Create Rubic's Cube in Blender (Beginner Course)

1. Intro: Hi, I'm glad too soon. For scores. You choose to learn blender and bads and excellent choice. Blender is a super powerful 3D application and it's growing like crazy. More and more people are using it. And it is an excellent time for you to jump on this train. I know it can be intimidating if you open it for the first time. But my goal of this course is to get you more confident using Blender. I like teaching and creating some kind of freely scenes at the same time. In this course, we're going to create a Rubik's cube. After this course, you will have a basic knowledge on how to use Blender, and you will be able to follow up more advanced courses or grade something by yourself. So let's begin. 2. Downloading the Blender: Because you're watching this course, I assume that you already have a blender, but just in case you don't, you can download the blender from the blender.org. Just press download the blender and you can download it from here. If you use Mac or Linux, you can download your version from here. And if you feel experimental, you can scroll down and go to VSCO experimental. Here you will find the better and alpha versions. Both versions might be unstable. And BS still in testing mode, but you can download it and use it if you want. 3. Navigation: When you open the blender or you should see a screen similar to that. You can just click on any part of the window and that's green disappears. You can move in the viewport by using those gizmos. If you click and maneuver, you can just go. In review, there are also two more gizmos. This one is to zoom in and zoom out. If you press and move your mouse, you can zoom in, zoom out. And this one is to move it in the view. So we can move to the sides up and down. You'll get the idea. But the thing is bad. Almost no one uses both gizmos. Blender has its own shortcuts, which are way more easier to use when both gizmos. So for example, if you have the mouse which has right-left and middle mouse button, you will need middle mouse button a lot. So for example, if I pressed middle mouse button, I can rotate it. That's way easier than rotate with this one. Just pressed middle mouse button and you can rotate it in your viewport to zoom in and zoom out. You can use again middle mouse button. You can scroll in and scroll out. You don't need to go here. If you need to move your view to the sides, you can press shift and middle mouse button. And now you can move way you want. You can rotate, move by holding Shift. And that's the easiest way to navigate in the blender viewport. 4. Moving Objects: So now when we know how to navigate on the viewport, Let's see how to move the objects in the view port. Here on the left corner, you can see this tab. If you don't see dry pressing T, try pressing T, it will enable, disable it. It should be enabled by default, but if you accidentally pressed T, it might disabled it. Also, you can enable it by this arrow. If we extend it a little bit. You can see that we have labels for those tabs. If we press move, we will select the object. You can see that we have those three arrows. That's the axis of the 3D Viewport. Red is always the x-axis, where green is the y-axis and blue is usually, if we will press on any of those axes, we can move our objects. If I press this, I can move it on the Z space. But as I mentioned in navigation lesson, blender has great shortcuts. For example, to move objects versus a shorter shortcut, G. Also, if you hover over here, it will give you a hint about the shortcuts. As you can see, shortcut Shift Spacebar or G. So if I press G, I can navigate my cube on the viewport. If I press G and X, I can navigate only with the x-axis. That's great. If I press GMI, I can navigate on y-axis. If I want to isolate one axis. For example, if I wanted to move on x and y, but I don't want this cube to go higher or lower. I want to isolate the z axis. I can press G, Shift and z that will isolate the z-axis. And I can navigate on all the axis, but my cube one go up and down. If I move it here, it moves through to the side, but it wasn't moved on the z-axis. 5. Rotating and Scaling: Moving objects is not the only thing that we need to do when we model. For example, very often we need to write it for objects. We have this option here. And we can rotate it freely. We can rotate it on certain axis. But again, I would highly recommend you use the shortcuts. And if I want to rotate, I use shortcut R. And I can rotate my object. If I press R and for example Z, I can rotate it on the x's, but I selected that same principles as navigating. Very often we need to scale the object. Again, same principles. If you press this, you have those gizmos. You can scale on y-axis. You can scale on x-axis, on z-axis. Very same principles. And it has the shortcut because everything in Blender has the shortcut. If I press S, I can scale it freely and I can scale it on all axis. If I press, for example, why I can scale on one axis. If I press S and for example, Shift Z, I, isolate the z-axis and I scale on both two axes. X and y basically axis. 6. Edit Mode: Now let's move to modeling basics. But before doing that, I will go to Edit and Preferences. I think on my, I think I will change the scale of video a little bit for you to, better to see it to 1.2. Here you can adjust the view scale. So 1.2, I think it will be easier for you to see what I'm doing. We have this cube, default cube, which is not very default anymore. So I can delete it by pressing EX, Delete. To add a new object, we can just go press Shift or add. And here is the object. I'll press Shift a because it's easier. And I will add an average IQ, which is the same as we had at the start. If we need to model something, we need to go into the edit mode. Here you can see where we are in object