Getting Started with Blender in 2025

1. Class Introduction: Want to learn three D, but don't know where to start? Or have you ever tried opening Blender and just been completely overwhelmed? Well, then this course is for you. Drill. Hi, I'm Southern Shadi. And in this beginner friendly course, getting started with Blender, I'll walk you through step by step from opening the software for the first time to creating your very own animated character, Essen here. Now, this is the first class in a series of blender classes that I am releasing, taking you from a total beginner all the way to a professional. And today's video is designed for people who have never opened Blender before. Now, I've spent over a decade working in the industry of Fortune 500 clients, and now I want to help you build that same creative career. Blender has become a major player in animation, visual effects, and tech, and it's only growing from here. Now, whether you're aiming to work in games, films or interactive media, this is one of the most valuable tools you can learn to jump start your career. So, let's get started. 2. Installing Blender: Already familiar with installing blender, you can skip this lesson. The reason I'm including it is because Blender releases builds every single day, so it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming to a new user to even know what to download. Now, downloading blender is very simple. Go to blender.org, go to Download and download the latest stable version. But I want to talk about some of the other versions you can download as well. Now, the first one I want to point out is LTS, which stands for long term support. This is designed for major productions such as video games or films that will use the same version of the software for many years. They will continue to update this software for stability. So if you plan to use Blender on a long term production, might want to consider one of these versions. Now the other area I want to point out is that they have a blender experimental section. Blender is an open source project, meaning it receives code contributions every single day. So they actually release a daily build of blender every day, and here you can access future versions if you want to test, try out, or provide feedback on new features. Now, when you're ready to click Download, make sure that you're downloading the correct version. Here I'm downloading a version for Windows, and Blender will do its best to guess what version you need. If it guesses wrong, you can click here and download the correct version for yourself. 3. Understanding the Interface: To be honest, this video might bore you a bit because we're going to walk through the interface of Blender, but this is where I see most beginners fail is they want to skip the boring basics of the intro, and then they end up getting lost and frustrated in a more intermediate tutorial later. So I ask that you bear with me and just walk through the interface with me, and I promise it'll make the rest of your learning journey that much easier. Now, once you've installed Blender, you will get a splash screen pop up here, and it may ask you a few questions here. You can go ahead and just click off to the side because we'll go into the edit preferences and set up those settings there's actually a few settings I recommend tweaking in here to make Blender a little bit easier to use by default. First is under the interface tab here, I recommend bumping up the resolution scale to 1.25. Blender has a lot of tools and features, and I believe that they're a bit small by default. Next, we're going to come down to the input tab. Now, you need to have a three button mouse if you're planning on doing three D, but if you do not, you can click Enable three button Mouse. And when you use Alt left it will serve as your middle mouse button. I also recommend having a number pad on your keyboard because using the number pad, you can actually snap through all the various views in blender. However, if you do not have one, click Emulate Numpad, and it will turn the numbers at the top of your keyboard into a Numpad function. Now if we come down to the key Map, we can actually alter the keyboard shortcuts for anything. We're just going to change a few sections up here. By default, the space bar action is set to play the timeline, but it's much more useful to set it on search. And then down here, I recommend turning on tab for pie menu. Now, it should autosave your preferences, but you can also click down here and click Save preferences as well. And so you understand what we changed here. And the Viewport mode, if I click tab, I can now switch between any of these modes by just dragging my mouse, which will be very handy later. And when I press Space Bar, I can search for anything. For example, add another cube. The search bar is really nice for beginners when you can't remember where things are in the menus, you can always hit Spacebar, and if you get a couple of the keywords right, you can generally find what you're looking for. Now, as you get more comfortable with blender, you're going to be changing settings, panels, positions, and more and finding things that you like to use regularly. Which is why I want to show you that when you go to File defaults, save Startup file, you can save your file exactly as it is. And every time you open Blender, it will open that way. If you've ever worked in Adobe, this is kind of like working with workspace presets. Look down here in the bottom right for the remainder of the series, you will see all of my keyboard inputs here. And that is to help you follow along a bit easier. So if you ever get lost with how I'm navigating, check out in the bottom right. Let's do a quick navigation of the interface. So here we have what is considered the viewport. And the viewport is where we are going to be doing all of our modeling, sculpting, texturing, lighting, and more. It's essentially the canvas of three D. And in that viewport, we have various viewing modes. So here you can see I have a scene that I've created, and we're viewing this in rendered mode. Now, you can change the mode up here. On the right here, we have viewport shading set to rendered. If I click here, it will set it to materials. In material mode, we can see the materials, but things like our lighting and HDR maps will not affect the scene. Over here, we have solid view. This view is much more performant in the view that you will be working in most of the time. And in this view, we can see all of our objects just in a solid color. Over here is the wireframe view. This is helpful for seeing the wireframe of the models that we are working with. Now, each of these modes, if we click into them, also has additional options. For example, if I go to the solid mode, I can change to MT cap and choose what I want my solid objects to look like. Now, another feature we have up here are the overlay options. So overlays will kind of turn on and off various features in the viewport. So if I click this here, we can see that I can turn off the grid or the floor. I can turn off the axis if I don't want those to be visible. Info, I can turn off extras, for example, that'll turn off all the lights I have there in my scene and many more. Now, the nice thing about the overlay is I have this quick toggle here. So if I were to switch into render view, and I wanted to get an idea of what my final render was going to look like, I can click this little toggle here, and it'll just turn off everything at once, so I can kind of get a clean view of my image. Next, let's talk about how to navigate your viewport. Now rolling in and out on your mouse wheel will zoom in and out. Holding Shift and clicking your middle mouse button will allow you to pan around the scene from the left, right, up and down. Now, just clicking in the middle mouse button will allow you to rotate. Now, if you have a numpad and you press period on that numpad, you will zoom in on your selected object, and then you will be able to rotate around that object specifically by clicking the middle mouse wheel. Now, if you're having a hard problem with the mouse control, you can also click the gizmo up here and drag this around. This is sometimes preferred by beginners. The nice thing about this Gizmo is you can click and snap to various views. So if I click here on the little Z axis here at the top, that will snap me into the top down view. Alternatively, you can use your number pads. So using one will snap me to the front view, Control one the back view, three to the side view, Control three to the alternating side view, seven to the top view, and Control seven to the this is where a lot of people really get overwhelmed in three D. It feels different than moving around in any type of two D software. So I recommend you maybe just pause the video here and just get familiar traveling around the scene. Now it would be a good time to download one of the example project files and you can utilize this to practice moving around your scene. Next in the Viewboard, let's focus on our panels. So we have two panels that can be opened by pressing in and T or by using these little arrows right here to bring them in and out. So over here on the left, which is opened by that's the tool panel. And this provides tools for whatever mode we are in. Currently, we are in object mode, so we have Gizmo tools, which we'll go through those in a minute. If I were to tab into Edit mode, you see that those tools will change by going to sculpt mode, those tools will change to sculpt tools. And on the right side here, we have what we call the N panel. This is essentially your properties, and that can be opened and closed by pressing the N E. Again, these will change based on the mode you are in. If I go into texture paint mode here, you can see that I have a tool option here which opens a bunch of texture painting tools. We'll dive into that a bit later. Right now, the only thing I want you to focus on is the item panel, which tells us the selected dimensions, scale, rotation, and location of whatever item we have selected. Now, in my version, you may see a bunch of extra tabs over here you don't have. It's because when you install add ons, they are installed over here most often where you can access them. For example, here, I can click Shortcut VUR, which is what I am using to show you my keyboard shortcuts. And you can see that I can change the properties here. This may seem a bit overwhelming, but know that for now, you pretty much only have to focus on the item up here on the top right is your outliner. Now, this outliner is basically like the file explorer of your project. It shows everything in your scene, and it also shows where your collections are and how things are grouped together. Now, by default, you will just have these three options. This right here will disable an entire collection. A collection is kind of like a folder or a composition. So you can see how I have moved all of my lights into this camera collection. You can see here, if I drag them out, I can move them out, or I can bring them back in here. Tell me, go ahead, double click this and call this camera. Lights. And I know that this collection will include all of my camera and lights. Now, if I click this checkbox, it will disable everything in that collection. And you'll see here that the lights disappear from my scene. These will also not render. Next to that, we also have an eye, which is hid in viewport. This will turn the lights off in the viewport. However, when I click Render, those lights will still be. I want to disable them on the render, I need to click Disable in Renders. You'll see here that they still appear in the Viewport. However, if I click Render here, you will see that my lights are not working in the scene. Now, you can actually add additional options up here. By clicking this filter, you can turn on other things in your outliner here. For example, if I turn on this selectable option, I can turn on whether these lights are selectble or not. So right now, if I want