Into the Forest: Add Depth to Your Illustration with Blender 3D

1. Introduction: If you're an artist or illustrator having some basic three D skills, that opens a whole new world of possibilities. This class explores the ways in which three D can add an extra dimension to your work. Hello, my name is John Knowles. I have over 15 years of experience as a character animator and animation director, but I also love to create illustrations based on the natural world as an animator. One of the first things that I wanted to do when I started to create illustrations, find ways of adding motion in order to help bring them to life. One of the simplest solutions is to add simple parallax moves to layers of artwork to give an illusion of depth. But this doesn't work for every image. With the use of three D animation software, we can go beyond these simple effects and actually project our illustrations onto three D geometry. This gives us far more flexibility to add complex camera movement to our illustrations and even combine our illustrations with three D elements or effects. Since this class is focused on providing you with the skills you need to be able to take your own illustrations into three D. It doesn't include any painting demonstrations, but I've provided my own illustrations which are free to use to try out any of the techniques. In this class, I'll be starting out with the basics for those who may never have touched three D animation software before. We'll then explore how to create multiplane parallax camera moves using the provided artwork. In the next part of the class, we'll create a simple three D scene based upon a sketch. This scene serves as a guide which you can use to create your own illustration, or alternatively, you can make use of the provided artwork for the next part of the class, where I demonstrate how to project the illustration back onto the individual objects in the scene. Finally, we'll add a camera move and some three D particles to add a little magic. This class makes use of the three D application. B***der. B***der is free to download and use, meaning. There are literally no barriers to getting started beyond your knowledge of the tool. Whilst the world of three D can seem daunting, by the end of this class, you should have the skills and knowledge to start creating three dimensional illustrations of your own. If you're ready, let's get started. 2. Class Overview: Hello and welcome to the class. In the early days of animation, camera moves were typically limited. Whilst it was possible to move a camera across the background or to zoom into it, the results were often flat and lacked any real sense of depth. To overcome this limitation, a new type of camera system, the multiplane camera, was developed where individual layers of artwork were painted onto sheets of glass. By separating these layers or planes of the image and moving them at different speeds towards or across the view of the camera, a believable feeling of depth could be achieved. This multiplane effect has been used in animation in one form or another for the best part of 100 years. While it was historically limited to big studios, with the budgets for the expensive and cumbersome camera systems required, this effect is now achievable by anyone with a computer using free software. As I mentioned in the introduction, this class is made up of two main sections. The first section covers how to create these multiplane effects within B***der, whilst the second section covers how to project an illustration onto three D geometry for even greater flexibility. Provided my own illustrations for you to use within the class, and these can be downloaded from the class resources section. Alternatively, feel free to follow along with the class using your own artwork for the class project. You may wish to create either the simpler multiplane animation or go all the way with the projection techniques that I demonstrate and bring your illustration to life in three D. Either way, I'd love to see what you create. Upload your finished project to the class project section for feedback and to share with the other students. Also, if you have any questions along the way, simply make use of the class discussion section. If you're ready, let's get started with the first lesson. 3. Class Updates: In July of 2024, Blender 4.2 was released, bringing with it a complete rewrite of the EV render engine. In most cases, this change will result in higher quality images, but the changes can also make it harder to follow training, which was created in versions prior to 4.2. Wherever possible, I update my classes to make them easy to follow with the latest version of Blender. Unfortunately, in this case, the changes would require re recording the majority of the class, whilst it is still possible to complete this class using Blender 4.2. I would actually recommend using Blender 4.1 to make things easier to follow. You can download past versions of blender by heading to the download page of the Blender website. From here, you can click on previous versions, download any blender, then scroll down to Blender 4.1. You'll then need to select the version of Blender 411, which is appropriate for your operating system. If instead, you'd like to continue with this class using a more recent version of blender, then there are a few things to be aware of. First of all, the images of planes add on, which is used extensively throughout the class is now native to blender and no longer needs to be enabled in the preferences. It does, however have a new name. It's now called mesh plane and can be found under the image section of the ad menu. The other big thing to be aware of is that the material transparency settings are now very different. We used to have drop down menus for both blend mode and shadow mode. This has been replaced with a checkbox for transparent shadows and a new render method drop down with the choice of either dithered or blended. The blended modes are similar in both versions of EV. The new dithered mode relates to the older Alpha hashed mode, Whilst the Alpha clip mode requires a new Shader base solution. In places where I've made use of Alpha clip, I would suggest instead selecting dithered to achieve similar results. Finally, the bloom option, which used to be enabled in the EV render settings is no longer available. Instead, you must now use the compositor to add a glare node set to Bloom to achieve a similar result. 4. Forest: Illustration Breakdown: I've opened my illustration here in Photoshop. I can just show you a few things. You can see here in the layers palette, that I grouped all of my layers so that they correspond with each of the planes within the image. If I just disable these top layers, you can see here that we have our mountains and sky all grouped together here. We then have a miss layer on top, our distant trees. Then each of the other layers, this is built up on top. And you'll notice with each of these layers that I'm painting the area that is actually covered up by other layers. This is important. Once we get into three D, we want to have some additional painting that can be exposed as we move around within the scene. Whilst I'm not painting all the way down to the bottom here, I am extending beyond what can be seen when we have all of the other layers overlapping. Then for each of these groups here, I'm exporting individual PNG files. Now it's important to use PNG files because they maintain the transparency. And we'll need that to be able to see through each of the layers to the one behind as I'm exporting. What I'll do is make sure that I only have a single layer visible. I then go up to save a copy. I'll change my file format to PNG. Then I'm just numbering each of my layers sequentially. That way when we import them into b***der, they'll all line up in order. Then I'm just leaving the large file size option and hitting, Okay, with all of the layers saved out, we can now jump into b***der and start looking at the interface in the next lesson. 5. Blender Essentials: When you first open up B***der, you greeted with a splash screen. And this gives you a number of different options of different file types that you can create. And also gives you access to recent files that you might have had open during this class. We'll only need to make use of the general file type. And you can either click on this general option here or just click anywhere out of this splash screen to get started. The first thing that greets you in B***der is this main large window here, which is our three D viewport. Below that you'll see a timeline which is useful for animation. Up on the right here we have the Outliner, which shows all of the different objects that are within our scene. Then below that, we have the properties panel that's broken down into a series of different tabs, which gives us access to different properties that we need. Up at the top here, you'll see a number of different tabs, and each of these really just opens a different preset selection of windows and in some cases changes the mode that we're working within. This can be useful depending on what we're trying to achieve at any particular time. Having a different configuration of windows gives us access to different features very quickly. And we can always just jump back into our original layout window equally. We have the option to reconfigure any of these windows. If we right click on the edge of a window here, we can add either a vertical or horizontal split. Then we can drag that to where we want and click. And now we have two separate viewports. Each of these can then be changed. We have these icons in the left hand corner of each of the different windows. We can change these to open up different editors that we might need when we're working. If we want to revert this back to how it was, again just right click on a border and then we can choose to Join Areas. We'll have this arrow which we can drag over the area that we want to get rid of. The that returns our viewport to how it was originally. The main thing that you'll need to know when you get started is how to navigate within the three D viewport. To start with, to zoom in and out, you can use your mouse scroll wheel or alternatively hold down the control key and your middle mouse button as you drag. You'll zoom in and out by holding down your middle mouse button on its own. You can orbit around the scene. By holding the shift key along with your middle mouse button. You can actually pan the viewport. Just by combining those three actions, we can move to anywhere we want within the three D scene. The other important thing to know is how to interact with the objects within our scene. You can see that this cube has a highlight around it at the moment that shows that it's selected. And we can see that up in the outliner here as well. If, for example, I was to click on this camera icon here, you can see that our selection has changed in both the outliner and in the viewport. If I re select my cube, you see a number of icons on the left side of the screen here. At the moment we have a selection icon. If I click on this move icon, we will get this gizmo up here. By dragging on any of these arrows here, I can move the object within the scene, just by clicking, Dragging on this circle in the middle. I can move it around freely, relative to my viewport. Moving down the list, we have our rotation gizmo, which will do the same thing. We can rotate on any of these individual axes and a scale gizmo here as well. Over in the top right of the viewport, you'll see this set of axes here. If we click and drag on this, we can orbit the viewport around. These icons below also allow us to zoom in and out or pan the viewport. Then we have a camera icon that lets us jump into the view of the camera. We can jump back out again. One thing that you'll notice here is that as we're scaling this object that we've already rotated, our axes are not actually aligned with the object itself. That's because the mode up at the top here is set to global, which means our axis will align the main axis within the scene, not with the object itself. If we change that to local, you'll see that the axes are now aligned to the object. If I go back to my move tool, you'll see the same as true. Now we can move relative to the object itself and equally rotate it on any of those axes too. If you take a little time to get familiar with moving an object around, rotating and scaling it and manipulating the three D Viewport, then once you're happy, we'll jump into the next lesson and get started. 6. Forest: Image Planes: Here we are in the new b***der, same file. The first thing that I'm going to do is to delete the cube and the light, because we won't need either of those objects. I can just drag Select over both of them. And then hit X and click Delete. What we're going to do is to import an image. Now to do that, I'm going to add in a plane to place it on. There are two ways to add an object. We can either go up to the Add menu. Here we have a number of different options. A quicker way to access that same menu is with the shortcut shift A. And that will pop up the menu wherever your cursor happens to be. I'm going to go to Mesh here and select Plane. Now we need to add a material to this plane over the Properties panel. Here we have this Materials tab. I'll click on that and then click New. The default materials within B***der are great for creating realistic results, but since we want to actually import an image that we painted, we don't need all of the different options. We're going to change this surface type here from this principle BS, DF. If we just click on that, we can go up to this emission option. That means that whatever image we place on this object, the colors won't be affected by any other shading or lighting within the scene. Now going to click on this little dot next to the color, we can go over to this texture section and select Image Texture. We can now click open and then navigate to wherever you've saved your class resources. If we go into the forest folder and illustration, you'll find this forest do N, G. We can open that now. We can't see anything at the moment, and that's because we're in the shaded mode. There are different modes. Up at the top right here, we have wire frame flat shaded, and then we can move on to the material shading. Now if we zoom in on this a little bit, you can see that we have our image projected onto this plane, but it's been distorted to fill the size of the frame. If I change to the scale tool here and scale this out, we can roughly approximate the correct dimensions for our image, but it's hard to get it exact. Fortunately, there's a better way of doing this. I'm just going to delete this plane again by hitting X and delete. I'm going to go up to the Edit menu and Preferences. This will allow us to enable an add on. We go to the add on section, up to the search, we can start typing image, you'll see this import images as planes option if we enable that and close up preferences. Now when we shift A, we have an additional option added in here under the image section. We have this images as planes. If I click on that, you navigate to that same forest PNG image over on the right here. I'm going to change my material type to emit because again we want that emission shader rather than the standard principle shader. Then just hit import images as planes. You can now see that it's not only created a plane for us, it's added that image to it and it's scaled the plane to the correct dimensions for our image. But the great thing about this add on is we can do this for more than one image at a time. If I once again just delete this image, shift a, import images as planes. Now I'm going to go up a level and go into this layers folder. Here you can see we have all of the different layers that I saved out of Photoshop. I'm going to select all of those. We need to change some other options on the right here. If I scroll down, you'll see towards the bottom here, we have this offset planes option. And we need to change this to Z positive. That will mean that all of the images are stacked one on top of each other instead of being placed side by side. Once we've done that, if we import images of planes, you'll see that we now have all of those different images imported, each of which is transparent and allows us to see through and get a really good sense of depth. Now I'm just going to split this viewport so that we can have a camera view alongside our three D view. To do that I'm just going to right click on this border here, vertical split and bring that across. Then on this left hand side, I'm going to click on the camera icon. Or you can hit the Numpad zero key that will bring us into our camera. Now you'll notice if I try to orbit around this, I jump straight out of the camera. Again, we need to change an option here. I'm just going to click on the camera again. I'm actually just going to scroll my mouse wheel to frame up that camera view just a little bit better. Then I'm going to hit the key over that window that brings out the side panel. If we go down to the view options, we have this camera to view check box. If I turn that on and then hit the key again to get rid of that side panel. Now when we try to orbit around, we're actually manipulating the camera itself within three D space. If I just move out in this viewport, you'll see as I orbit around here, my camera is moving over here on the right hand side. Now if I move in towards my images here and try to frame them up, you'll see that we have a bit of an issue. Because of the perspective within the three D scene here, our camera is not able to frame things in exactly the same way as they were set up within Photoshop. If we want to see the whole of that sky and mountain layer at the back, we have to zoom in so far that we're losing these foreground elements. Now we've got a couple of different options here. We could select each of these layers in turn and go in and scale them up until their size corresponds with the camera view. But that would be quite a time consuming thing to do and to get accurate. Fortunately, there is another option available within the import images as planes tool. