Complete Beginners Guide to Blender 3D

1. Introduction: Have you always been interested in creating 3D animations and illustrations but had no idea where to start. Well, you just found your entry point into this fascinating world. My name is Harry. I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare, and I'm here to guide you through your very first steps into 3D Art. I've been making Blender Beginner Tutorials for awhile now, but this class will be a little bit different. We'll be starting this class with the assumption that you have absolutely no knowledge of Blender or 3D Art in general. And then we'll work our way through interactive demonstrations until you feel confident enough to set up and customize your very own cozy campsite. This class is meant to be the perfect starting point for every one of my many beginner classes. Alright, Have I mentioned that Blender is when 100% free and all you need to have is computer to start your journey. Yeah, free. Not a trial. Completely free. I designed this entire class to follow a premade starter file. You'll have access to every single model that I'm using in class. So you'll never need to worry about missing out on an important feature or tool. All you need to do is download the Blender project file from the project resources section. Then let me guide you through each lesson using this easy to navigate Blender file. Please note Blender 3.6 or newer is required to use this starter file. This class is meant to teach you the basics of Blender and as such, won't focus heavily on version specific features. That means if you're watching this class and the current version of Blender is 4.04, 0.5 or even higher. You can still get a solid foundation. I've also included a handy cheat sheet filled with important keyboard shortcuts that you can reference during the class and in the future. Throughout this class, we'll get a basic understanding of almost every important aspect of 3d artwork during your time with me. These topics include things like Downloading and Installing Blender, Interface, Navigation, editing Objects, organizing Your File, Common Modeling Tools, Materials, Modifiers, lighting, animation Basics, cameras, Saving Your Final Image And much more. After we've set up a solid foundation, I'll lead you through the class project, where you'll assemble and customize your very own campsite utilizing a premade project file. The goal of the class project is to give you an easy entry point to creating your very first 3D illustration when you're done crafting your perfect Campsite posterior render to the project gallery and all congratulate you on a job well done at the finish line of this class. I hope you'll join me in taking your very first steps into the amazing world of 3D Art in Blender. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Download and Install Blender: In this lesson, we'll learn how to download and install Blender. Don't worry, Blender is completely free. To start our journey through Blender, we'll need to make sure we have it installed. First, let's head over to Blender.org so we can download the installer. Right at the top of the site, we'll see the current version of Blender. In this case it's Blender 3.6 LTS. Please note, this class is meant to teach you the basics of blender. And as such, won't focus too heavily on version specific features. That means even if you're watching this class and the current version is for example Blender 4.0 or 4.5 even higher, you can still gain a solid foundation by watching this class. Let's click the download button at the top of the screen to lead us to the installer download page. We can find that here, the LTS at the end of our version number here means long term support. That means Blender has promised to provide consistent support for this version of Blender for two years from the time of its release. This is mainly meant for larger studios that utilize Blender, but it's also a good thing to know if you're running a Microsoft Windows computer, you can simply click this large blue button here at the top and that will begin downloading the installer. Don't worry if you're using something other than Windows though, just click this small drop down menu here and choose the version of your computer. So if you're using a Mac computer, you would use one of these two options. And if you're using Linux, you can use one of these two options. After clicking the download button here at the top, you should see the download pop up somewhere within your Internet browser. This will change for each browser. However, it should hopefully be obvious. In my case, I'm using Google Chrome and it pops up here, down at the bottom left corner. Now we'll wait for the download to finish. It shouldn't take too long as Blender isn't a huge file. When it's done, simply click on the downloaded file to begin opening the installer. You might need to find the installer file in your downloads folder. If you don't see it pop up in your web browser with the installer open, simply follow the guided installation process here to install the program. It's really easy and shouldn't take very long at all. And the next lesson, we'll be opening Blender for the very first time. 3. Opening Blender for the First Time: In this lesson, we'll open Blender for the very first time. And learn how to save our progress upon launching Blender for the first time, you'll be greeted by a splash screen. This little screen has a lot of useful information on it, so let's discuss that now. First, we'll notice a large piece of artwork at the top. This artwork is unique to this version of blender. At the top right corner of the screen, we can see the exact version number that we're currently running. In this case, it's Blender version 3.6 0.0 though your exact version and artwork may differ. If you're watching this a bit later, don't worry if that's the case though. As I mentioned earlier, this class is not dependent on using this exact version of blender. Down here on the lower right side, we'll see any files that we've recently had open. If you just installed blender for the first time, you likely won't see anything here. But as you begin to work through these lessons, you'll start seeing files pop up here for easy access. Below the recent files section, we'll see a link to the release notes for this version of Blender. It'll go over any changes made to this version so you know what's new. You'll also see below this a link to the development fund for Blender if you'd like to donate to the continued development of blender. As I mentioned before, blender is entirely free. This isn't a trial version of this program. There is no time limit. There is no usage limits. So if you decide to donate to Blender, it's purely because you'd like to support the program. Over here on the bottom left, we have an open button which allows us to navigate to a specific file on our computer and then open that one. We also have a recover last session button below that, which allows us to reopen a file assuming it's crashed. Blender in general is a really stable program. I don't have crashes all that often, but if it does happen, this is how you would reopen a crashed file. And then lastly, we have up here our new file section. This area has a few different presets for creating a brand new file. Each of them will start your file in a different state that makes it more useful for different types of work. As you can see, Blender allows you to do a staggering amount of completely different things, such as two D animation, V effect video editing, sculpting, or we also have the general file type up the top. The most useful new file type in 90% of situations however, is the general file type. Let's choose the general file type now and see where that starts us. We can do that by just clicking the word general here on the left side. Blender has given us a few basic items to start our work and set us to the layout workspace, which is basically the default workspace. Don't worry about what the layout workspace is for now, We'll learn about that later in this class. This general file type has given us three different objects. By default, a camera, a light, and a cube. We'll learn about each of these objects as we progress through this class. But just know that these three types of objects make up the building blocks of virtually any three D scene. Let's end this short lesson by learning how to save this file. To save our file, we simply need to go up to file and then choose Save. This will bring up your file browser and allow you to navigate to a desired location on your computer. To save the file, we can give it a unique name down here at the bottom. In this case, let's just call this test underscore 01. When you've decided where you want to save your file and what you want to call it, you can click Save Blender file. After your file is saved once you can simply hit Control and at the same time to save over that file and update it. If you'd like to save a brand new version of this file without saving over the original, we'll need to use the save As function instead. To get to the save As function, we can go up here to file and then choose Save As. Alternatively, you can hit Shift Control and at the same time to also initiate the save as command. Now navigate to the location that you'd like to save this file. Typically, it's the same place as the original file. Lastly, change the name of the file at the bottom of the window. Something like test underscore 02 would work fine. It's important to note that if you don't change the name of the file and leave it the exact same as the original, it will overwrite the original file just like the regular save feature. That's why this name down here was bright red to let us know that the name was still the same as the original. When we've chosen our new name, we can just choose save as we're now operating in this new test 02 version of the file. And if left the old test 01 version, as is with our test file saved, we're ready to continue our exploration of blunder. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to navigate around the Viewpoard. 4. Viewport Navigation and Views: In this lesson, we'll learn how to navigate around the Viewport. If you have any questions at all throughout this class, please let me know down the discussion section below this video. I'll do my best to help you out with any issues you encounter during this class. Before we begin this lesson, we'll need to open up the beginners guide. Underscore starter file I provided in the project resources. I custom built this file to help make it easy to follow along during each lesson. Each collection, basically folders at the top right, has been labeled with the number for every lesson it's used in. Since this is lesson four, we'll want to have this collection enabled. We can check on this little box here to enable the collection. And then we need to uncheck any other collection that's currently turned on. We'll uncheck this collection here so that the only collection enabled is the lesson four collection with the correct collection enabled. Let's discuss keybines quickly. Keybindes refer to the specific keyboard shortcuts that are built into blender. These keybines will allow us to quickly access some of the most common and useful tools. You'll notice as you watch this class that I have a little keybine viewer down here at the bottom center of my screen. You're not sure what button I just pressed. All you need to do is look right here and you'll see the last key I pushed or the mouse click as well. These little dark gray boxes correspond to my mouse clicks. If I click my left button, you'll see left pop up and then this box here on the left will turn green. If I click my right button, same thing, except the right box will turn green. Then the small button here in the center, that's when I click in my middle mouse wheel. You can see that this class is built with the assumption that your mouse does have three buttons, The left, the right, and the middle mouse wheel in the center. If your mouse is missing a middle mouse wheel, there are ways to simulate having one within blender. However, I'll let you explore those settings on your own. I do have one last disclaimer to make. However, I have changed three of the default keybindings and blender to match my own personal preferences. I'll be teaching you the normal blender keybindes. However, you'll notice a different keypress show up down at the bottom center for these three specific keybindes. The ones that I've changed are really minor. And I'll point out all three of them so it's obvious which ones I've changed. With all of that out of the way, let's dive into navigating our viewport. You may be wondering what exactly the viewport is by this point. Well, you're currently looking at it. The viewport is this large area on your screen that is the view into the three D world that you're creating. The vast majority of what you do in three D is inside this viewport. In order to use this viewport to its fullest extent, however, we need to learn how to move around inside it. What we're creating in blender for the most part are three D objects, meaning we're concerned with how they look from multiple angles. To see around our object, we'll need to use specific keybinds to rotate, pan, and zoom into our objects. Let's start with rotation first. As I mentioned a moment ago, I have changed a few of my keybines. This is the first one to rotate around our viewport. You'll simply need to click in your middle mouse wheel. So click in that button and then move your mouse side to side, And that will look something like this. We can see here as we move our mouse back and forth, we can start to rotate around this camp fire to see the other side of it. The next thing we can do in our viewport is pan the view from side to side. This is essentially just moving our view left or right or up and down with no rotation involved. This is also another keybine that I have changed to pan your view left, right, or up and down, you need to hold in shift and then click your middle mouse button in. Then you can move your mouse around to move the view that looks something like this. We can see here, we're not rotating anything, we're just moving our view around. You can see how we can combine together pan and rotate to get a lot more fine control of what we see of our model and where it appears on the screen. Next up, we have our two different zoom modes. Zooming allows us to get closer or further away from our object. The easiest way to do this is to use your mouse wheel. Just simply scroll up on it to move closer to our object, or scroll down on it to move further away. You can see as we scroll in and out, it moves in these small incremental jumps. It's a little choppy, but it's relatively smooth to get closer to your object or further away. The other method for zooming involves using your control key. If you hold down control on your keyboard, and then click in your middle mouse button. Now you can slide your mouse up and down while holding both of those two keys down. This will move it a lot smoother. You can see here, it's not jumping back and forth, but also takes a little bit more effort to get it to zoom into the spot that you'd like. Then our last key bind is how we focus a model. What it means by focusing is if for some reason we zoom way out of our model and it's off to the side, or it's over here in the corner. And we want to just get a really quick way to jump right back to the model without having to manually move it to the center and zoom back in to get it back into the center of the screen. We can instead select the model. We just simply need to left click on the model, then you're going to hit the Numpad period button. This is the last keybind here that I've changed. And that's mostly because I don't actually have a num pad on my keyboard. I have a shortened modified keyboard. I had to move this because I simply don't have this button. But again, you're going to hit the Numpad period button. So the far right period button on your Numpad. Then when you hit that, it'll zoom right into the model. And it'll just zoom in nice and close, and center it on your screen. Now that we know these few shortcuts, we have pretty much everything we need to know in order to see any part of our model here. Really, we can zoom in closer to it, we can rotate around to the different side. We can pan it off to the left or the right and so forth. If it ever gets way off screen, we know the button to hit it. And then it'll zoom us right back into our view. Before we end this lesson, let's discuss something called orthographic views. Orthographic is a fancy word that essentially means something like perfectly from one direction. It also removes all indication of perspective and how far away something is from the viewer. What this means to us as three D artists is basically a view that is perfectly from one direction, such as the front, the top, the left, the right, et cetera, That flattens the three D view into a perspective less two D view. These orthographic views make fine adjustments and precise layout easier due to their very clear view of your subject. Now currently we've been using the perspective view, which is the default view for your viewport. This is where you're going to be doing most of your modeling and other things. To get into the orthographic view, we have two main ways to enter it. The first and most graphical way to do this is using this little thing up here at the top right called a gizmo. We'll notice that as we rotate around our viewport, this gizmo seems to reflect how the world is displayed here as well. We'll also notice that as we hover over these little circles here on this schizmo, that they essentially turn into little buttons. The quickest way to enter into one of these orthographic views is to simply just click on one of these buttons. Let's click on this Y button here. We can see that as soon as we click on this button, it jumps us into a different view. In this case the back orthographic view. Which means that this view is from the back of the object. We can tell this is specifically the back orthographic view by looking over here at the top left and seeing where it says back orthographic. Now if we wanted to switch into any of these other views, we could also just click on one of these little buttons here. If we click on this little X button here, this will switch us into the right orthographic view. If we click on Z, this will jump us into the top orthographic view. The other method to get into these orthographic views is using a hidden radio menu. We can enter this hidden radio menu by hitting the accent or tilda key at the very top left of our keyboard. It's below the escape button and above the tab button, and it's to the left of the one key. If we hit this button here, we'll see that this little radial menu pops up, Tor, where our mouse was. Then from here we can just hover over the view that we'd like to see. We can see either the left, the front, the top, the back, or the right. We also have a few other options down here such as bottom the camera and then view selected. In this case, let's choose the front view. We're just going to hover over front and then click the word front. We can see how this would be a really easy way to just jump around between the different views that you want to see. All we have to do is just hit that button to bring up the menu and then choose the view you want. It's entirely up to you which method you choose, whether you prefer the visual aspect here of this gizmo at the top right or if you prefer the ease of use of this radial menu. Either method is fine. Now that we're in this orthographic view, you'll only be able to pan around using shift, middle mouse putting, or zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. If you try to rotate this view at all, it'll pop you out of this orthographic view and put you back into the perspective view because an orthographic view cannot be rotated. Now that we know how to navigate around inside of our viewport, we're ready to learn how to affect the objects within it. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to use simple transformation tools to change objects. 5. Transforming Objects: This lesson, we'll learn how to use simple transformation tools to change Objects. We'll be using this campfire again to explore the transformation tools. So make sure that you have this collection turned on. Again, it's the lesson. And then in this case, five collection. Make sure you have this one checked on and then all the other ones checked off. If you're following directly from the last lesson, you should already have this turned on. Transformation in the context of 3d programs refers to the action of moving, rotating, or scaling an object. It doesn't mean that we're turning one object into another object. As you might assume when you hear the word, the most simple form of transformation is moving an object. If we left-click on our campfire to select it, will see this orange highlight around it. Now we can go over here to the left side. We can choose our move tool. In this case, it's the tool with the four different arrows pointing in all different directions. So when we select this, we can now see that we have a Move Gizmo on this object. Now we can simply grab any one of these colored arrows and move it in that specific direction. In this case, let's just grab this green arrow and we can click it and then move it in the screen direction. One important concept to understand when referring to transformation, particularly moving object, is the 3D world is based on a three-dimensional grid. This means that every single object has a specific coordinate within this world, measured on the X, Y, and Z axis. We can see these axes up here at the top right on this gizmo that we were using to get into the orthographic views. So we can see here that this red axis that we're seeing here in the viewport is the x-axis, the green is the Y, then Z is the blue, which in this case is hidden within the viewport, but we can see it here. This green axis, the Y controls whether it's moving forward or backward. In the world. The red X is left and right, and then the Z is up and down. These coordinates are measured from the origin of the world, which is represented by the intersection of these red and green lines, as well as this hidden blue one, as we see in our viewport. We can get a better look at that if we just uncheck this collection to hide it, we can see right where these lines meet up. This is considered the origin of the world. So I can turn this back on now so we can see our objects again. This world origin point is located at 0x0y and zero Z. So when we move any objects within the viewport, we're actually changing its coordinates within this world. We can see down here at the bottom-left that if we twirl open this little option box that says move at the top, we actually move this campfire here, in this case about one-and-a-half meters. This is measured from its original starting point, which in the case of this campfire, was directly in the center on 00. If we'd like to move this campfire anymore, we can just grab one of these colored handles and move it to the desired location. Will also notice that there are these little squares in-between these handles here. These arrows are moving it just in a single direction. Then there's these little tiny Xboxes between them. And these will allow us to move it into different directions. So this little green box here will allow us, if we grab it, to move it in both the X, which is the red, and then the Z, which is the blue at the same time. Then that's true of all these other ones as well. So whichever one that it's hovering between, it will allow you to move it in both of those directions at one time. Any action than we've done that we went to undo, we can hit Control and Z at the same time to undo the last thing that we just did. And every time we hit it, it's gonna go back one more step. So I keep hitting Control Z. I'll eventually get it back to its original position. Now using this move tool and the gizmo is a great way to visualize exactly how you're moving an object. However, it's not the only way to do it. We can also use the quick key bind to start moving the object. The key buy-in for moving an object is actually G. So G for Grab. So we had G on our keyboard. We'll see our object turns white. And then now as we move our mouse, it will move the object as well. Well, notice though by default, it's not actually respecting any one of the axes. So it's not moving just along the green or the red are the blue axis. It's moving along where screen is. So it's always staying about the same size within our screen. We can tell by this plane that it's actually going down and going under this plane as we move our mouse around. And that's because by default, just hitting the G key is only going to move it based on our screen orientation. So basically whatever direction we're currently looking at it in the viewport. This is good for minor adjustments and little small movements, but it's not great for really precise movements. Luckily, there is a way to bind it to just one of the axes. So after hitting G, and then you're starting to move it around just on the screen space like this, we can now hit the letter of a specific axis we want to bind it to. So in this case, let's hit the X key while we're still in that GI movement mode. We can see this little red line pop up. And that's telling us that we're now bound just the x-axis. It's now we can move it just over here, maybe on the x-axis. And then we can hit G. And then maybe why to move it just on the y-axis. And we can see that it's bound to that axis. It won't let us move it anywhere else except for this green y-axis. Then we can hit G and then Z. Maybe to move it up a little bit. We can see here that's a relatively quick way to move it. As long as you get used to these key binds, you can just hit G, X, move it closer, GY, then maybe G and then Z to kinda move it back down to roughly where it was at. So again, if you'd like to undo those changes here and we can hit Control Z a few times to pop it back to the center. Now that we've explored this move tool in detail, Let's quickly go through the last two transformation tools as they share a lot of the same key binds. The next tool we'll discuss is the rotate tool. We can get to that by going over here to this button on the left side. And it has a little square in the center with these arrows rotating around it. So we can click that to switch to the rotate tool. And again, we're greeted with a different gizmo in this case because it's a different tool. In this, gizmos just has a few different colored rings around it that allow us to rotate the object. So depending on which colored ring me grab, it will rotate it on that specific axis. So in this case, if we grabbed the red ring, click and drag it, we can see it's rotating it just on this red axis. Then again, we can control Z to undo that. And then again we have the y-axis. And z-axis will also notice that it has this white ring around it. The white ring doesn't really seem to be bound to the object in any way, just always faces us. And that's because wherever we're facing, if we grab this white ring, it will rotate the object based on the way we're looking currently. Whatever way we look, that's the way it's going to rotate it. I don't find this white ring super useful, and you'll see why in a second. Let's Control Z, those changes here to get it back to roughly the same spot. Just like the move tool, there is a quick button for this as well. This one makes a little bit more sense. We're just going to hit R on our keyboard to start rotating it. We can see here just by hitting R, it's going to rotate it based on our screen. I find this to be a lot more useful way to rotate an object if I'm only concerned about rotating it based on the screen space. That makes this white ring here a little bit redundant because it's a lot easier just to hit R and rotated on the screen space if that's what you want to do. I'll Control Z these to get it back to a little bit more of a normal state. Then again, just like the move tool, if we hit R to start rotating it, but then we bind it to a specific axis. So in this case, if we hit Z on our keyboard, will bind it just to the rotating on the z-axis here. We can also just hit Y to switch it to the Y or X to switch it to the ECS. If you right-click while you're rotating that at least with the quick mode heres by hitting the R key to start rotating it. If you just right-click, it will turn off any rotation and set it back to however it was before you started rotating it. If you accidentally start rotating something, just right-click in and that'll stop it. And if you move it to somewhere and then you left-click, that'll confirm it. So now let's go to our last tool, which is scale. We can get to the scale tool by clicking this little box here that has an arrow showing it growing in size. So we'll click that. And then we're greeted with a, another gizmo. And this one kinda looks like a combination between the rotate and move. This gizmo works pretty similarly to how the move works. So if we grab one, any one of these handles here, we can scale it just in one specific direction. So it's going to be stretching it out just in whatever direction you choose. So in this case, the x-direction. So we can make this flame a lot wider if we wanted to. We can also use these little boxes between them to scale it just in two different directions. So we can make the base of the flame much wider, but leave at the same height. On do that. Then lastly, we have this white ring, and if we grab this white ring, it'll scale it up uniformly. So it'll just make it uniformly larger or uniformly smaller. Now again, this is another situation where this ring, I find it a little bit redundant because of the quick key option. I'm going to undo that. And then the quick option for this is to hit S to begin scaling. So as soon as we hit S, it will do the same thing as that white ring. So in this case, I find this a lot easier if I'm just planning on scaling something uniformly to hit S and then just start scaling it up and then left-click to confirm it. And like all the other tools, if we hit the quick key, so S and then hit an axis, we can bind it to adjust that access if we wanted to do it a little bit quicker without having to bring up the gizmo. One thing that's important to note about these quick keys, as you don't actually have to have this tool selected while you're using that quick key. So even though I have this scale tool selected right now, I can still just hit R and then maybe Z to start rotating it, then G and then Z to move it up. So I don't actually have to have these tools on. So that's one of the major kind of upsides to using these quick keys and getting used to them. As you don't have to always switch back to this tool to move it, and then switch to the rotate tool to rotate it, and then switch to the scale tool to scale it. You can just remember these quick keys and do all of them regardless of what tool you have selected. So I'm going to undo these changes here, get it back to the center. But with all that being said, I would recommend against saving this file has we'll be using this campfire again in the future. If you've moved your campfire off to the side and scaled it up and rotated it and he can't quite get it back to where it was in the beginning with the undo key. That's fine. Just don't save your file. Will be using a lot of these collections multiple times, as you can see here, by the amount of lessons that are used in, we don't really want to be making changes to this file during one of the lessons, saving it and then having a out of place and out of sorts for the next lesson to use that same exact collection between lessons, you can feel free to just close this file and choose know when it asked you to save it. If you have, however, already saved over this file, it's really not a huge issue. You can always just read, download the file from the project resources and you'll have a fresh copy of it each time. If you've accidentally saved over it already. Don't worry, it's really not a big issue. Just read, download the file. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to add new objects to our scene 6. Adding New Objects: In this lesson, we'll learn how to add new objects to our scene, will again be using the campfire for this lesson. However, it's not entirely needed if you'd prefer to have an empty viewport for this demonstration, we'll be adding New Objects. Two are scene. So the campfire is just there for something nice to look at. The easiest way to add a new object to our scene is by hitting Shift and a at the same time. Then looking through this Add menu here and choosing the object that you want, you'll notice that this list contains many different categories of objects, not just new models like a cube. There's things like curves or lights or cameras. In most cases you'll be using this to add things like meshes. For the moment, we're only going to focus on adding meshes, which are things like cubes, spheres, and cylinders. Let's start by adding a new cube to our scene. So again, we'll hit Shift and a to bring up this Add menu. Go to the mesh section at the very top, and then choose cube. Will notice two things. When we add this new cube to our scene, the cube is made directly in the middle of the grid. More on that in a moment. And it popped up a small option box down here at the bottom left of viewport. If for some reason you don't see this option box, it's most likely collapsed. To open this menu, all you need to do is click on this little tiny arrow button, and that'll open up the menu. First. Let's start with this option box at the bottom left of the screen. This is where we will see the options we have while making this cube. The most important setting for this object is the size, which will make our cube either smaller or larger depending on the number that we have here. We can either click and drag on this number when we see our mouse turn into this little left and right arrow. And I'll work something like a slider. Or we can click on this number and then hand type and exact number in here if we'd like to. In this case, we can type in one and then hit Enter and it'll set it to 1 m. We do have some other settings below that we can adjust, such as the initial position or rotation of the object. I don't personally use these settings down here at the bottom, all that often. However, in this case, you might want to set the X value a little higher. That way it's slides this cube off to the right side, so it's not sitting directly on top of the campfire. When we're happy with the object that we've created, we can click into this empty space surrounding it and this option box will disappear. If we click this cube again, we'll notice that that option box is no longer available to us. This is important to remember when creating a new object, we need to change the settings Prior to clicking off this cube or moving it, rotating under scaling it. This doesn't mean that we can adjust this cube anymore. We just can't do it using that option box. Now that we have a new cube made, Let's add another object. So we'll start by hitting Shift and a to bring up the Add menu. So a for Add. Then we can go up here to the top under the Mesh Section. Then we're gonna go down here to cylinder, and then click that. We can now see that each object has its own unique set of options when creating it. The cube only had two options for size. However, the cylinder has vertices, radius and depth. In the case of the cylinder, the vertices slider will change how smooth the outside of the cylinder is. As we make it higher, it will make it smoother and more round. As we make it lower, it will make it as far down as a triangle if you'd like. Then we have our radius which changes how wide this cylinders. Then lastly we have the depth which changes how tall the cylinder is. Then just like the cube, we also have these initial location and rotation Settings. So in this case, maybe we will select this one off here to the left. Feel free to explore the other objects in the meshes menu if you're curious about what they look like and what options they have available. Now that we know how to Add New Objects, Let's learn how to delete them. There's two easy ways to delete an object. First, we need to select the object we'd like to delete. Then we can either hit the Delete key, which is above your arrow keys on your keyboard. So we hit that. It'll just delete the object. Now we can control Z to bring the object back. And then the other way to do it is by hitting the X key on your keyboard, which has all the way over on the left side. And then when we hit this, it's going to bring up an option box which in this case only has the option for delete depending on which part of the software you're currently in. Sometimes the delete option using the X button will bring up more than one option. But since we just have a single object selected, we just have the option to delete it. If we want to delete it, we can just click the button, Delete. Both the Delete key and the X button both basically do the same thing. It's really just a matter of personal preference. If you're more used to hitting the Delete key, you can hit that. Or if you'd like the convenience of the X key being all the way. We're on the left side where your hand is normally sitting, you can hit that instead. You'll find as we move through this class that there's a lot of different ways to do the same thing. It might be two different keys that both have the same function. Or it might be using a key on your keyboard versus using a button on screen. It's all a matter of personal preference and just choosing what feels right to you. The next lesson, we'll learn how to select objects within our scene 7. Selecting Objects: In this lesson, we'll learn how to select objects within our scene. We'll be using this mug, stool and campfire collection as our example for this lesson. So make sure that you have the campfire collection hidden in this collection turned on. And again, the easiest way to know which collection we're using is by simply matching the number on this collection to the current lesson that you're following. Selecting Objects is probably one of the most basic and important things we'll learn aside from how to navigate in the viewport, we really can't interact with anything in our scene if we don't know how to effectively select the objects, I'm sure you've already figured out by now, but the most basic way to select an object is to simply left-click on it. This will select a single object that you click on. If you have one object selected and then left-click another object, it will deselect the first Object and select the new object. This is useful if you want to only have a single object selected, but it's endlessly frustrating if you want to have both objects selected and you don't know how. If you want to deselect an object, simply click into this empty space around the objects, and that will deselect any currently selected object. So how do we select multiple objects at the same time? There's actually a few ways to do it, so let's go through them now. The most obvious method if you're familiar with other computer programs, is to click and drag with your left-click and your viewport. If we click up here and then hold down our left-click, we can drag out this box. And then anything that falls within this box will be selected when we let go. This is an easy way to select groupings of objects that are close together. So if we wanted to just select these left objects here, but not the campfire, we can just drag select over these and let go of the selection. And it will just select these left two and leave the campfire unselected. We're also able to change the shape of this drag selection by using this menu here at the top left. If we go up here and click and hold on this button at the very top of this list. We have three different options here. So select box is the default. That's what we were just using. There's also select circle. So if we choose this, we can see we have a little white circle now around our mouse. If we click and hold our mouse down, will notice it doesn't actually create a drag selection. However, this allows us to paint over objects and select them. I don't personally find this one that useful, but you might find it useful in some applications. Now we can go back up here to this menu. Click and hold on this button to bring up the other options. Then we can choose select lasso. I find this one a little bit more useful. This one if we click off of our model here and just into this empty space, that'll deselect all of them. Now we can click and drag, and we can see here that we're actually drawing out a shape that we'd like to select the objects from. This is better for getting a little bit more complex selections around certain objects. If we wanted to, we could select just these objects here by making sure that they go inside the selection. And we can omit the stool here on the left side, which might be a little bit difficult if we went back to the select box method. Depending on how close these objects were or whether or not they were overlapping, it might be a little bit difficult to avoid selecting this stool without using select lasso. So what if you went to specifically choose each object in your selection, rather than just dragging a square over top of your scene and hoping you only select the objects you'd like. But first, let's make sure we don't have anything selected by clicking off the objects into this empty space. Then we can hold down our Shift key. Then left-click on an object. So we'll see here that just selects the objects. However, if we keep holding Shift down and then select another object, we'll notice that it adds to that selection. Now we have two objects in the selection rather than a de-selecting the first and then instead selecting the new object. This is a particularly useful way to select things when you're working on a complicated scene. As long as you're holding shift, you can continue to add to your selection. However, if you let go of Shift and then go back to selecting just a single object, such as this mug. It'll just select the mug it and it'll deselect the first two objects. And that's because we weren't holding Shift, which was telling Blender to add to our selection. The last way I'm going to show you just select multiple objects within your viewport, is by hitting the a key. For all. If we just hit a on our keyboard, it will select all objects. When I say, Oh, I mean all objects, it will select every mesh, every camera, every light and etcetera in your scene. You don't get to pick and choose what gets selected. Now that we have all of our objects selected, how do we deselect just a single object similar to holding Shift to add to a selection. We can also hold Shift and click and already selected object such as this mug. To deselect it, you just have to remember to hold Shift while you're doing so or else you'll actually just select that object and deselect everything else. Shift is essentially the modifier key. That means add to or removed from a current selection. By doing this, this allows us to make large selections, then simply exclude an object or two from the selection to refine it. This D selection process also worked with the Drag select method. However, will need to hold down the Control key and drag over a grouping of objects to deselect them instead of Shift. So if for example, we drag select over top of all three of these objects and then decide we don't want these two selected here. We can hold down Control and then drag select over just these objects and let go. And that'll deselect anything that was inside that box. Lastly, how do we deselect every object in a scene? We know already that's simply clicking into the empty space surrounding an object. We'll deselect all Objects. But what if there is no easily clickable empty space, such as on a more complicated scene where there isn't just this massive void around it. So let's start by just drag selecting across these objects. That way we have a bunch of objects selected. Now you can hold down the Alt key and then hit a at the same time. So alt and a, and that will deselect every object in your scene without having to click into an empty space to do so, Alt and a is essentially the opposite of just hitting a for select all. It's the alternative to a in this case. That's pretty much it for all the useful ways to select objects within your scene. You'll find that these selection methods work in many places within Blender, not just the viewport that we explained. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to organize our file using the built-in outliner 8. Organizing Your File: In this lesson, we'll learn how to organize our file using the built in outliner. Let's start by enabling the correct collection up here in the outliner for this lesson. This is lesson eight and we'll need to have the lesson eight collection turned on. Make sure you have all the other collections turned off right now. With this collection enabled, we can hit this little tiny arrow here to twirl it down and see what's inside it. In this lesson, we'll be organizing this grouping of trees, bushes, clouds, and a moon. I mentioned that we're learning the outliner in this lesson. What is the outliner? Well, you've actually been using it for quite a while now. The Outliner is this list here at the top right that contains every object in your scene. I've already done a pretty good job of organizing this file for you, so it's easy to use. However, in a typical personal project, you need to do this process yourself. Let's learn how to do that. First, let's discuss the two main parts of the outliner. First up, we have the objects in our scene. In this case, it's primarily meshes which are displayed with these orange triangles. Other types of objects will have different symbols, such as a light bulb for lights or an old Timy camera for your three D camera. Next we have the collections. Collections are basically folders that contain objects in your scene. Collections are noted by these little white file boxes next to the names for them. For the most part, collections are just used to organize your file and keep things tighty. But they can be functionally useful for more complicated things such as modifiers, which we'll get into later. Lastly, let's discuss how to rename things. Right now, everything in the scene is named correctly. However, by default, objects will start with their default name. This means when I make a new cube, it's just going to be called cube. However, when I work with this cube and turn it into say, a camping tent, it will still be called cube unless I change it to rename any object or collection, simply double click on its name. In this case, let's rename this lesson eight collection. We'll just double click on this. It'll turn blue, allowing us to type something new. I'm just going to put a space, a little hyphen and then type in test in all caps at the end just as an example. Then once we're done typing our name, we can hit Enter to confirm it. Renaming your objects in your collections is a really important way to keep things organized. You don't want to just have a whole bunch of objects in your scene named cube and cylinder and sphere, and not really know what any of those objects are. With the basics out of the way, let's get our file organized. Our goal for this organization is to separate the three main objects on our screen into their own collections. This will make it easy to hide or select any one type of object without having to interact with the others nearby. We'll start with the trees first. Our first task is to select all of the trees in our scene. Obviously, given the last lesson, we know a few ways to do that in the viewport. However, this lesson is about the outliner. Let's use that instead. Head over to the Outliner and then use your mouse wheel to scroll down this list until you start seeing the first tree. In this case it's named pine tree. Now that we've found these trees, we're going to click on the very first one in the list, pine tree 007. Now scroll further down this list until you see the last pine tree in the list, in this case, pine tree 013. And then we're going to hold shift and then click this last pine tree. This will select every single object here between these two points. Now let's put them into their own collection. The easiest way to move these into their own collection is while you have them selected, hit M on your keyboard for move to collection. We can see that here at the top. This will bring up a new little menu here. And we'll have a list of all the collections that are currently in the scene, as well as a button here that says new collection. In our case, we don't want to move these objects to another collection. We want to make a brand new collection and put them inside it. We're going to choose New Collection. Now it'll bring up another menu here that we can just type in the name of this new collection. We'll call it trees. And then hit okay. After hitting okay, it looks as though our trees have disappeared from the list. However, they've just jumped to the very bottom of this list. We scroll all the way down here, we can see that we have a new collection here, named trees. Then all these objects here are inside this collection. We also notice that it named the collection trees 001. And that's because this file already has a collection in it named just trees. It had to give it a unique number at the end of it to make the name unique. Now we need to move this trees collection back into the original collection we had it in. A cool thing about collections is that you can have a collection inside of a collection. This allows you to make your file as organized or as messy as you'd like. The easiest way to move this collection into the other one is to just click on this name up here and have it highlighted. And then we can click and drag on this word here. And just slide it up and then place it anywhere inside this collection. I can see here that I'm seeing the word bush and cloud. I know this is the correct one and I can just drag and drop it here. Now if I scroll up to the top of this list, I'll see that lesson eight test, because I renamed it, now has these trees, collections inside of it. Now that we have our trees organized, let's quickly do the other objects. The next one in the list, here are the bushes. We'll select the first bush. Scroll down until we see the last one hold shift and select it. Select all the bushes in between. Now we can hit M to ring up. Move to collection new collection. Rename it Bushes. Hit, okay. It's popped it all the way down here to the bottom into its own collection. Now select this new collection. Click and drag the name all the way up here until we see our lesson, a test folder. And then just make sure we're dragging it down to the right spot this time. In this case, we actually have the trees collection. If we drag it here, it'll place the bushes inside the trees collection. We don't want that. We'll have to go down a little bit down this list and then place it here right where the clouds are. Now if we scroll up, we can see we have the bushes collection which we can troll closed now. And then we also have our trees collection as well. Then lastly, let's organize these clouds. We'll click Cloud and we're going to go all the way down to where it says Moon. We're going to put the clouds and the Moon together. And M New collection. We'll type Clouds and Moon. Click okay. Click the name and then just drag it up into lesson eight. We can actually just drag it directly onto the name as well for this collection. And it'll place it in there too. Now we can twirl this Clouds and Moon collection closed like the others with the organization done. Let's discuss a few remaining things. Let's twirl open the trees collection now, so we can see some of the objects inside it. This eye symbol here next to the collections or an object allows you to hide this object or collection just inside the viewport. That means if you click this eyeball to hide an object or collection, it will no longer be visible in only the viewport. However, you will be able to still see it in the final rendered image. This is useful for cleaning up your viewport, so you can see objects better without other things being in the way. As I mentioned, this works on collections to turn off an entire collection, or we can hide just specific objects within this collection. Next up we have the little camera icon. If we click this camera icon, it will hide this collection only in the final render, but it won't do anything inside the viewport. This toggle is a little bit less useful than the eyeball and will often lead new blender users to be confused about why their objects aren't showing up in their render, even though they can see them in the viewport. If you can't figure out why your objects aren't showing in your render, check to see if this little camera icon is unchecked. Again, just like the eyeball, you can do this to both objects individually or collections as a whole. If an object is inside of a collection. We also have the option for this little checkbox which we've been using throughout most of this class. This checkbox functions as both the eyeball and the camera icon at the same time. Meaning that if you uncheck a collection, it won't show up in the viewport and it won't show up inside your final render. This essentially completely turns off a collection. Lastly, let's discuss what the active or default collection is. These collections all have little white boxes next to them. And you'll notice on this box here, there's a subtle highlighted square around it. That means that this is the active or the default collection. Whenever we make a brand new object, it'll automatically be put into the default collection. This is useful if you'll be making a lot of objects at once and want them to all go into the correct collection. You don't have to organize them later. We can change which collection is the default or the active collection, just by clicking on this little icon here. We'll see if we click on this one, it'll make this one highlighted. Which means any brand new object we create will go directly into this trees collection, for example. A collection can only be active if it's also visible. I can make this one the active or this one the active. But I can't click on this one to make it active because it's not currently visible. Now that we're familiar with the Outliner and how to utilize it, we're ready to continue our exploration of Blender. In the next lesson, we'll learn about edit mode in the different parts of the model. 9. Editing Objects: In this lesson, we'll learn about the edit mode and the different parts of a model. We won't really need a model on screen for this lesson. However, if you'd like to experiment with one after we've learned more about editing, you can turn on the mug collection. We can find that here in our outliner under the Lesson 910, 1,113.20. We're going to go through this explanation with a much more simple model. Let's start by adding a new cube. We can do that by just zooming out a little bit. Then hitting Shift and a to bring up our Add menu, going to mesh. Then choosing Cube. The only setting will change on this cube is its initial X location. We get down here where it says location X. We're going to type in three and then hit Enter, and that'll move it 3 m to the right, just so it's not sitting on top of the mug. Now that we have a more simplified example model, let's jump right in. First, let's discuss the difference between Object Mode and edit mode. Object Mode is the default mode. This is the mode that we've been using for this entire class up until this point. Object Mode allows us to select different objects, as well as do things like move them, scale them, or rotate them. It's also the mode that displays this orange highlight around our selected model. We can see that we're in object mode by looking up here at the top-left and seeing where it says Object mode, Edit mode is accessed by hitting the Tab key on your keyboard. You can find this key to the left of the Q key and above the Caps Lock key. Now select the cube that we just made and then hit the Tab key to enter edit mode. Now that we're in edit mode, you'll notice a few things have changed. The interface has changed around the edges of the viewport. You'll see three different buttons at the top-left, which denote the edit mode that you're currently in. Your model will also appear a little bit different than it did before, depending on which mode that you're currently in. In our case, the model is turned completely orange because it is defaulted to having all of the faces selected. So now that we know how to enter edit mode, what is the point of it? And it might sound a little obvious, but Edit Mode allows us to edit the model. Editing in the context of 3D modeling means we'll be adding, removing, or altering the geometry of this model. In order to edit this cube will need to understand a little bit about the anatomy of a model. The three little buttons here at the top of the screen correspond to these different parts. Let's go through them one-by-one so we can get a better understanding of how a model is comprised. The first mode is vertex, and that's the symbol here on the far left side. It looks like a little box with a small dot on it. We can either click this button here on the interface or hit one when our keyboard. In order to jump into this mode using a key bind, a vertex is the most basic piece of a model. It's shown on the model when it's not selected by these tiny little black dots here on these corners. A model can technically have just a single vertex. However, most modeled objects will have at least three to make up a triangle. If we select one of these vertex, we can adjust it just like any other model. If we just select this tiny black dot here on the corner, we can now move this vertex and we can change the shape of this cube. We can see how this differs from just moving the cube or scaling or rotating it in object mode. We're actually changing the shape of the cube here. This is something that we wouldn't normally be able to do without using edit mode. We can also select more than one vertex at a time by either drag selecting over two of them like that and then moving them together. Or we can select one vertex and then hold shift and select another vertex somewhere else, just like selecting multiple models. Then we can move those together as well. Now let's discuss the second part of a model called edges. We can get to edge mode by either clicking on this symbol here, which is a box with a line across it. Or we can hit two on our keyboard and ten through the edge mode. We can now see our model has changed appearance slightly. The little black dots on the corners are gone, but we have black lines running across the edges of the cube. An edge is always made up of two vertices. You can't have an edge without having two vertices on either side of it. If we select these edges and then move them around, we'll see that it's moving both sides of these corners here because they're attached by this edge. We also have the ability to scale an edge. So we can hit S to scale it, or are to start rotating it. Again. You could also use the gizmo by switching to this specific tool for those as well. If you want it to be a little bit more precise, or just if you felt more comfortable using this gizmo. Lastly, let's discuss the face mode. We can answer face mode by going up here again to the top-left corner. Then choosing this box here with the large white square on it. Or you can hit three on your keyboard to jump into face mode. So as you can see, each of these correspond to a number. So 12 and then three face mode mono appear to different than Edge mode, but they do function pretty differently. This mode will allow us to select the square faces on this cube. Now if we hover over a model and then select an area, you can see it selects this entire flat surface. A face is made up of a minimum of three edges in three vertices. Most often though, you'll see faces created with four edges and four vertices. In order to make a square, we can move, rotate, and scale faces just like any other part of the model. So now that we know a little bit about what a model is made of, what is the point of this mode? Well, it's your main way to create the model that you'd like to make. I'll explain all the tools that I just used to make this simple model and a later lesson. But I just wanted to give you an idea of what you quickly do inside edit mode in order to make the model that you'd like. For now, I'm going to hit Control Z to go back until we get to the original cube. So we can just hit Control Z a few times to undo all these changes that we made while exploring the different Modes. And eventually we'll get back to our plane Q. If for some reason you're unable to control Z enough times to undo all the changes you've made. That's fine. You can just hit Tab to your edit mode. And then hit Shift and a and then create a brand new cube. I was able to undo enough times though. So I'm just going to use the cube that I have. Now before we move on, let's discuss one last important tool for edit mode. First switch to your vertex mode by hitting one on your keyboard or by clicking this icon here at the top left. Now, zoom out a little bit and then just drag select over your entire cube here and select all the vertices. Now let's rotate around our cube. And then we'll notice here at the bottom corner that we didn't actually select every single vertices because this vertices here wasn't visible from the direction that we selected from, which was the side. It wasn't able to select this vertices because it just couldn't see it. This is the default mode for selecting parts of your model in edit mode. However, there is a mode we can toggle to allow us to select through and see through our modal. The easiest way to enable this mode is to hit Alt and Z at the same time when your keyboard that will enter into X-Ray mode, if you'd prefer to use a button on your interface to do that, you can go peer to the top-right, and it's this little box here with the two squares overlapping each other. So you can click this button or you can hit Alt and Z at the same time to enter and exit your x-ray mode. Now as we rotate around our model, well, notice that we can actually see through the model. It's kind of sort of transparent. This x-ray mode, however, allows us to not only see-through the model, but select through it as well. Let's go back to a similar angle that we were at before. And then drag select across our entire model. Now when we drag select, we'll notice that this corner here, the one that wasn't able to be seen before, was still selected because we're in X-Ray mode. X-ray mode is really important when building your models. I typically default to using X-Ray mode while Modeling and only turn it off when I have a good reason to. X-ray mode works in vertex, edge and face mode. And it also works outside of edit mode. So if we hit tab to exit or edit mode, we'll see that our model is still X-rayed in object mode. X-ray mode serves a little bit less purpose in object mode, however, as it only really allows you to S3 a model, it doesn't really have anything to do with selection. Now that we understand how a model is made up, feel free to play with either the cube or select the mug here that we have in our example file. And just adjust the shape of this by either moving vertices are selecting faces and pushing and pulling them just to see how an actual model, such as a mug, reacts to these different adjustments. Don't worry about messing up the shape of this mug as you can always just close this file, not save it, and then reopen it. And the Mughal will be back to how it was. After you're done experimenting with these models, you're ready to move on with the rest of the class. The next lesson, we'll learn about shading Modes 10. Shading Modes: And this lesson, we'll learn about the three different shading modes. We'll be using this mug as our example for this lesson. So make sure that you have the lesson ten collection turned on, which has this mug inside it. So why this mug? What makes it a good example for explaining shading modes? First, let's explain what we mean by shading modes. Shading in this context refers to how blender displays each face of a model and how the light reacts to it. Each of the three shading modes I'll show you will handle the transitions between these faces differently? This mug makes for a good example because of the variety of different faces it has. We have areas that we want to appear smooth and round, like the outside of the mug and the handle. But we also have areas that we want to appear flat like the liquid inside the mug, as well as the bottom. This makes this mug a good testing ground for showing each of the shading modes and how they'll affect the appearance of these different faces. Let's start with the most basic shading mode, Shade flat. In object mode, select your model, in this case, the mug, and then right click on it, and choose Shade flat. Shade flat is actually the default when creating a brand new model. When we create a new cube or a new cylinder, it'll start out with Shade flat enabled. If we zoom into our model, we can get a better look. Shade flat essentially removes all smoothing from an object and displays each flat face as if they weren't connected to its neighbors. The shading mode is the most useful in models that you would like to be naturally flat in real life, like machinery or architecture. It's also widely used in a style of three D art that focuses on retro low poly aesthetics. Next up, let's look at Shade Smooth. Again, we'll right click on our model with it selected, and then choose Shade Smooth, and that's at the top. Now we can see that every single face is perfectly smooth and blends into its neighbors. This causes issues though in areas like the liquid, where it has this weird concave look. Otherwise, the mug looks pretty good though. This shading mode is generally more useful than Shade flat in most cases. More often than not, this is the mode that you'll default to, unless you have a specific reason to use our next shading mode. Now let's right click on our model again, and we're going to choose Shade auto smooth, which is in the middle. In Blender 4.1, auto smooth has changed slightly. For this example, you can use Shade Smooth by angle found here. This will produce a visually similar result to what Auto Smooth used to do. Auto smoothing, as we used to know it, prior to Blender 4.1, now exists as a modifier called smooth by angle. For the sake of this example, that's not particularly important, so I would just recommend you use Shade Smooth by angle. We'll see that this mode does a pretty good job smoothing the mug and leaving the liquid on top flat. However, there are areas like the mug handle and the rim of the mug that still seem odd. Luckily, Auto smooth gives us some control over how it smooths an object. Down at the bottom left corner, we'll see this option box that may or may not be twirled closed. If it is twirled closed for you, just click this little tiny arrow here to open it up, and then inside this option box, we can adjust the angle. As we increase this angle number, this will move it closer and closer to the equivalent of Shade Smooth. If we make it the absolute maximum, which is 180 degrees, it looks exactly like Shade Smooth. Instead of that, if we move it all the way down to zero, this is the equivalent of Shade flat. You can see Shade Auto smooth is a best of both worlds. It allows you to choose the exact point in between these two to get your model looking correctly. So in our case, let's move this up. And I think the value for this is actually going to be 32. So if we type in 32 for the angle, it's a little bit higher than the default, which is 30, but we can see that it's cleared up pretty much all the issues we had on the handle, as well as the rim of the mug. So we've just pushed this shade auto smooth a little bit closer toward Shade Smooth, which is the one that did a little bit too much smoothing. Auto Smooth is by far the most powerful of the shading modes. However, it does take a little bit of adjustment on your part. The last important thing to note before we wrap this lesson up is none of these shading modes are actually adding new geometry to your model. All these modes do is change how the original geometry is perceived. We'll notice that as we zoom in on this model, no matter how smooth it looks, it is still a little bit jagged on the edges. And that's because these shading modes don't add any new geometry in order to make it smoother. So you can safely smooth your models out as much as you'd like to using these shading modes without having to worry about making your models really dense and polygon heavy. In the next lesson, we'll learn about some of the most common tools. Oh. 11. Common Tools: In this lesson, we'll learn about some of the most common tools. Now that we understand the building blocks of a model, what are some of the different tools that we can use to edit the model? Let's go through just a few of the highlights here so you have a brief understanding of the most commonly used tools. Again, we don't really need any special model for this demonstration. However, if you'd like to mess around with the mug model after this lesson, feel free to do so. You can find that here in the Lesson 11 collection. Let's start out by creating a cube that we can play around with. We're going to zoom out a little bit here. Hit Shift in A. Let's bring up our Ad menu. Go to Mesh, and then choose Cube. Then down here we can set our initial starting location on the x axis. Here, set it to three, so it moves it off to the right. It's not sitting directly on top of the mug. Now, with our new cube selected, we can center it in our view here. Then we can hit Tab, Enter our edit mode. And then three, enter our face mode. And then we can just click off the model here to deselect it. One important thing to note that while you're inside your edit mode, you can't actually de select the model regardless of whether I select off into this void here, my model is still technically selected. Inside the edit mode, I just don't have any faces, edges, or vertices selected. The first tool that we're going to learn is called extrude. Extrude will allow us to select a face or an open edge and then extend the geometry off from that point. Start by selecting the very top face of this cube. Hit on your keyboard to begin extruding, and we can see here that it's actually extending this cube up by adding more geometry on top of it. We can decide where we want to extrude it two and then click our mouse to confirm that change. Now with this top face still selected, let's delete it so we can hit either Delete or X on our keyboard to bring up the delete menu. Now we can choose Delete Faces, that will delete the face that we just had selected. Now hit two on your keyboard to switch into edge mode. And then let's select each of these edges here. So we're just going to select the first one, then hold down shift, we're going to select each of these edges at the top on this new hole that we made at the top of the model, I have all four of these edges selected because I was holding down shift while I was clicking them. Now we can hit again to begin extruding, except this time you'll notice that the extrude behaves a little bit differently. It's still extruding off new geometry. However, it's not bound to just moving up and down in the z axis. We're actually going to have to hit z now after starting the extrude to bind it just to the Z axis. It's just a slight difference between these two different methods. Again, we can just move it up to here and then click to confirm the new extrusion. With these edges still selected, we can hit on our keyboard to fill in this hole in the model for fill. This will add a new face into this big open border that we had before. Let's go back to face mode by hitting three on our keyboard. And now we can learn about a new tool called inset. Make sure you still have this top face selected, the very top of this cube. Then we're going to hit to begin insetting. Once we hit I, we'll see this little dotted line connect from the center of that face to wherever our mouse is. As we move our mouse, we'll create a smaller face inside of the original. Let's move it to about here and then click to confirm it. Instting is useful for making things like tubes or maybe that coffee mug that we saw in the last example. We can combine the inset with extrude in order to push this face down into the bottom of this cube. So now that we've int this face, we can hit to begin extruding. Then instead of going upward, we can go to extrude it down. Inside of this, we make this cavity at the top almost like a cup. We can again combine this with the inset. Let's hit with this face still selected. We're going to inst it in a little bit smaller than the original hole that we made. Then we're going to hit to extrude this back up outside of the cup shape that we made for our next tool, we're going to go back to Edge mode. So we can hit two on our keyboard to go back into edge. Now let's click off the model to make sure we don't have anything currently selected. And we can just click anywhere offside the side of the model here. Now hold down your Alt key, which is next to your Space bar. We're going to click on this edge here. By holding the Alt key, we're selecting every single contiguous edge all at one time. It's selecting this entire line of edges all the way around until it can't go any further. We can also combine Alt and Shift together to do the same function, but add to our selection. Let's hold down Alt and Shift, and then we're going to click on this edge here. Now we can see that we've selected this entire edge, every single edge that was connected to it. We've still kept our original selection on this side with both of these edge loops selected. Let's round them off using the next tool called Bevel to begin beveling. Just hit control. And at the same time then again we'll get this little dotted line. Then as we move our mouse, it'll change the size of this rounding. Your rounding also might not have the same amount of edges as mine, and that's because it'll start out usually at a lower default. By using your mouse wheel, we can increase or decrease the amount of edges inside of this rounding, which will make it either more or less round. For our example, let's just add a few here just by scrolling up on our mouse wheel until it looks relatively round. Then we can decide how wide we'd like this rounding and then click to confirm it, just like most tools. After using them, you'll typically get an option box over here on the left side that allows you to further adjust the settings of the bevel, in this case, that you just made. If