Learning Blender - A step by step beginner Tutorial for 3D Artists

hi everyone tim from chamfer zone here welcome to the introduction to blender tutorial and to give you a bit of a overview of what to expect from this tutorial and also a bit of a background on me i'm a senior 3d artist working in the video game industry since 13 years and i've been working with 3d max exclusively pretty much throughout most of the time so it hasn't been until maybe half a year ago that i decided to pick up blender and i also had to learn everything from scratch so essentially this tutorial is going to cover step by step everything that you need to know in order to learn the tools the modifiers uh some shortcuts and also some plug-ins that we're going to look at and at the end of it you're hopefully gonna have a very good understanding of what can be done with blender from a modeling perspective view in this particular tutorial we're not going to look at unwrapping but the next tutorial that's going to follow right after that one we're going to then apply what we learned here and create a proper object with it and in that one we're also going to unwrap and then later also we're going to texture it in substance painter probably so stay tuned for the next tutorials and this one here is really a step-by-step guide that will show you everything that's essential to know to get you off the ground and start it and essentially that's it i hope you're gonna like the tutorial and also blender at the end of it so i would say let's get started and happy modeling cheers hey guys welcome to blender the first thing people usually do is press the middle mouse wheel button and just pan around a bit that already gives you a bit of a feeling here for the viewport so before we start i'm going to activate a plug-in that allows you to see what i'm doing if you click here on this little arrow that sticks out there you can also access that by pressing the n key you get this sidebar menu here this is where we get to see our transform information which by the way corresponds to the currently selected element and also other things here such as tool view and most importantly our installed plugins will always appear here and you don't have this plugin you also won't need it i just installed it so that here at the bottom you will now be able to see what mouse button i pressed and also which keyboard button so that makes it easy for you to follow what i'm doing here so while we're at it let's talk about basic navigation here in blender i'm gonna bring up the edit preference window because if we talk about navigation we also need to have a look here at our key maps and if you go over here you can change it to industry compatible which will then make blender behave more like you're used to it from 3d max or from maya and that might be something that you can try for me personally i decided to just go with the default blender settings because i figured that if i need to look something up there's a lot of tutorials out there where it's just the standard key maps that were originally intended that way from blender and that just makes it easier then to quickly look something up as you can see i already have my own shortcut file here but for the sake of this tutorial i'm just gonna have the blender settings and then i'm gonna change a few shortcuts where i think it makes sense so this preference window we're gonna get back to it very soon so we can always have it in the background let's just take a look now at basic navigation pressing down the middle mouse wheel button while having an active selection such as this box here will enable us to circle around it mouse wheel lets you zoom in and out and then pressing the shift key lets us pan around like this and now lets say we have this object here unselected by clicking anywhere here in the viewport and we are somewhere all the way out here now if we select this box again here you can press then the period key on the numpad to zoom right back to it so let's take a look at our different view modes which are perspective and orthoview same as in any other 3d software and you can see here this icon already indicates that we are in the perspective view and like it says there if you press the numpad 5 key you can toggle between perspective and orthoview so there is one important thing that needs to be mentioned first of all on the numpad keys we can quickly toggle through different kinds of views here it will always tell you here on the upper left which view you're in so for example numpad 1 is the front view 7 is the top view 9 is bottom 3 is right and so on so now if you use the mouse wheel button and get out of that it will then go back to the perspective view which is rather annoying so in order to prevent that we have to go back here to our preferences and then under navigation we want to disable auto perspective so with that done if we switch back here to our author view we can now always remain in the ortho view unless we press the numpad 5 key again here to switch to perspective if you need it there's also another way that we can toggle through these different modes that are on the numpad keys as well by pressing the alt key so it's kind of similar to zbrush where it will automatically then snap into the nearest view here such as now we're in the back view now we're at the top and so on so that is another very fast way that we can always uh snap here and that means you don't always have to press the numpad keys even though that's something that i like to do because that way i always know i'm in the left view or the front view and it's just a convenient thing where i don't always have to check where i'm currently at here in my 3d view but regardless it's a useful thing to be able to snap so by default we are in the object mode the object mode is where we can create new solid geometry here and let's for example add something by pressing shift a which will bring up this window here and then let's add a cylinder here to our scene now you can see that it will always spawn that cylinder here at x y z 0 axis right at the center and then let's say we want to take this out here out of this box we can then go over here to move and push it wherever we want to have it let's add something else let's have another cube here there we go and you will then see that it will add these things here into our currently selected collection so this is basically our folder that we have active and where everything is in right now another thing that by default always comes with a new scene here are these lights or i should say this one light and this camera here by pressing shift we can select them together and then pressing x will enable us to delete it usually we don't need that for modeling so now you can see we only have geometry left here in this collection folder but to be able to actually edit these cubes here or let's say the cylinder let's select this one we have to switch over to our editing mode so pressing tab will get you there and you see here we have all these extra buttons now inset extrude bevel all these things that we actually need to properly edit this geometry here so since we are in the new mode we are back into perspective i'm going to press numpad 5 to get back into the ortho view we are by default in this layout mode here if we go over here to modeling mode we have more screen space because it gets rid of this animation bar and as long as we're not animating anything it's probably best to have the maximum screen space and if we switch over here to our object mode it will also maintain this modeling view here so once again because now we are in this new mode here gotta tell blender that we also want to have the ortho view here i'm gonna press shift here on these objects press x and delete them and then while we are in object mode let's create a new cylinder so whenever we create new solid geometry in blender you will see here at the bottom left we can expand this here into a window where then we have further control over how we want this cylinder here in that case to look like we can also change the radius and the depth and if you're coming from 3d max then there is one thing to notice that is different in blender so let's say we take this here and we want to move this object then take a look what happens here to this property window now we let go and our property window is gone and this is a bit of a i would say more destructive workflow than in 3d max where we are still able to edit our properties even if we move it around somewhere and in blender this means we are now basically stuck with this cylinder and if we wanted to go back and change the size on that like right now we have 64 we want it to be 32 again we have to delete it and then we have to create a new cylinder it will always remember the last settings that we made so that makes it a little bit easier but it will always center it here at x y z 0 right there in the center so that would be the perfect time to take a look at some free plugins and one of the plugins will for example enable you to also spawn geometry based on where your mouse cursor is like we are used to do it in 3d max if you are familiar with that so there's a lot of plugins out there it's absolutely amazing the community of blender is great and this is something that i certainly love about blender some of the vanilla tools might be a bit limited but then we have the ability to look online for plugins so long story short let's take a look at these plugins that i find essential and that i want to show you in this tutorial you will find the links in the description so the first plugin we want to download is called cue blocker and if you're not familiar with gumroad the way that it works is that some people put free stuff up on there me included by the way and then it's up to you whether you want to be generous and donate something to the creator or let's say you're really tight on your budget you can also get it for free by putting in a zero here and then you hit that purchase button and you will get to the download screen where then you want to grab the latest version here which is 0 15. just make sure to download all these plugins into one folder it doesn't matter where that folder is located because we're going to install it then later from blender the next plugin is called cat transform which has some really nice snapping ability which is also more close to how 3d max does it and it just improves the general way that snapping works in blender we're gonna take a look at that later in the tutorial so same thing here make sure to grab it the next plugin is called text tools and if you're familiar with 3d max chances are you have heard or you probably have text tools installed there and i was happy to see that it also exists for blender now we probably won't be doing a lot of unwrapping here in this introduction to blender video but once you follow my free blender grenade tutorial we will definitely be doing unwrapping there and also make use of text tools as well as the next plugin which you want to download which is called uv squares just like text tools uv squares is a plugin that helps us unwrapping here on the creators github account you can download it by clicking on code and then download that zip file alternatively and if you feel generous you want to go over here to the blender market and like i did i purchased it here to support the creator who does a really amazing job creating these plugins and this one here in particular was exactly what i was looking for it's amazing you're gonna see it once we get to the grenade tutorial where we do the unwrapping so the last plugin for now is interactive tools by maxifs he has a massive thread up here on polycount that is worth reading because in there you will find explanations for every one of these