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of those image planes and I'm going to delete them. Before we import the images, I'm actually going to reset this camera position. What we can do is hit the key to open this side panel. Under the Item menu here you can see the location and rotation values that have been applied to this camera. What I want to do is just roll over the location here and hit the backspace key that will zero everything out. If I do the same on the rotation, I'm then going to manually enter a rotation value here. I'm going to enter 90 degrees on the x axis. Then I want to move my camera back along the y axis here. I'm going to go back about 15 meters -15 That's moved our camera back away from the origin here. Then we are. Now I can hit the key to get rid of that side panel again, and then we'll hit Shift A once again, import images as planes. I'm going to select that same group of layers that we had before, which we have our emission shader on. Scroll down, we have offset in Z positive. This time I'm going to increase the offset distance because I want to make sure that there's p***ty of space between each of those layers to give us a really good sense of depth. So I'm going to increase this from 0.1 up to 1 meter. Then I'm going to change the plane dimensions option here from absolute to this camera relative option. And click Import Images as Planes You can see now that scaled each of these image planes. Now when we look through our camera view, it looks exactly the same as our original illustration. I'm just going to move back into selection mode here. Up at the top here, I'm going to click on these two icons just to disable all of the different overlays so that we have a nice clean view here. Now I said that this looks exactly the same as the original illustration. There is one difference, the colors are not accurate. The reason for that is that b***der applies its own color management to the image. To fix that, we're going to go over into this render tab here. If we go right down to the bottom, you can see this color management option. Scroll down, we have this view transform film. If we click on that, we can change that back to standard. Now our colors match the original illustration. Now that we have all of our layers set up correctly, our color is correct and our camera is in the right place, we're in a position to start adding some motion to this. There's just one last thing to do before we move on, and that's to save our scene. I'm just going to head up to file Save as you can save this wherever you like. I'm going to call it Forest One and save us. So now that everything's set up correctly, we can move on and add some motion to this in the next lesson. 7. Class Update: Keyframe Menu: In Blender 4.1 a change was introduced to the behavior of one of the shortcuts. In previous versions of Blender, the IK opened a menu which allowed you to select exactly what you were setting a keyframe on. You could choose to record the location, rotation, scale, or any combination of these. As soon as you select an option from the menu, you can see exactly what's been key framed up here in the transform panel. Whilst this allowed you to be very specific, it did slow the process of animation, which often requires the setting of hundreds of key frames. The decision was therefore made to change the behavior of the shortcut from Blender 4.1 onwards. The default behavior of the key is to record a keyframe for an object or bones, location, rotation, scale, and any custom properties without popping up any menus. As soon as you press the key, everything in the transform panel changes to show that it's all being keyframed. When the cursor is positioned over entry fields within the interface, the original behavior of the IK still remains a key frame, will only be set on the values which are underneath the cursor. This new behavior is comparable to other major three D applications such as Maya, and can be modified within the animation tab of the preferences if required. In addition, if you require more specific control over what you're setting a keyframe on, the original menu is still available using the shortcut K. Therefore, if you're following along with the lessons and wish to replicate the same behavior, simply make use of the K shortcut Whenever I use the short cut over the main three D Viewport in order to bring up the key frame menu. 8. Forest: Camera Flythrough: Now that we have everything set up in three D, there are a couple of different ways that we can go about starting to add some motion to this scene. We can either take our three D camera and effectively fly it through the artwork, or we can move the different layers of artwork themselves independently. That's actually the method that they used with the old multiplane cameras. The camera would stay fixed in one position, and each of the individual layers will be moved forwards, backwards, side to side in order to create the illusion of depth and movement. For this example though, we're actually going to use both methods. I'll show you why if we start out by simply moving within our camera view here. If I scroll the mouse will in. You'll notice that as I get closer to these trees here in the midground, our background with mountains also increases in size significantly. Now with an object so far away from us, we wouldn't expect to see its size increase as significantly as objects closer to us. Reducing the amount of size change on the background is key to achieving a real sense of depth. The other thing that you'll notice as I scroll in here is that we can see all of these elements that are outside of the camera view. To help with that, we can go over to the Outliner, select our camera, go down to the Camera properties under Viewport display. We have this pass part two option. Doll that up to one, you can see it now blocks out anything that is outside the view of the camera. This makes it much easier to visualize what our end result will be. I'm just going to scroll back out, so my camera should be in its original starting position, which you can double check just by hitting the key. And you can see once again we have -15 as our location in Y there. Initially what I'm going to do is move these different layers at different rates towards and past the camera to give the illusion of movement. I'm going to leave the background exactly where it is, this distant layer of trees here as well. I'm also going to leave where it is, but I'm going to start moving all of these other layers closer to us. I'm just going to drag select across each of those layers there. Then with the move tool, we can start moving them towards us. But before we do that, we want to record their current position. To do that, we can hit the key on the keyboard that brings up this insert key frame menu, and I'm going to record their current location. Once I do that, you can see that this little diamond has been inserted down here on the time line, which shows that we have a keyframe on frame one. If I hit the end key, you'll notice that our location has turned yellow, which also confirms that a key frame has been recorded on it. I'm going to change my end frame here to 240, which is 10 seconds. Then I'm going to move to frame 240, just by clicking down here on the time line. You'll notice now that our location is green. That shows that there's animation on the location, but there's not currently a keyframe on this particular frame. And I'm going to start moving these different layers towards my camera. So I'm just moving all of the melita bits and gradually increasing the separation between these different layers, these layers at the front here. I'm going to move a lot further so that they appear to come much faster past the camera. I'm now I'm going to re select all of these layers that we've moved, being careful not to select the camera there. Alternatively, you can select them up in the outliner here. I actually need to select that other layer as well. So I'm going to select four and shift select layer 11 to select everything in between, I'm going to hit the key again, and once again record location. Once you've done that, it helps to go down to this playback menu down at the bottom here, and change the sync from play every frame to this frame dropping option that ensures that everything will play back in real time regardless of the speed of your computer. Once you've done that, you can hit Spacebar and it will start to play the animation back. I think that's a good starting point, but these two different layers are moving at roughly the same speed. I think I'm going to take this layer here and just nudge it slightly further back then this closer layer here with the green trees. I'm just going to move a little bit further out just to increase the separation between those layers. I'll select the two of those again, and once again hit and record a location key and play it back. That way we're getting a little bit more separation between these layers here in the midground. Now that we've got the main animation here on the layers moving as we want, I'd like to refocus the camera so it's slightly further across to the side here. In our final position, we're focusing in on this clump of trees here. To do that, I'm going to take my camera and I'm going to record its position and rotation. So we're going down to location and rotation here on the Insert Key Frame menu. Then move to the final frame. I'm just going to reframe this slightly within the camera view here. I'm just going to move a little bit closer and reframe it slightly. I'm just adding a little bit of rotation in here as well just to get a little bit of variation into the final position. I'm fairly happy with that. I'm just going to and record location and rotation once again. We'll play this back. Hopefully you can see now by combining a small move on the camera to reframe its position, by having a larger move on the individual layers of artwork, we can keep the size of the mountains here in the background relatively consistent. Whereas all of these layers closer to us are increasing in size far more rapidly. It helps to create far more of a realistic illusion of depth. Once you're happy with that, we can just hit space again to pause the playback. And I'm going to control less to save my scene. In the next lesson, we're going to go ahead and add some movement to these mis layers here, which will add a little bit more life to our scene. 9. Forest: Mist Animation: I'd like to create the impression that each of these misted layers here is slowly rolling around within the valley. We can do that quite simply just by moving each of these layers sideways as they get closer to us. To start with, I'm just going to click down in the timeline on my final frame, I'm going to select this close layer of mist here. What I want to do is just move this on both the x and z axes, because we already have this y movement here that we're happy with. I'm going to move it slightly in the X, again, up on the z axis, a little further on the X axis. We'll give that a try to start with and set key on location. Do the same with this next miss layer. Again that across on the x axis, up a bit on the. You can see I've gone a bit too far here and I don't want to expose this side. I'm just going to back this off a bit and location. Drop that down slightly so it's not obscuring everything. And again, record that position. Then for this layer of mist at the back here, I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to have that moved to the right here. So it feels as if this mist is slowly working its way around and up the valley. Move this cross on the x axis. And I think slightly down as well. I'll record that position and play it back and see what we've got. Overall, I think that's creating the right sort of impression that I'm after. But you notice that the movement of the mist accelerates at the start of the shot and then decelerates to a stop at the end. That's exactly what's happening with all of the other artwork layers and with the animation of the camera. That's not a problem with any of those elements because then it feels as if the camera is starting to move and slowly coming to a stop at the end. But we want the mist to appear as if it's already been in motion and it's going to continue in motion past the end of this particular shot. In order to fix that, I'm going to do is select one of those miss layers. We're actually going to jump over into the animation tab here. I'm just going to re enable my material preview up at the top of both of these viewports. Then down at the bottom, instead of this smaller time line, we've got this larger version known as the dope sheet. If you roll your mouse over this and hit control tab, we can actually switch this out to what's known as the graph editor that gives us more control over the movement of each of the elements within our scene. Over on the left here, I'm just going to roll this down and we can see that we have different channels for our X, Y and said locations. We know that our Y location here is the movement towards the camera. We want that still to maintain its ease in and out at the start and end of its motion. If we move around within the graph added to here, which you can do just by holding the middle mouse button again, if we hold down the control key, we can actually zoom this display so that we can get a better look our particular curve. You can see for this y location, our curve starts out flat, which indicates no motion. It increases in speed and then it decreases in speed as the curve flattens out again to reach its new value. The graph is showing time across the top here and the value change on the vertical axis. We're going to leave this y axis alone, but we're going to select each of our other axes. And we're going to change this particular graph shape. If we just double click on the x location channel here and roll over the viewpoint, we can actually hit the period key on our numpad, and it will frame up that curve with this x curve selected. We can now hit the key that brings up some different interpolation options. By default, we have this Bezier option, which gives us control over the shape of the curve. But since we want a constant speed for this particular curve, we can make use of the linear option. I'm just going to hit again there and change this curve to linear. That means we will have a constant rate of change throughout the shot. I can do the same now with my location. Again, just double click on that. Hit the period key on the non pad to frame everything up. And hit the key and change that to linear. And they're going to do the same for each of the other miss layers. If I slip x location, a double click on that, select it, I can hit my key, turns up to linear, the same for my location. I can frame that up linear, we'll just check out y location. Again, frame that up, and we can still see that we have that Bezier curve, which is what we want to keep. We did the same on the mist layer back here. Next location Tela, Same for the zed key things that Telia, our y location, is still correct. So we can now hit the space bar to play this back. And you should see that the movement of the mist is now continuing right through to the end of the shot. It doesn't feel like it's easy to a stop or accelerating at the start either, yet our camera movement still has that ease at the start and ease to a stop at the end, which is exactly what we want. I'm just going to jump back into the layout view here and save my scene, then we should be ready to render this out in the next lesson. 