Blender for Product Designers | Beginner Tutorial

i was watching dan petty's water card presentations and felt inspired to create a tutorial uh to help product designers go from zero to one in blender and making a 3d scene remnant of this inspired by this of a credit card as a way to get your foot uh like dip your toes in the water it's like the 3d software we're going to use blender specifically and uh really kind of add a little extra professionalism uh to your design presentations so i think 3d is something that's super important like it's only going to continue getting more and more useful and the software is going to get better and better so i don't think there's ever been a better time to jump into it so this is going to be a tutorial geared at product designers and going zero to one and designing something to help pitch deck or whatever you want or even a marketing website so i'm gonna quit chrome so it doesn't kill my computer i'm gonna use this file from the figma community by ben radcliffe it looks like this so i just took this portrait visa card i exported it 5x and that's going to be the base of our card so this is a blender tutorial so we're going to open up blender for the first time and blender is pretty complicated program just in the same way that photoshop's a pretty complicated program so don't think you've been off more than you can chew or something like that anybody can learn this it's really gotten easier and easier so opening splash card remnant of adobe products we can ignore that uh a thing i am doing i am using like an apple mouse and an apple keyboard just to kind of like handicap myself and i think that's what most product designers are probably using so ideally you'd have a three button mouse and maybe a bigger keyboard but i'm going to just to show that you can make it work with whatever you've got but because of that we're going to go into our preferences and hit emulate numpad and emulate three button mouse underneath this input setting and this will make things a little bit easier for us since we're using these peripherals so one thing to notice immediately is like this big 3d scene but even before that i want to look up at these tabs at the top so if you use photoshop before which imagine most product designers probably have at some point you're going to need to kind of customize it to whatever your workflow is so the essentials or the essentials for blender look way different here so what i'm going to do is like right click these and delete these i would recommend you do the same and kind of narrow down your list these are the three that we're going to use right now and we'll add in one extra one later on in the tutorial so don't worry about those like uh getting lost or anything this is a super modular program so you can make it look however you want um so don't get too attached to one layout you're looking at anyways so we have i guess the biggest conceptual leap when you're working in 3d is navigating 3d viewport so the way we do that is with our mouse and scrolling around will make us orbit our 3d cursor which is this little guy in the middle here underneath the cube so the 3d cursor is independent of any shape really and it's just kind of to root you in 3d space give you something to orbit around so scrolling does that hold command and scroll and you'll zoom hold shift and scroll and you'll pan from side to side and you can do all these actions up here using these gizmos as well same thing click into it the zoom pan this button will snap you to the camera view so we have a camera in this default scene right here you can see it over here i'll select it and if you hit this camera button it'll snap you to that view so that's going to be useful later on when we're finally like setting up our scene to render so what we're going to do to begin with is select everything in the scene and get rid of it so we can start with a fresh slate and i'm going to do that by pressing a on my keyboard to select everything and you'll see it's highlighted here in the collections we have folders figment take notes and we're going to hit x on our keyboard and delete everything so a couple other keyboard shortcuts to keep in mind are seven on your keyboard will snap you to top down view and three will take you to a side view so it's kind of hard to tell when there's nothing here so i'm gonna put something in there so we can tell seven this is a top view if we hit three this will take us a side view and those are just good to kind of almost is like home bases to get you back where you were i'm gonna delete this and go through how you add things more slowly so you can come up here and click add and then you have all these options here the thing we're going to add is a plane and it's because we're going to make a credit card it's going to be very thin like this and you can also add things by hitting shift a add a plane there's a thousand ways to do stuff in blender and you can also hit spacebar this is super important so take notes you can hit spacebar you get this really really this is a new feature in blender you get this really great search we can search anything in blender so if we wanted to add a plane uh we could do that so we have at like it shows you the shortcut here too so you can like start remembering those add a plane so we've added our plane i'm gonna hit seven to look at it from the top down and i'm gonna make it the shape of a card so this is where this is like very basic modeling in blender i'll show you how easy that can be to do so i'm zooming in just a little bit and painting around just to kind of center this so there's this idea of modes in blender so right now we're in object mode and that's denoted up here in the top left but there's also all these other modes so the most important other mode we have is edit mode so if we hit tab on our keyboard that'll take us into edit mode and now these little dots that appear on the sides here are actually the