we wanted to adjust it to a very specific size, we could say type in exactly 0.5 And then hit Enter, and we'll make this bevel exactly 0.5 We can also change the amount of segments, which is the amount of cuts here, which changes how round it is. Maybe we want more cuts on ours, so we'll type in ten and then hit Enter. In general, for Bevel, the width and the segments are the two most important settings. When you're happy with your bevel, simply click off your model to confirm it. Now let's learn about the next tool called Loop Cut. While we're still in edge mode, we can just hover over anywhere on this model and then hit control in R. At the same time, this little yellow line is showing us where we're about to place a cut. By cutting the model, we'll increase the amount of geometry. We have to work with the amount of faces, edges, and vertices. However, before we decide where we place this cut, we can still make some changes again. We can use our mouse wheel to scroll up to add more or less cuts to this. Maybe we'll increase it up to two. Then once we've decided how many cuts we want, we can click once, just start sliding our cut now we can actually choose where we want to place it. If we wanted them closer up towards the top, we could place them here. Or we can move them further down towards the bottom. Or we can leave them just roughly in the middle. I'm going to move mine back to around the middle. And then I'm going to click one more time, left click, to confirm the placement of these cuts. As I mentioned before, adding more cuts to the model gives you more geometry to work with that would allow us to do things like maybe select off the model here to deselect everything. Now we're going to hold down Alt and select any one of these edges here. I'm just going to select the one that's roughly in the middle for me. By holding Alt, I've selected it and it's selected all the way around the model. And now I could hit to start scaling this up. I could change the shape of this model doing that. And I could choose any one of these different edges here. Just continue to do that to change the shape and the look of this model. For our second to last tool, we'll be enabling something called snapping to do this. Go up here to the top center and we're going to click on this little tiny magnet icon. Once we've turned this on, it'll turn blue and it'll show this highlighted magnet snapping allows us to have our tools and parts of our model magnetized to different parts of our scene. If you click this little drop down menu next to it with the four dots, you'll see all the different options that you have in order to change what it's going to be magnetizing to. Right now, I have our snapping tool set up to snap to vertices. Let's see how that works. We're going to hit three to change into our face mode. Then we can select this very top face here. Now we're just going to grab this blue handle here at the top to move it up and down in the z direction. Then we'll notice as we do this, it starts bringing up this little tiny orange circle that seems to snap to different vertices on our model wherever we drag it. Once that little circle pops up, that's where it's snapping at exactly two, but only in the Z height. If I drag it to here and then let go, I've now successfully moved this face to be exactly in line with this face here. That's because we snapped to this vertice. That's a part of this face. Snapping is a really powerful tool that has a lot of different options. As you get more comfortable with three D, you'll find different uses for these different options. For now, let's just click this little magnet icon to turn it off. Again, that way we're not using snapping when we didn't mean to. Now let's hit tab to exit our edit mode on this object that we just created. Then lastly, we're going to discuss one last common tool called proportional editing. For this explanation, let's make a new object that will display this effect a little bit better. We'll hit Shift and A to bring up our Ad mode and then go to Mesh. And then we're going to choose Cho Sphere. After this sphere is created, let's go down here, down to the bottom option box. And we're going to set the subdivisions to five, which will make this sphere a little bit smoother. We can leave our radius at one. And then we're going to set our location to negative three, this time just to move it off to the left. With these settings changed, let's zoom in here on our Sphere, and then hit Tab to enter our edit mode. We also want to switch into our vertex mode by hitting one on the keyboard. We intentionally made the sphere really smooth and give it a lot of vertices to make this demonstration even more obvious. For the sake of the example, let's just say that we wanted to make the sphere into a little bit more of an egg shape. Meaning it would have a slightly pointier top and a larger round or bottom. If we just use the normal move tool, we'd need to select every single vertice by itself or enlarge blocks. We'd have to do something like this where we'd actually grab every single vertice and move them up individually. And you can see how incredibly tedious this would be or we would have to drag select over it and move them up individually, Then try to round it out ourselves. And you can see how this just isn't a feasible way to work. I'm going to control Z, these changes that I just made to undo them, it's back to a regular sphere shape. Now we're going to enable a tool called proportional editing. We can enable that by going up here next to where our magnet icon was for the snapping. And we're going to click this little tiny bull's eye icon, so these two little circles inside each other. We just click this on, and that'll turn on proportional editing. Again, for this example, let's just choose a vertex here that's roughly in the top center of this. You don't have to worry about being perfect just for this example. Just select a single vertice here at the top. This time we're going to move this vertice upward in the blue direction. So the z direction. Then we'll notice right away as we start moving this, it's not moving like it did before. And that's because of the proportional editing, this gray circle that we're seeing around here. Hopefully you can see that in the video. This gray circle that we're seeing, that's actually the fall off for this proportional editing. And we can change the size of that proportional editing by scrolling in or out on our mouse wheel. While we're moving it, we won't be able to change it prior to moving it, you have to start moving the object, or the vertice, or the face, or the edge, and then start adjusting this falloff. And the falloff determines how much of the model it moves along with that original vertice. Let's adjust our shape here. I'm going to make my fall off a little bit bigger by scrolling down on my mouse wheel. Then I can pull it up just so it's roughly in egg shape. Something a lot closer than the first time I tried to do it without proportional editing. This tool allows you to move your model in a lot more organic way, as if the model was made of clay. It won't move just a single vertice, it's going to move everything else around it based on that fall off dimension. The further out it gets away from the original selection, it'll move those parts of the model less and less, until it down here, say at the bottom, when it was well outside of that range, it didn't move these at all. Now let's turn off proportional editing by clicking the symbol again to turn it off. And then we'll hit tab to it, our edit mode. We're back in object mode. Before we finish, let's show you how to make a duplicate of this egg shaped model we just created. Making a duplicate is actually pretty easy. All you need to do is select the model you'd like to duplicate within object mode. Then we're going to hit Shift in D for duplicate. Just start making a duplicated version of that object. Now just like all the other move tools and transformation tools that we can bind this to a specific axis. If I hit x after starting to duplicate it, it'll move it just on the x axis. Maybe I'll move it over here. And then once I'm happy with where I'm placing it, I can just left click and then I'll make a brand new identical copy to the first egg. After making your duplicate, you now have two completely unique versions of the same model. Meaning I can go into the edit mode for this new duplicated object and make adjustments to it, and it won't make any changes to the original. Then when we're done, we can just hit Tab to exit our edit mode. That's certainly not every tool and blender, but it's a great set of tools that will help you make a lot of different types of models. In the next lesson, we'll learn about the importance of applying transformations. 12. Applying Transformations: In this lesson, we'll learn about the importance of applying transformations. We'll be using these two log models for our demonstration. In this lesson, make sure that you have them enabled in the Outliner. You can find them here in the Lesson 12 collection. We've already learned about transformations in a previous lesson. What do I mean by applying them as a reminder? Transformation in three D, modeling refers to moving, rotating, or scaling an object. When we use these transformation tools, we leave behind traces of these changes on the model. Many cases, this isn't really much of a problem, however, for some tools it makes a huge difference. One of these tools that's heavily affected is the Bevel tool that we learned in the last lesson. Let's start with an example on the left log. If we select this left log here, make sure that you have the applied scale log selected. Now hit Tab to enter the edit mode on this log. Then hit two to enter our edge mode. We're going to zoom in here to the rim of this log, right where the bark is broken off. Click off to the side of your model to make sure you have no other edges selected. Now hold down the Alt key. Then we're going to select this edge here that goes around the very outside of the log. So we'll just click on this edge here. And then that'll select the entire loop, all the way around the log. Now let's begin beveling this to see what the bevel looks like when it's behaving correctly. To do this, we just need to hit control and for bevel and then move our mouse slightly until we start beveling this edge. It doesn't really matter how many edges you put on it. So you can just scroll your mouse wheel down to lessen the amount of edges. We'll just bevel it out to about here. That's fine. These measurements really don't matter. We're just wanting to see some bevel here on the edge. We can now see that this bevel is nice and even all the way around the log and does a good job of rounding off the sharp edge. Let's hit Tab to exit our edit mode on this log. And then instead we're going to select the other log. This is the non applied scale log. This other log, I intentionally messed up the scale. It looks pretty much the same as the other log. However, we'll notice that it behaves much differently once we start bubbling. Let's zoom in here on this log, roughly to the same spot as the last one. Then we can hit Tab to enter our edit mode, then two to make sure that you're an edge mode. In this case, we already have this edge selected. However, if it's not, just click off of your model to make sure you have nothing selected, then hold down Alt and then select that same edge that we did the last time, this outer edge here. Now just like last time, let's begin bubbling this edge. To round off this corner, we'll hit control and to begin beveling, then we'll move our mouse away. Then we'll see as we start beveling this edge, just like the last one, this one is behaving much differently than the first. It's really squished on the inside and then it's really stretched out on the outside. It's making this even unpleasant looking bevel let's just move it around here and then confirm the change by clicking. One last thing we'll notice about this incorrect bevel is that the distance between these edges also seems to change. This distance here is much shorter than this distance here. That's also attributed to the stretched out nature of this pebble. Now let's hit control Z. Undo this bevel, we're back to how it was before. Then we're going to hit Tab to exit our edit mode. This stretched out bevel is because we haven't applied this scale correctly on this log. Let's learn how to determine that this log hats an incorrect scale and how to fix it with our logs still selected. Let's hit to bring up our side menu then. This menu here has a whole bunch of different tabs that do different things, but the one that we're concerned with is the very top one called item. Now if we look down here at the scale section, we can see that our scales here for the X and the z are set to one. However, the y is set to four. If we look at this object here, the y axis, which is this green axis, is the one that's incorrect. These should all by default be set to one. However, R Y is set to four. This means, as far as blender is concerned, this log is stretched out four times longer in the y direction than it should be, even though it looks pretty much like the other log. Now let's zoom out and then select the other log to see what this one looks like. If we select this log, we can go over here and look at the scale, and we can see that these are all set to one. Which means that the scale has been applied on this log, even though that this log is much longer in the y direction than it is wide in the x or the Z blender still thinks that this log is exactly how it should be and isn't stretched out in any one direction. Which means that our tools will behave correctly. Let's go back to the other log. By selecting it, let me, can zoom in here so we can get a better look at it. Now we're going to apply the scale to this log to fix this issue. We'll start out by hitting Control and a for Apply to bring up our Apply menu. In this case, we know that the scale is the thing that's currently incorrect. We're going to choose to apply the scale. After applying the scale, look over here at the menu and see that the X, Y, and Z are all set to one. Now by using this supply menu, we've told Blender to forget that we scaled this object and now consider its current state as the default scale. We can do this for both location and rotation. However, scale is what you'll typically use the most as it's used to fix most issues. We also notice that the look of this log has changed slightly because of fixing the scale. If we'd like to fix the shading of this quickly before redoing the bevel, we can just right click on it and then choose Shade, Auto, Smooth. It looks pretty much like the other log. Now with our shading fixed, let's hit Tab to enter our edit mode. We already have our edge selected from the last time. However, again, if it's not selected, you can just select off the model Hold Alt, and then click this edge on the outside. And then we're going to hit control B to begin beveling. Then we can start beveling this edge. We can see now that it behaves much more similarly to the first log than it did when it was all stretched out on the original non applied scale log. We can just choose any distance we'd like. Here, click to apply it, and we can see we have a nice round pebble now that isn't all stretched out in any one direction. One last important thing to note about the side menu and applying transformations. Blender will only consider changes made to the model while in object mode, not in edit mode. If we're in this edit mode here and we hit a to select all the edges on the model and then we hit to scale them all up, we can just make this log much bigger than the other one. Now we can hit Tab to exit our edit mode. We'll notice that the scale hasn't changed. It doesn't reflect this new larger size. That's because we made these changes inside edit mode. Any change made inside edit mode will not affect these parameters here. This is true of rotation and location as well. However, if we scale this log back down roughly to the same size as it was, we can now see that our scale here has changed. As you get more familiar with three D modeling, you'll learn ways to make this interaction work to your advantage. However, as a beginner, if you feel like a tool is behaving incorrectly, I'd suggest the first place you look is the side menu to see if you need to apply a transformation such as scale. In the next lesson, we'll learn about how to adjust the object origin point. 13. Adjusting the Object Origin: In this lesson, we'll learn about how to adjust the object origin point. We'll be going back to the mug again for almost the last time. This class, make sure that you have that collection enabled. You can find it here in the Outliner under Lesson 13 and then turn on that collection. Now, what is an origin point? You might remember, we discussed the origin of the world earlier on in this class. That's the intersection of this red and green line within the viewport that represents zero x 0.0 z in the world. An origin point on an object is similar but also different. Select this mug. We can see here that the origin point of this object is represented by this tiny orange dot here in the center. The origin point is how blender knows what coordinate an object exists in within the world. If we hit n to bring up our side menu, we can see here that the location for this mug is 0x0y and then just a little bit above zero here on the Z. If we select the Z and then type in zero to match all the other ones, then hit Enter. We'll see here that our mug drops down a little bit. Now this tiny orange dot is perfectly centered on this intersection. For the axes, the origin point is also used as the pivot point of an object. Let's switch over to our rotate tool to see an example of this. If we rotate this mug, we'll notice that it rotates around that little orange dot that's centered in the middle of the body of the mug. We can hit control Z to undo that rotation. And we'll notice that it's the same for every other rotation as well. Anywhere we rotate it, it's always centered here on that little orange.in the middle of the mug. And that's because that's where the origin point is. Why is all of this important? And how do we change it if we don't like where it's at. The origin point is the heart of your model. It dictates where Blender thinks your object is and how it rotates within the world. How do we change the location of this origin point? Then there are three main ways to move the origin point, but some are a little bit more common or useful than others. Let's start with the first method, with your models still selected in an object mode. Go up to the object menu here, and then go down to Set Origin. There are a few different options here, however. The most common ones to use our origin to geometry and origin to center of mass volume. Now let's select to the first one. We're going to choose origin to geometry. And then keep an eye on that little orange dot on our mug. After we select this, we'll see that this little orange dot has actually moved over here to the right side of this mug. In this case, it's actually moved our origin point closer to the mug handle. Because this setting doesn't really concern itself with the logical place for an origin point. It just looks at the overall dimensions of the parts of the model and chooses a point that's exactly in the middle of them for our mug, this makes the pivot point worse than it was before. Now let's try the other option. With our mug still selected, we're going to go back up here to where it says Object, and then we'll choose Set Origin. And then we're going to pick the very bottom one here, origin to center of mass volume. Let's select this and then watch where our pivot point moves. We'll see after selecting that option that our pivot point has moved basically back to where it was before. The center of mass volume option looks at the overall volume of the mug and does its best to put the origin point in the most voluminous part of the model. In this case, the body of the mug with the liquid in it has a much higher volume than the smaller handle. It weighs the movement heavier towards the larger piece. In many cases, using the set origin to geometry will work pretty well. However, if you have an odd shaped model, in this case a mug with a really thin handle off the side. You might have a better look here with the origin to center of mass volume. Feel free to experiment with the other options in this list to see how they affect the origin in different ways. Now let's move on to the second method. Rather than relying on Blender to guess where we want the origin, actually manually move it into place. If we'd like to do this, we're going to go over here to the right side where it says Options at the top right corner. Then we can click on the Options menu here. And we want to check on Effect Only Origins. Let's select this. And then we'll see a different gizmo pop up here. This is actually a representation of the origin for this object. Now let's switch over to our move tool. Then we can zoom in down here on the mug, and we can pull this origin point wherever we'd like. We can see that our mug is staying in place and we're only affecting, in this case, the origins. Let's move this origin point down here to roughly at the bottom of the mug. We now have the origin point relatively close to the bottom. However, if we'd like to be a little bit more precise, we can go up here and turn on our snapping tool. In this case, we have it still set to vertex like we had before. Now if we move this, we can move this origin point down and then hover over any one of these vertices here on the very bottom of the mug. And it'll snap it to that very bottom face. Now it's at the very bottom of the mug. And we can tell that it's actually lined up perfectly with the bottom. Then when we're done, we can turn off snapping and if we're happy with where the origin point is currently, we can go up here two options and then make sure we turn off effect only origins. The last method is probably my least favorite way to adjust the origin point. However, I figured I'd show it to you as you may see it in other tutorials. This method focuses around the use of the three cursor that blender utilizes. The three cursor in blender is represented by this small orange and white dotted circle here in the center of our scene. Very simply, the three cursor is used in a lot of different functions within blender. The main one being it's the location that any newly added mesh will also be created in. However, it can be used to adjust the location of your object origin. To do this first, we need to go into the edit mode here using Tab. With our mugs still selected, we'll hit Tab to enter our edit mode. Now you can switch to any one of the three modes using 12 or three on your keyboard. In my case, I'm going to use one to enter vertex mode. For example, let's say we wanted to move the origin point using the three D cursor to the edge of the handle here. Let's zoom into the handle and we're just going to pick any one of these vertices here that's centralized in the handle. In my case, I'm going to choose this one. Now we need to shift and S at the same time. I'll bring up this radial menu. There's a lot of different options here. However, we're going to choose cursor to Selected. This will move the three D cursor to wherever we had selected, in this case the single vertex here. Now we can hit Tab to exit our edit mode. And then we can go up here to object set origin. And then we're going to choose origin to three de cursor. This will move the origin of our object to wherever the three decursor is within the world. After choosing this, we can now see that the origin for this object has moved to where that three decursor was placed. We could have placed this three decursor anywhere, and then done this method. If we placed the three decursor way off over in the distance, and then did that same exact method origin to three decursor, it would have actually moved this little orange dot, the origin point of the mug, way off into the distance, wherever that three decursor was at. Artists who have gotten used to this three de cursor workflow that blender is known for may find this easier than the last method using the options and origins checkbox. Personally, I prefer the options origin check box over the three D cursor method, but feel free to try both and see what's comfortable to you. Now that we've moved the three D cursor, we should probably reset it back to the world origin point that it was at prior to do this, simply hit shift and at the same time to reset this cursor back to its original point. Hopefully these methods give you a little bit more confidence in making your models move and rotate how you'd like. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to join parent and separate objects. 14. Joining, Parenting and Separating Objects: In this lesson, we'll learn how to join parrot and separate objects. We're back to using the campfire for this lesson. So make sure that you have the lesson 14 collection enabled. Now let's jump into our first example. We'll notice in both the outliner as well as selecting the model that this campfire is actually made up of a few different models. We have the fire and then both of the logs as separate objects. This method works well while building the campfire model. However, after we're done, It's a bit inconvenient to have to select three different models just to move or rotate the campfire to a new location. For our first example, let's attach all three of these models together into one single mesh. Once to select both of the logs first while holding Shift, and then select the campfire, the actual flame last, we'll still holding shift. The reason we're selecting the objects in this order is by selecting the campfire last, we're making it the active object. We can tell the flame is the act of objects because the other objects have a slightly darker orange highlight. We can also see that reflected here in the outliner by the names being different colors. The campfire has a lighter orange highlight versus the two campfire logs. This means that after joining these objects together, they will all inherit the origin point on the last object, the act of objects, in this case the campfire. This will keep the origin point nicely centered in the middle of the flame rather than off to the side. We're either one of the logs origin points used to be. Now with these objects selected in the correct order, we can hit Control and J to join these objects into a single object. While this has taken away some of the ease of editing for this object and has made it much easier to move around the scene as well as rotate without having to worry about rotating each log and the flame individually. I'd suggest you wait to join your models until you're confident that you're done adjusting them. Let's hit Control Z until we get it back to the point before our logs were attached. Our next method to attach these objects is called Parenting. Parenting allows us to join Objects Transformations together without combining them into one single mesh. This method is best used for objects that should move together. However, they don't necessarily want to be made into a single object. This process is very similar to joining. So let's start by making sure that we have our logs selected first and then our campfire selected last. If you've de-selected your objects, that's fine. Just hold down Shift, select the one log first, select the last log. And then while still holding Shift, select the campfire. Now we'll hit Control and P together to bring up the Parenting menu. We'll be choosing the Object option here at the very top. As you can see, there are a few different options. However, in most cases, Object Mode should work just fine. Now let's choose object here at the top with our Objects parents. And together we'll notice a few things. First, in the outliner, we'll notice that we don't see the logs and the list here anymore. They're not actually gone them. If we twirl open the campfire objects by clicking this little down arrow. We can see here that the campfire logs are listed inside of the campfire Object. This denotes that the campfire is the parent in this case, and the logs are the children of the campfire. Will also notice that if we hit Alt and Z, enter our x-ray mode so we can see through the Objects. And if we rotate to the side here, we can see these little tiny dotted lines going from the logs origin points towards the campfire origin point. This is another way to tell that these objects here, I'll lead to this object, which is the campfire, meaning that these are the children and they lead to the parent, which is the fire. We can hit Alt and Z to X at our x-ray mode. Then zoom out so we see a better view. So how does Parenting differ from Joining? If we select and transform the parent object, in our case, this campfire, the children or the logs will follow. Let's just select only the campfire. And we can see here that the logs are not selected. Now if we move this campfire, will see that the logs go along with it. And that's because they are parented to the campfire. This also works for things like rotation as well as scale. So we can control Z to get it back to its original point. But Parenting them, that means as long as we select just the parent or the campfire, that they are essentially kind of like one object for most purposes. The biggest difference, however, is if we select just the children. So we select one of these logs and not the campfire. We can move, rotate, and scale these objects independently of the parent. This allows us to reposition the logs as we see fit without affecting the parent campfire in the process. Let's Control Z, these changes here to get the log back to where it was. The easiest way to understand the relationship between a parent and child object is, wherever a parent goes through, child must follow. However, a child is free to move around on their own without the parents chasing them around. Now that we've parented these objects together, how do we separate them if we've changed our mind? First, when you just select all three of these objects. In this case, the order doesn't matter. So I'm just going to hold Shift and then make sure I select all three of the objects. Don't worry about the order in this case Now I'm going to hit Alt and P. To bring up the clear Parent menu. We have three different options here. However, in most cases you're actually going to want to use the second one will want to choose Clear and keep transformation. By choosing this option will ensure that the children don't jump back to their previous location, rotation, and scale prior to us Parenting them. This is important if we've transformed the parent object at all, such as moving the campfire to the left or right, or scaling it up larger. If we choose just clear parent, the logs would jump back to their original position and scale prior to the parenting process, which would likely mess up their grouping. Let me quickly show you a difference between the two. The first example here, I'd just move this campfire off to the left. Now if I select all three of these objects, hit Alt and P. And if I choose just clear parent will see here that these logs jumped back to where they originally were at. However, if I Control Z, that change hit Alt P and then choose Clear and keep transformation. There are no longer parented together, as we can see over here on the list. However, these logs have stayed where they were moved to along with the original campfire movement. I'm going to move this campfire here back roughly to the center. It doesn't matter if it's perfectly centered, just basically backward used to be. Then lastly, let's discuss the last way to separate objects. For this last method, let's use the join method again to combine them into one single mesh. Again, we're going to want to select the logs first while holding Shift, and then select the fire last. Now hit Control and J to join them together. Now we're going to enter our edit mode for this new single mesh by hitting Tab. And then we'll hit 310 to our face mode. Now let's deselect all of these different phases by clicking off the model to deselect. Now let's hover over just one of these logs. In this case, I'm just going to choose the right log while hovering over it. I'm going to hit L on my keyboard to select linked. So L for linked, this option we'll select all linked faces, vertices or edges to wherever you're currently hovering. Will notice that it didn't select the other log or the flame because these objects are not physically linked to each other. Even though they're joined as a single mesh, they still exist as separate entities with inside this object. Now that we have this specific log selected, we're going to hit P. To bring up our separate menu. We have a few different options to choose from. But in this case we're going to choose by selection because we want to separate off just the object that we currently have selected. So just this right log. So let's choose the top option here, separate selection. After doing this, well, notice that the log we separated is no longer part of the original combined object. Let's hit Tab to exit our edit mode. We can now select this separated log individually. One thing we'll notice however, is that it did retain the Object Origin point of the connected objects. In this case the flame. The old origin point that used to be in the center of the log is now lost because it was moved to the center of the flame before when they were connected. And that's the last method I have for you in this lesson. As a reminder, don't save over this file has we'll need to use this campfire again in another lesson. You can always read download the starter file if you've already saved over it though. In the next lesson, we'll explore the many workspaces built into Blender 15. Workspaces: In this lesson, we'll explore the many workspaces built into Blender. We won't really be using any particular model. For this lesson, let's enable the entire scene so that we have something interesting to look at while we explore these workspaces. You can do that by turning on the full scene collection here at the very top. What is a workspace? A workspace is a preconfigured UI that is purpose built with the intention of being useful for one type of workflow. That doesn't mean that these functions are only available in these workspaces. However, Blender has pre built some of the most useful ones for you to save some set up time. Let's go through all of them quickly. Just do you have a basic understanding of what each of them are useful for? Where do we find these workspaces? At the top of your user interface, you can see an entire line of pre built work spaces. We can tell by the highlighted tab that we're currently in, the layout workspace. Let's start with this layout workspace. Layout is essentially the default workspace. When you open a new file using the general option like we did at the beginning of this class, you'll start in the layout workspace. This workspace has a large viewport, as well as the outliner panel, the properties panel, and an animation timeline Down here at the bottom. It's the default workspace because it has most of the panels you'll need to get started with any three D project. Now that we have an idea of panels a workspace can contain, let's give a brief explanation for the others. We'll be going through them from left to right, up here on this top line. First we have the modeling workspace, and we can switch to it just by clicking on the word Modeling up here at the top. This workspace is very similar to layout. However, it makes some panels a bit larger and shrinks or removes others. Mainly the timeline at the bottom is gone and the property panel is much larger. As I mentioned earlier, using these different workspaces is really just a personal preference. Virtually everything you can do in these workspaces can be done inside the layout workspace. Don't feel the need to always model exclusively inside this modeling workspace, but if you find this layout useful, feel free to use it. Now let's move on to the sculpting workspace. We can do that by just clicking up here. This workspace is purpose built for sculpting within Blender. Sculpting is a particular modeling method that allows you to push and pull parts of your models almost as if they were made of clay. In this scene, the campfire would be the most likely candidate for sculpting, as it has a flowing and organic shape. Which sculpting is best at creating. To begin sculpting and object, simply select the object you want to sculpt and then go over here to where it says object mode and then switch to sculpt mode instead. This will allow you to use the different sculpting tools here on the left to grab pieces of your model and adjust the shape of it Utilizing the different tools. I'm going to control Z, these changes to get it back to how it was before. Now let's switch to our next workspace, UV Editing. This workspace is meant for the action of unwrapping your three D models in preparation for more advanced textures. Unwrapping is the process of taking a three D model surfaces and arranging them completely flat so that two D textures can be applied. The right viewport shows you your three D model, and then the left viewport shows you the flattened two D UV layout. We can see an example of this by going over to our right viewport and hitting Tab to make sure that we're in object mode. Now select one of the logs and then hit Tab to enter our edit mode. If you hit A to make sure you have everything selected on this log, you can look over here to see what that log looks like when it's laid out as a two D view. We have the two ends of our log as well as the length of the log here. Let's hit tab to it, our edit mode. Then switch over here to the texture paint workspace. This workspace allows you to take these unwrapped models and paint directly on them. This process is like painting on a little figurine in real life, but with all of the benefits of digital tools such as different brushes and layers. Now let's switch over to the shading workspace. We can do that by clicking this tab here. Aside from layout, this is the first workspace we've come across that you'll more than likely use in almost every single project you create. Workspace is the main place that you'll be creating shaders or textures for your models. Shaders are what give your models colorful surfaces, like green grass or rough brown tree bark. We'll be exploring this workspace in particular in more detail later in this class. Now let's switch over here to the animation workspace. This workspace gives us a more detailed view of any animations we're creating for our projects. On the left side, we can see our camera view, assuming you have a camera in your scene. On the right side, we can see the viewport to actually interact with our models. At the bottom here, we have what's called a dope sheet, which is essentially just a more detailed view of the timeline we saw at the bottom of some of the other workspaces, Both the timeline and the dope sheet will display any key frames your objects have on them, which are the building blocks of any animated object. We'll discuss animation in more detail in a later lesson in this class. Now let's switch over to the rendering workspace here at the top. This workspace is made exclusively for you to see the product of your hard work, the final render, this box in the middle is where your final render will appear after it's complete. You don't need to follow along for this part, but this is what the final render for the scene will look like. I've sped this rendering process up, as this part does take a little bit of time depending on the complexity of the scene and the computer you're rendering it on. We'll be discussing this workspace in a bit more detail later in this class. We can move on to the compositing tab up here at the top. This workspace is closely tied to the rendering workspace. This workspace, we'll be adding additional effects to our renders to create things like soft glow around the fire in the moon. It works using a node based system, similar to how the shaders are constructed. We can see the nodes making up this effect over here on the left side. Unless you also rendered your image in the last workspace, you won't actually see the image here. Now let's move on to the last two workspaces. Next up is geometry nodes. This is one of the more complicated workspaces that we have access to. It's preconfigured to work on a built in system called geometry nodes. The system is incredibly powerful for creating procedural geometry effects for things simple or complicated. You could use this system to do simple things like just scatter an object like a rock across a plane. Or you can create a complex web of nodes that creates skyscrapers from a single line. The sky is really the limit when it comes to geometry nodes. If you're interested in learning it. This is the workspace to do it in due to its complex nature. We won't really be touching on it at all during this class. Lastly, we have this scripting workspace. This is another pretty complicated workspace, unless you have prior knowledge of coding, to rely on this workspace is meant for you to write your own code and create your own plug ins to bend blender to your will. If you have a background encoding, you might find this workspace a fun place to play and make custom tools to make your life easier. As an artist, I don't personally write my own code and rely on the amazing community of blender artists encoders to make these custom tools for me. Now let's switch back to the layout workspace to reset our scene. And that's it. We've now explored all of the preconfigured workspaces in Blender and gave a brief description for the purposes of each. You can also create your own unique workspaces up here by using this little plus sign button at the end of the list if you have something special in mind. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to customize the user interface. 16. Interface Customization: In this lesson, we'll learn how to customize the user interface. We'll be using the full scene again for this lesson. Make sure you haven't enabled in the Outliner. Now that we know about all the preconfigured workspaces, how can we adjust any of these workspaces to make them work better for our needs? We're going to use the layout workspace as our example for this lesson. The easiest thing we can do is resize a panel. We can do this by hovering over the border between two panels, such as the viewport and the timeline down at the bottom, waiting until our mouse turns into the up and down arrow in this case. And then click and drag between these borders to resize either of these windows. This allows us to make a panel larger or smaller, depending on how useful it is at the moment. What if we want to add a new panel to this workspace? We can do this by going up to the top left corner of any one of these panels, and then waiting until our mouse turns into a little plus icon. Once it's turned into this plus icon, we can click and drag. And that will drag out a brand new panel, which is a duplicate of the panel you just dragged from. It doesn't necessarily need to be from the top left corner either. We could drag from the bottom left corner if we wanted to as well, or the top right or the bottom right. We can also change what's displayed in this new panel by using the dropdown menu in the top left corner. Let's go to this far left panel, and then go to the top left corner where this dropdown menu is. And then we can choose a new panel type. Let's make this into the shader editor. Now we've made this panel into the shader editor instead of the viewport, which it was before. This would allow us to work on a shader at the same time as working on the layout work space if we'd like to. There are a lot of different options for these panel types. And you can see all of them by going up to this top left menu and then looking through the different options. Feel free to check some of them out if you're interested. Lastly, how do we remove a panel once we're done with it, to remove a panel, go to the panel that you'd like to keep in this case. I'd like to keep this panel here. Now I'm going to go back down to this corner where I drug out a new one. And then instead I'm going to go to the corner here. Click and drag. And then move it down into an already existing panel. And we can see as I do this, it starts highlighting the top panel, but it makes the lower one darker. It also turns my mouse into an arrow facing towards the panel I'm going to remove. Once it's turned into the arrow, and I have the correct panel highlighted, I can just let go and it'll remove that panel. We can do that again up here at the top left. Move up to the top left corner of the panel I'd like to keep. Move it to the corner and then drag over to the left side. And then let go to remove that panel. With this knowledge, you should be able to customize any workspace to meet your needs and make your life a bit easier. In the next lesson, we'll learn about the power of modifiers. 17. Modifier Basics: In this lesson, we'll learn about the power of modifiers. We'll be using the rocks from our campsite for this demonstration, so make sure that you have that collection enabled. Now, find it over here in the outliner under Lesson 17. What is a modifier? A modifier is an effect that we can apply on top of a model to do numerous useful or interesting things. These modifiers are editable and can be turned on or off if we need to see what our model looked like before we applied them. Let's start out with one of the most common modifiers you'll use while modeling. We can see here that our rocks aren't very smooth. They have jagged edges that don't look great for the aesthetic that we're after. Let's apply a modifier that can make them nice and smooth. We'll start by selecting the rock, and then we're going to go down here to the modifier panel. It looks like a little blue wrench icon. We'll select this and it'll switch us to the modifier tab within this panel. Let's apply our first modifier now. And we can do that by going up here to where it says Add modifier. If you're using Blender 4.0 or newer, this menu has changed slightly. Now, instead of seeing all of the modifiers laid out in one large menu, we instead have categories that we can look through depending on the type of modifier we want. These categories match the columns from the previous view if you already knew where they were. But if not, you can use the new search feature here at the top. Simply type the name of the modifier you want here at the top. And it will filter the list for you and find any relevant matches with that quick explanation out of the way. Let's head back to the lesson. And then we have a whole bunch of different options here. But the one that we're concerned with at the moment is down here in the second list here. And it's called Subdivision Surface, we'll select that. Now we can see after applying this modifier, that our rock is a lot smoother than it was before. The subdivision surface modifier divides all of the faces on an object, then smooths out the transitions between them to make the model smoother. Unlike the shading modes that we discussed earlier like shade smooth or shade auto smooth, this does actually increase the amount of geometry on the model. This means that we need to be a little bit more careful with how we use this modifier, as it might make your computer a bit slow if you increase the settings too high. Now let's go over the main parts of this modifier. It's broken up into two different sections, Viewport and Render. By increasing the viewport levels here to a higher number, we'll make our model smoother and smoother only within the viewport. Now this is the setting here, both of these numbers. We want to be careful with making them too high because every time we increase this number, we're making our model increasingly smoother every time, which is adding more and more geometry, which makes this file harder to run for your computer. Your goal should be to set this number as low as possible, but still getting the results that you're looking for. Now let's set this back down to two. The other slider here is the render slider. This number determines how smooth the model is, only within the render increasing or lowering. This number has no effect here in the viewport. We can see that here by setting this to one, it still looks just as smooth as it did set the two. Typically, you'll want these numbers to be either equal like they are now, or you'll want your viewport number to be a bit lower and then have your render number a bit higher. Using this method here with the lower viewport number and a higher render number will allow you to work in your viewport without it being too slow because of the high smoothing value. But then when it comes to render time, you'll still have a nice smooth model, which is what you're looking for. We can also choose to hide the effect of this modifier if we want to by using the buttons above the settings. If we uncheck this little computer monitor icon, this will turn off the effect of this modifier only within the viewport. This would allow us to have a complicated modifier applied to our model, but not have it slowing down our viewpoort while we're working. It will still, however, be seen in the final render. Let's turn this back one for now, so we'll make sure it's checked on and turned blue. And then the other option we have here is this camera icon. So if we uncheck this, we won't notice any change in the viewport. However, this disables this modifier within our final render. This option is a bit less useful than the viewport toggle. Much like the camera icon in the outliner over here that hides an object only in the render. You might want to check this toggle if your modifier isn't appearing the way you had hoped in your render, you might have this turned off by accident. Let's check this back one. For now, we have two other things that we can do with this modifier before we move on to our next example. First, we could just click this little X button here. And that will remove this modifier and set it back to how it was before. We can see that that modifier had no lasting effect on our model. If we want to remove it, we can simply remove the modifier and it goes back to how it was before. Now we can hit control Z to undo that change and put the modifier back on the model. And then secondly, we can do something called applying the modifier. This is a similar concept to applying your transformations that we discussed in a previous lesson. When you apply a modifier, you are taking this editable effect that we can change or remove if we want to. And instead, you're baking these effects directly into your model and making them permanent. To apply a modifier, you have to go up here to this little drop down menu. And then you can choose Apply. We can see now that this modifier has disappeared from the list. However, our rock still has remained smooth and that's because we baked these effects and made them permanent on our model. You might be wondering why you would do this if you can just leave it editable and still see the effects and you'd be right to be wary of this. There are, however, sometimes when you're making a specific model with a specific effect that you'll want to or need to make a modifier effects permanent. You won't really know when you need to do this until you come across this specific situation that demands it. But in general, I'd suggest that you leave your modifiers as is. When in doubt, applying them should be your last resort. Before we move on, let's hit control Z to undo the apply effect that we just did on this rock. Now to discuss our next modifier, let's create a new object that will make this effect a bit more obvious. Let's zoom out here. And then we're going to hit Shift and A to bring up our Ad menu, go to Mesh, and then we're going to choose Cylinder. We'll leave all of these settings here the same as they are for the default. The only thing we're going to change is the location for the x value. We're going to type in negative two and then hit Enter. That way it moves it off to the side. Now you can hit Tab to go into your edit mode. Then three to go into your face mode. We're going to select the top face and then rotate around to the bottom hold shift and then select the bottom face. That way we have both of them selected. Now we can hit Delete or X, whatever you prefer to bring up our Delete menu. And we're going to choose Delete Faces With those faces deleted, we can hit Tab to it, our Edit mode. And then lastly, we can right click on the model and choose Shade Auto Smooth. Now let's head over to our Modifier panel to add our next modifier. We can click here, choose Add Modifier. And then we're going to be adding a Solidify modifier, which is just above Subdivision Surface. Let's click Solidify. Now the solidifier modifier adds thickness to all the faces on our model. This will allow us to take the paper thin walls of our cylinder and give them thickness so it looks more like a realistic tube shape. We can adjust the thickness of these walls here by adjusting the thickness slider. If we make this larger, we'll make the walls of the cylinder thicker as well. We can also choose whether or not this thickness goes inward or outward from the original face. By adjusting this offset slider, right now it's set to negative one, which means the thickness is going inward. If we change this to positive one, now it's taking that original face, which is this here, and it's making the thickness go outward. Just like the last modifier. This has all the same different toggles that we had before. We can turn it off just in the viewport or just in the render, and then we can also apply it or click this X to remove it. There is one last thing I want to show you regarding modifiers before we finish this lesson with your cylinder still selected. Let's apply another modifier to it. This time I'm going to show you a quick shortcut to apply the subdivision surface modifier so we can smooth the cylinder. All we're going to do is hit control in two at the same time with our cylinder selected. And that will automatically apply a subdivision surface modifier with both values set to two. This key bind allows us to just save a little bit of time to apply this frequently used modifier. As you can see, you're allowed to have multiple modifiers applied to the same model, and they'll interact with each other as well. We can see that the smoothing is taking into account that thickness that we added from the solidifier modifier. What might not be obvious though is that you can re order these modifiers after you add them, and it will often change how they work. Over in our modifier panel, we can click these little dots here next to the subdivision surface modifier. And we can drag it above the solidify to see how it changes the look. We can see that after doing this, the smoothing looks like it's disappeared. However, it's not actually the case. Modifiers work from the top of the list and then move downward. This means that it will do the effects of each modifier one after another, starting from the top and then moving down based on that logic. That means the smoothing is happening first, making the paper thin cylinder walls smoother than they were before. And then it moves on to the solidify to make those new smoother walls thicker. If we reorder them back to how they were by clicking these little dots here next to the solidify modifier and dragging it above instead how it used to be, We'll see that it's adding the thickness first and then smoothing that thicker result using the subdivision surface modifier. That's what's giving us this weird rounded pointy shape here at the top. It should be pretty obvious to you now that reordering these and changing the way that these are applied can dramatically affect the outcome of the model. Hopefully, you've gotten just a taste of how powerful modifiers can be when used in the correct order on your model. In pretty much every one of my other classes, we use modifiers to do really interesting and useful things. Feel free to add or remove new modifiers to see how they work. You might just find a really interesting combination of modifiers that make a really unique effect. In the next lesson, we'll learn about the basics of animation and blender. 18. Animation Basics: In this lesson, we'll learn about the basics of animation in Blender. We'll be using this cute little frog for this lessons demonstration, so make sure you haven't enabled. You can find it here. In the Lesson 18 collection, I'll be showing you the basics of animation utilizing our little friend here. First, what is three D animation? In its most basic terms, animation is the changing of properties such as a location, rotation, or scale over a set amount of time. Essentially, it's how we can make this frog move forward 1 meter over the span of 3 seconds. If we wanted to, How do we add animation to this frog? Let's start by making the time line at the bottom of the viewpoint a bit larger. We can do that by just going down here to the border between them, waiting until our mouth turns into these up and down arrows. And then just dragging it up. This will make our view of this time line and key frames a little bit less cramped. Now, make sure you have your frog selected. And then we're going to go over here to the Object Properties tab. This tab has a little orange square with orange brackets around it. This is where we'll be setting our key frames. This isn't the only place we can do this, but it's one of the more simple places. I've mentioned keyframes a few times now, but what exactly are they? Keyframes are like little pushpins along our timeline that lock up property at a certain value at a certain point in time. As we add more keyframes to a property along the timeline, we'll force Splendor to animate the object between these values. Now let's place our very first keyframe. The first thing we'll want to do is determine where on this time line we're actually going to be placing this keyframe. This blue line here determines where that keyframe is going to be placed. Let's move it over here and make sure it's set to zero. We can do that just by clicking on the top and then dragging it over. Now let's place our first key frame. Go over here to the right side in your object properties panel. And then for our y location, we're going to place our keyframe here at 0 meters. To do this, we just need to click this little white dot next to this property. Once we place this, this value will turn yellow and we'll now see a diamond down here. We can also look down here on our timeline and see that we have a little yellow diamond right at frame zero as well. This keyframe tells Blender that the y location of this frog should be at 0 meters on frame zero. Let's zoom out a little bit so we can see a little bit more area in front of our frog. Now we're going to move this playhead all the way to Frame 90, which is right here. Frame 90 is exactly 3 seconds after frame zero. I know this because our file is currently set to 30 frames per second in animation. Both two D and three D time is broken up into frames per second. There are a variety of standards for frame per second based on the type of media you're creating. For example, big screen movies in two D animations typically use 24 frames per second. While three D animation typically uses 30 frames per second. This means that every second of time is broken up into 30 individual frames on our timeline. 3 seconds would be 30 frames times 3 seconds, which equals 90 frames. Now that our playhead is set to 90, we can go over here to our object properties. On the Y location, we're going to type in negative one and then hit Enter. We'll see our numbers changed from green to orange. The green was letting us know that there are key frames already applied to this value, but there isn't anything currently there. Once it's changed to orange, that means that we have changed the value of this key frame, but we haven't actually applied it yet. Let's apply it by clicking this little hollow diamond icon next to it. After doing that, we'll see it's turned to yellow like it was before. Now down here on the timeline, we can also see a little yellow keyframe. We typed in negative one meters instead of positive one meters because we want our frog to move forward. In this case, forward for our frog is actually moving negative on the y axis, not positive. If we had typed in positive one, he would have moved backwards 1 meter. Now that we have two keyframes placed on our timeline, we can slide our playhead back and forth to see how the animation looks. So we can see as we move our playhead, 0-90 the frog moves forward exactly 1 meter. We can also hit this little play button down here to let it play through automatically. So we can see 0-90 it moves forward 1 meter, and then it stops because there is no more instructions. After that, it's told to move up 1 meter, but then it isn't told anything else until it rolls around back to the beginning again. Let's give our frog some more keyframe so it makes a little bit of a jump at the end of its movement. First we're going to head to frame 60 by moving our playhead here. And we're going to place a zero meter key frame on the z location. The z location is what determines how high in the air this frog is. Now move to frame 75, and then set this z value to 0.15 And then hit Enter. This will hop it up a little bit into the air, but we have to remember to actually place this keyframe. We'll click this little symbol here to place the key frame. And then lastly, let's move it back to frame 90, and we're going to set our key frame for the Z back down to zero. We'll type in zero. And then click this little button here again. Now let's move our playhead back to zero, so it's at the beginning of the animation. And then we can hit the play button to see what our animation looks like. We can see now that our frog moves forward a little bit and then jumps off the ground into the air. And then lands on frame 90. As it stops its forward movement as well, if we'd like to shorten this timeline so there isn't so much dead space here at the end, we can change the length of the timeline over here. Let's type in 100 for the end of the timeline. And then hit Enter. This will shorten it, so there's only a small pause at the end before it rolls back to the beginning. Now we can hit Play again to see how that looks. So it's a little bit more pleasing to watch because it doesn't sit there motionless here at the end for so long. This is a super basic form of animation. But I'm sure you can see how a three D artist could overlap multiple different key frames and timings to create complex and interesting animations. You can also keyframe other properties, such as sliders on a modifier. All you need to do is hover over any property and blender and then hit the key to place a keyframe on those values. If you're interested in learning more about animation and how to make it look a little bit more natural, I have multiple classes teaching the basics while creating fun projects. In the next lesson, we'll explore the different viewpoint rendering modes. 19. Viewport Rendering Modes: In this lesson, we'll explore the different viewpoint rendering modes. We'll be going back to the full scene again for this lesson. So make sure that you have the collection enabled. You can find it up here in your Outliner under Full Scene, and then just remember to check it on. Up until now, we've only seen our scene with the models displayed as the shiny gray. Let's go through the different ways that we can view our scene utilizing the viewpoint rendering modes. First up, let's discuss the mode that we've been using this whole time. Up here at the top right, we can see four different buttons that correspond to different rendering modes, as well as a drop down menu here. Using this arrow, we can tell by hovering over this highlighted button that we've been using, the solid viewpoint rendering mode this whole time, solid view is basically the default mode. When you open a new file, it will start you out in this mode. Opening a previously saved file will also default to the solid view most of the time as well. This mode does a great job at being an all purpose view meant for modeling and animating. It gives us a nice fast preview of our models, while also doing a good job at highlighting the forms of the models, such as the ripples here on the Camp Fire. The main downside to this view, though, is it doesn't show any true lighting information or shader information. It uses a default, even lighting across the entire scene, and this smooth gray material on everything. Each of these four different viewpoint modes, their own unique set of options that we can adjust. We can access them via this dropdown menu over here on the far right side of these modes. Now let's check out the settings for the solid view. And we can do that by clicking this little dropdown here. To bring up the settings, I won't be going through every single option here. However, I'll go over some of the most useful highlights. First, we have the lighting or mat cap settings here at the top. If we leave it on the studio setting, we can click on this icon here and then choose different default lighting schemes if we click on this and then we have a few different options here, as we change them, it changes that even default lighting that we have within our Viewport. And then if we switch back here to the far left one, this is the default. We can also switch it from the studio mode to the Mat cap mode by clicking this icon here. Just like the studio options, we can click this icon here to change the different types of Mat cap. There are numerous different options here that might make modeling certain objects easier than others. You can go through each of these here and just see if any of these stick out to you as being useful for any particular object In general, these are usually used more for the sculpting aspect of blender rather than modeling. However, some of these have rare specific functions that might make your job a little bit easier. One thing that's important to note is that these are not true materials on these objects. They are simply filters that we apply to our scenes so that we can see them with these specific matt caps applied. When I choose this, I'm not actually texturing my scene with this shiny green material, It's just an override that's applying this material inside the viewport. I'm going to click on the Cycon here, choose the top left one to switch it back to the default mat cap, and then I'm going to switch it back to the studio as I prefer this mode. Lastly, we have the flat mode, and we can switch into that by just clicking the word flat here. And this mode just applies a default color, in this case white across our entire scene. In most cases, the default studio mode will work just fine for modeling and animation purposes. The last thing we're going to discuss in here is the cavity settings down here at the bottom. This setting applies a faint shadowing and highlighting to the edges of your model. By default, this setting isn't actually turned on. However, I have it enabled for you in this starter file. If you'd prefer to turn this off, you can just click Cavity and it will turn it off. And we can see the difference it makes inside of our viewpoard here. Everything has a little bit less shine to it and there's a little less shadowing between objects. However, if we turn it back on by just checking cavity, we can see our scene brightens up and it brings a little bit more shadows into the crevasses. You can adjust the brightness and darkness of these shadows and highlights by adjusting the ridge or the valley values down here. Ridge will make the highlights brighter, then valley will make the crevasses darker. I always have mind set to 0.5 I like that view the most. I'm going to set these back to 0.5 I think this looks nice. Now let's move on to the next viewport mode wire frame. We can get to wireframe mode by going up here to the top right, and we're going to choose the leftmost bubble here, and it's the one that looks like a cage. Wire frame works in a similar way to x ray mode. However, it completely removes the surfaces of your objects and leaves behind only the wire frame. The wireframe of an object shows all of the edges that that object is created with. We can see here on this rock, we can see every single individual edge that creates this rock. If you select an object in the viewport, it will change the wire frame color into an orange highlight color. This mode is the most useful when you're doing the same things that you use x ray mode for. You might prefer this view when selecting through an object or doing some detailed modeling that requires the view of the entire object. Zoom back out on our scene here so we can get a full view. Now let's go up here and discuss some of the settings. We can get to the settings by clicking this dropdown. The only useful options we have in the dropdown menu for the wireframe mode are pretty much just the color options. If you go down here to the color and then you can switch it to objects or random, you might find one of these modes here a little bit more desirable than just the single, which is the default color option here. Up next we have the first viewpoint mode that will display the lighting and materials in our scene. The Material Preview mode. We can get to that mode by going up here and it's the third icon here in from the left. It's this one that has like a checker board across it. Then we can select this. Now this mode might take a moment to load as it processes each of the materials. Just give it a moment and you'll eventually see the view that I have on screen. Now, it might just take a minute or so. It typically only takes this long upon opening the file for the first time after you've opened the file and switched to this mode once, it should be a lot quicker to switch back and forth between them again. What's the point of this view? As the name suggests, it's mainly used to preview your materials as you work on them after the materials have loaded. It's a relatively fast view which makes it great for making quick edits to your materials. We'll also notice that this view has started giving us an indication of the lighting in our scene. However, it feels a little bit off. It's all ambient and it doesn't really have any specific direction. You also know, based on the intro and thumbnail to this class, that our campsite is actually a nighttime scene. Not this brightly lit, evenly lit daytime scene. So how do we change that? Again, we'll be using this drop down menu to change some of these settings. Right now it's using this forest lighting scheme displayed on this mirrored ball icon. If we wanted to choose a different default lighting scheme, we can just click on this icon here. And then choose any one of these other preset options. So we have a few different ones to choose from. However, none of these are the actual lighting for our scene. They're all just default baked in lighting schemes that come with blender. This ultimately isn't really what we want though, as we want to actually see the lighting that we placed in blender. I'm going to switch this back to the default, And now let's learn how to actually show our lighting, not this default lighting. To enable the actual lighting in the scene, we need to check both of these boxes here at the top. First, we'll check on scene lights and then we need to check on scene world. By enabling both of these boxes, we remove the default lighting and allow our viewport to display the actual lights for our scene. There is one small caveat in this case, as the campfire light isn't displayed correctly due to some settings that it has enabled more on that in a moment. Overall however, our scene looks much closer to the actual look of our final render material. Preview mode, with the scene lights and scene world check boxes turned on is a great alternative to our next mode as it still retains all of the speed this mode is known for. So we can see here as we rotate around, there's some flickering that we're seeing here because it's processing it each time we move, but overall it's a lot faster. We're not really getting a whole lot of lag here. Now let's discuss our last viewpoint mode, Rendered mode. To get to that mode, we can go up here to the top right, and we're going to select this icon which looks like a shiny ball. This mode will use whatever your current render engine is to display a preview render of your scene. Rendered mode is the most accurate mode in terms of the lighting and materials. However, it's also the slowest to render and the most taxing on your computer. Depending on how good your computer hardware is, you might want to only turn this mode on to check something quickly, then turn it off and switch it back to the material preview mode with both of the lighting check boxes turned on to help speed up the viewport. As we can see, when we move around, there's a pretty significant lag between moving our viewport here and then it cleaning up the render and showing what it should look like. And we can see that up here at the top left, it's actually going through and rendering this viewport mode here. Overall, it makes this viewport a lot slower. However, it is a lot more accurate. One of the biggest things we'll notice about this view is the camp fire is displaying its light correctly. Now this is because this glowing material that we have applied to this campfire only works correctly when it's using the cycle's render engine. The cycles render engine can only be displayed in the viewport though, when it's using this rendered Viewport mode that we're currently in. The Material Preview mode, which is the previous one. If we switch back to it, this is utilizing the EV render engine to display our scene. Which is a much faster render engine. But it has limitations such as glowing materials don't actually cast light. We'll learn a bit more about the two main render engines and a later lesson in this class. Now let's switch back to the rendered viewpoint mode. And again, we can do that by clicking this icon here at the top right. The main thing you'll notice about this mode is that each time you rotate your viewport, just see a different part of your scene. The scene gets really fuzzy all of a sudden, and doesn't start clearing up again until you stop moving. That's because this mode isn't able to display this quality at all times and requires you to stop moving, so it can quickly render a preview of the new view for you. This is another good reason to use your Material Preview mode instead, if you're going to be moving around your scene a lot. As for the options and the dropdown menu over here, they aren't super useful. It's doubtful that you would ever want to use this preview mode without using your own lights. However, if you did want to, you could uncheck both of these boxes here and now it'll switch to using one of these defaults that we saw before. However, in almost all cases, you'll want to have both of these checkboxes turned on, as we do actually want to see the lights inside our scene, especially while using this mode. At this point, we've explored all four of the viewpoint modes. So now you can better look at your scene in exactly the way you need to. In the next lesson, we'll learn the basics of materials in blunder. 