10. Forest: Render: We're now ready to render our scene out, but first of all, we need to change a couple of settings. We head over to the properties panel on the right here. Our first section here is full render. We're using the EV render engine here, which is absolutely fine. But the render samples that we have in here are quite high for what we actually need because we don't have any three D lights within this scene and we simply want to capture each of these image planes as they are. We don't need our render samples to be anything like as high. We can actually set this value down to one. Let me do the same for Viewport. You can see that this has made no change to what we're viewing here. That will increase the speed of our render quite significantly. Having done that, we can leave all of these other render related settings as they are and just head into the next tab, which is Output. This is where we can set our final resolution for our output. I'm happy with that. As it is our frame rate is already set to 24 frames per second. And we're going to render out the full range of the animation, which is frame one to frame 240. All we really need to change here is in this output tab, I want to pick a location in which to save these files. I'm going to add a folder in the same location that I've already saved my scene file. And I'm just going to call this render. I'm going to enter into that folder, then down at the bottom here and get until you give my render a name. I'm just going to call it Forest. And I'm going to add an underscore at the end because each of the individual image files that saved out will then add a number. After the end of this I'm going to accept, we're going to be saving out with a file format of PNG. We can change this to LGB because we don't need an alpha channel on this, since there's no transparency in this final image. Once we've done that, we should be ready to go before rendering out the full animation. It's still worth doing a quick test render. You can go up to Render and hit Render Image or 12 on your keyboard and that will render just this first frame. Since everything looks okay though, we can go ahead and select the second option of render animation that we'll go ahead and save our individual frames into the folder that we specified. Once you render is complete, we can simply close this window down. Then if you head back up to the render menu, we have this option to view our animation that will open up this playback window where you can watch the finished result again. Once you're happy, simply head up and close this window down. Finally, save your scene. The final image sequence that we've just saved out can be made use of within any video editing software, but if you'd like to convert it into a video format, you can actually do that directly within B***der. And I'll show you how within the next lesson. 11. Forest: Output: B***der actually has its own built in editing software, we can access that. If we go up to the top here and add a new workspace, we can then head down to video editing and add in the video editing workspace in the sequencer window. Down at the bottom we can head to the Ad menu and down to image sequence. We then open our render folder. We have all of our individual frames rendered out here. If I chef, select all of those and add image strip that should bring in all of that animation again, we can hit the Spacebar key to play this back. Then we need to change some settings in order to render this out in this property panel up at the top here. Again within our output tab, we can scroll down When we previously had this file format set to PNG, we can click to change that to FFmpeg video. Having done that, we can click on the encoding tab, change this container type to Mpeg four video codec set to H 264. Then I'm going to set this to a high quality output. That complete, we can go back up to our render menu once again. Hit Render Animation on set's Complete. We'll close that window down again. Then if you navigate to the folder on your hard drive where you've saved your rendered files, you should see that we now have this MP four file saved alongside each of our individual image frames. Then you can take this MP four file and play it back within any standard media player. Then in the next lesson, we're going to start out with the same illustration, but we're going to see how we can use those layers to create a tracking movement across the scene rather than moving into the scene itself. 12. Forest: Tracking Shot Setup: As you can see, I've created a brand new seam file here. Once again I'm just going to select that light and default cube and X to delete it as we did before. I'm going to select this camera, I'm going to reset its position and rotation again. In this side panel here we access with the key. Hit the backspace key over location and rotation again. I'm going to enter 90 degrees on the x axis. As before, I'll put in -15 meters on my y axis. So we can now import our image planes again. So we'll hit Shift A head down to the image menu, Images as Planes. And select all of those individual PNG files. Again, make sure that we have Ima set as our material type. We'll scroll down the list and enter positive for our offset with a distance of 1 meter instead of absolute. We're going to change this to the camera relative dimensions. Once you've done all that just import enable mind material preview. Then as before I'm going to split this display. I'll introduce a vertical split. I'm going to hit the key to hide that side panel and the key will hide these tools over on the left there. Then the zero key on the numpad, or there's camera icon to jump into camera view. Frame that up a little bit better. I'm going to head up to the top here and click on these two icons to disable all of the different overlays that we have. Select my camera. Go down to the tab and the Properties panel, Viewport display, and increase this value up to one. Once again, our colors don't match. We'll go into the Render settings color management, Scroll down, change filmic to standard. Then the final step, I'm just going to once again open this side panel with the key. Go to the view tab and enable the camera to view options so that we can move around within this camera view. We'll then end one more time just to hide those options on the right there. Finally, I'm going to go up to the final menu, save As. Then I'm going to let my original forest file here. You can see this name field has gone red down at the bottom here. That's to say that we don't want to save over the top of this, but we can just hit this plus icon and that will increment the number by one. And then we can save As. Now we want to create a tracking shot where the camera appears to move sideways across the scene, with each of the layers moving at different rates to give us the illusion of depth. If I simply try and pan this view by holding down the shift key in the middle mouse button, you'll see that we very quickly leave the bounds of the image. I'm just going to undo that. Instead, what I'm going to do is just push in a little bit to give us a bit of space to play with. Once we've done that, I can move the camera off to one side. And then with the camera selected, I'm going to take the key and record its location. As before, I'm going to change my end frame to 240, get to my final frame, and we'll move the camera in the opposite direction. And again, hit the key to record its location. As we play that back, we're getting some movement in there, but it's not really that much and we don't get a great degree of separation between these different layers. So starter is what I'm going to do is I'm going to select these layers towards the back here. I'm just going to move them further away from the camera. To do that, we can use these Gizmos that we used earlier. But there's a different way of moving objects around within B***der. To move an object, we can actually hit the key. Once you do that, everything will move around until you click the mouse button to release it. Alternatively, you can hit the right mouse button and that will cancel the move. In addition, we can then type either x, y, or z to constrain our move to a particular axis. If I hit the key immediately followed by the y key, then we'll be able to move these objects back along the y axis. I'm going to move them back a little away here. Then I'm going to hit the key to scale them up. Then just by dragging with the, we can make them larger and I'm going to make the. A fair bit larger than our viewport here. Again, click to release. Now I'm going to take these next two layers and again move them back a bit. I'm going to hit to move y to constrain to y axis. And move them back towards the center of the scene here. Then again, we can use the shortcut to scale and scale them up a bit. Now in my first frame, I'm going to again select that camera. Let's see if we can move further across. And I'm looking at the background layer here, just making sure that we don't go beyond it. That gives us a bit more space and so location key. Then we'll go to the end frame here and we'll do the same out to the right hand side. Obviously, this looks like a mess at the moment, but what we're going to do is to move these other layers around to give us a bit more space to work with. If I head back to this first frame here, we know that we need this middle ground layer to move across. On the X axis, we can hit and X, make sure I've got the right layer selected there. All right, and X, and move that across until it hits the edge of the frame there. I'll do the same with this layer towards the foreground and X and move that over to the edge. Then finally this layer in the extreme foreground, let's move that across. And I'm going to move that up a little bit as well. What I can actually do is within my camera view, if I just hit the key, I can move that around freely. And I'm going to bring it up so it's quite large in frame, there we are. Now if I move to my final frame, I can look at the right hand side here, these layers in the foreground. We need to move those across. Again, I'm just going to move these within my camera view into place with the key. Let's select this layer up at the top here and we'll move that across to, and that can come down quite a bit. There we are now. Our miss layers are really exposing quite a lot at the moment, but I'm going to deal with them separately. So let's just make sure that I can remove is working to start with. So I'm going to hit the Space key and see how these main layers are working. Okay, at the moment you can see this layer here is becoming exposed. That's because as I moved my camera, I've actually moved it down a little bit as we've been moving through the scene. We can fix that quite easily just by selecting that layer and nudging it up a bit towards the end of the shot. Here we just scrub back through our timeline. You can see now that we're not exposing anything that we shouldn't do there overall. That's looking good, but we are exposing a lot of this layer underneath here. I'm going to take this miss layer. I think we can actually scale that layer up a little bit. Again, I'm going to hit to scale. Just drag out to increase its size of bit. Then I think we can hit and X to move that across, making sure that we're not exposing that edge at all. Let's just actually bring it a bit closer to camera and Y closer and, and X to move that back across, scrub through, see how that's looking, filling up the value a bit better. I think what we can also do is look at this layer here towards the foreground and increase the size of that. I'm going to hit and scale up a bit. Think we can now as see hit and z and move that up to fill that space a bit better. See how that looks as we're scrubbing through. So if we can move that slightly in X, we can again scroll through and see where we are. That's any good, this mis layer towards the back again, I think we're going to scale it up a bit, putting it a bit closer to camera and it, and it can definitely move down onto the side a bit. I'm just going to do within this viewport, it's sitting a little bit better. And finally, we'll look at the miss layer that we have towards the foreground here. See how that's looking. If we can afford to scale that up slightly as well, that's looking pretty good. Now if we just head to this playback menu and change the options to frame dropping so we get an accurate playback speed. And hit the Spacebar to play things through. Also, just notice that this layer here in the foreground, we're exposing the bottom of it as we get further through the scene here. We'll just nudge that down a little bit, that won't be a problem. I feel over on the side here, these two layers don't have that much separation between them. So bring the lay down at the bottom here, a little bit closer to the camera to see if that helps. I'm hitting and y to bring that forwards. Then we'll just move that in this camera view into place. Try something like that. Scrip through and see how that looks as we're playing back. Yeah, I think that works a little bit better. Okay, so we'll save our scene there, then in the next lesson, once again, we're going to animate our st. 13. Forest: Tracking Shot Mist Animation: This time around, we've only animated our camera. We haven't animated any of these different layers, which actually makes our life slightly easier. When it comes to animating the mist, the first thing I'm going to do is select all of those miss layers. Then I'm going to hit I to set a key frame on this first frame. So I'm going to key that location. And then we'll move to the final frame where we're going to reposition them all. But I've also just noticed that this miss layer at the back here is a little bit out of place. So I'm going to adjust that. Now, just the key and grab it and move it down a little bit. Start here and then we'll animate that in the background. So I'm going to hit and save that location as well on the final frame, just going to gently note that down into one side at the back, I on location, select this next miss layer. And as before I'm going to move this down to the right a little bit. And so if it's location, then I think because we were happy with the final position of these layers, I'm actually going to record the position of this layer here on this last frame, and then move back to the first frame. You can see this bar that's appeared here that just shows that these two key frames have exactly the same values. What I actually want to do is move this down to the right on the first frame here. Move it down and to the right of bit Soviet location. And you can see that bar has disappeared because our values are now different. Then we'll do the same with this foreground miss layer. I think we can go to the end frame. Move this up and to the right. Then I Soviet locations before. We want all of these miss layers to have linear animation curves rather than bezier curves because we want to make sure that their movement is constant while the camera is easing in and out with all of them selected. We can actually go down here to the time line here. Let's hit A to make sure that all of these key frames are selected. And then we can hit the key over the timeline. This gives us these same options. We can change things to linear here, and that should set all of our key frames there to linear. Let's hit space bar to play things back. See how it looks. I think we can actually take this four gram miss layer and see if we can move that just a little bit further to start with. And move it down into the right a little bit. Something. I'm happy with, the safe location again. Let's go to the final frame here. Let's move it up into left a little bit more. There we are, and I'm happy with how that's looking in the end. Let's save our scene, and then we can change all of our settings to be ready for render again, once again in the render tab here, let's just knock down our samples back down to one. Then within the output settings, we're going to save out RGB, PNG files, and we need to change our output folder and name. I'm going to save this in the same render folder that I had previously, but I'm going to give file a new name. I'll just call this for T. Again, put that underscore in at the end. It separates our name from the file numbers except that done, we can head up to the render menu and render animation again. Once that's finished, let's close that window down to the render menu and view animation again. Once you're happy, we can close that down and save. Now in the next lesson, we'll go beyond using these simple flat layers to explore how b***ders full three D power can be used to create images with even more depth. 