Learn Low Poly Modeling in Blender 2.9 / 2.8

welcome my name is esther from passion also known as infensia you might have seen my 10 minutes build before for example where i made 10 cars in 10 minutes or maybe a rigged dragon or a rigged pirate or a star destroyer i've had quite a few comments from my 10 minute modeling challenge where people say well this is too fast for me to learn from this is not a good tutorial and i wanted to make this video to really cover everything that i know at a slow enough pace so for those of you who thinks that 10 minute modeling is too fast and you don't have a clue what i'm going on about hopefully this video will give you a lot of insight and details in a step-by-step fashion so we could help you out in your modeling skills you could even start using this tutorial if you're brand new to blender because i'm going to go through everything in detail if you're experienced in blender maybe this first few minutes won't be so necessary for you to watch but you should be able to pick up a few tips because i've found a lot even though i've done this for quite a few years i find out stuff all the time about new nifty ways to do things so maybe you'll find something out of this video too you navigate just press the middle mouse button to rotate you hold the shift key and the middle mouse button to pan around in a scene and you use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out there's also a few shortcuts that you should know in the viewport and on the keypad you can press 1 to see the front view press 3 to get a side view and 7 to get a top view you can also toggle between orthographic and perspective mode using 5 on the keypad basically that removes the perspective and that's useful sometimes to do as well up here you've got something called the outliner and this will show you which object you've got in your scene and down here is a properties area and we'll only be using this spanner looking thing here which is modifier properties the rest we can ignore for now i also like to use the n key to bring this numbers panel up in where we can type in details sometimes in blender we use the left click to select nowadays it used to be right click but nowadays it's left clicking thank god for that if you use the right mouse button you get a context menu up i don't really use that one so much maybe you'll find use of it but there are a few things i do if you want to delete things you press the delete key and we can get rid of this light here for example and this camera we don't need those when we do modeling if you accidentally delete something then you can press ctrl z like in most programs to bring it back one of the most common questions that i get asked is how i colorize my low poly objects colorizing your objects is essential to get those low poly objects look just right i go to the shading tab and if you go to the description you can download this file as well i've created a palette for you and you can just drag this png file right into this section of your shading view material editor window here you can also download the palettes from lowspec.com for example they've got loads of palettes or you could create your own ones in any drawing program like photoshop i use for example but you can use free ones as well and be aware that my textures i do them in extremely low resolution this one is only eight by eight pixels because it saves a lot of texture space when you do import it into a game engine but we need to collect this color node here to the base color and you can see that it's really blurry here now and it's because it's so low resolution so we also need to change from linear here to closest and that'll bring make it crisp and nice i actually use the uv editing tab to do most of my modeling because if i zoom in here with the mouse wheel on the left you can see i've got quick access now to these colors that are in that texture if i resize this as well now the cube here as you can see is unfolded onto this texture and it's basically representing the 3d cube in 2d texture space if i use this little drop down here we can switch the texture and that shows you exactly how these uvs are laid out so this front side for example is represented right here we've got quick access now to colorize this object if i select all of these faces with a key and then on the left side here now i press a and then i scale it down to zero and then i can press g on the left side here to move it g for grab or move g as in move and if i place it over green here now the cube becomes green and if i wanted to change this face color here i select the face and i press g on the left side here and i can change that face to orange and this is a really fast way to colorize your low poly objects and make them look really crisp and clean don't worry i'll cover the hotkeys as well about moving and scaling and things like that in detail this was just to demonstrate the coloring process there are a few things that you need to be aware of when you do this when i scale down this uv here down to basically zero as you can see it's just a little dot when you import these objects into a game engine like unity or unreal they might require a uv layout to render for example shadows correctly in unity you can enable unity to generate a second set of uvs or you can create a second set of uvs in blender here we don't need to do that at this point because i'm just going to show you the coloring process but be aware that there might be some tweaks that you need to do when you're going to start using these assets in a game engine the second most common question i get in all my comments is i change my viewport settings a little bit and people are asking how i get about to do that so if you use this drop down here i often model with shadows enabled and especially this cavity feature here and if i change type here to both world and screen or as a world in screen i select both here and i ramp these up then you get glowing edges onto your objects and when you make low poly art for example like a car or a tree or something whatever a character even then having this cavity enabled can make the low poly objects really stand out nicely so i usually do this when i model you can also use the workbench render to render objects using the cavity settings if you want there's one final setting that i like to recommend and if you use this drop down again you should enable this backface culling feature and that will tell you if you have faces that are facing the wrong direction sometimes you can have a face that's facing inwards like this one for example if i go into the cube now you can see that this face here is facing inwards and most game engines don't render the back side of a face you can enable that but most of the time they don't render and in blender if you don't have back face culling then you won't really be aware that you have some holes like this in your mesh so i recommend that you enable back face calling that way you can see when something is broken and you can fix it there's something called for example if you press f3 and type in flip normals then you can flip that back but there are other ways as well i'll tell you about that there's something called object mode in edit mode in blender and by default when you come in it's in object mode and basically you can click click on an object and it'll select it here in the outliner but to edit an object we need to press tab on it because that will give us access to the geometry and up here you can switch between vertex edge and face select you should learn these hotkeys it's one two and three to select between those you could also hold the shift key and select multiple i often don't do that because i think it's a little bit confusing but just be aware that you can do that if you want and you can press a on your keyboard to select everything and double click a to deselect everything you can also press alt a to deselect everything and you can hold the shift key to select multiple and if it works as a toggle so if you click again on them with shift pressed it toggles between the selection okay finally we're going to start editing this mesh a little bit so if we're in edit mode here i press 3 to go into face select mode and i click on a face and i can press g now to move it in 3d space it's quite difficult to play something if you just press g and move it so you can press shift space and g to enable this little gizmo here and this way you can basically just drag it like this instead to place it and then if you drag on one of these axis it'll really make it easy to move something up or down or left or right back and forth pressing shift space and g all the time is a bit tedious so you can also use this drop down up here and enable the object gizmo move by default so now when we select something you'll always have the option to be able to drag it out like this drag it up and drag it out one more thing about movement is if we press one on the keyboard to get into vertex select here and i pick this vertex here if i press g it'll move it anywhere but if i press g again it'll actually slide it it's a sliding method that's really handy to do if you want to just slide this vertex along here or this one you want to slide it you press g again and that makes it easy to slide it along one edge the next one is scaling so if i select three on the keyboard and i press this face here i can press s to scale it and you can press this one scale it up and down and when you scale it if it really moves like this quick it's because you press scale when you're right near the center of it so i recommend that you move your mouse out a little bit press scale because then you'll have more control when you scale it up and down also when you scale something if i select these two faces i hold the shift key and select both of these and i press scale you can see that it scales pretty much the whole cube maybe that's not always what you want you can then press period on your keyboard and by default it's using medium point which is in the center here but we'll switch this one to individual origins and now when you scale it it just scales it along its own individual phase origin here so maybe that's what you're after sometimes if it doesn't work the way you want but let's go back to medium point which is also common to use the next hotkey is e to extrude and if i select this face and i press e to extrude basically it just takes that whole face and it extrudes it up this is really useful when it comes to low poly modelling you can click on any face and press e to extrude it e to extrude it again e to extrude e to extrude e to extrude you can go crazy with this e to extrude e to extrude