Learn Blender: Creative and 3D Printable Jewelry Design

1. Intro To The Class: Hi, there. This class is about modeling signet rings in Blender. Blender is a freely downloadable open source 3D program. Next to lots of other fun stuff like animation, character design or interior, it can also be used to create 3D printable designs. Everyone who wants to be able to model 3D printable shapes, be it for fun personal projects or freelance design will benefit from this class. My name is Gesa Pickbrenner, I am a freelance jewelry designer since 2017 and part-time Illustrator as well; as well as the creator of a lot of tutorials and a certified teacher for the Arts and Crafts from Germany. This class is for beginners to intermediate Blender users so if you're completely new, I recommend going to my first class where I cover all the basics. When I started out, even after getting the basics of the interface, Blender was still a big mystery to me. Yet I so much wanted to create cool and beautiful designs, but I had no real idea on how to approach this. This is why I created this class. We will make it seem easy-peasy to create a signet ring that you can then personalize, print, and render. You will learn about important techniques like box modeling, sculpting, arrays, mirrors. Of course, we will also pay attention to booling and the preparations for the print work, but the main focus of this class lies in trying out several different techniques to get some really cool design results. Those are the exact techniques I'm using in my professional freelance work for clients and for my own personal projects. I highly encourage you to share work in process, screenshots, and final files in the Project gallery so we can all appreciate and comment on your work, and I can give you some feedback and answer all your questions you might have. Of course, if you have at any point the feeling, how did that happen? Feel free to check out my earlier classes where I cover more of the basics of Blender, you will need a non-potato PC and Blender installed, and the rest is covered in class. Let's go. 2. Resources: Before starting an important point for you, go ahead and download the resource files below the class. In this, you will find everything to follow along and have the best experience with this class. It includes all the finished files, so you can even have a better idea on how to approach certain elements or even how I have done something. We have basically two milestones in our project. The first is creating the basic ring shape, so you have a signet ring that you can then also already use or print out. But after we have this basic ring shape, we are going to decorate it with all kinds of cool designs on top, with all kinds of several different techniques. If you just want to decorate you ring, you can just download the basic ring file from the resources and get started with the later lessons. You will also learn a ton and have some fun as well as even quicker results. Now without further ado, let's get into it. 3. A - Basic Ring Band I: Let's start by creating the basic signet ring shape. This will be the first class project and after finishing it, you will already have a fully usable, fully printable model ready to go. Hit "1" one your numpad for front view. Shift-A, Curve, and Circle. Down here on the left, choose align to view and then set the radius that corresponds to your desired ring size. You can basically set it to whatever you want, but if you choose to create the ring for somebody in particular, it might be nice to go with the current ring size right away. We are now going to create a cube and then slice it so that we can delete three-quarters of it. Shift-A, Add Cube. Tap to edit mode, Control-R, and right-click to create a new line of vertices in the exact center. Repeat this and then select with left mouse or C and delete the vertices with x which are not needed. To not leave the cube all cut open like that. Let's give him the missing parts back. Select the outer vertices and pull them out with g and x along the x-axis. Tap to object mode, add a mirror modifier. This will then move the vertices along the selected axis. The cube is whole again. Tap to Edit mode again and use Control-R and scrolling your mouse wheel to add a few more segments. Those will enable the cube to bend along the curve. That's what we're going to do. Tap to object mode, add a curve modifier, and choose our Bezier circle as the target. Control-2 to soften the hart edges with a subdivision modifier. This will give us our very handy basic ring band. In Edit mode, you can pull out the side vertices a little bit more along the y-axis so that you have a broader ring band instead of just an elongated cube. An alternative way to do this is with the JewelCraft Addon. With this Addon, you can choose the ring size even more quickly. If you haven't downloaded it yet, I highly recommend it. It is super-helpful with jewelry design. I want to show you this way as well, because it is super quick and has some additional perks. Afterwards, we continue with the current shape for the ring band. If you don't want to see this one, head over to the next lesson right now, or just follow along. We start again with the elongated cube. Delete the first Bezier curve and the curve modifier. While having the cube selected, go to the JewelCraft Addon and under Curve, choose Size Curve. There, you have the opportunity to choose from the correct size right away instead of having to calculate it with the Bezier circle. With those little buttons on the side, you can place the object on the outside or the inside of the curve. Here the outside of course makes much more sense, and what I particularly like if you click on "Stretch", the cube gets stretched along the curve and closes the ring. Very handy. Control-Z out of here for now. One thing we still need to take care of is that the ring has its opening on the wrong side. To correct this, simply select both the cube and the curve circle. Hit "R" for rotate, X for along the x-axis, and 180 to make it do a 180. In the end, the JewelCraft Addon has given us the same result, but with a little bit more control over what we might need as designers. Let's continue and in the next lesson, bring the shape of the signet ring forward a little bit more. 4. A - Basic Ring Band II: I went ahead and pre-loaded the signet ring shape into my view port. You can simply do that by opening up the Blend file of the ring and then copy pasting it over (CTRL C + CTRL V) Pull it to the side a bit with G and Y, so that our work in progress is visible. As you can see, the ring shape is also still subdivided, hence, if I turn the subdivision modifier off, the original faces become visible. Here you can see an important concept in blender, the edge flow. This just means that the faces and therefore the edges follow the shape in an organized way, that makes it easy to subdivide. Having only quads and no abrupt intersections of edges, helps having a good edge flow. We will come to this once you connect the top with the ring band. As you can see on the Signet Ring, there is no additional row of vertices on the flanks of ring, as we leave the two sides flat. On our ring band alt left-click and X "Dissolve Edges". This will remove this whole row of edges, combining the faces to the left and right of it. To make it easier to work with the shape of the band, let's quickly look at the curve modifier. At the top, you have the different visibility buttons. Turn off the edit on cage but keep the edit mode on. In this way, we have the original shape of the ring band in front of us, we're also seeing how it gets deformed by all the modifiers in real-time. The Signet Ring is rounded on the outside. Therefore, select only the row of verts on top of the ring and with G and Z, move them along the Z axis. Signet rings are very often getting broader and broader towards the top. This flow of the shape, this progression, can be easily achieved by rotating the vertices on the side. But if we just rotate them like this, the shape looks weird. What could we do then? Exactly, we set the pivot point. For this, select one of the two outer end vertices, hit "Shift S" and choose "Cursor to Selected". Now the 3D cursor jumps to the vertice you selected. To rotate: alt select, then Shift alt select the outer rows and when we hit R and Z to rotate along Z now this happens. Depending on your settings, it might still look a little bit wrong. To solve this, we need to make the 3D cursor the center of rotation (= pivot point) for our ring band, not the verts we selected. This happens up here. Simply select "3D cursor" and the rotation will happen around all the right places. Let's continue. To make our surface a bit smoother and to check if we have overall a nice foundation, you can level up the subdivision modifier from two to say three. To give us a little bit more control over the shape, we can add an additional row of verts with "Control R" and right-click for "center". We don't need the extra verts inside of the ring band, and we also don't need closed end caps here, since we are going to connect the ring to something more precisely the top. 3 for face mode and just select them and delete with X and faces. 2 for edge mode, We can bring those up a bit as well. Since it makes some perfectionistic organ inside me itch that the 3D cursor isn't exactly in the center anymore. Let's finally clean up the scene and hit "Shift C" to put it back where it belongs. Up next, we will, of course, continue our journey further up the ring and create the table. 5. A - Signet Ring Table : Let's hide our already made signet ring for now and create the top of the ring. I am using a circle; shift A, Mesh and Circle. This is going to be the upper part. Choose the amount of vertices according to the amount of vertices on the outer part of the ring band. Because we want to connect them later, this makes it easier for us. I choose 16. Numpad 1 for front view. Now you can move the circle to the right if it makes sense for your ring. I choose three millimeters here. This would take some experimenting and also depends on the usage of your model. If you want to print it later in metal, make it too high and the ring will be very heavy and will keep circling around the finger to the sides. It could also become uncomfortable or impractical. On the other hand, haha, some designs just need something like this to stand out. Of course, you have always the option of making it hollow later on. If you want to import a picture as a template for recreating a certain shape, you can do Shift A, add Image and Reference, then upload your picture into Blender. To lay it flat, put all these values to zero, to center it. Or of course, you could use the trick from my first class, "From Sketch to Model" to import a shape directly. In case you don't want to use a circle, but let's say an octagon, you would go about it a bit differently. Of course, there are many ways to Rome, but I think this one makes also a lot of sense. Shift A, add Mesh, Cube, then scale the cube the way you need it or according to the stone you may be using. You can also scale it later on, so it doesn't need to be 100 percent for now. Also look at it in side view to scale it down along the z axis. For the beveled edges, tap to Edit mode, 2 for edge mode, then select the edges you want to bevel, hit "Control B", and move your mouse. This works with all edges, as long as your geometry has thickness. You can delete the lower part for now, so you only have the table. Another idea for this would be that you use it as your stone if you need one. Now it is time to connect the table and the rest of the ring. First in edit mode, we will lengthen the basic ring band a bit more to help us with connecting to the upper part. Then I look at the ring band in subdivided mode, and I see that the subdivision makes it curl in a bit too far into the ring size, making the ring smaller. That is why, in edit mode, I lift up the whole thing along the z axis a bit to give it some more space. Now it lies exactly on the ring size. Afterwards, we adjust the thickness of the ring band slightly more. As long as the curve modifier is not applied, it is easier to change the thickness and wideness in a comfortable way. In the lower center of the ring, it looks as if the ring is not connected. That is why we need to turn clipping on, so the verts stick to each other in the mirror plane. Once you have that, you can adjust the thickness of the ring with R and Y. If you want to see you on the fly how your measurements are, go to the Measurement tool in object mode and use it like a caliper. Hold Shift to stick to things when measuring. If you want to delete some measures, click them and delete. If you want to keep them, just change the tool mode on the left and they will hide. Once you feel you have some nice proportions, you can then apply the curve modifier. This will give us more comfort when building the rest of the geometry phase by phase. Now we are going to join both meshes into one. Turn off mirror mode (visibility of the mirror modifier) Select the circle, tap to edit mode, and delete all verts except the ones above the ring quarter. Go back to object mode and then first select the circle, then the ring band. This is the active object (the bright yellow one) Join Mesh with Control J, tap to edit mode again, and here you can now see that all vertices are part of this one mesh and the circle verts have inherited all modifiers from