14. Stones: Modeling - Scene Setup: For this next section of the class, I've created a quick sketch to give me a rough idea of where I want the final illustration to end up. Well, this step isn't essential and you could jump straight into b***der and start mocking up your three D scene there. I find it can be good to have an idea of where I'm wanting to head to as I'm blocking out my scene in three D. I already know that I've got a good composition in mind. But of course, that doesn't mean that we're totally tied to this sketch. And if you come up with different ideas, once you're working in three D, that's totally fine too. So what we're going to do now is jump into B***der. And using that sketch as a guide, we're going to start blocking out our scene in three D. We'll then be able to take that three D block out into Photoshop, or your painting program of choice paint over it, and then reproject that image back onto the three D geometry that we've made in b***der. The first thing that I'm going to do is just delete the default cube and light, since I don't need either of those for this scene, I'm just selecting them up here in the outliner. And then you can hit the X key and they'll disappear. Next thing I want to do is select my camera by clicking on it. Go down to the property panel, to the camera tab, Then we're going to click on this background images checkbox. And roll out this drop down where we can now add an image. Click on that button and go ahead and click on Open. Then if you navigate to wherever you've saved your class resources, you should find a folder entitled Stone Circle. You go into that folder and then into the sketch folder, you'll find this sketch PNG. If we select that and open image, this should be applied as a backdrop. We can't see it at the moment because we're not looking through our camera. To do that, you can go over to this camera icon on the right here, or you can hit the zero key on the numpad. Then when we jump into the camera view, you can now see that our sketch has been applied to the camera. Now if I just use the middle mouse and move around my scene, you'll see that we lose that again, as we jump out of camera view, what we really want to do is to split this view so that we can see our camera and work in our three D view at the same time. And you can just roll over the border here, right click and introduce a vertical split. Going to drag over here. Then over in this viewport, we can jump into our camera view here. We still have our three D view. Now to tidy things up a little bit, I'm just going to roll over this left hand viewport. Hit the key, which will hide the tool bar that was over on the side there. We can also go up at the top here, if you just hold down the middle mouse button, should be able to drag this bar across. That gives us access to these icons here. If we uncheck this one that says Show Gizmos that will hide these extra elements on the side here. Now with my mouse, well, I can just scroll in a little bit until we've framed that up nicely. I'm going to hit the key whilst over this viewport. Then if we click on the view tab, we can enable this camera to view option once we do that, and I'm going to hit the key again to get rid of that, side panel now means that we can orbit around. You can see over here on the right that this is actually moving our camera within the three D space. We can now start to block out our three D geometry that we want to go in here. The first thing I want to do is to create a ground plane. To do that, we want to add an object. So I'm going to go over this Viewport and hit Shift A to bring up our Ad menu. Under the Mesh options, we can select Plane. Now by default this is going to be quite small, Just 2 meters by 2 meters. But we can scale that up. If we hit the key that will enable scaling, I can just drag this out to make it a bit larger. Now we see that as we've enlarged this plane here, we've lost sight of our reference image over in the camera view. Now to get that back, what we need to do is select our camera. Up here in the outliner, again under the camera tab. If we scroll down, you'll see some options down at the bottom here at the moment. Under this depth option, we have back selected. If we change that to front, it will mean that our image is always projected in front of any other object within the scene. That means that we can still see it and that will serve as a good reference. We can now actually orbit around within this camera view here to roughly work out the correct perspective and position for our camera. Just aligning the back edge of the plane here roughly with the horizon line, which will do for now. Once we start to add in some of these other objects, we may want to move our camera around a little bit further. 15. Stones: Modeling - Stone Circle: I think the next thing that I'm going to do is to just block in these standing stones here. That will give us a good idea of the right camera perspective. To do that, we're going to add just a simple cube object to start with, I'm going to shift a and we're going to add in a cube. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to modify the shape of this cube, so that's roughly the right shape and size of the standing stone. To do that, I'm just going to jump over into the modeling tab here. You can see that because our cube is already selected, we've actually moved into edit mode up at the top here, rather than object mode, which means that we get access to all of the vertices on this mesh. I'm going to go up to the top right here. I'm going to enable this x ray mode. By doing that we can actually see through the mesh. This allows us to select points that are on the other side of the mesh. If we didn't do that and we tried to select, we wouldn't be able to select all of these bottom four points. Just disable that quickly. And drag across, you can see these three points are selected as I orbit around. You'll see that file point has not been selected, so it's important to enable that option if we want to be able to select through the mesh. So I'm just going to select those bottom four points. Now I'm going to hit to be able to move those. Then I'm going to hit the key, which will constrain that to the z axis. Then I'm going to hit the number one which will move them up 1 meter. I'm just going to click to confirm. Now what that's done is to move all of those vertices up to our central point here. The reason that worked is because our cube was 2 meters by 2 meters. So we could simply move those points up 1 meter and that aligned them with the ground plane. Now obviously, we could have moved the entire cube up by 1 meter. But you can see this point in the center here that isn't one of our vertices. That orange point is actually the center point of the object. That's the point around which the object will transform. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to head back into the layout view. If we just frame up that object. If I were to hit S to scale, now you can see it actually scales around that pivot point I can actually hit. And then z to scale on the z axis. And you can see it is now just scaling up above the ground rather than underneath it. I can then hit S and scale the whole thing down again. And we're still just scaling around that pivot point there that sat currently on the ground plane. I'm now just going to jump back into the modeling mode. What I'd like to do is just select these top vertices by drag, selecting across them. I'm going to hit to scale them, and I'm just going to scale them in a bit. That will give us a better shape to work with. I'm now going to hit the key to select all of the vertices to scale. I'm going to then hit Y, and that will constrain it along this y axis, the green axis. Here I can squash it in a bit. That actually gives us a rough shape for our standing stone. Then we go head back to the layout view and we can see our object there. Now one thing to note, because we did some scaling here in object mode, if I hit the key, you can see here that we have scale values that are not set to one. Now within b***der, if we keep those scale values as they are, that can sometimes lead to different problems. Something that's useful to do is to actually reset the scale value. We can do that by hitting control and A, then we have this Apply menu. If we hit Apply Scale, you'll notice that those values have been set back to one, but our scale has not changed. I'm actually going to do that to this ground plane as well because this has been scaled up significantly to control a and apply that scale. Now I'm going to go up into my outliner up at the top here. With this cube selected, I'm just going to hit F two. Well, let me rename it. I'm going to call that Standing Stone. We might as well rename our ground here. We'll do the same thing. We call that ground plane. Now I'm going to just jump into the top view here rather than the perspective view. We can do that in a couple of different ways. You can use the numpad if you have one, and you can hit the seven key on the numpad, which would jump you into the top orthographic view. Alternatively, if you're here in the perspective view, you can use this gizmo up at the top here. If we just click on that Z, that will jump us into the top view. Just the same. I'm going to re select my standing stone by clicking on it. And then I'm going to hit Shift D, which will duplicate it. That automatically enables movement. I'm going to drag that off to one side here and click to release. I'm going to do the same again to create another one. I'm just roughing in. Stone circle here. Just shifted to duplicate move and click to release. I've just dropped in 5 stones here to start with. And now I'm going to go back to my camera view and I'm going to start orbiting around to see if we can get the perspective roughly correct. We can just jump into this view to move things into place. I think I'd rather keep that back edge straight there. So I'm just going to reposition some of these so that they roughly match up with our view. One can move over here at the moment, I'm just moving them roughly into place. And then we'll rotate them and scale them to match up. Now I think what I'm going to do is actually adjust the camera perspective here a little bit. If we select our camera, you can see that our focal ***gth here within this camera tab is set to 50 millimeters. Now we can adjust this focal ***gth and that will adjust the perspective of our scene. And see if I drag it down, we end up with a much wider view. If I drag it in the opposite direction, we end up with the effect of a telephoto ***s, which will compress the scene. I'm just going to adjust this a little bit to get a wider perspective and then zoom in on this slightly. That's helping a little bit. You can just grab these and move them into place. Roughly remembering that this is just a sketch so we can reposition things as we like. Obviously, I want to create something that's roughly suggestive of a natural stone circle as well. Now in this top view, I'm going to hit the arch and that will allow me to rotate these stones so just can get their orientation roughly correct. And I'm going to reselect that camera now. Just maybe even go a bit wider on. Let's try 24 millimeters 0, see how that looks? So I'm just going to hit the S key to scale some of these stones as well because we have that pivot point down on the ground plane. They should say stuck to the ground plane nicely. That should do as a rough starting point, I think because we're now happy with our camera position. I want to lock up this camera position so that we can't change it. Start with, I'm going to hit the N key over this viewport, and I'm going to uncheck that camera to view option. Then when we hit the key again, you'll see if I try to rotate around in that viewport, we just jump out of that view. If you want to get back in again, we can enable our Gizmos there so that you get this camera option or just hit the zero key on your number pad. Turn those gizmos off again. There we are. Now that we also have this roughly in place, the next thing that I'm going to do is just save my scene. So we'll just go up to save and just navigate to whichever folder you'd like to save it in. I'm just going to call this stone circle block in and hit Savas. 16. Stones: Modeling - Trees: The next thing that I'm going to do is block in this big tree up in the foreground here. To do that I'm just going to rotate around this view again. And I'm going to shift a and we're going to create a cylinder. Now when you add an object like this, you'll have some options down at the bottom here. These will only stay as long as you don't start to do anything else with the object ID. Select that and re select it. Those options are gone. In that case, we can simply delete that object x and delete it. Then it shift A, we can add our cylinder back in again. If we roll up these options, we can adjust how many vertices we've got to just the resolution around that cylinder. Think I'm going to set that back up to where it was. We'll leave that around 18. I think we can also just the radius of it and the height of it as well. For now, I'm going to leave that set to two because we're going to do exactly the same thing that we did with our cubes. Just going to select my cylinder. Go over to the modeling tab to select all of those bottom vertices to move to constrain the z axis and one to move them up 1 meter and enter. Then when we head back into the layout tab, we'll be able to scale this up. And that will scale it just on the z axis. We can increase its height. That will do as a starting point. Again, I'm going to go into top view, hitting seven on the numpad to get those options out of the way. Then I'm going to hit to move this tree trunk. We'll move it back over here somewhere. I can now hit S to scale that down just a little bit, I think then we can just hit the key to rotate it. You notice again that we're rotating around that pivot point down on the bottom there. Let's hit again and move that tell it's roughly in the right place for this tree trunk. Now, this doesn't have to be exact at all. I'm going to move that back a little bit in space. Let's keep moving around until we're happy with its rough positioning. And I want to scale it down quite a bit as well. Now, I also want to scale it along its ***gth again. But because we've rotated it, if I hit and Z, you'll notice that that's going to scale it vertically, not along its axis. What I actually want to do is change this option up here from global to local. Then when we hit S to scale, and you'll notice that the z axis is now aligned to our object. So we can scale out and increase its height. Again, going to scale, the whole object again, is trying to get it roughly in the right shape and size. I think that will do. Then With that selected, I'm just going to hit shift D to duplicate it. I'm going to move it up and rotate it. You can use this to create the branch again. I'm just going to move that roughly into position to rotate. And you can just keep moving around this viewport to make it easier to access. And I'm going to scale it down a little bit narrower. Move it down a little bit. Can do here. Again, scale it roughly how we want it. Now, these do not have to be exact by any means, because we can edit all of this later on after we've completed our illustration. But we just want to create some rough geometry that will give us an idea of where to paint and where we're going to be projecting this back again. I'm just going to rotate this a bit from above, so it's actually leaning back a little bit within the camera view to create more interesting shape here. I'm going to tilt this slightly in the opposite direction. Again, I'm going to z, just to scale that out a little bit to make sure that extends beyond our camera view. Now what I'd like to do is combine both of these elements together. So I'm going to select this branch, then hold down shift and select the tree trunk. At which point I can hit Control and J, and that will join them into one object. I'm going to go up into my outliner two and rename that to tree trunk. We can now do the same thing and rough in our other trees. Again, I'm going to hit shift. All got a new cylinder. I'm going to again move those bottom points up again. To do that we can either jump into the modeling tab or here within the layout view, I can simply hit the tab key to get into edit mode. And then we just have to remember to go up to the top here and enable this x ray mode. That way I can select just these bottom points here to move constraint to z and move them up one and Enter. Then we can just hit Tab again to get back into object mode. I'm just going to turn my x ray mode off for now to scale scale this down a bit and z scale it up. I'm going to jump into my top view to actually move this into place this way it will always stay stuck to the ground plane. Now I'm going to move this off to one side I think. Let's move it back in space around here. And let's rotate it so it's leaning over a bit. I'm just going to move it down slightly so it's actually penetrating the ground as well. Then again, I'm going to lean it slightly, so I'm just going to, we may take this one slightly towards camera. I think there out and just keep tweaking these things until you're happy with their position and scale. Rename that. Let's just duplicate this. Now I'm going to do enter the top view, shift D, move that back in across. We can just rotate that over here in the camera view. If we want to scale it on two axes at the same time, we can hit S to scale. And then instead of hitting the axis we want, we can shift. And that will mean that it's going to scale on the axes that are not z. We can scale that in a little bit, keep its ***gth. Let's took that away from a little bit. We are again to the top view shift D, let's move this across and back to create this last tree that sounds about there, a little bit more upright. And I'd like to create a branch coming out to the side here as well. So let's hit shift D. Move this up and to rotate and it can scale us down the branch, move around in the three D view just to make sure that it's in the right place That looks okay. Rotate slightly angles a bit different, there we are. So I'd also like to add in some rough geometry that will approximate the area that we're going to have foliage again. We'll probably change that later, but it'll give us something to start with. So I'm just going to quickly save my scene. Control to save. And then I'm going to hit shift A and add in a UV sphere. Once we've done that, we can just hit to scale it up a bit and then move it roughly into place. I'm going to start out with the foliage for this tree back here to scale. If you want to scale on a particular axis, instead of hitting either X, Y, or Z, you can also just use the middle mouse button and then move in a particular direction. Once you release that middle mouse button, it will be constrained to that axis. It's a technique that can be really useful. Speeds things up quite a bit, that can take a little getting used to just rotate around a bit, move it roughly into place. That should do just going to go up and rename that foliage. And that's shift D to duplicate. Bring that back scale a little bit. And again, none of this has to be exact, it's just giving us a starting point. Let's create another one up at the front here that should do for our main trees. Then I'm going to indicate where some of this foliage is down on the ground. But before we do that, I think what I'm going to do is just deform this ground plane a little bit, because at the moment it's perfectly smooth, which is not very natural to do that. We're going to need a bit more geometry, because at the moment we only