Learn Blender - 3D Design for Absolute Beginners

1. Class Intro: Hi. Welcome to this class. Here, it's going to be all about the absolute basics in Blender. It's perfect for you if you want to start Blender for the absolute first time but also if you already did some tutorials and want to tie it all together. In the first part of this class, we're going to play around for a bit. Try some bits and pieces and build some stuff without the pressure to actually create anything specific. In the second part, you're going to create your very own 3D model. My name is Gesa Pickbrenner. I am a certified goldsmith, autodidact in 3D design and an online teacher. I've been learning Blender for many years now and have been using it as a freelancer graphic designer, artist and teacher. I have specialized in 3D modeling and 3D printing of sculptures and jewelry. Regarding these topics, you will find a lot of extra knowledge in my classes. But this course is really for anyone who wants to get going with Blender and seeks a solid foundation to build on. When I started out at first, I wanted to get a fundamental overview of the basic techniques, I needed to actually create stuff without any overwhelm, and that is exactly what you will learn in this class. From first starting Blender, the basic settings, the navigation, the interface after the modeling and sculpting functions, which make Blender so awesome. All the functions you learn here will be very helpful for any Blender project you are going to do in the future. You will understand how to simplify complex shapes to their basic building blocks and find their main characteristics. In the end, you're going to have your very own 3D model right in front of your eyes, or maybe even in your hand, should you decide to print it. This was one of the very first 3D models I created. I think it is the perfect introductory model to get started with Blender and 3D modeling in general. Of course, you may create any other animal you like, maybe your pet. I am thrilled to be guiding you through this class. Get comfy in front of your PC and let's go. 2. Project Details: What are we actually going to create? It's all about your first steps in Blender. We're going to start in the first part by testing things out. We're going to break some stuff and put them back together, we're going to rearrange it and we're going to just have fun playing around a little bit. Super for everyone who really wants to get a good overview and hasn't touched Blender before. I am going to show you how to download Blender, the ideal settings to quickly get started all about the interface. Questions like, how can I customize the program for my blend style? Which functions would I even need, and which ones would only confuse me as a beginner? This course therefore also acts as a filter to spare you the time to figure it all out for yourself. Further on, we're going to explore the basic things you can do in Blender. How to model stuff, what are modifiers, and why do we need them? How do I sculpt things? For all this, we won't be going very deeply into the details, but in the end, you will know where to look for what, and most important, where to click to get the results you want. Just as with driving a car, if you're able to, you don't have to know every single knob in your car and know how to drive. It's enough to know where gas breaks and horn are. Just kidding, the steering wheel is also sometimes important. But the point is, it is enough to drive, and that's exactly what you're going to learn here. The second part is all about using our new knowledge and creating our project. You can also jump straight ahead into that part if you already have some experience with Blender. The idea is to create a low poly animal with very basic shapes, utilizing all the concepts we explored in Part 1. You can afterwards marvel at your creation, share it on social media, or of course, print it on your 3D printer, or print it with a print on demand service. No matter what you are going to do with it, this introduction will greatly help you to get a good basic understanding and feel for the software and for workflows in Blender in general. Please ask your questions anytime in the comments, I will do my best to answer them and to give you feedback. If you do leave me a review, please write what you think could be improved. It is so helpful for me to give you better content. Last but not least, share your progress in the Progress Gallery. I hope you are now pumped for it and ready to go. Let's start with the first lesson. 3. Materials & Resources: Materials, you're going to need a keyboard, preferably one with a numpad. Of course, you're going to need a PC, I hope that goes without mention. You're going to need a mouse and a scroll wheel is also very important and helpful, also called the middle mouse button. You can get away with not using a numpad, or a scroll wheel, you can substitute it in the settings of Blender, but it's not recommended because it's just more fun if you have both of them. I don't recommend to use a touchpad because a touchpad and Blender, it's just no, don't do it. Of course, you need Blender installed. I'm going to show you where to do this and how to do this in case you don't have it yet. Of course, it's open source and free for you to download so you don't have to worry about buying any license or so. Just download it and you're good to go once you've installed it. Before starting click on "Resources" and download the healthful files that accompany in this class. Also I have put a Blender cheat sheet in there to get you started with the most important shortcuts, enough with the materials. Let's go. 4. Interface Elements: A warm welcome to Blender. What should be greeting you right now is this screen. In the center you can see the so-called splash screen. This usually pops up once you start Blender. Here you can open a new file, recover your last session, or open one of your recent files once you created those. You can make the splash screen disappear by just clicking anywhere on the screen. The first thing I'm now going to do before I'm showing you the interface is hitting F4 on my keyboard, or going to Edit, Preferences, and opening the preferences, which are the settings of Blender. There I ramp up the resolution scale, so you can actually see what I'm doing. Here you can see all the different options, and adjust them to your heart's desire. In the next lesson I'm going to show you which settings you need to change to quickly get started. For now feel free to just observe for a moment, because I'm going to show you how easy it is to customize Blender so that it exactly fits your needs. I'm going to screencast my keystrokes. Under Install, I just navigate to my previously downloaded zip file of the screencast keys add-on. No need to unpack it, just double-click it and load it into Blender. After saving my preferences, the screencast keys have now magically appeared as a new menu find. Up here on the right in the so-called N menu. Well it's not officially called like that, but I call it N menu because you open and close it by hitting N. Here I can tweak some of the settings of the screencast keys, so I first change the color to pink, and as they are very small, and on the left side, I just bring them over to the right side, and scale them up a bit. If you are unsure about what I'm doing at any time, please take a look down here on the right and maybe it will become clearer. Now that this is done let's start with the fundamentals, the different parts of the interface of Blender. In the center, you can see the most important one, the 3D viewport. This is the virtual three-dimensional space inside Blender. In here our action takes place. The objects are there and everything happens in there basically. I would come back to the 3D viewport in much more detail a little bit later. Let's first take tour through the rest of the interface. The five buttons up here on the left refer to the whole program or the whole file in general. The most important points under File, are opening a new file, opening a different file. You can also revert the file you're now working with, which is basically going back to the last save point. Of course you can also save or save a copy. You can import and export different file types. You can also create a new startup file, which then becomes the default condition of a new file once you open one, and of course you can also quit Blender. Under Edit, you of course find the preferences, but also the menu search, which lets you search for many operations in Blender by their name. Up here you can also start rendering. Under Window, you can change the window mode Blender's in, for example, the full screen. You also have a help button, which leads you directly to the online documentation of Blender. If you click on the Blender logo on the left, you'll open the splash screen again. Directly next to the general options, you find a bar with many different buttons. The different names are referred to different workspaces. Their setup is predefined to make certain tasks in Blender easier. For example, right now we are in layout. This is a very good basic starting point to get going. If we wanted to scalp now, we could just click on sculpting. Blender has now changed its look, or in the workspace UV editing, which is optimized to put materials and textures onto objects. For starting out let's just stay in layout for now. Further to the right we see that we are currently in the first and only seen, and also in the first and only view layer. Both of these options are right now not important to us. But down below there is the outliner, and that is a very important part of the interface. You can think of it as the Explorer in Windows, or the Finder on Mac. You can see those little boxes right here. You could think of them as folders or also layers, and these boxes contain our objects, and everything in our 3D scene. The first box is the scene collection, and in it is one new box, which is the collection box, and in there are currently three objects: the camera, the cube, and the light. By clicking on the eye on the right you can hide and show your objects. You can also select things by clicking on them, in the outliner. Right below the outliner