the ring band. Neat. Let's connect both parts. Select the verts that are directly opposite and hit F to fill faces in. Now here, we can make it easy for us by going to front view with 1, selecting these verts that are not yet connected, E for Extrude and then moving them inwards to roughly the same distance as the last segment. Because of the subdivision, you can see that the ring shape stays nice and round and we can put the new verts exactly on the ring size circle. Here you also don't need to hit Shift Y for staying in the x and z plane. If you are in orthogonal view, meaning the front side and top view with the numpad keys, the movement will automatically only happen in 2D. Again, Extrude and the verts should get pulled towards each other and merged like little points of gravity when getting near the center line because of the mirror modifier clipping setting. I find it always oddly satisfying when this happens. Now we want to adjust the shape a little bit to follow the overall style of the ring. To make it look a bit smoother, let's turn on Proportional Editing up here and also check Connected verts only. This is most often the setting you want. You can also just hit O to turn it on. Now we can close the ring up. This face sits a bit awkwardly between the others, but because it still is a quad, it does not make the surface jagged or weird when subdividing. This is what I mean by edge flow. In face mode (3), if you select a line of faces with Alt Select, they flow along the surface. The same with those here, and also the ones at the top. They are all quads, and quads are easy to subdivide so that in theory, you could sub-divide a million times and the super small quads would still flow like this. (Don't, your PC will hate you :) If I now put tris in here, this edge flow gets broken. You can still select some rows, but this one is interrupted. It is not easy to subdivide because subdivision happens through dividing by four. But how to divide a tri by four without getting fractions? But if we now merge those faces again to form a quad, the edge flow is re-established. Sometimes of course, and especially in 3D printing, you can get away with tris. 00:07:33.200 --> 00:07:37.580 Also in small corners you can sometimes hide a tri or two, but for the modeling process, quads are best. Enough of this for now. The ring looks dandy and we can continue with the top. Same principle applies here though. We can choose how to put the faces on top. Start with pulling out two verts towards the center. We could then fill in these two pie slices. Sometimes it is just more comfortable to have a bit more geometry to work with so I fill them in like this. If there are already faces surrounding verts, you can hit Control Left-click and Blender will try to find the verts that would form a face. Sometimes this happens. This is mostly because of duplicate verts. To solve this quickly without having to search for them, select all with A, hit Space, and search for Merge by distance. And click it, or hit Enter. Now would be the right time to create a save file with all the mods still unapplied. Next up, let's get into engraving and create a beautiful signature on top of our signet ring. 6. B - Engrave Your Ring: I hope you have saved your basic ring shape with all the mods still unapplied. Because in the following lessons, we will continue to build upon this basic shape and create all kinds of cool and interesting decorations on top. Now, let's add for a start some engravings on top and inside of the ring. The next four lessons will be all about putting your signature into your ring by using various techniques, super cool tips, and a lot of different approaches. Ready? Let's go. Start by opening up a new .blend file, hit ''Shift A" and "Text". Tap to edit mode and now you can edit the text just as if you were writing a mail. Delete the text and add your desired insignia. I chose G for Gesa. Open up the green letter here on the right and find the menu Font. Open it and click on the folder icon to choose your favorite font. In this window, usually Blender should find the correct folder address. Here should be a list of all fonts that are standard to windows as well as any font you might have downloaded. If it is hard to decide by name alone, change the view up here. Choose your favorite. You can also try out different fonts and switch between them on the right. Maybe you want something more playful or something very formal and you can compare them. I just quickly create a circle roughly the size of our signet ring top and scale the letter up to have it in the right size, and save the file with the name "font.blend". Copy the letter from the new file with "Ctrl C", then open up the original ring band file you've created before, and use "Ctrl V" to paste the letter into the scene (Cmd C + V on mac). An alternative and also sometimes very useful way of getting your letter into your scene is this one. While having your ring band open, go to File, Append, navigate to the letter file you just created, double-click it, go to Object, and there the text should be found. Click on it, and there it is. This is very useful in cases you need some specific thing from another file, like a material, or in this case, a letter. Of course, we could have created the text directly in this file, but I wanted to show you this neat functionality, and it also doesn't hurt to keep such tasks separate sometimes for easier sorting and stuff like this. Let's convert this letter into a curve so we can work with it a bit better. Go to Object, Convert to, and choose Curve. If you are familiar with Illustrator, this curve behaves very similar to a vector path. With the handles, you can easily change the shape of the G. We don't need to do that right now, however, because the shape should be nice already. Instead, we go to the Curve menu here on the right, go to Geometry and put the extrude to anything above one millimeter. So we have some material to work with. Nice. We already created a 3D letter. I measure it real quick to make sure it is not too thin. For relief or engravings in metal like silver or gold, it is best to stay above 0.3 millimeters and even more safe to stay above 0.5 millimeters width and depth. With steel or something like that, it should be above one millimeter. By the way, if you want to make the measurements disappear, just select one and hit ''Delete'', or simply switch the mode on the left so they hide until you open the measurement tool again. Lower the letter down to the ring. If you now add a Boolean modifier to the ring to engrave it and you want to choose the text as the object, this does not work. Why not? Because to bool geometry together in Blender, you need meshes. Geometry that is made up of verts which connect edges, which form faces. What to do? Select the letter, go to Object, Convert to, Mesh. Now you can use it as a Bool object. By default, converted curves like this often gets shaded smoothly. You can spot this here with a face just looking a bit shaded as if it had a smooth gradient. To see the exact geometry, flat shading is nearly always preferred. You can change this up here, Object, Shade Flat. On-screen, you can see an example with the ring to see the difference. Smooth is practical for quick renderings in smooth style. Now you can see the geometry of the letter, pretty ugly. Definitely not good for putting textures on it or anything like that. What you can do if you want to create some more beautiful geometry for this letter, is you add a modifier and you choose the Remesh modifier. Now it will probably disappear. We need a finer graining, so to speak. You see if I divide it by 10, then it will absolutely look better already, and if I divide it by 10 again, then you see it is really quite beautiful. It has nice and rounded edges and this is exactly what we would want if we needed to bool something out of something that is then going to be printed, because not only does it look better, but it's also a lot better for the whole printing process if it's not a 100 percent sharp edge. You see it now has beautiful squared geometry. If we bool it out and hide it, there you go, we get this really nice look now. If we change the shading to Matcap up here and turn on cavity and shadow, the visibility will be better in the view port. Next up, I'm going to show you the approach of the self-made signature and also how to visualize it a bit better and give it a little material. 7. B - Material & Use Your Own Drawing: I have chosen to follow the path of my first class "From Sketch to Model", to create an SVG file from my sketch, which I then imported into Blender. I accidentally imported a bunch of other stuff too, which I put into a new collection and then forgot about. You can move the points on the curve here still, just like in illustrator, to make adjustments. Blender imports SVGs with this very dark color. I give the material a brighter shade and a colored hue, because, why not? Once you have that, also transform it into a mesh, same procedure as with the letter. Make sure you have a separate safe file for this result because you may want to keep the ring while it is still subdivided and mirrored and the Boolean mode unapplied for later use. Even if we turn Matcap on, the visualization is still not really nice. We can't really see what's going on there. A quick method, if you want to visualize it better, convert to mesh will instantly apply all modes on the ring, including the engraving. I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily apply two different materials to one mesh. Box select all faces inside of the letter. Deselect those on the outside with C and middle mouse. Then go to "Material", "New." Choose a black base color. Then click on "Assign", which will assign this new color only to the selected verts. Ramp up metallic to one, this will make the material behave like a metal. Now the whole ring has gone black because the other words haven't been assigned a material yet. Go to Select, Invert. Create a new material. Again, Assign, this will assign the new color to the inverted selection. Then choose silver or gold color by ramping metal up to one. Voila. Nice ring. Now, it is basically ready to be sent to a printer or you use it in a visualization, of course. Let's now invert our approach and see what you can do if you want to have a relief instead of an engraving inside the ring. 8. B - Bas Relief: To have the letter not as an engraving, but as a bas-relief, I created a circle, subdivided it, also gave it edge crease, and then Booled the circle from the ring. Here I used Shift N to recalculate the outset of the cylinder. For some reason it had flipped faces and flipped faces when Booling leads to, you guessed it, problems on the mesh and non-manifolds. Add a Boolean modifier again and this time choose union for the signature. This is also a nice and very beloved version of a signet ring. If you really want to stamp the ring into some wax, make sure to mirror the letter or signature or motif before you're Booling it so when pressing it into soft material in the end, you get the seal the right way around. Just a quick tip regarding the two different materials, if you want to apply them here as well, like we did before, only apply the circle Boolean modifier, not the signature or the letter. This way it is easier to select the lower circle. You can single out the ring. For me it's hitting / but for you it's probably under view and local view Then you select the vert in the middle and just hit Control and Numpad+ a bunch of times and then you have selected all of the inner circle of the now Booled ring. Afterwards, you can give the letter its own material. Reuse it from the ring. This will make it better to handle before you bool it all together and also to make adjustments. It is always good to have multiple save files from multiple stages of your project. I keep repeating myself, just make sure to save early and save often. Here you can choose from a few pre-loaded environments. Turn off the overlays up here. If you put the roughness of your material to zero, your material will shine like a mirror and this might look a little weird. If you keep it a bit higher, you will have a super quick way of sneaking in a screenshot or two, while it already looks really nice. Not photo-realistic, but nice and this is sometimes all we need to have an idea on how the ring might look in the end. Next up, we have just a super quick tip on how to achieve an engraved result even quicker without using Booleans at all. 9. B - Knifing Edges...: The good thing here is you can use the letter as it is, just copy and paste it or append it into your signet ring file. Important point is that you need to apply the mirror and the subdiv modifier right away so it is a bit less flexible but a lot quicker. Apply those, maybe increase the subdivision even a bit more because we need some amount of this here and then 7 for top view. Select the letter shape, select the ring, switch to edit mode, hit space and type knife, then choose mesh, knife project. Nice project. Now if you turn around the ring a little bit, you will be able to spot what we have done. What have we done? There are a bunch of new edges in the shape of our letter. To keep the selection for later re-use, go to the object data properties and create new Vertex Group. In this way, you can reselect any verts that were selected when you assigned the group. Afterwards, just hit E and extrude those guys down or up, depending on which way you want it. As you may see, the edges are a bit rough. The higher the subdivision, the better the detail. But if you wanted to print this, it might just be enough because the printer does not have this insane detail and it will also get polished, sanded, cleaned up and so on. Here you can see how I apply the black color to the inside of the ring. Because the color bleeds outside, I de-select the upper verts. Then invert the selection and apply the white one, and there you have it. Knifing edges, quick, dirty, but effective. That was it for the basic engraving and relief part. Next up, we're going to take a closer look on the inside of our ring. Take out some material to make it lighter and even include our own hallmark into it. Stay tuned. 