mode. By each, if we press this, you see that we have many more modes. Usually we will use object and edit mode, but we have a scope mode where it explains weight paint and texture paint. I don't think that we will use both in to begin a course, but we will jump between object mode and edit mode. If we will go into the Edit mode, you see we have a little bit different view and a little bit different menu. I will get back to default. You should probably see this just like fat and one more shortcut. Moving between edit an object mode, you can easily do that by pressing Tab on your keyboard. If I press Tab, I'm in object mode. If I press Tab again, I'm in edit mode. So it's very easy to jump between both modes just by pressing Tab and not going into this. So that's usually what we are going to do. We will press tab, tab, tab, tab. If we will need to change the modes. When we go into the Edit mode. You can see that our cube looks a little bit different. It has both dots and both called vertices. The line between those dots baseline it called edge. And we have free modes into editing tab. Here you can see that we have the vertex select mode, edge select mode, and face select mode. What's the difference? When I am in the vertex select mode, I can select vertices. If I select this, select vertices, I can select both dots vertices. If I go into edge select mode, now, I don't see those dots, but my lines edges a little bit brighter. If I drag, I select edges. I can select by typing them or by dragging. I selected both free. And the third mode is the face select mode. I can select faces. You can jump between those three by clicking both. Or you can press one for vertex select mode, two for edge select mode, or three for face-like mode. Both are not non pads numbers. Most are the numbers on your keyboard. Above the letters above big Q, W, and E. Both numbers. 7. Extruding: You can see that in the edit mode we have a different sidebar compared to the object mode. For example, if I jump into the object mode, we have those options in the edit mode, we have photos. Here you can find modelling tools, for example, extrusion, insert faces, bevel loop cuts, both. I remain tools that we use in modelling and in this lesson let's have a look at extrusion. And in the next lessons we will cover at a free extrusion is the most used modelling tool. Basically in modelling this, we can select vertices and we can extrude it. We can select edges, but it would be easier to understand it. We will try to extrude the phases. For example, if I select this face, grab this. And I can extrude, I can make manure phase, for example, this and this. But basically we never use extrusion as I did right now with this plus button. It has the shortcuts because everything in Blender has shortcuts. If I select the face and I press E on my keyboard, I can extrude it. And I can extrude it. As I mentioned before, we can extrude not only phases, we can extrude edges and vertices. For example, if I select an edge, I can press E. I can extrude it. I can press it again, and I extrude the same as with vertices. I can select which one vertices and extruded. I can select multiple of woes, and I can extrude it. I will delete this object that we just created. So I'll press X and delete. One thing. If you can't delete the object that we had, make sure that you are in object mode. When you delete objects. If you're going to delete something in edit mode, it will, it will give you a different menu. It will give you an option to delete vertices, just phases. For example, if I delete faces, it looks like that. If I go to the object mode, I can easily delete object. So in object mode, I will add the cube. Sometimes I will go to a face select mode, and I will select those two faces. And sometimes we need to extrude things into different directions. If I press E, I can't really do it. It gives me the option to extrude like that. I can cancel the action with the right mouse button, but extrusion still created new faces. If we select this and we will press G, you can see that we have new phases, so we can cancel the action by Control Z. Now it deleted both spaces. It's not deleted, it just undid it. And now I can move faces and we're not extruded. One more thing, we can extrude the faces inside. If I press E, I can extrude faces inside. I get back with control Z like I did the last time. And if we want to extrude faces, for example, into different directions, outside or inside, it doesn't matter. We have more options by pressing Alt E. If I press Alt E, it gives me more options extrude faces but standard, and it gives me the option extrude faces along normals. That's very useful. And we use that a lot. Also. It gives me the option extrude individual faces and manifold, but that's more advanced. Let's keep with normals. So extrude faces along normals. And I can extrude both phases outside or I can extrude them inside just by moving my mouse. So that's the basics of extrusion. 8. Instert Faces: Let's go into object mode by tab, select the cube, delete the cube, and I will create a new cube. We are creating a lot of cues recently. Let's press Tab and go into the Edit mode, and let's go into the Insert phases. Inset faces. If I select this and I breastfed circle and I drag it, I can insert the phase, I have another phase into this space. Again, it gives the shortcut much easier to work with. If I select the face and I press I on the keyboard, I can insert it just like that. What's happened if I select a couple of phases and I press I it didn't serves like that. Or if I press, I again inserts individual phases. Now when I moved my mouse, it makes some strange things. But here at the top, I hope you can see when we inserting phases, it gives me more options. For example, if I press I it changes individual phases. If I press I eat enables or disables, you can change outset with o, boundary with B. So blender gives you some hints what we, what you can do with the tool that you are working with. Usually it inserts spaces, lake bed, but if you press it, again, it inserts in individual phases. You can cancel that action by person just by pressing I. So that's the basic source of inserting phases. 