Blender | Easy Fruit Character | Beginners Tutorial

hello guys and welcome to another blender tutorial so today i've got something super exciting i'm going to be showing you how to very simply and easily make this cute little render of a kiwifruit guy whatever you want to call them and i'm going to be providing in the description below a link to some free images that you can get that are cc0 you can use them commercially whatever and just two images for these that we're going to just project onto this little subject here and i'm also going to be making the blend files available available on my patreon if you guys want to check that out but other than that i hope you guys are able to do this take the time it's only going to take us about half an hour but it's really fun and if you're a beginner i'll try and make it as easy as possible there's nothing fancy here just really basic modeling techniques um some basic boolean operations really you could call this a quick and dirty tutorial so you can see here what it looks like it's not a animation anything it's just kind of like a steel render of this cute little dude so if this is something you want to learn keep watching and i do appreciate subscribers and likes and that really helps me out a lot so let's get into this tutorial now as i mentioned like i said just go to the description below i'm going to be putting a link to this image here or one that is similar to it and this one here you can just download them they're free you don't have to even have an account i just put mine on my desktop here so you can see i have this one and this one and those are the ones we'll be using so once just the cutaway of the kiwifruit and once just a head-on shot of a kiwi fruit and then just go ahead and open up blender i'm using blender 3.0 and we'll get started i've got a new scene open up in blender and we're just going to be working with the default cube today so let's go ahead and select the default cube and if we just go into our front orthographic view so i did that just by hitting one on my number pad we can see we now have the nice front orthographic view we can now just hit the tab key to go into our edit workspace and with all of the geometry active you should be able to tell by saying it's all orange so if it's not selected just hit a to select everything we're going to right click with that active mesh and we're just going to go subdivide we're now going to go s and then z and just scale it up on the z about that much so what we're now going to do is we're going to go over here to this little tool while it's still really low poly so this is the smooth tool and just click on that little gizmo and just kind of smooth it out like that then we're going to go right click and go subdivide one more time for now and we're going to smooth it out even more like that once you've done that just hit z and go into wireframe mode and then click here and just drag select half of the verts here and then go x and just delete those verts so what you can see here is a perfect half and let's go down modifiers and let's just quickly give that a mirror modifier and if you don't want it to come apart when you're editing just make sure to enable clipping and you can see we have a clipped mesh pretty cool now we're going to do is we're just going to make some basic features now we have the mirror down so let's start by going to our face select mode here and to make an eye let's make it super simple so we're going to select this face here and if you hit the i key on your keyboard so hit i and you're gonna see we have an inset now you might be familiar with hitting e and then going s to extrude and scale but because we have clipping enabled it'll actually stick to the side that's why we're using i for the inset function here so let's go i to insert it and we're going to move it in about that much and then we're going to go s z and we're just going to flatten a little bit and then we're going to do is we're going to go e to extrude and extrude it in s to scale it a little bit and then if we go shift d to duplicate we can duplicate that face right click to let go and then e to extrude forward and out it doesn't look like much at the moment but if we now go to our modifiers and give it a subdivision surface modifier we can see it greatly smoothes it out we're now going to tab out into object mode and let's go to object and let's go shades move to give us some nicer viewport shading and let's also just go back into edit mode now we have that done and let's just move a few things around so i feel like the eyes are sitting a little bit low so i'm going to go into wireframe by going z and then wireframe and let's go to vertex select option and just click here and drag and just select these verts and then go g z and let's move them up to about there move them out a little bit maybe experiment a little bit you can also just select all of these eyes the eye geometry here like this and you can go s to scale it like so you can get s z scale it up like that just experiment a little bit we'll get to that in a little bit and even though it's optional i would recommend adding a mouth so let's quickly come over here hover over this corner or edge here and if you go ctrl r or command r you're going to see a yellow line up here so just left click twice and you can add that in so now we have a bit of extra geometry and what we're going to do is we're going to go to our edge select simply select this edge here and then hit the v key so v and we're going to bring it down and then we're going to click on this face here and then holding and shift we're going to click on the face or the edge right above it so just these two edges so it's going to be like a v over here and we're going to hit f to fill that in and it's a little bit messy but we're not animating this so it doesn't really matter so we're gonna select that edge there and just move it back in a little bit then if we go shift alt and we click on this edge it's going to loop select this edge all the way around and inside of this mouth and now if we go to our right view and we go into wireframe we can go e to extrude it a bit and then e and go further in like that now we have a simple mouth all