to pull that back ever so slightly, and we're really just trying to get that to match the line there. Now, I'm going to click "Off" so everything is deselected, and I'm going to switch back to Object Mode. I'm going to switch back to Solid View, and then I'm going to go back to the Front View by pressing 1. We can see here, let me turn off the reference here, we can see here that now our face is a little too tall or squished horizontally there, and we don't want that. That's why I think it's so important to constantly be switching back and forth between your front and your side views and other views, because when you're drawing its so easy because you're drawing from one perspective that you always know what it looks like from that perspective and you're trying to imagine the rest of the perspective. Well, in 3D, you have to account for the fact that that perspective exists and that you might want to rotate around your character. Let's go ahead here, grab the scale, and we're just going to go ahead and move that out a bit, and we'll turn back on our references, and we can see that our head has gotten a bit bigger, so I'm going to press S, scale that in there, and the reason that got bigger is because we brought it closer to the viewport there. Now if we rotate around, we can see now we have a little low poly phase poking out here. Let's go to our side view, and I go to the side of you by pressing 3 on the right orthographic, and again, you can use this to rotate, and I won't remind you of that, of the whole course, because I know that would be annoying, but at least for this first video, I want to keep people in touch with what I'm doing. We're going to select our head here. We're going to tab over into edit mode, and what we can do is start grabbing objects to move them up there. But you can see that we have a lot of points even with a low poly character, and then it might be a lot of work to start moving all of these individually, and that, if you try and move them all individually, you might start to warp or distort things. What we can use is this proportional editing tool. Let's go ahead, click this button up here, and the shortcut is O, if you'd prefer to use out. Let's go ahead and click this. We're going to switch over to wireframe view, and remember you can do that by pressing Z, or clicking up here, and then I'm going to make sure I box select here. I'm going to grab these two points here, and then I'm going to press G, because this is a bit easier to use if you use the shortcuts. By pressing G, it will grab that object and let me move that around, and you'll see that the circle appears here, and let's drag this way out, and the closer I put in that circle, the less that is affected. This is called the sphere of influence, which is part of proportional editing, and as I use my mouse wheel to scroll up and down, it will make that larger as the area to effects. I'm going to bump mine up there, until I get a pretty good area of effect there, and we can see that that's helping me stretch all those pieces out and maintain some of that proportion, hence the name proportional editing. Now I can left-click to put that into place, and then I'm going to click out here again, deselect everything. I'm going to box select these here. Again, I'm going to press the G key, drag to get our hood down there, and play the sphere of influence so I'm not dragging things I don't want, and then I'm going to left-click to place there, and then I'm going to deselect, and now we can go back to object mode, and we can switch to solid view, and we can see that we have our character's face and a hood, so we can turn off the reference to get a good view there, and you can see that now we have a little face in the hood there. Let's go ahead and turn our reference off. I'm going to go back to front view, and let's go ahead and add a little nose to our character. Rather than create a new object with selector face, let's go to edit mode here, and let's just duplicate this and turn it into a little nose. Let's hit shift D, and because we're inside our object, it just created another mesh, not another object, so we see that this is still selected within the face objects. If we switch over to wireframe view here, we can see that we have two objects overlapping. Let's go ahead and go to the side view here, but you'll notice that we still have proportional editing on, so if we try and move that now it's going to move all the objects. Go ahead, and I'm going to undo that, I'm going to turn off proportional editing, and now when we move forward it will only move what is selected. I'm going to bring mine here, and then I'm going to press S and scale that nose way down, and you can make that nose as long as you want. I'll turn on the Scale Gizmo here, and I'll just scale that out on the Y there, and I'll grab the Grab Gizmo and just push that out on the Y as well, and then I will deselect that, go back to object mode, rotate around and we can see that now our character has a little nose, so it's starting to actually look like a little person now. I want to add some hair here. I'm just going to do that by adding a bunch of spheres, and I think I'm going to, again, add that in the face objects. I'll go back into Edit mode here, I'm going to switch to front view, so this little button here, and now we can just add another mesh well inside of here. I want the mesh to add up there, whereas right now, that cursor is down here in the center. If we Shift, right-click, that cursor will then snap to whatever object we are looking at. You can see here we had snapped on the front of our forehead. I'm going to go back to front view there, and now if I go to Shift A and I add a round cube, and it should remember the settings we had before, you will see that it adds it with the center point right there wherever we had the cursor. If we grab that and we press X, and we scale down here, then create a smaller sphere, we'll go back up here to our front view. If you want, you can make this lower poly since the hair is so small. But I'm going to go ahead and use the Move Gizmo to start placing this hair on the characters forehead there. Then what I'm going to do is hit Shift D, and start moving this around until it fits where our character's hair is. Right now I'm only paying attention to the front view and making sure I cover up that hood line, and then we're going to switch to the side view and push this hair back and make it look it's popping out a bit. Now I'm going to take the box select and click out of here so that we have everything deselected, and then if we go to the side view here, we can see that our hair is just all in a line, which is not what we want. What we can start doing is grabbing this hair and pulling it back. As I mentioned before, if you hold L over a vertices, it will grab that object, and then we can start moving those back. We can go ahead and move that one back, and then if you tap A, it will deselect all objects. I'll go ahead and select this one, move it back, and again, I'm just pressing L to select those objects, and A to deselect everything. I have my hair in a pretty good place, and I'm happy with how this hair is looking. We're ready to move on to the next step, and we're going to go ahead and model the body. 10. Modeling the Body and Legs: Let's go back to object mode here. I encourage you to save frequently, especially when you're working with 3D, and if you're on a lower-end machine, you might find that it crashes if you have too many polygons in your scene. Let's go ahead and you'll notice now that our fur is flat again, so if we right-click and hit "Shade Smooth," that will go ahead and smooth everything, and that's because it has to calculate the mesh inside of it. So when you go and add a bunch of new meshes, by default, it's going to shade them flat. There you can see we have a bunch of little bubbly hair, and our body, if we turn off reference, we can see our characters starting to come too there. Let's go ahead, turn this Reference back on, and I'm going to press "1" to enter the front view. If you remember, I told you that if you hit Shift C, it will reset your scene and put the cursor back to the center. That is the quickest way to get the cursor back to the center, which we want as we're creating a new object. Again, just to show you a different way to add objects, we'll come up here to "Add," do "Mesh," this might be easier for beginners, and we'll do "Round Cube," and you can see here, that's creating a round cube. Here we're going to start using some more techniques and some of the tools that we mentioned before. I'm going to tab into edit mode here. Now, when we're in edit mode and we move meshes around, you'll see that the origin doesn't move, so if we go ahead here and we move this over, that way, we go back out on into object mode, and when we rotate, because it rotates, and scales, and moves around that origin, you'll see that it's going to rotate the object differently. We'll just go ahead. I'm going to reset that. I just want you to be aware that when we're in edit mode, that changes things. What we're going to do is scale this down until it's the size of this bottom body here. I'm going to press "S," scale that down there. I'm going to grab the "Move Tool" over here and move until I get the center here around the bottom lip, and just scale that until that's about the same size. Now I'm going to press "A" or click off to the side to deselect everything. I'm going to make sure that I'm in Wireframe Mode, and with Box Select selected, what I'm going to do is drag across here and grab that bottom portion. Then I'm going to grab the Scale tool over here and then I'm going to scale way down on the Z. Then I'm going to grab the Move tool and I'm going to move that back up, and what that's going to do is give us our bottom lip of the raincoat there. Now let's just switch to the side view, make sure it matches how we want on the side. Let's go ahead, click over here, and we can see that it doesn't quite match yet, that we're going to want to pull that up, but I think we can adjust that in a second. We'll go back to the front view here. Now what we can do is we'll grab this portion up here, and we will move that to the top up here, and we're going to press "S" and scale that down until we get that to be about the size of the shoulders there, and because I had made the body in a more triangular shape, you can see that that's working along that way. Let's go ahead to the side view here. I'm going to press "3," and I'm going to turn on Proportional Editing up here, and I'm going to drag, select these back view points, and then I'm going to press "G." You can also move that way, but it gets a little bit difficult, I think, to roll in and out, but you can use the gizmo with this if you want. There we can see that now our raincoat is popping out there, and I just deselected there with A. Let's go ahead, grab this top here, move this over a little bit, and we can see here that we have a little bit of a dent in there. What we can do is actually add some edge loops to give us more edges and vertices to work with. We do have the Edge Loop tool over here. I find Control R to be easier and to give you more control, so I'm going to go ahead and hit "Control R." Then when I hover over these different portions, it will give me options to add edge loops there. I'm going to do it here in the center, and then once you click once, you can move up and down, so I'm going to move up here a little bit and add one there. Then I'm going to deselect by clicking out to the side. I'm going to hit "Control R" again, I'm going to add one, and drag it down, and then click here to set there. Now what I'm going to do with proportional editing is still on, I'm going to grab this, I'm going to move this in here a little bit. I'm going to grab this and move this in here a little bit to match. Then I don't really have it in the drawing, but I'm going to give them a little bit of a bump back there for a booty, so I'll go ahead and do that. Then what we can do is we can leave it this way, but in general, you want your topology and your faces to be about the same size, so I'm going to do Control R again. Now, with the mouse wheel, as I go up or down, they will add faces, so by going up once, I'll add some more faces there. That keeps my faces all being even in size, which is what would be considered good topology and is very important if you're looking to do games or animation. Then I'm going to go ahead do the same down here, do "Control R," rotate up, click, and then down here, I think we only need to split this once with Control R, and now our faces have more even topology there, and topology, as I mentioned, is just the flow of the edges and your polygons. Let's go back out here to object mode and we'll see that if we turn off our Reference and go to Solid, that again, that is shaded flat by default. Right-click "Shade Smooth," and there we go, we're starting to get our little character put together. Now, let's go ahead, go back to the front view here, turn back on our Reference, and we're going to make the legs here. Let's go ahead, hit "Shift A," go to "Mesh," add a round cube. Then I want that origin point to be down here towards the bottom of the body, so if we go to Wireframe Mode, we can go ahead, drag that origin point so it's right around there. You'll see why I want to do that in a second. I'm going to go ahead, press "S," scale that down, get that to be about the width of the leg there. I'm going to name this Leg.R, and that just stands for leg right, which technically it's her left leg, but I'm just doing my screen version here. Let's go ahead here, grab our object, tab into edit mode, make sure we're in Wireframe View, make sure Proportional Editing is turned off, and then we're going to drag and select the bottom here. We're just going to move that down over here and shift that over a little bit there. Then I'm going to grab the Scale tool, and I'm just going to bring that in there. Then I'm going to click back to the Move tool. Make sure to just get it at a good spot there and click off to deselect. Now, if you want, you can add some extra edge loops here. Since I'm not planning to animate in this tutorial, it's fine. I'm going to go back to object mode, and now when we rotate our leg, we'll see that it rotates there, which will come in handy in a second. Let's just go back here into edit mode. I just wanted to show you that for a second, and we're going to use the Extrude Tool to make this leg here. First what we'll do is we'll box select here and we're going to do a little bit of an advanced keyboard shortcut here. As I've told you, scale is S, and G is grab, and R is rotate on the keyboard, but we can also do math and the axis as I mentioned before. If I hit "S," "Z," I will now only scale in the Z. Then I can type in numbers here. If I type in zero, it's going to zero those out and give us a flat section there. I'm just going to go back to front view by pressing "1" on the number pad, and then I'm going to press "E," which will do extrude, and that'll automatically go down on our Z there and we can go ahead, take that all the way to the bottom of our foot, and then if we want, we can grab the Scale tool, maybe scale that in a tiny bit on the X just to give her foot a little bit of shape there. We'll click off to the side there to deselect. We'll hit "Control R" to add an edge loop and then we will drag that down here. I'm going to press "A" to deselect everything. Again, you can deselect. There's a million ways to do things. Do whatever way is most comfortable for you. Then we're going to drag and select these. Then again, we're going to press "E," and this time, we're going to press "X," and that will lock up to the x-axis there. We can drag that over to the tip of the foot there. I'm going to click with my left-click to set that, and then I'm going to click again to deselect. Now I'm going to drag this top here, and then I'm going to use the gizmo just to move down a bit there and click the deselect, and you can see we've created a little foot there. Now, we probably want our foot to come to more of a point, so we can go ahead, grab this here, and then what we can do is grab our scale, and we can just scale that in a bit on the Y, which gives us a little bit more of a pointy foot. If you want to get more advanced, you can go through and play with other things. For example, I would probably grab these two points here by clicking one vertex and Shift click on to select the other, and maybe bring those in a little bit to round out the heel, and then click "Off." You can keep playing, adding edge loops and doing whatever to make this as complex as you want. I'm going to go back up here, return to object mode, I'm going to press "1," and then I'm going to zoom back out here with the mouse wheel and just deselect all these objects here. Let's take a look at what we have. We can see that now we have our one-legged character. We're going to right-click "Shade Smooth" there, and you'll see that we have some issues there because our leg doesn't have enough faces or data into it for it to shade smooth properly. So because we're going for a lower pottery look, I'm okay with some sharp edges there. So what we'll do is we'll come down here to the "Object Data Properties" with our leg selected, and this is really useful when you're doing hard-surface objects, and what we're going to do is turn down the Normals. We're going to click "Auto Smooth," and what it's going to do is smooth everything 30 angle and above, which we want a little bit higher than that, so what we're going to do, let's do 45 there, and you'll see that now it smooths out everything and leaves our boot flat, and that gives us a little low poly foot look. Now, if you want, you could extrude the whole bottom of this foot instead of just the little square we did, and you could get a rounder leg, and that would be one way to approach doing this. Let's come back here to front view and I'm going to deselect everything. Take a look at the character, make sure that everything is all in order. I'm going to turn back on the Reference here. We're just going to duplicate this leg rather than model two legs. So let's hit this leg, hit "Shift D," and then we can then move that leg around wherever we want. I'm going to just move that leg over here. Remember if you press the buttons X, Y, or Z, you can lock to the axis. If we press "X," it will lock us onto the x-axis and we can put our leg over there, and we'll see that now our leg is there, but facing the wrong direction. Again, we're going to do a little fancy-ish shortcut here. You could grab this scale here and scale it around that way. But it's hard to get an exact increment, so I'm just going to undo that. What we can do is we could do S, and then type in negative one, and then type in X. What that's going to do is that's going to scale our foot negative one on the x-axis, essentially mirroring it across that way. Now, because we have our origin point up there, we can take the Rotate and we can just rotate our leg until we get it into the position we want because this leg is at a little bit more of an angle. Then we can edit mode there and we'll come down here, turn on Wireframe, grab our foot here, and with the rotation selected, we can rotate that foot back out to flatten it, grab our grab gizmo there, and move that down to match the other foot, maybe move it forward a little bit. Now we can go back to object mode, and with that, we have our character's body and legs ready to go, and we're ready to move on to the arms and the umbrella next. 11. Modeling the Arms: Next up we're going to be modeling the characters arms. Here I am with my object and solid view, I reference turned back on and I am in the front-facing mode. Now the arms are a tiny bit more complicated, so that's why they're in on this section. Instead of that first section, with the overall body. I wanted to take this moment to bring up that I am saving these project files along the way, and they are labeled accordingly. If you do find yourself getting a bit frustrated with part of the course, or unable to follow along, feel free to pause, open my project files, and either view them to maybe help you out, or even to use my own project files so that you can keep following along, and then maybe the second time through, you'll be able to get it yourself. 3D is difficult and it can be difficult for certain people that have a harder time grasping 3D space, and especially if you're in Illustrator usually working in a 2D medium, it might take a while to learn and that's totally okay, and every failure is just another step of success at getting better. Don't get frustrated. Just pause and either restart the video or follow along with my project files if you need to. I want this to be easy for beginners. Let's go ahead here, and we're going to go to a Wireframe mode here, so that we can just see through our object. We're going to add a Round Cube yet again. I'm going to go ahead and grab this and just move this off to the side here. What we're going to do is make a little arm over here. We're going to call this one Arm.R. I'm going to zoom in here and we're going to tap into Edit Mode. Then with everything selected here, we're going to press S and scale way down just to make something about an arm's thickness there. You can go ahead and do that over the image if you want. But in my drawing, her arms are hidden, so it's not as useful. That origin point is still here, going to deselect everything. We're going to grab this, and then if we press E we'll actually just extrude strip down there. That'll make a long little tube which we can use for an arm. You can go ahead and play with the link to that until you get something that you like. Then you'll notice here that we have this edge loop causing us an issue because it's causing this pinch here, which you may want to keep to look like a shoulder. With my character I can add little tube arms, so we can actually select that edge loop. If we switch over to Edge mode, and then from this spot right here, we like one of these spots in between. If we hold Alt, left-click, we'll select that whole edge loop, and then if we press Delete, it'll give us this menu here and we can dissolve edges, and we'll see that that gives us an arm with a nice little a taper. Now we want to create an elbow joint, so what we're going to do is hit Control R, that will automatically center it into the model. But because our top and bottom are a little longer, we might want to move that up to what we think the elbow joint is. Then we're just going to go ahead, hit Control R, drag that down there, hit Control R drag that up there. What that does is give our elbow a little bit of joints so that we can go ahead and move that around there. Let's tab back out to Object Mode. We have Arm.R here, so we're just going to duplicate this, move this off to the side. We'll rename this one Arm.L. Then we'll grab this object and we'll move it over here on the X to our character. I'm just going to go ahead and grab this up here, and because we created the shoulder around that pivot point, we can now rotate our arm around that way. I'm just going to go ahead and scale that down because it looks like, I need the arm a little bit too big. Move that over there. Then I'm going to go back into Edit Mode. Now we're going to switch back to Vertex select. Again, I'm still in wireframe so that we can select through, and what we're going to do is we're going to press C. This gives us this circle select mode that we can make bigger or smaller with our mouse wheel. We're going to go ahead and select all of these there. I prefer using rotate mode, and when I'm in the front view is a lot easier just to hit R and move. But for the sake of beginners, we'll go ahead and use this rotate gizmo. We're going to go ahead, rotate the arm there and use this switch in between our gizmos and move until we get that elbow joint there. Then we're going to go ahead, deselect. We'll grab this bottom one here. We'll rotate here. Grab this, move this inside of the body here. I'll go ahead, grab everything. Now you don't need to follow every step I do here exactly, the point is that you just get these into place so that they look a bit natural. You're going to have to weasel around with your own model a little bit on your own until you get something that you like. Now what we can do is we can see that it's coming down here to the elbow, snapping straight, going down, and coming here, and that's why we added this extra geometry here. If I go back to Edge Mode and I Shift or Alt click here. I can go ahead and click "Rotate" and they can rotate a little bit there and move this down and just give a little bit more of a natural bend. I can do that up here as well. For the sake of this course, I kept it simple geometry, like low Pali, but you're welcome to add as many edge loops as you want and get as complex as you want to get a more proper elbow bend. Now, the inside of the hand here looks a bit odd, but if we go back out to Object Mode, we're actually just shoving her arm into to her coat there, and we'll just right-click and hit Shade Smooth on that. You can see that gives us the illusion, she has an arm popping out and going into a pocket and we can draw a pocket on there later. Let's go ahead and move this arm over here, which is going to be a bit more complicated. Let's deselect there. I'm going to press 1, to go into the front view here. We're going to drag over here, and we'll end up wanting into scale this arm down a tiny bit to match the other, but we can leave it at this for now. What we want to do is create this arm at almost like a right angled and make them holding the umbrella. I'm going to go into Edit Mode here. I'm going to turn on Wireframe, I'm going to turn on Vertex select. I'm going to grab all of these right here, turn on the Rotate gizmo, click here, and if we Control click, we can rotate on those little snaps there until we get a 90 degree. You can see that it's really warping our object awkwardly there, which is fine. We're going to grab this with the little Move tool, and move that up. Then we can go ahead, come in here and edge select mode, and we can have everything deselected