MODELLING For Absolute Beginners | Blender Human Tutorial

if you've ever wanted to learn how to do things like 3d modeling in a 3d software like blender for example this tutorial is aimed at absolute beginners by which i mean i'm going to be approaching it from the perspective of somebody that's never even opened up blender i'm going to be showing you how to move around how do basic navigational things work and the goal of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with modeling your first ever object in this case we're going to be modeling this really really basic little character here it's not fancy or posh like some of the other tutorials i've done and modeling techniques on my channel this one is really going to be kept absolutely basic very low poly by which i mean the amount of points and faces and things you're going to be selecting are going to be to an absolute minimal to make it as simple as possible i'm also going to be showing you guys how to use modifiers in blender which are these things over here so one i'm going to be showing you how to use is a mirror modifier and this mirror modifier allows you to be modeling on one side and it mirrors over to the other side and this is something that really saves you a lot of time and it makes for a more consistent even topology and then i'm going to show you how to add a subdivision surface modifier which is this thing here which just smooths out your model we're pretty much going to be starting with a default primitive object in this case it's going to be the default cube and once we've modeled it we're going to end up with this here so once again absolute beginners i hope you enjoyed this i hope you learned something and this gets you a good start with blender so um let's get started with this uh absolute beginner tutorial in blender so just in case you have not already downloaded blender i'm just going to quickly touch on it if you go to blender.org and then you go up to the top and you click on the download section you can download a version of blenders in this case it says download blender 2.92 for me i downloaded it and it made a zip folder which was in my downloads and then i just simply extracted that zip folder and then i took that file and i just put it into a builds folder so i'll quickly show you here if i go to builds i just i just put that extracted zip folder in the folder here and it can be anywhere on your computer so you're just going to open that up wherever it's extracted and just run blender you can also right click and you can just um pin it to your taskbar or your start which is also what i did so in this case i'm just going to run the this version of blender which is blender 2.93 even if you use blender 2.92 that should all be fine so go ahead and just run it once you've installed it and you do get options for mac windows and linux so i'm going to run mine which is for windows and when you open up blender this is what you're going to see right so it's not too complicated of a software to use i know it can look a little bit intimidating but it's actually very well organized and it's better than a lot of other softwares i've used in the past so what you're going to do is if you want to move around in blender one of the main ways to do that is you if you have a mouse you're just going to click and hold in the scroll button the the up and down scroll button and if you hold it in you can move your mouse and you can see you're actually able to turn around in your scene right so just practice that for a bit just press your middle mouse button and you can turn around and rotate around an object if you want to move side to side you simply hold in shift click the middle mouse button and you can move side to side that's with shift and you can also hold in control if you want so just hold in control or command on a mac your middle mouse button afterwards and then you can zoom in or out so super simple commands to use to make it a little bit easier i'm just going to hit n on my keyboard you guys don't have to do this and i've got an add-on in blender that i'm using that just allows you guys to see what i'm pressing so i'm going to enable that this is not something that you guys will see in your version of blender because i've specifically downloaded it and installed this as an add-on but you can now see down here the keys i am pressing are now visible to you guys if i press a or s or d or whatever so once again just quickly recapping we hold in the middle mouse button to turn around we hold and shift and then the middle mouse button to pan side to side and we hold in control or command and our middle mouse button to zoom in or out so once we have that kind of out of the way how to actually move around in the interface i'll quickly show you what we have in a default scene so in a default scene if i'm moving around here with the middle mouse button you can see we have a camera so if you just left click you can select the camera or if you left click on the cube here you can select that or if you left click on this object here that's your lamp or your light and that's what's gonna eventually we're not gonna be talking about that today but that's what we'll like your scene if you were to do a render so for now the only thing we're going to be interested is this default primitive here which is just a default cube now if you for example wanted to start with any other kind of primitive to model it you could just go shift a so if you hit shift a in blender that's what brings up your add menu so usually when you're going to do modeling the thing we're always going to be starting with are our meshes these are the actual pieces of geometry and that the 3d software that you can manipulate and extrude and move around so in this case you can see there's the default cube here's just a simple plane here's the circle here's your uv sphere it's all just like play school level stuff like little shapes you would have learned