Blender Crash Course - Beginner's Guide to Using Blender!

[Music] oh hello didn't see you there hey my name's casey ferris i make videos on post-production goodness today we're talking about blender we're gonna jump right in and if you are a beginner like you've never used 3d software at all my goal is to make this simple and easy and fun we're gonna make something really cool today even if you don't know how the heck blender even works let's do it blender is a huge program it can do like a million things and we're not even gonna scratch the surface of all the tons of stuff that you can do in blender but by the end of this i hope that you'll have a pretty good working knowledge of how to make basic things how to render and then you can kind of use that base knowledge to jump off and learn whatever parts of blender you want to learn in this video i'm going to be using blender 3 the alpha version which is out at this point and i don't expect things to change a whole lot when this totally releases that said almost all of this works with any of the later versions of blender so let's get started when you first open up blender this is what it will look like you have this little splash screen that'll let you open up a new file with kind of a layout based on whatever you're after you can also look at your recent files or open a blender file on your system we're just going to go ahead and hit general and this is what you're faced with we're gonna kind of learn the interface as we go because i could spend the whole video just showing you all the buttons on the interface and i don't think it's that helpful you don't really need to use anything until it's time to use it so let's take a look at the viewport first of all in the middle we have this cube and if we just do a normal click and drag we can select things here in the viewport we can right click for a bunch of options but if we middle button mouse click and hold we can orbit around again anybody who's watched one of my resolve videos knows that you should get a three button mouse and especially for blender i think it's really important push down on that scroll wheel and you can rotate around you can also scroll in and out to move closer or further away you can hold down shift and middle button mouse click to move up and down left and right and that's really all you need you can pretty much get anywhere you want by middle button mouse clicking going around zooming in holding down shift moving left and right so definitely get used to doing that in any 3d program you'll work with this kind of view which is the perspective view this looks just like how things do in real life looks 3d but we can also view things like just by the side top bottom so that you can line things up really easily there's a bunch of ways to get into that kind of view but an easy way is to go up here to this little widget and click on one of these letters so if i click on z what that's going to do is show me a top view and it will show right here what we're at top orthographic orthographic means that everything's kind of lined up straight up and down there is no perspective really at all there's no foreshortening or anything like that so you can tell exactly where things are in space we can also view from the side and from the other side and if i middle button mouse click and drag i can switch back to perspective view another way that i like to switch into those like top and side views is hold down alt and you can click and drag with your middle button on your mouse and you can kind of throw the camera up to like you know a top down view but you hold down alt and it switches it and we can kind of rotate it this way alt and middle button mouse in fact i can even turn on the fancy little screencast keys oh look at that thanks blender so now you'll be able to see down here in this corner what i'm doing so yeah alt and middle button mouse will let you kind of pivot around and look top or side which is going to be really helpful basically all the time inside of blender we're spending a lot of time on just moving around because that's like the main thing that you do but enough of this let's make something if you select the cube we can move it rotate it and scale it using these tools over here we click move we have a little move widget here rotate brings up the rotate widget scale brings up the scale widget i'll just hit ctrl z to get rid of all that stuff we did and if you like doing it this way i would actually recommend this little fourth icon here the transform because that combines all of those together which is pretty convenient if you want to move something you just grab the little arrow if you want to rotate grab the circle and to scale you grab the little cubes all kind of built in one and the way that you make stuff in 3d is generally you'll start with a basic shape like this and then you'll mess with it and kind of mold it into the shape that you want so let's say we want to make something like a 2x4 like a regular wooden board well what's the difference between a cube and a wooden board a wooden board is long and skinny and a cube is a cube so let's make the cube long and skinny let's switch over and maybe grab this green scale and just scale this up and i can scale the top down this and maybe i'll move around and scale the x like that and so we're wanting something maybe just a little bit yeah something like that so now this is just kind of a regular board and what's cool about this is that just like if you were going to make something in real life out of some boards you can just duplicate this board and make things out of it so let's take this board and i'm gonna right click on it and go down here to duplicate objects we can also hit shift d and that's gonna duplicate it and when i move my mouse it's going to move this around that's fine but wherever i put this if we move around it kind of just put it wherever it wanted it's really hard to kind of line things up so i'll hit ctrl z and again let's duplicate objects but this time i can move this off and i'll just right click and that will cancel moving it so now i have two of the exact same mesh over each other and i can do something like move the second mesh just on the x-axis here and now we have two boards next to each other and we can do this again this time i'll hit shift d again this will move this wherever it willy-nilly pleases right click and then grab the red arrow and i'll move this over like this and now we have three pieces of wood next to each other this is actually a little bit long so i'm going to select all of these and scale them back down to maybe something like this yeah i like that and now let's imagine we're making a bench so this is like the seat of the bench and if you're talking about like a park bench this might be the seat and then it has a back which is probably also three boards put together so we can select all of these and i can hit shift d again and same thing move somewhere a right click to undo that movement and i'll move this over on the x-axis and then this time i'll grab this green rotator and rotate it up like this so now we have this back and i can move this up move this this way and this is the point where it's a good idea to move into those other views so again i'll hold alt and kind of throw it this way and now we're seeing everything just from the side i'll hold down shift middle button mouse click to move around kind of pan and now i can move this perfectly to be exactly where i want so i want it to be something like that i can hold down alt middle button mouse and kind of switch to the front everything's lined up there i'll switch to the top everything looks good there and now we have our bench pretty cool so if this makes sense to you so far you're going to be just fine because really this is a lot of what we do in blender is you'll take an object mess with it until it's the right shape and then you put it somewhere and kind of line it up based on these orthographic views and this is really fun now because all we have to do is kind of look at this and go okay what else does this need well this isn't a magic bench it needs to have something that kind of connects things to it i mean maybe it is a magic bench that'd be fun but i don't think this is a magic bench right now and again we can just use this same board and change it however we want so i'll hit shift d right click and let's move this out and this time let's rotate this i hold ctrl as i rotate and it will snap in five degree increments and so i'll make sure that's 90 degrees the way that i know is when you have something selected over here in this panel the properties panel it shows you all kinds of things about what you have selected and here under rotation where it says z that's at 90 degrees i could also just select this and type it in there if i wanted to why don't we put this up on its end so again i'll hold ctrl and move this like that again it's 90 degrees right there and let's scale this down a little bit and let's put this roughly where we want it so i'm going to want it like here maybe we'll scale this down a little bit this is going to be just kind of like maybe it's a metal bar or something that kind of holds this you know hold down alt and just switch into this view hold shift middle button mouse to move around and we can kind of size this a little better and i'll just put this into the wood a little bit something maybe like that what's cool too is in this mode if i hit shift d i can move this around and it's just going to move it perfectly up and down or left and right it's not going to push it back in this other axis that's because really from this view i'm only moving stuff in 2d so it's like impossible for me to move it back and forth so that's a nice way to kind of quickly move things up or down or just left and right whatever you want and so i'll rotate this and we'll kind of match that angle here something like that good thing is most of this kind of stuff doesn't really have to be perfect it can be close and so for this we'll just have those intersect like that we'll make this one a little bit longer so that kind of intersects like that so now we have our seat and our back and we'll see one thing this kind of flickers right here that's because these are exactly on the same plane and it's kind of trying to figure out which of these faces should be in front and so one way to help with that is just to move this over just a little bit so i'll just push this this way just a touch and now we don't get that flickering of course we have the seam here depends on whether you care or not for this it's totally fine so now we have this kind of brace i'll just switch back into our side view i also want to make some legs for this so again i'll take this bottom one and hit shift d and let's scale this down a little bit and rotate it to be a leg same thing we'll do something like this shift d to duplicate that one and we'll move this over just like that again let's take these legs i just hold shift to select both of them and i'll move them out just like that so now we have the legs of our bench and the supports and let's grab all of these just holding shift and selecting both of those and again i'll hit shift d and it's going to move