and when you combine this with s to scale you can quickly start shaping out objects so you e to extrude s to scale e to extrude e to extrude s to scale and the more you become comfortable with this method of just scaling and extruding you'll be able to create something let's go all the way back down here to a small object let's colorize the whole object i'll press a here s to scale it to 0 here on the left the mouse has to be over the uv here to scale this uv 2d space here to zero i press g to move it let's move it back to a gray color here so recolor the whole object now to gray and let's say i just wanted to create something like a skyscraper or something then basically if i just what we've learned so far let's move these out a little bit and then here let's select this one drag it up a little bit and now press e to extrude s to scale it down e to extrude again e to extrude s to scale e to extrude e to extrude s to scale and then we could just narrow it off here e to extrude s to scale e to extrude s to scale e to extrude let's make a little ball here e to extrude s to scale e to extrude that's the scale you can also type in values if you wanted to scale this infinitely down you can type zero now and that basically scales this phase now that we learned before down to zero and now we've created something that could be turned into a skyscraper by just extruding and scaling and moving a little bit let's say we selected a few of these faces now like this there's also some tricks with extrusion here and if i were to press e to extrude now you can see that it just doesn't really know what to do it just slides it up and basically nothing really happened there so let's press ctrl z and try that again and this time we press alt e instead and then we do extrude faces along normals and now magically it just expands outwards the normal of a face is a line that faces perpendicular to the surface of the object and by using extrude along normals it takes each face and goes oh my normal is this way well my normal is this way mineral is this way and mine and then it extrudes it that way instead there was another thing we spotted and that's if you do alt e again and then you do extrude individual faces and now suddenly it takes all four of those faces and extrudes them individually also really good now if we scale it remember now we've got the medium point which is why it scales it down so if you wanted to get rid of that remember we press period and switch to individual origins and now when i press scale it scales those down this would be a really strange skyscraper so we're not going to make a skyscraper out of this one there is one more method that you can use to extrude and if you select any face here i press three on the keyboard into face select and i get this face here i can hold the ctrl key down and right click and that'll extrude it automatically to that location just hold the ctrl key and right click and that'll follow along one good thing to keep in mind here is if i select this face here and i press one on the keypad to go into front view now if i hold the ctrl key and right click i know that everything will be aligned perfectly let's rotate with the middle mouse button you can see that and we can even go to the side view here you can see that it's perfectly straight this one behind be aware though that when you do this method you can so you don't go too sharp if i were to go too sharp here then you can see we have this back face problem that we described before let's cancel out of this one controls that a whole bunch of times so we go back to here there's another hotkey that's really useful and that's to rotate things and r is the hotkey for that so if you just press r on a face here you can see that you can twist it here i'll select this one r to rotate it and if i have multiple ones selected here and press r it'll rotate it you can combine r to rotate so if if we select this one and you do e to extrude and you press r to rotate e to extrude r to rotate e to extrude or to rotate this is also quite useful you can also rotate around a fixed axis so if i select this face i press e to extrude it and then i press r to rotate it this also works for moving and scaling things but if i press the keyboard now to represent one of the axes like y for example to represent the green y axis you can see that it created a guideline here and now it forces rotation around that axis if i were to switch to x it'll rotate around the x-axis and if i press z it'll rotate around the z axis and this is a really useful way to force rotations if you want to do it around one axis also when you rotate you can type in the amount that you want to rotate if i press r to rotate i press y to rotate it around the y axis and then i just let go of the mouse now and i type 90. then it twists that face but be aware you don't want to rotate that much because it breaks the geometry so if we redo that one r to rotate y on the y axis and then type in 45 degrees okay another useful hotkey for hard surface modeling is eye to inset so if i select this face and i press i to inset you can see that it just creates an inset face here and if i wanted to now we could extrude that one for example and you can also after you do i to inset you can also extrude downwards to sync into the object i to inset b to extrude s to scale e to extrude i to inset e to extrude and you could create like a sci-fi skyscraper or a building really fast doing this method so remember we've got g to move s to scale e to extrude i to inset and these keys are lethal when it comes to low poly modeling so you should really get the hang of those do it as much as possible when it comes to in setting as well let's say you select multiple faces like these i hold the shift key to select multiple one if i press i to inset now you can see that it creates one single insert for all of these faces quite often this is the way you want it like let's say we wanted to extrude that could be quite common maybe you have a building complex or a pentagon or something like that then you want to do that but sometimes when you do i to inset you can press i again and that makes individual insetting and if you extrude those then suddenly you've created individual faces delete this one now i'll do shift a and create a new cube so we're back to where we started let's say we wanted to make a skyscraper out of this one now i do go tab into edit mode maybe slide this one up let's press these two with the shift key scale and then i press x to scale it on the x axis here let's move this one up a little bit e to extrude s to scale e to extrude e to extrude s to scale e to extrude e to extrude s to scale e to extrude e to extrude s to scale let's say we just have it like this now instead now you could create for example if you wanted to expand here e to extrude b to extrude e to extrude e to extrude and remember with inset now as well if i select a few of these faces i to inset and i've already got individual you can see at the top there individual is on so you toggle with the i again if you wanted to just inset it like this and you can inset it again and s to scale it you can start creating a lot of details on your objects by doing it this way and here let's say we wanted to create an indentation for something that could look like a roof i hold the shift key and select these two faces press i to inset e to extrude it down select these two with the shift key i to inset and e to extrude it down so now we're starting to be able to model maybe a sci-fi city really fast this way i also want to show if you've got the mirror modifier on this is another question i get a lot a lot and you press i to inset sometimes you want this center face here not to appear and there's a hotkey for that and if you press i to inset and then you press b on your keyboard it'll magically remove that one if you're using the mirror modifier we're going to cover the mirror modifier later on just so you know now though that b is the hotkey for boundary and that way you'll get rid of that center face if b doesn't work for you like this it could be because you've selected individual faces so if i have these two selected i do i to inset i to inset again now suddenly i do it in set and then i want to do b it doesn't work and no matter how hard you press b it won't work and that's because you've got individual on so toggle off individual first and now b works so just a little side note one more thing that's useful is proportional editing and that's a little thing up here you can press o which is a hotkey for proportional editing you should really learn these hotkeys by the way they'll save you a lot of time but you can also press up here and now when i press g you can see i've got a little circle around here and you can use the scroll wheel now to change the circle and this way we can proportionally edit the whole object here which is really useful maybe not for a skyscraper but there will be many times especially if i want to make some let's say you had a little building and you wanted to make some more character on it or you were creating an island and you want to drag up the surface or you're creating stones or something like that you can switch up here from different uh the default one here is smooth you could also do random for example and now when you move it'll start moving things randomly so that's also very useful let's put this a little bit to the test now if i hide that one i do shift a to add a new cube here and let's start fresh i'd like to go in fresh let's say you want to make a crate now let's make an actual object that we could be proud of when i create a new object often you have to go back into the shading tab by the way and then when the object is selected you switch back to material if it disappears you know why it's because when you create a new object it won't have that material by default now let's see what we've learned we press tab into edit mode a just make sure a to select everything here on the left side here i press a scale 0 and enter and i press g here to move these uvs it's called to here to make a brown box like a wood box i press three on the keyboard now and now i've got face select that's what we switched to with three here now we press i to inset and we had individual on from before normally you'd probably get to this where nothing is happening but when you press i again to switch on individual you get this magic here and then remember what we learned something else we did alt e to extrude along face normals and i drag it in a little bit and now we've already created something that looks a little bit like a crate a box that brings us to another technique that we could do and if