vertices that make up this piece like this mesh this piece of geometry and so we can manipulate these however we want so i'm pressing g on my keyboard to move all these around so if you have them all selected using the a shortcut from earlier you can press g and move stuff around you can select just one and move it around you could do a box selection by clicking and dragging and move both of these around so this is how you do all kinds of 3d models we're going to do some super simple stuff but it'd be the same if you're doing something super complicated like an apartment building so all that being said all we're going to do is select all of these vertices which is the default as well if you just left it like that and we're going to hit s on our keyboard to scale and if we just did that it would scale up just how it is totally proportionately locked it's like holding shift in fable or whatever but there's a we can we're wanting to lock it to an axis to elongate it and get that credit card shape so we're going to hit s and then hit x and now we're just scaling it along the x-axis and we're getting that credit card shape we're looking for so i'm just going to eyeball it make it kind of similar and i'm going to tap back out of edit notes and now we're in object mode and now we have the beginnings of a credit card super simple but this credit card is like infinitely thin right now so we need to give it some depth by tabbing back into edit mode selecting everything hitting e on our keyboard for extrude and we're going to make it a little bit thicker to give kind of the thickness of the credit card so you can make it as big as you want but uh credit card's pretty thin so we're going to make it something like that and there's other ways to do that too you also have these buttons over here for these kind of shortcuts but yeah extrude is also a super common uh thing to do so now we have the basic shape of our credit card it's a little box but our corners are super sharp so what we're going to want to do is somehow take these corners and round them so in 3d software that's called a bevel in 2d like screen design software it would be like rounded corners so we're going to go into edit mode and you saw me click around up here i'm going to jump in ahead of myself so these options will change what you can select in edit mode so we started with this vertex select which means you can pick these individual points and grab them with g if you wanted to and do whatever you want um but there's also this one which is for grabbing an entire edge right and then you have uh face select which will let you grab ah like a collection of all those and move a whole face we need edges because we're going to take our corners and round them so the way we're going to do that is select one of these go to our next one by navigating the 3d viewport selecting another edge and then we're going to go over here and select the other edge and we're going to select the final edge as well now so we did that kind of the hard way so i'm going to show you the easy way to do that too this will introduce the idea of like view modes which are up here these little circles so the one we're going to use to make it easier for us to select uh geometry like that select edges is this wire frame mode so you can get to that by clicking this up here and you get kind of this ghost view where you just see the edges and or if you're in let's go back into edit mode so if you were in here you would see like selectors onto faces or you just see all the little dots like one that you wouldn't normally be able to see if we were in this mode here so you also saw me swap super fast that's because z on the keyboard brings up this shading menu and you have solid which is what we've been working in the whole time wireframe which is what's going to make it easier for us to select through objects rendered mode and material preview so those both are going to be used later but for now let's go to wireframe mode let's select our object go into edit mode i'm going to press 3 on the keyboard and that'll give me the side view that we talked about earlier and we'll select the edge select so we can only select edges i'm going to zoom in so we can see and then i'm going to hit b on the keyboard and that'll give me uh this tool which i could use to select uh edges and i'm going to drag it over these and that just select all it's selected all four edges so if we did that in um this mode the solid the only thing we would select and i think we still have one select the only thing we'd select is the uh the front two edges that we're seeing so if i went in the wire frame mode you see these two aren't actually selected so that's uh important distinction okay deselecting everything and selecting those four corners you see i selected an additional one that i didn't mean to so i'm going to shift click it to deselect it and that's kind of a rundown on selecting things in edit mode so we press 7 on the keyboard this will take us to the top down view and even though you can't see they're selected they're still selected and i'm going to use another shortcut for beveling these edges so i'm going to hit ctrl b or command b because we're on a mac and i'm going to drag my keyboard or my mouse so you can see that we're getting the edges they're beginning to be beveled but there's only one bevel going on right now so it looks uh super sharp so using your scroll you'll be able to add more whoops i clicked selected okay just going back to where i was and using the scroll wheel you're able to put more and more detail in it so one two three four and just drag your bathroom so you get kind of the shape you want so i'm gonna put in five and do it about there that looks about right for a going back to solid mode for a credit card to me so we've got our rounded corners now we've got this totally blank thing how do we get this uh to look like the artwork we have or and something more presentable