Nomad Sculpt to Blender Beginner Crash Course: Learn a 3D Workflow and Create & Light a Cute Robot

1. Introduction: If I could tell my younger self one thing, it'd be not to follow all the rules when it comes to art and creativity. It's so easy to get caught up in how things should be. That thinking, obsolete. My name is Dave Reed. I'm a 3D artist and content creator living in Brooklyn, New York, and I've been a 2D traditional artist all of my life, and recently discovered a love for 3D sculpting and 3D animation. You might have come across some of my pretty incredible children's books, including the Dream Machine or my social media collabs with the American Museum of Natural History. You might recognize my creative visual time lapses on both YouTube and Instagram. Three D sculpting inspires me because it allows me to bring my art to life in a whole new way. Today, we're learning a complete workflow from Nomad Sculpt to Blender. We're going to bridge this gap from the ground up. Today's project is going to be a robot. Who doesn't love robots, especially key ones? Just saying, we'll make a quick model in Nomad, which we will then export over into Blender. It'll be a complete pipeline to Blender, which will give you greater control over your Sculpt and your Render. You can easily follow along at home with your iPad or Android tablet for Nomad Sculpt. You'll need Blender with a Mac or PC computer. We're on the front here of using Nomad Sculpt as a starting point for Blender. Being fairly new to the scene, Nomad Sculpt does an incredible job of using the latest touchscreen technology for 3D. The 3D landscape has changed so dramatically, and I love being on the forefront of artistic technology. By the end of this class, I hope you walk away with some new tools, new inspiration, and new ideas. Let's get started. 2. NoMad Sculpt: Head, Body & Legs : [MUSIC] Let's start by making this simple robot in Nomad Sculpt. Make sure you have the grid on and make sure that you're in Orthographic. Let's go ahead and import our reference image. We'll go here. Reference image. Can tap the image. Import Photos. We're going to use the robot and just hit "Add". Hit "Transform" and then you can move your robot, and once you're done, tap the screen with one finger and it goes back to sculpting mode. If you go to our scene, we only have the default sphere. Let's delete it and we're going to add a box. This is going to be our head. Let's just tap these three dots and rename this head. Also, I like to use a MatCap; is just easier to see rather than white. We will just tap this little sun here and switch from Lit PBR to MatCap. On the snap cube, I'm going to scroll out a little bit, it front again. Let's just move this up a little bit. We'll use our Gizmo. Let's just move this cube up. Let's add a floor. We're going to add it right where this red line is right here. That way, we can get rid of the grid. We go to our scene. Let's just add another box. Let's rename this floor. I usually use FLR. We'll just use our Gizmo and move that down. I'll put this back up there for now. You just want to squash it and line the bottom up with that red line. We can actually turn smooth shading off. Let's go to this little sphere and just turn smooth shading off. We can get rid of the grid. Now we can get started on the sculpting or building, I should say. Let's just move the cube up a little bit, and we're going to make it this general shape. We'll squeeze it down with the sphere, and then we'll open it up a little bit. I think that seems about right. Of course, you can make it whatever depth you want. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe I'll make it a little bit shorter. To get it round on the edges, we can do some things before we validate. We'll tap here. The Post subdivision, let's just put that to two. I'll move this over a little bit so you can see. Then the division X, we're going to bring this down. I'm going to put the wireframe on just so you can see what's happening. We're going to bring this down and you see it's getting more round. We can get to a spot where we like it. I think that probably looks about even, but it's getting a little pixelated, so I'm going to turn this up. Hit that once, and I think that's probably pretty good. I think that's all we need. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Validate". I'm going to set a camera angle just so I have something to go back to if I need it. I'm going to set it right equal with this. I'll tap here, "Add camera", and then I'm going to rename this one. Of course, this is just so if I move it around and I want to go back to that same spot, I can just press here and hit "1" and we go right back to the front. I'm going to turn the wireframe off. The body looks like a similar shape, but smaller. Let's go ahead and clone the head. We'll just clone that. Let's just name this body. We'll use our Gizmo. We'll move it down. I'm going to move this down at the bottom. I think it's easier. We'll move that down. We'll shrink it and maybe we'll stretch it up this way a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. I think that works. It also looks like we need a neck and we can just use a cylinder for this. We'll go back here. We'll add a cylinder and we can go ahead and make this a bit round too. I'm going to do the same thing. I'll tap the three dots, put the subdivision to two, and bring the division X down. I'll bring it down to 12. I think that's fine. I'm just going to go to the Gizmo and just shrink it because we know the general size here, so we don't have to spend too much time doctoring that. I think that's pretty good right about there. You can use X-Ray if you want to see through these shapes and if you want to make it a little smaller if that's easier. I'm going to go back from X-Ray. Perfect. He has little round parts on the left and right, like his shoulders. We can use spheres for that. This cylinder is the neck. Let's go ahead and name that. We can validate it, and then we can add a sphere. We'll go ahead and use our Gizmo. We'll shrink it, and then we'll move it over to this left side. We'll make it pretty small. We'll enter it in right about there. I think that is pretty good, maybe a little bit smaller. But I think that's good, and we will, of course, mirror that a little bit later. This is a small detail, but if you notice, this seems to round out a little more than here. Let's just do that really quick. Let's tap on the body. Hit "Solo". I'm going to tilt it a little bit so you can see it better. We'll go to Symmetry and turn on Show line. That's just so we can see the symmetry line. Let's hit "Local". X is already selected, so we just need to hit "Z". You should see a red line and a blue line. That's where you know where your symmetry will work. Let's just use Move. I want around 150 or so, and I'm just going to move in these edges a little bit. Maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger, maybe like 225 or so. I'm just going to move these edges in the slightest bit because I feel like that's what's happening in the reference. I am pretty crazy when it comes to details as you might already know. I think that's fine. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Solo". The only other thing I'm going to do is move this in a little bit more right about there. We do have a line across here. Let's just take this body. We'll use Split, rectangle, and we'll just cut this. We'll just go here and just make a white line and we'll cut this into two pieces. Hopefully, they should clean up nicely. I'm going to vox, so remesh these probably like 175 each. Let's do this one 175 or so. I think that looks pretty good. We can smooth these now. We'll just smooth these out really quickly. Looks like we still have the symmetry going, which is fine, that works for us. We'll hit "Solo" if that's easier to see, and we can just smooth this out until it looks nice. Hopefully, it looks nice, eventually. I'm going to hit "Solo" again and see what we have. The only difference is now I'll bring the body up a little bit. Maybe I'll make this smidge bigger, just so it matches up a little bit better. We still have that break that line in between. I think that works. We have a round little bit at the bottom, like a little pelvis area, and that should be pretty easy. We're just going to use a sphere. We'll add a sphere. Let's go ahead and name that now. We'll just call it pelvis. We can go ahead and validate it. Let's just shrink it. Let's move it down. Let's hide the floor for now. Just tap on the floor and we'll just hide that, and we'll go back to the pelvis. We just want to shrink it so that it's not hitting any of the edges. Let's make it a bit smaller. Maybe we'll just smush it a little bit like this. I think that works. Now we can add these two spheres that are going to be for the legs. We have the pelvis. Let's add another sphere, and we'll use our Gizmo. We'll shrink. Of course, we're going to do the left side of everything first and then we'll just mirror it. Let's put this here. We can add it maybe up to the pelvis a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. Now we need to shape like this. To me, this looks like a cylinder with the top tapered. We'll add a cylinder. Let's use our Gizmo and we'll shrink it with this orange ring that you can't see that well. We'll shrink it and bring it down and we want to make it just about the size of the sphere, maybe a little bit bigger than the sphere. It seems like. We'll go back to the cylinder settings and I'll make the bottom a little bit bigger like this. Let's make it round. Post subdivision 2 and then we'll bring this down until it's nice and round. I think that looks pretty good. Then we have another piece down here. I think what we should do is take this cylinder, so this will be a leg mid. The sphere would be leg ball. Let's name pelvis ball. That's like this pelvis ball and they're all connected. I think that works. We have leg mid and I think we can just clone it probably. Let's clone leg mid and make that foot. We'll just tap these three dots and we'll just call that foot. Let's do leg foot just so everything is together. We'll use Gizmo and we'll move that down a bit and maybe we can do something like that. Hopefully, we can make this into a better foot. Maybe we just stretch it. Let's go ahead and validate the foot. We'll turn it sideways, and I think that we can just make something a little better than this. I think we can probably use Move. We can tap on that foot. Let's tap on "Symmetry" and go local. Now let's just bring this back. Let's move to a little bit smaller so we can hopefully just move the top half and just make it into a better-looking foot. I think that works. We finished the head, body, and leg. Let's create the arms and the eyes. 3. NoMad Sculpt: Arms & Eyes : We finished the head, body, and leg. Let's create the arms and the eyes. I like the leg. Now let's just make the arm. Actually, this is probably a nice shape. Let's use this. Leg mid, we'll clone it. I'm going to move it up under the body. We're just going to call this arm. Let's call it arm B. Let's just use the gizmo and move it up and over. We'll stretch it out. I think that could work. I think that's a decent size. I think we'll validate and we'll just use move. Now let's just use our move tool and we'll stretch this shape. We want to make sure that we have the front and the back symmetrical. Make sure that you're tapped on the arm. Go to our symmetry. Local. Right now it's front to back. Let's go ahead and switch that to Z. Now we have this line, which would be the front and the back, and you can see it by these dots. Now when we go back to front and we use our move tool, we can literally just make this shape. I'm going to put it around 175 or so. We can just bend the arm into this shape. I bend it like this. I'm going to bring this edge down and this edge up. I'll bring this out a little bit, maybe make this a little flatter, maybe make this a little more round. I think that looks pretty much like what I'm seeing. I'm just going to use smooth and just smooth it out a little bit, make it a little more clean. Then maybe I'll just stretch it as well. I'm going to use the gizmo and just move that into place. I'm going to rotate it out a little bit. Let's add these eyes in. They're a little pill shape, so we'll deal with that as well. Let's add a sphere, but make sure that you're not on gizmo. Make sure you uncheck that and then just add a sphere. We can use our gizmo. We'll move it, and we'll move it out, and then we'll shrink it. Probably around there. I think that looks good. Let's just bring it over here. Now we want to make it more of a pill shape. In order to do that, because this doesn't really do the trick, let's validate. Now, let's switch the symmetry. Go here, switch from X to Y and then let's hit Local. Now let's use the arrow, and then we can pull these apart a little bit. We don't need too much. It's maybe something like that. I'm going to go ahead and change this back to world and change this back to X, making sure that I turn Y off. I'll put this back to auto. I'll turn leave symmetry on. Let's actually voxel re mesh it. Let's voxel re mesh around 150, and then let's just smooth this out. If you need to, you can stretch it, make it a little more as perfect to those as you can. I'm going to flatten it and then I'm going to bring it back into the face. I think that's pretty good. Of course, you can put yours anywhere that you want. I'm going to try to put it right in the middle, right around there. Let's do pivot center pivot. This is way too high. If you have an iPad and you have quad remeasure, you can go ahead and bring the resolution down. If