to select a light, I can move my light around right there. But if I click this on, I will not be able to select that light. This is great for turning off objects you don't want to accidentally click. Now, up here in the outliner, you can also search here. So I could search for example for a book, and that will bring up every object that has book in the name. I can grab that object here and I can rename it here if I want by double clicking, or if I hover over the viewport, I can press F two, and it will bring up that object and name it there as well. And it will also update over here in the outline. So if I type in dot test, we'll see that that name has over here. Now to organize in your outliner, we use collections, which are essentially like folders. So if I click up here, I can create a new collection. Let's call this one plants. And I want to move this object into my plants folder. There's two ways I can do that. One, I can grab my object here, and if I press the innkee, I can move to a collection, and I can just select plants. However, I can also locate it over here, either by the search menu or if I press the period button, it will grab the selected object here, and I can just drag that into plants. So if you ever can't find an object in your outliner, can't remember what you named it, you can always click it in the Viewport and press period and it will highlight. Like to point out that the outliner actually has various other modes and plenty of other advanced options. But the duration of this class, we're just going to use it to organize and rename our objects. Now, down here is our Properties panel. This is a deep dive of all the properties. For example, here, we have the render properties. This is where we can set our render engine, our sampling amounts, our light paths, and more. Now, there are a ton of options here that can be very overwhelming, but know that you only need to be able to adjust a few in order to get a good rendered image, we'll look at how to do that later. There are other tabs here, including the output properties tab. This allows you to set your resolution where you want to save your file and the file type. Render layers here, which is for compositing, something we won't be covering in this particular class. We have scene properties. This is where you can set things like the units you use in your scene if you want to use the metric or the imperial system or your dimensions. Here we have the world scene. This is where you can import things you might have heard of called an HDRI map. HDIs are image that you can import that will automatically light your scene using the image data. We'll cover how to use this later. And there are a lot more tabs. The ones we'll be using mostly in this class are your object property tabs, the modifier tab, and the material tab. And I'll show you how to use those later. Now, down here is an important one if you plan to do animation. I can go ahead and click Play animation here, and it will play the animation of my scene forward. I can click there again, Deposit. I can play backwards, or if I have an object selected, I can utilize these to snap in between keyframes. I can also click and drag down here to move forward and backwards in my timeline. And over here, you will see the current frame I am on. So if I set this to 200, I will snap to 200 and next to that is the frame range. So here you can see my scene starts at frame one and ends at 2:39. This will also affect how many frames are rendered when you go to render your video animation. Now, you can also navigate down in the timeline with your middle mouse button as well. You can go ahead here and you can middle mouse click and you can drag back and forth, or you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. Now, if you ever get lost, you can go to the view frame A, or you can use the home button as a shortcut key. Now, I'd like to bring your attention up here. You may have noticed these tabs up here. These tabs are preset layouts. So to change a panel and blender, you can click and drag on any corner. If I want to drag this into two, I can go ahead, click and drag there and split it down the middle. If I want to change what's displayed in this panel, I can do that up here in the top left by clicking here and choosing what's here. So, for example, if I wanted to work on my materials, I would click the Shader Editor. And now I can access my materials here and adjust them on my character over here. But, for example, if I wanted to make my character purple, I could go ahead and change them to purple there. Now the problem with this is that as a beginner, this is probably pretty overwhelming, which is why these are so handy up. Because they allow you to click through some default setups that you can use for your layouts. For example, here we have a modeling layout, a sculpting layout, a UV editing layout, a texture painting layout, and a material editing layout. These all come packaged right in blender and open it up, and they're intended to make it easier for you to navigate through the various features of Blender. Now, up here on the top left is where I can access the menus for whatever mode I am in. So if I click Add mesh cube, I can add a cube to my scene. But I can also do that by pressing Shift A and adding a cube. Now, blender is a very shortcut heavy program, and this is very intimidating so if you can't remember the shortcut, try checking the menus. And the nice thing about blender is that if you hover over anything, it will tell you what the shortcut is. So if I hover over add here, I can see that it's telling me it's Shift A. However, if I grab an object and go into the object menu here, you can see that I get a various selection of tools and features I can utilize. And a lot of these will also have the keyboard shortcut set right to the right. And if all else fails and you cannot remember where something is in the menus, we have set our search bar to space. So one thing about the menus is that you might notice that they're changing. So here in object mode, I have add and object. However, if I hold tab and switch to edit mode here, we can see that the menus change. And now suddenly we have things that allow us to manipulate or edit the mesh, vertex, Edge, Base, UV, and more. So just know that whatever mode you are in will change the context menu up here to provide you with the tools that you can utilize in that mode. Now, as a beginner, you may just want to stick to the search bar as this is not context sensitive, and this will work across all modes to help you find what you might be looking for. 4. Mastering Object Mode: I think this is where people start to get a bit overwhelmed in blender. It's because there's two ways to manipulate your models and blender, and that comes in the form of object mode and edit mode. And these next two videos, we're going to dive into what those do in depth. But in general, object mode allows you to move, scale, and rotate your object around the scene. It also allows you to apply materials, modifiers, constraints, and more, which we'll dive into later. Whereas in edit mode, we can actually go inside of the model and we can edit the edges, the faces, and the vertices to change the look of the model. So with that being said, let's dive in and take a look at object mode first. Now let's talk a bit about Gizmo. Gizmos are a huge part of placing your objects in your scene. Now, you may have noticed here and when I had my objects selected, this little axis indicator shows up. This is called the Gizmo, and we can access that over here on our tool menu. Remember, press T to open this if it is not visible. Now, the ones you want to focus on are the move tool, the rotate tool, and the scale tool. Move will let you move on each axis as selected here. If I grab in the center circle, it will allow me to move from whatever angle I'm at in the viewboard. And then you'll notice these little squares. So this will allow me to move just on the X and the Z axis, and this will allow me just to move on the Y and the Z axis. So this is a convenient way if you don't want to move it one direction. Now, the same thing pretty much applies to every Gizmo. Here we have the rotate gizmo, and I can rotate across each axis there. With the rotate Gizmo, if I click out on the white circle, I can rotate just based on the view there. Or if I grab in the center here, I can just kind of free rotate it from whatever angle I'm at we have the Scale Gizmo here, and this operates just like the move Gizmo, allowing you to scale just on certain axis, or you can grab this right here from the center and just scale it in and out uniformly. Now, you may notice one Gizmo down here called the Transform Gizmo. This combines all of them into one Gizmo. And although this is convenient, it can sometimes be difficult to select and isolate what you want. Now, since this is big Gunnar course, I'm going to do my best not to use keyboard shortcuts. But three that you should really know are GR and S. It stands for grab, rotate, and scale. If I grab an object here, I can press G, and then I can move that around. If I press S, I can scale that up. And if I press R, I can rotate that. I can also lock it to an axis. So since it's a three D object, we have a Z X and Y axis. If I press R and Z, I will only rotate around that Z axis. And that goes for everything. If I press G and X, I will only move along the X axis. So here, if I select my object, you can see here that I have this small orange dot to represent the origin this is where I will scale from, rotate from, and snap to. I can change origin points in a few ways. I can tab into Edit mode, and I can move the object around my origin point. Now when I tab open, you see that my origin point stayed in position, but my object moved around it. So I'm going to go ahead and undo that. I can also take my origin point and search for origin to three D geometry. And what that will do is try and center the origin point on my object. Again, I'm going to undo that. Lastly, I can use the three D cursor to set my origin point. Let's talk a bit about the three D cursor. You might have noticed it kind of hanging out in scenes here. I can hold Shift, right click and move my cursor anywhere in the scene. And what this allows me to do is to add objects here, move objects here, or more. So I'm going to press board slash on my Numpad. That will allow me to focus on one object here, and I want my origin point to be here at the bottom. So first, I'm just going to set this off to the center to show you as an example. If I come down here to the bottom of my mesh here, I can shift right click there, and that three D cursor will snap to it. Now if I search for origin to three D cursor, we'll see that the origin point snaps and my origin point has returned to the bottom of the model. Now to return to my scene, I can just press the forward slash again, and that will just bring everything in the scene back. So pressing Ford slash allows you to focus on one object, which is really handy. But we can also just hide objects when we're seeing. Let's say that I don't want to deal with these cups while I'm trying to place my teapot. I can press H on those cups, and they will disappear. That just stands for hide. But if I come up here, you can see that all it's really doing is turning off the eye that we see in the liner here. I can just turn those back on and off that way as well. Now, to bring all hidden objects back, I can press Alt and that will unhide everything hidden in the scene. Well, let's talk about this three D cursor more. I can also snap objects. So let's say that I want my teapot over here, but you can see that my table's kind of lumpy. So if I move it over there, it's actually just kind of floating above the table. Well, I can use a three cursor for that. So I will shift right click here. I will grab this object, and if you hold shifts, I can snap to the cursor. Alternatively, if you don't want to try and remember that keyboard shortcut, you can also just search for selection to