9. Bevel: Bell, another interesting tool that gives us an option to bevel the edges. You can bevel with faces. If I select this, I can bevel face or you can Bell edges and even vertices. Again, we never use this, we just use shortcuts. So the shortcut is Control B. If I go into edge select mode and I select this edge, I can press control V. I can bevel edge. If I scroll my mouse wheel, I can add more edges into the battle. And I can make a very smooth and detailed battle. 10. Loop Cuts: Now let's talk about the loop gets this tool is used a lot into modeling. If we press this, you can hover above your object and you can make a loop cuts. Basically, you can create an extra mesh for your object. But again, we never use this. We usually use the shortcut Control R. If you forget your shortcuts, you can hover above the tool you want and the blender will give you a hint about the shortcut. For example, bevel is Control B. Loop cuts Control R. So if I press Control R, I give the same options to make a loop cut. But now I can move my loop, but when I confirm with my left mouse button, I can move it here. Or even if I press Control R again, if I scroll up my mouse wheel button, I can increase the number of loop goods. Or I can decrease by scrolling down. So I can change that. I can create a lot of loop cuts. 11. Duplicating: There are two ways to duplicate the object in blender. You can press shift D and it will duplicate your object. And that's gonna be a separate object. You can see here in outliner we have the cube and cube 01. That's the one way to duplicate it, but we can also duplicate that with Alt G. If I press Aldi, that looks we're saying it creates a new cube, but most cubes share the same object information. For example, if I go here, you can see that this is using the cubes, zeros 06 information. This also uses 0 cubed zeros, zeros Six information. And this one which we duplicate it with Shift D, uses cubed zeros 07 information. So basically it created a new Cuban information in the object mode. It doesn't mean anything. For example, I can scale this cube on x-axis. It doesn't change anything in both cubes. But if I get back by Control Z, if I go into the Edit mode, you can see when I go into the editing with this cube, everything in this cube also changes. This one with shifty keeps the same without D, it's changing. And if I, for example, go into face select mode, and if I grab this face, if I move it, this one moves. Also. For example, if I'm make an extrusion, if I press E, extrudes also, this is the clone of this cube and it acts exactly we've seen in edit mode as this cube. In the object mode, I can move it, I can scale it separately. But if I change anything in the edge mode, basically, if I change anything to be mesh, if I, for example, go select both and I will bevel it with Control B. This one Bibles to, this one doesn't change. There are two ways to duplicate the objects. With shifty, you create basically the new object. With Alt D, you create a new object, but this shares the same object data from the original object. 12. Rubics Cube: So now when we go through all of those basic lessons, we can create something real. So let's create this Rubik's cube. It's a very simple object and we can easily create, and now we can easily create that in Blender. I bought this Rubik's cube as a reference for the scores. But my son play a little bit with it and I don't know how to solve it into his default colors, but we will do that in CGI. And let's jump into a blender and let's try to create something like that. 13. Creating the Shape: I opened a new blender. We know that default Blender. Again, I enable screencast keys so you can see what I am doing when I'm pressing something. You can see that for example, now I'm pressing middle mouse button. And if I press this and if I press G, You see what I'm doing when we will be modelling. If I will forget to tell you some shortcuts, you can find them here. So let's jump into the edit mode. Rubik's cube is made from 27 little cubes, which rotating at the different directions. So I would like to make one little cube from this cube, and we will duplicate that, and we will create both 27 a little cubes. If I counted correctly, my math might be wrong, but it should be 27. This Rubik's Cube have colors on besides, maybe let's jump into my camera so you can see it. It has those. You'll see that it has voce black parts and inside it has both colors. So let's create that. Most are not very sharp, so we will make that in Blender. Let's turn off my camera At first. We need to insert faces. We already did that. So let's go into face select mode. We can press this or we can press free on our keyboard. And we can press I. If I press I, you can see nothing happens because there are a lot of phases and we want to send individual phases here we can see what individual phases are off. We'll do it again. And if I press I again, now I can insert the faces. I need to instead just a little bit. Basically, something like that. I think that might be enough. Now what I would like to do, I would like to extrude both spaces a little bit inside. So if you remember, we have this option extrude along normals. If I press Alt E, I can select this extrude faces along normals. And if I move my mouse button, I can extrude it outside or I can extrude it inside. I will confirm with leftmost button. I extrude the Jess tiny bit. Don't deselect anything. Inset faces again, so I will press I again. Now my individual phases are on because I used wet and I will insert vet little bit, just a tiny bit, maybe even less than marriage, maybe something like that. And I will extrude this outside again. So I'll press Alt E, extrude faces long normals. And I will extrude basically to start position. So we created this gap, which is quite realistic. Usually, that's how voce cubes are made. Sonar. So we have this cube. Weekend start adding the colors. 