here. Alt click these. We can just Shift to relieve some of that pressure. Remember I am Alt left clicking those, to move those. Go ahead. I'll click this one, rotate it a little bit. I'm trying to narrate everything I do, but also not make this course take five hours because I don't think you want that either. We can see that we're losing some of our volume there, so let's go ahead and come up here to Vertex Select and we'll press "Circle," and we'll grab these right here. Remember, you left-click and drag to select everything and you middle clicked to de-select. We'll turn on proportional editing. I'm just going to grab with the move tool here, moving that out a little bit to give our arm its volume back. Then I'm just going to de-select there. Now I want to rotate the hand yet again. Go ahead, grab this, and we will grab our rotation tool here, rotate that out. We're going to turn off proportional editing and it might cause us issues later. Drag this out here until we have what looks like a little bent arm. Now, if we go back to object mode and you haven't moved your object around, you'll see that you can still rotate around that little arm joint right there, which will make it easy to place our arm. In solid view, I'm going to right-click, turn on shade smooth, and then I'm going to drag our arm over here, and we're going to end up scaling this arm down to make it fit in. I'm going to do wireframe in the front view here. I'm going to rotate this arm and just keep using these gizmos up here. I really encourage you to learn RS and G because it's a much faster way of working, but I understand that for beginners, 3D is hard enough without having to memorize all the shortcuts. But I do encourage you use S because as I said, when you're trying to scale uniformly, I find this to be a bit too touchy. I'm going to press "S," scale that down. We want that arm to be about the same thickness as that arm over there. Then we can rotate on the Z axis here. If we want, we can actually just type it in there, we can type in, let's do negative 75 there. Maybe not that much. Let's do negative 45. We'll go back out to solid view. We can see that we can't see our arm anymore, so we're going to grab that with the rotate gizmo, bring that out on X. You can see that now we can have our arm out in front of our character. You can just keep tweaking that until you get what you consider to be a happy position for your hand there or your arm, I should say. I'm happy with that arm position. Let's go ahead and flatten this out a bit so we can go ahead and add our hand. Now, it would have been easier to flatten this out over there, but that shows another way that we can transform. Let's go ahead, go in here to Edit, and that selection is still selected from before, for me. I'm going to turn on Reference and get rid of that. I'm going to go into Wireframe view. If you don't have it selected, remember, you can just go ahead and box select that there. If we grab the scale transform, we can see that it is scaling out there. If we want to flatten it this way, and we try and drag out, we can see that it's knocking it off kilter, so I'm just going to undo that. How can we get this scale to match the look of that? Well, we can measure some of the options up here. If we go to local, we'll see you that it will do it to the local view of what we have selected. Now we can grab this little red one here, which will scale it on the local X. That'll flatten it out. We'll go back up here and change that to global. What global does is it looks at the global world of X, Y, and Z. What local does is it looks at what you have selected locally and bases it off of that. By doing that little transform, we're able to get a more easier way to flatten that out. Let's go ahead and let's de-select that. I'm going to show you one more thing we can do with this cursor over here. What we're going to do is go to solid view here and we're going to select this in Vertex Selection mode, that center one, and we're going to put a hand right there. Remember that whatever object to spun, we'll spun in on this cursor here. If I hit "Shift A" and add a round cube, you'll see that it spuns in over on their cursor over there. I'm just going to undo that. I'm going to keep my reference off here. What we can do is snap that cursor to our selection of our vertices. Before I showed you that shortcut Shift S, and we can do cursor to select it. Or if I X out of here, you can also just type in cursor. By clicking that, it will snap the cursor to the selected vertices here. Now, if we do add, you can go up here or you can hit Shift A, add this round cube. If you notice when we hit Shift A inside of the object, the list is much smaller, and that's because we have only a mesh option. Since we're inside of a mesh object, we can only add more mesh. You can't put a curve and a mesh object together. Again, that's more advanced, but if you're trying to add some of the other objects and having trouble, that may be why. Now, if we have this selected and we just scale this down, we can see a little bit of scale right down there, into our hand. Let's go back, turn our Reference on, go back to the front view there, and scale that hand up to be whatever size we want. Now, I don't have the position exactly how it is in the photo, but that's totally fine. I'm fine with this looking the way it does. I think it looks a bit more natural than it does in the photo. You may notice that, that if you draw your characters stylistically, the perspective may not always translate exactly to 3D and you may need to treat it to get the look you're going for. I'm just going to click, de-select that, go to object mode, right-click this arm, hit "Shade smooth," and with that, we have an arm. Before moving on to the umbrella, what I want to do is actually make the bottom of the coat a little bit bigger. Let's go ahead, go back here into edit mode. The reason I want to do that is because I want to show this darkness here to add a bit of contrast. This allows me to show you how to hide and unhide objects. Let's say that you have a bunch of objects in here and you want to get to something. Let's say that you wanted to get to the vertices in there and you click wireframe mode, and it gets really difficult to select through, know exactly what you're selecting, or even to see what's going on. We can actually hide objects inside of the mesh. If I go in here, I'm going to press "L" to select that sphere and I press "H," that will actually hide that. That's two shortcuts you're going to want to learn, is H and then Alt H, which will unhide everything. You can hide parts of the mesh so that you can work on other parts of the mesh easily. With that hidden, what I'm going to do is switch to wireframe mode, grab this whole piece here, make sure you're on global again. I'm going to scale it up by just pressing "S," and scaling there. That's going to give us a fanned out raincoat arm there, which is what I wanted. Now, if I de-select everything and press "Alt H," it will bring that hand back. If I de-select everything, go into object mode, switch back to solid, you can see that now our raincoat is fanning out around her hand, which will allow us to add a different color there later. Lastly, for this video, we're going to go ahead and make this mushroom up here, which is a pretty simple model, and we'll also be using a different primitive. 12. Modeling the Umbrella: Because I have a different position of the arm, I'm not necessarily going to position my umbrella exactly the same as it is here, and that's totally fine. You will find that as you move from your illustration in 3D, that you're going to make micro adjustments. What I'm going to do is hit Shift A, go to Mesh. First we will add a round cube yet again. We'll name this one mushroom, and we will tab into edit mode here. I'm going to switch to wireframe mode. You notice that even with the reference turned off, things are starting to get messy with the character. You can go ahead and put these little eyeballs up here and you can actually turn off parts of your character, or if I undo that, you can actually outline an object mode, use those same shortcuts that we used before, and if you select an object and hit H, it will hide that object. That is another way you can do it. However, for beginners it may be easier just use the outline up here. What we're going to do is take this mushroom here, go into edit view, make sure that we are in wireframe mode, turn off the reference here. We're going to go ahead grab this bottom half. I'm going to grab the scale tool. We're just going to scale that up there. We're going to grab the move tool, move it back out here. You can see that we've already created that mushroom look. I'm going to drag select all of that, scale that out just a little bit to give us more of a hump there. Then what we're going to do is go back to object mode, unhide everything, turn back on our reference. In wireframe mode, we can leave it in wireframe mode, grab that up here, move our mushroom there, and adjust to put it in a position there. I'm going to press S maybe scale mine down a bit. Tab in edit mode here. Then I'm going to grab this here, turn on proportional editing. Then I'm going to press G to grab and I find G, S, and R work a little bit easier with proportional editing than the Gizmos because you're not trying to hold everything. I'm going to turn that sphere of influence way up, bump that up there, and then I'm going to deselect everything, go back to object mode, switch to solid view. Now we have a little mushroom there. I'm going to want to rotate that motion back there, but I can do that in a second. Let's go back to front view. Right click, shade smooth. Now we're going to add a new object. We're going to add a mesh and we're going to add a cylinder, which is the first time we've used this. Now we can twirl up these options down here. Now, once you left click, after creating a new thing you can't access those options again. You have to set those in the beginning, so just be aware of that. We don't need that many vertices because we're going to be shrinking it down to this side. If we get rid of these vertices, you'll see that it's making this here lower poly. I'm just going to set mine to eight. That will make that lower poly. If you want, you can change the radius there. Let's change ours to maybe 0.1, maybe even smaller to 0.05, and you can see you that matches roughly the size that we have there. That's a good starting point. We'll go ahead and with our rotate Gizmo selected and our umbrella cylinder selected, we're going to go ahead and rotate that until it matches what we want there. Really we just want to make sure this cylinder is moving into the center of our umbrella up here. That looks good to me. Obviously we're going to have to adjust this in a second, but now we want these to be the same objects. We have two meshes. We have the mushroom top here, and we have the cylinder here. Now if we want to join these into the same object, what we will do is we will click the cylinder first and then you will click the object you want to combine that object with. If I Shift click the mushroom tab here, you see that this becomes dark orange and this becomes light orange meaning this is active selected. If I do a join, this will join into that mesh meaning the cylinder will join the mushroom mesh, the last one you have selected. You can hit Control J to join, or you can find it up here buried within the menus right here, or you can just go ahead and type join. Just as you know there's always multiple options to do things and blender, and you'll see now that those are part of the same object. If we go into edit mode, you can see that now they are combined. What we're actually going to do now is we're going to deselect everything, go to wireframe mode. We're going to box select the grab, the bottom here. Then if we come up here to global and we change this to local, you'll see that now we can grab this little z-axis here and we can bring that up, that way we don't ruin the angle of our umbrella. We can go ahead and bring that to around there. Then we're going to adjust our umbrella so that we can rotate around this point. Up until this point, we've left the origin points mostly turn themselves without editing them at all. Let's go out to object mode, show an example of where an origin point can be harmful. In this case, if we wanted to rotate the umbrella and move it around, it's going to rotate from where we created that original mushroom. You can see that point right there. That's not really helpful. We would probably want our umbrella to rotate from around here. An easy way to do that is with the cursor. Now, this may be a bit confusing, so just try and pay attention or maybe slow down the video or pause if you need. What we're going to do is tab in edit mode here. I'm going to start by deselecting everything. Make sure I'm in wireframe mode. I'm going to drag the bottom here to select this and then we're going to do that Shift S, or if you want you can search the function. Again, we're going to move that cursor to the selected. Now because we