10. B - Hollow Out Your Ring & Hallmark: Now, we are going to create a simple Bool object to carve out from the underside. Paste, append, or insert your raw signet ring into the file. Because we want to create a Boolean cutout object from it, we need to imagine how the opposite shape should look like, and therefore reshape it a bit to get the desired hollowed-out effect in our signet ring. For example, I pull up the lower part of this Boolean object to reduce the amount of cutout that is happening here in our signet ring. I also make it a bit more slender by scaling it along the y axis. Let's create a second viewport by putting your mouse in the top-left corner until it becomes a plus, then click, hold, and pull it to the right. Put this viewport into top view by hitting 7 on your Numpad. In that way we can see what is going on a bit better, also turn transparency on there. Now we can adjust our Boolean shape and refine the details. Create more verts on the inside with Control R to be able to define the shape a bit more. Add some edges to make it smoother again. I additionally pulled up the lower part of the Bool object a bit more to reduce the amount of cut out that was affecting my ring. Can you see those two sharp corners? We need some more material on our ring to dull them a bit. Let's introduce another row of verts on the inside of the ring with Ctrl R. This will we give the signet ring more material and the Bool object can sit nicely inside the shape. In the end, use the Bool modifier to admire your result. A little detail you might experience yourself here, there's a slight undercut when the Boolean object takes away the material. This is not necessarily a problem, but I like it when the things flow outwards. But for this, I simply straighten out the Bool object a little bit more. It's just the constant flow of adjusting and readjusting until you get a nice shape. Sometimes it can be a little bit tricky, but if you can think in 3D, and I bet you can, then this won't be a problem for you. In the end, you will learn more and more with each step you take. Next, let's go for the Hallmark. This can be your personal punch or your initials or any other sign that you want to put inside of the ring to symbolize the creatorship that binds you to this ring. Can you say this in English like this? To symbolize that you are the creator. Here in my owl ring, I used my initials and my sign on a little plague inside of the cut out. Let's test this out. If you follow along, make sure to check the dimensions after scaling the signature down to fit under the ring. Better to make sure that the width roughly equals the height with such small engravings or relieves. The minimal line width also should not be under 0.3 millimeters for something like this. Otherwise, it could be polished down or just disappear in the printing and casting process. Also watch out that the ring itself doesn't become too thin. For something like this, I would stay above one millimeter. You can even reuse the circle from above to create a little plague, which you can then in turn engrave with booldifference. In this way, the ring will stay thick enough. Now that we have our basic engraving done, let's experiment with some more decorations on top, which will follow throughout the next several lessons. You can pick and choose your favorite, or of course, try them all. But please also be aware that they all build on each other so if you skip one or two, it would be sad because you would miss some valuable information that you might need. But they can be done as a standalone exercise. Just make sure to consult the earlier lessons if you get stuck somewhere. Or of course, you can always write me a comment. 11. C - Sun Array: Hey, cool that you have followed along so far. In the next couple of lessons, we will try out some more cool techniques and add our own flavor to this already awesome ring. Let's start with a nice and easy one, the sun array, a simple yet elegant decoration that can be achieved in no time at all. We start with our basic ring. The first thing that I'm going to do for this particular style of topping is change the table of our ring into an oval. I use proportional editing here so that it all looks smooth. Next thing I'm going to do is create a cube, put it up here, scale it out a little bit. We can change this to median point. Also, we can turn off proportional editing like this, maybe a little bit longer. We want to of course cut this thing from our ring, so we shape it into a little wedge. Very simple, nothing fancy so far. Then we rotate it along the x-axis so that it looks as if we want to slice a cake with this. If we now add a Boolean modifier and hide our cube, then we should get this little cut on top of the ring. Let's bring our cube back. Now, of course, we need to find a way to multiply this wedge and form it into a circular pattern. Let's add a modifier, the Array modifier. Right now, it's at a relative offset, which is not what we want. We can change this here, and this just means that we will change the offset relative to the object itself. If we change the size of the object, the offset will stay at one and therefore grow or shrink with the object itself. But we don't want that here. We don't want constant, we want object offset. For object offset to work, we need a reference object that will serve as the reference point for the array modifier. What I choose here is Shift A "Empty" and "plain Axes". You can use anything you want really. You can place it anywhere you want. But we want it in the center. If I now choose the empty, something changes with the offset. If I now move the empty, you see that this object exactly stays on my empty. But we don't want it like this, we of course, want to turn it around up here. For this to work, we need to make sure that all of those values here, especially location, is completely set to zero. This location has changed because we moved it in object mode already. If I move it now, it will change its position even more. But if we now hit Control A and apply All Transforms, this all changes back to zero. The absolute zero point of this object location-wise is now at 0,0,0. This will also set the origin (yellow point) back to the absolute zero point, The object origin again has been placed in the center. Now, the reference object (empty) and the object origin share the same space. What you can now do if you move the empty, the cube will always move in reference to this zero point. If we now move this empty into a circular pattern, well, we can move these like clock dials. Of course, we want a bit more, so let's switch this to 30. You can see now those are 30 pieces. Your PC might get a little bit slow right now, mine sure is, and if you want to evenly space them, you can choose the location with maths, the rotation, watch out for this. You choose 360 and divide it by the amount of objects in your array. Nice. Yeah, you can do this too. It looks pretty cool. But it was the wrong axis. Of course, we want the z-axis. Yeah, now we have this wonderful piece of tart, whatever it is. What's a tart? Is it a cake? I meant like a cake, whatever. We just hide this cube, and yes, we already get some nice results. I will just now turn the array off because it uses a lot of calculation power. We will bring this out a little bit more. Turn the array on again, hide the cube. Wow, and there you go, it already looks pretty freaking cool. Now if you want to change the viewport shading, I went ahead and already gave this ring a golden metal material. You can turn that off and look at that. Just looks so freaking nice. You can change the lighting as well, the preloaded environment lightings. Very well. Isn't this cool? That's it for the sun array. One more thing I forgot to mention is, of course, if you want to export this as an STL, then you first should apply all modifiers by simply hitting "Object", "Convert to", and "Mesh". Then you should check in edit mode for non-manifolds. Remember my shortcut is "Shift Control Alt M". As you can see, there are none. But it can very well be that there could be some in your case. What you should watch out for is the Boolean object itself should not have any overlapping in the area where you are actually booling something out of the ring. The array, of course, overlaps into itself many times, but not on those spots where they are touching the ring. That is important. Other than that, you are good to go. Now, the next lesson will be another decoration on top of our ring, which will be a beautiful rose or a lotus shape that is growing out of our ring. Stay tuned. 12. D - Flower Creation: Intro Dyntopo: Now, you are really warmed up, and we can go for something slightly more complex. In the next few lessons, we are going to sculpt a beautiful rose or flower shape on top of our signet ring. You will learn to block in basic shapes, to retopologize them, so they get a super smooth surface, to bool them together, and apply all tricks that we also learned before, but not quite used in this amount yet. If you want to go for something that is a little bit more in-depth, and you want to also get started with sculpting, then those are the lessons for you. Let's go and have fun. We are back with our basic signet ring, which of course you can find in the resources of the class. What we're going to do now is first create our standard cube, bring it up here, maybe a little bit to the side, because we want to sculpt the leaves of the flower going around the center, then we bring in our image and reference. Now we have our rose (thanks to Kordes-Rosen.com ;) bring it to the side a little bit, Ctrl/Cmd and let's say 3 or maybe 4, Apply. (Subdiv-Mod) The first thing, switch to sculpt mode, you can also go to Sculpting up here, or you can hit ''Ctrl/Cmd tab" and choose ''Sculpt Mode.'' Here you can see that we have our brush, and this little point means that it's mirrored. To turn off the mirror, you can go up here and switch it off. What we need now is this brush, this is the grab brush. You can acess it with G. With F, you can make your brush a little bit bigger. Shift F, decrease or increase the strength. Then you click up here, so that the circle of the brush that indicates the plane of the brush is not directly in front of you, but a little bit to the side, then you just pull it out. Because we want to sculpt the leave, this petal of the flower, we need a little bit more material. For this, I'm going to introduce to you a special technique. First, if you choose, for example, this first blob brush, and you sculpt something on it, you can see the faces are just getting bigger, and they're coming out of the object, and they get stretched, and stretched, and stretched. You can in theory sculp a lot with it, but of course, if you want to get very small details in here, with holding Ctrl you can subtract with a brush instead of adding. Normally the brush is adding, and when I hit "Ctrl", you can subtract from it. Really fine details are not possible here, because of course, I don't have enough faces. To circumvent this, I'm going to introduce the Dyntopo technique. Maybe you've heard about it before, just Ctrl Z out of here. Dyntopo is found up here, I can just click on it, tells you that, "Warning, Vertex Data Detected." You can ignore it if you don't have any vertex data and we don't have anything that we care about right now. If we now sculpt, you can see that all those little tiny details are not made up of quads anymore, but of triangles. The more I zoom in, at least this is my standard setting, the smaller the detail gets, and the detail is at "relative detail" and "subdivide collapse". The more you zoom in the more subdivided your model will become. As you may have noticed, the rest of the model did not change. It stays the same, so only the part where you sculpt gets changed, and you can go very, very small. Of course, if you need finer detail, you can just increase the subdivision. Then you can do really small details like those warts, or pimples, or craters, our whatever. If you now go to edit mode, just tap, you can see for once the tris and also that the subdivision has changed only on those places. That's the Dyntopo, and I will do Ctrl Z until I'm out of here. The Dyntopo setting is very useful if we want to make something organic, like this petal. First, turn on my mirror again, so I see this little blue dot. Get to the grab brush again, you can access it with G, remember. Then I can pull the shape out a little bit, but see there are no new verts created. This is because the grab brush does not increase or decrease the amount of verts. It is not affected by the Dyntopo. This is why I choose now the Snake Hook to move further. The Snake Hook literally pulls as