tools he made some gif graphics to make it really nice and easy to understand what does what and it's a collection out of different tools if you're coming from 3d max you will find a lot of them familiar which once again is a great thing because out of the box blender has its limits and that's where the creators of these plugins step in to create amazing things to enrich the blender experience so once again a plug-in that is a must-have and like the other ones or many of the other ones it is optional for you to decide whether you want to support this creator which i highly recommend or you can grab it for free here by punching in a zero so one thing i want to point out though is that here at the bottom of the polycount page he posted the last version of interactive tools with a link to his github account i think when i checked the version that was on gumroad was actually not the latest so make sure to grab it here from github download zip we are back to blender let's go over to our preferences settings and under add-ons we are then able to install these plugins we just download it and as you can see there's already a whole bunch of different plugins in here some of them are activated others are not but by default blender already comes with a lot of plugins that are ready to be activated so every once in a while the blender foundation looks at some really good plugins and decides to add them basically to the default setup file if you download it they already come with it so there's a good chance that maybe some of these plugins we were just downloading eventually get added by blender here to its core plugins that already come with it but since that is not the case for the ones we just downloaded we navigate over here to our download directory and let's start here with the maxifs tool interactive tools let's double click that and then you will see it automatically switches here to it all that's left to do is enable it and then if you take a look here on that button you see that it now appeared here not all plugins have its extra window but this one here in particular does have it and as you can see it has a whole bunch of different tools and you can always hide that view if it's too much but in general it always makes sense to have it opened for whatever plugin you're currently using so back to preferences let's install also the other plugins next one is qblocker let's also activate it q blocker actually doesn't have its extra window we're gonna access it in a different way we're gonna see it in a moment but let's carry on here this one is the cat transform another amazing plugin for snapping and then we have text tools let's activate it and also uv squares so these last two uv squares and text tools we're going to cover in the grenade tutorial once we actually do unwrapping so before we install the plug-ins we were looking at creating primitive geometry here in blender which by default always spawns in the center so now that we have q blocker installed let's delete the one that we have here that cylinder so let me just collapse the sidebar so that you see better the shortcut actions that i'm doing we access qblocker by pressing shift a and that will give us the same menu that usually comes when we want to create some new solids but now we have q blocker up here as well so let's go over and have a cylinder you see on the left side we already have an explanation that basically gives us the complete rundown on how to work with q blocker but in general let's press down the left mouse button and that will give us this basic shape here and then if we let go of the left mouse button we can then drag it out here so this is how we can create an actual cylinder and now if you look at the left side it says that if we press h it will convert it basically into a plane so now if we drag the mouse up and down you will see it stays that way if we press h again we're back to cylinder mode so let's have this one here then let's drag another one here as you can see right now it's not uniform so in order to have it as a uniform radius we want to press shift and now it's a perfect cylinder here let's do that again press shift another very useful thing with q blocker is that we can spawn new solid geometry based on our normal orientation indicated by wherever we have our mouse cursor that is where we will spawn it and let's say we want to have something here or for example here makes it really nice and easy but what if we want to have a cylinder with a certain amount of sides so by default it's 16. now let's say we want to have a cylinder with 32 sides what we do in that case is while we have our selection active here we press down the s key and then you can just move the mouse to the left or the right side so here we have 32 sides or we can also take that the other way all the way down to four which basically makes it a cube so this is how we can define how many sites we want to have and then we confirm that by pressing down the left mouse button so the other way of doing that and actually the better way is to create a cylinder same thing press down s and then we use our mouse wheel for that that way we don't have to worry to run out of monitor space and same principle applies we just define how many sites we want to have and then we confirm with left mouse button so whenever we are happy with what we created we press the right mouse button and that gets us out of the cue blocker mode so let's take a look how to select things in blender currently we have this cylinder here selected if we press shift we can then add to that selection one by one here and if you want to deselect something you press shift and you double click left double click the only problem is that i found that let's say i want to deselect that one it doesn't recognize it because it basically looks at the object that's behind it so let me try that see now it actually selected the other one so in order to do that it needs to be sort of out of the way so now if i do it it does it if that makes sense so same thing here and now again if i double click here while i press shift it won't let me do it but if i press here then it will actually do it so this is a little bit strange i must say i would prefer if there's a different way where i can just press alt to deselect how i'm used to it in 3d max maybe someone of you guys knows a way to do that but it's still okay this is just how it works and it's not too big of a deal so now everything is unselected and then of course we have our selection box here where we can then just select everything at once so now if we want we can move this selection around here with our move tool which i think is pretty self-explanatory here the gizmo which lets us move things in x y and z and if we select it here by this square we can then move it here in that case it would be on z and on y and here we would move it on y and then x and so on and of course control z same as in most other software we'll just undo the last step we did so ctrl z might be something that we want to increase actually because by default i think it's set to 30 32 so i like to have that at hundred and another thing that i want to do while we're in the preferences is here under navigation if we put on zoom to mouse position it will then zoom in with the mouse wheel wherever we have the cursor so i find that pretty nice if we don't have that then it will just take the center of our selection i'm not actually sure if i wanna have this on the whole time but i'm gonna leave it on for now and see how i like it so let's carry on with the tools that we have here rotating it works the same way as moving things around we will be able to make use of our gizmo here based on axis or if we hold somewhere here in between the xyz we can do something like that which you would rarely ever do really because you want to be precise and what you can also do is hold down control to do these incremental steps of 5 degree you can always take a look here at the upper left let me just repeat that to see exactly the angle amount that you were rotating and if you don't have control you just do it like that here free hand i usually have control on another thing that works for moving and rotating and scaling is that whenever we press shift it will slow down the action so that way we can be extra precise let's try that here while we have the move tool so this is normal speed now we press shift and that will just slow it down for us here the same principles apply for our scaling if we have the mouse within this white circle we do a uniform scale and then we can also do a scaling here based on x y and z by pressing on these buttons and of course we can also press ctrl and do this incremental scale stepping and pretty much that is move rotate and scale we have another tool here that combines all of these in one gizmo here so you see we have the rotation here we have the scaling i personally find that a little bit cluttered so i just stick to these three here so in the meantime since i started recording the tutorial blender 2.9 came out you are probably already on that version if you follow the tutorial but in my case i'm gonna install it now and then switch over to this version and also quickly show you how to activate the plugins that we just installed for the previous blender version so as far as the plugins are concerned we have to navigate over here to app data roaming blender foundation and that's where you find subfolders for each installed version of blender so what we have to do is go into the previous folder for 2 8.3 and then all you want to do is copy over the scripts folder into the new one here so let's just paste that in there and that takes care of all the plugins that we previously installed so i am back with blender 2.9 and i will just reactivate these plugins and fast forward through this process so let's continue to look at some of the plugins that we downloaded the next one here is the cat transform but in order to demonstrate that better we also want to toggle our wireframe mode because we're gonna snap in between edges and vertex points and so far we haven't actually activated the wireframe mode you can do that by going over here and then enable wireframe and now you see that this cube here actually shows us how many edges he has and in order to make that a bit easier we want to put that on a shortcut so in blender you can always wherever you have like one of these check boxes you can then right click on it and say assign shortcut so now i'm going to press f4 but the problem is if i press f4 now i get the file context menu so in order for this shortcut to be recognized we have to go and get rid of this file context menu first so let us go over here to our preferences under a key map and now we go over here to key binding and search for file context menu actually we have to be here under name file context let's see there we go file context and you just want to uncheck that because you can see it's already assigned to f4 and unchecking that means that we made it clear we deactivated here and now we can go back over to our wireframe and change this shortcut here to f4 and now we actually have this toggle here on that key so now let's take a look here at our cat transform plug-in by default the snapping in blender is pretty clunky i would say and i'm not even gonna go into it now but this here is basically the best way to snap things together and pretty much provides the same usability that you're used to when you're coming from 4d max so in order to demonstrate that better let's have a cylinder here next to that box so now let's say we want to snap this box here to any of these vertex points here first we have to actually select the box and then let's press n in order here to go into the configuration here for this cat transform and it looks pretty