14. Add Colors: To add the colors, we need to go to this. I don't know if that's a bowl-shaped, probably best. And here is the material tabs. We can select the face and we can add the material. Here. We can change the color. For example, we can make the red first, something like that. But you see nothing changes because we are in the solid mode. And here you see format. Basically, the first one is wireframe mode. If we press this, we can see our object as a wireframe. Here is the solid mode we worked in Vizmode so far. Here you can see the material preview mode, and here you see we added the color to the wall cube. That's not exactly what we want, but that's okay. We will fix that. And here is the render view. This mode counts all the information from our lights and the background and gives us the information how this image would look like in the final render. Let's get back to them material preview mode, and let's make that the base color. And we've been, our base color is black, so let's make it met base color. I will rename it, and let's make it black. We can slide this down and this is going to be pure black, or maybe it's slightly not black, something like that. We can reduce false, so it's going to be white, but we make it very dark gray or maybe black. Let's make them black. Here you can see a lot of options we can adjust. I don't want to go too deep into intervals options for, but for example, I can show you that if we slide with metallic tab, it will give us the metallic look, very shiny, metallic load. But I don't want to cover all of those settings in the beginning course. I want to adjust the roughness. Because if I decrease the roughness, It's become very shiny. And if I increase the roughness to the max, It's become very rough and it doesn't reflect any background. I would like to keep this at 0.7 around that number, something like that. I can add VIN number with my keyboard 0.7. If I press Enter, that's give me this number. I feel bad. Variety number for the Rubik's Cube material. And now we can create other colors. If we want to create more colors, we can press this Plus button. And we can press knew. We have new material. Let's name this red. We already tried to create red color, but we didn't succeed. So let's select the face, but we would like to work on, we can press this. Let's change the color to some kind of red, maybe something like that. And let's increase the roughness. Great. And you can see nothing habits. Because we didn't assign the color. And we created the color of beds perfectly fine. The color is here, but it's not assigned anywhere. So if I press this phase, and if I select red and if I press a sign, now we have a color. It's my little tricky at first, but let's practice even more. Let's select this face and let's make it green. Let's make it green. We'll create another color by pressing plus brace new. Let's name it green, because we wanted to be a little bit more organized. Let's change the base color to some kind of be green, which virtue like maybe something like mad. Let's change the roughness to 0.7. Something like that, and press Assign. Easy-peasy. Let's make this, let's make this blue. Let's press the plus button. Let's create a new material. But we don't necessarily need to create new. We can reuse the existing materials. Here. You can choose the material that we created before. For example, if I choose red, it created an average material. It's the same thing like we lend in the duplication part. Where we duplicate the cubes with shifty and algae. This is the same, this RED uses the same data from this red, but we can press this and it creates a new material, Red O one. But we can rename it to be blue. And that's our blue material, but it's still red. We can change the color. That's not a problem at all. We can change to something like Matt. But we already had set the brightness material because we copied all the information from that. And don't forget to assign. And now we have a blue material. Let's quickly create an materials. We have orange material. So plus, I will go a little bit faster now, I will select this face to create menu. Let's name this orange. Let's make it orange. The side. Let's make what colors do we have? We have white color. We can adjust this. If we need more space, we can move both lighters, new material, reuse this breastfeeds to create new. Let's make it white. Let's make it white. White is in the middle here. If that's not your white, like you want, you can just met with these sliders, mats, your whites, and we can assign it. Now we have mostly all the colors, whereas one left and I'm looking at my Rubik's cube and that's probably yellow. Let's create a new material which is going to be yellow. Let's choose any material and let's change the color for it. Yellowish. Okay, we have the roughness value already said. We have set and let's assign. Now we created all the materials for our cube. I will go into object mode to see it better. We have everything, but it looks really bad. I have to see it has most sharp corners in which we do not like that much. Usually in the real-world, we don't have that many sharp corners. We can bevel both, but that would be a little bit painful process and a lot of manual work. But luckily, blender has modifiers and we can add modifier. And actually it has the bevel modifier, and that's the bevel modifier. If we slide this, you can