not, just go up here to miscellaneous, and then you can decimate three or four times until it's very low. I'm going to use quad remeasure. I'm going to hit Quad Remeasure. I'm going to turn this off. I'll probably put in 3,000. Essentially, we're just lowering the resolution of that. Let's go ahead and name this I. We can go ahead and add a mirror and it'll show up on the other side. Let's call this I, and then I'm just going to validate. Join children. Yes. Now that we have our robot all blocked out, let's jump into some details. We'll start with the head. 4. NoMad Sculpt: Ears & Mouth: Let's add some robot ears and then we'll create the mouth. There's some little things over here. Let's go ahead and add, it looks like a cylinder and then a sphere. Let's go ahead and add a cylinder. We'll use our Gizmo. We'll do up and over. Looks like I've added it into a mirror. Let's take it out, so we just have one. Let's do Snap. Should be on 90, so we'll rotate it once. We'll shrink it. It looks like it's something like this. I think that looks pretty good. Of course, I'm going to soften it a bit, so I'll put post subdivision up and bring this down to around there. I think that looks pretty good. Flatten it up a little bit more. Now I'm going to add a sphere, but I'm going to put On Gizmo, add the sphere. That way it adds directly where the cylinder was. I'm going to use the Gizmo and shrink it and then I'm going to shrink it this way, so we just have that little. That's perfect. Now let's make this little mouth. We're going to do that similar to how we did the eyes. Let's add uncheck On Gizmo so that when we add the cylinder, it goes right in the middle. We'll use our Gizmo. We'll go up forward and let's shrink. Snap, we're already on Snap, so we'll rotate at once. We can turn Snap off. We can make it pretty small, stretch it out a bit. Let's make those ends round. Post subdivision 2 and then we'll make this down to pretty low. We'll put subdivision to three. We'll look crazy. It's pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and validate that. Let's go ahead and box re-mesh it. I'm going to box re-mesh it in like 130 or so it doesn't have to be much. The reason why I do that is if I don't and you try to move it, it can be a little wonky. I'm going to smooth it out. Then I'm just going to use move. If you want to give it a little bit of a smile, make it a little happier, and then just use Gizmo. Let's do pivot center, pivot just to get that right in the middle. I like to flatten it a little bit and then move it move it into the mouth space. That's pretty good. I'm going to make it smaller, maybe a little taller. I think I like it there, but we'll see. Now that we've finished up with the details on the head, let's create his hand so we can then mirror the arms and legs. 5. NoMad Sculpt: Sculpt & Mirror the Arms and Legs: Let's use a Taurus to create his hand, and then we'll mirror the arms and legs. Let's make these little robot hands. We're going to add a Taurus. Add a Taurus, let's just hit "Solo". Let's go to the Gizmo Snap 90 degrees. Let's rotate it forward. Like so. Let's go back to the gizmo or to the Taurus options. Let's find these pink little nodes, and we'll open it to probably about there. I think that's good. Let's take this orange node and just make it much smaller and then tilt it and find the green and you can make it a little thicker even. I would say something around there. Let's take the gizmo and use the green arrow. Essentially, we just want to stretch it lengthwise, like this. I think that's pretty good. Let's go ahead and make it a bit softer and rounder, so we'll tap here, put this to two, and we'll bring this down. I think I'll like that. We can up the subdivision to get it a little cleaner, and we can go back. If you need to, you can maybe make this a little more round, or you can make it a little chunkier. You can adjust it as needed. I think I might go ahead and do that up one. I think I might like that a bit better. Let's unsolo, and let's go ahead and put it in place and see what we can do with it. I'm going to rotate it a bit, I'll turn snap off and rotate it. I think that's actually pretty good. I like it. This is all looking very nice. We can take this Taurus and we can just rename it hand. Let's take these parts and just mirror them. We have leg ball. We can mirror it. We can validate join children and we can just rename it leg ball. We have leg mid, so we can mirror, and then we can validate that mirror. It is better to label them or else I'll forget and look like a dumdum when I'm searching for it. Hand, can mirror, validate, and then call it hand again. The sphere, this is the shoulder, so we'll mirror and validate it. Then validate the whole thing, call it shoulder. Eyes we can validate. Mirror this, validate. How children. This is the ear A, and this will just be the ear B. Even though they're not really ears, but that's okay. This is the mouth. We do have the floor again. This is the arm B. Let's go ahead and add a mirror. Now it has arm B, we can go ahead and validate and then we can just call it arm mids. Let's ball. Good. We're missing this little foot. Let's make sure all the parts are mirrored, and if not, you can just add a mirror, and it should go easy peasy over to the other side. We'll just call this foot. Now we can go through and some of these are high. If you have quad remeasure, you can lower them. If not, you can decimate them, but just be careful that you don't adjust too much of the quality. Just go through, and for example, I'm going to use quad remeasure. Right now, this is 59K. I'm going to turn symmetry off. I'm not sure how low we can go with this. I'll do 5,000, see how it looks. Look at the wire frame. It looks pretty good. I'll do half. Still looks pretty good. I'm going to go through and do that with most of these shapes just to get this robot as low resolution as we can. Again, if you don't have quad measure, if you're out on an iPad and you don't want to buy it, just use decimation. Just go through and decimate. Honestly, everything looks pretty good except for the body is a bit high, and I think that's about it. Everything else looks pretty good. I'll come back once this is optimized. Now that we've finished and optimized our little robot, let's move on to some final adjustments as we prepare to bring him over into Blender. 