Creating Low Poly Cyberpunk Scenes with Blender

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. I'm excited to announce this new blender course where we'll be creating this low poly cyber punk scene. We will cover all aspects of the pipeline from gray boxing to modeling materials, lighting, and rendering. This is an ideal project for anyone who is serious about learning blender to become a creative professional. The great thing is that when we're ready to advance past this low poly style, the key methods and theories still apply. Plus by the end of it, you'll have a really cool new portfolio piece draw me in a first section, we'll be blocking out the scene and scoping the project. 2. Blockout Basics: In this series of videos, we'll be creating a low poly cyberpunk style environment as seen here in first video, we'll be covering an introduction to low poly theory gathering reference material to establish an art style composition and color palette. We'll be creating a project folder for us to work in. We'll be blocking out the environment using primitives to create a gray box. We'll place our camera in lights and we'll add further detail to our gray box using blenders, annotations to start out with. Let's take a look at what we mean when we say low poly. This is an art style use in video games in the early years of computer graphics as a result of performance imitations B. But the style of senior resurgence in recent years and is very popular among indie game developers and beginner to advance three D artists. The key principle involve simple textures in our case will be using solid materials with uniform colors. A low poly, evenly distributed geometry, so the polygon count should be consistent across the scene. And flat shading to improve form shadows and add contrast to the render, some artists choose to use smooth shading. However, while the math, this course is to learn blunder, it's also important to take time considering the art direction. When working on a scene like this, studios and clients will require you to follow a brief, to work consistently their team, and bring their visions to reality. I've used this software called Pureref to create this image board from various artists that will inspire my project. Most cyberpunk art seems to have this blue, purple color scheme. So I've created a color palette that reflects this. You can see here, here is my project folder. I've created my blender files will be in the root folder. Freeze Access, and every time I make a significant change to the project, I'll click Save As and press plus button to increment the file in case I'd like to go back and restore from the previous point. After deleting the cube, I'm going to begin blocking out the key parts of the scene using primitive objects. None of the geometry we're adding in this stage will be present in the final scene. However, it will be used to assist us in planning our composition and seeing the scale of buildings as we're modeling them. In the next video, we'll start modeling the road and buildings. We can replace those temporary objects with the final versions. Grade boxing is a process that's done by game designers to ensure a prototype game environment fits the gameplay and feel of the game before spending time on the final models and textures. In our case, it allows us to experiment with different building shapes. It is vital in this stage to scale your scene accurately, but a fault and blender. Each grid square equals 1 meter. You can use this as a guide to figure out how large an object is entering an orthographic view. Using the gimbal in the top right may also be useful when seeing the building's absolute scale from the top and sights. At this point, I'd like to position my camera. This can be done using multiple methods. Firstly, I'm going to try just moving it manually using the widget. I'm going to choose this one here, because it allows us to both rotate and move in three D space. I'm going to change the pivot point up here from global to local because it's easier to do with the setting. But make sure you change it back to global once you're finished. You can say, I'm just going to use Skimball to place it in an area that looks good. It's important to preview where the camera is looking every now and then using this button up here, or you can press zero on your number pad as a shortcut to stamp to it. But this is a bit of a boring view. The second method is if you just position your view using the viewport camera like this, using the middle mass. I'm just viewport camera here. We can use tool a line active camera view. A line active camera to view. Or you can press control number pad zero to do that, it just snaps the camera to where we're looking. Once we're in here, I can start moving this around just using movement controls here. In pressing said to place the camera somewhere, that looks good. The third method is if we press open up this end panel right here and go down to view where it says Lock camera to view. If we enable this option, and then go into our Camera view where we move around using the viewport camera, our scene camera will snap to. It's just like a quick way to place it, but I tend not to use this option. I'm just going to disable it here. Make sure you turn it off once you're finished. A line in your camera. I typically use a combination of all three methods when placing a camera. However, in this project, I'd like to use an isometric viewpoint to do this. If we slap that camera here and go to the camera tab, I'm going to change the type from perspective to orthographic, and it will change a few of our settings. Whilst I'm here, I'm going to go to the output tab and I'm going to manually enter in a square resolution because I found square aspect ratios are better suited to portfolio renders. I'm just going to give this, say 1920 by 1920. If I go into our camera view, you can see it's got no perspective and all these lines are aligned. To get this isometric view, I'm going to manually enter the rotation values into the transform field in this end panel. What I mean by that, I've got the camera selected right now. I'm going to go up to where it says item. And this rotation here is just from playing around, I'm going to set the x rotation to 45 degrees. I'm going to set the Y rotation to zero, and I'm going to set the z rotation to 45 degrees as well. You can see this gives it this downward angle that you might see in some isometric games. And then if I go back into camera view, I can just move it around. If I press G, I can just move it around freestyle in places, so it's looking towards the center if we want to expand the view, because right now it's only capturing this small area. We go down to the camera tab and I'm going to change this orthographic scale from seven because that's quite small. I'm just going to make it a little bit higher, maybe something like this. Another thing I'm noticing is that I'm seeing too much roof here. I want to lower the camera down a bit so we can see some more of the sites To do that, I'm just going to change this rotation right here, 45-60 Alternatively, if your camera type was still in perspective, then instead you changed this focal length right here. You can see this changes the field of view that we got. But I'm going to set it back to an orthographic view. We'll go into more detail on lighting in a future part of this course. But for now, you may choose to add some basic lights to the scene to help plan out where the light sources and shadows are going to be. Don't worry about following along with this if you're unfamiliar with lighting and blenders, Not an important step. Lastly, I would like to add further details to the scene using blenders annotations. This can be accessed through the bus on the left of the screen right here, and holding down will show some other brush types as well. I'd like to use either the line or the polygon tool. The settings for annotations can be found in the panel on the right side of the viewpot. If we go down to view down to the very bottom, you can see there's a drop down for annotations. This allows us to add different layers which can have different colors, thicknesses, and opacities. You could use different layers for masking out different types of annotations. For example, I'm going to call this one building details. I'll set this to green. I can increase the thickness a little bit using the default hall. I'm going to go around here and I can start drawing on the side of the building to create a sign. Make sure we change the placement from here from three cursor to the surface and that will allow us to paint on the side of objects. You can see here, I'm having some problems where it's trying to draw on the spot light, that's a bit line, but I can just rub that out by holding down on the antion stool and going down to the eraser. Here we go on, I'm happy with this layer. I can then go into this one. I'm going to name this one road markings. You can see here, I'm trying to use these markings to break up some of this empty space down here. Add a bit of contrast. I'm going to create another layer, and I'm just going to call this props. I'll set the colors to red. This is going to be objects that are placed in the scene. So this will be things like lamp posts. I want some electronic parts up here. This right here will be a prop up sign. This might be like transformers, water towers, things like that. And over here I want like a balcony area where there may be some people eating. We spend some time familiarizing yourself with the tools we've covered in this video to finish off your great box scene. Once you're satisfied, we can move on to the next step will be organizing a project hierarchy, because up here it's quite messy. We've just got random things in different folders we can start modeling some of the streets and buildings. 3. Organizing Workflow: Welcome back. In this second video, we'll be organizing the Outliner Before starting the project, we'll be modeling the basic road layout and some of the buildings, and we'll be using some modifiers to speed up the process. On large scale projects like this, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the number of objects. So for this reason, it's important that we stay organized. Everyone likes to lay out their blender files differently, so there's no right or wrong answer when it comes to how you organize your scene. But I'm going to show you a workflow that works for me. So expand this Outliner panel right here and open this window across. You can see that our objects in the scene are grouped into different collections. These acts are a lot like folders in any file structure. You can see this is a set up that I've created before. I'm categorizing all the different objects in the scene into these different collections. What I tend to do is I have one for work in progress. I call this WIP and this is where the bulk of our modeling is going to be. I'll have another one, and I'll call this 1 gray box. I'm going to place all the blockout objects that we've created here. So that will be these ones I'm selecting. Now, I'm going to place this into the gray collection. This allows us to collapse them as well. They're not always shown in taking up space in the outliner. One advantage of using collections aside from organizing is that if we press this little eye button here, we can hide the collection from view. Quick way to navigate the scene and hide and display parts that you need at a time. Collections can also be created within other collections. For example, if I right click on this gray box collection and press New, we have like a sub folder of this collection. I can call this one Buildings And select all the buildings in the gray box that's these ones. Move these into the buildings collection. You can do this by pressing M on your keyboard or you can just drag them up to the collection. Now I can further categorize which objects I'm hiding and displaying at the time. Lastly, you can give each of these different collections a separate color. For example, I'm going to right click on this gray box collection. I can choose one of these colors. If I set this to green, then it's easier to find a large outliner because I'm us looking for the green one. I'm going to quickly set up my outliner in a way that's organized for me if you'd like to follow along the same way I'm doing. I'm just going to leave it up on screen for a couple seconds so you can pause it or lay it out your own way. It's up to you. Once you're happy with the layout of the scene, we can proceed as I start modeling my road. I'm going to hide this building collection that I created right here to allow me to see it more clearly in edit mode. If I select this plane in edit mode, I'm going to press control R. This will allow us to add a loop going along one side of the plane. I'm going to place one here and I'm going to place another one here to create this intersection. Now if I select both of these edge loops, all four of these, and hit control B, I can bevel this to create my road thickness. Once that's done, I can play around with this a bit more. I want this one to be a little bit thicker than this one going across. I'm just going to select this loop right here and