cursor, and that will move it over to the cursor. The other thing with a cursor is that we can also add objects. So if you remember in the previous video, we showed that you could add objects into your scene through the ad menu. So if I click add up here, go to mesh cube, that cube will spawn in wherever my cursor is. Now, if you ever want to reset your cursor to the center of the scene, you can just hold Shift C, and that'll reset the cursor exactly to zero, 00. You can also control the cursor up here under the view menu. So if I click around here and you can't remember the keyboard shortcut, I can just tab zero into this, and it will reset it back to the center of the scene. Now, another cool thing is that when you're working in fields and blender, since there's always three fields for the different coordinates, if you click at the top one and drag down and let go, you can change the value of them all at once. Okay, so you might have noticed that when I'm selecting an object here, we get a nice yellow outline around it. But I can actually select multiple objects. If I grab multiple objects here, I can go ahead and move all those objects at once. I'm just pressing the GK there and move. Now, if I right click, I will cancel that action, and it will return back to the original position. But you might notice here that when I selected additional objects, one was highlighted in bright yellow while the others turned orange. Whatever object is yellow is your active object. If I hold shift and reclick the table, you see that now it is the active object. That can be very useful because we can perform certain actions that utilize the active object. Let's look at an example. Let's use the active object to snap some of these decor to it. So I'm going to move this teapot up here. Let's pretend that we've just dragged it into our scene, and we're trying to get it onto the table. Well, what I can do is grab my teapot here and grab the table. Now the table is my active object. Now, if I hold Shift S, I will get my snap menu. I understand keyboard shortcuts can be difficult, so you can also find it under here under the Object Snap. What I want to do is snap the selection to the active. So if I do that, you'll see that it will snap it down to the origin point of the table, which I have conveniently set at the top, and then now I can move this around my table. Let's talk a bit about transform orientations. This references how things move along the axis in three D space. So here ICN, you can see I have the X axis, the Y axis, and the Z axis. This is considered a global ordinate. And by default and blender, when I grab my objects here, they will follow that system. So the schismo will move along the X axis, the Y axis, and so on. However, we can change that pivot. If we come up here, we can change this to various things. The two you need to focus on are global and local. Now, local is different than global that follows the object. Right now, the object is matching the global space. But let's say that I want to rotate the object on the Z axis here. If I go back to move, you can see that the object's local Y axis is moved over here. This can be really helpful for kind of fine tuning and placing objects in your scene. So if I go back here to Global, you'll see here that it returns back to the X and Y axis and moving there. I can move it locally on its own axis. Now, this may be a difficult concept to grasp at the early stages of using blender, but I promise this will make more sense as you begin to use it more. Let's talk about pivots. If I grab an object here up next to the coordinates here, we'll see that we have a transform pivot point. By default, it will be set to median pivot. What that means is that if I grab a selection of objects here, it will move the Gizmo to the median center point of all those objects. Form from that point. Now, a great example of this is that if I use the scale Gizmo here, we can see that I scale everything uniformly together from that median center point. However, there's another pivot point that we can use called individual origins. This will transform based on the individual origin of every object. So if I were to scale again, you can see that everything is scaling from its own origin. This is a very helpful one. However, we probably won't use it in this class. Now, we also have the option to pivot around the three cursor. And this is more helpful than you might think. If I grab the table here, go to Object Snap, do cursor to selected, my cursor will snap to the selected object. Now, if I grab this chair, for example, I'm going to switch here to top few by pressing seven, and I go Rotate. We'll see that the chair can rotate around the table so that if I wanted to maybe set this chair next to this chair, I could equally rotate around the table very simply. The three D cursor can be very helpful in specific use case scenarios. Now, next to the pivot point, we will also see that we have the option for snapping. And by enabling that, we can set it so that our objects snap to the grid or various other elements. So you can see here that we can actually snap it onto another object. And that can be very handy for placing objects. Here I have a cube, and you can see here that under the snap options, I have it set to snap to Vertex, and I've also set it to align rotation to the target. I can move this cube around and place it somewhere on my sphere, if I wanted. Now, one useful thing to do in object mode is that we can parent objects to other objects. So here you see I have a tab and I have a can, and I want that tab to follow the C. Now, there's two ways I can do this. One, I can combine these into one object. By grab this object here and click this object and search for join, I can make them one object. This may not be how you always want to do things, though. Sometimes you may want to keep them as separate objects. For example, here, I want to be able to have the tab have its own origin point so that I can animate this tab if I want to. In that case, I would want to parent this object to this object. And to do that, what I do is grab the object that I want to follow the other, first, then I grab the object I want it to follow, and I can hit Control P for parent. And you'll most often want to choose object keep transform. What this means is that it will parent to the object and keep its current position, which is the transform position. So if I go ahead and click that. Now when I move it around, these objects will follow each other. Around in your project files, you will see that there is a Bird's Nest project. Now that we've learned how to use some of the object mode tools, I want you to go ahead and open this Bird's Nest project, and I want you to go to the Ad menu and try and add a object in here and see if you can create a little scene using just the object mode tools you've learned. 5. Mastering Edit Mode: Where the real fun begins. We're going to dive into Edit mode and learn some of the editing tools. This is where we can actually start modeling our character. So let's dive in and get started. Up until this point, we've been focused on how to manipulate objects. Well, objects are just models in blender, and models, if I tab here into Edit mode, are made up of vertices, edges, and faces. And this is how the computer is able to calculate these models and render them in a way that we can see them visually. And that's where Blenders Edit Mode comes into play. Allows us to manipulate that data. And there's a couple ways we can enter it. If you remember, we had the Pie menu. So if you hold tab, you can go and select Edit Mode with an object, or you can just press tab and you will enter Edit Mode. You can also come up here and enter Edit Mode through this menu. Now, when you tab into Edit mode, you can then begin adjusting these positions with the move, scale and rotate. Up here, you'll see that you have the option to select vertex, edges, or faces. And when you grab those, you can then move those around and edit your model. Now, it's important to note that we can also utilize the wireframe solid mode, material mode, and rendered mode all here in the edit mode as well. More often than not, you will be working in the wireframe so that you can select through your object. You see there when it is see through, we can grab things on both sides at once or in the solid view here. So let's look at a few of the tools we have over here to work with our objects. I'm going to go ahead here and bring this all into one window by clicking and dragging there. Now, just like an object mode, we have the Gizmos remove, rotate, and scale, and our local and our global transforms work the same, and so do our pivots and our three D cursor. So all of that's the same as object. But the difference is now that we can grab multiple pieces of our model and move them specifically. So if I go here and grab these right here, I can then begin kind of moving out the edge of the can there to adjust the shape. Let's say that I want to make a small kind of dent in the can right there. Then I can come over here and switch there with the vertex mode and bump that in even more. Now a can looks like it's been smashed at the top. Let's look at the different selection modes. So we've already looked at vertex edge and face. I'm going to go ahead and grab face here. Now, in solid view, if I click and drag here, it will only grab the faces that I see visible. In Wireframe view, as you kind of saw earlier, if I click and drag here, you will see that it grabs faces on both sides. And up here, we have various selection modes as well. So by default, it'll be set to select box, and that allows you to click and drag a box. And if you want to deselect that, you kind of either click off to the side or if you press A, that will also deselect. If you press A again, when nothing is selected, it will select everything. The other thing you can do is press the key, and the key will select various objects. So you can see here it's selecting the object piece by piece, which can be very useful. Now, under Box select, we have the select circle, which is essentially just a cursor that allows us to kind of paint on and select our geometry. And if you hold control, you can then deselect certain portions. This one's very useful as well. And then, lastly, we have the select Lasso, which allows you just to draw a lasso around pieces, and it will select everything as I mentioned, we can just use the gizmos here, and we can move these pieces of our geometry around. However, we can also utilize this ball off up here called proportional editing. And this can be very helpful. When I click this on here, what it is going to do when I move is give me the circle. So I've pressed the Giki and now I can use the mouse wheel to make this circle bigger or smaller, which allows me to try and proportionally kind of influence all the topology around my selection there. Whereas, if I roll this all the way down, you can see I'm only affecting the faces I have selected. Can press O to turn this on and off or you can click it on and off up here. There's also different follow off types here that you can play with as well. Now, the advantage of this is that say, I want to grab a edge loop up here, I'll go into wireframe mode. I will grab this row of objects here, and I will switch back into solid view. And now if I press the SK to scale, you can see here that I'm creating a bubble here. But if I rotate out that thing here, you can see that it can make the top of the can slightly smaller than the bottom of so this is very useful for kind of editing large portions of the mesh softly. And I'll talk about a few more helpful shortcuts here. So first, if you hold the Z k and drag, you can choose what mode you want to be in visually. So wireframe, solid or material view. Just tapping the Z k will change you from solid to wireframe, something you'll probably be doing often, so that's a good one to remember. And then I also want to talk about Alt clicking. So if I Alt click a line here, it will select