First steps | 3D Modeling with Blender for Cosplay

hello guys this is penny from camera cosplay and welcome to one of those videos where I'm the one stealing the spotlight many of you told me that you wanted me to make a video of how a 3d model and prints with Lana's costume pieces worth blender and Here I am like any good parent showing you that you just need to cry long enough to finally get what you want all joking aside when I started with blender I was actually really annoyed that they were not really any tutorials that showed you how to make a complete costume piece from the very beginning to the finished print so hopefully I'm about to change that today because I'm going to show you how I made this alloy head piece from horizon zero dawn all the way from reference image to what you see here now svitlana was here she would probably used this moment to tell you to borrow milk and coffee book if you were to build cool tea too but lucky for you it's just me today and I'm not gonna remind you of that but now let's dive into blender okay now I switched cameras so you can actually see what I'm doing on my screen and rule number one of 3d modeling is get good reference images from as many sides and use as possible horizon luckily has a pretty good photo mode so I could take a lot of screenshots from all views and angles and for 3d modeling I usually suggest getting at least a view from the side and one from the front that should be enough then next I went into Photoshop and put all those views into one image and then I used two guides which you can find under view and show and guides I'll just drag them down from the rulers just to make sure they all have the same size and proportions so when I import them into blender it's one image with all the views on it I can work with okay next let's open lender I'm actually using blender 2.8 which is still in beta but if you go to the website you can see you can download it right here the the official build is still 2.79 but i find a 2.8 is a lot more easy to work with so i really suggest using this or at least getting used to it from the very GetGo it's sometimes crashes but just save often and I never problems with it so go with 2.8 is my suggestion then when you open the program this is what it looks like right looks complicated lots of buttons and interface stuff rest assured just maybe 10% of all of that that you're gonna use to make like a headpiece like that first let's talk about how you navigate through the 3d space and you do that most D by using your middle mouse button you click it drag it and rotate the camera pretty easy now if you hold down shift at the same time shift and little mouse button you can Pan the camera you look around like that and if you scroll with the middle mouse button you can zoom in and out you can do all the same by using these buttons to the right to zoom or pan or rotate the camera that's sorry or loosen these here you can also click the little buttons to go to the use yeah and that's pretty much it middle mouse button all the way now for modeling you also want to go to the top yond and side use a lot you do that either by going to you view point front back right left top dos if you have a number pad on your keyboard you can press one for the top view we for the right you can see it here as well front view right you and seven for the top view so one three and seven if you're on the laptop like me and don't have a number pad go to preferences input and say emulate number then you can just use two numbers on your keyboard okay well that's do we need for navigation we don't need the timeline so you can just drag this one down there is another menu to the right where you see this little arrow you can either push it which brings up like stuff like the dimensions for this cube or the location or you can press the N key let me just put a turn on my screen keys so you see what I'm pressing awesome to bring up this menu as well and one more thing you can go to the edges of your view like the top or the right and press the rest the right mouse button which brings up this menu view that says every options network join area split basically means you can split put you top you for example the top then put the bottom view to the front and then you edit something it shows you immediately what this does from every angle useful right I never use it at all I only work with one use so I just go back to join that's only use this one and then I much rather just look through the views by pressing the buttons but it's entirely up to you you can if you have a big screen you can make as many views as you want like split it once lit it twice a little bit even more times yeah but you don't really need it like I said okay next which one of those buttons and funny icons will we use the answer is not that many luckily because you can see here on the top there is layout modeling sculpting UV editing texture paint shading animation rendering opposing sculpting we don't need any of those I'm just gonna stay in the layout for this entire process so yeah consider yourself lucky because blender is a lot of options then to the right you have your options of the new port you can turn off this weird to occur so they have you can turn off the the yellow point here its origins you can basically get rid of everything can put all the extras away you can just able to grid or the axis and but I usually leave this on I only disabled actually cursor and the origins because they get in my way all the time then to the right of this we can make everything transparent which is very useful for