i select i press two on the keyboard and i hold the shift key to multiple select these edges here now here's another thing ctrl b is bevel and if i press that and drag a little bit it bevels the edges that i selected there is also a way to do if i select these at the bottom here i hold the shift key ctrl b to bevel if you expand this little one at the bottom here you could actually increase the number of segments if you wanted it to be rounder when doing low poly i rarely use that but it's good to know that you could actually have more levels to this if you wanted to there's also something called shrink and flatten if i press three to get into uh face selector i select these faces and then i do alt s to shrink and flatten that's another method that you could do we've got actually proportional editing on random here now which is why it turned out a little bit weird so let's deselect and do alt s and this basically shrinks and flattens these faces that i do it's different from scale because if i press s to scale it'll scale those faces only but if i do alt s it'll take and shrink and flatten the whole mesh if i do it inwards it'll shrink it i've already mentioned it a few times but you can also create additional geometry so i've got this cube here selected and then if i do shift a when i've when i'm in edit mode remember i do shift a then i can add a cube and i'm still in the same object here but we've got additional geometry this is why it's already colored because we're in the same object now but we've got more geometry more mesh data in here if i do shift a again i could add an icosphere for example and let's move that one to the side often when i model even if i do an entire island or a car or with loads of different parts i often model it in the same object but i have these different meshes and when you press shift a it'll create the geometry wherever this 3d cursor is i haven't really mentioned this 3d cursor it's just been sitting there in the center all the time you can place that one by holding shift and right clicking somewhere and that'll move this cursor if you click on an object it'll actually figure out that you wanted it on that surface so when you add something let's shift right click there and then i do shift a and i add another cube it'll place the center of that cube right there sometimes you want to have really specific control of where you place this cursor so if i want it to be right in the center of this face here i have face select on here which is three on the keyboard then you can press shift s and do cursor to selected and that'll place that cursor right there and i often use that to place it exactly where i want it before i do a shift a and maybe i wanted to add a cone there also when you add stuff like this like the icosphere for example let's create a new icosphere shift right click over here shift a let's create an ico sphere then you have often when you create something you have the for example subdivisions here you can step this up if you want more or less detail and if you don't see this one it's probably because it's collapsed down here so you have to click on this expansion thing now we can use what we've learned let's delete everything that we've done so far this building gone if you want to re-center this 3d cursor to the center you can press shift c to re-center it down here in this scene let's shift a add a cube we're going to make a tree now so i tab into edit mode or first we need to go into the shading tab because this time we created a whole new object so we lost this material setting so i switch back to the material go back into this uv editing here let's do a on the left side scale 0 press enter g to move this little dot here as well onto brown and now let's create a tree how we learned we scale this down a little bit maybe i view a little bit from the side i press control and i right click s to scale ctrl to right click s to scale control to right click s to scale g to move it if you want purposely i made a small step here because now when i select a side face here i can press either e to extrude it or i can look from the side here and control right click and then s to scale it to extrude that one you can even do two branches at the same time with what we've learned if i select a shift select these two and i do alt e and extrude individual faces and s to scale them and remember if you don't want it to scale down towards the medium point here in the center you press period and you go to individual origins and then you try scaling again and when you have these two phases selected you can actually move them up at the same time you could press r to rotate them together and you could press alt e to extrude this time we'll do along face normals and g to move it up so now we've created a basic stem of a tree and then i wanted to create some leaves here as well and we've learned most of that as well so if i shift and right click at the tip here of that face it placed my 3d cursor up here and then we do shift a because we want to we're still in this object remember now but i do shift a and let's add that ico sphere again and we can play around with how many subdivisions we want but let's keep it low poly looking so we'll keep it at two and then i can press s to scale this whole thing up now and here's the beauty thing that we learned before about quick colorization now if i go to the left side here hover with the mouse press a to select everything here s to scale it and 0 press enter and then still over here g to move it and move it to green now we're coming to a really important method when we want to select something since we're in this same cube object here but we've got two sets of geometries we've got the tree trunk and we've got this ball of leaves here instead of selecting all of this individually with shift now there's an extremely extremely extremely useful thing you should definitely learn this one and that's the l hotkey if i hover the mouse over this ball of leaves and then i press l it'll magically select all of those and that that's select linked since all of these vertices are connected to each other if i press one on the keyboard you can see all of these have lines connecting to each other but none of them have any lines that connect or vertices that connect to this tree trunk and that's how blender will know that if you press l while hovering over one of these it'll select all of these and as i said i often model in the same object here but with multiple features like on the tree here for example and this is by far the most effective way i've found to uh to quickly model things in the same object that'll bring us to another hotkey and that's shift d to duplicate things because we want to have a ball of leaves here and here as well and now if i press shift d i can duplicate this and it'll follow my mouse now and we can try to place it a little bit here but sometimes we have to tweak a little bit but let's place it there and we can use this gizmo remember we enabled that one up here so it's permanent we up here we've got the move object gizmo so we can move it just along these axises here to make sure that it's pretty good and then again shift d we move it to here okay we need to align it a little bit so let's move it into place like that and now we could press l to select these and if i press l over that one it'll add that one and l over that one and now you can also you can actually press shift l to deselect that works the opposite way and if i press l here now and s to scale it r to rotate here i press l to select it s to scale it r to rotate just randomize it a little bit l to select it s to scale it and r to rotate remember we also learned this proportional thing that was quite useful so we press o or click up here o toggles the proportional editing and if i select this vertex now and press g you can see that i can move this and it proportionally edits the tree trino so remember you can use the scroll wheel now to scroll this in and out and see how much it should affect and here we see something that when i scale this one up it starts dragging the tree branches or the tree trunk as well sometimes you don't want that and with proportional there's something called connected if we click on this one again you can select connected only here and that's pretty similar to how l uses to select things now when we do g to move it and you see that there's a hollow point here in the center and that means that it will only affect the vertices that are linked together so that are not connected so if you just wanted to change this ball of leaves and nothing else then you can use that method so let's use this one to g to move it g to move it and now remember you could also toggle here to random and that's becoming quite useful because now when we drag it it'll do a little bit random be careful so you don't move it too far so you start breaking the geometry you see you have some overlapping lines here so ctrl z you'll have to avoid that at all times you don't ever want intersecting lines like that you can also do proportional editing with r to rotate and then remember you could press z to lock it on the z scale here and then scroll down with the scroll wheel you can add some twists to the trees here as well archer rotates or to rotate and set sometimes you still want to have if you do alt o is the hotkey for this connected thing if you still wanted it to affect the tree trunk again then g to move it and you could totally reshape this tree all together now we're going to deep dive into some more selection methods because we've learned some of the basic modeling techniques now so i'd say most important of all in addition to the modeling techniques is the different selection methods because you're going to be spending a lot of time selecting and deselecting things in order to do some operations on them in fact you'll save immense insane incredible amounts of time by learning these different selection methods when you do low poly modeling everything is about to finding a quick selection method to select what you want and figuring out the right operation to modify those selections either to extrude or scale or modify them flatten them or something like that so a few things we already did l to select the linked very useful we know how to already click on things like this and holding shift to click on them to select and toggle multiple selections the next thing i want to show you is loop select and if i go into face select here which is three on the keyboard i can hold the alt key now which is a loop select and i click on this edge here and now it's selected everything around here so instead of having to click here and holding the shift