that loop. So a loop is a single connection of faces or edges that go around a model. You can see how that would be very helpful. As an example here, if I switch over to edge mode and I grab this loop right here by Alt clicking it, I can then shift there and scale just to move in and around that edge loop. So that's another very helpful one to know as well. Now we're going to dive into some of the tools over here, but there's one last thing I want to show you, and that's how to delete elements as well. So let's grab this face here. If I go ahead and click this face and press the XCliq, I will open the delete menu, and I can choose what I want to delete. So if I click Delete face, it will delete that face there. I'm going to undo that. But let's say that I have edge loops here that I don't want these lines. So let's say I Alt click one. If I press X and delete the edges, it will leave a hole in our mesh. I'm going to undo that. If I press X and dissolve edges, it will do its best to redraw that model without that edge. Another one that is very helpful. Let's take a look at some of these tools over here in Edit Mode. Now, to use the Edit tools, we're going to go ahead and use a simple up here. Not quite as exciting, but it makes it very obvious how each tool works. Now, the first tool I want to show you, one of the most common ones is the extrude tool here. So I'm going to grab the faces up here. I'm going to grab the top face here and I'm going to click the extrude region. And this is going to give us a tool that we can work. We click this plus and track it up here, you'll see that it will extrude that object. Here, we can grab the circle and move what direction it extrudes in, and by extruding, we can just keep adding geometry to our object. Now if I reset here, we have the inset faces. The inset faces oftentimes works in conjunction with the extrude tool. So here when I click Inset face, I get this little circle, and you can see here that now I can drag that in, and it will just inset the face on that top face, adding more geometry. Then I could go ahead and grab the extrude tool, move that out, click Inset face. Drag that in, click the extrude tool, move that down. And now we have somewhat of a kind of trash can type box here. Now, the bevel tool here will add bevels. If I go ahead here, and I click and drag this, you'll see how it would add bevels to all the edges of the faces selected. Now, if I roll up and down on my mouse wheel there, you'll see that it adds geometry, smoothing that out even further. Now, beneath that, we have the loop cut tool. This right here will add a loop cut around whatever portion of the mesh that you have selected. And it'll automatically edit right there to the center. Now, if I click here and drag, I can decide where I want to set it to split the mesh that way as well. But by default, it will always be on the center line of the loop that you have selected. If I press A and select everything, I'm going to select all my faces and right click. You'll see here that I get a bunch of other editing tools that we can utilize. I'm going to go ahead and click subdivide here. What that will do is take every face and subdivide it. If I twirl this menu up here, you can see that I get more options. So I can go ahead here and click more cuts, and then I can add geometry there a cube that we can then use to have more control over editing our cube. Now, here you can see that we have a hole in our cube and we want to fix that. So what I'm going to do is go into Edgemde here, grab these four edges, and then click F, and that will fill it with a face. Now, here you can see what I have looks like one cube, but this is actually two models. If I grab my move gizmo here, you can see these are two models that are separated. I want to join these models, and there's two ways I can do that. One, if I come up here to Vertex mode, I can click and drag here, select both of these vertices and search for Merge and click at Center, and that will merge those at the center of those two. But since all these vertices are close to one another, I can also just grab the entire model, I'll press A and search for merge by distance. You see here that I can set the distance minimum that it will merge by. I've removed eight vertices, as you saw just now taking a look at the knife tool, all we need to do there is click and drag around on our object, clicking every time we want a point. We'll go ahead, close off that loop. I'm going to hit Enter, and now you can see that we've cut geometry onto our object and created a custom face. Now, this highlights an issue I'd like to point out that happens with a lot of beginners, which is that you can make models with bad topology. Topology is how your mesh is structured, a layout of the edges, faces, and verses. And good topology makes your models easier to edit, animate and shade. Bad topology causes artifacts, weird shading or broken deformations. So signs of good topology are that your faces are mostly quads, which are just faces with four vertices, or it has clean edge flows, meaning you can select loops that follow the shape of an object. It's also important to note that oftentimes good topology means that you have even spacing between your faces, and there's no guns, which are faces with five plus size. Now, topology is a pretty advanced subject. And in our future class covering modeling specifically, we'll dive into this in much greater detail. And up here, we also have a snap mode. And if I go ahead and turn the snap mode on, you'll see that we have some good options here. So if I go ahead and grab vertex here and grab this vertex here, I can actually snap this to other vertexes on the object, for example. Now that we've learned some of the edit mode tools, why don't you go ahead and open the final hikiPject here, ab in edit mode, and maybe make some changes to the character here. Maybe you want to change how many hair he has or the size of the hair. Maybe you want to go ahead and change the beak. Maybe you think he should be taller and skinnier or shorter and fatter. Go ahead and play around and try and make it your own design. 6. What are Modifiers?: Up, we're going to take a look at modifiers. Now, modifiers are essentially effects or tools that we can drag and drop and put on our objects to adjust them. There's a lot of things you can do from modifiers, and we're going to look through some of the most common ones you'll be using in blender. Now, over here, when we select a object and blender, you may have noticed this wrench icon, which is the modifiers panel. Now you'll notice I have more options down here, and that's because I have add ons installed. By default, you'll have these categories right here, and you can also click here to search. And I want to point out that one of the key advantages of modifiers is that they're generally considered non destructive, meaning that you can apply them to their model without actually editing the geometry. This means that if you delete a modifier, your geometry will go back to the way it was before, as opposed to previously how we saw in Edit mode. Once you edited a geometry, unless you control Z to undo it, those changes are permanent. So let's use this robot as an example for all of these modifiers here. So here you can see the topology of my robot. If I go ahead here and turn on the subdivision modifier, you'll see that that topology gets denser. Now, you can see here that I can turn the levels up in the viewport and that will get denser and denser as it goes. Now, it's worth noting the more you do this, the slower it will run in your viewport because you're adding more data into your viewport. Now, the advantage of using something like a subdivision modifier over actually editing your mesh to subdivide it is that it can help smooth out some of the harder corners on your lower pot modeling, but go ahead. Zoom in here and click on and off. You can see how it's smoothing out these edges, and it's also more performing because you can just turn it on and off in here and then only use it in your render viewport. So you can work on a low poly model so that your scene doesn't lag, and then just when you hit render, it'll go ahead and apply that subdivision. Now, next up is the mirror modifier. Here you can see I have half a robot, and if I turn on the mirror modifier, it goes ahead and fills in that other half for me. This is really nice because if say, I want to change the length of the fingers here, to see how it's changing that on both sides. This means you only have to edit half your model, texture, half your model. Render half your model. So it's a pretty performant option. Now, here you can choose what axis that it will mirror over. By default, it will be the X, which is the one you will use most often, and it's going to mirror over the origin point here. So it's very important that your origin point here is at the center of your character and that you have a line of edges here that goes directly across the middle. That way it can mirror properly. Now, over here we have the merge option. What this will do is merge these connecting vertices here so that this appears as one object to blender rather than two separate objects. Let's take a look at this cube to show this as a better example. But go ahead here into Edit mode and I grab one of the vertex here and move this over. You can see how the mirror mode is failing, and now there is a hole in our object. That's because the mirror mode is going to merge based on distance, and in this case, it needs everything to be centered on the origin point there in order to work properly. For example, here, if I grab my geometry here and move this off to the side, you can see that the mirror function breaks and the object no longer connects. But if I go ahead and turn my distance way up here, it will continue to seek until it can connect them. However, once you get into larger values like this, you're likely going to cause complications and connect parts of your model that you don't want to. So it's best to always have the center line of your model directly there on your origin. Let's take a look at the array modifier. Now, the array modifier just creates simple arrays on your object. Now, there's a lot of advanced options here. We're just going to focus on the basics for today. So set the count up here that will determine how many duplicates are created of your object. Down here is the relative offset, and you can see here that it is factor X, Y, and Z. This will determine what axis it moves on. So if I switch this over to Y, so zero and one here, you'll see that it begins moving back on the Y axis. This factor here is determined by the size of your object. So one means that it will be exactly the edge of your object. So if I type in two, you'll see here that we get one chicki width of the Y, another chickiwid and then our object here. And you can also stack modifiers, and the array is a perfect example to show that. I'm going to go ahead here and search for array, or you can come down here, click this drop down menu and duplicate. Now what we want to do is make this so that they duplicate this way and form a grid. We'll set R Y here to zero. We will set two on the X factor, and you see that now we are duplicating our first array across here, and now we have a little grid of chickies. This is really great if you're into motion graphics and creating abstract designs. The bevel modifier adds a bevel where you can set the amount of the bevel, the segments of the beble and the angle at which the bevels kick in. The difference between this and edit mode is that you can turn this on and off and it's non destructive. Now, the Boolean modifier here allows you to take one object, pick another object, and choose to intersect, unionize, or differentiate those. Now, I recommend using the manifold solver as it will usually be the best option. So here you can see I have a cube and a cylinder, which are two separate objects. Well, the Boolean modifier here, if I go ahead and turn off the cylinder