Create 3D Alien Life - A Blender Workflow That Works

1. Intro: So you're ready to dive into some speculative freed alien biology in blunder. You've come to the right place. My name is Jodrey from PixoFred and with over a decade of experience working in various freed industries, I've developed a real passion for speculative alien biology. That's why I've created this class to guide you through the process of bringing your alien creatures to life in blunder. This class is broken down into seven focused lessons. Before we break down what they are, please note that this course is for those who already have a basic understanding of blender, specifically modeling and navigating the user interface as a very minimum. If you are, however, brand new to blender, don't worry. Check out my absolute beginner's blender course on Skillshare, and that'll get you up to speed in no time. Here is what we will be covering. Part one will be concept sketching. We'll start with a simple rough sketch just enough to give us a visual direction for our alien design. Part two will be modeling. Using our sketch as a guide, we'll create a basic but effective free Di model of our alien life form. In Part three, we'll dive into textures to give your alien that extra lifelike organic feel. Then in Part four, we'll create a basic scene where we'll be putting our alien creature inside of. We'll also set up some nice lighting. In Part five, it'll be time to bring things to life. We'll be using basic shape keys and particles, which we'll be adding some dynamics to to really kind of bring it all together, make it look like it's moving and alive. And then in part six, we'll just do some final touches, getting everything ready, tweaking things, organizing things a little bit. And then finally in Part seven, we'll be rendering everything out as a final MP four video. And that's the fun part because then you can share it with people. So this is going to be a fun course. And don't forget to download the included resources pack. It contains all of the dot blend file stages. So if you get stuck on any of the parts, you can check them out and use them as a reference. And there'll also be some handy reference images in there that you could use to design your alien creatures. So let's jump in and I hope you have fun. 2. Concepting (Part 1): So this is the first part where we're going to be looking at just creating a basic concept. Now, you don't have to be fantastic at drawing. You don't have to use any specific program. I'm just going to be using Gimp. But the main thing here is that you just kind of sketch out an idea, okay? So I'm going to quickly take you through the process of how I got to this concept over here, which is really rough and basic, but it's all I really need. And hopefully, you can use the same sort of simple approach with your own project. Along with this class, you'll be able to download a folder with some different resources inside of it. And one of the resources in there is a reference folder. So it's just called REF. You can click on it once you've downloaded the resources, and in there, I just have these four different photos of some soft corals now, I'm just going to go through them, and I'm just going to be showing you what they look like. I really like these ones because they have kind of this sort of worldly kind of out there alien sort of vibe, which I really liked. And you can see here this one is kind of like a soft coral if you sort of branching tentacles. Then the next one, I really like this one. I really specifically like the colors here. You can see there's a lot of blues, some oranges here, and even a little bit of pink. And then there's this one over here, which is a colony of Ziamphits and they're a little bit more just sort of one kind of colors, a few different shades of green, a little bit of brown. But they kind of, you know, look really kind of alien, really kind of cool. And then there's this one here, which I really like I kind of like the striking sort of orange. And these are kind of like the things that I'm going to use as sort of an idea platform to help me just kind of build something with a simple drawing, kind of get a concept together. And you can see here the cool thing about this one here and a lot of these they actually have little mouths in the middle. So that'll kind of be a kind of key feature I want to focus on when doing some simple art, just to kind of design something. The only thing is, I think I might want to go a little bit bigger than this mouth over here. And another thing I really like, like I said, it was the kind of color scheme here. I kind of really like the blue, the orange, and the sort of pink here. I think will look really nice underwater. So looking at references is always a very handy thing to kind of give yourself some ideas of how the biology of something might look like before you just go ahead and draw it. Now, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use a program called Gimp. Which is free. However, this tutorial is not about using Gimp. You can use a piece of paper. You could use Photoshop. You can use any sort of free or paid program that you want. It really doesn't matter. We can just draw some simple concepts to kind of give us an idea of what we want to do. So what I'm going to do? I'm going to take some elements of everything we sort and kind of combine it. So what I'm going to do, I'll just start by drawing. And like I said, you can do this in any sort of medium that you want, but I'm just going to kind of, like, draw a circle. And I'll try and get it as round as possible. There we go. It doesn't have to be perfect. And then in the middle, I'm going to kind of make like a mouth. It's going to be inside the coral. Okay? It's kind of like a slit. And then what I'm going to do is I really like the concept of these sort of little hairs that come off, but I want a lot more of them. So what I'm going to do is I'll just draw so you just get the idea a whole bunch of these little sort of tentacles almost look like fine hairs to kind of go around the whole outside like this. And they're also going to give us a really nice dynamic because we can also add some forces to them to make them kind of move in water, and it'll also really add to our animation. So I'm going to go make sure, and in my little illustration here, I'm just going to make a whole bunch of little simple hairs, okay? Just to kind of give me idea what I'm kind of going for like that. And here it is. It's kind of like a simple idea, but what's really going to also make this is the color. So what I'm going to do? Over here, I'm going to add a little bit of color to and what I said was, I really like kind of, like, the blue sort of inner part of this. So I'm going to go ahead and I'll kind of paint the inside of the coral blue like this. There we go. And then I want the blue to kind of bleed through a little bit to the hair. I think that'll kind of look cool. We can add a gradient going across. I'm going to draw it around here like that. And then what I'm going to do is I'll go with a little bit of pink as it kind of starts going out. So I'll add a little bit of pink. I think it'll look kind of really cool, having some pink kind of going around from the blue kind of blends in really well. And then towards the end, we'll have a nice bright orange tip to our little hairs. So kind of go on the outside and I'll show that as orange. There we go. Here we go. So something like that. So you can kind of see here, we have a very simple concept here of what we want to do what this creature is going to look like. And I might just drag the pasity down here just to kind of see the bottom drawing a little bit better. But yeah, this gives me a really, really good idea of what I want to go for. So this is how I sometimes work, really basic concepts. You don't have to be fantastic at illustration. And that's kind of what I want to get across here. It's just about giving yourself an idea and not just starting with nothing. So this is kind of what it'll look like from the top. And I think from the side, it would just be something really simple like this. It'll just kind of like a mushroom, probably, like, a simple foot, and then there might just be some sort of substrate like a rock where it attaches to. And with the mouth, we'll probably do something where we have, kind of, like, the mouth is kind of like a fin slit. And then as the animation progresses, we'll kind of have it kind of opening up. That, and it just kind of looks like it's kind of like breathing or filter feeding, which will really add some more life to it. So this is kind of like the concept I'm going with here. And once again, it's kind of based off a combination of these different references here that I think some of them have some really cool features that I think I'd like to combine together. So is the approach here. Go ahead. Find some reference images. I'd recommend that you just follow along for now with what I'm doing. But once you have this methodology, it's definitely worth getting some references of some different biology out there. Just quickly coming in. You can grab a piece of paper. You can use Photoshop Gimp, draw up a simple concept to give you an idea of what you want to do, and then we'll jump into blunder. So in the next part, we'll actually start modeling this little creature here and starting to set up the basic structure, and we'll go from there progressively adding more details. 