I Recreated the iPhone 15 in Blender

I'm going to show you exactly how I managed to design this render of the iPhone 15 in blender I'll show you the whole process from modeling design choices texturing rendering lighting and everything else involved let's go now before we get started if you're brand new to blender and you want to learn how to model and do the stuff I'm showing you in this video you can head to the link in the description and enroll in our free hard surface modeling jump start course over 70,000 students have went through this load of results so if you sit down and complete that course you'll learn something new and learn how to model link to that program in the description and like I said it's free so the first thing I had to figure out was the exact dimensions of the iPhone 15 after a simple Google search I got the exact dimensions in millimeters and the nice thing about blender is you can input those Dimensions directly into the dimensions panel and blender now this ended up making the phone super small in the viewport so I just scaled it up by by a factor of 50 this actually doesn't matter in blender because for this particular model we have nothing to compare the size to and we're just going for a single design and render generally modeling super tiny objects in blender can cause problems with booleans and things like this anyways once I had the outline of the phone I needed a reference image now I could have just eyeballed the whole design but what's the point of that when we have literal photos of the device makes no sense so I just imported a reference image and this made it super easy to get the exact bevels I needed around the edge here now we have something that actually looks like the iPhone pretty cool I'd also recommend enabling the cavity feature under the overlays panel and blender whenever you're modeling this will give the edges of your model a nice highlight now if we take a look at the reference photo you're going to see we have a super tiny bevel between this outer rim and the inner portion of the device very very small so here I just duplicated the face of the model made a small inset and then extruded it through the device and ran a slice Boolean operation then I just needed to add a super tiny bevel around that Rim mirror the outer part and now it looks 10 times better it looks like an iPhone and now we have a screen and a rim at this point I needed to create the back piece where the camera lenses are and this was easy I just added in a cube scaled it to the correct size and then beveled the edges following the outline now I wasn't too sure how far out this area extended so I just grabbed a side reference image and followed that one and once it was placed properly I needed to add a bevel between the phone itself and the lens for this I used a union Boolean which fuses the two meshes together and then simply added a bevel following the curvature of the reference photo and already just by adding in that bevel this looks way closer to the actual model of the iPhone people underestimate the power of bevels and all I have to say is they are incredibly important do not skip your bevels next I did the same thing but for the camera lenses all I needed here was a simple cylinder and the rest was easy Once I created one I duplicated it to the other areas of the lens and added in a small bevel modifier to add a nice Edge highlight from the reference photo I could tell these lenses are only slightly beveled unlike the rim of the case so for that reason I opted for a bevel modifier as opposed to a physical bevel now I actually have a full video on everything you need to know about bevels a full master class so if you'd like to check that out I go over design decisions sizes types of bevels and much more anyways I duplicated these cylinders once more for the actual glass part and by the end of it this was my result getting much closer next the buttons on the side were quite easy to do you just add in a cube line it up with a reference photo so the button isn't too high or too low bevel it and you're done then for the volume up and volume down buttons I just duplicated this piece adjusted the size and I had my buttons from the looks of it the bevels on these buttons are super tiny so I just opted for a bevel modifier pretty good progress so far next I created the front camera now technically this piece is behind the glass so I just made the shape and fixed it later once we added in the materials and I also noticed I placed the buttons on the wrong side so to fix that I just added in a mirror modifier and deleted the other side really easy fix so if you make these silly mistakes when you're modeling it really isn't a big deal just use the tools to your advantage man AG to fix them now the bottom I was planning to eyeball because I couldn't find a reference photo with a perfect orthographic bottom view but after a bit of digging I found a sketch and used that as a reference I really didn't want to eyeball things in this video if I didn't need to so the model itself was nearly complete just had a few more things to add in if you look at the iPhone you'll notice we have these very tiny slice pieces with different colors on the Sid of the phone very very small width to add that I just scaled down a cube and ran a slice operation with a mirror modifier to the top and the bottom same thing for the bottom I just ran a slice over there as well and just like that the model was complete it took me maybe an hour or two of work and next it was time for textures and materials normally I would use blender's default material system but the issue is you can't really tweak anything more than the basic parameters all you have is color roughness metallic Maybe you can add in some clear coat things like that blender materials don't have a realistic texture on them it'll look fake and boring for that reason I opted to use our own material Works plugin this is a custom texturing software we built for blender which has 50 of the most common hard surface materials you'll find in real life you can also add scratches grunge cool stuff like that which we won't be doing for this particular model anyways I'll link material works in the description if you want to grab a copy this is probably the best investment you can make if you want