so this is gonna bring in the idea of uv editing which is and just like shading in general so we're going to want to take our png that we have let me pull that up so we can remember um so my downloads yeah this png right here so we're going to try to take this one and put it on the card in 3d so how do we do that so we're going to go to the shading tab for the first time here and we're going to select our plane which we can go ahead and rename this to to our card so once we have a card and you can navigate around this the same way the whole reason it's got this background is because we're in this material preview mode so if we switch back it'll look like what we're used to but material preview is going to uh let us see what the changes that we're about to make so we've got this how do we give it a material or like a so material is what we'll give it a color or any of it's like physical properties and it's like how it interacts with light so there's this materials property button here on the sidebar so we're going to click into that and hit new and this button would do the exact same thing as this button here so i'm just kind of illustrating that there's two different places to do that we hit new and then we see both of these appear here so we're going to be working from this this is a node editor and a node editor probably looks pretty crazy oops i just hit spacebar and typed in a bunch of stuff so you navigate around this the same way by holding command and scrolling to zoom and everything but you'll see we have this material output a principal bsdf like what does any of this mean uh it doesn't really matter to you right now so the only thing that really matters is this uh base color and if you click that and drag it around you can change the color of this now we're starting to get like to the fun stuff in blender i really like editing materials but we're going to want to make it not just like a color or anything we actually want its material to be an image so that's where the idea of uv image editing and uv wrapping comes into play so what we're going to want to do is add a node down here just like how we did it i guess we haven't added a node yet but in the same way that we added a mesh out here same idea for adding a node so we hit shift a and then i'm going to search for the image texture node and i'm going to drag this in and what we're going to do is drag the color to the face color so yellow to yellow right here and now you see this goes totally black that's because there's nothing there right now so what we're going to do is open up our image that we downloaded this portrait.png and now okay we got something obviously that looks totally wrong but we'll be able to fix it so the way we're going to do that is by opening up a new workspace up here uh under general it's the uv editing workspace so we're going to open up that and uv editing is pretty complicated honestly i i'm no expert on it but i can show you how to at least get this to work with this object here so what we're going to do is go into edit mode and so in this right window we're going into edit mode selecting everything pressing u on the keyboard and doing this smart uv project option so if we do that and just hit ok to the defaults we'll see some stuff populate over here right we're going to ignore a bunch of this and we can also go into the material preview mode over here to kind of see what's happening so so we select everything and you you can see over here that you have these outlines that look like the top and the bottom of the card and that's what they are it's kind of like slices um so this debit visa that's like translating right here to this and this file had a bit of a drop shadow on it so you're getting some extra space down here but we're what we're wanting to do is to take this part here and scale it up to the whole card and make it fit so how do we do that so we're gonna do it by going to face select mode here and selecting our top face in this right window so these kind of show the same thing selected and then with that selected we're going to come in here select this whole thing and start using the same ideas that we learned in the other section right here so i'm going to press g to move it up a bit right and i'm going to kind of let's see where should i put it maybe right in the middle and then hit s to scale it and we're going to scale it till it starts getting close and we scale to the edges line up on the left and the right so the edges are kind of lined up now i'm going to move it around just a little bit more to try to close and you can see it's like repeating and everything this looks terrible still so now what we're going to do is just select these top bits here hit g and i'm going to hit y to lock it to the y axis i'm going to drag it down to the edge of this image here now we're getting closer try and line that up a little bit better and would do the same thing down here and obviously you could do more precise measurements to try to get these things lined up better but i just wanted to show like a real easy way to do this so okay we've got that kind of lined up here in our uv editor if we tab out you can see we've actually got our artwork and blender on this card so that's pretty exciting stuff that's a big step a bit of a eureka moment maybe for someone so that's super super important a big leap in this so but we we see like the bottom looks terrible right so we have the top but we're going to want to show the back of the card too how can we do that so the way we're going to do that is by assigning multiple materials to the same object and we're going to go back to the shading tab to do that so you can see we got our visa card looking pretty good now what we're going to want to do is add a second material to this object and we're gonna well before we do that let's go ahead and name the one that we have right here uh so you can name the material here or i think you could name it over here