if you would attach a hook to your geometry, pulls out, and gives you new material. Let's continue in the next lesson with refining our petal shape a bit more. 13. D - Refining Shapes: To define our shape more, we can choose other brushes as well. I have turned off mirror again. For example, we can use the blob brush to push the material inside a little bit with control and using the brush. When you hold Shift while clicking with any brush, you will access the smooth brush, and smooth out the shape you just created. If you are more or less satisfied, it just has to be a really basic shape, you do not have to do anything fancy here. Of course you can experiment with the different brushes you see. This one can crease your edge a little bit, to give you this sharp edge. If you want to flatten this, you can just go with this brush, and flatten the edge to give it a little bit more thickness, more definition, like this. Well, yeah. I've made better rose leaves, that's for sure. But this is exactly what we need right now because this is a really nice demonstration. For those little creases on the petal, the crease brush is very nice. The crease brush is usually quite strong, so I'd like to tone it down a little bit to get a more subtle effect. You can all do this with a tablet and then you have this pressure sensitivity, and of course it's better than to do it with a mouse. But it doesn't really matter here because we only want to block rudimentary shapes. This one is also always quite strong. I don't know where those brushes are all so strong. Maybe to see what's going on with them before deciding what to use. Another thing I just realized is, if you switch to Edit mode or any other mode and go back to Sculpt mode, your Dyntopo is off again. If you're wondering why your Dyntopo does not work, then it might very well be because it was turned off automatically. Not all brushes are affected by Dyntopo. Not all brushes do that. For example, this crease brush doesn't. Has to build new geometry to be affected like this one, for example you can very nicely put some material, and this is affected by the Dyntopo. You see it builds new verts. Of course you can decrease the pixel size of the Dyntopo even more, and then you get a really finely subdivided mesh. But as you can see, my computer is going to its knees. Right now it's starting to stutter. I would not recommend going down very fine into this subdivision unless you really needed to. Even though the brush icons all show these little different illustrations on how they ideally look, you can also experiment with the brushes and try out different settings for them. Here I'm making some creases with a blob brush because the blob brush gets affected by the Dyntopo, and you can make superfine creases with those. Here you can see me using the pinch brush to give the leaves this wavy look they have at their edges. You see what I'm trying to do here is just working my way and feeling my way out. I don't really necessarily go for realism. Of course I don't. You have probably realized this already :) But I just try to bring those basic shapes forward, that I'm seeing here. Like this. Now we have this basic leaf. Well, yeah. This is a common problem. Some brushes, they affect the back faces also, like this one. You have to watch out that you turn this on. Let's go into local view. For me it's / to see our petal a little bit better. This has cost me so many, I think hours, because I just forgot to turn this off. This is really a frustrating thing that some brushes have this by default, but, luckily you can use this one. Don't tell me this is front faces only, yes. Because now, those clay strips, they tend to affect both sides, and it's really annoying. Make sure you have turned on front Faces only, especially when you sculpt something small like this one, something thin, you can have fun with this one in the back and just also make Dyntopo a little bit less detailed otherwise it takes forever. Then we can just smooth this out again. Where is my reference? Ah, it is in local view. If you're wondering why you can't see something in one place or another, be sure to check out if you're in local view or not. At this point my perfectionism is kicking in, and I go back to Sculpt mode because I think it's just a little bit too unfinished. I wanted at least to have a basic resemblance of our reference. Let's continue and just pull and push and tweak on some areas just a little bit more, and also give it this three-dimensional shape so that it is a little bit more like a sculpture, and less like a flat leaf, flat sheet of paper. If you're feeling me when I talk about this perfectionism, make sure to not go totally over the top here, because we will, in a second, remodel this geometry so that we again have very few verts. This process is called retopologizing. The shape has just to be a basic resemblance, not the perfect accurate representation of a leaf. 14. D - Retopologizing : Let's go back to object mode and start the retopo process. Shift+A to create a plane. Put it up here. Right up in the center of the viewport, you can find this little magnet, and this is the "snap to" setting. Right now it's set to "snap to grid". This means that it will always snap to the little segments of the grid behind it. If you turn it off, you see it moves smooth again. We're going to need this little thing up here in a moment. Turn to Edit mode, and merge with M at center. Now you have this little lonely vert down here. Now, turn snapping on and turn on face. Tap to object mode again. Can we select this? Why can't we select this. Doesn't seem to do what I want. This is the origin. I was moving it, but the origin was staying. Now when we move it, you see that this thing snaps towards this shape. That's pretty cool because it enables us to do the following. We want to retopo the petal. For this, we just extrude some new verts here like this. and like this, and like this, and like this. Then you go here and here, select those four and hit F. Then you select those where there is no face yet, and then you Hit F and F and F, and F and F. Of course, you can just keep the F key pressed and it will automatically fill everything in. Here it does not really do that because for some reason it doesn't recognize that this would be the best solution to form a face. But once you're here, just hold F. It's going up like this. Now, of course, we have this skin. We're doing subdivision with it, so it gets a little bit smoother. Also what we're going to do, we go to the object properties and Viewport Display. And we choose In Front. Now our retopo plane will always be visible. As you can see, before it was hidden behind this. Now we will always see our verts. If you're wondering why we are doing this fun exercise, it's because retopologizing is really, really useful in a lot of circumstances. Because it enables us to rebuild the shape that we sculpted. Then we have this beautiful edge flow again, because if you go inside here this just looks like a total mess and we could not UV unwrap it (= give it proper textures) It's really hard to subdivide also because it is all tris and don't plant tris in Blender. Like this and this is probably a bit boring if you look at all but it's not that big of a flower. Now we also come to the fun part, watch out that you don't have any doubles. This happens quite easily. Here I made my first mistake. If you can see, the edge flow goes from here, 3 in face mode, goes from here, and it goes from here. By the way, if you want to select a row, just go to the edge of those that make sense in this case, because then sometimes you click in the middle and you wonder why it's not selecting the one that I want. You always need to go near the edge of the row of faces that you want to select. As you can see, this is part of both rows. We could not continue both rows here easily because this one counts for both and it just has one vert. If we would make another face here and then try to select in face mode, it would not really work out well, except if we put one here like this, and we go here. Then we have successfully created like a crossroad in our mesh. I keep turning on those. I really never use those...the select circle. I actually use this one. If you want to delete this, then you just use the select circle and select circle automatically deselect the ones that you're not selecting. This can be very useful when you do retopologizing. What was the topic here? We have this edge flow that we created. Now, of course, we want to build this part. To do this properly, I would always suggest to select one, hit y, and then you singled out this one vert. This is like a copy you created. Then you go along this edge with E, and from there you could try to find a connection. If you don't know how to connect two planes of your geometry through beautiful edge flow, then just first try to build one of those edges and then connect them. Like I do here. Here we have this little special case. I'm confused as to how to go about this one. What I'm going to do is I first build the lower part, and I first get this and this, and this. Always try to stay on a plane. This plane, this is here, and the other plane is up here, like this. We can look at this for a moment. I think we have inverted faces, A and Shift+N. There it is. You can see here it's broken up. Of course, we want to fix this. I first turn on my rose, get my rose back. I first go like this and like this, and then I connect it and I hope that it will work out. Of course, it often does not. You see, if we would fill this one in here, we would get a tri. I always opt for not planting tris. Then we do it like this. Now we have a quad. But this quad is wedged in between those others. We need to keep in mind that we need to continue the edge flow in a suitable manner. Sometimes it does this when we let it choose. Now you see we have only one edge of a face here, but we have a lot of verts here, and we really don't need all those verts. To give it a little bit more room, to open this up a little bit, and I'm thinking the most logical solution would either be to X and dissolve vertices here or dissolve edges, depending on what happens. But I think better, because we don't yet have that much geometry, would be to hit "Control R" and right-click to apply it, and then we have another row of verts and then we can continue building this geometry here. As you can see, only quads are left over. I'm really sure there could be a better way to connect this. It often happens that I just go for what I at the moment think makes a lot of sense. Sometimes then I come back later to this piece and, or through this part of the model and think, "No, this was not the ideal solution," and then I redo the edge flow, this happens really all time, it's no big deal. It's like when you do anything, it often helps to just finish up some rather sloppy version of it and then come back and then correct it. Then just trying to get it right at the first try. Who gets it right at the first try? I certainly don't. Where are we with this thing? Because I'm a lazy, I don't want to say any bad words here, but because I am quite lazy sometimes, I just mirror this thing, it looks a little weird. See it mirrors itself not quite properly. In edit mode, Find the mirror plane, I think that's the mirror plane. Now, we turn on clipping and then Option, select this one and we have clipping on, and therefore we can just, whoops, and there you go. Turn snapping off. Go like this. First, I always do like this. First, I separate those a little bit so that those that are already inside of the mirror plane go out a little bit and then I pull the rest out, and those are now snapped together and then I do the rest and it's like a little zip tie. Yes and that's basically our first leaf half. You can see that it has this little split in the middle and that is because the subdivision gets applied before the mirror. It makes all those rounded edges and it's most often best if you put the mirror modifier up here. Then you can see it has this really nice shape. What I'm going to do is, the key remapping is haunting me again. Like this and then I hit "Control R", and I create another row. I first pull this in a little bit. If I now select those on the center and pull them down, you see it gets this really nice crease. Really looks a bit flowery, I might say, or maybe like something else, but this, I'm not going to mention. Here, that's better. What sensual flower shape. Well, now we've come that far and it already looks a lot smoother than our basic shape. Of course, if you want this organic look, if you want to have those super fine details, you can go in with dyntopo and you can make those little things, those little spots, and of course, if you want to preserve those, you have to go in here and do the retopologizing according to the smallness of your geometry. As you can see here, of course, we don't have that many vertices. But for our purpose, I don't really think that's necessary because we are just building this flower shape for fun. Of course, if you feel so inclined, you can go crazy here and build your flower into something that would be worth of Michelangelo for example. But we will put our flower back because I'm not quite finished. This whole part can just be taken down a little bit. This unsightly thing here, we're not going to copy. This is just for quickness. Of course, if you don't want to sculpt all the underside, you could actually mirror this