bevel the corners. You can increase the segments of battles. But in this case, bevel one give me rounded corners, but I would like. We have another modifier which is called the subdivision surface. It's subdivides our objects. And if we go into the edit mode by pressing Tab, you see that's our object, looks like that, but it just subdivided and it changed quite a lot. That's not exactly what we need. First, I would like to increase the levels of viewport to two. If we increase met, it goes smoother, but we don't need that many subdivisions. Let's keep it at two, maybe three. We will see in the process how it will look. We can actually sub-divide it a little bit more manually. If we press a on the keyboard and we select all we can press right mouse button. Here you can see subdivided. And what makes it makes more geometry and more geometry makes it more accurate. Now, it is closer to what I would like to achieve, but I think I need one more subdivision to have the look that I would like to have. So I will press a to select all and sub-divide it one more time. Now I have quite enough geometry. This looks quite good. It's actually very close to the Rubik's Cube, but I would like to achieve, we can press right mouse button and choose sheets, move and it will smooth our object. I think we need to increase this to free to have a little bit smoother experience. So I will increase the level of the subdivision to free on viewport and on the Render. 15. Array Modifier: From this cube now we can create the actual Rubik's cube. We need to duplicate it a couple more times. For example, Alt D and move it on x-axis again and move it on x-axis and duplicate that 27 times. And that's not exactly what I wanted to do. I will get back by Control Z. Luckily, we have another modifier called array modifier. This one allows you to do a lot of stuff. For example, I can increase the count to 42. And now I have a long line of Rubik's cubes, but we need only free at this time. And we can offset it. We can mega lot of things, but opposite is going to be one. In our case, we need another row, two on the y-axis. So let's add another modifier, fire another array modifier. Let's make it count to three because we need three rows and let's change but x to 0. But let's make the y at one. And now we have the ground. We need an adverb modifying one more. We can add num one or we can just duplicate this by pressing Shift D. Or we can select this and press Duplicate. Again. We need free. This time we need one on z-axis. Let's say we have our cube. I hate to save ad, but we finished modelling a really simple object and we model it in a couple of minutes. But before morning, I would recommend to save this file. So file save, and we'll name it. Rubik's Cube, zeros 01. I will save it. Now every time I would like to save, I can press Control S and save it. We're going to apply array modifier because we are not going to change anything. We will have the cube free and free. I'm free, basically 27 cubes. But if you want, you can increase vet and you can, for example, have five on five on five. That would look very different in the Doo-doo-doo-doo. Whereas my last ray here is this. If I want five on five and that would be huge cube, I will get back to free and free and free. And we will apply the array modifiers because we are not going to change that. Here it is free and free and free. I will keep the subdivision modifier active because we might need to reduce the subdivisions. We can apply that by pressing bys and apply. Or you can see the shortcut Control a. So I will press vista apply and hammers, I will just press control a. That's it. One more thing, blender acts on the tabs on which you selected. For example, if I press Control a here, it won't apply anything, but if I press Control a heat here, it will apply my modifier. So let's keep your mouse on the things that you would like to work on. Because sometimes I see people try to make something to bear cube, but we're mouse is somewhere on when different tab. And that will work. So that's the solution to some problems that you might face in the future. Yeah, so now we apply it with array modifier and we have our cube. Yeah, that's great. One more thing, but I would like to change in this lesson, we have this origin point, which is on our original cube. And our objects change bear position-based on the origin point. For example, if I'm going to write it, we cube, it will rotate on the position of the origin point. I would like to move batch to the middle of the cube so I could easily rotate it at any, any point I want. It would be easier to work with that. We can change this, but we have to go through a couple of steps. First, I will go into the Edit mode, select all, and I would like to separate every cubed to the separate object. That might sound complicated, but if I press P, I have this option to separate. And usually we use separate selection. It will separate selection from the object and it creates a new object. But we will separate it by loose parts. And that means that we have those 27 loose parts that we created with array modifier. And it will give us basically 27 different cubes. So here you can see that we have 27 different cues. I will go back to object mode. I will deselect everything. I will select one cube because I want to select the cube in the middle. So I will press H on my keyboard, and that will hide. With cube. I will select this one, go to the edit mode. And if I select all, and if I press Shift S cursor to select it, it moves my cursor to select that object basically to the middle of my cube. In the middle of middle. The middle of the middle, I can press tab again, go to object mode, but I have missing cube. I can easily enable it by pressing Alt H. Now it shows all the cubes where hidden. We need to select everything except