overwhelming it just means we have a whole bunch of different options with it but all i ever needed for is the vertex snapping here so i'm going to press v and now you have to also press g because we want to move this so once you do that you can see that wherever we have our mouse cursor it indicates this here is the vertex point where then we can snap it to something with so let's hold down here and then you can see now we're able to snap anywhere here to any vertex point on that cylinder so then once we have it here in place we just hit the left mouse button again and that basically gets it done so this is a very comfortable way of snapping and that makes this plug-in definitely worthwhile so far we've been mostly in the object mode the object mode is where we create new solid geometry for the most parts and in the edit mode once we press tab we can then actually start working on these primitives that we added here to our scene so let's go ahead here in our object mode i'm going to press a select everything and i just want to clear out that scene and i'm actually going to create a new cube here not with cue blocker i just want to have it here in the center like this so now let's head over here to our edit mode and right click subdivide two times so that we have a bit more geometry here to work with to demonstrate some of these tools here so by default when we are in the edit mode we are in the vertex selection mode you can toggle by pressing two three and one and two gives us edge selection and three gives us face selection same as in 3d max so let's take a look here at our vertex selection which allows us to select any of these points here or pressing shift to select multiple ones then we can move them and scale them and just work with it let's go over here to our edge selection and let's say we want to have this whole loop here selected then all you have to do is press alt and it will make the selection for you here if you press shift and alt you can select the ones that are next to it it will add it to the selection and clicking anywhere outside of that cube will deselect the current selection so pressing ctrl and alt will give us this ring selection and pressing shift together with it will then also add to that selection so that way we can select rings and loops here also one thing to note is that let's say we have an edge loop selection like that and then you go back to vertex mode it will remember this selection and convert it here to vertex selection another thing that you might wonder where it is if you're coming from 3d max is the element mode in 3d max we have an element mode which here we don't have like that but you can have the same functionality by selecting any vertex point and then you press ctrl and l that will always select the current object in its entirety and the same works if you do it with face or edge so this is basically the element mode here in blender so even though this box is a bit boring let's stick to it because it's perfect to demonstrate these different tools that we have let's say we want to delete this edge loop here and essentially get rid of the onboarding faces together with it the way to do that is bringing up the delete dialog by pressing x and then you want to go over here to dissolve edges this is basically the same as in 3d max where i think it is on control and backspace and let's just undo that and see what happens if we go back here and then just say delete edges what it does is that it only gets rid of the selection that we had but it still keeps the edges that we didn't select together with the vertex points so this is the difference if we dissolve it gets rid of everything vertex points and the onboarding faces and let's see how we can connect two vertex points with an edge let's press shift to select both of them and then if we press j we make this connection here with an edge leading from this one to this one and now let's say let's undo that let's say we want to have a connection that goes all the way from here over to here it will then cut an edge connection straight through it which is pretty cool so j is the button for that so let's take a look how we would delete faces here on this cube so first let's go over here to our face mode let's select these four tiles here and then we bring up that dialog again and we need to then confirm that we actually want to delete the faces if i undo that and i say dissolve faces it will still remain that actual face here because it borders onto the other ones and that's why in that case we have to tell it to actually really get rid of everything so now let's do the same thing here at the bottom and now let's say we go over here select this edge and this one and we want to connect that and for dmax it would be the bridge mode and here it's the fill we press f and that way we fill that back up here so the same thing works of course if we would just want to have this whole selection here and that is how we do that in blender so if we delete geometry here like this one then we will see that our current object is showing as double-sided and this can sometimes be a bit confusing because you don't really know what you're looking at and in that case i always prefer to enable backface culling which you can do here under the viewport shading menu and then once we have this enabled we actually see that this is an hollow object and which way our actual geometry is facing and that is where you can find that so another frequently used action is to collapse something and most of the time that would be a ring selection like this one here so then we press m and we go over to collapse and that way we have only one edge loop here instead of two same thing here let's collapse that and then if we want to get rid of that one once again we would dissolve the edges and that way you can quickly get rid of edge loops that you don't want to have in place so let's say we want to do the opposite thing where we have this ring selection and now we want to have an edge loop going through the center that would be a matter of right click and subdivide and then we can do the same thing here once again so this is how you add edge connections here so let's go over and take a look how to target weld vertex points in blender we need to go over here to our snapping dialog and then change it to vertex then you also want to actually enable the snapping and here under options we want to enable auto merge you can set a threshold here and then we are able to snap these vertex points here and target weld them so instead of having to go through these two steps we can also make use of these maxifs tools plugin that we were downloading earlier and in here we have a whole bunch of different actions and one of them is target weld on or off and you can see how it will basically just toggle on and off here our weld and snapping so this is one of the cool things here with this plugin and we can then also go ahead if we want and put it on a shortcut or we can also have it on the quick favorites so i'm gonna add it to the quick favorites and right now this is under cue so if i press the q key i get this quick favorite dialogue and it makes sense to add certain actions into these quick favorites that we use a lot it's just a quick access so my only problem now is that i don't really want to have quick favorites on the q shortcut because i want to put the selection box here on cue and also some of these here so that it's basically mimicking what we have in 3d max where we have q w e and r for selection moving rotation and scaling because that is just the perfect hand position if you look at your keyboard and you have the left hand there and it's just very intuitive and i prefer that over for example having the move on g so i want to put it on alt q so let's go over here to our preferences and then under key map quick favorites and alt q so now we can overwrite our selection box here and i want to assign the q shortcut here to it so now when we press q we can make our selection box here so next i want to assign w and e r but there is a problem where i want to have e for rotate but right now e is already reserved here by extrude region so what we have to do is go over to our preferences and then here let's see for extrude this is the one extrude and move on normals and i actually want to have this put on d right now d is not really reserved for anything that i need so i'm gonna have it here on extrude instead of e so now i can put rotate on e and i can have scale on r so now we can comfortably cycle through here q w e and r and that is pretty much what you're used to from 3d max if you're coming from it so the only thing that we still have to do is go back into our object mode because in here we also have to reassign these shortcuts because it looks at it as its own mode with its own shortcuts so i'm gonna put this here also on cue our selection box and then let's put that on w here or move this here on e for rotate and then we have r for our scaling so let's create a new box here i'm just going to use the standard cube that spawns in the center then i'm gonna go over to our edit mode and i want to subdivide that two times so now let's switch over here to our face mode and let's take a look at our extrude which we have on the d shortcut now so as you can see we can extrude out new geometry here and at the moment we still have the snapping enabled because we were target welding we can then toggle that on either by clicking on that symbol or again we can just toggle it here the maxifs plugin that we downloaded so this is how we extrude in blender the way that it works is that it's looking at our normal orientation so that means that let's say we have a case like that here and we extrude these faces it will also follow the normal orientation but now let's undo that and let's say we want it to go this way what we would do in that case is extrude and then we hit the right mouse button which will still perform the extrude action but it snaps it back to its place here and then we can drag it out like this so whenever you extrude and hit the right mouse button it will snap back and then you can drag it out so that would also be a good idea to look at how to align something so let's say we want to have this here perfectly flat now on the x-axis the way that we do that in blender is by pressing s x and zero that will align it and the same works of course for the other axis as well so in that case here that would be the z-axis let's just make that a bit more obvious so let's say we want to have the whole thing here aligned on the z-axis we would make our selection press s z and zero so this is not the most straightforward way but this is just how it works in blender so sometimes it's actually the easier way to draw a selection so something like that here instead of having to individually select these faces we can then also switch over to our vertex mode and then with our q shortcut we can draw a selection actually we don't even need to be in that mode here we can also just be straight here in our move tool and also be able to draw a selection so this works in all our modes here even if we're on scale but the q shortcut here for our selection box means that it's not associated with any command that will actually change our position so that is usually then the safest way just to make a selection and be sure not to move anything so now we can again press s z and zero to align it so one important thing to look at with the selection is that let's say we want to draw something like that here then we would actually expect everything to be selected however this is not the case as you can see here it didn't affect these vertex points which were hidden here behind this geometry so the way that we do that in blender is to toggle to the x-ray mode we do that