have the four vertices in the corners of this plane. I think given our camera position, I can actually just scale this plane down a little bit as a starting point. But I'm going to scale it out on the x axis to make sure that it fully covers the extremes of our camera. So you can maybe scale it in just on the y axis a little bit here. Do now remember to hit control A and apply that scale. What I'm also going to do is just select all of these objects here and do the same thing. Apply scale to each of those. Now as we select all of them, you should see the scale is set to one. Let's again select that ground plane. We're going to hit the tab key to go into edit mode. I'm going to right click and I'm going to subdivide. I want quite a few subdivisions in here. So I'm going to roll up this set of options down at the bottom here. And we can increase the number of cuts here. So I'm just going to drag this up a little bit till we got a bit more geometry to work with. That's maxing out at ten cuts there, so I'm going to leave that, I'm going to hit eight, select everything right click, and subdivide once more. Let's just give us another couple of cuts there, that should give us a lot more geometry to work with as a starting point. Let's get one more. Now, what we can do is select individual vertices here and we can move them around with the key. Obviously, doing that on a single point would take quite a long time. What we can actually do is right click to cancel that action. If we hit the 0 key, that will enable this option up at the top here, which is proportional editing. Now when we hit the key, you'll see this circle appear as we move that point. You'll see that has an error of effect. While we're moving that point around, we can actually roll our mouse wheel to adjust the size of that error of effect. This allows us to very quickly deform the overall shape, this ground plane, just by selecting a few points. I'm just going to go around, just move a few of these points with this proportional editing on just to create a slightly more interesting surface to work with. Remember you can always adjust that size on the fly. I'm just trying to create a slightly more natural undulating form to the ground here. I'm lifting up this geometry over on the side here. I'm going to lift that section in the middle a little bit further as well, around this tree, so that you can see in the camera view that things are lifting up to one side here. We're going to do the same over here to lift this up a little bit, but leaving this area around the path to be flatter. I'll just keep tweaking things until you're happy. I can see already we've got a slightly more natural form there, so I'm just get tab to come back out of edit mode. I only can see now that we have a basic three D scene here. Control to save. 17. Stones: Camera Setup: The final thing that I'd like to do is to rough out our camera move. Whilst this can change later, it will give us a good idea of what we're going to need to be painting. To do that, I'm going to select my camera in the outliner here. The first thing I'm going to do is to duplicate it. I'm going to hit Shift D to duplicate that will automatically start to move it. I'm going to hit the right mouse button, and that will cancel the move and leave it over the top. This second camera I'm just going to rename, I'm going to hit two and call this camera projection. This is the camera that we're going to project our final illustration from. This other camera is the one that we're going to move around within the scene to view the end result. Now if we head down to the properties panel, here should be able to see the scene tab. If we click on that, that shows us which camera we're currently viewing the scene through. At the moment, we're viewing through this camera, not camera projection. We're going to leave camera projection where it is. In fact, I'm just going to disable its visibility here with this little icon. Which means that we won't be able to accidentally select and move it. Now what I'm going to do with the camera selected, going to roll over the viewport here. And hit the key that brings up this insert key, frame menu. So we want to record the position of this camera here on frame one. We have this time slider down at the bottom which we can drag along. I'm going to make sure that's on frame one here. Roll over my viewport, hit the IK, we're going to record both its location and its rotation. When I do that, you can see up here in this panel that our location and rotation have turned yellow. That shows that a position has been recorded on this particular frame. Down at the bottom here, you can see a little check mark here which shows our key frame. Before I start moving this around, I want to get rid of this sketch. So I'm going to go to the camera settings and then just disabled background images for now so we can see our three D scene properly. Now I'm going to make my scene 240 frames long, which is 10 seconds. I'm going to change this value here from 250 down to 240. I'm going to move to this final frame here. Then back up in my camera view here, I'm going to hit the key re enable this camera to view option so that we can move around using that viewport. Again, to get rid of that, we have our first frame recorded and I'm happy with the composition of that now. I just want to move around and find a new composition for my final position. Obviously, I want to focus in on these standing stones here. I'm going to choose a lower angle and just reframe things slightly for that em position, making sure that we still have a somewhat interesting composition. Let's see, try that to start with closer to the ground, and then once you're happy, you can again hit the key and record location and rotation. Now what I'm going to do is go down to this little playback menu in the bottom left here. Click on that and change my sync from play every frame to frame dropping. That just means it will play back at an accurate speed rather than trying to show every single frame. If your computer is not capable of doing that, I'm going to go back to my first frame. I can just press the space bar key and that will play through the animation. So we can see that we now have this slow camera move in with a little bit of rotation on it as we go past the tree and in towards the standing stones. So I'm just going to move to my end frame. Again, I think I can frame this a little bit more tightly, so I'm just going to push in a little bit further, closer in on those standing stones. Something like that. Having changed that, I need to again hit the key and record that location of rotation again. Just hit the Spacebar key and you can play back your animation. I think that'll work well enough for me. What we've got to be careful of is avoiding rotating too far around objects. Once you start to see the far side of things, our projection is not going to work correctly. We have to bear in mind that we are projecting from one particular view. That said, I think I'm going to go for something slightly more extreme here. Let's see if we can get away with that. Try to hit. I recall that location of rotation. Let's play that back. I think that should make an interesting looking animation. Just gives us a really good big shift in perspective. You might back it off just a little bit at the end of that rotation there, so we're not going too far round again recording that position. You'll notice that I'm only ever showing the same two sides of each of these standing stones. That means that anything that I paint should still show up accurately. Okay, I'm happy with that. I'm going to save that just there now, before we save an image out that we're going to paint over. Having created this camera move where the camera is actually moving around the scene a fair way, what I actually want to do is to project my textures from a point somewhere in the middle here. I'm actually going to re enable my projection camera here and I'm going to switch the camera that I'm viewing through to that projection camera. We'll go down to our scene options here, change from camera to camera projection. You can see now that we once again have that sketch enabled. So I'm going to go down to my camera properties and just turn off that background images once more. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to slightly orbit around this scene. Move the camera out across a little bit and back a little bit. I want to sure that I can still see that tree at the back there. Let's actually just take it back a bit here. We'll just we know roughly where that tree is so we can paint through. That's successfully, I think this way with the slightly wider view, we'll be painting this area of ground off to each side, which hopefully then means that we can see that in the final image. Just to check, I'm just going to go back and switch back to my original camera, scrub this through, see where we end up now. We're viewing quite far off over to the left there. Let's just change our camera back to the projection camera. Just make sure that we are just wide enough that we can paint that section in in a way that's going to appear nicely. Okay, I think that will do for now. What I did say that I'd do as well though, is to add in an indication of where those small bushes are going to be. To do that, I'm just going to jump back to my original camera. Come back to frame one and we can re, enable our background images, so make sure that we got the right camera selected. Enable the background image there. So you can see that we wanted some bushes in just down at the bottom here. Again, I'm just going to hit shift A, add a UV sphere and just scale this roughly to the right shape. Okay, I think I should do, let's just have a look at how that appears within the camera views. So let's just let the camera again disable that background image and scrub through our animation. There we go. So that looks as if that should work. Okay. So with that done, I'm just going to control us to save, go to my scene tab and change my camera back to my projection camera. I'm wondering about bringing that round further. Still don't think we'll leave that as is the somewhere about there. Should do so I'm just going to hide my camera up in the viewport up there so it's not cluttering up this view here. Then I'm going to go up to the menu. Up at the top of the viewport, I'm going to click on View and Viewport Render Image. Once you've done that, you can head up to the Image menu and click Save. I'm just going to save this in the same folder as my b***d file and just call it View Pot capture and save us. You now be able to take this image into the painting program of your choice, paint over it. Then once you've done, you'll be able to reproject that image back onto the three D geometry. The important thing to remember is that as you're painting things, you'll still need to keep it separated onto layers so that each of the trees, for example, has its own layer. So we're painting everything behind each of the other three D objects. I'll break that down in more detail in the next lesson. 18. Stones: Illustration Breakdown: I've switched over to Photoshop here so that I can show you the illustration that I've painted. If I just enable this viewport capture layer here. You can see that I've painted all of the elements to roughly line up with all of the three D geometry. For the most part I've painted within the ****** defined by the geometry, but I've also not been afraid to paint outside the geometry where it's required. This is something that we can easily fix once we move things back into b***der. As with the other example, I've also split everything down into these layer groups. One for each of the main planes within the image. You can see as I re enable each of the layers, we have things like the tree trunks separate to the foliage. I've grouped together these three standing stones at the back here because they sit roughly on the same plane. This lighting effect that comes through the trees, I've made sure is on its own separate layer and isn't painted into the background here at all. This means that as we move our camera around within the scene, that lighting effect is going to be separate to the background itself. Again, as I go through these different layers, you can see the same thing. Each of the tree trunks is separate from the foliage. These two standing stones here in the foreground, again, on one layer, separate to the others. This means that we can move around and they will appear in front of those standing stones in the background. Each of these bushes is on its own separate layer. Then I've separated this ivy out from the tree trunk itself here in the foreground. Then it's before, I'm just going to save out each of these layer groups to PNG files, making sure that we have transparent backgrounds on all of them. Now in the next lesson, we can jump back into B***der and start to reassemble everything. 19. Stones: Parallax Demo: Before we start projecting our illustration back onto our three D geometry, I just wanted to highlight why we're actually taking that approach here in b***der, I've once again imported all of my different illustration layers onto individual planes. If we go ahead and jump into the camera view, you'll see that everything is matching up and looks just as it did in the original illustration. The problem comes once we actually start to move our camera within the scene. If I just zoom in here, you'll notice that these standing stones and the bushes here are moving away from the ground plane underneath. As I start to rotate around, the issue becomes even more noticeable with the trees, standing stones and bushes all separating away from the ground plane. Made more noticeable by these ground shadows. If I jump back out of the camera view, you'll see that we obviously have our ground plane separated from everything else. So as we rotate around, anything closer to the camera is going to be visibly detached from that ground plane. In the previous examples, we obviously had layers that overlapped each of the levels behind them. This meant that we never had this issue of four ground layers needing to seem as if they are standing on a layer further back in the stack. So what we'll do in the next lesson is start to reproject these images back onto our three D geometry and see what difference that makes to the final result. 20. Class Update: Principled Shader: In the following lesson, we start to make use of what is known as the Principal Shader or Principal BSDF node. This is the primary shader that we use to control surface attributes, such as color and roughness in blender. In blender version four, this shader received a significant overhaul, which makes its appearance very different. Previously, all of the attributes were exposed in one long list. In version four, the attributes have been re ordered with only the most used ones exposed by default. All of the other attributes can still be found, however, by opening the various sections. Whilst most of the attributes retain the same names but simply found in new locations, there is one more significant change. The specular attribute, which originally could be found near the top of the list of attributes, appears to have been removed. There is a specular section, but no simple specular slider. In fact, this has simply been renamed to IOR level and it's used to modulate the effect of the index of refraction slider, which is now found at the top of the new shader. Whilst the changes do make the shader appear different to the examples in the class, overall it has been simplified for day to day use, which can only be a good thing. 