thing in the z-axis, I think. Yeah, of course, you could. It's because the origin is here. It always mirrors on the origin if you don't use an object, of course, we can try and mirror it along our flower. It's probably more like it. What you can now do is create another mirror modifier. This time only in the z-axis, and this one you keep in the x-axis. Put this all up here. It's the first that's applied. Go to object mode and then apply. This again, it's up here. I forgot to set the object, but it doesn't matter. I select everything, we'll see, pull this down here and I delete those verts. You can just click on one and hit "Control L" and pull it up. Now you basically have nearly the shape that we need. Because the underside of the flower, it's not going to be seen because we are going to bool it into our ring. That's why I'm doing this quick and dirty method here. This like this, hold F and see how it does all the work for you. I love it when computers do my work. Then you can just pull it out a little bit. The underside doesn't really matter. It can look a little bit weird because as I said, we were going to put it into our ring. Now it uses the cube as the center object. Here we don't want this. Then we can just lower this thing down. We can hide our flower for now. Then to see how it really looks, in object properties we switch off "in front". Now you see, it is pretty much ready to go. 15. D - Petal Arrays : Let's not leave our single petal that lonely anymore. Let's create some more of them and shape them into a beautiful flower. Yes, you guessed it, we're just going to use an array again because it just works so well, and it will help us arrange our leaf into this beautiful flower shape that we are going for. Empty 2 and again, remember, the offset is calculated by the distance of the origin from this object and the empty. We have to set the origin to 3D cursor, and then it's at zero. I think, I want how many are there, 1,2,3,4,5, I think a rose always has these five petals in one layer, in one layer of the flower. This looks nice, doesn't it? Like a wing of a bat or a dragon. There you go. Because I don't want to fine tune this myself, I just divide it by five, and it looks perfect. It looks really cool. If this one annoys you that this goes out, just pull it down a bit, and then it loses a little bit of its shape, but just a bit. Damn, this looks really cool. I mean, you can't say it does not look cool, because it does. Then you just copy it with shift d, pull the flower up a bit and then you re-apply the origin to the 3D cursor. Because when we now move our empty, all petals are getting affected, we just shift d this area as well, and we just put it in here. Then we select it, empty. Select our plane, select our empty and go like this. Then the array will turn with it. Of course, if we want to change something, we don't have to do it with all of those, just with one. This looks quite weird. I don't want it like this. Okay, that's the culprit. Because the mirror modifier is then pulled out, it will get this weird shape. What we're going to do to really get this in the right place, I would just apply the mirror modifier because I'm pretty sure it would not change so much. Then we can turn this on again, and then we can just scale this down. It does not really look realistic like here. I think it needs to be a little bit bigger still. It also needs to be turned. If you now turn it, it will go along the x-axis, the global x-axis. What you can do that you could hit R and XX, and then it goes for the local axis and the local is this one, the axis that is corresponding to only this one petal. Of course, say you want another one. Move this one here, ''Shift D'' and you apply everything because you can set the origin to geometry, and then you can scale it, and then you can pull it up and do all kinds of fun stuff. Then you can build this beautiful flower. Just try to make sure that everything is interlacing, interlocking. Because now we have this nice lotus shape. If you're happy with this, [laughter] you can go for the easy way and create an UV sphere , just put it in the center.[LAUGHTER] Yeah, I know. But why not. I mean, simple geometry is often the best geometry. Now if you take a look at the inside with alt z, you see that this is not really good geometry. It has holes in between and it's not one single watertight mesh. If you were just out to visualize an idea or render it now. Of course, it would be perfectly fine and nobody would see the inside of the model. But in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how I would go about booling this whole thing together, so that it is one watertight mesh, and we can then sent it to any printer and print it out. 16. D - Bool It For 3D Printing: Let's bool this thing together. For starters, what I would do is I'd pull this one down quite a bit. Let's select one more, choose e, and extrude this so that it fills out this whole space. We can also scale it up a bit so that it fits even more of the space. No one's going to see this, but then we don't have to worry about some air pockets inside when booling it all together. Let's start with the lowest of those. We first hide everything except this. With arrays, if you want to bool them, there's always this problem that if you now apply the array, let's apply this, apply this, and apply this. If you now apply the array and you go to Alt Z, you'll see that they are interlocked, but they are not really one single mesh. If you click on one, Command/Ctrl L to select everything, you see they are single pieces of mesh. This is not especially good because if we now try booling this flower together with this ring, of course, there would be errors because this is not a watertight mesh to begin with. Those are just singular pieces. Now you have two options: the first option would be, while having one complete leaf selected, hit P and separate the selection. Then you go through the next one. Then you go to the next one, Command/Ctrl L, P, Command L, P, Command L, P, Command L, P. You can imagine if you have hundreds of pieces, this is not fun at all. It does not really make sense to do it this way, but in this case, it is actually quiet all right. What we now can do, we get to our Booltron Tool and I set it to destructive. If you don't have the Booltron Tool, you again have a few options. You can use the Boolean modifier, choose union and choose the next leaf. Those two come together as one piece or you go to Preferences, look at your add-ons, and I'm not sure if blender has a Bool Tool pre-installed. I'm not really sure this is pre-installed, but you can find them online. Just search for Bool Tool or Booltron Blender and download the Zip file, put it in your add-on folder and install it. I really like the Booltron one, this is why I use this one. It's a little bit better for jewelry as I've found out. What this does is it just does this sequence of actions like this. See this did not really work very well here. Was it set to exclusion? I'm not sure. I would just control Z. Yes, it's set to difference. Of course, we need the union one. This is just what this add-on does, just automates this event for all of those and that's why I choose to click on Union. Here, it says Boolean operation result is non-manifold. This is a little error that this add-on throws automatically if we have non-manifolds. Remember, I have this Shift Control Alt M shortcut for this. If we now go on here, deselect all with Alt A and Shift Control Alt M. We have some non-manifolds, but those are just the tips of these petals. When I was using the mirror modifier, it must have gotten somehow stitched together here. When you're just clipping with mirror, this sometimes happens and this is not really a big problem, but I guess it could get somehow annoying because you never know if your non-manifolds really result from some Boolean error or if it results just from those tips. I will just Control Z a few times. I cannot go as far back, so I will just quickly revert. I will hide this one, hide this one, and maybe even hide this one. I get my array back and then I can just fix this little problem that arises through the mirror modifier. You can see here, there's the problem here. Those two, they are exactly in the mirror plane and this is why if I try to move this one away, it does not work, but this one does also not move away and so this face is squashed against this mirror plane. This is not what we want and therefore, I just briefly turn clipping off, select this one, move it a little bit away. Now you already see it does not look quite as weird anymore. This very sharp tip, this very sharp edge is resolved. Now, I'm going to save again because this is an important thing to do. Now, I can apply all these. I just go to object, convert to, and mesh. Same effect but quicker. I single those out. Oops, like this. Now, I do the same thing again and hope that now it won't throw me a non-manifold error. We want destructive. Non-destructive, by the way, would just mean that all of those would be booled together through Boolean modifiers. If you have followed my second class with the diamond ring, I have used this one briefly to show you. Union. Now it does not throw an error which means, all right. We are good to go. This is how a good booled mesh would look like. Very clean sections, no inside faces, no non-manifolds, no doubles. We could go for mesh, merge by distance, but you see removed zero vertices. This is a perfectly booled mesh. This is what we're going to use. I will not yet bool it to the ring. I like to first combine the object itself until I have a finished object that I then can use to bool it to the ring or do anything else. If I now would bool it to this ring, the ring would become subdivided, the mirror would be gone and so on and so forth. Right now, we have this thing that we can reuse for all kinds of fun stuff. Off we go to the next one. Where was it? The smallest, this one. What I did here? The thing I did here is I want to use merge. Remember here, I singled out the meshes and then put them together, but the array modifier also has this merge functionality. The thing is, you can already see it's not quite as beautiful as our mesh down here. Here, there is a very clean edge, and here it looks somehow...let's hide this reference image. Are we filming? Yes, we are. This doesn't look quite as good, don't you think? You can also switch the distance here so that it comes together depending on the distance between the verts. Can go very high here, but then looks quite weird. I think at this point, it's quite all right because if you now put the third on top, it's not so visible. But I already can see that this one won't work and gives us trouble because it connects the verts, but it does not care like a Boolean modifier if there are some inside verts. This is why it also looks so one-sided. Just looks as if there would have been a magnet and all the verts were attracted to it without caring if there was a skin under there. Because this kind of behavior, it's really not what we need right here. Just does not work that well for us. Because Boolean modifier sometimes really have problems if things are just on the verge of merging, just super near together, but not as if the meshes were on the same plane. It's better to either make this a bit bigger or manually sculpt this together, but I think let's try it this way. Let's apply the array, let's apply the subdivision modifier, and then let's try the union. Of course, separate those, separate those, separate those [...] (select vert, Cmd/Ctrl L and P > Selection) Because I do not want to do this a third time later, I will just do a quick testing now of the destructive modifier. Again, it tells me it's non-manifold, and again it's the tips. I forgot about the tips. But at least it works in this way that I thought it should. So let's revert for the last time, let's turn this off. Of course, I'm going to select this one. Scale this up just a little bit so that it touches and fix the tip. I'll just select those three and say merge them at center. This is such a small detail, nobody is going to notice it later when we print it. Because I do not want to do this a third time, of course. Now showing our sphere again to see where we are with this. I will adjust this a little bit. I'm going to give it some more edges in here. It looks a little weird, like this, and turn this on. With Shift Z, I will only scale it in x and y. Make it a bit bigger to fill out those intersections between the leaves. So we can just scale this out a little bit more already. Let's just save this because now I think we're ready to bool. Because I do not want to do this a third time with those above, apply this, and apply my array, duplicate it with Shift D, scale it up, scale it down. The median point is where? Oh, down there. You can fix this with origins to geometry. Make them nice and small and bring them down like this. Maybe I want those stand up a little bit more. So I select all of those and go to "Individual Origins," turn this off, and rotate them along the x-axis. Now you'll see those rotate all in a weird way. What I want, I want to rotate them along the individual x-axis but not on this way. I think we should have done this before appllying the array. Let's say you already applied the array and you still wanted to move those petals in, let's say this direction so that they go up a little bit. But if you try this with those and you had r and xx to