we're just gonna name it right here and we're gonna call it uh visa art right you can name these whatever you want but that's just to keep these in order because we're going to be adding an additional one so let's do that by hitting this button up here on this right part this is add a new material slot we do that and now we have a new blank material we're going to add it to the material and nothing happened that's on purpose though what we're going to need to do now is go to wireframe mode hit 3 and we're going to select everything that we want to be this other material so we're going to go into select it go into edit mode deselect everything and you can do that just by clicking outside of it and then we're going to hit b and select all these things underneath it so we've got everything selected except for the top and then what we're going to do is with this selected this not our visa art but this and also these things selected we're going to hit the sign and now this will have the white material instead of the visa material which wasn't uv unwrapped and it's looking crazy so to kind of display that it's working we'll put in a color and now you'll see the bottom is that color but the top is a different color okay pat yourself on it back that's another good one let's do a card back these names are terrible but at least we're consistent with figma so yeah that's looking good what else can we do to improve the look of our card maybe we'll change the color a little bit and honestly now that we have the card here we can pretty much jump straight into uh like rendering it and doing the exciting stuff and getting it through ready to go so our card's in here it's looking good i'm gonna save this file in case it crashes or something untitled one that is one thing that figma's been helpful with i don't have any more of those on my computer anymore so not to only throw out shade okay so we've got our card now what we're going to do is go to the layout tab and we're going to kind of block out our scene and add in what our final render is kind of going to look like so to do that let's add in the plane and scale it up pretty big and call this our floor and this will be the bottom of our scene um let's bring this up i'm selecting the card i'm going to press press g and z to bring it up a little bit one more thing we can do to our card to try to improve its look a little bit is actually come back into edit mode and let's select both the top edges and the bottom edges oops i'm scaling and let's bevel these as well so this will kind of round off these edges so with those selected we're going to hit command b and look at that get some rounded edges probably don't need a whole lot of detail there so something like this and now let's make sure that still looks okay yeah okay so that looks better now we've got slightly rounded edges i don't know if you can really tell but it'll look better in our final render and let's see what happens if we right click this and hit shade smooth so you see we did that and a lot so i can go back to shade flat you can see it helps uh kind of automatically make our thing look like a lot higher quality than it actually is so with those changes it's starting to look like a pretty solid card okay so we've got our card and we've got our floor um let's pick a color for our floor so everything doesn't look exactly the same and let's do that by coming in the material tab hitting new and adding in maybe like a light pink color something like that so this is an example of how the sidebar can actually be useful if you're not in the shading tab with that node editor you'll be able to just come in here and edit it kind of on the fly so let's do that and let's add in a cube so our cube is right in the middle of this um which isn't exactly what we want let's see let's let's move it back a little bit uh let's scale it up a little bit not that much geez and let's make it taller and let's make it wider too so it's kind of hiding in our card but we don't have to worry about that too much because we can move everything around so i'm just scaling this all around using those shortcuts i'm going to hit g and x to move it back a little bit more and this is where your kind of the idea of composition is going to come into play so it's more of an art really and you'll have to play around with it a bit until you get something you're happy with but the idea i'm going for right now is to get this card and kind of lean it up against this like wall so let's select the card now and a new shortcut is r and that's going to let us rotate but you see we're rotating all over the place there's like no control over it but same idea hit x and you're locked to the x hit z go back to the z and hit y you go back to the y and we want the y rotation so i'm going to hit 3 on my keyboard and where am i gonna hit three on my keyboard i don't think that's gonna help us here let's just rotate this on the y and kind of like eyeball it um then we hit g and z to move it up and now we'll hit three or one on the keyboard it's a shortcut to get to this kind of view that uh i wanted and let's move it so it looks like it's like resting on the uh on this wall here so if we hit g and x maybe back to that corner looks like it's touching we could select our floor here from the scene collection to get an idea of where it is and you can see right now it's cutting through the bottom so let's bring this up a little bit so it's not doing that and now if we look at it it looks like our part is resting uh nice and gently up against this wall so the next thing we'll want to do is probably give a material to our wall so it doesn't look quite so drab we'll make it um what color should we make the wall maybe like a teal i think that's a good look and now we're starting to get something that looks like a scene so let's add in another instance of this card flipped around to show off the back of it so i'm going to do that by selecting the card and