modeling because if you want to like get the the point that's behind here you can just press that's part and select it awesome and then to the right here you can choose between wireframe mode solid mode shape mode and anything else that you don't really need i'm usually gonna just stay in the solid mode you can also click on here for the shading and choose textures make the colors random if you have multiple objects go to madcap and apply weird textures or whatever reason you're feeling fancy nothing we need right now just so you know it's there and you don't make it then right - that is your scene selection that's all the objects we have we have these you can see here every new scene you create there it's like a camera it's here we have like a light source and a cube you don't need any of those so you can also just go here right click delete right click delete right click to leave so you have a completely empty scene you can also make collections it's basically a folder so if you have like a mesh like a plane and the sphere you have those two you can put those into a collection then you can hide the entire collection or make it so you can select it anymore this or you can create anymore objects like this weird giant cylinder and put this one right click into a new collection alright so you have those individually oh pretty handy and pretty standard so far Lenard 2.79 didn't add any of this so consider yourself lucky he you started when 2.8 was out already awesome beneath there at the bottom there's like a lot of different options and we're gonna need two of them tops which is usually here for the modifiers because that's where you can apply mirrors or subdivision surfaces which I'm gonna cover in a minute and more stuff like this entire scene where as it seems in the scene here it is the scene if you hover over it it will show you what it means so here's the scene where you can also set stuff like metric or Imperial and your units for example do centimeters which is very useful for reprinting great at the bottom there's the timeline which we don't need at the left there are things we can do depending on where we are if we are in object mode like we are right now we can transform this we can move it around by the present move you can rotate it you can scale it there's also shortcuts to that which I would suggest you use and I'm which is for example if you want to move something and press the button G or do or move a natural I'm not sure why it's G just press G to move it around click the mouse button it stops at this position if you press G and then press one of the axes because you can see here to the right there's like if you go upwards it's that axis if you go from it's the X and sideways is the y axis so if you press G and then one of those buttons for example that it will only move in this direction press X it will only move in this direction press Y it will only move in this direction can also do the by the mouse button press 3 hold the middle mouse button in this direction it won't move it here press the middle mouse button in this direction if you'll only move here works the same for rotation if you go to rotate you press rotate which is also R on the keyboard for rotate then you hold X it will only rotate in this direction we hold Y that you press Y on in this direction press that only end this direction because GD move R to rotate and scale it up by you guessed right pressing s for scale button yes it will scale you press that any skin this direction X in this direction and Y only in this direction okay so now let's edit one of our objects first let me get rid of all these things here you can either go here to duel each this so no nerves right click delete you can also just select them and press X X means delete and whatever you have selected will be deleted now we can add something new for example you can either go here to add and to mesh or you can press shift a which also brings up the same menu and let's just for now bring in a cube and this cube here now if you press the top button on your keyboard it will you can see you can swap between the object mode and the edit mode you can also do this by clicking with the mouse here and what this does is if your in object mode you can move the entire object if you press tab and you are in the edit mode you can either move the points the edges or the entire phases cases if you go here take a point select the point you can also select multiple points move them scale them or rotate them you can also select the edges like here those or you can also select the interfaces and move those or rotate those ETP be more thing you can also select the edge for example subdivide so you have another point in the middle which is awesome you can move this point to if you want to move it only along the edge you can move it press G another time and then it will only move along this side sometimes you model something you have a lot of points all around and you want to clean up the other your model you have a lot of points that you don't need you just move it over another point press a to select everything click the right mouse button and go to remove double vertices vertices are basically the points and then there's only one point again now I think it's actually time to build the headpiece so let's just get rid of our cube again and bring in the reference image and we do that by going to add or here go to that image and reference image but since I want this reference image to be only at the front and the side view like the front at the right view I'm gonna select the front view first