Make 3d Logos from 2d images | Blender 2.8

hello and welcome to GABA Media I'm grant Abbott and today we're making 3d logos based off a drawing now this is a continuation of the hard surface modeling and get good at blender series and I'll be going through some different techniques about how you can make this model there'll be a really simple easy way which doesn't have great topology but it does the job and then I'll go into more detailed methods so if you ever want to adapt the shape slightly or maybe sharpen edges and things like that then you can kind of take the logo to the next level this is a beginner based tutorial but you must have some experience of blender because I won't be going through the whole interface and it's a great idea to have done some of my beginner courses all of which you can find in the playlist section of this channel I'll also post some in the description and also in the description that's a great course from CG boost that's a paid for course but it's very in-depth and detailed and I can thoroughly recommend it okay so let's begin the first thing when they do is to get our reference image in you'll find the link to the reference image that I'm using in the description but you can use pretty much any image but obviously the more complicated the more detail you have to make and the more chance you have of making mistakes along the way so here's my wolf logo and I can click and drag that into my scene and that creates an empty if we look up here in our outliner you can see that it's an empty and I can hide it and make it visible up there if I need to now it's obviously the wrong way round at the moment and we can just press alt G which removes any grab or movement and alt are to remove any rotation and then if we go to top view with seven on our numpad we get a nice overhead view now this is a very rough drawing that I've done and we're going to smarten it up a bit and we're going to follow the outline with our shapes so you can of course follow along with me or you can try and make this model yourself if you want to do that pause the video now and you can restart if you want to see how I've done it now for this we can actually use the default cube so I'll click on the default cube I'll go into edit mode with tab on my keyboard or you can go to edit mode up here with everything selected if you haven't got everything selected you can press a to select all press alt M so alt M will merge and we can merge it at the center that will give us one tiny point at the centre now in order for this to work you must be on vertex mode which is one on your keyboard or you can press this button up here that way we have this one vertex selected if you're on one of the other modes you won't be able to select it or move it so let's move this into a position so G to grab and move it to the start of our shape here now I can extrude this by pressing eetu extrude and pulling it out or you can actually press ctrl right click assuming that you've got the default setup for blender I'm using blender 2.8 too and you can see I'm just following the curve of my logo and I'm spacing my points out fairly evenly that will help us later on so just follow around your curve and get the rough shape don't have too many points otherwise that will just make your life harder later on so just fairly even and about this far apart we can add more points later on so ctrl right click or e to extrude and then grab it out now we've been all the way around one side when you're coming back the other way try and even them up so keep spacing them in the same distance apart and have roughly equal amounts on either side it doesn't matter too much at this stage because again we'll tidy up as we go along the last one you'll need to have them both selected with shift left click and then F to fill usually it's join J to join but F to fill if there's no face there so with all of them selected we can press F to fill and we have created our shape so if I hide our empty you can see we've got the basic shape of our logo now if you want it really simplistic you can just then select your face in face mode e to extrude and pull it upwards and you've got a very basic logo and that should suffice if you're a complete beginner to this and want to keep this nice and easy now bear in mind if you're using this method you'll probably want to make a few more cuts and adjustments so if I undo this and go back into edit mode and go back into vertex mode I can if there's not enough curves back to top view with seven on my numpad you probably want to tidy up a bit in some places you may want to add a bit more detail if you ever want to do that you can select a group of vertices just by shift box selecting and right click subdivide and that will add vertices in the middle and then you can just sort of adjust them and move them about to fit I'm going to undo that because that's not the way I'm going to do it I think there's a better way but it does get a bit more complicated so with your face selected you can press I to inset and that will create a whole new load of vertices on the inside so you move your mouse up and down slightly if you hold shift it will move in smaller increments and we only want a tiny bit of an inset can you see over in the corner here when I push it too far it overlaps itself so watch out for that so try and get a reasonable inset where there's not too much overlapping so if I go to about here I can then come in and grab this vertex that's slightly out of place and pull it back into position so somewhere around there but we can see we're going to have issues around these tight corners that's a topology issue and one which we can smarten up so now that we've got this inset that will help us in our topology flow because we've got this edge flow going around the outside and that's really important when it comes to adding sharp edges or subdivision surface modifiers to things that you've got to flow around your edges that will help you now don't follow along with this bit but I just want to show a point if I were to extrude these faces out and try and make it thick at the moment