use the local x-axis, it will always use the one that corresponds to the first petal. This was this here. This one has the axis perfectly aligned. What could we do? I think the most logical solution would be to just delete those other leaves and to make an Alt D copy, and this Alt D copy is duplicate linked. We can move it around the origin, which is still in the absolute center point of those petals. I think we just move it like this. You can see the rotation of the petal down here, and you might remember that it was 360 divided by 5 when we rotated the array. This is 72. Let's just type 72 and then do it again. Option D, rotate around Z to 72, and then the last one, Alt D rotate around Z and 72. Now we have those linked references. The interesting thing, if you'd now go into edit mode, you see if you select one, it will just select this everywhere. If you now move this, it will move this everywhere. But it's not an array, those are linked copies. If you do an operation right here, it will not change it. But if you select everything here and rotate it around the local axis, all of those will rotate. Remember, R, X, X, and then you can just make those leaves stand up a little bit more, more like a real flower. Awesome. I think maybe they could even be a little bit bigger, so I just go to Edit mode and scale them up again a little bit more. I think this looks really cool. Now we get the inside and we get the lowest layer which is already brought together. This one is prepared for booling. I think this one still needs separation. It's ready for booling otherwise because we fixed the non-manifolds. Now let's save another time (separate file). Bool those together, of course in object mode. One item needs always to be the main one, the active object, union. No problems here, yay! Again, union, and no problems here as well. You see, this is how it should go about booling. Prepare, try, checkout problems. If there are some problems that might need solving. I will show you one problem that can happen quite often, which is that the Boolean operation itself gives some problems on those intersections. Magic command and there you go. Sometimes this just does not work. You see there are faces inside, they have not been solved like here, they have not been deleted and connected. So what we do, we just go to revert, because Control Z with booling is sometimes really a pain in the butt, and we go to union. Now I single those out, and now I do this manually. I choose a union modifier like this. Then I turn down the overlap threshold. Sometimes this fixes it, sometimes it doesn't. Then we move it just a little bit. to check if a Boolean modifier works, well, we can also turn it to difference. If this all looks good here, then it probably will work with union, and that's exactly what I think it did. You can also turn on Intersect. What I mean by it looks good is there are no holes. Sometimes there are holes as a result of a Boolean operation. I think now this probably is going to work. We can delete this or hide it and then Control Alt M I know this time it worked as you can see. Yeah, beautiful. If everything went well like this, you can now, I would say, save one last time (separate file), use this thing in the middle as well because it should pull all those other petals together and use union one last time. This might take a little while, but it did not throw an error. If I now go inside here, it does not show any manifolds, just nice geometry with alt z. It's not that visible because there's so much going on. But you see, it really looks like one single watertight mesh, and this is exactly what we need. That's how it should look for booling. You can now move it around, you have a one beautiful flower, and of course, you can now combine those two. Could scale it up as well if you want, you can combine those just another Boolean operation, and there you go, you have a finished ring. If you go inside Alt Z, you'll see all growing out of the surface, it looks perfect, and you're good to go. If you still want more and you want to create another beautiful decoration directly on top of your ring the next few lessons will be on about exactly that, that is sculpting on the ring directly. We will also change the shape of the table into an octagon, so stay tuned. 17. E - Change the Table Shape: Hey, you still want more? Cool. Then I have a special treat for you. In the next couple of lessons, we will put all our training that we did so far to the test and sculpt directly on our signet ring. In the next few lessons, I'm going to show you how to prepare your ring for sculpting on it directly, how to find inspiration and a lot more. Here we have our basic ring. This circle shape is not exactly what I want. Let's import the octagon shape from the beginning of the class. Let's join those two. They are one object, not one mesh yet. I hide it for now and I delete all those in the center that are not really needed right now, and those as well. Bring this back with Alt H, and then I just merge those: at last. It does not look quite alright. Now it works. Because of the mirror modifier, it looked weird. There we have our shape. Of course, I subdivide this as well and: Select and Delete. Now our shape lost its definition. It's more like a flat band now. Of course, it's not what I want. We do it differently. We delete those, and we select those, extrude them. Right-click and then we scale them down, like this. I just extrude because we don't need anymore verts on top here. This will come in just a moment. We can just close this up. There we go. For my taste, it's still got a little bit too sharp edge here, but we can just pull this out a little bit more and this one as well. Especially here, it goes like, whoop. Of course, the definition of the ring still isn't really sharp or octagon shaped and the solution here would be to crease those edges, and now so that we have a nice transition into the rest of the signet ring, we can also crease this edge here. The ones that correspond to the edges on the octagon, to the corners, rather. Now, make it go all the way down here, Shift E and 1 or just move your mouse and also there. I think this looks quite alright to me already. Because now we gave this a sharper edge, we can just scale this in a little bit because it's a bit too broad right now for my taste. We can give it a little bit of a slimmer silhouette and we also can rotate it along X, like this. Let's save this one. This is now an octagon. This is really a cool little shape we have here. 18. E - Prepare the Sculpt & Get Inspired!: If you want to follow along with the sculpt, make sure to watch this lesson before you watch the next one. We are going to sculpt directly on the ring, and for this I'm going to use a tablet. But of course you can follow along with a mouse here as well. First, of course, we apply all those modifiers. Just like you saw now, I remodeled this whole shape because I had this backup file. Then we switch to Sculpt mode. Let's use this layout here for a change, choose the mask. We can also turn on mirroring in the y-axis, so we have even less work, which is awesome. Then let's choose the box mask because it makes more sense for our boxy ring. Then we can just go like this. If now look on top, everything besides the top of the ring is black. This of course means that we can only model there where it's white. We can do all kinds of interesting stuff now here. I will turn my mirror off, and for blocking in shapes, I really like the clay strips, and of course we need to turn on dyntopo because right now the subdivision of the ring is quite low. I also will go to brush detail because then, you can zoom in with command and moving your pen. Then the detail will always look exactly like the size of the brush. You see? That's pretty useful. I want to make a playing card. I will quickly search for some inspiration here. I guess we all played Solitaire, when we were younger, or maybe not. But I love to play solitaire on Windows 98. So a king would be nice of course, or queen. I imagine this would be a ring for a man or a woman. Someone who plays poker, Someone who has fun with playing cards. An Ace would be a special thing. I always loved this one. I don't know the name in English, Ace of spades. I think this one looks really cool, and you could make this into an SVG , and put this on top of your ring , and it would look georgeous. Yes. Now we have enough stuff, and I will quickly go to layout again , and get our reference image. I think I really like this one. This looks just pretty amazing. Let's go back to sculpting. Yeah, it's still there. Very good. So of course we can leave it there or if you want to keep it up here, and you still want to be able to see what you're doing. Go to those settings here, to the empty data properties, and you can also turn transparency on, and lower the opacity a little bit. Then you can place it where you want it, if you have a less skewed reference than me. But I will just quickly undo this because I don't need it, and then I tell it to make it unclickable. Before you go, and get sculpting, I will just quickly show you a neat little trick. What I did not do, and I highly recommend you do it. This is you use this pencil here, and if you have a tablet now would be a good time to whip it out. But even without a tablet, you can of course make some basic sketches on here. You go up here while using the annotate tool, you can change all kinds of stuff here, but what I really like is you can change the placement to surface and in this way you won't draw at the 3D cursor like so. But you are going to use the surface, and this of course, makes a lot of sense in our case. So what I would do is I would just draw on here. Of course it's the wrong way around. Got love in my head and I'm drawing a heart. We're just creating this on here. This pencil is not visible in renderings. This is just for you to be able to quickly sketch in some shapes that you want to draw. The reason why I'm doing it here is because when I started sculpting, and I of course will walk you through it in the next lesson. When I started, I did not really pay much attention to the placement of the individual things I would then sculpt on here. I realized that I was off a little bit, the thing was not quite in the center, and in the end, I did not have enough space up here. Therefore, I will just quickly block in some shapes, and even if you are not particularly skilled at drawing, it does not matter because even without skill at drawing, you can create a circle or maybe a basic shape, even just the heart-shape to show you where your details should be. This also shows quite well that I don't really have the space to put an A in here. I could put it down here, but I really think I don't need to include it in this design. I wouldn't include it. If you hold Ctrl/Cmd, and draw, you can erase things. You could in theory also draw if you wanted to change the shape of the ring, and you wanted to sculpt from here, and make it smaller, you could also block him this shape so that it looks exactly like you want from here. Then you could sculpt it here to make it follow this line, and this can often help you in a great deal to visualize your ideas. So just a quick tip, and I recommend you are doing this now. After you've found your inspiration, just block in the basic shapes, and you can also already make sure that your design is not super flimsy, and not super small. Don't go under 0.3 millimeters in width for any engraving and sculpting or it will basically disappear after casting. You should then use the button here to change to sculpt mode because otherwise in this window it won't be visible anymore because it's a different workspace. As you will see in the next lesson, I am not going to use this or I haven't used it when I recorded the lesson. So don't worry about it, but I really recommend you do it because it will just make your design a little bit better, a little bit more precise. Yes, so have fun sculpting the ring. 19. E - Sculpt On Your Ring I: Now let's finally get into sculpting. CTRL+Tab or Command+tab, and then you can choose Sculpt mode, there we go. Then we can turn on the mirror again. Of course we have to turn dyntopo on again. I feel my way through this, I will not try to replicate the perfect shape right away. I will just try to put a little bit of material on top here. This is the thing, if I now, of course, make my brush really small, the detail will get even smaller. I don't want this, so I want constant detail. Now, it's a little bit too big. I think this works the opposite. Don't often play around with those brush settings, but maybe I should. Of course I should. There. You see to get some details in, like the point on the end, I go a little bit smaller. It's just a nice relief from all the stress of my life. I always try to be in orthogonal mode when I do this first. You can see the finer the details, the less you disturb, the rest of the flat shape. This thing is so thick in this area that there wouldn't be any problem with the front faces because the back face are, as far as I know, only affected if they're close enough to modeling your sculpting area. If there's not so much thickness. But of course, always gives me a heartache, this thing. You can see it just goes like this where you block in some stuff, some material. In the end, if you want to shape it, make it round, just go like this. Like this. Then I go for the little tail. For this, I'm going to make my