it wherever i'll right click and then let's go here and we'll move this over to be on the other side switch to move kind of to the right hold down alt and swipe this way with my middle button mouse and now i'm in this orthographic view and i can kind of make sure these are both roughly in the same space all right so now we have our bench that is pretty cool so this so far has been really basic we've just been using the one cube and duplicating it and moving it around with this little transform gizmo so now let's color this so it isn't just boring gray if you want to change something's color in 3d you're going to have to make a material a material is what this digital thing is made out of just like physical real things are made out of actual materials digital things are made out of digital materials so to do that we're going to go up here to these tabs and find the one called shading and click on shading and what that does is bring up a bunch of intimidating things but really all we're doing is telling blender what this bench is made out of right now if i select any of these cubes and i go over here to the properties these little tabs here all the way down like almost to the bottom is material properties click on that and here we have all of our color and all kinds of fancy things that we're not going to get totally into in this tutorial but one thing we have is base color if we click white right here we can change the color and so i'll make this kind of a brownish and look what happens to our bench our bench becomes brown that's neat and now we have our bench and it's kind of made out of something that sort of looks like wood of course there's ways to make this look like real wood and everything but we're kind of going for a cartoony feel in this tutorial so we're going to leave it like that for now now let's switch back over to our layout tab which is where we were working and oh no our color's gone what do we do actually it's not a problem any time that you have a viewport in blender there are a few different view modes that you have up here in the upper right hand corner of this window you'll see we have this little blue selection here and these four buttons are all about how we're viewing the shading shading is just how 3d things appear and so take a second and click through these buttons the first one is just wireframe second one is what we were working on third one is with some basic color and texture and the fourth one is rendered so this does kind of a low quality render so that you can see the lighting and you can see like more details and stuff we'll get into that in a second but for now we can just use this third one right here material preview so now we have a brown bench now let's say we wanted to make this into a picture so that we can post it on our socials and say what's up everybody i'm learn i'm learning blender check it out anytime that you want to actually make a picture or an animation in blender you have to render it so if we go up to the render menu and click render image this is going to give us an actual image of what we made now why does this look different than what we did well anytime that we render something it's using the camera if i zoom out we see we have a little camera right here it doesn't really look like a camera but this is a camera and blender and if i go over here to the upper right hand side this little button that looks like a little film camera i click on that that will show us the preview of this camera so we're kind of looking through the camera right now we can see what's going to be in the render and what's going to be out of it with this little rectangle and we can move this camera around just like we could a real camera in real life to show what we want to show there's a bunch of different ways to move the camera the best way in my opinion if you go over here next to the little xyz gizmo in the upper right there's a little kind of hidden button there are a lot of these in blender a lot of these little hidden menus if you click on this little menu and go down to view under view lock there's this little checkbox lock camera to view if we click that while we're in camera mode and we move around like we did before we can actually move this camera and so we can adjust this to be just how we want something like that maybe if we don't have this camera to view selected what happens is if we click and drag and kind of move our view it moves out of camera view and it just leaves the camera there we just go back to regular perspective view so we'll switch back to camera view that looks good let's go up to render render image and now we have a rendered image of what we made now if you're wanting to learn blender and you know make all these amazing beautiful things i promise we're going to get to that this is kind of a really basic really quick render just to show you kind of that that has to happen you do have to render something to get an image and we'll work on making this a lot prettier in a little bit but for now practice turning that cube into a board and positioning rotating that board duplicating it to make this bench because things are about to get a lot more interesting all right so now that we've looked at some of the basics of how to scale and rotate and move an existing mesh let's take a look at how to add a mesh there's a bunch of different ways to do it one way is you can go up to the upper left hand corner and click on add and you have a whole list of things that you can add here you can go to mesh and pick whatever kind of mesh you want to start out with so let's go ahead and add a plane and now we have a plane here that's just kind of intersecting everything so we can pretty easily make a floor if we want to but i think it's about time that we start talking about some keyboard shortcuts because honestly in blender you can use this gizmo and if you want to that's okay but i really recommend learning some keyboard shortcuts because blender is really designed to work fast if you know the keyboard shortcuts and it might seem like a lot at first but believe me it's worth it so what i'm going to do is just switch off our gizmo here in fact i'll go up to view here and twirl this down and turn off our toolbar so now we don't even have that toolbar in the way we can also turn off this sidebar if we want to go over to view turn off our sidebar now that's gone and now we're just focused on what's happening in the viewport and a lot of the time this is how we use blender we can select something just by clicking on it and then depending on what keyboard shortcut you hit you can do all of the things that you were normally going to do with these tools and with the transform gizmo so first things first if we want this to be a floor we need to scale this up to be a little bit bigger so i can just hit s for scale and now look what happens to my mouse turns into this little back and forth arrow with the dotted line and that dotted line is the amount of whatever transform i'm doing here so if i pull this out it's going to scale everything out and so if i want this to be scaled up a little bit i can be further away from this little center point and hit s and then i can scale it out a little bit like really finely if i want to scale it out a lot i can just move my mouse really close hit s and then look what happens i can scale it out just a ton and so it's dependent on how far away your mouse is from this 3d cursor this center point here so what i like to do if i'm going to make something really big is just zoom out a little bit move my mouse pretty close to the center and hit s and now i can scale that out and it's really quick because i don't have to have my gizmo here and then go in and make sure that i'm hitting just the right part in fact you can't even really scale everything all at once with this gizmo you kind of have to do one axis at a time and again any of this stuff you can do just with the keyboard shortcuts so we have scale now let's select our bench i'm just going to go right here make sure we have everything selected and if we want to move something up or down you can hit g i think g for like grab so that grabs things and moves them right i can right click to cancel that and it looks like we have our plane selected too i'm gonna hold down shift and select our plane and so now we just have our bench selected and to move this around i can hit g for grab and see i can move this wherever i want and again here's where the keyboard shortcuts really come in if i want to lock this to an axis once i'm in whatever mode i want so g for grab mode i can just hit the letter of whatever axis i want to lock it to so the z axis is up and down so i'll just hit z and that will snap it to only move up and down so i can move this up just so it's right above the floor i can check that by holding alt and swooping over here with the middle button on the mouse and i know my floor is right here on this red line so again i can hit g z and just move this up or down so i don't know maybe we'll do something like that and now i have my bench sitting on the floor so g for grab s for scale and then if we want to rotate something we can select it and hit r for rotate and that will rotate on whatever axis basically you're looking from so i'm kind of looking you know from the upper right and so it's going to make an access like from the camera's view so that's not always what you want that's really nice if you're in one of these orthographic modes because then you can turn it like that but again same thing you can lock this to an axis so if i hit r and then z i can rotate this just on the z axis this kind of thing is what we're going to be using a lot if you want to learn blender i really recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts i know it's kind of a pain at first i was kind of frustrated but once you get used to them oh man it goes so fast so we have our floor i think i'm actually going to make this a little smaller and let's turn this floor green so we're going to go over here to our material which again is in the properties panel this little red checkerboard ball and i'm going to make a new material and this base color we're going to make a kind of a cool nice little green there something like this yeah okay that's a nice saturated cartoony looking kind of grass and now i kind of want a little backdrop here and that's the cool thing about blender is i mean anything that you want to make you can make however you want just like you would in the physical world and so if we wanted a blue background in the real world we would do something like hang a curtain or paint a wall something like that well i could take this floor and i'll hit shift d that's going to duplicate it and just a quick note when i duplicate what it automatically does is turn this into grab mode just like i hit g and so i can lock this to an axis just like i would if i were in grab mode so this red axis here is the x-axis so i can hit x and i can just move this back like this and i can rotate this i'll hit r and i'll rotate it on the y axis which is my left and right and i can turn this up like this i can also rotate this a specific amount just by typing the amount so i can just type 90 and hit enter and that