is one of the most important parts of Blender. It is called the Properties panel, and you can basically change everything here. You can for example tweak the rendering settings here, the output format of the renderer picture. Further down you can tweak the adjustments of the individual object. You see right now we have selected the cube, so it says cube, and you can for example see that our cube is right now at the absolute zero point , the absolute center. Or you can add different modifiers, which will also be a topic in a later lesson, of course. Further down you can also define new materials. To sum it up, there are the general rendering settings for your scene, the settings for the 3D world itself, the settings for the collection, and also the settings for the individual objects, materials, textures, and so on. Let's continue. Down below here is the timeline. If you put your mouse on the border between these two viewports it will change into a little double-sided arrow and you can move this border. This you can do with all the windows. You can change their size by moving their borders around, just like people do with countries in the real world. This is important for animation, and if you click on the Play button, you can see that it goes to all the frames from start to finish, and then starts again. You can also start the timeline with Space. To finish our wonderful overview tour of Blender, let's quickly take look at the bar at the bottom. Once you play around with Blender a little bit, you are going to see that the options which are displayed down there do change depending on what you have selected, and what you are going to do. Honestly I don't look down there so often, but I can imagine that it is especially helpful if you're just starting out to find your way around Blender. That's it for our tour. Next we're going to tweak some basic settings to get started with Blender as quickly and easily as possible. 5. Settings: Before getting started in Blender, let's just quickly head over to the settings, hit "F4" and preferences are go up to Edit and choose the preferences. Just a minute ago, I set the resolution scale to 1.5 in here. To make your start in Blender as smooth as possible, I will now guide you through the most important settings you should tweak before starting. Under interface, I have nothing more to change. I'm not going to change anything in the themes because I quite like the default theme that Blender comes with but in theory, you could change anything you wish for here, from the color of the buttons to the size of the text. In the Viewport settings you really don't need to change anything except maybe if Blender is running very slowly on your machine, you could maybe turn down the Anti-Aliasing a little bit or the Anisotropic filter, so that Blender does not have to calculate as much. For the lights I won't change anything. Editing, I also won't change anything and the same for animation. Nothing needs to be changed here to get started with this course. Under Add-ons, you already saw me adding the screencast keys Add-on. I'm also going to type in Bool into the little search box up right. This is going to bring out the Bool Tool, which is an add-on that is already shipped with Blender. Just take the little box to enable it. This will help us make our Boolean operations quicker. Let's continue to the Input Tab. Here you can find some very handy settings and the first one is emulate numpad. If you don't possess a numpad on your keyboard, I recommend you activate this so that you can emulate your numpad by hitting the normal number keys and you don't have to use the numpad to navigate. The same goes for emulate three button mouse. You can just substitute by hitting Alt and left mouse button. Next up is Navigation. Definitely turn on orbit around selection. This means when you select an object, you are going to orbit around it, instead of randomly orbiting around the spot that you just happen to be in. You will thank me later. The next setting is Auto Perspective, I recommend you just leave this off. The third setting is Zoom to Mouse Position. I don't really use it, but some people prefer it because you can very finely tune where you zoom. Just test it out and see what you like. Under Keymap, you can, of course, change our key bindings and maybe we're going to do this later a little bit but for now we don't need to change anything in here. Next, under System. What I definitely recommend to do is turn up the Undo Steps and here, if your calculation power allows it. I like to have at least 50 Undo Steps in my workflow. What you also should consider doing even though we're not going to go deep into rendering in this class, is switch your render settings. Because if you have a good graphics cards, you can just turn it on and it will improve your rendering settings and your output. Next step, we go to Save and Load. Definitely turn on Auto Save. This has saved my butt multiple times I can't count it anymore. Definitely turn it on because then you can recover sessions which have crashed and you can get back your precious work. Two minutes is absolutely fine. Save Versions is also very interesting option because for each version that you manually save, Blender is going to keep another version, the older version, as a second file, which is then called a dot blend one file. If you want to have more of these versions, of course turn it up. But I have found one to be super sufficient for most projects I did really handy feature. Under File Paths, you can see the Default Path where Blender gets stuff from your PC or word outputs stuff to your PC or Mac, and if there is just a double slash there, it will just create a temporary folder in your main hard drive. Right now, I don't need to change anything here because I really like the default options. Last but not least, down here you have the Save Preferences button and you can also Click on the little burger icon where you can choose if Blender automatically saves the preferences you edit, and if you now hit the Save Preferences button with the little star, it means that these settings now become the default settings for each new blend file that you open. This is what we want and now you're done with the settings you need for this class. Next up, we're going to take a closer look at the different interface elements of Blender. 6. Creating Elements: Since we don't need the timeline for this class, I would like to completely get rid of it. Move your mouse into the corner in-between these two panels until it becomes a plus. Then while pressing your mouse button, just pull down. Now, something happened that I didn't quite want to do. I just created a second timeline. That's, of course, also possible. If I want to, I can create a new viewport here as well. You can create as many new panels as you want to. In this regard, Blender is very customizable as well, and you can create your very own workspace. I can also change this panel, for example, into a new outliner. With this button in the upper left corner of each panel, you can switch between all the different types. Of course, this now looks a little bit chaotic, and I would like to make some of those panels disappear again. This is done by putting your mouse into the corner between the two panels until it becomes a plus, then you hold your mouse button pressed, and then it will become a little arrow. If you now release your mouse button, the panel where the arrow comes from swallows the panel which it aims at. You have to be a little careful because it's easy to instead create new panels. But, of course, you can just as easily make them disappear again. You can see how I'm doing it with all these additional panels. As you can see, the interface of Blender is really flexible. In the next lesson, it's going to be all about Locomotion. How do I actually navigate through the 3D space? 7. Navigation: With this, we finally come back to the 3D space in the center. If you scroll with the middle mouse button or the scroll wheel, you will zoom in and out. Press middle mouse button, and shift and you can pan around. If you keep the middle mouse button pressed, you can orbit around stuff, in this case, around the selected object, because if you remember, we have said this in the preferences earlier. By the way, the small red and white object in the center that looks like a bulls-eye is the 3D cursor. You can move this little guy around by pressing ''Shift'' and right mouse button. The 3D cursor is a helper object and acts as a reference point, for example, if you want to rotate objects around it. Let's take a very small detour into the intermediate zone here. Up here, you can choose what the reference point for moving things around should be, and if I'm choosing 3D cursor here, and I now want to rotate my cube by hitting ''R'', and I want to rotate it around the x-axis by hitting X, then it will not rotate around its center anymore, but around the 3D cursor. Control Z to get the cube back to the center. If you want to get the 3D cursor back to its original position, then just hit ''Shift C'', and that key combination is also invaluable if you don't know where you are anymore. Maybe you have zoomed out a little bit too much or you have just flown all over the place and then just hit ''Shift C'' and you're going to get back to your original center point. In the beginning, this happened to me quite a lot. To sum it up, zoom in and out with a scroll wheel, middle mouse button, orbit, and pan around by holding ''Shift'' combined with the middle mouse button. Now, what do we actually see here? Well, for once you see a coordinate cross here, which is a help to know where you are in the 3D space. Right now, you can see the x and the y-axis. If you click on this button right here, you can also add the z axis if you want to. Here, you can also toggle many more viewport overlays. Most of them aren't actual objects, but helpers which assist you in navigating the 3D space, or gives you additional info. For example, you can scale the grid size up or down. Let's now use the numpad for navigation. Right now, we're in the perspective mode in the 3D view port. You can see this quite easily because the lines of the grid converge more and more in the distance, they become