Live Encore: Create Your First 3D Illustration in Blender

1. Introduction: I actually started using Blender almost 10, 15 years ago because I didn't have the money to afford some of the more expensive creative software, and Blender has always been open-source. It was one of the first 3D applications I opened up, and then I returned to it many years later after it gotten a lot of features and things and I wanted to explore 3D more. Hi, I'm Remington. I run @SouthernShotty on YouTube and Instagram, and then I also work as an animator in Silicon Valley at Facebook, and I have to disclose that they do not endorse my work, but they do allow me to explain that I work there, so I'm an animator there full-time. In today's class, we are going to be going through getting started with Blender. What we're going to be doing is focusing really on the interface and the basics of Blender. My previous courses where I taught animation, how to model your first character, and how to convert your illustrations with 3D, some Some the feedback I got is that it was hard to keep up with the process for people who weren't overly familiar with Blender's interface. So in this course we're going to be making a small little frog character, and through that process, we're going to be going through the interface and all the basics of Blender, trying to make you get a bit more comfortable with the software so that you can go on, move on, and make your own projects. This class was initially recorded live, and I was able to answer the students' questions. If you have any questions yourself, feel free to ask in the comments. I'm always going to watch it on Skillshare, and I'll do my best to answer any reoccurring questions or questions that pop up. With this course just launched, then I'll most likely be there in a couple of weeks answering every single question, and then after that, keeping an eye. If you have any questions while following along with this post, don't worry, I'll most likely get to you. Thank you so much for joining. I'm really excited to have you in this project. My students always upload their projects to Skillshare, and I always love seeing what they create, even if I don't comment on all of them, I do look at all of them because I'm always really excited to see what you're making. With that being said, let's get started and dive into the project. 2. What You’ll Need: Hi everyone. I'm Dylan Morrison. I'll be your host today. I'm a Writer and Editor living in Cleveland, Ohio and my pronouns are he, him. So Remington, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Hi, my name's Remington. I run a YouTube channel on Instagram called SouthernShotty, and I also teach classes here on Skillshare. I've done a few on how to model your character, how to animate your character, and converting your illustrations to 3D. Some of the feedback I got from those classes, where that people felt it was difficult if that was your first time opening the program to follow along so I thought I would do a live session called Getting Started with Blender, so that we could really focus on the basics and I will be going ahead and creating a little frog render, which I will show you a bit later. Then a bit more about me outside Skillshare is that I actually work in the industry out in Silicon Valley, and I have to make it clear that my employer does not endorse my messages, but they are fine with me talking about them. I work at Facebook as an animator and I do use Blender in my workflow there as well. So you don't need to pay to have expensive software always to work in the industry. So that's a nice barrier of entry removed there. So yeah, it's a bit about me. Excellent, and I know you went over it very briefly, but just so students have a real sense, what are we doing today, just in terms of like brief run-through? So I can actually begin sharing my screen now, if that's okay, and I can show the project. Is that cool? Yeah. Just go ahead share the screen here, and is everybody able to see my screen there? I certainly can, and I think folks will let us know in the chat if they are struggling. We should be good. So we'll be using Blender 3D, and we're going to be creating a frog from this scene right here. So we'll be focusing on creating this little frog here. I have a couple of different sketch variance, if you want to make your own version, and then the full scene here, I have a recording of how I put that scene together. That would be intense for some people's computers. I've included a basic scene, which has this lily pad, and this water back here, that we'll be able to import our character in so that you can render out an image or animation at the end of the course. So we'll be walking through making this little frog here and, I love frogs. I grew up with frogs in the Southern catching them all the time. I just think they have adorable eyes as you can see here. I made them extra big. So you mentioned a little bit that part of the reason that you liked talking about Blender is that it is a low barrier to entry access point for people. Why else did you want to dive deep into the Blender interface and basics? So the thing is that some creative software makes it a bit more sense when you open it for the first time. If you have drawing experience, Photoshop might make a bit more sense when you first open it, just to get started. But with 3D, because it's own thing on the computer and very technically oriented, it can be very intimidating to open for the first time, because there's really not much correlation to real life. So I understand that the interface and the navigation and all that can be quite overwhelming for people opening it the first time, so I'd like to help people get comfortable so they can get in there and start creating. Awesome, and what can students expect to come out of this class with? Well, you should come out with one frog Blender in a scene, and hopefully, a better understanding of the Blender interface, feeling a bit more comfortable moving around, being able to add some basic objects. Fantastic, and last but not least, I always ask what materials will the students need to follow along but unless I miss my guess, they just need Blender and a device capable of running Blender. Yeah. Just Blender and a device capable of running Blender. Throughout the course, we'll be doing some things that might be more intense on lower-end computers. So I'll try and caveat those things, and let you know what steps you can skip, if you're running on a lower-end machine, or maybe some settings you can tweak, if your machine is struggling to keep up. So if you're serious about 3D, then you'll want to look into a computer with a decent processor, a good amount of RAM and NVIDIA GPU card. Oh, no, go ahead. I also included a link that includes a material that we'll be using if you'd like to use the material I created, like a wooden material to match the wooden look at the frog, and then I've also included a scene that you can import your frog into if you don't want to just floating in space, and I also have a sketch sheet in there as well. I sketched a couple of different variations of the frog. So if you want to make it a bit more of your own while following along, you could do that as well. 3. Setting Up the Blender Interface: Cool. I'm going to go ahead here and I'm going to share my screen. Here we have Blender and I have my keyboard shortcuts down here on the bottom right. I'm going to try avoiding as many shortcuts as I can so that it's easy for people to follow along, but if I screw up and you are having a hard time following along, they will be displayed down there. Then when you open your scene, you should have this default scene here with this cube and this camera here. I'm going to go ahead and grab that camera and we're just going to delete that camera because we won't be using that in this scene. The way you delete in Blender you can press "Delete," but the common way to do it is actually to press "X" and then click "Delete" there. That's one thing that makes Blender different for a bit of people. One other thing we're going to go ahead and look at it as you're going to come up here to the Preferences, we're going to turn some options on that make it a bit easier if you're a beginner. What we're going to do is come to "Edit Preferences" here and we're going to click the "Add on" tab which we'll click here, and then up here in the search if you type in extra you'll see these add extra objects for curve and mesh and you'll want to click this little check mark on "Add Mesh: Extra Objects." That's going to allow us to add extra objects into the Viewport that we don't have to model and that'll just save us some time which is great if you're a beginner, giving you a few more options. We're going to come down here to the key map here and you can see that I have a couple of different options that I think actually make it a lot easier for beginners to use, so we're just going to go ahead and turn those on for now. You can turn them off later if you want. We're going to set space bar here. By