Create a smart box in Blender!

afternoon everyone so in the not the last video but the one the 45 minute one i just did for uh hard ops i had this thumbnail and a lot of you asked me because i didn't actually do a tutorial on making this you said how do i make this so that'll be the topic of this video making this cool looking render as well as the modeling process so i'm just going to do like one of those longer form tutorials so you can follow along and best part about this one i'm just going to use the vanilla workflow so no paid add-ons except i might use decal machine at the end just to you know make it detailed and whatnot so let me hop into screencast keys and we'll just get started with it so i'm just going to tab into edit mode here and select all four of these edges and ctrl b to add a bevel now we just have to scroll up on the scroll wheel to give maybe like 10 segments you don't have to have too many segments just enough to round it out and maybe to about here should be enough and now all we have to do is get rid of these ridges so we're going to right click and then shade smooth and then add on an auto smooth here so now we need a chamfer on the top if i bring the reference photo back in the one i made you can see we have this nice little chamfer going on which is just a 45 degree bevel essentially so let me pull that back over there and as you may have guessed we can select all these edges here just by alt clicking or you can just simply select the top face it'll do the same exact thing now we're going to press ctrl b and this time to scroll down on the scroll wheel get ourselves a nice chamfer and actually i want to do the same thing down here so i'll shift click this so we have both selected control b and pull the chamfer to about here so that about does it now uh here's the point where you can choose to go non-destructive you can choose to go destructive whatever you want i mean this is a piece that i'm not gonna really be making too many adjustments to so it's probably okay to go destructive even if we you know can't revert the changes so you know you could add in a boolean cut here on the top if you didn't want to you know go destructive but i think it'll be fine here so i'm going to press i to inset and if i keep looking this way i'm just referring to that model i made so i make sure i make it the same way and we're just going to pull it now you want to be careful because if you pull it too far we get intersections and you can clean this in like two clicks with mesh machine but that's a paid add-on so i'm trying to keep this vanilla so let's just pull it to you know about here or something that should be okay and then we'll go ahead and press e and then extrude it down on the z which that'll just be the automatic extrusion direction so looks like i pulled it down about this far so it's not too bad now i want to add in these little ridges that i had going on on the side so let me pull in the photo again these little ridges here and up here now i'm not going to do this destructively that would just take way too much time so we can just use some booleans to get in these little indents here so yeah if you're using box cutter you can easily easily come in here and do the cuts on your own but if we're going to do it in vanilla basically we're just going to bring in a cube here let me turn on screencast again see i'm just going to hop into the top view and then just kind of position this thing in this general area let's move it over a bit let's move it up and i put it to about here and then of course if you have the bool tool add-on enabled which you know if you're not using box cutter you should we can shift select this piece and press ctrl minus there we go now we have a little cut in there so i'm just going to go ahead and hide that guy and also looks like there is two little notches in this end so i'm just going to add in another cube these are tinier notches so add one in and then it looks like what i did was beveled these two edges so ctrl b give this like i don't know like six segments should be okay shift click control minus you get the drill and then we're just gonna move this up like so now you're gonna see we still have ridges here even though this has auto smooth turned on you need to make sure you always smooth out your cutter so just smooth that out and you auto smooth doesn't matter on the cutters you can turn it on if you want and there we go now you know what this is probably a bit too big let me scale this on the x a bit make it a bit smaller okay there we go and now all i want to do is mirror everything to the other side so i don't have to you know add the cut again or anything like that so let me go to the mirror modifier add modifier and then add on a mirror this one's going to be across the x we're going to bisect so split it down the middle and then flip the cutters to the other side if you're using box cutter alt x click and you're done so this is how you do it in vanilla and there we go so a lot easier than mirroring the cutters so now we need to get some little ridges here in the front like i had in the original photo so there's just a lot of basic cutters you know we can use a cube for this guy and scale it down on the yeah on the x ctrl a to apply the scale and it looks like i also rounded the edges on this guy so control b maybe give this like eight segments i'm going to be careful where i put this because i want to make sure no edges are going to be where another edge is on the on the base mesh otherwise you're running the hot lining you uh you can't run a boolean in the same exact position as an edge is placed in the piece you're cutting from if we run into that situation i'll be sure to point it out so we're going to do that and of course shade smooth auto smooth it and let's just pull this up a bit or you know what now let's pull this down and let's see did i do anything else i don't think so so we'll shift click this and then control minus now do i want these a bit more rounded so let me undo make these a lot more rounded pull it down i can't decide where i want to get these maybe i could go all the way no man this is me being ocd with it can't decide where i want to put it i'm just going to put it here and call it a day so shade smooth auto smooth pull it down a tad and then control minus we can pull this up a bit to make it more rounded now we have limited space so let's just be careful with it and we'll just pull