brush really small and I'm going to try to zoom in... I am going to choose this brush, this brush doesn't subdivide. Often I am just trying 'til I find something that looks like the thing I want. Important thing here is, of course, maybe you have thought about this already, I will do this as indentures so that it has this engraved look inside of itself. But I don't do this now, I only try to block in some shapes. The clay stripes are really good for this. I shouldn't have changed it. I really try to block in the basic shapes until I'm satisfied with it. Of course, you shouldn't forget the size you're working in. With alt Z you can see how big your model is, and I see it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Around 5-6 millimeters, four millimeters in width. This is not really big, but this is, of course, not a really big signet ring. But I guess I could have made this thing a little bit bigger. We still can, I haven't mentioned yet, but this is a little bit an advanced technique because for this, you don't get to bool your work in afterwards after you've finished it. But of course, you have to, it's like drawing on a canvas, and you can't really change so much once you have the basic shapes in. Let me just save this very quick, I'll call it dyntosculpt1. If you now try to smooth out something of this, you will never get it as smooth as this surface here again. It's pretty much impossible, you would have to get a big cube and bool it completely up there, so just scrape the whole surface with a Boolean, and then it would be smooth again. But if you try to smooth this out again, you can smooth it, of course, you can get it down. You can try to smooth it with this a little bit more or to smooth it even more with this. I think this is a smooth brush already, or you scrape it or something. But it's possible, I'm not doing a really job right now, but it's possible to smooth this out. You could also take some material away, a little bit too much maybe, and then smooth it, and then you see it would be nearly level again. It's possible, but it does not exactly look like the surface before. If you go to Edit mode, of course you see that it's never going to be like this again, it just won't. You have to make sure if you are doing this technique, it's really fun because you really have to get into it. You really have to feel your way through this. It's not for the faint of heart, not always. If you want to make really sure that you get something and you want to make it your own size and you want to be able to resize this, of course, you can just sculpt another plane or you can just sculpt this on a separate thing and re-topo it and do all the things we did with the owl. But of course, that is not so much fun, like sculpting on this thing directly is pretty cool. It's just a fun exercise, I think. I love to work like this, even though it's like, how do you say it. When you want to get a new job and people will asked you why you do it, you say I want a new adventure. Not adventure, but something else. I don't know. But it's like this. There we go. Looks like a nose and two eyes. Of course. You can do something like this, no problem. Now, of course, we want to engrave this. I think this here is a little bit too small, I should make this bigger because it's just too thin. After all, even if you don't go for it, I always keep in mind that I would like to print my stuff later on. It's also not my best work, but I think it's good enough for the purpose of explaining this, I don't want to bore you to death. I would probably spend a few more minutes and hours to reshape this whole thing. I always feel my way around the brushes. This could work, but I think it does not subdivide. That seems to be the same. This one also doesn't subdivide. I'm going to show you an interesting trick. If you use this one or even the smooth brush and you hit Shift+F, and you put it on very, very low, you can just go on top of it, and then it will subdivide with the subdivision without affecting the shape very much. Now you have a little bit lower subdivision, then you can start sculpting the rest of the details. First, again, don't worry about the details. Because later you will go in and you will refine them. I always end up using this one because it's better for subdividing. You're always going to end up going in later and really refining it. That's our mask, I'm going to make it a bit stronger. Some more punch here like this. That again, is a really small detail. Measure it, it barely has 0.2. 0.2 for such a little engraving would be all right. I would always try to go to 0.3 because that's like a line that, I'm talking about metal, of course, if you print it in metal. I always assume that you want to print some. Even if you want to use bronze or brass, it's useful to think about this. But of course, you don't have to print it. You can just go with the flow and build your dream design. Now you see when I tried to hit shift, I know you can't see my screen cast keys there. I'm sorry, I didn't put them on. Make it a bit stronger again. Go back to this. Yes, I love it. There you go. If you want to make it a bit broader, of course just make the brush thicker. There you go. You can also turn on auto smooth, yeah, it's somewhere here. Then it will smooth itself a little bit, saves a little time. Nice. Then we have this. It's pretty neat. I think what I'm going to do now, I will not right away, sculpt on all those other little details. Can I use another brush here? Won't want to use the same brush all the time. But it turns out that those clay strips are really useful for blocking in shapes. I will turn it to max or maybe this one here could be good. This one I have to turn down a bit. This is really good for very quickly growing the geometry. You see what I'm doing here, I exaggerate the detail on the outside. Dyntopo is off, of course, always is off when we need it the most. Now it looks nearly too big, but you have to remember we're working in millimeters here and tenth of millimeters. So this really is not that gigantic. It also helps when you zoom out. Turn on orthogonal view (numpad 5), and try to make it so small that you have the original centimeter or inch size or whatever measurements you have there. Then you see how big it is in reality. You see it's not that big. It's absolutely not that big. Again, we could have gone a little bit bigger here. Assuming you have all this beautiful work done that you wanted to do and now you want to refine the shape. You don't like that it looks like this hard edge creasy thing. What you can do then is just go in and make it really, really fine like this. Give it a bigger or smaller detail. If you want to have such a nice sharp edge. When I started out, I always struggled with sharp edges. I struggled with them a lot, I didn't like to create them. It helps to have something like this and use it like this. It will help you make a sharper edge. Now, of course you can go in there indefinitely and make it smaller and smaller and smaller. At some point, you will have such a sharp edge that when you zoom out, just go above here and smooth it out afterwards. Otherwise, you zoom out, you won't see that it's sculpted so much anymore. See you can smooth it on then it gets less sharp, but you can always go over it, refine it like this. When I was starting out, I tried to use draw sharp, but this at first goes, of course, in. If I hit "Control/Cmd", it does it like this. You see it's totally jagged and I don't like this brush for this purpose. Just doesn't give me a good edge or a good crease. This one goes inside, that's really good to refine creases. Sometimes it's even good to refine those edges on top because it doesn't give you such a jagged edge. If you want to have a good crease, say you wanted to have this one, the detail really accentuated then you can use Ctrl and the normal variant. Then you can just get this out really nicely here. Then if you want to have some more material and you want to exaggerate this edge a little bit, and you feed it with the clay strip brush and smooth it down. This way you can really build some nice edges. Really useful. I'm just going to work on this a little bit more to get it into a state where it all looks a little bit consistent. Of course, you can also make good edges like this. It's worth to experiment it. There are always more than one way to achieve what you want. It is really rewarding to start with such small little pieces and not with a full-blown human body, for example, especially if you did not start studying anatomy. But it really is rewarding to use the small stuff, because you can get relatively quickly, relatively nice results without having to worry about anatomy or stuff like this. It's hard enough to get the surface right. That's why I said don't worry about the details. Sometimes it can happen that your brush is really, really fine and it takes forever maybe to correct some shape. Then you just go a lot higher. Just go in there, smudge it out. All the details are gone. Then you go back down and you heal it again, and then you have very quickly readjusted the shape without worrying about the details. Because in the beginning it always looks like it was working in this really insane small stuff. Then when you try to adjust it, it just doesn't really work, you can't really smooth it out. It does not really look good if you don't want to work in this insane detail. It's much better to work from the biggest to the smallest and always adjust in between. Also, try to block in the basic shape from the beginning. You see I did not really change anything about my basic groundwork after I started sculpting in the smaller proportions, because it wouldn't make sense. If your basic shape is not satisfying, then you shouldn't go into the details. 20. E - Sculpt On Your Ring II: I'm turning off this mirror here. Let's try another fun brush. Let's see if this has dyntopo. It has. Here, going for the small one, just doing a little blob. It's not the correct placement. I don't have so much space here, I have to go in a little bit like this. Of course, you see that we could sculpt this A just as a letter, and put it on top of our ring. That would work really well I think (I didn't do it later, though.) This blob, blob. See now I'm using the crease brush, just quickly, get the shape out of there. Those are fun too but they don't subdivide. Again, you see I'm just really not doing a very good job here. If I did this for a client, of course, I would go about it differently, but I am here to teach it to you and not bore you to death with all the details. But, of course, if you have any questions just leave me a message I will try to help you out. Now we have this, and, of course, you have to realize that the opposite, if you hit six you can just turn around, the opposite should be drawn as well. Let's assume I just created another pique (spades) here. I just want to give you a little bit more demonstration of my workflow. This is also cool. This is the clay brush. Once you have this basic shape you can refine it with this. It's as if you were taking some clay and just dropping it on top there. This can help you to build a lot of material quickly. Here you see I want to go for this edged look by giving it these sharp edges. I always like it when shapes are accentuated like this when they are coming out, and not just go into an undefined round or three-dimensional state, but if they have this definition, here's an edge, here's a plane, here's this and it all somehow comes together and you really see that their shape is defined. If you look at the things around you, you can see that many things are built like this. Not just come out into an undefined blob, but they have defined planes. If something does not have defined planes it looks weird in our eyes. That's why I really love to give it those. You see, I don't really watch the example pic anymore, I don't need it anymore. Now I am in this free-flowing state where I just look at my stuff and what I have in front of me, and think about what could work here, what couldn't. Like this. Go in a little bit, flatten this, go really small, bring this out. What I would do next is I just, oh, it's already very strong, just go in there and bite a chunk out of it. If you want more this brush usually does a great job of getting in through it a lot quicker. To make holes, the first brush is excellent. Like this and so on and so forth. We could work on this forever. I'm getting ideas here. What you also could do, you just crease the outside where it touches the floor, so to speak. Once you have your shape, crease the outside like this. Then it has this little indent, it's like an engraving and a relief, and this will define it even better. You will have a good definition of the shape if you crease it a little bit. You see it looks like somebody had pressed a little piece of candy inside there. Of course, if you want to go really fancy and you don't want your surface touched at all, you could in theory, use a mask and mask everything around this thing. Then you wouldn't touch the surface no matter what. I really don't care right now because I think as long as the general surface remains undisturbed and looks smooth, this looks cool. The finer you get, the less the rest of the surface gets disturbed. If I'm going to 10 now, it disturbs it a lot. If I go to two. I forgot to turn on my mirror again. But sometimes if your shape is actually quite advanced, if your shape is