Low Poly Animals | Quick and Easy | Blender 2.8 | Basic Tutorial

hello and welcome to Cabot Media I'm grant Abbott and today we're going to be making low poly animals this is a basic tutorial but it's not a complete beginners tutorial see we'll need some understanding of the basic interface I would say in general it's about a 2 out of 10 in terms of difficulty but to make a good-looking animal it's about 5 out of 10 if you'd like the blender file or to download the model you can become my patreon you can find a link to that in the description my screencast keys are in the bottom left corner here so when I press anything you should see it appear there I'm using blender 2.8 and hopefully when you start your blender should look something like this the first thing to do is get some reference images that we can copy so I typed into google giraffe and side so I'm going to do a giraffe today and I found this nice one from dimensions guide and I could download it as a JPEG just here now certain files won't work in blender I don't think an SVG or a DWG works but usually things like jpg PNG gifts they're okay if you have any problems it might be the file format that you downloaded so try and find a different file so into blender and we need to bring those background images in I'm going to start off by deleting the default queue so I left click select and press Delete and in order to add objects we can go up to add just up here or you can see the shortcut there shift a so I'm going to press shift a and in the menu there is an image option and I'm going to bring them in as a background image so I'll click on background find my giraffe file and load background image now it comes in perpendicular to your camera which is a little awkward in this case so if I select it with left click and it's already selected if I press alt R that will clear any rotations so alt R and alt G will clear any movement so if I press n now to get my view up here you can see it's location is set to 0 its rotation is set to 0 and this scale is set to 1 and that should make it a bit easier for us it's not very good practice to work from the top view like this so I'm going to rotate my reference image in the x-axis which is this red one down here which you can also see corner here by 90 degrees so our then X 90 so type our X at 90 and it will rotate 90 degrees and press Enter you can scale it up if you like but it doesn't make too much difference what will make it slightly easier if I put it roughly in the center of my grid so I'm using this side reference here so if I press G to grab it in the x-axis I press X G then X and just slide it to the right there or whichever direction you need to slide it and place it in the middle there just check that's okay now what what's do is add a plane so I'm going to trace around my giraffe with a plane so shift a or go up to the top here shift a mesh plane now that also is the wrong way around so I'm going to press our X 90 so it rotate in the x-axis 90 degrees now the problem is we can't see our giraffe in the background because we can't see through our shape we can press and said on our keyboard which will take us to this radial menu here and we can click on wireframe you can also get there at the top here so we've got solid mode there and wireframe there now in order to start moving these points around and changing the shape I need to go into edit mode at the moment we're in object mode so I can press tab or I can go up here to edit mode so tab will take us to object mode and edit mode now if I start selecting these points and moving them around to move them into position like this so I'll start with this area here you can see that they're a bit distorted in 3d space so that's not the best way to do it so we'll undo those steps with control Zed and go back to this stage here where it's nice and flat what I want to do is go to front view with one on my numpad if you haven't got a numpad then do look in the links in the description or of the card in the corner to show you how you can change your keyboard settings to be able to quickly go to side view so one on the numpad will take me to front view and now I can start moving around these points by left-clicking G to grab and move them into position left click G to grab and maybe it's a position left click to select G to grab move it into position now at the moment I'm not going to do the legs I'm going to do the body and the neck and the head so is one big shape I'll explain why in a bit and I'm going to try and make as few faces as possible so I'll do another one here one here and so on try not to do loads and loads of faces because it just gets really complicated and you end up with lots of these little points to change so the less the better so what I'm going to do select at this point and this point at the bottom with shift left click so they're both selected now and press e to extrude and that pulls out a new face then I can left-click to select where that's going to be positioned and then start moving these points around by left clicking and pressing G to grab so I'll select these two points again do the same process that one their shift select that one there they turn orange which doesn't help that the giraffe is orange and then e to extrude and pull those out and then left click G to grab and move them into position so I'm going to continue that process up to the end don't want to much about this but at the moment or if there's any big lumpy pits you can add topology later or phases later if I need to move around in front view I shift middle-click and i can strafe around but as soon as i press the middle mouse button i'll go out of front view and i need to press 1 on my numpad to get back so I've got the rough shape there which you can see but it's very flat and perhaps we need to add a tiny bit of topology around here to help it out so if you miss a point you can press