closer together, and that is meant by our perspective view, and stuff that is further away will seem smaller than stuff that is closer to you, just like it is in reality. But who likes reality? If you don't want this, you can just hit ''5'' on your numpad and everything will be exactly the same size no matter how distant or near it is to you. Of course, you can also use the other buttons of the numpad. If you use one, you will see your object from the front. It also says front orthographic in the upper left corner, and only the x and z axis is visible. With three, you rotate 90 degrees around the cube. This is the so-called right view. With seven, you look at it from the top. With four and six, and eight and two you can take little incremental steps and rotate around the object like this. In the upper right corner of the 3D viewport, you have some options for visualizing your objects before actually rendering them. The second from the right sphere is the material preview, and right next to it is the actual live render preview, depending on the render engine that's currently switched on. To see which render engine is currently activated, just look here and EV is blend as real time render engine. It's really good for visualizing materials in real-time, but it can also produce high-quality final renders. In the render preview, you can also see that the light shines directly onto the cube. If you selected and move it with G, then you can see that the light actually changes. Sometimes it's also nice to only see things as a wire frame. It will also make blender a little bit faster. Next to the wireframe view, there is the normal view where you can focus on the shape and not the materials or any other bonuses. On the left side in the 3D viewport, there is a tool panel which you can hide and show with T. That's why I like to call it the T menu. In it you can find the basic transforming operations like move, scale, rotate, and also some helper tools like the measurement tool. Many of the movements are done with shortcuts on blender because it is just much quicker, and with N, you can hide and show the other sidebar, which I will call the N menu. On here, there will often appear the options of your add-ons, like with this screencast keys, and you can also see some info regarding the view and the placement of the selected object. That was N and T. Wow, you learned so much about the navigation just now. Let's continue with the actual objects. 8. The Objects: Let's continue with the objects themselves. Like I said, you can always find your objects in the outliner and can also select them there. The camera is like a photo camera and what you see through there will get rendered. It will be your render image or render animation output. If you hit Control 0, you will go into the camera and you will see exactly what would get rendered. If you would now hit F12 or render image, you'll see that you exactly see the queue which gets lighted up from the side by the light. If I now move the light to the other side with G, you can see that it's now lit up from there. An important thing in the outliner. The camera symbol is used for hiding and showing objects in the render itself. If you toggle it and then render another image, you can see that you don't see anything because the cube was hidden and there's nothing the light can be reflected from. Feel free to try this out now. Now, hit N. Go to "View" and switch on Camera to View. If you now navigate around like before, you will see that the camera follows you and you fly through the room as the camera. In this way, you can quickly and easily change the render position. If you now turn Camera to View off again and you move, you will fly out of the camera and be back in the normal navigational view while the camera stays where it was. Of course, as before, you can also select the light with left mouse button. If you use G, you can move it. You have two options once you start moving things around, you can either affirm the new position by hitting the left mouse button, or you have the option to cancel this operation, and send the object back from where you got it at first by just hitting the right mouse button. Most of the time, you can cancel things with right mouse button and confirm them with the left one. As mentioned, if you switch on the render view, you see also that the lighting will change before hitting the render button. Of course, you can also select the cube and move it with G. If you want to select multiple objects at once, you first click on the first one and then Shift-click on the next one. Now, if you observe carefully, you will realize that the cube has a slightly brighter orange outline than the light. This means that the cube is now our active object. You will also see it in the outliner. You need to know which one's the active object for many different operations in Blender. We will come back to this later in more detail. Of course, you can also move multiple objects together with G once you have selected them all. If you want to de-select everything at once, then just hit Alt-A. This is the general shortcut for de-selecting everything. A selects everything, so A for all and Alt-A, for none. If you only want to have the cube in your selection, just click only on the cube, the rest will get de-selected automatically. As mentioned, you can move things with G. You can also scale things up and down by hitting S and moving your mouse. Or you can rotate them by hitting R, for example, around the z-axis, by just hitting R, and then Z. X is the universal shortcut for deleting most things in Blender. Just as in many other programs, control Z is for bringing stuff back, or better known as the undo button. You can also very easily create new objects. After deleting the cube with X, just hit Shift A, and you will have a gigantic assortment to choose from with many different objects and types of objects. Under mesh, you can create the classical cube, but also curves or different things like reference images, lights, or a new camera, and many, many more. To move things around, you can also use the T menu on the side. For example, moving things around, the shortcut as you know is G, like go or grab, but once you hit this button, you can also move things by clicking on the little arrows that now appear on the object. But as mentioned, I almost never do this, the shortcuts are definitely the way to go for me. Also, the rotating or the scaling. It's just much quicker to remember the shortcuts and do it like this. Some things are interesting up here. For example, on the scaling the scale cage. With this, you have different grabbing points for scaling things into the corresponding dimension. Well and there you'll also find this little widget that enables you to perform every operation. Also, on the T menu is the annotate tool. This is really useful to give you some visual guidelines for working. But this will be stuff for another tutorial. Directly below it is the measurement tool, which is super-helpful if you're doing anything for the real world, maybe for 3D printing. If you click on the measurement lines and hit delete, you can, well, delete them again, or you just choose another tool from the T menu, and the measurement lines will be hidden. An interesting function is the one at the bottom. If you delete the cube, you can now see that you have the option to add different meshes, which are the basic objects that you usually start on. If you choose one, your cursor will highlight the floor below it with a little additional grid, and now if you pull, you will pull out a rectangle. If you let go of this, you can also pull up the cube. You now basically grew a cube from the floor. Now, you can grow more shapes using the faces of the cube as starting points. The same goes for different shapes, of course, with the sphere or a cone or anything else you can choose there. Now, at the top, you can choose this little tweaker, there are also some additional options to select multiple things at once. The lasso, for example, you can just click on an object and move it without letting the mouse go; it's a little bit quicker to move things around like that. If you select multiple objects by holding shift, you also, again, see the active object highlighted in orange. These are two ways of creating geometry, either with the T menu for some quick mesh shapes, or with Shift A to be able to choose from all the objects. That's it for now with the objects and how to create them. The next lesson will be about a very central and important topic, the difference between object and edit mode. 9. Object & Edit Mode: Well, let's have some fun. This is one of the central concepts in Blender, the difference between object and edit mode. Right now, we are in object mode, which means you can move the cube, you can scale it or you can delete it, but you cannot change the shape of the cube itself. This is only possible in edit mode. Using Tab, you can switch between the two modes. Now the cube looks slightly different. Do you see those little orange dots? Those are the so-called vertices or verts, which form the whole cube. You can now select each word individually and you can move them with G just as before. One vert cannot be rotated or scaled because it is only a one-dimensional point, but you can select two vertices by using Shift-click. Then you can scale the edge between them. You can also hit two, the normal two on the numeral, to switch to edge mode, and then you can directly select this edge. Just as before, you can move it around with G, going back to vertice mode with one. At least three vertices form a face, or in our case, four because it's a cube. You can also select faces directly by hitting three on your numeral. In the vert mode, one, you can see that each individual vert is selectable by itself. In face mode with three, you'll see the single face, which you can also move around. When you move the verts, everything else changes with them, the edges and the faces. If you now select all four of them and you hit E, you will pull out four new vertices and with them, new faces and new edges. By that, you create new geometry. The same goes for edges, no matter in which mode, or also for single verts. If you select those three vertices and