move this on the x axis to make the road a bit thicker. What I can do now is select all these planes which have buildings on top of them. So that will be this face and this face. I can extrude them up a little bit and this is going to be the curve for the pavement, you'll notice that lining it up so it's just above ankle height. From my skeleton reference, I know how big this is going to be in relation to a person. Once that's done, I can then select some of these edges. I'm going to select this one, this corner, this one, and this one. And I'm going to bevel this again using control B. If I drag outwards I can use a screw wheel to add in some more cuts. Now remember this is low poly, so we don't want to go too crazy with this, needs to be consistent to the art style. I'm just going to give it maybe two or three cuts. It looks something like this. And this will make up the corners of our curves because this is just a low poly sen. And we're not too worried about topology in this course. I won't cover this in too much detail, but we're just going to fix the topology on the ground a little bit here because the bevels have made it messy. I'm going to select this vertex and this one, and I'm going to press J to join. I do the same with this one and this one. Now if I select all these vertices in the middle, I can hit X to dissolve vertices. I'm also going to dissolve these two on the edge because we don't need those ones and that's just cleared up the face a little bit. For us, we tend to avoid using en guns in most situations, but for a scene like this, we're not too bothered about it. I would like to have a slight inst on top of these planes. I'm going to select these three faces right here and I'm going to press eye to inset them and this will kind of be like the inside of the curb. This section here is going to be the curb. And this section here is going to be like the tarmac on top. I'm going to extrude this on the z axis just to bring it down a tiny bit. Make sure you press C so you can see that blue arrows to make sure it's moving straight downwards. Just like this, very subtle at this point. I'd also like to change the shading mode that we're seeing in the viewport because it's kind of hard to see the form of the object with blenders. Default shader So I'm just going to go up to these Viewport shading panels up here. I'm going to change this from studio to mat cap. And I'm going to click on this pool and select the red one right here. This is my favorite. Another thing I'm going to do is go down to where it says cavity. I'm going to enable this and I'm going to change the type from screen to both. And it will give us a bit of ambient occlusion so that we can better make out this curve right here on the side of the road. I'm happy with the floor plane that we've got for now. So I'm going to go up and enable the buildings again, so I can see the gray box. And these are some very crude models I created, but they're very similar to the buildings I'm actually going to use in the scene. The way I'm going to create the buildings is I'm going to go up here to this, a button right here. If we hold down on this, we've got a bunch of other primitives. We can choose a spot. I'm just going to stick with the cube. And if I click on this bottom plane right here, make sure it's snapped to this plane, drag outwards. And then I can create a new primitive here, but I'm going to rename this building back or something like that, it doesn't matter too much. And hide the gray box again, this is going to be a new one of the buildings. If I'm going to edit mode, I'm going to change back up to the arrow tool right now and I'm going to edit mode to make some changes to this. The first thing I'm going to do is delete the bottom face because we don't need this. Some cuts to the scene to better define the outlines of the windows. I might have one up here at the very top. Just up here. Maybe I have to bring back the bridge so I can see a bit better. Just bring back the buildings. Yeah, I might add another cut right here just above the bridge. A last one all the way down here. This will be another, almost like a skirting board running around the outside of the building. Once that's done, I'm going to select some of these. I'm going to clip to select the loops and control bevel, scroll down so there's nothing in between. I'm going to also select the bottom faces right down here, because I want to select this as well. What I'm going to do with these is extrude them outwards just to add a little bit of contour into the building, I suppose rather than just using the typical extrude tool like this, we're going to need to move them all out depending on the direction that the face is pointing towards. That's called the normal. If we hold out, we can see we've got several options here. The one we want to use is extrude faces along normals. And you can see that means that each face goes outwards instead of inwards. So I can use this just to add a bit of definition. This may be, in my opinion, this improves the look of the building quite a lot. It makes it look a lot less flat. Now note that when I created this new building, I just placed it on top of the gray box that already existed. Sometimes you might turn your gray box into the new building. In this case, I just added a new one, so I'm going to delete the old one because I don't need it anymore. Just adds confusion so you can see if I hide this one, that building has gone from the buildings collection. Now one other thing I'd like to do is contour these buildings a bit so that each story is moving outward slightly. I'm going to select the following faces. These ones right here, basically all the front facing ones. And I'm going to move these out on the x axis to about here, once that's done. And then I'm going to set these top ones right here. I move them a bit further out on the x axis like this. It creates this effect like the street solve the buildings are looming over the street and this can add a bit of atmosphere and maybe make it feel quite crowded, which is the effect I'm going for now. That's the part where I'd like to add the windows to the building. One way we could do this is in traditional modeling. Maybe we could add some cuts down here in set some of the faces like this. But a much quicker way to do it that I would prefer is by using modifiers. For example, I'm going to go up here and I'm going to create a cube using the same tool in object mode. I'm just going to draw shape on like this, it doesn't have to be too precise. And I'm going to draw inwards into the mesh that's going to cut in a window. If I go into edit mode now, I can slip this front face and bring it out just so there, just so there isn't any clipping. I think I'm in local orientation, which is why my axis acting. So make sure you change back from local to global. So I'm just going to move this out a little bit. The modifier I'm going to use is a Boolean modifier. If I now slip building and go to the modifiers tap, I can go to add modifier boolean. And using this pipette, I'm going to click on the window. Now if I hide the window by pressing H, you can see it's all hole into. I'm going to unhide it. If I go down here to the viewport display, under this panel right here under the object properties. And I'm going to go down to the viewport display, I'm going to change the display from textured to wire. This basically means we don't have a solid view. We can see through the booting object the benefit of using a modifier rather than editing it into the mesh. Once we've placed it, if we wanted to move the window around, we can do that. We can just move it around and you can see how the modifier updates the building object real time. Now to create the other windows, we can either duplicate this one or copy and paste it. So I press shift D and move it along the y axis a bit. And then set up another bollin on a building, or what I'd rather do is use another modifier called the array. If we go down to the modifiers tab right here, I'm going to search for an array modifier. And you can see it's already chosen the right axis. It's going along the relative offset, which just means it's going to be one alongside the other one. And we can change the factor, which will be like the distance between them. So I'm going to set that about here maybe. And I can change the count as well. So we've just got a few more windows, something like that. Looks good to me and I'm happy with this once this is done in edit mode, because I want it to be part the same object and they're going to be just below. I'm going to duplicate these. I'm going to press A to select everything. Duplicate this, and I'm going to move it down a bit on the Z Xs and move it backwards on the X Xs. This will form our bottom line of Windows. I move it in about this far, maybe I think the top ones are a bit too far in, so I'm going to island select this and move it outwards. And you can see how the modifier updates the building real time. If these Y frame displays are a bit cluttery, you can just hide them in the outliner and bring them back when you need to. Sometimes I'd like to create a new collection just for cutters. I'm going to rename this one Cutters. And this is where I put all my Boolean objects in. I make the cutters collection red, so it's easy to find using these techniques, I'm going to dress up the rest of the buildings as well. In this case, I'm just going to use the gray boxes that already exist because they're in a perfect shape, we need them. I'm just going to slip this phase. Move it back a little bit. Do some slight tweaking, this face right here. I'm going to move back on a white axis so it rests above the pavement. This one, these edges as well, because I don't want any angles. I'm just going to move these ones back on the y axis. So that's also on a pavement like that. The topology isn't great in this case, but because we're using flat shading, and it's a fairly simple scene, it's not going to cause us too many problems. It will just take a lot of time to fix. Happy with this, I'm going to go through and create the rest of the windows and do some other detailing to these buildings to give them a bit more character. I'm playing through the stu, recording and you'll see that I end up duplicating this window object that I created quite a few times. Because I want the windows to look similar across all the buildings since they're on the scene of street, I end up duplicating that object. Also, you'll notice some part along the way, I give up naming the window buildings. I know what they are, I know what collection they're in. I'm not too strict on naming correctly, depending on what building you're on. It just takes up too much time. I'm using the same extrusion tool that we're using before the extrude long normals to add some more definition to the rest of these buildings here. You can see at this point I want to move the side of the building over on the y axis slightly. I go into edit mode on the road and just select all the S. I want to move to the side. I was thinking of having the staircase pull on the side of this building. I set up some windows so I could do that, maybe any future video, and I added a doorway ready for that to happen. I changed a bit from the annotations that I did in previous video. I was thinking of having a sign at the top and in some more buildings down below, but I thought I could have a long vertical sign instead and just some small windows at the top of the tower. You can see I'm adding like three or 4 billion modifiers to this building. So don't be scared to add multiple billion modifiers to each building. Put as many as you need. You can see I'm making lots of use of this extrude along normals tool. If you have any weird artifacts from doing this, you can always offset even. Here's the finished result. Now that we've covered the basics of modeling the buildings and street in the scene, we can go into a bit more detail and work on some of the props, which will be explained in the next video. 