will make that perfect 90 degree angle let's take this background and scale it up with that background selected i'll hit s with my mouse really close to the center point there and then i'll just boost this up so that there's just a huge background like this and maybe we'll bring it back i'll hit g for grab and x to bring this back on the x axis you see how quick that is after a while you get really used to it and you just like let's make this background kind of a sky color if i were to go here and change this color in the material what that's going to do is change this background to blue and it would also change this ground plane to blue because they both share the same material see if i change that it changes them both which is not what we want so what we want to do is make a new material for this plane so with the plane selected i'll go up here to where it says material 1 and i'll hit minus right here and remove the material slot now i can go down here and hit new and this will make material 2 and let's make it blue like a nice sky blue yeah so now we have this nice blue background and our bench and things are starting to look a little bit more like a scene here yeah but it's kind of boring right now we just have some flat stuff why don't we do something cool like make a tree now there are about a thousand different ways to make a tree what we're going to do is make a really cartoony kind of tree and we're going to start with a cube so i could go up and hit add mesh cube but instead of that i'm going to hit shift a shift a is the shortcut for add and let's just click on cube and now we have a cube kind of in the middle of everything so i'm going to bring this cube back on the x-axis i'll hit g and then x and bring this back because that's about where our tree is going to be i'll also bring this up on the z axis g z and bring it up so it's about sitting on the ground there again we can kind of confirm that if you hold down alt swoop to the right with the middle button on the mouse sorry my screencast keys weren't working for a minute but here they are now we can hit g and just move this up a little bit to make sure that's right on the ground so how do we turn this into a tree first of all we're going to think about this as a really kind of a blocky tree the trunk of the tree is going to be almost kind of square that's why we're starting with the cube you could totally start with a cylinder and this works almost the exact same way but how in the world would we turn this into a tree a tree isn't really made of cubes or you know kind of rectangular objects like this bench well this is where we get into something called edit mode right now we've been working in object mode which is pretty much all about moving scaling and rotating existing objects that's really all we've done but of course the power of 3d and modeling is that you can change the actual shape of these things the way that we get into edit mode is we can go up here to the upper left hand corner where it says object mode we can switch this to edit mode like this and what that will do is enter edit mode for whatever object we have selected you can also just hit tab on the keyboard to move between object mode and edit mode so that's the way that i like to do it so anytime that i say enter edit mode it's just tab so in edit mode like i said you can grab different parts of this cube and move it around and you can use the exact same keyboard shortcuts and everything that we were using before i can grab just one point like this and hit g and i can move that one point around in 3d all the points that something's made out of are called vertices one of them is called a vertex and this is really how we make kind of custom stuff is by moving these vertices around so now we have this weird oblong looking thing but not only can we move just the points we can select an edge or a face and the way to switch that is up here in the upper left right next to where it says edit mode right here there's these three little buttons this one's called vertex select you can also switch to edge select and that lets us grab an edge and again if i hit g i can move two vertices at once i can also do face select which will move an entire face like this so it's really important that you get your head around this part because basically the entirety of 3d modeling is moving vertices edges and faces in some way or another so i'll just undo a bunch the name of the game here is moving these vertices and faces and edges almost kind of sculpting this to look somewhat like a tree so first of all let's make this a little bit smaller and we could just switch back into object mode and scale this down and that would be fine but let's stay in edit mode and go to face select by clicking this third button here you can also hit three on your keyboard and i can select one face and orbit around and hold down shift and select another face and another face and i can select all the faces on the outside here not the top or bottom faces then i can hit scale and remember i can scale on x if i hit x or y if i hit y or z if i hit z but i can also scale on everything but an axis by just hitting shift and that letter so if i hit shift z look what happens i can scale this just on the x and y axes at the same time and i can make a tall skinny box like that and the good news is we're still sitting on the floor so we don't have to scale this and move it down and all of that kind of thing so this is going to be the trunk of our tree but how do we make this look not like just a stretched out cube well we can select this top face and what we can really do is kind of duplicate this face and basically just add another section here and that process is called extruding so we could go up here to our little menu here and hit face and select extrude faces or we could also hit e on the keyboard of course i like the keyboard shortcut with that face selected i can hit e and look what happens if i push the mouse up it makes another section here so what this is doing is adding geometry based on that face so now instead of six faces we have six plus four so we have ten faces and each of these new faces is editable just like the ones that we had and really we're just pulling out some new geometry from this cube that we had so i can hit e again and make this a little bit taller and e again and make this a little taller and now we have this big tall cube with some edges in the middle now why in the world would we have these edges in the middle because if we get out of edit mode it just looks like it's one big tall box remember we can edit all of these edges we go to edge mode i can move this around and we can make this shape kind of wonky if we want right so then we're adding a little bit of character to our tree trunk i'll just undo that real quick so this is going to give us a lot of wiggle room later to move this around and kind of mess with it and edit it a little bit i'll hit three on the keyboard to select faces and let's take this top face and we can kind of taper this so i can hit s on the keyboard to scale this and we could taper the top like that and i could go around and shift select all of these faces like this and again scale it down so now it's tapering it even more and i could shift select all of these and hit s on the keyboard and taper it even more so now we have this kind of squarish tree trunk that tapers up at the top like a real tree does and that's really the basic process of how you would make something tapered like that but there is a faster way to do it i'll just undo this real quick one way that we could do this is scale the top like this then i can hit control plus on my numpad and then scale this down and what that will do is control numpad plus adds one ring to our selection basically so if i hit control plus that adds more and minus it takes away a ring right so it's a really easy way to just select the next kind of layer out from whatever face you have selected and so we can do it like that and kind of scale things down control plus scale and that goes a little bit faster so that works pretty well but i want to take a second and have a look at one of the most really useful tools in blender and that's proportional editing up here sort of in the middle of the top of the screen i have this little circle next to this hump if you click on the circle that turns on proportional editing and really what that does is whatever piece that you select in edit mode if i hit g to grab this let's say it draws this little circle around and if i roll back and forth with the mouse wheel it'll make it bigger or smaller and what this circle is is really how much of everything else is going to be affected when i move this the easiest way is just to take a look at it so if i have the circle really small and i move this face around this is what happens i can move it back and forth and it's really sharp right but if i roll back on the scroll wheel it selects more of the mesh and i can kind of move it all at once so this is really great if you want to have something that you know for instance has a soft curve in it like this like a tree might and that works for grabbing and moving things as well as scale i can move this up or down and also rotating so it's a really handy tool to know about so what's cool is we can just grab this top part and without having to you know control plus or control minus select a bunch of different parts of our mesh i can just kind of grab this and move it around and adjust this little threshold circle as i edit this so now we have this nice little curve without a whole lot of work okay this curve looks good i'll click off of this to deselect it and hit tab and now we're back into object mode so we can move this around just as its own object right what we're going to do is duplicate this just like we did with the boards on our bench i'll hit shift d and i can move this over it doesn't really matter where and we're just going to kind of rotate this scale it down and we just want to make a little branch on our tree and i'm just going to kind of eyeball this one it doesn't really matter a whole lot hold down alt and swipe down and that will bring us to our top down view and i can grab this and kind of put this in where i want so now we have the trunk of the tree as well as a little arm like that you can really build some pretty cool stuff just by doing this hit shift d offset it here and i'll just rotate this and scale it grab it kind of bring it around like that so now we have this little branch and all we had to do was model one part of this now we want these to be brown so let's go over here to our properties and here under the material properties we'll browse our material and i'll just grab this brown material and i'll just select all of these and select that brown material and we have our brown little tree but we want this to be kind of a happy cartoony tree right with some nice big green puffy leaves here so let's add another primitive and we'll hit shift a then we can add any kind of mesh we want and the kind of mesh i'm going to look for is called an icosphere an icosphere is just a sphere that's made out of triangles and it's really good for this kind of low poly cartoony kind of look click that