you hit F, you can create a new face between them. This is the basic way of creating and building geometry in Blender. Of course, each of those different parts can be deleted by selecting them and hitting X and the corresponding name. Of course, you can also hit Control Z here, to make everything undone. If you now hit Tab again, you will again be in object mode and you'll see that the whole cube has changed its shape. But once in object mode, you cannot edit the shape of the object anymore, you can only move it as a whole or rotate or scale it. But what else you can now do with it? This I'm going to show you in the next lesson, where we are going to take a closer look at modifiers. For this, I now hit again a few times Control Z so that my cube loses some of its loose geometry. Blender automatically switches between object and edit mode when you hit Control Z to undo the changes you've done. 10. Modifier: Switch to object mode again with Tab. Now in the properties panel, you can click on the blue wrench symbol. There you can add modifiers. Modifiers change the object in some way, but in most cases, they are reversible, unless you apply them. If you click on it, you can find all the modifiers. One of the most well-known is the subdivision surface modifier. As the name implies, it subdivides the surface. Who would have thought? You see then once you select it, the whole object has changed. It somehow got more rounded. In slightly technical terms, it is a modifier which simply divides the faces by the amount of edges surrounding them. These additional faces are then used to round off the angles between the faces. But it is much easier to see it than to explain it. If you shift up the levels, you see that it gets subdivided more and more, and the whole object becomes rounder and smoother until it looks even nicely polished. If you now hit Tab to go back into the edit mode, you see that the whole object still only consists of 12 vertices. Just as before, you can select them individually and move them around. As you can see, the subdivided object changes with them. You see those buttons at the top of the modifier, you can select how much you want to see of it in the edit mode. But you can also turn the modifiers' visibility off completely in edit mode. If you now switch to object mode with Tab again, you can also turn off the visibility and the normal 3D view completely by clicking on the little screen icon. If you click on the camera icon, you toggle it off in the render view. That means that geometry basically hasn't changed. The modifier just makes it appear so. Until we apply it, it can always be just deleted and the object will change to its original state. Suppose you are totally satisfied with the object right now and you want to apply the modifier, just click on the small arrow at the top of the modifier and click "Apply". This is only possible in object mode. To apply modifiers, you have to be in object mode. Now the modifier is gone. We now switch back to edit mode with Tab again. Many new vertices have been created and now you can move every single one of these individual words to change the shape in much more detail. For some hands-on, you can try out some of the other modifiers but beware, some of them can use a lot of calculation power. So it's good habit to save before trying out any you don't know yet. Why not try out the wireframe modifier together with the subdivision surface modifier? Depending on the order of the modifiers, you can move them above and below each other. The result looks different so you can combine them in different ways and get different geometry. Of course, because they are reversible, you can always go back to your original shape. In the next two lessons we will finally come to the technique of sculpting. Sculpting is so cool because the geometry behaves like chewing gum, clay, Play-Doh, and certainly even some other materials. It is a super intuitive and artistic way of creating sculptures in Blender. 11. Sculpting: Basics: Now we're going to start with a smart introduction into the Sculpt Mode of Blender. Just now you learned about the Object and Edit Mode. The mode where you can influence individual vertices and the one where you work with the object as a whole. First, let's check out the different possibilities to switch into the Sculpt Mode. You can either click on ''Sculpting'' up here to change into the corresponding workspace. There everything is prepared for you to start sculpting right away. But you can also just switch to the Sculpt Mode in any other workspace. Just click on the box where it says ''Object Mode'' and switch to the Sculpt Mode or you can, of course, also use the shortcut, use Control tab then this radial menu will pop up choose ''Sculpt Mode'' with your cursor, I simply press too. You see there are many different paths to choose from. To get going, I prefer to just switch the workspace to sculpting because everything is set up and ready to go. Now, what do we see here? On the left, there are many different brushes which are used to alter your shapes. First, let's check out the basic principle of how these brushes are working. Before in Edit Mode, we were manipulating the verts directly and we do the same here in Sculpt Mode. But of course, the different brushes all have very different effects. The little thumbnail of each one already shows a good preview of what it will do. Let's just start with a standard brush without changing any settings. Now you can use F to change the size of the brush. When you now move your mouse over the cube, you'll see that the circle flips around on the surface, depending on the direction the face is pointing it. Once you hover over the corners, you'll see that a little blue dot is visible. This is a representation of the vertice underneath it. If you click on this corner, you'll see that it gets pulled out a bit. The vert changes its position. Now hit ''Shift F'' and move your mouse to make the blue circle bigger. This means that the brush will get stronger. The vertices will move even quicker now. You see that you can influence the vertices directly with the brush and you can change the whole shape of the cube with it. If you hit ''Control'' or ''Command'' on Mac, you reverse the direction of the brush like an Eraser Mode. In this way, you can alter your object, and of course, the other brushes all have their own effect on the geometry. For example, the Snake Hook will pull out vertices very quickly. If you make it bigger, you influence multiple verts at once. As you see, just like in Edit Mode, you can influence the vertices, but each brush has its very own rules and settings of doing this. The Blob Brush, for example, will do just this, make a big blob. But most of these effects can be seen really well on this shape. I just wanted to start with the unset divided basic cube here. Because here you can observe very well how brushes just influence individual or multiple verts to create specific shapes. To see the action of the brushes in more detail, let's continue with our sub-divided potato shape we created earlier. Switch the Sculpt Mode. Don't forget to actually select your object our blender will know which mode it has to switch to. If we now use the Draw Brush, you see that here the individual verts get influenced as well. If you look closely, you will spot the little blue dot that shows us which word is the main one to get affected. Now the Draw brush works much better because there are many more vertices which can be influenced. The same with the Snake Hook. By the way, the shortcut is K. You can see this by hovering over the brush symbol. With it, you can pull out verts like snakes. Now you can also do proper blobs with the Blob Brush. Everything gets inflated like a balloon. You see the more verts you have, the more possibilities you have to alter the shape because all the brushes do basically is changed the placement of multiple verts at once and all in their very own way. One very important and helpful function when sculpting is mirroring. You can change the mirror settings up here. If you have sculpted for a certain time without this, but you now want to model to be symmetric again, just click on ''Symmetrize'' down here. If that was the wrong axis, you can simply change it above the Symmetrize button. This was the basic way of handling the brushes in Blender. In the next lesson, you'll learn about a very important ability that every intelligent being using Blender should know about because it saves calculation power and makes very fine details possible. Dynamic topology, and chart, then topo. 12. Sculpting: Dyntopo: Sometimes it can happen that you have too few vertices. When you sculpt, the ones that are there gets stretched, which results in an uneven and ugly shape. This can happen, for example, with the Snake Hook. But Blender has a solution for this problem. This stands for dynamic topology and means generating new surface geometry or topology on the fly. You can dynamically create or merge vertices, increasing or decreasing their number. If you turn it on in the upper-right corner or hit Control D, you'll get a warning that Dyntopo won't preserve any custom vertex data like UVs or colors. But in our case, this doesn't matter yet. Another important point is that Dyntopo won't recognize modifiers. Once you turn it on, all the effects of the modifiers will be hidden. If you now sculpt with it and you switch back to Object Mode, Blender could go crazy by calculating the new shape plus the modifiers. It's best to play or delete any modifiers before using Dyntopo in general. It is also important to note that Dyntopo always generates Tris. Tris are faces which have exactly three words connected around them, the smallest face possible. This means that sometimes you need to make a rematch before continuing with the model because in many cases, it is better to have "Faces with four verts." For 3D printing, this actually doesn't matter, and for our purposes we won't worry about this for now anyway. Dyntopo doesn't affect every brush but it, for example, affects the Snake Hook and also the basic brush at the top, the Draw Brush. Let's now go back to our cube. Switch to the Sculpt Mode and turn on Dyntopo. Now you can see that new geometry gets created