How to Make Low-Poly Models with Pixel Texture | Blockbench Tutorial

hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and today I'm going to be taking my first look at a program called blockbench which is a totally free low poly modeling software that appears to be mainly for creating Minecraft assets but it also has a really great look for General modeling as well with this characteristic combination of low poly shapes and pixel texturing today I'd like to start simple with a very beginner friendly tutorial because well I'm a beginner myself and I'll show you how I made this Pokeball design and then after that we'll make this other secret object to go with it which you could probably already guess what that is so get yourself settled in and let's get to it alright when opening blockbench we can see a lot of different options for our project type with most of them being different variations of Minecraft assets and mods and things like that but today we're going to be doing some general purpose modeling so I'm going to click on generic model and then create new model I'll just name this one Pokeball and then leave everything else set to the defaults and now we can see we're in an empty 3D workspace and if we want to add some shapes to start playing around with we can come over here to the add mesh button and this is going to let us select from a series of basic primitive shapes that we can use to get our model started I've got nine different ones in my list here and here's what the default version of each of those look like when you're thinking about what you're going to model it's best to consider how that thing can break down into a series of simple shapes obviously we're starting quite simple with the Pokeball design so I'll just go ahead and select a sphere to get this one started by default it's telling me it'll have a diameter of 16 units and it'll be 12-sided I'm just going to click confirm and the nice thing here is that it allows you to adjust those parameters after you see what it looks like so if I want to change the size I can just click along the diameter or type in a value and then the same idea for the number of sides as well I like the idea of this being a really low Fidelity asset with really simple geometry to it rather than being like a perfect sphere so I'm just going to dial this in and I'm feeling like something with 10 sides looking pretty good and I'm going to stick with that default diameter of 16. now for navigating the space you can hold left click to rotate and tilt the workspace you can also hold right click to pan it around and then you can control or command click or use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out right now we're toggled onto the move tool and so you'll notice as well there's this set of arrows oriented to the object and we can click and hold on those to move it along that particular axis if you want to reposition shapes within the workspace if we want to start altering and manipulating the shape there are a few different ways to do that up at the top here there are a few different selection modes with the default sort of diamond gem icon here being used to select the entire object if we flip to this box one called face that lets us click on any face of the object and then if we were to use the move controls that'll drag that face around and allow you to distort the object that way similarly we can click on the edge selection tool and this one does the same thing but for the edge lines of the object rather than the faces and then finally there's the vertex selection which allows you to drag single vertices or you can also highlight multiple at a time if you need to in the case of my design I'm going to click and drag over the bottom half of vertices and delete those and this is leaving me with one hemisphere for the Pokeball I'm going to take two of these and sandwich them together so I can create a small physical seam between the two halves but before copying it I just want to close off that bottom part we can see that it's been left open after deleting those points with those perimeter vertices highlighted I'll right click and select create face or Edge and now that's closed off the shape from here I'll duplicate the shape which is now sitting in exactly the same places that original one and I'll flip it by going to transform flip and flip it along the y-axis after bringing these together you can see where that small Gap is going to create that seam between the two halves and I'll fill in the rest with a small cylinder by adding a new mesh and selecting cylinder from the drop down just eyeballing it it looks like it'll just have to be a height of about one and for the diameter since we use 16 for the sphere we'll drop this down to 14 just so we can see enough of a difference between the two and then again we'll match it up to be 10 sides just like the sphere now you can see when I try to move it into place it's clicking into place but never actually how I want it to be centered and that's happening according to the default block grid is kind of snapping it but if you want to get more nuanced with the position you can hold Ctrl or command while dragging and that'll give you smaller subdivisions to move around Within so in this case I've adjusted the position by 0.5 which you're able to see at the bottom corner here while making that adjustment okay this is coming along but the last thing we need is the button on the front and for that I'm going to use a couple cylinders that are nested together so we'll drop another one in here and reduce the size and then move it into place by default it's facing up and so we need to rotate it to be facing sideways so we'll go here to the rotate tool and now we can spin it around you can see by default that my rotate controls for this new cylinder are way down here at the origin point that it was brought in at so when we rotate it it's making these giant arcs that really aren't the most useful so if we want to spin it in place where it actually is we can Center the pivot point of the object by going up to this button here called Center pivot and that redefines those pivot controls from the middle of that object so now it actually rotates in place except in my case I placed it a bit too far within the sphere to begin with