i'll hit g and just bring this out to where we can see it see look at that that's kind of kind of nice looks like a big multi-sided die and just in object mode here we can hit shift and maybe bring this up i'll hold down alt and swipe with my middle button on my mouse to bring me into one of our side views here and we can kind of position this and scale it to be about right for tree hold down alt and swipe again with my middle button on my mouse and that's looking pretty cool let's grab this i'll hit shift d and move this over scale it up s to scale g to grab then we're having a pretty good time here grab this and move it down a little bit pretty cool maybe we'll move this over just a little bit i'll hit shift d and duplicate it and we'll scale this down a little just so we have this kind of poofy look to our tree maybe something like that i think that looks nice and really that's pretty close to what we want for our tree i can grab each of these and change this to a green material now we have our nice green tree but like we've learned if we want to make this a little bit less perfect we can hit tab and go into edit mode and i'll hit one on the keyboard to select our different vertices and we can take what we've learned with our proportional editing so we still have that on up here i can hit g to grab and roll back and forth on my mouse to select different parts of this and the bigger the circle the more of the tree i can kind of stretch out here and this is perfect for stuff like this that doesn't really have to be exact you can really kind of just take it and stretch it to be a little bit more interesting yeah i like that a lot hit tab to come out of edit mode select this new one hit tab to get back into edit mode and again i'm just grabbing little pieces here just randomly and dragging them around so that we don't have those perfect spheres tab out tab back in on this one and again just picking random little points and my proportional editing circle really big there we go now we have our cool little tree that's pretty awesome our scene's looking pretty nice i think having this flat part down here is a little bit boring so again we're going to take what we've learned so far with the ico spheres and moving this around and we're going to make a floating island this is going to be pretty cool i think what we'll do is just get rid of this plane i'll just hit delete and hit shift a and we're gonna make another icosphere just like that and let's make this really big i'll just hit s for scale and make this really big and then z to scale this just on z and we'll squish this down something like that so now we have this flat little disk i hold down alt middle button swipe to the right g to grab and we'll just position this how we think might be good alt middle button swipe that looks pretty good so now this is sort of in the middle of our island and let's move our bench back a little bit closer to the tree so i'm going to drag and just select everything i can here make sure it's all selected i make sure to shift select to deselect our island and now we have everything for the bench selected and i could hit g and just move this around like this but i think before we do that i'm going to add this to a collection a collection is basically just a group of different objects inside of blender with everything from my bench selected i'm going to right click anywhere on this object and hit move to collection you can also hit m on the keyboard and let's select a new collection and we'll call this bench i'll hit ok and now anytime that we want to select all of these together i can just go over here to the outliner and i can right click on bench and hit select objects and now i have everything selected again now let's take this and move this back towards the tree there's a bunch of different ways to do this again i think i'll just alt little button swipe and hit g grab this and kind of put it back here maybe we'll even rotate it a little bit there now let's take a look and make sure it's looking nice it's okay if it's in the ground a little bit for this we just don't want it to be hovering above the ground that looks pretty nice so now let's take a look at our island again and let's take this and mess with it kind of like we did with the trees with this selected i'll hit tab and i can grab any of these vertices and i'll just kind of start to move these around i just want to make this a little bit different looking so it's just not obviously a squished down sphere like this and maybe what we'll do is hit control plus on the numpad and select just the bottom here but this time i think i'll take off the proportional editing and go up here and click this you can also just hit o on the keyboard and the reason i want to take this off is because i want to just move the bottom i don't want to move the top so i'll hit g and then z and just make this a little bit thicker maybe even i'll hit s and z to kind of scale this up a little bit and now we have our island kind of growing and this is looking pretty nice so far just pull some more of these vertices here oh what happened here just bring that back down and now we have our island looking a little bit better let's select our island we'll go over to our material properties and let's make that green and now we see where we're going with this right now let's add a little bit of dirt kind of under this so it has sort of a green top and some dirt coming out from the bottom there's a million ways to do this what we might try is hit shift d and then just right click and so what i've made is a duplicate and then g z to bring this down now we have a duplicate here and we'll scale this down a little bit on all axes and then scale it up on the z axis by hitting s and then z like this and this time let's make this brown and g z to move this up now we can kind of see the little ridges here maybe i'll scale that down just a little more and let's rotate it on the z-axis just to where that's nice yours is probably going to be a little different than mine but something like that looks pretty cool it's kind of this little floating island and i think just to make this a little bit more kind of crumbly i'll hit shift a and make a new icosphere like this again let's scale this up a little bit select it and we'll hit g and just kind of put this down below for now and we're just going to roughen this up a little bit but this time we're going to do this a really cool way we're still going to select this and hit tab to get into edit mode select a vertice we can hit o to turn on our proportional editing but here where there's this little hump there's a little drop down menu and the last one here is random what that's going to do is apply whatever you're doing to random parts of the mesh that are within this circle so if i hit g and i'm moving this around it moves random parts of this around so i can kind of pick a piece and then move it pick a piece and then move it pick a piece and then move it and it sort of randomly just kind of decides which ones get moved as well so that's a great way to roughen things up really quickly just like that and maybe we'll switch back to smooth and we'll grab just the top of this and hit s for scale and now i can kind of scale that up like that that's a pretty cool way to make a little chunk here and we can scale and move this shift d to duplicate r to rotate s to scale and we can kind of just start to fill this in with these little pieces i can even take one and you know make it more pointy and we'll turn all of these brown just like that now we have our kind of crumbly floating island it looks pretty nice now let's take a look at adding a sidewalk kind of right in front of this bench we've learned a few different ways that we can do this but we're going to start with a plane and then we're going to talk about something called modifiers so i'll hit shift a to add a mesh and we'll select plane and there we have it here i'll hit g to grab it and we'll just kind of put this up here a little bit i'll hold down alt and my middle button mouse and kind of swipe around to my different views here and we can have this above things right now it's totally fine that's actually just fine so now what we're really going to do is make the top face of a sidewalk and we want it to sort of go in a curve across here the way i like to do this is select the plane and hit tab on the keyboard and we're gonna go to edge select which you can go up here and pick edges from these three little buttons up here or you can also hit two on the keyboard and now we can select an edge if i hit g to grab this i can move this around i'll make sure to turn off our proportional editing and i can adjust this edge all at once and if i hit e on the keyboard i can extrude this just like we did with the tree and i can continue to hit e and extrude this over off of the island now let's say i want to curve this so that it aligns with the edge of this island i can select this edge and i'll turn back on my proportional editing like this and hit r on the keyboard and i can roll back and forth on my mouse and as i change this it's going to change the curvature of our sidewalk and i'll hit g to grab it and i can just put this back kind of where it's supposed to be i'll have that overlap just a little bit okay that's one side we'll select the other side i'll hit o to turn off our proportional editing again and hit e to extrude e to extrude p to extrude e to extrude again i'll select that last edge hit o to turn on proportional editing again r for rotate and we'll rotate this like this g to grab and there's our little sidewalk here maybe we'll grab this little edge and move it i'll hit oh turn off proportional editing and hit g and kind of move this around so that's pretty good for our sidewalk but it's kind of floating in the air and it's also flat a sidewalk in real life isn't actually perfectly paper thin like this it has some thickness and what we could do to fix that would be to go into edit mode hit tab and i could hit three on the keyboard or click this little button up here to select our faces and i could shift select all these faces i could also just hit a on the keyboard to select them all and i could hit e to extrude these faces up and give this sidewalk some thickness like this that is a totally valid way to do that but because we're going to be messing with the slope here it might be easier to use something called a modifier now a modifier is basically like a filter that you put on a 3d mesh that will change the way that it acts or looks in real time so i'm going to hit control z just to go back to my paper thin sidewalk here and this time i'm going to select the sidewalk and i'll go over here to the properties and there's a little icon that looks like a wrench this is going to list all of the modifiers for whatever we have selected so up here i'll say add modifier and there's a bunch of different modifiers that you can explore they all do kinds of interesting things the great news is you don't have to know all of them it's fun to get in here and play around but right now we're just going to use solidify so i'll click on solidify and what this is going to do is pretty much what we just did with extruding the faces if