visibility, you can see that we're using it to cut a hole on our object using the boolean. This is a really great thing if you want to do robotics modeling, vehicles or more. I can also click on Union, and it will combine those into one object. Or if I do intersect, it will show only where the objects intersect. This is a great point to add that again, you can stack modifiers. If I go ahead and add a bevel here, you'll see here that I'll begin adding beveling onto those edges. The solidify modifier here just thickens objects, and I can choose the thickness there. If I turn this off, you can see this is just a flat plane. This is great for doing things like, for example, creating clothes on a little character. Or more commonly, it's actually used to add thickness to glass in various renders. The decimate modifier will remove topology from your objects. So here you can see I have 50,000 thousand faces on this object, and I can go ahead and bring this down and reduce it down to something like 10,000 faces. Now, you can see here it's effectively ruined by topology. Now, I wouldn't recommend this for objects that you plan to animate or continue to edit, but if you have a bunch of props in your background and you just want to reduce the topology to speed up your scene, this is an effective way to do that. Make sure to apply it because it won't actually reduce the geometry until you've applied it. Now, to apply a modifier, you just click here on the apply tab. Once I do that, the changes will be permanent. It's important to note, though, that if you have multiple modifiers here, the order in which you apply them matters. Here you can see I have an array modifier, and it is reducing the geometry of both of these. So if I wanted to apply these modifiers effectively, I'd want to go from the bottom up. So go ahead here, click Apply, click Apply, and then everything would be permanent. Now, the lattice modifier is one of my favorite modifiers to play with. What you want to do is add a lattice object, which you can do up here. Once that object is in the scene, you'll want to edit that in edit mode to be about the size of your character like I have here. After that, you can go ahead and add a lattice modifier to your character and then choose the lattice that you have created in this field here. Now, once you have the lattice, you can come down here to the lattice Data tab and change the resolution. So if I go ahead here and add a few knots there, you'll see that my lattice nail has more resolution. Fun thing about the lattice modifier is that now when I tap in edit mode and it's attached to our character, I can grab these and begin playing with proportions. So I can go ahead and scale up here and you can see how it just kind of broadly changes our character. It's a pretty fun tool to play with. You can also use the lattice modifier for some fun warped effects by moving your character through the lattice modifier, as you see here. However, if you want the lattice modifier to stay attached to your character, grab the modifier, then your object, it Control P, object, keep transform and now they will move together and stay as one. You can also apply the lattice modifier and make the changes permanent and delete the when we went to animate our characters, we take things like this rig and apply them to our character and utilize the bones to animate our character. Now, this is a pretty advanced process, and I'm planning on an entire class covering this. However, I'd like to point out that these are applied using a modifier, as well, and we will look at how to do this in our next lesson in a very simple way. Now that we've taken a look at modifiers, how about you open the robot project file blend, add a lattice modifier to our character here, and adjust the proportions to your liking. Remember when you're done, you can go ahead and click Apply over on the modifier stack to make your changes permanent. 7. Model a Character: Going to take some of what we've learned and apply it to creating the chicki character ourselves. Now, first, I want you to do is open a new scene here and we're going to delete the camera and just work with the default cube. For now, I don't want this in the way, so I'm going to click the cube and press H to hide it. Now, if you've downloaded the class project files, we're actually going to use some reference images. You can just drag those into the Viewboard or you can go ahead, open your viewpoort here. Come up to Blenders file browser and locate the files. I have mine here, and I have the front view and the side. What I'm going to do is come over here and come to my front view. So I'm going to press one on the number pad or click this little negative Y up here. Go to drag this in to the front view here. Then I'm going to go to the side view by pressing three or clicking the little X here, and I'm going to drag in the side view. I no longer need this file browser, so I'm going to click this, drag it over to close it. Now I want to snap the pictures of the chicken here to the center so that we can use those as a center reference. So I will go ahead and name these up here. I'll grab the front one and name it front ref, and I'll grab the side one and name it side. What I'm going to do is make sure my three D cursor centered by hitting Shift C. Then I'm going to snap into front view again so that I can see my front object here. Going to grab this object, come up to object, snap snap to cursor, and now we have our object perfectly centered. Let's go ahead and do the same thing for the side view here. L this here, grab the side view. And this time, we'll use the keyboard shortcut. So it's at Shift S, and we will do selection acursor. Now we have both of these reference images in a way that we can use them to reference with our model. Now, if I click down here on the data project, you can see we have a little picture icon, and here we can set some settings. The depth here will determine how it displays in front of your model. We're going to click front on both of these. That way, they are always visible. However, what we are going to do is click the opacity down here and turn this down to something like 0.15. Just for 15% and do that on both of these. Now when we rotate back and forth in front and side view here, we will be able to model with our cube. I'll go ahead and turn that visibility back on and use this as a reference. Now to begin modeling, we're going to take this layout we have here and split this into two screens here. We're going to click for the front view on one layout and the side view on the other layout. Now we can edit our character on both views at once. Now we're going to make a very simple model here. So let's grab this object here. We're going to add a modifier, go to search subdivision surface, and let's pump this up to something like two. Now we can see here that when we tab into Edit mode, we have our cube here, but we're also displaying the shape of our sphere that is being subdivided. So I'm going to press A to select everything, grab the move Gizmo here, and move this up on the Z axis here and bring the bottom of our cube to the bottom of our character there. Now, when I select this, I want to select on both sides here. So I'm going to go ahead and do the wireframe mode. Now I want to click and drag my box select up here, I can go ahead and begin moving my box to match the shape of the character. So I'm just going to match the front and the back edges there, just like that. And now we have a general shape around our character. Now let's use some of those editing tools that we learned. So if I want to make this subdivision surface snap to an edge, I can go ahead and tighten up the edge loops. So I'm going to hit Control R or use the loop cut here tool. Click there in the center, and you can see how the subdivision surface kind of snaps to the new edge loops. I'm going to grab this edge loop here with the boss select that I just created. Going to grab the Gizmo here and move this down. And you can see how it's starting to flatten out that subdivision. Perfect. That's exactly what I wanted. Now I'm going to grab these two up here and I'm going to drag up a little higher so that the model itself matches the top of our character. Now we can drag across here in the bottom. We're going to grab the scale tool here, and we're just going to go ahead and scale here on the X axis just to bring the width of the character out. Feel like we could use another edge loop here in the center to kind of add this little chunky belly that our character has here. So let's grab the loop up tool. Click here at the center. I'll go back to the box Seck tool. And with that selected, I can go ahead, grab that, make sure that's selected there in the wireframe view. We'll grab our Gizmo here. We will bring this down, grab our scale here, grab the X, and we're going to move this out just to give our character a little bit of width there in the center. Now, I want the top of the head to come in a little bit. I think that gives it a more appealing shape. So I'm going to click and drag up here, select that, and I'm going to grab the circle here and just scale this in all the way. So now you can see that our character is starting to get that little kind of gum drop shape. And then what we're going to do is start adjusting the back here. So you can see that we have almost this kind of like little tapered back. We'll go ahead. We will grab this, take our move gizmo there, grab it in the center there, move that there, grab here, move that up there. Now, if I tap back out into optic mode here, you can see that we have a simple little shape for our chicken. Now, I want to go ahead and add a bit of a belly there. So I'm going to tap back into Edit mode there. And we're going to need another loop. T instead of the tool, let's use Control R. So let's hit Control R, click there, and now we get some geometry. Now we can grab this middle tool here and I'm going to turn on the proportional editing tool here, which will adjust everything around the edges there, and I'm going to rotate that out there until we kind of get this belly to poke out. So I had the general shape there. So now what I want you to do is just go ahead and grab these and just begin kind of moving them around until you get them into the position that you like. Perfect. Now, when you're adjusting them, just make sure that you're using the outline of the subdivision surface. And here you can see that we're getting a nice little chicki shape. I'm pretty happy with this shape. Continue to adjust yours until you're happy as well. Now, you might notice that we have all these faces that are clearly visible. And this is called flat shading. Now, if I right click here and click Shade Smooth or shade Auto Smooth, what it will do is try its best to smooth out between those faces. And this is great because our character can stay low polyly and render quickly, but we can still get that smooth shading look. If you want, you can also add another level of subdivision. However, make sure that you also up it in the render view here. These are the levels in your view port, and these are the levels on the render. So if we were to render it out now, it would still render low poly. So I'm going to bump both of mine up to three. Now let's go ahead here and look at how we can make this simple little beak that our character has. So we are going to hit Shift A or come to the add menu, whichever you prefer, and we are going to add a small cylinder. Now, this cylinder is too heavy for the topology that we need. So we're going to twirl this up, and we're going to reduce the vertices from something like 32 to 16. That'll make it not so high poly. On object mode here, let's go ahead and rotate this into space here. So I'm going to move this here. I'm going to press the R key to rotate so that those lines are familiar with there and the origin point is there. Then we're going to press the S key and just scale down until it's about the size of our beak there and get it into a good spot. Just pressing