dynamically, and we are therefore, not as limited as before in creating new shapes. We don't have to worry about the amount of verts anymore. In the settings of Dyntopo you can change the granularity, make it finer or coarser. You can also decide if you want to create new geometry relative to the brush size or if you want to keep it the same all the time. I like to use relative detail. You can zoom in and out, and Dyntopo creates new geometry according to at what distance you are from the model. Let's check out what you can do with Dyntopo by looking at the example from the last lesson. First, I turned Dyntopo on and set it to 7 pixel details size. Then I built new geometry with a Clay Strip brush and the Blob brush. With these thin, snake like shapes, you have to be careful to not pull the back of the object towards the brush and make it even flatter. You can avoid this by making the brush slightly smaller with F and then carefully at new geometry until you have enough volume so that the backside won't be influenced by the brush anymore. For the eyes, I'm just using some flat stripes. I also lower the detail size to 5 pixel, I'm basically using the same scheme the whole time. I add new course geometry and then I smooth out the surface by holding shift, where sculpting. Holding Shift automatically activates the smooth brush no matter which other brush you have selected. I'm currently building a very stylized sheep or ram and I think it needs a nice look at the forehead. For this, I also use the Snake Hook. If you only move it a little, then you can curl or twist the geometry with it and you can shape a nice squiggle up here. Then I move the back of the head around a bit with G, which is the Grab Brush. This one isn't affected by Dyntopo by the way. I think I'll leave it at that. That was the introduction to the basics of Blender. I hope it helped you out a bit so far. This was basically the first part of the class. The second part will be all about creating something awesome with all the new knowledge. Let's model something together. Get yourself something to drink, have a breath of fresh air outside, do a few push-ups, and let's go. 13. Project: Bird: I hope you had fun doing the first part of this class. If you want to jump right into the bird project, welcome. Let's start with our low poly model. If at any point in time you get the feeling I'm going to bit too fast, you can either slow down the course a little bit by clicking on the video player on the "Speed" button or you can just revisit some of the earlier lessons. To create such a simple model is very helpful to get the basics down right. So it is a super good project for anyone who's just starting out with 3D. Of course, you can also create any other animal you want: your pet, the cat, maybe a dog, a horse, a monkey, an elephant, a crocodile, a butterfly, a spider. Whatever your imagination allows you, try to reduce your animal to basic 3D shapes like a cone, a cube, a square, a sphere, and so on. It is a similar process as withdrawing. When you start learning to draw, you starting out by sketching very basic and simple shapes. Everything around you can be reduced to such shapes, so it is worth learning how to work with those. Other functions you learn here will be very helpful for any Blender project you are going to do in the future. You will understand how to simplify complex shapes to the basic building blocks and extract their main characteristic. In the anterior blend and knowledge and 3D thinking, we will be nicely improved. It will help you with all your projects in the future. Enough introduction. I hope you're excited to build something. Let's start. 14. Base: Half Sphere: Let's begin with creating a new start up file. In this project, when starting out, we don't really need the light and the camera. Let's just delete both either with Delete or X. Then click on "File" and under Defaults, choose "Save Startup File." In this way, Blender state right now will get loaded each time we open a completely new project. After this, also delete the cube. Now we have a completely blank canvas to work with. You saw in the beginning that one of my first models was the small printed bird. Let's create something cute and cool, just like that. First, hit "Shift A" and create a UV sphere. Press "One" for the front view, and "Five" to get out of perspective mode if you don't see the grid behind the sphere. Now we are in orthogonal mode. Hit "Tab" for edit mode, Alt A to deselect everything, Alt Z to make everything transparent. Hit "One" again if you moved out of front view, then "B" for box select. Now, select the lower half of the sphere. Because we switched to transparent mode, we also now selected the backside of the sphere, and just delete it with X. Now our sphere has a hole, which means it is not a watertight mesh anymore. After pressing Alt Z again, you see the inside of the mesh which you can identify by the lighting. It seems to come from below. This is not good as meshes, just like living beings, do not like to be cut open. They should always be watertight. That is where I now I'll click in between two vertices on the edge of the sphere. This will select the whole ring of verts. This also works in edge mode. Just hit "Two" on your keyboard and you will see the edges selected. You can also select all other edge shrinks with Alt click. This works with faces and face mode as well. Hit Three, and you can try this out. Depending on where on the face you click, the vertical or horizontally connected faces will get selected. Back to our open sphere. Alt click again if you deselect the open edge ring. The easiest thing we could do now is to hit "F". The whole sphere would just be closed up by one giant face. This is quick, but a little dirty, and sometimes we don't want just one single face in-between so many verts. Delete it again with X, and we will go about it a bit differently. Again, select the vert ring, then hit E. By default, this extrudes out a connected copy of the initial selection. If you hit Z, this will get pulled out along the z axis, but now we don't want this, so right-click to undo it. But watch out, the extruded verts are still there. They're just in the exact same location as the original selection. This is one of the most common cause for doubled verts, which can make problems with Booleans. If you want to make sure that there are no doubles, just select all with A, then click on "Mesh", Merge, By Distance. Here you now see that blender removed 32 vertices by merging the new ones with the old. The other way is to just hit "Control Z" until you see the edge between the lowest selected verts and the ones above glowing again, meaning that they have a direct connection. To show you how it looks otherwise, hitting Control Shift Z, the edge between those does not glow anymore, meaning that there's no direct connection and there must be verts in between this lower and upper ones. Again, Control Z, and we have only a single ring of verts there. Well, and if you are not sure that you only have one ring of verts, hit "E" again and directly afterwards hit "S". Now the new verts gets scaled exactly at the height of the original ones. With one, you can see it in front view, E, S, and you can see that it is perfectly level. Now, I can do that again. Finally, I close up the ring with F. Even one face would have been okay. But most often it is helpful to have a few more faces to work with. An example would be if I wanted to change the shape below the dome like this, but also when subdividing. These were the most basic means to close and open spherical mesh. In the next lesson, we will continue with the body. We will change the geometry a bit more than with a sphere. See you there. 15. Body: Cube: Next, it will get even easier. In this lesson, we want to create the body of our little bird. We could, of course, create it directly at the center, like our base sphere. But in this case, let's create the body further up at the pole of the base. For this, we will use the 3D cursor. As a rule, every new object gets created where the 3D cursor is located. But how to move the 3D cursor exactly there? Of course, we could just use Shift, Right-click, and move it somewhere, but this is not very precise. So what to do? First, select the dome we created, switch to edit mode, and select the central vert, then hit Shift S. A new menu pops up with a lot of options, but the ones I use most are these two. Down here it says Cursor to Selected. Let's click on it or press two, and the cursor should fly to the pole. Maybe you saw it here, the cursor sprung from here to there, and now it is exactly in the same spot as the vertice. Back to object mode, front view, de-select everything with Alt A. Hit Shift A to add new. One thing, if you don't want to create new objects with a shortcut, you can always click on "Add", up here. This opens the same menu, but to be honest, I never do it like this. Shift A is pretty much ingrained into my muscle memory, so it just feels totally weird not to use it. So Shift A and let's create a cube. This cube now gets created with its origin exactly at the 3D cursor. The origin is the small orange dot in the center. Blender uses it to precisely know the actual location of any object. Blender doesn't look at the whole cube, but always at the origin because it needs one specific coordinate to locate a thing. The origin can also be placed outside of the mesh. Scale it down with S, then G, Z, and move it up a bit. How do we achieve our bird shape now? Of course, in Blender, there are a thousand ways to Rome. What I like to do here is. Checking if I'm really recording, Yes, I do. Am I filming this as well? Yes, I am filming. Nice. Well, what I like to do is adding a new modifier, this means clicking on the blue wrench and adding a subdivision surface modifier. Leave it at two subdivisions. Don't forget to save so that your hard work isn't lost in case of an emergency. If you turned on auto-save, like I showed you in the settings lesson, this shouldn't be such a big issue. I will call this file Bird_1. Now, let's switch back to edit mode. Go to edge mode width tool and select the front edge, hit Numpad 1 for front view. Now, use G to move the edge a bit and shape the body. Just a moment, what