you have to do is go to your vertex select option select the corner of the mouse here all you have to do is go to enable proportional editing up here then select the corner of the mouth for now you can go g roll your middle mouse button to control the fall off and you can make him smile or frown or whatever you want to do so now if we tab out we can also just come here to the subdivision and bump it up to 2 to really smooth things out a bit now at this point you know if you're happy with it you can keep it that way but this is where you can come in with the proportional editing enabled you can select verts and you can just move them around trying to make the shape feel a bit more natural so for me at the moment i feel like i could make this a little bit less square by just selecting certain points and verts and moving them in but this is not something that is you have to do to the letter of this tutorial just really customize the shape this is where you're going to give a feel to your specific character something that kind of sets it apart a little bit now with these eyes over here as well if you just hover over the edge here and you go ctrl r you should see a yellow line up here so double click and you slide it up hover over down here again you should see it appear do the same thing and we're just making the eye look like that and what we're going to do with a vertex selected on this eyepiece just hit ctrl l and that'll select this as loose geometry disable the proportional editing quickly and then go s to scale it just make it a bit smaller and you can also add in more loops here to edit if you want but to me this looks good so what i'm going to do now is maybe i feel like the eyes here just need to be a little bit more down to here a little bit smaller so i'm just moving these first so you can mess around with it as much as you want cool so what we're going to do now is we're going to go out and you can save go shift d and make another version of this in case you mess it up but for me i'm just going to leave it so i'm going to take this guy now and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to my mirror modifier and i come to the drop down and i'm going to go apply so now we can't mirror it's pretty much set in stone at the moment and now let's go over to our subdivision and let's bring the level down to 2 to one over here and let's come to the drop down and let's just apply that so now if we go into edit mode we can see all of this is applied we no longer have modifiers this geometry here is what we have so it's now destructive essentially it's not a destructive workflow anymore with the modifiers that's why i did suggest maybe making a duplication before you apply the modifiers just in case but for me i'm pretty confident so i'm just going to leave it as is now what we're going to do is pretty fun let's get into some of the basic materials here so we're going to select the kiwi fruit guy here we're going to go to our materials and let's quickly go over to the base color here click on this little tab and let's go to image texture click on open and like i said i'm going to go to my desktop and in this case you can see here the first one i'm going to pick is this kiwifruit which is just like a front on view i'm going to click it and if we now hit z and we go material preview you can see that there's something going on here but it's not lined up properly so we need to quickly with this character here active go over to our uv editing workspace and you can see over here we're in edit mode simply go into your front view hit a to select all of the geometry and now if you go u so hit the u key on your keyboard you can go over to project from view and it'll project it as you're seeing it from the front then you simply come over to this video here select everything and then r to rotate s to scale and just make it line up however you feel looks most natural you can come to your proportional editing select a vert move it around it's quite a lot of flexibility with this method just try and get as much detail in there as possible until everything looks cool and to preview it you can go z and then click over here and go material preview and you can actually see so let's tab out into object mode and you can see it looks cool now we do have the stretching at the sides so if you were going to do this as an animation or where you're going to be seeing it from multiple views you'd want to get multiple images and actually protect your paint them from different angles maybe with like a stencil method but because we're just doing a front on render and we are going to be having a particle system on this we can kind of get away with this so let's go over to our layout again and let's just quickly make sure you go z make sure material preview let's go to our materials tab go up here and let's just click on the plus again go new and let's just call this material eyes and let's go to our base color and make it black and let's just bring the roughness down over here on the surface so it doesn't look as reflective and now we're going to tab into edit mode select a vertex here on the eye and go ctrl l now it's active and let's go over here to our materials selection click on the eyes and then go assign so now we have that black material and make sure to do the same to the other eye as well and tap into object mode that's looking pretty cool if you wanted to add a mouth material in here in the mouth you could select a loop of geometry here and go ctrl plus to go to selection and then you could just give it a new material assign it and maybe make it like a inside of a mouth kind of color whatever you feel works for the character here but that's optional you don't really have to do something like that so that's pretty cool but what really made makes this design cool is kind of like that cut so the way we're going to do that is we're going to go shift a we're going to add in a cube and we're going to move this cube and we're going to rotate it and we're going to scale it now this is where you're going to be to have the cut wherever this is going to be performing a boolean operation or intersecting here that's going to be the cut so you can come to the side you can