default, it would be at play. We're going to set it to search. We're going to do Select All Toggles and Tab for Pie Menu. Just make sure those are checked on and that'll make it easier to follow along and I generally leave those on because they feel they're a bit easier to use overall. I'm going to click out there and that will automatically save when you X out. Here, we have our viewport right here and we're ready to get started. First what I'm going to do is walk you through a bit of the interface, but we're going to start creating our frog pretty quickly and try and learn most of the interface as we go along with modeling frog because that's a lot more interesting than me just explaining a screen to you but I have to go ahead and show you a bit up front. First up is that you're going to probably want a middle mouse button so that you can move around. There are ways to do it without a three button mouse but if you're serious about 3D, you're going to need a three button mouse. One way to move around the viewport is if you click the middle mouse button, you can see here that you can rotate around your object, and then if you hold Shift middle mouse button. You can pan back-and-forth and then if you scroll in and out on that wheel, you can move there as well. Now that can be hard for some people. If you're a gamer, it's probably going to come to your pretty naturally but if you're having struggle moving around with it, they have this thing up here which is called the viewport gizmo. This thing is pretty nice because you can just click this and drag it to move around, and then you see that there's all these little dots here. If you click that, that'll snap it into view. If I click this little red x right here, you see that it snaps it into a view. If you're curious as to what view you're in, you can always view that up here and it sees here that we're on right. This is what I'm going be calling side view then if I click this green one here, it'll take us to the front. You can see how it just snaps in 90 degree increments and if you ever get lost, lookup here, and it'll tell you where you're at. If you still get moved around, you can come up here to the View and then you can go to Viewpoint there and you can switch around here. When I say I'm in front view or side view, I'm talking about front and right view. If you ever get lost, just come up here and you'll be able to move that around there. Then looking at the rest of the basic interface, what we have here is called our view port, and this is how we move around in 3D. Over here, we have our outliner which serves as like a list of layers. You can see here we have a collection which is like a folder and then here, we have our cube object. You can see I have a couple of different options on right here, you can toggle those under there if you want, and if you hover over them they'll tell you what to do but we won't be using too many of those in this piece. Over here, we have our basic move tools. So we have our grab tool here which allows us to grab things and move it on the different axes. Then over here, we have the rotate tool and you can grab any one of these colors, and it will lock into that or you can grab it and move it around like that. Lastly, we have the scale which again allows you to scale on those axes or scale up and down. That's basic navigation of there. Down here we have our timeline, which we can use to introduce animation and to play our timeline back and we'll see those key frames appear there. Over here, there's a catch-all properties panel where we can grab it and click different things. Here, I'm on this little material button and if you hover over it, it'll tell you what it is so we can control our materials from here. This little wrench will allow us to add modifiers which are like effects and there's just various other options here. Try not to get overwhelmed about those, I'll tell you what they are as we use them and I think we're ready to get started. 4. Setting Up Your Frog: So I'm going to go up here, I'm going to go to View and just depending on where you're at, we're just going to reset to the front view because we're going to use that to begin sketching. Now we have this cube here, but we're going to go ahead and delete the cube. So I'm going to press ''X'' and then hit ''Delete'', that'll get rid of that cube. Now you have this little thing right here, called the 3D cursor, and if you shift, click and right-click, that'll move that around. Wherever you move, that is where your objects going to place. So if that's somehow got moved around, you can reset that by pressing ''Shift C'', and that'll just put that right back in the center. So just press ''Shift C'' to start and make sure you're in the center because some of the things we're doing are dependent on being in the center of the viewport here. So we're going to be using the frog sketch as a reference. So if you look in the folder, you should see this little sketch sheet here. I know this is rough, I could have cleaned it up, but I honestly get a lot of questions when I was doing more clean drawings, people are asking, can I do 3D if I don't know how to draw? The answer is yes, some amazing 3D artists are terrible 2D artists. I intentionally [LAUGHTER] left this sketch pretty rough, because I don't want people to think that you have to have this amazing drawing, to even start that can be intimidating. But I've gone through and created a couple of different frog variance and we're going to go ahead and make this one right here. But feel free if you're comfortable grabbing any different proportion and following along. I tried to make just a wide variety of sketches there. It's actually pretty simple how to get that sketch in there. So if you just take your file here, and you just grab that little PNG file, and then you just drag it into the viewport in front view. This is going to snap that in there and we're going to be able to use that as a reference. So now what I'm going to do is if I click this image, I can move it around using my gizmo here, and if I grab the little white section here, I can just move it wherever I want. I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to shift-click that move down there. I'm just going to try and get this frog just in the center here of that cursor, so that when we create a sphere move around the edge of that frog. Now up here you can see [OVERLAPPING]. What's up? I'm so sorry to interrupt, I just have somebody in DMs who is wondering if we can just go a little bit slower so that folks have a moment to follow along with what you're doing. I think they're just looking for a little pause after the action. Cool. Yeah, I can do that. Excellent. We have our sketch here, caught up here in the middle, and then over here on the outline while you're getting that ready, you can actually rename this if you want. You can see I named it as empty. You can go ahead and double-click that and rename it if you want. But the first thing we're going to do is make this a bit easier to work with. So we're going to come over here, and there's a little object data properties down here. It looks like a little picture, it should be the second from the bottom. If you go ahead and you click that, you can see that we have a bunch of options for image here, and this is going to make it easier to work with on the sketch. So we're going to turn on depth, and what depth does is there's the default depth, where it lives in the viewport, or we're going to turn them front. Basically, what that's going to do is make sure that our image is always in the front of whatever we're working on. We're going to click this Opacity button here, then we're just going to turn that way down. So one is 100 percent, so I'm going to put mine at like 0.1. Then that'll just let us see what we're doing there. Then if you come up here in the Empty, you can grab this little filter button. Make sure this button right here is toggled on, it looks like a little arrow. What we're going to do is once that's toggled on, we're going to click it there, and that'll disable it. So now we can go ahead and work in our viewport without that image getting in our way. So as long as everybody's caught up there, we're ready to begin modeling our frog. So I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to mass wheel zoom in here. I get as close as I can, so it's easy for everybody at home to see. Then what we're going to do is add an object. So we can come up here to Add, and we'll see that we have all these objects that we can add. Because we did more, we have a couple of options by enabling that add-on at the beginning, which will make this a bit easier. So we're going to come over here under Mesh, and we're going to come down here to Roundcube. We're going to click ''Roundcube'', and if I zoom out a bit, you can see that it's giving us a cube with round edges. Now, don't click away yet, but you come down here and this toggle will be down here, and if you click that or open this and we're just going to use a preset here. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to click that Operator preset, and we're going to come down here and add what's called a quad sphere. That's going to give us a sphere that we can then use on our frog. Then we can come up here, and once we have that sphere added, we can grab the scale button here. We'll click in this white circle, and we'll go ahead and we'll just click and move that in. I'm just clicking and dragging it that way to make it a bit smaller. Now we can see that we have a sphere for our little frog body. Now, if you want this, you can see that it looks flat. So what we can do is right-click this and hit ''Shade Smooth'' and you'll see that makes that a bit smoother. Now, this may not be optimal for everybody who has a slower machine, but we can actually add what's called a subdivision. So I'm going to just put this back to shade flat, so I can illustrate what that does. You don't have to do that step. Now, if you come over here to the little wrench icon, you can add a modifier, and these are effects, and there's quite a few here. We're only going to use two in this course, and there are two of the most common ones you're going to use, which are mirror and subdivision. Let's start with subdivision and what that does. So if I click ''Subdivision surface'', you can see that what it's doing is for every face there it is then subdividing it once, so you can see that a bunch of faces gets smaller. Now, if you're on a lower-end machine, this might make your machine lag, so you may want to skip this step. So if you're having trouble moving around the viewport, just get rid of this subdivision, and it might make that a bit easier. But what it does is when I right-click and hit ''Shade Smooth'' again, you can see that it now makes my object look quite a bit smoother, and that's because it's adding geometry and stuff. Some people like the low poly look, so feel free to do that as well. So we're going to add one other modifier that'll make this a bit easier. So if we tab into edit mode, we'll be able to edit our object. Which this is one of the things that is always hard for people learning 3D understand is the difference between object mode and edit mode, so we're going to pause and go over that. So I'm holding down tab to get this menu to pop up, and you can see that it highlights whatever one I'm on and I can select. So right now, we're in what's called object mode. If you're familiar with Adobe, then an object would be a pre-comp in After Effects, a Smart Object in Photoshop, a graphic and Flash, or a group in Illustrator. An object can hold multiple things within it, and you can't edit those objects until you go into edit mode. So you can move it around, you can scale it and you can rotate it, but you can't actually start sculpting or manipulating the geometry until you're in edit mode. So right now, we only have this round cube object, so we're going to tab into edit mode. So with this object selected, we'll hold Tab, and then we'll come over here to edit mode. You'll see that that brings us in here, and now we can suddenly see all the faces and vertices and edges that are used to make up geometry. So if we come up here, we can actually toggle the different selections between those, so I'm going to grab this for illustration purposes. So I'm going to click off here to the side to deselect everything, you know something selected when it's orange. So here, we're up here, you can change the different modes between Face Select, Edge Select, and Vertex. So when you're in face mode, what you can do is you click and grab in order to grab all these different faces. When you're in edge mode, if I click edge mode up there, what it'll do is select the different edges, and there's all different ways to select and make this bit easier here. Then over here we have vertex, which allows us to select different vertices. Since I'm in edit mode, I can grab those things and move the geometry around, which I can't do in object mode. Now, the different types of selection can be toggled up here. You have the select box here and if you hold this down and you can do select with the circle, select with the lasso. We're just going to mostly stick with the box, which allows us to just click and drag, which everybody should be pretty familiar with if you've used creative software before. Now one thing you'll notice is that when I'm grabbing things and moving them around, you can see here that we're getting this weird-looking mushy look, and it's hard to see, that's because of our subdivision modifier. So if I disable that, you can see that we see the original geometry. Now for simplicity sake, since it's hard to work with this on, I'm just going to ask you to click this little button right here, which will turn it off and edit mode, so that you're able to work without seeing that. So again, just make sure the subdivision surface that you toggle off this little button here, edit mode should be gray. 5. Wireframing: Now we're ready to begin modeling our frog. One thing we can do to make this easier is we can use a mirror modifier so that we only have to model half of the frog and then we know that the other half will look correct. Here we are in what's called solid view. You can see here that when I grab and select there and rotate around, it works just like a regular object, you can't sect what's behind it. If I go up here, I have Wireframe Mode. If I click "Wireframe Mode" there, and then I click and drag, I'll select everything from the front to the back, so that just makes that see-through. We're going to be switching between those modes quite a bit. We have Wireframe Mode here and Solid Mode here. I'll make sure to always tell you which mode we're in. But notice that there's these other two options, we had this mode here, which is called Viewport Shading and when we add materials, this is going to give us a view of like what our materials could look like, and then over here we'll have what is called a render preview, which will preview our lighting and everything. Try and stay off of that tab, especially if you're on a slower computer that's going to be harder to work in. We'll mostly be working in the solid and wireframe view. Now, lastly, before we get started, I'm going to run through a couple of these tools over here, which are very common modeling tools that we'll be using for these tools will actually be using the keyboard shortcut because there are actually a little bit easier to use, but I'm still going to show you how to use them over here. But before we start there, do we have a question? I do. Yeah, so I have somebody wondering, it looks like they hit Tab and it didn't pull up Edit Mode. Is that something that would have been a preset on your computer? Is that something that should work generally? Yeah, you might have missed the beginning of the class. If you go up to Edit, Preferences and you bring this down and you click Keymap, you want Tab for Pie Menu toggled on and that's just a lot easier to use. The other way you can do it if you don't want to do that, is you can actually up here with your objects selected, you can click "Object" and go down to Edit Mode, so that's another way you can enter Edit Mode as well. Is there any other questions before I move on? I think otherwise we're good. There are folks who are going to want to look back over this, I do have somebody who wants to know, if you could slow down a bit and just sum up the first step till now. Yeah. Basically the first step until now was to drag the reference image into the viewport, which allows us to use it as a sketch and then we were able to come down here and change this to a front view, and then toggle Opacity down to 0.1. Then I was able to take the filter up here, make sure this little selectable buttons turned on, and I grabbed that empty, which is what contains that image, and I click this arrow here to disable the selection. Then after that, we went up to Add, Mesh, and then we added a Round Cube here, and when we did that, we change the preset to a quad sphere. Then after that we're able to scale it down to match the size of our frog and then we click that and we've moved into Edit mode. Are we good to continue? I believe so, yes, I just have one person who is not seeing the vertices when they pull up Edit Mode but I wonder if that is. Yeah, so you may have missed that step, but there's this toggle up here where you can switch in-between the different modes there, and then depending if you added the subdivision modifier, we disabled that in the Edit Mode or Edit button right here. Toggle that, so it's gray because I can sometimes screw up your viewport as well. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. I'm in Vertex Mode up here, so that's this little button here, and we're going to switch to Wireframe Mode. Then we're going to make sure that we have this clicked up here, which is our box select and then what we're going to do is we're going to drag and select. If you're with me, you should be in the front view. We haven't left the front view, so just View, Viewpoint, Front there. Then now you should have these vertices here selected. Then what we're going to do is press X and then we're going to Delete. You can see here that we have all these different options and this can be a bit overwhelming, I know but just follow along with me. We're going to hit X, Delete, Vertices, and that's the top one there. Going to click that, you'll see that half of our sphere is missing. Now that we have half of our sphere missing, we're going to tab back out into Object Mode. I'm just going to switch over here to Solid view and make that a bit easier. You don't have to do that. We're going to add another modifier. Now this modifier is called the Mirror Modifier and what it will do is mirror this side over here to make it so that everything we do on the right side will happen on the left side. We're going to go ahead Add this Modifier here and you'll see Mirror here under Generate, and you'll see that that automatically mirrors over to the side. You can see that we're getting a weird bump right here. If I turn this to flat, you can see it a bit easier, you can see we're getting a crease here. That's actually because if you use After Effects or Photoshop, you should be pretty familiar with this, the layer stack affects the order effects occur in. Because we're subdividing our cube first and adding the mirror, it's given us this weird artifact. What we can actually do is grab this little thing on the right here, it looks like a little texture and that'll actually let us drag and move it above. You'll see that should disappear. One thing important to note about the Mirror Modifier is that it operates off of the origin of the object. You may have noticed that when you click your object, there's this little orange dot here and that orange dot is like the origin. If you're familiar with like anchor points, so it's like if I move that around, you can see it's going to split because it's mirroring based off of where that origin is. Now if you've been following along with me, that origin should be dead center of your sphere and there shouldn't be any issues. But if it's giving you an issue, what you can do is you're going to click your object and you can search, Set Origin and just do origin to geometry and what that'll do is whenever you have an object selected and you do origin to geometry, it's going to put the origin at the center mass of whatever that object is, so that could help you solve there. Now, we're going to go back into Edit Mode so that we can begin editing our frog body. What we're going to do is click our object here and then we're going to go to Edit Mode here and then I want to make sure that I'm in Wireframe Mode so I can select all the way through. Up here, we will correct Wireframe Mode. I'm going to click off to the side so that we can see through our object. Now, if you've been following along, you should still be here, but we're in Vertex Select Mode and now whatever we do over here will be mirrored on the left and you can see that grayed out there. I'm just going to go ahead and deselect everything. One thing you want to be careful of is that if you alter these vertices here in the center so that they're not on the center, you can see that if I tap back on the Object Mode, we're going to get a split. That's just something to be wary of as you're working. I'm going to go ahead. Now, everybody should be in front view in Wire Mode with Vertex selected. With that, we're ready to begin modeling our frog. 6. Beginning to Model Your Frog: What I'm going to do before we model our frog though, is walk you through a few of the tools over here. Don't follow along with these steps, just watch. But what I'm going to do is go ahead and you can actually add cubes and other objects within an object. These are called meshes. We can move those meshes around in here. That's what I was talking about before, how an object can actually can contain a group of message. Like I said, don't worry about following along, I'm just showing you what some of these tools do so when I reference them later, you know what they are. Here's the cube over here, and it's just a bit easier to illustrate. We have the Extrude Region tool. Now what this does is allows us to extrude a portion of an object. How we can see that is if I click this face here, you can see that it actually just extrudes that up and creates new geometry. I'm going to go ahead and undo that. We have the Inset Faces tool. What that will do is shrink this face in on there. We'll actually be using this one later. Now like I said, these tools are cool, but I think the keyboard shortcuts are actually easier for these, so we'll be using those later, but I'm showing you how to use the tools as well. I'm going to go ahead and do that. The other one is bevel. If you grab bevel, what that will do is actually bevel the edges there. Then if you go up and down on your mouse wheel, it will add more geometry to create a smoother bevel. If you're interested in making robots or things like that, you can see how that would be quite useful. Then lastly, one that's pretty useful is we have the loop cut. What that will do is it will create a loop around the geometry at the center of wherever you click. If I click there and click there and then click over here, you can see how it's adding all these edges. That'll give you more geometry to work with. For example, if you were modeling a box that way, then you could come on here and then you could grab this and extrude this one, and then you could just inset that face a bit and then you could extrude that again and then you could bevel that and scroll up. You can see how you can start cutting up your geometry and making anything from it. Now, the stuff we're doing won't be quite this fast or complicated, don't worry. We're going to go ahead and I'm just going to get rid of this here so that it's not interrupting us. Real quickly. Before you do, I do have somebody wondering what the best practice way is to merge those meshes in an object specifically for rigging and animation? They said for example adding an arm. We are going to be modeling the leg different and then joining it into the mesh. We'll cover that later. Rigging in itself, there are entire people who base their career off of just rigging. It's a bit complicated to cover in a beginner video. That is something that I'm considering for future courses because I get a lot of questions about rigging, but we will be covering how to make a leg later and join it into this mesh, which is what you would do if you were planning to animate and rig the character later. Awesome. Thank you. I'm resetting back to where I left everybody, which is in the front view here with the wireframe mode on the vertex and we're ready to begin editing. What we're going to do here is we're going to box-select these bottom pieces here. What we want to do is scale these up to flatten out the bottom. I'm going to go ahead, grab the scale tool there. Let me see if I can move this. Sorry, the zoom toggle is in my way. What we're going to do is click this "Proportional Editing" up here. What Proportional Editing will do is move all the geometry around it. Right now if I scale, you can see that we get this not natural-looking deformation, but if I come up here and turn off Proportional Editing, what we'll do is when we scale we'll get the circle that will go around and you can adjust the size of that circle with the mouse wheel and you can see how it's affecting different parts of the geometry. I'm just going to reset back to where everybody else is. Make sure this is toggled on. What we're going to do is grab this blue scale right here and we're just going to drag that down a bit. Then what we're going to do is scroll on our mouse wheel until it's about that size there. You can see how that's just flattening out our bottom and we're just going to let go and then what we're going to do is come over here, grab the Move tool. We're going to grab that bottom one again. We're just going to drag that down a bit. I'm actually going to scale my circle to be a little bit larger. With that, you can see that we have the bottom of our frog. I'm just going to click off the side here to de-select everything. I'm going to click this button again to turn off Proportional Editing because that can screw us up. One thing I'm going to point, if you're following along exactly, this shouldn't happen, but this happens all the time, that if you're grabbing things and moving them around, it can split that center there and give you artifacts with the Mirror Modifier. That's just something that happens quite often when I'm working with beginners in a Mirror Modifier is they accidentally break their middle. If that happens to you, what you can do is you can go into wireframe mode with everything de-selected. Just click off to the side. You can box-select all of these vertices in the center here. You can come up here and you can hit 3D cursor and then you press S, X, zero. What is going to do is just snap everything back to this 3D cursor. You shouldn't have to do that step, but I'm just going to put that step in there for anybody who's watching later that if they get lost or if that middle breaks, that's how you fix it. But with what we're doing, it shouldn't happen. 