recognizable and you think you only need to work on some details, it can be fun to turn off the mirror and just give it a little bit of that extra asymmetric style, because I think in nature nothing really is symmetric and therefore, if something is 100 percent symmetric, it can look quite a bit boring. Of course, it can look super cool if you have some machinery style stuff or something, but I think the real wonder of art lies in the art of being artistically imperfect, to know when there is the need of being natural and to know when there is the need of being strict, and to get this balance right. Because there are times when it calls for absolute precision but it also has to do with your intuition, there's no denying that. You can use B and you select this part and it masks, and you can use control B and select this part. I always forget how to get out of this rendering panel. I know there's a way, but I always have to google it because I never use it. Control Alt B. It's so unintuitive because most other things you can go out of with Esc. The one thing I wanted to show you and I messed up before with Ctrl B, is actually Alt B, and what Alt B does, whatever you select with it, it gets singled out and you can then sculpt on it individually without affecting the rest of it. If you now hit Alt B again. You see it just got cut off there, for what it's really good. Just select this and now you, of course, can go crazy in whatever you want to sculpt. Let's say you want to sculpt this really big. I forgot to turn dyntopo on. Say I want to sculpt here like a big nose like this, and you hit Alt B, it absolutely left your surface untouched and then you can smooth it out, and this is really useful, especially in this case. Of course, the Snake Hook is extremely important because it allows you to create like a hand, you can go in and it will get more detailed, you see now it's more detailed. You can just make a hand grow out of the ring. Of course you can do that, a zombie ring. Imagine another hand here and maybe a face here that looks grim and there you go, you have a zombie ring. I mean, there is no end to your imagination, and just because no one did it yet, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. My mutation is gone again. At this point, I decided to continue refining the ring and sculpting on it further. But since the lesson would get incredibly long if I had included every last detail of it, I decided to put it in here just as a time-lapse. All the techniques I used here, I've shown you already, and therefore, you should have no problem following along if you want to create something like this on your own. As you can see, I again start by drawing on the shape directly with the annotation tool before I then use the clay strips to start building up some material and afterwards I smooth it out by holding Shift and drawing over it. Since I wasn't really satisfied with the small ace of spades on the side, I continued to refine the shape as well. I also started masking out a little bit of the surface so that I could move the shape with a grab brush. By doing this, I started to crease the otherwise flat surface of the ring a little bit, and I actually started to regret that I did not build those small shapes before hand and then just bool them into the ring. But hey, it's a learning lesson for all of us. I as well thought that it would have been much easier to just mirror the object onto the other side. But since I had gotten so far, I wanted to now finish it and continue in the path I had chosen. The fact that I did not mirror it, but sculpted it by hand, also gave it that little bit of an individual twist. At first, I wasn't quite sure on how to approach the shape on the other side. I of course, started by sketching it in so that I would get the placement down correctly. Again, the Clay Strip brush helped me build up some material really quickly. I also included the outer line with a blob brush and then creased it with the crease brush a little bit. In this way I was able to not exactly replicate the other shape but I think I've gotten close enough, and also this was just an exercise piece. All the techniques that I've shown you so far are meant to be assets in your toolset. This exercise is a way for you to experience and experiment with all the different kinds of techniques and brushes that are in here and to build some feeling, some momentum with those tools. Therefore, I think this exercise is especially well suited because it shows you different possibilities and also limitations of those techniques. Now, I again tried to include the letter for the ace. I wasn't quite sure where to place it, so I experimented with some configurations and placements until I finally settled for a little bit more conservative approach and just putting it where it normally goes on a card, just below the sign in the corner. I also tried to include some of the gem shapes that are available in the jewel craft add-on but I finally decided that those would be a little bit too small and not really fitting for this design and I deleted them again. This design is what I am now going to use for the final render, but not only this one but also all the other shapes that we so far created. If you want to follow along, get all your different designs ready, and then be sure to have a new Blender file open, and we're going to top it off with a final render, very quickly and beautifully. 21. F - Rendering Rings: You're still with me? Do you have a saved file from all your finished ring designs? Awesome. If you do, then let's tie it now all together by just quickly rendering all of our designs in one final scene. I start with an empty file that I called Render All Rings. I will now open up all the other files, one after the other we created earlier, and copy and paste everything I need over into this new file without copying any hidden files that might annoy us within the render process. The first thing I add is a camera, and my screencast keys. Cmd/Ctrl zero, and under View, Camera to View, zoom out a bit, and there you have all the different rings. This one is already booled, everything is in place that I need. Those two are still separate, and I will also pay attention to the subdivision because in the Viewport it's one and in the Render, it's two, and that's totally fine with me. Let's bool those two together and everything will get applied. I'm not really sure on how much subdivisions I gave this one in the render view. This is something we need to pay attention to, but I think at least the subdivision of two will be there. If it is not, we can give it another one, it will work as well. This has now a lot of subdivision. For this part here, I have not yet applied the sun array. Therefore, if I now do this, I will also pay attention to how much subdivisions there are. I will put it at three in the render. Still enough. Let's take look. This would be three. This would be four. I think I will choose four. That's a good number for the rendering. Then I will also just Convert to Mesh so that all the modifiers get applied. This one I will just delete. We now turn on the Viewport Shading with the material preview. We can already see our materials. Let's give it some background. Very simple. Just make it a plain plane. Five to get into orthogonal view and put it slightly below the rings. I will also give it a material. I will make it black and slightly metallic. Then I will open up another viewport. Go to this button here, go to the Shader Editor and click "World". Then again we go to an Environment Texture and open up an HDRI. I included one in the resources and I will choose this one, Sky_Cloudy_Environment hdr. Just to give it a little bit of that basic lighting. Pull this down here to close it and now to make it look a little bit more dynamic, I'll turn Camera to View on again and zoom out a little bit. I want to make this look as if the rings were just flowing and hovering in this rendering so that they are in a non-defined space, but also visible so that it's just interesting and fun to look at. Put the golden one next to this one so that the gold ones are not so directly next to each other. Make it so that we can see some of the details of the rings by just bringing them into a position that looks interesting where we have a little bit of visual appeal from every one of these rings where we have some different angles and can admire those rings. I will also change my resolution a bit and zoom in a little bit more like this and turn this off to see how it looks. Of course, we can define more. I want the sun array to really shine and stand out. I want to capture this nice curve here of the ring. Just experimenting a little with what is possible here and maybe I will also change the color of this ring a little bit so that they all have a slightly different tone of material. They look quite different, but that's okay. It's just to learn how to approach this. Basically, now we are ready to render and I would just put this one down and render an image to see if I have any baggage left in here that I should delete before continuing, but it doesn't appear to be so. Turn on Ambient Occlusion. So the shadows will get a little bit more defined and maybe I will experiment with this one because it's not quite as defined. It would look better if it was a little bit less rough. This one can be a little bit more shiny as well. All of them can be a bit more shiny. This one's already. Maybe we can also experiment with putting the nearer or closer depending on what we want to see. But I will leave it like that at first. Then I will put this up again and render the image. There you go. That's basically already it. I did it with Eevee and that's why it was so fast. We can, of course, switch to Cycles. Then the shininess of the rings will be a little bit more accentuated, a little bit more defined. Here, I think it would look nice if you just put an area lamp. Make it a little bit bigger. Turn off Camera to View. Turn off the rendering for a moment, so it's a bit quicker. Bring it up here, put it like that, so that we have a little bit of a...you see right now, the lighting comes mostly from this side and I want it to be also lit from this side a bit. Again, it's very, very faint. Five hundred mW is already a nice value here. Maybe even a little bit less. This ring gets the bulk of the lighting. We will move it a bit to make it come more from this angle here. This gets blown out a bit. What we can do here is either we put this farther away. Make it a little bit softer, like this, and then bigger. This already does something for it. But I would not put it that far away and I will just move this ring a little bit more to see if we can bring out the shape of the ring even more. I will also move this one over here and this one over here. Because I think I will make this into my thumbnail. I will again render it. This time with Cycles. I will switch this from CPU to GPU Compute. Because now we use Cycles, I will also put the sampling up to 500 and denoise it a little bit. Save it as "Render All Rings Cycles" and hit Render or F12. This is looking quite good already. I can see that here with the sculpting, I really should have put the subdivision up a little bit more because now we get this subdivision here that is visible. Maybe to remove those we can smooth this in the Viewport. It would render more smoothly. I will try this in a minute. Our results overall really came out quite nicely. There you go. Image, Save As, Render All Cycles. Let's do another one with Eevee just to see the difference also in speed. As you can see, it did it nearly instantly, but it also doesn't have quite as many details. I still prefer for many things Cycles. And now I will try this: Object, Shade Smooth. Let's see if it makes a difference if we now render the image. Yep, absolutely. But it also gets some artifacts around here. Looks a bit weird. Let's try it in Cycles. Let's bring this one down a little bit because it took a few minutes last time. Already you can see it actually works okay. You see no visible faces on this ring anymore. I think that's a good point if you forgot to sub-divide anything to just shade it smoothly. In many cases, it will work quite well as you can see. I'll render this one again with a 100 percent. One more trick, under the render tab, scroll down all the way to the bottom to Color Management, and set the Look to High Contrast. This will bring out some extra punch in your picture. 22. Thank You!: If you've actually made it until the end, wow, that was a lot of ground to cover. Thank you so much for watching and participating in this class. I think it's awesome if you really followed along all the lessons and created all those designs. I think then you have just leveled up your Blender game big-time. If you just skip to take a peek here, well, thanks as well for your interest and maybe try out some of the lessons at a later time. But in any case, if you learned anything useful, please leave me a comment, post your project file, and also rate this class. It would help all so much if you share your project in the project gallery, I will do my best to comment on your work and give you feedback, and marvel at your awesome creations. I so much hope that this class has in any way helped further your abilities and your design thinking overall. If you want to return the favor and give my class some love, I would be absolutely thrilled. Well, thanks again and see you in one of my next classes. Bye.