ctrl R to create a loop down the middle if I just quickly go to solid mode up here and press ctrl R you'll see it a bit easier and it depends where I have my mouse positioned as to where it's cutting a line so ctrl R is what's called a loop cut and it cuts a line so I want one in this area here so I can create these funny lump bits sticking out there so I left click I can move it where I like along that face but just in the middle there is fine so left click once again and now I've got some points that I can pull around again I'm just going to even these out a bit because it makes a little bit simpler when they're even and that's a reasonably good starting point but I made a slight mistake there because I started moving them around when I wasn't in front for you so if I go to the side view now with three on my numpad you can see that they're slightly out of kilter that doesn't matter because I imagine lots of people are gonna make that mistake and I'm going to explain how to get rid of that a bit later on so I've got a very flat looking giraffe and I want to make it into a solid shape if I go to face mode up the top here or you can press 3 on your numpad so this vertex edge and face and select all the faces with a and press e to extrude I can pull them out and I've got a solid shape now what I'm also going to do is mirror this across the x-axis so in the y-axis so that we only have to build half the shape in order to do that I'm going to need to delete this half of my faces so I don't have faces in the middle so with face mode still selected I can just shift-click all these faces and press delete and then faces now I've got half model that I can mirror so I go to the modifiers tab down here with this little spanner click on add modifier and then mirror now it's not mirrored how I'd expect it's going across the y-axis even though it says it should be the x-axis here and that's because right at the start we rotated our plane so if I get to the location settings on my panel over here by pressing tab on my keyboard to go into object mode you can see the locations at 0 but the rotation is at 90 degrees in the x-axis we need to clear that but we can't actually just type in 0 here because it puts it back so I'll undo that with control said we need to set this rotation so it's all 0 we do that by pressing ctrl a rotation and that will apply the rotation now it's all 0 and if I now take on the y-axis and uncheck the x-axis you'll see that it mirrors across nicely it's mirroring around this edit point here so if I go into edit mode again select all my faces and then G to grab and the y-axis you can see it's mirrored around that centered point now what you have to be a bit careful of is if I pull this over to the other side it still mirrors it but we're all reversed so watch out for that and watch out for this as well when they overlap each other like this that's not good either so the best way is just to pull them apart slightly so I've selected all with a pull them apart in the y-axis so G then y2 maybe somewhere around there and then we can turn clipping on which will make sure that any touching points in the center will stick together so we can select this edge loop going all the way around the middle by clicking on the edge menu here or two on your keyboard and then alt left click and you'll select that big edge loop around the middle there G to grab in the y-axis and they'll stick together now when I press G to grab in the y-axis I can't move them because they're stuck I can move them in the other axes though like this okay so we're getting there we need to do some legs next an important point is not to press apply on your mirror modifier as soon as you do that it will apply the shape and it won't copy what you do on one side to the other side you just leave it there running so let's make some legs now many people think that I can press three on my keyboard go to face mode and maybe pull these two out e to extrude and make a leg but they'd be stuck together in the middle and they're a bit fat as well so let's undo that what I need to do is create a loop cut down the middle so that there's a space between the two so ctrl R for the loop cut if you remember that and then point your mouse when you get this loop down the middle there and left-click and then probably around here I reckon and left-click again now I can press 3 and then select this face ready to pull out the leg so let's go to front view again and press e to extrude to pull that down so e to extrude will pull out your mesh and create new topology I'm scaling that in grabbing it and following the contours of the leg so e to extrude again I can also just rotate this grab it rotate with our grab with G and scale with s e to extrude scale rotate and grab with G R and s and remember I'm doing this all in front view so we've got the basics of our giraffe coming out now I'll select this front face here to extrude this leg down back into front view e to extrude to pull that face out and move it into position with G now if you want the bottle faces to all line up if I select both of them go to my front view again and press scale Z 0 it will scale them all and make them flat in the z-axis so we've got the very basics of a giraffe now we need to do a bit of editing to change its shape and to make it look a bit more giraffe like so from here you can probably figure out how to adjust your shape into a giraffe based on everything we've done already in the next episode I'll be completing the model and going through a few render settings but I'd encourage you to have a go and see if you can try and create the rest of it for yourself otherwise I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 575,603

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, giraffe, lion, elephant, dog, cat, 2.8, print, 3dprint

Id: 6mT4XFJYq-4

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019