about in kindergarten so let's just not worry about that because we already have the default cube and if we want to work in blender we have usually a front view so if you have a number pad on your keyboard you can hit one and that'll take you into the front orthographic view if you hit free that'll take you into the right orthographic view if you hit 7 it'll take you to the top orthographic view now if you have a laptop and you don't have a number pad you can go to edit you can go over to preferences and you can go over here to inputs and you can go emulate number pad so if you don't have a number pad and you just have to basic one two three four five six and so on on the top of your keyboard you can press emulate number pad and then you can close this and that'll do the same thing if you want to do it manually you can just go to view and then you can go to viewport and you can choose top bottom front and left so up here in view that's how you do that but i would definitely recommend getting accustomed to the viewport shortcut so for example one is front of graphic view three is the right of graphic view so what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to hit one on a number pad and you're going to see up here it says front or for graphic you can see right up here it says front or graphic and once again you can just go here to viewport and go into the front if number pad didn't work for you and we're going to now select the default key and the way you know it's selected you can see it has this orange outline so if i quickly deselect it you can see there's no orange outline but if i click on it i can see it's an orange outline so i know it's what we call active and i can also look up here in my scene collections and i can see under this collection here's my cube and the cube is highlighted it's got this blue bar around it so i know it is an active element in my scene so it's not my light it's not my camera but it's the cube itself that is selected now we're currently in what we call object mode in blender so that's this mode up here right in object mode we can see objects we can also move them around and rotate them but what we want to do today is we actually want to edit the geometry itself the mesh and to do that with this cube active we need to actually go up to object mode and go into our edit mode there are other things you can do in object mode for example if you hit the g key you can move if you hit the r key you can rotate if you hit the r key twice you can rotate on all axis axis like this but if you also um hit s you can scale so that's super useful but we're not going to be focusing on that today we're going to actually be getting into the edit mode so let's go over to our edit mode with the cube active and what we can see here is all of these points here which we call vertices right if it's a single vertices we or we call it a vertex okay so what we're going to do now is you can click on any one of these verts here and you can see they become active you can also see up here we are currently in vertex select mode which means if we have that enabled we can select the vertex if we then want to select one of these edges we can click on the edge select mode and then we can click on edges so if i click on this edge or this edge you can see we are able to select them then we have this thing here called face select mode which enables us to as the name implies we can select individual faces so i'm selecting this face now i can select this face so what we're going to be doing in this tutorial we'll be going in between these little modes often so let's start by just practicing some selection so with the face select enabled if you want to select more than one face at a time right so for example i want to select both of these what you can do is you can click on the face first like this one for example and if you hold and shift you can click on the second face and in the third face and then you can hold your middle mouse button you can still move around then just hold and shift again and you can keep selecting faces and holding and shift will allow you to select multiple faces if i let go of shift and then i click on another face all of a sudden it just selects that face so that's how you do multiple face selections the exact same thing goes with edges if i select one edge and then i hold and shift i can select another one hold and shift i can select the third one and so on and the exact same thing applies to the vertices if i want to select one vertex i can go over to the next one by holding shift and so on so forth so you can see that's how it all works so that's just different ways of selecting essentially the same mesh but just in a different way so what we're going to do is we're going to hit 1 now to go into our front orthographic view and once again if you go to view you can go to viewport and do that over here by going front and if we want to be able to model this one thing that i'm going to teach you about are modifiers so modifiers are these things down here if you go and you click on the modifier properties you can see something here called add modifier so if we click on add modifier you're going to see a whole bunch of things which we won't be focusing on today but they essentially give our mesh or geometry certain kind of properties that are applied to them that consult us make things easier for us for example if we go over down here under degener generate we can go over to what's called a mirror modifier and the mirror modifier is essentially going to take this geometry and take one side of it and mirror it exactly the same on the opposite side so let's quickly go ahead and add in a mirror modifier and now we need to select our geometry and just move it to the side so what we're going to actually do is we can hit a to select all of the geometry then in our front orthographic view we can go g x and move it over to the side you can see it's actually mirrored on