20. (Blender 4.0) Material Basics: In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of materials in Blender. This lesson has been updated for Blender 4.0 If you're still using Blender 3.6 you can skip this lesson and proceed to the next one, where we go through the same topic, but in Blender 3.6 instead. On the other hand, if you're using Blender 4.0 watch this lesson. Then you can skip the next lesson as it explains an older version of blender that isn't relevant to you. With that out of the way, let's proceed with a lesson. We're heading back to a more simplified example For this lesson, Let's get the correct collection enabled before we start. We can do that by going up here, turning off the full scene collection, and then checking on this Lesson 20 collection which has our mug inside of it. Now we can head up to the top and switch to the shading workspace. Now we'll switch to our Material Preview View. For this top viewport, we can go up here, select this button here at the top right, someone with a checker box icon on top of the circle. Then this dropdown menu here to the right. Make sure you have both of these checkboxes unchecked. This will give us some nice default lighting for our scene. Lastly, let's change this default lighting to something a bit more useful for this mug. We can do that by clicking this button here, So we click on this little orb. We're going to choose the one here that looks like the inside of like a living room or a bedroom or something like that. We'll select this if the background of your scene here has a blurry version of this lighting in it, you might have your world opacity slider turned up. If you don't like that blurriness in the background and you find it distracting, go back to this drop down menu. And then below, we'll see here world opacity. You can just drag this all the way down to zero and it'll make it gray again, but it'll leave the lighting behind. With our lighting set up, let's zoom in here to our mug so we can get a better look. Okay, now that we're all set up, let's start exploring materials and blender. First off, what is a material? Materials in Three D software give your object surface details such as color, reflectivity or bumpiness. The two materials on this mug make this cup look like a blue ceramic and then this liquid on top look like a dark coffee or tea. Let's explore this new shading workspace and a little bit more detail. On the top left, we have a file browser where we can locate image files if we'd like to use them. At the top center, we have our three D viewport that we can get a preview of our materials with. We can also rotate around remodel to see it better. This works just like all the other viewports that we've used in the past. At the bottom center, we have our shader editor. This is where the bulk of the work is done in this workspace. If you haven't already, you can select your mug model. Then that'll show the material that's currently applied to this model. Lastly, on the right side, we can go to our Material Properties tab, which is this little red circle with the checker icon on top of it. If we select this, we'll get a little bit more simplified view of the material that's currently applied to our object. Now let's start adjusting this blue mug material so we can get a better idea of how a material is structured due to this mug having two different materials supplied to it. We'll need to make sure that we're viewing and editing the blue material and not the coffee material. We have two different ways that we can do this. We can either select it from the list on the right side here in the Material Properties tab here, we can see mug test, and then we have coffee test. You'll notice down here in the bottom when we select the different options, this preview down here changes. That's because we're actually editing a different material. In our case, we want to be on the mug test material because that's what we want to edit. If you didn't want to use this list on the right side. Instead, you can go down here where it says slot one. We can click this drop down, and then we'll see the exact same list as here as well. Again, we can just click on this or this to switch back and forth between the two different materials currently applied. Again, we'll want to be on the mug material. The shader editor at the bottom of your screen can be navigated using your mouse wheel. If we scroll up and down on our mouse wheel, we can zoom in and out to get a closer look. We can also click in the middle mouse button to slide the view around the shader Editor operates based on a node system. If this is the first time you're seeing the node system within Blender, let me give you a rundown. Each of these squares that we're seeing here, both this left green one and the right red one, are called nodes. Nodes pass their attributes from the left side toward the right side. Each of these nodes will have colored dots on it, called sockets. You pass the properties of a left node to the right node by connecting their sockets together with wires, which are these lines connecting them. To add more complex effects, you simply add the appropriate node and connected to the other nodes in the system. You'll be layering together a bunch of different nodes and then outputting them to a single material with more complex effects. In the case of this mug material, we're only really using this single node here to create this simple material. Let's explore some of the properties on this node to see how they affect the material. First of all, this principled BSDF node is basically the default node. It contains most of the basic properties that almost any material will need. We could connect more nodes to the system to add more complex effects. But for this simple material, a single node has a lot of power. We'll start at the top of this node and explain the most useful and common properties. I won't be explaining every single property. However, I encourage you to mess around with all of these different sliders on your own and see how you can affect the materials look. If you'd like to make the shader editor bigger so you have more space to work, we can just grab this line between these two viewports and drag it up to make this window a little bit larger so that when we zoom in, we can get a better view. The most simple thing that you can change is the base color. This property is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It changes the color of your material. For this mug, I have it set to a light blue color, but we can easily change it by clicking on this little color block. If we select this, we'll get a color picker pop up. We have a couple of different ways that we can adjust this setting. First, the most simple way to do this is to go up here on this big circle and then just click and drag anywhere you'd like. And that'll move this little white dot to somewhere on this color wheel. Wherever we place this dot is what color our material will be. If we wanted to make it red, we could drag it all the way down here. You also notice that the outside of this color wheel is more saturated than the inside. If we wanted to make a more desaturated red, we'd move this dot towards the center using the same method, if we wanted to make the material lighter or darker, we can go over here to the right side and then drag this dot up and down to add more black or white to the material, we can make it a dark, desaturated red color, which in reality is basically brown. We can see down here, this little color block at the bottom has turned to the color of our material. The other way to adjust your color would be to use these sliders at the bottom. You'll notice as we move the dot around, that these sliders are also moving with it. These are connected to each other. This hue slider will change which color it is. So it will slide it circular around this big circle icon appear at the top. Saturation will move it closer to the center by making it desaturated or further to the outside. As we increase the number so it'll make it more saturated. And then we can adjust the value, which will control the white dot on the right side on that black and white slider. These sliders are the most useful when you have an exact color in mine and you know the hue saturation and value of this color. I typically use this big circle at the top here to find the basic color that I want. We'll go with like a warm orange color. Then once I'm pretty happy with the color and I want to make some fine tune adjustments now, I can go down here and maybe lessen the saturation a little bit. Maybe make it a little darker and then decide I want it to be a little closer to red instead of orange. Some of these fine tune adjustments are a little bit easier on the sliders, whereas the just picking your color adjustment is easier on this big circle at the top. Lastly, we can switch the way that this color is calculated by switching to the RGB or hex mode. Down here, we have different ways to choose our colors. We have RGB, the default is hue, saturation and value. Then we have hex as well. These modes will produce the exact same colors. However, they allow you to select the color in different methods. For RGB, you're choosing the balance of red versus green versus blue of your color. And then for hex, you're actually typing in an exact code for the color that you want. Hex codes are a standardized system of color picking that people familiar with web or graphic design might prefer. However, in general, the most common way to use these color pickers is just the hue saturation and value sliders. I'm going to set my mug back to a blue green color that I had before, but you can make your mug whatever color you'd like. Next up we have the metallic slider down here below. Again, this is another slider that just says what it does if you have it set to zero, Your material is not metallic. If you have it set to one, your material is metallic. I won't be going into the exact differences between metallic and nonmetallic materials as I think everyone has at least a basic understanding of what it means when you say something is made of metal versus not. I will say, however, you don't generally want this number to be 0-1 You either want it to be set to zero or to be set to one, because in real life most things don't exist in a state between being metallic and non metallic. It's not that realistic to have something set in between. However, feel free to play with values in between if you'd like to, to make a more stylized look. They wouldn't have made it a slider if they didn't want you to use these middle values, at least some of the time. For now, let's set this back down to zero. Next up we have roughness. Slider controls how sharp or blurry the reflections caused by this IOR slider are. Let's zoom in on our mug here and find a nice spot that has some reflections. Right here, we can see the reflections of some windows or doors or something like that. We can see these white lines going down it. If we take this roughness slider and we slide it all the way to the left, making it zero, we'll make these reflections as sharp as possible. They almost look like a mirror. And that's because they're not blurry at all. There's no roughness to the surface, however, if we slide them all the way up to one, we'll make them as blurry as possible. Now currently we're actually competing with another setting in this list here. I'm going to go down here to where it says coat. Twirl this open and then I'm just going to turn this down to zero for now. And we'll see why in a second. We can see here after turning the coat down to zero now we can see that we have actually pretty blurry reflections here. There is some light reflecting off the surface. You can see it's a little bit lighter over here. But as we lower this value and get it closer to zero, making it zero roughness, our reflections will begin to get more and more sharp until they're eventually like a mirror. Let's set our roughness back to 0.5 which is the default. Now we can move on to the IOR slider here. This slider controls how much reflection is present on your material. Ior stands for index of refraction, which is a scientific way of calculating how much light is reflected off of a surface based on its angle relative to the viewer. This is a fancy way of just saying how much light is reflected off of the object. Most materials will reflect more light on the faces that point away from the viewer. Like the edges of our mug, we can see here on the edges of our mug here, it's actually a little bit lighter and that's because it's reflecting more of the surrounding light. Then here in the center, you can see it's a bit darker. And that's because the face is pointing directly towards us. Typically, we'll reflect less light if we increase this value from the default, which is 1.45 So if we just make this go up, we'll see here that the center starts getting more bright and then the edges get even brighter. By increasing this value, we allow more and more light to be reflected back to us on the faces pointing towards us. Meaning the object will look overall more reflective. If we drag this slider all the way down to one, which is the lowest value that'll make all of the reflections on our object disappear. All we're seeing now is just the shadow on the object. Typically, setting this slider to one and removing the reflections is meant for a more stylized effect. Almost nothing in real life has no reflection at all. This would even include things like concrete, sand, paper, or fabric. They would all have some level of reflection on the opposite end. If we increase this slider, we'll make our object more and more reflective. We can see here, as we start raising this up, it starts looking more like metal. And that's because metal has a very, very high IOR value. Technically, this slider goes all the way up to 1,000 However, you really won't notice any changes on your object past about 50. Once you get to about 50, that's probably about as reflective as you can make your objects within reason. There's diminishing returns as it get higher. So if we lower this down to something a bit more realistic, maybe we'll set it to about three. We can also mess with our roughness above it and then make a really, really shiny, really glossy mug if we wanted to. That's just by combining these two values. For now, let's set these back to their defaults. So we'll set roughness back to 0.5 then IOR back to 1.45 The rest of the settings in this principled BSDF node are collapsed into their own little sections, and we can see those down here. Let's go through the most useful settings inside these sections. Now our first section here at the top is subsurface. Let's twirl that open by clicking this little triangle icon. Now we can zoom in here to see our settings better. Starting from the top here, we have the white slider. This weight slider adjusts whether or not light can scatter around inside the surface of your object. To best view this setting, let's set our color for our mug to white. So we'll go up here to base color. We can just turn down the saturation and then turn up the value. We'll make it a nice bright white color. And they're also going to rotate below our mug. We want to see the shadow side on the bottom of the mug. This will be the most obvious place that we can see light scattering inside the mug. Now, if we go back to our subsurface settings, we can adjust this weight slider to determine whether or not light will pass through and scatter underneath the surface when it's set to zero. That means our surface is completely opaque, light is allowed into it and it can't scatter around. However, if we turn it all the way up to one, we'll see here after the material is updated, now we're getting some light scattering around inside of our object. We can see the light hits the side here and then bounces around and illuminates these corners here, where the light is passing through it and then bouncing around underneath the surface. This is another example of a slider that you usually want to have either set 20 or one, and you want to try to avoid values in between. Subsurface scattering is the most common in real life for things like candle wax, milk, or skin. Subsurface scattering is a different effect than things like water or glass. Water and glass allow the light to go completely through the object depending on your settings. Whereas subsurface scattering is more of like a translucent setting. It allows light to go into the surface and then diffuse and bounce around. But it doesn't really come out the other side like glass would. If you shine light directly on a glass of milk or even candle wax, you'll notice that the light passes through the object and illuminates the inside of it. Now that we have our weight set to one, we can go down here where it says Scale. Then we can increase or decrease the scale size to change how much the light bounces around inside of our object. If we have a really small value, it won't bounce around very far, it'll go in and then fade out really quickly. And then if we increase this value, it'll bounce around a lot longer and it'll go further into our object. Let's lower this down to something a little bit more realistic. Somewhere in like 0.08 range should be fine. Then we have these three radius sliders here. We'll notice that the light bouncing around inside of our object has a warm pinkish glow to it. And that's because of these radius sliders from top to bottom. Here we have the red light, then the green, and then the blue. Based on these numbers here, we have a lot of red, a tiny bit of green, and then even less blue, which is why the predominant color of this light bouncing around inside is red. By adjusting these sliders, we can change the color of the light bouncing around inside the object. To start with, let's just make them all zero, which will basically remove the effect because we're now trying to bounce around black light. Which black light doesn't really exist so much in three D, so it's not really bouncing anything. However, if we now increase just the red slider, we'll see that this light gets really red. And we'll notice if we go above one, it starts scattering further into the object. In general, we'll try to keep this at one even though the slider can go above. Now we can see here, it's pure red. It's not that kind of orangey red that we had before. If we set this down to zero, now we can increase this one to the middle slider, which is green. If we set that to one, now it's green here. And then if we set this back to zero and then increase the bottom one, we can see the light now is blue. You can combine these colors together to make the color you want. If we increase just the blue, then the top one which is the red, we'll get a pinky color because blue and red mix together make a pinky purple color. Then as we add more green, it'll start desaturating that light color. If you wanted it white, you could just set all of them to the exact same number. Now one thing to keep in mind is that the base color of your material will suppress some of these scattering colors, which is why we changed it to white. Because white will allow pretty much any color to scatter through it. As an example, if we set the red slider to zero and the blue slider to zero, and we make the light just green inside here. And then we go back to our base color up at the top, and we set this back to our blue green color that we had before. We'll notice that this green effect is a lot more muted on top of the blue, and that's because it's mixing with this blue color. If we can adjust these colors and see how some colors have very little effect by increasing our red slider here, we're essentially seeing almost no value of red being produced underneath the surface. That's because this blue is suppressing that red color. The color that can scatter underneath the surface is pretty heavily dependent on what color of the object actually is. To turn the scattering effect off, we can just turn this weight slider all the way down to zero, and that will completely remove the subsurface values. Let's collapse the subsurface menu and then move on to specular, which is directly below it. Specular section has settings that adjust the look of our reflections if we rotate around a little bit so we can see our mug again. Now we can adjust this IOR level slider down here to fine tune our reflections. If we slide this all the way up to one, this will double the amount of reflections on our object. Now our object currently is not particularly reflective. Let's first we'll set this back down to 0.5 We can increase our IOR up a little bit, then let's lower our roughness down a little bit. Now we have a really shiny mug. Now if we adjust this IOR level and increase it, we'll see here that it's doubling the brightness of our reflections. And that's by setting this all the way up to one. Now technically, this does go above one. If we wanted to type in two, this will just continue to increase the effects of this IOR slider up here, but this is basically just fine tuning the original base IOR slider. On the other hand, if we drag this all the way down to zero, we'll remove all of our reflections as well. If we set this IOR slider back to the default of 0.5 it's making no adjustments to what this value is doing. It's not decreasing it by going down or increasing it by going up. It's just showing exactly what this IOR slider currently says. In general, I would get your reflections looking correct using this top IOR slider. And then if you need to, you can fine tune them a little bit down here. But in general, you can get your reflections pretty much perfect using just this top slider, and you won't really need this one. Below this slider here, we have the tint color. Right now it's set to white, which makes our reflections white. However, we can adjust this color to a different color and that will change the color of our reflections to a different color. Tinted reflections are typically reserved for metallic materials. You won't typically see tinted colored reflections on objects in real life that aren't metallic. Now again, this can be completely used for a more stylized effect. If you like the look of this red reflection on your blue cup, that's fine. Just know that these color reflections aren't super accurate if you're trying to go for a realistic ceramic material. If you want to set it back to your default, you can just change this back to white By lowering the saturation down to zero and then leaving the value at one. Now we can close the specular menu and then we'll go back up to the top. Set our roughness back to 0.5 then our IOR back to 1.45 Our next menu here is transmission. Let's twirl this open, and then we see it's just a single slider. The transmission slider is what you'll be using to make your materials into glass. Currently, it's set to zero which means it's completely opaque and not glass. If we increase this all the way up to one, we'll see here our material preview will update. And now we have a glass material, so we can see the light refracting going through this handle here. That's probably the best place to see it. Here in the center, we're seeing an effect as well. But you can see here now that this light is actually coming through this mug and then coming out the other side again. This is another slider that in general, you usually want to have set to either zero for not glass or one to make it glass. But feel free to use these values in the middle if you're looking for a more stylized effect. The color of this glass material is determined by your base color. If you adjust your base color to something different now we'll have red glass, or orange glass, or green glass, whatever you'd like. Then the blurriness of this glass material is handled by the roughness slider at the top. This roughness slider will both control the roughness of your reflections as well as the frosted look of your glass. If we lower this, we'll get a more clear and less frosted looking glass. Then if we increase that, we'll get a more frosted looking glass. But again, remember that this is also affecting the roughness of the reflections on the surface as well. Let's set this back to 0.5 Then we can lower this transmission value down to zero to make our mug back into an opaque material. I'll also set my color back to the blue green color as well. Let's collapse this transmission menu, and then we can go down here to coat, which is something that we saw earlier. The setting is very similar to IOR, as it adds a second layer of reflection on top of your material. This weight slider down here is meant to simulate a thin, clear coat applied on top of your base material. In real life, you'd see this on things like wood varnish, or clear coat on a car paint. As with most of these weight sliders, this is typically one that you'll want to have either set to zero for no clear coat or set to one to make it a full clear coat. But don't let that stop you from using these middle values, especially on the coat one, as this one has a little bit less of an effect on the physical nature of your material. We can control the blurriness or the sharpness of the reflections from just the clear coat by using this roughness slider here in this section. We can increase the roughness to make these clear coat reflections a little bit more blurry. Or we can lower them to make them nice and sharp. We also have an IOR value here, which can make the clear coat either more or less reflective. And this is independent of this IOR value up here. This only affects this thin, clear coat that we've applied on top of the original material. Then lastly, just like inside the specular section, we also have a tint color here. This allows us to tint the color of this clear coat. Now in the case of the clear coat, it's not actually tinting the reflections, This is tinting the clear coat itself. It has a bit more of a pronounced effect than the specular tint did. This will make your clear coat not completely clear. You can make it a light blue clear coat or a light red. And we can see here how this mixes with the color beneath. You can use this to make some pretty cool effects. I'm going to lower this IOR value down to something a little closer to normal. We'll set this back to 1.45 It's not quite as reflective. Now we can collapse this menu and move on to Sheen. This weight slider here for Sheen. Will you can think of it two different ways. It's either fuzziness to the outside of it or dustiness to the outside of it. It's the same exact effect. It's more or less the type of material is how it's perceived. In the case of this mug, this might look like dust on the outside. But if this was a fabric, this might look like a little layer of fuzzy fibers on the edges. This works similar to the IOR slider and that it places more fuzz and dust on the edges of the faces that point away from us than it does here in the center. We can control how far into the model this dust goes by adjusting this roughness slider. If we lower the roughness, this fuzziness or the dustiness will stay closer to the edges. And if we increase this roughness, the dust will start moving further into the center and start applying it to the center faces as well. If you'd like this dust controlled by the sheen to be a different color, we can adjust that color here. For now, let's turn this off. And we can do that just by turning this weight slider all the way down to zero. We can see here that by setting this to zero, none of these effects here have any change on the model. And that's because we've basically turned off the sheen that they're applied to. And then lastly, if we close this, we have our emission section. The emission color block that we have here and the strength slider are how you make glowing materials such as the camp fire flames from the other scene. To start with, you'll just choose the color that you'd like. It starts out with black. Which black won't glow at all? First, we'll have to increase the brightness up to something other than black. And then we can choose the color that we want. Let's say we wanted to make it orange. Once you choose the color that you want, you can increase the brightness of this glow by increasing the strength of this slider here. One important thing to note that inside the EV render engine, which this current material preview mode that we're in now is using, the object will glow. However, it won't actually cast light into your scene. We can see here that this object looks like it's got some internal lighting, which is in this case orange. But it's not casting light outward. That casted light can only be seen when using the cycles render engine, which is what the original full scene the camp site is using. That's why we're able to get that glow emanating from our fire. For now, let's just set this strength back down to zero and that will turn off entirely the glow effect. Then when we're done, we can just collapse this emission slider. Before we move on, I want to quickly show you how you can add a new node to your system. To do this, we're just going to hover over here on the left side. Then we'll hit Shift and A at the same time. Shift and a for ad. Then we can click the search button here at the top and then type in Noise O I. Then up the very top here, we can see noise texture. We'll choose noise texture just by clicking it here. Then we can click to place it inside our system. Now that we have this new node created, we need to connect it to the system as well. To do this, we just need to click from this socket. So we're going to click from the color socket, this little yellow one, and then drag it over here and plug it into the base color socket on the principled BSDF. Can see here, after we've plug it in, our material will update. And then up here now we can see this rainbow noise texture that we have one here which looks like rainbow clouds. By plugging this node, this noise texture into the socket for base color, we've now overrode the blue color that we had before. It's now no longer looking at the blue color that we had, and instead it's getting all of its information here from this noise texture node. This would be true with any single socket that we see here on this principle BSDF node or any other node. Every one of these little dots here. Instead of using the slider, we can instead plug another node into it and then have that node determine what the slider does. Now let's go back to this noise texture then. Here we can see this noise texture has a bunch of different settings. Just by changing the values here on these sliders, we can change the look of this noise texture which is currently applied to our model. We can see here some of these settings have pretty interesting effects. We originally connected this color output to the base color, but if we instead use this factor output so the FAC socket and then drag it over here to base color, instead of having a rainbow image. Instead get a black and white version of that exact same noise texture. You'll pretty often see color outputs and factor outputs right next to each other. If you need a black and white version of it, choose the factor output. But if you do want that color rainbow effect, then you can choose the color output. We're also able to use pictures from outside the program to use as textures. Just as an example here, you can just watch me do this if I go to a folder here that has a picture in it. So I'll just grab this picture here. I can drag and drop that right from this file browser down here into the shader editor. And now it's drag that image into our shader. Now if I move this down here and then replace this wire with this one instead, we can see here, it places this image directly onto our mug. This image is a bit stretched out on our mug, as this model wasn't prepared for an image texture. But you can see how we could use some really interesting pictures to make really interesting materials if we wanted to go back to using just this original blue color that we had in our base color before we need to disconnect this node from the base color socket. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the control key and then click in and hold your right mouse button. Then you'll notice as you move your right mouse button, while it's being clicked in and held, it turns into a knife. And we can just drag it across this wire to cut the wire. This will allow us to sever this connection and go back to the original base color that we had before. Alternatively, if you knew you didn't want this image anymore and it was still connected, you could just select the node that you don't want anymore and hit either delete or X to just delete that node. But if you wanted to keep that node around for some reason, but you just wanted to cut the connection, then instead you hold down control and then click in your right mouse button to drag across the wire to cut it. There are countless different nodes that you can add to your materials to create unique effects. They can also be combined together to make infinitely more complex effects by filtering them through each other. I suggest you take some time exploring these nodes to see how they affect your materials. If you're looking for a simple place to start, I'd suggest you hit Shift and A to bring up your Add menu here. And then you can go down to this texture section here. Then any one of these textures here, just drag any one of them in. In this case, maybe we'll try the brick texture, place it here, and then connect it to our base color so we can see it. Because until it's connected to this node here, we can't actually see the output. And then you can just start messing with any of these settings here to see what it does to your material. If you'd like to learn more about materials and blender, every one of my other beginner classes walks you through how to make unique and interesting materials for your projects. In the next lesson, we'll learn about the basics of lighting. 