if you don't see the subdivision in edit mode and at the same time, the cage, the edges themselves? Then check out these upper buttons of the modifier. If you turn on the leftmost one with a triangle, you will only see the sub-divided mesh without the base shape. If you don't have a square shapes button turned on, then you will just see the basic mesh without the subdivisions. Of course, in our case, this is impractical because you don't see the changes made directly, so let's turn on both of them. One thing you should take care of here is that you are really in front view. You see this because the grid is visible in the background, and it also says front orthographic in the upper right corner. If you don't see it, try hitting Numpad 5 to get out of perspective mode. Why should you take care of it? Because in the orthographic views, the ones you can access with a numpad, all changes you make will automatically be only in two dimensions, in this case, along the z and x-axis. If you hit three, you will only move it along y and z. In this step, you shouldn't be in any free view. Here, it is called the user orthographic because then the selection will just go anywhere, and in that way, you will lose your symmetry. Of course, you could use the mirror modifier for symmetry, but sometimes you just want things to go along with the axis. Of course, even in user orthographic view, you could hit G for grab and move, then Shift and Y. Now, you see because of the two glowing active axes, that you can move the selection along the Y-axis. You will see it better from the front. G, Shift Y, and then Y is excluded from the movement range. Now, I flew into the void. I actually moved the selection a lot, but it's still was only along x and z. You see in user orthographic view or user view, these huge movements can happen quickly, therefore, it is much more comfortable to just get things done in the numpad views sometimes. Hit Alt Z to make everything transparent. In this view, you can also select multiple vertices in vertice mode. If they are directly connected to each other, you will see the whole connecting edge glow. But sometimes you forget to select both, and because of that, I will use edge mode with two. Long story short, I will move my edges in front view with Shift, and by this, I will shape the body of my bird. Of course, it is very helpful to take a look at birds on Google to get to know the outline of your favorite. In this case, the elongated shape is the bird's body, including the folded winks, a sphere will make its head. The dome at the base is an abstraction of a perch, I do not model any legs. In this way, I slowly approach the abstract shape of my design. Of course, you can also hit A in edit mode to select the whole shape. By moving the shape like this in edit mode, the origin does not move with it. If you change to the object mode and move the shape, the origin moves. Remember, the origin is the point that marks the coordinates of an object, the actual location in the 3D space; you will also see that in the End menu, under item, if you change the number in the z-axis under location, the object moves. If you switch to edit mode and do the same, you will see that the median location of the mesh changes. If you now, after moving it, go back to object mode, you see that the number in the z-axis did not change. It was also at 1.3854 before. In object mode, you see the origin location, and in edit mode, you see the median location of the mesh. Just a little side note, if you want to know where your objects are and how to alter their location. Now, let's get back to object mode. Let's continue modeling. If we orbit around our model, we see that it is bean-shaped, a little slim for a chubby, fluffy bird. To make it a bit more voluminous, hit three in the numpad. [inaudible] here, everything is already selected, if not, you can first select everything with A and then scale it with S and Y and make the whole bird a little bit thicker. Often with birds, the upper part is a little thicker because of the folded wings. Because of this, I will select the opposite edges and scale them with S and Y. While doing this, the upper part will change a little bit as well because of the subdivision. Maybe you want to bulge out your animal in the center a bit, but like this, it will only make the shape broader at the top. What to do? Just create more edges. Hit Control R and then a new yellow edge will appear. If you move the mouse a little bit, it will jump between the vertical and horizontal. If you scroll a bit, more lines will appear. If you now left-click, the new edge gets created. Notice how the whole subdivided shape has now changed a bit. Move the mouse, and the edge will move along the mesh. If you left-click now, the edge will stay where it last was. If you right-click, the edge will stay in the exact half of the mesh. This actually now looks a bit too edgy for me. I like my bird nice and round. It is a good thing, in general, to use as little edges as possible to model your shapes. Just as many as you need to create the desired shape. I'll just scale it outwards at the top of it more and then finito. Nice, so much for the body. Next, let's continue with the head. 16. Head: Sphere: [MUSIC] What's missing now? Of course, the head. First, use Alt-Z to go out of transparency mode. You can also hit that button-up top to toggle it. Close the N menu, we don't need it right right. I move the body up just another bit. Watch out that you choose the correct axis when moving the objects, so that it doesn't just end up somewhere random. If it happens, and you want to move it back to center, you can use Shift C so that the 3D cursor is in the center, and then Shift S. This time not cursor to select it, but selection to cursor. What's missing? A head would be nice. This select, everything. Shift A, mesh, and UV sphere. Again, I move this in front view, one to the top. Now my bird has a head. It is a bit big though, and therefore, I scale it down a bit with S and moving the mouse. For this, you can again, look at photos or drawings for reference of scale. I find well done drawings, often very good references as well. It is important to get the proportions right, the ratio between the different parts, to get a convincing abstraction. Of course, you can also play with this if you want a more comical or stylized look. Also note the individual placement of each body part. At this stage, I like to take a look from all sides with the middle mouse button. Zoom a bit in and out to just get a better look at my project. Similar to how a painter steps back from his painting. To have the body look a bit more smoothly, increase the subdivisions. You can of course keep it up like that. But this could also make blender slower, and this is not recommended in the modeling phase. Also, I like the edgy look on this one, it is part of the design. In the next lesson, we'll continue with a beak, or the snout, or the trunk. Think about which geometric shape could make the most sense in your design. 17. Beak: Cone: Now we have the head. What else do we need to do? First, save. It is always good to save incremental versions. That means for me, Bird_1_2. Or under File, Save Copy. What are we going to create next? The beak. Shift A, Mesh, and Cone. This is really big. I move it up a bit with G and Z. I just realized that my keystrokes don't show up once I hit "G", so the axis are not visible. Hope you can still follow me. I tried to mention which ones I use. By the way, while moving something, you can always undo the movement by right-clicking. Small hint, if you did not see that until now. Almost any change to values or locations can be undone by right-clicking while doing it. This way, you can very easily try out how something would look without committing to it. A neat little info for you there. Here's my conus. It is a bit too big for my taste. I scale it down with S, of course. Now I want to put the conus on my bird. I could do this in front of you by just rotating it and placing it here. But I could also turn on snapping, so the object snaps to something. By default, objects are snapping to the grid, then it stutters when you move it around. You can also make the grid bigger or smaller under this button. You can't undo the grid scaling with Control Z, by the way. Why do we need snapping? Because you can also snap to other things. For example, to volume, or to singular faces. Let's choose this one. Now, you should see a small orange dot where corner lines to the faces. But this is not optimal. I don't want to place a head on my bird. Maybe you do, of course. But I only need the beak. I again right-click, and it will fly back to its former place. Snapping allows for some other neat tricks. You could turn on a line rotation to target. Maybe this will rotate our cone the right way. Now, this makes more sense. The line shows you exactly in which direction the rotation goes. Another thing you could turn on is snap with Center, then it would use the origin point of the cone for snapping. Now it will sink a little deeper into the bird. Maybe I want it like that, so I will put it at the outermost edge of the sphere. Now, let's check it out with three, how it looks, or maybe with seven. Now you might also see what I'm seeing, that the cone is not exactly centered. Since this makes the artist inside me scream, I want it perfectly in the center. Therefore, Control Z and back. Why was it not perfectly centered? Because the front rows of faces on the sphere are not aligned with the front. You can see it in Edit Mode, and under Overlays. Now you can click under Normals on Display Normals, and in this way, you can show the direction of where all the faces are looking. Now you have the slightly hairy ball, and you can see that the lines are not perfectly on the x-axis either. What can we do? Back to Object Mode, select your cone again, and check, Snap To, Vertex. Now the beak of the bird should land exactly on the center line. No matter from where we are looking, it is perfectly aligned. I can relax again. Awesome. Front view with one G, X, and let's pull it out a little bit more. Now we can turn off snapping again because sometimes this can really be annoying. We can also stretch the beak and make it