key and rotating around instead of doing that hold the alt key and just click on one of these edges in between and that loops selects around and that also works in this direction it selects the whole loop around the tree here another method is to press c for circle select and that brings this little circle up that you can change the size of with the scroll wheel and then basically just paint over which ones you want to select and then you press the middle mouse button if you want to deselect things so you could just paint a little bit there paint a little bit there paint a little bit there oop maybe not that so you press the middle mouse button and then you have to remember that when you're finished with this you press enter and then that selection is remembered for you so if you wanted to do something like extrude that for example e to extrude it or s to scale it now we've got proportional that's why it's do not let's disable that scale it so circle select is very useful as well in edge mode you can also do something called ring select and if i go here i have two pressed or go into edge select and then i do alt control and i click on one of these it selects the ring around these you can also do loop select which is alt and click on that one and that selects the loop round you can also use the control key to select the shortest path to something if i have edge select here i press two to make sure i'm in edge select and i select that edge and then i select an edge over here and i press ctrl it'll select the shortest path to that one here i select this one control and select so shortest path also very useful another one i use a lot is box select so if i go into one here to see the vertex mode double click a to deselect everything press b on the keyboard to box select things really fast way to get and see that it doesn't pick the back faces here if you wanted to include all the back purchases i do that quite often i'll double click a maybe i'll go into front view with one on the keypad and then i press alt z to enable x-ray and now when i press b to box select and i slice something like that for example then you can toggle back from alt set and now it's selected all of those vertices around there so maybe you wanted to just select those to do maybe you wanted to g to move them up or e to extrude them and has to scale them down for whatever reason b to box select is very useful that's very useful especially from an orthographic side view like this where you really want to select if you had a like an island for example with loads of vertices across the ground then it's useful to use that method another one useful is lasso select again if i do alt z to see through here the x-ray double click a to make sure everything is deselected now i hold the control key and i use the right mouse button to draw around here this is lasso select if you want it to really be precise like this well i do it often and quite fast like this as well even if you wanted to just select a few regions if i double click a here alt z you can use ctrl right click to just lasso select a few of these vertices if you wanted to just select a few of them another useful one is to grow and shrink your selection if i press 3 on the keypad i select maybe i select that face alone if i press ctrl plus on the keypad now it'll grow that selection by everything that's enabling that selection if i press ctrl plus again it'll expand it again this is a quick method let's say i wanted to select i hold the shift key select a few of these top ones ctrl plus a few times and now we've magically selected all the top parts here if i wanted to e to extrude it or maybe s to scale it e to extrude it maybe i wanted to create snow cap here like this yeah that's very useful to grow and shrink the selection oh wait i said shrink selection now because you can equally do control minus here to shrink it so control plus expands it and control minus shrinks it since we're on the topic of selection here's another tip you can select the random stuff as well so if we double click a nothing is selected i go to select here and then select random it selects a random number of faces and here you can increase and decrease the number of percent of randomness that you want maybe you only wanted a quarter of them selected or maybe you wanted 75 selected another thing we can do is select similar ones so if i select this one and do shift g we can select similar faces let's do for example polygon sites now it's selected everything that had three three edges to the polygon so it didn't select anything on the tree trunk because that's got more four it's uh four edges we could also do shift g we have to have one selected by the way at least before you press shift g for the similar one maybe we wanted to do normal okay nothing was selected so maybe we increased this threshold and now we can see that it's selected faces that were facing this one so again if we wanted to do the snow cap i could just select one face here press shift g normal and then use the slider here for the threshold to say okay that's how much we want to be snow covered now it also picked some of this tree trunk here as well but maybe we wanted something there i do alt e extrude along phase normals and let's say we also see that didn't actually when we extruded now we didn't have this edge selected but we want this to be snow as well then remember here's where control plus is really useful now it added that it expanded the selection to include all the neighboring ones and then here on the left now you can see that it's combined we've got some faces that are brown and some that are green so to fix that one we can do a quick operation on the left here so while the mouse is over here on the left press s to scale it while they're selected and then zero and now it shrunk it down to yellow because that was the medium point here but i can press g to move it to white and now we've snow covered everything that was similar facing to what we selected before so play around with shift g and you can select different things here try to find methods that work there's also something called checker deselect which is useful if i press l here to select all of these linked ones and then i do f3 and i type in checker deselect then you can see that it deselected pretty much every other one so maybe if you're doing like a castle wall or something with all these little firing holes or if you're doing a kitchen floor or something like that check your deselect will be able to uh to do that really quickly one more thing when it comes to selecting and deselecting things it sometimes is a bit tricky to see so i want to show you how to hide and show things so if i press l to select all of these leaves here and then i press h on the keyboard then it hides those but they're still here if i tap out of edit mode you can see that it's still in the object but while we're in edit mode here with tab they're gone and now you could do stuff like here you could fix and maybe you wanted to tweak this one maybe you wanted to rotate this one a little bit or say maybe it was a bit too wonky there so we fixed that one maybe we wanted to extrude it a little bit more there do some final tweaks and now to bring the geometry back that's hidden you do alt h and that brings it back you can also do this for certain faces let's say you only wanted to hide these faces here so i hold the shift key and then i press h to hide that because sometimes you want to be able to see stuff especially if you in old z with x-ray here sometimes you want to hide some geometry and then you can always bring it back with alt h when you're done i do this very much if i model cars for example and i want to hide a bunch of cars that are in the same object i just hide them h key out of sight out of mind and then i bring it back with alt h again okay now we're going to go into some more mesh editing details here this is fun stuff so don't snooze off on me now let's hide this tree i press h to hide the whole object this time let's add a new one we want to bring this 3d cursor back so shift c to bring it back into the center here let's revisit that crate that we did before so we do shift a we add a cube and remember we added a new object now let's double click on it and name it create this time since it's a new object here i could have to go back to the shading tab while it's selected click this little drop down here and select the material again and here's our colors back remember we do on the left side here a scale 0 and then g to move the colors back here and we're going to repeat what we did before now i'm going to do i to inset and remember we still have individual on if it looks like this for you just press i again and then alt e to bring these faces in here let's say we wanted to create some planks now here we can do control r to do a loop cut and we can use the scroll wheel to scroll up and down the number of loop cuts we should have and when i press the left mouse button now it also offers us to place it somewhere but i want it to be in the center now so i just right click and it'll snap it back into center and just like that we've created a bunch of loop cuts and it's extremely useful to do loop cuts i do it all the time if you wanted to not have these to be wonky like this you could hold the alt key and remember we learned how to select all the way around like this like a loop and then we learned how to press s to scale but we don't want to shrink it like this but we also learned that we can press z on the keyboard to only scale it in one direction and we also know that we can type in zero and so just like that we've actually flattened this whole thing if we wanted to do that for all of them just hold the alt key select scale zero we can probably do it for these at the same time if i do alt here and then i have to hold the shift key and alt to select this one as well but now if i press scale z and now because we have individual origin here on on period selected now when we do scale z 0 we flattened those as well if i'll just control that out of that one and i'll do period if you're on medium point and you press s to scale z and then zero it actually brings it into the center like this so what you want to do these if you want to flatten them is that you want to be in individual origins here on period scale set zero and now we've flattened those okay what more did we learn we learned that we can select uh we can press three on the keyboard to get this face select and we can hold the shift key and select multiple faces and we can extrude these in and i can select two more here e to extrude those in and we'll select two more here as well and we can actually