it down like that we can always move these edges in a bit more if we want like so but i'm just going to leave it for now okay so let's hide that cutter there with the h key and now we have that and you know what this is just too close for my liking i'm going to go into face mode and if we alt click here and press s and then shift z we can move this in a bit more let's see did that affect anything not really let's move this in a bit more probably too much i think this will do but what i am going to do is to kind of balance that oops to balance that i'm just going to bring this cutter in and then just move it out a bit and you're going to see the mirror is also going to replicate and we'll just go ahead and hide that let's do the same thing for this piece pull it out a bit hide that and we're pretty much good to go so this looks decent now if we want to get the mirror to work again all we need to do is put the boolean modifier here which goes to this piece above the mirror so that way it adds the boolean and then flips it now i'm going to move these over a bit more so there's some more space here like so and then just go ahead and hide it now you're going to see in the corners here we have like the um the the bevel is pinching where the chamfer is right so this area is causing like a little bit of stress here as you can see so to kind of ease that all we need to do is drop in a few loops here to kind of even it out and that'll fix the issue completely probably don't even need three usually like one or two will be enough but you know we'll just leave three for now that's fine same idea for the bottom here we can just add in about three and call it a day so already in you know just a few minutes we have this pretty cool looking cut and it'd be even quicker if i wasn't making a tutorial so yeah we're making good progress there are some other areas i i do want to work on so i'm going to hop into the front view here and if we take a look at the reference you can see i made this little red panel in the middle so that's super easy all we have to do is use a oops that was the wrong wrong screen i moved wasn't it give me one sec move that in here okay there we go so yeah to get that red panel we're gonna essentially just run a slice operation directly through the center now i'm just going to move the 3d cursor back to the center with shift s and then cursor to origin add in a cube scale the cube down and a little bit bigger than the main piece here that should be enough and then shift select this and press control forward slash on the number pad and that's going to get you a simple little slice in the middle now i also want to get some small ridges here on the on the side so same idea you can always start with a symbol cube and scale this guy up and just move it in now we want to be careful what i'm actually going to do is go into wireframe view here under viewport display go to wireframe we'll just pull this guy to about here so i want to make sure the boolean isn't hitting this edge directly i'm going to try to show you what happens if i run a boolean like this i don't know if i'm gonna be able to replicate it but watch what happens if this boolean hits this edge at a certain position it's really hard to hit for one it's going to cause shading errors too it's um there's going to be manifolding issues so essentially when you run a boolean just make sure it's not hitting an edge directly just pull it a bit farther you're a bit shorter whatever you prefer like that and it's not cutting through this piece so to fix that i actually want to let's see well you know we can just run a difference through there as well maybe it would have been easier to run the slice afterwards but at the end of the day you know you can just select that one and cut through there as well so i'm going to hide this and then just turn off the wire frame view we don't really need it anymore and there we go we're looking good now this is probably a bit too big so with this cutter we can of course scale it on the z however we want that should probably be more than enough okay and then i'm just going to go ahead and get this mirrored to the other side so just make sure all your booleans are above the mirror make blender happy put this one above the mirror and it's just going to flip to the other side here as you can see now we have a happy little cube here with the slice in the middle and a little cut on the side the main downside of using vanilla workflow is that you have to keep repositioning the booleans in the stack whereas with hard ops it does it automatically so that's like you know i'm not too concerned about using manual cutters but the modifier stack is just so annoying to deal with that's where most of your problems come in is just one of your modifiers in the wrong position okay anyways what we have now if we look at the photo if i can bring it in we have a few little notches here in the front right about here and on the bottom and things like that so we can add those in quite easily so you know we'll just run a cube and put this roughly where we want that notch to be so not a huge notch just a tiny one right about here okay and then i'm just going to pull the cube out let's pull it out this way and then at this point all we need to do is run a simple chamfer with control b and then run a difference bully and you're gonna see it goes to the bottom so we need to actually move this face here up so that doesn't happen and there we go so that's perfect but actually not quite perfect because i want that to be a little bit bigger so we can scale it so scale that up a bit and then of course as you may have guessed boolean needs to go above the mirror it's going to flip to the other side and we're making pretty good progress here so what else are we missing so it looks like in the reference photo for these pieces it's also kind of slanted right here it's kind of slanted upwards and there's also a hole in it so let's add that in real quick so in order to make that type of design let's recall this guy and to kind of pull it up all i'm going to do is tab into vert mode and i'm just going to select that bottom set of vertices there and just kind of roll them up move this down let's roll them up some more let's see is that enough is it getting everything like i want it to i might need to run a j right there to have a clear isolation point you know it's because i i did a destructive bevel here so that's why