3. Modelling (Part 2): Welcome to part two, where we're going to be modeling our alien creature in Blender. Now, one of the things to keep in mind, like I mentioned in the intro of this Scotia class, is that this is going to be dependent on you already knowing the basics of blender. Now, in this case, I wouldn't say it's too difficult. So if you're still new at Blender, it should be relatively simple. If you don't know anything, I'd highly recommend you just go and check out some of my other Skillshare courses that are aimed at absolute beginners. If you go to my Skillshare page, you'll see there I have courses that are labeled as blender for absolute beginners, and that'll get you up to scratch on everything you need to know to follow this course more easily. Otherwise, you might get a little bit lost in some of the details, especially when it comes to modeling here. So let's jump in and model our three D start of our alien creature. The time of making this Skillshare course, I'm using Blender 4.4. Now, like I said in the beginning of this Skillshare class intro, this is for people who already know the basics of blender. But if for whatever reason you're watching and you don't know, you can go toblender.org. You can download a free build of blender. It doesn't cost anything, nor does it require an account. And then you could run a blender. I think for the most part, even with the newer updates that you'll get after the recording of this Skillshare course will still be compatible with this course for some time. So what we're going to do once you open up blender, you're going to see the default scene over here, a cube, a camera, and a light. For your convenience and to make things a little bit simpler, I haven't abled a screencast key here so you can see the keys that I'm pressing and my mouse movements. So that should hopefully make things a little bit simpler. Inside the resources folder, I will add that simple drawing that I made just to kind of give us an idea of what we're doing. We're going to be modeling this alien coral creature, and this will be the top view. And from the side, we'll kind of make it look like a bit of a cup sort of mushroom like this. We have a mouth that can open and close. So very, very simple. So in our blender scene, we're going to click and drag and just select all the objects and press the let. Then we're going to go Shift A. We're going to go to our mesh options, and we're going to add in a circle. Our circle active. You can see up here it's highlighted. You want to go over here to object and change it to edit mode. And we have the vertex select option enabled here, as you can see, it is blue. If it's either face or edge, just make sure to select the vertex. You're going to click and drag to make sure all of it is active, so click and drag over it. You can also just press A, and it'll select everything as well. And once you do that, you're going to press seven on your number pad to go to your top or a graphic view. If you don't know that much about blender yet, if your computer doesn't have a number pad, you could go to edit preferences. You can go over to input and you can emulate a number pad. This is handy if you have, for example, a laptop with a limited set of keys. In my case, I'm using my computer, so I do not need to emulate the number pad. You can also come up here to view and then go to the view port and go to the top view. In our top view with everything active, we're going to press E on our keyboard to extrude, and we're going to go to scale. We're going to scale in a little bit like and then click. Now we're going to go E to extrude again and S to scale. I want to go about this much, we're going to click. Now we're going to go S, and we're going to go X and scale a little bit down on the X like so and then click. Now we're going to go E to extrude, S to scale, just a little bit and click and then E to extrude again as to scale and just a little bit and then click. And then E to extrude again as to scale. We're going to scale in about this much. And then click and then go S and X and just scale down on the X just a little bit like so, as you can see here. And then E to extrude again as to scale. And we're just going to go a little bit again and click and then go S X and scale down on the X a little bit more like. And then what we're going to do is before we go extruding any further, we're going to come in here and we're going to go Shift Alt and left click to select this loop, so click on this loop over here. And then we're going to go Alts and scale it in along the normal. So Alts and then move your mouse and then click when it has a divot and then shift Alt left click on this edge and go Alts and scale it out and up like so and then click. So we have a bit of a ridge like that. Then we're going to go back to our top orthographic view by pressing seven on a number pad. We're going to go Shift Alt and left collective loop select this inner ring by clicking on it. Now we're going to go E to extrude S to scale, scale a little bit and click and then go S X, and scale it down like so and then clicktll it's very narrow like this. Then we're going to come over here and go Control R by hovering over this edge over here. And because this is still a loop, we should see the yellow line appearing for our loop tool. And then we're going to roll our middle mouse button once just to add in two segments and then double click. That's going to add it in. And then we're going to go Alt S and scale it down like say Alt S and scale that down a little bit, and then click. We're then going to deselect, and we're going to go Shift left click on this inner loop over here. We're going to go S and then Y and scale it in on the Y just a little bit and then click. And then what we're going to do, we're going to go Z and go into our Y frame so we can see better in the inside. And we're going to go E to extrude and Z and extrude down on the Z and go down about that much. So I'm going to go Z, go back into solid. So we've gone down into Z axis about that much. And then we're going to go, again, E to extrude, S to scale and make it smaller, and then S X and scale on the X and click. Like so. And then we're going to go E to extrude and Z on the Z axis to go down. So you can see the blue line there for the Z axis, and we're going to bring it down and click. And then we're going to go Alt S and scale it out along the nulls and click, and then go S Y and scale it down on the Y just a little bit and click. And then we're going to go E to extrude S to scale and scale it quite small. Then G and Z, bring it down a little bit, like so, and then E to extrude and Z, and then click and then S Y and flatten it a little bit on the Y and then click. We're kind of narrowing this inside part of the mouth, like so, and for now, we'll leave it as so. And then what we're going to do is we're going to deselect everything, and then we're going to go Shift left, click the loop selector outside edge. We're going to press one on the number pad to go into our front or for graphic. Then we're going to go E to extrude and follow it by Z to restrain it to the Z axis. We're going to go down a little bit and then click and then go S to scale, and then click. Then E to extrude and Z to bring it down, and then click and S to scale just a little bit. And then E to extrude as to scale, and then click and go, G, Z, and just bring this edge down a little bit. And now looking at a reference, the top was really simple, but we actually want to come in here and just kind of make like a cup shape with a little stem that comes down. So that's very simple. So what we're going to do with this edge still selected, we're going to go E to extrude, Z to bring it down, click as to scale, and then E to extrude, Z to bring it down, click and then A to scale again. And then we're going to go E to extrude Z and click as to scale, and then E to extrude and Z go down as to scale. And scale about this much and then E to extrude and Z, bring it down, click S to scale and scale it out like so. Then you can come in here if you need to Control R, click, add in a loop and go Alt S, and then go Control B, just to create a bevel. If you need to, you can roll in another segment. So now we've made this flange over here, and we can keep it relatively low detail here at the bottom because we're not really going to see it so much from the bottom. But if you wanted to, you could always come in here and just hover over edge, go Control R, double click, and just add in a loop if you need to. But something like this is fine. That's all we really need to do. Have this very, very simple shape. And one thing we need to do as well is we're just going to come over here around the outside of the mouth. We're just going to go Control R on this edge here, so the loop running just in the outside of the mouth. You can see we have to corner here, and then just in the inside here, we're going to go Control R. Double click, and we're going to go Alt S and just kind of scale it out a little bit and click and then go Control B and create a bevel and roll the middle mouse button once just to add in an extra segment just to tighten it up. There you go like that and then click. And there we have that. If you want it to, you could also just select this inside loop, G, Z, just bring it down just a little bit. Just something simple like that. Okay, keeping things very simple. So what we're going to do now, we're going to go down modifiers over here. We're going to go add modifier, search and type in sub. We're going to give this a subdivision surface. And now we can see it's smoothed out a lot. So let's go now and get out proportional editing. Let's come over here to the drop down and make it connected only, and the proportional editing will allow us to edit more than one vertex at a time. There's something we want to do here. I want to be able to shape this. Soha we're going to do, we're going to go into our front orthographic view by pressing one on a number pad. We're going to click on a vertex here at the front along the lip of this object. And we're going to go G and kind of just drag it up a little bit to give it some shape. And then we're going to press Control one or Command one on the number pads or Command and one or Control and one. And then in the back, you're going to select vertex and you can go G and move it up a little bit to give it some shape as well, like that. And then what you can do is you can come in here and you can kind of just grab some of this and just give it a little bit more volume and make it a little bit more random. So I'm just kind of, you know, just adding a little bit of organic shape to it. So it doesn't look symmetrical all the way around. Something organic like this. And I might just select two verts here in inside and just go G and just kind of roll my middle mouse to bring down the influence and just kind of sag these guys down just a bit. Just create kind of that sort of shape. That. Just very simple shape. So once you've done that, you can go back into object mode. You can right click and go Shade Smooth. And now you can see here, we have the beginnings of our alien creature here and it's going to look a lot cooler as we go on with this. So what I might do, I'm going to tab back into dit mode. So I'm just heading to tab key. Or you can just come up here and go back into Edit mode this way. And once again, if any of this is a little bit confusing, it's because this course is more aimed at people who know the basics of blender. But for now, what we'll do is just go Shift Old and we'll left click to select any loop in the inside of the mouth. We'll just go S Y. And with proportional editing, rolling that middle mouse button down a bit, I'm just going to kind of scale the mouth in just a little bit like that. I think that looks a lot better. And there we have it looking really, really good. So this is the very beginning of our alien creature. From the top view, by the way, if you want it to edit mode, it looks perfectly round. So you could always just come here and just shape it a little bit, so it doesn't look too round, okay? Just a little bit of organic shape like that is really going to add more realism to this. So having a look at our reference again, you can see here this is what we've achieved. Over here, you can see this is the beginning of our creature here. But what we're going to do in the next part is we'll be adding some shaders and some hair particles to add all these little tentacles that come off the side, these little tendrils, and we'll be adding some nice looking shaders to actually add some color and texture to this object, so it'll render nicely. So that'll be in the next part. I'll see you there. 