by pressing alt and z and now if we draw a selection we will affect everything that's back facing so this is something that you have to get used to if you come from 3d max where we can decide whether we want to select everything with the back faces or not here in blender we have to always be in the x-ray mode for it to get affected so what we can also do is grow a selection let's say we have only these points here selected then we can press control and plus and grow this selection control and minus will undo that and then we can for example delete these guys here and bridge it back together let's switch over to our face mode let's select that face here and now let's take a look at inset you press i and then you can make an inset here into these faces and if you press ctrl you can determine the depth of it and then if you let go of control it will lock it here into that position if you press ctrl again you can still make changes here whether you want it to go up or down so that is basically the inset here in a nutshell and it makes sense to have the mouse cursor a bit further outside here to have more control over it if i have the mouse cursor here you can see that i have less room here to operate that so i'm gonna undo that and it makes more sense to be a bit more outside here to have this control and also if we press shift like everything else in blender it will limit how fast we go so it slows everything down a bit so we can also access the inset here on that button but in general shortcuts are faster let's take a look at the bevel which is one of my favorite things here in blender let's select these edges here and then if we press ctrl and b we can decide how much of a bevel we want to have here and if we use our mouse wheel we can add segments to it so this is pretty cool here in blender and it's a lot of fun and in general i would recommend you to just have some fun here with a box and just use these tools here you know drag them out extrude them go over here to the bevel and basically just try all these tools that we have and that way you will be able to learn everything pretty fast so as a next thing let's take a look at our knife tool which is over here or we press k okay for knife and this is essentially what in for dmax we use as the cut tool so you can see our cursor changed to this knife and if we draw it here anywhere over an edge it will already indicate that it will snap to it and the same goes here for the vertex points so let's say we want to cut something like this here some random shape and then we come back here to another point we still have to confirm it then by pressing enter so now that we did that we have our vertex points drawn in here on that face if we press the tilt key the one that's under escape we get this nice menu here rolled out so let's go to the top view or you can press 8 on the numpad and now let's say we want to slice through that whole object from here to over here in 3d max we would use the slice plane and here in blender we go back to our knife tool and you click anywhere here and then it already drags out our slice plane pretty much all the way and then we want to confirm the point wherever we want it to slice through and if you look at the bottom where we have this text it says c to cut through so let's press z and now let's confirm and hit enter and this is how we make a cut here through that whole object the same as the slice plane in 3d max it might not be exactly the same but this is the closest thing that we have to it in blender as a next thing let's take a look at our edge constraint and for that i'm gonna go over here to our edge mode and i want to get rid of this corner here basically dissolve edges so that we have this angle here now let's add an edge loop and let's select it and what if we want this to stay in place here for that we have to enable our edge slide so now we're able to just have it in place without affecting any of these positions here and we can also access that by pressing gg so that would be the shortcut for it so let's get rid of this box here i'm back in the object mode and i'm gonna create a new cube and i also want to subdivide it two times so now let's take a look at how to make instances and copies and this is important to notice that we are in the edit mode right now because this behaves differently in the object mode we can make copies here in the edit mode and we do that by pressing shift and d so that will basically take whatever we have selected and in that case we had the whole cube here selected and it will make a copy of it and if we want to have this in place and not something like that here the same technique applies as before we say shift d and then we hit the right mouse button it snaps back into place and even though it looks like this is one object it still has the copy selected so if we copy something here in the edit mode it will become the same element of which we took the copy from so in that case here these two cubes are actually the same element if we want to detach that we press the p key and then we say separate by selection so now you can see we have actually two different elements here for it and once we hit over here to our object mode you will see that the pivot is still based on the original object where we made the copy from and that would be another use case here for our interactive tools we can then go over to quick origin and it will then automatically center the pivot of our selection here in that case the whole cube but we are also able to go back here to our edit mode and for example while we are in edge mode we select this edge and we press quick origin and it will then take the center of our selection the same works here for our vertex mode once again quick origin we'll now put the pivot right here and that makes this quick origin a very essential button or shortcut pretty much and i'm gonna put it here on our quick favorite bar so now if we have alt q we can then just hit quick origin and there's our new pivot point for now i'm gonna actually delete this box here and let's remain in our object mode and see how copy and instances work here so in the object mode we are not able to select any individual vertex or edge but it's always like the name suggests the overall object here and then if we press shift and d it works the same as in our edit mode we make a copy here and as you can see it automatically makes a new object out of it once again if we are doing that in the edit mode it will attach it to the current element where here it's already coming as separated so here we have our copies and now let's see what the difference is if we make an instance so we make an instance copy by pressing alt and d and it looks the same if we press right mouse button it snaps back then we can drag it out let's make another one and here we have our instances and here we have our copies and if you are not familiar with instances let's take a look at what it actually means so let's go back to our edit mode and by default we are in the vertex selection and you can already see that these three cubes here indicate that they can be edited and because we have instances you can see that wherever you make a selection it also makes a selection here on our referenced objects so that means that if we want to make a change here to that let's for example make an inset or let's make an extrusion that it will apply this change to our referenced objects as well while these two objects here are separate objects which won't get affected because we made them as copies and not as instances shift d for copies and alt d for instances so while we have this object here let's go over to our edge mode and let's bevel this corner here and now if we go over here to our object mode and we toggle the wireframe off you can see that we don't have any smoothing group here on that so in blender they don't call it smoothing group and we also can't assign them individually but the way that we can get some smoothing on here is by first of all selecting the object and then right click and say shade smooth and by default it will just basically apply one smoothing group on the whole object and now it's up to us to go over here to our object data property and under normal we can then define an angle where it's supposed to start smoothing so in 3d max the smoothing groups are very important for my workflow that i've shown in my previous tutorials here in blender we're going to use bevel weights we're going to take a look at it in a moment another thing that we need to be in the object mode for is if we want to attach things together so as you can see we have five different objects here and now let's say we want to attach these three here what's important to pay attention to is in which order we select it because the pivot point will always be taken from the last object so let's select this one here with shift and then this one and let's press ctrl and j and now we have this as one object and you can see the pivot point is the one from the last object that we selected you can also see it because it's color coded if we do the same thing over here you will notice that this is now orange and the currently selected one is a bit of a brighter yellow so now if we select that one this here becomes the one with the bright yellow and this indicates that this will be basically our pivoted object and it will also then convert whatever settings this has on the rest of our object so if we now control and join that it will then not have the auto smooth enabled and let's see what happens we then have to tell it to auto smooth again so this is basically attaching in blender so let's assume we want to detach those elements here again into each individual object then we go back to edit mode and while we have our current selection here we can then press p and say separate by loose parts so now if we go back to object mode you can see that all these objects here are individual again but the pivot point for each one of them is still assigned to the last object where we made the attachment to so if we wanted to have the pivot point back in the center of let's say this one we can then make use of our interactive tools again and going on the quick origin so even though we talked about detaching stuff before i want to make another example here out of having one object and what if we want to detach let's say that piece here and make it a separate object then we would go over here to our face mode and we would grow that selection and press p and say separate by selection so now you can see that we have a new cube here as a new object and basically that is how we would split that up if it's already one element before so another thing that we could take a look at while we have all these different objects is the isolation mode which you can find on the slash key it will then also do a bit of a zoom and basically hide everything else so this is the isolation mode in blender so while we have several objects here in the scene let's take a look at the material editor the way that this works in blender is that each one of these objects here has its own material properties and essentially that is our material editor here so let's say we want to have a color here on that one we then go over here and say add material slot and then we say new material so now this material slot has its first material which by default is gray and doesn't even show but now we actually confirmed that we have a material here and let's call it red so now we go over here assign a color and then we have to go over to our edit mode press a to select our current object and then we say assign so now the reason why nothing shows is because we still have to go over here on viewport shading if we go here on that arrow we can also put scene lights on and we are even able to change the