have that whole bottom selected, what it did is averaged out and placed itself in the center of those. It's always going to place itself in the closest center it can to the selection that you have. Now, if we go back to object mode, and we grab our object here, you can come up here to the object and go down to set origin, an origin to 3D cursor. The other one you might use often is origin to geometry. Let me do that one first. Origin to geometry there will take the origin and place it at the closest center of the overall object that you have. That can be a useful quite often. In this case we want it to rotate around that 3D cursor. I'm going to do object, set origin, origin to 3D cursor. If we go back to our front view here, now we can rotate our umbrella around there giving us a little bit easier flexibility when we're trying to position there. Now, we want to reset the cursor back to the center. Because as I've mentioned with Blender, there's always a lot of little steps in 3D applications and usually you can want to reset. For example, turning up proportional editing or resetting your cursor back to center so that later when you go to add an object, you know it's not just flying out in a random place and space. By hitting Shift C, that will return that back to center. Now we can work on adjusting our umbrella. I'm going to go ahead here. I'm going to turn on solid view, I'm going to turn on reference, I'm going to right-click this, I'm going to shade smooth. We can see that we might be getting a bit of artifacting with the low poly there. We can go ahead turn on the auto smooth here. I'm going to turn that up to 45, and I'm going to turn that all the way up to 60. We can see there that we get a little bit better smoothing. What I'm going to do is, I'm still in local transform mode if you remember. I can move that there, and then I'm going to go back to global because again you always want to reset your settings. I'm going to go to the front view and we can see it's intersecting with our sleeve there. I'm going to go ahead, grab this rotate Gizmo, just rotate that out a bit so it's not intersecting. Then let's take a look at our side view. We can see here that she's not really covering herself in the rain. We'll go ahead grab that red here, and drag that just a little bit. She's covering her face in the rain. With that our character now has the umbrella and the body. Next we're ready to begin texturing our character. 13. Creating a Material: Next up is texturing our character. Now Blender has this Texture Painting tab where you can actually do complex paints with all these painting and drawing tools. It's pretty great for getting a painterly look, and it almost has some photoshop like tools enabling you to really paint your character, give them a storybook look or an illustrative look. Now that's a bit advanced for this class, and it would also take its own course to cover. I've provided a link to my other Skillshare class, where I give you a beginner's introduction to texture painting, and also a link to my YouTube tutorial, which is meant for people who've never opened Blender, to be able to follow along and texture paint. Those are two ways that you can follow along if you want to actually go around and paint your character. As for this course, we'll be using a method with projection mapping, which is commonly used in independent games because it's a very time-saving and faster render technique, making it excellent if it's your first time using 3D. I recommend watching this as well, even if you do plan to do a full texture paint, because they can both be useful ways of texturing your character. Let's go ahead and look at our object here. To create materials for our object, we need to have an object selected and be on the material properties page, and we can add them here. Let's go ahead and add one here. Let's change this to red. We'll see that we can't see anything. That's because we're in solid view, which won't show materials. We need to go to material or rendered view. I'm going to go to material view because rendered view takes more processing power, and it might slow down lower in machines. Let's go ahead, click "Viewport Shading", and we can see that now we see a material, but it's only applied to her body. That's because if we select these, we see that they don't have anything on them. Now, this is pretty common practice and most scenes are going to have multiple objects. But in the case of our character, I want everything to be on one object. I want the umbrella to be one object, and the character to be one object. I'm going to take this umbrella. I'm going to hide that mushroom umbrella. I'm going to select everything here. Then I'm going to shift select the body, making sure that it's highlighted. Then I'm going to come up to Object, Join, then I'm going to name this character. Now our character is all and on one object here, and it has inherited the material there, because that was the only material there. This will collect all the materials from all the joint objects and put them in a list here. Now, we can go ahead and just change the one we have here, we don't need to delete it. But first, before we begin editing this material, you can edit everything down here, but that can be a bit difficult and time-consuming working in this list view. So we're going to switch to the shader view. Now if I go to the Shading tab up here, you can see it opens up all of these windows, but I feel this isn't very conducive for sharing my screen for you because there's not much real estate for you to see. I think it's important that you get comfortable with adjusting your viewport as well. I'm going to click back here to the Layout tab. I'm going to click down here in the bottom left and drag this over here, and that'll split our screen. Up here on the top-left, I'm going to crab there and hit "Shader". Then I don't want this panel here taking up my view. So I'm going to go ahead and do the sidebar off there. Now this is the shader graph, which could spend an entire course or a book on its own. You can create incredibly complex shaders in Blender, and make anything from glass, to prisms, to metal, and whatever you can think of, you can make it if you're well-versed in these nodes system. Now as beginners, we're going to stick to some basics here. To navigate, we middle-click to move around, and we zoom in and out with our mouse wheel. By default, you have this principled BSDF node and you can see there's some options here, like metallic, roughness, transmission, which will make it see-through like glass, and various other options there. With this node, you can create a lot just by adjusting these settings. You can make your objects shinier or completely rough. Feel free to play with some of these if you want, and you can get a different look. Now we're going for a flat shader look. Many of these are just going to have more of a tune look and there won't be any actual shading. We don't need this node. We're going to go ahead, we're going to delete this node. You'll notice that the character goes black because they now have no shade. With that node deleted, we're ready to begin creating our own node system. Now this can get pretty complicated, and I don't expect you to fully understand everything we're doing here, but you just need to follow these steps exactly, and shading something you can dive into deeper later. There's a couple ways to add nodes. We can hit "Shift A" just like mesh. We can come up here and add. Now what I like to do is hit "Shift A" and click, and that'll search, and that's because I clicked this little Search here. Now this is a different search than if we press "Space Bar". If we press "Space Bar" in here, this is searching blended wide functions, but by hitting "Shift A" and clicking "Search", we'll only search within the shaders. That's how we're going to be adding nodes. However, you can go ahead and search through all of these individually if you like. However, it will take longer. Let's come up here and add Shift A, click "Search", and we're going to add an emission node. An emission node will take the object and emit light from it whatever color you have and put it here. This can actually be used to light a scene, but that's a bit more complex than what we're looking to do. We're going to click this, and we can move it around by clicking and dragging. We're just going to move that back here a little bit. I'm going to hit "Shift A", "Search". We're going to add a mix shader. This allows us to mix two shaders again. Again, as I mentioned before, this does pretty complicated. You're probably not going to grasp everything on this first try, but that's fine, we're just going through some of the basics here. Let's hit "Shift A" again and search and type in image texture. This one's going to allow us to load our gradient in. Now we're going to hit "Shift A" one last time, and we're going to search for light path, and drag that up here. Now, notice that even though we have all these nodes in here, our character is still a dark shadow over here, because none of these have been connected to the material output. Let's go ahead, and first we'll connect this mix shader. You'll notice that it's still black because there is nothing plugged into this, and this by it own, doesn't output anything. It's looking for things to input and mix the shader. We're going to drag this emission, put that into the shader there, and now it is splitting because this factor is here. It is splitting 50 percent between whatever shader is plugged in here, and whatever shader is plugged in here. Now we only need this emission node plugged into the bottom, but we don't want it to cast light on the rest of our scene. This gets pretty complicated, so I don't expect you to understand this if this is your first time with a render engine. But if we take this Is Camera Ray from the light path node and plug it into the factor, it's going to say that anything that's not the camera ray will only not emit. That's a really fancy way of just saying that basically our object will be flat and always render without shading, but it's not going to castellate into our scene. Again, this is pretty complex stuff. It's okay if you don't understand it, just make sure you follow along, and you'll get the results that you need. Now we're going to take the color, and we're going to drag this color over into the emission. Now we'll see that our object is black again, because with our image texture here, we're not actually inputting anything in there. We need to pick a texture, and now we're going to click "Open", and then we're going to load our color gradient. Wherever you saved your color gradient file, or if you downloaded mine, when you click "Open", you're going to navigate there and select your gradient. Now when you load it, you may notice that your character changed color, but it still looks odd. That's because it doesn't know where to apply these colors, which is where UV editing comes in. 14. UV Editing: UV Editing is as you unwrap your 3D object into a 2D image. Think of if you took an action figure, and you just peeled off the texture, and put it in sticker form so that you could stick it back on to another action figure. It might make more sense if we go over to the UV Editing tab. Let's click "UV Editing" here. Now, over in this tab, we will be able to edit the UVs of our character. Up here on this menu over here, we're going to grab the color palette and zoom out here so that we can see the color. Let's go ahead. I'm just going to add a box over here, don't follow along with this, I'm just going to give you an example of what a UV is. If we add this cube here, we can see that by default, it's already unwrapped, and you can see here that this is this 3D object unwrapped into a 2D form there. For example, let me go ahead and grab all this and scale this here. I'm going to make sure I'm in material view because sometimes, when you switch to UV Editing, it may switch you back to a solid view. We can see here that as we move this around, it's actually sticking the colors on there wherever they're at. We can see that this box right here represents this face. As we move that around, we can see that whatever is inside of this face over here on the 2D texture, appears over here. Again, this can be pretty difficult if you're new to 3D. I'm just going to go ahead, delete that box. It's a good example of what we're going to be doing. Now, I'm going to come back here to front view. UV editing can be extremely complicated. If I was to grab this here and just do a smart UV project, which is just going to try and intelligently break apart the character, we can see how insanely complex it can get over here. You can get in here and you can paint all of these individually or paint them here. That's how you'd go about texture painting. But that's a bit hard if it's your first time UV Editing. What we're going to do is make sure you're in edit view, make sure you're in front view, and then what we're going to do is select everything. I'm going to select everything by pressing A. That will select everything. Ignore what's over here because we're