then hitting shift d to duplicate it and i'm going to lock it to the y axis by hitting y and i'm going to move it right next to it and you'll see we have another card over here that's automatically named and let's rotate this card around until it's going the way we want it to go also another way that might help with editing rotations and stuff like this is hitting n on your keyboard to bring up this menu and this will show you all the properties of this item here so our rotation for instance if we're running to rotate the z i guess we'll want to do it 180 degrees so you could type that in here or you can while you're doing one of these you just hit r on the keyboard and type in one eight zero now i hit 160 r 1 8 0 and then or are we just doing 90 degrees i'm getting all lost here oh no i know what the problem is i wasn't hitting z so r z and then 180. it's like we're almost programming at this point so yeah lots of shortcuts in blender but now we're rotated um let's do that same thing we did last time and rotate the what is this the y-axis until it looks like it's about right or why and these don't have to be the same if you don't want them to be like this is where you can get kind of uh artistic with it i suppose um but obviously that's cutting to the wall which is not ideal so we're gonna move it so it's not doing that and there we go so these will be a little bit offset okay so now we have the basics of what our scene is going to look like but we need to set up a camera to actually be able to render this at all because we don't have a camera in the scene right now so the way we're going to do that is hit shift a and we're going to add in a camera where is it there we go so you can't see where the camera is but if we went to the wireframe mode you can see it's hidden over here um we're not even going to worry about that right now so you could move it manually if you wanted to right but what we're going to do is kind of line up in our viewport where we want the camera to be and then what i handed out earlier go into the spacebar menu and type in camera and let's do this align active camera to view so it's got a shortcut to it but i can never remember it but that's the function we're wanting here so now that outline is what our camera would render and i just moved my mouse on accident so i'm going to hit this camera button to toggle us back into the view and another useful thing is to hit this view tab here so if you don't have this menu it's in on your keyboard or i think this little arrow does it too maybe yeah okay so in or that tiny tiny arrow hit view and do this check box and now the camera will follow your view automatically so this is pretty useful as well we're going to zoom in on it maybe something like this you can go into the material preview to get a better idea as well let's try to get a little more depth of the cards in the shot here so let's do something kind of like this make it a little more dynamic and then i'm going to uncheck this so i'm not moving the camera around everywhere and then i'm going to go back into the camera view we're not moving the camera though but we've got all this empty space on the sides so i'm just going to scale everything up a bit to oops that's the wrong axis to kind of fill up that space so now we have what our scene should look like all blocked out but if we render this right now it'd probably look pretty crazy so we're going to go to the rendering step in order to do that you're going to hit this render or the scene tab what's this called the render properties tab so right now our render engine is eevee which is like a real-time render it's super fast good for video games stuff like that or people do pretty crazy stuff with it but we're going to use cycles because it gives you a more photorealistic render three hit cycles and then a couple more options will be in here your cpu or gpu i'm going to use the gpu i think that's usually better but it'll depend on what hardware you're on so now that we're in cycles we can go to this rendered view and you'll see something much more realistic looking but it's incredibly dark and that's because we don't have a light in our scene right now so in order to do to add a white door scene we're going to go into our shading tab um actually i think there's a better way to do this now let's see let's go let's keep this on we're going to go to our world properties tab and can i do this here okay no i don't think i'm going to be able to do the way i thought i was but okay so let's go back to the shading tab go to the world tab and we're going to that was pretty quick so shading tab which we've been to before uh i just switched it to solid view because my computer's heating up i don't want to explode or something like that and then you could talk between object and world we're gonna go to world because we're gonna set the lighting for the whole world here so same thing as adding notes to the other section but we're going to look for the sky texture which is new in blender and super super powerful so again connect color to color and now if we go to this world tab we can see the sky textures here and we can expand it and get the same settings here as well as here so i'm going to go ahead and leave this tab and go back to this one and you can see our light the sun is working so but it's way too bright so you have all of these settings here and i think this shadow is great because it goes to like the physical world for about a fourth here all these are like true to life you can change the rotation of the sun to get these shadows to look however you want the sun's obviously a little too powerful here so i'm going to bring that down to half this on the string and maybe even lower to like a 0.1 and this is where again a lot of like the freedom will come into play so you'll just have to make something looks good but i trust if you're a designer you've probably got pretty decent taste but also who does i don't know