you can also here to you you point in front then go to add image reference image and select the reference image awesome now we have it here I can select it because G moving it up here I'm gonna move it along the z-axis because I'm gonna mirror it left and right later so let's just try to find the middle awesome like this move to the right side you go to image reference image bring it again and move it up like around here awesome I'm not sure if that lines up what we going to do in a minute I'm first gonna select this one go to the right here - or is it here at this one object data because we want to change the object data for this image which is I want to make it transparent so I can see what I'm building beneath it or over it so I'm gonna put the transparency to the 50% like point-five neck that it's only viewable in or to graphic view so only in the front view pretty much that means what I rotate the camera it's gone and it's only visible if I'm in the front view kind of do the same for the right image 0.50 awesome so it's not in the way when I rotate the camera but it's there when I need it okay now to make them line up I'm gonna add a cube and I'm gonna move that cube so the bottom line lines up so I can put there go to the right image and make so that lines up as well so I can see they are on the same height and since it's the same image and all they're the same the same dimensions awesome so they're all lined up amazing now I use select those two by shift I can select two items and two objects that's what it does on put them into the collection and press this little arrow to the right which say it's disabled for for a new port selection which basically means I can select it anymore and it doesn't get it in my way when I pulled something okay now I'm ready to start building this Hattie's so how am I going to do that well there's multiple ways to do it my favorite way is to work with planes so I'm gonna add a mesh and a lane line is basically just a flat 2d like plane doesn't have a height to it it's just four points connected by four edges which is one face if you add any type of object there's a little add menu that pops up at the bottom here which says how big it is and I'm not gonna care about the units for now and I can also align it to the view which is what I'm gonna do now because I want to see my awesome as soon as I click somewhere else that menu disappears and I have my plane you can see here called right now I want to start building so I scale this down just a little bit move it up here and I want to mirror it from the right to the left and I need a mirror axis for this basically a point over which my part is a mirror and I do that by adding a empty arrow single arrow like it doesn't have anything to it it's not an object it's just a single arrow you can see here it's a zero zero zero point of my navigation system and this empty I'm just gonna call needle like this make it unselectable make it invisible and now when I go to my plane I create it I can go to the little wrench here which is the modifiers and one of the most important parts to the right menu here the rest is nut it's important to go to wrench click on add modifier and go to mirror now I want to mirror this based on the mirror object the mirror every arrow I create it like this you can see what happens I'm just gonna show the show the error again because it's mirrored based on where the arrows I can do it here and it's not awesome now you can see if I move it like this it will go into each other and I don't really want that so I can click on clipping here which basically makes it that it melds together in the middle so if I go to edit mode they move this along the mirror plane you can see there's only one point here and I can move it past the pass the mirror exits which is what I want because I want it to be exactly at the mirror plane it would be like weld together in the middle now let's go back to the front view and start building this piece first I'm gonna move this one here this one here and this one here and this one here great now the cracks behind making any three object is changing between the front and the side used constantly so that's what I'm going to do now I select my points go to the side view move them only along the y-axis one person why yep so I'm good like here and this point goes here this one goes here this here and this one goes here awesome great that's the first step now let's extend this downwards you extend something by selecting the points you want or the edges or the faces and pressing the button e for extension then you can see it creates two new points which I can move downwards press again move it sideways press me again move it down walk to press me again sideways Pacific and ours but again sideways you get the idea awesome now I created all of these points you're just gonna make member and this will again yep looks great from the side well not so much so let's select these points and move along the area again along the y-axis this this one this this one here like this move this one here like this awesome looks a lot more like the piece we want now let's continue this I can also select a single punch hit E for extension and go here press E again go here I can also select two points and create a bridge between them by going either to vertex like points and vertices points and go edge from face space from vertices like this and that basically connects a bridge between the two just gonna go back to show I can also do it by selecting both and pressing F which is a lot after awesome now yeah select those two drag