do this at the same time so select those and do alt t extrude long phase normals got a few more planks there so now we've started to create some low poly planks in our objects let's add some loop cuffs here as well ctrl r scroll it up with a wheel maybe to same amount of planks right click to snap them back i've got individual origins here on period set so i can do scale but this time we're going to scale it on the x-axis the red one and then zero and that flattened all of those as well and i press three on the keyboard to go into face select and i select a whole bunch of these planks here on the top and the bottom like this alt e extrude long face normals and now we've created some more planks that brings us to another one that's quite useful and that's k which is the knife tool it doesn't matter if it's like this as well see that this one i didn't extrude that one you can extrude that one manually a little bit like this if you wanted to you don't have to be so uniform with everything but let's select a few of these as well hold the shift key e to extrude that one in so let's bring out the knife tool we press k on the keyboard get this little green dot and a knife and then we can start slicing stuff so let's just click here on the edges and let's create something that is shaped a little bit like the texture of wood so k here we can even begin in the center here go here there let's make some interesting shape here maybe like this we can do like another loop down there to there to there and then k let's do one here as well we can even begin in the center of the face here and just slice it like this and see that it added two lines here because it can't exist a phase within a phase without connecting edges so it actually added these little lines here for me as well automatically okay let's do another one here okay here as well and now if i go three to get make sure i'm in face select i hold the shift key and i select these ones that i created now on the left side here we're still on the same brown but if press g now i can move the color of this to maybe a darker brown and if i tap out of edit mode we've started to create some colors for this and here's where i mentioned before that doing this method could add a lot of geometry or it will add a lot of geometry to your meshes so you have to be aware if it becomes too many polygons maybe it'll affect your performance in that case it could be better to to do a texture map but again i like to keep this crisp look and for my purposes often it doesn't add so many polygons that becomes a problem because pcs especially they're used to handling millions of polygons so these extra few aren't going to be a problem if we reselect these now you can even do an extrusion here to get this even more detailed so let's select those again and press just b to extrude them in a little bit and that added some texture and tab out and this is what it suddenly looks like you can also do someone that are brighter so if i press k here slice a little bit there maybe something here as well three to select the faces here and then g and let's move it to a brighter one and let's move those out so e to extrude out a little bit tab out of object mode there so we can see it there's something called the topology of meshes as well and this is breaking a few of the rules and i'll probably get some a few comments about this because when you're modeling characters and things like that you should really avoid to do what i just did here with creating basically meshes that are have vertices that are in the middle of a face here because especially if you animate objects like a body or something like that where you're bending limbs it'll look really weird if i were to move this vertex out now you can see that it looks totally broken so that's something you have to be aware of but i don't want to rule out this method to do stuff because it's really useful if you have static objects like a crate for example or like a stone or whatever it is then it's not really a problem i'd say you could use it i use it all the time so if i wanted to add some character to this box now we could select the face here and then press g to move it or o to enable proportional editing g to move it scroll the scroll wheel down and then we can start making some some shapes to this object we haven't colorized this part here but let's move that one down just be aware though that when you've used this method to colorize object or make some details then you have to be really careful with the proportional editing because it could really easily break here if i press if i have proportional editing enabled there i press g to move it you can see that we run into problems so that's something you that you need to be aware of the knife tool as i mentioned as well it's got a few more tricks up its sleeve and if i tab into edit mode again i press k to go to the knife tool sometimes you want to make sure that you're in the center here and you can just hold the ctrl key and it'll snap you to the center so then you know that you snap from one edge to the other there and then press enter so that's a good thing about the knife tool another one is the the angle constraint so if i press k on the knife tool i press there and then i press c then i can angle constraint it to an axis here which could also be useful okay that was our crate let's hide that one for a second and let's do shift a now to create a new mesh a cube and let's bring the shading here we need to switch the material back here as we did before go back here a on the left side scale zero enter g to move it to gray let's make a stone this time now we're going to do something called subdivision surface if i have this object selected now i have to be out of not in this edit mode but out here in the object mode and then i can press ctrl between 1 and 5. if i press ctrl 2 here it applies a modifier called the subdivision modifier and basically that just takes an object and adds geometry and smooths out the edges so this cube nearly became a perfect sphere now suddenly if i were to press ctrl 1 instead it would have been the same as having one level here and if i were to press ctrl 3 it would have or 4 it would have added a lot more detail here if i wanted to make a stone here let's go back here and press ctrl 2. i have to enable my screencast keys again so you can see and now let's apply this modifier it's in this wrench tool thing here we apply this modifier because otherwise this is actually still a cube here but this modifier when it's enabled shows it the way the result should be but we want to actually apply this one all together now and now it's applied this modifier and transform this so this is actually a instead of a cube now it's a subdivided cube that rounded it off like this subdivision is really useful you can use it when you make characters you can make them from blocky to really round and smooth and if i uh let's say we wanted to model a stone here now in fact let's control z and even apply more of a modifier here let's go back all the way to the cube here control four let's make it really detailed like this and then apply this one tab into edit mode one into vertex mode and then we have proportional editing very important here remember the o key and then g to move it and now we can start squashing the stone so g to move let's just take some different maybe we want it flat at the bottom so i pick a vertex down here g to move it up scroll wheel to round it off and this is not so low poly anymore as you can see but that's okay we're going to make it back into low poly so let's just use the scroll wheel and proportional editing to get some interesting shapes to the stone here like this maybe there and maybe some more shapes like that now we've got something but we still want to bring it down now again so that brings us in another modifier and that's we can apply this one called decimate that we just did for the box before as well so we click on decimate and we have to be in object mode now so not in edit mode and then i bring this ratio down on the slider you could also type in something but now we've decimated geometry down back into low poly so the combination of subdividing objects adding details so you can reshape them and then using decimate to decimate them again can really get some interesting low poly results for you so keep that in mind subdivide modify and then decimate working on this rock now as well we can turn it into more of a stylistic rock here as well with something called flatten if i tab into edit mode i press three to go into face select we could use anything here but let's do c to circle select a few faces here like that press enter now i can press f3 here and type in flatten and suddenly it's turned this into a flat surface let's do that a few times so i do seat circle select maybe those ones enter f3 and we've already typed flat in there so i press enter c to circle select or first we want to actually press escape and double click a to deselect c to circle select a few of these f3 flatten and here becomes a bit of a problem maybe so we could think about ways to fix that but let's do a few more things first let's do flatten this part as well f3 flatten and maybe here enter f3 flatten we learned before that we could use scaling on on a certain axis so for example if i do c to select here enter if i were to scale this now it just scales it up and down and if i were to scale it on an axis like z it would flatten it and widen it but here we can actually go into press comma and here we have a whole new selection of something called orientation that we haven't covered yet and by default it's set to global so when i scale on the z-axis it's the vertical blue z-axis here but if we do scale or if i do comma and then select normal here remember the normal is the face the perpendicular angle to a face so if you have a flat face like this it's 90 degrees in the center going up that's the normal and when we have multiple faces selected it'll be the averaged normal so now when i you can see this blue arrow is pointing away from an average of these normals here so now when i press s to scale i can do z to flatten it like this and we've got proportional editing on now as well which is why it's moving the surrounding one if we then want that we can deselect that one with o press s to scale again and then force it on the z axis and then you can type zero as well and that's basically the same as flattening but if you don't want to fully flatten it you can press s to scale and then do z to like bring those faces a little bit more into the shape that you want sometimes you have little squiggly bits like this that you want to get rid of and let's