direction of the sun if you take a look here at the shadow so now let's say we want to have only a segment here with a different color first of all we have to be in the face mode and let's just click outside to deselect if we press alt and then make a left mouse click we can automatically select the whole loop here if we press alt and click in the center it makes it vertically so let's do it here at the side so that we have this horizontal selection and then let's create a new slot new material and let's just call it green and assign it and there it is so one thing that left me wondering when i learned blender is if i now go here onto a different object and i go on the material editor i don't see these materials that we just set up for this one so in order to reuse materials that we already created we want to remain here first in that one and make sure that we created the materials that we want to use so i'm just gonna go ahead here and make a blue one let's also give that a proper name and then let's create a yellow one as well just to demonstrate that better so now let's say we want to assign these colors these materials here to any of these objects we then make our selection with shift we can again select multiple ones and i'm gonna select these four here i'm not gonna select that one remember that is its own object that we detached earlier and then most importantly with shift we select that one here as the last one which then automatically becomes our active selection with this material here and we can then press ctrl and l and say make links to materials so now what is important to remember is that this is our current active selection which consists out of these five cubes here well these really can't be called cubes anymore but whatever that means that with that selection if we go back to the edit mode and we are here in the face mode or really any mode we are able to select all of them here now let's press l and then we can make a easy selection here and assign it with whatever color we want so this one here let's make it blue and then remember this cube here doesn't actually have this material yet so all of these have it but this one we left out and if we wanted to assign it we would then just again select this or we could also use any of these here because they also have it press ctrl l and say materials so this is how that works here in blender with the material editor okay let's take a look at some of the modifiers in blender and let's start with the boolean modifier for that i'm gonna create a new cube here i'm gonna duplicate it snap it back into place and then let's scale it a bit something like that here we can always change that later and now what i'm gonna do is head over here to the modifier properties with our currently selected object where we then apply it to and in here we have all the modifiers that are currently available here in blender and here we have the boolean i hope i pronounced that right and now let's say we want to have a difference here with that cube we simply go on that thing and select it and now you can see that it already did the cut but we can't really see what's going on unless we hide this cube here so we could hide it or what we could also do is select this operator here this cube and then we go over to our object properties go to viewport display and we put it to not textured but wire so now essentially we have a live boolean view here which adapts to whatever we do with that shape here and we can then also go back here to our edit mode and because that here is essentially just another element here we can then further edit that and that applies the changes here to the original cube that we pick from so then whenever we are happy with that shape what we can do is go back here to that object where we have the modifier on and then here we can go on that little arrow and say apply so now that operation is actually done but we still have this cube here in the scene which we can then just get rid of so now let's take a look at the bevel modifier which enables us to make a high poly out of this geometry we want to go back here to our modifier tab and then we add the bevel modifier and as you can see right now it just basically chamfers everything if you're familiar with 3d max this is the equivalent to the chamfer modifier and in here we have different limit method types let's say we want to put that here to angle then it looks at this curve here and it takes that as one continuous angle here so it puts the chamfer then accordingly this works for something very simple like that but in general the more control is given when we use the bevel weights so let's take a look at the weight method we put the modifier here to wait and right now the result is that we see nothing because we have to go over here to our edit mode and then while we are in the edge mode we can say select sharp edges which is also looking at the angle here to do that but we can also manually select edges so now with that selection let's bring up our item here and in here you see we have the mean bevel weight which we want to put up to one and now we basically tell it we want these particular edges to reflect than our chamfering within our bevel modifier we have these expandable options and in here we can also change the amount and the segments so all these settings here play a role in what it looks like once we add our subdivision surface on top which in 3d max is the turbo smooth and you have these two options here this one here is only when you want to render something this one here actually puts the subdivisions on it and the reason why we don't really see it here is because we have optimal display on once we uncheck that you will then see that our mesh actually subdivides and since we have one massive n-gon here on top we get this overlap so we're gonna switch over here to our vertex mode select that vertex point and that one and then we make a connection here by pressing j j for join and also down here so now we can see that we still have some overlapping going on and this is where some of these other options here come into play so usually what then makes the difference is to change this here from sharp to arc as you can see now we don't have any more overlapping you can also try some of the others here but for example the patch gives us this pinch here which we don't really want so let's have it set to an arc and we can also toggle on and off here our subdivision modifier to actually see what that looks like so if we compare the patch to the arc then you can see that this here actually comes with a bit of a curve where the other is perfectly straight we also have another setting here where we have the loop slide so really it's a matter of trying these things out and see what works best so it appears as if disabling the loop slide is actually producing a better result than having it enabled it seems to bring it further here to these edges makes it more accurate and the other thing is that if we press tab we can go over to our object mode and we actually see everything without the modifiers so essentially our end result is seen in the object mode and then in the edit mode we have our modifier stack and we can work on it so when working on a high poly object we could also add a material to it to make it a bit more obvious how our high poly actually looks like and i'm gonna add a bit of a roughness here to it a bit of a glossy look and that way we can better see do we have any pinching and how does it look overall especially if we go here into our object mode so the most important thing is that while we have our modifiers on it in the edit mode we can further go ahead and change this geometry for example these two edges here i'm gonna give it a bit of a bevel here and now there's one thing that is a bit of a problem which is that we have our currently selected and beveled edges shown as blue this is how you know these edges have some weight information on it however these edges here we currently can't see because they are hidden by the high poly geometry only once we go here into the x-ray mode with alt z we see these edges so in that case it makes sense to have a toggle for this mode here which is basically another wireframe mode that really shows everything so i want to have this here on a toggle and in order to do that we can for example use the interactive tools here which has this on that button here so that allows us to toggle back and forth in between and i like to put that on f3 however on f3 we currently have this search menu here which lets us search for everything in blender pretty much which is kind of useful but i'm gonna put that on f5 instead of f3 and then put that toggle on f3 which kind of mimics 3d max and that's really the reason why i want to do that because that's what i'm used to so let's go over here to our preferences and then here under key map let's look for f3 and under key binding we see that we have it here on the search menu so i'm gonna right click in here and actually no i'm gonna click in here and now i'm gonna put that on f5 so now if we go here we have it on f5 before that we didn't have anything on f5 so now we can go ahead and say right click assign shortcut and f3 so now we have a toggle for it and here on f4 we have this toggle so when we were doing this chamfering here on that corner you see how the edge weight automatically gets put wherever we did that action but it also puts it here into places where we might not want to have it because if we look at it here in the object mode it has a bit of a pinching here and it's not really necessary to have it because it's one continuous flow so i'm gonna select these four edges and then here we can go back basically put the weighting to zero and now you see we have this continuous flow here which looks much better so just when i recorded that boolean part of the tutorial blender 2.91 came out and it now has a button where you can put it to exact and essentially it does an even better job when it comes to handling complex geometry so i just installed that and there is also another thing that i want to show you that i just discovered it's called jmash tools so it's a really cool plugin that helps us with the boolean operations and some other hard surface related tools and we're gonna take a look at it in just a moment you can download it here once again if you go on download zip and then you just activate it through blender and if you look down here there's a link to the documentation that's also worth checking out where everything is perfectly explained and listed so i already have it installed and then it will pop up here as tools so before we look at the jmash plugin let's take a look at the mirror modifier which is another very important one so let's apply it and the reason why we don't see anything is that we have a few additional buttons here that might help in that case so enabling bisect now actually gives us the result that we expect so it's often a matter of trying out here in combination with these buttons to get the expected result so right now being in the object mode means that we see our final result if we go over to the edit mode we see our currently selected object with the modifiers applied to it so we can toggle that on and off but we can also leave it on and then make changes here to our geometry while these modifiers work in the background so something that is important to consider is that the hierarchy of these modifiers plays an important role and right now we have the mirror modifier above the subdivision modifier the hierarchy is basically inverted here in blender whatever we have at the bottom is actually at the top or at least when you come from 3d max so this here is the latest modifier and the reason why it does this thing here is that we have it currently