4. Creating 3D Props: Welcome back to the third video in this course. In this video, now that we've got our basic scene blocked out, we're going to start populating the scene with some prop assets. We're going to be covering what is a prop and how they're used in the scene. We're going to talk about instancing. We're going to go through two to three modeling examples of props. And we're going to start placing them into the scene. Due to the time that we have, I'm not going to go into full detail on all of the props I'll be making, but I'll show you the basic principles with a few that can be applied to the rest. I'll show you the main tools that I'm using to create them. At the end of the video, I'll show you a fat recording. Leave me modeling the rest of the props in the seam. So I'm going to start out with like a dust bin and some bin bags to go on, onside it. So we've got like some rubbish collected on the pavement. If I hold shift right mouse to place my cursor here, I can add a circle. So I'm going to press shift A, go to mesh and add a circle. Remember this is low poly, so I'm going to change the vertices from 32 down to something like 12 and we're going to see how this looks. Even this might be too high for us. And then I'm also going to hold shift to fine tune and decrease the radius a little bit. The scales right can use my character for reference. It might make it a bit thicker than this. It's important to name this object as well. I'm going to rename it from circle to have been. And I'm going to move it up into the work in Progress collection. Once this is finished, I'm going to go into edit mode. We don't need to fill the bottom face, but I'm going to by pressing and then I'm going to extrude up. I'm happy with the height of the bin. Once this is done, I'm going to press to scale it out a bit. At the top now I'm seeing it's too big. With everything selected and my pivot point set to the three cursor, I can scale this down. It's about waist height. I'm going to set my pivot point back to the medium point in case it causes any problems later this I can now select the top face. I'm going to extrude out again upwards. If I select this outer ring right now, I can extrude along normals to create the lid of the bin. With this face, I can scale it in and move it up. I'm happy with the overall shape of the bin. You may want to add some vertical grooves running around the side, but for me, I'm comfortable with this level of detail, but that might be a nice challenge. Next, I'm going to create the handle for the bin lid. If I go into edit mode and at this top face, I'm going to press Shift and cursor to select it, and this will give us the place to create the bin lid. Back in object mode, I'm going to press shift A to create the plane in edit mode, I can now scare this down to create the basic shape of the handle. Now if I hit control to add a cut in the middle level this out, add another bevel in between. I can move this face upwards and maybe scale these two on the outside as well. It's important to scale it along the x axis. If this handle, we need to add some thickness, I'm going to do that. I'm going to add a thickness modifier. It's called the Solidify modifier. I'm going to change the offset to one, enable even thickness. Going to play around with the thickness and scaling in add. I'm happy with the handle, this is looking good to. If you want to add a little bit more detail, we can hide the modifier. In edit mode, I can select the following edges and give a slight level. Then when I enable it again, it will just give us some curvature to the handle, which you may think looks quite nice. Once I'm happy with this, I'm going to apply this modifier and I'm going to join it to the rest of the bin by shift clicking the bin, pressing control J, using similar techniques to that which I've just shown you. Try creating a barrel, maybe with a fire pit inside, which is something you might find in your cyberpunk scene as well. Creating a cylinder using the same process that we did before for the bin and creating some grooves around the outside which the stealing outwards. For the top, I use the knife tool to add some polygons to the top face, filled it in, using control to triangulate it. Then I moved some of the parts up using proportional editing. In the top, I added some basic cylinder objects, cut them down the middle, walked them and combine them to make the fire fuel. In the top, I'm now going to create a bag black bin bag using completely different techniques. Once again, I'm going to place my cursor down here on the floor. Instead I'm going to create an icosphere. To edit mode and just scale this down a bit. I can even move this up just so it's a bit easier to work. With this done, I'm going to go up to sculpted mode. Don't worry if you haven't been in sculpting mode much, We'll cover it more later. But the main things I'm going to change dynamic topology. I'm going to enable this tick box right here and set the detailing from relative to constant detail and increase it to something like ten or even 12. Don't worry about being too hypolyx. We'll reduce it later. I can paint and change the shapes. Be more bag shape. I'm just going to paint over the mesh to get some basic resolution going on. Add some bumpiness to it, and then we can play around with some of the other brush types. The main ones will be using this one, the basic draw brush, and also this grab brush right here that we can use to change the shape of the bin bag. I'm going to flatten the bottom out. Using this flattened brush right here, you can always isolate the object pressing forward slash. And then I'm going to come in with the smooth brush to iron out some of these weird creases that I don't like. You can then come in with this crushed brush, then add some grooves going along the side. Maybe change the size of your brush a bit smaller. You can add the cloth like groups going around the side. Once we're happy with the shape of this, we can go back into the layout tab and I'm going to add decimate and modify to this. If we reduce the ratio, you can see it reduces the poly count at the bin bag procedurally. Which means that if we're not happy with the value, if it's either two high poly or two low poly, we can always change it later. I'm going to reduce the value a little bit. Once that's done, I'm going to add a knot at the top of the bin bag. I'm just going to add a basic cylinder with five. Select all the bottom ones and press M to merge at center, and this will create the knot at the top. Once again, I'm going to select these. I might apply the decimate modified. Before I do this, I'm going to join it together. Name it a bin bag. And I'm going to move this up to the working progress collection. Using these techniques, you may want to create a few of these slightly different shapes and sizes and then we can stack these around the bins and barrels later on. I'm just going to move this down so it's on the floor plane. For another prop, I was thinking about making a metal road barrier. I'm going to place myredcursor here. I'm going to use a few different techniques, traditional modeling, that we've done before. To do this, we're going to need to enable an extra objects add on that allows us to place a single vertex that we can then extrude out to extrude out the shape and silhouette of the metal paria just as single edges. And we're going to convert this to a curved object to give it thickness. First we need to enable this add on. It shifts with blenders, you don't need to install anything. We go to Edit Preferences, and under the Add Ons tab we can search up for extra objects. You can see I've enabled it here. All we need to do is click this tick box and save your preferences. If you want to keep this, we're going to close that. Now if I press shift A under mesh, I can go down and add a single vertex. It's important to make sure you're in vertex mode, otherwise you won't be able to extrude anything out. I'm going to move this up a little bit and I'm going to extrude up, it's just above waist height with my character model, using these two verses. I'm going to extrude out on the x axis to around about here. I'm not being too precise, be a little bit longer in order for this to work. This has to be a single line of edges, so there can't be any faces in here. I'm just going to press X and I'm going to delete only faces. Now with all these vertices selected. Device select, and I'm going to hit Control shift to Bbl vertices. This is different to hitting control B. I can increase the number of cuts till uncomfortable with it. I'm going to keep a random part here. This line of edges is going to make the outer ring of this barrier. If I select this edge right here, just by clicking these two vertices, I'm going to duplicate these and make them a separate object by pressing P and separating them by selection. If I go back into object mode and select this edge, I'm going to go into edit mode, select everything right click, and subdivide it. Once I'm happy with the number of cuts, I'm going to extrude this down. I'm going to use vertex snapping to align it to the bottom edge. I'm going to select everything and I'm going to delete the faces. Only faces. Now the way we can convert this into a curve is if I search up using the three menu convert to curve, I'm just going to search up curve. We can see that if we go into edit mode, we're now given curve points instead of vertices and edges and faces. If we go down to this curve tab, and there are a couple settings we need to change to give it some thickness under geometry we can change the depth and it's all give it some roundedness. And we can also change the resolution. This is a bit high for my art starts. I'm going to set this to maybe just one or probably two or zero. I'll set it to zero. I'm not happy with how these edges are looking at the top. I didn't mean to include those. I'm just going to box, let this top line right here. I'm going to press X and delete segments and they're going to do a same to the bottom. So that we've just got these vertical bars. Before turning this outer frame into a curve as well. I'm going to create the stands because I'm going to extrude these out from the vertices right down here. If I select this object, go into edit mode and select these two vertices. I'm going to duplicate these by pressing Shift D and separate them again. Now back into object mode, I'm going to there's new object, it's a bit hard. We can go into the Outliner in edit mode. I'm going to once again extrude down until I make the floor plan. I can use face snapping for that. I'm just going to move it on the y axis to around about here. Maybe that'll do for me. I need to delete these edges now, face connecting them. That leaves us with these two for the stand. Copy this over to the other side. I'm just going to go and add a mirror modifier quickly, which should be going across the y axis. And I'm going to apply this. If you're not quite happy with the angle, you can go back into edit mode, select everything, and scale it on the y axis. I think I'm happy with this. Once this is finished, we can convert all of these to curve objects. To finish off the model, I'm going to start off with this frame. I'm going to type into the three men you convert curve and go down and change the same settings under geometry. These faces here are very subtle, but if I zoom into the end, you can see there's a hollowed out end. The way you can fix that is just by pressing fill caps over here, enabling fill caps. Once this is all finished, if we select everything on this model, we can convert it back to a mesh. Again, I'm just going to type in mesh to the three menu Convert to Mesh. And I'm going to join everything together again by hitting Control. Now we can name this, move this up to the Work in Progress Collection. We've covered a range of different modeling techniques in this video. I'd now challenge you to put this to practice and create another few assets on your own to populate the scene. Right now I'm making this lamppost and that's just using basic cylinders for the base. And then I use the curve that we use for the road blockade to create the arch. The top light was just done using basic poly modeling. Once you're happy of all these props that we've made, we're going to start placing them in the scene. I'd recommend turning on face snapping for this. And that just means that as long as the origin point is at the very bottom, at ground level, wherever we place it, it will snap to when we're duplicating objects. We want to use old to instant. You can see how I'm pressing old and what that means is that any change we do, so one of these objects will affect the other instead of shift D, which just duplicates and creates new object data. This will be really important later on when we add materials because there'll be add materials to this lamppost. I want to also add it to the other one in the same places. So I'm just going to go around a scene now and instance some of my props. In the next video, we'll be covering modular assets. But in the meantime, make sure that you've got enough of these props modeled and placed around a scene until we're comfortable with it. 5. Creating Modular Assets: Hello and welcome back. In this part we're going to be covering modular assets. And we'll be talking a bit about the differences between modular assets and props that we made last time. We'll create a couple examples to show you what I mean when I'm talking about modular assets. Once we finish, we can start placing them into the scene and then we're going to do a bit of housekeeping and tidyo because there are three other things we need to add to the scene and fix up. I'd like to think the main distinction is that modular assets, they're usually part of something else, so they'd be part of a building or maybe a window, something that you can also edit and scale different parts of. So you might want to change the size of a window or door. Or in this case I might make a staircase. I might want to increase the height of the staircase and it can fit onto any building and we can change the height. Whereas a like these bins and lamp posts were made last time, you can just dot these anywhere around a scene and any work fine on their room. As I said, I'm going to start creating the staircase here on the side of this building. But she'll reach up to this door. So I'm going to place my curtain down and use this tool right here to add a