4. Particles & Shaders (Part3): Welcome to part free. And in this part, we're going to be adding these lovely looking shaders to our alien creature and also these hair particles to which we'll also add a nice looking gradient. You can see here this will be the end result. This is our reference, and this is what we're going to be making. This is the goal here. I hope you enjoy this part, and if you get stuck, remember that the different blend file stages are available in the provided resources. Now that we're in Part three, we're going to select our alien creature. With it active, you can also come up here to your scene collection and under the collection dropdown, let's double click on Circle and just call it creature So it's always important to have a name. Or I guess we could be more specific. Let's just call it creature body because that's more specific. So it's a creature body. And what we're going to do is we're going to come up and click on a shading workspace. And inside of our shading workspace, what we're going to do is we're going to go over to our render properties. We're going to go here to the render engine and change it from EV to cycles. If you have a GPU on your computer, at this point, it would be good to go to Edit preferences. Go to your system and make sure that you have QDA enabled over here. You can see I have my graphics card selected. Now you may not have one. In which case, you could just stick to a CPU option. So once you have that done, make sure just to come here and save preferences. You can close your preferences, and then you can come here to the device and just change it to GPU compute. Once again, if you don't have a GPU and just have a CPU, you can stick with CPU. It's only going to render a bit slower. So what you can do then as well is come down to your render. Over here in the Max samples. That's how many samples it's going to take to render this. Let's just change that to 45, and that's all we need to do for now. This is not any sort of rendering that we're going to be doing yet. It's just so we can see in the viewport our materials as we're working with them. We're also going to quickly just go Shift A. We're going to go to options in this window over here. So Shift A go to your light options and just add in an area light. This area light active, just go G and Z and move it up and click. And then go Z. Press Z and then click on the rendered view. And now with your light selected, make sure it's active, go over to your data properties for the light over here, and then go ahead and change it to 120 and increase the size. I'm just going to quickly rotate it a little bit and move it off to the side. Now, this is not the lighting part of this Skillshare class. This is just so we can see for now what we're doing. We'll focus on lighting and things like that later on. But for now, we're going to click on the creature body, make it active. We're going to go here to the slot and click on new to create a material, and let's call it body. And over here, if you drag this up, you can see we have more space. And this is roll our middle mouse button to zoom in. You're going to see by default, we have this principle here, which has a white base color. Now we're going to plug some interesting textures into this to make it look organic. So we're going to go Shift A. We're going to click on search and type in wave. And let's get the wave texture. Don't confuse it with the wavelength, just the wave texture. It over here, and then take the color and plug it into the base color. You're then going to come to the distortion and make it 34. You're going to add more detail by taking it up to 15, and the rest will leave as they are. But we'll just come up here to where it says bands and change that to rings. And now we already have something that looks really cool. Now we want to add some color to that. So what we're going to do, we're going to move this up. We're going to go Shift A search and type in amp. And you're going to see an option here called color ramp. You're going to click on it, and then just hovering over this cable click, and it should automatically add in. So it's now going to the factor and the color is now going to the base color input. What we're going to do is we're just going to drag and select both of these, move them up a bit. Then we're going to click on this color ramp. We're going to go Shift D to duplicate, move it up and place it on this cable again. And this time, we're going to go ahead and drag these two values. So sliding the black value all the way and the white value all the way down closer to it. And we're going to click on this white or black value first, click on the black value first. There you go. And we're going to come to this black bar. Click on it. Let's drag the value up, and let's give us a blue kind of color. So there we got it looks nice. Then let's click on the white tab, click on the bar here, let's make this a nice, saturated kind of orange. That. And now you can see we have some nice looking color here. But this looks very flat and lacks texture. So let's come over, and let's go down here and go Shift A. Click on Search and type in bump. Let's get a bump node. Place it over here. Let's take the color from the gray color ramp and plug it into the height. So this one over here, so the color is going to the height of the bump, and let's plug the bump into the normal of the principle. And let's take the strength and make it 0.2, two. So 0.2, two. Let's also come over here to our roughness and let's make it 0.8. And let's come to our subsurface, and let's give it a weight of 0.3. And here you can see this is the skin of our creature so far. It's looking really, really good. So for now, what we'll do is we'll go over here in the window and go Z and then click on solid. Let's drag this window down. Give us a bit more space. And what we're going to do is we're going to go into Edit mode with our creature selected. We're going to go Shift Alt, holding those two and then left click on this outer loop over here. Go to your object out of properties, which is this one over here, the green triangle. Then go to your vertex groups and go plus and create a group. Let's call this outer particles. And let's go ahead, with this whole loop selected. You can see it's orange. Let's click on a sign, and now it's assigned to that particle group. So if we go Alts just to deselect here, you should be able to click on this group and go select and you should see that becomes active. We're also going to come in here, so deselect everything and go Shift Alt and left click loop select, this loop over here. So that's the only one active. Then go plus and create a new group. Let's just assign it to that group. Let's call this inner. Particles. There we go. So now we have this one over here, and we have this one over here. These two selections. Now what we're going to do is go back into object mode. With our creature selected, we'll go to our particle settings. We'll go plus, and let's call this particle group long, and let's make it hair. Let's click on Advanced. And let's first of all, go all the way down to our vertex groups. And under the density, let's click here and select outer particles. So now it's only adding it to the outer part. But what we need to do is come up all the way to the top here under remission, and let's just drag that hair length way down. What we also need to do is just go over to our modifier stack. Let's just click on the particles and just drag it above the subdivision surface, like so. And let's go back to our particle settings. As you can observe here that the hairs are actually sticking inwards. Now, this is a common problem when our object has inverted normals. A simple solution is just to go into Addit mode. Press eight to select all of the mesh. Then go over to your dropdown up here for mesh dit mode, and under normals enable normal. You can currently see many of the normals are sticking inwards. So if we go Alt N with everything active, we can go recalculate outside. Now all the normals are pointing out, and so should our hair particles. So if we now go back into object mode, we can see our hair particles are pointing outwards as they should. Now, going back to our particle settings, let's go down to the children drop down. Let's make it interpolated. Let's just go up to our emission, and let's just change the number to 200. Like so. Let's just make the length 0.6. And under the children, we're going to go down to the clumping. We're going to click on use clump curve. And now we're going to shape how these curves look. So we want the hair to kind of point, the little hairs to point to the tip. So let's come here and use this curve. We're going to click on this handle and drag it down, and then click in the middle to add a new handle and just kind of drag it up like so just to kind of create this shape. Now, you can see it's looking very kind of jaggedy because we don't have enough points. So what we need to do is go up and we need to go over to our render under the path, we need to enable Bs plane. And then in our view port, we also want to go down here, let's change the strand steps to five, like so. And now we have something that stats to look very nice and organic. To have this kind of hang, what we can do is go up and let's enable hair dynamics, and now it would be a good time to quickly go back to our layout. Let's come over here and drag on our timeline to drag it up. Make sure your frame starts at frame one. And now if you hit the space bar, you're going to see the hair particles fall. Now, this is not the animation part of this class yet. However, for now, just so we can see it hang. I've just showed you how to enable that. But one thing we do want to do is just under our hair particles, under the hair dynamics, we want to go to the structure, and under the stiffness, let's just make that 1.5. And now if you go back to frame one again and