you so let's see we've got that we can change all of these settings if we make the sun bigger our shadows will become more diffuse and if we make the sun smaller our shadows will become way sharper so it's totally up to you i personally like like a softer shadow look so i'm going to crank that up to 50 and i'm going to crank the light to 0.3 and these settings will i mean i can't hammer home how much your personal taste is important here but i hope you get it all right so let's do 0.35 for the brightness and we could render this right now and get a pretty good result but there's one more thing i want to change and this is kind of a fun uh trick so we're going to go to the shading tab go into our object uh we're gonna go to the card back and you can go into the render view here to get a better idea of what this preview is gonna look like and what we're gonna do is use a color ramp to get a gradient effect so color ramp node color to color should be getting used to that and then we're going to edit these colors to be whatever we want let's do that same kind of purple that we had and right now it's going purple to white let me zoom out so you can see what that's looking like so it looks kind of like the floor right now so maybe we'll darken it up a bit and we'll change this white handle to another purple maybe a or maybe a teal to kind of go with the theme of the whole render let's see let's like this one let's make these colors a little darker so they're popping out a little bit more and you can also change other parts of the material so if we made it metallic it would start looking metal almost like it's illuminating so now it's like almost mirrored so this is a pretty cool effect i don't think it's exactly what a real car would look like um i'm seeing my webcam slow down because i'm like really pushing the computer with all this rendering so anyways we've got that set up our camera looks like this if we go to the render tab our scene looks like this what we're going to do now is go ahead we could go ahead and render our scene but again i'm going to keep getting close and close but there's one more thing that i think is super important and it's this idea of depth of field so if we go into the camera settings with the camera selected there's this camera tab you hit depth of field and use this eyedropper tool and if we select this object card our depth of field is uh looking at this card and i'm sure there's some photographers who are also designers so this stuff should make sense but we can also break the laws of physics here if we wanted to and make these numbers do whatever we want so i'm going to make the f-stop just like super low um i'm no photographer so i don't know if that's actually physically possible or if it's just would be very expensive so if you do something like this you'll be able to like fade out the background um which is a really good look at a lot of effects it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in this scene we're doing right now and it's going to be super over dramatic but i think it's an important feature you should notice there depth of field and the little eyedropper so with all of that done all this leg work we finally get to render it and see what it looks like so the way you do that is come to this render tab and hit render image now what this is going to do is make your computer take off like a little jet plane but very slowly but surely you'll be able to see your render take place and this is kind of this is a very rewarding part of working in 3d is being able to like see this render happening everything's looking great and uh you get it just like wait your computer's on fire so go get a cup of coffee or something you've uh you've earned it and even though the things in this render aren't actual geometry like this is just a png right uh but it goes a long way uh to making it look real like sure we could go in there and like model all of this stuff by hand and give it like a physically accurate reflective metal material but for the majority of stuff you don't need that much you know you just need like a uv map on a rectangle and that'll get you like 99 of the way there so you can see how this is rendering it looks great um we don't have to sit through the entire renderer but something you should know is that because this was confusing to me when i real started i did my render then i know how to save it so you hit image and then you'll be able after it's finished you'll be able to do the save as and then just save it as an image on your computer wherever um but yeah that's kind of the rundown on how a product designer can use blender in like in a pretty simple way right we didn't set up any crazy lights or anything like that our background is a couple cubes and uh you know our card is just a rectangle some rounded edges um but you get stuff that's super nice like this so i i i think more and more like we've been seeing this more and more designers are using uh 3d software and i think if it's something you don't already have in your tool belt at least like a surface level understanding will take you a long way so anyways that's everything i wanted to go over one more thing i can mention is under here in these rendered settings uh or this out the output settings here this tab you can change the resolution of the output so if you want to do like a nice 4k image of it it'll take a while but you could do that here so yeah i hope somebody was able to learn something like that and that i didn't skip over any giant step that's uh prevent anyone from finishing but if i am just drop a comment and i'll try to respond to it as fast as i can but yeah thanks for watching and i hope you guys are able to make some pretty cool stuff in blender now all right thanks

Channel: Learn With an Idiot

Views: 4,535

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Id: pMAZf5taoC4

Length: 36min 59sec (2219 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021