this side here and over here you can see that's our x-axis the x-axis you can also see up here this little gizmo shows us the x goes this way right the z goes up and down like this and then the y goes like that but that's from our right orthographic view which we're not working in currently so just hit 1 to go back to your front orthographic view and over here you can see we have the cube mirrored on the x you can also change these by the way so you can change them like this if you want to work on different axes but we won't be doing that just focus on the x for now but what we also want to do is we want to come over here and enable clipping when we enable clipping and we take this cube and we go g x remember it's all selected because we hit a to select everything so we're going to go g x and we're going to move it in and you can see these are clipping together now they're in the middle so we're going to bring it in just about this much you can see they're clipping together see there and if we hit g and then x to move it back on the x i hit g and x move it this way you can see they're kind of stuck together and that's what clipping is for which is all good now they're fused together and whatever we do in this side we'll copy on that side but at the moment if we hit z so if you hit z on your keyboard you can go to what we call wireframe so you can actually see through this and at the moment there is actually a face in between these two which we don't want okay there's actually a face here if i just un come over here and i hide the modifier you can see there's a face in here so let's just go to face select select this face by clicking on it then hit x and delete that face once again select it hit x and just delete the face now we can just bring that back and make sure clipping is enabled so now what we can do is we can hit a again to select all of the geometry and this time we want to flatten it but on the y axis this one over here so what we're going to do is we're going to hit s to scale and we're going to go y and we're going to scale it down on the wire to flatten it so about this much okay if you hit 1 to go back to your front or graphic view you can hit g x and you can move it like this so we want something that looks like this and then from the side looks like that doesn't have to be exact but just roughly these proportions and then what we're going to do is we're going to go over to our edge select option and we're going to hit a twice to deselect everything so double tap a and then we're going to select this face here or edge so make sure you're in your edge select and once you've clicked on it hold in shift go to the other side and then click on this edge now they're both active as you can see and then we're going to go s and we're going to hit y and we're going to scale it on the y like this as you can see that's really easy to do and then we're going to hit 1 to go into our front of graphic view and then what we're going to do is we're going to hit z on our keyboard and we're going to go to wireframe then we're going to go to our vertex select option i'm going to click here and we're going to drag so click and drag and we're going to select just these bottom verts and then we're going to go g z and move them up to where that red line is here that's our x-axis so you can see it's our floor pretty much and then we're going to go g x and we're going to move these in just a little bit on the x like that and while we have those verts selected or active we're going to go e to extrude and then z and we're going to extrude them down so extruding them down to about here like that so you can see we have almost like an hourglass here and if you want to go back into solid view you can go z and then just click on solid so now we're back in solid view and now we kind of have the the torso of the body as you can see the upper chest and the bottom of our model here the bottom of the torso but what we want to do now where this face is here we want to extrude a leg so we went into our front view and with those faces or vert steel active in our front view we're just going to go r to rotate and we're going to rotate it a little bit like this but one of the issues we're going to run into now if we hit e to extrude and we try to extrude that face in they're kind of clipping together here which is not what we want so we're going to just hit ctrl z to undo that or command z and we have to temporarily just come here under our modifiers to our mirror modifier and just untick clipping so now if we hit e to extrude and we extrude it out so i just hit e to extrude so we're extruding it out and then just click somewhere here to stop that action you can see we've now extruded the legs we can now enable clipping again as we do still need the clipping with these vert steel selected or active you can now go s to scale them and if you accidentally did deselect them all you have to do is just click somewhere here just drag over them and select them you can also just go to your face select and just select the face so for now let's just actually go to face select and select the face go into our front view again for that face active we're just going to go down to about here which would be where our knees are bring them in a little bit closer and then we're going to just rotate so hit r to rotate in your front view flatten them out just a bit and then e to extrude bring them down to about here and then s to scale with that face still active and then g and just move it over to the side so hit g and just move it over like that so you can see now we have the legs coming down like that very very simple very basic so far but let's get started with the top here so we're going to go so holding in my middle mouse button to rotate i'm going to select the top face here and then what we're going to do is go back into our front view and we're going to go r to rotate and we're going to rotate that face just a little bit like