we zoom in here we can kind of see these faces are thicker now and so we can take this thickness and boost that up and that will do kind of the same thing so why in the world would we use this versus just extruding well if we have our object selected and we hit tab to go into edit mode we can see that the only actual object that exists is the one that we had this thickness here this is all just kind of a result of the filter that we're putting on here and so if we change our original mesh like i can just select a face and hit g to grab and move this around it's going to add thickness based on whatever that mesh looks like so if i change this around it's going to make the change and then apply the thickness if i rotate this it's going to add the thickness after it's rotated so this is great for something like this that you want to have this kind of thickness but you're going to be changing it around a lot and you don't want to worry about you know selecting all of the edges or all of the faces on this side as well as this side and making sure that you have everything selected perfectly i can just switch back to say edge mode by hitting two on the keyboard and i can grab just these top edges and move them down let's say i'll just hit g and then z and i'm just going to push this down to where it's just intersecting that green grass grab this g z push it down maybe i'll move it over here a little bit to where it's really just starting to be on top of the green grass gz gz you could also use proportional editing to mess with this but we can move these and rotate them without worrying about messing with the bottom edges so it's kind of a nice way to work so again let's grab all of these g z and we'll push that down until it just starts to intersect that green grass jay-z now we can push that down and that thickness is still uniform throughout our whole sidewalk because we're making that sidewalk curve and then we're adding the thickness and the cool thing is at any point i can just move this number around and i can make this a thicker sidewalk or a thinner sidewalk i can even push it up instead of down and i don't have to worry about selecting the specific faces or anything like that i can hit tab to come out and that's essentially the way that modifiers work is they are applied after you make your geometry and you can even stack multiple modifiers there are modifiers that duplicate things and you know align them to a grid there's ones that mirror things there's all kinds of cool ways that it can affect your geometry and you don't have to do all the work yourself really nice tool now that we have our sidewalk let's change the material again over here in the properties this little second to last icon material properties let's click on new and for base color we'll just make this kind of a gray all right now we have our gray sidewalk now let's make a little pond and by this point we've really learned a lot of the major tools for modeling so we're going to start moving just a little bit faster on some of these parts so let's say we want this kind of circular pond thing here almost like a fountain i'll hit shift a to add the closest kind of shape to that which i think could be a cylinder there we go and when you add a new mesh down here in the lower left-hand corner there's this little pop-up and this happens with basically anything that you do in blender if you twirl this up this gives you a little bit of options for what you just did so we can do something like change the radius change the amount of vertices for our cylinder and so if you're ever wondering how to adjust something specifically that is the way to do it let's bring this depth down a little bit maybe a little bigger something like that we can always scale this and move this later but it's nice to kind of start with a pretty close shape to what we want so let's grab this again i'll hold down alt and middle button swipe to kind of view this from different angles i'll hit g to place this and i think it's a pretty good size let's view it from the top just grab this and maybe put it right here again we want to make sure that this is on or below the grass because the grass can kind of overlap it a little bit but it's not going to be floating above the grass right so something like that is just fine for what we're doing and now what we want to do is turn this into a circular wall with some water inside of it so again i'll make sure this is selected hit tab on the keyboard and let's select our top face which we'll have to do by hitting three and clicking on the top and we want this same basic shape but we're going to want kind of a ring around here and we're going to add this ring in kind of a specific way one one way that we could do this is hit e to extrude and then scale this like this and now we have that ring and we can kind of bring this back down like that but that is a few different steps that we can kind of all do all at once with an inset so an inset is sort of like an extrude but the new face kind of just stays on the same face that you are in setting so if i hit i on the keyboard that'll inset this and so now we have that wall and from there i can hit e to extrude and push this down and i'll push it down just a little bit and now we have our wall with our face here which we're going to use for water now we have a problem this sidewalk is going through our pond here and we can fix that a few different ways first thing i'll do is hit tab to get out of edit mode we could change the geometry of our sidewalk to go around this wall we could change the geometry of our pond to not intersect the sidewalk or we can move the pond and it doesn't really matter where the pond is so i'm just gonna move the pond let g and just make sure that that's not on the inside of the wall it can be in the wall for our purposes like that because for all we know it goes up against it and that's how they kind of poured the concrete we just don't want it to be clipping through it so that works just fine and now let's add our colors let's select our pond and go over here to our materials and here with this little ball click on that and i'll select our existing material our gray one and that's good but we have a problem we want the inside of this to look like water which for our stylized purposes is going to be blue so how do we add multiple materials to one mesh if we hit tab on the keyboard we can go into edit mode and we can select specific parts of the mesh i'm in face mode i can select this face and over here in our materials i'll hit this plus button what that'll do is add another material slot to our mesh so that we're just telling blender that this mesh has two materials and now we can select a material like our sky material but after we have that selected we need to hit assign with these faces selected so i'll just hit assign and now we have our water all right looking pretty good we're starting to run into a couple problems here and the main one i would say is that the edges of this looks really sharp nothing in the world is really this sharp other than a knife so we want to kind of soften these edges a little bit and again there's a ton of different ways to do that one way that i like to work is with a modifier called bevel what a bevel does is just take all of the edges and kind of averages them out it turns each edge into two edges so that the transition between these two faces is a little less harsh so let's select our pond and go over to our modifier properties this is the same place where we added the solidify modifier to our sidewalk and here under add modifier we're going to find a modifier called bevel and let's click on that and what that will do is soften all of those corners and so now it's a little bit more round and the cool thing again is we can change how this looks by just messing with this amount and we can move it back and forth i can hold down shift to move really slow and i'll start at zero and just push this up a little bit to maybe like 0.24 and now we have just a little bit nicer edges there on the top that's nice it kind of goes along with our style and again because this is a modifier i can turn this on or off whenever i want i can go up here to this little monitor and kind of preview this on or off to see the difference that it's making so this is a really nice way to work if you can now something to remember about modifiers is that they're added after your mesh is drawn and so however you draw your mesh is going to have the modifier applied to it afterwards and why i say that is because blender and a lot of 3d programs kind of have this thing called history if i hit shift a and make a cube i'll bring this over here when we brought this cube in it was made a certain size and shape and it was put at a specific place in the world after i moved it anytime that blender redraws this cube it's going to make this a certain size and shape and then move it where i moved it if i go over to the properties here and click this little orange button we can see the location is nine negative four negative one if i were to switch these back to zero it goes back to where it originally came in and everything is pretty much relative to that point this might not make sense here for a second but this is a really important concept that you know about blender because it will seriously mess you up if i were to move this over like this and i wanted that to be its new home what i could do is apply those transformations and then basically tell blender that no this cube lives here right now its location should be zero zero zero so to apply something i can go up to object apply and then we can decide whatever we want to do usually i can just hit all transforms and now if we look over here in the properties we're at zero 0 0. this is especially important for modifiers because if i were to take this cube and apply a modifier to it right now like go over to the wrench and say add modifier bevel that's going to bevel all of my edges all the same right let's duplicate this i'll hit shift d and just move this over and let's take the bevel modifier off and now let's say i want to scale this up i want this to be taller i can hit s z and scale that up and a couple things are happening one is that it's scaling from way over there this is where its origin point is and so if i'm moving this around if i'm scaling it if i'm rotating it it's rotating from like far away that's because we haven't applied the transforms also if i were to add that bevel modifier to it add modifier bevel look what happens these side edges are right but look at the top it's all weird because my scale has changed and my location and everything has changed it messes with how the modifier works so if we do want something that's this tall like this we need to apply the transformations first i can select this go up to object apply all transforms and now if we select this and go over to our properties here our location is zero our rotation is 0 and our scale is at 1. so now if i apply this modifier all the edges look like they actually work right so that's a really really important thing is that if you move something around and you're going to apply a modifier to it or if really you're going to change it a lot you're