about to redo that. We're going to press U, we're going to put Project From View. If we do Project From View, you'll see that it will project it from this front view, and now, we can see that our character is here. Now, if you're doing a more complex texturing method, this wouldn't work because if we select from the side view here, if I select, it's going to sink whatever your selection is. If I select these faces here and then I select these faces here, I see that they're in the same exact position, meaning that if we're texture painting, these would be overlapping and it wouldn't know what to apply where. If you're doing a complex or advanced texturing, you never want to Project From View. But we're using this as a simple way to project and I'm excited to show you how this goes about working. With everything selected here, let's go ahead, go to Viewport Shading here. We can now see that as we drag our character around, we can go ahead and apply different colors to different parts of the mesh. This is actually how we're going to texture our character here. If you haven't already, make sure that your material here is named. I'm going to name mine, Gradient, just to keep things a bit organized. I know that the majority of my character is going to be over here on this yellow raincoat. I can bring the character here, and you can move these around with the gizmos up here, and you can rotate them, and you can scale them. Again, you can use those G, S, and R shortcuts there. Let's go ahead and you can select these over here as well, and it's all the same selection shortcuts. Over here, you have the different selection modes. I'm going to leave mine on vertice. If you want, you can press L to select an entire object. It's also synchronized. It needs to be selected over here to show up here. I'm going to turn off proportional editing so we don't get any issues there. If I deselect over here, you'll see it disappears there. If I grab a part of the foot there, it appears there. Just keep in mind that as you're making selections, that's how the synchronization works across both. Now, I know this can be complicated but just to reiterate, all you need to do is select everything in edit mode and Project From View, and then we're ready to begin using the method we're going to be using. 15. Texturing the Character: Let's decide what elements we want to be yellow. I want her legs here, her body and her coat to all be yellow. Let's go ahead and we're going to select these by pressing L. Since the majority of the character is actually going to be yellow, you can also just press A to select everything. Then over here, you can see that you're not moving anything around because you also have to select over here. Once you select it over here, you then have to select over here. It can be a bit confusing at first for a new workflow, but you'll get the hang of it. Select everything over here. Then we can grab the gizmo here, we can move it up here. We're going to grab the scale tool. We're going to scale that in a bit there. Then we can scale that in there. You can see the magic of using a gradient over here. If I tab back out in the object mode over here, we can see that the gradient is now appearing across our character. Now I'm going to go ahead and change my color management down here. So if we come up to the Render Engine and change our color management, we'll see that our view transform is set to filmic. Color processing can be very difficult, but that means that it's working in a wide color space. But in this case, since we're using simple colors, I'm going to go ahead and switch this to standard. That'll give us a more accurate representation of our colors. We're not planning on color-grading this later, so it shouldn't matter anyways. I'm going to go ahead, grab the character here and if you notice your colors are off, that's one way you can go about fixing it. I'm going to go back in the edit mode and I still have everything selected and I don't want the entire character to be in this rain coat. Now I'm going to go ahead and start moving pieces around. Let's say that we want to select their hair and add that to the red section here. We can zoom in here, we can press A to deselect everything, and then we can just use L like we've used in the past, to go ahead and select all of these pieces. Now remember if your colors aren't showing up, make sure that you are in viewport shading mode there. Now if we look over here, we see that we have her hair here, and it's already selected. But if you want, you can double tap and make sure everything's selected there. We can go ahead here, move that over here. Now because it's at the top here, it's only going to show this portion red. I want to get a little bit of a gradient. I'm going to go ahead grab the scale tool, and just stretch that way up and then move that down. Now if it comes off, it's going to turn black or go to the other side. If you notice that happening, that might be dipping over the edge. Now we can see that we've added that color to her hair. Now I'm going to deselect this by pressing A then I'm going to press L to select the nose and L to select the face. Again, I'm going to move this over here. Then I'm just going to scale that up. You can play with that however you want. The more scaled up, the more contrast and color you're going to get. I want my nose to be slightly darker than the rest of my face. So I'll go ahead and deselect everything by pressing A and then I will press L to select the nose. Then I'm going to just move that nose to the bottom. Then if I deselect there, we can see that my nose is now a little darker than the rest of my face. I'm going to go back here to the front view. If you want, you can go ahead and move different pieces of this code around. For example, you could take these legs, and if you wanted you could say, rotate these legs here, upside down. Then you could scale those legs up and go ahead and move those up there. Then if we deselect that, we can see that now the bottom of her body and her legs are the same color. So if we go ahead and grab her body there, we can scale that up and move that down. If we deselect so we get a better view there we can see that now her legs and our body are starting at the same color. You can really even just play with all the colors there and the raincoat. Let's go ahead here. Let's hit L to select the hand there, and let's move that over here. Again, I just want some contrast. You can play with your positioning and contrast and all that you want here. But let's say that we want to do just these feet here. We can't press L because it selects the whole leg, but we want just the boots to be black. Well, what we can do here is I'm going to snap into front view, I'm going to make sure wireframe is on. Then I'm going to drag and select those feet. I'm going to teach you a new tool here. We're going to do the gross selection tool. If you hit "Control Plus", it will continue to grow up until it selects the entire feet. If you hit "Control Minus", it will do that. Now if you want, you can just go ahead and use a circle select or the box-select but I wanted to show you a new way to grow selection. The feet just selected if you hit "Control Plus", it's going to move it up and select the next section of faces selected. We'll see that we have just our feet selected here. We can go ahead, take our feet, move them over to wherever you want. I'm going to move mine down here, and I want to rotate those back, side rotated in the legs. I'll go ahead and scale them a little bit to give them contrasts. I don't want them to be completely white. If I deselect there, come back over here to the material view, we can now see that our legs are a different color. Likewise, we can do that here. Let's show how the grow selection can be useful again. Let's press L, and we're going to press H to hide that hand. Then we're going to select in vertex mode, there's one vertex here. Then if I hit "Control Plus", you'll see that it grows out and out and out. Now we've selected that entire piece there, and we can go ahead and move this over here. I'm actually just going to move mine all the way down here and I'm going to keep it scaled down because I want it to be mostly dark. Going to deselect everything by pressing A, Alt H to unhide everything and A again. We can see that now we have a nice little texture for our character. You can play around with the positioning of these until you get exactly what you want. I'm going to tab back out into object mode, I'm going to turn on the mushroom here. Next we're going to texture the mushroom and show how we can apply two materials to an object. 16. Texturing the Umbrealla: Let's grab this mushroom, grab the Material Editor here, click here, we'll see that we can add our current materials here, we have the default material that Blender creates, and then we have the gradient material. We'll see that it looks funky because we haven't applied our UV texture yet, so we'll go ahead and press 1, tab into Edit Mode. If we select everything here, we'll see that we actually have the default unwrap mode, but we're just going to press U and do "Project From View". You can also access that up here, "UV", and we can do "Project From View", and now, we get the little shape of our umbrella there. Deselect everything there, let's just select that little umbrella piece there. Now, if you're in Vertex selection mode and you're pressing L, you need to make sure you're over vertices, so you may find that difficult on here so you can always switch to face selection and make it a little easier to select your faces there. If it hit Shift L, you can deselect that. Now, we have our little umbrella rod here. I'm just going to take this here and I'm going to rotate this so that it's straight, and we're going to see what way it's facing up here, so we'll move this up here. I want the darker end to be up here under the umbrella and I can see, right now, it's the lighter end. I'm going to go ahead, take that, and rotate that, so it goes that way. The lighter end is in their hand, and I don't want that much contrast so I'm going to scale it down and just move that down there. Now, we have a mostly dark umbrella shaft there. What about those mushroom? We wanted to add a mushroom texture to it. If you remember earlier, I encouraged you to paint out your own mushroom texture which we'd be using later. Let's tab back out to object mode here. Select our object. Now, we're going to add another material. First, we'll click this Plus icon which will add a material slot. Now, we can choose a material there or add a new material. We're actually just going to modify our existing material. Let's go ahead grab the gradient. Then what we can do is click this little button here which will make a new material based off of this material. It basically just duplicates this material for us. Because here, these are material slots, but if I'm change anything in one of these slots, it will change everything everywhere because this is still the same material being used in both. We need to create a new material there, we're going to grab that there, and were going to name this mushroom texture. Then we want to change the image texture on this. We can do that in the use node, so we could open up the Shader editor, but we're already in UV editing mode, and we're feeling lazy, we don't want to go back and do that. What we're going to do is click down here, twirl down the Shader emission node, and this is the same thing that we had in our Shader editor, just in a list view instead of a node view. Then we're going to twirl this down, and we can see that there is our image section there. Now, I have my interface cranked up bigger so you can see, so it's harder to see. What I'm going to do is just go ahead and click this little folder here, and then I'm going to navigate out to my artwork folder, and again, all these textures are included if you didn't paint any yourself, and I'm going to grab this mushroom texture. You'll see that now, it's changed in this little preview here, and you can also twirl down this preview up here. You can see that it's imported our mushroom texture. Now, let's come over here, grab mushroom textures so that we can see or mushroom texture, and we'll notice that it still hasn't showed up anywhere in our material because by default, the material in your first slot is applied to your entire object. If we want to assign this material to a portion of our object, we need to manually do so. Let's go ahead, tab in the Edit Mode here, and you'll see that now, this changes to assign, deselect, and select here. We're going to select our mushroom by pressing L, and that will give us our mushroom there, and then what we're going to do is click, "Assign." Now, you can see that it is adding our mushroom. But we see that it's smearing across. If we grab our mushroom there, and we can either press L there, or if I deselect that, when you have an object selected with multiple materials, if you hit "Select" there, it'll select whatever portions of the material have that option, and you can deselect it. If I just click mushroom material with