cube object. And I can drag it out so it seems like a decent size. Looks sensible to me, may be a little bit thicker. We're going to add, I can bring this face down on the y axis. Now here we're going to use the array modifier to create multiple of these going upwards. I'm going to go to the modifiers tab. We're going to search for array. You can see it's already created one going along this axis. This is using the relative offset, I can decrease this amount so the stairs overlap a tiny bit. This is the factor on the x axis. If I want to change the height as well so that they go up one, I'm going to use the z axis as well. Going to increase the height about here. Remember we can use our human for reference. If I just instance this place, this one right here, I can see how big the stairs are going to look out that maybe I want them pretty steep. And now if I increase the count, I can keep making knees taller until it reaches the top below that. And I might need to move this. There we go. Well, I'm happy with the height in this case. I'm going to apply the ray modifier. But if you wanted to instances and create another staircase where you'd have different heights, different heights of the stairs, then you wouldn't want to apply this. I'll quickly apply this. If I go in, I can select this face and just bring it out a bit on the x axis, so creates a nice platform to stand on below the door. Now I want to make some metal frame going around the outside of the staircase just to keep the stairs together. But I want to create it as a separate object while still using this geometry as like a helping hand for I'm just going to select some edges. I'm going to select these two edges. This one might be a bit more easy to tell what I'm doing. Once I've shown, I'm going to press Shift D to Duplicate, and then I'm going to press as its own object. If I go back into object mode and select these edges, now might be a bit hard to select them. These ones I can go back into edit mode and just move everything up a bit on the z axis. There we go. Once that's done, I can extrude everything down on the Z axis, just going slightly past, something like that. If I set this edge in this face and join this edge in this edge, and join them up by pressing, I can move this one back a little bit till it's roughly even. You can see the effect I'm going for. It's not going to be perfectly accurate, but for a small project like this, I can't spend too much time on these details. Once this is done, I'm going to extrude it out along normals. We could also use a thickness modifier for this. Extruding a long normals works quicker If we're going to edit mode and set everything going to press, here we go and drag it out a little bit. This will be the thickness of the metal. Make sure offset even this might look a bit weird around the corners if you don't offset even should be turned on. So make sure to select everything and recalculate normals by pressing shift because this has given us some shading problems. But we'll talk about this later. I just realized my method for joining this face up wasn't quite right. Instead of restarting it, I'm just going to select all these parts down here by going into wire frame mode and move this on x axis till it looks right. Once again, I'm just eyeballing this. I'm not trying to be too accurate because remember how far away the camera is from the staircase? That should be close enough for us and I'm going to add a railing to the side of these stairs. I'm going to tool again for this. I'll just select it. We're going to just drag out to a railing shape. This should be somewhere between the hips and the chest on a character roundabout there, and then drag out of this square. This is a pretty rough way of doing it. You might find a way it's a bit more accurate and better practice once this is done using the rain modifier. Again, down to a rain modifier, we're going to create two or three of Up the staircase. Make sure you get the height consistent across them like this looks pretty good to me. Apply this ray and modifier. I'm going to select this one right here, this railing post, and I'm going to duplicate it on the X axis to create this side. Then, with face snapping enabled, I'm going to duplicate it again on the shift z axis. I need to move it first. It's already on this side. I'm going to move on a shift axis and snap it to this corner here to create the actual railing. The rail that goes on top of these posts can use a few tricks. I'm going to select all the faces on the top of these in edit mode. Once again, I'm going to duplicate these and create them as a separate object. I've selected all these, I'm going to press shifted D and then to put them as their own object. Then if I go back into mode, I can select all these edges and join them up. Fill this corner here. I'm going to use edge snapping, so you can just extrude it out x axis. I can fill in this one. Now I can just press, say, to select everything and extrude it up the axis. See how this looks. You can always select this ring going, run the outside, and use extrude along normals. Again to give it some more thickness. If we like, make sure to take off even because sometimes it's nice to have the top rail thicker than all the rest. The nice thing about using these posts to create the top railing is that it gives us the flat depressions right here, which is a bit realistic. I'm going to shift to duplicate a couple of these and just move them further down the railing. We've got a few other shorter ones. With all this done, I'm going to slit everything. All these parts right here. Move from the way just to see if anything is left behind that looks like it's good. And I'm going to save my file. One important thing to do when you're making big changes like this, because I'm about to create this as one object. We're going to go up to file save as wherever your location is that you saved that you see here, I've named the file, Low Poly Cyberpunk seen 001. If I go over and press this plus and minus, you can change that as a shorthand wave of increment in the file plus, change this to two. Now I want to hit Save, as this is version two of our file. Whereas if I go file open recent, you can see number one comes up. If we want to revert back to an old file before we made this change, we can do that that way on sled everything. I'm going to hit control J and I'm going to rename this object. You can always hit two. To rename, I'll call this Fire Stairs. One quick other change I'd like to make is just this face right here. And move this on X little bit. It was popping out too much once this is done. Like one example of where you might use modular assets in your scene. It's like an instance, this just move it around. Maybe you rotate it by, rotate it by another 90 degrees scale on the Y, X minus one. And this is just basically flipping it. Now I can move this in to make it as if it's underneath. I want to move it back a little bit more so we can place these all throughout the scene and they fit in quite well. But for a small scene like this, don't go overboard. Mod assets are usually used for levels in games. So the level designers or set designers can place lots of different assets, environmental assets, around the level without having to create lots of different models using the techniques we've just used. And now I'm going to try and create some ladders as well. I'm just trying to think about where I'd be placing these. It doesn't matter too much. I can just add some up here. We want to think about modular assets, we can move them around. Once we've finished for this one, I'm going to create single vertex. Remember if the extra objects add on that we enabled last video, I'm going to go down to single vertex, add single vertex in edit mode. I'm just going to extrude this out a little bit, downwards to the bottom, something like this. And maybe subdivide it as well. Now what we can do is add ray modifier array relative offset. We want to change the axis from X to Z. I'm just going to type in zero on the x axis, I'm going to the z axis. Down, you can see the effects is having. I'm going to set this to one or minus one, sorry, you can increase the count to make the length of the ladder. This right here, it is just going to be one of the sides of the ladder. I might go into edit mode and create another one. Just strike that out so we can see it. Once again, I'm going to track this human up so we can use it for scales. Pretty good to me. Now, using this, this is going to be the middle of the ladder. I think it might be a little bit too short. I'm just going to increase the length of tiny bit. Now if I select these two vertices, I'm going to shift D to duplicate them. I'm going to fill them into, it's like one separate edge. And I'm going to press P again to create this is a separate object. This line in the middle is a separate object to these parts, the outer parts right here. That means that we can add a curvature to this. I'm going to turn on, I'm going to convert it to a curve objects. If I just press three here and typing a curve, I can convert it to a curve. And then remember if we go down to geometry, stuff we did last video may be the death. We can change the depth and resolution. Make this look like one of the bars going across the ladder. Then we can do the same to this, some curvature to this. I might actually remove the array modifier from this isn't seem very useful. I'm going to go here and just remove that. Instead, I'll just extrude these vertices down to the ground because it's just add an extra geometry instead, I think it'd be better just to keep the array on this piece right here. We can add one right here. I can drag down on Zaxis. This is probably a bit more useful of this set up. I'll drag that down here and then increase the count it touches the floor. Then what I can do this vertex, I'm just going to drag this up a bit because I found the ladders, I found some reference images right here. And it's really important to use this when working on these modular assets. And you can see it's this curvature going up. I imagine when you climb it up you can rest your hands on. I'm going to extrude both of these vertices up out along the Y axis. If I select these two vertices, I can hit control shift to babble them and add a bit curvature. Something like this. Looks good to me. I'm also going to select this vertex, vertex snapping. I'm going to extrude it down on the Z axis to here. Just so asymmetrical. There you go. So I'm going to convert this to a curve that's in this example is a bit more simple. Have a go creating this ladder. And once we're finished, we can start placing around the scene by instancing these beams right here. This one. And I'm just going to move out a little bit on the way Xs, something like this. Because we're more likely to change the length of the ladder, you might not want to duplicate it. I'm going to select these 20 to instance them. And we can move this around the scene. Not quite sure where to place this one. Maybe just down by this building right here. I'm just using basic snapping tools that we should have covered before. Something like that. You can see that adding these ladders and fire stairs add a bit more verticality to the scene that wasn't there before. Using a combination of the techniques we've used in both of these modular assets, I'm going to challenge you to create some railings to cover some of the other rooftops in this scene. So we're going to have some going across the bridge and maybe some on top of both of these roofs right here. See if you can ever go. 6. Creating a Low Poly Car: Hello everyone and welcome back. In this part we're going to create a low poly cyberpunk car that we're going to play somewhere here in our scene to start out with, I composed a reference board of images from various artists that I found online and that I want to take inspiration from. Remember that because we're making this low poly, we want to keep details to a minimum. And I'm going to try and add a lot of hard jagged surfaces like this as opposed to some of these smooth surfaces here that we find. But I still like some of the details from the vehicles with this reference board. I went into Photoshop and I drew out this sketch, which just helps me understand the form of the model and block out the proportions before I go into three D because it allows me to play around more. I've also added some details here like the mirror and the headlights, but I imagine some of these details will change later on when we start modeling, I was thinking about some of the cyberpunk twists we could add to this to fit the style from the rest of the scene. And I was thinking maybe we could add some mechanism here that rotates the wheels so they fly like in the second batch of the future film. And once it's finished, I'll also end up adding a bunch of cables going around the car if it still feels empty. But once we've got this basic design, I'm going to open up blender and start modeling. To start out with, I'm going to add a cube using this on screen tool right here. So I'll just drag this out and roughly match the proportions to this little amateur that I've got, something like that may be. Then if I go back into edit mode, I can select