hit the space bar, you should see it's not quite as floppy. We can always adjust it later with the animation. But for now, what we're going to do is we're going to go back into our shading workspace, and we want to add some nice gradient to this hair. So I'll show you quickly here. Remember our reference. We wanted a sort of nice gradient of colors going outwards like so. And this is actually really simple to do. What we're going to do is we're going to select our alien creature in our shading workspace. We're going to go to our material properties. We're going to scroll up, and then over here, we're going to go plus and create a new material, and let's call it gradient. And once you create this gradient material, let's drag this up so we can see what we're doing. So what we're going to do is we're going to go shift a search, and we're going to type in curve info. We're going to get a curve info node, and the information we want to take about the hair curve is going to be the intercept. We're going to drag the intercept into the base color of the principle. We're going to go shift a search and get a color ramp, type in color and go to the color ramp. Place it on this cable, and let's move these two up. And then what we're going to do, we're going to drag this black value up a little bit. Then let's grab this color ramp and go Shift D to duplicate, place it on the cable again. And this time, we're going to take this black value, drag it down. Let's come here, click on the color, and let's make it blue, a similar blue to the body. Let's go plus to add in another one. This one, we're going to drag down a little bit. Let's click here and make it a nice pink color. And then the one on the end, we'll drag it down a bit and let's make that a nice orange. We're then just going to come to our particles again. Let's drag this down. And what we need to do is we need to go to the render under our particles, and we need to go here to the material and change it from body to gradient because we don't want these hairs to use the same material as the body, but instead, this new gradient that we've created, and this gradient uses the curve info with the intercept to give us that information on the particles. So now if we go Z and we go rendered, you can see we have this beautiful gradient coming out like so. And you could always come here once you press Z and go rendered, and you can always adjust the slider so you can adjust how much of each one you want. Like so. So you can slide them around. But I think something like this looks really beautiful. I might just emphasize the orange a little bit more making it a little bit more saturated. But there you go. We now have a really beautiful material. So another thing we want to do just quickly and it's really simple to do. I'm going to press Z and go back into solid. Let's click on our creature. Let's go back over to our materials. Let's scroll up and let's click on the body. And what we want to do, we're going to go plus. And let's with this new material, make sure it's selected. Come to the drop down and select body. So now we have body here twice. But in the one here at the bottom we're going to come and click on the number. So over here it says two, and I'm going to click on it. This now makes it its own material. So I'm just going to call this body. Inner. Or let's call it mouth because it's really going to be for our mouth. So I'm going to call it mouth. And this mouth material is now the exact same as the body. But what we can do here is we can come over with this mouth material selected. And let's just come and grab this blue. Let's make it a lot darker in value. And let's grab the orange. Let's bring that down and make it a lot darker in value as well. And then what we're going to do is going to come and go into Edit mode. And we're going to come down here at the bottom, and let's deselect everything. And we're going to go Shift Alt and left click and just select a loop in the inside of the bottom of that mouth, or you could just come in the inside of the mouth. Any loop, just select a loop inside. Then go Control plus or Command plus a few times till the inside of the mouth is selected, like so. So you have all of these faces inside selected, then click on a mouth and a sign. And now if we go back into object mode and we go Z and then go rendered, you can see we have that darker mouth material. Now, you could always come in here and adjust the values if you think it's too dark. But I think generally, having it a bit more darker might make it a bit more purple, just kind of gives it a little bit more contrast and the inside of the mouth. And there we have it. We now have created a beautiful looking alien plant creature that's based on some corals. And I just think it looks really amazing, and it's also really simple. So I'm going to quickly pull up the reference, and you can see this is kind of what we are going for. Here you can see the two side by side. This is our concept, and over here is the creature that we've created. So that is really, really exciting. So in the next part, we'll be doing our scene setup and our lighting, adding some volume metrics to make it look like the ocean on the water, and that's going to be a ton of fun. So I'll see you in the next part, and I hope you're enjoying this course. 5. Scene & Lighting (Part 4): Welcome to Part four, where we're going to be looking at scene setup and lighting. Once again, if any of these things get confusing, make sure to check out the provided blend files in the resources so you can have a look. But this is going to just be a simple approach to setting up a scene and then adding a bit of volume metrics, some lighting, and really just making this all kind of come together. So let's jump in, and I hope you guys enjoy Part four. So now that we're in Part four, we're going to work on the scene setup and lighting. If you are in the shading workspace from the previous part, just go back into your layout workspace. What we're going to do is we'll delete the temporary light we added in, we'll select it and press delete, what we're going to do is we're going to go and press one on a number pad to go into the front of graphic view, and in the front orthographic view, we're going to go Shift A. We're going to go down to our camera option out in the camera. Then we're going to press seven to go into our top orthographic view. What we're going to do is in our topographic view, we're going to go G and move the camera. Pressing G, we're going to move the camera to outside, click, and then with it active, let's press R and rotate and rotate it towards the camera. It's about 45 degrees. We're rotating the camera 45 degrees towards the subject here, which is our alien coral. What we're going to do then is with our camera active, we're going to press zero to into camera view and we're going to go G and Z. G Z and move it up until it's a bit higher. And then click. And then in your camera view, so we press zero to go into our camera view. We're going to double tap R. So double tapping R, you can rotate a camera, and we're going to rotate it so it's facing down a little bit like so. In fact, I think we're going to go G and Z. Let's go a little bit higher. Double tap R. Let's go down a bit more. I might just go G and Z again, move your camera up a bit more. So we kind of want it looking up from the top like this, looking down at our coral, okay? That's what we're looking for. We also want to take our camera with it selected. We want to go over to object data properties for the camera and make it 90 on the focal length. And now if we go into our camera view we're pressing zero, you can see it's a lot closer in the focal length. So we're just going to go G and then hit the middle mouse button and just zoom it a little bit back. And that's looking like what we want. We're not going to go Shift A. We're gonna go to mesh options out in a plane. And we're going to go G, Z and move this plane down a bit, like so. Then we're going to go S, we're going to scale it up nice and big. And then once it's about this big, we're going to tap into Edit mode. We're going to right click and go subdivide. Then let's come to our subdivide tab and give it something like 25 subdivisions. Come to the drop down, drop it down like that, and let's go back into object mode. And then what we're going to do is we're going to press free to go into our right orthographic view, and let's go Z and then go to Wireframe. And we have a floor here selected. Let's just go back into edit mode. Let's enable proportional editing. And what we'll do is we'll just select. So going to our top view, we'll just select some verts here in the upper corner in our top view. Then press free to go back into the left or graphic. And then just go G and roll your middle mouse button with that proportional editing and kind of bring this down a little bit, so that corner. Here we go. And then let's grab this opposite corner and go G, Z, move it up a little bit. And then in our front. So this is the front here. We're going to shift to left click to Loop select or just select this whole row of verts and go G Z and just kind of move it up a little bit, like so. So now we have kind of like this descending kind of floor, as you can see here. So if we go into our camera view, this is what we should see, okay? So we just want to sort of, like, lowering ocean floor like that. And we're going to go back into object mode. If you did it a little bit different, it doesn't matter. We're just kind of adding a little bit of a dynamic sort of bend to our floor. We're also with our floor active. We're going to right click and just go shades move. In object mode still. And then we're going to go Shift A. We're going to go to mesh options and just add in a cube. With this cube selected. We're going to press tab to go into Edit mode, or you can just come up here and go into Edit mode. With everything active, you're going to right click and go subdivide. Go to your subdivision tab, and let's give it 12 subdivisions. Or maybe let's actually go with, I think seven or maybe even four. I think we can get away with four in this case. We're going to have four subdivisions. Then we're just going to select a vertex, and we're going to kind of just move it around with the sub proportional editing. So I'm going to grab it here, maybe bulge it out, make it look a little bit uneven. That. They're going to go back into object mode. I'm going to go and give it under the modifiers. I'm going to go add Modifier search and type in this for displace and get a displace Click New and then go to your texture properties and under the type, change it to Cloud, and then go back into your modifiers. Now you can mess around with the strength a little bit. Then you can go add Modifier search and type in sub and give it a subdivision surface. There we go. Now, right click and go shades move. And now we have a rock. You can always come here and increase the strength to make it more jaggedy like this. So I want to go S to scale this rock and then click. And then in my front view or maybe the right view, so I'm just going to my right or for graphic. I'm just can go G and move this guy down and just kind of place it underneath the coral like this. And you can kind of rotate it till it kind of makes sense. I'm going to go something like this. There we go. It looks good. And then I'm going to go into my camera view by pressing zero on the number pad. And then I'm just going to grab this rock and I'm going to go Shift D to duplicate, move it to the side, double tap R, and maybe the scale. I'm just going to kind of make some more of this guy. I'll adjust the strength a little bit. And I'm just placing some more rocks in here and I'm going to do the same over here. Shifty to duplicate, R to rotate. And then in the top view, I'll just do that again. Maybe rot it around, kind of creating this sort of substrate for it to sit on. Maybe scale the sky up a bit, and you can do this as randomly as you want to. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. Just kind of give it a little bit of a nesting area like this. I might just grab this guy, duplicate him, rotate him around. There we go. That's looking really good. Keep it simple. You don't have to overcomplicate any of this at all. So then what we're gonna do is I might actually grab my camera. I'll just rotate it down a bit more, move it up. But once again, you can kind of fine tune your own camera placement all you want. I'm going to kind of go with something like this. Okay. And then what we're going to do is in our camera view, we're going to go Control B. We're going to drag over our camera to limit the rendering to the camera view. And if you remember in one of the previous parts under our render properties, we actually change it to cycles, and we set up the GPU. Now, once again, I did mention you could stick to CPU if that's all you had. We also changed our render Mac samples to 45, which it should be. We can now go Shift A. We can go to our light options out in an area light. Then go G and Z and move it up. So move it up about here. Then you can go to your light properties, give it a strength of 200. Give it a size of 2.1 meters. And then going back into your camera view by pressing zero, you can select this light. Because that cursor is in the middle, you can come here to your transform pivot, change it to free Dcursor. Now if you double tap R, you can rotate that light around the cursor. So I'm going to rotate it off to the side. So now we have kind of coming off from the back here, just like that. Then I'm going to go Shift D to duplicate and then R, Z and rotate it around and have one coming from the side over here. But with this light, we're going to go ahead and make it a strength of 500 and we're going to give it a size of 1 meter, and we're going to go G and move that guy a little bit further back, like so. So this is kind of the lighting we have. We're going to change the transform pivot back to median point. And now if you go into our camera view by pressing zero, and we go Z and then click on rendered, we can see this is what we have. Now, it obviously doesn't look underwater yet, and that's because we need to add some more materials. So let's click on one of these rocks. Let's go into our shading workspace. Let's go press zero to grano camera view. And then with one of these rocks selected, let's just go new and creative material, call it rock, and you should be able to move over and somewhere there should be a principal shader like this. And what we're going to do we're going to go shift a search and get a noise texture. We're going to plug the factor into the base color of the principal. Then we're going to go shift a search and get a ramp, type in ramp, grab the color ramp and place it on this cable, drag this value up and change the black value to a brown color. There we go. Maybe not too dark, but something like that, kind of like a smoky mocha brown. And then come and drag this white value down to here and then make it kind of like a purplish kind of pink like this. Dragging the value down just as a little bit. We're then going to shift a search and type in ramp again, get a color ramp. Let's take that factor and plug it into the factor of the color ramp here. And at this point, I'll just grab all of these and just go G and move them up a bit. Then I'm going to go shift a search and get a bump node by typing in bump. Wrap it, and then plug the color into the height. And I'm going to plug the normal into the normal of the printable shader, like so. And what I'll do as well, is I'll just quickly move it over, and I'll take the color and actually plug it into the factor of this color ramp. So all we have is this one, the noise going to the first color ramp. Then I'm going to drag this black value up for more contrast. I'm also going to come here to the roughness and make it 0.34, 0.34. And now, if you come over here in our window and we go Z and then click rendered, you're going to see that's what we have. So now to add it to everything, we're just going to click on the floor we're going to hold and shift and select all of the rocks. So I'm holding and shift to make them all active, and we want to lastly select the one that has that rock material. And with the material that has rock active and everything else selected, we're going to go Control L or Command L and link the materials. Now if we go to our camera view, we hit Z and go rendered. We can see this is what we have, but the scale is a bit off. So what we want to do is we want to come over here to our scale and change it to ten like that. And we also want to come here to the detail and make it nine. And we want to take the roughness up to 0.8, like so, as you can see here on our noise texture. So these are the values for our noise texture. And now you can see over here, this is what we have, this is going to look even better now when we add in some volume metrics. What I might just do quickly is just select the actual one of these rocks, and I'm just going to go ahead and just adjust this brown value to add a little bit more brown, and I'm just going to make it a bit lighter and a bit less saturated like that. I might just drag this in just a bit slightly like that. Now we have our rock with some pink underwater growth on it. Now this is going to look a lot better once we add some volumetric. So what we're going to do is we're going to go back into our layout. We're going to go back into solidy by pressing Z and clicking on solid. Then we're going to go Shift A. We're going to our mesh options out in the cube. We're going to go S to scale the cube as big as our little scene here and then click. Then we're going to go S, Z and scale it down on the Z slightly like that. There we go. And then what we're going to do, we're going to go over to our object properties. We're going to go down to our visibility. Or router our viewpoint display. We'll go to our viewport display, and under the display as we'll make it wire. This way, it won't get in our way and we can still see through it. But we are going to go to our properties. We're going to click New to create a new material, and we're going to come here to the surface, and we're going to look through here and we're going to just look for a principal volume. So over here we can see the principled volume. Then we're going to go over to our shading workspace again. And you should be able to move around here and just scroll until you find the principled volume. And make sure that the principled volume is plugged into the volume of the material output, not the surface that's really important. Then you're going to come here to the color, and you're going to make it kind of like a bluish color like this, make it a little bit darker in value. You're going to come to the density and make it 0.05. And now, if you're going to Camera view and you go Z and you go rendered, you're going to see we have this underwater look because we now have these volume metrics. How cool is that? Now, another thing we can do to make this look even cooler, but it is going to make it more computationally intensive. Is to select our camera, get our object data properties, go to the depth of field and enable and then click on a little eyedropper and then actually click on the creature body over here. You can see now it has a creature body's a focal point and then make the F stop point free. Now if you're going to camera view and you go Z and go rendered, you can see we have this nice soft focus, and with that high focal length, it's really lending to this quite well. I will also select the actual light over here. So I might have to go into wireframe just to select it. And then I'm just going to go Z, go rendered. And I'll just increase the strength there to about 300, and I'll just kind of rotate it a little bit more like that. But for now, this is looking really, really good. We kind of have that underwater feel that we were going for. So what we're going to do is we're going to make sure to save. We're gonna go back to our layout. And now that we have this, let's just quickly go and go render and render the image just to give it a test render. And here we have our render. Now, keep in mind that the hair physics isn't quite right yet, so we're still going to tweak that a little bit. But overall, we really are getting closer to the end. You can see this is looking underwater. And if you were to add some particles, that would really add to it, as well. But we will tweak this a little bit going forward, but this has been Part four. I hope you guys enjoyed it, and I'll see you in Part five. 6. Animation & Forces (Part 5): Welcome to part five, where we're going to be doing some animation by opening and closing the mouth, and we're also going to be adding in some force fields here to make the hair particles move so they look like they're moving in the current underwater. So this bit is going to be a little bit more involved, but we'll go step by step and make sure it's nicely explained. And if anything is confusing, feel free to look into resources to find this blend file at this stage and see how I've set things up. So let's jump in to part five. So now that we're in part five, we're going to be focusing on the animation and the forces that make the particles move in the water. So let's start off with the animation of our underwater creature, which is really