Beginner Blender 4.0 Tutorial - Part 2: Basic Modelling

now we know how blender functions let's start building that donut so as before Let's uh well first of all just to repeat make sure you are working with a new scene completely new scene don't want any remaining monkey heads lying around let's begin fresh slate and let's delete our default Cube just with the delete key and let's replace it with a new object you might remember the hot key for that is shift a and as I mentioned before you usually want what is underneath mesh cuz these are your Primitives so we want to start with something that most resembles what it is we're building you if it was a house you might start with a cube if it was a vase you might start with a cylinder in our case we want the donut shaped one although mathematicians call it a Taurus for some reason so let's add that now if I zoom in by scrolling up we can see we have something resembling a dut looks like a pretty weak looking dut you know very flimsy looks like the the doughnut before it's cooked when they just drop it into the vat and it's just this little wispy thing um so immediately after you do some actions in blender you have options to change it and the options are hidden down here in the bottom left hand corner you see a little box and if you click that box you see options and look we can change the dimensions of our Taurus now something to note is that these options in blender only appear immediately after you have done that action if you do another action like say deselect your Taurus by mistake it's gone right because blender has assumed you have moved on you've accepted the state of your donut and this is the one you want right now if you haven't done anything drastic or changed this object in some severe way you can temporarily bring it back by hitting F9 I never actually remember that hotkey I just remember that immediately after I have uh added an object if I want to tweak it now's my chance before I move on to something else okay so we could change you know the size of it here we can also change the resolution I'll use the term resolution Loosely um to uh to make it higher or lower Fidelity and a mistake that a lot of beginners make and I say this because this was the exact mistake I made way back in 2003 when I started learning blender is they go well I need a a realistic looking donut so I guess I need to go really high resolution I remember my first project one of my first projects was for a high school film project and I wanted to have a closeup of a face didn't realize faces were going to be difficult but I went really high poly and then it was just an absolute nightmare to work with so the problem the reason you don't want this is that for starters things that are high poly are very slow to render and they're very hard to work with if you want to tweak the shape of it but also as you learn and you grow with 3D you'll discover that it is a lot easier to add resolution to something later on but is very difficult to take it away if you've already built it into it and you don't need it so long way to say what we actually want is to have as few Poes these are called poy uh as you can get away with so I'm going to go with 32 major and 12 minor and don't worry that it looks all Jagged because we will fix that in a moment now the major and minor this is really up to you but I find that something that looks uh looks kind of chunky like a fat donut just looks really delicious so I'm going with something around about this size okay and once I'm happy with this once I'm ready to click off I click off the options are gone and this is it this is the donut that I am now working with so how do we make this look higher resolution less Jagged well one way is to use smooth shading so if you rightclick with your object selected go to shade smooth and look at that this is immediately better without getting too technical this is kind of a fakery it's sort of like the Shader is telling the renderer that this is a really high poly dense mesh when it really isn't it's just basically kind of like averaging out uh V uh faces and anyway it's very technical but basically means it's not going to add anything to your render time but it's going to look smoother and so this is generally what you want for something that is smooth and and organic looking like we want if you were rendering like architectural or like hard surfaces like later on we're going to put this on a counter then the object would obviously want to be flat but in our case we're just going to use shade smooth but you might notice that looking at this especially if you go side on that you've got this sort of uh Jagged shape around here right so the silhouette is really breaking that illusion that this is a high poly or a smooth looking donut but thankfully rather than adding all of that complex density into the mesh itself and then making it hard to remove later on there is another way through modifiers so if we go over here to our properties right this very confusing lots of option looking properties click on the wrench and this is the section called modifiers and this is one of those uh object dependent uh things so if you've got your camera selected you won't see it so it's only when you've got actual meshes that you might see uh this uh this modifier here so it's much easier to explain if we just add one so up here add modify and you got a range of options here that can do a whole number of things the one that we're looking for is underneath generate and it is called subdivision surface and it is a really common modifier that you use all the time in fact it's so common it's actually you can just immediately add it to any object just by hitting control one but don't do that cuz we've already got it so there now some of you might have just discovered that your donut has disappeared if that is the case you need to go to edit preferences and then underneath viewport where it's got subdivision at the very bottom disable GPU subdivision that will then make the subdivision perform on your CPU instead instead of your GPU which is maybe nonexistent or not performing whatever um but disable that and it should appear but if it's already working for you don't disable it keep it