pretty sure it's going to kind of end up there but you're going to mess with it it's good to apply those transformations so the reason we say that is because especially this bench if we select any of these boards on the bench and we go over here to our properties under transform properties look at this we have location a bunch of numbers rotation a bunch of numbers scales all weird if we were to apply something like a bevel if we want to make this wood a little bit have softer edges if we went over and applied a bevel modifier right now look at it it's like weird it's not quite what we want it's still sharp on the edges it's kind of elongated and strange so all we need to do is apply those transformations which you can also hit ctrl a and just say all transforms and now when we add the modifier bevel it comes in nicely and of course we can adjust that modifier to be something that makes sense look at that it's so nice look at that bevel modifier gotta love a good bevel modifier so since we're at the bench why don't we just grab all of the bench i can do that over here in my outliner i can right click on bench and say select objects that's gonna select all the parts of the bench i'll hit ctrl a to apply the transforms and then since we're pretty much just going to use this as one thing we can just join this and actually it looks like we have quite a few different objects that are in our bench collection that really shouldn't be so we have our pond and our ico spheres down here and our sidewalk so let's just grab those and i can hit m on the keyboard to move these to a different collection and we'll just say scene collection that'll bring it back to the root of the scene and we'll right click and select our objects in our bench make sure we don't have anything else selected looks like it's just our bench so that's good and i think what i'm actually going to do at this point is just join these all together because we're really probably just going to be moving the bench all together so we might as well just make this all one mesh so to join these together i can just hit ctrl j and that will join everything in our bench and so i can just select that really easily and if we move it around it moves the whole bench again let's make sure that our transforms are applied i'll hit ctrl a all transforms and then we'll go over and add our modifier add modifier bevel and that's going to bevel everything in our bench we probably don't want it quite this beveled so we'll take this amount down i'll hold down shift to really dial that in yeah somewhere in there now we have our nice looking beveled bench man that makes a big difference doesn't it we can also apply modifiers to other modifiers but again i'm going to make sure we have our transforms applied for our sidewalk i'll hit ctrl a and apply all transforms and then we can go up here to our modifiers and say add modifier bevel and we can bevel our sidewalk that looks pretty nice just adjust that to be tasteful and there we have it and depending on how crazy we want to get we could bevel the tree i'll just select all of these and hit ctrl j to join them all hit ctrl a to apply all the transforms and again we'll use our bevel modifier and push this up so it's just a little bit nicer on the eyes and that's the thing also with this cartoon look is that we have these kind of faces here almost like things are made out of paper and i do kind of want to keep that so you can kind of decide whether you want to do the bevel on the tree or not i think i might actually like it without it so i'll take the bevel off kind of like that look but i do like the bevel on the bench now let's make some kind of big boulders some little rocks here and we could certainly do this with an ico sphere that would be a great way to do it but i just want to show you a different kind of modifier so let's hit shift a and we're going to add a cube here we have our cube and i'll just put this here for now and with our cube selected go over to our modifiers and this time let's select the subdivision surface what that's going to do is divide each face and each edge into two and then it's going to kind of average out the shape and we can start like this where we have big faces we can also push up this level's viewport to two and now we have it a little bit more round kind of depends on what you're going for it's also important to realize that there's levels for viewport and levels for the render generally i like to keep these the same unless there's some kind of performance problem like where it's just hard to navigate because i want to know exactly what it's going to look like in the render but you can do something like have this at one and have the render before if you want to do some really high res kind of smoothing but for what we're doing let's just go two and two and now because we have a modifier on this i can hit tab and look we're actually adjusting this cube so i can hit one on the keyboard and grab the vertices and move them around and look how it stretches that kind of ball so we could make some interesting little rocks just using these four points on the cube making these kind of bolder things again if i hit tab then we have our boulder and maybe we'll have one kind of by the bench like this maybe i'll scale it up a little bit then we can select that and shift d scale it move it around rotate to make a different rock and if we hit tab we can go in here on our cube and move the vertices around to give this a little bit of a different shape that's just another way that you can make those kind of shapes you don't always have to start with something like an icosphere in fact a lot of high-res stuff is made in this exact way is you create kind of a lower quality version of something and then you add a subdivision modifier to it and adjust things to make it look the way that you want with that kind of filter selected let's duplicate our rock i'll hit shift d and move this over here and let's make a really different kind of rock and we can use this same one but i'll show you another cool trick for modeling things tab to enter or edit mode and maybe i'll put this back to looking sort of like a cube we've done a little bit of adding geometry using an extrude to take a face and kind of duplicate it and push it out as well as inset on the pond but you can also kind of cut faces and just like split them to add a little bit more detail what we're going to do here is add a edge loop and all that is is just it kind of draws a loop just like you were to take a marker and just draw a perfect loop around your shape we're going to do that here i'll hit ctrl r on the keyboard i like to remember that by like oh i'm going to add a ring to it like add another ring but it's called an edge loop and i can left click to add this loop and now we have this cube kind of split in two and now we're in this mode where we kind of select where the loop goes because it was added in the middle by default but we could push that to the side if we wanted to or we can right click and just leave it in the middle so now because we have this modifier on it we can change these vertices around and get a little bit more interesting shape and again if we wanted to add a little bit more geometry i could hit ctrl r and it'll make a ring perpendicular to whatever edge i'm mousing over and so maybe we'll do this edge like this and if i push this up or down we get these different kind of shapes so maybe i'll push it down towards the bottom and i can even take this loop and hit s on the keyboard and scale it so i can make this a little bit chunkier on the bottom you know now it's a chunky rock and i can hit tab to get out of edit mode and now we have this kind of bigger bigger bulgier rock here and remember a lot of this magic is coming from the modifier which if i select this and turn off our modifier this is what we're really working on and we're just kind of averaging out all those vertices to make this smoother rock we can even take down these levels at any point if we want to if we want to make a little bit more faceted rock like that maybe that's what we want that's the cool thing is you know we're making this little world and it can be absolutely anything bob ross was right so move this over scale it down maybe just kind of put this here maybe we'll maybe we'll give it a little friend yeah and we'll just make sure that that's touching the ground now we have our little rocks we can go into our material and we'll select our gray material for the rocks you could even make them a different color if you wanted to but there's our rocks pretty cool now let's add some little leaves coming off of this tree i think it's always cool to have something kind of floating in the air gives a little bit more depth to things and what we're going to do is just just straight up cheat we're going to make things that sort of look like leaves and just place them over here not doing anything fancy just given the illusion of something fancy so i'll hit shift a to add a new mesh and this time we'll just add a plane and i'll bring this up grab this on the z axis and just bring this up a little bit so we can look at it and i want a little bit more detail on this which there's a bunch of different ways to do this but if we hit tab and go into edit mode right click on this face we can select subdivide and that will just split this to be twice the resolution and this is probably just fine for our leaf let's hold down alt and middle button and drag up to go to the top view and now we can just grab these vertices and i want to just make this really roughly sort of a leaf shape yeah maybe something like that select all these vertices and scale them if i wanted to just sort of like a leaf it really doesn't matter that much because we're not really going to see much detail on here let's also take maybe this vertice and turn on proportional editing and hit g with a great big circle and just kind of move this around here move it up and down make a little smaller circle here so now it kind of just looks like it's floppy leaf right i'll hit tab to get out of edit mode we'll select our leaf let's make it green i'll go over to the material properties in the inspector and just select our green material hold down alt and swipe with my middle button and let's grab this and move this over and scale it down hold down alt middle button swipe over here and move this sort of close to the tree just look at it from all three directions it's going to have to be smaller yeah so now we have the leaf kind of floating out there next to the tree like if it's really windy and the wind's pushing this way that's what we're after what we're going to do is just duplicate this and kind of make a few different leaves first let's rotate it a little bit like that and i'll hit shift d to duplicate this a few times and we'll kind of push these out in a line and now let's take a couple of these and just rotate them randomly there are a lot of different ways that you can do something like this in blender you can use particle systems and all kinds of crazy stuff but for something quick like this man it's just it's fine to do it this way so now we have all these little leaves kind of coming off let's make a few of them