6. NoMad Sculpt: Finishing Touches & Export : Now that our sculpt is optimized, let's make some final adjustments just to make sure he's perfect and ready for export. You can, for example, I'm going to lower the head a little bit because there's a bit more space here, and I'm going to lower him so that his feet are right above the ground, which basically just means selecting everything and moving him down slightly like this. Perfect and then I'm going to take the head and everything connected to the head. I'll take the eyes, the head and both the ear parts and the mouth. I think that's it. I'm just going to lower that a bit on the head, that looks perfect. I encourage you to take some time to jazz him up. Maybe you want to put some antennas on top, put some vents or box or cylinder, just make some shapes. You can add some things to him, make him a little more exciting. Then once we do that, so once your character is all finished, then you want to go to your scene menu and bake each one of these meshes. We'll start with the head, we'll go to the Gizmo and then Gizmo options, and then bake. I'm just going to go down and bake all of these. Now we'll switch from MatCap back to Lit PBR. I'll go here and change from MatCap back to Lit PBR. You obviously see there's environment here. If you turn it off, then it goes completely black. This is my eye glare environment. You can download this from Projects and Resources and to install it, you just tap here, import photos, and then you find your image and hit Add. Let's do some quick coloring just so we can tell the difference between white and black. All we're going to do is tap the different parts that are black, for example, the eyes, and then we'll tap this little color window. You can bring it to black, and you can make it as rough or glossy, whatever you like. I'm going to make mine a little glossy, but not too much. I'll hit paint. I'm going to go through and paint all of the different parts that should be the same. Like, for example, the neck and the little ball joints. I think those are all going to be maybe the same as this black, so you can bundle them together. Let's say we have the neck, and then we have this one, we have the ones for the legs. Maybe we'll just these for now. We can go ahead and join those, and we want to add the hands and the shoulders. We join all these and we'll just put black parts and then those we can paint the same color black. Of course, these we can paint black and the only reason I'm not adding these in because I might want to change the color of these. Maybe this is black. The mouth is well and then we have some fun details back here. Black and maybe this part is also black. No, I think I like that white. I think that's pretty good, yeah. I like this. I think this is great. Let's save. Now everything is set up correctly. We don't need the floor anymore, so we can go ahead and delete the floor and we don't need the cameras, so we can go ahead and delete the cameras. Now we have all of these parts that we're going to send over to Blender. You don't have to select everything. You can just go to the folder, GLTF export and I'm going to export this to my computer. You want to export this to your device where you have Blender, and then we will open up in blender. Now that we've exported our robot, we can now import him in Blender. 7. Blender: Set Up Your Workspace: You transferred the gITF file from Nomad over to your computer. Let's go ahead and open up Blender. Now we're on the computer where we have Blender. Make sure that you share your Nomad to Blender.glb file, so you have access to it on that computer. Now we can go ahead and open up Blender. As you can see, I'm using Blender 4.2.2. Even if this is a later version, it should be pretty much the same. We can tap on the background to get rid of the splash screen. Let's go up to ''Edit Preferences''. Then go down to System. Depending on what system you're using, I'm using a PC with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, so I have optics and I have this selected. You'll have to see what works best for your specific system. One last thing in the preferences, just go to ''Input'' I have ''Emulate Numpad'' selected because I don't have a separate Numpad on my keyboard. I just have the numbers on top, where it says one and exclamation point, two, add symbol, that thing. That's why I had Emulate Numpad. The next thing we'll do is go over here to the right and go up to Render. Once you tap the little camera, you should see the render engine, and I like to use cycles. Let's tap this and go down to cycles. On device, it says CPU, and this is always going to be slower than the GPU in my experience. Again, this is going to depend on your system, but I like to do GPU compute. Any place in Blender where you see CPU, I always change to GPU. Let's go down to the Render tab. Here we have Denoise. I'm going to tap on the pull down, and then go to use GPU. Next let's go up to the Render settings, and let's change the max samples from 4,096, just tap on that, and just change that to 300. This is one of the things that controls the quality of your Render. I think 300 is fine, but obviously, 4,000 is a lot more, but it'll also take a lot longer to Render. Underneath this little Camera tab is a little printer, so let's tap that. This is the resolution that your Render will export as. Let's head up to the scene collection. Let's go up to the top right and click on this little tab here, which will add a collection. Let's add three of them. For the top one, let's name this Camera. For the second one, let's name it Lights, and for the third one, let's name it Background. Up here, you can see that we have our camera, which is here, our cube, and we have our light, which is a little light right here. Let's bring the light into Lights. Just drag the light down into the Lights collection. The cube can go in the Background, and the camera can go in Camera. Let's change collection to sculpts. Let's drag this down to the bottom, see if it stays down there. There we go. I just want to mention there are some differences in the keyboards from a Mac keyboard to a PC keyboard. Shift, Control, Alt, those buttons are a little different on a Mac keyboard, so they may be a little different than what I'm doing here. That's the only thing. If you're using a Mac, then you have to figure out the little shortcuts specific for iOS keyboards. You can do all the actions. They just might be a little different than exactly what I'm saying here using my PC. Now let's go through some basic mouse actions. When I move the mouse in a circle, you can see the pointer just going around on the screen. If you hold down the scroll wheel, then it'll orbit around your cube. If you hold down Shift on your keyboard, then you also hold the Scroll wheel, and instead of orbiting, it'll pan, so you can go up and down, left and right. Then you can scroll on the scroll wheel to go backwards, forwards. That's pretty much how you control the Viewport. What we're seeing now on screen is the Viewport. But it's also useful to see the camera view. The camera view is what we'll actually render out. That's where the money is. This is the camera. When you want to view what the camera is seeing, just hit "0" your keyboard. This is what your camera is seeing, and this is what we'll render. You can move the mouse