going cuz GPU will be faster so what exactly is this doing well it's a lot easier to explain if we look at the shade flat mode because we're not being uh tricked by the the smooth shading there um if I set this levels viewport to zero this is our original mesh this is before we add the subsurface essentially when we increase this you can see that it is adding resolution to our mesh and the more I increase this viewport levels here uh the finer and finer that detail becomes so to explain it because this is such a very very common uh modifier it's kind of important to understand how it's working you can see that uh this is uh these squares here these are called Faces by the way and and for each one of these faces here as I add a level you can see it's becoming four faces right and then now if I zoomed in on this one one face here if I do another level that's now become four faces and then if I zoom in again it's now become four faces so it's exponentially adding detail and you might also know that it is smoothing it out as well like this Jagged Edge that we've got here you can see now becomes smoother so to quickly visualize that if I just draw like imagine you've got like a 90 Dee uh corner right like this if you add a Subs surf modifier what it's going to do is it's going to add uh a point here right because this is uh the extra detail it's also going to take that point there and it's going to average it out it's going to average it out between these points and it's going to create another one there and another one there so you go then from having that really hard corner there to having something that looks a lot smoother so it's going to take a point and it's also going to uh change it to make it look smoother gener speaking so there we go um so now as I increase this you can see it's getting uh smoother and smoother now the reason there are two options here you've got levels viewport and levels render so reminder this gray area that we operate in is called our viewport the render is the pretty version so as an example um you could see if I just turned it off for the viewboard it looks very Jagged but then for my render if I increase that to three if I do my render which you could go up there F uh and render image or remember the hotkey F12 you can see that that donut is now smooth but I go back and you can see it's Jagged so the viewport you want to generally keep it lightweight and then the render time that's where you want to get uh a really nice looking pretty image so you want to often have two different levels um in our case though I don't really think we need to go beyond one even for our final pretty image um because this with uh shade smoothing turned on is good enough and we're going to be adding more to the scene later on so we don't want to make it too complex so this is actually pretty good okay so we have a perfect dut and that's the problem it's too perfect you could spend decades trying to develop a machine in the real world that make it that made a donut this perfect and you never would this is so mathematically precise that the eye will always see this as looking fake so that's actually a problem you learn pretty quickly in 3D that things that are too perfect just look fake so you have to spend time making things look misshapen and adding variation there like you see in the real world because your eye expects to see it so how do we do that how do we make this doughnut look a little more lumpy and interesting I do that by changing the mesh itself so this mode that we are in right now where we can uh you know click on different objects is called object mode and I know that because in the top leftand corner you can see we are in object mode but if I click the drop down you can see I get a number of other options options here and these options again will change depending on the object you've got selected if I've got a lamp my little light there selected you can see I've only got object mode my camera I've only got object mode but a mesh will give you extra options here so let's enter into edit mode ooh right now you can see our mesh our sorry our object has become something that looks weird it's got a bunch of uh little points on it with lines and very technical well that's because this is actually what the mesh is made up of these little points here which you can click on just by selecting are called your vertices the singular term is called vertex I never say that I like to just call all of them vertices regardless of whether it's one or two just because you always get some comments that go um actually it's called vertex if it is singular anyway so these are called your vertices and if you have two of them joined by a line that is called an edge and if you have four of them forming uh a face then it's called a face so with these I can quickly change the shape of my object by using the same hot Keys as before and if I want to move this then I would simply tap G right and you can see it's now attached to my cursor and then if I want to confirm its movement I just do a single left click and there it is now if I go back into object mode like that you can see that my mesh has changed okay and by the way the hot key for jumping in and out of object and edit mode is Just Tab okay so you can see it's just toggling between those two modes because it's so common that you want to just quickly change things that it's just uh easily accessible by that now this is okay right but you can see it's like it's got like some artifacting it's like it's not the greatest lump right so how do we make it look a little more uh natural well I mean you could you know you move one drag it out Okay click and then I move oh the next one next to it right I'll move that out and then I'll move this one out a little bit and then and then I move this one it's like okay well now I've got the thing but it took me like five action ridiculous right no one wants to do that no one's got time for that thankfully there is a tool in blunder uh just for this and it's called proportional editing and you can enable it up there in your toolbar so if you enable that now if I hit G and I move it out you will see I get a little ring around my cursor there and that is now changing uh the mesh around