above the subdivision now if we drag that under the subdivision you see that we have a much better result here so essentially the subdivision modifier should always come last and in general i don't like to have this on while i still work on something so it's something that i like to put on at the very end when i'm pretty much done with my high poly but while i work on it i want to see what my edge flow looks like and that makes it much easier to work on sorry guys right now you're looking at a freeze frame what i did was i put the edges back where my pivot point is and then i go over to the mirror modifier i go to the arrow and i apply it so our mirror modifier will always look at our quick origin point which in this case here is in the center of the original box that we were spawning before we made any modifications to it so if we want to change it let's say we want to have it mirror around here then we can make use of our quick origin again let's select these faces and then under our favorites we have the quick origin and now we have this point right here and we are then able to make another mirror i'm gonna put it here to z and this is essentially how you can do that now you may probably not want to have this edge here so then again it's a matter of putting that modifier here under the bevel so if we have it above it we have this edge and if we put it under it it actually has one continuous flow here so once again the hierarchy is important and what is also important is to check the settings that we have here because right now we don't have this here set to bisect and let's take a look at what that means in our edit mode we still have the selection for these bottom faces here and essentially if we drag that here into each other then these faces will remain so if we go over to object mode you can see we have some pretty funky geometry here and now if we come over here and put that to bisect it pretty much welds that for us so this can sometimes be a little bit confusing or it might be something that you forget to put on so just make sure to really check your mirror settings and in most cases you probably want to have bisect on so that it welds so now i can go ahead and i'm gonna apply this mirror modifier once again and what i want to do is select these faces here also on that side and then let's get rid of them so because we are in the material preview mode it doesn't show the back face curl if we go in the viewport shading it becomes clear that we only have faces here to the outside and this is not double-sided geometry so this is important because now that we put on the solidify we actually get our thickness here it's essentially the shell modifier in 3d max and what it enables us to do is to add a thickness here to it so as you can see it does some weird stuff here and that's again because we have to consider the hierarchy if we put the solidify modifier and drag it here to the beginning we get a much better result however it still looks a little bit strange like you can see that this curve here is not really the same as this here so in order to make that the best it can be we go in here and then we tell it to go into the complex mode and now you see we have a really nice result the best it can be and that is basically that modifier here and it works of course also hand in hand here with our subdivision and this is how we can create something like that here and give it thickness so now let's take a look at our j mash plug-in i'm gonna go ahead here delete this and let's once again spawn a cube and then i'm gonna make a copy of it and let's just leave it like that here so now with our jmash plugin we can pick this box here and then we put it to difference and now you see it automatically did that operation for us however i'm gonna undo that and then i'm gonna uncheck apply immediately and hit difference again so now we are able to basically change our boolean here in real time and we didn't have to go through all these steps that we did previously so essentially it already puts it to wire and it just helps us being faster with the boolean and then we can also again go ahead and let's say we want to bevel this here make a nice shape out of it and then we say apply selected booleans and that leaves us here with this geometry and another very cool thing about it is that we can then hit that bevel button which brings up this dialog and it automatically adds these modifiers here to our stack consisting out of bevel and weighted normal which further helps to make this more nice looking here for us so we can adjust the width here let me go over here to the wireframe adjust the width and now if you apply this it will automatically collapse these modifiers so don't get confused about that in most cases we want to be non-destructive so i'm gonna just close it and essentially this is how you can be really fast and this plug-in as you can see helps a lot with it we can also go ahead and click on that button to get rid of these modifiers it still leaves the weighted normal on i'm not sure why but it's not like this causes any issues for us and then if we want we can just go back and apply it again so now i'm gonna snap here into that autographic site view and let's take a look at the primitive mode once we enable that it will tell us that we have several kind of options here and for starters we can choose between different primitive types so i'm gonna go over here and start with a circle and now wherever we have the mouse cursor and press ctrl and left click it will spawn it so in my case i'm gonna have it here and with the mouse wheel we are able to control how many segments we want so i'm gonna have 18 and then i confirm that with the left mouse button and now we're able to look around and this stays there but now we still don't have a shape so i'm going to press e and drag out this shape here goes both ways and let's say we want to have it something like that here then all we have to do is confirm it by pressing ctrl and left so now we did that you can see we have this geometry now here it's solid but we still have this object here so that might be a little confusing at the beginning but all you have to do now is press escape and now we're left here with this primitive so then once again we can just say difference and there we go we now have a boolean operation here on this object so in that case here i actually want to go back to that object and say unbevel because now that we have this new primitive here we want to have to bevel it again in order for it to take effect here to this new operator so let's have something like that and then once again we are able to move that around and do a live boolean operation here so this is pretty amazing stuff and then of course we can take a look and see if it maybe messes it up a bit in that case here our bevel segments might be a bit too wide so it's then a matter of adjusting it a bit but you can see that we can do pretty complex stuff in a very fast time and then when we're happy we can say apply and that leaves us then with this geometry here so what we can also do is use that primitive mode here and make our own geometry if we toggle over to the polyline we can then press once again control and left and then we're able to make our own lines here might not be very pretty what i'm doing here but just to demonstrate it and then whenever we're happy we say control and left and that leaves us here with that shape which we can then once again extrude out and by the way if we go for example here in the top view and press g we're able to move it around so now let's say we are happy with that we can then again control and left and then i'm gonna hit the escape button to confirm and for example in that case let's have it a union so this time i'm actually not gonna do the unbevel just to demonstrate to you that we can also just hit the apply while we have the bevel modifier on top and it will then automatically merge it and add the bevel to it so let's apply and here we go so let's go back to the primitive mode once more let's say we're looking at a face here from the orthographic view and let's take the rectangle here for example now let's draw that anywhere and if we want to center that we can make use of this cursor if we press ctrl and the green button it will center it here on the z axis and if we put it anywhere else and then hit that blue button with control it will center it on the y axis and if we press the white button it will center it on both axis so that it will be in the center of our face so that's a quick way to have it aligned and then we can just proceed and make our boolean operation here so in that case here let's have a difference and then we can still of course change the position right now it's in the center but as you know we're able here to also move our operator around and then we can also go over to our edit mode and for example use a bevel on it and then apply it so that makes for a quick way to work here with this primitive mode and what we can also do is add a mirror modifier by clicking on mirror so that will be a non-destructive modifier that we can add on top and that we can toggle on and off and if we like it we can then apply it but i'm just gonna delete it another way that we can use the mirror is by clicking on these buttons and it will then not add a modifier but do the mirror operation instantly but the good thing is that the other modifiers are still intact so we can toggle them on and off so i'm just gonna go ahead and clear that scene out here so let's get out of this primitive mode and let's have another cube and now let's take a look at this array modifier and we have two of them here so it's already pretty much giving it away this one here allows us to work on a specific axis can only be one or we can also change it here in that direction if we want to and that allows us to do this kind of operation here whatever we duplicate here will automatically become an instance so if we go over here to the edit mode it's becoming a bit more obvious and it also adds a modifier that we can toggle on and off if we want and then if we're happy with it we can either apply it or in that case i'm just going to get rid of it now let's also take a look at the circle array so what is important to consider for the circle array is that it's basing it here on our cursor so this one right here which by default is in the center of x y and z will be the origin from where on we do this circle array operation so then same principle as before applies we have these instances here now and if we like it we can collapse this modifier or if we want to move it around we can press a and that will select everything and we are then able to move it while we still maintain our modifier and can make changes to it so if you're coming from 3d max you might be familiar with reset x form in blender we also have a reset x form and for example if we have this stack of aerate objects and i'm just gonna apply it here the modifier and now we push that out here to the side that means we change the orientation of it and by pressing ctrl and a we bring up this dialogue where we can reset all these different values here we can do it individually for location rotation scale or just for everything here and now if you take a look at what happens to the pivot it jumps back here to x y and z zero so this might also be a good thing to just quickly reposition our pivot back to zero and then for example we could just use that again here and have more of these instances so lots of use cases for that and that is where you can find that so if you ever have a need to flip your normals you can do that here in our edit mode and now let's say we are in face mode and we have everything here selected and we want to invert these normals then we press shift and