this just to give a bit of a slant to the shoulder and then we're going to do something that might be a little bit tricky if you're new to it but we need to add in some extra geometry here and the way we're going to do that we're going to go over to our edge select here so click on edge select then you're going to hover your cursor over this edge here and if you hit control r or command r you should see this yellow line appearing and if you roll your middle mouse button you can see these yellow lines increase if you roll it down they decrease so that is what we call a cut we're adding in an edge loop here or a cut so once you see the yellow line just left click and you can move the the cursor once you've left click then your left click to slide it once you've kind of let go of it so if you click again and that option is no longer there you can just hit g twice with that edge still active so hit g twice and that allows you to slide it along the edges so what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to slide it right down to about here and that gives us this square over here so let's quickly go to our face select option click on the square and we're going to go into our front orthographic view and we're just going to go s to scale i'm going to scale that square down a bit so just s to scale and go back into your front view rotate it a little bit more and then g to move it over to the side of it so just hit g and then you're going to go e to extrude and then with that face still active you're going to go r to rotate and once again i'm always going to my front orthographic view by hitting one on the numpad so we're just going to rotate that face like that then we're going to click on this bottom face once again back into our front view r to rotate it a little bit like this g to move it up and now we're going to go e and we're going to extrude that face out i'm going to bring it to about here and then s to scale it and then hit g and move it just to the side here you can kind of use a bit of creative license here place it however you want but i'm just going to put mine here and then we go r to rotate then i'm going to go e to extrude and i'm going to go s x and just flatten that face just like that for now and then i'm going to hover over this edge here with my cursor and i'm going to go ctrl r once again we see the yellow line just left click you can move the cursor to move it but i'm just going to leave it there by left clicking again go into your front view and then with that active you can just hit g and just move it out just a little bit and then r to rotate that edge so now we have the arms coming together it's still very primitive at this point but we are trying to make this as basic as possible for beginners to understand how modeling works so let's hold and shift in our front view just so we can move around once again just remember that and roll your middle mouse button to zoom in and now we're just going to hit z and we're going to go into wireframe and we're going to go to our vertex select option and over here in the front you can just click anywhere and drag and we can select vertices so i'm just going to select these guys here i'm going to hit g and i'm just going to move it up just to make the legs a little bit shorter and this is where you can come in and you can correct the proportions however you want so it's completely up to you how you want to do that but for now i'm just going to leave it as is and with these bottom verts actually selected here what we're now going to do is we're going to scale them just a little bit more and we're going to make the feet so in your front view with those selected we're going to go e to extrude them down to about here and then what we're going to do is we're going to hit z we're going to go into solid view go to your face select and once again select the face over here we're just moving over to the side a bit in fact hit free on your number pad to go to the right orthographic view and if that's face active you're going to go e to extrude and then y and you're going to extrude it forward on the y like so go to your edge select select this edge here and then go g z and bring it down go back to face select select the face here and then we're going to hit 7 or control 7 or command 7 to go into the bottom of graphic view you can also just go to view view port and then go to bottom and if that face still active we're going to go r to rotate it and then s x i'm going to scale it a little bit on the x maybe just rotate it a little bit like this by hitting r then go to your vertex select option and holding and shift just click on this vertex and this vertex so they're both active ctrl 7 again to go into the bottom of graphic view and then g just to move them out like that and then hold click on this one hold and shift and select this one ctrl 7 again to go to the bottom and you can just move that however you need to just to kind of make the bottom of the foot so just use how much um however much creative license you need but just something like that basic should be fine and then we can come over this corner here with our cursor hit ctrl r and you can see a yellow line appearing just left click and then move down to here left click again and then just s to scale that in to kind of make a bit of an angle and that's how simple that is double tap a to deselect everything shift and alt so if you hold shift and alt n you can actually click on an edge and that will loop select the whole edge so once again just practice that shift alt and then click on an edge it'll loop selected and you can go s to scale that as well however you want so i'm just going to scale that down just a little bit you can also just hit g in your front view just to move it like that so just position the knees where you feel you need to but around here should be okay so far it's all coming together pretty well so let's start working on the upper body here to come