21. (Blender 3.6) Material Basics: In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of materials in Blender. We're heading back to a more simplified example for this lesson. So let's make sure that we have the correct collection enabled before we start. You'll need to have the Lesson 20 collection enabled, which has this mug inside it. Now we can go up here to the top and switch to the shading workspace. And we can do that just by clicking the word shading at the top. Now let's switch to the material preview mode over here on the top right. We can do that by clicking this little checkerboard circle here. And now that that's loaded, let's open up the options and then make sure that you have both of these checkboxes unchecked. You want to actually be using this default lighting scheme. We will however be changing which default lighting scheme it uses. So let's click this little mirror ball here. We're going to switch it to this one which is the interior of a room. That'll give us a little bit more accurate and more interesting reflections for this mug. We'll select this and it'll change the light. If you have a blurry background behind your mug, you might have this world opacity slider turned all the way up to one. You can leave it on if you'd prefer to have that sort of blurry representation and where the lighting is coming from. However, if you don't like that, you can always turn this down to zero and that'll leave just that gray background behind it that you're used to put it will still have all the same illumination. Now let's select our cup. Then we can zoom in to get a better look at it. Okay, so now that we're all set up, let's start exploring materials inside Blender. Your first question might be, what is a material? Materials and 3D software give your objects the surface details such as color, reflectivity, bumpiness, and transparency. The two materials applied to this mug make the outside of the cup look like a reflective blue ceramic. And it makes the liquid inside the cup look like dark coffee or tea. Now let's explore this workspace and a little bit more detail so we know what's going on. On the top left here, we have our file browser, or we can locate image files if we wanted to use them on the left side here, and we can see all the different hard drives. We haven't our computer as well as some default locations. Then over here we can see the different folders and then we can go into each of these folders and pull out an image file or whatever it is you'd like to use. At the top center, we have our 3D view port that we can get a preview of our materials with. This function is pretty much identically to the 3D view port we've been using in the past lessons. At the bottom center, we have our shader editor. This is where the bulk the work is done within this workspace. Lastly, over here on the right side, we can see our material properties panel, which is this little circle icon with the red checker on top of it. This gives us a simplified view of what this workspace down here is showing. Let's start by adjusting this blue mug material so we can get a better idea of how a material is structured due to this mug having two different materials applied to it will need to make sure that we're reviewing the correct material and we're editing the blue material, not the coffee material. We have two different ways that we can do this. We can either select the material on the right side while we're in this properties panel for the material, we can choose either the mug material or the coffee material. Then we can see down here things change when we select them. Or down here at the bottom center where we see the word slot one. We can click this Drop-down. Again. We'll see basically the same menu. So we can switch to the coffee material or the mug material. In this case, let's make sure we have the mug material selected. The shader editor at the bottom of the screen can be navigated using your mouse wheel. If you click in your mouse wheel, you can pan the viewer around. If you scroll your mouse wheel up or down, you can zoom in and out of this view. The shader editor at the bottom operates based on a node system. This is the first time that you're seeing a node based system, especially with inside Blender. Let me give you a quick rundown. Each of these squares that we see here are called nodes. Nodes pass their attributes from the left side over to the right side. And then each of these nodes has these little colored dots on them called sockets. You can pass the properties of a note on the left side by connecting it to the node on the right side utilizing wires. And these wires flow from socket to socket. In the case of this mug material, we're only using a single node to make this simple material, this material output node and that we're seeing here on the right side isn't like the other nodes. This one is basically just the output for all of the other nodes in the system. So whatever is plugged into this node is what's actually displayed on this material. If we remove this connection, then we'll see here that are mug turns black because it doesn't have any material actually applied to it right now. And that's because nothing is attached to this material output. So I'm just going to click and drag from this top here. And I can plug it back into surface. And now we can see this blue mug again. Now let's explore some of the properties here on this green node on the left to see how they affect the material First of all, this principled be SDF node. We can see the name here at the top is basically the default node with inside Blender. It contains most of the basic properties that almost any material we'll need. We can connect more nodes to the system to make more complex effects. But for simple materials, this single node has a lot of power. We'll start with the top of this node and then explain the most useful when common properties as we move down. I won't be explaining every single property. However, I encourage you to mess around with all of these sliders on your own and see how they affect the look of the material. You can learn a lot just by playing around with the sliders. We'll start with the very first thing, and that's the base color. This property is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It changes the color of your material for this mug, I have it set to this light blue color, but we can easily change that by clicking on this little colored block. So we click here, that'll bring up a new option box that allows us to change the color. We have a couple of different ways that we can adjust the color for the setting. The first and pretty much the easiest way to do this is to go up here to this colored block at the top. And we can just click anywhere on this and then move our mouse around. After clicking, we can slide it around this color wheel and pick anywhere we want, wherever this white dot is sitting. That's what color it's going to end up being. If we wanted to make it red or orange, we could just move it down to about here. And then like over mouse. And now we've cemented that color. We can also adjust how light or dark it is by clicking this little dot over here right side and slanting it up and down on this white and black track. So we can make it a darker orange, almost brown, or we can make it as bright as possible and make an almost yellow. The saturation of your color is determined by how close it is to the center. So the further you move it towards the center, the more it is towards this white spot here, which is making your color desaturated. It's a little less vibrant. If you move it further towards the outside, you can see your color gets a lot more saturated and colorful. The other way to adjust your color would be to use these sliders here at the bottom. These sliders are the most useful when you have an exact color in mind and you know the hue, saturation and value of the color. I typically use the color circle at the top to get a basic color. And then I go down here to the sliders and make any fine tuned adjustments to that color. So if I wanted to make this a green mug, I can move this dot up here to around green. And then we can go down each one of these sliders here. We can adjust the hue, which pushes the color left or right on this wheel. If we move it to the left, it's going to move it down closer to yellow. If we move out right, It's going to move it closer to blue. So maybe I want to make it a little bit more blue. So blue, green. And then saturation, like I said before, that just moves closer to the center. If it's further out, more saturated, if it's closer to the center, it's less saturated. And then value that affects that slider on the right side, the black and white slider, it's not going to make it a nice forest green by making it a bit darker. Then alpha here, this will change the alpha, the color. In most cases, this isn't actually going to be doing anything. And you won't really be using a slider. You basically just always want to leave this at one. You can leave your alpha here set to one. Lastly, we can switch the way this color is calculated by switching to the RGB or the hex mode. These Modes produced the same colors. However, they allow you to select colors in a different method. If we switch to RGB, it's going to change it from the hue saturation and value sliders instead to red, green, and blue. So you can make any color you want just by combining different quantities of red, green, and blue together in order to make your color. And then lastly, we have over here that the heck system, the hex mode, allows you to use hex codes in order to choose your color. Hex codes are standardized system of color picking that people familiar with, maybe web or graphic design might prefer. Every color you can create has a unique code down here. If you know the exact color that you want to create, you can just type in the hex code down here and it'll pick that exact color. I'm going to switch it back to HSV, hue, saturation and value because that's the default. I'm also going to switch the color here just to something a little bit more, more appealing. I'll switch it back to that sort of bluish color that I had before. But feel free to make your mug whatever color you'd like. Now let's move to our next setting, which is sub-surface. This slider here, as we increase it, will adjust how the light scatters through your material. Subsurface scattering is the most common in real life for things like candle wax or milk or humans skin. By increasing the number on this slider, we allow light to scatter further into the surface of our object. So as we lower this, it's going to make the light scatter a little less inside of it. So we can notice here that sort of nice thinner areas and around the rim of this cup, the color appears lighter and that's because light is hitting the surface. Then it's going into the surface itself. So it's actually going into the mug and then kind of bouncing around almost making it kind of like a jelly material or like I said, milk. Like if you shine light directly on a glass of milk or even candle wax, you'll notice that the light passes through the Object and illuminates the inside of it. That's what this slider here is trying to mimic. You can also change the color that's scattering around inside your object caused by the light, by changing this color here. And this works just like the other color sliders did. So we could change this to a green color or red color. In the case of this, we don't have a very high subsurface value. The higher it is, the more noticeable this color will be So we can move it to like a light blue, blue-green or something. And we can see here that this value is making our glass keV, this milk glass look to it. If you're familiar with that type of glass. This isn't really what I'm looking for for this mug. However, I'm just going to set the subsurface back down to zero. And that will remove all the subsurface scattering, which means that this color isn't really doing anything. You don't really need to change it back to white if you don't feel like it. Because if this value is set to zero, this color isn't affecting it at all. Anyway. Let's continue down this list. So we'll move further down. We're going to see metallic here. Again to move down your list, remove this view around. You can just click in your middle mouse wheel, turn it into a button, and then just click and drag it and it'll move it around. You can also zoom in and out using your mouse wheel. The next property is metallic. This is again another slider that basically just does what it says. If it's set to zero, your object is not metallic. And if you turn it all the way up to one, your object is now metallic. We can see how that adjusts what it looks like. I won't really be going into the exact differences between metallic and non-metallic materials. As I think everyone has a basic understanding of what metal and nonmetal means. I will say however, you don't generally want this number to be anything but zero or one. Anything in the middle isn't really all that realistic. A whole lot of things in the real-world that are half metal. So either things are metal or they aren't metal. And that's how you want to use the slider. If you're going for a stylized look though, and you're not concerned without sort of matching reality. Feel free to adjust the slider wherever you'd like. It might make the effect you're looking for. Just know that you're breaking reality in some ways. Doing that, I'm going to set mine back down to zero so that my mug is not metallic. Directly below metallic, we can see specular. This slider affects how reflective and Object is. The higher this number, the more reflective an object is, then the less this number is, the less reflective it is. Now we're actually currently competing with another setting. So I'm gonna turn this off for now. So don't worry about this. You can just watch what I'm doing. I'm going to turn off clear coat. Now if I go back to the specular, you can see specular set to zero. It makes it very chalky looking up. And then if I increase my specular, we can see here that I have a much more reflective and shiny looking cup. If you'd like to follow along with what I just did, just make sure you turn off clear code by setting it down to zero. We'll get to the setting in a minute. One thing about this specular slider here is it's important not to think of reflectivity as the sharpness of the reflections. Even things that you might not assume have any reflections at all, like sandpaper or concrete, still have a value above zero on this slider. So it's relatively unrealistic to have this set all the way down to zero unless you're trying to do something very specific. In most cases, even for very non-reflective materials, you would still have it somewhere low, maybe 0.1 or 0.2. I'm going to set mine backup to one. That way it's as reflective as possible. The next setting we'll discuss is the roughness. This slider controls how blurry or sharp your reflections are caused by the specular slider. So as we adjust this roughness slider, if we increase the roughness, it'll make our reflections even more muted. So it's really blurring them out and making them more similar to something like concrete or sandpaper are pretty much anything you can think of that you wouldn't really consider as reflective in real life. As we lower them closer down to zero, this mug starts looking more and more like a mirror. So it's making it shiny or in shinier until it's almost completely perfect, flawless reflection. This roughness slider here only affects the reflections caused by the specular. If we have no reflections at all and set this specular down to zero, this roughness slider really doesn't do anything because there's nothing to affect. You need to have some level of specularity, some level reflectivity here. The specular slider, in order for this roughness slider to actually have an effect on your material. Now let's move further down the list and we're gonna go back down to where we saw clear coat before. Clear code is very similar to specular as it adds a second layer of reflection on top of your material. Right now we have it set to zero, which means we have no clear coat. Then if we increase it up to anywhere past zero, really, if we set a to 0.6 or all the way up to one, we can see our object now is a little bit more shiny than it was before. This slider is meant to simulate a thin, clear coat applied on top of your base material. In real life, you'd see this on things like would varnish, will make a table or something like that. We're clear coat on top of a car paint. We can control the blurriness or the sharpness of the reflections caused only by the clear coat using the clear coat roughness slider. This is the same thing as the roughness slider above that worked for the specular, except this only works on the clear coat reflections. You can combine together the clear coat, clear coat and roughness, and then your specular and specular roughness. To make a little bit more of a complicated looking reflection. Let's continue moving down the list. Now we're gonna go down to transmission. In order to see the effect of this letter, we're going to need to switch our viewport Rendering Mode. We can go up here, so the top-right, and we're going to switch to the rendered viewport mode We'll click this first and we'll see it's going to turn all black and that's because there's no lights currently turned on. So twirl open your option box here. Then this is one of the very few situations where it's actually going to be useful to uncheck these boxes so that it's not using the scene lighting for this. You can double-check here to make sure that you're using the correct default lighting, which is this one here that looks like a living room. So just make sure you have that selected. The reason we switched Rendering Modes here just for the setting, is because this transmission effects doesn't really show very well in the EV render Engine. We needed to switch to the rendered viewport mode, which in this case is using the Cycles Render Engine, which shows the transmission effect better. Now that we have that all set up, we can adjust the slider here. If we adjust transmission and we start sliding it further up, we slide it all the way to the very top. We can see now that our mug has turned into class. So this transmission effect here in this transmission slider is essentially, you can think of it like your glass lighter. So one turns it into glass, and then zero makes it not glass, so it makes it completely opaque. We can adjust how blurry this glasses. So whether or not it looks like a nice clear glass or if it looks like a frosted or etched glass. By using both this transmission roughness. If we increase that, it'll make it look even more cloudy and kind of like a frosted glass. Or if we set this back down to zero, we can also go up here to this roughness slider. So transmission and roughness are tied together as well as we lower our roughness. This class is going to look clearer and clearer when top of the fact that it's also making these reflections also more sharp. So if we wanted a frosted glass, we would need to increase this roughness as well. Let's set this roughness back down to roughly where it was at before. That gives around 0.3. Then we can come down to our list and then lower transmission all the way back down to zero. So our coffee cup is no longer made of glass. Lastly, we have the emission Settings here at the bottom. This is how we make objects glow similar to what our campfire is doing. By default, the emission is set to black. So if we select this color first, we'll need to slide this slider up. So right now it's set as dark as it can be, so it doesn't really matter what color it is. It's still going to show black. So we need to raise this up. I'm going to lift it all the way up to white. Now I can go down here and choose which color I'd like it to glow. Maybe I want it to glow bright red. Now that I've chosen the color that I like, I can also change the strength of this glow. Sorry, now it's defaulted to one. If I make this any higher than one, it'll start glowing even brighter. As it gets brighter, it's also going to lighten the color up so it's turning more of an orange or yellow color. Now, before we move on, Let's go up here to the top. Go back to our render settings for the rendered viewport mode. And then we're going to check back on the scene lights in scene world. As we don't want to forget that for later. Now let's change our view port mode back to the material preview mode, as we don't really need to see this version anymore. Let's change our emission strength back to one. So we can just type in one here after clicking on it. And then we can change the emission color back to black. So it's not glowing anymore. Before we move on, I went to quickly show you how you can add a new node to our system. Let's zoom out here on the bottom so we can see more of this node system. Then over here on the left side and this empty space, we can hit shift into a to bring up our Add menu. Each of these menus here as a whole bunch of different nodes that you can add. However, you can also use this search box at the top. So let's just click on the word search. Then we can type in noise N, 0, S. We're going to choose noise texture. Now that we've done that, we can see a new node as popped up and it's attached to our mastery. Now, if we click anywhere with our left-click, it'll place that node. Now let's zoom into this new node. Then we're going to connect it to our system here. More, remember before that attributes are passed from the left node towards the right. And it's done via these sockets using wires. Let's click from this color. We're going to click on this little yellow dot here. And we're going to drag it to the base color slot here. We can see as we get it close, it magnetizes to it. So we'll just click and drag it here and then let go. We can see now that it's applied this kind of colorful cloudy material across our mug, and it's removed the blue color that we had before. And that's because we're no longer using this color box which has now disappeared. Instead we're getting all of our color information from this new noise texture node. Any parameter that you see here that has a socket next to it means that it can be overridden. So all these sliders can be overwritten with a whole different note, such as in this case where we're overriding our color with this noise texture. If we look at this new noise texture, and now we have a whole bunch of different sliders that they can affect to change the look of this texture, such as the scale. So we can lower the scale here, make the numbers smaller to make this bigger over here, just kind of counterintuitive How this case works, we increase it will make that noise pattern a bit smaller. We can address things like the detail to make it sharper or more cloudy. We can change the roughness, which is pretty similar to detail in this case. Then we can also adjust the distortion, which kinda makes it look almost like a water ripple. We can also instead choose to use the factor or FAC socket here and drag that into the base color. Will see after doing that, instead of having this rainbow cloudy material, now we have a black and white version of that instead. In most cases, the factor socket, wow, put a black and white version of the texture. While this color socket, while put a rainbow version of the texture, there are countless different nodes that you can add to your materials to create unique effects that can be combined together to make an infinitely more complex effect by filtering them through each other. You can also add things like images to your textures. If we go over here to our file browser, we can navigate to wherever I have an image saved. In this case, I'm just going to use an example of this orthographic projection JPEG that you saw on a previous lesson. If I click on this little icon here, so I actually have to click on the icon, not the word itself. So I'll click on this and I can drag that down here and then drag and drop it. And it will create a brand new node. In this case, an image node with this image preloaded into it. Now I can drag this color socket here and place it into the base color over here. Now if I spin around in my viewport, I can see this image as applied to our mug. Now it's not applied correctly and that's because the mapping is not correct for this mug and it hasn't been done yet. However, you can see how you would be able to apply any image you'd like to, any object that you'd like. Another method for dragging in an image such as this orthographic projection JPEG. Just bring in one of your final browsers and just drag and drop the image directly into the viewport here. Now also just basically do the exact same thing as this file browser at the top-left did. If you're starting to get a bunch of nodes here that you're not using anymore. You can just select the node and then delete it to remove it. So we can delete both of these. Then if you have a node that you no longer one convected, we don't want to delete it either. You can hold down Control and then click in your right mouse button. And that will turn your mouse into a little knife. And then you can just drag across this wire. It's a cut it, and that will remove the connection. Instead it back to whatever it was by default. If you wanted to reconnect it, just click on the socket that you want to connect, and then drag it to whatever property you'd like. So in this case, I'll just drag it back to base color. I'd suggest that you take some time exploring a lot of these different nodes and see how they affect your material. If you hit shift into a, you can bring up your menu here. Then the most useful section here is probably going to be texture. If you're just going to do kinda mess around and play with different things. If you go to texture and there's a whole bunch of different options here that works similar to how the noise texture worked before. So we just pick any one of these may be checker texture. We can choose that. Place it down here, and then just click and drag from color to base color to replace this connection, you'll see it on cooks the image. And now it has a checkered texture on it. Then you can just mess with these settings and see how they affect the look of your texture. Every one of my other beginner's classes walks you through how to make unique and interesting materials for their projects. If you'd like to know more about this system. The next lesson, we'll learn about the basics of lighting 22. Lighting Basics: This lesson, we'll learn about the basics of lighting in Blender will be heading back to our campfire for the last time this class. Let's make sure that we have that collection enabled. You can find it up here under Lesson 21 and just make sure you haven't enabled. We'll also want to switch our viewport mode to the rendered view. We can do that by going up here to the top right, Choosing the furthest right cymbal. And then just twirl down this drop-down here and make sure that you have both of these checkboxes turned on. I've intentionally made the flame on this campfire not glue for this example. We'll get to that in a moment. For now, let's start with the world Properties tab. We can get to that tab by going down here to this little globe icon, little red globe icon. I'll click on this tab and that'll bring up our world properties. The most basic form of lighting in Blender is controlled by the surface options here in the world Properties tab. This color and strength slider are responsible for the ambient lighting you find in brand new Blender files. For this file, I've already adjusted their parameters to match a dark moonlit night. But let's make some changes to see how it works. First, let's increase the strength value. Right now it's set really, really low, so it doesn't have a whole lot of effect. Let's increase the strength all the way up to one. For now. We'll just go to strength, click it, and then type in one and hit Enter. We won't notice any change happening because it's competing with another setting and are filed called volume. For now, let's disable this so that we can look at the surface lighting on its own. To disable it, we can go down here under this volume options. So if you don't see this, you can toilet open where it says volume. Then we're gonna go down to density. Then we're going to type in zero for density and then hit Enter. We'll come back to these volumes settings later. But the volume disabled, we can see the full effect of our ambient late strength. If we increase or decrease the strength slider here at the top, we can see that it either makes the light dimmer or if we increase it, it'll make it brighter. I'm going to set mine back down to one because that's a nice medium value. What exactly do I mean by ambient light? In this case, ambient is referring to the fact that this light has no real strong direction. It's not clearly casting late from one side or the other. And it just creates really soft and almost invisible shadows. In reality this late isn't truly ambient as it does come from above the Objects. But it's so subtle that it's nearly directionless. This type of lighting is similar to what you might see on a really, really cloudy or overcast day. We can also change the color of this ambient light by adjusting the color bar here. So if we click on this, we'll see the same exact color settings that we've seen before and things like the Material Editor. So if we want to change this color, we can set it to something like green or yellow or red, whatever color we'd like to. In general though, if you're using this ambient lighting for your scene, you do generally want to keep these lights a little bit more desaturated so you don't want to go really saturated. It makes it a really strong effect. Typically you'll want to hover here in the middle around maybe like 0.4 for your saturation. And then you can just slide this hue and find the color that you're looking for. I'm going to leave my settings here as a really sort of pale blue. So I'll set this to 0.6 for the hue and then 0.4 for the saturation. And my value, I'll leave at one. I'm also going to lower the strength down to a really low value, so it's not competing too much in our scene. So for the strength value, I'm just going to type in 0.075 and then hit Enter. Now let's create a brand new lightened are seen to start exploring how a more typical light behaves to create a new light. And we're going to hover over a viewport. Hit shift and a to bring up our Add Menu. And then instead of going to the mesh section, down here, to the late section, and we're going to choose. So what does click this and it'll create a new point light using your move tool. Let's move this light outside of the center of this campfire. We're going to move it over here off to the side. We can now see as we move the light, the illumination in the shadows move with it. The point light is the most basic type of light objects. It's just a point in space that casts light outward in all directions almost like a glowing ball. The slight object isn't actually visible though, only the illumination that at cast. If we'd like to change the settings on this light, we can go down here. So the Object Properties tab, which is this little green light bulb icon. So we'll click this. Now we can see the settings for this light. This is where we can change things like the color of the light as well as the brightness of the late. If we wanted to make this light maybe red, we could choose this color here. And then slide it towards more of a reddish orange color. Then if we wanted to make it brighter, we can increase this power. So the higher this number is, the brighter or late will be, the lower it is the dimmer it will be. Another important thing to notice about these slides is the closer we move them to objects, the brighter they'll appear. So it will seem really bright if it's really close to this plane. If we move it further away, that light spot is going to be dimmer This is typically how lights work in real life as well. The last thing you might want to adjust is the radius of our light. If we increase the radius of our light, will notice that the shadows casted by this light gets softer. So the bigger this light is more soft, the shadows will be. Then the smaller it is, the sharper the shadows will be. There are four different types of lights that you can make by default. And you can convert any single light into any other light by clicking these buttons here. Each time we click one of these buttons, they will convert our currently selected late until one of these other four types won't be going through every single light here. But just as a quick example, if we switch it to spot, move our light up and we can see how the spotlight differs from the point light. The spotlight is projecting light only in this cone, instead of projecting it in all directions. It still has the same color and power sliders like the point light did. However, it also has these unique settings down here for the beam shape. If we increase the spot size, it will make this cone larger. So it emits in a larger area. If we change this blend, it will either softened or hardened the edges of this cone. You can get this specific type of light that you're looking for. This light can be rotated either using your rotate tool like this. To Angola where you'd like to see it. Or alternatively, this little tiny yellow dot can be moused over and then grabbed by clicking on it. Then if you click and drag this yellow.it will snap to your scene and point wherever you're placing this little yellow dot. So this is just a quick way to place your spotlights here, so that's angled at the subject of your render. We won't be going through each of these light types in this class. But I encourage you to play with each of them and see how they differ from each other. I've actually made an entire class about the topic of lighting. If you're interested in learning more about each of the light types and how to best use them. Let's switch this light back to a point light. We can do that just by clicking the word point here with this light selected. Now let's go back to the world Properties tab and we're going to re-enable the volume setting that we turned off earlier. To do this, we can go down here to where it says density. We're going to type in 0.025 and then hit Enter. We can see after enabling the volume again, that the blue ambient light is pretty much disappeared. But the point light in our scene now has this cool looking glow around it. I'm going to switch back to my selection tool here, just so we don't have the gizmo in front of it. So we can get a better look at this glow. This glow is caused by the volume setting that we just turned back on. Volume is sort of like placing fog in our scene. We can adjust the density of this fog and how it behaves in order to illuminate the error around with lights. This can give you a renders are really interesting and moody. Look if you use correctly the two main parameters that you'll adjust in this volume section, or the density and the Anisotropy, the density slider is pretty obvious. The higher the density, the thicker the fog is. Right now we have a very thin fog in our scene, so it's not too overpowering. If we increase this density, will start making this fog thicker and thicker inside our scene. So it's almost like there's a thick smoke surrounding it. Now let's set it back to 0.025. Hit enter. So it looks back to how it was before. Then the last slider here is Anisotropy, which is a little bit less obvious than density. This slider changes how concentrated the glow effect is around your lights as you raise this number past zero. So if we set it back down to zero, we'll see that our gloves kind of dispersed render scene. But as we increase this value, we'll see there's less glow in this general kind of further away area. And then the glow around our light gets brighter. If you want the glow around your lights to be really intense, be don't really want it to affect the rest of your scene as much. You'll want to have a higher number here. If you liked that kind of general foggy look, then you'll want this, set this down to closer to zero. I'm going to set this back to 0.5, which is what I had it before. Then with our light still selected, we can go back to our object properties here. Then we can see that if we switch to spot the shape of this, this glow here, this fog changes with the shape of the light. Now we're not getting this glow around the late, we're only getting it inside this cone here. We can see that the shape of the light actually affects the, the wave is fog is displayed in our scene. Before we end this lesson, let's learn a little bit about emissive materials. I'm going to select my light and then I will delete the light because we don't need that. We don't want to compete with the emissive material that we're just about to apply. Now select the campfire in your scene if you can't see it here in the actual viewport because it's too dark, can always select it over here from this list. So to select the word campfire here. Now let's head over to the material properties tab, which is down here, this little checker on top of the ball icon. And this campfire only has a single material applied to it. And it's the campfire flame test. The only thing that we're concerned with on this material is if we scroll all the way down to the bottom, we're concerned here with the emission. The emission color for this flame is not using just a solid color, it's actually using a texture. We won't worry about the color for now. The only thing we're concerned with is the emission strength. Because it's set to zero, it's not glowing at all. So let's increase this up to a value of 1010 and then hit Enter. Now we'll see that our flame is actually glowing within our scene. If we increase or lower this value here, the emission strength or flame will get brighter. Hartle get dimmer if we lower it. So if we want a really dim flame, we can lower it down to like one or two. Or if we want a really bright flame that casts a lot of light in our scene, we can raise it all the way up to like 50. I know that I've mentioned this before, but it's important to note that this illumination we're seeing being cast from the flame texture is only possible in this Cycles render Engine. I know we haven't explained what that means just yet, but I wanted to make sure that you're aware of why this won't show up in the material preview viewport mode has a utilizes the EB render Engine to preview the textures. We'll be exploring more on the differences between these two main render engines in a later lesson. In the next lesson, we'll learn about the basics of camera properties in Placement in Blender 23. Camera Basics: In this lesson, we'll learn about the basics of camera properties and Placement in Blender. We're heading back to our full scene again for this demonstration. So make sure that you have the correct collection enabled. You also want to make sure that you have the little white box icon next to the full scene collection checked on and highlighted. You can do this just by clicking on this icon. Will be making a new camera in a moment, and this will make it easier to find. You've gone through all the effort of modeling, texturing, and lighting your scene. And now you want to find the perfect angle for your final image. That's where the camera comes in. The camera in your scene is how you get the perfect shot of your newly created 3D world. It's basically like you're a photographer walking around inside your scene, trying to find the most pleasant composition. To start with, let's make a brand new camera. We can do that by hovering over our report, hitting Shift a, and then heading down here to the bottom of this menu and choosing camera. Your camera is created on the 3D cursor, just like every other new object in your scene. We'll need to move it out using our move tool to get a better view of the scene. So let's switch to our move tool now. Let me can rotate our view port here, and then we're just going to pull this camera back. Now let's zoom in on the camera to get a better look. The camera icon is a single point in space that has a direction and aspect ratio displayed by this pyramid that extends off of it. Whichever way this pyramid points is the direction your cameras currently facing. Right now our camera is actually faced towards our scene. We know already that we can move our camera with the Move tool. But how do we see what our cameras sees? To do this, just click this little white Camera icon here below this gizmo at the top. So we'll click on this and we'll notice