rotate it a bit you can move it up just kind of get a dynamic cut something that looks cool to you personally that you like so i'm going to go something like that then i'm going to select the subject here i'm going to go to my modifiers and by this point you should have already applied the previous mirror and subdivision surface modifier otherwise this won't work so let's go and give it a boolean and let's click on the eyedropper and then select that cube and you should now see if you hit z and go into wireframe it's all cut how cool is that if you wanted to you could grab this cube and still kind of move it around till you get something you like but you know i'm going to just go something it looks like that and then i'm going to grab my kiwifruit guy here maybe just adjust it just a little bit so i'm going to select him and just come to the drop down and i'm going to apply that boolean select the cube and then hit x and delete that now if we select our character we tab into edit mode we should see by default all of these here are active so let's quickly go and click plus give it a new material so make it new and let's just call it inner and let's quickly go down to the preview or the surface let's go to our base color here make that an image texture click on open and now i'm going to get that second texture once again link in the description is going to be this one here just click on that go open image and let's go over to our uv editing workspace and make sure that this whole face here is active so you can go to face select just click on this face you should see it's active and then go you and then you go unwrap then you can select it and you can come over here to the drop down go to that second image and we can see it here and just go s to scale this down and just match it up with the inside here if you go over here and you hit z and you go material preview you can now see a preview but also make sure that that inner material if you go to materials with that face active go to that inner material and make sure to hit assign as well and now you should see it so just come over here like i said you can easily get the proportional editing tool select vertices and just move them around till you get as much of the texture filling that space and there you go it's looking pretty good so let's go back to our layout and let's go z go material tab into edit mode and what you can do is you can go to your um with face like active disable proportional editing and make sure the face is active then you can go i to inset so go i to insert it just a little bit and then we can go alt s and just scale it out along the normals just a little bit so we just get a little bit of a rim here which kind of looks cool and now we can also go to our modifiers and let's just give that a subdivision surface modifier and that looks pretty cool so you can see we're getting kind of this messiness around here that's because we have like faces here that have more than four sides so they're not even quad so you can do is just go to your edge selector and just select these edges and you can go and you can hit f3 and you should go merge and you can go merge at center and it'll merge those together so wherever you have those funny artifacts happening so you can see here we have a face over here that has one two three four five edges so we can go over here select this edge and then hit f3 and just go merge at center again so you can go around and just clean things up like that so you can see over here it didn't really fix it but the more time you spend just adding in a bit more geometry so example you can come in here hover over one of these edges you can go ctrl r just add in another loop and just work your way around and you know clean that up a little bit so i'm going to maybe just go to face select shift alt and just click on an edge here for this inner loop and just assign that skin material okay so i forgot i still have to unwrap it so what i might do is just leave it as that inner fruit material so maybe another way we can clean it up without having to spend too much time um redoing the geometry around here is we go to edge select and just go shift alt click on one of these edges just loop selected and let's go shift e and we're just going to drag our gizmo thing here and just tighten up that edge you can see it now has a blue line let's just select this one as well shift e let's just tighten that up a little bit um that hasn't helped too much but like i said what you can do is you can hit k as well to get your cut tool and you can also kind of go around here and just add in some more cuts to try and clean that up so i'm not going to go too much into that it kind of just looks okay for just something that's going to be a steel render but spend as much time as you want and grabbing edges that don't make sense and then you can do something like you can hit x and you can also just dissolve edges like over there that's fixed that a little bit uh it's just one of those things where you can go around and clean it up so i'm gonna go too much into it but that looks okay you can see here with my original one i spent a little bit more time but not too much and it looks okay so i'm just going to move that over to the side so now we have this guy pretty much done almost so let's just do a few more things so we're going to select them in object mode we're going to go g z and just move it up to about here and let's just make some really basic feet so we're going to go shift a and let's just add in a cube s to scale the cube tab into edit mode and let's with all of this geometry active we're going to go s z and we're going to scale it down into z go to our face select and select the top face e to extrude a little bit s to scale e to extrude up and then just select this front face and then e to the street forward a bit go to your subdivision your modifiers and let's just give it a subdivision surface modifier go over here to the edge control r double click double g to slide just add in a loop and there is a really basic foot tab out and increase the viewport levels under your subdivision surface modifier go to object and enable shades move and then let's just move this one over to the side and