around by just hold in your scroll wheel and it'll go back to the Viewport view. Along with zero being the camera view, you can also hit "1", and this will show the very front of your sculpt. This is very similar to the view that we see in Nomad when we hit "Front." Now that we're looking in the front, I think it would be useful to set the camera so we're looking at it directly in the front. Here's our camera, what we need to do is move it so that it's about here and it's facing our cube. When you look at the camera, you can go over here. There's a little arrow that comes out of the screen so you can tap that, and then you can see item. This is the location, the rotation, and the scale of the camera. Any object that you go on is going to show the location, the rotation, and all that information here. As we're looking at the camera, you can see these numbers are random. What I like to do is, let's just go to each of these numbers and hit "0", and then you can see where it actually puts the camera. I put 0, and it lined it up directly in the front of the camera. The rotation is off, but it's still in the front. Why just hit "0", and now it's actually at the top. In Z, we hit "0", then it goes right towards center. If you want to move it up and down manually, we can either use the move or we can use the transform, which is essentially just like our Gizmo in Nomad sculpt. Using the Gizmo, I'm just going to use this green arrow and push it back, and let's hit "1". Now we're seeing the front, we can see that our camera is not facing the right way. I'll just go to this rotation. Obviously, you can do the rotation this way. It's a little less clean, but you can do it this way. It's interesting to look at the numbers as you do this. They will change as you do this. This is close to 90, so let's put 90. You can see the camera goes. This is closer to zero, so let's just put 0, and this is close to zero, so let's put 0. Now we are lined up directly with the cube. You can press "1", and see that we're lined up with the cube. Also, one thing that I like to do in Nomad is work in orthographic. Let's do that here as well. You'll notice anytime you have the camera option, if you look on this bar right here, you'll see a camera option. If you click on the ''Light'' there's a light option. But when you're on the camera, then it shows the options for the camera here. Let's change from perspective to orthographic. You can see the camera got a lot bigger, let's hit "1". Now you can see that we're perfectly lined up with our cube. Now that we've got the lay of the land in Blender, let's move on to setting up our scene and importing our robot. 8. Blender: Set Up a Scene : [MUSIC] Let's jump right in. Let's go ahead and delete this cube. Let's just tap on it and then hit X and delete. Now, let's hit Shift A, go down to Mesh, and let's add a plane. So add a plane here. While the plane is selected, hit S. This will resize it, so now we can just size it up Let's say this is our floor. There's two really quick ways that we can make a back wall or a backdrop to our floor. The first way is really simple. The second one will lean into more what Blender does really well, which will introduce some new ways that you can use: vertices, edges, and planes. You can hit Shift D to duplicate, then you can move this off here and then you can rotate like this, and that will give you a pretty good backdrop. Let's X this, so tap X and delete. Here's one of the really cool things about Blender that you can't do in Nomad. We select our plane. Let's hit Tab to go into Edit mode. See these three options up here? This controls the vertices, this controls the edges, and this controls the faces. The vertice is each of these points, so there's four points at the corners. We can tap the Move tool, and it will just move these vertices. We'll hit Control Z to go back The edge. Now you can select the edges, and you can move those. The face. Obviously, there's only one face here, so you can select the faces. But what's really cool is we can go over here to Extrude. We're still on faces, so it's going to extrude this face and make a cube or a rectangle. Control Z. We can go to the edge, let's select this edge, and now we can extrude. Let's grab onto this yellow handle and hit Z. Hit Z twice if it doesn't snap to just the z-axis. Then we can just move that up. You can see here that we have a pretty good backdrop. Let's hit zero so we can take a look at our camera. Which looks fine, but let's take the camera and you notice that you can't select the camera, so let's hit Tab to go back to Object mode. We'll tap the camera and let's just move it up. Let's hit zero. Let's move it up this way. There we go. Now we can move it up like this. Let's do right around there. Perfect. Now when we look through our camera that we're seeing just our backdrop. Let's make it a little more interesting. Let's rotate it a little bit down. Let's hit zero. Let's rotate it a little bit down, so we're seeing a bit of the floor and the background. This is one of the reasons why I like doing two separate views. We'll go up here on the top right, and you'll see this little crosshair that pops up. Let's left-click there and drag this window out, so then we have two windows. I'm just going to use the scroll wheel and scroll in. Now for this window, let's hit Z, let's hit Rendered. This is the rendered version. Let's just keep this solid. If you hit Z, we have rendered, wireframe, material preview, and solid. We'll just keep this one solid as is. They look the same because we haven't set any lights or anything like that. Now we can move this one around and we can actually see what we're seeing in the other window. I'm going to tilt it back a little bit. Something like that. We're seeing a little bit of the floor in the bottom, and we're seeing the whole backdrop. Right now, we have one light here. This is a default light. This is a point light. You can move it around and you can see the difference that the light makes. You can see if we're on a camera, there's a camera setting. If we're on a light, there's a light setting, so let's tap on this. This obviously gives you the temperature of the light and the power of the light and different things like that so you can adjust how the light hits everything in the scene. For now, let's just leave this light here. We'll put it over on the right, but let's add a new light. Let's hit Shift A, and we'll go down to Light, and then we'll add an area light. Now we have our area light. Let's move it over to the left. Let's move it up. Let's make it bigger. You can make it bigger in two ways. You can go on the orange ring of the light and make it bigger this way, or you can go down to these light settings. I'm going to switch this to rectangle. We'll keep both of these on, and you can obviously adjust the sizes here, but usually, I just go and adjust them this way. We'll do two lights. We'll do one in the middle. We'll move it up a little bit. Let's rename this top down. Let's hit Shift D. We'll move this off a little bit. Let's change this to an ellipse and we'll rotate it a little bit. We'll move it back. I think that'll work. The only other thing I'm going to do with this light, let's change the spread from 180 to let's just do 90. I'm going to make it a little smaller, too. I think that works. We have three lights now. Let's name this one key. I'm going to put key left because it's on the left side. We have key left, we have the area light. We'll just call it glow right, and then we have top down. The floor plan is now the backdrop. Perfect. Let's go ahead and save. Let's save this as Robot_Render. "Okay". We'll save that. It's time to import our robot. 