it's being a little bit difficult so you know what might be easier it might be easier to just run a completely new cube so i'm going to scale the cube down and let's just try this again so right off the bat before i bevel anything let me scale that down a bit and i guess just before i bevel anything we can actually pull this up right off the bat pull this in you know pull it down and just make sure these vertices are already at an angle ready for us so now if we run a difference you can see it's already slanted at which point we can just really get in here and you know do our own manual little eight segment bevel or however many segments we want to use pull that in okay there we go much much better so only thing is this needs to be scaled a bit more pulled over a bit more like that and then we can just go ahead and remove that old boolean and run this boolean above the mirror and okay there we go that's much better okay so that looks good for now now i want to add in a circle on the top so all we need is a cylinder as you may have guessed i don't know how many segments i want maybe like 40 let's check 40 46 or something i don't know it doesn't have to be super rounded so i guess like not super dense but not super low so that way it still looks like a circle and then we'll scale this down and position it right there in the middle now if it was with the box cutter this would be infinitely easier because you can actually snap it to the surface but if you want to snap to the surface as in match the angle of this piece you're going to actually have to go into face mode go to align rotation to target and then grab it and hold ctrl so that way it actually snaps there automatically and now you can move this down by grabbing it on the local z so g z zz g y y to move it up and we can of course run a boolean right there okay and for this piece we can get in here move the boolean up and i think that is basically how that one went there we go okay so let's go into the front view and let's add in the little notches that were in the front as well so to scale this guy down scale it on the z we'll go ahead and pull it out on the y and scale it on the y this is all just very basic manipulation i'm not going to explain too much what i'm doing because it should be obvious so control minus we're going to add in a cut there and just adjust it a bit and then as you may have guessed boolean above the mirror if you have hard ops you won't have to do that it's automatic so thank goodness for that and then i guess the rest of this piece was just a um we'll hide this so just another cube but just a bit bigger so kind of like this i just need to remember how i position this exactly so it was something like this i believe and then i just put it back and you know scaled it up a tad so now we have something like that and you could also rotate it over the x if you wanted it to be more of like in a like an angle or something maybe that's what i did actually yeah that is what i did so i'm going to rotate this over the x-axis yeah over the x 45 degrees like that and then we can grab it on a local z or local y maybe and then pull it back pull it down okay this is actually how i did it before i couldn't quite remember so if we need more space we can just pull one of those and we could also rotate it at more of a steep angle if we wanted to but i want it to match the general chamfer so i'm actually going to leave it right about right about here should be okay yeah that should be fine we'll go ahead and hide that piece and then maybe we can go to this guy right here and just pull it up a bit so we have some more room make it look a little bit neater and cleaner and there we go so as far as the cube's concerned that's about all i did for that piece and you know i was using box cutters so i knocked it out in you know five minutes if that so it looks like we have all the pieces we need now this is where it gets it's not tricky it's just uh tricky for some people who don't have the add-on and it's all these little details these circles here these um these little ventilation units in the front you can see those little circles um all the little notches and screws and things like that so let me show an example see this piece down here these little vent holes so let me show you what i would have to do if i wanted to add in those vent holes in vanilla it's absolute insanity it it it's to the point where it just doesn't make sense it's like a confusing calculus problem trying to see i already tried to go into box cutter by um what i'm used to so if you were to do this in vanilla you'd have to go in and scale all this down you'd have to get some really really tiny you know ventilation cuts like i was just showing you so if i wanted a bunch of you know like a cool venting unit i'd have to go in take these guys join them i'd probably have to run an array modifier all the way down let me apply the rotation and scale so yeah i'd have to get in here and then you know pull one of these run a difference boolean and you know that looks okay but already look at the difference here so the vert count right now is at about four thousand four hundred thirty five if i delete these look at that we're down to one thousand you just added an extra three thousand verts for the most simple object for no reason and uh not to mention once we add a bevel in here if i were to you know i'll show you in a second if i were to run the bevel let me push these actually now i'll leave it where it is leave all those where it is yeah if i were to add my bevel right now and turn off clamp increase the segments put it to angle look at how quickly intersections start hitting it's like it's almost immediate the artifacts occur like before we even if we have the tiniest amount of bevel the artifacts already start hitting so that's another huge issue it's it's simply ridiculous to do it this way in vanilla to add in this actual physical geo whereas i could just go into decal machine like this right i just go into decal machine i find a screw let's see let's just get a basic screw in here or a basic like um ventilation piece i know we have one somewhere okay here it is so instead of doing all that like i just showed you i can put in a decal you know maybe duplicate this a few times and just move it over keep in mind this is a single plane this is an extra four vertices each time i add one in and look at that you literally couldn't tell the difference