the R and the Sky and the GQ to place it. You can also use the Gizmos, if you like. And now we're going to tab into Edit mode and make some changes. But first, I want to show you something. I open the Transform panel here, we can see that with the cylinder selected, that we have a rotation of 65 and then it's scaled down to 0.084. Now, this scale can sometimes interfere with certain tools, such as the Bevel tool. You usually want this to be set at one if you're going to use tools like the Bevel tool. So what we can do is actually apply that scale. So you can apply it under the object menu, or if you hit Control A, you can apply the rotation in scale. By click that, we see that now this object scale rotation have permanently been set to this position. So Blender now sees this as an object with a scale of. Perfect. That's exactly what we want. Now, let's grab this object and tab into Edit mode. In the front view over here, I'm going to switch to face mode. I'm going to grab this face here, and I'm going to use the Bevel tool. Another way we can access it is to hit Control B. But hit Control B and drag. You can see here that I begin creating kind of a pointed tip. If I rotate up on my mouse wheel there, you'll see that I will add geometry. Perfect. Now I'm going to go back here to wireframe mode, and I'm going to switch to vertex so you can come up here, grab the vertex button. And then I'm going to use the circle select, and I'm just going to drag across this line back here. I'm going to right click here, and then I'm going to open the scale Gizmo or press S and scale. Now you'll notice here everything is scaling, and we're zoomed in so we can't see what we actually have the proportional editing on. Now, this is the common mistake that people make by leaving that on. So if you ever notice your geometry is moving funny, come up here and check if your proportional editing is on. I'm going to turn that off, and I'm going to scale this up. And you can see here that I've given him quite a big. Now, if you want, you can scale this beak down, make it smaller, or you can adjust it to whatever size you want. Now, again, we're going to grab this geometry here. I'm going to turn off this mode up here, which is called X ray, which allows me to see through. Click that. I'm going to right click and hit Shade Smooth here. And now we have a little beak on our nose. You can notice here that the shading looks kind of funny. That's because of what we talked about earlier with topology. I'm going to rotate around in here so you can see inside of the head. If I come in here and I turn on the wireframe mode, you can see that we have a big gun on the back of our beak here. Now, it's not noticeable up here because it's a very small one, it doesn't interfere with the shading, but it does back here. But we don't actually need this face because it's inside of the model anyway. We're just going to get rid of this face. Let's press X and delete face. Now, if I tap out into object mode here and go back into my side view, you can see here that the shading has been fixed. So that's why having good topology is important. Now, if you want, I would recommend maybe taking this beak here and going ahead, grabbing these faces here on wireframe mode, and maybe just pull those a little bit further back into your object. This will make sense later when we animate. We don't want the beak to separate from the object. Let's look at how we can create this little hair on top of our character. We're going to use a new object type called a curve type. So I'm going to add a Bezier curve here, and you see that it's added a curve in the bottom. I zoom in on this. This is what it looks like from the top view. I'm just going to revert back here. Now, what we want to do is rotate this 90 degrees, and we can actually do that very simply with a keyboard input. So I'm going to his R I'm going to type in 90 on my Numpad. And you see that that has rotated 90 degrees. I want to rotate it 90 degrees again, so I'm going to press R and 90. But I don't want it to rotate back flat like we had it. So I'm going to rotate it on the Z axis. After I've pressed R and then 90, I can now press Z, and it will rotate there on the Z axis. However, the curve is facing the wrong direction. But if I press the minus key, it will turn it into negative 90. So by pressing R negative 90z, I told Blender I wanted to rotate 90 degrees on the Z axis. Now, this might feel overwhelming now, but this is a common way to edit and model and blender, so I recommend you practice and get good at working with rotating by the degree that you want. Now I'm going to press Enter to apply that. Now I want to apply that to the object as well, so I press Control A and apply the rotation. Now if they come over here to the panel, we'll see that this is now the default rotation of the object. So with this curve, what we're going to do is we're going to tab into edit mode here, and you'll see that we get some weird controls. And that's because this is a curve. If you've ever used Adobe software, you'll recognize this. We have the vertex points, and then it tries to draw a curve line to the other point. Just how that curve is drawn, we have these handles here, and we can smooth out or sharpen that based on the position of those handles. We can also grab everything and press S to scale those. So what I'm going to do is grab this handle here, press the Z key to lock it and the G key to move it, and we're going to move it up to the base of our head here. Now I'm going to grab this handle up here, press the G key, and I'm going to move this down to the tip. You see right now that our curve is really screwed up. What we're going to do is rotate this here. So we'll grab this going to press R, rotate. Press A to scale that down. I'm going to grab this bottom curve here. This curve is way too big for our hair, so we're going to press A and scale this down here, and I'm going to rotate this. You see here we're starting to get the look of a hair. Now, here's where you can have some fun to really customize the look of your hair. What I want to do is add another subdivision in between these two. So another point on the curve. So I'll grab both of these, right click, subdivide. And you see here we get a new point here in the center. I'm going to click off, grab that. And you can use the move Gizmo or the GK We're just going to move this into place here. Now we can begin playing with the handles here until you get something that we're happy with. So I'm just looking for just a gentle little curve. Nothing super fancy here. And I'm just grabbing those points and moving them around. So for now, I think this looks good. So what we want to do is add some depth to our curve. So I'm going to press tab and switch back the object mode here. And you can see we have this simple curve here. I'm going to come over here to the data property tab where we have the curve menu. We're going to twirl down the geometry here, and then here we are going to add a bevel. And this is just going to add some you're going to want to use really tiny numbers here when I drag this up, you can see it gets big very quickly. So I'm going to just do something really small, like 0.025. Now, in my front view here, I have a taper on the original. So what I'm going to do is tab into edit mode here again, grab this point, and you can actually adjust the taper of each point individually. So I'm going to press Alt S, and that will allow me to scale the taper there of the curve. And then I'm going to grab this one and press Alt S and drag and make that a little thicker there, Alt S down here and maybe scale that down. Can play with this until you get a look that you're happy with. Now, lastly, over here under the curve menu, we're going to go ahead and click Fill Caps, because if you notice here, at the end of the curve, it's actually a empty hole. So they click Fill caps that will go ahead and fill that cap. G to snap back out here in the front view, and you can see now we have a full little character, and we're ready to move on to texturing. But before we do that, let's go ahead and convert this all to mesh. So the problem here is we have a curve object, and a curve object is different than a mesh object. So if I try to join these two objects into one, it would not let me because they are two different types of objects. But hit Control J, you can see I get no mesh data to join. But we want to convert this curve up here into a mesh. So I'm going to click Convert to mesh. Now, remember, if you follow along, you press space bar to search. Go ahead, convert to mesh. Now this is seen as a mesh, not a curve. And if I click this mesh and this mesh, we can join them together. So let's click Search, join, and now all those objects will join together. Well, you see here that we have an error. And that's because we took off the subdivision surface when we joined all those together. So I'm going to press Control C. There's two ways to fix this. We can either take our object here and apply the subdivision surface and then join them again, or what we can do is make sure that we join them into the main object. We'll grab the nose, the hair, and then the mesh here and hit Control J. Now all those objects are joined into one, and they keep the subdivision modifier applied to all of them. And now we have a little body for a chicki that we're ready to go work on our material for. 8. Learning Materials: Up to this point, we've been focusing exclusively on modeling and blender, but it's time to add character and realism to our objects utilizing Blenders material system. Now, in today's lesson, we're just going to focus on creating a simple material for our character here to get you through the basics. Let's look at how we can apply a material to our character here. Now, I'm going to come up here to the top left and change this to the Shader Editor. Now, there's two ways that we need to look at when applying material. First is on our object, we need to come to the material panel, and we need to click New to create Immaterial. Let's call this hii body. Now, by default, this will apply to the entire object. So I'm going to switch to material view here, and you can see here that if I go ahead and change the colors that I am changing the color of everything on this object. Perfect. So when working with materials and blender, we had the material tab where we apply the materials, and then we have the shader window where we effect the shaders on our object. Now blender has a ton of shaders included in it. However, with this principle BSDF node, you can pretty much do everything in one material node that you need to for a simple sense. So, for example, if I wanted my character to be metal, I could turn the metallic all the way up, shift over to something like gray, and you can see here that now my character looks metallic. I'm going to go ahead and turn the metallic off. Here we can adjust the roughness. So the further I turn this down, the shiny our character gets, I'm going to set this to something like 0.75. There's a lot of other advanced settings here, we're just going to cover some of the basics. Below that, the next one to pay attention to is the Alpha. This will change the Alpha of your character. So the opacity. Down here is when we start getting a bit more advanced, and there's quite a bit. Well, let's look at two of them. One is transmission. If I twirl this down and turn this up, this essentially turns our character into glass. Now, the roughness is affecting that. So if I go ahead and turn that down, you can see that now our character is transparent with glass, and it's reflecting the HDRI I have in the scene. I'm going to go ahead and undo that there. Now, the other thing I want to show you is the emission. Emission actually allows your character to emit light. So I'm going to move another character over here. And I just did that by hitting Shift D to duplicate, and now I have two characters. And I'm going to take this character, delete the material here, maybe add a new dark