say we wanted to fix this one let's say this face is annoying us a lot like this face is annoying most people probably but here i can switch this little thing we haven't talked about this one but but snap two i can change to vertex if i wanted to move this vertex now onto exactly the location of that vertex i can press g to move it and since we had switched to vertex at the top now if i hold the ctrl key i can actually magically snap it onto any other vertex here but we have to be careful because when i did that now it looked like we fixed everything but if i press g to move it you can see that it's actually two vertices there and that's a problem you don't really want to have overlapping vertices because you have faces there now that are basically non-existent but it'll cause problems there's two ways to fix that first one you can do instead i press ctrl z and we can enable this little thing up here called auto merge vertices so if i click on that one i press g to move it and now if i hold the ctrl key and i snap it onto there since auto merge vertices is on now it'll detect that oh these vertices are in the exact same location so i'll merge those into one so now when i press g to move it it's already magically fixed that for us the other way to do it is if you don't have auto merge vertices you press g to move it hold the ctrl key snap it onto that vertex then now i can do a to select everything and there's a hotkey it's changed now so in 2.83 it's just the m key it used to be different one it used to be alt m but now it's m and then you do merge by distance and you can see down there it says removed one vertices or one vertex it's because it goes through the whole mesh and detects if there are duplicates one so that's pretty good to do every now and then if you've got a complex mesh just select all the vertices do m and then merge by distance and remove all those doubles so you don't run into problems with them i don't know if i've covered this but i'll give you this one as well let's say we wanted to create a bit of a worn edge to this stone and i press two to make sure i'm in the edge select and let's hold the shift key now and select a few of these edges here and then now you can press ctrl b to do the bevel again and we've actually done this before because i've got loads of lines here we don't really want that many so let's bring segments down to one and now when we tab out of object mode we can see that it's created quite a nice little beveled edge to this and then if we go one into vertex edit here we can select a few of these vertices and press s to scale them and then here maybe we want it smaller as to scale it down here maybe we want to scale it up again you can control through scaling here how much you want those beveled edges to be on the rock so that's quite good for stones low polystones okay let's double click and name this one stone sometimes you want to start getting nitty gritty with your editing so sometimes you want to delete faces let's say we wanted to shift select a few of these and then we wanted to press delete for whatever reason then it's a big hole here that could be a bit scary in the first time that happens but don't be too worried about it you can actually fix holes like this by if you have a hole in your mesh in edit mode click a for everything and press f on the keyboard that fills this hole automatically but it creates one big mesh like this so sometimes you can get into some alignment issues let's say we had these gone over the edge here like that let's select those press delete faces select everything and press f you can see that it fixes the hole but it's got some weird stuff going on here with the shading and that's because it's created one face so it's really finding it difficult here but there's a way to fix it either we can do it manually by selecting we know that we want the line between that vertex and that vertex and then we can press j and that fixes pretty much everything there because then you tell the mesh that i want a distinct edge here so that's fixed another thing you could do is if we control z out of that one you could select that face and press ctrl t to triangulate it that's another way to fix that one also if you want to say exactly how faces should be created actually let's do ctrl t to triangulate that one as well let's say we had this one deleted again like this delete faces if you want to have control while you create this instead of marking everything you can press 2 to select the edges here and let's say i want to select this edge that edge and that edge and now when i press f it'll create a face between those lines that i set here same thing here if i wanted to control i could select exactly which lines and f to create them sometimes you'll run into a problem here where the face is created maybe inwards i'll just flip it manually now so you can see what i mean flip normals so this face actually exists here if we do old said you can see that there's like a center point here you can see it that one an old set again to disable x-ray so there is a face here but remember that we have the back face culling on so if if we can see the back face it looks like there's a face there but if we enable backface culling this is what most game edges would see a big gaping hole here sounded weird okay but we can fix that in a few ways one of them is manually by selecting this face that we know exists there pressing f3 and typing flip normals so that was one way to do it the other way to do it is that you can actually recalculate the normals for the whole mesh so let's say we flipped we let's say we have a few of them let's flip like this i'll select a few bunch flip normals if you don't want to select all these manually and flip them you can do a to select everything and then press alt n and then recalculate outside and now blender will sort of detect which ones are facing outside and try to fix it for you so that works quite often not all the time but quite often and equally there's this thing called alt n and you could do recalculate inside so if you made a cave for example then you can certainly be inside of it but let's flip them back alt n recalculate outside and back to our stone here you can also remove individual edges here so if i press two to edge select and let's say we wanted to it's called dissolve so if i wanted to remove these edges here but not delete them i can press x or delete and then dissolve edges and sometimes you want to do this as well because sometimes you don't let's say you have a bit of a triangulation going on like this which might be just this like this sometimes you want to select all of these like that press x and dissolve edges and that will dissolve those and just create one face but be aware that when you subdivide and things like that okay another thing we can do is something called bridge edge loops which could be quite useful let's hide this one the stone and let's bring a new one shift a create a new cube tab into edit mode first we'll switch the shading again back to the material here a scale 0 on the uvs you know this by now g to move it onto gray l to select this one actually let's just create something here um let's do the old school stuff what we learned a long time ago now e takes true d to extrude s to scale e to extrude to extrude s to scale maybe i to inset let's say we had something like this now and inset that one and then let's duplicate this whole object now shift d these are facing in the wrong direction now because before remember we pressed comma to go into normal but we're going to go back into global now so everything makes sense i'll slide it on this red axis and let's do something here item set this one e to extrude let's say we wanted to connect these two now so we're in the same object here now the cube here but we've got two sets of geometries and sometimes you want to connect this one here let's slide this one out instead so how do i go about connecting these into one single mesh here you could just select this face select that face type press f3 and type in bridge and then select bridge edge loops here and that links those together and we can do alt z to make sure it actually took away the center phase that was in here as well so there's no more center phase in there we can actually double check here as well i'll select the loop around there and press h to hide it and you can see that there are no faces here as well and then alt h on hide so if you wanted to link these together just select those two f3 bridge edge loops if you wanted to select these two up here you can link those together as well f3 bridge edge loops like that let's say i wanted to model top of a table with a computer a monitor and a keyboard on it let's do shift a as we've done before we'll add a cube and we'll go here bring shading make sure we have the material selected go back to uv editing i'll select everything i'm in edit mode now so i've pressed tab very important scale z and then we flatten it down maybe like this scale on the x axis make it wider so we'll just make the i'll skip the legs for now i'll just make a table top here a on the left side on the uv here scale 0 enter and make a brown table top again so now we're going to put a computer here and this is something i do quite often to save a lot of time i select this table top just this face here i'm three in phase select here shift d to duplicate it and you can see that it's loose here but if i press right mouse button now it'll snap it back to where it was but now we've got a separate face here so i can press s to scale that face and s again and press x and scale it on the x axis and then move it to here and then now when i press e to extrude it we've got a computer here and remember that i can press l on this one to select it we're still in the same object here but since these vertices are only linked to this face and the extruded part of it it's not linked to the tabletop anymore so we can control this separate and then i'll press on the left here g and move it to black so we make a black computer always cool to have a black computer let's make a monitor so in the same way i'll take the tabletop here again shift d duplicate it right click scale it down e to extrude e to extrude again s to scale e to extrude let's actually press l here and move it all the way to the side so we get some space e to extrude s to scale s to scale again on the x axis e to extrude and press l to select all the links g here on the left side move it to black let's do i to inset and e to extrude and let's change g here and change this to a blue screen of that and let's make a keyboard so same i'll pick this one shift d to duplicate it scale it