nothing selected, it will select that. We can go ahead and we can scale this up and move this around, and we'll see that it looks like smeared across this way which is not what we want. What we're going to do is actually project from a different view. What we're going to do is we're going to grab our mushroom here, and in Edit Mode, we'll make sure that we have just our mushroom there. If you want, you can take this umbrella rod and just select that and hide that so that we have only our mushroom there, because we don't want to unwrap our umbrella rod. With our umbrella rod hidden, we don't have to worry about re-unwrapping that rod because we already have that set to another texture how we want, we only want to change the way the mushroom is unwrapped which doesn't really look correctly when project from the front view at all as we see if I go here and Protect From View, you can see that it looks great from the front view which is good if that's all you want to do, but you just see it smears when he turn around. To fix that, we can actually manually unwrap that. Here in Edit Mode, what we're going to do is we're going to make sure we're on Edge Mode, and we're going to shift click this little edge down here which is going to select all the way around. We're going to do UV, and we're going to do Mark Seam. Now, if we hit Unwrap up here, we'll make sure that we have this selected because it will only unwrap what's selected. Since our rod is hit and I'm just going to press A to select everything there, do "UV", "Unwrap". You can see that it is unwrapped with that line broken there. If I select everything there, you can see that it redrew there which is exactly what we wanted. We're just going to take this top part here, and we can see that that's this island over here. If we go ahead and select everything, and we select this here, we can drag this up to the center, and then we can go ahead and scale that mushroom up. You can see that now, our umbrella looks like a mushroom. You may not want the bottom to look like a mushroom. If you want it to look like mine, how it was in the illustration where the bottom was blacked out, what you can do is you can deselect everything, you can come down here, switch to Vertices Mode, grab this bottom vertices, hit Control plus, grow that a few times, and then we'd get up into that edge there, and you can see we have that selected. I'm going to grab the gradient texture and we're going to assign that. We'll see that now, it's displaying those random colors around. We'll go ahead to the color palette here, we will select this, and we will scale that down, and we can just go ahead and move that over here into the blackness. There, you can see that now, we have our a little umbrella setup. If I go ahead and deselect everything, hit Alt H to bring back our umbrella rod and switch over to Object Mode. Now, we have our little character textured, and we're ready to move on to working on to our plants. 17. Plants and Rain Models: Here I am in the layout mode with a 3D viewport over here set to viewport shading in the front view, and over here I have the shader editor, which is the setup we had before. I'm going to come up here, I'm going to add a new collection, I'm going to call this one plants. Then I'm going to move over here to the right of the character and shift click so we can go ahead and add that plane there. Then I'm going to hit File, Import and we'll see images as planes here. Now, I'm going to navigate to my images, and it is important that when you're doing that texture, that you have an alpha channel if you want to be clear around the plan. Otherwise, you're going to have whatever background color you chose. Let's go ahead, grab leaves here, and you can use mine if you want, import it, and then first we won't see it because it's not rotated. To show you a little rotation trick, you can also press R and type in math, so if you press R and do 90 and then tap X, it will rotate so that it's facing us front forward by rotating it 90 degrees. Now what we're going to do is actually just cut our objects out of this plane so we can place some around our scene and bend them as we see fit. What we can do, there's a couple of ways to do that. I'm going to show you one way to do it here with the leaves. Then I'll show you another way to do it with the rain splashes. Let's tap into edit mode here, and you can see that all it's done is imported our image and applied it to a plane. We can see over here that basic material they have setup there, and they have the color going into the color and the alpha going into the alpha of this node. What we can do is select this plane, right-click and we're going to do this sub-divide option, and then this pop-up menu is going to come up. This works like the subdivision modifier, but it's applying it permanently, it's not on the modifier panel where we can adjust the settings later. We can go ahead and enter our custom number here. I'm going to do 32, which will give us a lot of mesh geometry to work with and then we're going to click out of here to apply that. Now I'm going to go back to object view and before we go ahead and start cutting these objects out and placing them around the scene, what I'm going to do is actually come over here and modify the shader. Now we're going to modify the shader so that it's a toon shadeless shader that matches the rest of our scene. Now this node setup's going to be a more complicated, so you may want to just look at my project files that are included with that if you're having a hard time keeping up, but I'll make sure to go slowly so that we can hopefully make it as easy as possible for beginners. First I'm going to delete this here. Now what we're going to do is add a mix shader, we're going to add another mix shader, going to add an emission node. We're going to add a transparent one, there's a translucent and transparent, so make sure you get transparent or it won't work. We're going to add a light path and there we go. We have everything we need and you'll see that it's the same as before, but we've added a transparent and a mix shader. That's so that we can account for the alpha of the image and make sure that we have no background behind our leaves. Again, like I said, this is complicated, so feel free to take a peek at my project if you want to copy how I have it set up. But what we're going to do is grab the mix shader here, drag that there, drag this mix shader, put it into the bottom of this mix shader, and then take the is camera ray, put it into the factor of this mix shader and we're going to take the transparent here, put it into the top shader slot, the emission, put that in the bottom shader slot. We're going to take the leaves, take the color, put that into the color of the emission and you can see now that we can see our leaves, but we want to make sure that we don't have this alpha background here. So we're going to take this alpha and drag it into the factor and now you should be able to see the background through our object there. With that, we're ready to begin cutting out our leaves. We'll grab this object, we will tab into edit mode, and we're going to press C to use the circle select. Then what we're going to do is to select all these points around one of our leaves. I encourage you to use the face select mode, which is over here. You can grab that auto face select mode and that'll prevent you from accidentally grabbing any vertices or things. We just want to make sure we grab everything that has our leaf on it and I'm just going to deselect some of these ones I chose that I don't need and make sure that I have that one because I caught a little bit there. Now what we can do is press P and that will separate the selection. You can also go ahead and type in separate here and that can also be found up here buried in the Mesh menu, Separate by Selection, and now we will see that we have a new object. If we tap back on the object mode and grab that leaf, we can see that now we have a leaf object. We're going to go ahead and do that for all of our objects and I'm just going to fast forward through that process. Now that I have these all selected, I can actually grab the original leaves object here and it is now just empty because it is just the alpha, and I can go ahead and just delete that. You could do them multiple ways, I'm just going to tap the "Delete" key, and now we're ready to begin placing our objects around the scene to match our reference. Now, one thing is we'll notice is that everything maintained the same origin of the plane there. If you want, you can go ahead and use some methods I've shown you to go ahead and place the origin point at the bottom of all of these leaves or another simple thing you can do is you can just grab all of these, you can go to Object, Set Origin, Origin to Geometry, and that'll go ahead and send it to the center of every leaf. You'll notice that these leaves are flat and if you want, what you can actually do is tab into any of these leaves, and you can actually come in here and you can grab some of these points. Let's say I grab this and I go ahead and use the proportional editing here. I'm just going to go ahead and drag over there to make that appear and close that so you can see a little bit better. Then I can actually move this forward with the sphere of influence and curve the leaves and scale the leaves and move the leaves around and I can just go ahead and grab that. I encourage you to do that and go through and add a little bit of depth to all of the leaves and then you can actually move those leaves around and place them into the place of the reference. We can go ahead and grab some of these leaves. I'm not, for the sake of this course, going to show you the process of curving and placing every single one, because that would be a tedious process and you already have the steps needed to place them where you see fit. But you can just go ahead and place these all around the scene and duplicate these as you see fit. I'm just quickly moving these around, and you can also take a look at my final scene and see how I place these as well. Then if we switch here to the side view, you see that they're all in one section. What we can do is we can turn off our reference again and we can tore up the plants and we can just quickly hide our character. Then we can go down here to our plants and we can just start grabbing these and you can offset these in whatever direction you see fit. Play with these and bend these around and rotate these around and place these around as you see fit. Again, I'm not going to walk you through every single one because it would be very tedious and you already have the skills you need to place those behind your character, but I recommend that you place them around, add some depth. If it was me, I would go ahead and grab these grass pieces up here and what I did with mine is I move them around in the top view. So I placed them around where her feet were and then I moved these around varying degrees here, and then I just rotated them and duplicated them and reused them until I made several grass patches there. Now let's take a look at those rain splashes. Now those rain splashes are done in the same exact way, but I'm going to show you how we can do that a bit quicker. Let's go ahead, create a new collection here. Type in rain splashes, and we can go up to File, Import, Images as Planes. We'll navigate to our PNG textures, and then I'm going to go ahead and grab Rain-Splat. Again press R 90 on X so that's facing me in the front view. Now, the way I designed this one is so that it was easier to cut. Now if you remember, we had to prep this to be shadeless so if I go ahead and drag this over, switch back to our shader editor. We don't want to go through that whole process again because that was a complex node setup. What we can actually do is just call this one Rain-Splat-Old and what we're going to do is switch over to our leaves texture, click this New button here, call this one Rain-Splat, and this is the one we'll be using. Then we can come back over here to our image texture, change this from leaves by clicking this drop-down menu here. Just change that to Rain-Splat, and you can see that that will switch that over and now that is shadeless and will work just like our other piece. Now what we can do is go into edit mode, instead of doing that crazy grid mode because we drew these rain splats on a grid in our illustration process, it's actually much easier because we can hit Control R and then Control R. We can just drag in between there without any overlap, and make sure my proportional editing as off here. Let me just slide that around so there's no intersections. Now when you go to split these up, let me grab a couple more, you can switch to face selection mode, grab a face, and just move that way and it's a much quicker way because they were already designed on a grid. Now again, these textures are included if you want to use them. I use these as my rain hits, I use these as raindrops for the umbrella, and I use these as puddles around her feet. Now, I'm not going to cover how to make every single plane object or every single rain splat or putting them around on the scene because as I've mentioned before, that's a bit tedious and I've already shown you how to do it. But I am going to open my scene and show you how I placed mine and then we're going to move on to add some line work to our character and then how to render. 