them down here move this one here move one down here select these four create a new face move one here so these four create a face move one here select these four create a face move on here these four select the face create a face move on here and little bit work down a little bit I'm gonna care for those later but you see since I'm only extending in one direction only stays on this plane here which we can remedy by going to the side view and moving these points where we want them like this one here move this here here basically only trying to look at the reference image and finding the points or one goes to be according to the reference image so this one goes around here sorry this here if you can see the parts behind there's always the transparent button which makes everything transparent don't forget that that's one rule of thumb - yeah which you shouldn't forget us always try to make your faces with four points try to avoid having a face book five points you can make one but it will always lead to problems later so I recommend always doing for point pieces so for it I'm not going to move this one up here this one here just so I can create another four points here because that's gonna be a lot easier to work with so no three points no five points always try to go with four points if you can now we have like a little hole that is supposed to go in here how we do that easy peasy we just select the points around it press E for extension key for extension e for extension key for extension and select the form if you try to face select these four to create facing these large creative face don't gotta break my own rule make one but only three points so you never listen to me one more with three points dad with four points and one more in here yeah that's exactly 100 not really but I can select those go to the side view only move them along and make these transparent only move those along the y-axis and you can see what this does is it creates a nice hole that's exactly what I want awesome right already getting a lot closer now if it's sometimes hard to see what you're doing you can always go here to the shading option for example turn on cavity which basically makes riches and valleys more visible you see creates more shadows also uses more computing power so if you have a weak machine that try not using it too much or you can also go to madcap and selecting one of those options for example which makes it also easier to work with now I want to since I'm getting it's a little bit too rough for my taste and I need a little bit more detail I want to cut all of these lines here directly in the middle there's multiple ways to do that I can either go here to the left to the knife tool start cutting my way like a butcher all the way down knock-knock-knock press ENTER and I have really ugly seam it works but it's not pretty so I'm just going to reverse that and the next shortcut you might want to remember or write down is pressing ctrl R if you press ctrl + R this little yellow line shows up which gives you the option to cut things directly in the middle which is what I'm gonna use here so I press it once then I can still move it if I want to but I don't want to suck up escape and now I have a neat sorry I have a neat little cut exactly in the middle and the faces are all split in half which allows me to create a lot more detail which is what I'm gonna do here because as you saw from the top view this one here should probably be more like this just a little bit that yeah that one like it here this it's just fine-tuning all the way that's basically the entire hours of work that you're doing is just fine-tuning fine-tuning fine-tuning for hours on end awesome slowly we're getting somewhere now as you can still see it's still very flat piece then if you look at the side view there's actually a thickness to it so how do we have tecna's to this piece you guessed right we just select all the points from along the edges like this like this like this there's selective selective selective selected select select them all around go to the side view press e for extension and just drag it out like this and already it has a really nice thickness to it now if I continue to show you the building process in this amount of detail this video will probably be let's say six to seven hours long which I would like to avoid I want to do something else that I do so I'm just gonna record what I'm doing and just gonna jump in whenever there's something interesting to see and just talk over my recording pretty much hope that's okay and yeah that's good after I finished the part on top I continued building the side piece the same way again I started with a simple plane that I extended step by step to the left until it had the shape but then I switched to the front view and make sure all the points here line up to this reference image as well next came the tooth at the front this was done pretty similar based on the front image I started with a long plane that I then separated into smaller sections and these sections were then properly placed from the right viewport after that I just extended these shapes to the back and the first tooth was done and as you can guess the second tooth was done exactly the same way the side piece here was just more of the same as well at this point I try to work with as little details as possible to find the right shapes luckily I have this 3d scan of Alana's head which was really helpful to make sure the head piece would fit now I just mirrored the teeth and the side panels along my mirror axis and the rough base shape was fine later