7. Adding Eyes: Now we have the body of our frog, so what we're going to do is go ahead and add the eye. We're actually going to add this object still in edit mode. We're going to go to Add and we're going to go to, sorry, we had to do it through the menu. We're going to hit "Shift A" and click "Round Cube" down here. Shift A will bring up this mesh menu and then we add "Round Cube" here. That's going to add us this cube. Again, make sure your proportional editing is turned off otherwise you're going to start scaling everything all around. Make sure this button up here is gray. Then what we can do is grab the Scale button here and it should still be the same quadrasphere that we had before, but if it's not, you can just make sure to click that quadsphere there. We're going to grab this white circle here and we're just going to scale this in. What we're trying to do is get it to be the size of the pupil. Then what I'm going to do is grab this Move tool and just go ahead and move that over there. If you see this, this is just the mirror modifier working. Then what I'm going to do is just go back and forth between the Scale tool and the Move tool until I get that to match the size of our pupil right there in the center. That's pretty close for me. I'm just going to pause and let people catch up there before we move on to the next step. Excellent. I do have somebody wondering if they should enable clipping in the mirror modifier. In the mirror modifier, there you shouldn't need to enable clipping now. Excellent. It should be off by default. Perfect. Everybody is probably caught up by now, so I'm going to go ahead and move on. What we're going to do is actually use Inset to create the rest of this eye in a very quick way. What we're going to do is we're going to do our first few changes. We're going to snap into the right mode, so we're just going to click this little red X here and your view should say right orthographic. Now, you can see here that it's problematic because if I want to click there and drag, we will select this mesh back here. What we're actually going to do is select this mesh and hide it so that we can select just our eye. By pressing L, you can select an entire object if you hover over that object. Since we're in vertex mode we want to hover over a vertex. If I press L you'll see that the entire object there turns orange. Then we're just going to press H and that's going to disappear. It's still there, it's just hidden. It's like toggling an eye on a Photoshop layer or an Illustrator layer. Up here we have our eye and we're in right view. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to click and drag there and select the back half of that eye. We want to go all the way to select the middle of the eye. I'm just going to wait for people to catch up there. Absolutely. I'm just keeping a little bit of an eye on time. It's a couple of minutes before 10:45 now, we can go up to 15 minutes over if we need to. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click this view here and that will bring us back to the front view. You should be in front view with that back half selected. Now what we're going to do is we're going to use the Inset tool. In this case, it's a lot easier to use the shortcut and it's easy to remember because it's I for Inset. We're going to press "I" and you'll see that you get this line selected. Now, what you're going to do is you're going to hold Control and then you're just going to move your mouse over. You don't need to click or drag anything, just move your mouse over until it matches the side of that eye right there. Then you can just let go of control and click to set that and you should have an eye. Let's make sure that worked. I'm going to switch over to solid view here so you can see. Now we have a little eye here. If I go ahead and rotate around, you can see how we've created an eye there. What we're going to do is I'm going to snap back in the front view with everybody. I believe everybody should be caught up by now. We're actually going to switch modes to Edge Select mode. This will be the first time we switch modes for this. I'm going to switch over here to Edge and then we're going to click this line here. Now, it's going to be hard to select In front view, so I actually recommend grabbing this up here and moving over so you're slightly offset. What you can do is you can hold "Alt" and you can click this edge right here and you'll see that it moves the entire edge there. Then we're going to bevel this, so we're going to hit "Control B". You'll see that it creates that line again. Again, you don't need to click or anything yet, you're just going to drag a bit. You can roll up and down on your mouse wheel to insert as many edge loops there as you want to get a smooth look. Then I'm just going to click to let go. What that does, it gives our eye a round look. Now, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to shift click this edge. I'm just going to give everybody a moment to catch up there on the bevel. While we're doing that, I'm going to explain the next step. If I come out here in the object mode, and just as a note, things that are hidden in the mesh mode will still show up when you switch back out to object mode, but you can also hide objects. You can unhide objects by pressing "Alt H" which we'll do in a minute together. But what we can see here is that the subdivision is smoothing everything, so if I go ahead, anytime you add new mesh, you need to right-click "Shade Smooth" to get that look. We can see here that our eye and they're globbing together and that's because of this subdivision modifier adding geometry and smoothing that out. But we want a sharp edge there. What we're going to do is we're going to tab in the edit mode here. We're going to Alt click this line here and that should select everything there. Everybody should have that edge selected now. Then what you can do is you can actually go up here to edge and click "Mark Sharp". Then when we tap "Backed Out", it should sharpen that a bit. Actually, I'm sorry, that was the wrong one. I'm just going to undo that. If you're unsure of whether you undid it or not, you can either come up here and you can go up to edge and you can do clear sharp and it should just be back to its yellow color. It shouldn't be blue. We actually want to do edge crease and then that's going to make your mouse disappear. But you'll see that if you drag left or right, that that line gets purple. You just want to drag it till it's full purple. Then I'm just going to click up to the side to de-select and that's what it should look like. When we tap back on an object mode, you can see that now we have a much sharper line there, which gives us a much more natural looking eye. I'm just going to chill out for a second so people can catch up on that step because I know that might be confusing to some people. As you're catching up what we're going to be doing, just we're going to return to the front view here. I'm just going to go to the Viewport Front to get back to our frog here. I believe everybody should be caught up by now. If you tab in the Edit mode, what we're going to do is in the object edit mode, we're going to hold "Alt H" and that's all that's going to do is bring our body back just so that we can see that and edit it if we need to. I'm going to come back out to object mode, wait for everybody to catch up. We're in front view with solid view on and we're in our object mode. 8. Adding Legs: I'm going to go ahead and add a round cube here. I'm going to come up here to add mesh and add another round cube. We're going to take the scale tool, grab this little white circle, scale this in, and you can see the outline behind the object. This is an object mode by the way. You don't want to be in edit mode here. Then I'm going to grab the move tool here. I'm going to move this over here to the leg right there. What this is going to do is to sculpt our leg in a really simple way. There's a full sculpting suite in Blender, and we're just going to look at how to use one tool. But with this leg selected, we're going to tab and go into sculpt mode. You see that you have all these tools over here, which can be quite overwhelming. But we're only going to look at one and it's a really easy one. Over here, there's a little arrow you can click, but it's easier to press N. That'll toggle up this view over here if you click tool that will allow you to see your settings here. Again, this may look overwhelming, but all you need to look at is the radius here, the strength. What we're going to do is come over here and you see see little tool right here that looks like a little pin head. We're just going to click that, and it's called the grab tool. When you hovered over, it should say grab. Let's say grab up here, and then we're just going to make sure that our radius is big. I'm going to set my radius to about 100 