9. Blender: Import Your Robot: Now that we have our scenes set up in Blender, let's pull in our robot. Let's go up to file. Let's go down to Import GLTF. Then you just find wherever you have your sculpt. Mine is called Nomad to Blender, so I'll tap that and then tap "Import", and it should come in right at World Center, and also his feet should be on the ground perfectly. Now the whole thing is selected. I'm going to hit S and just make him a little bit bigger in the frame. I think that looks good. It's another reason why I like having this and having my camera view here. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this because we don't need this on that window. Perfect. The next thing, we're going to play around with some of the lights. We'll add some materials. You can really see the effect that the lights make on your character. Don't forget that you can adjust these. You can turn some off, turn some on. You can add some other shapes in there. You can hit "Shift" and A. Let's say you want to add a cube, you can move some things around. Just get a little more used to Blender and used to the Gizmo and the controls. That's the only thing that will make this process easier is just practice and having fun with it and actually seeing what everything does and how everything affects your model. In the next video, we'll come back to our little robot. We'll clean things up and find some fun, interesting ways to make the scene pop as much as possible. I encourage you to download Blender kit. It's free software that gives you free materials, models, scenes, things like that. There's a link to Blender kit in the class resources tab. Great job so far. Don't forget to save. 10. Blender: Develop Your Scene: Let's make our scene a little more interesting. Okay, so all of our objects to our robot are over here on the top right in our scene collection. I'm just going to add it to the sculpt scene. I'm going to click on Ant A. What is that? Arm. I think it's supposed to be arm. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to click on Arm A and then click on the bottom object. Then I'm just going to long press and drag this into sculpt. Now, sometimes some things are connected, but they don't go in, so just make sure they bring everything inside that collection. Now we have that sculpt. I'm actually going to rename it robot A. The reason why I want to do it robot A is because I want to clone this whole thing. Let's copy and paste. Here we have robot A1. It's inside here. I'm just going to drag it out. There we go. I'll just drag it out, and I want to drag it below this one. There we go. I'm going to name this one robot B. Now we have robot A and robot B, and I'm going to right click on this one and select objects. That is going to select everything within that collection. This is robot B. Now over here, I just want to drag this over, and I'm going to drag it up, and then I'm going to hit S and just scale it down. Now there's like a little mini robot. Why not? I think I want to take this box, and I'm just going to drag it over so he's standing on this box. I'll keep this screen in zero, and I should be doing all this in this screen. I'm just going to flatten these, like so. Then let's go ahead and stretch it. Here's a good place where you would hit one. You can go in and really see what's lining up and what isn't. I'm going to stretch this a little bit more. I think that looked pretty good. That looks pretty good. Let's just take a look. Nice. I'm going to go ahead and save. Now that we have our scenes set up and interesting, let's make sure everything is in focus. 11. Blender: Focus Your Camera : The next thing I want to do is add our focus points. One of the things I always love is adding depth of field, which is our robot may be in focus, but the background will be a little bit blurry. I always use that, so I think it's important that I show you how to do it. We can go ahead and expand these by just clicking on these arrows, at least the top three. Let's go into Camera. You see the little Camera option here. Here we have depth of field. So if you tick depth of field, then right now it's just going to use this focus distance. There is also this eyedropper for the object. Let's say we tap on the eye, but I don't find it to be as exact as I want, and that's mostly because these objects have depth to them. They're not exactly going where I want them to go. Here's what I like to do. Just go on one of your view ports and hit Shift A and then go down to Empty and then go down to Circle. We'll click "Circle", and now let's just move this circle right in front of our robot. Let's move it up. You can hit S if you want to rescale it a little bit. I want to put it right up to the front of his eyes. You can hit 3, and that will give you the side view so you can make sure it's right to the front of the eyes. Now we can go back to our camera. You see it says focus on object. Let's X that, let's tap the eyedropper again, Eyedropper. Let's go over to our empty, and you'll see it'll say object empty. Let's tap on that. Now it's focusing on these eyes. Where is our empty? Oh, there we go. If I tap on it, you'll see this little thing is lit up a bit. I'm going to open this, and here is our empty. I'm just going to drag that up into our camera, and then I'm going to rename it focus ring. If you go to Camera, this is focused on the focus ring, and you can see that the eyes are in focus. Right now, the reason why the rest of the robot is blurry is because it's an extremely shallow depth of field. Let's go over to our depth of field. We're in our camera, we're in depth of field. We have F stop and blades. I usually put the blades to 10. Then for this F stop, let's just put it to maybe five. We'll put it to 15. The F stop is at 15. Pretty much the eyes in the robot is in focus, but then it still gets a little blurry towards the back. But I think that looks nice. Of course, you can always just keep it off if you want everything to be in focus. I'm going to keep mine on. Now that our focus is