let's go to our back to our modifiers and let's just give it a mirror select a little eyedropper and select the subject here and now we can see the feet are mirrored and let's just go to our materials here go new and let's just call this material feet and i'm just going to make that slightly black and bring the roughness down just a bit for a bit more reflectivity so there we have it you could give him arms but i think he works fine without arms but before we actually get into doing the particles let's give it just some basic lights and a backdrop and a camera of course so what i'm going to do in object mode is i'm going to go shift a i'm just going to add in a plane and i'm going to scale it up about that much tab into edit mode go to edge select and select the back edge go to your right orthographic view and just go e to extrude and let's just extrude it up and out a few times like so select everything s x scale it on the x a bit that looks okay and let's select our camera and now if we hit zero we can go to our camera view and in camera view with the camera active we can hit r twice that allows us to rotate the camera and we can also hit g and move ourselves around so using those two r to rotate g middle mouse button to zoom in and out we can move our camera and we're also going to go to my camera settings and under the focal length i'm going to make it 125 and i'm also going to go to my output here and i'm going to make the top resolution 1080 and i'm going to make the bottom resolution 900 and then once again with my camera active i'm just going to zoom it out just a little bit more maybe something like that now we're going to go to our render engine or our render settings let's make the engine cycles i'm going to enable my gpu and if you go over here to under the sampling to denoising if you have it you can also go render and just enable the denoising path for the render and you can change it to optics as well if you want so i've done that and now if we hit z and we go rendered we should see it looks like this you can also go ctrl b click and drag over your camera view and now it just limits that render to the camera and that gives you a bit better viewport performance but at the moment we just have this kind of crappy default light so let's just delete it and now we're going to go shift a and let's just go down and add in an area light g z move it up go to your light settings and let's give it a strength of 150 and let's increase the size to something like three meters and move it up a little bit we're then going to go shift d to duplicate move it out rotate it in a bit and then we're going to go shift d make another one and rotate it in go back into your camera view by hitting zero and you should see this so we have some nice basic lighting here to get us started and i'm just going to select the background plane and i'm going to go to object and also enable shades move and we can add materials to that later but at least now we have our character here we have a backdrop we have our camera and now let's just quickly save things i'm just going to make sure i'm going to save this so i'm saving this blend file so we don't lose anything especially when we're going to get into doing particles that's quite important so let's select our little subject here and let's quickly go over to our particles let's click on plus and let's make it a hair system first of all first problem you can see it's everywhere so let's go over to our under our mission let's come to the hair length let's make it .04 and let's also go over to the children's tab make it interpolated so for each one of those parent particles there's going to be 10 children in the viewport and let's just make the render amount 40. but at the moment those little hairs are everywhere and if you ever cut open your kiwi fruit you know that there aren't hairs in the inside fleshy part so let's go over to our object data properties let's go to our vertex groups and click plus tab into edit mode and let's select the face here and let's go control i or command i that's going to inverse our selection and let's go assign so now everything is assigned except the top face let's go over to our particles now and let's just go down into vertex groups go to our density and let's make it group okay so it hasn't changed so let's just quickly go back to object out of properties tab into edit mode quickly and i think what we need to do is select this top face control plus or command plus to grow the selection just one more little bit so it selects some more geometry and then just remove it from that vertex group now if we tab out we can see it's not on that top face so we hit z and we go material preview let's have a look at that so you can see we have the little hairs but not on the kiwi itself so that's looking pretty cool i'm liking that so far so the hair is okay but let's just quickly go to our particles quickly and just give it a bit more randomness so let's go down over to under our children let's go to the clumping and actually let's go to the roughness let's increase the uniform roughness just a little bit the size just a little bit and let's come to the end point here and turn that just a little bit as well you can also give the shape a little bit of a bigger value there and mess around with random here and also the size until you get something that you like but don't go overboard and definitely don't make the hairs too long but overall that should kind of be okay and at the moment you can see the hairs are also on the eyes so if you just want to go to object out of properties go back into edit mode and just select the eye geometry you can also click on a group and just remove them so now they don't have that applied make sure to save and let's just quickly go z and go rendered and see what it looks like so here is our little kiwifruit guy has the particles and that's already really helping out with the look of this okay so i'm going to do too much more of that but you guys can spend as much time as you want trying to refine that but for me um just for the tutorial sake i'm going to leave it at this it still looks pretty cool especially as a concept and you can see here if my original like i said i