pixels, give me a bigger thing there. I'm going to set my strength to about 0.5. Radius is 100 pixels and strength is 0.5. Then what we can do is we can just grab our object here and we can just start moving our object around. What I'm going to do is actually zoom in here and grab this object and drag it down. Now as you see, as you zoom in, the cursor gets smaller, so you can only do small increments. You can go ahead and increase your radius way up if you want or you can just zoom out to follow along. That's up to you how you want to do things, but I'm just going to go ahead and zoom out, so my legs small here. You see that the cursor rotates to tell you where you're selected. I'm just going to get here at the bottom where it starts to flatten out. Just going to go ahead and grab these and then just going to drag that down. I'm just going to click over here. I'm just move that there. There's no exact process to here. Just grab something and make it so that it looks like the leg. And you could really spend a lot of time here. There's really no exact way to follow along here. It's just moving things around until you're happy with how it looks on the leg. Don't worry about the foot yet. We're going to add that again in a second, but I'm just going to go ahead and keep clicking around. You don't need to follow me step by step here. Just move your leg until you get something that you like. I'm going to go ahead and make the top of my leg a little bit just chunkier there, give him a little bit of thunder to his thighs there. Absolutely. He's got a half on those sides. I know. Who doesn't love a good thick frog leg? I'm just going to move that around there. Just feel free to move around in your viewport. Keep moving it and adjusting it. I'm just going to pause, I'm going to return to the front viewpoint and just give everybody a moment to get their leg somewhere they're happy before we move on. I know we are running short on time, so we won't spend a ton of time waiting. 9. Bringing It All Together: I'm going to assume most people have caught up with their legs. Where I want everybody right now is to cleave view, viewpoint front and make sure you're in solid view up here. Now we have our frog body and our frog leg here. We're going to go ahead and we're going to add a foot. Again, we're going to add another mesh sphere. We'll come up here to add and we'll go to mesh, and then we'll go to round cube. I'm just going to zoom out there and we're just going to go ahead and scale this down. Again, this should be its own object and I'm just going to scale down quite small. You can see that outline right there. We're going to grab that. We're just going to move this over here. Then we're just going to zoom in on it. I'm going to slow down for a minute so everybody can catch up. Then what we're going to do is, we're just going to tab back in the sculpt mode, and we're just going to grab that foot and move it out. Again, press N to get this up and you can adjust the radius if you want here. I'm just going to grab that foot. Just move it out there. I'm going to flatten the bottom. Now, the foot, you could spend a lot of time finessing to get to fit exactly how you want. I'm not going to spend a ton of time since we are running short on time here, but I encourage you to spend quite a bit of time massaging your frog's foot to be whatever you want it to be. I'm going to go ahead and move this around because, as we know, frogs feet are pretty wide at the end there. If you missed in the beginning, I'm just moving around my viewport with the middle mouse button. Because I have this object selected, you can see how I'm rotating around that foot. You must just be spending hours just massaging the foot. Yes. The frog foot should be cool. Just write it out. Again, like I said, we could spend a lot of time here for the sake of time. You can return to this foot later. Nothing we're doing on this foot will be permanent that you can adjust later. We're going to go back into object mode. You can use the Tab key if you've been following along there, or you can come up here and click and go back to object mode. Now what we're going to do is go to View, Viewport Front. I'm going to wait for people to catch up. While you're getting back to this mode, make sure you're still on solid mode. You'll see that now we have three objects and these aren't mirroring. That's because these objects aren't part of this object which has the mirror effect on it. What we're going to do is we're actually going to put these into this object, which will allow us to join it. For the person who asked about animation and rigging, you can actually model your character out in pieces like this and combine them into one. Or you can model the character all out as one piece. I model the character all at as one piece and the modeling your first character class. Maybe you'd be interested in learning that one. I also include the project files to the owl, which I have. I believe I have the owl rigged as well. You can see how I rigged that for the person that was asking about that earlier. What we're going to do, is assuming everybody's caught up here and in the front view, is we're going to select these objects with this being the last one we select. We'll click this one. Then we're going to shift click the leg and you'll see that it goes from dark orange to light orange. Whatever is light orange is considered your act of selected object or your last selected object. That's important to know. Those select, we're then going to shift click and grab the body. You should have these two dark orange and this body should be a light orange. Then we're going to hit Control J and Control J will join. You can also search for join, if you want by pressing "Search" and doing object join there as well. Then you'll see that it immediately mirrors that over because now everything is selected in here. You'll also see that the subdivision was applied as well. If we right-click Shade Smooth because we've added new objects, that we'll go ahead and make everything there into one object. 10. Adding Textures: The last thing we're going to do is I was going to add a tongue, but we could technically paint that into save on time so we'll go ahead and paint that tongue in. What we're going to do next is we're going extra paint our character. What we're going to do is we can come up here and there's all these different layouts that you can use and when you click in these layouts, you'll see that it gives you different views. But I'm going to show you how to make your own views. You can see here all the different ones that you can click through. We're going to go ahead stay in layout though. What we're going to do is click down here. You'll see it turns into a crosser, going to click and drag. That's going to give us a new window there. Now what we can do is turn this one into a texture paint mode and then over here we'll be able to see your object. Now your controls are only going to work and whatever window you're hovered over. If I want to rotate over here, I can do this so you can have a front and side view, for example. You can see how that's helpful. But you can also change all these windows here. If you come up here, we have this little editor type window. If we click that, you'll see that we get all the different types of windows that we can put over here. We're going to put the UV editor, so that's the third from the top there. If we click "UV Editor" you're going to see that we get this, and what this does is allows us to see the texture that we're about to paint. What we're going to do is we're going to grab our little frog here. We're going to tab into edit mode and we're going to select everything, and then we're going to smart, unwrap that. But first what I want to do is you see here that we only have half of our frog. We're actually going to go ahead and apply our mirror modifier to make that permanent. If you're following along, you may want to save a different version if you plan to go back to your frog layer and modify it, because it's going to get more difficult after this step. What we're going to do, it's come back out to object mode, make sure you are in object mode up here and you have your frog selected. Give everybody a moment to save if they need a new version. [inaudible]. Any questions? No. I think we're good for now. Cool. Then we have our mirror modifier up here, which should show up if you have your frog selected and you're on the little wrench icon. We're going to grab this arrow here and then you'll see that we have the option to apply it. We're going to hit "Apply" and then when we tab into edit mode, we will see that now it is all one single mesh. You can see how it'd be a bit more difficult to change some things later. Make sure that you have your frog in edit mode and what we're going to do is select everything. You select everything. You can press A on the keyboard, which is different than other programs. Normally press Control A to select everything. But in this program you just press A. Just press A. Then what you can