set, let's light our seed. 12. Blender: Light Your Scene : Let's set up some lights. Of course, we have three lights that we've added. But if we turn all of those off, so if you go over here to the right and tap all of these eyes for the lights, you can still see the robot. That's because of the ambient light. To control the ambient light, you just go down to this little world type symbol here. Background, color, and strength. If you tap on the color, right now it's this dark gray. If you were to put it up, it gets brighter. If you put it down, it gets lower. That's your world. That's what's pretty much giving off all of the ambient light in the scene. Let's go ahead and turn that all the way to black. Now when we go to our lights, you can see exactly what each light is doing. These look really nice. I think this looks nice. For now, I'm going to keep the scene quite a bit brighter. I'm going to go to my world and I'm going to put this. I'll bring this up, too, just so our scene is nice and light. Of course, you can adjust all of these lights to get different looks and different effects. This looks great. I love how big this is on the little robots eyes. I'm going to bring it out a little bit more. We have some of this on these eyes as well. It's a little bright, so I'm going to go to the light here and I'll put it to maybe 600. I'll put it to maybe 500. You just don't want it to be too bright on one size. That's 350. That way, it's bright, but it's not too bright. You don't want any of the white to be blown out. That's pretty much the world here, and that's how you control your lights, and you can add as many lights as you want. You can have a good time with lights. In the next video, we'll work on materials like color and texture. 13. Blender: Materials, Colors & Textures : Now, let's focus on material colors and textures. Along with lights, another thing that you can adjust which will control how your robot looks is the robot's material. The material is just the surface of each of these objects. Let's start with the background. If you click on the background, and then you click over here, this little symbol here, so this is our materials. There's no materials here in this window, so we'll hit "Add" or hit the plus next to new. Then it says material 1. Let's click on here and name it backdrop A Now, backdrop A is this color. You can tap on here to adjust the color if you want, and you can make it a little bit brighter or darker. I think I like that. You can also adjust the roughness, the metalness, those type of things. There's lots of these options here that you can play around with in Blender. That's the background. Let's say, we want to give the box the same material as the background. Just go to your Material tab, and instead of clicking new, you can click this, which shows our preexisting materials. You can just hit "Backdrop," and now this will match the background. If you change it, it will just follow along. I'll hit "Undo" to go back to the orange. Let's make sure that we're on the box. I'm going to subtract this. The box will go back to white. We can add a new, and let's change this to box. Let's say, we want to just make it a different color, we can easily make it a different color here. Each one of these materials you can go into and adjust. You can change the color. You can change the glossiness. For example, let's say the head, we'll go over to our materials. Right now, it says material 0. Let's just change that to robot head. The reason why we don't see a color here is because we colored it in Nomad, and we brought it over. Just tap on where it says base color. Tap on this, and then go to RGB, and then you will be able to adjust the colors. Let's say, we did like, lime color, but we want to make it really glossy. We can do that. I don't know if I want to make it too glossy. You can also change the metalness and make it a little bit brighter. Now, we have this lime color up here. Let's say you wanted to change all of these to that same lime color. Just tap on one, hit Shift, and then you can select all of these pieces that you want the same color. Make sure that you're on the viewport, and hit Control J. This is going to join all of those parts together. Let me open this up. Now, the head is going to be all of those parts joined together. If you go in your Material tab, you'll notice that the head is still green, but all these other materials are still white. You'll have to just hit the minus to get rid of these materials. Now, everything is the same material as the head. A few things I'm missing here. I'll just hit Shift, and I'll join them with Control J, and then I'll go ahead and get rid of these as well. Now, everything is that same color. Let's say, we want the eyes really glossy. We can set the eyes really glossy. Feel free to get creative. You can change or adjust any material in the scene. You can have matching robots or experiment with different looks. Next up, let's see what Blender kit has to offer and why it's amazing. 14. Explore BlenderKit : [MUSIC] If you did want to download BlenderKit, I just want to show you some of the great things you can access with this free software. On your sidebar here, you should have the sidebar for BlenderKit. If you tap "BlenderKit" and you tap "Materials", we'll go down to Categories. Here you have all the categories of materials that you can use. Let's go to metal. You need to hit this little I. Now you can use the scroll wheel to move or you can press these arrows. I usually use the scroll wheel, and you can go through these nice lovely materials. Let's say we're on the little robot. You can add any of these materials to your robot. Let's go back to all. I'm going to go up to Search and just type in Edge. I like to use these worn objects. That's my favorite. I'm going to hit "Shift," select all of these parts, hit Control J, and I'm going to subtract all of these and hit the yellow. Let's go here and just make sure that we have both the eye and the camera on. You don't want to have anything like this because when the eye's on, that means you can see it in the viewport. When the cameras on, that means that it will render. If you have the eye off, you won't see it in the viewport, but it will render. If it's like this, then you'll see it in the viewport, but it won't render. You just want to make sure that you have everything on that should be on. Test out your free material library with BlenderKit. Let's add something with an emission. An emission is when you can make something glow. Let's try these little side parts. Maybe this will be a fun emission. We'll go to our materials. Let's name this Ear Lights A. Next, we can go to the surface. Right now it's a principal BSDF. That just means a normal material. We can tap here and find emission. Now you can already see that it's pretty much glowing. I want to change the