n and then nothing seems to happen but we have this dialogue appearing here now recalculate normals and if we say inside you can see now the normals are flipped so sometimes there's a use case for it not too often but that's where you can find that i'm going to select everything that we have here in the scene and just gonna clear it out and let's have another cube here in the scene and i also want to subdivide it i'm not sure where this extra x y and z came from this black one here but we don't need it and i'm gonna turn it off here under extras so now let's take a look at a cool new feature that got introduced with blender 2.9 and it's the extrude money fold let's select it here in that sub menu of the extrusion command and now if we are in the face mode we are now able to select an individual face and extrude essentially here to the inside that would have caused some issues with the regular way of extruding and now we have some sort of a smart extrude here so that's a pretty cool new feature and just to demonstrate how it used to be before we have our extrude command here on d and it's always possible to extrude here to the outside but to the inside we would get this so this is essentially the difference with this manifold extrude that we don't have to stress about that anymore we can also make an extrusion here to the inside so let me just undo that and just to make it extra obvious now here we don't have these extra faces to deal with so it's a pretty cool new feature but for now i'm gonna leave our old extrude shortcut that we have set up for d because i'm not sure how much use i'm really gonna make of that but i'll see in the future so now i want to take a look at curves in blender also known as shapes or in 3d max we call it splines i'm going to get out of the extrude mode and i want to select edges here so let's switch over to edge mode and to demonstrate that better i'm gonna make a bevel here so now while still being in edge mode i press shift and alt and this will also select these edges here so now we can take that and press shift d and then snap it back into place and now with this active selection we can press p and separate that out so now we can go over to object mode and select this and we could also isolate it here to make it more obvious and now what we have is basically edges with vertex points i'm just going to go back here to the edit mode to make that more obvious we have our vertex points and here we have our edges so right now this is not a curve yet what we have to do is take this selection and then we go over to object and we say convert to curve so now it's officially in curve and you can see now that this symbol here changed to being a curve so over here in that tab we can then go over to geometry and we can then add depth to it so this is how we do that so as you can see this is far from ideal because we don't have an even flow here wherever we have like a 90 degree angle it kind of messes it up like that and in case you wonder what we can do about that we do have a fix if we put it to 2d so this is how i would actually expect it to also work in 3d and you might wonder well let's just always put it to 2d so we could do that but the problem is that if we also want to have set information then we can have that so i'm just going to take these and let's say we want to have something like that here now we don't have any even flow here and if we put it to 2d it will then flatten it back here so this is a bit of a issue right now and i hope that eventually one day they gonna fix that because right now in the 3d mode we have these inconsistent flows here and 2d is the only one that fixes that either way i'm not actually using that that often either but that's just something to be aware of and also we can change the resolution here so we can bring it down like that all the way to basically just being four sides or we could really crank it up a lot so this is up to us and then fill caps does as the name suggests it caps it here so these are basically splines in blender also known as curves so then whenever we're happy with it we can go back here to object and say convert to mesh so now it's regular polygon geometry here and another thing that we can use the j mash plugin for is to make that same selection here just to demonstrate it that we did before so here's our selection i'm gonna snap it back and now what we can do is hit that mesh to curve button over here and it automatically does this step for us that otherwise we have to go over here to object four and we're ready then to work with it same applies as before of course we have to go in the 2d view here or our 2d mode in order to get rid of these uneven edges but another useful tool that we have here in our jmesh plugin so let's also take a look at text in blender let's press shift a and that pops up our default menu here and here we have text so once we have that in the scene it will always appear like that here and right now we can't change it for that we have to press tab and go over to edit mode now we are basically in an edit mode specifically for text so now we can just type in here whatever we want and then we have our 3d text here and then it's also pretty similar to what it is with the shapes we go over here and that pops up this menu where then we can for example extrude it and what we can also do is add a bit of depth and that will basically give us a bit of a bevel here around it for which we can then also change the resolution if we want and this is how we can make text in blender so i really think that this is as good as it gets here for our fundamentals of blender let's go ahead and have some fun i'm gonna delete that text here to clear out our scene and let's make a vulcan cannon round and then we let it drop to the floor first of all i'm gonna put our units here two centimeters and then i'm gonna have the link to the reference image in the description i want to go over here to our front view and then we gonna add a reference image so now i'm gonna navigate here to my reference like i said i'm gonna provide it in the link and now we don't see it because we still have to check extras on here so now we see what we actually added in here as reference image and now i'm gonna go ahead and create a cylinder and then put it here according to the sizes that we see on the ref image radius of 1.5 centimeters and then we have a depth here of 16.8 so now we see that this is way smaller than our reference image that's why we grab the reference image and now we just scale it down here till it fits our cylinder i'm gonna put the cylinder to the x-ray mode and now we see better how we can scale it to really fit it so just a little bit more adjustment here and now let's just make sure it's centered as good as it can be here i'm actually gonna push it a little bit more here to the right side so now we have a nice center position here and we can also make use of this measure tool to see if we actually got it right and yes we did this is three centimeters so let's make use of a new tool here that we haven't looked at before it's the loop cut by default it will always align to the center and i'm going to make one connection there in the center but if we keep our mouse button pressed we can decide where we want these loops to be so i add two more loops there at the top and then also one here at the bottom so now with these loops we can go in vertex mode and i'm just gonna align it a bit here to our reference image just use the scale tool and make sure it's a uniform scale the same here and then let's also take that here and do the same thing so let's just make sure we fit it here to our reference maybe this one here a little further down and then i'm gonna actually go over here into that perspective and drag our reference image a little bit back out there so that we have this more isolated so now let's take another look here at this and i'm comparing it with our reference image and basically what i want to do is go in the edge mode and then i'm going to bevel it here to make it nice and round so over here i'm also going to select the edge loop and i'm going to make use of the bevel tool once more and have then these two sub loops in there which now i'm selecting as a ring and scale it down this here up a bit so let's take another look here on the upper part and i want to go in vertex mode and select these parts here and just make a bit of a uniform scale and now vertical scale to make that a bit more thin here at the upper part i'm also going to make a loop selection and then i want to bevel that here as well and i'm gonna select this center part and press m and collapse it to the center so right now we're only concerned about making this look good here that 20 millimeter vulcan round later we're gonna duplicate it and drop it to the floor which is going to be a lot of fun so right now i noticed that i don't like how i have this bullet selected but it doesn't rotate around it as you can see here so we can change that in the preferences if we go over to navigation and then we hit that orbit around selection button and now we always have our selected object in the center and i prefer that very much so i'm gonna go ahead here with this tool once more and add some extra loops here according to our reference image where we have this extra ring now i'm gonna go over here to our face mode and i make a selection for the projectile and i press the p button and i separate it out by selection so i'm gonna hide that selection so that we can focus on this here i'm gonna make a loop selection press f to fill it then switch over to our face mode and then let's make an inset on it just a little bit now we can use the extrude command that we have on d and bring that all the way down so now on the upper right at the scene collection i'm gonna hide this activate this and now we can also click on this little icon there on the left side so that we can actually work on it so we don't always have to go out of the edit mode i'm gonna do the same thing here i'm gonna make an inset after we filled it and now i'm just gonna bring this all the way down here and as you can see we have a bit of a bevel there so what i'm doing is just another inset and then followed by yet another inset and that way we can also just have a bit of a bevel so we don't always have to use the bevel command we can also basically use the inset it doesn't always have to be one action i'm gonna have a sub loop here and i'm gonna use the bevel on it and now i'm selecting these two edge loops and i want to give it another bevel and then i'm gonna make a ring selection here on the inner parts and make a uniform scale on it so that it looks like our reference gonna do the same here on that edge loop and i'm gonna add another bevel loop here in the center just using the mouse wheel and then selecting it and scaling it in and here at the top we also have this detail on the reference i'm gonna use the loop cut tool once again to bring that edge exactly where we want to have it followed by another bevel and then let's select that edge loop and once again let's scale it down so here we have it now we can also unhide the rest of it and one thing we still have to do is here at the bottom let's go over here select this and then bring it in with the inset and i'm gonna follow up with another inset and press control to give some depth to it let's do another inset and then once again control to bring it down and yet another inset which i'm gonna collapse and then with the vertex selection i'm just gonna bring that down a bit so now it looks like we should probably bring that up again so that this actually could stand right now this doesn't seem to be accurate so now we have taken care of that and essentially that is the model that we want to have i'm gonna apply a