compared to whether this is actual geo or if this is you know part of the mesh and it'll become more obvious once you actually add in materials and things like that but yeah hopefully my point has been made because this is an extra four times three this is an extra 12 vertices in your scene whereas if i made all of these using physical geo it would have been thousands of extra vertices it it's insanity how easy decal machine is and how silly it is to not use it in your work it's it's just an amazing add-on really i'll put the link in the description if you haven't gotten it yet so yeah instead of adding in those holes manually you know we're going to be using decals for that just because i cannot be bothered adding in physical geo so yeah same for these pieces over here if i wanted to add in these circles this looks like geo right it's not this is literally a decal this is a single plane four vertices and if i wanted to do that on this side i'd have to go in same idea i'd have to go in with a cylinder i'd have to rotate this guy i'd have to you know array these across run a difference boolean i'd have to get in move the boolean above the bevel and it's just you're just having a bad day after like if you come into blender with a cranky move that's gonna make you crankier i can confirm so instead of that what we'd do is you know just find a nice decal somewhere i'm not sure what i have available to me but i can check so this one right here is what i used you know you just rotate it 90 degrees you scale this guy up maybe to about here and then all you have to do is just project it to the mesh so we'll project it that's probably a bit too emphasized there that should be fine especially if we go out of ortho it'll show up quite well so yeah way easier than geo you just pop those decals on you're good to go so with all this being said enough of my spiel about decal machine let's get in here and add some materials so this is a cool little metal crate looking thing right this has more of a metallic texture to it so of course when we add a new material we want to make it metallic so right off the bat after we add in a material let's pull it up to metallic so it gets all those metallic properties for base color i'm going to make this a little bit on the darker side so around there and right off the bat let's also take this guy here and oops there we go let's add a new material to this guy as a matter of fact i'm just going to apply all the booleans here by the way this is the modifier tools add-on it's built into blender so if you go to edit preferences and type in modifier [Applause] modifier you can turn on the modifier tools add-on and then you can apply everything at once so i'm actually going to do that and if you don't have access to the apply button you have to add a new data user another pro of hard ops you don't have to do that every time so you're going to click apply all and now this should be a separate piece so we can just get in there and add a new material make this one like a rough type of red color maybe give it a little bit of clear coat make it a bit more exciting and there we go so as for the base material here there are a few things you want to mess with just right off the bat metallic if it's metallic put it up to one if it's not put it to zero in general you're not going to ever use an in-between because you have dielectric material then you have metallic in the real world there's not really any in between so it's either going to be one or zero so quite obvious there specularity i never touch specul specular tint that's only if you change that i leave that roughness you're going to change if you want a reflective surface drop the roughness if you want a rough surface increase it very very simple concept you can mess with this to your liking i want to make this a little bit more shiny uh sheen don't really use clear coats nice if you want a little bit of extra detail on there so i'm going to crank that to like .6 and then give it a bit of clear coat roughness so it's not super obvious you can see that's better and uh this should be fine for now now the reason this thing isn't popping is because we haven't applied a bevel yet to make this look good not to mention we haven't finished applying our decals so let's go ahead and right off the bat add a bevel modifier change the limit method to an angle about three segments should be fine and then you can drop a hard normal or a weighted normal but first before we do that clamp overlap needs to be turned off and we need to really mess with the offset here just a very slight offset let's also add a you know what we can just take on hard and harden normals for now okay so the reason this thing isn't popping very nicely is because right here it starts pinching right uh first thing you can see these shadows are crazy i'm turning them off right here you see how it's like triangulated and pinching you need to change the outer miter type to an arc first of all that'll just clean it up a second thing this boolean is kind of annoying our base geo if i go into wireframe look at this we have a big end gone here so we get bad shading and stretching so to fix this since we're still working non-destructively meaning that boolean isn't applied there we can actually the trick i use is i turn on this is only if i'm doing it in vanilla i just navigate to where's the big cutter that i used not this one right here this guy so i turn that on temporarily and then i run a loop cut right below that point same for the top right above it so now the shading is confined to this area here so it's not as big and noticeable so if i turn off wireframe you're going to see that shading is a lot more neatly held and that's something we can work with a lot a lot better so yeah that's just how you can quickly clean up shading if it's giving you some problems so same idea for this piece we can add a bevel but if you there's a much quicker way than adding another bevel turn on the copy attributes add-on right here just yeah enable that guy and then if we shift click the guy with the bevel and press ctrl c we can copy the bevel right from it so it's just a little bit quicker than adding in another manual bevel and adjusting all the settings and all all that jazz so as you can see the bevel is hitting flawlessly you do need to check for any artifacts shading can be confined and fixed artifacts are a no-go you need to fix your artifacts so artifacts