your designs to stand out and you want your models to look more professional also the iPhone literally has textures on it so I couldn't exactly use blender's material system I needed those realistic Textures in the first place so I decided to go with the machined steel material this adds a very nice texture similar to aluminum with a nice reflectivity and color however on the actual iPhone the streaks from the texture are vertical not horizontal so I simply rotated the texture the texture was a little bit strong as well so in material works we actually built a custom normal map slider to reduce the intensity of that texture and in literally 10 seconds we had this beautiful metal material on the rim of the phone I added this material to all the buttons as well and it was already looking 10 times better and super realistic so I was happy with the progress now for those little tiny slice pieces on the sides of the phone I just duplicated the machine steel and changed the color to something slightly darker the screen of the phone was a bit tricky because this is glass and also multiple other parameters so as you can see the glass is dark it's super reflective it isn't see-through and I need to make sure I can replicate that inside of blender I can't just slap a glass material and call it a day now material works also has this type of glass in the pack so I opted for the matte screen GRE material and changed a few basic parameters however I did change this to canopy glass later on in this video because it looked better and for the lenses on the back I decided to use the canopy glass material as well one thing I did not mention yet is how powerful your choice of lighting is by simply changing the lighting this could literally destroy the realism of the phone that is why I always opt for Studio hdis for realistic lighting and that is what I'm using now now for this model now material Works does come with five of our favorite Studio hdis to ensure your models get that realistic feel to them next I needed to put that front camera behind the glass and still make it visible this proved to be rather difficult because I didn't want to change the alpha value of the glass otherwise it would have been seethrough kind of like you can see in this clip here when I was making the changes I could see the cylinders and the camera gear through the glass so that was problematic so I needed to keep the alpha value at one while still being able to see the camera since I would just going for a good render I moved it slightly forward and it was good enough then I just modeled in the small camera piece on the front and I was finished and for the camera eyes it was so small that I was able to get away with using a decal I found one from our decal and trim sheet pack that looked close enough and that got the job done I also added those decals to the back of the phone on the camera lenses as well by the end of that the back of the phone was looking nearly identical to the actual device and one thing I love about these material Works materials is how nicely they diffuse the light usually on very reflective surfaces the light just kind of reflects and looks terrible this is a huge beginner mistake I see a lot of people making they don't know how to handle their lighting but these materials were made by a professional material designer so they're actually not only physically accurate but they also have these very nice Elements of Light absorption like you'd see in in real life that's why this phone looks so appealing to the eye and the viewport it's all in the materials design and the lighting finally I needed to add in the Apple logo this was easy I just found a PNG and imported it into a blender add-on called decal machine and plac the logo on the phone and Chang the color I opted for a darker color and boom I was done so here's a nice viewport overview of the device next it was time to render now rendering is not an easy feat it requires deep knowledge of composition framing lighting attention to detail and lots more this is the number one thing that hurts 3D artists they're good at modeling but they cannot render to save their life so hopefully this overview will help you and if you do want a larger overview of rendering and all the stuff that goes into it do check out our rendering University program over on our website so we opted for a slightly angled render here of the phone and used a nice cold Studio H your ey giving the metal a hint of blue indicating cold it's a subconscious lighting decision but makes the phone in the feeling behind it pop even more for example using a hot HD with red lighting would just make the phone feel painful to hold so these small micro decisions are actually very important to make and consider this cold metal feeling makes the phone feel brand new it took a little bit of tinkering to find the right angle but eventually we got it then we just duplicated the phone stack them together so that way we could see both the front and the back of the device and we also added in a reflector which is essentially a white plane that reflects light back onto the object outside the camera frame by doing this we reflected some nice diffused lighting right back onto the device elevating the look even more and the rendering portion was super simple we just rendered with a transparent background and in Photoshop we added in a black background to it and after a bit of basic postprocessing we had our final image and that's really all there is to it modeling skills design skills rendering skills and the right assets will take you from a mediocre hard surface designer to someone with competency and confidence and again if you are brand new to hard surface modeling you should definitely enroll in our free hard surface Jump Start program it's on our site no payment required totally free and should help you get up to speed with blender and learn all this stuff from scratch like this video so I hope you enjoyed the video I'll link that jump start course in the description along with all the tools we use in this video in case you want to grab them hope you enjoyed it thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 20,867

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Id: P-ij14IoDpM

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024