and add some sort of subdivision surface modifier to make it nice and smooth it took a while because it was struggling and it was unable to complete the task and you can see this big mess here so I'll undo that the problem is this huge end gone in the middle and that's a face with lots and lots of sides or edges we therefore need to divide this up now what we're aiming for and you may have heard before is we're aiming for a quad based mesh so a mesh built up of rectangles so what we'll need to do is go around our model and try and make that happen so back into top view and let's delete this face and come in and see if we can't tied it up a bit now remember we want quads so I can add a loop cut here with ctrl R and then I can easily make a quad at the bottom here now there's a nice quick way to make quad so you select one edge right at the end and you press F to fill and then if I keep pressing F to fill you can see it filling up with quads now obviously we've got an issue when it comes to this point I can add a quad here which works but it's not great topology I'm not going to get too far with the topology I'm not going to make it super clean because it can take quite a long time to explain these things and you can actually get away if you haven't got a complete understanding of topology by adding a triangle in here if necessary and the reason you're able to do that is because we have this edge flow around the outside the subdivision surface modifier will still work with slightly bad topology in the middle here now I'm going to improve the topology myself just so you can see some improvements and generally what you're looking for in topology and the best way to do that here is probably to add an edge loop here and here and then go to vertex mode and extrude an edge out there so now when I go to the edge mode F and F we've got a smoother topology going along here and I can start filling it in here as well I'm going to make one here so F and then we'll need to do a quad here so ctrl R do a loop cut pull it up there grab this so there's a bit of a curve and then just fill this face in here again don't worry if you're not following this bit as long as you have this middle section filled in even if you got a few triangles you'll be okay so at this point I can't just press F all the way through I'm going to have to extrude this point here I can probably get rid of this one here until we get to this point if you ever want to get rid of an edge like this delete and then dissolve edges now let's get to edge mode or fill these in with F and this one here and now at the end here they're quite thin gaps so we can have quads in here by selecting two and then filling them in I might have to delete one of these edge loops so let's delete this one dissolve edges and then fill it up this way but we've got a problem here we've got one two three four five six sides so like I say this can get a little bit complicated when it comes to this apology if you're struggling to understand it select all the edges and press F and have a big end gone that should be okay with this minimal distance between them but the easiest way to sort this one out is to grab this edge here extrude it out and you can probably see now that we've got one two three there now again this isn't the most amazing topology because we've got what's called a pole here which is a vertex that has less or more than four edges going into it and ideally you shouldn't really go above five but in this case I'm just going to keep it nice and simple it will work but it may cause very minor pinching that you probably won't notice and we can easily cover up so we continue around our shape filling in and then when we get to tricky points we just have a bit of decision-making to do this is a very sharp angle here and sometimes it's best to avoid those if you're doing good topology so we can actually use the knife tool this time so I cut down from here to here so press K for the knife tool click on an edge left click on an edge to create a vertex and when you've finished press ENTER and then I'll bring this in words slightly and I'll make a cut here as well so it's a bit smoother and cleaner I can get rid of face that I don't need anymore okay so if we go from the bottom end again and just see where we're at and then I can fill in here and fill in here again there's a pole that's a bit naughty there but we can probably get away with it her points like this we might want another poll so we can again extrude out from here and fill in some faces but we probably wanted narrow again here so I'll fill in that face by selecting these two edges and pressing F and then going up that way probably want another cup there so I'll pause it there for now and let's see how we're going to tidy up for this area here so with one on my keyboard I can eat extrude this point out and just have a look where we're going F to fill this one in so select two vertices and press F and then let's just fill these in FFF to fill and we've got one slight problem here we've got F to fill and F to fill and we've got a triangle that dreaded triangle now again it doesn't matter too much because it's on a flat surface so if you want to put a triangle that's fine but have a think how you might get out of this sort of triangle situation well we can actually use this to our advantage slightly if we look out at our shape we've got quite nice rounded section here that could be more rounded so if I press ctrl R in fact I'll delete this face first select this face delete faces and then ctrl R and then I can grab this out slightly now I can select this face and press F and F again and we have our quad base mesh still again I want to stress that this isn't amazing topology but it will work like this and you have got a quad based mesh but if you are trying to make nice clean topology trying to minimize this pole here or the amount of poles is the best solution at that point it does become a bit more detailed but you'll see at the end it doesn't make a huge amount of difference in this case so let's continue around our mesh I'll just add another loop cut here so we