21. Stones: Projection - BG and Ground Planes: I've reopened the three D scene that we created earlier. The first thing that I want to do is save it with a new name. I'm going out to file save As, and I'm just going to remove this block in and name it Stone Circle. The reason we're doing that is just to make sure that we always have a safe version of this file that we can go back to if anything goes wrong. The next thing I'd like to do is to add a plane in that will form the background of our scene. I'm just going to hit shift A and add in a plane. We're going to scale this up a little bit to rotate. We're going to rotate that around the x axis by 90 degrees. Just hit x and 90 and enter. Then we're going to move this backwards along the Y axis. So I'm going to hit to move Y. You'll notice we're still in local mode here. I'm going to cancel that move. I'm going to change from I'll, at the top here, to global. I'm going to hit and Y again. And that will allow us to move back on the Y axis. I'm just going to scale this up a little bit more and then scale it out just along the X axis. X. I'll scale just out a bit larger than the sight of our camera view. I'm just going to rename that quickly. Two up in the outliner here. I'll rename that background then. Because we scale this up, I'm just going to hit control A to apply my scale. We can now start to project our illustration onto these different pieces of geometry. Before we can do that though, we need to add some materials. I'm going to head over into the shading tab here. I'm just going to right click on these borders and join areas and give us a bit more space to work with. I'm also going to split this top view and jump into my camera. I'm just scrolling in with the mouse wheel, then I'm going to hide my gizmos and overlays. Let's just select our camera, which is the camera projection. Down to the camera options, Viewport display and increase it Passport option to one. Reset this background object and add a new material to it. At the moment, we have this principle BS DF node. It provides the main shading here on the background. What I'm going to do is change this base color and just knock it all the way down to black. Now going to hit shift A to add a new node, just click on Search. I'm going to start typing image texture, click on that and add it in. Now instead of adding this color into the base color, we're going to drag it down and drop it into the emission. And we'll drag the alpha down into the alpha. Now we need to open a file. If we just head up a couple of levels, we should have our class resources here. So within our class resources, we can open up the stone circle folder, head into illustration. And now we have each of our layers here saved out as PNG files. Just going to click on 01 here and open the image. Now we already have something here on the background, but it's not going to be lined up correctly at the moment. I'll solve that in just a moment. Before we do that, I want to change a couple of other settings here on the shader. This specular value, I'm going to dial all the way down that removes any unwanted highlights here on the surface. And equally, I'm going to increase the roughness up to one this way. Now all of the shading should be coming simply from the image texture that we've applied. What we now need to do is to create UV coordinates on each of our objects in order to correctly map our images onto them. To do that, I'm going to head over into the UV editing tab. Once we get there, you can see that we've moved into edit mode. With our objects selected, all of the vertices are selected. We just hit the key to confirm that. If I scroll out on the viewport over here, you can see at the moment these vertices are perfectly mapped to the corners of our texture. In many cases, that would be what we want. But in this particular case, we only want this image to appear in the area that can be seen from the camera. So I'm going to quickly jump into the camera view. For this, just click on the Scene tab to confirm that you have the projection camera selected. I'm quickly head into the material preview here, so we can see our material. Now I can hit the U key to bring up this UV mapping menu. We've got a lot of different options here, but what we're interested in is this one down here which is project from view. When I click on that, you can see that now our UV's have moved so that this image is only projected on part of the image plane. Hit zero to jump out of the camera. You can see the effect that that's had. Now if I jump back into the shading tab, I want to remove these repeats here. And we can do that on the image node here. Just change this value from repeat to clip. Means we won't be repeating the image over the rest of the surface. Now what you'll notice up in the viewport here is that we're still showing some of that black. It's not perfectly matched up to our camera view. The reason for that is when we're projecting a texture onto a piece of geometry, we actually have to have enough resolution on the mesh for it to project correctly. At the moment, we only have a single face here. What I'm going to do is hit the tab key to move into edit mode. Right click and subdivide. We can roll this out and increase the number of cuts here, increasing that up to the maximum of ten. Now if we move over into our camera view on the left here, we can once again hit that U key to reproject and project from view. You can see we're now matching much more closely. I think we can probably increase the resolution slightly more. So I'm just going to right click and subdivide once again. Again, let's hit over this Viewport and project from View. Now that is looking pretty good, so I'm just going to hit Tab to exit edit mode here, we can move on to the next object in our scene. That's going to be this ground plane here. I'm going to select that. Once again, we're going to need to create a new material, but we can actually use the last one as a starting point. Instead of hitting you, I'm just going to hit this drop down on the left here. And I'm going to select this material, one that we've just created. Obviously this is applied the wrong texture to this, but that's easy enough to change. Now if I were to go in and change this image file here at the moment and change the image that's applied to both of these different objects, that's because they're both currently sharing this material. One, and you can see that by this number two next to it, that shows that it's applied to two different objects at the moment. If I click on that number two, it will create a new unique material just for this particular object. We can then click on Open and pick our second PNG file. We now have a ground plane in here. It's obviously not being applied correctly because we have the wrong UV Co ordinates. If we hit Tab again, we can a to select all of our ground plane, roll over our camera view and project from view. In this case, we already have quite a high density mesh here. That means we don't have to subdivide this any further. I can hit Tab to go back into object mode. Now at the moment, anywhere outside of our image texture is showing up as black. That's fine with our background, but you can see along the edge here, we actually have a blurred edge that should be blurring through into the background and not showing up this black along their border. Now even though we've plugged the alpha of the image into the material node, we have to do something else as well. So I'm going to go into the Material tab here. Scroll right down, under Settings. Down here, we have these b***d modes. I'm going to change this from opaque to alpha b***d. I'm going to change the shadow mode to alpha clip. Alpha b***d gives us a softer transition here than some of the other options such as alpha clip and alpha hatched. But there are occasions where you'll get glitches with the alpha b***d mode. And sometimes it can be useful then to switch to one of the other modes instead. This, at the moment, is giving us a smooth transition between the ground plane and the background that's doing exactly what we want. So in the next lesson, we'll go ahead and start projecting the illustration back onto other objects within our scene. 22. Stones: Projection - BG Tree and Stones: Working from back to front, I'm next going to select this tree at the background here. You'll notice that the trunk and this branch are both separate from one another at the moment with the branch selected. And then going to shift, select my tree trunk and hit control J. And that will join them into one object. The other thing that's worth doing before we go any further is just adding some extra geometry here. If I hit the tab key, you can see at the moment we don't have any edge lap running through the tree trunk here. As with the background, that's going to cause its problems when we reproject our image onto it. And we can fix that just by hitting control R to add in an edge loop. You can see this yellow loop here in the middle here. If we actually scroll our mouse wheel, we can increase the number of cuts. Then when we click, we have the option to move them around. But I'm just going to right click to cancel that move. And that's added in these loops for us. I'm now going to roll over the branch here. Hit control R, and we'll do the same thing, just add in a few loop cuts, Click and then right click. We can then hit Tab to exit our edit mode. As before, I'm going to go down to the shader window here and browse for a Material. And I'm going to bring in Material two, that was our ground plane, and that had the b***ding options applied to it. Again, we need to remember to click on this little number two to give us a unique material. Now we can open the next image in our sequence three, open as before. We're going to have to project our UV's. Let's hit the tab key A to select all of the vertices of the camera view project. From view tab out, you'll see that we've projected on, but the result looks slightly strange. If in the Material tab we scroll down to the bottom here, what we can do is click on this Show Back Face option. That will hide the back faces at the moment because we can see through the edges here because the area that we've painted is actually smaller than the geometry. If we have showed backface enabled, the image is projecting through and projecting onto the inside of the cylinder as well as the outside. If we disable that option, it won't appear on the inside of the cylinder. As we rotate around, you'll see it's still projected on the back of the object itself. That's the result that we're after. We can now move on to the foliage up at the top. Here again, we'll go into the dropdown Pick material three, the two icon. Open our next image tab to edit mode. Select everything again. Let's hit the UK and project from view that's projected our foliage on nicely. But we're actually clipping the edge of this here because I actually painted beyond the bounds of this geometry in Photoshop, we can see that if we head over into the UV editing view, you can see that the projected UV's don't cover the whole of this image here. In order to fix that, what I'm going to do just in the three D view here, is I'm going to change into local mode. I'm going to hit to scale. I'm going to hold down the middle mouse button just to constrain this to the x axis. And I'm going to scale is out a little bit. You'll see at the moment nothing changes. And we've actually just stretched the image as we've scaled this out, what we have to do is reproject that once again. I'm just going to jump into my camera view project. From view you can see now our geometry is bigger than the size of the image. It looks like we're clipping this slightly at the bottom still here, but that can be easily fixed as well. Over here in the UV editor, I can actually hit A to select all of the vertices here and just reset that position slightly. You can see as I'm moving that around, if you look at the camera view, the effect that that's having, I can reposition this so that covers the whole of that image texture. That's a click to release. Now if we jump out of the camera view, you'll see as we move around, it's projected nicely onto here. If I head back into my shading tab. The next objects that we want to work on are the standing stones at the back here. I'm just going to select this one over on the left here. Again, I'm just going to add the last material, click the number two to create a unique material and we'll change the texture that we're applying to image five tab to enter edit mode here and project from view. Again, I'm just going to head over into the UV editing tab just to check exactly how this is being projected on. It looks like everything is nicely contained as we move around within the three D view here. You can see that this looks great from this angle, we have a bit of flexibility to move around it, obviously. If we move too far then we start to see all of the stretching being applied there. That's perfectly normal. I'm going to head back into the shading tab now. We're going to select the standing stone on the right here. We're going to apply the same material, material five. And in this case we're not going to a new material because each of these three standing stones is going to share that same material. All we have to do is redefine the UV's here tab. Make sure everything's selected over the camera view and project from view. Once again, that seems to be working correctly. Now the other thing that I'm noticing here is that the alpha channel isn't being applied correctly. And you can see that we can still see the outline of our three D geometry. Now, I mentioned before that we have some different b***ding modes. If we scroll down to the bottom of the material tab, here we have the alpha b***d applied. If we change that now to alpha clip, you can see it's actually solved the problem in this case because we've got the same material on both of these objects, it's solved it in both cases. You can also see, looking at the back here, that we have the same problem on the tree. I'm just going to hit Tab to go back into object mode, select that tree and change from alpha b***d to alpha Clip again, that's cleaned up that edge. Alpha b***d works really well. We've got the soft transitions like up on the foliage here, but sometimes for the cleaner lines, the alpha clip will work a little bit better. We'll now select this third standing stone here. Again, apply that same material five tab and then hit over the camera view to project from view. Now the issue that we have here is that when I painted this standing stone, I made it much larger than the three D geometry that we have here. What we're going to need to do is to scale this up a bit. I think what I'm actually going to do is just select these top points here. And to start with, and just to hit I notice that we have proportional editing enabled. So I'm just going to hit right click to cancel that and hit to turn proportional editing off. Hit once again and it said, let's move this up a little bit to start with. We'll try that for now. A select all of the vertices, and again, let's try reprojecting them. I think I can just move that down a little bit and reproject. That's looking a lot closer. It might need to go a little bit further. Actually, I'm just going to jump into the UV editing tab once more. We very close to the edge here. I'm just going to grab these vertices on the side here and just move them ever so slightly out just to make sure that we're fully covering that. There we are. Let's head back into the shading tab. And don't forget Savi's seen periodically as well. 23. Stones: Projection - MG Tree: Now our next layer would actually be the lighting effect that cuts through the trees here. But I think I'm going to skip past that and we'll come back to it later. I'm just going to move ahead to this tree over on the left here. Then again, reuse our last material, create a unique copy of it, and change the image we're applying. In this case, we don't want image six, we want image seven. As with the other tree, we don't have enough geometry here. I'm going to hit control to add in a lip scroll mouse wheel to increase the number of subdivisions. Click and right click A to make sure we selected all of the vertices and project from view to it. That in this instance you can see that we can still see the tree doubled up on the back here. So if we actually scroll down in our Material tab, the option that we had previously to hide back faces was only available under the Alpha b***d mode. If we change this back to alpha clip, you'll see that that option has gone and we can see this back face here. What we can do instead though, is enable this backface culling option. And that will remove that completely because we've got the same issue now on this tree at the back here. I'm going to do the same thing, enable backface culling on that particular object. You can see the same thing is happening with these standing stones. But for now, I'm not so bothered about the effect there. It actually fills things out and might give us a bit more flexibility with our camera move. If it becomes a problem later we can change that option. I'll select the next piece of foliage here. In this case, I'm actually going to apply material four because that was our last foliage material. And we'll want the same b***ding options on it. But again, let's create a unique version of that material. Then we'll need to open image number eight as usual, let's tap into edit mode, Select everything and project from view. Now we have the correct foliage on here. As before, we can see on the left hand side over here, things are being clipped off by the geometry. So I'm going to head over into the UV editing tab and we can have a look at what's happening. You can see here that the image extends beyond this geometry and to a certain extent on this side as well. What we can do once again here, it's just in the three D view. We want to make this tree a little bit larger. I'm going to hit and X and scale this out. To start with, let's jump into our camera view and project from view that's looking a lot better, but I think that we possibly need a little bit more down at the bottom here. I'm actually going to do is again head into the three D view. And I'm going to rotate this slightly. I'm just going to hit the R key and rotate it in the viewport slightly. Go back to my camera view project from view that looks like it's covering everything nicely. So that should do the job. Head back into my shading tab and you can see that we're starting to build up this sea nicely. So I'm just going to save things there. And then we'll continue with the other elements in the next lesson. 