of course I don't want to print the head piece in this blocky looking state good thing there's a really easy way to increase the detail just select a piece and go right to the modifiers and choose subdivision surface this modifier will automatically subdivide all of your shapes into even smaller pieces see that you can increase the detail even more by increasing the view count I usually go with something like 4 or 5 now comes the magic part if you press n to bring up the sidebar menu you'll find the mean crease option the closer you set this value to 1 the more of the shapes will stick to your old blocky shape and the closer it is to 0 the smoother it will be now let's change to the edge selection mode to get a really nice shape I keep the outer edges sharp while at the same time only smoothing the inner edges and this creates a really great finish the detail however I still had to add by hand of course for this I basically split some phases in smaller pieces deleted them edit new points and connected them again to different shapes now here's a handy tip if you ever come across a piece that acts really weird chances are that the front and the back sides are flipped you see every face as a front and a back side if you go to the Overland menu at the top you can turn on the face orientation and you will see immediately what I mean just make sure every piece always shows to the front which is blue to fix this simply select the faces that are flipped go to mesh normals and flip normals now it's all good again and should work as intended now we're getting really close to the final shape however as you can see I still need to cut out some details on the surface of some parts this is a little bit tricky but nothing we can't handle I started by adding a few smaller cubes and rotating them to fit the position of the cutout then I mirrored it and added a subdivision just like before next I played around with the mean crease until it had the shape I need it and here comes a trick first I select the piece I want to carve my new shape out from then I add the modifier called boolean and now I need to select the nearer and smaller piece I made and set it to difference I only need to hide the little one and there it's carved out easy right well I only had to do this a couple of more times and the final headpiece was done yeah and with this it was finally time to move on to 3d printing to make sure all of your sizes are correct I suggest checking the scene tab in the options menu to the right here you can set you unit system to either metric or imperial and to blender what units you want to use I decided to go with centimeter now this took a little bit of experimentation but it worked fine for me I set the unit scale 2.01 and the grid scale two point zero zero one I mean this probably involves some math which I'm honestly not very good at however now I selected my top hat piece and exported it to STL in the export menu I set it to selection only and set the scale to 10 now when I open this STL in my 3d printing software the head piece has the correct size don't ask me why it just us to make it easier to print I split the model in half and then placed it on the print bed I pretty much just went with the standard settings and started the printing process if you're interested we have two Zoar tracks and 200 printers printing all the headpiece parts in abs Terk around 30 hours combined after all the parts were printed I used a little sanding machine to send away the printing layers and then went over it again with a soft sanding sponge to glue all the individual parts together I used a self-made glue that's made with leftover ABS melted in acetone I attached all the pieces and filled in the glue seam with some spot puddi now I applied a layout spray primer and senate it's smooth again just to check if there were any more flaws and finally to the painting first I applied a silver spray paint and when this was dry a thin layer of hairspray now a few very light coats with white average color on top and when this was dry I could use a toothpick and some water to scratch the white away again and make it look old and used and finally just a lay off spray varnish and brown or a color that I wiped away again with the towel for some really nice weathering well and with this it was done in the meantime swetlana made a headband that I could connect the headpiece to I simply drilled a very small hole here and sewed it on a couple of blue stripes attached with hot glue and the headpiece was done yay making the entire thing from reference image to finish print took me around 10 hours not counting the printing time of course that's a really short time to make a wife really happy well and that's it I really hope this video was interesting to anyone who stressed starting with 3d modeling I only started using blender a couple of months ago so I don't think it's that difficult to get to the point where I am now if you like this video make sure to subscribe hit the notification bell or support our channel on patreon thanks for watching see you next time and bye bye [Music]

Channel: KamuiCosplay

Views: 256,143

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, 3d printing, 3d modeling tutorial, getting started with blender, aloy cosplay, horizon zero dawn, sickness eater, cosplay armor, 3d for cosplay, 3d printing for cosplay, 3d cosplay, cosplay tutorial, cosplay 3d printing, 3d printing tutorial, blender 2.8, blender sculpting, 3d printing with blender

Id: vvuah9D9NJw

Length: 35min 38sec (2138 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019