everything and just move it up a bit so there's a little bit of clearance. I might be changing this later. Now I've got the rough shape. I can see that I might need to scale it on the X axis in a little bit. May get it on the Y axis as well. If this done, I'm going to add a couple loops across the model like this, start matching it in place. I've got my reference image on my second monitor right now. I'm looking across at both of them. Before I go any further, I'm going to add a mirror modify to this so that I only have to work on one side of the vehicle. I want to work on this side. I'm going to hit Control our, Add a look in this way and just select all these Urbces here. In delete them, it should be hollow on the inside. Now if I go to the mod fast panel in Adam mirror, as long as we haven't moved this origin here, it should be across the other side. It's important to note though that sometimes if we extrude up, we have extra gerometry here in the middle. To get rid of this, I'm just going to delete these faces to create this inset here on the front and around the bottom, I'm going to use the knife tool. If I hit Kate, I can drag in from here and then down. When I pull these, just to make them a bit more accurate, I'm going to select this vertex snapping mode. I'm just going to align this on the x axis. Then actually we can select all of these because they're a vertical and I'm going to scale them on the Z axis by zero. Now I'm just going to go through and connect some of these to topology. More sensible D, I think. I'm going to select this text and bubble this out. I'm going to hit control shift to bubble it. And that'll give me a nice curve right here. I can change this mode from offset 2% short be profile that I've got here. To insert some of these pieces right here. I'm going to hold out and extrude faces along normals and make sure you change tick offset even. And I'm going to use this to give a bit of depth to the front. You may even want to consider selecting all of these loops right here. Embbling these just just move it out a little bit. But in this case, I think that might add a few too many polygons to the model. I'm going to do the same with the Windows. I s this face right here. I'm going to insert this a little bit with tipped, actually I might add a loop along here. You can see now that I've got the rough shape of the car sorted. And I'm adding a couple more details like the headlights and the outline for the will to cut out the actual hole where the bill's gonna be. I'm gonna use a bullion operation, which I'll show you how to do right now. You can see this shape here that I've forgot for the world guards, I suppose you call them. It's just an outline of faces if isolate the object right here, as you can see, it's just an outline of faces around the outside which I've mirrored across to make sure you turn on clipping on the mirror modifier. And I've added a solidified modifier in ward to give it some thickness. So I'm going to do this, I'm going to duplicate it as its own object shifted to duplicate, and I'm going to hide the original on it. And now if I apply these modifiers, I can go in and just to delete some of these faces on the inside and fill in the gaps between, connect these vertices right here just to get rid of any weird engons. As long as the object is manifold, it should work. I'm going to select both objects, go into it mode, select everything and do shift to recalculate normals because this sometimes give us artifacts. When doing bullion, I'm going to add a bull modifier to the main cup object, and if I hide this one, you can see it cuts out a perfect hole for the Wls quickly. Yeah, apply this Boolean, but I'd recommend doing a safe as an increment in the file before you do this, because you can't turn back once you apply the modifier. In this case, I found that if I apply the modifier, now it gives us these little holes in the middle. And that's because it probably wants to do the mirror operation first. If we apply the Boolean operation right now, it will ignore the mirror operation and the object won't be manifold, meaning that it's got this hollow part on the inside. In this case, I'm probably just going to apply the mirror modifier, then apply the Boolean modifier because I'm done shaping the body. Anyway, what I'm going to do here is a detail you might notice on my drawing. Thought I'd sweep one of these sides down a little bit, so that could be like maybe a heads up display or a little screen on the inside. I'm not actually quite sure if I'm happy with these windows. I think I made the rooms a little too thin. So I'm going to go through and redo this right now, an extra layer of thickness. I'm just going to insert them again. This probably isn't the best topology, but it will work for me for now. This car is looking much better to me. Now I'm going to start adding a few more details to the car now. First of I'm going to add back the word outlines just by pressing Opt H and I'll delete bullion ones because I don't need those anymore. I'm going to add a few more details using the tools that we've already covered in this course and see if you can follow along. Another detail that I'm going to add to the car is some cables running from this part down to this panel here and also to connect the wind mirrors up. I'm just going to do that by adding some single vertices. You see how I've placed my cursor on this face. If I go into object mode, I'm going to do shift mesh in single vertex and then I can start shaping this before we turn into a curve. I think that concludes the modeling for this car. Once everything's finished and I've checked around it a couple times, I'm going to slide everything and move it down. I might just snap it to the floor. Just Ty ball, it doesn't need to be too precise. Then I'm going to hit number pad zero to go back into my pew. And I'm just going to place it somewhere that makes sense. What we could even do is duplicate this by pressing old D. Move this over here under the bridge. And I'm going to rotate it on the Z axis by 180 degrees. It looks like there's another one going the other way. I'm fairly happy with that. Good luck in your modeling. Try and be a bit more creative to me. Let's see what results we can get. 7. Adding Materials: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be adding materials to the scene. Now, we're going to do this by creating a different material for each color and then selecting the faces on the models. We want to apply those materials to. Note that this probably isn't the most performant way of doing this, especially if it's for a low poly game. For a simple scene like this, this should be more than adequate to start out with. Let's go into Rendered mode or Material mode. I'm going to go into the Material Preview. This shows us the color of our objects. By default, everything will be white. To change the color, I'm going to start off of the floor because it's quite simple. If I just click on the floor here and then go to the Materials tab down here in a Properties panel, I can create a new material. And I'm going to call this mode over here by changing the base color to a slightly more gray tone. You can see the result. Now, to create the curve, I want this to be a slightly lighter shade of grace. I'm going to create a new material, and I'm going to rename this curve. And now we need to select the faces that we want to apply this material to. I'm going to go into edit mode in face select mode. And I'm going to select this ring, this ring right here. And this loop by selection. Double check that I got everything. I'm going to hit the sign button. You can see everything has become white because it's been given the second material slot here. I'm going to change the base color to be still gray, but slightly lighter than the road to set it back. Now I'm going to create another material again, and I'm going to call this pavement because I want these sections here to be slightly lighter than the road. Once again, I'm going to select the faces in edit mode, the three guns right here. And I'm going to hit the assigned button. Make sure that your clicking imagery, you want to asign them too, that's my mistake. I need to click on Pavement and then click once again. If we're going to object modes, we can see it better, can change the shade. It's important to note here that although my color pallet is very purple and blue, this is going to be achieved through lighting later on. And the actual surfaces that appear purple and blue in these images are actually gray. They're just lit by these colored lights. We'll cover lighting later on. Another nice thing about working with materials in blender, as well as assigning, you can also select any faces of particular color. Let's say I've just got this model and I wanted to select all the faces that are part of the curb. I can click the curb slot. Press select. It will automatically select those faces With the floor done, I'm going to now start adding some materials to the buildings. I'm going to start off with this piece right here. We can just go into edit mode and add a material slot. Call this building wall. One note that I've got a naming convention here, but for a simple scene like this, it doesn't really matter because when you look down this list of materials right here, you can see the color. In a preview, we're going to change the base color of this water. Still gray, but just going to make it slightly browny. Just by moving this little color icon towards the orange part of the spectrum. I'm going to select these faces. Sometimes if you press C on your keyboard, you can use a circular selection mode and it's makes it a bit quicker. And I'm going to assign these to a gray material. However, rather than adding another material slot and create a new material, just creates a new material slot. This is an empty slot right here. And assign it. Then we can select the material from the dropdwn. I'm going to put the curve material on this. We can see it's got the same gray that we created before that's used down there on a curve. This is really nice because it means that we're not having to create new colors from scratch every time we want to color is seen. It also means that our color palette is a bit more consistent. Looks like I've missed one of these faces. I'm going to this just by assigning it to the color slot. However, if we change this shade of gray, not only does it update the material on this building, but it also changes the shade of gray curb on the ground. I've got the material slot of the building selected. If I change this to like a red color, you can see it updates the curve at the same time. Just be cautious of this. If I wanted to create, this is a separate material slot, but retained the base color, I can go down on this two icon and I can click this and you can see it puts a 001 on the end. This is a way to know that it's a separate material, but it's derived from the curb. And you can see in the drop down that these are two separate ones. Now if I change the base color of curb 001, might make it slightly more browny. And I'm going to rename it Building Curb One. We can see that it's separate from the curb down there. The problem that we're having now is that where we use a Boolean modifier to create these windows, it's assigning a white material to both the actual window face and this part around the wall right here. This is not desirable. One way we could fix this is by applying Boolean modifier on a building, and then going in and changing the colors of these faces. This means that we can't change the position of the windows later on, it's a destructive workflow. However, the way that Booleans work in blended by default is assigning these faces whatever material is on the Boolean that we're using, that's this object right here. Change this material to the curb. Just to show you an example, you can see that it creates the inside on this material to the curb material even though it hasn't got it there. But if I go back onto the cutter, I'm going to change this to the building walls, seamless transition there. Then I'm going to create a new material and I'm going to call this dark window, set this very dark blue. Maybe if I go to edit mode right here, I'm going to select this face. We've got an array modifier on this cutter. We'll copy it to all the other instances. And I'm going to go down and assign this the dark window material, and this has the desired effect. I'd like to create an admissive material for some of these windows though, as if the lights are on. I don't want to be applied to all of them. I'm going to apply the array modifier on this series of windows. Maybe I'll go into isolate view. I could select it better. I might have these two windows lit. I'm going to go down to the materials tap and I'm going to add a window material, assign these places, never go back. You can see that it's updated. But the way to make this actually glow is by going down on this principle as opposed to surface settings. And we're going to add an emission color. We're going to drive this, set this to orange, yellow color, and we're going to change the emission strength to be a bit higher. This is acting like a light source in our S. Now, it's a bit difficult