material to it let's go over here to that material preview mode and we can use the color picker on our reference image and then i'm gonna bring up the metallic and what we can also do is put the shade smooth and then what i also want to do is bring the roughness down so that this becomes more glossy and now let's do the same thing here for the upper part where we have three different material types if you look at the reference image i'm going to select the face at the bottom and press ctrl and plus to grow the selection and then i'm gonna make a new material here for it and just make it dark and let's assign it so now i'm gonna make an edge selection here for a ring and also press ctrl and plus to grow it make a new material and then let's use that color picker again to pick up on the actual color that we see on the reference and also assign it and now for the upper part obviously we have a blue so what i want to do here is take it in the face selection mode and now we just have to grow it once more so that we also have these faces there where it goes to the inside let's have a new material and then let's once again pick up some of these blue colors that we have there we can always modify that later but then we assign that and now we have quickly done our color setup here according to our references i'm gonna select these two objects press ctrl and j to join them and now what we can do is bring up the j mesh tool and add a bevel to it i'm not going to use the bevel weights let's just use this here and now let's see what that did the j mesh tool let's further lower our amount here on the bevel 0.05 should do the trick and that way we have basically a perfect high poly but this part there doesn't pick it up so let's carefully bring down the angle and now you see okay 15 degree angle did the trick and everything else still looks good so we don't necessarily always have to use the bevel weights we can also just use the angle method let's go back to our materials for that ring part i want to bring up the metallicness and also lower the roughness to make it nice and glossy and on the blue i'm not gonna have metallic it looks like it's just painted on but let's make it a bit more glossy so i think that pretty much does it i'm not gonna add text to it i know we have that on the reference but instead let's just take a look that this here looks good and yeah i was just pressing l to select the element and bring it up and now we can press ctrl z to undo that because everything looks good i'm just going to delete the reference image because essentially that bullet is done but i just want to make that ring a little bit bigger so i'm going to go over here to vertex mode while we are in the x-ray mode to make that a bit bigger there this ring so now what i want to do is use the array tool here we can do that also with the jmash plugins and now let's have 10 instances here let's close that and let's navigate to our modifier tab where now we have these three modifiers added here and let's add another array modifier i'm gonna put x to zero and then y to one or actually a little bit more than that so that we have some space in between there and now let's increase the count to seven something like that i mean you can have as many as you want but it's gonna be also heavy on the performance so let's drag that up here so that we can let it fall and i'm not sure what these objects are here they say they're empty so i'm just gonna delete them as the next thing let's collapse these array modifiers so once we collapse them everything here becomes essentially one element i'm gonna press p and say separate by loose parts so now we can individually select each one of these elements what i want to do now is press a so that we select everything and now we need to give each one of them its own pivot point because right now everything links only to one pivot point so let's go to object set origin to geometry so now you can see everyone actually has the pivot point in the center and now we gotta add some physic magic to it so we go over to the physic properties we add a rigid body i'm gonna put the mass 2000 so that it drops really heavy because that's not always accurate i'm gonna leave it as active where it says type and the collision type i put it to convex hull that works pretty well now with this selection i'm pressing a to select all the others once again and then we want to go over to where it says rigid body and we say copy from active so what that does once we hit it it applies our physic properties to each one of these objects so now they all have it next i'm gonna have a circle here added to our scene i'm gonna increase the count for it to 128 so that it's nice and round i'm gonna go over to the edit mode make a loop selection and drag it down here with extrude also gonna select the upper edge loop and i'm gonna bevel it so that we have this also nice and shaded and smoothed gonna scale it up a bit and then select all the upper ones here and also center it a bit more so that once we let it drop it's actually falling into the center of this object here speaking of which let's go to rigidbody and make this one here a passive type the ones that we let fall are active i'm gonna make a selection here on this and make a copy with shift d and then join it together with ctrl and j and put it to passive so with this selection active we can then go over to our layout mode and you can see now that we have to put our shading back on so let's do that and now we can snap into the orthographic view and this extra one here we're just gonna position it already on the floor so that this is a collision type for the other ones that we let drop so in our time frame let's say 30 frames because we don't need to really load 250. let's play that animation and then once it's done loading you can see here how that bullet is a passive type now once it's done loading we can then pause the animation and let's put it here maybe to frame 29 where we have this nice still image basically so next let's press a to select everything and then we have to go to object and apply visual transform because if you want to reload your scene after you saved it that way it will stay in place so now let's add a point light to our scene we don't see anything yet but we have to go here into the proper render mode there on the upper right now you see that light actually affecting our scene i want to go on the light properties expand the menu and add contact shadows which further makes it look nice here i'm gonna also add another light which is the sunlight this time it doesn't really matter if we drag it up or not i think but this one too i want to enable the contact shadows aort mode served its purpose now let's go to the shading mode here let's also enable our material view that shows us the lights and now it's time to make this look good let's switch this to world let's press shift a to get the add menu and we're gonna add an environment texture let's connect this here to the color slot and then we open the default blender hdri images that already ship with blender found here i'm gonna add the courtyard scene and now things start to look interesting as you can see we got a proper scene reflection from our texture map now let's just find an interesting angle on here and then what we can do is on the right side we go into our scene properties this one here and let's enable ambient occlusion i'm gonna bring that down a bit doesn't need to be so strong but just enough to have some extra depth added to it and then what we can also add is some bloom the default is too strong we actually have to crank it up to make it less so it's a matter of just looking at it and trying out the different settings pretty much still looks good screen space reflections is a very important one now we have a proper reflection from within our 3d models i want to turn off the half rest trace so we have it looking better and then we won't be needing everything here but here under shadows we can for example if we turn off soft shadows it becomes a bit harder but that's really up to us what we like and then what else do we got here under color management we can have some different contrast modes so if we put that here to high contrast you will see that everything gets a bit stronger here on our image so once again that's a matter of trying it out and then this actual plate that we have here let's add a material to it and now with a screen space reflection if we turn that here dark and then we add it to being metallic we got some nice mirror reflection here on the floor so first let's make it metallic and that already adds a whole lot of interesting depth here to it and then with the roughness we got a proper reflection going here which is pretty nice so i'm gonna go back to the scene properties for our lights and then what we can also do is go back to screen space reflection and if we adjust the edge fading we can sort of tune how much visibility we want to have on it so maybe i put that to let's have it at 0.1 somewhere around there so now there's just one more thing to do which is zooming out here just to make it clear this is the currently selected object and i just want to shade smooth it so that we have some nice edges there and then we can also scale it down so that it fits this better here and it's not so in your face and too big so now i'm just gonna bring that up because we just scaled it and essentially now we have this scene here we just need to add a camera to it shift a and then you can see the camera is now facing a completely different direction so in order to look through the camera we position it here something like that and press ctrl alt numpad 0 now let's go to the camera settings because we're actually looking through it now we can still use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out and if we go here to the camera settings we can also change a bit the parameters here and we can even put it to different focal length i mean not even but of course but we can also put it to orthographic view if we want so now we would just have to scale back in here and for example this here might make a nice picture so i'm just going to zoom out a bit with the mouse wheel once again we're still in the camera and then what we can do is also add depth of field to add some extra interest here to it bring that focus distance down and maybe so that it highlights the one that's standing up here that's really the one that we want and there might be better angles that you can experiment around with uh might not be the best render ever here but just as a quick demonstration how to do that then we can put our render passes up to have a better quality on the sampling and we hit that render button and essentially just wait for it to be done and that is how to make renders in blender obviously there is much more to it but to give you a quick introduction of that here as well so here's our image and one thing that i forgot to mention is if we want to close that here and let's say we want to change our resolution we do that here under the output properties you can see if we change this here it reflects our dimensions there so i'm just gonna leave it in 1920 and 1080 we can also change the image output png or jpeg and then when we're happy we go on render once again and that concludes the introduction to blender tutorial i hope you liked it please subscribe to the youtube channel if you did and come hang out with us in the chamfer zone discord where amateurs come together with industry professionals is a very great community we got there and stay tuned for more tutorials to come very soon

Channel: ChamferZone

Views: 172,158

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Id: g2U0MiZSV9A

Length: 132min 4sec (7924 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021