are those little black splotches that occur from overshooting vertices on the bevel in this case it looks like we're okay but obviously if i really cranked this then we get bad artifacts because you know i'll just show you because if the bevel goes too high it starts overlapping as you can see so we just want to make sure that's not happening that would be a a big no-no for blender but overall the bevel's catching everywhere very very nicely so yeah you can see the difference here between no bevel which looks awful and then bevel which captures the light on the edges when it gets rounded so you know most of you know this already but this is also supposed to be another beginner's tutorial so you know why not explain it as i go okay so now when we go into material view everything looks a lot nicer here we have the bevels where we want them and we can just start working on this some more so as for the base material you know you can adjust the settings i think i got mine where i want it for this piece i think it's fine a little bit of clear coat on there and a little bit of roughness so that looks good so all we need to do is really get in here and just start adding in decals and things to make it look cool so what i'm going to do is hop into front view let's add in let's add in some sort of screw like this these types of screws i like adding in on slanted and chamfered surfaces i just think it looks quite nice now decals don't work or they work but they don't look good in ortho you need to make sure you're in perspective if you want it to look good so it looks a little bit warped so if i project this it should be a bit nicer or maybe not yeah this one's not looking as exciting let me let me mess with a different one let's try this is the one i used originally so let's add this one in move it up on the y a bit and then we'll just go ahead and project it there we go that looks a lot nicer so that's looking looking okay now let's see what else we have here in the decal pack so i believe i used this right here this decal and just put it in you know to scale it down and put it in alt q that's just my hotkey by default it's the d key but uh decal machine and box cutter both both have a d hotkey so i just change it to alt q to make it easier so now we have that now these right here that i added you're going to see one they don't look very good i wish these were a bit cleaner on the edges but that white material has to go so we can actually use the material matching system or if that doesn't work we can go to the material base color and drop that down like that and then let's go ahead and mirror this to the other side so add a mirror modifier perfect and already you can see this after a few decals the thing this thing really starts to come together and look better so now we can add in a few more decals then we'll just go ahead and preview this in cycles to see how it looks so let's go in and i'm going to add in the tmc logo where did i even get that one from oh it's right here okay cool so yeah sometimes adding in text decals looks quite nice in my opinion so add one of those there we'll just project it and for these logos i don't want it to be too bright so i'll just turn it up to metallic or if i don't want that i can maybe you know with decals i don't mind cheating the system and using a middle ground for metallic that should be fine looks a little bit better that way anyways and maybe just pull it down a slight bit there we go looking good so let's add in some of those ventilation units on the front so i'm going to add in one of these guys here scale it down and then maybe position it to about there and i'm just going to duplicate move it up a bit and then duplicate this one and i'm just going to do all this by i really that should be fine so now we can just join all these together and i can either maybe i'll move it over here and then project it okay project doesn't want to work with us right now so i'll just leave it how it is and then run a mirror modifier so add a mirror the mirror object is going to be this piece and we are looking good now only thing this part gets cut off so perhaps i could does that hurt us at all no that should be okay we can just cut off and kind of smush those down a bit that should be all right and then the last few things i want to add in are some decals on the side and on the top so not much left so i'm going to go into the side view and just add in some simple screws so maybe one like this we'll add that there and then we can just you know make life easy use a mirror the mirror is going to be on the y axis in this case over this object and then across the z as well and then you know what across the x-axis as well why not so one of the few situations in which i actually mirror across all the axes pretty interesting so now we have some little bolts and screws on the side and things like that okay so while we're at it i think it's a good time to go into cycles which you should be in by default cycles render and let's see how it looks not too bad so my guess is your render does not look like mine right now and that's fine the number one rule at least for rendering and getting just a more static decent looking render you need an overcast hri meaning you need an hdri that has very static lighting neutral lighting not any superimposing lighting that's coming from a directed source so by default you're going to have this you're going to have nothing just a simple color and what a lot of people do is they just adjust the color now this is a terrible way to do it for obvious reasons this just looks awful so what you actually want to do is use an acri which has natural lighting from the real world so this is where i get all of my acris from hdrihaven.com they're all completely free you don't have to pay anything or sign up this is where i get all of mine now there's one primary one i use like 99 of the time so you go to the website you go to acris you go to overcast because overcast is like a cloudy day where it's bright but there's no like clear direction the lighting's coming from if that makes sense so wait for this to load i'm um transferring files to dropbox right now so my internet's kind of slow because i'm transferring like terabytes of information so give me a sec okay so finally it loaded so we're just going to scroll down to the one i use right here abandon slipway this is like a godsend for hdri so get this one i'll put it in the description