spent a little bit more time cleaning up the geometry so let's just quickly grab our background plane here let's go to our materials and let's just click new and let's get our base color and let's just make it a little bit darker in value and then hit z go render it and let's see what that looks like okay it looks pretty cool but at the moment this kiwi fruit guy is kind of blending into the background so if we go shift a and we just go to our lights and add in a point light and we just move it behind the subject like so we can now come here to the radius and increase it and also increase the power and if you move it around and you duplicate you can see we now have kind of this rim light effect happening on the side here of the subject and that just kind of helps them pop out from the background so you can just move them duplicate them move them over here just all around the back side here of the subject just helping him pop out from the darker background so i like to look at that it's something you see quite often with um a lot of artists kind of use this in the industry just to make work really look cool let me move it back a bit and you can also go to your world increase the value of that just a little bit as well to make your world environment a bit brighter select the plane again and let's just maybe make that just a little bit darker and give it a little bit of brownish warmness there into the red spectrum so that looks pretty cool so you can actually select the fruit itself and just go over to your shading workspace and make sure you're in your rendered mode and just go over here to materials and you can actually select the kiwi fruit materials and with the kiwifruit here let's just bring the roughness down and let's just go shift a search get a color ramp let's plug the color into the factory of the color ramp and now if we go shift a and we go search we can type in bump get a bump node and now we can take this gray scale plug it into the height and let's take the normal output of our bump and put it into the normal of our principal cheddar and now we got a little bit of bumpiness here but what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the strength down to 0.5 and i'm going to just mess around with the slider here just until i get a little bit more contrast and i'll like the way it looks okay so something like that looks okay i'm gonna definitely bring the roughness down to make it a little bit more shiny or wet if you will so yeah something like that like that looks pretty cool so what i'm going to quickly do is i'm just going to maybe quickly kick it into time lapse and just quickly go around here and just fix up a little bit of this geometry here i've just cleaned that geometry up a little bit more but just getting rid of some of the double um some of the double overlapping edges and even here you can see i just missed some of these edges here that don't need to be there just dissolve them and merge things together where you can but don't overdo it just you know just clean it up just a little bit until it all looks right okay cool so now what we're going to do is we're probably going to grab these lights here and i'm just going to duplicate one more area line and just bring it more forward a bit more down just so you get a little bit more light hitting the front of the subject there and i definitely want to grab that eye material here and i want to make sure when i selected that the roughness is all the way down so we've got a nice reflectivity here but with the shoes that are also black we want to make them a little bit higher on the roughness so they don't look as shiny but that's looking pretty cute so what i'm going to do now is just do one more thing that i think adds a little bit of extra detail so we go shift a let's go over to our empties add in a cube move it forward kind of like where his nose would be if he had one and scale it down if we now select our camera and we go to our camera settings we can enable depth of field click on the eyedropper and select that that empty there so just make sure it's the empty that you're clicking on so i'm going to click on the empty and let's just take the f-stop and make it point seven and now if we go z and we go rendered we're going to see we have this nice soft focus so if we actually grab the cube and we move it forward just a little bit at a time we can see we start to get this really nice soft focus around the subject and you can also select the camera go to the camera settings and then decrease the focal and the f-stop here under the focal length until you get the desired results so i'm going to just go something like that the most important thing is we just want that nice sharpness here where his face is but around the edges here and in the background it's nice and soft so there we have it that is our little kiwi fruit guy so make sure to save everything and let's go to render and go render image and see what this looks like okay so here we have the final render and despite how quick this was and even how messy some of the operations were the final result just as a steel render looks pretty cool now you could definitely spend more time with the materials and the particles but just even with such quick and dirty techniques look at the result that actually looks pretty cool so i'm excited to see what you guys can take away from this and what you're able to make and i will be making this blend file available on my patreon which you guys can check out in the description below and that also really helps support a lot of this free content that i do make on the channel for the community and i really do appreciate that i'll see you guys next time for another blender tutorial and stay safe

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 5,276

Rating: 4.9876542 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Blender Modelling Tutorials, Getting started with Blender, Blender easy modelling for beginners, 3d modelling made easy, easy tricks for 3d Modelling, Blender lazy tutorials, beginner blender tutorials, Blender 3.0, Blender for beginners, Ian hubert, cg matter, Blender quicky, Blender quickie

Id: 3X8_sO6H4ug

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021