gray material, just like that. And I want this character to light that character. So I'm going to go ahead and insert a strength of something like ten here. And you can see that now we are emitting light onto our character. Emission lights are really great for things like Sci Fi, for example, in this robot, where I want the eyes or the neck to light up other parts of the mesh. Those are the basics of BSDF let's look at how we can mix some other nodes in here to create a unique gradient to move up and down our character to make it a little bit more interesting. So I'm going to hit Shift A, click Search, and I'm going to look for a gradient texture. Going to click that there, and you see we have this color tab. If I take this color tab and plug it into the color over here, it will then affect our character. You can see here that we have a linear gradient moving from the left to the right, and we're going to add some more control over that let's go ahead to Search, look for a color ramp. And now when I move this color ramp here, you can see I can control the gradient as it moves across our character. But we want to change the direction there. Now, if we want to adjust the position of the gradient, we're going to want to change the vector coordinates. Now this is getting pretty advanced. But what you need to know is that the vector coordinates store the X, Y, and Z data. But by altering that, we can change the position of the gradient in the space. That's the basics. We're going to just do a very simple example. Let's drag this vector off into space, and it'll give us a search menu. I'm going to look for a separate X, Y, and Z. Going to click that, and we're going to click there to place our node. We're going to take the Z here and drag it into our vector. And you'll see here that our character went entirely black. And that's because this is looking for the information on the overall object. So we will drag this off one more time, and we're going to type in a coordinant nodes, and we'll just leave this at generated here. What this is going to do is generate some coordinatets it can use to determine where this exists in three space. Now, like I said, I know this is pretty complicated, but that's all we're going to do for now. Now we can go ahead and change the color of our character. I'm going to grab the black here. I'm going to bump this up, maybe choose a nice warm orange there, grab the white here, bump this up, and I'm going to choose just a kind of softer, pretty yellow at the top. Now, here I can change the mode, how it blends from one to the other. I'm going to change it to HSV, and it will shift the hue across the way. Now, you can click here to add more stops and move them around, L minus to remove them. You can play with this until you get a look you're happy with. But next, we need to address the beak. The beak should be orange. However, it's just adapting the color of the body. So let's look at how we can apply multiple materials to one object. We're going to go ahead here, click plus sign. Now we have two materials on our object when that object is selected. We're going to click New and we'll type in beak here. Now, we want to apply this just to the beak. So if we tap into Edit mode here, this is where we apply our materials. So if you remember, I told you you could press L to select an object. So I'm going to select that beak and assign that color there. If I tap back into mode here, you can see that the beak material has been applied to just the beak. We'll go ahead here and maybe just put a little orange color there. And I'm going to turn the roughness all the way up we want to add some eyes to our character. And the simplest way for us to do that is to apply a texture map. So let's go back to our chicki body here. And we're going to click and drag, put all these nodes down here. We're going to move these off just for now. And in here, we're going to hit Shift A, search, and we're going to add a image texture. This is going to allow us to create an image texture that we can paint onto. Now, what I'm going to do is click New here. I'm just going to leave it at the default thousand 24 picks, and I'm going to call this eyes. This down here is just the resolution. Here you can set the color. For example, you could maybe set it to a orange color if you wanted, but I'm just going to leave mine on black. Going to set it to Alpha. And for the color here, I'm going to click Alpha and turn this down. That way, we're essentially creating a blank image. I'm going to click new image here, and now we have an eye image. Now, if I plug this into the base color, everything's going to go black. So let's look at what our image texture looks like. I'll come up here, brag this down. I'm going to open a image editor window. I'm going to click here and I'm going to open the eyes. We've essentially just put a blank texture on our character now he has no color. So what we're going to do is combine these two colors together. So I'm going to drag these nodes over here. We're going to hit Shift A, and we're going to search for a mixed color node. This will allow us to mix two colors together. So we can mix the colors we created with the color ramp down here with the texture we want to put on top. So we're going to grab these Is here and put this in the bottom because in blender, B will be on top of A. We're going to turn this factor up to an A there. We're going to take this color. We're going to mix it. To plug it there, and you'll notice that our texture becomes black again. It's because we have the factor set to 100% down here, and the factor here will determine how these two layers blend together. So if we grab the Alpha here, it will use that Alpha information to mix together. So since this is blank, it will just draw on the color. Now we are going to paint onto this eye texture, and whatever we paint on there will appear on our character. And since we have the setup, it's actually quite simple. We're going to grab our object here. We're going to hold tab and drag and hit texture paint. You'll see here we get a cursor. Now, this cursor's way too big. So we can change the size up here. I'm going to set mine down to something like maybe 50 pixels. And that'll give us two little eyes, maybe even smaller than that. Now, up here, we can change the color of our paint. So I'm going to go ahead here and I'm going to grab this here, drag this down to black. I'm just going to give them two little black eyes. And if I click there and there, we now have two little black eyes on our hikibrd. Now, you'll see over here that it's actually appeared in our texture. Now, it's important here when you see this asterix, this means your texture hasn't been saved. So I'm going to click Save here and then just pick a spot to save these eyes. I'll just put them on my desktop for now. This ensures that next time I open blender, those eyes will still be there. And with that, we've created a simple material. 9. Basics of Animation: Later in the series, there's an entire class dedicated to animation and rigging. Well, let's look at a fun little animation we can create now. There are three ways to insert keyframes and blender, usually. First is the auto keying here. If I click on this with the auto keying, when I move my object and move forward in the timeline, it will automatically insert keyframes based on the position that I have created. Now if I move back and forth, I can go ahead and see that animation play out. I can also click and drag these keyframes and position them if I want to slow down that animation. I can also delete these keyframes here by clicking and dragging and deleting keyframes. I'm going to go ahead here, turn off Auto key and reset the position on my character. You can do that by pressing Alt R and G and S. That will reset the scale rotation and location. The other way to insert keyframes, so if it come up here under the end panel, grab my object, I can go ahead and right click and insert a single keyframe to just the X axis, or I can right click answer for keyframes and do the entire location across all three axises. Now the other way to insert keyframes is to press the K key, and here I will get a keyframe menu. When I turn on auto king by default, it's just going to insert keyframes on whatever I moved. So if I change the S there, you can see how it's moving there. But if I want, when I press the K key, I can choose what I want to. So if I say I only want to insert a keyframe on the keyframe menu, and move over here to ten, move this over here, change the scale. I can insert a keyframe on the location. And you can see here that the scale was not affected at all. We've only inserted keyframes on the location. Now, animation and igging gets much more complicated than this, and I'm skipping a lot of the steps. But my goal is just to help you create something fun here in the beginning. So we're going to apply a rig to this character so you can do a little animation of the character. And to do that, we need to learn how to use a feature in blender called Wile Append. So if I click File Append, this will allow me to import an object from another blender project. I'm going to click File Append here and I'm going to navigate to the project files that you should have downloaded. And in those files, you will call one called hikiRig. Now when we double click that blender file, it's going to give us a list of all the categories in blender. Going to go ahead here and go to object, and we're just going to do the chicki rig here. What that's going to do is import a rig. Now, once you've imported the rig, it's going to import everything associated with the rig over here. We're going to go ahead and take all these controls and put them in their own collection, call this controls, and we're just going to turn this off just to keep the scene a bit clean. All you need to focus on are your object and the chicki rig. And mine fits perfectly, but if yours does not fit perfectly, you can grab the rig here, tab into Edit mode, and you can grab this bone, and you can move it to match the height of your character. Now, after you've done that, you will then need to come out to pose mode. So you'll grab this object hold down tab, go to pose mode here. You'll come over here to the armature. You'll turn off the star right here. Click this one here, come down to the bone constraints tab, take the original length and click X. And that's just going to reset this constraint to match the new length. It's a bit complicated to get into what all that means. But no, that's all you need to do to fix it. Come back over here to this armature tab, click the star here, and then you'll only see the controls again. Now, what we're going to do is switch back to object mode here. We're going to grab our character here, shift click, grab our armature here, hit Control P, and we want to parent this to the armature with automatic weights. Is going to try and automatically apply the bones to the character in the way it sees fit. So we'll click automatic weights here. And now, if I grab our armature here, we can tap into Pose mode, and we can see here that we can now animate our character using these bones. Perfect, but it's a fun, simple little setup we can use. Now, if you want to animate your character, you will animate it in pose mode. So let's look at a simple animation we can do. I'm going to set my timeline 1-24. I'm going to tab into pose mode here. I'm going to grab this head. I'm just going to turn on auto keyframes here. And I'm just going to bring this down a bit here. Then I'm going to come down to the end here. I'm going to press G again and grab what that's going to do is insert the same keyframe, and then around the middle marker, so we'll say around 12 or 13. What I'll do is I'll go ahead and grab that again and just move it up. Now, when I hit Play, we can see we have a little bouncing animation of our bird. Now what we can do is we can actually grab these keyframes here. We're going to use a keyboard shortcut here. Shift E, make cyclic. What that's