to see in this view, but if we go up to Rendered, you can see the effect it's having. This will look better when we add something called Bloom or a fog glow to post processing and blender using the composite. This will be something we cover later on. Just note that you add your color to the glow here and you change the emission strength, which is how strong the light source is going to be. One last thing that you might want to tweak is the roughness of these materials. If this right here, this is easiest to see in rendered mode. If I go up on the surface panel to the roughness slider, I can increase and decrease this, so medicine this material here. And you can see that when I decrease the roughness, that makes it a bit more glossy. For this low poly art style, I find a middle value of 0.5. Works best. You can play around with this slider for each of the materials, using these techniques demonstrated, try and add materials to the rest of your scene. You can see as I'm working away here, I'm trying to balance of tonal values and even saturation to fit my composition. I have to go playing around with an experiment with these materials. And then in the next part we'll be adding some neon signs to the side of this building and maybe above this bridge. As well as adding some other models to populate the rest of the scene because it's feeling a bit empty, especially on these rooftops and on the road. And then we'll also touch on lighting and rendering. Good luck. 8. Adding Neon Signs: Welcome back. In this part we're going to be adding some neon signs to the scene and play around with the curve editor. Once that's finished, we'll do a bit of housekeeping and add some other assets to the scene that we haven't had time to model yet. To start out with, we're going to need to add a object to the scene. I'm going to press Shift, Click on Text. And down here under this tab of the Properties panel, you can see we have a fonts that drop down. If we go down here, we can click on this folder icon to select a font from your Windows computer. Might end up changing this later. We're looking for something that looks cyberpunk. I'm thinking we could use this one for now. I'm going to press open font and you can see it's updated. You can position this like any object in blunder, so you can move it about. In object mode, I'm going to press to move it up. And then rotate it on the y axis by -90 it's going down the building member. You can also scale this up by pressing in object mode to change what the text says, you click Tab and then you can use backspace and type in whatever you want. Now I'm just going to call this sine one. I'll probably end up changing this. I think better name is put there impressed tab to go back into object mode again. I'm going to scale this up and move this in place. Need to come up with a better name for that sine. This is using the white material from now, just the default material and blunder. But if you go down to the Materials tab, you can create a new one. I'll call this neon sine one. You can go down and change the Mhm color. I had a bit of brightness in there and I might make this a pinky purple color. And then we can change the emission strength as well. Now we go up into rendered mode. We should see this update. It's about finding the right level of emission. We can also copy this if you hover over this color and hit control C, we can copy this into the base color like that. After thinking about what this sound is going to be, I decided to make it a hotel. I'm going to go into edit mode. Delete this and type in a hotel. Then if we go back to object mode, just going to move it back. I think it would be cool to have a couple just neon lines running down here on either side of the hotel sign. I'm going to place my cursor can just press Shift to place my cursor where this object is. I'm going to create a plane. Rotate it on the white axis by 90 degrees. And I can just play around in edit mode to position it where I want s this edge. I can just drag this downwards. This is quite a hacky way of doing it, but it works for what we need. Then back in Edmde, I can just slide everything and duplicate it and just move it across to the top, scale these in a bit as well. The line then just a subtle detail like that adds quite a bit of character to the scene. I'm going to make sure I give this neon material, Neon sign one. Then once that's done, I'm going to sign, I'm going to duplicate it. Resin, shifty. I'm going to have this one going across the bridge. I need to rotate it till it's in the right place. I haven't thought about much to name this. I'm just going to call this Bridge House. That could be the name of the district or restaurant, hotel. I'm not quite sure. I'm going to change this material here. I'm going to flip the little three and I'm going to change this to neon sign two just to stay organized. And I'm going to make this slightly more blue color. Make sure to change both the base color and the Em. I don't think the base color mats too much, it's mainly the MS Exchange. So make it more of the blue color and a copy in to base colors. Now we go back to camera. This makes the scene feel a lot more lived in. Feel free to add some more neon signs. I'm quite happy with how that looks for now. I think it's time to carry on adding some more models to the scene. I'm going to start off by adding some broad markings to the ground here. My very simple way of doing this is just coming over here to the add objects. I'm going to add a cube and I'll just drag on the cubes to the ground that this says, it's just slightly raised above the ground. Maybe move it a little bit and add an array modifier along the Y axis just like this. So I've got a few more markings running down and that just adds a slight bit of contrast to the ground out. I'm going to change the color. I'm going to try a yellow. I'm now thinking, because this is a Sip punk scene, we could even try giving it an missive material just to see how it looks. Might not like the result, but we can try, I suppose we'll see how it looks once it's rendered. I just realized I forgot to add some headlights to the car. I'm going to go in edit mode on this object here that contains the headlights. I'm going to select these faces right here on the Materials tab. I'm going to add a new material slot and I'll create a new one where I'll call this the headlights and signs we go, we'll tweak the intensity of all the lights later on. When it comes to rendering, I'm now going to show you a sped up time lapse of me adding some more details to the roof using the same techniques that we've used before. Course, I'll start out by adding some green structures above the little shed on the other side of the bridge. And then adding a fire barrel on top of the bridge just to break up some of that empty space. This water tower on top that added to the very top of the hotel, I thought would be a nice addition to create this support structure below the water tower. You can see I've created dissylinder that I've subdivided around the middle. I'm going to add a wire frame modifier to this, which is here. Just change the thickness a little bit. I'd like some diagonal supports going across as well. The way I'm going to do that is by selecting all these faces going around and I'm going to hit control to triangulate some of these might not match up around here. You can change some of these modes method. Let's try fixed alternate. This should be quite consistent. So if we look back in object mode now and unicolate, I'm quite happy with how that looks, especially from a distance. Just go easy on the polycount. I might need to make it a little bit thicker that fits the width of the railings. You can see here some details to the top of the roof next to the water tower. Just added some boxy bits of electronics and some air ducts coming out just to break up some of that empty space. On top you can see on this a little balcony, rooftop, here it is, Cyberpunk. I decided to add some random electronic machinery. I put some Teslicorsres. Well, because I thought those look quite cool. You can see instance the box from the top rooftop down there as well. Just the same model just recycled across the scene over here. I wanted to add some party going on on balcony. I added tables and chairs and a little umbrella. And I also copied the same barrel model up there as well. It looks like they were using that as a fire. Make sure to rotate some of these chairs slightly just so that everything is not quite the same, especially if it's placed by someone. You don't want all chairs to be aligned perfectly. You can see the legs there. I'm just convert they're all edges that I extruded down from the top and I'm convert curve object. I'm just going through making some more changes. That's where I'm adding the ducks and I'm going to copy some of those assets I just created down on top of the bridge as well. You can see you really speed up your workflow by recycling these assets. Shorts to randomize which windows are let as well. I think that concludes all the modeling for this project. Next time we'll be tackling lighting and rendering, which means we'll be playing around with the intensity of some of these lights and setting up our rendering settings. And also which sky background to use, because by default we've just got the standard gray background inside blender. 9. Adding Lights and Tweaking Render Settings: Hello and welcome back. In this part, we're going to be adding some lights to the scene and tweaking some of our render settings to get a final exported image. First things first, if we go up into rendered mode, we do this by holding down the zeke and going up to Rendered or up here. And then we go up to this table right here, we can see our current rendering engine is V. Now this is a rendering engine that was brought out to Blender a few years ago. And it's really good for real time visualization. It's interactive. We don't have to wait for a render to compile before we can see our scene. For if we change this to cycles, this is a ray tracing rendering engine and as you can see, it's much more high quality and the lighting is more realistic. This is because many rays of light are cast out from each pixel to calculate light bouncers based on how light works in the real world. At the expense of cost and a little bit longer. You can see one thing you might notice, we've got a bunch of these artifacts on screen. These are sometimes called fireflies. And you can also see there's a little bit of noise grain here and that's basically where the sample count isn't quite high enough for what we need. You can also check noise here in the Viewport and render it gives us some smoother results. You may also see this number here for both render and Viewport there separately. Usually you have your render settings higher than the viewport, which is just used to visualize the scene. You can see our maximum samples here is 1024. That's basically the number of rays of light casting outside of each pixel. And when we move our scene here, you can see up in the top left, it's calculating each sample, so it goes 5678, and you can see that as that number goes up out of this value, the renders get in more high quality. One annoying thing you might notice is that the window cutters that we use to show in the solid objects, because when we hit them before, it doesn't work in rendered mode. So we're going to have to bring those back and hide them on the render level. If I just let all these windows here and door cutters as well, just let them all and I'm going to add them to a separate collection to make it easier to handle them. So I'm just going to press M and I'll put them in door cutters and I can press the number of high period key to jump to this collection In the outline of the vigus, press the button it jumps down and shows where they are. We've got the two buttons here. We've got the hide button, this little e which just hides in Ini viewpoint. We've also got this camera button. And what the camera button does is it hides the object in random mode. In our final render, anything inside this collection won't show. You can also do it on individual object level. If I just select this one right here, then hide that. You can see you can do individual objects, but we put them in this collection just so we can do them all at once. It's a little bit faster to work with. Now we go into Rendered mode. We can actually see the windows cut into the buildings, which is quite a mess. Now if you remember, when we first created this scene, and I added a bunch of these lights here just to block it out and see where my light sources are going to come from. However, I'm going to completely relight this sea. I'm just going to delete all those because also I've changed my mind about where certain lights are going to come from. If we now go into rendered mode, see, this is looking a little bit different. It's looking a bit darker, so we might need to add some more lights to it. The first thing I'm going to do is let these neon signs right here. And if we go down to the Materials tab, we can change the emissive strength because when we set the emission before we're in a different rendering mode, and the intensity of lights looks a