those objects. Let's deselect those by holding Control. And we can go to Object, set origin to 3D cursor. And now all of those cubes has origin at the center. So I don't need all of those cubes in separate objects anymore. And I would like to join them into one cube. So I will select all of those. I need to select one separate. It doesn't mean which one. This is just going to be the main cube. And if I press Control G, it will join bed into one cube. Now we have the cube and we can rotate it. The world, the origin of it is in the middle. And that's exactly what we need. 16. Background: Now when we have everything ready modeled in the cube is basically prepared from for rendering. We can go into camera and lighting. Let's go into the render mode. And here you can see how it looks, how this cube looks with our lighting and with our camera. I moved my light a little bit because it doesn't allow me to select all the cubes. I don't know if I got it it from from what I did or not. But just in case if your light has a different position. I moved it a little bit. Previously. We have a camera and we can go into a camera view by pressing 0 on the numpad. This is where our camera is facing. We can adjust the camera view like we do with everything. We can select the camera and we can press G, grab it and move it. We can press G on z. And if we press Z again, it will lock with z axis of the camera and we can go away, but we can make it a little bit different. We can hover in our, in our viewport, find the angle which we like. For example, I like this angle. Maybe. We can press Control out and numpad 0. Now our camera and just jumps into this position. If we press G, we need to select the camera. We can select it here or we can select it like that. And we can move it to somewhere here. If I press numbered one here, the front view, I would like to move this cube a little bit up to match baseline, basically 0, bad, basically the center of our world. Easy board. So I'll press GZ and I will move it a little bit up while I'm doing this because I will add the plane as my background and it will appear here. And I want this cube to be basically standing on this plane. So that's why I needed to lift it up. As we speak, we can add this plane and it is going to be our background because now we have this interesting view. But before that we can press Shift S. Let's set the cursor to world origin because we changed the cursor settings to the middle or the cube. Now we need it at the world origin, where all the axis teams together. Let's say like that. Let's add another object, press Shift a, and search for v plane. We can scale it up. As you know, it's the shortcut S. And we can scale it up by a lot. That's going to be good for now. We can go to our camera view by pressing 0. We will adjust that a little bit later. But now let's set up with background a little bit. I'll get like wet. I will rotate our plane on z-axis. I'll press R and Z. And I will rotate it like Matt. I will go into the top view by pressing Seven on the numpad. Now in the top view. And now I can press G and move it a little bit to here. Maybe you can scale it up a little bit more. Did here. I will go into the edit mode by pressing Tab to the edge select mode. And I will select this edge. I will extrude it. As you remember with shortcut for extrusion is E. I can extrude this edge. I will look it up on the z-axis. So I'll press Z and I will look it up. Something like that. I have this view and now all my world is blocked by this plane. So I have this nice backgrounds. But I have this very rough edge which I don't like, so I can bevel it. So let's press Control V, bevel it. And let's increase the number of segments. Quite a lot. I don't know how many beds. Six probably. It doesn't really matter that much. And if I go into the object mode, I can see it and I can press Shift, move to make it smoother. And let's go into the shading tab. Add a new material. Let's name it Vg as a background. And let's make it dark. Let's make it black. And let's increase the roughness a little bit. Let's try at max at first and we will see how it looks in the process. That's how my cube looks like. Right now. I can move my camera a little bit up. I think. 17. Lighting: We have a really simple object in our scene and varies, not that much to show. So I would like to make it a little bit more stylized and I will work a little bit more on the lighting to give more character for this object. Let's talk about the lighting a little bit. We have many ways how we could light the scene. First, let's go to the render view. And that's how our object looks like in the render. If I press number 0, this is how it looks. In our scene. We have one light, it should be this one. And let's go into the camera view by numpad 0. And if we go if we go to the lighting settings, when we selected the light, we can adjust the power bar of a slide. For example, if I changed with our 50 watts, we have less light. And if I change by two pi 5 thousand, we have quite a bright light. If I select this and I will need to select the light. And if I press G, I can move a light and our scene is reacting to his slide. Bad grade. But for now let's delete this slide. Just select the light and I will delete it. And we still have some light bands because we have our background lighting. Let's go into the shading tab and let's select the render view. Here we can change the shading view to the world. And you can see that we have the background, which has the dark gray color and the strength of one. If we change the color, for example, if we make it white, we have quite a good lighting already. That's how our render would look like. If we change the color to something like greenish, we will get more green light. On the other side of the spectrum. We can add. We can change a lot, but the great