right away that the view through this camera doesn't appear to match the one that we just created. We can tell that explicitly because we can actually see the camera that we created in this view, which means it can't be that camera. And that's because our active camera is set to the camera that I included in the starter file for you. We need to go to this camera that we just created, and then click on this little green camera icon to turn it into the active camera instead. So we can click this. Now we can see that our camera view has jumped right into the new camera. Inside our viewport, you'll see a faint dotted orange line depending on whether or not your cameras selected that shows the bounds of your camera view. Anything outside this square in the slightly darker areas surrounding it will not be inside the Final Image. It helpful knowing what's outside of your view when positioning your cameras so that you know how far or close something is from the edge of your frame. In other word of viewing the scene from inside our camera, how do we continue to adjust our cameras position? Well, unfortunately, it's not quite as intuitive as you might expect. However, there are some tricks and tools that we can use to make this easier. The first thing we'll notice while inside of our camera is we can't just rotate our pan or viewport like we're used to. If we try to pan, it's just going to move the view back-and-forth, but it doesn't actually move the camera. And as we rotate, It's going to immediately jump us outside of our camera. So we can actually adjust the position of the camera wall inside the camera. Let's learn our first trick to make placing our camera a bit easier. To do this, we're going to need to drag out a new viewport. We can do that by going up here to the top-left, waiting to our mouse turns into a little plus sign and then click and drag towards the right. And we're going to drag out a new viewport. Now that we have two identical viewports, left side, we're going to click the camera icon here. Now we'll jump us into the view for our camera on the left viewport, but leave us in the regular viewport here on the right. Now let's zoom in here to get a better view of our camera. And then on our right viewport, well, notice that if we move our camera, it actually updates the view on the left side. This allows us to move around in our viewport, then move our camera wherever we'd like to. We can get a better view of what it's actually seeing over here while moving it. Now that we can more successfully place our camera using the transformation tools. What if we still want an easier way to place our camera? Luckily, there's a setting just for that. Over on our left viewport. We're going to hit N to bring up the side menu. Now we'll switch to the View tab here on the side. Then we're gonna go down to this checkbox here that says Camera two. And then in this case it's actually cut off because it's a little too small. So if I make this bigger, you can see it says camera to view. So let's check that box on and then hit N to hide our sign menu again with a setting turned on. Now we'll see that the edge of the camera bounds are also dotted even though the camera is selected. This is just a clue to tell you that you have the setting on. The whole point of this setting is that it allows you to move around in your camera, just like you're used to inside the viewport. Now if we zoom back, it will actually move our camera with it. Or if we pan to the left or right, or if we rotate our view. So this is a lot more intuitive way to move your camera if you're used to using the viewport controls that we've already learned. We can really have a lot of fine control here over our camera to get it to the position that we'd like. You also have noticed that it didn't pop up out of the camera while we're doing this. And that's because of the setting allows us to do are moving inside the raw camera. Once we find a view that we're happy with inside of our camera, we can bring up that side menu by hitting N. Then we can go here and turn off camera to view. Then hydrocyanic menu again within. That means now that our camera is cemented in place, we want to worry about zooming in or out, moving the camera We can also pan left or right, so we can actually zoom into a part of our camera here, part of our view. Get a better look and then zoom back out after having already placed our camera and the exact position we like. Just don't forget to turn off the setting when you're done placing your camera or you might accidentally move a Camera Placement that you are already happy with. Just remember to turn it on, move your camera, and then when you're done, uncheck it and unhide the menu again. Now that we have our camera in a position that we like, what else can we do with it? Let's select our camera again from either the viewport here on the right, over here in the eyeliner too. We can select it from the list. Then go down here to the object data properties, which is this, this little green and Camera icon. And then we can see the settings for it. One of the most impactful changes you can make to a camera is by switching its type. An example of the different types are, we have perspective, which is what you're typically used to. That's what our viewport is being viewed in. And that's what most cameras would be used as. But there's also another option here called orthographic. So if we switched orthographic, it's going to put our camera into an orthographic mode. This is a stylized mode for your camera and that will convert it into an orthographic view, just like the front or top view that we discussed earlier in this class. This is a very stylized effect and should primarily be used with a specific purpose in mind. Feel free to play around with it though and see what kind of cool angles you can find. You can change the zoom of this orthographic view by changing the orthographic scale slider here, which is directly below the word orthographic. We can lesson it to zoom in or we can increase it to zoom out. Let's switch back to our perspective mode though, so we can explore some of the more typical settings. The most common setting that you'll adjust on a perspective camera is the focal length. This corresponds to real camera measurements. In our case, all we really need to know is that a higher number will make a flatter and more zoomed in render. A lower number will make a more distorted, but also zoomed out render. Typical real-world ranges for this value would be somewhere between 18 mm up to around maybe 300 mm. I'm going to set mine back to the default of 50 and then hit enter. One of the last things you might wanna do is make your foreground or background blurry. To do this, we'll need to use the Depth of Field Settings. First, let's check on the depth of field Settings here on our camera. We can find them by scrolling down and then checking on this box here next to the word depth of field can also twirl open the settings here with this arrow. Will notice nothing has really happened here on our left side, inside of our camera. And that's because we haven't enabled another setting yet in order to actually view this depth of field that we're going to be adjusting, we need to change some settings here inside of our viewport. So over here on your left viewport, go up to this top bar. And we're going to click inner middle mouse button to pan this thing over to the side. So we're painting all this option box is over here, over. That's because we need to see these buttons here. So we'll stay inside of our solid view, but we do need to check on an option. So we're going to twirl open this option box here and then go all the way down here to the bottom and then turn on. Depth of field will check that on. And then we'll start seeing this blur inside of our viewport. Now this option that we just checked on didn't actually enable depth of field. All it did was allow for this step, the field to be visible with inside this viewport mode. Even if we didn't have that option checked one, we would still have depth of field in our final render. We just wouldn't be able to preview it here inside the solid view. Find enabling it in the solid view for our camera to be the best way to find the measurement for the distance of our focal depth. So what exactly is depth of field? Depth of field is a property of real cameras that causes the areas outside of the focal point to be blurry. This focal point is typically the focus of your render. In our case, we might make it the campfire. By adjusting our depth of field, we can make the objects in front of and behind the campfire blurry to help make the campfire stand out more. The first thing we're going to do is lower the f-stop value, which we can find over here on the right side. The smaller this f-stop value is the blurrier your render we'll be right now it's set to the default of 2.8. Let's lower it down much lower. We're going to set it down to one so that the blur is really obvious. So we'll type in one and then hit Enter. Now that we have a nice blurry render, let's decide where that blurs starts and stops. To do that, we'll need to adjust the distance. We have two main ways to do this. We can either manually type in a value or slide this slider back-and-forth, define this distance manually. Or we can use this little eyedropper here on the focus object. So we can click this eyedropper and then choose an object with inside of our scene. In this case, maybe we'll choose the campfire. If we click the campfire, it will automatically choose the correct distance to make sure that the campfire stays in focus. Lot of cases this focus objects by using the eyedropper, does a pretty good job of choosing exactly what to be in focus. If you're using really low values though sometimes you'll need to actually manually choose the value for the distance. If you needed to do that, you can uncheck this. So just click off this X button here. Now clear that object out. Now it's using this distance. The best way to really hone in on the distances to zoom in on the objects that you want to be in focus. So I'm going to zoom in here right on this edge of the flame. Now I can start adjusting this distance. Right now it's set to 10 m, which is a little bit too far. So we're going to need to Lesson this value. We can just click on this and start sliding it down to lower the value. And we'll see here that are eventually our campfire is gonna be coming into focus. So once we get it pretty close, we can now zoom in a little bit closer on our, on our fire here. So right on the edge, find a spot that we want to make sure it's definitely in-focus and maybe this edge right here. Then we can start sliding this. And then while we're sliding it, hold down Shift. That will make any slider within Blender move a lot slower so you can have a lot closer and more fine detail on it. Let's slide it around here. And then maybe right about there is probably the right value for our campfire to be in focus. We needed to have it set to 2.8 m. Now we can zoom back out and see what that looks like for our full-frame. With this last setting discussed, hopefully you feel a bit more confident getting the perfect shot of your 3D world. In the next lesson, we'll explore the biggest differences between the two main render engines in Blender 24. Render Engine Differences: This lesson, we'll explore the biggest differences between the two main render engines in blender. This lesson will be a bit more of a discussion than a demonstration. You won't really need any collection in particular enabled. If you'd like something on screen while we go through this lesson though, I'd suggest the full scene collection. So I've mentioned render engines a few times throughout this class. However, we never really got into what they are and how they differ from each other. In simple terms, a render engine is a set of properties that tells blender how to generate the images of the three D files that we create. There are three different render engines inside blender. However, two of them are used significantly more than the third. If we go over here to our render properties and scroll all the way up to the top, we can see a list here for render engine. The two main render engines we'll be discussing in this lesson are EV and cycles. We won't really touch on workbench at all. EV and cycles are the two render engines you've heard me mention a few times in this class so far. Now that we know what the two main options are, how do they differ from each other? The most basic difference between EV and the cycles render engine is how they handle generating your image. Let's start with the EV render engine. And we can get a preview of that by going up here to our option bar at the top and then panning it over using our middle mouse button. And then we can switch to our material preview view. Now that all of the textures have finished processing, this is a pretty good representation of EV. The EV render engine is a real time render engine. This means that it's generating your image in real time, and there's very little processing time, if any, aside from that initial load. This is pretty similar to how video games operate. The visuals are processed in a way that's fast enough for it to be done in the moment, rather than waiting for an image to be created. We can see a representation of how fast EV is by going over to our rendering tab. And again, you don't have to follow along with this. This is just me showing you as an example. We'll discuss this rendering tab in a bit more detail later on. Now I can go over here to my render engine, switch it from cycles to EV, and then I'm just going to hit the render button. And we can see here after rendering it, I only took 12 seconds for this to render. We can see here the time that it took, and it was about 12 and a third second or so. Now, in this case, the image doesn't look quite correct because this was built with the intention of it being rendered in cycles, but it renders really quickly, and we could always adjust this image to be better suited towards EV if we wanted to. So how does EV differ from the cycles render engine? The Cycles render engine is a path tracing production render, meaning it has to generate each image over time using sampling. In basic terms, the cycles render engine is unable to generate images in real time due to the slower process it uses to create these images. Images are generated slowly and refined over time to create the final output. To see an example of this, we can go over here, switch back to the Cycles render engine, which is what this was built for, and then I'm going to change the slot and then render this image. We'll see that this image takes a lot longer to render. Now that the render is done in cycles, we can see that there was a pretty massive difference in the time it took. The last one only took 12 seconds, whereas this one took a little over 2.5 minutes. Now, there was a significant increase in quality here, but that's mainly because this image was built with cycles in mind and not eV. If we switch back to our layout tab, we can also see a pretty big difference in the way it behaves in the viewport. So if we switch back to our rendered viewport mode, which is going in this case, use cycles, We can see that there's a lot slower response time of cycles inside the viewport than there is by using EV. So EV is a lot faster, a lot smoother. Even if we check on these boxes here to make it look more similar, it's still much faster than switching to the rendered viewport, which is going to use cycles. We can see it has this kind of graininess that it eventually clears up. So that's a major difference between the two different render engines. So how does this difference in speed affect the overall quality of our images? While both render engines are capable of making amazing renders, there's a clear winner if you're looking for the highest quality images. The cycles render engine may be slower than the EV render engine, but it makes up for it with superior lighting, shadows, and reflections. As I mentioned before, both are capable of making awesome images. But EV will require a lot more work arounds to achieve a similar quality and will hit a ceiling of quality well before Cycles does. The extra time devoted to creating your images isn't wasted when using the Cycles render engine, and for the most part, requires a lot less tinkering with settings to make it look great? Now that we understand the most basic differences, how does it affect our decision to use one over the other? Let's start with animations. Due to the massive speed difference between these engines, in most cases, EV will be your best choice for animation. If you're planning to make an animation that's more than just a few seconds long, using the EV render engine will save you countless hours of render time. That's not to say that you can't use cycles for a higher quality and more realistic output, but you'll be setting yourself up for render times that are magnitudes longer than EV would have been. How about material differences in each engine? Well, the one we already know is emission. This is something that we ran into with the campfire texture. When displaying emission using the EV render engine, the campfire flames don't actually cast light into the scene around it. It has a sort of unnatural glow that doesn't interact with the world around it. This can be overcome by adding another light into your scene to mimic this glow, but by default, it just doesn't work the same. And we can see a quick example of that just by switching back to the material preview view. This camp fire doesn't actually appear to be casting any light out into the scene, whereas it does, when we're using cycles. Transmission is also another effect that doesn't look great inside EV. This is something we noticed when exploring the materials on our mug. The transmission slider is what we use to make objects look like glass, and it doesn't look good inside EV, and requires some work arounds to get the same look that is easily attained with cycles. Lastly, we have NPR textures. NPR stands for non photorealistic, meaning textures that have no grounding in the real world. This is most commonly used in cartoon style shaders. I actually have a class that uses this exact same effect to make a cartoon bumblebee animation. NPR textures like this cartoon effect can only really be made in the EV render engine without some significant work arounds to get it to look similar in cycles. So in this case, EV is actually the clear winner for materials like this. With all of that said, which render engine is better or worse? Well, that honestly depends on what you're making. You can see by all the different caveats that I've mentioned that there's no clear winner for every single situation. If you're making a long cartoon style animation, you'll probably want to use the EV render engine. If you're trying to make a stunningly realistic cabin in the forest render, Cycles is probably your best bet. That being said, don't be afraid to try each render engine and see which one you prefer for your style and workflow. In the next lesson, we'll learn the basics of render and output settings. 25. Render and Output Settings: In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of render and output settings. We'll be using the full scene again for this lesson. So make sure you haven't enabled here in the collections. We'll also be switching to the rendered viewport mode. So we can click that here on the far right. And then lastly, let's jump into our camera. So we can click this camera button here to jump into our camera view. If you still have your old camera set up from the last couple lessons, we can go over here to our camera and lights folder inside the collection, and then click the camera here inside this folder, click the little green icon here to make that the active camera. Now that we know about the main differences between the two common render engines, how can we adjust our settings to get our image looking a bit better. We won't be going through every single setting, just the most commonly used ones. Let's start with the cycles render engine as that's what the scene was built for. First we need to go to the render Properties tab. We can find that here by clicking on this icon that looks like the back side of a camera. This tab contains almost all of the settings we need to optimize our render. Let's start at the top and then move our way down the list, picking out the most useful settings. First, we have our render engine, which we've seen in the past. This is where we can decide whether or not we're using cycles or EV. EV is technically the default for brand new files, so you'll need to switch it into cycles if that's your preference. Let's stay on cycles for now though. The first setting will come to under cycles is the device option. The setting allows us to choose if the render engine is going to use only our CPU or if we'll allow it to access our GPU as well. Adding the GPU to the render as well will significantly speed up your render times. I won't really be getting into the specifics of computer hardware, but just know that every computer has a CPU, and most mid range desktop computers will have a GPU as well. If you play modern video games on your computer, you'll very likely have a GPU. Typically, only higher end laptops will have a GPU, so you may need to use the CPU mode if you're using a more standard laptop. We can change that here by switching it from CPU, which will only use the CPU or GPU, which will use the GPU. The default is actually CPU. So if you want to use the GPU and make it faster, you'll need to switch to that once you switch the cycles. Now let's move down here to the sampling section. We have two different options for sampling. We have the viewport, and we have render. The viewport options will only affect the rendering of our viewport and have no bearing on our final image. And conversely, the render settings will only affect our final image and have no effect on the viewport. The settings between these two are largely the same, so you can apply the same knowledge to both. First, we have our noise threshold. Noise threshold determines how much noise blender will leave in your image. Noise refers to a sort of static TV effect that you'll see over top of your image if your settings aren't high enough. Lower the number, the less noise blender will leave behind inside your image. Lower in this case, being closer to zero. The closer it is to zero, the higher quality the image will be. The further away it is from zero in the positive direction, so as the number gets bigger, it will begin to leave more and more noise on your image, which will leave more of a static looking effect over top of it. Now we have our max and our min samples. I won't be explaining the technical aspect of these settings, but in basic terms, MC samples determines how long you're willing to let blender render a specific area of your image before giving up and then moving on. The min samples determines how long you're forcing blender to render an area before moving on to the next part. In the case of the min samples, zero means that it's actually using an automatic setting determined by your noise threshold. It doesn't exactly mean zero. It means that it's going to be looking at this value and then determining what an automatic value for min samples would be. In most circumstances, you can pretty much always just leave men samples set to zero and just let it use the automatic value. Of the two values here, the Max samples has a lot larger effect on your inval image. Now let's discuss D noise. We can twirl open our D noise settings here so we can see them. By default, D noise is not checked on for the viewpoard. In this case, I have it checked on for you, but it is checked on by default for the render. Turning the D noise setting on allows blender to create an image that's a bit noisier than you'd like, and then use a post processing effect to smooth out all of that static left behind to make your image look better than it did before. Using D noise is a great way to shorten your render times while not sacrificing a lot of quality. The main settings you might change for the noise are the D noiser, which changes the way it's handling this noise. The default is open image de noise, then there's optics, and then you can also just set it to automatic and let it choose whichever one is faster. In general, optics is a bit faster and lower quality, whereas open image de noise is a good bit slower, but also higher quality. From my viewport, I tend to prefer using optics, so it's fast, and then down here for our renderer, I typically prefer using the open image de noser because of the higher quality, even though it's a little bit slower. The last setting we'll discuss is at the very bottom of this list, and it's called color management. These settings change the way blender displays the colors and the values in your images. You can adjust these settings to make your entire image more saturated or brighter or darker. The primary way you'll be doing this is through the view transform dropdown and the look menu, which are here. Filmi is the default view transform and generally works pretty well for most scenes. It's primarily meant for photo realism. It does tend to make your more stylized renders a little dull or washed out. The other common option for view transform is standard, which in some cases gives you a little bit more of a contrast look while also keeping your colors a little bit more saturated. This scene was built with the intention of using filmic, so I'm going to switch it back to that. Regardless of the view transform that you choose, whether it's filmic or standard, you can also change the look of this view transform. This will let you decide if you want to have a more contrast the image, or if you'd prefer a bit more washed out and dull image. We can change that here by choosing look, and then the default here is actually set to none. But we can see as we turn this off, it's really changed the look of the image. But we can choose a whole bunch of different ones here. There's a very low contrast which makes it really washed out and gray, we can choose very high contrast, which is the exact opposite. It makes it really dark and really saturated. Then in my case, I think this image here looks the best with high contrast, which is what we had it set two before. At this point, we've gone through the most common cycle settings. Now let's switch over to the EV render engine and go through some of the settings quickly as well. So we can scroll all the way up to the very top of this list, and then render engine, we're going to switch that to EV. If you're using Blender version 4.2 or newer, you can skip to the time one screen now. If you're still using Blender version 4.1 or older, you can continue watching this video, and then I'll tell you when to skip the version 4.2 explanation. In general, there's a bit more work you'll need to do in the EV settings to really fine tune the look of your image. Again, I won't be touching on all of them, but we'll go through just a few of the highlights. First up, we have our sampling settings, which are also broken into renderer, as well as viewport. The setting is similar to the sample settings in the cycle render engine. The higher the number for each of these settings, the higher the quality of the image. That being said, though, in many cases, these default values work perfectly fine for most renders and rarely need to be increased unless you have a specific reason to do so. Before discussing the next setting, let's go up here to our rendered viewport mode, and we're going to adjust the settings here and uncheck scene lights and scene world. Because it's going to be a little bit easier to visualize this if the scene isn't quite as dark as it was. And this next setting is ambient occlusion. So we can just check this on to turn it on, we'll see right away, soon as we turn it on, we're starting to get these little shadows here that are underneath objects. So as we turn it on, our scene gets these little tiny, like sharp shadows underneath like the log, underneath the rock, and each of these pieces of grass. And that's because ambient occlusion is a type of shadowing. These ambient occlusion shadows help ground objects to the surface and make them feel like they're actually making contact with it. It's usually a good idea to turn this setting on for most renders. It generally just makes your images look better because these shadows just add a bit of realism. There's some additional settings here for immune oclusion that you can adjust, such as the distance and how far out the shadows move and other settings. I'll let you explore those on your own though. The next setting is down here, and it's called Bloom. So we can check this on, and we'll see as soon as we check that on, we get this glow now around our fire. The bloom setting enables a glow around the brightest areas of your image. In this case, it's the fire, as well as the moon, although we're seeing that a little bit less so in this case. If we twirl up in the options here, we can adjust how large and how bright this glow is. We can change things like the intensity, so how bright the glow is, as well as things like the radius, which just makes the glow bigger or smaller. You can also change the threshold, which will make more or less things in your scene glow. So basically lowers or raises the threshold in order to enable the glow on top of the object. The final render for the scene is actually enabling glow in a different way. So I'm going to turn off the bloom settings for this. That way, we don't have two blooms sitting on top of each other. We'll discuss that alternative way to add glow to your renders and a later lesson. Then lastly on this list, we're going to discuss screen space reflections. So let's turn that on. By turning this on, we've enabled slightly more realistic reflections while using EV. These reflections aren't perfect, but in general, they are a pretty large improvement over leaving this setting off. I'd recommend you turn this setting on for most renders. To see an example of the screen space reflections difference, let's zoom in here on our fishing rail. We can zoom in all the way down here. We can see this blurry little piece of metal here. If I turn this off, you can see it doesn't really look that metallic, and then when I turn it on, the reflections here are a lot more accurate and make it look more like metal. We can also see this back here on the stool, so the legs of the stool are made of metal. If we turn it off and then on. So we just get more accurate reflections if we leave this setting on. Now let's zoom out so we can see our whole image again. Center it back in our screen. If you're using blender version 4.1 or older, you can skip to the timeline screen now. The EV render engine received a massive update in Blender version 4.2. Luckily, for us, this actually improves nearly every aspect of this render engine and makes our lives a lot easier. This new version of EV is significantly better looking and resembles the quality of cycles much more closely while still maintaining the speed that we're used to. Let's quickly go over some of the most impactful settings. So you're a little bit better informed of what they do. First up, the most important setting in this entire menu is this new ray tracing setting found here. Let's turn this on now by just checking on this little box. This one setting packs a lot of useful features into it. The main things that we'll notice when enabling this setting is that the lighting, the shadows, and the reflections are all improved in quality. However, due to the darkness of this scene, it's a little difficult to get a great look at this effect. Let's go up here to the drop down next to the render viewport button. And we're going to turn off these scene lights and scene world buttons here just temporarily. Now if we go back down here to this retracing option, and we turn it on and off, we'll get a lot better look at what it's actually doing. You should be able to see the difference right away when we turn this setting on and off. Everything has more accurate lighting. There are deeper shadows between objects. And if we zoom in on a reflective object, such as this coffee cup down here by selecting it, painting our view around and then zooming in closer to the liquid. We can see when we turn this setting on and off, the reflection of the rim of the cup disappears from the liquid. So by having this setting on, we're getting more accurate reflections here. We can also see things changing around the scene as well, so we can turn this back on. And then the next setting we're going to check is by twirling open this retracing menu to see more of the options below, and then the main setting that you're going to be really changing is basically just this resolution here. By default, this resolution has been set to a one to two ratio, meaning that this retracing effect is being generated at 50% of the normal resolution. This helps speed up the render time and lessens the burden on your computer. However, if you wanted a slightly higher quality effect, you can click on this drop down, and then instead choose the one to one resolution, meaning that the resolution of the effect is at 100% of the normal resolution. So there's no downgrading going on here. If you wanted to make the effect lower quality, to speed it up for your render times, or if you have a weaker computer and you need it to be a little less heavy on your computer. We can go over here to the resolution and then switch it to something like one to four, one to eight, or one to 16, one to 16 being the worst in terms of resolution. So if we switch it to here, we can see how much blurrier this effect has gotten. That's because it's rendering it at a much lower resolution. In general, you'll want to keep this resolution as high as possible, so meaning as close to one to one as possible. You might not need to run it at one to one, but one to two should be a good place to start. If for some reason, though, it seems like it's really slowing down your computer or your render is taking a while, then you can lower it here to make this effect a little blurrier. For now, we can leave ours at one to two. If you zoomed in on an object like I did and you wanted to go back to your camera view, we can just click on this little camera button over here to jump back into our camera view. If you're at all familiar with the previous versions of EV, you'll notice that many of the old settings that you recognize over here are no longer there, such as ambient occlusion or screen space reflections. This new retracing setting is the replacement for both of those settings, as well as other improvements to things like lighting. One setting that's been removed entirely, however, is the ability to add a default bloom to the image. Bloom is the term for a hazy glow that you see around really bright light sources or reflections. Bloom is now generated in the compositing step of the rendering, rather than applied directly on the image. This is the same workflow that the cycles render has used for a while now. You'll learn more about compositing and a later lesson. And then we're going to scroll all the way up here to the top, and we're going to switch our render engine back to cycles, so we don't forget about it later. So let's switch it to cycles, and that's what this image was made for. And then lastly, we'll need to go up here to our top right, and we're going to change our rendered viewpoint mode, and we're going to check back on these boxes. That way it's actually using the real lighting within the scene. Now let's quickly discuss the output settings within blunder. We can get to those settings by going over here and clicking on this white tab that looks like a printer printing out of photo. Output properties refers to the way that your final rendered image will be saved when you're done with your project. They determine things like the resolution of the image, the frame rate of the animation, and the file format that the image is saved as. Starting from the top, let's hit the most useful options. Under this format section here, the most useful things here are the resolution, as well as the frame rate. We can set the resolution of our image here by changing these values. Right now, it's set to a square by making your image 2000 pixels wide by 2000 pixels tall. If you wanted to change this image into a more standard HD resolution, for the x value, which is the width of the image, we could type in 1920, and then for the height, which is the y, we could type in 1080, and then hit enter. And now this is more similar to the same aspect ratio as what an HD television would be or an HD monitor for your computer. I'm going to set my image back to 2000 by 2000 as this was made for a square format. And now we can go down here to where it says frame rate, and this is where we would change the frame rate of the animation that we were creating if we were making one. We discussed this a little bit during the animation lesson. However, this is where you would actually change the frame rate so that your timeline down at the bottom reflected the correct frame rate. The standard value here when you make a brand new file is actually 24. However, I've changed this file to 30, so it's a little bit more standardized for three d animation. And then lastly, at the very bottom, we have the output section. These settings here are primarily used for exporting animations. If you're just saving a single image, you can do that from the rendering workspace. We'll discuss how to save a single still image in our next lesson. If you were, however, saving an animation, this is probably where you would want to adjust your settings. If you click this little white file icon here, you can navigate to a location on your computer tell it that's where you want to save the files. And then you can also change the file format, so the type of file that it's going to be saved out as. If you're interested in animation, I have other classes that focus on that topic. At the end of those classes, once you've created your project, I'll show you how to set up your file so that it saves out your animation correctly. However, when in doubt, you can save your still images as a JPEG and your animations as an MP four. These two formats are pretty much universal and will work on any platform you'd like to upload them to. In the next lesson, learn how to render a final image in blender. 