longer. Let's do that in Edit Mode. We can turn off the Normals Overlay as well. Let's stretch along the x-axis, S, X, and pull it a little bit. But on second thought, I quite like it like that. Let's keep it short and sweet. Nice. Let's refine the cone a bit more. For many modeling projects in Blender, you should avoid such poles, meaning a singular point where many edges come together. This can be annoying while sculpting, and also for textures, even with 3D printing, such as SharePoint, can be a little bit problematic. The poll on the beak is a little bit extreme compared to the one on the sphere. Therefore, let's do this one a bit. In Edit Mode, you can see that this is just a single vert. We should put a few more verts here to give us more geometry to work with. Control R doesn't work here very well. Remember, this is the shortcut which creates these yellow lines which will then become new edges. This is because Control R always subdivides quads, a face with four vertices. But on this cone, there are only trees. This is a tree, and this is a tree. These are all faces with only three verts. These can be subdivided with Control R. The easiest solution is actually to delete this vert. Maybe that's a bit counter-intuitive because we just place it here a moment ago. But sometimes you go forward and blend out by going back a few steps. It is useful to care about these details to get better models. X deleted, I'd click on the circle and selected "E", extrude a new ring of verts, small detail. You can see the z-axis when extruding, because a moment ago we rotated the cone, and this has now become the new up and down for the cone, the local z-axis. Quick tip. You can change it up here. If you switch this to Local, and you move the selection and hit "Z", you will move it automatically along the local z-axis of the object. If you select "Global" up here, and then hit "G, Z", you will move along the global z-axis again. By default, when you extrude, it moves along the local. Back to the topic. We wanted to recreate the corners. Let's just hit "S" and scale this down. Now we don't have a pole anymore, but a very tiny face, and it looks nearly identical. No printer lies infinitely sharp points and edges, better to bevel this a bit. Another advantage is that you could now subdivide the quads on the beak further. Awesome. Well done. What's next? Of course, the tail. 18. Tail: Copy Paste: If the part with the axis has confused you a little bit just now, don't worry about it. Just remember that there is the possibility to show the local axis of the objects, which is very helpful if you need to keep symmetry while an object is already rotated in some way. Note that once you hit "Control A" and apply rotation, the global axis will become the local axis. Another example is in edit mode, if you want to extrude a phase, it will get extruded along its local z axis, its normal direction. But this was just a short excursion. This knowledge is already a bit intermediate. Usually we have global transformation turned on, so you can orient yourself by the three big axis in the center. Let's take a little moment to rename our objects. This is a good habit to get into. Here, it is not as important. But imagine you have a giant cityscape, naming your things can save you from a lot of confusion. Let's save another copy, Bird 1_3. What's missing? The tail feathers of course. Again, we have thousands of possibilities here. One of the easiest methods would be to just use ''Shift D'' to make a copy, and just move it over here. Use R to rotate it a bit and scale it with S. If your had set twice, you will automatically scale along the local z axis without having to switch the option. Now you see how useful this is once you rotated stuff to keep their appearance. Let's scale it a bit more until we have a shape we like. Now that was easy. To fine tune the shape, first hit ''Alt Z'' so you can see something. If you want to select them all at once without zooming in hit "C" and just paint select them. If you use the middle mouse button, you can de-select. To get out of C mode, hit "Escape". Now we can scale the bottom of the cone. Wow, now the tail is already done. But what if we want to change a bit more on our model, something that might not be easily done in edit mode? Maybe we want to draw our scalp directly onto the model. Let's save once more. This time, I again use 1_3 because nothing irreversible has changed. Let's engrave our signature on our model. In the next three lessons, I will show you different methods to bring your model to the next level. Depending on what style you want to achieve, you have lots of options. I will show you three of them, and explain the advantages and disadvantages. 19. Sculpting with Multires: How cool it would be to inscribe our name into the base of our model. Let's do exactly that. However, let's sub-divide our base a bit more for that. Of course, we will use a modifier for that. We could use a subdivision surface modifier, but now I want to show you a different way, the multi-resolution modifier. Choose it. First, nothing is happening. Here it also says sub-divide. Click on it, and it does as it says, the base subdivides itself. The whole bird has low poly look. I really like that because it is fitting for the style. But for demonstration purposes, I want to show it to you like this. Because you can now switch to the sculpt mode and draw your name on it, just use the first brush. This is a bit pixelated because we didn't sub-divide very strongly. Let's do this now and go to the wrench symbol and click on Subdivide once again. The whole podium is now really finely subdivided. As you can see, the drawing appears more smoothly now. Back to object mode. You can click on Layout or just switch to object mode in this workspace. Now the signature is again a bit more pixelated because in the object mode, only three subdivisions are currently active. This is the cool thing about the motorist modifier. You can also downshift the levels without losing the sculpting information. If I turn the modifier off by clicking on the small screen some more, it is still totally un-subdivided. This wouldn't be possible with a subdivision modifier. You can't use it in sculp mode. Save a copy if you want to, because we will delete the modifier now. If you do that, all the sculpting information is lost again. Of course you could have applied the modifier, going to edit mode, you will see that now you have a lot more vertices which were created by the modifier and moved by the sculpting. Let's check out the difference between the multi-face modifier and the subdivision surface modifier a bit more closely in the next lesson. 20. Sculpting with Subdiv: Now, how else could we prep our podium for sculpting? Again, use a modifier, this time, use the classic subdivision surface modifier. Let's ramp up the subdivisions to four. By the way, if this edge is too rounded for your taste, there are some neat little trick. Tap to edit mode. Select the lowest edge with art click if it isn't already. Open the end menu and go to item. Here is a section called edges data. What you need is the mean crease. The amount of creasing or folding that is happening in the selected geometry. The higher the amount, the less surface will be rounded, and the more the edge will keep its unserved divided look. You can also see the creases by how much the edge is glowing, pinkish. Back to the object mode. Switch to sculpt mode without applying the mode and try sculpting. Only the actual verts are affected, not the subdivided ones. If you turn off the mode, you will see that the vertices have moved, but not in a meaningful way. Therefore, we need to apply the modifier first. If we apply the modifier in object mode of course, we can sculpt on it just like before with a multi-rays mode. But this subdivision is now irreversible and we can just go back to the Ancef divided version. Let's save again for the third way of inscribing your name by sculpting. Maybe you already guessed it. We will use the top for our signature. This way you can keep the low poly look and sculpt really fine details. 21. Sculpting with Dyntopo: On to the third case. What if we want to keep the low poly look, but this sculpt the really nice signature onto our bird? Let's go back a few steps. Delete the sub-div mod. What if we want to keep it like that? Again, back to the sculpting workspace. Click on "Dyntopo" and "Okay". Let's lower the details size. Maybe to run six pixels. Use the first drawing brush. This setter size is a bit too rough, maybe around three pixels. This way, we can just start sculpting on the exact shape of the model. New birds are created for us on the fly. Let's go back a bit and give ourselves a flat surface first. Let's try the flattened brush, make it a bit bigger. In this way, we can just create a little plaque. Again, now we can use the first drawer brush and draw on it. This font is a bit too fat and a bit too blurry. Let's change the fall off a bit so that the brush has some more sharp profile. This looks already different. You can experiment a bit with this and write your initials. You can also, if you want to flatten the surface a bit more, use the clay strips. One of my favorite brushes. You can hold "Control" while sculpting to invert the brush, then hold "Shift" to flatten the surface. With shift, you automatically turn on the smooth brush. Maybe add a little bit of material again to flatten it out. To write down the initials, I will change the fall of again, maybe two root. Again, I will get another look. In this way, you can sculpt your initials under the bird. Of course, you could also engrave them or manipulate your shape in any other meaningful way. The closer you get to the bird, the finer the detail that Dyntopo will give you. This is because Dyntopo has the relative details setting. In this setting, the brush diameter will stay the same all the time, but the object relative to the brush will seem bigger or smaller underneath it. Therefore the brush will draw bigger or smaller depending on how far out or in you zoom. Now we have our signature, or of course, any other detail that you wanted to add to your object. Now you have seen how to keep the low pulley look and at the same time create finely sculpted details. One of the reasons for showing you this was to give you a general understanding on how the modeling can be used together with the sculpting. First, you can quickly create general shapes, and afterwards you can sculpt them organically to get finer details and personality in. Next, let's check out a way to repair one of the most common errors and blender, which are inverted normals. These are a hindrance if you want to combine geometry or when rendering, and should be avoided in general. 