a little bigger i'll just hold down shift and scale a couple of them scale a couple down so now we have these different leaves with different rotations different scales kind of coming off of the tree like that i think maybe also i'll just grab a couple and put them really close to the tree shift d so that they're kind of really kind of coming off of the tree that looks cool and it's really up to you kind of how you want to place these but i don't really think you can do it wrong looks pretty cool we have our scene mostly finished the one thing i want to do is add a little sign here just like you would see at the park you know that tells you not to do something or to do something or that wildlife's endangered or whatever so let's start by modeling the sign and by this point we should have a basic idea of how that would work right here's a little reference a sign really has two parts it has the poll and then it has the actual sign part this sign has do parts but you get the idea we need a poll and assign part and with modeling again we always pick whatever the closest kind of basic mesh is to each of these and so we can look at this and decide so let's say this pole that could either be just a really tall cube or it could be a cylinder and this is just a rectangle that could either be a plane or if we want a little bit of thickness we could make a plane and extrude it make a plane and use a solidify modifier we could make a cube and then make it really wide and tall and not have much depth and that would work too and really whatever you decide is fine it's not really that important as long as you get where you're going so i think what i'll do is hit shift a and let's make a cylinder and because this is going to be a little tiny cylinder we probably don't need 32 sides we can go down here in our history and just take this down to like i don't know eight sides maybe enough so it looks round without having to be just way overkill again let's make the radius really small and the depth really long so now we have this thing that already looks kind of like a pole that's good and the advantage of changing stuff here in the history is we don't have to apply our transformations this is drawing it like that and then it's not scaling it or moving it or anything like that it's just starting that way which if you're going to add modifiers is a big deal it's not actually that big a deal in this case because we're just going to kind of have this be its own thing i'll hit g and move this sort of where we want the sign swipe with my middle button holding alt and i'll move this over so the signs like right here let's just start with it right there now does this look right i feel like it's still a little big so i am going to scale this down a little bit and move this on the z axis and now we have our little pole so now let's make the actual sign part and i think what i'll do is go to our front view here like this and i'll hit shift a and make a plane like this and it puts the plane right here but what we actually want to do is have that plane kind of facing the camera and so we can go into the history of the plane rotation on the y-axis let's say 90 all right and that just tilts that towards us and i can hit g to move this back and forth here and i'm going to make this about the right size so i'll scale it down scale it on the z axis and now we have our little sign like this and kind of make sure this is the right shape now we have that lined up with our sign but it's not lined up on this axis that's okay we'll just swap over hit g and put this right where it's supposed to be and again for this i think um maybe i'll just hit tab and go into the edit mode hit three to select faces and hit e to extrude and make this a little bit thicker make sure my proportional editing is off and i'll grab this and push this back to where it's about about sign shaped hit tab to get out of edit mode select this and hit g and x to move this back on the x-axis make sure that's just touching okay it's a pretty good little sign i like it so now we have to decide what is the sign made out of well the pole let's say is made out of wood and so we can use our material we've been using for wood this brown material and then the sine we're actually going to do something really cool here we're going to apply a texture to this sign so that the sign actually says something and this is pretty much how things work in 3d is if you want there to be a picture or you know text or you want something to be basically not just one color you apply a picture to it and it kind of wraps around it sort of like you're wrapping it in wrapping paper and doing that is a huge topic which we're not going to get totally into but we are going to do a really basic version of it right now we're going to select this sign and we're going to make a new material so over here in the materials let's just click on new and i'm going to actually rename this for once sign m for sign material and here under base color instead of using a color i'm going to click on this little yellow dot and we're going to go and load an image texture that's going to bring up a little pop-up here and we can click open and tell it where our texture is there's a texture here called ducksign.png which i'll include in the description and let's hit open image now what it does is it applies this texture to our plane and it happened to work out to where it sort of makes sense but the texture's not quite right it's sideways so how do we adjust that well with our object selected we can go up here to the top part of our interface and there's a bunch of tabs here and each of these tabs is just a workspace that is designed to help with whatever task you want to do and the one that we want to click on is uv editing uvs are basically the way to tell 3d things where to put a texture you can think of like the coordinates for a texture that is being wrapped around something and we have two panels now the left one is our uv editor proper and the one on the right is our normal 3d view which is all gray because up here in the upper right hand corner we are on solid mode and we really should be in material preview mode so now we can see all of our colors and everything we can zoom in here to our sign and we can definitely see things are not right so how do we use this new crazy layout to adjust where this picture goes if we select the object that we want to adjust and hit tab on the keyboard to get into edit mode you can select whatever parts you want just like you would normally if you were going to move a face around i can select this face and in this left hand side all of my normal controls that i would use here in the viewport work here on the left and if i select a face and hit g on the keyboard on the left here i can move that shape around here in the uv editor and basically tell it what part of the texture i want it to use so our main problem is that this is facing the wrong way and so i can rotate this just like i would normally i can hit r and i can hold down control to snap it to a certain angle and i can just turn this 90 degrees and left click and now we have please feed the ducks that's great if we look at the sign though i feel like it's maybe just a little bit squeezed so again we can select this front face and then i can hit s to scale this up and down and it's kind of backwards because really we're it's almost like we're kind of cropping this and so i'm going to scale this just on the x-axis which in the uv editor is left and right and as i move this back and forth i can see it update in the preview there so i don't know something like that great so now we have our sign and it says please feed the ducks it's the opposite of all the other signs where you you don't want them to feed the ducks they're actually happy about it that's our sign that's pretty awesome but if we go over here to the other side we can see that we still have this back side that doesn't look right at all so if i select this i can actually just scale this face in the uv editor and just select something that's yellow doesn't really matter wherever and now we just have that plain yellow in the back and then the front says please feed the ducks that's great if you're having trouble to where if you select a face and it doesn't select it over here there's a special little button in the upper left hand corner there's this little these two little arrows make sure that that's blue because anything that you select here in the viewport is going to be selected in the uv editor which is almost always what you want so you can select whatever face you want and scale and move and everything to your heart's content so that's basically how you would apply a texture to something this is a very simple easy to apply texture and even if you don't quite get it at this point it's really okay because the more that you work with this the more you'll really understand it but if you kind of think about if if this were a piece of paper and you were going to wrap this piece of paper around around our sign what pieces of paper would go where that's kind of how i like to think of it so now we have their please feed the duck sign and this is looking nice i'm gonna go back over to our layout tab in the very upper left this is where we've been the whole time and we are looking pretty good now let's talk about one of the most uh rewarding and also intimidating parts of 3d which is lighting lighting pretty much makes or breaks your renders you can make something that looks really cool and not have great lighting and it won't look cool that's the same with video production with cinematography everything lighting is very important the good thing is this is a pretty simple little project and we're going to do a pretty simple lighting setup the first thing that you might notice is you might have this little light bulb here i'm just going to hit delete on the keyboard to get rid of that so now we have no lights in our scene at all and if we were to go over to the upper right hand corner and click on this fourth little ball up here that will preview our lighting this is what our render is roughly going to look like and we don't have any lights and so it looks really dark the reason we have lighting at all is because this kind of gray space is sort of helping add a little bit of ambient light to things but again if we were to go up and hit render image it's pretty dark so to add lights to things you just hit shift a just like you add anything and we'll go down to light and there are four different kinds of lights a point light is just light that comes from one little point makes sense thank you for subscribing and i move this around it's something like a little candle almost it just puts light right there and if we go over to the properties here where the material properties usually are we have this little light bulb and these are all the options for the light so it comes in at 10 watts which is usually not enough so maybe if we make this 100 watt light bulb there we have our little light bulb going on and we can add lights that way this is great for little accents little things that you might want to add just to kind of pop little parts but for a big scene like this you'll generally want