to the upper body select this vertex here and then double tap g just to slide it back a bit and then we're going to go to our face select option we're going to select this face here and now we're going to hit e to extrude and once we've hit that we're going to hit s right after it to scale in so we're going to scale it into here and then we're going to go g y and we're going to move it or g x and we're going to move it in like this and i'm going to go g z and just move it up a little bit like that and then to flatten it we're going to go s and then z so s and z and we're just going to flatten it onto z just a little bit we're then going to go e to extrude move it up like this and then g x to move it in a bit and now what we can do with that face still active we can hit control plus or command plus just to grow the selection once then we can go g y and that'll allow us to move that all back just a little bit if you now hit free on your number pad you can go to the side of graphic view and over here you can also hit g if you want to move it around a little bit easier so just about here we don't want the neck too forward or right in the middle just a little bit more back then you can get your vertex select and you can select these chest vertices here and just move them to flatten them out a bit just so the chest isn't as pointy at the front so just like that you can also select the verts at the back and just move them in the ones on the shoulder here you can also move it in the arm itself should not be sitting too forward in the body in fact an easy way to solve this is just to go shift alt click on an edge down here to loop selected go control plus and grow the selection till the whole arm is active so that should be enough and so just make sure it's only these here that are selected the arm go to your thing here called proportional editing so if you click on that you can now go g y and move it back and if you roll your middle mouse button while you're doing that you can control the fall off so how much goes along with it so we're going to roll the middle mouse button until it's quite small and i'm only going to move the arm back on the y just a little bit like that so once again i just hit g y to move it along to y so just back a little bit you can go into your right or graphic view by hitting free and you can actually see the arm doesn't need to be in the middle just a little bit back like that and what we can also do is just select this vert down here and just bring that in a bit it doesn't need to be so thick here at the front so just using proportional editing here you can select verts you can move them around and you can roll your middle mouse button to control the fall off so this is a really powerful modeling tool here i use it a lot in my own work at the moment the waste here is a little bit fixed so if you come here to the edge here you can go ctrl r just click twice disable proportional editing and then just go g y or gx so gx and just move it in a little bit like that so we already have this little guy coming together quite well so let's go over to our head so we're going to go over to our face select select this face here and then we're going to go e to extrude we're going to extrude it up to here and then we're going to go e one more time to extrude it about this much and then we're going to select this face holding in shift we're going to select this face as well and then we're going to go e to extrude forward and then s and we're going to scale that like so we're then going to select this back face here go into your right orthographic view and then go g and just move that back and then select this top face here and just g and move it up in your side view you can also just hit g z g z to move it up on the z but we're going to move it up to about here and we're just making a really basic head if you hit one to go into front of graphic view you can just rotate that face like so and you can also just select these side faces here in your front view g just to move them over to the side and at the moment the neck's a bit thick so if we come in here over this corner we can hit control r click twice and then s to scale and now we can just add a little bit of more definition to the neck and we can also go shift alt and click on this edge here and in our front view we can go g to move it around and this is an easy way to kind of define the neck a little bit it really depends on the character you're making you might want a bit of a thicker neck but just something like this should be fine so you can now kind of see we're getting this guy coming together quite well um in the front view as well you can just select some of these points on the face just kind of move them around and by no means are we trying to make this look really accurate this is very low poly we're just going to select this face here and we're going to go g and just also move that down so just creating a super basic head model here maybe just grab this edge here hit g and just move it in a bit so now we have a very low poly character here but what we can do to make this look even better once again we can go to our modifiers tab and now on top of this modifier here let's go down click on it go to generate let's add a subdivision surface modifier what the subdivision surface modifier does essentially it just sub divides each face and it's something that you can turn on and off and you can also come here to the viewport level and increase that the render here is simply just what it's going to be when it does a final render what we're going to be focusing on here is actually just at the moment the viewport display because that's what we're actually seeing so i've clicked on that now and i've bumped it up to two and now we can see it's a lot smoother but we're still seeing this cage out here the rough um approx like the rough cage we originally modeled if you want that to kind of hug against that modifier you can come