thing about the background light is wet. We can add the image or even HDRI and we can get white realistic lighting. For example, if I will press Control T, here, I get more option. It will enable my environment texture. But if it's not working for you, Let's go to the Edit Preferences. The atoms and search for Node Wrangler. Most likely what it is disabled in your, in your blender, so enable it and you will be able to add this by selecting this node and pressing Control T. This environment texture gives us an option to add an HGRI. I would recommend you to go to the poly haven. Here you can find HDRI textures, models, a lot of stuff. Here, you can find a lot of environments. And I would recommend you to download few uploaded to your blender and see how everything looks. I would like to get the night environments and some kind of the city and maybe this one, Shang Shanghai. I will download it. I will upload it to my blender. As you can see, my cube already looks quite good. It is lighted and we have many lights from his three basically. That's quite realistic. One thing about environment texture, it doesn't cast the shadow on. And let's talk a little bit about render engines. We were working in EB and we will switch to cycles. What's the difference between those two? If very simplified, EV is very fast, but it's not that realistic. It's a real-time engine and the, it gives a fast results, but it's not wet realistic. And in our case, it doesn't cast shadow from the HDRI. Recycles are very realistic rendering engine, but it is wasteland where have an EV. Sometimes we want to work in EV and to render in EV. But since we are making a still image, I would recommend to change review two cycles, we will get way, way, way better image. I will choose the cycles. Here is a couple of settings. We'll change that to GPU compute because they have a GPU on my computer. In the viewport, I will change my samples to 512. Here on the render, I also change it to 512. Or maybe I will change the viewport samples to be something like 64 or 128. I will keep it at 128. If it is acting very slow on your computer, you can decrease viewport samples to something like 16 or 30 Jul. That's totally fine. We'll look, we'll be a little bit grainy, but you will see the details, but you need to see another thing. Let's select the cube, go to the modifiers and we have a level on the viewport as free, we can decrease that and decrease by a lot. I will decrease at one. And if your blender is still slow, you can decrease it to 0 even it destroys our cube. But on the render, it's still set S3 and it will render as free. You just see it a little bit different. I will set to one. I will have a lower resolution on my viewport, but in render it has the normal resolution that we already set up. That's how we can make our viewport a little bit faster. And you see that we have a shadow, we didn't, can't bet in EV, I will switch back to EVA real fast. We didn't have it. And then cycles we have it. That's really great. And here in the mapping on the Z rotation, we can change the direction of the shadow. So for example, I can, you can see that my background is moving and I will change the shadow too. Maybe this angle, I think, I think that looks good. I'm going to my layout for now. We can actually add the shading here. Blender is very adjustable and you can create your own windows in the way that you want. We enabled shader editor here. We can change the world. We will have those settings here. We might need to change the strength or the HDRI lighting. I will keep that at one for now. We're just looking good. Our cube is in good. One more thing, I will add another screen on my blender. I can do that. You can see if I slide it to the corner, I Canvas Plus button, and if I select it, and if I drag it, I can have multiple windows. I can add more. If I need to remove it. Again, I can go into the corner and if I slide it, I see this arrow. It will dissolve the window. It needs a little bit more practice. It's sometimes it's tricky, but it's working. And that's very helpful. So in this window I will share my view without relighting. Here, I will have a look how everything is looking on the camera. So for example, in this view, I will press numpad seven and I will look at everything from the top. So here I have a camera, I can scale it up. It won't change anything. Just have a bigger icon. Basically, I can select your camera, press G. It is way easier for me to move on machine. We became, I see where it is and I see how everything looks like in my renderer. So We'll move my camera a little bit back. And I will press G and Z. I will move my camera a little bit up. That's great. I will duplicate this group and I will create two more cubes. I think that free cubes will fill the scene a little bit better. So I will duplicate this cube with Alt D. It one degrees my performance on we've seen that much because we will use the same data from this object. I'll D will place one here. I'll, I'll place an array here. And that's instantly better. Now I think we need to rotate those cubes a little bit. So I selected this. I will press R, and let's rotate it on y-axis. And let's rotate it 90 degrees. So I press 90. And I noticed one thing that we have two yellow colors on the cube. Let us go into the shading tab and we have green color, which is yellow. Here. We also have the same problem. And I see that I use this color. At, at two parts. So I can select this. Now I can change this to green. Nothing changes. So let's select our cube. Let us go into the editing mode. This has happened because we didn't assign this material to any part of this cube. For example, if I select this and if I press Select, it selects all the parts of a cube which maybe it will be more visible here, which are assigned to this material. We need to assign this