18. Background Assets: So I just wanted to open my project here and show some of the various objects I have in here that we're not necessarily covering how to make in depth due to time, but you have all these skills to create them. You can see here for the plants that I just warped these plants and I put the origin point at the bottom, so that I could easily move that around and place those, and I just made those pop all around. For the bushes here, I just went ahead and used the same flat projection texture that we did there and put all these little red cherries all over it, which is little spheres. If I tap into "Edit Mode" here, you can see that these are just a bunch of round cubes that have all been connected together there as well. Then out here you can see I've moved the grass blades around and then this is actually, these little mushrooms are just made from the umbrella, and then the stem there has just been made a little thicker and I use the skin color for the bottom of the stem. Then the frogs, you can figure how I made those pretty simply based on the modeling techniques I've given you. Likewise, for the rain texture, the rain is just a plane that has been subdivided once and then just has a bend. I have that placed around the scene and multiple places. I also created, if you want to import my assets, so if you don't want to recreate these or if you can't figure it out, what I've done is made an asset project for you and the way you can import into Blender. Let's go ahead and place our cursor over here. Let's say that you wanted to import my frog here, we could go to File and Append is how you import in Blender. We'd go ahead and go File, Append. You'd go to the Assets Project and then you would see all of our things here are Brushes, Cameras, Collections, but we're going to go to Object because that's where we're going to be importing and you would see everything listed here in alphabetical order. If you wanted to import my frog, you'll just go ahead and choose a Frog and Import that one little frog. Then we see here that it imported into the plants and then imported down here. We can go ahead and see that frogs over there so I'm just going to move them over here in our view and zoom in on him. You can see that now we have imported this little frog. If you want, you can import assets from My Scene. If you're struggling to figure out how to model these, or if you just don't want to take the time to do it yourself, you're welcome to use assets from My Scene as well. But for now we're going to move on to how to do line work on this character and then we'll move on to how to render our scene. 19. Grease Pencil Overview: Here we are. I've gone ahead and done the placement of all my plants here. I just have these little bush downs here and the frogs and the little mushrooms, and I've placed these rain planes in the front and back which I went over in the last lesson a little bit. If you want, you can just open and import all these assets as I mentioned, or you can go ahead and just open this scene and start from here. What we're going to do next is we're going to use a tool called the Grease Pencil to add some linework to our character. As you'd probably assume, you could go ahead and you could actually paint those lines onto your character with some of the texture painting tools I mentioned in the resources, but we're going to do something a bit more unique to blend here. We're going to use what is called the Grease Pencil, which is actually a 2D animation tool. I'm just going to go ahead here and share a little bit of Blenders official open-source short film here where they use the Grease Pencil. The Grease Pencil is actually built into Blender. It is a full 2D animation program built into the 3D environment. You can mix 2D and 3D animation very seamlessly and use the strengths of both mediums, which is really cool, very unique to Blender. We're going to be using it to draw some lines onto our character, because I think it's a really neat tool that would be fun to introduce you to, so let's go ahead and take a look at how to do that into our scene. I have everything organized up here into collections. I have the rain up here and the mushrooms down there and the plants there. I'm just going to reduce it to our girl here. I'm going to go into the front view, and what you can do is make sure that your cursor is in the center of the scenes by hitting "Shift C". Let's start in front view here with our girl selected. We're going to go to add Grease Pencil, Blink. Now, this is a Grease Pencil object, I'm going to name this Linework. A Grease Pencil object works like a normal object that we can draw inside of that and draw multiple measures or lines, so to speak, inside of that object, and then we can move that object around. It is worth noting that if you move forward to frame and draw again, it will automatically insert a key frame, since it is a 2D animation tool. We're using it to do some lineworks, so we're just going to stay on frame 1 here and to be careful not to bump forward. What we can do is with our Linework up here selected, which it's impossible to select here in the viewport because it's invisible when it's blank. You want to select it over here in the scene collection. We can tab into what we now have new modes or as I mentioned before, you can access to those up here. We have a Draw mode now. If we begin drawing here on a front view, we can see that we can actually just start drawing and painting. If you have a Wacom tablet or as antique, this is a really great way to draw in Blender. Of course, you can also just use your mouse. To prove that is possible, I'll make sure to use my mouse as well for this series. You can also switch over to Edit Mode, and almost just like a normal mesh, you can actually move this around and you can edit it in 3D space. You don't have vertex, edge and face selection though, you're going to be playing with these two. You have Select only points and Select all stroke points. We'll select all stroke points, you will select the entire stroke. If I had another stroke up here, and in that mode, in Edit Mode, and I select one of these, it's like I can grab each one of these strokes that I started drawing and moving those around. If I have points, I can actually take those points and move those around. I can move those in 3D space too, so you can actually add some depth to your linework there as well. I'm just going to tap "A" and delete all of that for now. I'm going to go back to Draw mode here. Now, we have several other properties here, the one we're going to be using as just material which works very similar, but we have a few different options. If we click "New" here and we type Line here, we can see that under surface where there're option for a stroke and a fill. We're only going to use Stroke, and we're going to do the base color here. We can click that and we can change the color of our stroke. We can drag this up, we can move around, select our color that way, if you want, you can color pick. I'm just going to grab this little color picker, move that over here and select the inside of the jacket, and if we start drawing around, we can see that we use that black color that we've been using throughout our scene. I'm just going to go ahead and undo that. That's how we can switch between Draw mode and Edit Mode and how we will be drawing there. That's one thing I wanted to focus on. Next, I want to take a look at some of the tool options. If you come up here to View and we do our Sidebar here, we can go up to Tool and we see that we have all these different options here. By default, I believe it might set you an Airbrush. You may notice that your linework is really blurry. If we click here, we can click one of the presets and I recommend using the Ink Pen for this tutorial. Then we also have the Radius here. We'll be focusing, just on doing the Ink Pen and changing the radius of our pen here. The bigger we make that, the thicker it's going to get. I'm going to make mine in my scene 10, but you may want to make yours bigger or smaller depending on the scale of your [inaudible] or the style you are going for. If you want, you can come down here to the Post-Processing and you can twirl that down if that is checked on and you can turn up smoothing, so if you're drawing on a mouse that might make your lines a bit smoother. If I start going around there, you can see that it smooths it afterwards. If you're on a mouse, that's one way we make up there. But really the only thing you need to do is make sure you're on Ink Pen and change your radius. However, you can experiment with these other ones if you want, they're not drastically different, but they do add a little bit of variation. For now I'm going to hide that side panel so that it is not in our way. 20. Adding Linework: I'm just going to press "Shift C" and make sure that we have our cursor set here to the center, and then what I'm going to do is "Shift A" and add a black grease pencil. Just start along with me here. We'll add linework, we will add a new material, we will call this line, and then we'll click "Base Color", make sure only Stroke is activated, not Fill. We will click the "Base Color" and choose our color. I'm going to color pick mine over here, and now we're ready to begin drawing on our character. By default, when you go to draw it should be set to the Origin option here, and when we're in the Origin option, whenever we draw it's going to draw from whatever point we start drawing. You can see there as I draw, it starts rotating around. If you want, you can actually do some pretty cool things and draw around your character that way and create 3D, almost 2D lines. But we're actually going to use something simple. We're going to paint directly on the surface. To do that, first let's go back out to object mode and we want to make sure that our characters scale is set to one. We've done a lot of transformations and we've moved things around a lot, so our scale of our character might not be one, and for this next effect to work, we want to make sure that our scale is set to one. We can do that by applying the rotation and scale. By that I just got "Control A" to bring that up. But you can also just type search here and do Apply Object Transform if you want or you can find it up here in the menu. We're going to go to Object, Apply, Rotation & Scale, and that will just zero out the scale on our character. There's a lot of technical reasons why you need to do that, but they don't really matter. Just make sure that before you use this next technique that you apply the rotation and scale. Let's click "Linework", go into draw mode, and up here from origin were going to change this to surface. What that means is it's going to draw on the surface of our object. You can see there that as we rotate around that its actually snapped to our object, which is really cool because we can use that to go ahead and draw directly onto our mesh to get our linework on there. If I go back to that surface option, you can see that there's actually an offset. If I crank that way up, which it has a max value of one there with the slider, and I draw on there. You can see that it's actually further off the surface than in this one. I tend to leave mine at the default or to get bump up to 0.2. With that, I find that I generally don't get too many messy interactions there. But you can see that sometimes it's going through, so you may need to make that offset a bit higher, and the higher that number is, the higher it's going to be off the surface. I'll just go ahead and leave my offset, the one, just to make sure that I don't get any issues there. Then what I'm going to do, I start actually just drawing on my character. You may be tempted to use your reference image, but anything that is in front of it, it will draw on top of. So if you put your reference image in front of your character and start trying to draw, it might actually screw up and not draw on the surface because it's going to try and draw on the reference image. We're just going to want to freestyle it here. I'm just going to zoom in here, and you'll notice that this surface offset will actually reset sometimes depending on the actions you've done. If you notice that when you're drawing things start to go on the surface, just double-check that that's where you want it. I'm going to leave mine at one just to ensure there's no mistakes, and I'm going to just draw some little pockets on my character here and I'm going to go ahead here and draw a line right down the middle of the raincoat there. Then I'm just going to go ahead and add some buttons, and then I'm going to add some freckles. You can see that some of these are going through the surface because we're on a curved surface, so the offset might not be enough. What you can actually do if you have that