as well if i forget just remind me and i'll put it in there so like i said internet slowing down because i'm transferring files but i'd recommend going with an 8k or a 16k 16k is probably overkill but i would definitely go for an 8k to get as accurate lighting as you can see you're just going to download this guy and you're going to go into blender and under the world settings for color go to environment texture and then open up the hdri file you just downloaded so it's going to be purple until you open that file so i already have mine in the scene so open that up and then ta-da look what you have you have a beautiful illuminated box now now let me show you something else just for those who don't know so if you go to you're probably going to see the acry whereas i don't under the rendering settings under performance no not performance under film there's a transparent box i would always keep this on unless you're messing with the hdri so take a look at this back here is like cloudy over here still cloudy but that's where the sun's hitting the most it's it's bright so most of the lighting is pushing from this direction as can be seen on the box and also when you rotate the box the um you see the lighting at different directions right so not only does the hri matter the position of your camera matters as well we'll get into that shortly when we actually do the rendering so yeah just keep that in mind but for now i'm going to turn on transparent we'll be good to go so we'll change the lighting positioning and all that in just a bit but for now before we do that i want to finish adding in some decals so to just top off everything i'm going to go into the top ortho add a few screws here in the top so maybe like actually this is one of my favorites right here this guy so i'm going to add in a few of these just put them in the corner and let the mirror do the work for us so add a mirror over this as the mirror object and then over the y as well and just to make this a little bit cleaner move that over and then maybe i'll just put like a big decal in the middle here or something like one of these i don't know these are pretty cool so most of these decal packs you can get on gumroad for free and i have a few paid ones but yeah they're um you can get decal packs everywhere really and then i'm just gonna project this onto the mesh and there we go we're basically finished i don't think i added anything else this is pretty much ready for rendering actually no wait i lied i want to add in two little vents here in the bottom so real quick i'm going to add in a little vent there and now it's too that's too um too small i'm going gonna add in one here and then add in one over here and there we go now i think i'm satisfied so at this point we're ready to render ready to make this thing look even cooler the number one thing people do and i was guilty of it for a long time is you can have the coolest looking box but it's going to look terrible unless you get the renderings to look good so this next part is going to be heavily focused on rendering and how to get a good clean look for it okay so what we're going to do is first of all you want to have this sitting on a plane right right now just floating in space like the astronauts so this thing isn't an astronaut this thing is a box so we need to make sure we treat it as such i mean we're going to add in a plane and just let it sit right on top of that plane and just scale the plane up and i'm gonna do this in perspective so i have a good view okay now another important thing we're gonna add a material and it's important to know and understand how materials work and that'll come with practice so right now we have a white material with half roughness and it's reflecting a lot of light back up here onto the object this thing looks terrible over you know overexposed and just doesn't look good now watch what happens if i change this to a metallic floor already starts cleaning up and even more so if i change the base color to be darker now you can see those colors aren't reflecting as as harshly on the mesh it's looking a lot nicer so you know the darker the color the more the natural light comes back into play so you know make sure you're careful with the color of the floor and also whether it's metallic or whether it is rough or dielectric rather okay so i usually for these renders i like to have a little bit of reflection on the floor like this but you know maybe a bit more if you go too high on the roughness all of that reflection goes away or most of it now it's just shadow but if we have a lower roughness you can see it starts bringing in that reflection so i'm just gonna go down to around point three i like showing it but not to the point where it's you know crazy exposed in the ground so maybe like point three three six would be okay so check this out if i delete the floor you can see a lot of that lighting goes away on the sides because this floor is bouncing light back up onto the crate now if you ask me for all the physics behind it i i'm not a physicist i don't know i just know how the light works based on the material settings and that's all you really need to know in blender and if you know the physics physics behind it then even better because you're a lot smarter than me i suppose so yeah you can really see the difference compared to where this is placed and how it affects the lighting on the box so you want to make sure you focus more on materials than the lighting per se now that's that's a very general statement but for the most part it works so this looks decent i'm going to make it a little bit darker though just a bit and i'm not going to add any clear coat i think this will be good so once you set the materials materials are always number one get the materials looking good and how you want them and then number two is moving the hdri lighting to be in the position you actually want it to hit so right now it's hitting in the back of this so that's not really where i want the lighting i want the lighting to be more on the front so i can see it so this is usually what i do to adjust the lighting i pull up a new panel i go to the shader editor i go to the world tab and oops okay there we go they're going to have this node set up right here basically all we want to do is rotate the acry around the z-axis so it goes like this basically that's how it works so if i go and turn off transparency watch what happens when i