maybe move it to here scale e to extrude it l to select the length and g to move it maybe it's a great keyboard say we wanted to make a chord here as well we could do the same here thing with lu we can do the same thing i'll do shift d to duplicate it scale it down maybe scale it on the z axis let's look from the top now and then just remember we could hold the ctrl key and then just right click like this and then connect it to the monitor there maybe move it into the monitor and it's hanging in the air now so maybe we want to fix that i'll go into two to edge select select any edge here let's press o to enable proportional editing and g to move it down scroll it up a bit see that we're distorting the computer now we don't really want to do that so let's right click to cancel that and do alt o to make sure we only have the connected here this one remember that it's connected only now g to move it now we're only affecting the chord no matter how big we go so we can hang the chord down to maybe there select that one scroll it down that one scroll it down so now we've created a low poly cord that's hanging maybe we wanted to even hang off the table a little bit have to be careful maybe we want to rotate it bring it down move that one there just make sure you don't twist the the stuff too much i probably went a little bit overboard here so be careful with that so this is still again the same object but let's say we wanted to detach this now into a separate let's say we wanted to detach the monitor we can actually double click a to make sure nothing is selected press l over the monitor here and now there's a hotkey called p and then separate selection and now we've created a separate one here and that's our monitor and this one first here is the other combined if i control z that you could actually do this as well you can select everything p and separate by loose parts and now it's created all of these for us so i can go to this one name this one monitor here is our computer here's our very basic keyboard and here's our tabletop maybe we wanted some legs on this table as well after all so we can do the same thing here i do shift d to duplicate it scale it down scale it on the x axis move it into move it into the place of a leg here maybe so we slide it on these axis and then e to extrude it down maybe we do ctrl 7 to go to the bottom view because i didn't mention that before but 7 is the top view but control 7 is the bottom view press l to select the link here shift d to duplicate it right click to snap it back move it on this axis and let's press l over this one so we select both legs shift d to duplicate it and then move it roughly today and then now we've got some legs on that table as well equally like we did with separate before you can actually bring them back into the same object again if you want to we could select this one hold the shift key to all of these for example and that one and then do control j and that merges it into it'll pick the latest name here that you had computer stuff and i think the chord is still a separate one here so we can click that one click that one and do control j to join that one as well and now suddenly it's in one object again so remember that you can separate it with p into separate objects if you want to export it for the game and have everything separate that's fine and you can join stuff together again with the control j also very useful now we're going to get into some modifiers are you still with me are you still awake i'm barely what time is it 3 15 in the morning i love this stuff can't get enough of it that's why i'm going to keep going so we're going to do a modifier here and it's going to be the mirror modifier very useful if you want to model a spaceship for example and so you go on the right side here with the object selected in object mode you go to this wrench icon and then add modifier and mirror and it'll look a bit weird here because it doesn't really know how to mirror it it's mirroring it on the x-axis here by default you can control which axis you do i always use the x-axis for mirroring but it doesn't look mirrored now so we don't know what's going on and that's because this geometry is going past the center here if i take this face and move it you can see that it's still there which is really strange but it's because it's mirroring this part of the green side of the y-axis here on the x-axis it's mirroring that part so in order to to get into a cube that's mirrored you'd have to if you do it manually you'd have to delete that face and then press two maybe and alt select this ring and then bring it back and it's difficult to know exactly how far but you can enable this clipping feature here because then it'll detect that when you hit the center here it won't allow you to go past it but we've got proportional editing on still so disable that so when i move it now it'll detect that oh i'm going to glue you together now because we've hit the center so now if i try to move this one it doesn't work because clipping is preventing us from doing that so most of the time that's what you want to do saying all of this there's actually a great way that you should do this instead so instead of applying this mirror modifier here you go to edit preferences and then here you go to add-ons and then type here you can type in auto mirror i have this one enabled by default because i love this one so make sure you have that one enabled and now when you click on the object you can press n on your keyboard to get this little menu here and go to edit and now you have this magic one called auto mirror so click on that one and that just did everything that i did manually if i tab into now it's already got the perfect slit here it's got clipping enabled everything is ready to go so save yourself a lot of time and hassle by doing that use auto mirror another useful modifier is the displays modifier if i do shift a here this time let's add a plane tab into edit mode scale it up a lot tab out of edit mode and ctrl 5 and now we can actually go into simple now because we just want to subdivide this one it doesn't look any different now but if i apply this one and tab into edit mode you can see that it subdivided it a lot of times here to create this grid instead let's actually subdivide this one one more time so i select the object press control two simple and apply it and now we've got even more geometry here so if you wanted to create a low poly island or you could uh enable this proportional editing and then select the vertex press g to move it and then use the mouse wheel to start changing this you could also what we learned before ctrl right click to lasso select something and press g and then use proportional editing here to start creating different shapes to your island that's one way to do it but i wanted to show this displays modifier so if i go to add modifier here displace and i have to tab out of edit mode to see it now i can click new here on texture and on this little icon here and let's switch the type here to clouds for example and change the scale to this maybe two and then we can go back into this modifier tab here and change the strength maybe we wanted to tweak this one even more maybe we wanted this one to scale 4 or 10. increase the scale even more so here's a useful thing and if you wanted to make it maybe you wanted to add something like a water thing there you could go into this color one and do color ramp and then you slide this bottom one it takes away details from the lower part of the of the randomness so it creates like the surface of a c here and if you're happy with this you could go back to this modifier here and just click apply and now we've created something that looks a little bit like a low poly landscape we could decimate this one again because it still doesn't look very low poly so we can go add modifier decimate it like we did before and slide this one down and that brings it into like a low poly landscape and then apply that one we have some issues here as well if we wanted to fix that we could do that we can select those two vertices press x and dissolve vertices so if you have some problem areas like that x this is all vertices we could do one to get the side view alt z to see all of this trickiness b to box select and then just select the very bottom here as slow down as we can and now we've selected all the bottom faces more or less alt said to snap out of that on and we haven't actually changed the material here so let's change the material go back into uv editing a to select everything on the left that we selected scale 0 and now we can select that one to blue if we wanted but what about the rest well we can press ctrl i to flip the selection and then a on the left side scale 0 g to move it maybe to green so that's one way to create something that looks a little bit like a low poly landscape if it's too steep for example you can select everything scale z to flatten it again let's say we wanted some uh white snow capped tops here make sure we're in edit mode here maybe press uh one to vertex select double click a to deselect everything b to box select and let's go like this switch into face selector mode with three again maybe we still want let's say we wanted some uh gray mountains first we could do control plus a few times maybe to there on the left side here we've also got some water selected now if we didn't want that to be selected we could see it's these we could maybe deselect these manually like this if it's tricky to see where the water is selected and stuff you can actually click on this little thing here called uv sync selection because now if i do be shift select that one it'll deselect edit anything that had that blue color and then we can switch this back on again so now we we've ensured that we don't have any water selected and then i can do g here and go to gray maybe and then ctrl minus maybe three times and then g and move that to byte and tab out of edit mode and now we've created something that looks a little bit like a low poly landscape one more modifier that's quite useful and that is the skin modifier if you wanted to create a tree again for example you could do here we can there's actually another useful thing here you can go to preferences and then here we type extra objects enable that one because now when we press shift a we can actually add a mesh but we can add a single vert it'll bring us into vertex edit mode here and now zoom out a little bit and i hold the ctrl key and i just right click a bit like this and then i select this vertex right click select that vertex right click a few times with the control key by the way so control key right click right click right