problem, is you could tap over into edit mode, or you can access that up here, go to Edit Mode. You can take this here, select those points, and then you can actually move those out a bit. You can see there that now they're above the surface. You can just move those like you would a normal mesh, and I'm going to go ahead, go back to Draw Mode, give her a little mouth, and then I'm going to open my tool panel over here and I can click that little arrow, or I can do View, Sidebar and then I can crank up the radius here, and I'm going to do something 25 and that'll give me a bigger eye there. We can see that that offset again is not enough. So I'm going to just switch to edit mode and then I'm going to go ahead and select these eyes and bump these out a little bit there. Now, what you can do is let's look at how we would go about adding a second material. Let's say we want to add a little highlight into those eyes. I'm going to go ahead and grab this mouth, move this out just a little bit there. What we can do now is go back into Draw mode, and we can go ahead and add a new material slot and a new material. Then we can add a white material, and I have one from a previous example. That's why I have two. I'm just going to go ahead and select that. What we can do is come down here to the base color, and if by default that's black you can crank that up here to white. Then now when we paint, we will paint with that white material. I'm going to lower my radius back down to 10. You don't have to use these exact numbers, use whatever fits your scene, and what you can do is actually go ahead and paint little highlights on their eye there. Again, those are not offsetting as much as I want, so you can go ahead and grab those and just move those out so that they appear in front of the eye there, and I'm just Shift clicking those. Now we have our character with our little eye highlights. Let's say that you go about and you've drawn several strokes, and you want to go ahead and change the color of the stroke. Let's say that you want these pockets to be more of a dark orange, not necessarily the black like everything else. You can go ahead and create a new material slot. Creating new material, let's call this dark orange, and then you can choose that color down here. I'm just going to start by selecting that and darken that a bit. Then just like the other materials, you can assign to the materials you have selected. Now, you won't be able to assign the individual points. That's a complicated thing to do in grease pencil. So far you can really only do it on strokes for beginners. But there are methods to do it other ways, called vertex painting, but we won't be diving into that for this lesson. With that, we have some linework with our character, and if we turn on the rest of our assets, you can see that we have a full scene that we're actually ready to render. Let's look at how to do that in the next video. 21. Rendering: Here we are in our scene, ready to render. You'll notice that I've put two rain layers, and that's because I wanted to add depth. You can make as many layers as you want. I'm going to put the camera on one side over here, and we're going to go through a couple of our options over here. If you remember before, I told you about the output properties, where you can set your resolution here. That's important that you have that set to what resolution you want. Next, we're going to go down here and we're going to look at our image settings. By default, the file format should be set to PNG, and you can play with these here. You have black and white, RGB or RGB with an Alpha, 8-bit color depth or 16-bit color depth, and how much compression you want of that image. I usually do RGBA of 16 with 100 percent there on the compression. One thing is that we want to make sure that we have a background color here for our character. We're going to come over here to the World settings, and you can set that background color here. You won't see that background color here in the Viewport Shading. But if we go over to Render Mode, we'll see that that color appears here. Normally, this would light your scene, but because we're using all of our shadeless shaders, it doesn't affect it so we can just go ahead and use it as a background color for our scene. Go ahead and make sure you're on the World tab here, and choose whatever color you want here. I've chosen a dark grayish blue, and you can go ahead and copy mine if you want. Now we have our color set for our world, and we have our resolution set down here. We have a file format, and if you want, you can change that to JPEG. Most of these are video formats over here, then we have several image formats but I usually just use PNG. Then after that, we are ready to add a camera. We need a camera to render our scene. We're going to add a camera just like we would any other object. I'm going to make sure I'm in Object mode, and then press "Shift C" to make sure that that cursor is there at the center. We're going to hit "Shift A" to add a camera, which is its own object down here. Now when we select the Camera, let's go ahead and move that out of this collection here so that we have that on its own. When we select that Camera, we'll notice that the camera icon appears here. Also, you'll notice someone who imports the camera, he puts it at this angle, and I don't really like working at that angle. So I'm going to go ahead up here to the rotation, and just zero that out. That will have us pointing down there. We can take it on the X and rotate that 90 degrees. That will make it so the camera is facing that way towards our character. You can also use the gizmos with the camera, if you want. I'm going to just start take this move gizmo and drag this over here because I want this reign to be in front of the camera in-between our character that hopefully add a layer of depth. I'm going to go ahead and close that sidebar by pressing in, and look at the Camera settings here with you. If we come down to the Camera settings, we can see that we have different camera types. Now, for beginners, I just recommend leaving it on perspective. But, if we do go in here and we change it to orthographic, you can see that it removes the perspective from the camera, and that might be what you want if you're looking for an illustrative look. But I won't be covering all the settings here, so I recommend sticking with perspective. For the focal length, this is the lens length of a camera. If you're familiar with cameras, this will be very familiar to you. Otherwise, 35 is typically what the eye sees. If you do 12, you're going to get a really wide shot. If you do something like 85, you're going to get a tight shot. I'm just going to leave mine in 85, because I want to be pretty tight on my character, and I might actually even bring that in a bit more. Let's say, I'm going to do a 110 there. I like that composition that I have there. Now here is where we can turn on the depth of field for our camera. Let's go ahead and turn that on. Then we have the option to choose a camera focus. We can set the distance here. As we twerk that distance, you'll see that different things in our scene are going into focus. What you can do is choose an object to focus on. You can either click this "Picker", and choose an object from the scene, which here we have the rain in front of us. That's making it hard. What you can actually do is click here, search for girl, which is what I named my character object. Now, only that girl will be in focus. Because, we did grease pencil object, you'll notice here that we've seem to loss our color when we switched from material view to viewporting our rendered shading here. If you zoom in, we see a little bit there, but we're actually losing the color of our grease pencil. The reason being, is that we don't have any lights in the scene. As we've mentioned before, we're using a shadeless workflow, meaning that no lights will affect anything. We just need to tell grease pencil that we don't want to use lights, so select your Grease Pencil object, then over here, you can come down to this little twirling line, which is your Object Data Properties, just turn off Use Lights. Then your grease pencil will just show whatever color you painted with. Let's come back here to our Camera settings. We have our girl selected, and down here we have our f-stop. The higher that number is, the less blur there's going to be, and the lower that number is, the more blur there's going to be. You can play with that until you get something that you like stylistically. Now, by having multiple layers of rain there, we're introducing some blur, which I think introduces some interesting depth. I'm going to leave mine at 2.8 for the default there. Again, if you're familiar with a camera, all these numbers should make sense to you, but if you're not familiar with camera, just know that the higher the number, the less blur they'll be, the lower the number, more blur they'll be. Same thing with the focal length, the lower the number, the further away it will be from your object, the higher the number, the closer it'll be. Let's come up here. Let's look at the Render settings. We can move our camera around just like any other object with the gizmos here. We can adjust our camera and get it to where you want in your scene, and where you're ready to render, and then we're going to set some settings here. If you don't remember how to get to the camera view, you can actually go ahead and click this button here, and that will just toggle you, or you can press the Numpad 0. That's how you can switch to your camera view. A little trick you can do, while you're placing your camera, you can actually drag out another viewport here. We can leave one as our camera view, and then the other, we can go and we can move our camera around until we get a setting that we're happy with. Once you pick where you want your camera to be, leave that there and we're going to focus on our Render settings. I also want to point out that if you're not familiar with 3D viewports at all, it may be confusing that you see part of this is half- dimmed and part of it is not. That's because that's letting us know, this is everything in our viewport, but we're only going to render what is inside of this square. Let's go ahead and look at some of these settings here. Now, these are typical settings that you might see in a game engine. If you're familiar with that at all, you may recognize some of these. If you want, I recommend playing with the Bloom. If you turn on the Bloom, you can play with that threshold, and you can play with that intensity there and enter a number you want. You can add this intense glow, and you can add a little bit of glow to your scene. My scene is at nighttime, so I don't want to bloom. But let's say you're doing a daytime scene, you may want to make certain objects have a little bit of a glow to them. This threshold, the higher you do it, it's going to mean that only the brightest object glow, whereas the intensity, it's going to play with the intensity there, and the radius plays with the radius. I'm going to go ahead and check that off. The other setting we want to look at right now, is that within our Render settings here, and we have the depth of field, we may have to turn that on. Mine is set to 100 pixels by default. If you're looking to get the same look I have with a depth of field, make sure your depth of field pixels are set here. The rest of these are a bit complex. That's all we're going to go in for now. But let's say that you hit "Render", so I'll show you how to render in a second. Let's say you hit "Render" and things look a little too fuzzy or the edges don't look right, you can change the samplings here. The more samples you add, the longer it's going to take the render, but the more clear your image is going to be, assuming that it's not from your depth of field that is blurring your image. The default is set to 64 or 16, and I've never really had to change that. I feel like with that, that's good to go. To render, you can press F12 on your keyboard, or you can come up here and you can click "Render", "Render Image", and then it will render your image. From here, you can click "Image", and you can click "Save As", and it will open a window here. Again, you have the option to change your file format if you wish to do so, and you can change your name down here. With that, you are able to save out your image and share it for us to see. I'm really excited to see what you've created. 22. Outro: Congratulations, hopefully you've converted your illustration to 3D, though I know that 3D can be a bit difficult. If you had any issues, please let me know in the comments. I'm really excited to see what you've created after watching this. Please make sure to upload it to the project so that everybody else can see. Again, thank you for watching and don't forget that there are additional learning resources in the resources section of this course. If you'd like to follow up and learn a bit more, also feel free to peek at my project files and maybe see how I animated them or accomplished some other things. Again, thank you for watching.