going to do is make it so that it cycles forever. So if I set this to 48 keyframes, you can see here that animation will keep moving. Now if I tap back out on the object mode, I can move my bird around the scene, and he will animate wherever he is at. But first, make sure you turn off auto keying as not to accidentally insert more keyframes. Perfect. Now let's look at how we can add this character to a scene and light it. 10. Lighting and Rendering Our Scene: Today we're going to look at the basics of lighting, and we're going to create a simple lighting setup for our little character here. So on this video, we're going to dive through those, demystify them a bit, and help you render your first image. Now, if you open the final render template project file, you will get this little robot scene here that we are going to use to do our final lighting and rendering. So we're going to add the chicki to this scene. So I'm going to come up here to the scene. I'm going to create a new collection, and I'm going to name this chicki. Now if I come to file append, we're going to go to the project that had our chicken in it, and I'm going to import the object chicki. Now, because the rig is attached to the chicki object, it will just import everything. If you want, you can spend some time over here organizing this, but I'm just going to leave this as is for the sake of time. So you can see we've imported our chicki down here. I'm going to switch to material view so that I can see everything. Now what we want to do is move our little chicki up into the bird's nest on our robot's head here. So I'm going to grab the armature here and I'm going to shift click on the top of this to move our three to cursor there. Now, if that armature is selected, if I hold Shift S and do selection to cursor there, you'll see that our character snaps up to the bird's nest. Now what we can do is in side view here. I'm going to press three to snap into side view. Remember, you can also click the Gizmo up here. I'm going to press R to rotate and get our chicki into position. When we hit Play, we can see that we have a little chicken placed on the top of our character here. So now let's look at how we can light the scene and get it set up to render. Now, to render the scene, we're going to need a camera. So let's hit Shift C to reset our cursor. We will hit Shift A to add a camera, and now we have a camera in our scene. Now, if I press the zero key on the numpad or come up here to view camera's active camera, it will then show us our camera scene here. Now, you notice that my render image is square. That's because over here under the output tab, we can choose the resolution. I've chosen 1080 by 1080 to render a square image. Now we can just place the camera anywhere we want, and we move this just like any other Gizmo. So I can just rotate, move this here. I'm just pressing the G and the ar keys here, and then I'm just going to move this back so that we can kind of see both of our characters here and position our camera. Very simple little setup. Now, if were to come up here and hit Render Image, you'll see that our scene is very dark, this is because we have no light. Now, before we dive into lighting or scene, I want you first to come up to your render properties here. Now Blender comes with a couple of different render engines. EV is like a game engine. It's much faster and easier on lower spec computers. However, it's not as realistic as cycles. So why don't we set Rs to IV for the sake of learning in this class, knowing that it will render faster. But go ahead, set your render engine to IV, and I want you to click on ray tracing here. And that'll just help with the realism. I'm going to switch to the render view here. We're actually going to add some lights into our scene and look at what the lights do. So we can add lights under the object mode under the light menu here. We'll see we have a point, a sun, spot, and area light. This is the point light. It is a small point in space, and it will emit light in every single direction, 360 degrees. This is an area it only emits light in the direction of the line pointed here. We can scale this to make our lighting softer and scale it down to make our lighting sharper. This is a spotlight. It has a cone, and we can adjust the shape of the cone by this arrow here. And you can see it behaves just like you would expect a spotlight to on a theater stage. This is a sunlight, and this produces light in an infinite direction on whatever angle this line is. Is because this is intended to mimic a sun up in the sky producing infinite light. Now, each light type has their own unique settings, but there's three that you want to pay attention to, which will be the color, the power or the size, sometimes called the angle. Let's go ahead and change the power here. Let's change this up to something like 5,000. You can see how much brighter that's made the light. Here with the color, we can change the color to give us a nice warm glow there. And then with the size here, we're changing the size of the light. The bigger the light is, the softer the shadows will be, the smaller the light is the sharper the shadows will be. We also have a thing called HDR lighting. If we come over here under the World tab, click color here and go for environment. See we get the option to open a map here. Now, you can download maps from places like Plyhaven for free, and then once you do that, you will open that image here. So let's look at one of the ones I've downloaded. I'll go on here, DRI and it's at Empty warehouse. And what that'll do is light my scene using that empty warehouse. If I rotate around in my scene over here once it's loaded in, you can see that this is actually surrounding my entire scene. Now, this is a simple way to add some lighting to your character, and it's great for beginners, however, it has its limitations. It doesn't give you complete creative control, but it does generally give you broad spectrum fill lights that you can this is a really simple way for beginners just to light their scene. However, I recommend importing an HDRI, lowering the strength to something like 0.15, and then adding lights into your scene. This allows you to get some reflections and cast lighting from the HDRI, but still gives you control. So let's go ahead and add some more lights here. I'm going to hit Shift A and add an area light. That's going to create a light pointing straight down here. I'm going to go into my front view here. I'm going to grab this light with the G key and move this up, and then I'm going to rotate the light using the archy, move it back over, and press S to scale. Feel free to use Gizmos if you're not comfortable with the shortcuts. I'm going to go over here and turn my camera view on by clicking active camera there, and we're going to begin adjusting this light. So let's go ahead and bump the power up on this light. We just want to get some nice soft lighting off here to the side. Then I'm going to go ahead here and change the color light, maybe something a little warm like that. Now, if I come back here into the top view, I'm going to move this light back, put it behind my character, and that's giving us a nice little bit of back lighting. Now, you can keep playing with the values here until you get something you like. Maybe I'll bump it up to 500, and I'm going to move it off to the side here so that we don't get this nasty shadow there. I'm going to go ahead. Plus Shift D with that light, and that will duplicate the light. We can bring it over here in the top view and rotate it back. Now you can see we've begun lighting up the background of our character. Our character here himself still looks a tad dark, though. So let's add a point light. We'll add a point light here. We'll just use this move skif somehow here. I'm going to move it maybe up here around in front of the character. We'll go ahead, **** the power here, and we're going to move this up to maybe something around 250, and that's starting to fill out our character. It's giving us a lot of harsh lights, though. Let's increase the size. I'm going to increase it to something like 1 meter and soften up the lights. I also think it's kind of adding a bit too much cold light. It's going to add just a tiny bit of yellow there. And here you can see that we have a pretty simple lighting setup. But what happens when we want to render the scene? Well, we can render the scene up here to render image. And now you can see that our scene is much more visible. Now, this is a very basic flat lighting setup. It's not very exciting. If you go ahead and open the final render example I have utilizing cycles, you can see a more complex lighting setup. Let's go ahead here, though, and look at our render setting so we can learn how to render our image. Now, since we're using EV, it's quite a bit simpler. We go ahead and just set the render samples here. So I'm going to set mine to something higher like 128. I'm going to come down here to the output, set my resolution. I want it to be 1080 by 1080, and then after that, I can choose where I want to output it. Now, you only need to worry about this if you're rendering in animation, which in this case, you may want to. So I would recommend coming up here to F video coming down here to encoding, changing this container to impact four and leaving that at default. Now you can choose a place to save your animation. So I'll go ahead and say animation on my desktop here. And if I come up here to render animation, we will see that it begins moving through the timeline frame by frame. And here you can see we have a simple little animation of our chicki this is very basic. I actually recommend that for your first project, you just go ahead and render a single image. What I'd like you to do is pick a more interesting camera angle and a more interesting lighting setup and share your results. Now, we just worked with the camera by default. But if you grab the camera here, you can come down to the camera settings, and you can change quite a bit. But most importantly, you can change the focal length here, which will give you a different millimeter if you want to do a crazy wide angle lens or something really zoomed in, like a telephoto lens. And you can also click on depth of field. So if I turn on depth of field here and choose my bird's nest here, I can go ahead and lower my F Stop here and start to play at the depth of field. So I'd like you to play with the camera set play the lighting and the position and create an interesting image here. After that, why don't you go ahead and open the Idle animation example here? And the idle animation example here, you can see that I've played around with the camera and the lighting to create an appealing image. I'd love to see what you can come up with. Now, I can't say I recommend this because it may be a bit advanced for beginners, but the robot is also rigged, as well. If you like, you can try and apply some of the animation techniques we learned to him. However, bear in mind, this may be a bit too advanced at this. 11. Next Steps: Made it this far, I just want to say congratulations because this is the hardest part. Opening the software, learning the interface, and getting started with your first render can be a bit overwhelming, but it only gets easier from here. Now, this was the first in a series designed to take you from beginner to professional and blender. In the upcoming classes, we're going to deep dive into the various topics such as modeling, texturing, animation, and more. Now, my goal is that by the end of this series, we'll take you from opening Blender for the first time to feeling that you can confidently work on a professional client project. Most important thing you can do is practice these skills. So before you go on to the next class, I recommend you try and design your own original character or find a character you're a fan of and recreate them using the skills we learned in this class. Now, I'd love to see what you create, so please make sure to share and tag me in it.