do is you can come up here to the UV menu and we're going to do smart UV project. Then it'll give you this little menu here and we'll just click an arrow up here on the island margin like once or twice. As long as it's like 0.0, 2, 3,1 or something like that, it should be okay. Then we're going to hit "Okay" What you can see is that it's unwrapped our object over here so that it creates almost like a 2D object. The way I like to explain texture painting to people is that it's almost like you're breaking your geometry apart into a bunch of stickers. If you're trying to paint a real object, you would break it apart into stickers and you can place it all over the object. That's how I'd explain it. With that, we're ready to begin texture painting. What we're going to do is we're going to create a new image up here. Now, by default, mine is set to 1,024 by 1,024 pixels. I'm going to leave mine at the default. That should be good for most computers, low-end or high-end, and then we're going to name this frog and we're going to hit "Okay". You can see that we have the texture or the image appear here. Now what we're going to do is come back up here and you can see that we have the different modes up here. Right now we're in edit mode. If we go to texture paint mode, you can see that we get our frog here and they turn purple and that's because right now they don't have a material. What we're going to do is add that material. First let's take this image up here and we're going to save as and I'm just going to save this in a texture folder and just call this frog PNG. I'm just going to save that in there and that's what we're going to do there for now. Now what we're going to do is actually import the texture which I have provided for free with the class. If you have everything downloaded, you should have one that's called painted wood. What we're going to do is we're going to go to file, append and append will allow us to import things from other projects. We're going to go ahead and do append. Then you're going to select that painted wood project or puppet wood is what I called it. You have puppet wood here and if you double-click that, you'll see that you open up a folder with everything in there. We're going to the material and painted wood. When you double-click that, it should import it into your scene. There's nothing to really tell you it's there. What we need to do is we're going to click over here to material properties and we're going to add a material to our frog. Adding a material to our frog allows us to apply materials to different parts of the frog. What we're going to do is go ahead and we're going to click this to add a new material and it gives us a slot so that we can put a material in there. Now we can click New and create our own, or we can go ahead and add the puppet one that I just made. We're going to go ahead, click this little toggle button here and add this painted wood texture and that should give us this kind of painted wood surface. Now if we come over here, we're going to go to the shader editor. Again, that's clicking up here where the UV editor was. I'm just going down a little bit further until you see this little sphere. It gives us the shader editor. I've tried to make this as simple as possible. Notice here that mine has a red tab over there and that's a add on I'm using that gives us a preview. Just, just ignore that for now. I'm going to switch the material preview here so that you can see we have this painted wood texture. What we're going to do is add that image that we just did. If we come up here to add, go to texture. Add texture, and we're going to add image texture. We'll get this little menu right here. We're going to take this color socket and we're going to move this color in here. Now again, you're kind of seeing some text up here and this is a preview tool that I use that makes it easier. It may be a bit confusing right now, so just ignore those. You shouldn't see those. Now you'll see that everything went black on my frog. Now your frog may not look like this because you may not be in material mode and that's fine. We're going to do is we're going to click this button here and this allows us to choose an image, and we're going to choose the frog image. We'll see here that that makes our frog black. I'm going to switch back over to the solid view-port here. This is where you should be left off. Now we're ready to begin painting on our frog and we'll be painting onto this image texture directly. I'm going to press N to get rid of this tool there and give us a bit more room to see. I'm going to go back to the UV editor. Click on that top left. Click the "UV Editor" and you should see your frog texture there. Now you can drag this to give you more room and you can zoom in and out. I'm going to drag this over so that people following along can see a bit easier because it's less important what we see over here. If you've been following along step-by-step at this point, you should still be in texture paint mode. If you're not, you can click the object and click texture paint up here. Now we're ready to begin painting on our frog. We had the brush tool and then we also have the fill tool. Those are the two tools that we're going to be using. You may notice that there's no tool options and just like sculpt, if we press N, they will pop up over here. You can see that we have several different places that we can paint on. I'm going to go ahead grab this here. It should give me the single image. Yeah, sorry. What we're going to do over here is where it says texture slots and if that's not down, you can twirl that down. For mode, by default mine says material. If you grabbed single image, it'll go purple again and that's because you can't see an image. What we're going to do is we're going to grab this little button here and choose that frog and that'll allow us to paint on that layer there that we just created, and you can see how it's showing up there. Now, I know we're pressed for time. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and just use a fill button here and if we click "Fill up" there, you can see over here that we have different brush settings. Make sure that your strength is set to one. What we're going to do is drag on this little color wheel and pick a nice green color. I'm just going to grab a color there and then over here I can drag up and down to darken that color. Then if I click with the fill button, you'll see that it turns our whole frog green and we see everything light up here. Of course you're going to want to paint some character and stuff into your frog. Let's go about how to do that. I'm going to show you how to paint with the brush, and I'm just going to do the tummy for now and then you can go ahead and paint in your details later. With the brush tool selected, we have the radius option here, which allows us to adjust the radius of our brush and we have the strength here. We want our strength at one because we want it fully opaque. I'm just going to go ahead and paint a little bit of yellow right here. I'm just going to go ahead, grab a yellow that looks like a frog belly yellow. Then I can go ahead and move that around. Now you see that that's a soft edge. If you want, just like in Photoshop, you can adjust everything. Down here you have the fall off. If you twirl it, fall off down and you click this little brush tip here at the end, you can see that gives you a harsh edge. If that's what you prefer. But you can play with that and get what you want there. I'm just going to go ahead and make mine semi harsh. Just give it a little bit of yellow there. Again, I encourage you to return to this after the course and spend quite a bit of time finessing it. With that, we have our frog yellow belly, and I'd encourage you to paint in the tongue as well. I'm going to skip that step for now for time. Now one thing that's very important is Blender does auto save your image, but it's pretty infrequent. So you're going to want to make sure you always save your image, otherwise you're going to lose your work. Come up to image, save, and we have that texture there. Let's go ahead and Tab back out into object mode and you'll notice that the colors disappear and that's because they don't display in solid view. If we come up here to the painted mode or the material mode, you can see that now we're seeing that appear in our viewport there. Now you could spend a lot of time painting our character. Of course, you're going to want to paint the eyes, and the tongue, and the mouth, and the rosy cheeks. I'm going to go ahead and show you how to render it, because you could spend quite a bit of time painting it. Now, if you want to watch me paint it, I will be including a link to the full-time lapse recording of this process. It's like a three-hour recording so you can watch me build this entire scene if that interests you. It's a bit much for a course. A course like that would take eight to 10 hours to go through and we're trying to walk through the basics here. But if you'd like to see how I created everything, I have a video recording of that that you can follow along with. But you can go ahead and you can keep painting your object and then once you have it where you're happy, we're going to move on to the next step. I'm going to show you that next step now. But if you're watching this retroactively, I encourage you to pause the video. If you're watching it with me live, I encourage you to follow along for the next step and return here later. 