24. Class Update: Modifier Menu: In the following lesson, we make use of the modifier menu prior to Blender version four. This menu open to show all of the available options in one place. Whilst this made finding the option you wanted easy, it didn't allow for new additions to the menu without it getting extremely bloated. In Blender four, the decision was made to replace this with a more conventional menu. This means that individual modifiers are now hidden under sub menu. Whilst this may at first make things seem harder to locate, the menu now has a built in search function. After clicking to open the menu, it's possible to start typing and you'll instantly begin searching the menu. For example, if we wish to locate the Bevel modifier, I can simply start typing the name and then select it from the list that appears below. Likewise, if I start to type sub, it will allow me to apply the subdivision surface modifier, which is faster than digging through menus to find it. 25. Stones: Projection - MG Tree and Stones: Continuing forwards within the image. We're going to select this tree trunk. Next I'm going to add a material and we'll apply material six which was the last tree trunk that we applied. It's create a unique copy and change the image to number nine tab. Let's introduce some extra edge loops here. Again, control scroll the mouse wheel, click and right click, select everything again and project from view. I just want to check what's happening down at the bottom here because we have some tree roots which extend slightly beyond the bounds of this geometry. In this case, what we're going to do is still an edit mode here. I'm going to hit Control R to add another edge loop. I'm going to click, just drag this down slightly, it's just above the area that the roots are. Click to confirm. I now want to select these bottom two edge loops. I can hold down the Okey. Just click on this edge loop here and I'll select around. Then if I hold down the shift and key, I can click on this bottom edge loop and select that as well. I can now hit to scale. I'm just going to scale these out a little bit. I think what I'm going to do is just slip just this bottom edge loop. And also scale that out yet further. Again, let's hit a. Let's reproject this project from view that's looking a bit better. If you ever want to increase the size of the camera view, you can just roll over it and hit control in space that will increase its size to full screen. Then you can control space to go back again. That's looking pretty good. I'm just going to Alt on this bottom edge loop and Z to move it up a little bit, just so that we get a better fall off on this edge here. Again, A to select and reproject once more. Okay, so I'm happy with how that's looking. Tab to edit mode, and then select the foliage, select my last material, make the unique copy and select image ten as usual. Tab and project from view. Now once more, this isn't anywhere like covering the right area, we have to the UV editing tab, we can see just how far out we are in this case, we actually want to cover this area down at the bottom here as well. What I'm going to do to fix this is a slightly different solution to what we've applied previously in the past. We've scaled up this geometry and then we've had to keep reprojecting that involves a certain amount of guesswork. But there's a different approach that we can take. If I head onto the modifiers tab here, I can click Add Modifier. We can add this UV project option. We can now pick an object to project from. I'm going to select my projection camera as usual, what this is going to do, this is going to create a live projection from the camera. We need to change this aspect ratio though, because the aspect ratio of the image here is a 16 by nine image. We need to input those values here. I'm just going to change that to 16.9 You can now see we're back to where we were previously. We can select our UV map at the top here as well. This means we now have a live update on our UV map. If, for example, I now to scale this up, you can see as we scale it, rather than stretching the image, the image is being projected through the piece of geometry, which is exactly what we want. Now, I'm not going to scale this to encompass all of the leaves here. I'm actually going to leave it just covering this area at the top. To start with, I think I'm going to jump out of camera view. I'm going to make this a lot shallower. I'm going to start out just by scaling along the y axis so you can, and Y. I'm just going to squash this up quite a bit to start with, I think we can scale it vertically quite bit as well. And Z, then I'm going to move it down in Z. You can see as I'm doing this, we get this live update, which is really handy. Let's just move this across a little bit. Scale it again out in X, a little bit more as well, so we're getting closer. And I'm going to rotate this a bit as well so it better matches the shape that we're going for. Freely move it around till we're getting closer to what we want. This way the leaves will wrap around a little bit. I think we're going to increase the depth just a little bit more. Scale it and Y, that's looking all right. Now, down at the bottom here, we need to extend some of this geometry down so that it'll encompass the other leaves low down on the tree. What I can do is just grab some of these vertices here. I want just these ones towards the bottom you can hold down shift to add to your selection at any time. Now you'll notice I'm not selecting those points through at the back there. That's because even though we can see through this object at the moment, I don't have that x ray mode on slightly deceptive reselect through here. You can see I'm selecting on both sides of the mesh. I'm just going to move these points down a bit until we're starting to show these other leaves up down at the bottom here. Now, I don't want these leaves to be too far away from the tree trunk, so I'm just going to select all of these. I'm just asked to scale them in a bit, move them closer over to the tree trunk. I'll just move some of these points down as well. Obviously, the further you are around the side of the object here, the more distortion you'll get. Just trying to neaten this up slightly. If we jump into the camera view, we'll get a better idea of how this is working control space. Just to increase the size, I can move up into the right a little bit that's now encompassing all of our leaves nicely here. Just move these points out a little once. It looks a little bit messy. It should do the job control space again, to jump back out of that, I can review now it looks as though those leaves are attached to that tree trunk. Once we're happy with this, we can actually get rid of this projection modifier. To do that, let's just hit Tab to go into object mode, roll over the modifier and hit control A to apply that modifier. That should now mean if we hit the tab key and Aid select all of our vertices, we can now see our corrected UVs over here projected over the image. I'm just going to head once again back into my shading tab and save my scene. Our next elements are the standing stones here in the foreground. I select one of those, select our last material and create unique copy. Then we want to open our next image, just number 11, edit mode, and project from view. All right, so we can do the same with this other standing stone. Tap back out, select the next one. Apply that same material, material ten, in this case we're going to keep the duplicate. Tap into edit mode and project from view. Next elements of the bushes and I actually created an additional bush within the illustration. We're going to add that in the next lesson. 26. Stones: Projection - Bushes and FG Tree: The next thing we need to do is just select one of these bush objects here. I'm just going to hit shift to duplicate and move this back a little bit into this area. And you can see from the shadow that's painted on the ground plan, roughly where that bush should be fitting. Just move that down a little bit. Back of touch, let's adda new material. Pick out material ten, Create a copy, pick image 12 All of our vertices and project from view, so this is quite hidden. But we can see that we are clipping the edge here slightly. So let's go again back into the UV editing tab, see what we've got. So you can see this needs to be stretched out a little bit and also needs to be slightly taller. So we can just hit a scale scale, this on the x axis quite a bit, and I'm just going to nudge it up into the side slightly as well. Once again, from our camera view, let's just hit you and project that looks as though it's covering everything nicely. Now back into the shading tab. Let's select our next bush and do the same thing at the last material. Make it unique and load image 13 into it mode and project from views. Fairly good. Let's just check in the UV editing view, we're missing some of the edge here again, we can just scale that slightly and move it slightly in the camera view and that's reproject that's covering things well enough. Now we move on to the final bush here, create unique material, load image 14. Project that from view. Again, I'm just going to look at the UV editing tab. We're missing the top of some of these ferns here. Let's just move this up slightly and reproject. Still missing the edges ever so slightly there. Let's just on the z axis, slightly, I think. Generally slightly larger. Try again, that looks good. Again, that seems to be projecting well enough. That just leaves us with this tree in the foreground. Now for that, let's select the geometry tab to entered it mode. And again, we need to add some edge loops here. Control, let's call that mouse wheel click, right Clk. I'll do the same on the branch. Select everything we need to add that material before we go any further. So let's select that material 13. You want to be an object mode here, and I can make that unique material 14. Let's sort this out. We actually want image 15. Now let's turn back into edit mode and project from view. In this case, our geometry definitely needs editing because we have some additional roots down at the bottom here. We'll see that mostly if we head over to the UV editing view and see we have a lot of our image texture outside of the bounds that are defined here by the UV's. What I'm going to do is just to have to to edit mode, we can start out just by slitting this bottom edge loop, by holding down Alt and clicking, and I'm just going to scale up. I think what we're actually going to do in this case is the same thing that we did for the leaves over here. We're going to use the live projection option, which will make our life a lot easier. I'm going to head into the modifier tab and add that UV project modifier. Again, let's select our camera projection. Change the aspect ratio, that is 16 by nine UV map. Now it'll be a lot easier to edit this. We're going to scale this slightly. I think we can add in an extra edge loop to help control add in an edge lap and right click scale out a little bit. Let's this bottom loop, let's just scale out again. I think I'm getting both of these, just going to move them across slightly. I think we're clipping the edges. And this loop above, I'm going to scale up a bit as well, make sure that's not cutting anything off. Just scaling and moving it slightly. That's looking fairly good. You can see that we're slightly losing the top edge here. There's obviously not quite enough geometry. I'm just going to add in another couple of edge loops up at the top here. Just control our, add those in to help hold things together. I'm also going to adjust some of these edge loops here. So I'm going to do is just scale these individually. And I think scale and move these closer to the shape of the branch. That means it should wrap around a little bit better. I'm gonna do the same with it's branch down at the bottom here. Just can scale in slightly, not you up. Okay, I'll be the same with some of these loops up at the top pair just scaling in slightly and moving them around a little bit. I'm happy, I think that matches well enough. I'm just going to tab to head back out to object mode again. I'm going to apply this projection, so I just roll over it and hit control A to apply it now, like in our UV editing tab. To select everything we can scroll and just check that everything's contained within the UVs, which it does appear to be. Now I'm going to add the ivy layer over the top of this. To do that, what I'm going to do is to duplicate this tree, this tree trunk that's selected. I'm just going to hit shift D. As we start to move that, I'll take the tree with us, but we can hit right click to cancel that move. And I'm going to rename this as Ivy Two Ivy. Then we're going to hit Tab to enter Edit mode with all our vertices selected. If I just hit the key to bring up the tools on the side here. We scroll down to the bottom, you'll see that we have this shrink fattened option when I click on that, this little handle. And that will allow us to scale this in and out a little bit. So what I want to do is just make this ever so slightly larger than the tree underneath. This is slightly different to a scale option in that it's pushing all of the vertices out along their surface normal. That means it'll get uniformly larger in all directions. Just have to go back to object mode there. We're going to create a unique material because we've duplicated the object, it already has that tree material applied. Then we can change this, 216. Let's now brought our ivy in, It's interesting tab to go into edit mode again. Let's just make sure we reproject this so that our V hasn't scaled up. Again, I'm just checking the UV editing tab. You can see that we haven't quite made this large enough since we're in edit mode here. We can again, just click on this same tool here and just scale things up a little bit more. And then to reproject, there we are. Now we've covered up that v nicely. Now at the moment you can see these borders around some of the ivy leaves. As we get closer, that will disappear. But at the moment, it's looking quite pronounced. If we head onto the Material tab and scroll down, we have this alpha clip option enabled. We can try the alpha b***d and see if that's better. In fact, that's worse. Let's go back to alpha clip and we can change this clip threshold. If I increase this a bit, that will often help. What we'll really need to do is see how this is looking in the final render. Before doing that though, we still need to add that light beam to the center of the image. So we'll do that in the next lesson. 27. Stones: Projection - Lighting: Now in order to create our light beam, what I'm actually going to do is start out with a cylinder. So I'm just going to hit shift A. We'll add in a cylinder. Check the options that are applied here. I think I'm just going to leave the defaults for now. Then I'm going to hit Tab, turn to Edit mode, and I'm going to select this top edge loop. Just by hitting Alt Click you can see that we still have this shrink fattened option enabled. We can just hit the key to go back to selection mode there. And I'm going to hit S and scale in, that will give us a rough cone shape. And I'm going to add a couple of edge loops by hitting control R, scrolling my mouse wheel, and click and right click. Then I'm scale everything along the y axis just to squash up that light beam a little bit. You know, I move it back into place. I'll scale the whole thing up a little bit, all to rotate, to move it into place. Scale it up so it's a bit bigger. So I think that's roughly where we'll need it. So let's just go back to object mode there. Control to apply that scale and right click to shade smooth as well. Now select a Material. I think what I'm actually going to do is select material four here, because I know that had the alpha b***d mode applied unique material. And select image six. Obviously, we need to fix our UV's tab. Select everything project from view, we obviously have some issues here. It's head into the UV editing tab. See that things aren't quite aligned as they should be. That's as to scale scale. And I also want to rotate it a bit better, match the angle and reproject that. Just going to go back to selection mode there. The UVs are covering the image nicely there. I think we can even just scale this down a little bit, remove it, That's reprojecting that. Let's head back into our shading tab now. You can see that we've got an issue, once again here with our layers. This tree foliage that's currently in front of that layer is clipping off. Now if I select that material and scroll down, we had the alpha b***d mode applied. We can change that Talha clip that's got rid of that issue, but at the same time it's also not giving us the soft b***d that we'd really like. On the change that to alpha b***d, again, I'm actually going to do is just try adjusting the position of this folio slightly. I'm going to scale it down To start with, I'm going to hit S, let's constrain that to the y axis. To scale it down a little. I think I'm going to rotate that just a little bit. Move it, touch close to camera. Let's tab, turn to edit mode and you to reproject. That's still not quite working. Let's go back to object mode and see if we can fix what I'm going to try doing. It's just moving this forward. That works a lot better when the two aren't intersecting fully. Might rotate this, I'll just move it slightly. Can even just try scaling this down a little bit as well. So now you can see we've got a better result now. No, I don't like the harsher edges on the edge here. Let's just try reprojecting this one more time. It's obviously not big enough. Let's head into the UV editing tab. What I'm going to do is just select everything here in the UV editing tab and I'm going to scale this up. This will make sure that the images within the UV's even though the end result will be that things look a little bit smaller here in the three D view. If I head back to the shading tab, you should see in the camera view we're losing that harsh edge. There's still a little bit of an issue there. Let's just tweak that slightly further scale. It's up slightly more. I'm just going to offset it slightly. Let's see how that's looking. And that's cleaned up that edge nicely. Now, this tree at the back here, I can see that we are clipping the edge of that foliage slightly. I'm just going to select that foliage there. Let's head back into our UV editing. It's absolutely we can see, so it's obviously just poking out just at the bottom there. So let's just scale this serves slightly up and reproject. It's still a slight issue. Rotate it slightly, move it down. They don't reproject. Let's fix that issue. I'm just going to save that there. Now that we've applied all of those textures to the geometry, we can start looking at our camera move in the next lesson. 