simple. We're going to select the body of the creature. We're going to go over here to our object data properties, which you can see here, the green triangle. Going to come here to this thing called shape keys. We're going to click Plus. This is going to add a basis. Now, the basis is just the original untouched version of this. This is where we want the changes to revert back to its initial state. And what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and hit plus. By the way, we're in object mode, while we're doing this. And when we add plus, we add a shape key. Now you can add many shape keys, but for now, we're just going to add one shape key. We're going to double click on it and call it mouth open. And with this mouth open selected, we're going to go into Edit mode. And inside of Edit mode, what we're going to do is we're going to go to our top orthographic view by pressing seven on the number pad. We're going to make sure nothing is selected, and then we're going to make sure up here that our proportional editing is enabled. Under the drop down, we want to make sure it also says connected only. And with that done with our vertex select option up here, you can see, we're going to go and click on this side over here. Just select the vertex here near the mouth, and we're going to go G and move it. If it grabs too much, roll your middle mouse button to reduce to fall off. And just go to move it over to the side like this. Then come over here and select a vertex over here, and then go G and move this one over, so it doesn't have to be symmetrical on both sides. In fact, having it a little bit different is going to really help make it look not too uniform, like that. So there we have opened it up, and now let's go back into object mode. Now we have this mouth open slider here, and we can come down here to the value, and if we drag it through to one, you can see at one, it's all the way, and at zero, it's just the basis here, which is the original way it looks. So with the mouth open here, we can now use this value here and animate it to animate the mouth. This is really simple. We're going to come over here to our timeline by dragging it up, hovering over the timeline, roll your middle mouse button just to shrink it a bit, and then you're going to come to frame zero or frame one. Either one of those. You're going to make sure that this value of the mouth open is set to zero, and you're going to click on this little animate property. And now it goes yellow. And you can see here we have a yellow keyframe on frame one. We're going to go to frame 250 at the very end where we want it to loop, and we're going to with a value of zero, click here again and it makes a yellow keyframe. Now in between here, we can randomly go to different spots. I'm going to go to 50, and it's frame 50 or 51 round about there. I'm going to drag this all the way up to one, and I'm going to hit the little animate property. Now it adds in a keyframe, and then I'll come to something like frame 120, and I'll kind of drag it down, but not all the way, maybe something like 0.28, and I'm going to click on animated property. And then I'll come to frame maybe 180, drag it all the way back up to one, click on the animate property. So what we should see if we go to frame one and hit the space bar, is we now have the mouth opening like this, which adds some life to our alien creature. How cool is that? Another thing we're going to quickly do that we didn't do in the previous part, which is, I think, just an extra little detail is we'll just select our alien body here. We'll just quickly go over to our particles. And let's just scroll up to where we have the particle system. Let's click Plus, and let's just make it hair, and we're going to create a second system here. Let's just call it short. Okay? So our previous system here is long, but this is our short hairs. Let's just also bring the hair length way down on them like this. Very short, like 0.09 millimeters or meters, as you can see here. And we're going to go down to the children, make it interpolated. And we're going to keep scrolling down to the vertex groups. And under the density, we're going to click here and make it inner particles. Remember, we created that group in an earlier part, and then what we want to do is we want to go up to our children again. In the viewport, we want to make this five under the display amount for the children, and the render we'll make that 12. We're also going to go down to the roughness, and we're going to make it a little bit rough with the endpoint and the random, like so. There we go, looking really good. We're also going to scroll up to the top, and we're going to enable hair dynamics for that as well. And under the number of hairs, we want to make sure to make it something like 100. That's all we need there. Okay. So now we have this, as you can see. Awesome. Now, if you want the hairs themselves to actually react with the mesh of the body, just make sure to go over to your physics, give it a collision, and now the hairs will collide with the actual mouth over here as well. Also, just one thing before I forget, going back to the particles with the secondary short hairs, make sure to scroll down to the render and under the material, change it from body to gradient as well. And make sure to enable beast blind. There we go. And with our previous hair system here that we're going to animate now with the forces, we want to click on that the long hair. And we also want to scroll down to our children. And under the clumping, remember we use that curve. We're just going to come here at the end handle and drag it up a little bit, so it's not too pointy at the tip. Just kind of even it all out a little bit, like so. There we go. That's looking a bit better. And we're also going to just scroll up to the render. And under the Bastblind here, under the path, we're going to just bump that up to five. We're also going to scroll up now to our hair dynamics. Previously, we added a stiffness under the structure here, a stiffness level of 1.5. Let's make it 1.2 instead. And then we're going to go Shift A, in our view port here, Shift A. We're going to go over to our force fields, and we're going to add in a wind. We have this wind selected. We're going to go over to our physics. We're going to give it a strength of ten. And then what we're going to do, we're going to go into our right orthographic view by we're saying free on a number pad, and then we're going to go R, and we're going to rotate this in towards, like so and click and then go G to move it to the side. So now, it's kind of over here, just facing our alien creature. Now, if you press seven to go into your top orthographic view, at this point, you could always take it and move it. So, for example, if I want the current to come from here, I can place it over here and rotate it so the arrow is pointing towards here, and this is where it's going to blow and create this sort of force field effect like that. So if I now go into my camera view, I go to frame one, and I hit the space bar you can see this is what we have. We now have the hairs actually moving underwater. Add even more realism, you can select this force over here and you can come to something like frame one, and with it selected in the viewport, you can press I to enter the keyframe. And over here, you can see a keyframe. You can drag over it and go Shift D to duplicate, move it to frame 250, and then in between here, you can enable the auto king. So let's maybe come to frame 60. Press seven to go into your top orthographic view, and now you can just go R and rotate it slightly and then maybe move up to 120 around there. R to rotate it the other way slightly. Then maybe come to frame 190 and rotate it the other way a little bit. You can do this completely randomly and then turn off the auto key framing. Now, if you come to frame one and you hit space bar, you're going to see your force field here is slowly rotating. To see this a little bit better in real time, we can select our alien creature. We can go to our particles, and with the top particle system with the long hairs, we can scroll down to the children, and under the viewport display amount, we can make that three, like so, and the render will make 70. So now if we go to frame one and we hit the space bar, it should be a little bit faster in our viewport, as you can see here. And there we have it. We now have the mouth opening and closing, and we have the animation here. But what we're going to do, we're going to select our alien creature. We're going to go over to our physics, and we're going to make sure everything is where we want it to the collision distances. Over here, I can see nothing is interacting, so I'm happy with that. Then we're going to go to our particles. And with our long hairs at the top here, the first particle system we created, go to scroll to the bottom to ces cache. And at the moment, it's one to 250 frames, which is what we have here, which is correct. And we're going to come here and click on Bake and it's going to bake this simulation into our blend file. And now it's baked. If you make any changes, you need to make sure to delete the bake first. Then change any of the settings to your hair producles and then bake it again. But now you can see here, this is what we have. How cool is that? And if we go Z and we go rendered, you can see we now have these hairs around the mouth as well, adding more realism to our alien creature. So this is starting to look fantastic. We now have animation here, and this is starting to look really, really good. I'll see you in Part six. 7. Final Touches (Part 6): Welcome to part six, where we're going to be finalizing our animation here. So what we're going to do now is just quickly organize all of our things into these nice collections. We'll add in some particles getting emitted here, and we'll just do a little bit of touch up, a little bit of compositing setup, as you can see over here to get this sort of effect, and we're just going to make it look nicer. So that will make us ready for the next part where we'll be able to render it out. So let's just quickly jump in. Do part six, where we do some final touches. Now that we're in part six, we're going to do a few final touches. Now before we go any further, I think organization gets very important. So what we're going to do, we'll start adding these to some collections up here in our scene collections, our scene outliner, as you can see. So what we'll do is so far, everything is just in this one collection over here called collections. So we'll double click on it and call it let's call it alien. Oops. I had my cap locks on something alien. And I it's called