material to this part of the cube or risk part. It doesn't matter. I'll get back to machining view and we'll press L here. It selects the linked mesh. But we can expand this and we can change the material. Now it will select well-linked material. If I hover above this and a breath l, and here and here, and here and here. I will select all of those. I will go to my green material and I will press Assign. Now we have a green material on this one. We fixed the problem very quickly. Now it fixed. I will get back to my camera roll by number 0. That looks good. Let's rotate this one, and let's rotate this one on x. So maybe 90. I think we have too much yellow color. So I will rotate this on Z because we have yellow color, color here, yellow here and here. So our Z, I will rotate it like that. Maybe to something like different angle because both have the same angle. I will rotate this one a little bit to me like that. I will move this a little bit to this side. Right here. I would like to cover a little bit both of us. We have our scene and we need to make it a little bit more interesting with lighting. If I press Shift, I can add the light and we have point light, sunlight spotlight an area light. I will add the point light. I will press G and move it behind this cube. And if I go to reside view, you can see what my light is a little bit too low, so I will press G and Z. I will go into the lighting settings here. When I selected the light, I will increase the power by large to something like 500. It's not even visible yet on our render view. Oh, it's not render view. Here is Burundi review. Here. We will have a better understand what's happening. I will power it up to one, maybe 1500. Now we have a little bit of lighting. I will change the color to something like bluish. Light will give us quite a nice shadows from behind or the cubes. And I will duplicate this lamb by pressing Shift D. And I will add another one in somewhere in here. And we already see those shadows behind it. That's quite nice. Maybe I'll increase the power to three files and I will see how it looks. It looks like. I think it looks better. I will increase the radius a little bit to something like one meter, and I will place it here. I will do the same with this 13,001 meter. Now, we have some, some lighting from behind. I can try to add another light behind this cube, but it might light voce cubes too much. But let's try to do that. Shift D. I will add this one here. I kind of like it. Maybe here it gives this interesting shadow. And that's really interesting. I really like how this looks now. But I see, but that voce do cubes are better. Let it when the main cube, which is a little bit darker than both. And I think that we could add two spotlights. Or to realize facing this cube, I will go into this view and I will press Shift a and search for light. And I will add an area light. I will write it in my view a little bit. Or maybe ONE, get back to a top view with number seven, I'll press G, I'll move my lambda here. I will rotate my view with middle mouse button. I'll move this lamp a little bit up. So G and Z. I will rotate it with our now it should face the main cube, this lamp, it's only turn watts, so it's not powerful enough. Let's one-bit up to something like 500 or maybe even 1500. And change the color to something bluish, maybe more bluish, something like mad. And let's agrees besides of it to make it softer. Let's have a look from the top. I will rotate it a little bit. Maybe I'll move it to somewhere here and I will rotate it. Let's change the shape just to disk at one camp both corners. And I think this slide is good. Maybe we can move it more. Doorway is besides select it and move it to this side. Looks good. Let's create another one. So we can just select this and press Shift D to duplicate it, move dirt or deed it. Let's move it somewhere here. I will change the color opposite spectrum to something orangey. I will try to adjust to face my main QB better. And I think that's it. One more thing, I like more contrast in the scene so we can go into rendering settings and go to color management. In here you can see that we have coupled settings and I would like to change the look to medium high contrast or even maybe high contrast. And I think that would look better. You can adjust the exposure if we want. But I will keep that at one. We default midterm. And if we have our picture. 18. Rendering: No, I think we can render our image. We can go into our rendering settings. We basically have all the settings set up here in the rendering settings we can, you can change these samples if you think that it is rendering too long for you, or you can go into resolution and decrease resolution or increase it. And another thing, if you go into the cube settings, you can decrease the number of subdivisions it wanted to impact your image that much, but it will boost your render times by a lot if you decrease it to two or maybe even 21. Adjust your settings based on your computer. And I have quite a good computer and I will render in both settings. To render, we can go to Render and render image, or we can press F12. So I'll press F 12 and it will render my image. It took me 35 seconds to render this image. And I really liked result, I think is going to be my final image. And do we can go to Image. Save As we can navigate through your folder. Name it. I will name it Rubik's Cube render. You can call it as you want. I will just save the image. My image is on my hard drive right now. Here is how it looks. 19. Outro: So congratulations for reaching vandals this course. I hope you way more confident in Blender now. And if you created something interesting shared on social media and tag me as, as Bill GA, I love to see my students work on land. And the ones I am. Congratulations, and see you in my next course.