over here and click on this cage on and it'll put that on it like so and it looks a little bit nicer so i'm going to click on that and now we can just do the exact same thing you can go into your front view you can just select edges some still have my edge select here you can hit g to move it you can enable proportional editing to control the fall-off um whatever you need so this is where you can kind of look at a reference image and kind of just define the shape of your model or your character a little bit more and that's very very fun and powerful tool to use and you can select different edges on the the torso bring them in a bit just to find the mesh a little bit more and stuff like that you can come over here to your leg shift alt just click on this edge here go to your right view and just go g and just move the leg forward a bit to give it some dynamic and you can also go hit z go into wireframe go to vertex select and then just click and select these bottom verts and go g y and just move them back a bit like so just create a little bit of a bend in the legs there so here you can see using some very basic and rudimentary modeling techniques we've kind of made a figure and once again i'm keeping this super basic for absolute beginners that's why it's a very basic looking model with no like big features it's just getting the main proportions established so what we can do now if we want to make some very basic hands is we can simply just go to our face select then just select this face down here and with that active we're going to hit g and just move it in a little bit i'm in my front orthographic view and then just e to extrude it a little bit more and then i'm going to come over here over this edge here and i'm going to go ctrl r click twice and then double g just to slide it up a bit then i'm going to go to my face select and i'm going to select this face right here then i'm going to go to my right orthographic view and i'm going to go r to rotate and then g to move it forward a bit then i'm going to go e to extrude like so and then e to extrude one more time and then i'm going to disable proportional editing and with that face active i'm just going to go control plus and then i'm going to go s x and i'm just going to scale that down a bit just to make a very very simple looking thumb we can select this face here we can go g y and just move back a bit and then you can come over this edge ctrl r click twice double g to slide down to here and then s just to scale it like that just create a basic wrist so this is a very very simple character you can just select edges anytime you want g to move them so i might want to select this edge here g to move that very very simple all i'm doing is i'm with my edge select here i'm moving around clicking on edges and i'm hitting g to move them let's hit one to go back into our front orthographic view and here you can see we have the basic character done so i'm just going to go back into object mode over here so go into object mode you can also hit the tab key as a shortcut to do that and at the moment it's not looking very smooth so with this cube still active we're going to go to object mode up here and we're going to go shades moves now we have nice smooth shading on here and if you want this guy so example in object mode if i were to hit r to rotate them you can see it's actually rotating around this point here which is what we call an origin point but what we wanted that origin point to be is at the bottom of the feet a quick way to do that is just to tab into edit mode hit a to select everything and then in go g z and just move it up till his feet are where that little orange dot is or where the floor is so you should be sitting right on the floor then we're going to go back into object mode and now if we hit r you can see here rotates around that origin point so here now in our scene we have this character here that's really low poly so that means there's very few points you actually have to edit when you go into edit mode but he also has a subdivision surface modifier which makes him look nice and smooth so once you've learned these basic extrusion techniques and also just how to select verts how to select edges and how to select faces and also how to scale them rotate them and extrude them right once you've learned that you can pretty much make anything in a 3d space and you can also use your subdivision surface modifier you can at any time come over one of these edges here hit control r click twice double g to slide and add in more geometry and that's how simple this is i hope you guys enjoyed this absolute beginner tutorial on modeling and blender i know it's a little bit lengthy but it is for absolute beginners so this is probably if you're really new to this this might be one of your first creations in blender and i really hope you enjoyed it i'm just going to go back into object mode here and yeah that's pretty much it i'll quickly show you guys the one i made earlier when i was practicing this you can see this one exact same thing i just spent a little bit more time on it proportions a little bit more but it's pretty much the exact same technique and i kept it really simple for beginners so i will see you guys next time for another tutorial and if you want to see some more advanced things you can check out some of my other tutorials where i go over things in a little bit more detail but they're also a little bit more advanced so i'll see you guys next time you

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 201,879

Rating: 4.9530559 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.9, Blender modelling, Blender for absolute Beginners, Easy Blender Tutorials For absolute beginners, How to model a 3d person, 3d human tutorial, 3d character modelling tutorial, Blender 3d modelling tutorial for beginners, Blender Tutorial

Id: 9xAumJRKV6A

Length: 35min 17sec (2117 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021