can continue and press F to come down to the base here I'll move this one down it does help to have them in line and not these sharp edges like this I'll press F to fill this one in and F to fill that one in and that worked out fairly nicely I'll undo that and I'll just create another one here that's okay so f again here now it might be the case that I need a loop cut in here and I can just go around filling these areas in I'll do another one here because I think that will be a bit tidier and there's one last one at the end there which is a triangle there's a couple of ways you can clean that up but I'm going to just fill it in in this case just to show you that a triangle is okay it's not ideal but it's okay so we have our shape and now it's pretty much full of quads and pretty much okay in terms of topology so now let's try and add that subdivision surface modifier we can see that it works okay it's up the resolution I think I had mine on three and now we can select our whole mesh and extrude it out and we got the beginnings of our logo I'll just right-click and shape smooth if you want sharp edges now we can select that edge loop around there we can press n on our keyboard and go up to item and there's a mean crease that works with our subdivision surface modifier and we'll create a crease you can also crease these areas up as well so grab that edge there just make a note of how far you're creasing it so point three in this case and you can go around doing similar to that all the edges if you like to give it that crease and sharpness because we have a subdivision surface modifier on it should smooth out most of our curves but you might find some places such as in here where it's a little bit out so wireframe mode select them all and just move them into position if you ever need to sharpen any of these areas up and there's more than one edge flow going around so we can't just grab this edge and sharpen it we can actually just move them closer together so if I grab that edge going down there I'll go back to solid mode so you can see it a bit easier and then GG to grab an edge slide sliding them together will create a sharper edge as you can see there and that's why they're called supporting loops because they support each other to create those sharp edges so if I bring back my empty there is another bit here this sort of flow to do but that's fairly straightforward and works in much of a similar way to the other one so have a go at that as well and see what you come up with so the last bit now then is a bit of shading so let's go across to the shading tab remove my empty and let's press the full-stop key to come in nice and close the way I made my metallic material is fairly complicated but you can make a nice easy one with a low roughness and metallic all the way to one and you got a lovely metal material you can change the color to a Goldy color or maybe a bluey silver one and it looks lovely now the very last thing that you might find useful is to be able to have it on a transparent background with a bit of a shadow that's nice and straightforward as well if we press shift a to add a plane and scale it up a bit and just make sure it's underneath so grab in the z-axis and make sure it's underneath I could go to side for you to line it up perfectly and there we go now notice I haven't sharpened the bottom edge up so you might want to do that as well from your object so anything that's purple has one of those mean creases on it but my bottom edge hasn't so it looks a little bit blobby at the moment but yours is gonna look lovely so in order to create that shadow but a transparent background you do need to be in cycles so the render engine across here changes the cycles and let's go to the render tab now of course how quickly this renders depends on your graphics card or processor I'm changing mine to the graphics card and notice it doesn't look so nice because we haven't got an HDR eye in the background so you need to go to world tab and put your own HDR I here shift day to add texture environment texture and hook that up it should go all purple because you haven't got an environment texture in there yet so we need to open one up you can find some nice ones on HDR I Haven I'm just going to choose any random one here's my folder of HDR eyes so I'll choose that one open it up and suddenly we got these nice reflections the only problem is it appears in the background we can go across the render tab and down to film and transparent to get rid of it out of the background but we've still got our plane in the middle what's great about this is that we have some nice shadows but what if I want to put this into some other background well you can click on your plane click on the object properties and down to visibility under visibility you have shadow catcher and when I take that it actually makes the plane transparent but keeps the shadows but that's only available in cycles the last thing you might want to do is to actually make sure the plane isn't visible in this reflection and you can just uncheck the glossy for that and now it's only reflecting the HDR I in the background okay so hopefully that wasn't too complicated for you again do look at my playlists for lots of free courses and remember there's my website which has the courses in sequential order so one after another so increasing difficulty so I hope you enjoyed this let me know how you get on in the comments thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 397,812

Keywords: understand, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, graphics, game, guide, easy, how to, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender 3d, 3d modeling, simple, create, model, beginner, starting out, grant abbitt, blender beginner, blender (software), blender low poly, subdivision surface modifier, sunsurf modifier, loop tools, bevel, modelling techniques, blender 2.8 modeling tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender 2.8 modeling, edge flow, topology, hard surface modeling, mean crease, hard surface

Id: hwTfNmFpCs0

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020