bit different depending on what rendering engine you're using. I might increase this one a tiny bit, just so it's a little bit brighter and we get more of a reflection off this building. I'm also going to tweak the intensity of the windows. We've just hidden the window cutters. The door cutters. I'm going to bring these back. I just click on anyone. There you go. And if I go up to the lit window, I'm going to increase the emission strength a little bit so that the windows are brighter while I'm here. I'm also going to decrease the brightness of the dark window because they're looking a little bit too bright. Right now, it doesn't look like they're dark. I'm just going to drag the color down and I might increase the roughness as well. See how this looks, just so it looks a bit more diffuse, as if there really is nothing going on inside there. I'm happy with that. The next thing I'd like to do is change the brightness of the background. You can see here by default in Blender we've just got this gray background when we render where you can change that is by going up to this world type right here in a Properties panel. Can see we've got a dropdown of the different worlds in our scene. We can select, I'm just going to edit the default one for now because I don't want to change anything much like the material editor. If we go down to the surface, you can see here we've got the color and let's play around this. I might make it a slightly more midnight blue tone. Something like this, maybe even brighter, can play around with different intensities. I think something that might work, although my scene is actually quite bright now. Because I've given it a very blue and purple tones. It has the effect of moonlight. And this is a technique a lot of filmmakers and game artists use when they want to film a nighttime scene, but also be able to see everything. The next thing I'm going to do is add some natural light sources to the scene. If I zoom in a bit, first thing I'm seeing is this bridge, how sign look like. It's out a bit too much. I'm just going to move this further back on the y axis, it's closer to the building it's attached to. That looks a little bit better to me, and we're getting more glow of the bricks behind it as well. I'm going to add some lights underneath these lampposts because the emissive material I put under there isn't strong enough. I'm just going to place Mac Cursor under like this. And I'm going to go shift A to add a light object. We start off of a point light. There are different light types that we usually change that down here in the properties panel, you can see we've got point, sun, spot and area. The one I'm going to use for this one is going to be a spotlight. Let me do it now. And you can see it's already pointing downwards. If you want to change it, you can rotate it just using the arch blender. Or you can use this little gizmo bile down here to point at another part of the scene. I want it still pointing downwards. For now, the first thing we're going to need to do is increase the intensity of the light because ten watts is a little bit too low for us. Let's try something like that. And I'm going to see how this looks from this view up here. And I might also increase the radius as well, maybe not the radius, spot size at the angle. I can increase this a little bit, it's wider. Increase the blend because I don't want a sharp line. There we go. It might give this a slightly more yellow orange tone. Make it a little bit warmer, something like that. Looks nice, especially on the yellow paint of the car. With that, I'm going to instance this by pressing up along to the other lamppost, just assuming a little bit, making sure I'm align them. Probably haven't done the most perfect job of placing these, but as long as it's roughly in the middle of the lamppost, I'll do fine. I should have probably added this light object underneath the lamppost and in instance, both of them to place them across the scene. But I've really done it now. That's a final one. I'm using an AMD graphics card currently. If you've got an in video graphics card, you can use tracing, a real time tracing in cycles using your RTX card. If you are an invideo user, that might be a good thing to look into. There we go, that's the last light done instance. I can change the color. If I wanted to make it slightly different shade of orange, we can always do that. I might actually make it slightly more pinker tone because it valefits color scheme for the scene I'm doing, play around with this, I'm not quite sure. I'm quite happy with that and increase the intensity a little bit. Another light sourcing I'd like to use is the sun lamp. If I place my, cuts it here, I'm going to press Shift A and add a sun light over here. And just move this up a little bit, it's off the ground. What you can do with this is create a bunch of lights. Instead of spreading out and diverging from a point like this, all the rays of light move from whichever direction sunlight is pointing. In this case, it's going downwards. But if I rotate it here, just by a position in this gimbal, you can see I can angle where the lights coming from. If I have this direction, this, there you go. I can tweak the color I have like I'm not quite sure, just slightly yellow, greenish tone. Strength is quite low. So we can increase this, this will have the effect of sunlight. But if we set this to -0.5 I think is a good value, then it does the opposite. You can actually make lights go negative and blender and they start darkening the scene rather than lighting them. You have to type, you won't be able to use it slightly. You have to type it in manually. So you can see if I set this to something like -100 it's darkening the scene than adding light in, which isn't the way it is intended to be used. But I think if I set it to something -0.5 it gives us a really nice subtle darkening to shadows coming from this angle. And this helps us with our form a little bit because it's creating a distinction between this plane and this plane of each of the buildings. I think this effect can be quite nice if you use it subtly. Whilst we're here, I'm going to quickly change the color settings for the scene, what we call the color management. So if I go across this render tab here and go down to the color management tab, what I'm noticing is that the scene looks a little bit flat overall. And I want to add a little bit more contrast. We'll treat this later again using a composite. But for now we've got some of these settings here. We can see that the view transformers on film, the color range we want to use in this scene. You can see here under look, we've got a bunch of different presets. That blender comes with different exposures and gammas. I'm going to play around with adding a little bit more contrast. I'm going to try to add a medium high contrast. Maybe a little bit too high, maybe just a medium contrast. You can play around with these different signs that just makes a scene glow a little bit more, which I like. The other types of flights and blender that we haven't covered are the plane and the point light. And these are probably the most simple. I'm just going to quickly change my render set into V just because it's a little bit quick and I can show you what I mean if I now zoom in. Just click on this barrel here. I'm going to add a point light above, I think, where my cursor was. So we just shift, click here and add a point light. It looks like this is casting out from inside the barrel. I might increase the intensity a little bit. I make this more of an orange tone, so it looks like fire, something like that. And this has the effect of the barrel gloweuse'se this timbers right here. Yeah, point light just diverges all the rays of light out from a point. You can change the size of the point right here with radius. And you can see that's shown by this little round gizmo. You want this to be quite small if it's going to be inside this barrel. I'm just going to undo to put it back. The plain light is also fairly simple. Sometimes we use this just to shine light over a whole part of the scene. It's a little bit, we're not necessarily the most realistic, but I'm going to press shift A and add an area light. Shine this on here. And you can scale this in its local and white axis. This, you might need to increase the intensity a little bit. I suppose you can use these schismos as well. If I drive this power up a little bit, you can see I'm just shining some light onto this rooftop. We're not necessarily sure what this light source could be. It could be another building. But sometimes it's just nice to light up to be parts of your scene because it's look a little bit too dark now that I've added the contrast and the negative sunlight. So I'm just going to create a couple of these area lights. Remember if you're scaling them up, you're going to also need to increase the intensity as well because starts looking quite low. I'm going to change my render engine back to cycles now. Second, see look in final render that looks a little bit more lively to me. And I'm going to also add an area light here just because where the lampost starts leaving this patch of road exposed here. In general, larger light sources tend to make the light a little bit more soft. So using the point light, you can see the shadows coming off. I don't know if we'll be able to see an example here. Yeah, this car, you can see when it's coming off, this point light, which is very small compared to the object and it's far away, the shadow line is quite sharp here. Whereas with these huge soft shadows, the huge soft light sources, you can see the shadows very soft. And it doesn't look like the light source is as close as harsh on it. Which is quite nice because I'm just trying to add some subtle tones here for this light source might mean for the alittle bit closer. And I'm just going to increase the intensity a little bit. You can change the color as well, but for now I'm just trying to brighten it something like that. Works nice. I think I'm going to add some more light to the rooftop as well. The very last thing to do now is I want to make the background transparent because I don't like this blue color that we've got. We'll add a different color to it in a composite. In the next part, that might just be a solid black color. We go up here to the camera tab and then down to film. We just need to take this transparent option. You can see it gives this alpha checkerboard pattern using these techniques. Make sure you're happy with the lighting in your scene and then we can finish off in a final render in the next video. Good luck. 10. Final Video - Compositing: Hello everyone and welcome back. Now we're not going to waste any time because we haven't got long left of this project. So we're going to jump straight up from the layout to the compositing tab. I'm going to click Use Nodes up here. Those of you who are familiar with Blender's nodes will most likely have used the shader editor to create materials for objects in Blender. However, in the Compositor, we're going to stack a series of these nodes together to create effects over our final render. And do some slight tweaking to things like color and exposure. Now first off, it's nice that we could have a preview render of our work in a background of this editor so that we can see the result of the effects we've placed over it. To do that, we're going to add a background image to this. We go up to the view tab here. This is an panel much like in three DB port. We press to bring this up, we might need to do a render of the image first in order for it to show in the compositor. To do that, I'm just going to hit F 12 on my keyboard and it will bring up a render window. Now we just need to wait for this render to finish. My sample count here is quite high. It's on about 4,000 Just while we're working in a compositor, I'm going to change my render sample count much lower. I'll set this only to about 50. That'll probably do for now. And I'm going to hit F 12. To render, we need to add a viewer node. So this is a composite node. This is the final output of the render. But if we're previewing it in this backdrop, we need to add a viewer. So to do that, we press Shift A, like adding anything in Bender. We go down to output and we choose a viewer node. Now you can see this changes the backdrop to a black color. And if we drag the output from this image into here, we can see background. And we're going to need to press Fit or reset. You can always zoom in a little bit as well, it's to zoom out, but I'm quite happy with this. Before we go any further, the first thing I'm going to do is something we didn't really have enough time to do in the last video, and that's adding some fog to the scene. Now, there are a couple different methods of doing this. The first one is something called volumetric fog, which is very realistic because the light bouncers are calculated by the rendering engine. Cycles. Rendering engine. If we go up to the wall tab right here and under volume, I'm going to click on this and I'm going to select the principled volume. We go this one, if I hold z and go up to render, I can preview how it's going. Now the reason this might be looking strange is because it's