alien Coral. You can call it whatever you want. But that's what everything is currently on. If I hide that by clicking this little I, you can see everything goes away. So what we're going to do is we're going to progressively add things to their own collection. We'll start by selecting this volume, this big cube, and we're going to press M. So M for mouse. And we're going to go a new collection, and this called this volume and then go create. And now you can see here, we have this volume, so I'm just going to drop this down. I'm going to click and hold on this volume, and I'm going to drag it. And it's very important that you be careful of this because you don't want to drag it into another collection. But we're just going to drag it so it's sitting. You'll see a black line appear like that, and it says, move before collection, and just going to let go. So now what we have here, and by the way, I'll just drop this alien coral down as well. So here we have the alien coral. So if I hide that, you see all this disappears. If I hide the volume, just the volume disappears. In fact, I'm going to take the volume. I'm going to click and hold on it and drag it until it's just underneath the alien. I'm going to go move after collection. You'll see the little message pop up there. It says move after collection. What you don't want to do is accidentally drag it into a collection. So make sure it either says before collection or after collection before you let go. So I alien coral, the volume, and we're going to keep doing this. Let's now go and we'll select the floor. Holding in shift, we're going to select all of the rocks. So holding in shift. There we go. So you can see if I go, G, all of these move. And I'm going to press M again. New collection and what's called this scene. And go create. And here we can see it. I'm going to go to the drop down like that just to make it more compact. So clicking on a little error here. And for now, I'm just going to hide the scene. I'm also going to hide the volume. And we're going to just progressively keep creating more collections. So we're going to select the lights, or maybe let's select, let's select lights. Holding and Shift select both lights. Press, create a new collection and call it Light and camera and go create. And then let's also come here, drop it down and just go and hide it. We'll also just select that camera and press M. And instead of going new collection, let's just also quickly add it to that lights and camera by clicking on it, and you can see the camera gets hidden as well because it's in that collection. Then let's click on our force fold here, the force field, and press M, create a new collection and call it forces. And create. And if you ever want to create more forces, you could add them into that collection. Drop it down. Let's hide it, as well. And for now, we have a very organized scene. So we have alien coral, which we can turn on and off, and we can bring back any of these utters whenever we want. Now, the things like the volume, we don't need that to be in our way. As long as that little camera is enabled, we'll see it in the render. The same goes for our scene, our lights and cameras. We don't need to see them. As long as this little camera is enabled, they will render when we render and render the image. And for now, just make sure only the eyes are ticked off. You can still press zero on your number pad to go into your camera view. Now if that done, we'll bring back quickly the scene lights and camera and also just the scene itself. Then we're going to press Z and we're going to go render. And you can see these rocks here look a little bit too smooth. So I was going to go Z and go solid again. I'm going to select these rocks, okay? I'm going to huld and shift and select all of these rocks. Selecting them. You can see they're all selected, and I'm just going to go Control J, and that's going to join them together like that. And then I'm going to go over here, just drag this up. I'm going to go to my modifiers, and I'm just going to drag the subdivision surface above the displace. And then I'm just going to drag the strength down, like so, and if you were to bump up the viewport, you can see it gets a little bit smoother. But what we're actually going to do is just going to leave the level here at one, and the render will also make one. Like so. And then we're going to add modifier, search, and type in sub again and get another subdivision surface. And this one will also have just one in both the viewport and the render like that. And now those rocks look a lot nicer. At least I think they do. It's completely up to you how you want to do that. You can mess around with that to adjust the strength and the smoothness anytime you want. But that's what I'm going to go with. I'm also going to select the alien body. I'm going to go to the modifier stack. I'm going to make sure this time to actually take the sub div modifier. And make sure that both particles are above there. I'm just going to drag the sub modifier above or below the particle. So we have particle particle, and then we have the subdivision. And then the collision should be perhaps, I think, at the very top. So we're going to drag the collision, or in this case, yeah, just click and drag it till it's at the very top. And I think that order is going to work a lot better for us. There we go. So now that's a lot more organized, as you can see. We're also going to select the alien body. We're going to go to our physics. We're also going to select our alien body. We're going to go to the hair particles. We're going to click on the second system, which is the short hair. We're going to scroll down to the cache and also click on bake. And now that's baked in as well. Then we're going to go shift a search, and we're going to add in under our mesh options. We're going to add in a UV sphere. We're going to go S to scale and scale it down. And then we're going to go G, Z and move it down into the hole here, and we're going to go over we'll actually just go to particles. We're going to kick plus. But this time, instead of using hair, once we click Plus, we're just going to stick with a miter, and we're going to scroll down all the way scrolling down. Till we get to our field weights, and we're going to take the gravity, and we're going to make it minus one. So, type in minus one. And then scroll up to the viewport display. Just bring the size of these particles down so they're a little bit smaller. And now if you go to frame one and we hit the space bar, you can see we have all of these particles kind of shooting out at Wi high speed. If they're going too fast, you can always come back down to the field weights and make it -0.2 or something like that, a smaller value. So -0.2. And now you can see they're not as aggressive. Okay. Now, what we can do is just take this emitter and move it up a little bit. Scale it down a little bit, make it smaller. Then go to frame one again, hit the space bar. And essentially we just want these little particles kind of coming out here kind of look like eggs being scattered out, and they're kind of catching the current here, and that's why they're kind of moving out. Now, to have these actually render, what we're going to do is with this sphere selected, we're going to just select it. And once you have that sphere selected, you're going to press M, New collection. And let's call this emitter. And go create. And now we have this emitter collection, and we're also going to shift a layer of mesh options and add in a circle. And we're going to go G Z and move it up. Once we have it moved up, we're going to tab into Edit mode. And with all of these verts selected, you can press F just to fill that. And let's go back into object mode. And we're also going to take this guy, and we're going to press M. And once you've pressed M, we're going to move it as well to the emitter collection, and we're also going to just go G and move it over to the side out of the way like this. And now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and click on that emitter. And if you have to just go Z and then go into Wireframe, then select it. It can be a bit tricky to select. And then just with it selected, go over to your particles and then scroll down to the render. Change the render as from halo to object, and then come here to the instance object. And what you can do is you can click here and then just look for that circle object. Okay. And now just enable rotation up here as well. Come to the drop down, and then just randomize the rotation, and also come here to the render and also just randomize bring down the scale a little bit, so it's quite small and also randomize the scale, like that. Okay. Also, with the orientation access under the rotation, you can change that to normal. And now if you go to frame one and you hit the space bar, you should see a bit of randomized rotation as well. I'm still going to go down to the render and just change that scale even smaller like that. So now if we go to camera view, you can see we have all of these particles flowing out like that. Now, it's important that we select that emitter again. And what we do is under our particles here, which want to go up or down, I think it sits here under the render. And under the render, we want to turn off show emitter, which we don't want that to show in the render. And we also want to come down to the cache or up here to the cache, and we want to click on Bake as well to bake that in to the blend file. Now let's go into our camera view, and let's just drag through the scene here to get a shot that we like, something like that. Make sure to save, and then let's just go render let's click on Render Image. And here you can see is the render now. So we have all these little particles coming out, and they're looking pretty good. So this is it. It's looking quite beautiful. One more thing we can do now that we have a render going is we can kind of close this render window. We can go to our composite we can click on use nodes. We can kind of scroll zoom in here. Then we can go Shift A, search and get a viewer node by typing in Viewer, and then place it here and then trag the image into the here. Then holding in shift, you can right click and just drag for here to cut these two cables together. You can press V to zoom out, like so. And then I'm just going to drag this render layer. I'll zoom out a bit. I'm going to go shift a search and get a lens, type in lens and get a lens distortion and place it on this cable, and then give it a distortion value of 0.05 and a dispersion value of 0.03. And then click on Fit. And now you can see that's looking really good. We have a little bit of dispersion. If