color. I'm going to make it very saturated because when you raise the strength of that light, it's going to get more white. That's just the nature of lights. That's the nature of color. But once you start raising this, then you'll see that it gets progressively whiter. I think I'll just put it to maybe four. If you want, you can do the same thing with the little guy. We'll change this to Ear Lights B. We'll change it to an emission. Let's make these maybe blue. We'll put this to four. Another small trick that you can do is you can add lights so that they mimic what this light would be doing. For example, if I hit Shift A and add a point light, and then I move the point light up and over. Now the point light is right here. I can change the power of this point light to 100 and then I can change the color to a matching color. I'll up the radius a little bit, maybe 2.2. You can see this orange ring. Now we have more of an orange. In order to see it, let's say we put this color to black, you can see it a little bit better. Let's Control Z. If you have a darker environment, it's going to be easier to see these lights. Now you can see how much the light is actually emitting. I'm just going to this light for now and turn these back on. Next, we're just going to export our little characters. Make sure you go through. You can play with the materials, and then we're going to export our little robots. In the next lesson, we'll export our seed. 15. Blender: Render Your Scene : Let's go ahead and render our little robots. Again, our render settings are these little printer here, and right now it's 1920 by 1080, and you want to make sure that in your camera, your max samples are 300. Whatever's in this box, when you hit 0; if your camera's like this and you hit 0, it doesn't matter which window you're in, you can hit 0. This is what is going to render. Let's go up to the render settings and hit "Render Image". You can see slowly it's just going to render out your image, depending on your max samples. Here's our rendered image. Now, as I'm going in, I can tell that this looks like it's in focus, and this looks like it's still a little out of focus, so I'm going to close it and see if I can fix that. I take the focus ring and I move it over. See that little bit of difference. Anyway, I'm going to take Robot V, select all. I'm going to Shift, and I'll hit this box below and just move this up the tiniest bit to around there. Now let's render our image bigger, but that's okay. Another thing that I did not do is I didn't tap on these eyes and make them glossy. If I do that and then I render, that might help get them nice and clear. They're much more clear once I made these eyes glossy. This is our first render, but for me, it still looks a little bit blurry when we zoom in, and that's because of the size of the render. We can go back to the printer, and I'm going to change this to a bigger size. I'm going to go here. I usually do 4K, UHD TV 2160, so I'm going to tap that. Nothing is really going to change much here because the same aspect ratio is just a larger size. Now you can see that the size is larger, so I'm going to go ahead and hit "Render". It's going to take a little bit long to render out. But you'll notice the samples makes a difference, and the size makes a difference. If it's going really slow, you're going to have to set them lower or just wait a little bit longer for your render. There we go. If I really wanted to make a copy of this to keep, I would even go larger than that. Underneath the resolution, there's 100%. I might go 200%. If I was making a reel or a short or something like that, and I wanted to really have the ability to zoom in on either of these robots to make a cropped thumbnail or something like that, I would do 200, and then I would render that out. Party till I die. God, I hate that I have that song in my head. Such a terrible song. I'm so sorry. These look really great. I like to zoom in and really check out our surfaces. Now, sometimes in Nomad, you can do things with smooth shading off. For example, this sphere is not as crisp. It's probably because of the surface layer that we did in Nomad. That's where things like quad remeasure and remeshing and the surface resolution comes into play. Maybe if this was a higher resolution, this would be more clear. That's one of the things that you just have to learn and get used to when you're going back and forth through the programs. If I tap on this I and I right click on it, so they're shade smooth. Nothing really changed, but you can do shade flat. Now you can see this is with smooth shading off, which doesn't look great. I'm going to right click, there's autoshade smooth, and then there's just regular shade smooth. It looks like it was best with regular shade smooth, so I'm just going to leave it like that. I don't see anything else that needs to be smooth shaded that isn't already. I find that if it has smooth shading on or off in Nomad, it usually mirrors that here in blender is what it seems like. But everything looks good. I'm going to render this. Now this is the point where you experiment, move the cameras around, move the lights around. You can take the camera and change to perspective view. There's so many amazing shots that you can get with different perspectives; going in close or pulling out and getting wide shots and things like that. Be creative, have fun with it. Once you get used to Nomad for a while, it's nice to just bump things up to this really professional level render. 16. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in class. I really appreciate your time and I hope you had fun working in 3D. We started out in nomad sculpts. We just used some cylinders, spheres, boxes, simple shapes to create our character. It doesn't always have to be something super complex. Now you know the steps to prepare it, exporting it from nomad, importing it into blender. You know how to bring it into the scene, set up the lights, the cameras, when you can take advantage of both applications, it really brings everything to the next level. Really excited to see what you create in nomad and blender, and I'm really excited to see your robots. Be sure to post them in the project's gallery. Also, be sure to rate and review. I really want to know what you loved about the class, what you'd like to see more of, and even what you'd like to see less of. I'm not only growing as an artist, but I'm also growing as an art teacher, so I hope you feel at home and comfortable in my classes. Let me know in the title of your class project, if you want to be critiqued or if you want any tips or anything like that. I'm happy to help. Once again, I'm Dave Breed. You can find me on social media TikTok, Instagram, YouTube @drugfreedave, and, of course, right here on Skill Share. Keep drawing, keep sculpting. I'll see you all in the next video.