click i'll hold the ctrl key right click right click and i rotate the viewport a little bit now when we've got this that looks a bit like a tree trunk we can add the modifier here and add the skin modifier see that it's a little bit too thick now tab into make sure you're in edit mode so you see these vertices press a to select all of them and then ctrl a and that's the hotkey to scale vertices for skinning for the skinning modifier here shift deselect that one let's enable proportional with o we can't do scale remember we have to do ctrl a for the skinning one and then scale it down and we don't want symmetry on either and then this one ctrl a to scale and then roll up proportional so this is how you could create three branches if you remember before we enable this thing called vertex snapping and we used it to snap one of these vertices onto another one like this pow but one thing that's really really useful let's say you had another line there and let's say that one was a bit wonky that one was a bit wonky you can actually use the vertex snap on an axis as well click on this axis here that we have before again if that's not enabled you can go up here drop down and have this one enabled or you can press shift space and g to enable it as well that's the same as clicking on this move tool here and now if i move on this axis and then i hold the ctrl key and then snap it to there it'll only snap it on the x axis to that one and this is really really good if you want to align to make sure that they're on the same on the same distance on the on one axis similarly if i wanted to bring this one up and make sure it's the same height as this one move it on this one hold the ctrl key and move it and move it so you get that little circle and then we can see here that that one's poking out we wanted to bring that one into the same as there move it on the green axis on the y axis hold the ctrl key and snap it to that one so if you want to do aligning vertex snapping on an axis is really useful we've already enabled automator here but there are a couple of more ones i'd like to mention so in preferences under add-ons one good is loop tools so make sure you enable that one and another one while i'm here is f2 we'll enable that one too and one more is bool tools let's enable that one and i'll show you what these two as well so if i do shift a mesh cube here we've got a normal cube again let's subdivide this one ctrl 3 maybe and apply that one and let's say you wanted to make these if you wanted to extrude these but you wanted them to be circle shape so if i shift select these and extrude it's like a square thing that i'm doing so ctrl z on that one and then we've got loop tools here you've got a few things i won't go through all of them now you can experiment with these but one for example is circle here and that just basically takes that square and makes it a circle and now when i extrude it's more like a round thing so that's very useful but there are some other good things here as well like flatten that we did before we've got uh bridge and all sorts of stuff the other thing which is really good is the bull tools one and again if i edit here it's a bool tool here if i do shift d to duplicate this and then i select this one shift select that one and then i'll do control shift minus on the keypad then it basically cuts that first mesh out of this one again very useful maybe you wanted to create a moon or something like that so maybe we scale this one off with proportional scale it down do a few of these i'll select this one shift to like this one ctrl shift minus on the keypad i'll select this one this one ctrl minus select this one remember shift select that one ctrl shift minus on the keypad so bool tool very useful especially to do subtractive boolean operations and then the next one is the f2 that i did and for example if you have let's say we have a bunch of these cutaway press delete faces f2 will do this for you remember that we created faces before uh we could do everything and press f to create one big weird face but f2 add-on will do this for you select this one press f ffff it'll automatically fill that together for you into usually a quite a good sequence all right i want to finish off this uh lengthy video with a few tips as well if you run into issues there could be a few tips maybe that you can look into so one thing that you might run into is parallel faces and if you select this one and then if you extrude now up then you've actually got this face here is sliding down between and that's not really good you don't want that so there's a few things that you could do to fix this one way to do it is if we've got this auto merge vertices here i could do control r add a loop cut here and slide it down roughly to that place and if i made it close enough which i didn't because they're still separate there then it's uh it would have fixed it i'll select this vertex press g to move it ctrl and snap it onto that one since i've got this vertex snapping on here same thing for this one select that and that vertex is actually dug into here so i do alt z to see through select that one alt set g to move it and snap it on to there and now and then if i move this vertex now you can see that we don't have any double faces there anymore and if i do old set i can also see on three here we've got an issue still we've got an internal face here that was created due to this you can only see that with old said here and i've got that selected there and then you can just press delete and delete that face and now we see that there is no dot here anymore in the center alt z so everything's fixed we've now fixed that double alignment the other thing that we had is if we don't have this enabled we could have some duplicate vertices sometimes so if i do control r loop cut that one move that one up to there roughly let's actually snap it let's do this all together and snap all of these up with uh here now it looks like this is just a normal mesh here but if i try to tab here and move this one you can see that it goes all weird and the best way to fix this one is just do a for everything m and then merge by distance and suddenly six vertices were removed and now everything's back to normal the other thing that we had is that faces are facing the wrong direction so remember if you have something that looks like a gap but there's actually a face here you could either do alt n to flip it or you can do it for the whole mesh and do everything alt n and recalculate outside that will usually fix that one then you have the misaligned vertices like this you wanted to have those aligned remember make sure that vertex snapping is on move it on this axis hold the control key and snap these into edge same for the height and the width you could do control snap it ctrl snap it height wise to that one and height wise to that one so that's one way to really align everything back into shape if in setting is behaving really strange for you let's say we wanted to inset this one like this eye to inset if for some reason you have accidentally scaled your objects outside of edit mode let's say you're in object mode you scale your object along the x-axis or let's do the y-axis like this now if you look here on the item you can see that the scale here is string it's not 1 1 1. so now if i try to inset this one it's not scaling it uniformly it's scaling a lot more on the y axis and that's because this y axis scale is more and to fix that you have to just select the object in object mode click control a and apply scale and that brings it back the scale to 1 1 1 and then i to insert now you can see that the insetting is working correctly let's say you wanted to work on this vertex here but when you rotate you're not really rotating around that vertex just press delete on the keypad or the period or the comma key and that'll recenter everything you scroll out again and now when you rotate you'll work nicely around that object so it frames it to that object another thing that you might run into is if you add the subdivision modifier by pressing ctrl 3 for example and everything looks too round let's say you wanted the base not to be rounded ctrl z out of that one then you could press ctrl r in edit mode here add a loop cut quite close to the base so it's doubled up here and now if i tap out of it into object mode and press ctrl 2 again then you can see that it kept a nice solid edge around the bottom here so that's one way to get around if you want to keep some edges when you subdivide it the other thing that we had remember when we did the center line when we subdivided for example for a car window or something like that if you have mirror modifier on and the inset produces a face in the center that you don't want make sure you press b for boundary and that'll remove that little center face for you and if b doesn't work it's because you have individual faces on so press i again first to disable individual faces and then b for boundary should work again all right guys so that sums up it was a long video and a lot of information but it's pretty much everything that i do when i low poly model stuff this is what i've learned over the course of the last four to five years that i've been using blender i used a bit of 3ds max before that but not really at a serious level but i think it's mostly the two most recent years that i've done on a lot of low poly stuff and especially this year with my 10 minute modeling challenge i'm really trying to find the most efficient workflows and good fast techniques to do low poly modelling come back to the video re-watch certain parts break it down practice practice practice make a lot of low poly stuff i do that all the time i basically jump into blender and i just model anything i can think of houses islands cars dragons i haven't even covered in this video i haven't covered so much about character modelling same technique applies but when it comes to rigging it'll be a few more things and animating those i should make some videos about that so thanks a lot guys for sticking with me give it a thumbs up if you like this video and subscribe if you haven't already and i've also got a patreon so if you want to give that a little bit of extra support head over to patreon.com infensia until next time have a good one take care bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Imphenzia

Views: 992,080

Rating: 4.9771914 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender 2.83, blender low poly, low poly modeling, low poly modeling tutorial, how to do low poly, model, imphenzia, gamedev, lowpoly

Id: 1jHUY3qoBu8

Length: 83min 16sec (4996 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020