I press V or Alt V, I can zoom in and out. And I think I can hold Alt and a middle mouse button. So Alt and a middle mouse button, and you can kind of move around. You can see how much of a difference that makes the realism. Okay? There we go. So now we have some compositing done really simply. So what we're going to do now is just go back to our layout. And now we have all of this done. One thing you could also do is you can go to your emitter collection, and you can always grab this emitter object that we have here. The object that's being emitted, the little particles, and just give it a material. And then under the base color, you can make it a little bit more yellowish, a little bit darker in value. So it doesn't look quite as white. But I think this looks as good as it's going to get for now, and this is going to look really nice once we have it rendered out as an animation. So in the next and final part, we will take all of this, and I'm just going to hide these by the way. So the only thing I have active here is the scene and the alien coral. So in the next and final part, we're going to be rendering this out as a final video. And that's going to be really fun. 8. Let's Render (Part 7): So welcome to Part seven, which is the final part of this tutorial series where we're going to be taking our renders, rendering them out as individual sequences, and then compiling them together into a nice MP for animation. So let's jump in, and I hope you guys enjoy Part seven. So now that we're in Part seven, let's start by rendering things out. So to do this, we need to go over to our output properties, and then we need to go down to what we call our output here. So we're going to click on this file, and this is where you're going to select a destination in your computer. So I'm going to select my desktop in this case. I'm going to right click and over here, I'm just going to go new folder, and I'm going to call this folder SEQ, which stands for sequences. You can call it whatever you want and then hit Enter. If that folder selected on your desktop, go ahead and click Accept and then click Accept again, and now you have a destination. Now, the file format here, you can change this directly to video and render this out directly as a video. The only problem with this, if anything fails or there's a crash, then you lose all of it. So it's much safer and more practical, especially if you want to do post compositing, like in something like Adobe Premiere Pro or DeventureRsolves. It'd be much better just to have something like PNG sequences. So we're just going to leave it at PNG sequences. And that's why we call the folder sequences. And what you're going to do is you're going to make sure that RGB A is selected. Now, you could technically go RGB because we don't need an Alpha channel in this case. But if it's the default, I usually stick with it. It's nice to have that sort of Alpha channel if you need it anyway. You can go ahead and give it 16 on the color depth. I find that eight works fine, and a compression of 15 is usually fine as well. So that's about it. That's all you need to know, right? At this point, it's worth just making sure that all of your scene collections here have the rendering enabled. So it's a little cameras here because we don't want anything to be left out. You can kind of drag through here to make sure that everything looks right. The animation is working. Now, one thing I'll quickly mention, when I originally did the practicing for this tutorial, I also added some animation and movement to my camera. Now, I'm not going to be doing that in the Skillshare course because I feel like that will be a fun little challenge for you guys. Go ahead and see what you can do with the camera action and add some movement. Now that you have sort of, like, the fundamentals of this kind of nail down, I think it's really cool to see how you guys can make it your own scene by how you present the animation. So I'm going to leave it as just a stationary camera for this Scotia class, but I definitely encourage you guys to pursue your own sort of camera angles and movements with key framing. So with that done, make sure that you save. So all of that is saved. And then this time, you're going to go render. And instead of going render image, you're going to go and go render animation. So once you click on you're going to see it's going to start rendering. Now, obviously, depending on the strength of your computer, this could take a while. So for me, it's taking about 45 seconds to a minute for each frame. So at 250 frames, I could expect it to take anywhere 230-250, maybe even more minutes. So it's definitely going to be a few hours. And that's why I'm doing this at nighttime now. And I recommend you guys kind of do the same thing. If there's a time you need to be using your computer, it's definitely best to kind of try and let it happen at nighttime or when you're going out to work or to school. That way, your computer isn't being occupied by you and it can just kind of render. So here you can see, it's rendered and it goes on to the next frame. So I'm going to go to that folder on my desktop, and over here you can see, we have the first frame, which is frame one, it'll now just automatically keep rendering these guys out. So I'm going to go ahead and go to bed now, I'll wake up in the morning and I'll continue recording this little segment and show you guys how to compile these frames together. Okay, so it's now the morning, and all of my sequences are done rendering. What I'm going to show you here is, I'm just going to minimize this, and I'm going to go to that sequence file that we created. You can see here, there should be one through to 250 frames in here, and I'm just going to zoom you can see this is just like a snapshot of each frame. So what we need to do now is compile them into a video format. Now, I will tell you this. I usually use something like Adobe Premier Pro when I'm compiling sequences. It's just a lot more powerful. However, you can do it in blender, and because not everybody has Adobe Premiere Pro, I'm going to show you how you can use blender. So what you're going to do is you're going to close your blend file, okay? Go ahead and close it. And then just open up a fresh document in blender. So a fresh document doesn't matter. Now you want to make sure in this document that your end frame value matches what we had. So we had 250 frames, which was a default and blender. But if for example, you went to 300 frames or 400 frames, you would need to make sure you match that on a timeline. You're also then going to go over to your output properties. You're going to scroll down to the output and click on a folder, and I'll just select my desktop and go except. And this time, instead of going with the file format PNG, we're going to click here and change it to FFMPEG video. Once we have that done, we're going to go down to the encoding over here. And under the container type, we're going to change it to MP four PEG. So MP four, there we go. And once we have that done, we have a destination now, a file format. What we're going to do is we're going to load in the sequences. So we're going to come up here to the plus. We're going to click on it. We're going to go to video editing and add a video editing workspace. Inside of here, we're going to go down to the ad I want to go to image sequence, and then we want to go to our desktop. Then we're going to go over to our sequence folder where we have all of those sequences or wherever you render them out to. You can press A, and that'll select everything. And then you can just go add Image strip. And now it's going to add it in like so. And because we have 250 frames, as you can see down here, it matches perfectly. So if you actually come here and we hit the space bar, you're going to see we have the animation playing. How cool is that? So what we need to do is let's go up here, and let's just go to output. Once again, let's just double check, make sure everything is correct. We have a output, a file format, and under the encoding, we have MP four, and then we're going to go up to render. And this time, we're going to click on Render Animation again. And now you can see it is compiling this instead of rendering. So we'll let this finish, and I'll show you what the mp four looks like. And there we have it. It's done compiling it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go out of here. We can actually close this up. I'm going to go ahead and close it. And now on my desk up here, you can see I have this file here. So it just says 1-250, so I'm going to double click on. And here you can see we have our finished animation. Now, the cool thing is, if you were to do this in something like Premiere Pro or some other compositing software, you could always add different effects to this. You could mess around with the color, the contrast, the saturation. But just out of the box, Blender does a really good job, and it's allowed us to make a really cool alien concept with very little tools. In fact, we've just used blender. I might have used Gimp in the beginning to concept, but you don't even have to do that. A piece of paper would have been fine. And this sort of simple blender workflow is what I wanted to get across in this Skillshare course. Really want you guys to go out there, do some cool concepting and make some creative alien creature. Picture a world out there, make it your own, and then make some of this sort of organic, imaginative, speculative, kind of alien life, which is just a fun thing to do. So I really hope you've enjoyed this, and I'll catch you guys in the outtro where I'll give you a few tips and encourage you to go a little bit further than what we've done here. 9. Outro: So I really hope you have enjoyed and gotten something from this Skillshare class. Making speculative alien biology is a ton of fun. And after you finish this class project, definitely go ahead and see what you can do in terms of making it your own. Try making your own concept. Try just following that concept as close as you can, add some cool shaders, render it out. And I'm really looking forward, not only to seeing if you guys can follow along with this class. Seeing what you can do with the workflow. It's a rock solid workflow. I've used it many times to create simple creature concepts, and it's even got me a lot of work in the industry. It's a really quick way of just whipping up a cool concept for a project or a game or something like that. So yeah, thank you for watching. Remember to download the resources, go through there. There's going to be a ton of handy stuff in there. And I'll see you guys next time for another Skillshare course.