to use a different kind of light if we go over here to the light properties you can actually just change the type of light so if i hit sun what that does is make a giant directional light right now it's coming from the very top and strength is at 100 because i was at 100 watts before so let's make this strength at one and now we have more of a reasonable kind of sunlight and again we can move and scale and adjust this just like we do anything like i can rotate this with r and now look oh it's sunset oh yeah it's noon and sunrise because that's how time works apparently you can even grab this little yellow widget and kind of move things around so we can have that as a sunlight there's also a light called a spotlight so if we click on that that comes from a specific point but it goes in a special direction and if we boost up the power to i don't know like a thousand watts then we can really control where that light goes with the different properties here and adjust the spotlight shape and how soft it is that's a really nice way to kind of cast a little light on things but what i like to do actually in this kind of scene is use an area light an area light is if we click on that it's just a great big plane that emits light and i like that because it gives a big nice soft kind of diffused light just like you would in real life you'd want to use like a soft box or you know a great big silk or something to make things look really soft and nice you can do that in blender too and so i'll boost up the size a little bit and as you boost up the size the shadows get a lot softer so i'm going to boost this size like way up so this is just a really nice soft light and we'll move this over here a little bit move the power up a little bit let's do i don't know five thousand i think we'll also light this sort of from the back i feel like that generally looks pretty good just go up top here grab this and put it in the back rotate it scale it up now we have this soft light kind of coming from the back let's make this a little more powerful maybe 10 000. now it sort of looks like a nighttime scene we can make this color just a little warmer that'll help with a little bit so this is really cool and we can play around with lighting a bunch but what's really going to sell this what really makes a big difference with lighting in 3d is if you use an hdri an hdri is a high dynamic range image and really what it means is you map an image to the inside of a sphere and you put this whole thing inside of the sphere so that wherever you turn it looks like you're looking out you know you can see the sky above you you can see the ground below you that kind of thing you can see a little bit of a preview of that if we go over to the shading tab which is up here in sort of the upper middle click on this and we move around we have this kind of environment map here and this isn't really part of our scene it's just kind of a preview but this is the kind of thing that really helps things look nice so we're going to add one of those but before we do that we're going to switch our renderer right now we're using a renderer called evie and by renderer i mean just the way that it calculates light and reflections and all of that stuff when we actually render out something it does it in a certain way and we're just going to change the way that it does that real quick so over here in the properties this first little tab right here it says render engine right now it's using eevee like the pokemon ev and what ev is for is stuff that's supposed to kind of look like a video game and it's whole thing is that it renders really fast so you can render it in almost real time depending on your computer but for something really high quality you want to look really nice generally you'd switch the render over to cycles cycles you can immediately see a difference of how nice the shadows and everything look how nice the reflections look it's a really big difference and when you move around in the viewport with this render preview shading on it gets a little bit fuzzy that's because it's trying to show you basically what's happening without worrying about a ton of detail and then when you let go of your mouse it starts building a little bit more detail to show you kind of what it's going to be like now that we're in cycles i'll switch my device from cpu to gpu that will make things a little bit faster and i'm going to go down to this fifth little icon which is called world properties and here under surface under color i'm going to click on this yellow dot and select environment texture it's going to turn pink and blue because we don't have an environment texture on there yet but if we click open i'm going to select an hdr called evening meadow which i'll put a link in the description to this and hit open and what this will do is load this meadow thing and look at look at the huge difference here look at the difference with that hdri on how awesome that looks compared to without it this is really the difference between something that looks pretty good and something that looks awesome now that we have that we can look at our light see what our lights doing and that's adding just a little bit of a halo kind of behind stuff which i think looks nice you can adjust this however you like maybe we'll make this a little bit warmer as well maybe we'll make it a little bit brighter now we have that kind of nice warm feeling behind it and now it's time to set up our render so to set up our camera properly for rendering really the easiest way to do that is just in this view if we look through the camera and the way to do that is here on the upper right hand part of our view we have this little camera icon you can also hit numpad zero and now we're looking through the actual camera but if we were to move around like we normally would in the viewport we kind of come out of camera view and so what we can do is when we're in camera view like this we can click on this little tiny arrow and that opens up this little menu and here under view we're going to select lock camera to view what that's going to do is make it so that this camera stays where our view is and so we're actually just moving the camera around while we orbit our view and so this is a great way to position a camera we'll do something like this and we want to have our island kind of something along those lines so the one thing that we don't want to do is uh show our environment sphere in our render we just want it to be clear and so in our render options over here under our properties here on this first little camera looking icon down here where it says film we just need to check transparent and now if we look through our camera we see it's transparent i think we aren't seeing this blue field because it's just too far away so we can select this blue field like this and let's scale this down a little and let's move this a little bit closer now let's look through our camera and now we can see it in the view this time we'll just position this so that it's filling up the whole background and we'll rotate this on the z by hitting r and then z and that should be pretty good make sure it's not too close to our island it looks like it's going to be pretty good and now we've set up our scene to look pretty nice a couple things to look at with the render options over here in the properties most of the things you need to pay attention to are under the camera so we want cycles and here where it says samples this is basically the quality depending on what you're doing you might not need this to be such high quality uh or you might need it to be way more for something like this just so it's a little bit faster i'm just gonna bring this down to 32 and see how it looks and we can go from there and if it doesn't look right i'll also click on denoise and that's going to get rid of some of the little speckles the other thing is here under light paths if we take some of these down that will help a lot with our render times all of these are basically how much light bounces in between things and depending on what you're doing you might need them or not transmission is how much light goes through something and so this is stuff like glass and you know realistic water and stuff like that so we're gonna just turn that all the way to zero we don't need any of that we're going to take velocity down to like two and diffuse down to like two and transparent all the way down because we just don't need like most of that and that's going to speed up our render a little bit and then the rest of it as long as we have transparent on the film if we have movement we could tick motion blur we don't really need to do that and that's pretty good for those properties the next one down we want to make sure that our resolution and everything is set right frame rate frame range if we're doing a animation and make sure that our file format is right so a png rgba 8 bit is fine for what we're doing right now if we're doing a high quality render you might want to do something like open exr but for now just kind of previewing this this will be just fine so now since we have our render settings set and we have our camera set where it's supposed to be we have our lighting we have everything looking the way it should let's go up to render and say render image and there we go there is our render on my machine this took six seconds which i think is pretty cool looks really nice nice and bright happy colors nice little low poly thing here that's pretty neat so that's really the basics of how to make things in blender i think that's a pretty nice render again i don't see any major problems with it like when i zoom in it doesn't feel like the quality is like terrible or anything but of course if we need more quality we can up those samples and i think this looks pretty sick so i hope that gives you a good idea of what is possible in blender honestly this is just the surface just the little tiny taste of what blender can do this is such an insanely deep program and i'm learning more every day so if you want more blender tutorials let me know i definitely want to do more tutorials in the future of doing post-production stuff in blender and vfx and mixing them in resolve and fusion and oh man so many good things ahead if you made it this far make sure to let me know by clicking the like that would be that'd be helpful and you and i are gonna we're gonna we're gonna hang out we're gonna soldier on we're gonna be like the dogs in homeward bound and your chance and i'm shadow and peter will completely lose faith and think that i died because i was 30 seconds later than everybody else even though i'm like 100 years old and that's not the case a guy crawled out of that pit peter shadow

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 14,589

Keywords: Blender Crash Course, blender beginner tutorial, how to use blender, blender for beginners, casey faris, simple blender, blender made easy, blender, 2021, tutorial, basics, 3D, modeling, free, create, guide, Blender Crash Course - Beginner's guide to blender, 3D tutorial, how to model in 3D, making something in blender, blender for dummies

Id: NtxkI0KM48E

Length: 93min 22sec (5602 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021