so we're starting to kind of lose it clipping in there but you can see when I bring it out that I've rotated it 90 degrees and I'm just centering it along that edge of the sphere now for the second cylinder I'll duplicate this one and drag it away from the original then I'll use the resize tool to make it smaller [Music] and now this thing is looking like it's ready for some color and by the way you might be wondering why this has this multi-tone gray sort of pattern on it and that's just the default look when there's no artwork defined yet so the default grade pattern has this looking a little bit like the Death Star at the moment but if we want to paint this up with our own colors we'll move on from the edit tab into the paint tab now we've got a new set of controls along the top and I'm selected on a paintbrush and I've got a black color selected in my Color Picker but if I try to paint on the object it's giving me this message this surface does not have a texture and that's because we need to create a texture file that's going to store the artwork information for us so to create a texture for the full object we first need to select everything you can use Ctrl a or drag a selection if you only want certain parts and we can see what's been selected from this list here then we'll go over here and click create texture this is going to bring up a panel to configure the texture settings I haven't played around with anything extensively here yet other than just realizing that the pixel density setting will give you a finer pixel grid to allow for more detail but for today we're going to stick with the default setting of 16 and just going to click confirm on this now we can see it's become this multi-colored Pokeball because it's gone through and mapped all of those surfaces and kind of unfolded them to create the texture sheet the cool thing the thing I really like about blockbench is that we can actually just paint pixels directly onto the model itself and it'll update that corresponding texture sheet as well and you can see that all the pixels are just kind of following that mapped on grid there so I'm gonna get this one started by getting all the solid base colors in and I'll do this more efficiently by using the paint bucket tool and setting it to the face setting which means it's going to drop solid colors into a face of the object so it's fairly easy to run through this way and just give a solid base coat to everything with a few different colors one minor thing I did notice along the way is that the painting grid didn't always have perfectly Square pixels but like we can see here that these ones look a bit rectangular and I'm not sure if this was some sort of visual glitch or something but I got it to sort itself out by toggling the painting grid button off and then on again and after doing that now we can see that it looks way more even and appropriate and keep in mind this sort of visual glitch wasn't actually affecting the way that the pixels were being painted on the model it really was just what I was seeing for the grid level visualization of where I thought the pixels were going to be if that makes sense at any rate with that sorted out I got the rest of the flat coloring put in and then I also want to make sure that I get the undersides of those hemisphere shapes and if you need to access tighter spots like that you can toggle the visibility of other layers just so they're not getting in the way sometimes you don't really see those sides in the final presentation anyway but I think it's nice to have it all taken care of just in case it ends up being visible at certain angles so this is looking pretty good but it still doesn't really have that pixel art flavor to it because this is all just solid colors so the next thing I'm going to do is to go back into the paint mode and use the brush tool to just dot in some highlights and shading that not only make the artwork pop a little bit more but it'll also allow us to appreciate some of that Charming pixel texture that this can have for the most part I'm selecting my colors from the preset palette off to the side and then sometimes tweaking them a little bit to my own tastes I'm following a hue shifting approach to these selections where the highlights along the red part of the model become more yellow as they get brighter while the shaded areas lean the opposite way toward more of a purple color similarly for the bottom half of the model I'm given a slight blue tinge to the white and this allows for a slight change of color along with brightness when defining the shadows for that one and in general just looks a bit more Dynamic and a bit more vibrant than if it were completely grayscale all right once we've got everything painted up we can export a rotating animation of the model by going up to view screenshot record gif this will give you a few parameters the turntable speed here represents how fast it's going to spin around where a value of 60 means one rotation every second that sounds a bit fast to me so I'm going to use a value of 15 which means it'll take 4 seconds to complete one rotation next we want to define the length of the animation and I'm simply going to set this to turntable rotation which means that it'll lock the recording like to one complete rotation and therefore will have a perfect Loop point for the animation to recycle over and over and I'm sure an FPS had the default of 20 is fine but I bumped mine up to 30 just because that's the frame rate I use for my videos so I figured I'd match it up just to be the same when we hit confirm we're now in a framing mode where we can frame out our shot and kind of rotate the camera and then when you've got that all lined up you hit the record button uh we'll see it do that one full rotation and then after a quick processing we've got the final result here that we can save to our computer alright so that was a good starter exercise but we're going to keep exploring blockbench by moving along and building the final mystery object and if you haven't guessed already I'll reveal to you now that this is going to be the original Kanto region pokedex to go along with the Pokeball that we've already got I'll go through this one a little bit faster since we've covered a lot of the basics but there are a couple