28. Stones: Camera Animation: Before we start looking at the camera animation, I just want to head over into the properties panel into this render tab, down to color management, and change this from filmic to standard to make sure that we have the correct colors for our illustration. We can then head up into the scene tab and change from our camera projection to our camera. I'm just going to scroll up and we'll change the visibility so we can hide our projection camera and re, enable our scene camera here. Then with that selected, I'm going to go down to the camera tab again, increase this post part option to make sure that we have this black border. We'll then jump back over into the layout tab. Let's just change our view to be material preview. In both cases, I'm going to remove the overlays on this viewport as well. Obviously, I defined a camera move before I went ahead and painted this illustration. Now if we scrub through the timeline, we can see how well it's working. Obviously, our final camera position here is exposing this empty area off to the left of frame here. We've obviously gone a bit too far. Pretty much everything else is holding up though. So the move overall is working well. I think what I'm going to do is just adjust this end position of the camera and see if we can get something that works with the existing illustration just in the camera view. I'm going to orbit around a little bit, reposition things, see if I can get something that's working nicely, so the drop down a little bit lower. See if I can come up with a composition that's looking nice. I think having this larger standing stone just framed in the middle here of these other two works quite well. I think I'm happy enough with that. I'm just going to hit now and save the location and rotation key on the camera. Can now hit space and play this back to see how it's looking. Obviously now you should be able to see how much better this works than the version we had when we had separate layers. Because the ground texture is now projected onto the three D environment, it means that our standing stones stay sitting nicely in the right place, as do our trees in the background here. Now the one thing that's not working quite as well as it might is just at the back here, we can see the top of this tree trunk becoming exposed underneath the foliage there. So I'm going to see what I can do to fix that. I'm just going to go back to my first frame here and we'll take a look at that foliage. I think what I'm going to do to start with here is just scale this down slightly. I'm going to hit S, to scale on my Y axis. Scale it in towards the tree trunk there. I think I'll actually jump to the final frame and see what effect that's having. You can see as I scale it in, in the camera view is getting closer to that tree trunk and it feels less like the two things are detached. We can also just hit and scale it up ever so slightly, and you can see it extends down over the top of that tree trunk. If we now scrub back to our first frame, just check that everything is still looking all right there, which it is. I think that should do the job nicely. I say I'm happy with that end result. So I'm just going to save my scene there. And then in the next lesson, we're going to add some particle effects that will give the illusion of fireflies flying around the scene to add a little extra magic and depth to the final scene. 29. Stones: Particles: In order to add the particles, we first need to add an object to emit the particles. So I'm just going to hit shift A and we'll add in a cube. I'm going to change its name up in the outliner to emitter. Then let's scale it up a bit. I'm just going to scale it to encompass roughly our scene. I'm just going to scale it up a bit. Let's move it back on the y axis, let's go a little bit larger. We can actually scale this down vertically as well. In Z, it doesn't need to be quite, in fact, I'm going to keep it above the ground, move it until it's roughly sitting on top of the ground plane and extends up to the top of the trees. Now I'll visit the moment it's blocking everything else in our scene for the time being, I'm going to click on this object tab. Go down to Viewport display, then where it says Display As. I'm going to change it from textured to bounds. Since we've scaled this object significantly, I'm going to hit control A to apply it scale as well. We can now head into the particles tab of the property panel. Then if we just hit this plus icon, we'll add a new particle system. I'm going to reduce the number of particles we've got to 200. Then at the moment, it will start emitting particles from the first frame and continue emitting them through to frame 200. And each particle will only survive 450 frames. We want to change that so that we actually start out with all of the particles already within the scene, and they remain for the duration of the scene, our start and end of frame one. And we'll continue through to frame 250. Now we move around here, you'll see that all of these particles have been added, but they've actually been added just to the faces of this cube. We want to emit particles from within the volume of the cube. We can do that under this saw section here. Instead of emit from faces, we can change that to volume. Now they're evenly scattered around within the volume itself. Now if I just hit the space bar to play this back, you'll see that our particles just dropped straight out the bottom of frame here. That's because they start out an initial velocity and they have gravity affecting them. We're going to change both of those settings. If we go down to this field weight section and open that up, you can see that our first option here is gravity. And I'm just can take that all the way down to zero. Now when we play back things don't fall down but they do all push straight out away from the origin. That's because of that initial velocity that was set. We can go back up to velocity here. And we'll change that value. Instead of one meters per second, I think I'm going to drop this down to just not 0.1 start with. So we've got a little bit of movement in there, but it's not so significant. But at the moment, our particles are still just drifting around. So there are some other settings that we can change to affect them. Under the physics tab here, you can see that we have these forces. I'm going to start out by increasing this Brownian value, increase a bit to start with, and see what effect that has. You can see that these particles are starting to jitter around. We can experiment with that it up a bit more. In fact, to get slightly more erratic movement, I think I'm going to go back to that velocity just right back down to zero. Let's restart our play back. See where we are. So we have this really erratic movement. Things are going quite fast, so I'm just going to increase this damping a little bit, then we'll actually have an effect of slowing down these particles. They've got this jittery erratic movement, but they're not going too fast. Just just that down a bit further, I think that's the sort of effect that I want. I'm noticing some particles are getting clipped at the back here. I just want to check that we're not going too far back. We'll see how they look once we change the particle type, I think. For now. You can see that we have these gray spheres in here. What we actually want to do is add an object into the scene, which we can then use to replace each of these spheres. I'm just going to hit shift A and we're going to add under the mesh menu an ico sphere. I'm just going to leave the default values here at the moment, but what I'm going to do is just hit and drag this out to one side so it's way out of the view of the camera. Then with that selected, I'm going to go to the materials tab and add a new material to it. We're going to scroll down. I'm going to reduce its specular so it's not catching any highlights and also increase its roughness. But what we're most interested in is the emission option down at the bottom here. I'm going to click on the emission color here and I'm going to turn that right up and pick an orange color. Then I'm going to start increasing its emission strength. I'm going to do this up quite a bit. What I'm going to do is just jump into the render settings quickly here because we have this Bloom option. If I enable that, you can see that we now have this bright glow around our sphere. Having done that, I'm going to re select my emission object. Go back to the particles tab, then if we scroll right down, we can get to this render section the moment we have Renderers Halo, which are these spheres that we're seeing here. If I change that, I can pick the Object option and then we have this instance object option beneath it. I click in there, I can just scroll down and pick this co sphere that we've just added. You can see because of the display settings that we set on the emitter, we're not able to see our spheres properly. What I'm going to do is I'm going to disable this Show Emitter option under render. And then I'm also going to open up the Viewport display. And I'm also going to disable show emitter there as well. Then we can go to our object settings under Viewport display instead of bounds, we can change this back to textured. Now we can see all of our particles appearing correctly, but at the moment they're really quite large. So I want to go back to my particle settings and reduce the scale. If I scroll down again until we find the render section, we have a scale option in here. We also have this scale randomness. And I'm going to crank that scale randomness right up to one. That means that we'll have a variety in the sizes here. But I still need to turn this size down a bit. Somewhere around 0.1 or 0.2 We'll see how that looks. Now I think we can actually go into the material again. If I select this Ico sphere once more, go to its material tab and scroll down. I think we can push this emission strength up still higher, around 50 or so. And now it's sharp, a little bit better. Going to click my emission color here. Just change that slightly, a bit more orange into it. If we go back to our first frame, we can hit the space part to play this through and see how that's looking. With the particles flying around, I think we can afford to go slightly larger on those particles. Again, I'm going to go down to render section. Just adjust this scale slightly just by holding down the shift key, we can adjust this in smaller increments. It's something that looks nice, increase the size of my viewport here, the control space, and play that back, so you can go ahead and keep adjusting the settings on the particles if you want to. But I'm fairly happy with that end result, so I'm just going to save that there and then we can render things out in the next lesson. 30. Stones: Render: The first thing I want to do before we render out the full animation is just do a test render moved back to my first frame. And then you can head up to the render menu and render image or 12. You can see that the settings that we changed earlier on the ivy have got rid of most of the artifacts, but we still do have some around the edges here. You'll also notice this tree trunk on the right has some artifacts down the ***gth of its trunk. We'll have a look at fixing those before we render out the final animation. Just going to close this down, I want to select my tree trunk. If you have difficulty selecting the trunk, you can always hold down the old key and click. And then we'll give you a menu of everything that's underneath your mouse cursor and we can select the trunk that way. So if we go to its material settings and scroll down, we can again increase this clip threshold. Let's see what effect that has. Now those artifacts are still present on there. There's something else that we can look at to see if it'll fix that texture. I'm just going to head over into the shading work space. If I just zoom in a little bit on the edge here, you can see this white border on the image texture node here. This first drop down where it says a linear. That affects how b***der scales images up and down. Internally, we can change that setting from linear to you can see it's now got rid of that white edge and clean that up nicely. I'm going to try the same thing with the ivy again. Just hold down 0 and select the ivy. Let's change that from linear to closest. Again, it's cleaned up all of those artifacts. Once again, I'm just going to hit 12 to do a test render. You can see that's looking much better. Just heading back to my layout tab is scrub the timeline here. I want to check the edges of these bushes here as well. I'm going to hit 12 at this point and see how that's looking in the render that's coming out fairly clean. Going to close that down. If you notice the particles aren't visible here, that's simply because they need to be spawned on frame one. Jumped ahead through the timeline. Once you've played this through, it will cache the particle effect. And that will be visible, and should also be visible in the final render. The final thing we need to do is to change our output settings, which is over here in the properties panel. Our resolution is set to 1920 by 1080. And we're going to keep the frame rate at 24 frames per second. Starting end frames match our timeline. That's all good, and we're just going to change our output options. I'm just going to jump to the same location that I've been saving my b***d files and adding a new folder which I'll call Render. Then I'll rename this to Stone Circle and add that underscore at the end so that our image frame number will appear. After that, then accept, I'm going to leave this as a PNG file, change it to an RGB file because we don't need the alpha in the final result. Then we should be good to go. You might wonder why I'm not saving this out as a movie file and I'm instead saving out an image sequence. That's simply because if the render crashes part way through with a movie file, we'd have to start all over again. Whereas if we render our individual frames and we have a crash partway through the render, we can just render the remaining frames within the scene and piece everything together at the end. So I'm just going to save my scene, then head up to render and render animation. Once you render is complete, you can head up to the render menu again and view animation. Then if you want to, you can either drop your image sequence into a video editing application or once again we can add a video editing workspace. Add down in the sequencer image sequence, open render folder, select all of frames and add image strip. And head up to our output options here. And change the file format to an FFmpeg, video encoding turns to Mpeg four and just increase the quality to a high quality output. You then ready to once again render render animation, and in the render folder you should now have this MB four file saved out. Now if you want to join me in the final lesson, we'll recap some of the important points to remember, you're creating scenes like this of your own. 31. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class. Hopefully by now you have a better understanding of how some simple three D skies can help you with your illustration process. Now in this final lesson, I'd just like to briefly recap on some key points from the class. When creating multiplane style, it's important to ensure that each of the layers overlap each other sufficiently. The multiplane effect will not work if the foreground layer needs to feel attached to a background layer. When you save out the layers of your image, be sure to use a format such as PNG, which preserves the transparency of the layers. Naming each of your layers sequentially will make life far easier when importing them into b***der. When you import your layers, don't forget to set the material type to emit and use the Z positive depth option to layer them correctly. When creating three geometry. For image projection, you'll need to have sufficient resolution in the mesh projection to work correctly, but you can always add additional subdivisions or loop cuts and then reproject your image when you need to make major changes to the three D geometry. The UV project modifier enables live updates which makes life much easier If you've been following along with the class and have a final project to share, either using your own illustration or one of mine, Please do add it to the project gallery. I'd love to see what you've created. If you've enjoyed the class, then it'd be fantastic if you could leave and review. It really helps new students know what to expect. Finally, if you'd like to take your three D skills further, then do check out some of my other classes which cover both essential three D skills and more complex character creation and animation. I hope that you've enjoyed your journey into the forest to explore the possibilities that three D offers, and now feel confident to create similar projects of your own. Good luck and I hope to see you again soon.