start rotating around the z it starts rotating the hdri and you can see the lighting starts moving around the scene so usually what i do is i just you know i get a good position where i think i want the render to be you know right around here would be okay i turn off the overlays panel and then i just slowly rotate this guy and just see which area i want the light to hit already it's starting to move towards the front looking a little bit worse as i go so now it's kind of getting more towards the front and then once you get to an area you like i always recommend jotting down just mentally the numerical value you like and then each time you get a better value think of the new one and just jot it down mentally so you know if you want the light to hit from that side then you keep rotating but i think i want it to be coming in more to the front on the right side which means it's gonna have to be like probably around the hundreds area i can't quite yet make a decision so i'm going to pause the video till i find a value i like so i think 125 is a good even value so i'm gonna leave it there and yeah this should be okay now one thing it's okay to increase the strength of the hri but you need to do it in very very small quantities if you're pumping the strength too high to the point where um you're like at a value of 5 or 10 or something you're doing something wrong i would never recommend pumping the strength below or above like two you know very very minor increments like 1.1 or 1.2 is like the most i usually go if i pump the exposure in the hri so i want to put the strength to maybe like 1.2 so that looks decent and now all we have to do is essentially add in a backdrop or you know what to you probably don't even need a backdrop to be honest because i can probably position the camera so it's only looking at the floor so that brings us to the next part we're almost done i promise so we need to add in a camera and if you press ctrl 0 on the number pad that'll make that camera the active camera in which case we can go to view and then align view align active camera to view but you want to wait until you're in the position you like the most before you do that so i think this position just depends where you want this to point right around here should be okay and then we'll go to view align view align active camera to view and right now my rendering settings are on 2560x1440 you could do like 1920x1080 if you prefer and now all we have to do is grab this camera and let's see what the settings are here so 50 millimeters is generally what the human sees so i'm going to move this back a bit on the local z you know i just want there to be room i don't want it to be you know too confined to the corners here i want there to be breathing room around the edges so i'm just going to move this out a bit and i also want there to be blank area over here so that way we can take this into photoshop and add some text and stuff like that so at this point once you have the camera set up and you like how it looks go here turn on render region this is how the render is going to look so if there's anything you want to change at this point go and change it so in this case i'm going to actually make the floor a little bit brighter so bring the base color up a tad you're going to see that makes the box a little bit brighter as well and if you want to reposition the camera over a bit more you can do that and uh yeah this thing is looking pretty nice now i might increase the focal length that teensy weensy bit to like 54 just so it's a little bit more zoomed and you know that's even might be a bit too much 50 oops not 23 53 might be the perfect point okay so at this point we're ready to render there are a few things i need to point out before you render though so first things first i render at a 16 by 9 aspect ratio using a resolution of 2560 by 1440 so that way it's just a little bit better quality you can get away with by 1080 though make sure the percentage is at a hundred now we need to save as a 16 bit tiff that's all you have to change and here make sure the denoising data option is turned on that's very important very man i'm losing my voice today it's very important because we're going to be using blender's ai denoiser so that way when it renders all the noise goes away next for the rendering settings you can just copy mine just just follow along render 100 to 200 samples will be fine you don't need that many contrary to popular belief you can choose what you want to render with i'm using gpu under light paths copy these values here don't ask me why i just copy them you're going to get good renders every time if you do that this clamping 0 to 10 is fine caustics don't really matter film transparent but it's not going to matter too much because we're not looking at the background so you know do whatever you want with that tiles depends on if you're doing gpu or cpu i'll let you be the judge of what you want to use for that i'm using gpu at 2048 by 2048 that should be fine and other than that i don't think there's too much left to change besides in the compositor so in the compositor you want to add in a denoise node so shift a filter you want to add a denoise node and add in a glare node so this is just the default compositor settings you always want to have in and i trust that everyone here can look at the screen and connect up how these connection points are set up make sure you change the glare to fog glow because fog glow is actually what brings out the bloom effect in the cycles rendering engine so anyways at this point we're ready to go in and we can press f12 and render this guy out so this should take just a few minutes depending on your machine that's why we used all the settings i told you to use because you can get away with just a couple minutes for the render to finish so looks like mine's going to be about a minute so i'm just going to pause the video here so here it is and at this point all you need to do is save the image as a once again 16-bit tiff is very important for the quality and at this point i'm just going to go in here and i'll just save it as box and now all we have to do is make this thing look better it looks good but not good enough okay so i just brought this guy into photoshop here and we just need to make this thing look a little bit cleaner and photoshop post processing is the best thing you can do to your renders and i don't want to take all the credit here