other features that we didn't get to see when building the first model so I'll highlight a few other things along the way to get this one started I've created the two covers of the Pokedex using cuboid shapes that I've resized into these thinner rectangles and then joining them together is going to be a tall cylinder shape acting as the hinge so when it's closed that's all going to fit together something like this now since we're able to rotate objects we're actually able to simulate what the action on that hinge would look like and the first thing I'm going to do is get the model organized into layer groups so first I'll select everything and click on ADD group this places everything into a folder so that's nice for keeping it separate from the existing Pokeball model next I'll select the cube and the cylinder and group those together as the front cover now if we want to flip this open like a book the entire front cover group needs to rotate from the center of that cylinder and currently we can see that the pivot point is somewhere inside the cube to move this Pivot Point manually we can use the pivot tool and this is going to define the pivot point for this group of objects meaning both the cube and the cylinder that make up the front cover will move and rotate together from this Pivot Point so with that placed along the center line of the cylinder we've now got a working hinge for the book this will be extremely handy when setting up for making animations which I'm actually not going to cover in this video but it's pretty useful and kind of fun to sort of like use this to plan out the model from an early phase regardless for now I'm just going to separate the two halves so that I can get a good amount of breathing room in the model but we'll bring it back together at the end the next thing to do is to create that angle along the front cover which means we'll need to find some way to cut and form that shape from this rectangular piece for this I'm going to divide the cover up using a tool called Loop cut first we'll start by clicking on the face selection mode then select the front face of that cover I will right click and find the loop cut option now we can see that it's divided the shape in half starting from this face however in my case I'd like the cut to be running vertically rather than horizontally so I'm going to change the direction from 0 to 1. additionally I'll use the offset number to move the position of the cut to where I'd like one of the ends of that angle to be to define the other end of that angle I'll click on the face again and make another vertical Loop cut now there's a full set of edges and vertices that have been introduced within this shape and now if I click on that far third of the cover and bring it down using the resize tool it's going to introduce an angle to that edge resulting from the way this piece has been cut up into those thirds there also needs to be a complementary piece to fit on the other side kind of like the negative cutout of this angled cover to make that part I duplicated and flipped the cover piece so now I have the same Loop cut structure to work with and then I just had to rebalance the placement of those cuts and kind of shape the whole thing into place now we can see with the cover back in place we get this relatively clean fitting of those two shapes together when closing and opening the last thing for the modeling here was just tacking on a bunch of shapes for the buttons and screens and all sorts of details like that this probably would have worked to just paint everything like this onto the flat surfaces but I really like the idea of seeing a little bit of Dimension from them as it rotates around for the most part it's just a bunch of rectangular shapes that are made from the cuboid primitive but there are a couple more interesting ones as well probably my favorite is this larger orb shape thing on the front which I made by sticking a sphere into that front face and then sort of give it this outline Rim using a thin cylinder shape with the same number of sides as that sphere before moving on to the texturing I was feeling like I should make this whole thing a little bit larger because I didn't think the scale against the Pokeball was exactly right the problem with resizing is that if you try to highlight everything and just use the resize tool you see it all just sort of balloons everything out individually and doesn't treat it as this uniform object in the scaling so to do this in a proportional way you can select the entire object and then go up to transform and then scale and use the slider here to adjust the size in this case I've gone with a scale of 1.5 times the original because that felt like the most reasonable multiple in the neighborhood of what I was hoping to see and once again for the texture I'm using the default setting of 16x pixel density and taking a similar approach here starting with the solid base tones and adding flat highlights and shading along certain faces of the object I'm keeping things pretty simple here since this is very much cartoony looking object to begin with but again I did want to make sure that some of that pixel texture was quite obvious so there are a few highlights along different edges and sort of this like diagonal Sheen across some of the flatter surfaces to finish it out I've detailed the screen using a green sort of Game Boy kind of styling and with that why don't we jump ahead and join this back up with the Pokeball and just take a look at how everything came out together here we go [Music] all right it's a last-minute Edition here I've added that rare candy to the mix I felt like this would look really nice as a set of three items and that one was made easily just by popping two cones onto a sphere I've still got a lot more to learn with blockbench but I had a really good time here and I hope the info here comes in handy if you decide to explore it as well so we'll close out with a quick CRT time and thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 250,683

Keywords: low poly, low-poly, modeling, modelling, blockbench, minecraft, blender, picoCAD, 3D, assets, game design, indie dev, pixel art, tutorial, beginner, ps1, n64, retro gaming

Id: GukhptdHlPk

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023