26. Creating a Final Render: In this lesson, we'll learn how to render a final image in Blender. We'll need our entire scene for this lesson. So make sure that you have that collection enabled and you can find it up here at the very top. Now let's head over to the rendering workspace to begin rendering our image. We can find that up here at the top sensor. So we'll click this and that will switch over to our rendering workspace. The first thing we'll want to do is actually render our image. We have two easy ways we can do this. The first easy way is to go up here to the very top left where it says render. We can click this button and then we have two options. We have render image or we have render animation. In this case, this isn't an animation. We only need to render the image. We can either click this button here or the second way is to hit the 12 key on your keyboard. Either way you'd prefer, you can do that. Let's click this button here. Now we have the file set to cycles. This image may take a few moments to finish based on the render settings we're using and the strength of your computer's hardware. I'll see you in just a moment when my image has finished rendering. My image is done rendering at this point. And we can see up here at the top left that it took about a little over 2.5 minutes to finish. Luckily, we can adjust some of these settings to make this render faster if your computer took significantly longer to create the image. Let's head over here to the Render Properties tab, so we can adjust some of these settings. You can find the render properties here in this tab with the little backside of a camera on it. The main settings we need to change are here, specifically the noise threshold and the max samples. Let's adjust these values to see if we can speed up the render time. We're going to increase the noise threshold from 0.01 up to 0.05 We're increasing the amount of noise left behind inside the image. Now let's go down here to the max samples. We're actually going to lower this down to 50, We're having this number, we'll type in 50 for our max samples. Then these two are the only changes that we're really going to make. By changing the settings here, we should make a pretty noticeable difference in the amount of time it takes to render. Mainly, it should be a bit shorter if you're really pressed for time and you don't want to wait around and try to figure out what the best settings are for your image. You can just change the time limit down here. In this case, you can just tell it to render for a certain number of seconds and then it will stop regardless of where the image is at. If you're not worried about quality and you just want to make sure that it only takes exactly 1 minute, or 30 seconds, or 15 seconds. You can type that in here. Instead, I personally don't use this setting all that often because I want to have some control over the quality of my image. But if you'd prefer this method, feel free to try it out. Now, before we render this a second time, let's go up here where it says slot one and we're going to switch it to slot two. This will allow us to render another image without overwriting the first image. We can then compare the differences in the render times and quality by flipping back and forth between slot one and slot two. Now let's render our image a second time to see how these settings made a difference. This time I'm just going to hit the 12 button, which you can find directly above your backspace key, And I'll see you in a moment once the second image has finished rendering. Okay, our second render is done and we can see appear at the top left that we've knocked off over a minute of the render time. So the last one took 2 minutes and 40 seconds, this one took under a minute and 30 seconds. That's a pretty noticeable decrease in the amount of time to render. Let's zoom in on this image and see if it made any difference in the quality. Now I know it did make a difference in the quality, but let's actually compare the difference between them. Right now, we're looking at the lower quality image that rendered faster. We can tell that because we're on slot two. Now let's click this drop down up here, and then choose slot one. We could see when we change the slot one that the image has a little bit less of that staticky, cloudy look over top of it, but it's not a massive difference. If this is something that you're willing to accept on slot two, the shorter render time with the lower settings, this might be better settings for your computer, you might be willing to accept for your project. The image doesn't need to be incredibly high quality and you'd rather prioritize faster speeds of rendering. This is especially true in things like animation, where you render times for each frame really stack up if you can get to a point where your quality is good enough for your presentation or whatever you're making, and then the render times are much, much shorter than an equivalent higher quality render. You might prefer that, especially for animation. In the case of animation, typically render speed is prioritized over quality. Now, that's not true for big budget Hollywood films, But if you're just an independent artist and you want to make a cool animation, you don't usually have weeks and weeks to render. You just want to get it done in a few days. In those situations, you might be willing to lower your render settings, something similar to what I did here, or even lower, as long as it doesn't degrade the quality too much. In order to get your render to go faster, feel free to look around this image and switch back and forth between slot one and slot two to see the differences in quality. You shouldn't notice anything too drastic, but there will be a noticeable difference. I'm going to switch mine back to slot one because it is slightly higher quality and we've already rendered it. Now we can zoom out to see the full image. Before we save this image, let's quickly discuss compositing. To do this, we're going to go over here to the compositing tab, which is right next to the rendering tab, if you're not seeing your render here on the right side. Go over to this button here that says Backdrop, and turn it on by clicking it, and then turn it off by clicking it again. That should hopefully make your image pop up here on this block here on this node, as well as on this right side window. This workspace here is meant for compositing. Compositing in three D refers to adding effects on top of your render to add things such as glow or distortion to your image. It can also be used to adjust things like value and saturation in your image if you'd prefer not to use a program like Photoshop to do that, the current layout you're seeing now on our compositing tab is not actually the default layout. I've adopted this work flow from the fantastic teacher blender guru. I walk you through exactly how to make this compositing tab layout and many of my classes such as my Mushroom Terrarium class, what effect did I actually add to this render? The only additional effect is the glow that's present around the camp fire as well as the moon. I added this using the glare node you see here on the left side. This compositing editor over here on the left side works very similar to the shader editor that we discussed earlier in this class. The main reason I had to add this glow with compositing is the cycle render engine that we're using doesn't have an easy way to generate it directly into the image like the EV render engine does for this image. I had to add it in with compositing. For the sake of example, if I wanted to increase the saturation or value of the scene, I could add a hue saturation value node to the system here on the left side. Let's walk through that now and see how we can do that. We're going to drag Select over both of these nodes here on the left. And move them over so that we can make some room for this new node. Now inside this Viewport, we can hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu just like all the other editors. And then at the top we can go to Search. We'll click that, then we're just going to type in U, H, u. We can choose hue saturation value. We'll click that, we'll generate this new node. Now we can drag it over here on top of this wire. And we can see as we drag it on top of the wire, it turns white, which means once we click to place it, it will automatically connect it up for us. This automatic connection feature also works in the shader editor as well. Now that we have it added to our system, we can just zoom in here to see our settings. And this has hue, saturation and value that we can adjust. If we wanted to make our image more saturated, we can just increase the saturation value. And we can see that reflected over here on the right side, we increased it a really large amount here, so it made it really, really saturated. So maybe we wanted to make it something a little bit more realistic. The default is one for the slider, I'm going to type in 1.2 and then hit Enter, and that'll make it about 20% more saturated. Which in this case is still probably a little bit too much. But we'll just leave it like that for the example. We can adjust the value down here so we can make the image a bit darker if we wanted to, or a bit brighter if we go above one. And then the last slider up here is the hue slider. So this is going to change every single color in our image and shift it along the hue scale. If we move it anywhere in here, it's really going to deviate our image. If we move it all the way over here to the left, it's making all the oranges into pinks. It's making the blue green into more of a normal green and it's just sucking out a lot of that blue that was in our image. Now as a post processing effect, this actually works pretty well as making the scene look more spooky or magical, or however you want to view it. But we would still have access to our original image just by setting these values back to the default. So this is a way you can make variations of your images just by adjusting some of the settings here in our post processing, but not actually having to adjust the actual image itself. There are a lot of different nodes that we can add here. I won't be going over all of them, but I'm just going to show you how to add one more that's a favorite of mine, so I'm going to hit shift. And up here at the search bar we can type in lens L E N S. And we'll see here lens distortion. So we can choose this then rather than moving these over, we can just drag it over here until this little line here on the right side highlights. We'll place it and it'll just start sliding things around to make room for it. Now we can go down here, then this slider at the very bottom here, it's a little cut off, but it says dispersion. I'm going to set my dispersion to 0.2 and then hit Enter. Now we can see over here on our image that we're getting this cool motion blur and chromatic aberration effect on the edges. It's the colors here on the outside split into almost like a prism effect. A lot of the renders I do are pretty stylized. I actually use this effect pretty often to get this interesting effect here on the edges. We can see it all around the image and it's mostly focused on the edges. This is just an example of what you could do with just a single node inside of your compositing workflow over here on the left side. Feel free to look through this ad menu by hitting Shift and A, and then going through each of these different settings here, these different categories, just picking out any one of them that seem interesting to you. And just dragging and dropping them into this system here and seeing how they affect your image. I'm sure you'll find a lot of different cool and interesting effects. For now though, I'd like to set our image back to default, so I'm going to drag Select over these two nodes that we added. And then just hit Delete to remove them. Our image is going to disappear and that's because it's no longer connected to these last two nodes. All we need to do is just click and drag from this socket here at the top of the glare node. And then drag it to this dot here. And that'll reconnect it to these two nodes, which sets our image back to default. Now that we're done playing around with the image, let's actually save the image. The easiest way to do this is to go up here where it says image. We'll click this and then we can choose Save As. Now just navigate to wherever you'd like to save your image. Typically, I save it in a folder wherever my blender file is located. But feel free to save it wherever you think makes sense. Then down here at the bottom, we can change the name of our file. Maybe we'll call this camp site underscore 01. By adding the 01 at the end of it, we leave it open for the option of making a second version or a third version. And we can easily just change the number at the end of it to make different versions. And then lastly, you can go up here to the top right and then choose the file format for your image. The default is set to PNG, which works perfectly fine. However, if you'd like to change the file format, you can go up here and click on this drop down, and then we have a whole bunch of different options here. The most common two would probably be PNG or J Peg. If we wanted to switch to the J peg, we could just choose Jpeg here, we can see down here, it's already changed the name for us, Then for our quality, I would probably increase that to 100% if you're using the Jpeg option. And then when you're done, just hit Save As Image, and that'll save your image out if you're not doing any compositing effects or you've already handled your compositing effects on a smaller render or a test render and then you render your final image afterwards. You can do that same save process here on the rendering tab. Instead, you can just switch back to rendering. And we can see here that glow is still in our image. That's because the compositing already existed prior to this being rendered. If we had done the compositing after the fact of rendering it for the very first time, we would need to either rerender it or just save it out from the compositing tab instead. But because I already had all of the compositing set up prior to rendering this image, it's automatically applied it to the render here. Instead, you could just go up here to the top left and then choose Image, and then choose Save As. And it would go through the exact same process with our final image saved. We've officially made it to the end of our instruction for the beginner focused class. We're not quite done yet, though. In the next lesson, we'll discuss our class project. 27. Our Class Project!: In this lesson, we'll discuss our class project. You'll need to open the class project underscore, set up camp file for this lesson. This is a different blender file from the one we've been using throughout most of this class. You can find this file in the project resource section, the same place you downloaded the starter file we've been using this whole time. I've reconfigured this file for you to make completing this class project as easy as possible. As you can see, I've removed the original scene I had set up for you and placed all of the pieces of it to the side. My intention for this file is for you to use it almost like a toy diorama. You'll be using all of the different models to set up your very own campsite. You can place all of these pieces wherever you'd like and then change their colors and adjust your camera angle to make a camp that feels unique to you. I'm going to walk you through a very quick explanation of how you can accomplish this project. You can share with us all in the project gallery. Let's click on one of our objects here. And then zoom in so we can get a better look at what we have to offer. The first thing you want to do is consider a few key aspects of your camp. Think about things like, where would your camp fire be, if there even is one? Are you going to have a tent? If so, how many, where's your camera going to be? Will it be high above your scene so you can see the whole camp? Or will it be a lot closer and more focused on a single part of it? How about time of day? Will it be nighttime or daytime? After you have a rough idea of what you want to make, start playing with the objects in your scene and assemble your camp however you'd like to. Don't be afraid to change your initial plan if you have a better idea while you're setting up this file is meant for experimenting, so have fun. If you want to make your own unique objects using the knowledge and tools we've learned, please do so. I'd love to see all the new things students make for their class project. I'm going to start this quick walk through just by moving a few objects here into the camera view, we can zoom out. I'm going to move over my camp tent, a log, and then also a tree. These objects here and everything I'm doing in this video is meant just as a helpful guide while doing your class project. Please don't feel the need to follow along exactly with what I'm doing. Your goal for your class project should be to make a camp that's unique to you. Just use this video as a way to get an idea for some things, as well as a few different helpful tips and tricks. After you have a couple objects moved into your scene here, you might find that you want to make a duplicate of some of them. We know from previous lessons that if we just select an object such as this tree and then hit Shift and D, we'll start making a duplicate. But we also remember we have to bind it to either the x or the y axis. In this instance, we don't want it to lift off the ground. We need to make sure that we bind it just one of these horizontal axes as we move it. Maybe I'll move it over here to the left. And I can keep doing this. Hitting shift D, then X, move it over. Maybe I'll slide this one back. You can see it's tedious to make a bunch of different objects if we're making a lot of duplicates. There is, however, a trick to doing this, when we're making a bunch of duplicates that we don't want to lift off the ground, such as these trees. It's easiest to do this in the top view. We can get to the top view by either clicking this little bubble here to jump us into the top orthographic view. Or we can hit the tilda or accent key. Bring up this radio menu and then choose to. Now that we're in the top view, we'll notice that if we hit Shift and D, when we move this, it only moves in the x and y axis. That's because we're in this top orthographic view, it's binding it to just x and y and it won't let it move in the Z. This makes moving around trees and making duplicates a lot easier. We can just select a tree, hit Shift and D, and then really quickly make duplicates without having to remember to bind it to either the X or the Y while we do it. It also makes it really easy to see how much objects are overlapping, if at all. In this case, if I accidentally move this over here and I didn't know that it was overlapping, it's really obvious to tell that it's overlapping in our top view. Now I can go round and just select some objects, scale them down if I want to. And it's just a really easy way to blueprint out your scene without having to do all the tedious work of binding things to different axes. So I'm just finish placing a tree over here as well. Maybe scale that one up. Now I've really quickly filled out the background here with trees. You also find that in the top view, it's pretty easy to just select an object and then quickly hit R to rotate it. That's because it's only letting it rotate on this Z axis. We don't have to worry about rotating it lopsided and having it tilt into the ground or anything like that. Whenever we move an object, we'll also notice that it's only moving it here on the x and the y axis and it's not lifting it off the ground. This is a really easy way to quickly lay out a scene. The tedious nature of having to bind things to axes. I'm going to quickly move in my campfire here as well, because I'd like to still have a campfire in my scene. And maybe I'll place it around here. After you have a few key objects in place, now would be a good time to place your camera in the scene. You don't want to go too far creating your scene without at least a basic idea of where your camera will be. You have a few options when it comes to placing your camera. You can either make a brand new camera and place it in your scene wherever you'd like to, or simply use the camera that I've already included. Feel free to use this included camera that I have over here on the left side if you don't feel comfortable compositing a brand new shot. But I encourage you to at least try it out. You might surprise yourself with an awesome new camera angle of your new campsite. For the sake of this example, I'm going to make a brand new camera. Before I make my new camera, I'm going to go over here and click this camera in lights collection. That way when I make my new camera, it'll automatically jump into the right collection. Now I can hit Shift and A over here on the viewport. And then go down to camera and then make a brand new camera. Before I start moving my camera, I do need to make it the active camera, so I'm going to click this little green icon here next to the brand new camera in my outliner. And that will jump us into the view of this new camera. Now let's rotate around in our viewport here. Can move our camera up and we can see because we were inside the top view when we made this camera, the camera pointing straight down, just like the top view. That's not a big deal as we can use our rotate tool to rotate it if we'd like to, or we can use my preferred method, which is to go over to your left viewport, the one that's currently looking through the camera to bring up your side menu. Go to the view tab and then check on this camera to view button here. And then hit to hide the tab again, so we can see a little bit better. Now we can just use our normal viewport navigation and this left viewport to place our camera. I'm going to find a different angle of our scene here. Maybe I'll make it a little bit closer, a little bit more intimate, and then maybe this is my new scene. Once I'm happy with my camera angle, I can hit to bring up the side menu again. And then just remember to uncheck that box and then hit N to hide that menu again. If you made a brand new camera or you moved around the original camera, don't forget to adjust your depth of field. In my case, I made a brand new camera. So I need to go down here and actually turn on depth of field if I want it, you don't have to turn it on. If you don't want to, then I need to choose a new focus object. So I'm just going to use the eye dropper here. And I'll select my Camp Fire, that's now the focused object. Then down here I can adjust the F stop and I'll set it to maybe 1.5 to make the background a little bit blurrier. If you don't see the depth of field represented over here in your left viewport, at least inside the solid view. You're going to have to go up to your settings here, the dropdown menu, and then go down to the bottom and just check on depth of field. Now we can see on the left side here that my background now is a little bit blurry. I'm going to finish placing the rest of my objects for the scene and getting my camera in the place that I like. I'll be speeding up this part of the video so you can see the process, but don't worry about copying exactly what I'm doing. The whole point of this class is for you to experiment and create a campsite that feels unique to you. Just have fun placing your objects in your camera for now. I'll see you in a moment when I finish. Okay, I'm done placing the objects in my scene now. Now that we have everything placed, let's decide on a time of day as it will drastically affect the look of our materials. First, we need to switch our left viewport into the rendered mode. So we can do that by clicking this little button here to turn it into the rendered mode. And if you're not seeing this button, you might need to pan this tool bar over. To do that, just hover over the tool bar and then click in your middle mouse button. And that will allow you to slide it left and right. These buttons here are on the far right side over in our outliner, I've already given you a pre made nighttime lighting scene, as well as a daytime lighting scene. For the sake of this example, let's switch ours to the daytime scene. I'm going to check one daytime and then uncheck nighttime. We can see that by switching the time of day, we've really changed the look of our image. Now let's change some of the materials in our scene so we can choose what color some of the objects are. Now let's choose an object. I'm going to select this right tent that I created with our object chosen. Now we can go down here to the bottom right and we're going to switch into our Material properties tab. This will give us a simplified view of all the materials on the selected object. If you're only concerned about changing the color zone object, in most cases you'll be able to do it here if you don't see this color block here on the texture. To change the base color, you'll need to go into the shading workspace and adjust the colors on the gradient node I have plugged in. This isn't too common and only appears on a couple of objects. As a quick example of what that would look like is if I select the ground plane here, then I select the background material here which controls the dirt as well as this green grass we're seeing in the background. Well, notice here I don't have a base color to change. It just says color ramp. Now if I go over to the shading workspace and I zoom out here on the bottom, you can see here, this is where the colors are coming from. For this, it's plugged into the base color, so it's overriding that basic color that it has, and it's using Es. Instead, if I wanted to make my grass a little bit darker, I could select this green block here. I'll have to switch to my rendered viewpoint at the top so I can actually see it. Then I can collect this color box down here. And then I could just make the grass a little darker if I wanted to. And we can see it's changing it up here. I'm going to undo that change because I prefer the color that it was before. But if you wanted to change the color, this is how you do it. And then also down here at the bottom, if you, the little triangle above this brown square, that'll allow you to change the dirt color. And again, you could change the color, or you could just make it brighter, whatever you choose. But I will undo that. And then I'm going to go back to my layout work space where we were before. Now let's go back to this tent for this example. Zoom out a little bit here so I can see everything. If we wanted to have two versions of a material, in this case for two different tents and we wanted to make them different colors, we need to branch that material. To do this, select the object that you'd like to change the color on, in this case, the right tent. And then find the material that you want to change, which is tent fabric. So we'll have that selected. Then we need to go down here to where we see this little number. This number is corresponding to the amount of objects currently using this exact material. Right now we have three objects. We have the top of the stool, the right tent, and the left tent. And we'll see as an example, if I change this color, it's going to change the color of all three of those objects. Now if I hit control Z to undo that, if we click this little number here, this will make it into a unique version of that material just for this object. This number is going to be different depending on which object you're selecting and how many of there are. But if you click this number, we'll see the number disappears. And now our tent fabric material has a different name. And that's because it made it unique to just this object. I'm going to rename this by cutting off this number that it added. And I'm just going to put test at the end of it just for the example of this video. Now if we select the other tent, we'll see it has just tent fabric on it still. And it says two here because we branched this one off. Now let's go back to the other tent that we want to change the color of. And I'm just going to change to any other color. I'd like maybe I'll make this one a ready pink color. We can see here it's only changed the right tent now in this viewport. And feel free to to make this color whatever you'd like if you're not a fan of the pink or you can make it yellow or green. And really it's just going to depend on per object. So maybe I'll make mine more of an orange color. I think the orange probably fits a little bit better in this scene, so sort of a reddish orange. Okay, so now that you have a color that you're happy with in the case of this specific tent material, we are going to want to change this subsurface color. That's because this tent material had some subsurface scattering on it, which allowed some of the light to go through it. So the easiest way to make this color here more similar to the orange that we changed it to, is to just mouse over top of the orange. Hit Control and C at the same time to copy it. Now mouse over to the next color, in this case, the subsurface color. We can hit control and V to paste it. And now we have the exact same color in both slots. And then if we wanted to adjust this bottom color and make it a little less saturated like the last one was, we can do that here with this slider. And we'll notice it only changes this color and it leaves the original as it is. As another example, if we select our stool here, currently this is still using the original tent fabric material. But what if we wanted to make it match this new orange tent that it's sitting in front of? The easiest way to do this would be to select the tent fabric material on this stool. And then we can go down here to this little drop down menu next to the name. And then we can choose a different material. We'll choose tent fabric Test, because that's the orange one. And then when we select that, it'll swap that original material to this other material. Now we have a matching stool in front of this tent. Feel free to make as many changes as you'd like. When you're scene change any color you'd like, swap materials around and just make it feel more unique to you. With your scene created and customized, all that's left to do is render your final image. We're going to head over to our rendering tab up here at the top. And then we can go over to render and then render image, or you can hit 12 if you'd prefer that. Now let's start rendering our image. Okay, My render is finished and it took about 2 minutes and 15 seconds to render. This time will vary though, based on the power over your computer. You'll notice that after your image finished, it applied the glow that we saw earlier in this class. If you'd like to adjust that glow or remove it entirely, you can go over to the compositing tab. Then here we can adjust the glow. It's likely that the glow looks pretty good on a nighttime scene, if you decided to keep that lighting. However, on your daytime scenes, it might be a little bit too much. The two main things you would want to change on this glare node here would be the threshold as well as the size. First, the size. If we lower this, it just makes the glow a little bit smaller, it just doesn't go out as far from the object. The second thing you can change is the threshold. If we increase this number, it will apply the glow to less objects. If I double it to 0.6 in this case, and then hit Enter, we'll see that less of the objects in the scene will get glow on them. It narrows it down to just the brightest objects. As you raise this number up, it makes less and less objects get the glow at all. For the case of this day time scene, maybe 0.8 for the threshold and eight for the size looks a little bit better. This would also be a situation where you could add a new node if you'd like to. Maybe we'll add again, one of my favorite nodes will hit Shift and A go to Search, Type in lens L E and choose lens distortion. And I'm just going to drag it in this gap between these two here, it automatically hooks it up. And then I'm going to type in 0.1 for the dispersion at the bottom. And this will give this render just that rainbow distortion around the edges. Again, this is entirely optional. It's just something I like adding to my renders. And if it's too much, you can always lower it. Maybe 0.025 is better for this image. Just add a tiny bit of it at the very edges. Then once you're happy with your image, you can go up here image and then save as if you didn't make any changes here to your compositing. You can simply save your image here, right on the rendering page. However, since I made some changes, you can see this image looks more like the old one. Since I made changes to my compositing, I need to go back over to the compositing tab and then save this image. Instead, I'm going to go up here, Image, save As. Then at the bottom I can change the name. I'll call this class project underscore 01. That way I can make different versions if I'd like to. Then I can also change the file format. I'm just going to switch mine to Jpeg and then increase the quality up to 100% And now I can hit Save As Image. Now you're ready to share your render with all of the other students and me in the project gallery. For this class, I'll personally look over every project uploaded to the gallery and congratulate you on a job well done. If you have any questions while making your class project, please feel free to ask anything you'd like down in the discussion section below this video. In the next and final lesson, we'll end the class with some conclusions and farewells. 28. Conclusion: You've made it to the end of the class. Congratulations, I want to thank you all so much for taking my class. It really means a lot to me. I hope you found this experience valuable in learning the basics of blender. Hopefully the knowledge you've gained throughout this class leads you to exploring the exciting world of Three D art in blender by making your own fantastic renders and animations. Don't forget to post your project render to the gallery. I'll personally review every project uploaded and congratulate you on a job well done. For my class project, I created this cozy little campsite. It was made using all of the same techniques we learned during this class. If you like this class, let other students know. By leaving a review, your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in the class. You can leave a review easily by going to the Reviews tab just below this video, and clicking the Leave or Review button. I appreciate the support after leaving a review, you might want to follow me here on Skill Share as well. You can follow me at any time by clicking the follow button above this video, or by going to my teacher profile and clicking the Follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make important announcements. Lastly, I want to thank you all again, so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with farewell and I hope to see you in another class soon. 29. Skillshare 1-on-1 Sessions: I've been working on a new project with Skillshare and I'm really excited to finally share what it is with you all. Starting today. You can now book a Skillshare one on one session with me. If you're not familiar with what a one on one session is, let me give you a quick rundown. These 30 minute sessions are personal video meetings with me where we can discuss your three D art portfolio. At this point. This session is meant exclusively for inspiring three D artists looking for targeted feedback on their portfolio. As a beginner to three D art, it's difficult to know where your natural strengths lie and where you could use some guidance to improve your artwork. This guidance is what I'll provide in these personalized sessions. These sessions are great if you're looking for targeted feedback on your artwork to determine where your skills are the strongest, where they could use improvement, and to build your confidence on your ability to improve your three D artwork at the moment. These beginner three D artist portfolio reviews are my exclusive offering. However, I hope to add new session types in the future. So be sure to check back often to see what types of sessions are available. You can book your session today by heading over to my teacher profile here on skill share. My availability and bookings are limited, so check it out now if you're interested. I can't wait to connect with you all. I'll see you soon.