11. Rendering: What I'm going to do is go ahead, hit "Save" and make sure that our frog is saved. I'm going to make sure that our image is saved and everything should be saved there. Now what we're going to do is we're going to grab a round cube up here and we're finally going to name it. We're going to name this frog. If you double-click that up here, you can just double-tap, and then you can tap "Off" and it'll select and have your name finished there as well. I'm just going ahead and save. With where we're at now, you should have your image saved, your project saved, and your object named Frog. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to open one of the other files I included. If we come over here to File, Open, we're going to open the Frog E-Pond Environment. I've also included a finished file, so you can see how I finished mine as well if you'd like to match mine. I'm just going to go ahead, open that. Going to give everybody a minute to catch up there. When you open the scene, you should have this open. You should see this frog scene here. We're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you how to close a window. This was if we were going to teach animation, but since we're skipping that for now, and don't worry, if you're here for animation I promise we have an animation course on Skillshare, so you can go ahead and watch that after this, if you like. That's also geared towards beginner. If you hover over here, you remember that I told you if you clicked and dragged, you could split windows. I added a new window. You can click and drag over and it'll show an arrow there and combine the two. We're just going to go ahead and do that. You should have a full scene here. What we're going to do is now append our frog into the scene. Wherever you saved that frog file, you can go ahead and do File Append, and I saved mine out of it further. Live session here. Now when you double-click that Project file, again, you'll get the objects here. Now what I'm going to do is double-click "Object" there, and then I'm going to double-click the frog. You'll see that our frog came in way down here, and that's okay. Let's show you how to use that split viewport to make that a bit easier. We're going to drag that split viewport, and we're going to go to View, Viewport, Front. You'll see that a frog just got dropped under down here. What we're going to do is click and drag that up there and place them on the Lilypad. We're going to want them to be a bit bigger, so I'm going to go ahead grab scale, scale them up so that it fills that Lilypad. Now you notice that he's way off, and that's one thing that's always hard for beginners to learn as that 3D. It's not a drawing. You can't just work on one perspective the whole time. You're going to have to move around the fix things. Right now I'm in front view. Let's go ahead and get him timed up on that. But you'll notice he's still not on the Lilypad, so what we need to do is go to View, Viewport, Top, and then scroll back out and move over. It's easy to get lost in the Viewport. If you have an object selected and you press "Period" on your number pad, it will take you to that object if you ever just get completely lost. [LAUGHTER] I think you can also View, Frame Selected. If you don't have a numpad, you could do View, Frame Selected, and it'll take you to your frog. I'm going to zoom out here. This is the Lilypad, the big one right here. We're just going to go ahead, drag him back there. We now see that there on our Lilypad. I had this scene set up already. Let me switch to Render View. You can see here it's dark because there's no lights. What we're going to do is add a light. We'll go in here to View, Viewport, Front, and we'll go to Add, Light, Area Light. This is going to give us this square light. We can just move this around just like we would anything else. I'm just going to go ahead and move this over here. First time, we're going to use the rotate tool. We're going to rotate that light so it falls in. We're going to scale that light up. Grab that. Scale that light up. You'll see that it's still too dark. By default, it usually goes to the lighting tab. But over here, you'll see a little light bulb. If you click that, you'll see power, and you can just crank that number up until it's as bright as you want. I'm just going to put mine all the way up to like 250. You can see that we're getting a bright scene here. Now what we can do is add a bit of a mission color into the world. If we come up here to the World Properties tab, grab this color here. We can see it's black now. If we just drag this slider up, we can see that we're brightening our scene there. I'm going to go ahead and move my light over a bit. That gives us a basic setup so that we can go ahead and render our scene there. Now, I'm working in Render View. If you find that your computer is slugging too much, you can click up here, the Render Properties. There's a render engine here called Cycles. You can switch this over to EV, and it'll take a second to compile all of your shaders. This Render won't look as good. You can toggle a lot of settings and make it look pretty, but that's pretty advanced. This is a game engine. If you're on a lower-end computer, you may want to render in this mode. One quick thing you can toggle on to make that a bit easier is ambient inclusion, and you can see that adds some shadows. But I'm going to move back to Cycles. That's just the name of the render engine. Now we have our scene lit and ready to render. Then now all we have to do is render. There's two settings you need to look at when you're rendering. One of those is your sample count. That doesn't really apply if you're using EV. But if you're using Cycles, the more sample you have, the less noisy your image will be. For a lot of technical reasons that are too advanced [LAUGHTER] to explain right now. But if we toggle this denoising down here on Render, it'll give you options to denoise. You should see all three options. If you don't, you should see at least either Optics or Open Image Denoise. I'm going to select that one. What that'll do is use denoising so that we can render much quicker. Right now the Render is set to 5,000, so we're going to lower that sample to something really low, like five, and that will allow us to render our image quickly. Lastly, you want to come over here to Output Properties and check your resolution. Now, if you're on a lower-end machine, you can lower this resolution to whatever you need. But after that, we're ready to render our image. I'm in a Render View, which might be hard for some computers so you can always operate out here in solid view if you need. You can actually go ahead and render your image now. The easiest and quickest way to do that is just to press "F12" on your computer. Now if we press "F12", we will see this Render View pop up, and you can see how it's noisy at first, and then it's going through doing that denoising path to clean it up. Now, of course, our frog isn't fully textured here, so it'll looks a lot more interesting with eyes. [LAUGHTER] We're going to go up here and we're going to go to Image, Save As, and then you can save your frog wherever you want. I have an exports folder here and I'm just going to save as there. Then when I open that Export folder, you'll see that it'll save out your image there. Then you can use that to upload it to Skillshare and share your project with everybody. Again, I know we had to start cramming there a bit at the end, but feel free to review the video. I would love for you to return back and finish texturing your frog, maybe adjust the look and size of your frog. Maybe make it your own, give it some unique proportions. Maybe add a couple more lights. One thing you can do with the lights as well is you can add colors to the light. If you grab the light, you can change the color of the light. Maybe play with the lighting of your scene and your frog. We've went through some of the basics modeling. If you go through some of my other courses as well, you could go ahead and create other objects in the scene or you can go ahead and just create your own creature from your own scratch. I'd love to see whatever you create and make sure to upload it on Skillshare. I do actually look at all those projects. I try and comment on most of them. I would love to see whatever you create from this course. 12. Final Thoughts: Thank you for joining in and watching. I hope that you learned quite a bit about Blender. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask in the comments below. As again, as usual please share all your projects to Skillshare. Thanks.