because my a good friend ryu a lot of you probably follow him as well another hard surface artist he has taught me a ton just in general about photoshop compositing post processing all of that so i've learned a lot of these techniques from him which i'm just passing on to you so if you want to learn from a photographer a pro modeler everything artist related go to his channel and check that out i'm just going to kind of show you some of the stuff he taught me for post-processing i've definitely gotten better at it over the months okay so we're gonna have a layer zero here i'm gonna press ctrl j we're gonna make a duplicate so that way we always have access to the base render so first thing on this duplicated layer we're going to go to the camera raw filter and just do a few adjustments here first thing i'm going to bump the exposure up just a tad bit maybe to .25 i'm going to bump the shadows just a bit and maybe bump the whites just a bit and you can kind of see this helps bring out the metallic a bit more um everything else maybe now we can paint that in so we're going to add in some texture and clarity but we're going to actually paint that in let me show you so texture and clarity brings out the texture and clarity as you can see but i only want to bring it out for the box and not the rest of the scene so to do that we can go to the brush tool and in here maybe we'll paint in some shadows paint in some texture and paint in some clarity and we're just going to go all around this box here and just paint across try to get every single spot now as you paint you're not going to see a difference i think it's like an illusion or something but watch what happens if i undo and then redo it's like night and day it's interesting because when i paint the detail i never see the detail changing until afterwards i don't know why but it's interesting and especially these areas where it's a little bit darker you can see those come out a lot nicer so that's why you want to paint that stuff in for now we're just going to click ok this kind of bumps it up a bit as you can see this looks way better now and this is another plugin that ryu introduced me to the infinite color plugin and this thing basically just does like color balancing color grading all that stuff in just a one click to make it easier so i'm just going to go to light and then click on create and usually you just click through until you get a nice one actually the first one was decent so i'm going to stick with the first one so you can see the difference here so this is the base render and this is with a little bit of color grading looks way better now so i actually got lucky with the first shot so i'm happy with how that looks now we're just going to drop in some text so i'm going to add in some text here click it we're just going to call this i don't know the blend box something whatever you want to call it you know you just put in some text and you can just go to google and look for sci-fi text fonts um and you know just change through the fonts you don't want to have a boring one like calibri or calibri however you pronounce it looks boring you want like a cool sci-fi text right you know like something like that or maybe um oasis oasis is pretty cool um space age is pretty cool you know really whatever you want so i'm gonna do the whoops i'm going to do space age i think space age is quite nice we'll add that in and now all we need to do is just get this in a nice spot on here so i guess i'm low on disk space now so i'm going to deal with that after the video anyways just get this text in a nice neutral spot that catches the eye i'm going to drop the fill a bit so that way it's not not like uh too imposing on the scene and then maybe change the color to more of a silver i can't really decide this is like the number one issue i have when i do this is deciding what looks good so just put the blend box over here and then maybe i'll add in some more text and maybe put my signature down on the bottom and just make this one a different font like a lasis elastus whatever we'll put this down here drop the fill like that and yeah it's looking pretty good and you know you could get creative with it you could put like your own logo over here or something or some more text really whatever you want but i think this is pretty cool where it is and now what i want to do is take everything but the base layer so shift click press ctrl alt shift e and that's just going to add in a layer with everything fused to it as you can see so i'm just going to go back up here to the camera raw filter and add in a tiny tiny bit of vignetting so under effects we'll just give a little bit of vignette just a slight amount you can kind of see the difference there we have a little bit of a border going on and last thing i'm just going to adjust the contrast just a tad bit so i'm just going to select this new layer we're going to go to i'm using the add-on that ryu suggested me to get the knit collection with color effects you can do the contrast manually if you want it's not like super crucial from what i've seen it just adds a little bit of a nice touch to it so i'm going to go to the pro contrast click on that that already made a difference give it a little bit of extra contrast here a little bit of a boost and a little bit of shadows and we'll just wait for that to load in and then you're going to see the difference is a little bit nicer wait for that to load so that's with the contrast enhanced and this is without so without with without with a little little bit nicer so at this point you just have to go to file save as and then save it as a jpeg which i've already done and then yeah you're pretty much good to go so hopefully this video gave you a little bit of insight into the blender and rendering photoshop workflow and you have a pretty cool looking render after doing this video so i'd love to see how yours looks you can send me a picture on twitter instagram and anyways until the next video i will see you then

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 44,970

Rating: 4.976521 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, hard, surface, box, modeling, smart, tutorial, complete, beginner, boolean, bevel, non, destructive, decal, machine, hole, cut, decals, mesh, topology, topo, cleanup, hardops, boxcutter, 2.90, features

Id: O8UH8UBKO8w

Length: 56min 55sec (3415 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020