22. Correcting frequent Errors: I noticed the small error. Look closely. The head, the body, and the podium are all lit up from above. The shadow is located on the bottom of the geometry. At the beak it is the other way round. Why? This happens most often when creating new geometry in Edit mode. Remember that we deleted the single vert on the cone and then extruded new faces from the remaining circle. Sometimes inverted faces can happen. If we turn Overlays on, we don't see these little strokes that show the direction of the normals. Once we press, All set, we see that they are turned inwards. This is now the confirmation that the geometry is inside out. The quickest way of changing this is to select all with A, then press Shift N. This is the shortcut for re-calculate the outside. As you can see, the strokes are now on the outside again. Going back to object mode and audit transparency mode, by hitting All set, you can see the shadow on the bottom of the object, which is where we want it. As a beginner, it can be hard to see this error sometimes, if you forget the shortcut, you can also search for this command here. Edit, Menu Search or F3, and recalculate outside. Any command can be found there. Remember that you can search for commands and blender with F3 or under Edit, Menu Search. Because we copied the tail from the beak, I think this one has the same problem. Yes. These normals are inside out as well. Just notice the small error on the bottom of my podium. When I sculpt it, it seems to accidentally influence that down here as well. Oh, in Edit mode, all the strokes make it look like a hedgehog. Let's turn this off for now. You can see the result of Dyntopo as well, that there are now numerous new faces, small triangles. Dyntopo was influenced the bottom a bit as well. We can easily repair this, just delete this one word that got shifted upwards, select the hole with Alt click, and then just use F to close it up. With F, we can always create new faces. Why did we do this? Of course, no bird would like the inside out continuously, and more importantly, a blender, we need good geometry for a multitude of operations. Because otherwise, at some point there will be problems. For example, when bullying stuff together and this is what we're going to do next. In this way, your object will become nicely for interval for any 3D printer. 23. Assemble and Export: [MUSIC] If you build something and there are many different pieces, it may be that you want to move it around but so far, these are all different objects and you would need to select them all individually. So sometimes it can be useful to combine all the different objects into one. At the moment, the objects are touching each other but they are not a single mesh. One method to combine things is to join them. Control J is the shortcut. When you join objects, all the modifiers except the ones of the active object get deleted so there can be such results. Everything I had selected before is now part of the last active object podest, the podium. As you can see, if I go back a few steps, the podium was the active object. If I also select the schnabel, the beak, now this becomes the active object. If I hit "Control J," now all these different objects have become part of schnabel. To see what actually happened here, we need to switch to edit mode. With all set, we can see that these are still individual meshes. They have become part of one object, schnabel but there's the separate meshes. You can also see that they intersect each other, they overlap. Another method to make objects follow each other without combining them is parenting. For this, you first select all children, the objects that shall follow. Lastly you select the parent and the parent should be active. Then you can press "Control P," a small menu appears and you can select parent, keep transform so that the objects stay in their position. Now, if you move the parent object, all the children will follow. Neat. Also in the outliner, you can now see that all the other objects have been joined to the kopf, the head object. If you want to clear the parent and separate the family, go to object, parent and clear parent. Now the children have finally finished puberty and go out of the house to start their own families. To conclude, you can join the objects with Control J into one object and you can parent the objects to each other. With both methods, they move around together but what if we want them to be actually only one single mesh? For this, we need Boolean and the Boolean modifier is the last modifier I want to show you in this class. By the way, kudos for staying with me all the way. This is a really good modifier that you can use on 3D printing. You are learning so much. We need it to combine meshes, watertight, as if your whole mesh was made of rubber and filled with air and there shouldn't be a leak anywhere. For this, let's select the podium and then choose the Boolean modifier. Again, you have different options to choose from. Most important are the ones at the top, intersect, union and difference. Union means you unite shapes, difference subtracts shapes from each other and intersect leaves only the parts where objects will intersect. Down below, you see that the operand type is an object and with this, we can just click on the pipette and choose the koerper, the body as target. Now you see the outline changed. It now includes the podium and the body. Sadly, I can't add the other objects into this one modifier. For this, we would need to create more modifiers but if I do it like this, the outline doesn't change. This is because for now the podium is of course, still just the podium and the first Boolean mode isn't yet applied. The tail and the head do not touch the podium and can be combined with it. We first need to apply the first modifier before we can combine the second object with it. It is a good idea to save before applying any Boolean modifier. Now, apply each one of the modes. Here I deleted the others but you can of course just apply one after the other. What has happened now? Tap to edit mode to make it clearer. With odset, you can see it. The whole object has now gotten sews at the places where the meshes touched as if someone sewed them together. Now it just really like a big rubber figure. The other objects haven't been deleted. They are still there. You can hide them or delete them. Now, only the bird is left over which is now both one mesh and one object. To check if there are no errors after Boolean, tap into edit mode, deselect everything with od a, select one vert and then hit "Control L." This means you select everything that is directly linked to this vert. If everything was selected, you can see that all parts are combined. Time to save another incremental safe. I will now open the bird before the Boolean process to show you the difference. Again, use Control J to join the objects into one object but not one mesh. Hit "Odset" to see everything and just randomly select a vert. Press "Control L" or go to select. This menu is very helpful if you need to select by different traits, select linked and you will see that only one mesh is selected. This means these are all separate meshes. Awesome. Let's go back to our bird, I would ever awesomeness you may have created. My bird is finished. If you want to print it, all you need to do is select it, go to file, export STL. This file can then be printed by almost any 3D printer and of course also by a print on demand service. Look in the description for a discount code at my favorite one, Shapeways. Tick selection only to make sure you only export your selected object, not any hidden ones or additional ones from the scene and then click on "Export." If you have your own 3D printer, there are lots of different slices just as there are multitude of printer types. The slice is as a program that helps prepare your STL for printing where you can set all the options of your printer, like speed, layer size, and so on. It is called slicer because it slices your model into layers which then get printed one after the other. I have used [inaudible] but I recently fell in love with the ease of use and swiftness of the free PrusaSlicer. I have a Prusa M cat 2.5 and they work perfectly together. Prusa is an awesome company and I can really recommend their products. In the PrusaSlicer, you just import your STL and select the settings you want to use. The default settings for Prusa printers are already really good. For other printers, you might need to search online for a good profile or maybe PrusaSlicer already includes your printer as well. Important for this model are the automatically generated support structures. If you don't own a printer, I have added a few hints way confront your model down below in the description of the course or just leave me a comment if you'd like a more detailed description on how to print it yourself. 24. Final Thoughts & Thank You!: Hey, there. Thank you so much for learning together with me. Have you worked through the whole course or did you just take a peek here? Regardless, please let me thank you for being part of this class. I am very happy and humbled to be able to share my knowledge with you. If there's anything you think could be improved, please leave me a review with your opinion. I love reading your thoughts and comments and it really helps to make better content for you. Also, please share your project in the project gallery. It is awesome to see your projects and ideas. Don't forget that I also have some more courses on 3D design. How to create your own jewelry and in general, how to make your ideas a reality. I would love to see you there. I also have some free tutorials on YouTube. I'm wishing you a blessed day, See you next time. Bye-bye.