it now a lot of people in my previous tutorials were like I don't see what's what's going on you have to have something selected first and then when you hit G you will see uh that uh that little circle of influence okay now this circle of influence if I scroll down sorry if I scroll up you can see it's shrinking its circle of influence and if I scroll down it is expanding its influence so it's only going to affect what is in that uh that ring there okay if you are on uh yeah if you don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel you can also change the influence by using page up and page down and if you don't have page up or page down because you're on a Mac keyboard then what you would have to do is go to keymap and then change your page up and page down to something else just so that you could get around that but guys you got to get a mouse get a mouse with a scroll wheel I think they're I don't know 50 cents or just in the nearest landfill somewhere get a mouse cuz it's going to make uh your life in 3D a lot easier okay so with this I can now uh make quick work of uh of lumpy shapes okay so I just drag that out okay I've got a little lumpy shape there maybe I go down here and I pull this up just by hitting G moving it up okay so already this is looking a little more natural right cuz even if we were making a stylized world for a Pixar movie or something like that you can't have just a a spherical looking donut sorry spherical round looking circular doughnut cuz it just your eye will see it as fake so very quickly I'm able to add a little bit of variation to the dut um just all around it just a little bit over here and you can see that I am uh just changing my circle of influence depending on what size of a a lump I want to make so if I just want to make like a little bit that sticks out I can make a small Circle just by scrolling up like that um and you just want to do that until you get something that looks a little more natural I might want to make the the inner part as well maybe just drag that in with a smaller Circle and that's pretty good let's just have a look from the top I might actually just drag that out make it a little bit more like that but there you go that's pretty good for a donut it's still kind of simple it's not too detailed um but it's got just enough variation in it that uh it's more interesting to look at oh one more thing forgot to mention go back into edit mode with tab um Donuts when they're sitting in the uh little vat thing right uh they're only like half submerged then they have to be flipped uh but it means that the bit that's nearest to the surface is getting less heat so essentially what I'm saying is the bit that's around the the dut the the circumference of it is usually a little bit flatter so Donuts aren't like perfectly round all the way around they usually a little bit flatter so what I want to do is I want to select these vertices along here and then I want to shrink them now I could go around one by one like this which is actually what I used to do when I was uh learning blender pre YouTube days and there was uh no tutorials what I would I would do this if I wanted to select this silly because there's a a a function a tool for that and it is Edge select so if you hold down alt on your keyboard board and then do a single left click on not the points but on the edge right this little line here you can see it's selected all the way around so it's anything that's connected along that line is now selected so if I want to shrink this right what would I do well I mean yeah you could like move it around right we want to shrink it we want to change the scale of it so we would change we would use the hotkey S for scale so s and I'm going to scale that in and I actually don't want proportional editor so I'm going to turn that off and now scale in and just make it a little bit flatter and there you go see just feels a little bit more natural doesn't it looks a little bit closer to what a donut looks like and by the way don't worry if yours doesn't look exactly like this like your lump is a little bit off like some people get a little bit too precious with the G I got to match exactly everything I do like I'm just working on the fly as well so just make what you think looks good maybe you think this is not misshapen enough and you want to add more go for it because it might actually turn turn out better than what mine is now before we move to the next part um how to save how to save blender very very easy you just go save as and you just get one file it's called dot blend um very literal file extension really pushing the limits of what a file extension can be that's almost a word blender anyway um dot blend and that's it and then next time you open it up it's exactly like it it's not like zbrush where you got like four or five different ways to save a project or an object or a tool hate zbrush okay um that's how you save now also finally I will say uh if you need help because I know if you if you're stuck and then you leave a a YouTube comment you might not get a reply uh if you want immediate help I've got a Discord so I'll put the link uh below so there's like a little channel in there where you can just ask for specific uh donut help so if you're having issues uh feel free to jump into that and also guys don't beat yourself up like 3D is definitely a uh has like a steepish learning curve so you're in that that steep slope right now and it's it's really common like a lot of this stuff is very foreign 3D is very unique it's very different to a lot of 2D tools um but don't give up like it's it's definitely achievable to learn and self-learn at home you don't have to go to school you don't have to pay for a tutor um it's really easy to uh to get help online nowadays so do make use of that Discord um post uh comments as well in the YouTube comment if you want to um but I hope hope you stay with it so if you're ready to jump to the next part after you've saved your blend file go ahead click here and I will see you there

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,375,418

Keywords: andrew price, blender guru, blender tutorial, blender

Id: tBpnKTAc5Eo

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023