very dense right now and it's this density value that we might change. So I'm going to set this to 0.001 might still look a little bit foggy. If I leave this to render for a bit, you can see that the background is now appear in black. And some of the light coming in from the sun and from the windows is scattering here almost into like a haze or a cloud, which is very nice. And this looks even better in perspective mode, I found because from orthographic mode, the whole scene looks quite flat. You can also change this density, this might be a little bit too low, so I can try changing this to 0.005 and this looks very foggy, which is quite nice for these cyberpunk scenes. Just be aware that adding volume to your scenes tend to increase the amount of artifacts you've got, these rendering artifacts or these little fireflies that we call. I'd recommend setting your sample count quite high if you're going to do this. As mentioned before, this volumetric fog doesn't look the best in orthographic mode. But just in case, I'm going to try rendering this out now to see how it looks. You can see here one bounce side is that the area lights that have placed around here to illuminate these buildings are actually glowing through the fog. Because as soon as the ray of light leaves this area light, it's really bouncing through the volume and back at the camera. That's something to be aware of. Sometimes it might be best to just use sun lamps, which don't do this, or you can just move your area lights further away from the scene. Another method for adding fog to your scene is not quite as realistic as the one we've just shown, but it's still quite a useful tool anyway. First off, I'm going to go to the layouts tab and I'm going to get rid of the volume that I've just added. So I'm going to click on this and then remove. I find that this only really works best in perspective mode. It might be worst if you place your camera down a street level like this for renders, but for now I'm just going to keep it up here. And I'm going to go down to the camera tab and change this type from orthographic to perspective. This should not work in a compositing tab. These are the channels of the render that we've got available to us. We need to add another one. Currently, we've just got the image output and the alpha, you can see this background. We made the background transparent in a previous video. I'm going to go through on this tab right here, the view layers properties. The 11 is missed and you can see it. This adds a new output to the render layers here. If I hit 12 to render this and then get rid of this window, we now drag this mist into the viewer. We can see that we've got this depth map. White areas are completely included by mist. The closer an object gets to the camera, it will appear more black. This is what we call a mask in compositing, and it's basically a black and white image that goes 0-1 where zero is black and one is white, or vice versa. This is indicated by a gray output in the compositor. Unlike this yellow one, which is an RGB, for the color of the image instead of this mist directly plugging into the viewer. Or the output of the image. We're going to use this as a mask to blend between this image color right here. This is the one that's going to be visible. And then we're going to be using this mask to blend between this and another color, the color of the fog. I sometimes like to add a little bit of blur in there as well, but that's quite advanced stuff for this video and bear in mind you don't need to follow along unless you actually want to add fog. I can't imagine I'll have it in my final scene because I think it looks nice enough as it is with this view node. I'm going to just drag this out a bit so I've got more room to work with now. First node we're going to add is a mixed node. This is found under color and it's a little mixed node right here. So I'm going to drag this in and notice that our image goes into slot one. Slot two is just a color. Now we could drag another image into this color to replace it instead. Right now it's just white. And that's going to take up the whole screen. And then we can reduce this by using the factors we set to 0.5 Then it's going to mix 50, 50 type in 0.5 It's going to mix 50, 50 between the output image result and the color white. And that's going to plug out into our viewers. You can see how nodes work from left to right. The input of one node is used to calculate the output instead of just using this 0.5 factor, instead I'm going to drag in the miss. Remember, this mismap here goes from black to white, 0-1 If I plug this in, using this mask to determine how much of this scene should be white and how much should be this color. Now by default, I'm not quite happy of how it's splendid because I think this is way too foggy for our scene. So I'm going to add something called a color ramp node. If a press shift A go down to converter and add color ramp, I can add this. I'm just going to hover over this gray line here to add it between those two nodes. And drag it down Cycle a bit more to work with by moving these pins about. This is a bit like a gradient in Photoshop. By moving these pins about, we can control the drop off that mis goes through. Now these look quite strange. What I might end up doing is just slept in this white one here. And decreasing this, the brightness of this from white to black. Not quite completely, but just a little bit so that our fog is a bit more subtle. You can see there's still some fog there, but it's not quite as obvious. Another thing I'm going to do is change the color of this. It's just white, but you might want to make it a little bit darker, adding some temperate colors. If you're adding like a desert and you've got a dust storm, you might want to add orange colors to your mist. Likewise, if it's very cold, then you'd add blue colors. Since this cyber punk, I think these kind of colors work quite nice for the mist, but you can play around with different results. That's a very basic set up for adding fog in the compositor. But like I said, I don't think I'll keep missing my final results. I'm just going to delete these nodes right here and have the image as the result for the render. Now that might seem like a lot of work for something that I'm not actually going to include in my final scene, but I imagine a lot of you might want to add fog. And also it's quite a simple exercise to understand the compositor. I think it was when I started doing fog that really helped me understand how this window works. Now aside from that, we're going to add some fog glow to the scene. So if I press shift A and go down to filter, we want to add some glare. So I'm going to drag this on this orange line, on this yellow line that connects between them. And you can see it's already making the windows glow quite intensely. We're going to change this mode from streaks to fog glow, and now you can see it is a bit more subtle. This has the same effect that Bloom has if you've ever worked in EV rendering engine. You can play around with some of these settings on the node, but I'm quite happy with how it looks by an alpha default. Another thing I'm going to do is tweak the color balancing of the scene. I'm going to press Shift A under Color. I'm going to choose the color balance node and drag this on between the glare and the view. Or you can put it before if you want. I can't imagine there's too much of a difference in this node. The lift is used to control shadows. The gamma, overall midtones, and again are the highlights of the scene. I'm going to tweak some of these settings. First off, want to make my shadows a little bit darker. So I'm going to go in the lift, but these are the darker bits of the scene. You can see that if I drag these down a little bit, maybe a little bit too extreme, I find you have to be very subtle with this node that adds some quite nice contrast. Then you're going to come in with my highlights. Just can never forget if you need to brighten or darken might be a little bit too extreme. Just something like this, it's already looking quite contrasted. I'm going to drag my highlights down a little bit just to make the scene feel a bit more dark. You can also use the temperature here. Shadows, I might make these blue and it has a styled approach that's too extreme drag to the center to make it a little bit les saturated. I'm quite happy with how that's looking from my highlights. I'm going to drag this more into the yellow spectrum. The yellow part of the spectrum, something like that, looks quite good to me, it might be too extreme of this. If you do, you go overboard. You can tweak these to extreme amounts. I can track this all the way up here. Then instead of trying to fine tune it towards the middle, I can just drag the overall factor down until it's zero, which is basically the wrought input for the node. But I'm just going to leave it how I set it up with most of the composites and Done, the last thing I'd like to. A nice background. So I'm going to go up to the layout tab. I going to change this camera back from perspective to orthographic because we've finished showing off the fog. So I'm going to set list orthographic and 'n to composite in tab. Do another render by hitting 12 for this background, I'd like a nice gradient in the shape of a vignette, so the corners are darker and the middle is brighter. To do this, we can use lens distortion node. I'm going to press shift A under, we can find lens distortion. Remember, you can always go up here and type in the node you want under the search, if you can't find it under the list below. So I'm going to add a lens distortion. This is going to plug into a mixed node, so once again I'm going to press shift A and just search for mix and it's going to drive the factor. So I'm going to drag the output of this mix up into the view speaking preview. Currently it's just blending between white and white. I'm going to change these colors to something else just temporarily. But why not do purple and blue make this purple slightly darker though? Then you need to set the distortion to a value, currently it's on zero, but can increase this to one. And you can see this is creating the effect of the vignette we'd like to see around the outside. I've zoomed in a little bit on my background image so I can see it better. But I'm going to press Fit for now because I'd like to see the borders of my square enda. Once I've got this mix, I'm going to then plug this into a blur node so I can just search for this. Add this on the end, and guan, I'm going to set the x value to about 500, Y value to about 400 between these values later on, we even want to increase in further try 600 on each, and that makes the effect a lot more subtle. Once you've got this, we need to combine our render on top of this background and we're going to do that using the alpha mask. We're going to add a mixed node between the blur node and the viewer. I' going to drag the output for the image render layer into this slot. And I'm going to drag the alpha render layer, the factor. You can see that now we're blending our rendered image over this backdrop. Might want to tweak these colors. I think I made in a bit too bright. It's going to decrease the value of the blue here. You can play around with these. Having realized that this we're using the input from the render layer instead of the output of the glare and color balancing that we did earlier. I'm just going to quickly reorder these nodes. I'm going to place everything here first, so they're going to add the background first just by switching this to the output. And then adding this to the input of the glare. We can see the glare again, the color balancing, and also because we're doing the color balancing, after adding the background, the tone and saturation is a bit more synchronous. Our compositing is now finished and we can up the sample count a little bit. In the renders tab from 54,096 a very high number. If we go back to layout, there's one last thing I probably should have done earlier. I'm going to go into material mode quickly and just select some of these edges on the floor plane. Just the outer ones. I'm going to extrude these downwards that if I go back into the camera view, I find this little lip in the edge just looks a bit nicer for an orthographic render. Once this is finished, we can hit 12 to do our final render. We're just going to quickly go back to the composite in tab though, and make sure that not only is this output plugged into the viewer node, that it needs to be plugged into the composite node for our final render. So I'm just going to drag this over here. That's it. Just plug the output into here. Now we should be good to render. Here we are. My render is finally finished. It took me quite a while. It took me a good few minutes because I had such a high sample count that I'm really happy with the result. Now to save this image, you just go up here to the Image button and then click on Safe As and find somewhere on your computer. Thank you for following along this course. We've covered some quite advanced and intermediate topics. Despite the simple scene, I'm hoping you can take the skills you've learned from this project into your future blender career.